Category Archives: Great Wheel

Family, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities

While The Cyber River Closed

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Samhain                           New Winter Solstice Moon

Midnight  12/6/10

Writing this on Word since I’ve had no internet connection for a few hours.  My limited number of tricks have not produced a link and I don’t have the patience for navigating so-called “customer service.”  George Orwell would be proud of the internet and internet services industry.

Kate’s cold continues with little sign of progress.  She suffers, complains about not liking to be sick, but otherwise Norwegian’s through it all.  She takes illness as a personal insult, something to be shrugged off if possible, if not, to work through and last something that requires rest and chicken noodle soup.  She’s in the latter mode right now.  Good for her.

We skyped tonight.  It’s Hanukkah so the grandkids had various gifts from doting grandparents and uncles and aunts.  The literal hit of the evening was an inflatable t-ball set.  Ruth took swing after swing, often swinging from her right shoulder and leveling at the ball.  She’s co-ordinated for 4.  Or, rather 4 and ½.

Her blond hair swirls, ringlets tumbling every which way as she performs couchnastics, a living room form of gymnastics that replaces gym equipment with the normal living room furniture.

My Latin is still here spread out on the desk beside me.  This Ovid requires slow, laborious work.  Look up words.  Figure out forms.  Check usage possibilities, verb tenses, noun declensions.  A lot of back and forth with books and pages of help.  I realized tonight that it’s a hobby, something I’m doing for fun.  Weird, huh?

Winter has snugged us up in the house, the furnace and insulation our best friends just as the AC and the insulation are our best friends in the summer.  I like winter because it provides all this darkness for desk work, darkness in which there are no outdoor chores.  Therefore, no guilt.

Commentary on the news, Friends, Great Wheel, Myth and Story, Woolly Mammoths

Nick

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Samhain                                       Waning Thanksgiving Moon

The Nick Caspers murder trial will not happen.  Nick decided to plead guilty to Felony A Murder, a charge that gives a chance at parole, as opposed to the Felony AA that he faced at trial.  That one carried life without parole.

As Woolly Paul Strickland said, we all have done things in our lives for which we were not brought to account, not so for Nick.  I share with Paul a hope that the judge will be merciful in his sentencing.  The extraordinary impact an event like a drunken fight in a small North Dakota town can have on individuals and families near and far makes me aware of the lives impacted by each person involved in our criminal justice system, victims and perpetrators alike.  On TV the criminal is often a bad person and the prosecution and the victims good people; in life, the shades of gray cover the just and the unjust.

Nick enters the darkest part of this long and unfinished journey in December.  There is, of course, the irony of his situation counterpoised to the holiday lights and Santa Claus and families gathered in churches singing Christmas carols.  Not so ironic, and perhaps more helpful, is the season seen from the perspective of the Great Wheel.  In December the earth reaches the point in its orbit, the Winter Solstice, when the darkness that has gathered strength ever since the Summer Solstice reaches its zenith on the longest night of the year.

The Great Wheel teaches us that the descent into darkness is never the whole story.  In fact, it shows us that even the darkest night bears within it the seeds of increasing light, an increasing light that will lead, in time, to a new growing season.  Owning the descent for what it is, a trip down into the underworld, but a descent that has a path leading back to the surface world, is a strong narrative for Nick and his next few weeks and months.

Mikki and Pete, Nick’s adoptive parents, Nick, Jim and all the South Dakota folks:  we’re with you as you make this journey.  You don’t have to go it alone.

Aging, Art and Culture, Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities

The Value of Increasing Darkness

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Samhain                                         Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

The daylight is gone, twilight has fallen and night is on its way.  Now that we have entered the season of Samhain, the leaves have vanished from the trees and the clouds, like tonight, often hang gray in the sky.  Samhain means the end of summer and in the old Celtic calendar was the half of the year when the fields went fallow while the temperature turned cool, then cold, hope returning around the first of February, Imbolc, when the ewes would freshen and milk would once again be part of the diet as new life promised spring.

In between Imbolc and Samhain lies the Winter Solstice.  The early darkness presages the long twilight; it lasts from now until late December as we move into the increasing night until daylight becomes only a third of the day.  This has been, for many years, my favorite time of year.  I like the brave festivals when lights show up on homes and music whirs up, making us all hope we can dance away our fear.

The Yamatanka mandala at the Minnesota Institute of Art gives a meditator in the Tantric disciplines of Tibetan Buddhism a cosmic map, brightly displaying the way to Yamatanka’s palace grounds.  In the middle of the palace grounds, represented here by a blue field with a vajra (sacred thunderbolt) Yamantaka awaits our presence.

In the Great Wheel as I have come to know it, we visit Yamantaka on the night of the Winter Solstice, that extended darkness that gives us a foretaste of death.  Our death.  On that night we can sit with ourselves, calm and quiet, imagining our body laid out on a bed, eyes closed, mouth quiet, a peaceful expression on our lifeless face.

We can do that, not in suicidal fantasy, but in recognition of our mortality, our finite time upon the wheel of life, awaiting our turn as the wheel turns under the heavens carrying us away from this veil of samsara.  If we can do that, we can then open ourselves to the thin sliver of light that becomes more and more, as the solstice marks the turning back of the darkness and brings us once again to life.

When we can visit Yamantaka’s palace, sup with him in this throne room and see death as he, the conqueror of death sees it, we are finally free.

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

Holiseason: The Sacred Walks Among Us

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Samhain                                           Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Holiseason has gotten underway with the usual signs:  bare trees, halloween candy going stale in the bowl, Santa Claus and Christmas music showing up well before Thanksgiving, a few turkey related cartoons.  The concentrated portion of holiseason begins with Thanksgiving and runs with little stopping through January 6th, the Feast of the Epiphany and the last of the Twelve Days of Christmas.

Now, we have signs and symbols, little in the way of active celebrating, but a sacred nimbus began to spread out as Samhain festivities came and went, a nimbus that extends over this difficult, cold, darkening period, drenching us in the depths of our own lives and in the collective life of our friends, family and community.  This is a two month plus stretch of the year that cries out for alone time, time to explore what constitute our deepest values, for together time to reaffirm our love and our regard for each other, for gifts and lights and merriment. Let Fezziwig’s feast start early this year.

I wish you the best of this long and roller coast time, a cup of good cheer, a smile and a moment or more of reflection, even meditation.

Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Great Wheel, Memories

My Friend

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Samhain                                                   New (Thanksgiving) Moon

Thursday night around 9 pm I went out to the mailbox to drop The Book of Eli in the mail back to my buddies at Netflix.  It was not a cold night, a slight chill, but the night was clear.  From nowhere in our house can we see the eastern horizon, neighbor’s houses and woods block our view, so it came as a surprise to me to see an old friend there when I opened the mailbox and glanced to my left.

Orion’s brawny left shoulder and his glittering belt had begun to emerge.  Back a long while ago, the winter of 1968 and 1969, my last year in college, I worked at the magnalite corporation as a week-end night watchman.  I had a round leather clock with a shoulder strap and a key hole and every hour I had to walk a circuit in the factory, find a key hung from a metal chain, insert it in the clock, turn the key, remove it and move on to the next station.   I had no protective duties, rather I served at the leisure of magnalite’s insurance carrier who insisted on hourly inspections when the plant was empty.

When I was not on my ten-minute round, I spent time in the guard shack at the entrance to the parking lot.  I often divided my time between studying and dozing off since I had the 11:00 pm to 7:00 am shift, but when I left the shack for my rounds or to wake myself up, Orion was there.  Being in a large factory complex alone, at night, on the weekend, is lonely duty.  I liked it for that reason, but I found Orion’s presence companionable, and it gradually grew into a friendship.  He and I could talk.  We both stood watch in the night.

Since those days, now 41 years ago, each fall when Orion rises, I greet him as an old friend, a true snowbird, one who returns when the snow comes and leaves as it does.  My old college friend has come for his annual months long visit.  And I’m glad.

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

Samhain: 2010

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Samhain                                                    Waning Harvest Moon

In the ancient Celtic faith Samhain (October 31) and Beltane (May 1) were the only holidays.  W. Y. Evans-Wentz gave a folklorist’s account of that faith in his first book, . Evans-Wentz wrote this amazing work, little known in spite of his later and famous first translation of the Tibetan  Book of the Dead, after wandering several months through the Celtic countryside, staying in the villages and modest homes and listening to these stories as they were told around fires of peat, voices passing on a tradition and whiling away the dreary winter months in a time before electricity.

Think of such a time as the cold begins to bear down on us and the leaves have fallen, the vegetables brought in from the garden now lying in their dark storage.  Imagine if those vegetables and what grain might be stored as well, imagine if they were your food, your only food, for the next five to seven months.  Though the Celtic winters were not as severe as the ones here in Minnesota, they were just as fallow, the earth no longer yielding fruits, all hope of new produce gone until late spring.

It’s easy for me to imagine this because I harvested the last of our vegetables yesterday.  I would be in a panic r if we had to survive on the few carrots, beets, potatoes, onions and garlic we have stored dry.  Yes, we have honey, canned tomatoes and some pickles, but even for the two of us, we would have to be almost magicians to live off this amount of food.  At best we would enter spring mere shadows of our October well-fed selves.  As supplements to our diet, our stored food is wonderful, a blessing; as sustenance alone, it would be meager.  At best.

Among the Celts this was, too, a time when the veil between the worlds thinned and passage eased from the Other World to this one and from this one to the Other World.  Like the Mexican Day of the Dead, celebrated on the same date, it was a time when ancestors might visit.  To keep them happy their favorite foods and music and dress would be available.  The Celts also believed that, in addition to the dead, the inhabitants of faery could come and walk among human kind.  They might steal children or lure unwary persons back across the veil, back to the world of faery where time passes so differently than it does here.

We have the faint memory of this holiday today.  The costumed remind us of the strange and often scary entities of the Other World that flit, often unseen, among the living on this night.   The jack o’lanterns have descended from the Samhain carved turnip (a rutabaga to us in the U.S.) which, when lit with a candle, glows yellow, much like a skull.  The carved turnip and the parshall were put on or near the lintel (sound familiar?) to keep those roamers from the Other World at bay.

On a personal and spiritual level this can be a time to consider the past growing season, Beltane as the Celts called it.  What came to maturation in the last six months?  Have you taken time to harvest and store up the fruits of those efforts?  It can also be  a time to consider the fallow and bleak time ahead, Samhain.  While Beltane might be the Baroque or Rococo time of year, heavily decorated with lots of shadows and light, winter is the minimalist season, a time when the canvas might even be bare.  Then we might confront our world as a Mark Rothko painting, an inward time, of seeing the other as it resides in our Self, or going down to the well of the collective soul and replenishing ourselves for the year ahead.

A paradox rears itself here.  A paradox most neatly stated in the observation by certain Western thinkers that September 29th, Michaelmas, the celebration of the archangel Michael, is the springtime of the soul.  Thus, as the growing season wanes and finally extinguishes, we follow Persephone under ground, down into the cathedrals of our own souls.  There we can recharge oursSelves in the deep waters.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel

Harvest Moon, For Me and My Gal

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Fall                                               Full Harvest Moon

What a great moon in the southern sky.  As I drove back from St. Paul, after sheepshead, the night had grown chill.

On the way in the full harvest moon hung high in the east behind a scrim of cirrus clouds, casting a pale circle, surrounding itself in a nimbus of moonlight.  On the east, the full harvest moon, and on the west, the skyline of downtown against the late twilight sky.  Skylines have their own beauty, a fragile outline in light of daytime sturdy buildings.

We had a sixth tonight at sheepshead, a friend of Roy’s in from Appleton, Wisconsin.  The dealer sat out and we played our usual five man game.  Dick Rice came away the big winner.

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

Let There Be Darkness

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Fall                                                Waxing Harvest Moon

Let’s try darkness again.  In Taoism the familiar Taiji makes my point about the essential and complementary nature of light and dark.  Taoism gives equal weight to the yin and yang* represented in the taiji, the small circle of yin within the yang and of yang within the yin, emphasizing the Taoist belief that all things contain their opposite to some degree.  So, one part of my argument simply notes that light and dark are both necessary, necessary to each other, nothing apart from each other.  In the Taoist taiji they represent the dynamic movement of heaven to which all things must conform.

In our Western cultural tradition, though, light has taken precedence over darkness, both in a physical and in an ethical sense.  Jesus is the light of the world.  Persephone goes into Hades and the earth mourns her absence until her return when it blossoms into spring.  Eurydice dies and Orpheus goes to the underworld to retrieve her.  Dante’s Divine Comedy finds Dante wandering, lost in the dark wood of error, before he begins his descent, guided by Virgil, into the multiple layers of hell.  The traditional three-story universe also reinforces these ideas:  Heaven above, earth, and the infernal regions below. Milton’s Paradise Lost follows the rebellion in heaven and the casting out of Lucifer, the Morning Star, into hell where he builds his enormous palace, Pandemonium.  Our common sense understanding of death involves hiding the body beneath the earth.  Why?

Coming out of the spiritualist tradition represented by Camp Chesterfield (see below) death involves a transition into the light, the spirit world.  Ghost Whisperer, a TV program, uses the trope from this tradition, as dead souls are led into the light.  It is, perhaps, no wonder that darkness, night and the soil come off badly in our folk metaphysic:  up and light is good; down and dark is bad.

I wish to speak a word for the yin, symbolized by the moon, the female, the cold, the receiving, the dark.  The moon illustrates the taiji perfectly.  In the dark of night, the moon, yin, reflects the sun’s light, yang, and offers a lambent light, neither yin nor yang, but the dynamic interplay between the two.  So we could look for art that features the moon as one route into the positive power of darkness.

Also, any seasonal display in a work of art, whether of spring, summer, fall or winter can open the question of each season’s value, its role in the dynamic of growth and decay, emergence and return.  This can lead to a discussion of the importance of the fallow season, the season of rest, the earth’s analog to sleep.  This can lead to a discussion of sleep and its restorative powers.

Art work of mother and child, or especially, mother and infant, can stimulate a discussion, in this context, of the womb, of the fecund nature of the dark where fetuses and seeds develop before their emergence into the world of light.

Similarly, death focused works of art can open up a discussion of birth and death as dynamic moments of change, yin and yang of human (or animal) development.  This could lead to conversation about the Mexica (Aztec) belief that life is the aberrant condition and that death is the vital, regenerative moment; we are here, goes one Mexica poem, between a sleep and a sleep.

Winterlight festivals represent a western imbalance focused on the light, the yang, and a tendency to cast the yin in a negative light, something to be avoided or eliminated or held in check.  As I said previously, this is understandable given the pre-historical science which made the return of the sun doubtful and therefore terrifying.  Many of these festivals are, too, our favorites:  Christmas, Deepavali and for a different traditional reason, Hanukkah.

In my own faith tradition, roughly pagan, I look forward to the dying of the light and celebrate as my most meaningful holiday, the Winter Solstice.  Of course, I also celebrate the return of the light that begins on that very day, but first I immerse myself in the long night, the many hours of darkness.  This affords me an opportunity to acknowledge the dark, to express gratitude for its manifold gifts.   In this way my idiosyncratic faith has a ritual moment that honors the taiji, utilizing the cues given by the natural world.

To find art that emphasizes this aspect of darkness I plan to walk the museum from top to bottom, searching for images and objects that can help our visitors understand that when they celebrate the festivals of light that darkness is the reason for the season.  I would appreciate any thoughts or ideas.

*In Chinese culture, Yin and Yang represent the two opposite principles in nature. Yin characterizes the feminine or negative nature of things and yang stands for the masculine or positive side. Yin and yang are in pairs, such as the moon and the sun, female and male, dark and bright, cold and hot, passive and active, etc. But yin and yang are not static or just two separated things. The nature of yinyang lies in interchange and interplay of the two components. The alternation of day and night is such an example.

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

Photocentrism

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Fall                                              New (Harvest) Moon

OK,I made this up.  Photocentrism is a focus on the virtue of light that, by implication, puts darkness in a negative or bad relative position.  Just because I made it up, however, does not mean I’m joking.  The context:  the docent annual meeting today and the presentation of a new December of the month called Winterlights.  I agree that Winterlights is a complex noun that has a rich associative feel.  I even agree that the celebrations in what I have long called holiseason–Thanksgiving to January 6th, the traditional 12th day of Christmas, Epiphany (visit of the Magi to Bethlehem), and the date for the celebration of Christmas in the Eastern Church–offer an unparalleled opportunity to learn from other cultures about matters deep in the human psyche:  Thanksgiving, Advent, Deepavali, Hanukkah, Posada, Winter Solstice/Yule, Christmas, Western New Year on January 1, the 12 days of Christmas and maybe Kwaansa, though its constructed nature makes me a bit shy of it.  Eid al Adha, the Muslim holiday that marks the end of Hajj by celebrating the Irbrahim and Ishmael story, falls in November this year, but not within holiseason itself, so I’m going to leave it out of this discussion.

The festivals or holidays of light, in particular Deepavali, Hanukkah, Winter Solstice (although is a special case as we shall see) and Christmas (more for what it replaces, Saturnalia, than what it celebrates itself) do have a common thread.  Deepavali, Winter Solstice and Christmas all relate to the despair felt in subsistence agriculture communities when the light of the sun seemed as if it would wink out and perhaps disappear altogether.  This fear, of the Sun’s final rising, put its mark on well-known pre-historical landmarks like Stonehenge, Chichen-Itza and the great Newgrange dolmen in Ireland.  Without a knowledge of the physics and celestial mechanics of the earth’s orbit and the sun’s central place in our solar system, it was frightening to consider the possibility that this time, this winter, the gradual diminishment of daylight might proceed all the way to an apocalyptic darkness.  No light for the crops.  No crops for the animals.  Cold all the time.

What to do?  According to theories of sympathetic magic, like produces like, so the logical response to oncoming darkness was a bonfire, a torch, a brave manifestation of light and heat in hopes that the sun, since it is like light and heat, will either be rekindled or seduced into rising again.  And these practices work.  Each time the bonfires were lit, the torches paraded, the sun did not disappear, but returned to once again start the growing season and stave off starvation and freezing for another year.

All of this makes sense, granting the scientific understandings of these early peoples.  As cultures grew more sophisticated and astronomical knowledge became a bit more advanced, however, it did put out the lingering fear that the darkness would one day come and never leave.  So holidays that focused on light, especially, but fire, too, became integral parts of the cultural and religious traditions of many peoples.

They all leave out one important thing, though.  The virtues of darkness.  I first became aware of the following arguments when I began to research the goddess, the great mother goddess.  I won’t get into here the debate surrounding the contention by some that a great mother goddess preceded the monotheistic, patriarchal deities of the Abrahamic religions, though I’ll tip my hand enough to say that I don’t find the evidence compelling.

What I found out about darkness surprised me and changed my mind about how I view it.  Darkness is as necessary as light.  Seeds start growing in the dark soil, away from light and even after they penetrate the surface, their roots continue to press their way into the surrounding nutrient-filled earth.  Mammal babies live their first few months of life in the moist, nourishment rich environment of their mother’s womb. (OK, not in the marsupials and the platypus and the echidna’s instance, but you get the drift.)  Darkness creates the time of rest and restoration for us and for many animals.  It is when we sleep and when we dream.  Darkness is the natural condition of space, attenuated by billions of stars only in what amounts to a small total area of the vastness of the universe.  Light itself requires a degree of darkness to create vision.  Anyone who’s ever been in a whiteout where snow and sky mix to create a vertiginous world with no up and down, no distinguishing characteristics understands the problem well.  Or consider a bright, very bright light and its affect on your sight.

This argument can be cast as a feminist one in which the light represents patriarchy and the darkness the creative agency of women.  It can also relate to anti-racism work in that we tend to equate darkness, blackness with evil, with corruption and decay.  This denies the regenerative, restorative and generative nature of darkness and narrows our conceptual world in literally dangerous ways.

How could this relate to Winterlights?  Without this kind of background the celebration of light has a sinister side as well its assumed positive one.  The celebrations of light only make sense in terms of the deep cultural background and when we go there we need to understand the fear that created these holidays has also unbalanced our appreciation of the other state, darkness.  I’ve not given it any thought, but I imagine there works of art that make darkness a central theme, that could be used to help put the other holidays in a balanced perspective.

Hanukkah is a special case here in which the focus does not seem to be on the Winter Solstice but on a cultural achievement by the Maccabees, the expelling of the Greeks.  It does however beautiful-darknessshare a darkness dispelling theme with the others.

There is more to say here, much more, but I’m hungry.  Catch you later.

Aging, Bees, Family, Friends, Great Wheel, Memories, Travel

Harvest

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Fall                                      New (Harvest) Moon

Second round of apiguard in the parent and the divide.  The top box on the package colony has gotten heavier, but I plan to feed them some more as I will do to the parent once the apiguard comes off in two weeks.  Sometime in early November I’ll get out the cardboard wraps and cover the hives for winter.  That will pretty much finish bee work for the year until late February or early March.  I’ve given away honey and plan to give away more.  Part of the fun.

A quick walk through the vegetable garden shows kale and swiss chard looking good, a few rogue onions that escaped the harvest, plenty of carrots, beets and butternut squash.  The harvest is 2010-10-04_0351not yet over and will go on until the ground threatens to become hard.

While I drove through the countryside on my way back to Lafayette on Monday, I passed field after field of corn and beans, some harvested, some not, about half and half.  Seeing those scenes put me right back at home, especially the corn fields.  Here’s a field near Peru, Indiana with the combine spilling corn into a tractor trailer for transport either to a corn bin, grain dryer or even straight to the grain elevators, all depending on the price and moisture content of the corn.

Indiana is no longer home, Minnesota is, but Indiana has a large section of my heart, the chamber of childhood and early young adulthood, a room full of corn fields, basketball, small towns, a baby sister and brother, county fairs and James Whitcomb Riley poems.  I was glad to be there the last few days and to walk again in the part of my heart filled there so long ago.

We move now toward Samhain, Summer’s End.  Blessed be.