Category Archives: Great Wheel

Great Wheel, Travel, Weather +Climate

A Year of Two Springs

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Fall                                                  Full Autumn Moon

A cool rain and a chilly fall evening with wet gold stuck to the bricks and asphalt, a low cloud cover and darkening twilight skies.

Though ready to travel there is a sadness in missing the rest of fall, the transition from this still part summer, part cooler season time to the bleaker, barren time of November.  It is a favorite season, the continuing turn toward the Winter Solstice.

We will leave it behind, first for the warmer, much warmer Western Caribbean, then sweaty Panama and hot Ecuador.  As we move south, we move into spring with milder temperatures, then, in southern Chile among the fjords and glaciers and around Cape Horn, the southern equivalent of the far north, where temperatures will be cooler.  So, for us, 2011 will be a year of two springs.

And, a shortened fall.

Meanwhile, Mark in Ha’il, Saudi Arabia faces 97 as a typical daytime high.  Gotta wonder what global warming has in store for the desert kingdom.  Sort of the old petrocarbons coming home to roost.

Bees, Family, Garden, Great Wheel, Our Land and Home

Making Pot Pies

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Fall                                                       Waxing Autumn Moon

We had our final straight from the garden meal last night.  Roasted potatoes, onions, fennel, carrots and a lone beet.  Raspberries for dessert.  Marinated chicken for protein, not from here.

Today I cut up the leeks, cooked some chicken breasts, carrots, celery, peas and corn (none of these ours), and cooked the leeks in salt water for five minutes.  After shredding the chicken, a roux thickened the broth with the vegetables.  The shredded chicken went in the pie crust, then the leeks (our own), and after that the thickened broth and vegetables.

A rolled out pie crust for a top to the pies and they went in the oven.  4 chicken/leek pot pies, frozen now, treats we can have when we get back from South America along with raspberry pie.

Had an aha about our garden while cutting up the leeks.  We’re not feeding ourselves in any significant way with our garden, though we do eat several meals a year with our own produce and fruit.  What we can grow, and the leeks, garlic, heirloom tomatoes and heirloom potatoes are good examples, are specialty vegetables that, even if we wanted them, probably wouldn’t be available and would certainly not be available fresh from the garden.

We preserve tomatoes, store potatoes and onions, garlic and honey.  Kate makes currant jam and wild grape jelly.  We have raspberry pies frozen and now the chicken/leek pot pies.  We also freeze chard and spinach.  Our garden supplements our diet in ways that would not be possible without it.

It also gives us a joint project, a place we can work together, while keeping us in touch with the Great Wheel and the ways of the vegetative world.  We get a lot from our garden.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Politics, Weather +Climate

A Changeable Month

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Fall                                                Waxing Autumn Moon

A warm fall night, a clear sky, a half moon high above it all.  The moon roof open on the Celica.  October in Minnesota.  A changeable month.

The Sierra Club set its legislative priorities tonight, though with this particular legislature a good deal, most, of our work will be defensive in nature.

Today saw final touches on my tour of ancient art for a group of Somali teens.  I did not know that Somalia was, most likely, the ancient land of Punt.  It covers the Horn of Africa like a cap, hugging the coastline north and south while extending in toward the interior.  Piracy is not a new activity here in this country positioned close to major shipping lanes for centuries.

Did some editing on Spiritual Resources for Humanists, or With No God, and found it could use some rewriting. I’ll get to that Friday or Saturday.

 

Aging, Art and Culture, Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Our Land and Home, permaculture, Politics

Partners and Co-Creators

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Fall                                                       Waning Harvest Moon

Went out and picked raspberries for pancakes this morning.  With a definite chill in the air the garden felt different, a bit sleepy, ready to bed down for the cold season.  After a month or so of feeling burdened by it, wanting it to disappear, my spring affection reappeared.  This patch of earth, these beds, work together with the plant world and Kate and me.  We share a joint stewardship of this property, each in our way committed to making it healthy, beautiful and bountiful.

The soil has given of its nutrients, its water holding capacity, its sturdiness as a base for roots and stems.  The plants have combined the chemicals of the soil with that water and pushed themselves up and out of the earth, then blossomed and in many cases fruited.  Kate and I weed, tend the soil, watch the plants, picking bugs off of them, pruning, replanting.  We also harvest and, when the harvest ends, we replenish the soil with composted manure and mulch.

When we use the plants and their produce, we take the leaves and stems and other unwanted parts and put them in a compost bin to return to the soil.

This complicated working partnership among many different parties here is, in microcosm, the partnership we humans have with the natural world and the world of soils, air, water and sunshine.  It’s significant to note that the one unnecessary party to this the work is the human race.

Plants will grow.  Rain will fall.  The sun will shine.  Soils will improve.  Fruits and vegetables will be made and distributed, all whether humans enter in or not.  We exist only as part of a richly integrated chain of being and we exist as its wards, not benefactors.

We do have the capacity to intervene, but too often, far too often, when we do intervene, we disrupt what nature does willingly and foul the process, in the end harming ourselves.

I wish our gardens and our orchard were more than supplements to our diet, but that is all they are, to be otherwise would require a commitment to the work I no longer feel able or willing to give.  Even so, as a supplement, this growing of flowers, potatoes, tomatoes, beets, carrots, leeks, beans, onions, lettuce, chard, spinach and peas, this caring for bees and harvesting honey, does keep us intimately engaged as partners with the natural world, a partnership so often hidden from view in this, the most capitalistic of all possible worlds.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story

Fall Equinox

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Fall                                                     Waning Harvest Moon

Meteorological fall begins on September 1st, but the ritual calendar of many earth focused traditions places the beginning of fall at the moment when the sun’s equator and the earth’s align, the earth, just for a moment, losing its tilt relative to the sun.  This means we are half way through a cycle that began in June on the Summer Solstice and will end in December on the Winter Solstice.

Here’s an explanation from Wikipedia:  “In the half year centered on the June solstice, the Sun rises and sets towards the north, which means longer days with shorter nights for the Northern Hemisphere and shorter days with longer nights for the Southern Hemisphere. In the half year centered on the December solstice, the Sun rises and sets towards the south and the durations of day and night are reversed. Also on the day of an equinox, the Sun rises everywhere on Earth (except the Poles) at 06:00 in the morning and sets at 18:00 in the evening (local time).”

What are the marks of autumn for you?  Is it the return to school, the burst of energy, enthusiasm that comes from strapping on the cultural expectations of our youth?  Or, are the leaves changing, the senescence in the plant world a key moment for you?  Perhaps the chill winds and cool nights, the clear night skies.  For some it could be the nearing of deer hunting, or the start up of the NFL and the college football seasons.  Some find the gradual slide into darkness a time of increasing depression, the beginnings of Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Whatever marks this change for you it comes along with the seasonal ones; changes marked by decreasing solar energy per square foot and the attendant cooling.

This is the second of the three harvest festivals in the Celtic calendar, the first happening on August 1st, Lughnasa, and the final harvest festival marking Summer’s End, Samhain, on October 30th.  This was an other occasion for a market fair, settling of debts and entering into contracts.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Minnesota, Myth and Story

Seasonal Pilgrimage

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Fall                                           Waning Harvest Moon

Each turn of the Celtic seasonal calendar I find ideas, personal reflections, astronomical or traditional lore to pass along.

This time I’ll pass along one from Waverly Fitzgerald who maintains a website, living in season.

She suggests a seasonal pilgrimage, a visit each turn of the year to a place that, for you, embodies the energies and essence of the new season.  This recommendation struck me because I have a place myself, next to the Carlos Avery Wildlife Refuge, the Bootlake Scientific and Natural Area.

To get to my sacred area I walk back through a field, it formerly held a house, now gone, traverse a crescent of young oak and birch to emerge in a circular meadow filled with furze.  Across the furze and to the northwest is a path back into the woods, not long, that takes me to a parcel of land between a pond on the south and the marshy edge of Bootlake on the north.

On this land between the waters stands an old growth white pine, a white pine with a crooked top, probably the main trunk broke off in a storm or lightning strike and a secondary branch took over, but at an angle from the main.  My guess is that this deformity allowed the old giant to survive the woodsman’s axe.

In a ring around this older tree are its offspring, a small grove of younger white pines who now stand sentinel around their older parent, a conversation now lasting at least a hundred years of more.

A portion of Tully’s ashes came with me one day.  I scattered them around the base of the tree, then sat down with my back to its trunk, snugged in between two great roots while I gave thanks for this Irish Wolfhound who had taken a special place in my heart.

At other times, often on New Year’s Day, I have visited this sacred grove, the air often below zero, snow crunching, black crows watching me from high atop leafless oak.

This small place, away from the city and the suburbs, a place intact, has been a refuge for me for over twenty years.  I visit it still, though less in the last few years.  It’s time to return.

 

 

Aging, Family, Great Wheel, Retirement

Changes

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Lughnasa                                                  Waning Harvest Moon

May I present Autumn?  It comes to us in russets and golds, grays and rain, with some chill and occasional warmth.  Autumn continues our seasonal review, following the spectacular summer with its heat and its emphasis on differing shades of green, a color wheel of blooms and food.

Autumn, like our earlier season, Spring, is a time of change, the gradual transition from the heat and bombast of the growing season to the bleak outer landscapes of the fallow months.

Autumn also marks the beginning of the academic year, a moment of new beginnings, a springtime of the inner world.  This part of the season has its own holiday, Michaelmas, the holy day for the Archangel Michael, and the traditional opening of the English academic year.

In my life change has blown in with the cold rain.  Mark will leave us sometime in the next few days, before the end of October.  The growing season has wound down with only potatoes, beans, leeks and chard left in the garden.  A long vacation grows closer by the day, less than a month away.

There is, too, a growing sense that a major life change may be imminent.  Just what it will be is unclear, though it feels like retirement may be in the cards, joining Kate in her journey beyond the world of work.  How would that manifest in my life, long ago cast off from the port marked Employment?

Leaving behind the era of productive engagement with the world feels premature for me, but a new freedom may emerge.  It may longer be necessary to lash myself to the mast while sailing between the Charybdis of success and the Scylla of ambition.

Mystery.  The once hidden ocean of mystery lies beyond the current horizon.  And I’ve already set sail.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Humanities, Writing

Getting Ready for the Dark Time

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Lughnasa                                         Waning Harvest Moon

The museum (MIA) has us check out when we’re going to be gone over our tour days, so I’ve checked out from mid-October through early December.  I’ve not had many tours in August and none in September, just one in October.

That, plus the relatively light schedule for the Sierra Club–the legislature doesn’t convene until February, so no weekly meetings–has given me plenty of time for the late garden work with time left over rearranging the downstairs and reconfiguring my study.

Yesterday I finished swapping out books from the bookcase nearest to my desk.  The desk and the bookcase form the sides of a U, with the bottom of the U created by the computer workstation.  On this bookcase I had collected various art and art history texts as the docent years had gone on, but they were works I did not reference frequently.

What I need near the desk are books I pull off for work.  It’s a working bookcase, not a storage unit.  Now I have near me all my Latin dictionaries, commentaries, grammars and readers; various style manuals like The Chicago, a thesaurus and english grammars plus books on writing.   The works I use most after the latin texts are the oxford dictionary of art, the oxford dictionary of philosophy and the oxford english dictionary.

On the bottom most shelf I have notebooks from docent training and several comprehensive art history texts.

I do have a shelf devoted to a long term project which I’ve shorthanded Ge-ology.  This project has its own page on this website, but I’ve let it dangle, as I have the ecological history of Lake Superior.  Here’s the summary:  This work will gather various strands from ecology, environmental movements, pagan and neo-pagan faiths, literature, art and philosophy.  It will weave those strands into a faith indigenous to the Midwest (and most other places) and universal to Ge.

Having at least some key texts near to hand may spur down time work on Ge-ology.  Oh, hell, why not go for it?  It will produce work.

There are still a few book stacks on the floor and this and that to find new places for, but I’ll finish that today.  Ready for winter.

Great Wheel, Great Work, US History

For Me and My Gal

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Lughnasa                                                    Full Harvest Moon

Hay wagons filled with laughing teenagers.  Plants beginning to go brown in the garden.  Root cellars and pantries filling up from a growing season almost over.  Thoughts of how to handle snow removal begin to occur.  The first few leaves begin to turn, russet and gold tips on some maple trees.  Evening cool downs and chilly nights.

All under a harvest moon.  The harvest moon is the full moon closest to the autumnal equinox, sometimes landing in September (usually), but occasionally in October.  Those who have any rural roots at all here in the Midwest know the scenes of hay baling, corn pickers mowing down corn stalks with their military grade blades, golden streams of corn flowing into the grain truck following nearby.

Bulky combines in the wheat, moving castles of iron and computers guided by the cyber harvesters mounted in air conditioned cabs far above the fields.

Farm implements move now from field to field, 20 mph obstacles on the back roads and highways, one set of tires, the right side, often on the shoulder, as these field creatures crawl along pavement, out stripped by cars and trucks whizzing by, creatures of the highway.

All hale the gods and goddesses of the harvest, of reaping, of bounty.  This is the American advantage.  We have food, acre after acre of food.

Yes, this September issue of Scientific American praises cities as efficient, creative, green.  Cities are the future hope.  Even the present hope.

But let me tell you this.  No farms.  No cities.  Rural counties may be depopulating, and they are, but the need for the products of the country only increases as the greener, efficient, creative cities thrive.  It will always be so on this earth.

So this harvest season maybe we should all put a temporary bumper sticker on our car:  Hug a farmer.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel

State Fair, Auld Origins

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Lughnasa                                                                            Waning Honey Extraction Moon

The state fair has begun:  corn dogs, cheese curds, church run restaurants, politicians of all stripes, trade unionists, farmers and a few cows, horses, pigs, chickens, llamas and rabbits.  Oh, yeah.  That butter sculpture, too.  You know, Princess Kay of the Milky Way.  Or, Queen of the Tao of Dairy.

State and county fairs, occurring in late summer, are the direct remnants of the Celtic festival of Lughnasa, a first fruits market and holiday week which brought farmers, crafts people, villagers and nobility together.  These festivals had a religious beginning, honoring of some god or goddess whose attributes seemed especially apt, in the case of Lughnasa, the Celtic god, Lugh, a god of many skills, whose foster-mother Tailtiu died after clearing Ireland for agriculture.

At Lughnasa handfast marriages were made, hands stuck through a hole in a stone wall and held fast blessed a couples trial for a year and a day.  Games and feats of skill played a prominent part during the Lughnasa festivals, too.  Winter lodging for those without homes was also contracted for during these festivals.

(Lugh had a spear which sought battle, a sling with which he was expert and a raven by his side.  His name means, in Gaelic, long arm.)

The gathering of such diverse groups as 4-H’ers, beekeepers, dairy folk, farm implement dealers, artists, union workers, political aspirants and hawkers of all kinds makes our contemporary Lughnasa as vibrant and colorful as the originals.

I don’t know how many year and a day marriages get sealed at the State Fair, but I imagine many relationships begin or deepen during its run.

However you style it, the State Fair celebrates the many skills and talents in our state and brings folks together.  Lugh, the god of many talents, must feel at home here, too.