Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Humanities, US History

Baby boomers, angels or devils?

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Beltane                                           Waxing Planting Moon

Baby boomers, angels or devils?  As part of the bleeding edge of the boomer generation, born in 1947, and step-parent to a Gen-Xer who often articulated his frustration with us all, I have had the full boomer experience plus listened to and read many critiques:  self-involved, cowards, greedy, idealistic (in a pejorative sense), hypocritical.  You might summarize it by this phrase:  Not the Greatest Generation.

Were there the yuppies who only provided the then current manifestation of suburban oxford cloth striving?  Of course.  Were their Vietnam War era protesters who were cowards?  Sure.  Did many who critiqued Emerson’s notion of the establishment end up part of it and indistinguishable from those there before them? Had to be.  I’m sure if we did a generational breakdown of the folks involved in the latest banking scandals we would find many boomers among them.  Greedy?  Hell, yeah. Clinton and Bush were our Boomer presidents.  Uh oh.  Did many boomers have dreams of a back to the land paradise that devolved into something much less?  Oh, yes.  I had the Peaceable Kingdom, for example.

All these critiques are valid.  And they would be valid for any generation.  They only express the ongoing critique of American culture as materialist.  It is a critique based in fact.

History will be kinder to the Baby Boomers than the keyhole history used to validate sweeping criticisms.  Why?  Because as a generation we sacrificed ourselves and our lives over and over again.  We provided allies to and were a direct part of the Civil Rights struggle.  When our country interfered in a millennia old civil war in Southeast Asia, using as a rationale a bankrupt understanding of communism, we stood against it.  When women began to push back against the leftists of the day and the whole patriarchal culture, we again provided allies and were a direct part of the struggle.  While many of us blended back into the cultural establishment we had critiqued, which is no surprise, many of us stayed out.  We joined the Peace Corps.  We worked in community organizing, community based economic development, community health clinics.  We stood in solidarity with working people and were working people.  We supported the poor and were poor.

We put our own beliefs and our own received values again and again into the alembic of radical critique.  We changed our hearts, transvaluated our values and moved on to the next struggle.  Yes, we were then and are now guilty of idealism, of believing we need a more just, verdant and peaceful world, as the NPR sponsor says.  Our lives have not been easy, they have often been painful estranged lives, wandering from one inner journey to another, searching always searching, traveling this ancientrail, then another.  This is the stuff of epochal change, of shifting the zeitgeist.

Has that change always gone in the direction we intended or hoped?  Never does.  Has much of the change we sought produced the conservation reaction we saw in Reagan, the Moral Majority, the Christian Right?  Yes, but always remember Alinsky, the action is in the reaction.  The view of history is long.  Once the reactions have settled down, as they may be beginning to now, it will become more obvious that baby boomers paid with the coin of their own lives to gain both victories and defeats.

We rode and shaped a shift from a manufacturing based economy to a knowledge based economy, from a white majoritarian male world to a world with an appreciation for difference, a world in which women have surged ahead, a world in which war no longer stands for glory and is questioned at every turn,  a world in which the world matters.  These are not bad things.  They are good things.  Very good things.

Were we responsible for them?  No.  Did we act as the agents of the change? Yes, we did.  We shaped and were shaped by the chaotic, violent, bigoted world into which we were born.  When the last boomer is dead, our legacy will be a different set of problems from the ones we inherited.  That’s the way culture and history works.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, Minnesota, Myth and Story, Politics, US History, Writing

Staying Within My Skill Set

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May 22, 2010              Beltane                    Waxing Planting Moon

While reading an article about Trevor-Rope, a British historian,  I learned that Gibbon wrote Decline and Fall in an attempt to answer the problem raised by the Enlightenment’s idea of progress.  This triggered, for some reason, an echo of the talk by Siah Armajani at the MIA a couple of weeks ago.  A successful artist and philosophically inclined Iranian, he said, “I don’t know how to make legs. [this in response to a question wondering why there were no legs on the figure he said represented himself in an installation currently on display at the MIA in the Until Now exhibition.]  I try to stay within my skill set.”

I’ve not tried to stay within my skill set in that I’ve lived what I call a valedictory life, one typified by reaching to another skill, like say, beekeeping or vegetable gardening or becoming a docent, rather than following the trail laid down by my more obvious gifts:  scholar, poet, writer, political activist, monk [that is, a person oriented toward the inner world].  That’s not to say I’ve abandoned them, I haven’t; but I keep myself off balance by continually being on what I love, a steep learning curve.

This lead me to wonder just what my skill set is and what I would be doing if I chose to remain within it.  A notion came to me, though it’s not the first notion along these lines that I’ve had, but I thought some about what it would mean to stick with it, see it through to the end.

My study contains stacks and shelves of books arranged because they speak to a general interest I have:  the Enlightenment and modernism, the Renaissance, Carl Jung, American philosophy, matters Chinese, Japanese, Cambodian and Indian, Poetry.  You get the idea.

Ian Boswell, a recent Mac grad, and pianist for Groveland UU, said he loved my presentations because they presented a “clear stream of ideas.”  I said, “The history of ideas.”

There is a core skill set:  I have a decent grasp of the history of certain big ideas in Western thought and a much less comprehensive, but still extant, notion of the history of certain ideas in the East as well.  I can communicate about these ideas in a manner accessible to most.

So.  Put that together  with new definitions/understandings of the sacred, the reenchantment of the world, an earth/cosmos oriented approach to the inner life, an historical and ecology examination of Lake Superior, Thomas Berry’s Great Work, a long immersion in the Christian and liberal faith traditions, a now substantial learning in art history, an awareness of and some skill in the political process and work on translating Ovid’s Metamorphosis, an idea begins to present itself.

A series of essays, monographs loosely tied together through a historical, ecological and political look at Lake Superior might use the Lake as a particular example.  It could be the thread that held together thoughts on emergence as a redefinition of the sacred, a symbol reenchanted in another {this is where the work on Ovid could play a role.], a place where the Great Work can focus in another [this is where the political would be important], a look at the history of ideas related to lakes and nations, placing Lake Superior in an art  historical context by examining photographs, drawings, paintings, poetry and literature related to it.

It’s a thought, anyhow.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Family

The I Get Big and Strong Story

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Beltane                                    Waxing Planting Moon

In this month’s Atlantic an article investigates teen-age girls and the hook-up culture they now must navigate.   Written by the daughter of an early feminist the article identifies the reason girls swim in this often self-destructive ocean is the Boyfriend Story.  Teen girls today, as teen girls yesterday and of years ago, want to find a real, true, pure love–the Boyfriend Story.  Never having been a teen-age girl and not having raised a daughter, I don’t feel qualified to assess the accuracy of the author’s premise.

It did get me to wondering though.  What’s the story that propels teen-age boys?  It’s not the Girlfriend Story, I know that much for sure.  It might be the I Get Big and Strong Story.  In this story the hero does not seek real, true, pure love, but the vehicle for becoming a man, usually a career focused drive, different in substance and in direction than the Boyfriend Story, but a story that puts teen-age boys on life’s highway like deer in front of an oncoming 18-wheeler just as surely as the Boyfriend Story puts girls on the same highway, facing down the same oncoming truck, just one carrying a different load.

I remember high school, hoping good grades would make the I Get Big and Strong story happen for me.  If that wasn’t it, maybe it would be acting.  I did Our Town and had to learn to walk like an adult.  If neither of those worked out, it could be leadership.  The class president had to amount to something, didn’t he?

The I Get Big and Strong story is a not we story, it is an I story.  As the teen-age girl runs up on the shoals in search of a partner, the teen-age boy hits the rocks alone while fending off the competition, making himself bigger, faster, stronger, smarter, cleverer.

What do you think?  What is the boy’s equivalent of the Boyfriend Story?

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Our Land and Home, permaculture

Permaculture and the Natural World

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Beltane                          Waxing Planting Moon

I’ve not written about permaculture in a while.  The orchard has clover all over, including in some of the plant guilds, but they seem intact.  It has changed the view from our kitchen, a productive part of our property now sits just outside our windows.  The bees fit in well to the permaculture process because they  fertilize the fruits: apples, pears, cherries, blueberries, currants, quince, gooseberries, raspberries and strawberries.

In a modest sense, given the small number of our fruit producing plants, the bee/fruit blossom connection is a complete one.  The fruit grows in our soil, blooms here, the bee comes, collects nectar and in the process fertilizes the fruit.  The fertilized fruit grows large to encase the fertilized seeds.  The bee returns to the hive, uses the nectar and pollen from the fruit blossoms to feed larvae and make honey.  When we eat the honey, the circle includes us in a direct and intimate way.

In a similar way the plant guilds, selections of plants that complement each other by warding off predatory insects, attracting beneficial insects, setting nitrogen and micronutrients into the soil, also have a circle of benefit that, in turn, helps us produce healthy vegetables for our table.  Our gardens and orchard have a more modest impact on our overall diet than a larger plot could, but the very act of growing and eating at least some of our food makes us more conscious of everything we eat.

There is another strong positive, too, perhaps the most important one of all, at least for me.  By working with plants that have specific needs, specific soil temperatures, water requirements, nutrients, length of growing season, protection from pests Kate and I have to orient our lives to their rhythms.  No matter what we do, a plant needs to be planted when it needs to be planted.  It needs thinning when it needs thinning, pruning when it needs pruning.  When harvest comes, it too must be done in a timely manner or the whole process will have gone for not.

The bees, too, have their cycles of birth, maturation and decline.  To work with bees we have to take them as they are, not as we would wish them to be.  We  work with them according to their ancientrails, ones laid down thousands, even millions of years ago and ones to which we adapt, not the other way around.

This act of submission to what could be called biological imperatives does not, surprisingly, chain us, rather, in that wonderfully contradictory way, it frees us to become an active part in nature’s ongoingness.  We become an active partner rather than a dominator, yet another living thing dancing to the music of cold and heat, wet and dry, light and dark.

Yes, it is, of course true, that we run our air conditioner in the summer and our furnace in the winter.  Yes, we refrigerate some of our food.  We close our doors so that we don’t dance to the buzzing and whirring of insects also part of nature’s minuets, gavottes and tangos.  So, no, we are not pure, but that is in fact the human dilemma. We are part of nature, able to respond to and participate in her rhythms, yet we are also creatures of culture, the complex web we weave to make our home on this planet.

This tension creates an angst we sometimes know only when we stand on a cliff’s edge, look out toward the ocean and see the sun sink below the water’s blue margin.  It is an unresolvable angst, this in but not entirely of nature realm we inhabit.  It is, I would argue, an angst that we must embrace, not push away.  Why?  Because pushing away our delicate problem has created an ecological disaster that just may scour us off the face of mother earth.  That’s a good reason, I think.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Humanities

Under the Planting Moon

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Beltane                                Waxing Planting Moon

Under the planting moon a large batch of potatoes will hit the soil, companion planted with bush beans.  Nasturtiums go in today, too.  I may have to replant a few things I optimistically sowed a couple of weeks ago.  I knew better.

Finished Wheelock chapter 15.  Gonna let that sink in for today, then I’ll hit the Ovid tomorrow.

Kate and I head out to the new Hindu Mandir in the northwestern burbs tonight for a tour and a meal.  Should be fun.

Goin’ outside.

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

The Self

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Beltane                                   New Moon

In theology and philosophy an anthropology reveals how the system views the human.  The Cartesian split between body and mind is an anthropology as is Freud’s id-ego-superego.  A familiar medieval anthropology is the body-mind-soul, a tripartite division.  From just these three examples you can see that anthropologies often get layered one upon the other rather than displacing each other.  We assume the Cartesian anthropology when we cannot imagine mind moving or directly affecting anything in the material world, but we might also believe in the medieval body-mind-soul division when it comes to the afterlife.  We may also, in our daily lives, use Freud’s work to analyze our own motivations and dilemmas.

One of the valuable lessons seminary taught me was that we each have our own theology, our own psychology, our own metaphysic, our own philosophy, our own anthropology.  That is, we all have conclusions, though they may be unformed and unsystematic, about the nature of the sacred, the operations of the human mind, the way the universe is really put together, our own views on beauty, truth and justice.  We each, too, have our own anthropology, gleaned from our years of experience as an example of the kind as well as our years of observation of others of our kind.

Here’s my anthropology in summary.  We are unique, solitary and complete within ourselves, yet each of us yearns for the other, some contact, some intimacy that suggests our unique and solitary nature does not condemn us to life alone.  This tension between our isolated existence and our yearning for connection is unresolvable, creating a great deal of suffering, though also creating the purest joy most of us ever know.

We live our lives, when we live them most richly and well, with what I call the Self constantly with us.  The Self is not a perfect you, nor a successful you, rather the Self is the you that can contribute your individual gift(s) to others.  This means that the authentic life, the life lived toward the fullest expression of the Self, is, ironically, the one lived most fully for the other.

Stripping away cultural roles, parental expectations, linguistic and moral customs, seeking the you that calls you forward into richness and toward harmony with the whole of creation is our only real task in this life.  It is not easy, in fact it is hard, and prone to manipulation and deception both from within and without.

If you can, however, pare away the not-you, get down to the core, the place where the seeds of your true Self are, you can nurture those seeds until they grow strong, bloom, bear fruit.  It will be a rare fruit, a strange fruit, a fruit with a flavor and a vitality only you can bring to it.  This journey, the ancient trail inscribed over the temple to Apollo at Delphi, Know Thyself, is the only path that leads to solid ground.  Until you come to know  yourself, you stand on sand that can shift under you.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Health

Death Came Calling

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Beltane                                     Waning Flower Moon

Yesterday death came to call.  Dizziness and nausea took over my body while my mind raced back to October, 1964, trying to inhabit, again, the mind of my mother as the stroke hit her, trying to imagine the transition from vitality to powerlessness, wondering what thoughts came to her as she fell to the floor in the basement of the United Methodist Church.  Pushing this thought back, far from me, get thee behind me death, I wondered if she had done the same, imagined that this was like all the other times, a bit more severe than most perhaps, but surely something that would lift.  It didn’t.  She died a week later.

Death had come to call on me as a reminder of the future in the guise of a dark moment of the past.  All that work on Latin, I thought.  Then, just as quickly, would you have done something else?  No.  The answer is no.  At that moment a peace settled over me, if this was my time, so be it.  It’s just fine.  If not, I’ll get downstairs and study my i-stem nouns and ablatives.

Then, today, in a lecture, Nietzsche posed a hypothetical:  What if a demon came to you and said, “You will live and relive your life.  All of it.  The pains and the sorrows, the joys and accomplishments, all of it, even this visit from me.  And you will relive it not only once, but over and over.”  What is your response?  If you can say, Thank you, oh divine one, then you have lived an authentic life and have come to rest with who you are.  Nietzsche called this the myth of eternal recurrence.

I find I’m on the Thank you side of the demon question.  Yes, I’d like another helping please.

Much of my attitude toward life seems to have its roots in Nietzschean thought.  Strange that I’m just now discovering this.

Aging, Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Friends, GeekWorld

Every Life Is A Universe

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Beltane                                      Waning Flower Moon

As you can tell, cybermage Bill Schmidt has contributed again to this blog.  He set me up on WordPress and has updated this software from time to time, including the new photograph.  The old one has only been retired, not eliminated.  We would like to find a couple of more photographs I could rotate over the course of year, perhaps a seasonal array.  Thanks again, Bill.

In the docent lounge today I saw Wendy talking with Linda.  This was a moment to remind us that we can never tell what lurks in the life of people we see casually from a distance.  These two women talking, not remarkable.  A woman recently treated for breast cancer and another whose son recently died of an overdose of oxycontin talking, more remarkable.  It took my breath away.

I’ve spoken with both of them over the last few weeks and I can only say that the resilient and yet unblinking attitude they both have is a testament to the human spirit.  We never know the full story of those we meet, even those closest to us, because the inner life exists encased in an impenetrable place, the mind and heart of another.   Still, we do get clues, signals from the interior and they often come in moments of tragedy.

(Pissaro:  Conversation)

One of the truest things I have ever read is that each death is an apocalypse for an entire universe dies each time a human dies.  This makes these encounters with it more telling, for the stakes are so high.  So, the next time you see two people engaged in casual conversation, pause a moment to celebrate this oh so simple, oh so magnificent act.

Aging, Bees, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Garden, Great Work, Humanities, Our Land and Home, permaculture

Home

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Beltane                                     Waning Flower Moon

There is here the action:  taking the hive tool and wrenching loose the propolis, moving the frame, all the while bees buzzing and whirring, digging into the soil, placing the leeks in a shallow trench, the sugar snap peas in their row, inoculant on top of them, around them.  The plants move from pot to earth home, their one and true place where they will root, work their miracle with light and air.  The dogs run, chase each other.  Vega plops herself down in the water, curling herself inside it, displacing the water, getting wet.

There is, too, this other thing, the mating of person and place, the creation of memories, of food, of homes for insects and dogs and grandchildren, for our lives, we two, on this strange, this awesome, this grandeur, life.  This happens, this connection, as a light breeze stirs a flower.  It happens when a bee stings, or a dog jumps up or leans in, when Kate and I hug after a day of making room for  more life here.

In a deep way it is unintended, that is, it happens not because it is willed, but because becoming native to a place is like falling in love, a surprise, a wonder, yet also a relationship that requires nurture, give and take.  In a deep way, too, it is intended, that is, we want to grow vegetables, flowers, fruit, have room for our dogs and for our family, for our friends.  The intention creates the space, the opening where the unintended occurs.

Sixteen years Kate and I have lived here.  A long time for us.  Now though, we belong here.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities

Beltane: 2010

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Beltane                               Waning Flower Moon

The old Celtic calendar divided the year into two seasons, Summer and Winter.    Summer began on Beltane, May 1st, and ended at Samhain, Summer’s End, at October 31st.  Summer is the growing season, the time when a subsistence farming economy like that of the Celts in Britain and Ireland raised food stuffs that had to last throughout the long, fallow season of  Winter.

As my inner journey has  changed over the years since Alexandria, Indiana and my received Methodist Christianity the wisdom of these early earth based faith traditions means more and more to me.   The technology of food raising and preservation has changed dramatically, it is true, but the human need for food has not.  We still need enough calories to sustain us throughout our day and most of those calories still start out in the form of plant material.

Taoism emphasizes conforming our lives to the movement of heaven.  At its most obvious level this means making the rhythms of our lives congruent with what the Celts called the Great Wheel of the Seasons.  If you care for flowers, have a vegetable garden or raise bees, then the biological imperative of their seasonal needs tends to pull you into the season.  If you enjoy the gradual and beautiful transition in Minnesota from the growing season to the depths of Winter, the cool days and leaves may call you outside, perhaps to hunting and fishing, perhaps to hiking and birdwatching, perhaps just for the changing colors.  As fall changes to winter, you may, like the bears, begin to  hibernate, turn away from the cold and begin to do inside work.

Taoism also encourages us to conform our lives to the possibilities of the moment.  That is, when standing in a river, pushing it back upstream is foolish, but it is possible to dig channels for it and divert it’s energy.

The Great Wheel is often seen as a metaphor for the human journey:  baby (spring), youth (summer), adulthood (fall), elderhood (winter).  The tao of human life is to act as the moment in life you are in suggests.  A twist on this might be to consider what the adult stage finds calling to it when the season of summer is upon us.  There are many levels.

Beltane offers us a chance to reflect on those things in our lives that have begun to take on real form, that seem poised for a season of growth.  In my case bee-keeping and the translation project come to mind.  I’ve done preliminary work with both of them and it may just be this summer that they grow into regular parts of my ongoing journey.    I hope so.

Whatever it is for you, whatever things in your life  need a long hot summer for maturation, give it to them.  This is the movement of heaven.

Kate’s colleague Dick, whom I have mentioned occasionally here, has come close to the end of his painful last days.  The cancer has proved more than his body and the medical wisdom we have now could defeat.  What comes to maturation for him in these first days of summer is the whole of his life and the transition of death.  None of us know what lies on the other side of the grave, or even if there is another side, but all lives end.  Vale, Dick.