Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Art and Culture, Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Health, Writing

Night Talk

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Samhain                                   Waning Thanksgiving Moon

Though the pain has subsided, it still keeps me awake without medication.  So, I’m up at 6 am, a rarity for me these days.  When Kate shifts off regular work, no longer comes home around 10 pm, then I’ll go back to an earlier bed time and 6 might not be so unusual.

I understand the attraction of the night.  I feel it myself.  The quiet, the dark has a friendly feel to it, a time when the home becomes a hermitage or a studio or a writing garret, far off from the demands of mundane life.  Reading late has an appeal, the book, the words float up and occupy the whole, not reading anymore, but traveling along, carried on a river of narrative.  Writing has the same free, anchors away momentum.  The ship sails away from the dock, following the rhythm of an ocean current, one that runs just along the border between the conscious and unconscious realm, between the warmer, busier, lighter waters near the surface and the benthic deeps, unvisited, stygian, fecund, down there the ocean reaches its source, the collective unconscious, yet deeper and universally expansive, the holy well from which archetypes, genetic memory, forces creative enough to bring life itself into existence make their slow way.

Night talk.  Or, rather, very early morning talk.

Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Work, Holidays, Humanities

Black Friday

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Samhain                                                   Waning Thanksgiving Moon

Kate had to tell me, again, what black Friday means.  Apparently (and you probably already know this) it’s the date retailers calculate they slip over from being in the red to being in the black.  When I have trouble remembering something, it’s often because I have another association clogging up the rememberer.  In this case black Friday has a theological tinge in my brain; it takes me to a day of lost hope, ultimate despair.  As a result, I have trouble associating it with anything positive.

If I consider the number of people camped outside (one woman since Wednesday night at a particular BestBuy), and, if I consider the reason many of them are in those lines, my association seems closer to the mark.  Our emphasis on extravagant gifts to celebrate the birthday of a man who wanted us to declare freedom to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind has always revealed the dark side hedonism which we let loose at Christmas, but the pitiful sight of people braving cold and inclement weather as blind captives of our economic system.  Well…

A very positive note is the number of scientists now willing to engage in reasoned debate on the topic of global warming.  Understanding the science behind global warming takes careful attention to several different lines of reasoning and a dispassionate explication of those various strands works best from within a scientific rather than a political frame.  Perhaps, as an article in the paper said, we will be able to move beyond this debate and onto the question of what can we do.

We are not saving the earth; the earth will be fine no matter what we do.  We want to preserve an earth fit for human habitation; that’s what’s at risk here.  Can we learn to live on this planet lightly enough that it can carry us, feeding us, watering us, disposing of our wastes, providing materiale necessary for our habitations and our economies?  Those are the stakes.

Aging, Art and Culture, Asia, Bees, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Great Work, Memories, Retirement

Not Stepping In The Same River Twice

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Samhain                                                      Waning Thanksgiving Moon

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.  You, too, tiny Tim.

Stayed up late last night reading a novel about a Chinese detective in Chinatown, NYC.  Not sure how it happened but China has become my favorite country, much like Germany used to be and Russia before that.  Instead of Buddenbrooks I read Romance of the Three Kingdoms, instead of Steppenwolf I read Chinese mysteries.  No more War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, though I could read them again, I choose, as I always have, to plow new ground, read things I have not read before.

I tend not to read things twice, except poetry.  A big part of reading for me is the journey to somewhere new, following a trail with no known ending, a similar joy to the one I find in traveling, especially to countries where the culture disorients me, leaves me little room for my old ways.

New disciplines give me a similar boost:  art history, Latin, writing, vegetable gardening, bee keeping, hydroponics.  I’m sure I miss something in my search for the novel, which may explain why I find living in the same house for 16 years, driving the same car for 16 years, being married to Kate for 20+ years soothing.  As Taoism teaches,  life is a dynamic movement between opposites, the new and the old, the familiar and the strange, the taxing and the comfortable.  The juice flows as the pulls of masculine and feminine, life and death, youth and age keep us fresh, vital.

My buddy Mario uproots himself and moves along the earth’s surface, finding new homes and new encounters.  He changes his work with apparent ease, finding new friends and new experiences as he does.  Brother Jim, Dusty, constantly challenges his present and his past, leaving himself always slightly off balance.  Both of these men take the juice and mold it into art.

There are many ancientrails through this life, including intentional disorientation, familiar surroundings, ambition, compassion, politics, nurturance, keen observation, delight, dance.  The key lies in finding yours and staying with it, getting to know it and to be it.

When you can, you will find every day (well, most days) are Thanksgiving.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, Letters, Literature, Myth and Story

An Ancientrail, Still Traveled

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Samhain                                                  Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Tracking down a quote from a Mary Oliver book led me to Plato and to his Symposium, in particular a portion dedicated to the mysteries of love.  It reminded me of my initial excitement in studying philosophy, created in large part by J. Harry Cotton, a professioral stereotype at Wabash College.  He wrapped tobacco in a light paper plug, inserted it into his pipe, applied a match and away we went into the history of Western philosophy, J. Harry’s head wreathed in tobacco smoke.  He often quoted whole pages of Plato or Aristotle in Greek, showing us the key words on the blackboard, explaining the intricacy of their translation and how an interpretation could turn on a single word.  I’d never met any one like J. Harry and my memory of him is still fond.

The excitement he stirred slowly winked out when I had to transfer to Ball State University, out of money for Wabash.  There the logical positivists still reigned, even though their star had already fallen in graduate schools across Europe and the US.  At Ball State I had the opposite of J. Harry, Robert something.  He was the head of the department and an avowed enemy of all metaphysics and a champion of philosophy as clarifier of scientific language.  What exactly do we mean by cold?  Hot?  Solid?  Gas?  Not unimportant question in a techn0-scientific age, but hardly inspiring.  At least to me.

I finished out my philosophy major, but added one in anthropology because my passion for it, once lit, did not go out.  This was all a long, long time ago.  I graduated from Ball State in 1969, so that’s, what?  41 years and another millennium in the past.

What is truth?  Justice?  Beauty?  How do we know what we know?  What is a sound argument?  What is a weak one?  Why?  How have ideas about these big questions changed over time?  And why?  What do they matter now, in our world?  This was what interested me and the logical positivists had nothing to teach me in regard to them.  Perhaps it’s not surprising that I ended up in Seminary, where those questions still matter and where there are answers and the history of the answers.

Ironically, of course, I have come to inhabit the flattened, anti-metaphysical world of the logical positivists, but not from the perspective of clarification and rejection of metaphysics, but from the standpoint of existentialism.  In this new world, which I’ve inhabited since 1991 or so, gnothi seauton, know thyself,  inscribed over the door within the Temple of Apollo at Delphi that lead to the Oracle, has been my holy writ.  Rather than books full of poetry, creation myths, messiahs and anti-Christs, I have two words.  They’re enough for me, though.  More than enough.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Woolly Mammoths

The Self

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Samhain                                                   Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Woollies at Stefan’s house tonight.  Bill, Frank, Warren, Stefan, Scott, Tom, Mark, me.  Paul was there for a bit before he left to have dinner with his daughter Clare.

Topic tonight was what role a higher power plays in your life, if any.  We wandered here and there, but came back to a few themes:  some found matters of this sort best expressed through loss of the ego, others found the idea of a higher power important for their journey.  A few of us focused on the self, the authentic self or the integrated self or the deep self, a self that is sufficient to itself for worth, but eager to belong:  to belong to the earth, to each other, to a past, to a family, but in that belonging still the self remains what it is, validated and grounded in an accidental combination of genes that is unique and separate, yet also a part while remaining apart.  The key element to this perspective then becomes personal responsibility, willingness to make choices and accept their consequences.

We touched on the notion of the sacred as a created sense of belonging, of a self located in a context, a place, a family, a cemetery, a house.

Some found this perspective a product of aging, of graceful self-acceptance, of knowing who we are, warts and all, and loving that self, not an ideal self that others or external systems would have us mold ourselves toward.

We have different toe holds on our reality, on what we need to feel whole and authentic, but we agreed long ago to take this journey together, and we’ve accepted responsibility for the ride.

Aging, Art and Culture, Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities

The Value of Increasing Darkness

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Samhain                                         Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

The daylight is gone, twilight has fallen and night is on its way.  Now that we have entered the season of Samhain, the leaves have vanished from the trees and the clouds, like tonight, often hang gray in the sky.  Samhain means the end of summer and in the old Celtic calendar was the half of the year when the fields went fallow while the temperature turned cool, then cold, hope returning around the first of February, Imbolc, when the ewes would freshen and milk would once again be part of the diet as new life promised spring.

In between Imbolc and Samhain lies the Winter Solstice.  The early darkness presages the long twilight; it lasts from now until late December as we move into the increasing night until daylight becomes only a third of the day.  This has been, for many years, my favorite time of year.  I like the brave festivals when lights show up on homes and music whirs up, making us all hope we can dance away our fear.

The Yamatanka mandala at the Minnesota Institute of Art gives a meditator in the Tantric disciplines of Tibetan Buddhism a cosmic map, brightly displaying the way to Yamatanka’s palace grounds.  In the middle of the palace grounds, represented here by a blue field with a vajra (sacred thunderbolt) Yamantaka awaits our presence.

In the Great Wheel as I have come to know it, we visit Yamantaka on the night of the Winter Solstice, that extended darkness that gives us a foretaste of death.  Our death.  On that night we can sit with ourselves, calm and quiet, imagining our body laid out on a bed, eyes closed, mouth quiet, a peaceful expression on our lifeless face.

We can do that, not in suicidal fantasy, but in recognition of our mortality, our finite time upon the wheel of life, awaiting our turn as the wheel turns under the heavens carrying us away from this veil of samsara.  If we can do that, we can then open ourselves to the thin sliver of light that becomes more and more, as the solstice marks the turning back of the darkness and brings us once again to life.

When we can visit Yamantaka’s palace, sup with him in this throne room and see death as he, the conqueror of death sees it, we are finally free.

Aging, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Great Work, Humanities, Myth and Story, Politics

In The Right Spot After All

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Samhain                                      Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

“To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult.” – Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Goethe captures the crux of a dis-ease I felt at the dam conference, a dis-ease that probably explains more of why I didn’t end up in academia than other explanations I often give myself.  In short there was more talking than acting and even the references to acting were talking and more it was talking about talking to partners and allies in their language.

Thinking of the caliber in this dam conference is, however, not easy; in fact, it is hard and many of the people who spoke were clever, insightful, giving a new spin to old ideas, my favorite example the delta subsidence problem. People who can take a long held belief and shake it inside out until it reveals it’s underpinnings have my utmost respect.  I hope sometimes I can reach that level in my own thinking; it’s the way change can get started, the reframing of the old in terms of something new.

Who would think, for instance, that sea level rise inundation of coastal delta areas might be alleviated by removing dams upstream?  So, first you have to have the new idea, the problem and its source carefully linked before action can target a plausible solution.

Still, I find myself impatient with just this kind of thinking, that is, root and branch thinking that stops without corollary action.  In the end I’m more of an action guy, much as I love the abstract, the analytical, the historical, the exegetical and the hermeneutical.  I want to change the way dams impact rivers and streams, whether it be by better design or by removal or by prevention.  I want to leverage the way dams have become visible issues into victories for the planet, victories that turn us toward a benign human presence on the face of the earth.

In the end I would have been unhappy as an academic, I see that now.  I would have strained against the confines of the classroom and publish or perish.  As it happens, I’ve been able to continue my learning on my own while engaging pretty consistently as a change agent.  Probably led the life I was meant to lead after all.  Good to know.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics

By A Dam Site

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Samhain                                     Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Once in a while it’s bracing to throw yourself in the deep end and I did that today.  I went to a conference titled  Experiments on Rivers:  the Consequences of Dams.  I realized how little consideration I’d given to dams by the end of the day.  I’ll just give you one example and it came in the first three minutes of the conference in a presentation from Efi Foufoula-Georgiou, Director of the National Center for Earth-Surface Dynamics, headquartered at the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, location of the conference.  After four slides and a technical explanation, Efi told us that of the 40 large river deltas in the world surveyed in a recent scientific study, 27 of them had much less sediment than the same deltas had before the construction of dams begun largely in the 1950’s.

What’s the big deal?  Well, it turns out that all deltas are subsiding, that is, sinking.  The thing that keeps the deltas and the land forms dependent on or within them from getting inundated is the build up of sediment; sediment now significantly blocked in 27 cases by upstream dams.  Think global sea level rise, then put the two together.  Efi’s crowd predicts that without solving the sediment deposit drought New Orleans (why does everything focus on the Big Easy?) will be gone by 2100.  Whoa.

I’ll drop other information in throughout the week so I don’t overload ancientrails with dam related topics.

The St. Anthony Falls Laboratory*, created in 1938, has run continuously since then, churning out (ha, ha) hydraulic studies for dams, transportation studies and much, much more.  The tour of the wind tunnel (also a from of hydraulics), delta modeling and stream and river bed modeling was worth the time to attend the conference.  This is real science done with made up tools, including a pipe cleaner forest and a wooden and plexiglass model of downtown Minneapolis.

*SAFL is the world’s only fluid-mechanics laboratory that uses a natural waterfall as its prime water source. For over 70 years researchers from around the world have been visiting our unique location on an island in the Mississippi River to conduct research for developing innovative and sustainable engineering solutions to major environmental, water resources, and energy-related problems. We would like to extend our warmest invitation to visit our facilities and talk with our research staff and students.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities, Myth and Story

Holiseason: The Sacred Walks Among Us

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Samhain                                           Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Holiseason has gotten underway with the usual signs:  bare trees, halloween candy going stale in the bowl, Santa Claus and Christmas music showing up well before Thanksgiving, a few turkey related cartoons.  The concentrated portion of holiseason begins with Thanksgiving and runs with little stopping through January 6th, the Feast of the Epiphany and the last of the Twelve Days of Christmas.

Now, we have signs and symbols, little in the way of active celebrating, but a sacred nimbus began to spread out as Samhain festivities came and went, a nimbus that extends over this difficult, cold, darkening period, drenching us in the depths of our own lives and in the collective life of our friends, family and community.  This is a two month plus stretch of the year that cries out for alone time, time to explore what constitute our deepest values, for together time to reaffirm our love and our regard for each other, for gifts and lights and merriment. Let Fezziwig’s feast start early this year.

I wish you the best of this long and roller coast time, a cup of good cheer, a smile and a moment or more of reflection, even meditation.

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Myth and Story, Our Land and Home, US History

A Tour Knocked Together

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Samhain                                       Waxing  Thanksgiving Moon

Finished initial work for my tour of the Thaw exhibition.  Some new information will come on Thursday during the Friends lecture focusing on Blackhawk and his ledger book, Elizabeth Hickox and her finely crafted miniature baskets and Maria Martinez, the renowned potter of San Ildefonso Pueblo.  I’ll meld that into the work I’ve just done.

I’m starting on Thursday in the Plains gallery with Judith Fogarty’s martingale and medicine bag for which she won the 1988 best of show at the Santa Fe Indian Art Festival, a prize of distinction in native american arts.  From there we’ll look at the honor shirts and Blackhawk’s ledger book, still in the Plains collection.  The Woodlands gallery, our home region, contains a wonderful bag, probably part of the kit of an Anishinabe shaman of the Midewiwin Society.  In the Arctic and Sub-Arctic I’ll take the group to the Yupik masks.  In the Northwest Coast region we’ll look at the frontlet of Raven-who-owns-the-sun and the bulging sided bent-wood bowl for serving fatty fish.  We’ll end up with a Maria Martinez pot and an Elizabeth Hickox basket.

This is a wonderful opportunity to see the very best of native art covering broad geographic regions.  A rare chance.  Hope you’ll be able to come.