Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Friends

Here Comes the Parade

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Fall                               Waning Back to School Moon

Had no internet connection at camp Chesterfield.

October 1st, 2010 9 pm

Chesterfield Spiritualist Camp, Chesterfield Indiana Rm 219, The Western Hotel

Drove down from Lafayette taking interstates because I wanted to have time for a nap. Got here about 2 and took an hour long nap. The room is basic. A bed, a small chest of drawers, a lamp and a bathroom. No three pronged plugs and no internet. A retreat environment.

In Alexandria I saw Tim Lockwood and Mike Lynch hanging out in front of the Alexandria Historical Society. My folks. When I went inside there were about 15 people in the room, many of whom I didn’t recognize.

Teddy Bryant I did recognize. He told me about Saturday being the devil’s night, long ago. He’s a real estate agent now after a career as an electrician. “I had two careers, both of them I looked forward to going to work in the morning. Not many people can say that.”

Then, he added, “I have a bone to pick with you.” Huh. “One night after we got done with the truck at Coxes I walked over and asked Vicky Moore out. But. When I asked her again the next day, she said, Charlie told me what you said. She never went out with me.” Gee, Ted. A while ago. I don’t remember the incident or Vicky Moore for that matter.

Jay Kantner was there, short as ever with a beard and a hearing aid. He lives in Oregon, fishes the Columbia and hunts in the area. When I asked him if it was salmon, he said, “All five species.”

Larry Maple, the original organizer with Becky Ellis, looked pretty beat up. He had a bladder taken out and replace, then a swollen lymph gland that they just drained three weeks ago. He looks thin and weak.

Tony Fox came up and asked for her flowers and honey. I plain forgot. She hugged me to her now ample bosom and gave me a kiss.

After a bit more like that, they organized us for the homecoming parade. We had a float which consisted of a flat bed trailer with hay bales and a few chairs. About 20 of us got on and rode 670class-of-1965-floatthrough town doing the wave and old Alexandria Tigers cheers. Along the way we played remember what used to be there along Harrison Avenue, many of the store fronts are empty and only Cox’s Supermarket and Broyle’s furniture remain of the businesses from our childhood: The Rexall Drug Store, Danners, Murphys, PN Hirsch, Bailey’s pharmacy, Furman’s, Baumgartners, Mahoney’s.

It was fun and bittersweet, being with old friends, childhood friends, sharing memories but noticing that this was our 45th reunion, lots of gray hair, 20% of the class now dead.

After the parade wound its way out to the newer Alexandria High School, Larry Etchison drove us back into town. We got our cars and drove out to the curve. I saw Bill Kildow. Geez. Been a real long time. His brother, Steve, was in my class, but Bill and I had a special bond. It was good to see him. The Kildow’s lived on Monroe Street in the late 50’s and so did I.

We sat around swapping stories. Where do you live now? What do you do? Any grandkids? You have great grandchildren! Louie Bender, extroverted as ever, went up and hugged a woman, said, “Tamara, Don’t you remember me? Louis Bender.” It wasn’t Tamara.

October 2nd. A laundromat across from what used to be the Roller Rink, at one time the best in the nation and site of national competitions. Now it’s an Eagles. The only skating is, as someone said last night, “after there’s been a lot of drinking.”

Breakfast this morning at the Maxon cafeteria, just across from the Western Hotel. It serves guests and residents of Chesterfield. At the table I talked with two women, professors of Spanish and Spanish Literature at Depauw, one from Colombia and the other from Argentina, Buenos Aires. They had a similar reaction to the Camp, about which they’d known nothing before they got there. It’s a great setting for a book, like being back in the 19th century, down to the little floral decals on the light bulb holder in the bathroom.

“I’m interested in how people form their worlds,” I said, “And this is a particular world. We all have them, but here the line are so clear.” After I said that, I realized it was exactly what I’m interested in, how people form, give definition to their weltenschaung. How do you become and sustain a belief in spiritualism, in the non-physical plane? You have to ignore or explain away a lot of evidence to the contrary.

After breakfast, it was back to the Alexandria Historical Society for coffee and another meet up. I looked at a 1965 spectrum, our yearbook. Gee, it was a long time ago. A lot of things were different back then. I had hair. Juvenile delinquency was a problem. Remember j.d.’s? How innocent, almost quaint they seem in light of rap music, meth and general ornerynesss of our time.

Steve Kildow had a huge tent with catered food and lots of booze. A lot folks were there including Jerry Ferguson, who looked a lot different, enough that I didn’t recognize him. Steve lives two miles west of town off Hwy 28, a big spread with a fancy house and lots of horses. Steve looks like he enjoys his groceries.

Now I’m at the laundromat, getting enough clean clothes together for the rest of the trip. I decided to spend this time to pack a bit—a lot—lighter. I’m glad I did. Well, the dryers are coming to a stop and I have folding and rolling to do.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics

Booming One More Time

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Fall                                 Waning Back to School Moon

Metro Lounge                  Union Station

This is the first class lounge, folks who’ve bought rooms.  My next trip to Lafayette had no rooms, but I convinced the lady here to let me in since I had rooms on the Empire builder both ways.

Old folks pass by, some in the early years of aging, like me, others in the thin, papery skin and tottering walk phase.  How many of them in the former, I wonder, marched in Washington, fought for student rights, worked hard to end the Vietnam war, protested to achieve civil rights for African-Americans?  Age and accommodation hide the former marks of my kind, the long hair, the frayed jeans, the combat boots, the green book bags, the peace symbol pins,the flower print dresses and plaited hair.

We walk past each other, joined by other links, the cane, the gray hair, balding pates, bum knees, expanded middles.  Makes me think of another addition to symbolic logic:  the law of the expanded middle.

One of our own, Tom Brokaw, wrote a book, the Greatest Generation, talking up the folks of the WWII era as saviors of our culture.  Maybe they were, I don’t know, history is difficult to judge; but, the next spate of articles and books focused on how the Baby Boomers are not the Greatest Generation.  Somehow we have failed to live up to pundits self-made expectations of us.  Balderdash.

An article this month in the Atlantic offers a guide as to how we can retrieve our lost promise by solving the economic crisis at home.  C’mon.  A minimum sized group of greedy bastards almost sunk the American economy, a breed that, like the poor, has always been with us.  It is the chattering class that needs to fix the economy and they’ve worked at it in fits and starts.  The economy never was our forte.

No,we fought our battles for change at the level of the personal,the local, the national foreign policy level, not in the canyons of wall street or the board rooms of the Forbes 500.  We challenged US military policy so successfully that a generation of military leaders has vowed never again to make the same mistakes as Vietnam.  We supported the African-American community among us and Lyndon Johnson in a push for civil rights.  Women and men of our generation took the gender controversy into our private lives, struggling for a just place for women one bag of garbage, one diaper and one sink full of dishes at a time.

We have had our share, more than our share, of brilliant scientists and innovative artists.

Where we still have a big opportunity is not in the stock market or its ancillary phenomenon like the Department of Treasury.  No, our opportunity lies in the self same area we did early work in during the 60’s when we took the advice of such gurus as Scott and Helen Nearing and tried to go “back to the land.”

Climate change, local food, energy independence, forest and water health, these are the areas where our generation can still act and act forcefully, this time for the future of the unborn generations who will suffer from the profligacy of our time.  We know how to use the levers of popular power.  We know how important it is to speak truth to power and to use our personal lives as leverage in the pursuit of deep social change.

I hope we take the challenge and begin to acknowledge each other in the metro lounges and streets and lobbies and town halls and legislatures of our country.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work

The Great Wheel in the City

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Fall                               Waning Back to School Moon

How can city dwellers, big city dwellers, stay in touch with the natural cycles, with the rhythms of the Great Wheel?  This was on my mind yesterday as I walked around the loop.  There are, of course, the occasional plantings decorating outdoor cafes, the greenery of Grant Park and Millennium Park, even a lushly planted median on the boulevard of Michigan Avenue, yet these seem like captive specimens, botanical exhibits in a zoo for denizens of concrete, stone, metal and glass.

When I went out for a walk this morning, wandering down Jewelers Row, out to Michigan Avenue and down to State Street, building facades began to show themselves.  Here there were floral inspired Prairie School designs.  There were viny elements in tile and plaster ascending the column of a building.

At 30 Michigan Avenue an idea began to form.  There on a frieze perched above a  soulless slab of polished marble that defined a Walgreens were small medallions punctuated by a familiar face, the Greenman.  He looked like this one.  There were four, separated by the flowery medallions.  After that, the plant inspired architectural design appeared, as if by magic.  For those who have eyes to see, let them see.

In a flash I realized what I dislike so much about Modernist architecture.  It does not acknowledge the real context in which it exists.  This Bauhaus influence attempted to rid the world of the Greenmen, the vines, the flowers, the sinuous riverine shapes that the late 19th and early 20th century architects considered essential.

And they were essential.  Why?  In our cities we put on a brave front, raising  our forests of buildings that shade out the sun, paving over the earth so trucks and cars can move about with ease.  Tunneling electricity so even the night cannot dominate us.

We still need to eat. Our lives depend on the vast unbuilt land where the primary things that spring from the earth are corn stalks and wheat fronds.  Where animals may outnumber humans and the humans work with and for the plants.

We still need to breathe.  The lungs of mother earth, the circulatory system that cleans our air consists in large part of trees.  The forests lie outside our urban boundaries, though they do join their city cousins in their work.

We still need to drink.  Fresh water comes from rivers, lakes, streams and aquifers either far away from city centers or buried deep beneath them.  Care for the source of our drinking water means  caring for those ends of the earth from which it comes.

Thus, it is not an idle question to wonder how we connect with the Great Wheel, with the changes of season and the growing of food, the cleansing of water and air.

The design motifs inspired by green leafy beings recognized that dependence and writ its continuing message on the walls of the buildings which we use and which we see each day.  They inspire us and help us recall mother nature in  her beyond the city state.

There was. too, another reminder.  I looked down Washington from Wabash and my gaze carried up the  building led me to a patch of blue sky.  There was the moon, a half moon, the Back to School moon, framed by buildings with leaves and greenmen and flowers.  These are enough.

One thing more.  Remember Ozymandias, King of Kings.  Recall the ruins of Babylon, Xi’ang, Epheseus, Athens.  Cities do not last.  Nature reclaims them all at some point.  What seems so permanent, so imposing, so there only awaits its end.  Which will come, sooner or later.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, permaculture

Following the Old Religion

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Lughnasa                                            Full Back To School Moon

Summer has three endings:  Labor Day which marks the end of summer vacation for many school children; and, for many adults like myself, kicks us into serious mode as all those years of conditioning continue to affect our attitude;  Mabon, or the Fall Equinox, which comes tomorrow, that point when day and night balance each other, neither claiming dominance, though the trend matters and at this equinox, the balance tips toward night as the darkness increases, pulling us toward the longest night, the Winter Solstice on December 22nd and Samhain, or Summer’s End according to the old Celtic calendar which divided the year in half, Beltane-Samhain or the growing season, and Samhain-Beltane or the fallow season.  Samhain comes on October 31st and, like all Celtic holidays lasts a week.

The growing season has this triple farewell reflected too in the holidays of Lughnasa, the festival of first fruits, Mabon, the peak of the harvest and harvest home, and Samhain, the end of the harvest season and the end of the growing season.  No matter how you notice or celebrate it these real changes in the agricultural year still happen, they still have critical importance for our human community, and they still deserve our attention.  Why?  Because our ages old relationship with agriculture is what separates us from the hunter-gatherers.  Agriculture allows us to live in villages, towns and cities by producing surplus food on farms in much the same way that the honeybee produces surplus honey while still making enough for the colony to survive on throughout the winter.

Without those who farm, there would be no surplus food.  With no surplus food we would have to revert to subsistence agriculture, growing what we needed every year or hunting and gathering.  This would prove daunting since most of us have forgotten or never been taught how to grow food, how to hunt, how to identify edible plants.

This is the great hidden reality for many, if not most, urban dwellers, who make up, since 2008, over half of the world’s population, a projected 5 billion people by 2030.  Without  a healthy eco-system, one that can support intense tillage, that is, sustainable tillage, the world’s urban dwellers will be bereft of something they cannot do without:  food.  Add to that the pressure on the world’s fresh water supply and two fundamental sustainers:  food and water are at peril.

Granted following the holidays of the Great Wheel will not work magic–sorry to all my Wiccan friends–but it would remind us all, 8 times a year, of the source of our sustenance.  That would help.  Naming our days after these holidays (I do it in the upper left of each post) keeps that reminder fresh.  Our sustainers, mother earth and father sun, do not require us, do not need anything from us, yet they will support us if we live within their limits.  These holidays began when our ancestors realized the need to remind themselves of the delicate, fragile harmony required for human life to flourish.

Over the course of the years and centuries and millennia since, hubris has lead us further and further away from the old religion; we have replaced it with  idols, fetishes, really.  We will, at some point, pay the price for our blasphemy as we upset that harmony, creating an environment that will no longer sustain human life.  Only if we step back from our profligacy can we ensure our survival.

Knowing the rhythms of the natural world, of the agriculture that feeds us, of the systems that keep water fresh and available, is our only chance to avoid apocalypse.  Will we do it?  I don’t know.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Woolly Mammoths

The Great Wheel

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Lughnasa                                                       Waxing Back to School Moon

Tomorrow we move into the fall equinox position on our yearly orbit.  In this sense time recurs again and again and again, each spot on the orbit revisited as Earth passes along on its ancientrail.  Of course, the orbit changes slightly each year and the solar system moves further and further away from the center of our galaxy, so in a strict sense the spots are not quite the same, but from a terrestrial perspective over the span of a human life, the differences are not noticeable.  Birthdays point as much to a specific point on Earth’s track around the sun as they do to a “time.”  Our age, which we consider linear, really counts the number of times the Earth has revolved around the sun since our birth, not linear at all, but elliptical.

Tom Crane said last night that he and Roxann climb a hill at the Arboretum and each time they see a tree.  At one point the tree has bare branches, at another leaves, at another flowers and fruit, colors change at yet another point.  It feels linear, but, wait…the colors change, the tree has bare branches, then leaves, then flowers and fruit and again the leaves change color.

As he spoke, I thought of our circle, made sacred now by 20 years of showing up, how our hair has gone gray, our flesh taken on wrinkles and on some of us, a few pounds.  Again, it feels linear, this aging process.  Then, the conversation turned to grandchildren who will crawl, walk on two legs, then three, just as the Sphinx had riddled.  Within our species the childhood, maturity, aging repeats over and over again as the fleshly vessel sloughs off, but its genetic information goes on.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Retirement, Woolly Mammoths

Delighted

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Lughnasa                                                      Waxing Back to School Moon

In the company of old men.  A surprising event occurred tonight among the Woolly Mammoths.  We had an evening of delight.  Warren raised this interesting topic and as it went round the room in our usual whoever wants to talk jump in and do so style, a congruence began to emerge.  Each of us reported more awareness of delights or miracles (see below) in our lives.  They ranged from grandchildren, whose every action delights us, to fly fishing and feeling the water around the legs, working on the Mississippi for twelve hours a day, dogs thumping and jumping when we come home, poetry, not having to perform anymore, just playing the music, sex, bees and honey and the Landscape Arboretum.  As we each offered up those things that delight us, it became apparent that most of us (all of us?) have entered a phase of life where external success has become a muted to extinguished need and instead we find ourselves driven by the inner life, by receptivity and acceptance.

Though it was, in one sense, comforting and even encouraging to hear this more relaxed, old folks with their feet up on the cracker barrel sort of ambiance, it seemed a bit too happy, a bit distanced from pain.  Just as this thought crossed my mind the conversation shifted to cremation, to place, in part spurred by one of us who talked about visits to West Virginia, to the hill top church where his grandfather had served his first and his last pastorate, a place where he’s buried and other members of the family, too.  This physical location, this place on a hill top in West Virginia, felt rooted, felt his, helped him feel grounded.

The cremation conversation moved along wondering about rootedness, about sense of place, about visits, though occasional, to parents burial plots.  Where will those who want to remember us go?  I mentioned green cemeteries and natural burial.  We will probably revisit this discussion.  It has an interesting relationship to something that intrigues me, something University of Wisconsin Madison geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan, called Topophilia.  All of this dovetails into a taoist perspective, or at least a taoist perspective as I understand it.

Bees, Commentary on Religion, Cooking, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Garden, Sport

Grounded

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Lughnasa                               Waxing Back to School Moon

Finished digging the potatoes.  The crop seems smaller than last year’s, but I can’t tell for sure.  Still, we don’t eat potatoes often and we have enough to last us quite awhile.  Kate made an early autumn roast vegetable medley with onions, carrots, leaks, garlic, beets and one potato I pierced with the spading fork.  It was delicious.  So was the raspberry pie–of which we have two.  Our raspberry bushes have been exuberant.  We’ve still got leeks, greens, beets, carrots and squash in the ground.  Some of it will stay in the ground until the frost and freeze gets serious.  I made a mistake last year with the carrots and didn’t get them out before the ground froze.  They became organic matter for the soil.  We also left our entire potato crop out in our garage stair well.  When the temps dropped down, way down, the potatoes froze, then thawed.  Not good for potatoes.  We’re trying to not make those mistakes this year.  We’ll make new ones!

Working with Leslie today reminded me of the punch there is in ministry.  Yes, the institutional confines squeeze life out of faith, but the individuals, the people can put it back.  She asked me an interesting question.  We got to talking about Christianity and she wondered, “Do you miss it?”  I’m not sure anyone has asked just that question of me.  I don’t, not at a faith level.

I miss the thick web of relationships I once had there.  I miss the opportunity to do bible study.  That may sound strange, but higher criticism of the bible is a scholarly affair requiring history, language, knowledge of mythology and tradition, sensitivity to redactors (editors), an awareness of textual differences, as well as a knowledge of the bible as a whole.  I spent a lot of time learning biblical criticism and I enjoyed it.  Not much call for it in UU or humanist circles though.

By the time my nap finished it was too late to put the shims in the hives.  I hope there’s some clear, sunny time tomorrow.  Also need to put the feeder back on the package colony.

The Vikings.  Not sure.  Favre needs some better wide receivers, yes.  The defense played well.  Adrian Peterson did, too.  It felt as if we were outcoached the last two games.  Not sure about that, that’s a murky area to me, but something doesn’t feel quite right.

Faith and Spirituality

Good Job, Leslie

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Lughnasa                                              Waxing Back to School Moon

Leslie did a great job this morning.  A creative approach with a candle passed among Grovelanders asking them first to identify a point where they performed ministry, then a time when they were hurt by ministry and finally a time when they were transformed by ministry.  There were tears, laughter, revelation and vulnerability.  Hats off to Leslie.

The vikings.  They may be saving me some time on Sundays.

Bees, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Myth and Story

Miracles.

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Lughnasa                                              Waxing Back to School Moon

Nap.  Off to Ace Hardware for chemically resistant gloves.  Really.  Why would I use anything that required them?  Normally, I wouldn’t.  But the varroa mites compromise the divide’s ability to survive the winter and the U says to do this until IPM begins to work.  If I didn’t have a strong recommendation to go ahead from people whom I know share my overall perspective on medication, I would just chance it.  Kate made shims for me to put on the hive boxes to give bees enough space to walk around and get in the Apiguard.  She made them in plenty of time.  I forgot to take them out with me.  Sigh.

I have to go out again tomorrow and put them in place.  Didn’t realize I’d forgotten them until I came inside and saw them still there on the dog crate.

The garlic is in the ground.  This is the first year I’m planting only garlic I have grown.  In previous years I’ve always bought a few bulbs of a variety I haven’t tried.  The planting of garlic grown here both naturalizes the plant to our locale and gives me a sense of a circle closed.  Satisfying.

Dug potatoes, too.  One row of three.  Not as productive as last year so far, but not bad.  I planted these at ground level in the oldest of the raised beds, one almost flush with the garden floor.  I will not do that again.  Way too much bending over.  Still, the thrill of digging a potato out of the loose soil constitutes a miracle as far I’m concerned.

The older I get the more I have the opposite problem from the early advocates of higher criticism of the Bible.  They thought miracles were problematic in the biblical narrative and went about finding natural explanations for them or chalking them up to mythologization.  Not me.

Miracles are everywhere in my world.  Those pale yellow roots against the darkness of the soil.  Edible!  Planting garlic in the fall so I can harvest it next June.  Cooperating with insects to produce a sweet, delicious liquid that I can share with friends.  How about that!  Being part of a young woman’s search for her vocational path.  A person mutating from young adult to a professional.  Getting up in the morning with energy and eagerness for the day.  Greetings from Vega and Rigel with tails thumping and bodies quivering.  Knowing that we get our food from the energy of a star 93 million miles away from us.  Having a modest grasp of quantum mechanics.  The absolute, dumbfounding miracle of love between Kate and me, our kids, our grandkids.  Friendships that have endured for years and years.  Life is so full of miracles I have to fight through them to get to breakfast.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, permaculture

A Green Neighbor

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Lughnasa                                               Waxing Back to School Moon

Early am picked wild grapes.  Kate makes them into a grape jelly.  The harvest was not as bountiful this year because we arrived about three weeks late to the banquet.  Others had gotten there first.  So it goes.  More than compensated for by the abundance of raspberries.

After the wild grapes I had an hour long session over skype with United Theological Seminary student.  I’m her mentor as she starts out on the long road to becoming a minister in the UU tradition.  The fact of listening to her, helping her sort through feelings and plans as she begins her internship, helped me remember why I agreed to do this.  Each person in a new endeavor needs someone who has walked roughly the same ancientrail.

After that time I went back into the garden and picked yet more raspberries, greens and some tomatoes.  While working in our raspberry patch, I came across this guy sitting high atop one of the raspberry canes.  frog6002_2010-09-18_0292He kept me company while I picked the ripe red and golden fruit.  He waited yet longer while I got Kate.  He waited even longer when I went back inside and got the camera.

One invasive close-up to many got him to move.  He leaped away and I lost my friend.  After a quick search, he appears to be a gray tree frog, Hyla versicolor.

We also have skinks, salamanders and toads, all reflecting a healthy eco-system here where no pesticides or artificial fertilizers contaminate the plants and wild life.

Having a chance to visit with this guy is one of the perks of that choice.

After lunch, I popped the garlic cloves from my largest garlic bulbs.  They go in the ground this afternoon or tomorrow.