Category Archives: Great Wheel

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.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Springtime of the Soul

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Fall                                                                               Falling Leaves Moon

A brief interlude of high 70’s and 80’s disappears starting today. It’s 50 and rainy. Better, in my opinion. And more fitting for Michaelmas anyhow. The springtime of the soul.

St. Michael, the Archangel, is God’s general, the militant leader of the warrior angels, chief strategist in the war against the rebel angels and instrumental in ejecting Lucifer, the Morning Star, from heaven. His mass day, today, September 29th, honors him and the other archangels, Gabriel and Raphael, and often, Uriel.

Michaelmas was one of the four English quarter days which celebrated equinox and solstices on set days rather than on their astronomical occurrence. Thus, Michaelmas celebrates the autumnal equinox, which one author called the day of the “darkening.” It is the start of the English university first term and a day when rents were paid for the year, contracts settled and festivals held.

Michaelmas is the springtime of the soul because it presages the coming fallow time. It emphasizes the darkening aspect of the fall equinox when the hours of nighttime begin to exceed those of daylight. When the plant world faces the long dark cold, it turns inward,

goes down into the ground either as seed or as root and gathers its energy, readying itself for emergence in the spring when lightening begins and temperatures warm.

Just so with us. As a cold rain falls here today on Michaelmas in Andover, the joy of sitting inside with a book, or meditating, writing, sewing, quilting comes. Our inner life can begin to blossom, the richness in the soils of our souls feeds projects and dreams and meditations.

This springtime of the soul has only begun today and it will follow, over its time, the fallow season. I welcome you to this nurturing, deep time. Blessed be.

 

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

A Crucifixion Moment…for the garden

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Fall                                                                                    New (Falling Leaves) Moon

The river birch has begun to shed its golden leaves, small instances of light as matter falling toward the ground. The neighbor’s Norway maple has turned its autumn red, a reliable clue that the seasonal change is well underway.

Senescence becomes the word for gardens, vegetable and flower. Green turns to brown, then withers and falls onto the earth which has held it up so long. Tired, I suppose, from the long fight during the growing season to remain upright.

The water that fills out the cells flees back to the roots or out into the air through transvaporation, so leaves shrivel, stalks collapse. But this is not the field of ruins it appears to be. This is instead gathered nutrients ready to return to the soil following that

most necessary of almost hidden processes, decay.

We have arrived, from one perspective, at our crop’s crucifixion moment, when they give up their bodies on behalf of others. It is only an apparent crucifixion though because the dead will rise again, either from underground chambers where they lie dormant or from seeds. What a wonder. And it happens every year.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Wheel, Holidays, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Nocturne

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Fall Equinox                                                                   New (Falling Leaves) Moon

For those of us who love the night, this is a fulcrum holiday. We enter the long period that starts with the final harvests and does not end completely until the vernal equinox. From today, till then, the night will gain dominance, peaking at the winter solstice, but not relinquishing its grip until the sun hits 0 declination in the east next March.

It’s not that I do not love the light, I do. It is rather that I prefer the dark, the quiet, the solitary. I’m also entranced, quite literally, by what I call Holiseason, that period beginning at Samhain and running through Epiphany. As we move into the dark, we also move into our fears, our paleolithic uneasiness with the reliability of the heavens.

These fears have driven humanity across time and across the globe to create brave holidays that feature the light. Yes, you could say that the emphasis on them really underscores our fears, rather than challenges them, but I choose to go with the perspective that they hit the fear directly. No, night, you cannot have us, not for all the day, never, and surely not for all the year. In the words of Battlestar Galatica, so say we all.

From late October to early January a parade of festivals bring us lights and gifts and warmth and family celebrations. What a delight. Good music, too. And theater.

It all starts tonight.