• Category Archives Great Wheel

  • Sad Movies Always Make Me Cry

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    60  bar steady 29.59  0mph NNW dewpoint 59  Beltane, night

                  Waxing Crescent of the Flower Moon

    What a beauty.  This crescent moon, nearing the first quarter, has two stars above it, one low toward the horn and the other on a thirty degree angle further away.  Rain scrubbed the sky clean tonight, so they sparkle.  We only to look to the moon and the stars to find ample inspiration.  Do we need another layer, a human interpretation of the wonder we feel when we see the great star road?  I’m not so sure anymore.

    The list of movies I haven’t seen that others have a long time ago included Dances With Wolves until tonight.  Not many movies make me cry, but the closing scenes when Dances With Wolves and Stands With A Fist leave the winter village did.  Especially moving to me was Wind in the Hair crying from the cliff top, “Dances With Wolves, do you hear me?  Do you know that I will always be your friend?” 

    When the soldiers killed Dances With Wolves’ horse and then his wolf companion, I also cried.  The wolf’s loyalty and love repayed with death.  These two incidents capture so much of the casual violence that American culture legitmates.  Once again, I cringed at the harsh lessons of the frontier. 

    Weeding tomorrow.  Oh, boy.  Also, I get to do some chainsaw pruning.  We lost a main branch off one of our Amur Maples.  They have a tendency to fragility so it didn’t surprise me. 


    Cinema and Television Garden Great Wheel 📎and tagged

  • Rites of Spring

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    52  bar rises 29.94  2mph NW  dewpoint 20 Beltane, sunny

                    Waxing Gibbous Hare Moon

    Nope, this isn’t about naked pagans dancing under a full moon.  Sorry.

    Rather, it’s about those things we do.  In spring. 

    The Mickman’s guy just left.  “Charlie,” he said, “We came through the winter pretty good.  Just one dead sprinkler.”  He handed me a sandy, wet plastic sprinkler head, smiled and went on his way.

    Kate bought her annual supply of, well, annuals.  Alyssum, impatiens and coleus.  She’ll go back for a few more.

    We prepared and planted new beds, cleaned old ones.

    The furnace last ran in April, but, unlike most years we have not turned on the air conditioning yet.

    The dogs spend more and more time outside, just like we do.

    The guy who cleans the gutters and does the outside windows will show up after the cottonwoods disperse their seeds.

    We moved the snowblower to the back of the garage bay and the riding lawnmower to the front.  These are his and hers machines.  Snowblower–his.  Lawnmower–hers.

    We have all of these mechanical/electronic servants.  Instead of a gardener, we have a sprinkler system and a riding mower.   Instead of servants working mechanical fans we have an air conditioner.  Instead of a summer kitchen we have Vent-a-Hoods.  Instead of the post office we have e-mail.  Instead of shopping in real world stores we have Internet retailers.

    These are sophisticated technological devices and they replace human labor of the domestic variety with skilled human labor.  The skilled folks make more money because they work in several locations rather than just one.

    I find though, that when I work in the garden, I prefer hand tools:  a spade, a spading fork, pruning saw, trowel, rake.  In general  I allow only one mechanical tool into my work on our grounds.  The chainsaw.  It replaces labor I’m not sure I could perform even if I had the time.  On occasion I’ll rent an industrial strength chipper, but only after many hours cutting down trees and brush, then delimbing.  I plan to rent a stump grinder sometime this spring, but that’s a very special purpose piece of equipment.  Otherwise it’s shovel and pick, adz and drawknife.  Small sledge hammer, wire cutters and bolt cutters, Japanese weeding knife, serrated sickle and unserrated sickle.  A tool in the hand is worth two in the bush.  Or something like that.


    Garden Great Wheel Great Work 📎and tagged

  • Obama By Five Percentage Points

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    52  bar rises 29.84 0mph NW dewpoint 30 Beltane

            Waxing Crescent of the Hare Moon

    The Hare moon stands in the west, just above the treeline a ways off our deck.  The night is misty and the crescent has a faded glow around it.  These nights, still cool, and days that don’t get too hot, ideal.  I like the cool days for garden work.  Today I stayed out in the sun too long and got a little woozy.  Just because the air is cool doesn’t mean the sun isn’t out to get ya.

    I wrote Hillary asking her to get out quite a while back.  Now the hounds are at her heels.  Money won’t come in.  The math doesn’t work.  Superdelegates have begun to flee.  Yet, she has decided to press on.  Why?  Pride, maybe?  Certainly a commitment to being the first woman presidential candidate and then the first woman president.  Both laudable and signficant, but by themselves insufficient to keep her in the race.  She may not believe what’s happening.  She will.

    My own take is that Obama will look like very different against McCain than he has against Clinton.  He embodies change, as she did, too, but he will look younger, stronger, less hidebound, though he will also look less experienced, less weathered by fate and circumstance.  The race will hinge on his ability to pick up some of the Reagan Democrats who swung so decisively behind Hillary.  How can he do that?  VP is one strategy.  I still think his best shot is Bill Richardson, but I read some pundits who think a strong woman would be a good choice.  Maybe John Edwards? 

    Obama by 5 percentage points in the end.  That’s my prediction.  And I have no basis for it, other than hope and gut instinct, neither too reliable, but there you are.

               


    Great Wheel Politics 📎and tagged

  • A Burning Tree

    Posted on by Charles Comment

     65  bar falls 29.94 0mph S dewpoint 30 Beltane

                  New Moon (Hare Moon) 

    The forest is a peculiar organism of unlimited kindness and benevolence that makes no demands for its sustenance and extends generously the products of its life and activity; it affords protection to all beings. (Buddhist  Sutra)

    Though this comes from a Buddhist sutra (thread) it resonates with Taoist thought.  These two ancient traditions crossed paths over and over again in China.  At least one of those occasions created Chan Buddhism, which, in Japan became Zen Buddhism.  

    The Buddhist element I see here is the notion of unlimited kindness and benevolence, an attribution to the forest that I do not believe my brother Taoists would make.  They would agree that the forest is a peculiar organism (among many) and would further concur that it makes no demands for sustenance (on humans) and does extend its product of life and activity (generously–well, maybe to a Buddha, but probably not to a tree) and would also acknowledge its protection to all beings (except those plants killed by competitive toxins and the small prey animals killed by predators).   

    Taoism is a fascinating (to me) blend of reason and organismic thinking which produces a vibrant metaphysic understandable at the tinest particle of matter and at stages of complex organization from thence upwards to the Heavens themselves, the 10,000 things.

    Mostly clean up outside today.  Getting ready for the more ambitious projects that will soon occupy my time.

    From the deck last evening I looked at our Magnolia.  It stood against the seven oaks like the flame atop a Thai Buddha.  Its white glinted, mirrored back by white daffodils.  This evening, for this moment, the Magnolia had a nimbus, a sacred aura, as if it had transcended its treeness and become another living entity all together a vegetative, blooming fire.  A burning tree.


    Faith and Spirituality Garden Great Wheel 📎and tagged

  • The Wollemi Pine–Live From the Carboniferous

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    33  bar steep rise 30.06 5mph N dewpoint 22 Spring

                    Waning Gibbous Moon of Growing

    The workshop I attended today had two co-sponsors, The Institute for Advanced Studies (UofM) and the Arboretum(UofM).  This was the culminating workshop in a two-year long effort by the Institute for Advanced Studies to explore time from many perspectives.  Today we examined time in three different, but related, botanical areas:  phenology, paleobotany and time from the perspective of trees. 

    The phenological, by definition, is the chronological study of events in nature.  This strikes me as an odd definition since it seems to impose a human mental construct, linear sequencing, on what is cyclical.  The notion is a good one, though, since it involves paying close attention to changes in the natural world, day by day, and making a record of them.  Phenologists know when the ice goes out lakes, the first robin returns, the dates that various spring ephemerals like the bloodroot, snow trillium and scylla bloom. 

    Over several years I’ve tried my hand at phenology.  It is something an amateur can do.  So far, I’ve not had the discipline to continue my observations day after day, year after year.  Perhaps as I get older and slow down a bit this will come to me.  I hope so.  The woman who was our teacher for phenology was a lively Cantonese woman named Shirley Mah Kooyman.  A Smith graduate in Botany she has a direct and engaging teaching style.  Shirley took us outside and showed us the spring ephemeral garden they have planted.  It gave me ideas.  Our field was cut short by blowing winds, snow and cold.  On April 26th.

    Over  the long lunch break I wandered the bookstore and picked up books related to aspects of permaculture I want to pursue in more depth:  pond building, fruit and nut trees and landscape design.

    In the afternoon Tim started us out with segments of trees so we could tree rings.  This lead into a discussion of the time and stories that a tree knows, sometimes revealed in its growth rings.  He showed an amazing graphic created by an arborist who actually dug up tree roots and followed them, painting them white as he went so he could measure accurately.  He discovered that almost all trees have relatively shallow, but very broad root systems.  I learned, as did Tim, that tree roots stop at the dripline and that what’s below the tree roughly parallels what’s above in size.  Nope.  We measure a double centurion outside the learning center.  You measure at breast height, compute the diameter with everybody’s favorite mathematical constant; in this case it was 52 inches, then multiplied by a factor for white oaks, 5.  This gives a rough estimate of 260 years for the trees age.  Cutting back a bit for optimal growing conditions, experts feel this oak is 225 years old.  That means it was an acorn in 1780!  Whoa.

    The last session focused on the evolution of plants.  In some ways this was weakest session, yet in another it astonished me.  Randy Gage, the guy in charge of school groups for the arboretum, took a trip to Australia to investigate the Wollime Pine.  Here are some fast facts from the Wollemi Pine website:

    Fast Facts
    …………………………

    Claim to fame One of the world’s oldest and rarest trees

    This is a tree that, prior to its discovery in 1994 was known only in the fossil record.  It was a coelacanth or stromatolite like find.  Remarkable.  But I missed it.  Maybe you didn’t.

    The time related stuff here was somewhat cliched with the 24 hour clock and an arm span as metaphors.  The Wollemi Pine story is the stuff of science fiction.

    Taking this symposium at the same time I learned about a book, Reinventing the Sacred, which attempts to reinvent spirituality from within a scientific perspective, but one that discards scientistic thinking (reductionism, empiricism) has really set the wheels turning.  So many things clicking.  We’ll see where it all goes.


    Faith and Spirituality Garden Great Wheel Great Work 📎and tagged

  • No Matzoh In Andover

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    47  bar rises 29.95  3mph N dewpoint 40 Spring

                         Full Moon of Growing

    No matzoh at Festival in Andover.  No lamb.  The butcher said, “We only carry it for holidays.  Can’t push it any other time.”  Not many Jews in Andover either, apparently.  This is a big one for Jews all over the world, but not big enough to create a market for lamb at the local supermarket.  No matzoh cake meal either.  All this  means a trip to Byerly’s tomorrow.  Plenty of Jews in and around Maple Grove.  It’s all about the market.  Plenty of Hindu’s in Maple Grove, too.

    I don’t imagine there are many Parsi here either.  Oh, well.  It’s probably fair to say that I’m one of a handful of the Taoist inclined, too.  May be a few Chinese folks and me.

    Just finished the Saturday workout.  This one’s a bugger and my muscles can tell they’ve had hard use.  It’s the only way to make’em grow and the only way to compensate for age related loss of muscle mass.  It’s important, but it doesn’t make it easy.

    The world is a strange, big place.  While I did my resistance work, I listened to a program on the evolution of the planet.  The irregular catastrophic punctuations in her history gives me pause.  The Chixilub meteor, fissure eruptions, super volcanoes, snowball earth, a few ice ages here and there and pretty soon, as Evertt Dirksen used to say, you’re talking about real extinction events.  It may be that we have come on the scene in a period of Pax Terra; but, based on our history as a planet, I’d say it won’t last.


    Faith and Spirituality Great Wheel Great Work 📎and tagged

  • Spring Ephemerals

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    32  bar steep rise 29.79 1pmh SSW dewpoint 30  Spring

                           New Moon (Growing)

    Snow!  Yes, it happens in April.  Even May here sometimes.  Even so, at this point it seems like such an insult, a step backward when the engine of solar warming has already taken hold and eliminated most of our snow cover.  Yet, even as I write this I don’t mean it.  This is the ever present dynamism of our latitude, visible both in the deep cold and dark nights of midwinter, as well as the forwards and backwards of early spring.  And I would have it no other way. 

    The plants that show signs of life now, that spear their first leaves up through the oak leaves and straw laid down to keep them cool until temperatures even out a bit, they are ready for this, made to achieve height and bloom before their contemporaries.  This is an example of what Bill Mollison (author of Permaculture) calls a time niche.  Most perennials have specific time niches. Part of flower gardening involves learning their niches. Only then can you have a garden with blooms throughout the growing season. 

    Daffodils, tulips, bloodroot and anemones fall into a category roughly named spring ephemerals.  Their strategy is to grow, bloom, and begin to die back before the larger, woody plants like trees and shrubs leaf out.  That way the spring ephemeral gets light denied to those that grow later in the season, light filtered or blocked out entirely by the leaves of maples, oaks, dogwoods and lilacs. Ephemeral refers to their time niche and defines them as the mum and aster are as fall bloomers.

    I like the spring ephemerals.  Their pluck, their hardiness and their almost too obvious metaphorical value regenerate horticultures spirit in me each year.  Right outside garden patio door I can see the red leaved tulip plants and the yellow green daffodil leaves.  Up from and behind them the iris have already grown as much as six inches.  The moss has turned bright green and buds on the dogwood and magnolia have swollen. 

    At this point I’m always reminded, in an admittedly perverse way, of the Aztec poem that goes something like this:  We are here as in a dream between a death and death.  I haven’t got it quite right and I can’t find it.  The intent though is to say that life is the illusion, that our true existence is in the realm we think of as death, we emerge from it at birth and return to after death.


    Faith and Spirituality Garden Great Wheel

  • Tea Master for a Day

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    46  bar falls 29.96 3mph NNW dewpoint 25

              Waxing Gibbous Moon of Winds

    Last night the moon of winds cast shadows on our yard, elongated dogwoods, thick oak trunks and thin lines of multiple raspberry canes.  This point in the seasonal change is delicate.  Thin ice forms a lattice over the snow while tiny drops of water gather along the roof line ready to plummet the final distance to the earth.  Snow and grass play encirclement with grass spreading outward from trees and shrubs while the snow holds its own over the lawn, the hills and prairie grass.  Here there daubs of photosynthetic green have begun to appear.  Rosemary beneath the steps.  Tufts of grass up close to the house.  It is a gradual change for the moment, but soon the earth will leap and shout, fly flags of bright colors and clothe itself again in verdant splendor.

    Tour today with students, 6th graders, from a Muslim school in Fridley.  As near as I could tell, the kids were mostly Somalia, all born here, but there parents emigrated.  I had the boys, David Fortney had the girls.  We circled each other for half an hour in the Islamic gallery as these children drank in the physical objects of their cultures, linking themselves to the Seljuk Turks, the Safavid Persians and the Mughals of India.  After half an hour we went into the Weber Collection (Japanese traveling exhibition).  I asked them to become tea masters selecting objects for a tea ceremony for persons unfamiliar with Japanese art.

    We saw Hotei reach for the moon and a Zen monk’s ordination festival.  We learned wabi from the Negoro ware with its faded red lacquer, worn and used; we learned sabi from the tea wares, especially the lumpy and imperfect mizusashi.  I read them a Daoist poem and its conversion into a Buddhist poem by the extraction of only one line, spun downward in a flowing cursive script.  Time went fast and at the end they picked objects for their tea ceremony:  8 Views of Xiao and Xiang, the delicate miniature Song dynasty-like landscape, the Negoro spoon, the tea caddy with a silk cover, Oribe teaware and a few dishes for tea food.  Then we were done.

    Afterward I copied and copied and copied, even to the end of the toner cartridge, material on Chinese bronzes.  I have a tour on Saturday that will focus only on our Chinese bronzes.  I chose them because I wanted to go deeper into the world of early Chinese dynasties like the Shang and the Chou and the Han.


    Art and Culture Great Wheel Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • So, This Guy Trips and Falls in the Ocean

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    7:12PM  Night.  Had the weird experience of seeing Oscar winners announced at 4:30PM. 

    Tripped and fell in the ocean.  Got wet. Of course.  Mumbled.  Then, ah, what would one expect when in the ocean.

    Have a burgeoning collection of coral, have found few shells here.  

    This morning on the way to Hanalei I had just passed the taro field after crossing the one-lane bridge and there in a field was a painted pony with an egret sitting happily on his back.  A few miles further on I noticed a field with horses had several egrets.  Is there something about their relationship? 

    It looked like a fable.

    The tao continues to make inroads into my thought process.  It’s almost Platonic, in that this feels like stuff I have always known.  My intuitive processes have led me here, in spite of my rational faculties which spent so many years concentrated on Christianity because I wanted to read religion in my own cultural idiom.  It didn’t occur to me that my own personal faith language may speak in a different tongue than the Judaeo-Christian.

    Here are a few things.  All things are one.  This means, in simplest terms, that things that may seem separate, light and dark, good and bad, men and women actually compose a whole when we realize each is necessary for the other to exist.  Without light, no dark.  Without women, no men.  Without bad, no good.  Those of us married to the Western logical paradigm which has the law of excluded middle, something is either this OR that, this concept may seem troubling, even scandalous.   As Alan Watts points out in Watercourse Way, our dichotomized thinking has lead to idealism which imagines that good must made bigger and bigger until there is no bad left in the world.

    As one whose path has followed that line of thought, it becomes clearer and clearer to me why Christianity surprised me with its intellectually sophisticated approach to reality.  Christianity linked up so well with my leftist politics because leftist politics are based on the linear view of time, a time that runs out and therefore seems to demand an ending; an ending which may be good or bad.  Yikes!  Better work for the good one. 

    All over Kauai there are churches with signs: Jesus Is Coming Soon.  If that’s your paradigm, that the big guy is on his way back and watch out, then you have to work on yourself and on your society to make sure that good triumphs over evil.  This is not true only of conservative Christians; it is true of liberals, too.  This thinking made me sick.

    How?  I began to see the world in black and white terms, with them over there and us over here.  Taoist thought helps me reintegrate myself, to find some of them here and some of us over there, until, gee, we all look like part of the same world.

    My first intuition of this came in high school when I wrote a bad poem, The Test.  In it I questioned the nature of a god who only gives a person 7o years plus or minus to determine how eternity will be spent.  The math didn’t work for me.  Not long after that I knew that if I could describe one flower I can describe the whole universe.  Today I discovered that Lao-Tze said, “If I sit in the house, I have the whole universe available to me.”  Hints of this way of seeing the world.  But I couldn’t put it together.

    So, I backed into it all by leaving Christianity, then becoming more and more Celtic.  When I found Unitarian-Universalism, I found Emerson.  His essay Nature demands that we find our own relationship with the gods today, rather than rely on the experience our ancestors.  Emerson and the Celtic embrace of cyclical time lead me further and further away from a progressive view of history, until it began to recede as the dominant view in my thinking.

    When I began to start art history, Chinese and Japanese art captivated me.  In studying them, I began to search in the various schools of thought that inspired the aesthetics of these two cultures.  The art that grabbed me had Taoist influences.  Song dynasty landscapes.  Chan Buddhism teaware.  Zen Buddhist prints. Chan Buddhism comes from Buddhism’s collision with Taoism in China. 

    As I do, I began to plow backwards, into Confucius and then more seriously into Taoism.  What had long attracted me finally began to occupy more and more of my thinking and, even more important, my heart.  Now I’m diving deep and it just may be I won’t come up at all this time.  At least not as the me I’ve come to know.

    Oh, well, if you read this far, it’s your own fault. I’m on a tear here, I know.


    Faith and Spirituality Great Wheel Great Work Travel 📎and tagged

  • A Sacrament From Mother Earth

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    35  91%  23%  2mph ESE bar29.06 steady windchill34  Winter

                  Last Quarter of the Winter Moon

    Something I’ve thought about for a while.

                                                       A Sacrament

    water from our well, bread from local grain and cheese from Minnesota, candles

    Light candle(s).

    Say to all:  See this light, not as symbol, but as energy brought to us by fire from the sky and fire from deep beneath the earth.  By the light of this fire we see this water, this bread, this cheese.

    On the table or altar have the pitcher, a cup, a plate with bread not broken and cheese not broken

    Water in an earthenware pitcher. Pour into a single cup.

    To each person as they take the cup:  take this and drink it, not as symbol, but as substance, the necessary liquid of all life as blood is the necessary liquid in our body.

    Break the bread and hand pieces to each person

    Say to all:  Eat this bread, not as symbol, but as substance, the marriage of earth and sun which gives birth to grain.

    Break the cheese and hand pieces to each person

    Eat this cheese as a gift from one mammal to another, food which sustains us.

     Say to all:  This water, this bread, this cheese transforms itself even now into your body, one link in the sacred chain stretching back to the one-celled organism, our common ancestor, and forward to our descendants, who may be as different from us as we are from that one cell.  This is a miracle.

    Go now in peace. 


    Faith and Spirituality Garden Great Wheel Great Work Our Land and Home 📎and tagged