Category Archives: Great Wheel

Colorado, Garden, Great Wheel, Our Land and Home, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., The Move

Weather Station Clean Up Day

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Samain                                                                    Moving Moon

Took my weather station apart today and cleaned it up. There’s another Davis weather station not very far from our new house and it posts on Weatherunderground as Black Mtn/Shadow Mtn. Once I get mine setup I’m going to go back to posting my weather, too. I moved the display panel away from my broadband hookup into a room where I only use wi-fi here and could no longer post.

The study is done for now. So is the garden study. It was the one with all the files. Tomorrow I’m going to head into the closet under the stairs and the built-in cabinets down here in the basement. That will represent the last of the packing until December 15th or so, moving week. Then, all the computer stuff, all the monitors, this tower, keyboards, mice, cables, power surge strips. Into boxes. Another box for desk supplies, Latin books, remaining stuff.

Next week I plan to go through all of the manuals we have and organize them. I’m also going to work on information about the house itself (where the gfi’s are, filters, that sort of thing) and put together a handbook for the various gardens and the orchard. The new folks will do whatever they want of course, that’s how transfer of property rights work, but I want them to know how and why we did what we did.

There will be a bit in there, too, about cohabitation with the pileated woodpeckers, great horned owl, the moles and the voles and the mice. Those land beavers and whistle pigs. The occasional snapping turtle, small green frogs, salamanders, newts and garter snakes. The odd opossum and raccoon, of course, as well. Chipmunks, squirrels, turkeys and deer. Crows and nuthatches. Chickadees. Hummingbirds. The whole blooming buzzing menagerie.

Great Wheel, Holidays

The Occult Sun

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Samain                                                                              Closing Moon

sun calendarOn my circular calendar the large egg yolk in the center has begun to pull further and further away from the inner circle that counts the days in the year. What that means is that the daylight hours have receded considerably since Mabon, the Autumnal Equinox. The season of Samain, now two weeks old, runs from October 31st to the Winter Solstice, falling this year on December 21st.

Over Samain the air grows colder, plants go fully dormant, and the skies become gray, gravid with snow. By the Winter Solstice, the bleak midwinter, cold has come in earnest and the sun spends most of its time in other climes. These are the seasons for those of us acquainted with the night.

No wonder the brave lights of Diwali, Hanukkah, Christmas and New Years try to push back against the darkness. Some find it intolerable, oppressive. Long. In ancient times there was the fear that the sun, once hidden for too long, might forget to rise again, or, even if it did rise again, that it might stay on this diminished course. Fear of darkness lies deep in the human psyche, probably literally at the base of the brain.

Yet some of us welcome the coming of the darkness. Some of us know that underneath the barren fields some plants and animals do not wink out, but merely slumber, gathering themselves for the spring, preserving the hard one fruits of the growing season in roots or through hibernation. Some of us remember that the womb is a dark and liquid place, that in it we were once swimmers, beings of fluid grace and that the light is a surprise, an alien medium to us then. Some of us know that darkness is the realm of the heart and the place where creative acts take place.

Some of us watch the receding yellow on the circular calendar and count down toward our favorite holiday, the Winter Solstice.

Colorado, Great Wheel, The Move

Winter Solstice 2014 on Shadow Mountain

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Samain                                                                             Closing Moon

This full moon, shining on the early weeks of Samain, illuminates important nights in our life. Already within in this new year we have purchased a new house, contracted a mover, found fence, painting and carpet contractors and readied ourselves for the final push psychically, fiscally and logistically. We will, still in the season of Samain, move into our new home and begin our new life in that house.

Then, only two or three days later, the highnight of my sacred calendar, the winter solstice, will come and we will celebrate our first solstice on Shadow Mountain. This is a potent beginning to a new year and to a new phase of life.

Colorado, Great Wheel, The Move

A Day in Deep Space

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Samain                                                            Closing Moon

Spending the night in a Quality Inn in Lincoln, Nebraska near the only capitol with a unicameral legislature. Left Conifer sometime in the morning. I say sometime because I got up at 5am with Central Daylight Time moving my body in Mountain Standard Time.  Drove across Colorado, looking back occasionally at the snowcapped Rockies, mountains which had been mostly gray/green on my arrival last Friday.

All the day the nation has voted and I’ve been in deep space with the beginning of the first Formic war, part of Orson Scott Card’s Ender series. Having voted a week ago by mail and powerless today to have even the smallest effect on the outcome, I decided to stay dark and just drive.

A full closing moon rose over stubbled corn fields often filled with herds of cattle gleaning between the rows. Other fields had the working lights of corn pickers raising clouds of dust as they moved through light tan rows of ripe corn, yellow rivers of kernels flowing into flanking trucks. This is early November and the corn harvest is still underway.

I noticed a degree of comfort rose in my chest as I reentered the agriculture zone after 6 days in my new home. In the arid west there are cattle and mesquite, mountains and conifers, but no yet to harvest fields of corn. This place with its Great Wheel rhythms, the rhythms of my whole life, these humid plains and the farms of the Midwest have cut deep furrows in the fields of my memory.

Last night at Brooks in Aspen Park I met Sarah, a Kentucky transplant, from the largish city of Louisville, still not sure about this mountain, winter thing she had moved into just a year ago. A waitress and young she still felt out of place and a deep part of me understood her bewilderment. I also know that if she stays a while, she’ll become one with the mountains and the winters just as I became one with winters and lakes.

 

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Holiseason Is Almost Upon Us

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Fall                                                                                 Closing Moon

Fall is in its last days. Samain comes on Friday. The seasons of the year that speak most directly to my soul arrive back to back. Samain, then Winter. Guess that tells you what it’s like to live inside my skin.

The sky today glowered over the landscape, a November sky ahead of its month. It felt like a homecoming to me.

A long while back I chose to identify the period from Samain to Epiphany, as holiseason. It’s a whole season of special holidays, moments and weather. They are distinct, yes, from Diwali to Kwanzaa, Posada to Hanukkah, Christmas to the Winter Solstice, Thanksgiving to New Years, Samain to Epiphany, but their proximity, their charged valence in their particular cultures adds up not in simple sums, but in layered complexity.

Put, for example, Samain’s celebration of the thinning of the veil between this world and the Otherworld in dialogue with the holiday of gratitude and family we call Thanksgiving. To do so reminds me of a small object in the art of the Americas collection at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Nayarit house.

This is a tomb object, excavated from a ninety foot deep shaft grave made by the Nayarit culture of what is now western Mexico. We have little firm information about this object but we can infer from its presence in a tomb that it might convey something about life and death.

It contains groups of people, probably relatives of the deceased, eating and drinking with each other. As groups of kids investigate this ceramic object made between 300 BCE and 400 ACE, they usually conclude that the group above is living and the group below the ancestors. The key thing they also note is that they are eating and drinking together.

Of course this brings up the Mexican celebration known as the day of the dead, also a holiday in holiseason. It could be seen as the living generation celebrating Thanksgiving with each other, yet intimately connected to their ancestors, who carry on their own celebration, one we acknowledge at Samain. Or, one we might acknowledge at Samain if we took seriously the Celtic imagery of the veil between the worlds grown thin, a very similar idea to the one celebrated throughout Latin America, but especially in Mexico as the Day of the Dead.

The most mythic and sacred period of the year approaches. I’m excited about it.

 

 

Great Wheel, The Move, Weather +Climate

Falling

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Fall                                                                                          Falling Leaves Moon

IMAG0683And so the leaves turn color and begin to fall. What was first a few golden river birch leaves has now become russet Amur maples, reddening oaks, the fiery leaves of the euonymus now waving against the steady greens of the spruce and the pines, waving and loosening, taking to flight, filling the blue sky with spirals of flames and sunsets. The Ojibway named this moon well.

Met with friend Mark Odegard this morning. Talking about turning 70, sailing out beyond middle age. He said he’d disregarded recent birthdays, but 70. Well. Though it’s still 2 and a half years away for me, I see it as a trailhead birthday. From 70 that long final walk begins.

Mark’s helping us put together a booklet of pictures for folks who look at the property, a take-away to go with the wild grape jam and/or jar of honey from Artemis Hives. It’s so hard to see our property without spending a year, watching the seasons come and go, experiencing the raucous symphony as perennial flowers rise, bloom and die back, vegetable push up and mature, are harvested. The orchard blooms, then fruits. The bees buzz around working throughout the growing season. In fall the firepit becomes a central spot with bonfires and smoke. This is a four-season place.

 

Great Wheel

May the Circle Be Unbroken

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Fall                                                                                  Falling Leaves Moon

sun calendarThis calendar, circular, with the sun’s hourly presence each day indicated in the middle by a somewhat squashed circle, displays a yearly calendar  that conforms to my understanding of time. Rather than day running after day in small squares, linear fashion, on this calendar the days and the months follow each other in curved segments of a circle, finally rejoining, December 31st and January 1st. As opposed to most Westerners, I privilege the circularity of time, the Great Wheel, which, like this calendar, follows the earth around the sun and, like this calendar, begins again where it has been artificially ended.

It’s easy to forget, in our casual way of saying what hour it is, or what day it is, or what year it is, that none of this segmentation has any but the most abstract relationship to the natural world. The year, for example, marks a spot in earth’s revolution around the sun, erects a flagpole, or, better, a timepole and says this is a lap marker. Each time we pass this timepole we’re going to add one unit to the last one. By not so common agreement we start counting units for calendar purposes on a date supposedly coincident with the death of a man claimed to be a god, two-thousand and fourteen laps ago. I say not so common agreement because the various numbers to put on this “year” vary a good bit among Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Chinese and Old Church Orthodox, just to name a few.

Though this is a very common human meme, the calendar and its year, it is not given in the nature of earth’s orbit. What observation of the orbit suggests is the linked nature of time, it’s non-divisable reality (perhaps even its non-reality). What I choose to emphasize is the turning of the Great Wheel, with its repetitive though not identical seasons, its warm periods and cool periods, its fertile days and its fallow days. In this way, too, I choose to emphasize the ongoingness of human life. The human cycle, which follows the Great Wheel by analogy, understands birth as the springtime of a life, adulthood in the fertile seasons, and the time of aging and death, analogous to the fallow time. And this cycle, though it apparently begins and ends in each individual’s life, in fact, goes on with births following deaths and deaths following births.

May the circle be unbroken…

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science

Something’s Happening Here

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Fall                                                                                       Falling Leaves Moon

50008 28 10_late summer 2010_0199I’m having these flashes of insight, as if some larger realization lies not far from view, but still below the horizon of awareness.

Raspberries have something to do with it: wading into the thorny brambles, canes curved low with hanging fruit and picking off the sweetness. So do those blue skies and the chill in the air while I engage in the oldest human method of obtaining food-gathering it from plants.  That symbiotic trade between the food value of the fruit and our inadvertent willingness to bear its seeds to a new place places me there, so firmly there. No where else but picking raspberries.

I will say it with caution, because I don’t want to be confused for a transcendentalist, but I do look into the raspberry when I pick it. But, I also look into myself. When I look into the raspberry, I see water siphoned up from the soil, having fallen in rain or come sprinkled in from the aquifer below our property. I see colors, beautiful and rich, each fruit a miniature, reminding me of those Persian paintings. The seed is evident there, encased in a small cell filled with water and nutrients, so that when it hits the ground it will have what’s necessary for a healthy transition from top of the plant to the soil which is its natural home.

The raspberry itself is the Great Wheel, all of it. It comes on the plant after Mabon, after Michaelmas and left on its own will fall to the ground, probably before Samain, where it will lie on or just under the soil through the cold months of Winter and the days of Imbolc. Sometime in Spring it will begin to move, to thrust a small green stalk toward the sky and another, darker filament into the ground, seeking stability and food for its above ground presence. Over the course of Spring and Beltane the stalk will grow and the root deepen and strength its grip on mother earth. In the heat of Summer the stalk will grow into a cane, thorns will pop out and leaves, all moving fast toward the sky, the sun. Then it will reach Lughnasa and the strength of the cane and the roots will be at their optimum, ready to press out on tiny branches, flimsy and delicate, heavy dark-red fruits which will, once Mabon is past, once again droop toward the ground.

And so in the raspberry is millions of years of evolution, an evolutionary path older even than the one we humans have made, an ancientrail indeed. When I see the raspberry, this is what I see. When I look through the raspberry, I do not find revealed another metaphysical layer, a layer transcending the mundane and making it somehow special. No, I find the story of this stuff, these elements, this reality, a story which spans billions of years for this universe (and who is to say how many universes there are?), a story which spans millions of light years of space (and who can say how many miles there are in places we cannot see?).

If I wanted to introduce the religious into this conversation, I would tend toward the Hindu pantheon with Brahma the stretched out space in all its extensions and Shiva as the creator and destroyer of worlds and universes and maybe I would add in Vishnu so that this time in which I exist has an image of stability and permanence, even though such an image is an illusion. For which there is, of course, a wonderful Hindu idea, Maya.

I find Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu only useful as metaphor, as analogy but I do find them valuable in that way-as stand-ins, avatars, for the mystery that is what all this is.

These flashes, just out of sight. Something’s coming. And I’m satisfied to wait on its arrival.

Garden, Great Wheel, Our Land and Home, Science

Blood Moon Risin’

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Fall                                                                                   Falling Leaves Moon

 

Add blood moon to the adjectives in front of the Falling Leaves Moon for October 8. These lunar eclipses reflect light from sunrise and sunset giving the moon a russet color. Blends in well with the changing leaves. On my weather station I notice a small symbol I’ve not seen for awhile. A snowflake. Means it could snow.

We’re going to make use of the cooler weather with a work outside day today and perhaps a couple of other days this week. First task, start a fire in the firepit so the laborers can warm themselves. Then, the harvest. After that move old aluminum siding to the garage for recycling. Yes, this is stoop labor.

Gotta get out there.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Weather +Climate

A Cold Rain Must Fall

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Fall                                                                                  Falling Leaves Moon

A cold rain must fall. When temperatures drop and a soaking rain comes and leaves lie bloodied in the street, the Great Wheel has advanced another turn, this time toward the dark. That fireplace reasserts itself as the center of a room and evenings seem made for candles and lace.

This is my time of year and it has barely begun, the cold rain putting a seal on its arrival. I’m ready for it.

The cold rains are Demeter’s tears for her daughter Persephone, gone now to rule for half the year in Hades. This is a medieval painting showing Persephone and Hades on their thrones.