Category Archives: Great Wheel

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Wheel, Great Work, Health, Holidays

Be Glad You Exist

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Samhain                                                            Thanksgiving Moon

Thankful.  Grateful.  Still here.

Yes, that’s the  prerequisite to all that follows, my living presence to write these words. And, yes, damn it, I’m grateful to be alive.

When I visited Constanta, Romania a year and a half ago, I went there as a pilgrimage to the place of Ovid’s exile.  This is a city that has Roman (Romania!) roots.  Outside an excellent museum of Roman and Greek antiquities (it was a Greek trading port first.), there was a collection of grave markers.  On one of them was this line:  Be Glad You Exist.  That’s what I would call ur-gratitude.  Thankfulness for living.

It’s where I’ll start.  Beyond consciousness and good health in my own case I’m thankful for the same in Kate, the dogs, family, friends and even a few others.  Our home.  Our buddies and colleagues the bees, the soil and the plants which grow in it, those past and those to come.  The orchard and the trees in our woods.  All the critters, sleeping and active that call it home.

Extending all that in a generally cosmic direction, I am grateful for the physics that allow us to exist at all, the sun for its energy, the planet for its hospitable climate (sorry about that hot pack, Gaia) and the North American continent for its wildness and its cities and towns.  Yes, the suburbs, too.  Even Andover.

Language.  English.  Being able to communicate with each other, even through such a flawed and miraculous medium.  What would life be without language?  Western medicine.  Often maligned, but my fav.  Western civilization.  Also often maligned, but mine and yours.  At least most of you who read this.  And just as worthy a human artifice as anyone else’s.

Of course the internet.  Cyberspace.  What a wonder to an old man raised with bakelite phones, 6 digit phone numbers, a time before tv.  So much.  So much to say thank you for. More than can be expressed in any list, no matter how long.

How about, for example, oxygen?  Or the properties of water?  We are made of stardust, animated elements spun out so long ago at the birth not of our nation, not of our planet, not of our solar system, not of our galaxy, but of our universe.  And now they walk, talk, consider their origin.  How damned amazing is that?

So.  Thanks.

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Memories, Music

Holiseason Begins to Put the Pedal Down

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Samhain                                                              Thanksgiving Moon

We’re in that pre-holiday time when the air begins to take on a certain quality.  It’s part hope for a Thanksgiving (this time) that we both recall and imagine, a desire for an ideal time with family, with busyness, with good food and good memories made.

There are those other times, the times before, when the magazines had turkeys in their ads and the Whitehouse spared a turkey.  This year it will be a Minnesota turkey.  The times when we all had to put on our Sunday clothes even though it was Thursday and drive to an Aunt’s or to Grandma’s or to a friends.  Football and stuffing, a browned turkey and mashed potatoes.  Too many people around a too small table.  That drowsy, sleepy feeling, a tryptophan haze.  The turkey drug.

Those times mesh with hope, give it a flavor, a scent, a sound, a cast.  Those are, for me at least, good memories.  They give the time, this time, a pleasant before hand buzz, a family inflected smile.

This is holiseason.  It has these moments one after the other.  Times when others and the world of commerce and the world of religion and the world of small children all begin to bang into each other, making the world merry.  Yes, it’s chaotic and capitalistic. No doubt of that.  But it’s also fun, filled with good songs and lights.  Gifts and cold weather.  At least here.  Not so much in Singapore and Muyhail.

To all of you headed over the hills and through the woods.  Have fun.  Eat too much.  Laugh a lot.  Drive safely.

 

Family, Great Wheel, Science, US History, World History

The Journey and the Moon

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Samhain                                            Thanksgiving Moon

The last two nights the Thanksgiving Moon has hung like a pale lantern behind the clouds. The moon draws out of me such tender feelings, yearnings.  Maybe it’s the corollary of the old lover’s cliche, we’re seeing the same moon tonight.

What crosses my mind are all those long ago relatives, bearers of my genetic markers, on the trip out of Africa.  They may have moved on nights like these when the moon was full. Or, would they have huddled around the campfire, wary of predators who saw better in the gloom?

In either case they would have looked at the same moon unchanged from the time they began to move on that most ancient human trail.  Unchanged, that is, until July 20, 1969, a hot night in Muncie, Indiana when my flickering black and white pulled in the live–live–signals of Neil Armstrong setting a space-suit (space-suit!) boot on the lunar surface.

What a journey, if you think about it, from that trek across northern Africa, up into what we now know as the Middle East, to that boot touching down on the eons long undisturbed (by other than passing meteoroids) moon.  Even now when we look at the moon it appears the same as it did then.  Really, it’s only our knowledge that has changed, not the way it looks at night.

It pleases me to think of those, my people, in this season of the year, somewhere perhaps in a temperate latitude after thousands of years of journey, feeling a November wind chill in their face and what would become my Thanksgiving moon overhead.

Cooking, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Wheel, Holidays, Travel

Over the Plains and Through the River

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Samhain                                                               Thanksgiving Moon

Beginning to get that over the river and through the woods feeling.  This coming Sunday we head out for Denver.  Kate discovered, in a drive to Denver that she made this spring, that if she drives, her back doesn’t give her fits.  So, she’ll drive and I’ll watch.  Lot of good book thinking between here and the Rockies.

Holiseason has begun to assert itself more and more.  I’ve heard the occasional Christmas song, seen the articles about Hanukkah and Thanksgiving, been asked what we’re doing for them.  Now the feelings, those old, yet always new feelings, Holiseason feelings have begun to bubble up.  They’re positive for me, though I know they aren’t for a lot of folks.

As a pagan these days, I focus on the lights, the many festivals of light, the Christmas tree, the Yule log, the Thanksgiving medieval banquet, the turn of yet another new year, but reserve my real longing for the Winter Solstice.  It has become my favorite and most significant holiday of the sacred year.  I’ll be writing more about it as it approaches.

Now it’s Thanksgiving.  When growing up in Indiana, we went to my Aunt Marjorie’s for Thanksgiving.  She was the acknowledged queen of the kitchen in the Keaton family universe, consistently turning out great meals.  The kids got the card tables in the family room while the adults had the dining room table.  After the meal, the men would retire to watch football and smoke cigars.

I would read comic books, generally try to huddle in a corner somewhere, usually overwhelmed by the mass of people.  Too many and too little chance to escape.  Even so Thanksgiving was a strong part of the glue that held the Keatons together, me and my 21 first cousins.  It’s now a shared memory, several blocks in the quilt that covers our generation.

Later on Kate and I cooked many Thanksgiving dinners here in Andover, for many different configurations, but those days have waned with the movement of the kids to lands far from here.  So now we pick up and go to Jon and Jen’s who cook in their renovated kitchen.

We’ve done a couple of family Thanksgivings at Lutsen and I hope we can again.

And I don’t even like turkey.  Go figure.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities, Latin, Poetry, Translating Metamorphoses, Weather +Climate, Writing

Everything You Need

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Samhain                                                                                                         Thanksgiving Moon

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
Cicero

I’m set.  The library surrounds me as I write this and the garden is two weeks into its winter slumber.  Cicero and I agree about life’s necessities, books and a place to grow food and flowers.  Between them they service the body and the mind.

It’s a dull, grey November day. Rain dribbles out of the sky, unwilling to commit.  The temperature remains in a warmer trend, 45 today, a trend our weather forecaster says will remain until early December.  I hope so since we’re headed out across the plains a week from tomorrow, exposing ourselves to the wind driven weather coming down, with no topographical resistance, from the Arctic.

Finishing up ModPo and getting off the Latin plateau I had inhabited for many weeks has left me in a satisfied Holiseason state of mind.  Before them Modern and Post Modern ended and the garden got put to bed, the Samhain bonfire held.  So this is a time of endings, as Samhain celebrates, and festival season beginnings.  The unusual confluence of Hanukkah and Thanksgiving means the whole last week of November will be celebratory. In December then we can focus on Yule, the Winter Solstice and the pagan side of Christmas.

In the coming weeks I look forward to finishing Missing’s 5th revision and getting it off to the copy editor, learning Dramatic Pro and using it as I develop Loki’s Children while I continue to work in the new “in” the Latin style that Greg pushed me towards.  This will also be a time when I consolidate my understanding of the Modern and the Post Modern and do some more writing around that, especially as it changes and informs my Reimagining My Faith project.

Reading poetry more regularly will also be part of the next few weeks, too.  I want to continue my immersion in poetry.  One of the ModPo teaching assistants, Amaris Cuchanski, said poetry is the leading edge of consciousness and I believe she’s right.

 

Great Wheel, Our Land and Home, Science, Weather +Climate

Asleep

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Samhain                                                                        Thanksgiving Moon

Another implication of the fallow season had escaped me, at least at the level Jim Gilbert describes in a recent phenology column in the Star-Tribune:

“Hibernation is a winterless life chosen by reptiles, amphibians, insects and some mammals. During the winter untold millions of animals — including toads, frogs, salamanders, snapping turtles, garter snakes, bats, woodchucks and mosquito larvae — are hibernating across Minnesota.”

We often miss the warm period lives of these creatures because many of them are small, secretive and prefer to remain well away from humans.  Their winter lives, in the millions, untold millions Gilbert says, never massed together in my mind.

(this wonderful piece by Travis Demillo.)

Walking in our woods right now there are thousands of salamanders, toads, frogs, garter snakes, woodchucks, various insects, ground squirrels and gophers in a state of suspended animation, dreaming small animal dreams until the weather becomes more suitable for their life again next year.  It gives the woods a haunted, Snow White sort of atmosphere with so many of its active and vibrant lifeforms stilled to the point of coma.  And by intention.  Well, evolutionarily adapted intention that is.

Here’s a lifted glass to their long night, a safe sleep and a welcome return.

 

Garden, Great Wheel

Ah.

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Samhain                                                 New (Thanksgiving) Moon

Finished.  Go now. The growing season has ended.  The last chores are complete:  bees gefscorked, cardboarded and moisture boarded. (not at all the same as water boarding), tulips planted.  Mulch laid down where it can be and the rest waits until the ground freezes.  Over the new bulbs for example.  That’s it. Every apple, leek, raspberry, tomato, beet, garlic, onion, carrot, ground cherry, herb and pepper has either been eaten or preserved.

The next big gardening moment is the arrival of the seed catalogs in January.  That will prompt a round of garden planning, getting ready for the 2014 garden. That’ll also be time to check on the bees, see how they’re doing.  Until then, hasta la vista, horticultura.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, Friends, Great Wheel, Woolly Mammoths

The Samhain Bonfire, a bit more.

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Samhain                                                             Samhain Moon

Frank said as he left, “Casual gatherings.  Low key.  That’s what I like best.”  It was low key, but in its own surprising way, profound.

The bonfire stayed interesting for 3 hours plus, the last hour or so the result of the five four foot lengths of ironwood cut in the morning.  There will be a number more of those logs cut over the next few weeks as we prepare for the Winter Solstice bonfire on December 21st.

The calling of the ancestors to the circle worked.  When we finished, they stayed with us, entering our conversations, adding layers to the people gathered around the fire.  Our group of 7 grew by generations of Fairbanks and Charles’s and Wolfe’s and Perlich’s and Zike’s and Spitler’s.  Some of us called in our tribal ancestors from those days long ago before settlement of Europe and all of us gave a nod and a toast to the Tanzanian man whose y chromosome all the men share.  Mitochondrial Eve, too.  (Though I understand that picture has gotten more complicated.  But the idea is sound.  That woman and that man, far enough back to have entered all our DNA.)

Warren and Sheryl threw their names into the fire wrapped around logs from long ago cached wood for a barbecue.  When they did, sparks from the fire flew up toward the night sky.  Reminded me of Beowulf’s bier, where “heaven swallowed the smoke.”

More memories gather around this place.  It becomes richer with each event, especially with the crowd of ancients who filled it last night.  Some of their spirit will linger on, remembering us and being remembered.