Category Archives: Great Wheel

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Humanities, Weather +Climate

Hail, La Nina

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Imbolc                                New (Bloodroot) Moon

A while back I asked John Harstad, then the naturalist at Cedar Creek Nature Center, a wonderful place run by the University of Minnesota and only about 15 miles from home, about first signs of spring.  His answer coincided with a local master gardener, “Bloodroot blooms.”  Since that should happen within the waxing and waning of this moon,  I’m choosing Bloodroot Moon for its name.

The snow began to come down this morning and has some legs.  The sky has turned sheet metal gray and the wind blows in from the northeast.  If I recall correctly, such wind direction can foretell deep snow.  Not predicted though.

This is the half-way point in my stay here at Blue Cloud.  I’m feeling it, too.  I’ve been working almost twice as long each day as I usually do when I write at home.  Though I love it, I’m getting tired.  Might be another 10 am nap coming on, too.

Conspirata, a novel about Cicero’s life, has been my casual reading.  I’ve finished 60% of it; I know this because the Kindle gives you a percent read number for each page since you don’t have the sense of the book’s length but its heft.

The other reading I’ve been doing is Livia Kohn’s introductory text on Taoism.  As with most things that interest me, I find as I get deeper into it that my opinion begins to change, split along certain lines where my own sensibilities face challenges.  In the instance of Taoism I find myself drawn more and more into the mystical, physical aspects:  the Dao, the exercises, meditation practices and pushed further away from the political implications, or wuwei (inaction) applied to political affairs.

This doesn’t bother me as I’ve learned, quite a while ago, that I don’t have to swallow the whole message to be enlightened by a school of thought.  Part of the creation of dogma comes as an institutional base emerges around any school of thought.  The dogma supports the creation of certain organizational structures, then the structures become a conservative force clinging to the original dogma, thoughts most often far removed from what Max Weber called the original “charisma.”

Thus, by the time most of us enter into a body of religious or philosophical thought the original genius behind it is hidden by layers of defensive structure and dogma hardened over time, often hardened against the danger of the original charism.

And so forth. Time to pick up the tablet and get to work.  Bye for snowy now.

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

I (heart) Religion

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Imbolc                               Waning Bridget Moon

Some people like NASCAR, others quilting, some the middle ages, some middle age.  Tastes and attractions vary for often indiscernible reasons.  Me, I like religions.  Most of them anyhow.  Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Shinto, Taoism, Celtic Faery Faith, ancient Greek, Roman and Egyptian, Voodoo, Native American, Mayan, Aztec, Hawai’ian, Tibetan Buddhism, Jain.  Buddhism, except for its practices like meditation, mindfulness, some how doesn’t attract me.  Don’t know why.

A part of me, a strong, even dominant part never left the young boy stage where why came out at every instance of anything.  Why do birds sing?  Why do dogs die?  Why is the sky blue?  Why is Dad grumpy?  Why did you make noise last night, Mom?

Philosophy suited me, fit me like a bespoke suit straight from Saville Row.  What is beauty?  Why do we love?  What is justice?  What is the nature of reality?  What is reality anyhow?

Religion is often a folk way of asking–and answering–these same questions.

Let me give you an example from breakfast.  I just experienced transubstantiation.  The folks who run the monastery think that happens at the eucharist as the wine and wafer transform themselves into the actual body and blood of Jesus.  I”m not sure about that.  But, I do know that this morning I ate an apple, a slice of bread with peanut butter and drank some tea.  They became me.

No.  I’m not saying I’m Jesus, far from it.  I am saying that the apple, the peanut butter, the bread and the tea did transform, through the miracle of my digestive tract and its millions, billions, of host organisms, into me.  Think about it.  After the big bang and the gradual cooling of the universe, gas clouds gathered, due to gravity and created stars from the initial elements, thinks like hydrogen, iron.  The stars themselves, in their fusion furnaces, then combined and transformed those basic elements into the familiar elements making up the periodic table.

Later still, as the gas clouds and chunks of matter surrounding each star coalesced those elements deposited themselves inside and on the newly born planets, comets and asteroids.  Those same elements, the very same elements, then, through more eons, at least here on earth, combined and recombined to form simple organisms like single celled animals and  plants. Long after that those simple organisms combined to form multi-celled life forms, among them humans.

This morning I–consider that I–the end point of a certain historic chain of events traceable to the creation of the universe ate.  In eating I took in the products of other organisms, the apple which grew in the air on a tree, wheat which grew in fields across these very plains and peanuts which grew beneath the soil.  I also drank water, the same water present on earth for eons, perhaps the same water drunk by dinosaurs.

And it is, even now, as I write, becoming me.  The apple, the wheat, the peanut are also, like me, the end point of a traceable (if we had the instruments and skill) chain from the moment before time until now.  So we recombine, sift and shift elements.  A miracle.

Bees, Great Wheel, Great Work

Bee Diary: 2011

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Imbolc                                                           Waxing Bridgit Moon

Out in South Dakota, near Hecla, the ewes have begun to swell, an ancient, very ancientrail.  They will give birth, lambs.  Around that time, lambing time, the fields, too, will freshen with grass, food for the little ones.  Think of the shepherds at Jesus’ birth.  Jacob and his twelve sons.  Shepherds rescued Oedipus, Romulus and Remus.  The shepherd became a metaphor for closeness to nature, a life untrammeled by the woes of civilization, watching over flocks in difficult places, protecting the sheep from wolves and foxes and dogs.  Sheep provide wool for cloth, milk for cheese and meat for the table.

Similar, I suppose, to beekeeping, another very ancientrail.  In both cases the shepherd and the beekeeper are partners in a collaboration between, in one instance, fellow mammals, and in the other, with insects.  In both cases the primary goal is to maintain the flock and the colony in good health, free from disease and predators, and in return receive wool and honey.  It is, to me, a special case though, to enter into an intimate partnership with insects, and not just insects individually, but insects in community, a colony.

This last, this partnership between humans and bees, crosses not only a species barrier, but phyla, both animals yes, but with very different evolutionary paths.  I don’t believe there is much fellow feeling between the bee colony and the beekeeper, at least from the bee’s side, yet the collaboration demands each do their part and I find it entrancing that, when I work in the garden and the bees are there, too, dipping into the flowers, that we are colleagues here at 7 Oaks, the bees of Artemis Hives and the humans of 7 Oaks.

When the weather warms above freezing, I will go out and inspect my three colonies, see how many have survived the winter.  Just a quick check, the only purpose to discover if the colony is alive.  If not, I will order a package for each dead colony.  Also, I will remove the bees and try to diagnose cause of death; since a diseased colony, especially one with American Foulbrood, may require burning of all the frames and scorching of the hive box with a flame thrower.

I hope they’re alive, all of them.  It was a good feeling last spring to find a thriving colony.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Travel, Woolly Mammoths

When the Bell Tolls, It Tolls For Me

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Imbolc                                      Waxing Bridgit Moon

Here I am, a heretic beneath the bell tower of Blue Cloud Abbey, sitting at this mobile scriptorium, pecking away at the keys.  The bell tower rises outside the window, a jet passing by, contrail at an acute angle toward the north, a metal angel streaking like Icarus toward the sun; a sun, obscured early by the western wing of the retreat center, that this morning draped a bloody red-orange mantel over the far horizon, visible for miles from this point, 900 feet above the floor of the otherwise flat prairie.

When the bell rings, which it does every quarter hour once, every half hour twice and the  number of the hour on the hour, I fly on the time machine of sound back to the middle ages when the sound of the bell determined the compass of a parish, all within the sound part of the same community, an aural community, knitting itself together every half hour.  These days, these latter days, these 21st century days the bell could not be heard over the rumbling engines of trucks bearing cookware, basketballs and note-book paper, cars scurrying here and there with people, like small loud beetles set loose on the hardened surface of mother earth.

How do we know what community we belong too, now, now the bell’s sound has become muffled?  Could it be that this very medium (there goes the bell, ringing 3:00 pm), these bits and bytes that travel from this prairie monastery, constitute our new bell tower?  A quiet sound heard world-wide, making us one people, one community, one pale blue marble in a vast ocean of airless space?

We ate lunch today with the monks in their lunchroom, a wide, long room with the animals symbolizing the gospels painted on a mural, done in a style reminiscent of Northwest Coast Native American design styles:  an ox, an eagle, a lion, a winged human.  Some of the monks wear the black robe, others blue jeans and sweaters.  Some of the monks have become stooped by age, while others, younger, would not be distinguishable from any one at the counter of a Marvin, South Dakota coffee-shop.  I had spinach, a vegetable medley, two peaches and a bit of tuna salad.  Fare fit for a simple life and just fine with me.

I find myself wanting to come here by myself, perhaps for two weeks or so, to concentrate on my Latin, on finishing the novel I’ve already well begun.  Perhaps I will, one of these days, if Kate’s ok with it.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Weather +Climate

Imbolc 2011

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Imbolc                                                                              Waning Moon of the Cold Month

This is the holy day of Bridgit, the triple goddess; she of the eternal fire at Kildare, a goddess who tends to the fire of creativity at home, for the poet and in the smithy, the place where things are made by hand.  As with so many things Celtic, the Roman Catholics appropriate her, given her a birth story.  Her father, the story goes, was a druid, her mother a good Catholic.  She became a Catholic woman known for good deeds and miracles.  After her death she became a saint.  Many Catholics know her only as St. Bridgit, but her origins as a religious figure had their beginnings and much larger compass within the ancient Celtic faith.

It was the Celts who first tended the eternal fire at Kildare, devoting men and women to the task.  Later, in the days of the Celtic Christian church there was a double monastery there, men and women in separate units, abbot and abbess respectively.

Imbolc itself means in-the-belly, referring, as I wrote a few days back, to the lamb in the belly of the ewes.  The quickening of the ewes meant fresh milk.  After at least three months + of stored food, little meat, and chill weather a small cup of milk or its use in cooking must have been a reason for great celebration.  The lambs also were a reminder that the rebirth of spring would come again, just as they had come.  Nature’s cycle could be trusted.

We can buy green beans, strawberries, fresh fish, eggs, milk, butter, bread in a brightly lit store.  Aisles and aisles of food, so many versions of cereal, peanut butter, spices and salts, rice and pasta, beef, turkey, chicken, pork and, yes, even lamb.  In some vague way we know this food arrives at the grocery by truck, packed in cardboard boxes.  The workers remove and open the boxes, distributing the food to shelves, meat counters, produce bins, milk coolers.  We pick it up, put it in our carts, pay for it, then take it home and store it in cupboards, refrigerators, pantries. Until very recently there was not much attention given, at least by most of us, to the source of the food.

The buy local movement has focused our attention especially on produce and meat.  Was the beef grass raised?  No antibiotics?  The eggs.  Were the chickens free range?  The leeks and the tomatoes, the lettuce.  Who grew it?  How far did it travel?  Is it organic?  Did the salmon come wild from Alaska or farm-raised from the Atlantic?

As we once again allow the blurred image of our food sources to come into focus, I hope we will also allow the blurred images we have of the natural world to come into focus.  We may see that the sacred is not a notion found in texts, but in the world.  We might feel our way toward the vitality of the dog, the raven, the oak, the tulip, even ourselves, a vitality that emerges, has its day and then absorbs back into the world;  the universe represented here, for us, by our planet and its sun, by the web of life sustained by the inanimate, but also sacred world of rocks and water and air and fire.

The Great Wheel, the cycle of solstices and equinoxes broken up the cross-quarter holydays of the Celts:  Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasa and Samhain turn us not outward or upward, not away from ourselves and our world, but inward and downward, toward ourselves and our world.  These holydays root us in the changing world, that, paradoxically, changes back into the world of last year, each year.  In this sense time for the Great Wheel cycles and recycles, never moving into tomorrow, always returning to yesterday.  We need this reminder, the Great Wheel’s reminder, because we are so much in the grip of chronos, the swift moving river of time that sweeps us along towards the gulf of our mortality, a great dead zone at the end of this wonder we call life.

The Great Wheel reminds us that while our life will end, life itself does not.  That as we die, a birth occurs.  As tears fall, laughter rings out.  After the winter, the ewes will freshen, there will be milk.  And flowers.

General, Great Wheel, US History, World History

The Weekend Cometh

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Winter                                                           Waning Moon of the Cold Month

Imbolc, in the belly, comes next week, February 1st.  It is the celebration of the quickening of the ewe’s and the freshening of their milk, providing a much needed respite from winter stores among the ancient Celts.  More significant to me it is also the celebration of the triple goddess, Bridgit, goddess of hearth, smithy and poetry.  Look for more information on the 1st day of February.

Today is a doing, outside and out in the world errand day.  Weekends still inhabit the same free, but free to do domestic things that they have for all my life.  Strange that the rhythms have not changed for me, but they have not.  I did get groceries yesterday and today will do some makeup chores and other thises and thates.

The unrest in the Middle East shows the threadbare nature of the Realist school of diplomacy.  In this approach, think Kissinger among others, the best you can hope for in enemy territory is a regime you can influence.  Realism gave us the Shah of Iran.  Saddam Hussein.  A stubbornly prickly Israel.  Mubarak in Egypt.  The Saud’s in Saudi Arabia.  It also prompted us to side the with the corrupt regime of southern Vietnam against the communist north.  This is a bankrupt policy stance and nothing shows it so as the fervor for democracy or at least different tyrants in the Middle East this week.  We end up on the side of the brutal, the crazy and the meglomaniacal.

No tyrants for me today.  JIF peanut butter, ranch dressing and grapefruit.  Forgot’em last night night.  And fixing that damned printer.

Aging, Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Myth and Story, permaculture, Retirement, Weather +Climate

It’s About Time

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Winter                                                                 Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language. And next year’s words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning.” – T.S. Eliot

Though the calendar, as reformed by Julius Caesar and then Pope Gregory XIII*, rolls over tonight at midnight, and, confusingly to me, has already rolled over on several midnights already, you might notice that the time I keep remains the same.  Tomorrow we will still be in Winter and the Moon of the Winter Solstice will still be waning.  The Great Wheel does not recognize a calendar; it counts time by terrestrial movement through the heavens, moving, instead of hands, solar radiation and expressing itself not in hours or minutes but by days and nights and seasons.  Of course, an accurate calendar makes sense for the world of humans because we figure time in much smaller units and like to be able to do things according to spans of weeks, months, years though these are not, no matter what some might say, natural measures.  They are measures created by the human mind, invented to follow our fascination with chronological time, that is linear time, probably occasioned by our awareness of death.

Note, however, that measuring time does not create more of it, nor make of it less.  All calendars and clocks do is divide up the turning days and advancing nights, make smaller divisions in the more basic cyclical time generated by spaceship earth in its star-loving path.

We can choose which time we want to emphasize in our lives.  I prefer the cyclical time, the turning of the Great Wheel of the heavens, the coming of light and dark, the changes of spring, summer, fall and winter.  As much as possible I try to order my life and encourage myself to respond to seasonal change, but I, too, live in a world in which I am 63, soon to turn 64 in the year 2011, the third millennia after another bout of terrorism in the Middle East.  In this world people will only release money to me based on the linear trajectory of this body.  As for me, I cherish now the inner life brought on by the long nights, the cold and snow.

When spring breaks winter’s grip and flowers begin to push through the earth, when the garlic and the strawberries and the asparagus start anew to grow and flourish above ground,  then too, will I cherish the smell of moist soil carried to me by moist early spring air.  It will not matter to me whether that time comes in March or April or May.  Oh, it may matter to the horticultural me who needs to get leeks and peas and lettuce and other vegetables planted in their due time, but even those kind of changes cycle, too.  The bees will re-emerge to begin their dance with the blooming things, driven not by the clock, but by the presence or absence of the sun, the bright colors of flowering plants and the demands of the colony.

We have our preferences, I know, and mine for many years was the dayplanner, meeting time, always moving stream of time.  No longer.  At least not when I’m at my best.

*wikipedia  “The Gregorian calendar, also known as the Western calendar or the Christian calendar, is the internationally accepted civil calendar. It was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII, after whom the calendar was named, by a decree signed on 24 February 1582, a papal bull known by its opening words Inter gravissimas.[4] The reformed calendar was adopted later that year by a handful of countries, with other countries adopting it over the following centuries. The motivation for the Gregorian reform was that the Julian calendar assumes that the time between vernal equinoxes is 365.25 days, when in fact it is about 11 minutes less. The accumulated error between these values was about 10 days when the reform was made, resulting in the equinox occurring on March 11 and moving steadily earlier in the calendar. Since the equinox was tied to the celebration of Easter, the Roman Catholic Church considered that this steady movement was undesirable.”

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

Missing Spirit

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Winter                                                            Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

Wondered if I was missing something.  Turned on the radio to 99.5 and listened to Christmas music, classical variety.  As I just to wrote to my brother and sister, there is some residual Methodist wandering around in my head, recalling those nights in the church on John Street, candles winking out as congregants extinguished them, leaving the sanctuary in darkness, a voice, in this particular instance, a voice from the Metropolitan Opera, a hometown gal who’d made it big in the big city, singing out of that darkness, O Holy Night.  Still sends shivers up my spine.

There is, too, a small boy waiting for Santa Claus and the luster of mid-day on objects below.  He misses the Christmas tree and the presents and the music.  And family.  Perhaps most of all family.

These both are, however, voices from my past, valued and warmly received when they emerge, but no longer vital in my present, just as the music of the 60’s or the cars of the 50’s still recall a good time, an important time, but a time now gone by.

I pressed the cd button and returned to the lectures on Big History, this time a review of the paleolithic, a historical era critical for our species, but often overlooked.  In this time we migrated first to the southern rim of Asia, then across the waters to Australia, and through Asia, across the land bridge to North America.  Each one of these migrations a test for our new specie’s capacity for collective learning, each one requiring a new set of skills, new tricks to wring energy and resources out of a new environment.  These were tests we passed and in that passing set the stage for our current dominance of the earth’s biosphere.

Christmastime and the Christmas spirit no longer enfolds me as it once did, sweeping down after thanksgiving and placing me in the confusing mix of retail extravaganza and high religious celebration.  Now the Solstice carries some of that numinosity for me, but none of the commercial buzz.  I don’t miss the maw of gifts and money and credit, false gods if ever there were ones.  Quiet, calm, still.  Dark, meditative, inward.  That’s the reason for the season for me now.

So, I’m glad for a place of peace as the Christmas machine churns anxiously all around me.  Still into the incarnation though.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Humanities, Myth and Story

Winter Solstice

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Winter Solstice Eve                                            Full Moon of the Winter Solstice

My friend Allison sent me a link to this article, There Goes The Sun.  It contains an excellent digest of solstice activity around the world and also explains some of the astronomical oddities attached to it.  Good reading.

Here’s another tack, a way of setting yourself in the context of the solar system, and, in that way, in the context of the cosmos, headed in one direction–out, external–and another that places you in the context of mother earth, the animal kingdom, mammals, hominids and your self, headed in another direction–inward.

As an astronomical event this solstice marks a transition, for those of us on earth in temperate latitudes, from a day with mostly darkness toward the inverse, experienced on the summer solstice when we make the transition from days with mostly light and again head toward darkness.  From the solar system perspective all that really happens is the earth returns to a spot on its orbit where its angle of declination spreads light out over a wider area, making its affect weaker.  The sun burns on, hydrogen turning to helium, vast amounts of energy released in this fusion reaction, radiating out from the sun toward the planets it holds in thrall.

The sun itself is one of 100-400 billion stars in our Milky Way Galaxy.  “Its name is a translation of the Latin Via Lactea, in turn translated from the Greek Γαλαξίας (Galaxias), referring to the pale band of light formed by stars in the galactic plane as seen from Earth.” Wikipedia.   How many galaxies altogether?  Estimates run as high as 500 billion.  I offer this to give you a sense of the particular significance of one moment in the orbit of one planet around just one of our galaxy’s suns.

Coming in toward you though, we can follow a different ancientrail.  This one responds to the specificity of the solstice and its impact on our northern home–winter.  Squirrels bury nuts.  Bears hibernate.  Dogs grow a coat of inner fur.  Human homes turn on furnaces and humans clothe themselves in ways designed to keep in heat.  Plants like daffodils, tulips, garlic, parsnips and lilies lie at rest in the soil during the cold period brought on by the solstice and the time just before and after it.  We have adapted to the return of the sun to this particular spot in the sky; and, without those adaptations this change in solar intensity would kill us.  In other words this event, so very insignificant when considered against the back drop of 500 billion galaxies, matters critically to those of us here, on Sol’s third planet, Earth.

There is a chance, tomorrow night, the Winter Solstice night, to abide with the darkness and the quiet, Stille Nacht; a chance to light a candle and meditate, take an hour, maybe more, to consider what has taken place in your life since light dominated the day, a time that ended on and around the fall equinox and how it may have changed as the dark began to grow more and more dominant.  This is not, and this is important, a once in a life event; no, this is a once a year time, a point where we can consider our lives, where we can go beyond our animal response to temperature and light, move inward toward the depth of our selves, that inner well where the uniqueness of you dwells.  You can spend time listening to the Self who contains not only who you are today, but who you could become tomorrow.

Or, you could pile up the wood, light the fire, dance naked under the stars and the full winter solstice moon, daring the sun to keep hiding, challenging it to start its journey, or, better to continue its journey, or, even better, challenge the earth to continue its journey so that the suns radiation will strike us with increasing intensity.  The Swedes have such celebrations, will be having them tomorrow night.  Seems a bit much for Minnesota, but there’s always a first time.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Politics

A Northstar Solstice Party

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Samhain                                                              Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

After a meal and some awards, members of the Northstar Chapter of the Sierra Club gathered around a bonfire under a clear sky lit by the almost full Winter Solstice Moon.  A poem was read; there were some reflections on Christmas in Santa Fe and the wonder of fire, then the annual solstice event began to break up with couples walking the quarter mile down a moonlit path to the parking lot.

The potluck meal, served before hand, represented the various subcultures within the club.  Vegetarians, vegans and carnivores all had dishes.  My favorites were the creamed corn, the summer sausage and a vegan vegetable and bean soup I made earlier in the day.

Dodge Nature Center is in West St. Paul, one of those spots south and east in the metro area, below St. Paul.  We live north and a bit west of downtown Minneapolis so we drove across most of the metro area to get there.

It was nice to have Kate along and I hope we can begin to do things like this more and more once she retires.