Category Archives: Great Wheel

Aging, Great Wheel

There and Back Again

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                                 Waning Honey Extraction Moon

A birthday really marks the spot on the earth’s orbit where you were born.  So, it is not necessarily a function of time in a linear sense, but the count of revolutions on the (roughly) same path.  In other words even the years of our lives do not, at least in this sense, refer to the passage of time so much as they do the passage of the earth around the sun.  I like this because it helps me have a concrete understanding of my years.  I have, for example, gone round the sun 64 times and am about halfway through my 65th.

A space-time co-ordinate.  When we add in our linear sense of time, occasioned by the evident aging process that ends in death (entropy at work), our birthday becomes a space-time co-ordinate, fixing our birth in the 4-dimensional reality of space and time, or Minkowski space.   Our birth date locates not only the 3D version of our birth–the physical locus of our birth–but establishes a reference point in some standard measure of linear time.  In the West we tend to measure time in relation to a fixed point occurring around the birth of Jesus, but it could have as easily been the birth of Socrates or Alexander or Cleopatra.

Linear time, as we measure it, has this odd pliability.  We have no fixed point in reality against which to mark its passage, unless you count revolutions around the sun; but, then we end back in the cyclical view of time, the type of time measured by the Great Wheel, because to indicate linear time we still have to agree on which particular revolution starts our series.

How many revolutions ago was Caesar murdered?  How many revolutions ago was Confucius born?  How many revolutions ago did Homo sapiens emerge out of Africa?  We still have to place our tent peg, our starting point somewhere and it will still be in revolutions around the sun.

No matter how hard we try to escape into chronological accounting, our human estimates still return to our revolutionary experience, the root source, which is, and always will be until we leave this planet for the stars, cyclical.

Aging, Asia, Great Wheel, Health

A Beautiful Moon

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                                                 Full Honey Extraction Moon

The moon.  Tonight.  A darkening sky, blue behind the openings in the clouds and peeking out from behind a modest veil, a full Honey Extraction Moon, its color a silvered gold, honey-like and mysterious.  I love the surprise of a beautiful moon in the sky, looking out on a familiar horizon to see it transformed by the ordinary extraordinary moon.  The moons from now through the end of the year often have a wow factor.  The Harvest Moon.  The Thanksgiving moon rising over stubbled fields coated with snow.  The Winter Solstice moon, sending lambent light onto the snow, casting faint shadows of trees, houses, people.

This moon shone in the eastern sky as I returned from Tai Chi.  This was the 20th week and the teacher, Cheryl, announced, again, that we were close to a third of the way through the form.  “It’s a milestone,” said Cliff, a 13 year practitioner.  A third of the way through.  20 weeks.  At this pace it will be a year before we have worked our way through the whole form.  Being patient with myself.  Learning that in this class.

At points now I feel a grace coming into my motions, a fluidity beyond learning the choreography, beginning to make it mine, to work from the inside out rather than the outside only.  Not often.  But I have felt it.

Thought about Cliff, a younger guy, maybe in his forties, having practiced 13 years.  Realized I’ll be 77 by the time I hit 13 years.  Whoa.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Wheel, Humanities, Letters, Myth and Story

Looking Backwards

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                                                        Full Honey Extraction Moon

Over the last week plus I’ve watched the Starz Network version of the King Arthur legends, Camelot.  I get it streaming from Netflix.  Each time I watch this program I get a shot of creative juices, similar to the ones I got when I first read the Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley.  Those didn’t inspire me to write about the King Arthur material, an area that gets reworked a lot, but it did cause me to think about my own heritage, my ethnic heritage and what might be there as a resource for writing.

At the time I chose to emphasize the Celtic aspects of my bloodline, Welsh in the instance of the Ellis line and Irish through the Correll’s, my father’s father’s mother’s family.  The Celts have a rich pool of legends, religious ideas and quasi-historical accounts.  Most have heard at least something about druids and faeries, both part of the Celtic past.  There are, too, holy wells, a Celtic pantheon and the series of holidays known as the Great Wheel which I celebrate.

I’ve not done much with the German side of my heritage though it is, arguably, more substantial since the Zikes and the Spitlers, my mother’s and father’s mother’s families respectively are both German.  The Keatons, my mother’s father’s family, we think have an English connection though it’s proven difficult to track down.

The legendary and religious aspects of the ancient Celts and Germans are what interest me, the more recent history not so much and by recent I mean from the Renaissance forward.

Roman and Greek mythology and legend has also fascinated me since I was young and my Aunt Barbara gave me a copy of Bullfinch’s Mythology.  Through out my life at various points I’ve read such works as the Iliad, the Odyssey, Hesiod’s Theogony, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, amazed at the richness of these stories.

As you know, if you read this blog with any regularity, that lead me to learn Latin, which I am doing, so I could translate Ovid’s great work, the Metamorphoses, for myself.  The distance between a translated text and its English version has interested me especially since seminary.  In seminary I studied both the Old and New Testaments extensively, learning in the process many techniques for analyzing ancient texts.  It was my favorite part of the seminary curriculum.

When I observed yesterday to Greg, my Latin tutor, that the commentaries I’d found for the Metamorphose lacked a lot compared to commentaries for the Biblical material, he challenged me.  “Well,” he said, “You could write a commentary to it.”  I might just be able to do that.

When I mentioned it to Kate, she said, “Oh, and finish your novels, too?”  And she’s right of course.  I have more than one creative iron in the fire, plus other matters related to art and the environment.

Even so, the idea intrigues me.  A lot.  Now all I have to do is get very facile at translating.

 

Aging, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Travel

Senescence

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                                    Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

Walked in the garden alone.  Yep, it’s an old time spiritual, much loved in the churches of my youth.  It also describes my morning turn among our vegetables and in our orchard.

The garlic has come out already.  The potatoes have a while yet to go.  The beans have gone from green bean material to soup beans, waiting now for the pods to dry on the vine.  A few onions remain, as for the tomatoes, there are a lot of possibilities, but as the weather cools, will they ripen?  In the orchard we’ve had more productivity than any year so far, a few cherries, lots of currants, many dropped plums, but a few now maturing on the tree.  The apples, in their plastic sandwich bags, have begun to swell on the honeycrisp tree, but on the other, a green apple, they’re not a lot bigger than when the bags went on in July.  Our blueberries came and disappeared into the mouths of birds.

The wild grape harvest looks like it will be a big one this year.  These vines are everywhere on our property, but the ones that produce the most fruit hang in dense layers over the northern fence that fronts our orchard.  Picking the wild grapes usually marks the end of the gardening year here at Artemis Hives and Gardens, at least the food gardening.

The fall flowers of course begin to bloom then, the asters, the mums, the monkshod, the clematis.  It’s also the time to plant bulbs, tulips and daffodils, lilies and croci. It is, too, the time that the garlic bulbs harvested in July, yield up cloves from the largest bulbs for planting.  I like planting the garlic in late August, early September.  Garlic is a counter culture crop, sown in the fall and harvested mid-summer.

Senescence has fascinated me for a long time.  Earlier in my life the process of degradation that rotted wood, turned leaves into humus and prepared more soil got my attention.  An early interest, I suppose, in the great chain of being (note the lower case here, less Scholastic, more Great Wheel).   Now I’ve noticed another key aspect of senescence; it is the time of harvest.  Yes, in the plant world, the dying of the plant’s above earth body follows or is in step with the giving of its fruit.  That is, aging produces

This is also the time when gardening begins to wane in interest for me.  My energies now turn to novels, research for tours at the MIA, preparing for the fall issue selection process at the Sierra Club and the upcoming legislative session.

Now, too, the cruise, which begins in October, looms closer and the loose ends for it need to be tidied.  The Brazilian visa.  New luggage.  Check the clothes.  Rent a tux. (yes.  I’m gonna do it.  3 formal nights a week on the cruise.  i’ll pretend it’s halloween every one of those nights.  i’ll be some seriously weird expatriate Muscovite on the run from Putin’s secret police.  something like that.)

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

A Season Bent Toward Darkness and Cold

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                                                Waxing Honey Extraction Room

Since March I’ve driven home at 8 pm, each Sunday, from Tai Chi at the corner of Hennepin and Franklin.  As March receded and April arrived, then May and June, the evening drive had light, then light in abundance, with the sun setting well after I got home.  Now we are in Lughnasa, a full six weeks past the Summer Solstice.  This last Sunday night the sun had begun to fall behind the trees as I headed toward Highway 252.  The long downward slide toward the Winter Solstice is well underway, the days growing shorter and the nights longer.

This is my time, now, the season bent toward darkness and cold even while the heat of summer continues to swell the fruits of the garden.  I can already feel the movement inward and down, the contemplative months reaching out from the future, beckoning my soul.

Once the harvest begins in earnest, which it did here in July with the garlic crop, the gardening year moves toward senescence, ripening proceeds the coming of brown withered stalks and leaves turning already to dust.  Nature puts the bounty just before the fallow time.  It is the fallow time though, the time after the sensuality of seed fertility has yielded to summer and produced crops, crops that finish the plants purpose for that season at least, in many cases forever, that leaves room for the imagination, writing its dreams on stubbled fields, carving its fantasies in clouds pushed down from the north, opening the heart to its own rhythm.

(Allison found this Van Gogh drawing.  It even has the hint of melancholy the season brings in its train.)

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

Lughnasa 2011

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                                          Waxing Honey Flow Moon

The third cross-quarter holiday in the Celtic calendar, Lughnasa follows Beltain and proceeds Samhain, thus it cuts the once much longer Beltain season, essentially the growing and harvesting season, in half.  It marks the first fruits of the harvest, a time of gathering in and being nourished by the summer’s heat, the plants’ flourishing.  Lughnasa apparently celebrates the god Lugh, a sun-god, though the relation between him and this festival is uncertain.  The Catholics honor this pagan tradition through the feastday, Lammas, when parishioners bring in bread from the first grains harvested.

In the old days these festivals lasted a week or more, with farmers coming into the village from the countryside or meeting at a customary spot to set up a market.  Feasting, drinking, games, searching for a mate or for work blended with the serious task of laying up sufficient stores to survive the winter, foreshadowed now by the earlier setting of the sun.

A remnant of these market fairs continues on in county fairs and state fairs where feasting, drinking, games, searching for a mate or work blends with honoring those who still provide our food.  Yes, we have the grocery store now and no we don’t wonder about surviving the winter, at least many of us don’t, but the old need to come together and crown a Princess Kay of the Milky Way, to sculpt her in butter lingers.

Lughnasa here at Artemis Hives will find the honey harvest joining the tomatoes, the potatoes, beets, carrots, beans and onions.  It also finds us reaping the harvest of new learning:  Latin, Tai Chi, quilting techniques, potting and celebrating family.  The dogs have become a calmer pack thanks to an investment of time over the last few months.  Mark has made some progress towards a job and a healthier future.

Celebrate your harvest, too.  Raise a glass of wine or water, eat a meal with friends and loved ones.  Wear a flower garland and go the state fair or the farmer’s market.  Why?  Because these are things we humans have done for centuries, for millennia, they keep us alive and healthy.

Art and Culture, Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Woolly Mammoths

To Bee, To Do

Leave a comment

Mid-Summer                                                             Waning Honey Flow Moon

Out to the bees in just a few minutes to slap on two more honey supers each, the six I finished varnishing yesterday while Mark put foundations in the frames.  This will find six honey supers on colonies 2 & 3, while colony 1, the parent colony for next year’s only divide, will have four.  Not sure if I’ll need more than these.  I’m having to do this in the early morning, not the best time, but the only time I’ve got today.

At 9:15 Kate and I take off in separate cars for the Northern Clay Center.  Our clay intensive starts this week, 10:00 to 4:30.  I hope to learn how to make Japanese style tea cups and salad sized plates.  Like tai chi working clay puts a premium on hand-eye co-ordination and sense of touch as well overall design skills.

A good while ago my spiritual journey had gone stale in the reading, meditation, contemplative modes I knew best. The next stage of my spiritual practice became gardening, working with the rhythm of flowers, soil, spades and trowels.

That practice went on for many years when Kate and I decided to add vegetables and the orchard with permaculture principles in mind.  That added a good deal of oomph to the tactile spirituality, deciding to keep bees put animal husbandry into the mix.  At this point my spirituality has become more and more attuned to the rhythms of growing seasons, plants and bees, all within the context of the Celtic Great Wheel.

With tai chi and clay my spiritual practice comes closer in again, my hands, my feet, my hips, my arms.  Both clay and tai chi are paths on this nature focused ancientrail, though for me they are quite a bit harder.  But that’s the push I need to grow.

After our first day at Northern Clay, I have my Woolly meeting tonight at Highpoint Print co-operative where we will make prints.  One more step down the ancientrail of the mind/body link.

Great Wheel

The Solstice of Summer: 2011

Leave a comment

Mid-Summer                                                                    Waning Garlic Moon

A favorite website of mine, Pip Wilson’s Almanac, comes out of Australia and reminded me of this illustration with his cheery, Happy Winter Solstice.  Yes, indeed, cross the equator and the seasons switch, while we have the Summer Solstice, they have Winter.  I’m excited about our cruise for many reasons, but a particular one is that we will cross the equator and enter the realm of season’s opposite to ours here in the Northern Hemisphere.  Thus, we will cruise through Chile and Argentina in their spring time heading toward summer, while our home here in Andover experiences fall heading toward winter.

Here at 45 degrees north we celebrate now the middle of summer, the moment when, usually, our temperatures have begun to heat up.  Not this year.  As Pip Wilson points out, today is not mid-summer, that comes on June 24th, St. John’s Day, which is the traditional sabbat.  That is the day celebrated in Shakespeare’s “A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream.”

The Solstice, on the other hand, is an astronomical holiday, that moment when sun stands as high in the sky as it will all year.  Now we celebrate the longest day, the longest proportion of light to dark.  In Australia they celebrate the reverse, the shortest day and the longest night.

You may celebrate this on the 21st, the 22nd, or the 23rd since they all have the same long day.  Only on the 24th do days begin their long, slow descent toward the longest night of the year.

This is the midst of the growing season though the year has been chilly and generally wet so far.

I always take time around now to celebrate what grows well for me right now and what needs attention to move toward harvest.  There is, still, that novel out there, which needs lots of attention.  My work with Ovid has grown a good deal in the last few months and will benefit from yet more time.  The Sierra Club demands more and more of my time and my hope is that over the next few months we can push our legislative efforts into greater and greater strength.  I’ve been concerned for a while that we’ve been punching below our weight and it’s my feeling that the environment and the state need us at our best.  This is a slow time for tours at the MIA, but it is a time when those of who give tours can concentrate on getting the best resources made available to us.

What is it that grows in your life right now?  What needs more attention?  What has a good start toward the harvest?  Take the time to sit with a plant or two in your immediate surrounding and watch how they grow.  Become patient with yourself as a plant is patient in its growth over a season.

Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Myth and Story

Horticulture

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                              Waxing Last Frost Moon

Gardening commends itself in several ways, but two are most important to me.   Having life tuned to the seasonal and daily rhythms of heat, light, rain, snow, even frost like we have predicted for tonight, grounds me.  If the frost comes and I have nothing outside to protect, it is a passing phenomenon of little interest.  With delicate plants to protect I know what it means, cold enough to cause ice crystals inside plant cells to burst.  Likewise drought is of no notice to me if I live in a condominium or on a city lot where my grass and a tree or two are my only contact with the plant world.  With a vegetable garden, though, the plants dry up, don’t produce.  I have to consider the drought, see that my plants get adequate water.

When the rains come, followed by warming days and the seeds leap up through the soil, when the potato eyes push a stalk and early leaves through to the surface, when those leeks nurtured since early April stand up and begin to fatten, it matters to me.  Their work, much like the bees, comes from their essence, not from anything I do, but, also like the bees, I have a role, to protect them, to see they have what they need.  We work together, the vegetables, the fruit trees, the currant and gooseberries bushes and the bee colonies.

The food that comes from our garden does not see us through the winter, though some of our crops, like potatoes and garlic for example last that long, but eating close to the land, lower down the food chain, happens more naturally when some substantial part of the diet comes from home.  So, the food alone serves as a final link to the growing process, but as a present symbol of the food available in the vegetable world, it paints into our world color that needs to be at our table all year round.

This, then, has come to pass as my new faith, a link with the earth and its fruits, a role in caring for them and the constant reminder of our dependency, our interdependency on it all.  When I began to work with the Sierra Club three plus years ago, I did it to put my political experience to work on behalf of the living world, in part at least as a thank offering for the sustenance I have received from it all these many years.