Category Archives: Great Wheel

Apples and the Equinox

September 21, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Lugnasa (Fall Eve) Autumn Moon

“O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stained
With the blood of the grape, pass not,
but sit
Beneath my shady roof, there thou may’st rest,
And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe;
And all the daughters of the year shall dance,
Sing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers. ”
– William Blake, To Autumn

Tomorrow at 9:49 we move into liturgical fall (as opposed to meteorological fall). I’m partial to the liturgical fall, especially with its astronomical significance. The sun comes up on the equatorial plane–as projected 93 million miles plus into space of course. Otherwise, crispy critters. Full entry tomorrow.

The campaign moves on, annoying me less than many because we cut the cord, or the coaxial, with Comcast and no longer have cable television. Though we do have a basic component of broadcast channels, we never watch them (they bring down the cost of the broad band service) and thus miss the television political ads.

That does not mean we miss out on television shows altogether though since subscriptions to Netflix streaming and Hulu mean many of them are available to us, just not CBS programs. BFD. My current new favorite is Grimm, a weekly tale of a Portland detective’s life as a homicide investigator and a Grimm who has the family vocation of seeing and vanquishing fairy tale creatures and/or learning to live with them.

Kate and I went around the outside this afternoon identifying tasks that need to be done. What needs pruning, weeding, transplanting. What we want in next year’s vegetable garden and where to plant it. Where the iris and the lilies and the tulips I buy will go. What needs to come out altogether. The yews out front, for example. Long past their prime and now tall enough to hide the house.

I harvested the apples off the leaning tree of Zestar. Boy, are they good. A light, sweet flavor that seems almost unapple like. This is the tree that needs shoring up. Not a hundred percent sure how to do that. Stakes and wires are one option, but with our sandy soil I’m not confident the stakes will hold at a high enough tension. May have to support it from the front and hold it in place with stakes.

Great Wheel, Weather +Climate

Autumn

September 17, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Lugnasa New (Autumn) Moon

Paul Douglas (local weather doyen) reminds us that meteorological autumn begins September 1st. I suppose. Autumn begins for me when we have days like this one. Low 40’s when I get up. A chill rain. Nights growing cooler. Leaves changing, falling.

(West Wind. early 1900’s. Thomson influenced the Canadian Group of Seven though he died before they formed.)

Now that ancientrail begins. The one where straightening up the house, restocking the larder and then, that final touch, turning the vent system over from summer to winter mark steps of readiness.

Like a denning creature, bear or beaver say, making the place warm and comfortable for the cold months ahead we burrow into our houses. Ready for when the north wind doth blow.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Are You Trying To Start a Movement?

September 16, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Lugnasa Garlic Planting Moon
Presented Homecoming: Faith of a Pagan at Groveland UU this morning. They’ve honored me by having me come regularly for over 20 years. Fewer and fewer times as I’ve moved away from the ministry, but still, each year, at least once, often twice.

There’s something about an immediate audience that makes writing fresher, harder, cleaner. During the discussion after the presentation I found myself explaining my reimagining faith project and the more I said, the more enthused I became. Strange, I know, but that’s what happened. Partly I could see connections, heads nodding. This was taking root as an idea.

“Are you trying to start a movement?” one long time Grovelander asked.

Made me stop and think. No, I’m not. But I’m trying to get clear enough to write down my thoughts, make them into a book, because I feel this reimagined faith needs to be part of everyone’s inner tool kit. I don’t mean it needs to replace your Buddhism or Christianity or Judaism or Sikhism. It can be an adjunct, a both/and. Or, like me, it can be whole deal.

An essential awareness of and responsiveness to the world in which we live, the planet on which we depend has too often been lost, especially in developed countries. Now, too, developing countries like the BRIK nations. Unfortunately, those are the very spots where this kind of earth mindfulness is most needed. These countries are the ones that make decisions large and small that effect the future of human life on this planet.

Another Grovelander, a young Macalester student, challenged my pushing off against Christianity as an example of a metaphysic that distances us from the world. She was right. This message needs to penetrate especially religious and economic ideologies, be attractive rather than repulsive. Yet still strong enough to bite. Not an easy task.

But, hey? If it was easy, someone would have already done it.

(illustration above: The Green Knight Gesso tells the tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from the Green Knight’s perspective. The old ways are parting for the new, yet in the ancient there is wisdom to learn and to be retained. The Green Knight is symbolic of ancient wisdom.)

Asia, Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, US History, World History

These Strange Times

August 14, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Lugnasa Hiroshima Moon

Pope’s butler accused of theft. Wait. The pope has a butler? Shootings yesterday at Texas A&M. The Sikh Temple in Wisconsin last week. Aurora the 20th of July. Can anyone else hear a tear in the moral fabric of the universe?

Not to mention that yesterday the stock market was down because of news from Asia. Asia? What happened to the euro? It’s true that bad news always happens and good news is not, usually, news at all. Still.

Let’s throw in the news from Europe’s Cryosat that the polar ice has begun to retreat

(at) a loss of 900 cubic kilometers of ice in the last year. That’s 50 percent more than computer models predicted would melt.

A lack of ice is good news for shipping, and oil and gas exploration, but dark ocean water warms the air above more than reflective ice, a “positive feedback” that accelerates warming. Research suggests the Arctic is warming 2-4 times faster than the rest of the Northern Hemisphere. So what? This warming is nudging the jet stream north, to the tune of 1 mile a year, 18 feet/day. (paul douglas weatherblog)

Predictions of the end times have a 100% failure rating (so far), so I’m not going there, but bizarre times? Yes.

Of all of these, the news I understand least are the three shootings. Like the man here who killed his three daughters, there may be a psychological explanation. Certainly there is a psychological explanation. Has to be. But explanation does not serve. Tracing the inner path to these crimes leaves us with the crime in the end.

I’d like to know, if anybody does know, the incidence of these or similar crimes in other cultures. Are we truly aberrant or is it a statistical phenomenon, a law of large numbers reality?

Of all these, the news that worries me the most comes from the cryosat satellite. This summer was miserable for us and horrific for much of the country. In this case I understand the cause. I drive one. So do you. I use electricity. So do you. We have treated global warming as a topic for next year. For the next generation. Guess what?

It is next year. And we’re the next generation.

Great Wheel, Great Work, Poetry

August 11, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Lugnasa Hiroshima Moon

The Spring Dumbledor

An August Midnight
by Thomas Hardy

A shaded lamp and a waving blind,
And the beat of a clock from a distant floor:
On this scene enter—winged, horned, and spined—
A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore;
While ‘mid my page there idly stands
A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands…

Thus meet we five, in this still place,
At this point of time, at this point in space.
—My guests besmear my new-penned line,
Or bang at the lamp and fall supine.
“God’s humblest, they!” I muse. Yet why?
They know Earth-secrets that know not I.

Great Wheel

Lughnasa 2012

August 1, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Hiroshima Moon

Lughnasa (Lugnasa, Lugnasadh) falls between the Summer Solstice and the Fall Equinox. The cross-quarter holidays, in the Celtic calendar, came before the solar holidays. Originally, the year divided only in half: May 1st, Beltane-Summer to October 31st Samhain-Summer’s End. After the solar holidays became part of the calender, two more cross-quarter holidays, Imbolc and Lugnasa, got established.

This is a time of joy, the harvest has well begun. Our neighbor brought us a colander filled with vegetables from his garden, a first fruits gathering. We gave him some honey. Our garden is a bit behind his because he has a wonderful open spot for his and we have woods around all of ours, limiting sunlight. Still, we harvested onions this week and garlic a month ago. Kate has also put up several pounds of beet greens, chard and kale with more to come.

The workload, too, changes, as the garden begins to die back after its summer of growth.

Lughnasa is the first of three harvest holidays, coming later are the Mabon, the fall equinox and Samhain, summers end, which marks the end of the harvest season and the beginning of the fallow season.

You could almost call this a fifth season, Harvest, with three holidays. Imagine how important this time of year was to agrarian societies where it determined the quality of the long fallow season. No wonder there are so many traditions, fairs, queens of this and that associated with it.

It might be a good time for you to check your life. What’s had a long growing season and is ready for harvest? Today I began work on the revision of Missing, its first draft finished in May and now ready for revision. I will also begin, at some point in the next week or so, Missing’s sequel, Loki’s Children. These represent the fruits, the harvest of much work and thought over the last couple of years.

Sewing projects? Home renovations? Jon and Jen have the plumber coming tomorrow to connect their two new bathrooms, their sinks and their stove. Overnight they’ll go from a one bathroom to a three bathroom home and a home with a remodeled kitchen and dining area, a new deck, new landscaping in the back and new bedrooms for all. But it took all the last year to get to this point. Harvest.

In fact, the whole summer olympics, coming as the calendar turns over to Lugnasa, are a harvest festival. Thinks of the hours, the weeks, the months, even the years most of these competitors have trained, just for this moment. A growing season perhaps begun in their youth, or, for some like the gymnasts, realized in their youth.

The state fair celebrates the agrarian culture that feeds us and its celebration comes during the Lugnasa season. Cattle, chickens, pigs, rabbits, honey, cakes, political campaigns, art all come to the fair. These fairs are the outgrowth of village markets that sprang up around the cross-quarter and solar holidays. Usually a week or so long, they gathered in the larger community, shared music and food, brokered deals, signed labor contracts or fulfilled them with payment, sanctioned marriages, sometimes handfast marriages for a year and a day.

It’s a festive time of year. Celebrate, celebrate, dance to the music.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, US History

The Growing Season Begins to Wind Down

July 30, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Hiroshima Moon

On Wednesday we move from the growing season emphasis of early summer to the harvest emphasis of late summer. The Celtic calendar marks that change on August 1st which begins the season of Lughnasa, a first fruits time. Yes, harvesting has happened before this, but now the inflection is on crops for sale, trade or preservation.

[ in precipitation in during the growing season (after Meehan et al. 2004 and Bowen et al. 2005)]

If any of you saw the opening ceremony of the Olympics, the first, agrarian phase of Great Britain before the industrial revolution is the time the Celtic calendar marks. It is not a calendar for an industrialized or a technological society though it has an important place in both. Industrialization and technology both move us away from direct experience of the
natural world and especially from the source of our food. The Celtic calendar gets its seasons from the botanical and meteorological rhythms, not the work day or the academic year or the never asleep world of the internet.

Those other rhythms, the Taylorized day or the instantaneous cyber world, lead us away from natural rhythms into a cultural space dominated by rationality, science and human control. In the Celtic calendar the natural world rules, just as it does yet today, though we hide ourselves from it with thermostats, electric lights and high speed broadband.

This is not an either/or situation; there is a dialectic between the world of human artifice and the world which brings the thunder and the lightning and the rain, which grows the food, which gives us night and day. Yet. So many of us, in our air conditioned, wired, well-lit by electricity homes, obscure or forget or ignore that our food grows in the soil, the flesh of mother earth. That it depends on water either from rain or from irrigation, this dependent of rain and replenishment of hidden aquifers. That the sun which gives food the energy we need does so without human intervention or assistance.

All of our civilization has as its foundation, its literal without which nothing support, the vegetative world. And we do not control it. We can help it, nurture it, bless it, curse it, but we cannot make plants grow. We can only provide or protect the conditions under which they do so. In our amnesia about this simple, stark fact we pave over farmland, alter the chemical conditions under which plants grow, change their genetic patterns trying to extend our control, but all this begs the question. How did the vegetative world get along without us?

The answer? Just fine. This is not a rant, this is a reflection of our current reality. It is the hope of ancientrails that it can serve as one reminder. One reminder of the essential, unique and healing power of the world beyond our control.

Great Wheel

Aside June 30, 2012 Charles 2 Comments

Summer Under the Lily Moon

Latvia’s most important national holiday is arguably not Christmas but the summer solstice celebrations of Ligo (pronounced “leegwa”) – a pagan tradition when Latvians celebrate the shortest night by staying up to greet the rising sun.

Wanted to add a note from a Latvian which puts an interesting twist on this:

“Just sent you a couple of notes on your wonderful blog. Interesting you would call Summer Solstice the shortest night, when I was gorwing up, all the Latvians refered it to the longest night – meaning, they were up all night because it never got dark, as opposed to winter solstice, which technically is the longest night – then,they would light a lot of candles. So much for pagan traditions.

Oh, the reason the guy is wearing an oak wreath on his head is to celebrate St. John, whose favavorite tree was the sacred oak. The women only wore reaths made of wild flowers. Go figure.”

BTW: St. John’s Night is the night before St. John’s, the saint’s day for John the Baptist. It’s celebrated on June 24th. Before easy calculation of the exact day of the four solar holidays, a fixed date near the usual time was chosen and used as the celebration.

Great Wheel

Summer Solstice 2012

June 21, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Lily Moon

The summer solstice. On Tuesday the sun rose at 5:26 am and set at 9:03 pm. That same length of day lasts through tomorrow. On Saturday we move to 5:27 am rise, 9:03 set. Sunday, too. The change in daylight begins to decrease in very tiny increments, but is now on a course that will culminate in the Winter Solstice when the sun will rise at 7:48 am and set at 4:34 pm. So, today, for example we have 12 hours and 37 minutes of day light; by December 21st that will have receded to 8 hours and 46 minutes.

The solstices are the extremes of our solar year while the equinoxes, coming in between them mark the days of relative equality between daylight and dark. Another way to look at the equinox is as the moment halfway between one solstice and the other.

Roughly, too, they mark the point when the amount of light shifts toward its next extreme. That is, September 22nd, the autumnal equinox, has sunrise at 7:00 am and sunset at 7:09, almost 12 hours of light and 12 hours of dark. After that the night begins to gain ascendance with more and more of each 24 hours dark rather than light.

The midsummer festivals in Northern Europe, like the ones around Beltane, often involve fire. The painting at the top is a Finnish summer solstice festival from 1910.

Look at what burns within you now, what illuminates your life. What part of your life could be more visible? Needs more light?

If you try to match your life to the seasons at all, this is a time to consider picnics, gardens, being on the water, painting outside, perhaps drawing. It’s a time to be with others out of doors.

This is also a moment to consider the value of excess in your life. What might benefit from an all out, all stops out push from you? What things about which you have been moderate or even frugal might blossom if given an outlandish amount of attention. This is a time when the balance has swung up on the side of maximum light. What deserves maximum effort from you?

It is, too, a time to celebrate the gifts of peak experience. Look for those things in your current life that are reaching their pinnacle. Don’t let them languish through inattention. Beat their drum. Sound their cymbal.

Most of all, embrace the light in your life. This is its day. Its week.

Garden, Great Wheel

Full Garlic Moon

June 3, 2012 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Garlic Moon

The garlic moon is full and we still have no scapes on our garlic. Will they be late this year? I’m not sure. One thing I’ve finally learned is that no growing season is typical and the garlic, planted in September, grows ten months or so. That means it went through this unusually mild winter. Could it have affected its growth? I suppose, though I don’t know how.

The potatoes took off while I was gone. They are vegetable interlopers in a bed dug out between large clumps of hemerocallis. We also have vegetable interlopers in a bed out front, three tomato plants and two peppers.

As trees mature in and around our vegetable garden in the back, shade is beginning to limit the beds that receive enough sun to grow vegetables. I know we could cut them down, but at this point I’m more inclined to plant shade lovers and give up the space. Part of shifting the garden gradually toward less and less maintenance.

Kate has a summer focus. Weeds. She’s determined and when she’s determined, things get done. The beds look so much better sans weeds.