Category Archives: Great Wheel

Art and Culture, Great Wheel, Writing

The Voice of Autumn

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Lughnasa                                                                     Honey Moon

Even though the heat blazed down like mid-July today, the twilight comes much earlier. The wind moving among the trees in our woods sounds like the voice of autumn, not the return of mid-summer.  May it be so.

My heart has already begun its turn inward, the work of Loki’s Children and Changes, a novel after the trilogy is done, beginning to dominate my early morning and post-nap moments.  No, I’ve not made the complete transition yet, the bells have not yet rung, but soon, soon the night will begin falling earlier, the state fair will be finished and Michaelmas just around the corner.

September 29th is daughter-in-law Jen’s birthday and Michaelmas.  Michaelmas was the date that began school terms in England and can be seen, as a friend once noted, as the springtime of the soul.  It is the holy day of St. Michael, the archangel, the warrior of god.  A complicated day with many threads woven into to its tapestry.  All this is within a month or so now, the year has begun to change.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel

Harvest

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Lughnasa                                                                   Moon of the First Harvests

As we settle in to the season of Lughnasa, we can look back over our lives and anticipate the harvest festivals current and those to come.  They’re a time to consider the notion of harvest, of a growing season completed and the crop taken in.  What in your life have you been nurturing, feeding, weeding, making sure it gets sun and water and space? Is it time now to start picking the fruit?  Worth considering.

As is, too, the notion of what you may plant for the next growing season.  More time for travel?  More reading in a certain area?  More time with family or a particular person or a particular set of people?  More time devoted to your health whether exercise, diet or meditation?

Whatever your crop you can take a cue from mother earth.  What does your crop need to flourish?  What will give it a good start?  What kind of nourishment will it need along the way to get its roots and leaves in place?  How much space (time) does your crop need, apart from others?

Maybe next Lughnasa or as soon as Mabon (Fall Equinox) or Samhain (Summer’s End) you’ll have some fruit ready to pick.  If you do, celebrate it.  Have a bonfire.  Buy yourself or cook yourself a special meal.  Go on that trip.  Harvest time is festive.

Great Wheel

Lughnasa 2013

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Lughnasa                                                                            Moon of the First Harvests

Today begins the first of the three harvest seasons, Lughnasa.  This is the holiday of first fruits, the celebration of those beets, carrots, onions, garlic, chard, herbs, peas and the cherries, currants and pears already brought inside.  In the Catholic tradition this was called Lammas, the feast of the first breads, baked from the first harvested wheat or other grains.

Lughnasa, Mabon (Fall Equinox) and Samhain (Summer’s End) celebrate the beginning, peak and end of the harvest.  This is the time of year when the hard work of late spring and early summer produce results.  In many agricultural societies these were the months that determined life or death over the fallow winter months beginning at Samhain.

There are many traditions and customs peculiar to these harvest times, not the least in our society, of course, the beginning of school.  The State Fair and all the county fairs held in these months echo these traditions since the holiday itself, August 1st in this case, usually began a week long market fair where goods were exchanged, feasts held, dances and games held, new relationships begun or ended.

This year a new harvest.  The first fruits of the broadening grasp of human diversity in Minnesota.  Gay couples can and have already married here.  Coming only days after the Pope’s who am I to judge, this may be a first harvest worthy of the history books.

Kona’s death was, too, a harvest, a life lived fully, ripened and now mature.  Lughnasa 2013 will be remembered.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Third Phase

the moon

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Summer                                                                    Solstice Moon

The super moon has come and gone, the moon only its normal lunarity tonight.  Deciding that each moon at perigee is a super moon strains the adjective too far.  The marginally larger and closer moon would be truer.

The lead up to the super moon did reignite my never far dormant moon watching passion.  This Japanese ritual seems very well suited to life’s third phase.  Quiet, dignified, can be done without glasses at home.  No money changes hands.  A glass of tea, or a shot of single malt, a beer.  Some cheese and the moon beside us on the deck.

As our closest neighbor in the overwhelming emptiness that is our universe, the moon has a special place, a unique place in our lives.  It illumines the night, goes through its phases each lunar month, defining tides and creating romantic moments.

I’m finding it hard to describe why the moon fascinates me so much.  Not about astronomy.  Or moon walks.  Something about its floating, silvery presence.  A silent partner to the dark its moods changes with the seasons.  The floating harvest moon, round and large and orange differs from the white full moon that passes through the cold skies of the winter solstice time.  The moon of the summer can preside over long evenings outside, a dim lantern providing just the right amount of just the right kind of light.

It also figures in story and myth.  The goddess Diana and her crescent moon, which appears in so many portraits of the virgin mary, especially our Lady of Guadalupe.  Lon Chaney’s version of the Wolfman:  “Even a man who is pure at heart, and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.”

Not quite getting there and I’m tired.  Will try again soon.

Garden, Great Wheel

Yes

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Beltane                                                                           Solstice Moon

 

The earth has reached the point in its orbit where its tilt reaches toward the sun.  This is one solstice, the solstice of leaning toward.  At the solstice of leaning toward, the sun reaches its highest point in the sky.  Heat begins to build and will continue to do so after the solstice even though the arc of the day has begun to diminish and the arc of the night to expand.

This solstice can be seen as a moment of extravagance, of the sun blessing us with its bounty. (though it must be observed that the sun spends itself without discrimination as regards our home.  it is, rather, our capture of more of its expenditure that defines the season)  In that regard we can look into our lives for those blessings, those extravagances that assert themselves right now, throwing heat and light into our days.

The summer solstice begs us to enjoy them.  Grand kids shine their innocence, a brilliant beacon, into us and in the reflection of that innocence we find ourselves restored.  We can wonder whether astronauts have tushies, read books all the time, giggle at negative numbers, shoot long threads of silly string over the forest, smile or even act mischievously in that ingenuous way kids have.

The garden’s green and growing things:  carrots, lilies, iris, beets, leeks, hosta, juniper, kale, chard, sugar snap peas, lilacs, hydrangeas, ferns, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, asparagus, strawberries, rhubarb, raspberries, daisies, peonies, bug bane and begonias.  The orchard with hundreds of apples, cherries, plums and pears, currants and blueberries, gooseberries.  What a cornucopia.  And the bees, working at building their colony.  This is life throwing itself away for the life of others, a joint dance with humans and plants and animals in it together.

23 years of marriage.  A wondrous extravagance, giving that many years and promising that many more.  The time, the memories, the trust, the hopes, the suffering, the joy.  Yes.

This is the time to say yes.  Yes marriage.  Yes garden.  Yes grand children.  Yes home.  Yes state.  Yes earth.  Yes sun.

This is the time to lean towards.  To react with great warmth.  To shine as brightly as you can.  Wherever you can.  Yes.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities, Third Phase

Outside, Inside. Again.

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Beltane                                                                          Solstice Moon

Summer is its own creature, a season apart from the others, especially here in the north.  Things grow.  Outside has only insect barriers, no cold or ice or snow or chill.  Yes, rain and thunder and tornadoes and derechos. Yes.  But only occasionally.  Usually the sun shines, heat climbs, jackets and boots stay in the closet.

It is now, finally, summer.  In three days the summer solstice will arrive, midsommer as celebrated in Scandinavia.  Here, this year, it will almost mark the beginning of our actual summer.

With the bees and the flowers, the vegetables and the woods, now the fire pit and visiting kin you would think I might love the summer.  And I do, in my way.  I appreciate it, look forward to it, enjoy it.  In particular I like working outside, planting, tending, harvesting.  Having the self expand out into the world beyond the house feels good, extends my understanding of who I am and of those whom I love.

Still, I will celebrate not the light on the day of the summer solstice, but its opposite, the beginning of night’s gradual increase.  I don’t know whether it’s my northern European DNA, or the mysterious lure that drew me north ever since reading Jack London, or a tendency toward melancholy, or a more general sense that my most vital activity occurs when the nights grow long and the temperature falls.

What I do know is that as the shadows lengthen and twilight comes sooner, my inner life begins to deepen, ideas bubble out of my interior.  My creative self flourishes.  It just occurred to me as I wrote this that attention outside draws me away from myself and from the inner work, undoubtedly a good thing, but as I sense the need for outside attention wane, my inner world grows more demanding.

If this is in fact the way it is, then I’m glad, for it means my inner life and the progression of the seasons have begun to synchronize in a powerful, subconscious way.

Garden, Great Wheel, Our Land and Home

Heat

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Beltane                                                                              Solstice Moon

All beds but one mulched and that one I want to plant some carrots in tomorrow or Sunday.  Planted another row of carrots in the large raised bed today.  Put down jubilate and transplant water on the carrot seeds and on the leeks.  Having the heat is good, the tomatoes, peppers and egg plants need it.  Now this isn’t much heat, I know, if you’re reading this in, say, Riyadh or Singapore, but still it counts here.

The growing season has begun to rock on.  I thinned some early beets and onions today, the strawberries have fruit and all the orchard trees have fruit, too.  Kate’s already given away rhubarb and lilacs, plus tomato marmalade from crops awhile ago.

In just one week the sun will hit it’s peak height here in the northern hemisphere:  “The summer solstice occurs when the tilt of a planet’s semi-axis, in either the northern or the southern hemisphere, is most inclined toward the star (sun) that it orbits. Earth’s maximum axial tilt toward the sun is 23° 26′. This happens twice each year, at which times the sun reaches its highest position in the sky as seen from the north or the south pole.”(Tauʻolunga)

After that, as the maximal tilt gives way, slowly, the days grow shorter, the dark begins to dominate and I move into my favorite half of the year, the part headed toward the winter solstice.  Though I love the growing season, it doesn’t feed me in the same way the gradual darkening and cold does.

It’s great right now though, heat for the plants, which will, ironically, feed me when the dark season comes.

Bees, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work

Welcome, Growing Season!

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Beltane                                                                                  Early Growth Moon

We have turned the corner on winter it seems and now will begin the gradual invasion of a more southerly clime, with heat and humidity climbing like kudzu broken free from the Confederacy.  We are two distinct climates in one here in Minnesota.  The one for which we are best known and with which most of us here identify is the polar influenced late fall, winter and early spring.  Cold, often severe, snow and a long fallow time typify this one.

The second, one for which we are not known at all, but which we know well, is the briefer Northern summer in which all signs of that polar influence wane then disappear, giving way to temperatures often reaching the 90’s and sometimes into the 100’s–this has happened more lately of course–and dewpoints moist enough to make being outside like wrapping yourself in one of those turkey cooking bags sold around Thanksgiving and sticking yourself in your oven.

This means, the good part, that we can grow crops that mature in under 120 days or so, leeks stretch that, but I’ve done it consistently.  This is long enough to get most garden vegetables including tomatoes, peppers and others that require frost free conditions when planting. (which shortens the season).

The bees, long adapted to cold climate, are fine with these temperature swings; it’s the multivalent attack of pesticides, mites, loss of habitat, mite borne viruses or viruses aided by the mite weakened bee and reliance on bees not bred for hygienic behavior (cleaning out diseased larvae before they can infest the colony).

Our cherry, plum and pear trees all blossomed in Monday’s record heat.  The apples have not, yet, and I’m glad because once their blossoms fall I have to get out the ladder and bag each fruit set.  And, this year I’m getting more aggressive with the damned squirrels, those tree bandits.

It’s time to get out there and dig several holes in the ground, mash it up, put it in a plastic baggy and send it off to the lab.

Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Great Wheel, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Overview Effect

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Beltane                                                                                              Early Growth Moon

“There have been household gods and household saints and household fairies. I am not sure that there have yet been any factory gods or factory saints or factory fairies. I may be wrong, as I am no commercial expert, but I have not heard of them as yet.”
G.K. Chesterton

The video below, 20 minutes long, came to me via friend and cybermage Bill Schmidt through his daughter, Moira.  I include the two quotes along with it to emphasize a subtle point.  Chesterton was looking anthropomorphically at the locus of fairies, gods and saints, ok as far it goes, but he neglects the much longer tradition of nymphs, dryads, fairies of the woodlands and fields, holy wells, sacred mountains, places of pilgrimage and, most tellingly underlined in this wonderful video, the dynamic, vital oasis in the midst of the vacuum of space:  Earth.

(John Byam Liston Shaw  angel offering the fruits of eden)

We live already, as Bill likes to point out, in paradise.  We are, unfortunately, working hard, very hard, through the godless, saintless and fairyless world of commerce–Chesterton surely had this right–to expel ourselves from paradise.  There is no east of Eden in space.  If we lose this paradise, there is not another for us to inhabit.

“Heat-Trapping Gas Passes Milestone, Raising Fears  The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported Friday, reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years.”   NYT yesterday

I enclose the second, seemingly far out of context, quote which comes from our money manager because it highlights a fall in the prices of copper, platinum and paladium.  This fact, falling commodity prices, rather than science or political will, are the main things that will work in favor of stopping the Polymet mine near the Boundary Waters Wilderness Area and its follow-on mines that await only its successful completion of its environmental impact statements.

(expulsion, Masaccio)

“PolyMet expects to mine copper by late 2015   One day after announcing plans to raise $80 million in cash, officials of PolyMet Mining Corp. on Thursday said they are moving headlong toward permitting and, eventually, construction of Minnesota’s first copper-nickel mine.”  Duluth Tribune

We should not, must not, leave these decisions to the whims of the market.  We must develop the political and personal will to say no.  Hard?  Yes.  Necessary?  Listen to the astronauts and look at the thin layer of atmosphere that is all that protects us from the harsh reality of the space we inhabit.

“Commodities markets. It wasn’t all bad in April: natural gas futures rose 9.0%, cocoa futures gained 9.1%, and wheat futures rose 6.3%. Now for the bad news: gold fell 7.8% last month to an April 30 COMEX close of just $1,474.00. Silver cratered 14.6% in April; copper fell 6.4%, platinum 4.3% and palladium 9.2%”

 

 

OVERVIEW from Planetary Collective on Vimeo.

Commentary on Religion, Garden, Great Wheel, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Weather +Climate

Growing Up

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Beltane                                                                   New (Early Growth) Moon

Cold, wet and occasionally sunny the short Minnesota growing season has finally begun.  Our cold weather planting is done, sometime in the next week we’ll put in our tomatoes and peppers.  Then, we wait for the sun to warm the soil, the rain to nourish the roots, carrying nutrients from the soil into the plants, elevatoring it up to the leaves where that true, abundant and necessary miracle photosynthesis will transubstantiate solar energy into the real body and blood.  Each leaf a priest, each plant a diocese.  A garden the whole catholic universe.

It is in here, somewhere, that reimagining faith will finally come home, right down here at that literally elemental level where the chemicals and elements of earth, soldered by sunlight make the essentials for life.  No photosynthesis, no life, at least on the surface of the planet where we live.  I understand there are different processes in the deep sea vents, strange creatures with arsenic in their veins, but up here, in the green world, we depend on–what a weak word–we live or die by this vegetative marvel.

It’s not as if there might not be gods, there may be.  There may be.  But I can think of no god that does more to sustain my life than the least of the leaves.  Here’s the nexus where sin and redemption must occur.  Sin makes our planet less hospitable for these; redemption conserves the planet’s soil, assures the availability of sun light.

(Gods Pantheon.  Ratteau)

Think of the crucifixion each year as soils leach out their nutrients, become so friable that they can blow away in the wind.  Think of the top soil, made fertile over hundreds of years, wasted in a season or two.  Think of the aquifers, draining themselves for our sake with no hope of replenishment in a hundred hundred human lifetimes.

How will we roll away the stone on this deep crime?  Who will stand at the tomb, that fine rising’ up mornin’, when the world cares for its soils and its forests and its lakes and its streams as if life of very life could not do without them?  Someday.  I hope.  Someday.