Imbolc Garden Planning Moon
The flipside. Africa is really big. NASA.
Ironic isn’t it? Our space agency has given us compelling information about our own planet.
Category Archives: Great Wheel
Imbolc 2012
Imbolc Garden Planning Moon
On the Great Wheel we have moved past winter now and have arrived in a season dedicated to Brigid, the triple goddess of smith, hearth and poetry. Her fiery inspiration fills the kitchen, the world of artisanry and of the poet.
Her fertile presence in the world is also reflected in the name of this cross-quarter season, Imbolc, or in-the-belly. In Ireland of old this was the season when the ewes became pregnant, that is, had a lamb in-the-belly. This meant the ewes freshened and could be milked.
(see more of Wendy’s work at paintingdreams)
After a season of bleakness and no growth fresh milk and the cheese made from it would have added a lot to the diet, protein and calcium in particular, and done it with no need to diminish stores or kill an animal. This was a seasonal miracle.
In our time we can walk or ride to the grocery store and pick up a half gallon of milk in any season. Imagine what it would have been like to have had only stored vegetables, probably a lot of porridge made from whatever was still left in the root cellar or pantry, and then, suddenly, to have fresh milk. And cheese.
A glorious thing, I’m sure.
Today we might look in our pantry and check what’s almost gone. That is, what in your life has gone out of supply. Energy? Love? Imagination? Motivation? Friends? Family. Consider those the result of a fallow time, a winter of emotional or relational resources. We all have them at different times and in different seasons of our life.
Look, then, for the new milk. What’s quickening in your life? Perhaps a new project. A new friend. Maybe a child. Could be a feeling of confidence, of new direction.
What do you need, after the fresh milk has invigorated you to bring your little one into the world? More time to devote to it. More affection to bestow. More time with yourself for ideas to emerge? More time with family and friends to allow your relational life to blossom?
Whatever it is, Brigid is the goddess who represents the creative force necessary to freshen your life. You might look at her and what she means. Google Brigid. There are lots of articles. Don’t get into the ontological question. Look at how a presence like Brigid might move into your life and give you new perspectives, new images, new paths.
Open yourself to the things you need to have a fruitful and productive new year. The season awaits.
Hi-Res Earth
Winter Garden Planning Moon
Wow. From NASA.
On Moving Toward Doing the Work Only I Can Do
Winter First Moon of the New Year
Spent yesterday shifting to my new work schedule. A couple of hours on Ovid, plus analyzing some of Caesar’s Gallic Wars. Edited three portions of the Tailte Mythos: Book I and began clipping postings from Ancientrails to consult for my first essay in the Reimagining project.
Also learned that I can’t go to sustaining status at the MIA until I’ve had 8 years as a docent. Sustaining would cut my tour requirements in half.
This means I’m going to have duck out of the Sierra Club sooner than I had planned.
No plant starts this year. I’m going to buy already started plants and of those only those we decide to grow for particular, planned uses. We’re going to shift our gardening now toward minimalism, toward those things we’ll preserve. Two colonies of bees. Emphasizing less maintenance everywhere, planting towards a time when the gardens will need even less, eventually very little care.
Life’s focus changes as our lives change and now I’ve become focused on those kind of things only I can do. Only I can write the Tailte books. Only I can set down my scattered thoughts about a sort 0f ur-faith, a common reverence all of us on the planet might share. Others might/will translate Ovid, but only I will work toward a beginner’s level commentary, one similar to Pharr’s commentary on Vergil.
Not sure why now for this shift except to say that I know my time is finite. Yes, it always has been, that’s true, but now it seems existential. No, I’m not covering something up here, I’m not ill, in fact, I just got a set of labs that Kate says are typical of a 40 year old.
Long ago, in my 20’s, I read an article about when certain professions reach their maturity. You know the material about mathematicians and scientists, early ripe, but certain other professions matured much later, writers and artists, for example, with the oldest age of maturation according to this reckoning being 50, for philosophers.
Factoring in my drinking and an early career emphasis on politics and the practical side of religion, I don’t find 65 to far out of range for me. I feel mature in my thinking and writing skills now and I need to deploy them or my unique contribution will be lost.
How the New Year Might Look
Winter First Moon of the New Year
At an inflection point with the Latin. Either I keep the pace I currently follow, maybe 6 hours a week; or, I ramp up, say to 10 or 12, maybe a couple of hours each day. Some analysis of other texts–maybe Caesar or Suetonius or Julian, I have all of these in Loeb Library volumes–plus more translating of the Metamorphoses. My inclination is to ramp up, do more, focus on Latin and the novel. That’s what my heart tells me.
That other project, too. The one I’ve got slotted for 5,000 word essays each month next year. Where I’m going to give voice to my whirling ideas about the earth, about ge-ology, about what would help us help our home planet. That one, too.
When you add these things together, they constitute real work and I feel good about that, not trapped or bummed. Now all I need is a way of allocating my time so I can work them all in and still manage the art, the garden, the bees and family.
That may be my new year’s work. Pruning activities and creating a new schedule.
Solstice Celebrations. What Might They Mean?
Winter Moon of the Winter Solstice
Something new seems to be happening. Not sure if I’m reading the rustling in the ether of our culture right, but it feels like the Great Wheel may have begun to reemerge. Not in a Wiccan or alt-pagan way, though that’s certainly there, but in a from the ground up way (so to speak).
A friend called me tonight to wish me a salubrious solstice. Kate wants to do a fire tonight. First Universalist has a solstice celebration as do many UU congregations. There has been, for a while now, solstice celebrations on the continent. I’m most familiar with ones in Scotland and Sweden.
These celebrations, rituals whatever we might call them are not confined to the Winter Solstice though the spreading knowledge of Christmas’s relationship to the Saturnalia, itself a winter solstice holiday, has given the Winter Solstice a cultural leg up, as has a more general appreciation for the other festivals of light around this time: Deepavali, Hanukkah, Christmas trees and home decorating–neither one of which has any obvious link with the Christian holiday.
I don’t know quite how to go about measuring the cultural penetration of solstice and equinox awareness, or the depth of its relation to individual’s religious yearnings, but my own sensibilities suggest the penetration has gone far past the surface and has, for some folks, like myself, reached the point of religious sentiment.
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, in a somewhat ham-fisted way, changed its holiday traditions focus from a sort of Victorian dress up for Christmas to what is now called a Winter Lights celebration.
I’d be interested to know what you think, what you see from your standpoint.
Winter Solstice 2011
Winter Moon of the Winter Solstice
Darkness has fallen. The solstice has begun. The longest nights of the year occur over the next few days.
The summer solstice, now a half year away in either direction on our orbit around Sol, has faded, faded, faded until the longest day of the year has become the longest night; in the other direction, toward which we move, the summer solstice is a half year away.
Starting now, we will begin, second by second, minute by minute, then hour by hour to turn ourselves toward the light until, at the moment of light’s triumph on June 20th at 6:09 pm, we will begin again a sure glide into winter.
On the Great Wheel it is neither the longest night nor the longest day by itself that matters, rather it is the certainty of their coming, light followed by increasing darkness, darkness followed by increasing light. This reality, as metaphor, reminds us that no light is so fulsome that it is without darkness and no darkness so total as to be without light.
Too, we can see our lives as a turn of the wheel. In late winter we quicken, growing small within the mother. We emerge during Beltane, the sun’s heat and the day’s length increases and we mature, grown into adults, as the turn moves toward Mabon and Samain, summer’s end. Our lives develop fruit and we harvest; as Summer’s End moves toward the Winter Solstice, our hair turns gray and our bodies decline. In Winter we move toward the darkness, back to the enveloping womb that is our mother, the earth.
Tonight we celebrate the winter season of our lives, the time when our life finishes its run. This bears no sorrow, nor any fear, since we know that on the morrow, as it has since time begun, the light will again gain strength. Living or not, it will shine on us, too.
The Simple Life. Bah, Humbug
Samain Moon of the Winter Solstice
“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. I say let your affairs be as one, two, three and to a hundred or a thousand. We are happy in proportion to the things we can do without.” – Henry David Thoreau
(Walden Pond, 2010)
When I bought my farm up near Nevis, Minnesota, Thoreau and I would have been on the same page. The Peaceable Kingdom had its own well, a septic system and heat provided by the forest I owned. Of course, that year the simple life saw a divorce, the temperature hit -50 and a heavier yet reliance on beer and scotch.
Don’t get me wrong. I think simplicity is a beautiful thing. Then again, so is complexity. If my body simplified itself, there wouldn’t be much me left. If my consciousness simplified itself, the rest would slip away.
There will always be, of course, the few who take the Taoist monk approach, a life lived close to nature. There will be, too, those folks who just find wilderness better company than the rest of us and who’s to say they’re wrong?
Me, though, I love samsara, this whole roiling, boiling mess we have for a place to live. I love computers and television and movies and books, philosophical and political thought and action. I love relationships, messy and unwieldy and complicated as they can be. I love art, often complex and difficult.
I suppose this means I’ll never have a Walden experience or the insight of wandering through the Tao. I’m ok with that. If you need simplicity, then seek it, make it so.
As for me, give me complexity or give me, well, what? Greater complexity.
Reimagine
Samain Moon of the Winter Solstice
Jon sent these two links. Wish I’d had’em when I owned that farm up near Nevis, Minnesota. I might still be up there, motoring around on some of these very clever inventions. They show what an ingenious mind can do when rethinking what appear to be over and done with ideas.
http://opensourceecology.org/
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/
Makes me wonder what other ideas need a complete rethink. Computers have followed a pretty standard architecture up to now, one based on a central processing unit. I read an article in Scientific American last week about a neural computer which, in essence, gives each unit of a computer a cpu, allowing for massively parallel processing as an integral part of the design. It’s modeled on, but not attempting to replicate, the human brain.
How about housing? Cars? Or, my personal quest and long time obsession, religion? The family? Electrical generation? I’m interested in distributed generation where a cul de sac or an apartment building or a couple of blocks city residential units might get their electricity from, say, a combination of wind, solar and geo-thermal units sited in their immediate vicinity.
Here’s another one that could use a complete overhaul, reimagining: nations. The nation state is a relatively new phenomenon, most experts date its rise somewhere around 1800, perhaps a hundred years earlier in the instance of Portugal and the Netherlands. In the wake of the globalization of economic life national boundaries have much different meanings that they did, say, 50 years ago.
Let’s go back to religion for a second. Over the last several years, 23 to be exact, I’ve wrestled with the hole left by Christianity in my life and sought to fill it through what I call a tactile spirituality, one wedded to the rhythms of the seasons, of flowers and vegetables, of bees. This direction took its initial impetus from an immersion in Celtic lore while I sifted for writing topics.
Then, I began to follow the Great Wheel of the seasons, a Celtic sacred calendar focused on 8 seasons, rather than four. That led me to integrate gardening with my sacred calendar. In the wake of these two changes in my life, I began to see the vegetative and wild natural world as more than tools for food or leisure, rather I began to see that they were my home, that I lived with them and in them, rather than having them as adjuncts to my anthropocentric life.
This whole change, this rethink of what sacred and holy mean, what the locus of my spirituality is and where it is, has had a long maturation, much thought and experimentation. My hope is that my reimagining might provide a common religious base, a sort of ur-religion, which all humans everywhere can embrace.
As in times past this base religion could certainly have others layered on top of it, its essence after all is to be non-exclusive. What I hope further is that reasserting, inviting, even luring others to see the sacred and the holy in our planet and its other living beings, they will be more likely to join in to see it healthy and vital.
Oh. Yeah.
Samain Moon of the Winter Solstice
We have entered my favorite season of the year, the slow slide toward the Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year. Cue Robert Frost.
(Dandelions at Lapatia Bay, Kate)
In Ushuaia the sun did not set until 9:30 pm. Here it sets at 4:30. As we traveled south along the west coast of South America, the days grew longer and longer. The evening I went into Ushuaia to have supper, it was 8:00 pm and still quite light. People strolled the streets, window shopping, holding hands, glancing here and there at other walkers.
They’re headed for a date with December 21st as well, but for them it will be the summer solstice and the longest day of the year. I knew this intellectually, but it was the little things, like taking pictures of the dandelions at Lapatia Bay, the southernmost harbor of Tierra del Fuego, that pressed its reality into my experience. Let’s see. Dandelions here. Leafless trees at home. Spring. Autumn. Oh. Yeah.