Category Archives: Great Wheel

Beyond the Boundaries, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Judaism, Memories, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., World History

Ancientrails

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Imbolc and the Leap Year Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Alan, recovering from pneumonia. Brenton and Corrine who have both contacted us through DogsonDeployment. We see Corrine on Thursday in Boulder. The gentle aches in my body, the sleeping in this morning that mean I had a good workout yesterday. The steer that gave its life for our ribeyes. Rocky Mountain Land Library.

Art Green’s book has done what he intended. I’m looking backwards, now even to Christianity, for a religious language that can express the deep moments, open up the inner world of the one. Hear oh, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Over the next months, years I imagine this work will become easier.

Paganism and Christianity have many crossover points. Why? Because Christianity absorbed and integrated many pagan religious ideas. I’m sure you know about the Christmas tree (eternal life to Teutonic auld faith), the Easter bunny and Easter eggs (signs of fertility, again Teutonic). You might know about Lammas, the feast of loaves, which follows the Celtic Lughnasa, a first fruits harvest festival. Or, All Saint’s Day which recapitulates the Celtic Samain, the end of summer, and the time when the veil between the worlds thins. The Saturnalia, a Roman festival, “…was celebrated with a sacrifice at the Temple of Saturn, in the Roman Forum, and a public banquet, followed by private gift-giving, continual partying…” wiki. It ended on December 23rd and became the precursor of Christmas.

Ancientrails of the human condition all: the mystery of life and death, the wonder of pregnancy and birth, of seeds quickening, the relief at the first harvest, the longing for loved ones who have died, the need to brave the darkening over mid-winter with light and friends and food and gifts. We die. We make love and we plant. We hope for food sufficient to cover the long fallow time. We grieve, mourn, yearn. We wonder whether spring will ever come, whether the sun will return this time.

Green says each religion is a language, a language that speaks in the varied tongues of the one. Yes. I agree with him, though I can’t do what he did, that is, remain in the religious culture of his childhood. What I can do, though, is go back to Christianity’s pathways, its way of speaking the language of oneness, as I did yesterday with Jesus at the Mount of Olives and his resurrection. What I can do is stay in what I call paganism, perhaps a form of panentheism, and speak from within it about these ancient human trails. I say perhaps a form of panentheism because I do not share with Green the easy use/reuse of the God word. That word carries, again for me, way too much baggage: violent, misogynist, patriarchal, xenophobic. Maybe a panenpneuma? Panenpan? Panenohr? We’ll talk about these options tomorrow.

Beyond the Boundaries, Colorado, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Jefferson County, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Park County, permaculture, Plants, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, The West, Third Phase, US History, Weather +Climate

Deep Guidance

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Imbolc and the Leap Year Moon

Sunday gratefuls: An extra day in my birthday month. DogsonDeployment and the three folks who responded right away. Seoah’s careful scrutiny of the profiles. Kate’s help with Corrine, who called from DoD. Blue skies and warm temps. Atlas Obscura. The Rocky Mountain Land Library. Jon’s offer to stay with Kate while I take the kids on a road trip.

Just signed up for a Food and Land Bookclub. My real interest in it is its association with the Rocky Mountain Land Library in next county over Park County. When I bought the books for the book club, four in all, I found my powers returning. Oh, this is what I’ve got energy for my body said. Book titles: Mayordomo: chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico, Braiding Sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants, One Size Fits None: a farm girls search for the promise of regenerative agriculture, and, The Seed Underground: a growing revolution to save food.

When we first moved here, over five years ago now, I wanted to garden, to learn the native plants, to hike the mountains, learn the land and streams and wildlife. Prostate cancer, bum knee then knee replacement, COPD. Kate’s various medical dilemmas later. Distracted. Accomplished little of these. Some hiking, not much thanks to the COPD and the bad knee. Gardening here required more physical energy than I have available. My first native plants class got interrupted by my prostatectomy. Life. Stuff.

I first discovered the Rocky Mountain Land Library in 2015, our first year here. It was only a dream then, an idea concocted by the former owners of Denver’s most loved book store, Tattered Covers. It now has a ranch in Park County, south of Fairplay, a bit over an hour from here. Buildings and projects have begun to come together. It wasn’t ready when I found it and, as it turned out, neither was I.

During Gertie’s last days I reflected again on my instinctual opposition to euthanasia for dogs. It’s no longer absolute because I saw its necessity as Gertie suffered, but it’s still strong. Were there any other instances in my life where I made choices from an instinctual level?

Instinct? Intuition? Deep inner guidance? Link to a source of knowledge I can’t access consciously? Instinct in any formal sense is probably wrong, but the feeling involved, a strong compulsion, a certainty that this path was mine, had that flavor anyhow.

Turns out there were other such choices. When I turned 32, I knew I had to be a parent. Got a vasectomy reversal. Didn’t work. OK. Adopt. First child, a girl, died in a salmonella outbreak at the orphanage. Raeone didn’t want to go forward. She’d just gotten a new job. My deep push made me agree to take care of the new baby myself, no matter what it took. I took him to work with me until he was 18 months old.

After an Ira Progoff workshop in Tuscon, an intentional stirring of my inner life, I stopped by Denver to see Ruth and Gabe. By the time I left I knew Kate and I needed to move to Colorado. She agreed and so we did. We wanted to live in the mountains and to be in our kids and grandkids lives.

Other less dramatic instances. Saw a movie while in college that featured Manhattan. Put my thumb out and spent the summer of 1968, the summer of love, not in San Francisco, but in Manhattan. Curator of Asian art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Bob Jacobson, gave a lecture on Angkor. Specifically he showed the amazing stone bas relief sculpture that runs for a quarter mile around Angkor Wat’s great Hindu temple. And in particular the churning of the sea of milk where gods and demons struggle for a magical elixir. Had to see it. When my dad died and left me enough money to do some travel, I went.

A related but less pressured decision came when I realized I was no longer Christian, that I had to leave the ministry. Had I not met Kate, this feeling would have been tested, but I met her and she allowed me a graceful exit.

Right now I’m feeling a similar push, perhaps not only to the Rocky Mountain Land Library, but to reawaken the me who woke up for twenty springs, twenty summers, and twenty falls glad for the chance to plant lilies, weed onions, harvest garlic, trim the raspberry canes. The me who woke up for several years and knew tending the bees was in the day’s labor. The me who came here excited about the West, about the mountains, about being in a brand new place. We’ll see where this goes.

Denver, Dogs, Family, Great Wheel, Health, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Family Time

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Imbolc and the new Leap Year Moon

Monday gratefuls: Gabe, who wants to be an actor. Seoah leafing through a furniture catalog. Lunch with Ruth, Gabe, Jon, and Seoah at the Yak and Yeti. Seeing the Highlands neighborhood in Denver. Discovering University Ave. in Denver. Coffee. Coffee growers. The coffee plant. Laborers who grow, roast, and grind coffee.

Took Seoah and Gabe into Denver yesterday. Seoah wanted to exercise her military discount at Lululemon, a chic athleisure clothier. And, she did. Seoah is in great shape. She regularly runs 20 minutes at 6.5 or 7.0 mph, does 300 squats, yoga. Her fashion sense is also highly developed from 20 years in the upscale Gangnam neighborhood of Seoul. Lululemon is a natural for her.

Three things that make Seoah happy: a discount, pho, and Indian food. After the visit to Lululemon, we drove south through Denver. I’ve gotten my sea legs in the Denver street system now, I can navigate. Chose University Avenue to take us south to Hampden. Had not driven on it before. It runs by the University of Denver, Iliff Seminary (Methodist, as is UD), and past blocks of college type retail. Around UD the streets have names like Harvard, Yale, Bates, Cornell.

Hampden is the main east-west street for the southern part of Denver, which has no ring road that makes it easy to traverse the city. Hampden is also Hwy. 285, a Federal highway that runs out of Denver to the west, into the mountains, then south all the way to Santa Fe. It’s also the primary road we take when we need to go down the hill. I know it very well since it runs close to Swedish Hospital and is on the route to Jon’s house much further east in Aurora.

We met Jon and Ruth at the Yak and Yeti, an Indian, Nepalese, Tibetan restaurant. Wanted to eat at India’s Restaurant, the oldest Indian restaurant in Denver, on Hampden like Yak and Yeti, but on Sundays they don’t open until 5:30 pm. Yak and Yeti’s food is undistinguished, but plentiful. Attracts folks who want to eat cheap, the buffet is $12.95, and who want to eat a lot. A lot of family time this weekend.

Today Kep goes in for his physical and his rabies shot. His vaccination, good for three years, expires on the 27th of this month. Given our recent history we don’t want a dog with an out of date rabies vaccination. We’ll also pick up Gertie’s ashes.

No new word on Murdoch. We’ll visit him a couple of times this week. He’s having a great time there so far. Always happy and wiggly to see us. No idea he’s in exile.

Commentary on Religion, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Judaism, Mountains, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

A Task

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Imbolc and the waning crescent of the Shadow Mountain Moon

When I first began reading Art Green’s Radical Judaism, I thought maybe my job would be to think Christianity through from his truly radical, non-supernatural perspective. Look at Christian civilization in the manner of Mordecai Kaplan with Green’s theology as a pathway, a halakha. The way to walk. Couldn’t get any energy up to start. Why?

Ah. I left Christianity behind long ago now. Of course, it still informs me and my life as the Torah informs the life of a Jew whether secular or religious. But, I don’t feel shaped by it in the distinctive manner my friends at CBE exhibit. Even if G-d no longer requires the hyphen, they still bow during the Amidah, wear the kippa, show up for High Holidays. I have no interest in Christmas or Easter services, that old life.

Huh, I thought. That’s weird. I spent all that time in sem, 15 years in the ministry, and I’m a product of Western civilization, profoundly shaped by Christian belief and thought. I like big projects. Why wouldn’t I want to go back and rethink all that?

It came to me slowly. Somewhere in Green’s book, I can’t find it right now and that frustrates me, he casually dismisses neo-paganism. It’s not clear what he meant, whether he’s taking a substantive jab at pantheists from his panentheistic position, or knows the shallow roots of Wiccan’s, witches, and druids. If it’s the latter, I agree with him. Silliness abounds in contemporary pagan practice and what passes for thought.

If it’s the former, he and I are in conversation with each other. In either case though it triggered a realization. I’m a pagan. Maybe not the best word with all its freight, but one I use intentionally. The pagans of the middle ages, rural folk (classical Latin paganus: rustic, villager, rural folk, peasant, unlearned, countryman, bumpkin), held onto their older religious practices and beliefs because the church had a more tenuous connection with them, less power over their daily lives.

In contemporary usage pagan is a very broad umbrella: Wiccans, latter day Druids, Asatru, Dianists, polytheists of many shades all fall under it. There are also pagans, see this page, who use the term much as I do, as a placeholder for a religious position outside the usual suspects of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam as well as outside other traditions, in particular Buddhism, Hinduism, and most shamanisms.

That’s it, I realized. My task is to use the theological tools of Art Green and the civilization leaning thought of Mordecai Kaplan to reconstruct paganism for a contemporary audience. That I have energy for. Stay tuned.



Dogs, Family, Feelings, Friends, Great Wheel, Health, Memories, Mountains, Plants, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

The Day After

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Imbolc and the Full Shadow Mountain Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Sleep, much needed sleep. Resolution for Gertie. A peaceful house. No doggy conflict, no tension. Another six inches of snow. Pho with Seoah yesterday. Murdoch’s happiness at seeing Seoah and me. The kindness of the staff at Bergen Bark Inn. Another heart to heart with Kate. Our life together. My healing. Orchid, beautiful and white, from Tom and Roxann.

The day after. Gertie is at peace. Murdoch in the kennel. For the first time in our married life we have only two dogs, Rigel and Kep. The house is quieter. Peaceful. Gertie is no longer suffering on her bed in the living room. Murdoch is no longer here, creating a constant possibility of violence. It feels, good.

Not glad Gertie is dead, but very glad her suffering and pain has ended. We couldn’t control it and that tore at Kate and me.

On Tuesday night last week Gertie still had enough will power to go outside to pee. She came in through the downstairs door and I decided to lift her up into the bed with us for the night. She slept between us for the whole night. At about 3 AM she woke up giving me lots of kisses. She kept at it for a long time. It was unusual. Now I imagine she was saying good-bye, letting me know how much she loved me. I will treasure that memory forever.

Yesterday lack of sleep and grief had me. Both battered my sense of self. Why did you let Gertie suffer? Why did you bring Murdoch into the house? Why did Kate marry me? Why am I such a screw up? Went down into that place we can all go, that dark place where our fears, our anxieties wait to trap us, hold us hostage.

Again, Kate came out, sat in my chair while I perched on the ottoman. We talked. In the way only those long together, long in love, bonded, can. She saw me. And in her seeing me I saw myself again. She challenged how I saw myself. And, then, so did I. Oh. The grief. The exhaustion. The last two years. Oh. Yeah.

Our talk allowed me to feel the peacefulness, the quiet in the house and to take some of that and put in my heart. The needle probe withdrew from my psyche.

This morning I fed two dogs. Went out for the paper. Not here. Snow always deters this delivery person from her rounds. Made coffee. Shoveled a path to the loft stairs. Came up here and wrote.

Final note. You might be interested to know that it was difficult for me, missing two days last week. Writing Ancientrails is part of my morning meditation, a freeing of my heart, a way to stay connected with a wide community of friends and family. So important. Glad to be back at it.

Dogs, Family, Great Wheel, Health, Memories, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Gertie, a Love Dog

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Imbolc and the Shadow Mountain Moon

Following the metaphor one post below. Got knocked off my board, almost carried away by rip tides. Gertie has cancer, maybe a couple of weeks to live. Vet this morning.

Pet euthanasia. I’m an outlier on this one, I know. I realized how opposed I am to it when Buck died in my arms at the UofM vet hospital. The pink liquid the vet injected worked. He died. All I could think: he trusted me.

Since then all of our dogs but two, Orion and Sorsha, have received home hospice care until their death. What I want for Gertie, too.

Climbing down into the dark well that is my aversion. The well is deep and cold, might be bottomless. Might be my Mom’s death is in there. I know for sure the issues of trust and choice are. Our dogs trust me with their lives for their whole lives. They have no ability to enter into the decision.

Lots of folks, the majority I imagine, the great majority, see euthanasia as a final kindness. I don’t. It’s wound up in what’s convenient, less messy, easier.

Gertie has trouble walking now. When Orion reached that stage with his osteosarcoma, we had to euthanize him. I couldn’t pick him up, take him outside, bring him back inside. 190 pounds. 30 pounds more than me at the time. Even though I agreed it needed to be done, I still couldn’t stand to be there.

I was in Kate’s sewing room, hyper-ventilating and crying. Feeling like I had betrayed both Orion and myself. Kate was there. I felt ashamed that I couldn’t support her, or Orion, but, I couldn’t.

Now that Gertie’s home I took her doggy bed down from the loft. Kate suggested it. Gertie stayed up here with me most days since we moved here 5 years ago. Even when her back right leg gave her trouble, a botched operation on a torn acl, she came up here on three legs. Now Murdoch is here, lying right where the doggy bed used to be.

Her diagnosis is neither unexpected, nor unusual. Gertie’s an old dog, our oldest, at 12. And, a rascal for all 12 years. So much fun. Sweet, too. Her kisses were meant. Not random licks for salt or submission. How do I know? I just do.

The well. That holy well. I remember the first time. When the doctor told Dad and me, Mom’s stroke had left her in a vegetative state. No coming back. Damn. 17. 3 in the morning at Riley Hospital in Indianapolis. Hard plastic chairs. Down. Down. Down. I didn’t climb back up out of that well until I quit drinking.

The holy wells of Ireland and Wales are portals to the Other World. A place where rags get tied on trees, flowers left by the opening, or, where the water gushes up from Mother Earth.

Suppose this means I need to go down this well again. Still. Live at the bottom for a while. Greet the darkness, my old friend. Might be where I get my love of fecund darkness, of quiet darkness, of the longest night.

Anyhow, Gertie. We’ll make her comfortable.

Beyond the Boundaries, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, Great Wheel, Kabbalah, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase, Torah

Rocking my inner boat

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Winter and the Full Future Moon (98%)

Thursday gratefuls: for the Geek Squad guy who came to install our microwave. for his calling out an electrical problem. for Altitude Electric for coming next Monday. for the Geek Squad coming back next Saturday. for the first session in the Human Narrative, the Kabbalah class using Art Green’s book, Radical Judaism. for Zoom which allowed me to both here and there. Bi-location!

Kate and I have been doing sixty second hugs. As Paul Strickland mentioned in his review of a conference he and Sarah attended. What a great idea! We hug anyway, but often short ones. Sixty seconds encourages intimacy. More intimacy is welcome.

Also, we’re dancing with zero negativity. Same conference’s idea. For us, a real challenge. Not so much because we’re negative toward each other, but because both of us have minds that veer easily toward the critical, the analytical. And, we both know a lot so challenging each other’s conclusions comes with breathing. Still. I know where this concept heads and I would like to get there. So…

I describe myself as a neo-pagan by which I mean that my faith is located in this reality, not in some other, supernatural place. And that my faith reads revelation first from the ur sacred text, the book of Nature. This does not exclude other sacred texts as sources of wisdom, inspiration, even revelation, it places them second to seeing what you’re looking at. (Casey Reams) Or, being mindful. Or, deep listening. Or, respectful touching.

It also means that I’ve backed myself into an interesting corner, or, maybe, an interesting geodesic dome. If the cosmos itself reveals the sacred to those who see, the sacred underlies the whole cosmos. If the sacred underlies, is within, permeates the cosmos, then the Kabbalistic notion of divine light, ohr, waiting for us in everything begins to make sense to me.

If that makes sense to me, then the notion of an underlying unity also can come into focus. Is that unity the shekinah? That is, the feminine aspect of the divine said by the Kabbalists to constitute this material world? Not ready to go there yet, not sure I want to put a label on it. But, the idea of the shekinah does work for me at the level of analogy, metaphor.

Challenging. Rocking my inner boat. Yes.

Family, Great Wheel, Great Work, Health, Jefferson County, Mountains, Park County, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Weather +Climate

Mountain Strong

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Winter and the Future Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: For Paul’s idea of the 60 second hug and zero negativity. For Bill’s call yesterday. For Rabbi Jamie and Art Green, the class at Kabbalah Experience by Zoom. For Sandy, who cleans with energy and whose tumor has begun to shrink. For all the good dogs everywhere. All dogs are good dogs. For Mountain Waste who takes away the stuff we can’t use, don’t need.

Mountain strong. See that a lot up here. Bailey’s town motto is Mountain Strong. Has a sort of defiant, libertarian meaning to most. Clues: lots of comments about guns as a primary home defense system. About citiots. (city idiots) Griping about service up here when we know the difficulties involved.

Also, though. We can handle it our own. We’re neighbors, let’s help each other. Respect the wildlife. Keep the night dark.

I like it. Mountain strong. That’s how Kate and I feel. We’re mountain strong. Can it be difficult up here? Oh, yes. The thin air has caused both of us problems most of the time we’ve been here. On certain days the snow is so good we can’t go anywhere. IREA, the local electrical company, has miles of lines in difficult to reach, yet sensitive to weather places. Like up and down whole mountains. Outages are not uncommon and Kate needs O2 24/7. Generator. Delivery is episodic rather than consistent though we have an exceptional (for the mountains) mail carrier. Not to mention that it’s far away to all the services we need.

All true. What I call the Mountain Way. Just more molasses to crawl through for certain aspects of daily life.

However. The bare rock, the lodgepole pines, the aspen groves, the cold rushing creeks, the deep valleys and tall mountain peaks, the moose, the elk, the muledeer, the fox, the lynx, the bobcat, the mountains lions, the bears, the magpies and the Canada Jays, the crows and the ravens, the curvy roads, the changing seasons. And the clear, dark nights with the Milky Way and Orion and Ursa Major, Gemini and the whole zodiac. The clouds, the lenticular clouds and the clouds with a long straight front coming over Mt. Evans. When they’re lit by the rising or setting sun.

And for me, the two visits from the mountain spirits. The three mule deer bucks who greeted me when I came to close on the house on Samain of 2014. The two Elk bucks who stayed in our yard for a day eating dandelions. The day before I started radiation treatment.

Mountain strong. They promised that, welcomed me on the close of the Celtic year. They promised that, assured me on the day before the Cyber Knife visits. We are neighbors, mountain spirits and humans. We need mutuality to survive. The mountains themselves have greeted me and come to me as companions. Our mountain journey is now five years old and only just begun.

Mountain strong.

Anoka County, Colorado, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Garden, Great Wheel, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Myth and Story, Our Land and Home, Plants, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Death and Resurrection

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Winter and the Future Moon

Saturday gratefuls: The snow, coming down hard. The temperature, 17. All 8,800 feet above sea level. Two weeks of consistent workouts, 5 days, 3 resistance, two with high intensity training. Ruth’s being here. (she’s sleeping with Rigel and Murdoch right now.) The Hanukah meal last night. Hanukah. Whoever conceived and executed Resurrection: Ertugrul. The internet.

Been thinking a bit about resurrection. Not as in Resurrection: Ertugrul, which is about resurrection of the Seljuk state, but in the New Testament mythology. Birth, life, death, resurrection. Christmas, Ministry, Black Friday, Easter. The Great Wheel. Spring, growing season, fallow season, spring. Osiris. Orpheus.

Death is being overcome every spring. Life emerges, blooms and prospers, then withers and dies. A period in the grave. Spring. Resurrection is not only, not even primarily, about coming back from death. Resurrection is a point in the cycle of our strange experience as organized and awake elements and molecules.

Saw an analogy the other day. Twins in the womb. Talking to each other about whether there was life after delivery. How could there be, one said. What else is all this for, said the other. Do you believe in the mother? Yes, she’s all around us. I can’t see her, so I don’t believe in her. How would we get food after delivery? How would we breathe? I don’t know, but I believe we’ll do both.

We know, too, the story of the caterpillar, the chrysalis, and the butterfly.

Might resurrection itself be an analog of these ideas? Could be. Easier for me to comprehend is the death of a relationship, the period of mourning, then a new one, different from the first, but as good or better. The death of a dream. Having to sell the farm, a period of mourning, then a new career, different, but satisfying, too. The death of a certain belief system. Say, Christianity. A period of confusion and mourning. Then, a new way of understanding. The way things are. Consciousness and cycles. This comes; that goes.

A Minnesota life. Well lived and full. Dies. A period of mourning and confusion. A Colorado life. Different, but satisfying, too. The gardens of Andover. The rocks of Shadow Mountain. The lakes of Minnesota. The mountains of Colorado. The Woolly Mammoths. Congregation Beth Evergreen.

Are there other resurrections? Of course. Is there a resurrection like that of Jesus? Unknown. I choose to celebrate the resurrections that I know, rather than the ones I do not. The purple garden that emerged in the spring. The raspberries on the new canes. Those apples growing larger from the leafed out tree. This marriage with Kate, a notable resurrection of intimacy in both our lives.

What is dying? What are you mourning? What resurrection awaits?

Beyond the Boundaries, Commentary on Religion, Family, Friends, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Mountains, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Painting, Plants, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Merry, Merry Meet

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Winter and the Gratitude Moon, waning sliver

Christmas gratefuls: the silence on Black Mountain Drive. Black Mountain itself. The stars above Black Mountain. Shadow Mountain. Our home. This loft, a gift from my Kate, now five years ago, and still wonderful. Kate and her increased health. The sacred side of Christmas. The pagan (also sacred) side of Christmas.

When I went out for the paper this morning, it was dead quiet. No dogs barking. No cars or trucks on the road. No mechanical noises. The sky was the deep black of the cosmic wilderness, lit only by bright lights: planets, stars, galaxies. Silent night, holy night.

Those shepherds out there tending their flock, sheep shuffling around. A baa and a bleat here and there. Visitors on camel back. All that singing. As imagined, probably not a quiet night.

Here though, this dark Christmas morn. The deer are asleep. The elk, too. Pine martens, fishers, foxes, mountain lions might be prowling, but part of their inheritance is silence. Black bears went to sleep long ago. Millions of insects are quiet, too. The microbes in the soil, the growing lodgepole pines, the aspen organisms, their clonal neighborhoods, bulbs, corms, rhizomes all alive, all quiet.

Silent night, holy night. Yes. Sacred night, holyday night. Yes.

I read this long essay on consciousness by the president and chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. In it he says this:

” Yes, there’s this ancient belief in panpsychism: “Pan” meaning “every,” “psyche” meaning “soul.”…basically it meant that everything is ensouled…if you take a more conceptual approach to consciousness, the evidence suggests there are many more systems that have consciousness—possibly all animals, all unicellular bacteria, and at some level maybe even individual cells that have an autonomous existence. We might be surrounded by consciousness everywhere and find it in places where we don’t expect it because our intuition says we’ll only see it in people and maybe monkeys and also dogs and cats. But we know our intuition is fallible…”

Even silence, since it presumes an awareness of noise, is a proof of consciousness. All that consciousness around us here on Shadow Mountain. The trees and wild animals, grasses and microbes, dogs and humans, all here, all experiencing a self.

I take panpsychism a bit further than Koch with the kabbalistic idea of ohr, the divine spark, resident in every piece of the universe and the process metaphysical view of a vitalist universe creatively moving toward greater complexity.

This waking up mornin’ we can see the baby Jesus as an in your face message that, yes, of course we are holy. Yes, of course the universe sings to us from the depths of the sea, the top of the redwoods, and the person or animal across from us this morning. And, to get downright personal, from within the deep of our own soul.