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  • A Wandering Soul

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samain and the Moon of Thanksgiving

    Sunday gratefuls: Paul’s birthday. Mark Ellis. Mary. Diane. Rigel, keeping me warm. Dr. Bachtel. Cod fingers and steak bits. Onion and Cucumber salad. A Colorado blue Sky day. Colorado road builders. Jeffco snowplow drivers. Whoever invented concrete and macadam. Britain. Wales. Scotland. England. Isle of Man. Druids. The Holy Isle. Castle Conwy. Hawarden, Wales. St. Deniol’s residential library. Chester, England. Horse racing there.

    I have my toe in the Christmas Spirit pond. Not fully there, but it’s coming. Feels wonderful. Getting ready to dive into some research on Yule and the Winter Solstice. Where most of the Christmas traditions originate. I love learning about Celtic and Northern European religious traditions. Their pantheons. Their myths and legends. Snorri Sturluson. Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Tolkien’s work. Beowulf. Not sure why but these traditions resonate with my inner life. As does Taoism and the lifeways of the Japanese. Much more so than the New Testament or the Torah. Seems strange that it would be so. But, it is.

    Even Diwali and Holi. I’d like to experience Holi at least once. Throwing colored powder at each other to celebrate the riotous colors of spring and the triumph of good over evil? Yes. Messy, beautiful, ecstatic.

    Buddhism doesn’t do it for me either. Except certain aspects of Tibetan Buddhism. Yamantaka. Bardo. Again, not sure why. Thin soup for me.

    Those traditions that find animacy everywhere like Shinto, many Native American traditions. Yes. Roman and Greek myth, legend. Yes, not in a soul way, but as story, as ancient layers below this civilization in which we live.

    Perhaps my soul never left the time into which it was born. Maybe during the journey out of Africa when all things were miraculous. When all things moved and lived and had their being right alongside those of us on pilgrimage to humanity’s future. Or, maybe some shamanic ancestor moved directly into this body. Wondering what it was like far from his or her time.

    Whatever the explanation. Once I began to see, and then shed, the totalizing myths I’d been steeped in from birth… Well. I can’t unlearn the fragile and human created nature of them. The scent of fear in them, attempting to make certain an uncertain world. Building meaning for lives out of tissue paper and sealing wax. Like the Catholics who built their English churches over Celtic holy wells. Tried to absorb enough of the Faery Faith to draw the Celts away from their pagan practices. It worked. For a while. As Judaism and Islam work for a while, for many. Zoroastrianism.

    Not sure about Hinduism. It seems to want those most early, most primal connections with this place. Great stories like the Ramayana and the Rig Veda. I don’t know it well enough. Maybe never will. The Mahabharata. Many mystical practices. Lots of color and fun. Also, the dark side of caste, of killing Muslims.

    This month though, the time of deepest darkness, has inspired so much wonderful music. Story. Celebration. At least for those of us in the temperate latitudes. And, I revel in it. Going down with the longest night into the well of my soul. Coming out to light an evergreen tree, hang mistletoe, holly and ivy. Santa Claus. Elves. Snow. Cold. Icicles. Sleighs. Horses with halters. Fire up the yule log. Wish I could lift a glass of grog, or ambrosia, or single malt scotch. But, alas no.

    Guess this is my Sunday unsermon. Leaving one way and seeking others.


    Beyond the Boundaries Commentary on Religion Great Wheel Holidays Judaism Letters Memories Myth and Story Original Relation Our Land and Home Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. Shadow Mountain

  • My Christmas Wish

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samain and the Thanksgiving Moon

    Thursday gratefuls: Last night Kate said as we were going to sleep, I know one of your gratefuls. OK. Your electric blanket. Oh, yeah. She right. And that down comforter on top of it. Plus, the cold bedroom that makes them both necessary and a joy. In the single digits here. Windows open. Our way. The small Animal which created the narrow tracks that look like a tiny wagon had crossed our snowy driveway. The Mule Deer that came by later. My own, for that matter. The wheel tracks of the garbage taken out yesterday morning. Temporary memories. Our mailbox. Bought one that has a door in the back as well as the front. I can get the mail without standing on Black Mountain Drive as folks drive home from work.

     

    Prepping for a Hanukkah post. Advent, too. Yule and the Winter Solstice. Why is our New Year’s in the middle of winter? Kwanza. This is a big holiday month. We need it this year. We also need it to be safe. Hope you have an uncomplicated but joyous holimonth.

    My Christmas wish. Please make DJT disappear from the television, social media, and print. I don’t care if he stays in the Whitehouse until US Marshals come to serve him an eviction notice. I’ve coined a phrase, and I don’t want it to offend those who got PTSD in horrendous circumstances, or to demean them in any way, but Post Trump Stress Disorder is real. His voice, his image, news articles about him trigger me. His careful enunciation of outright lies, his presentation as conman in chief shames our country and has been repudiated. Couldn’t we muzzle him for the next 48 days? I have a wire muzzle for Kepler that out to fit him. Or maybe noise cancelling electronic devices when he opens his mouth?

    Still feeling glum. I don’t have the holimonth spirit. And, I want it. Gonna find that box of Christmas decorations in the garage and lug it up here. String up some lights. Position my small collection of Christmas snowglobes around. Put out ornaments. I’ve got a spruce on our property to cut for a tree. Not a very big one. While I’m decorating, I’ll hit Pandora’s Christmas music stations.

    Oddly, what I miss about Christmas is not the church services, except for the music. I don’t miss the creche. Nor the story of a baby God. I miss the parts of Christmas that make it a family holiday. The tree. The music. The food. That Night Before Christmas feeling. I want to put out a five dollar bill, ok, maybe a twenty, so Santa can go eat at the Rustic Station in Bailey. Get some of those buttermilk pancakes. I’ll put out hay for Rudolph and Dancer and Vixen and all the team. Some milk or whatever elves prefer. This is the Christmas that absorbed so much of the pagan Yule.

    Today’s a Happy Camper day. I’ll see the white tops of the Continental Divide as I drive on 285. Snow sprinkled Ponderosa, Lodgepole, Spruce line the highway. At points along the way, tucked away in the tree are the stone chimneys and fireplaces left over from earlier settlers cabins. Not to far from Conifer High School, on the way to 285, are two cabins from that time, too. They’re dotted all over. Plenty on Shadow Mountain Drive. The road goes up steeply and down dramatically. Mountain roads. Each time I drive here I look at the mountains, scan for wildlife, enjoy the odd mix of businesses and homes, some mansions often high up. Five full years this Winter Solstice and it’s all still beautiful and amazing to me.

    I’m not a small government guy. Not at all. I believe government has the responsibility to keep all of its citizens healthy, educated, housed, and with adequate nutrition. Even so. I want government to recede, go back to its normal presence in our lives. Post Trump Stress Disorder has made me eager to have him gone and to have words and whole sentences, complete thoughts in the mouths of our government officials. Calm. Quiet. At least until January 20th. Please.


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  • We are the people of Holiseason!

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samain and the Full, Blue Moon of Radical Change

    Saturday gratefuls: Dr. Eigner. Undetectable PSA. The Great Wheel. Taoism. All us pagans. Samain. The fallow season. Holiseason. Darkness. A return, however brief, to time sanity. The big snow that tamped down the Cameron and East Troublesome fires. The American Way. The American Dream.

    Samain. Again. The Celtic New Year. The Great Wheel turned now for a full orbit around the sun since last Samain. Though I embraced the Jewish New Year in September, 5781, as a way out of 2020, it never seemed to stick. That is, 2020 kept crashing back over the dike of even as ancient a tradition as that one. Gonna try again.

    The Celtic New Year puts the beginning of a new year at the beginning of the fallow time. Samain in ancient Gaelic means Summer’s End. In the most ancient Celtic calendar that we have, the Celts recognized two seasons. Beltane, now on May 1st, marked the season of fertility, growth, harvest. Samain, now on October 31st, is the final harvest holiday. The growing season finished villages prepared for the difficult time of year to come, a cold time when people lived off their stores. Interesting to me that the Celts chose such a time for their New Year.

    The veil thins during this time, the veil between this world and the Other World. The Other World is the land of Faery, the land of the Gods, the land of the dead. The thinned veil meant ancestors could cross back into this world, as could the Faery folk. Since the Faery folks sometimes kidnapped children and ancestors could be ornery, it was a scary transition from growing season to the fallow time.

    Contracts ended or began during the Samain market week as they did for each of the Celtic holidays: Beltane, Lughnasa, Samain, and Imbolc. Always a festive time of year Samain like the others, saw trading and feasting, late night dancing around bonfires, visiting family. The Celts also celebrated the two equinoxes and the two solstices: Ostara, Midsommar, Mabon, and Yule with market weeks.

    Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophist, and radical thinker of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, says Michaelmas, the Saint Day for the Archangel Michael, September 29th, is the “springtime of the soul.” Along with the Jewish New Year which always falls near the same time, we’re encouraged to go deep into our selves. I marry this idea to the increasing darkness, the gradual lengthening of the night that began at Midsommar and reaches its maximum at Yule, on the Winter Solstice. Samain invites us to not only go inside, but to also open ourselves to that Other World, the Unseen One, that lies just out of sight. Might be a multiverse, might be a dimension not understood by science or reason.

    The Great Wheel teaches us about the link between our inner journey and the seasonal changes. The seasonal changes themselves can teach us about the world beyond our lived reality. We can avert our attention from the screens and pages and indoor rooms of our lives and take our attention out of doors. We can wonder what lies beyond that mountain, beneath that lake.

    It teaches us Covid too shall end. And, makes us aware as well, that it will both end and return again. Though I hope we don’t have to have another Trump. Please. Don’t make authoritarianism and rampant stupidity laced into cupidity a renewing moment. Please.

    Holiseason begins now. The term is not mine-I found it in the Oxford English Dictionary-but I apply it to the time between today, Samain, and January 6th, the Epiphany, the day after the Twelve Days of Christmas.  Holiseason includes so many, many holidays: Samain, Thanksgiving, Divali, Hanukah, Advent, Posada, Winter Solstice, Yule, New Years Day, Boxing Day, Kwanza. Add ones that you know.

    We bathe ourselves in light and darkness, spend time with family, often giving them gifts. Holiseason is a time to sing songs, make the tables groan with food, decorate the house, the city, the nation, hug friends and family, acknowledge all the ancient spiritual trails we follow,  cue ourselves in to the soul’s journey, move deep into the caverns of our own inner life.

    If you open yourself to its richness, holiseason will alert you to the fullest potential in yourself and those you love. It will remind you that the whole globe seeks for wisdom, for love, for light. Traditions come alive in song, in movies, in books. Poetry. We need not despair, even with Trump, even with Covid, even with hurricanes and wildfires. We are the people of the Holiseason. Joyous. Alert. Loving. Singing. Diving deep into our own souls to turn them inside out and know others through them. Blessed be.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     


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  • Oh, I See

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall and the Moon of Radical Change

    Sunday gratefuls: Snow. 8 degrees. More Snow, more Cold drooping down from the north, screaming in later from the west. Rigel and Kep. Kate. Our dialogue about doing things together. A warmer day yesterday. Happy Camper. Safeway. Ruby.

    A light Snow, crystalline, falls outside. The temperature has dropped to 6 degrees. We are in a belt, once again, that could get up to 12-14 inches. Any amount of Snow and cold comes as a relief, not only here on Shadow Mountain, but also for those affected by the East Troublesome Fire and the Cameron Fire, well north of us, up in the Rocky Mountain National Park part of the state. I hope it’s enough to douse them, or at least bring them under control.

    My favorite coffee mug has the Polar Express on it. I got it when Kate and I took then 7 year old grandson Gabe to an evening on board a Christmas train. He remarked, “We don’t celebrate this!” and huffed at the whole production. I got mad. Couldn’t he back off and enjoy the elves coming through with hot chocolate? Nope.

    Gabe is not an observant Jew, even now several years later at the age of 12. But, he held fast that night. I admire it. I can say that now, but then, I thought, you ungrateful little killjoy!

    You see this coming, right? What was really going on there? I loved Christmas. I loved the Polar Express. I did not associate it with Christianity by that point, but Gabe certainly did. Christmas is the great temptation for Hanukkah kids. Partly why Jewish children do so well at Hanukkah these days in terms of presents. Look! We have 8 days, they only have one night.

    Not Christmas. Nope, Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel. Not Silent Night. No Christmas Tree. No Santa Claus. No The Night Before Christmas. A clear demarcation line between them and us. Kate and I that night were them. Gabe defended his faith and his culture. Again, good for him.

    Fast forward to a Hanukkah at our house a year or so later. My knee replacement had just happened. I was home but medicated, morphine. Big pain.

    As Ruth and Gabe went through the stack of presents on the coffee table, I was hit with a sudden wave of despair. What was I doing here? Why was I celebrating Hanukkah? I’m a Christmas guy. How did I let myself get into this?

    The same kind of holiday dysphoria, I think, that Gabe experienced on the Polar Express. Huh. What goes around, comes around.

    Since that moment, which passed as the morphine went away and the knee healed, I’ve realized the exasperated finger needed to point back at myself. Both incidents indicated a deep longing, a childhood longing, for a holiday I knew as mine.

    I love Santa Claus, twinkling lights, hot chocolate, candy canes. And, yes, the Christmas Tree. I don’t love the hassle of the Christmas Tree or the materialistic orgy. No. That was easy to leave behind. What are the presents for anyhow? Proof of love? What kid needs that? Or, at least, what kid should need that?

    The whole mishmash of mistaking parental love for the giving of gifts let me walk away from Christmas. Kate helped of course because she got tired of decorating MY Christmas Tree. Can’t blame her for that.

    I don’t need the whole crass side of Christmas. Neither do you, I imagine. Maybe nobody does.

    But. Boy, do I need the songs and the lights and all that stuff about Santa and the North Pole. And, the Tree. This year I’m going to pick a Lodgepole in our yard as my Christmas Tree. No, I’ll not cut it down. Maybe I’ll find a living Evergreen Tree to have inside, a small one.

    Its that Evergreen connection that makes religious sense. Evergreen, a resurrected God. See? I’ll continue this, but I want to post now, so I can get breakfast before my time with the ancient ones.


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  • Minding the Gap

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall and the RBG Moon

    Saturday gratefuls: Two ayes for two eyes. Clearer, some fuzziness. Supposed to go away. Easy to read computer screen. No pain. Tony’s. The clerks at Tony’s. Kate’s wrist improving. This mythic sky. Fall. Courage. Sadness. Springtime for inner work. The days and nights of the year’s last half. The harvest. The rut.

    Come into me, spirit of Fall. As I drove down Shadow Mountain yesterday, the golden glory of autumn Aspens against the evergreen Lodgepoles, all on soaring Mountain sides, this prayer came, unbidden. Soon my hand moved in a waving motion, like the sageing rituals of the Lakota, wafting the vision of Fall I could see into my heart, into my soul.

    Judaism emphasizes kavanah in prayer. Intention. I wondered, what is the intention of this prayer? Why has it come to me?

    Minding the gap. That’s the intention, I understood this suddenly, too. The gap between my self-understanding as a distinct and separate living being and the World outside my car window. It is a false understanding, made to appear real by the mind we carry and the body that is its vehicle. I am part of the Fall, part of its courage and sadness. Part of its springtime for Soul work.

    The Great Wheel turns. We live through its Seasons. Its Seasons live through us. Invite the Season into your body, into your Soul. Live within it, not as an observer only.

    Then. The Mountains. What do they mean? Strong. Hard. Tall. Shansin make me strong, hard, and tall like Black Mountain, like Shadow Mountain, like Conifer Mountain. Raise the mountain in me, let it support and define me.

    Then. The Aspens. Make me aware of the living links I have with friends and family. Like the Aspen Grove. Interleaved. Sharing nutrients and knowledge and warnings. Then, no, not like the Aspen Grove, as the Aspen Grove. Help me feel the rootlets of these Aspen, these Lodgepole supporting me, feeding me, making me aware of what’s coming.

    Why these prayers, these meditations, came to me, I can’t say. They were powerful and sank into me, radiated back out of me. I was one with the Fall. One with the Mountains. One with the Aspen Groves.

    The Great Wheel has within it the learnings we need. And, apparently, will grace us with them when we need them. Blessed be.


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  • Unanswerable Questions.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall and the RBG Moon

    Sunday gratefuls: Orion, clear and distinct, like Descartes wanted his ideas. The night sky, visible again! Meatloaf from Easy Entrees. Learning to sleep all night on my side. The lens in my left eye. Kate, waiting for relief. Ruth will watch Kiss the Ground. Groveland wanting to hear me again after all these years. It’s Beyond Me.

    Three days post-op now. Biggest surprise so far was Orion, there. No longer several bursting flares, but his own, distinct self. Rigel there, too, his left foot, bright and clear. Ah. It’s good to see an old friend looking well.

    I no longer need glasses for television. But, I did order three pair of 2.5 cheaters off Amazon. I can still read now with my right eye, but that goes away on the 8th of October. With the artificial lens I can’t focus anymore.

    This surgery is such a good metaphor I wonder why it’s not deployed more often. Our vision gradually becomes clouded, the world becomes less and less easy to see. What do we need to remove our political cataracts and gain a humane vision? Those cataracts that have developed over years of lesser evils and disappointing politicians. Do we all come with the cataracts of racism and classism or do we develop them over time? Who will be our surgeons?

    Shifting. It’s Beyond Me. I’ve had fun gathering answers to Groveland UU’s question: What are the origins of religious beliefs?

    Finding an anthropologist, Harvey Whitehouse, has worked on the subject pleased me. He’s a cognitive anthropologist, a specialty that had little footing when I studied anthropology back in the late 1960’s. They study the way our mind shapes our understanding, rather than the understandings themselves. Whitehouse’s work is bloodless, but it has high points.

    This presentation has to be a discussion. It asks an unanswerable question, my favorite kind. Each of us has an intuition about the answer. It will be interesting to learn what others have concluded. I have several notions to throw into the pot, but the answer is lost in the long ago, far away.

    Doing presentations is a delight. I get to do research. I get to think about a topic. My ideas and conclusions get an airing. Feedback comes. On occasion cash, too.

    It’s also unsettling. The research has to stop. The thinking must end. No matter how tentative, the ideas must be articulated. Exposed. Naked. And, in person.

    My work doesn’t include the realm of the certain. I cannot say what the origin of religion is. No one can. Then I here Wittgenstein, of that about which we cannot speak, we must be silent. I only speak about such matters. A challenge, for sure.

    So right now I’m anxious, teeth a bit clenched. Zoom adds another layer of uncertainty. Also a layer of experiment, of trying something new.


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  • Courage and Sadness

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Mabon (Vernal Equinox) and the RBG Moon

    Tuesday gratefuls: Kate resolving the missing $5,500.Rigel eager to get up this morning. Orion in the south. Mars in the west. Venus in the east. Sirius in the southeast. Small bursts of color. The Great Wheel, turning.

    The vernal equinox. When the night hours increase. Daylight shortens. Crops come to fruit. The Earth begins to gather back to itself the plants that grew in fields and meadows.

    The Elk rut. That strange strangled cry of the bugling bull Elk. The cough of the mountain lion as they hunt in the dawn and twilight. Bears in their hyperphagia phase (a new word for me), 20,000 calories a day. Preparation for hibernation. Upturned trash cans, detritus on the roads.

    Orion returns to the night sky. Getting the paper while feeding the dogs. In the dark now. Seeing the stars. Or, rather, their cataract driven explosions of light.

    Earth/Sky, a favorite website, has a fascinating short article about the Chinese sense of autumn. This observation I found significant: “…it’s part of Chinese culture to maintain and add to ancient wisdom. In contrast, we in the Western world tend to replace old ideas with new ideas. So – although our Western way of thinking encourages advances in things like technology and economics – the Chinese understanding of natural cycles remains far deeper than ours.”

    The emotions associated with autumn for the Chinese, courage and sadness, rise in full measure this 2020 harvest season. Sad. The feeling of Leaves falling, Grasses withering, light diminishing, the Sun’s angle shortening. RBG’s tzaddik death. The pandemic. Our beleaguered and chaotic nation. Isolation and its discontents. Courage. Facing the election, doing what’s necessary. Mourning, then fighting. Going on as the Vegetative world dies, changes. Living with the pandemic instead of in spite of it. Leaning into the third phase for those of us old hippies and radicals still here.

    The Great Wheel is ancient Western knowledge. I have chosen to maintain it and, I hope, add to it. As the Earth/Sky article notes: “To the Chinese, nature means more than just the cycling of the seasons. Nature is within and around us…” It used to meant that in the West, too, but our emphasis on reason, on results, on arriving at destinations, on a monotheistic creator who controls nature, have become mature cataracts for us, occluding our vision.

    We see what we believe useful. We find the laws of nature, then proceed to own them, use them. This gives us the impression that, like magic or miracles, we can control nature. The rapid warming of our planet gives the lie to that.

    I’m neither a Luddite nor anti-reason, anti-science. I am sad about what we’ve lost in our rush to understand and after having understood, manipulate.

    I find comfort in knowing as autumn comes to the Rockies, it has also come to me. My life has matured, has headed for the fallow season, the long season in which I return those borrowed elements, become again one with the universe. Though of course I’m one with it now, too.

    Which makes me feel the turning of the wheel, it tugs on me, pulls me toward not only death, but also spring. The cyclical renewal. Who knows? Maybe autumn prepares us not for annihilation, but transformation and renewal. It does for Mother Earth. Why not us?


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  • Head, Heart, Hands and Health

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa and the Lughnasa Moon

    Sunday gratefuls: The framers. Jon’s print. Ode’s. Ruth’s painting. Kate’s heirloom needlepoint: Love is Enough. All beautiful. Art by friend and family. Pho. Singapore noodles. That woman and her kid who needed money. Ruby and her air conditioning. Driving through Evergreen with the window down and the AC on. Allergies. Sympathy for my father. Blue skies, cool nights. No wildfire so far. Lughnasa

    Lughnasa in the mountains. Lughnasa is a first fruits harvest festival. In ancient Celtic life it would have meant, like all the major holidays do, a market week. Games, trading, drinking and feasting, contests. State fairs and county fairs are Lughnasa influenced. They tend to fall between August 1st, Lughnasa and the autumnal equinox, or Mabon.

    The Madison County 4-H Fair, which was held in Alexandria, my hometown, rather than the county seat of Anderson, Indiana, is a good example. I don’t recall, or maybe just don’t know, the reason Alexandria’s Beulah Park got the honor, but it was great for us as kids.

    A carny setup strings of lights, cotton candy machines and hot dog stands, rides, and games. We would go early, watch them setup. Mom holding me on her shoulder, a blue blanket wrapped around me, a string of lights above my head is my first memory. A faint chill shuddered through me. I’ve always believed that was the first sign of my polio.

    Local men erected tents with thick stakes and strong rope. Vendors of all sorts came to the fair. My favorite one was the dairy that passed out dixie cups of chilled buttermilk. I’d sprinkle mine with salt and pepper, going back as often as they’d allow it.

    Car dealers brought out new model cars. I saw my first 1957 Chevy at the Madison County Fair. Farm equipment dealers brought tractors, hay balers, wagons. Those big yellow and green John Deeres. The red Massey-Fergusons. Tires taller than all of us kids with deep tread.

    There were entertainers: magicians, singers, choirs, local celebrities. A queen contest. But the most important part of the fair, the Madison County 4-H fair, were the 4-H exhibits and shows. Some of you city folks may not know about 4-H: Head, Heart, Hands and Health.

    4‑H Pledge

    I pledge my head to clearer thinking,
    My heart to greater loyalty,
    My hands to larger service,
    and my health to better living,
    for my club, my community, my country, and my world.

    This was small town America, rural America at its best. That pledge works. Can you imagine djt taking the pledge, for example?

    4-H, the county extension office, and the cooperative extension offices from public land grant universities made room for kids with sheep, pigs, cows, rabbits, chickens, ducks, geese, horses. The kids came with their animals, often slept in their stalls during the fair. They made room for kids who cooked, baked, painted, did seed art, crafts like crocheting. County extension offices sponsored contests for wood-working, pie baking, honey making, quilting. County 4-H’ers could win blue ribbons, go on to the State Fair in Indianapolis.

    Walking through the stalls with Holsteins, Guernseys, Jerseys, Angus, Hereford, and smelling farm smells, the ordure mixed with hay and urine. Seeing the biggest Boar lounging in his pen, his testicles usually visible and the scene of much laughing and pointing. The fancy Pigeons and high-strung Banty roosters. Rabbits with their long ears and velvety fur.

    The buildings held jars of pickles, honey, jam. There were live Bees, honeycomb, and jars of amber honey ready to be judged. Decorated cakes. Plates of cookies. Bird houses and hobby horses, hand made. Quilts. And much more.

    We knew where food comes from. Our friends and family grew it in their fields, raised it in their barns and pens. This was, and is, a celebration of Mother Earth.

    The 2020 Madison County 4-H Fair was canceled due to the pandemic. But it will be back, spreading the country gospel of head, hearts, hands, and health. What we need right now.


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  • A Hard Place to Be

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer and the Moon of Justice

    Sunday gratefuls: My partner, Kate. Our sweet girl, Rigel. And, our good boy, Kepler. Kate’s stoma site looking better. The front yard, looking clean and foresty with the stumps gone. The backyard looking good, will look better before Labor Day. Window cleaners, gutter cleaners in August. Yeah. Rethinking our Covid life. Republican, Trumpian angst.

    Every limbo boy and girl
    All around the limbo world
    Gonna do the limborock
    All around the limbo clock
    Jack be limbo, Jack be quick Chubby Checker, 1962

    Remember the limbo? Wonder how we’d all do now? Those of us in the Boomer brigade. Would not be pretty, I imagine. Kate and I used this word today to name a source of sadness. Covid has put our lives in a limbo between then, PC, and, whenever, post-C dominance of life. Her illness puts our lives in limbo between our old life together and whatever happens next. In some ways the third phase is a limbo phase between the younger, active days of education, family, career, and that old scythe wielder in the black hoodie, death.

    Limbo was an abode near hell, a permanent eternal home for the just who died before the birth of Jesus and those who died unbaptized. Limbo is the ablative form of limbus, or border. Reminded me of liminal. Comes from a Latin word that means threshold. On the threshold of hell lies a well-bordered realm for those who couldn’t fit into a medieval Roman Catholic understanding of theodicy.

    Yes, that’ll do. We are, through no fault of our own, needing to stay at home, in limbo, our homes being the border between us and the hell of Covid. And the threshold, the liminal space, is a place now filled with danger and possibility.

    The ancient Celts believed the liminal times of dawn and twilight were magical, the optimal time to work spells, to conduct rituals. Many religious traditions have waking up and going to bed prayers, rituals. Jews, for example pray in the morning to open the literal eye and the metaphorical one. Episcopalians pray at night: “Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith.”

    Limbo is a tough place to be. Liminal spaces like dawn and twilight, or liminal places like an ocean beach or a lake’s shoreline, offer entrance to another world, one unlike the one we are currently in. At night, sleep. In day, wakefulness. On the beach land underneath us and oxygen in the air, in the water, water beneath us and oxygen trapped, for us, in its molecules.

    What’s beyond the threshold of limbo? A Biden presidency? A world made safer with vaccines, good testing, and contact tracing? A healthier Kate, able to get around more the world? We just don’t know. We are not, however, unbaptized souls trapped in a metaphysical realm, but flesh and blood trapped in a disastrous political situation compounded with a pall created by plague.

    We are souls in waiting. A hard, hard place to be.


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  • A New Covenant

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer and the Moon of Justice

    Wednesday gratefuls: Mountain Waste. The Claussens, coming for my pallets. The much improved back. Mowed. Most of the detritus picked up and moved. Photographs from Scott of the Woollies at George Floyd’s death site. Sjogren’s, not Covid. Pork ribeye. Napa Cabbage. The heat. The coolness of the morning. Garbage bags.

    And then the world came crashing back into my consciousness. Been following the coronavirus spikes, unable to shed the schadenfreude that accompanies the horror. All those people sick and dying because of Trump, Fox News, sychophancy. The Master Race putting its own head on the guillotine. Fixated on this, like looking at a fire in the fireplace or a gently moving fan.

    Opened up the email from Woolly Scott. Pictures of my long time friends at the site of George Floyds’ death. Long arcs of dead and withering flowers freshened up by new bouquets. A line of soft toys, teddy bears and rabbits, looking both sad and sweet. Mark Odegard in an orange shirt, a mask, looking at the George Floyd mural. These are friends who lived through the sixties, who understand this holy site in the context of MLK, Malcolm X, the Civil Rights Act, The Voter Registration Act. All that.

    Statues falling. Folks going after not only the Confederate memorials, but Founding Fathers like Washington and Jefferson. Or, later, Woodrow Wilson. The screeches of foul play coming from the dotard in chief. His allies revving up their motorcycles, donning their leathers, taking their automatic weapons off their racks and out of gun safes. Heading out to protect the constitution and their way of life. Their white privilege. A complicated time.

    Here I am on the mountain top. Moved, but unmoved. A latter day Noah on his ark, Ararat below me. Can this earth flooded with hate and hope create a new world? Maybe I need a dove.

    What might be the sign of a new covenant? A bonding among all humans agreeing to live sustainably on our only home, in peace with each other. I can still see the double helix as the trunk of a tree of life, its crown, its keter, in the heavens, its roots dug deep below the soil. This covenant I can feel.

    Let’s all cut our fingers, slash our palms, swear a blood oath that we will live as if all of it, you and me, the Lodgepole, the Whale, the Mountain, the Ocean are holy. Worthy. Precious. Loved. That should do it.


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