Category Archives: Great Wheel

Aging, Family, GeekWorld, Great Wheel, Great Work, Politics, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

Whew

July 21, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Waxing Grandchildren Moon

OK. This will be last of this. But. Kate reminded me of her surgery on June 30th. Which preceded preparation for and the arrival and stay of Jon, Jen, Ruth and Gabe followed then, as I said yesterday, by our too inclusive preparations for the Woollys. No wonder I wore out yesterday. Let my prop it up and keep going inner coach have the day off. Better rested and more clear-eyed today. Ready for ancient Rome.

These two paragraphs came my way in the last two days. Their conjunction speaks for itself.

“Speaking of heat, NOAA reports that June was the hottest month in recorded history, worldwide. That is the fourth
month in a row of record warmth for planet Earth. June also marked the 304th consecutive month “with a global temperature above the 20th century average.” The last month with below-normal temperature worldwide? February, 1985. 2010
temperatures from January to June were the warmest ever recorded for both land and ocean temperatures, worldwide. Stay tuned.”
Check out Paul’s blog startribune.com/pauldouglas

(I imagine it’s photoshopped, but still…)

Mark Odegard found this quote in a book he’s reading about walking with caribou:

Henry Beston in the beginning of book.

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of wild animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creatures through the glass of knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken a form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, greatly err, For the animal shall not be measured by man, In a world older and more complex than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethrern, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

Aging, Great Wheel, Great Work, Health, Humanities, Hydroponics, Minnesota, permaculture, Politics, US History

You Say You Want A Revolution? Yep.

July 4, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Waning Strawberry Moon

It’s been done, I know. Still, I’d like to put in a call for a 2nd American revolution. Oh, ok, I don’t care what number it is. I’ll settle for another American revolution.

My American revolution has a bit of Norman Rockwell, a touch of Helen and Scott Nearing, more than a dab of Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman and C. Wright Mills, some Benjamin Franklin, the spirit of pioneers and native Americans alike when they relied upon on this seemingly limitless land for food and space. There’s a Victory Garden or two in there as well, plus generations of smart women who canned, dried, jellied, smoked and pickled all sorts of produce and meat. This New American Revolution demands no marches, no banners, no barricades, no guns and no repression. And you can dance all you want.

What is it? It is a revolution of and for and with the land. It is a revolution that takes the wisdom of a 7th generation Iroquois medicine man who said: “We two-leggeds are so fragile that we must pray and care for all the four leggeds, the winged ones, those who swim in the waters and the plants that grow. Only in their survival lies the possibility of ours.”

What is it? It is a revolution of and for and by the human spirit. It is a revolution that insists, but gently, that we each put our hand and our back to something that feral nature can alter. It could be a garden. It could be a deer hunt. It could be a potted plant outside where the changing seasons affect its growth and life. It could be a regular hike in a park, through all the changes of the seasons, seeing how winter’s quiet fallow time gives ways to springs wild, wet exuberance, the color palette changing from grays, rusts and white to greens, yellows, blues, reds the whole riot.

What is it? In its fullest realization this revolution would see each person responsible for at least some of their own food, food they grow or catch or kill. In its fullest realization each person would use whatever land they share with the future in such a way as to increase its natural capital, using the land in such a way that it improves with age and gains in its capacity to support human, animal and plant life.

What is it? In its fullest realization this revolution would find each person closer, much closer to the source of their electricity, their transportation and its fuel, their work and their family. In its fullest realization this revolution would shut down the coal-fired generating plants, shutter the nuclear generating plants and have maximum and optimum use of wind, geothermal, hydro, solar and biomass generation. In its fullest realization each person would eat food that had traveled only short distances to their table, the shorter the better, the best being from backyard or front yard garden to the table.

What is it? Well, we have a ways to go yet. Perhaps a long ways, but if we want our descendants to have a chance to enjoy the same wonders in this land that we have known, we will have to change. We will have to change radically. We need, as I suggested, another American revolution.

Aging, Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Humanities, Myth and Story

Summer. It’s About Time.

June 21, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Solstice Waxing Strawberry Moon

The longest day of the year. Light triumphant, streaming, steaming. The darkness held at bay.

Summer Solstice

This is an astronomical phenomenon transformed and translated into a spiritual one. We humans have over millennia taken solstice and equinox alike as moments out of time, a sacred caesura when we could review our life, our path as the Great Wheel turns and turns and turns once again.

The Celts first divided their year into two: Beltane, the beginning of summer, and Samhain, literally summer’s end. As their faith tradition developed, they added in both solstices and equinoxes. Since Beltane and Samhain occurred between the spring equinox and the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice respectively, they became known as cross-quarter holidays. Imbolc and Lughnasa filled in the other two cross-quarter spots.

It is the eight holidays, the four astronomical ones and the four cross-quarter, that make up the Great Wheel. In the most straight forward sense the Great Wheel emphasizes cyclical time as opposed to linear or chronological time. This seems odd to those of us raised in the chronological tradition influenced by Jewish and Christian thought in which there is an end time. With an end to time the obvious influence on our perception of time is that we progress through the days until they become years, which become millennia until the Day of the Lord or that great risin’ up mornin’ when the dead live and time comes to a stop.

That this is an interpretation rather than a fact rarely crosses the mind of people raised on birthdays, anniversaries, celebrations of one year as it comes followed by the next. Our historical disciplines from history itself to the history of ideas, art history, even geology and the theory of evolution all reinforce the essentially religious notion of time as a river flowing in one direction, emptying eventually into an unknown sea which will contain and end the river.

Immanuel Kant, in attempting to reconcile the dueling metaphysics of two apparently contradictory philosophical schools (rationalists and empiricists), hit on the notion of time and space as a priori’s, in a sense mental hardwiring that allows us to perceive, but is not inherent in the nature of reality. That is, we bring space and time to the table when we begin ordering our chaotic sense impressions. My interest in the Great Wheel and in the traditional faith of my genetic ancestors came in part from a long standing fascination with the question of time. We are never in yesterday or tomorrow, we are always in now. What is time? What is its nature and its correct interpretation relative to the question of chronological versus cyclical time?

I have not settled these questions, not even in my own mind, and they continue to be live topics in philosophy. Learning to pay attention to the Great Wheel, to the now, and to the specific place where I live has pushed me toward the cyclical view, as has gardening and now the keeping of bees. It is, today, the Summer Solstice. Again. As it was the last time the earth visited this location in space (ah, yes, space. another conversation which we’ll bracket for now) and as it will be the next time. This is a literally cyclical view of time based on the earth’s orbit around the sun, one which returns us, over and over to much the same spot.

Next summer when the solstice arrives the asiatic lilies will be ready to bloom, Americans will be getting ready to celebrate the fourth of July and kids will be out of school. The mosquitoes will have hatched, the loons returned and basketball will finally be over. These kind of phenological observations depend on the repetitive, cyclical character of natural events. There is a real sense in which this time does not move forward at all, rather it exists in a state of eternal return, one solstice will find itself happening again a year later. Is there any progress, from the perspective of the solstice, from one to the next? Not in my opinion.

I don’t deny the intellectual value of arranging knowledge in what appears to be a rational sequence. It aids learning and explanation, but it may well be a mistake to think that sequence exists outside our mental need for it. It may just be that time is, in some sense, an illusion, a useful one to be sure, but an illusion none the less.

Even if it is, we still will have the Summer Solstice and its celebration of light. We will still have the Winter Solstice and its celebration of the dark. We can see each year not as one damned thing after another, but as a movement from the light into the dark and back out again. We can see the year as a period of fallowness and cold (here in the temperate latitudes) followed by a period of fertility and abundance. This is the Great Wheel and it currently makes the most sense to me. That’s the light I have today anyhow. Let’s talk next year at this time.

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Garden, GeekWorld, Great Wheel, Minnesota, Our Land and Home, permaculture, Politics, Writing

The Sublime Gift

June 10, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Waning Planting Moon

” Life can’t bring you the sublime gift it has for you until you interrupt your pursuit of a mediocre gift.”

Woolly brother Tom Crane sent this to me. It took me back to my recent post about Siah Armajani and his personal commitment to staying within his skill set. When I worked for the church in the now long ago past, I had a boss, Bob Lucas, a good man, who had several sayings he used a lot. One of them was also similar in spirit, “Don’t major in the minors.”

Stop focusing on the small things you might be able to do well to the exclusion of being challenged by the prajaparmita400 serious, important matters. Stop your pursuit of a mediocre gift. The tendency to judge our worth by the accumulation of things–a he who dies with the best toys wins mentality–presses us to pursue money or status, power, with all of our gifts. You may be lucky enough, as Kate is, to use your gifts in a pursuit that also makes decent money; on the other hand if your work life and your heart life don’t match up, you risk spending your valuable work time and energy in pursuit of a mediocre gift, hiding the sublime one from view.

This is not an affair without risk. Twenty years ago I shifted from the ministry which had grown cramped and hypocritical for me to what I thought was my sublime gift, writing. At least from the perspective of public recognition I have to say it has not manifested itself as my sublime gift. Instead, it allowed me to push away from the confinement of Christian thought and faith. A gift in itself for me. The move away from the ministry also opened a space for what I hunch may be my sublime gift, an intense engagement with the world of plants and animals.

This is the world of the yellow and black garden spider my mother and I watched out our kitchen window over 50+ years ago. It is the world of flowers and vegetables, soil and trees, dogs and bees, the great wheel and the great work. It is a world bounded not by political borders but connected through the movement of weather, the migration of the birds and the Monarch butterflies. It is a world that appears here, on our property, as a particular instance of a global network, the interwoven, interlaced, interdependent web of life and its everyday contact with the its necessary partner, the inanimate.

So, you see, the real message is stop pursuit of the mediocre gift. After that, the sublime gift life has to offer may then begin to pursue you.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Our Land and Home, permaculture

Permaculture and the Natural World

May 20, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Waxing Planting Moon

I’ve not written about permaculture in a while. The orchard has clover all over, including in some of the plant guilds, but they seem intact. It has changed the view from our kitchen, a productive part of our property now sits just outside our windows. The bees fit in well to the permaculture process because they fertilize the fruits: apples, pears, cherries, blueberries, currants, quince, gooseberries, raspberries and strawberries.

In a modest sense, given the small number of our fruit producing plants, the bee/fruit blossom connection is a complete one. The fruit grows in our soil, blooms here, the bee comes, collects nectar and in the process fertilizes the fruit. The fertilized fruit grows large to encase the fertilized seeds. The bee returns to the hive, uses the nectar and pollen from the fruit blossoms to feed larvae and make honey. When we eat the honey, the circle includes us in a direct and intimate way.

In a similar way the plant guilds, selections of plants that complement each other by warding off predatory insects, attracting beneficial insects, setting nitrogen and micronutrients into the soil, also have a circle of benefit that, in turn, helps us produce healthy vegetables for our table. Our gardens and orchard have a more modest impact on our overall diet than a larger plot could, but the very act of growing and eating at least some of our food makes us more conscious of everything we eat.

There is another strong positive, too, perhaps the most important one of all, at least for me. By working with plants that have specific needs, specific soil temperatures, water requirements, nutrients, length of growing season, protection from pests Kate and I have to orient our lives to their rhythms. No matter what we do, a plant needs to be planted when it needs to be planted. It needs thinning when it needs thinning, pruning when it needs pruning. When harvest comes, it too must be done in a timely manner or the whole process will have gone for not.

The bees, too, have their cycles of birth, maturation and decline. To work with bees we have to take them as they are, not as we would wish them to be. We work with them according to their ancientrails, ones laid down thousands, even millions of years ago and ones to which we adapt, not the other way around.

This act of submission to what could be called biological imperatives does not, surprisingly, chain us, rather, in that wonderfully contradictory way, it frees us to become an active part in nature’s ongoingness. We become an active partner rather than a dominator, yet another living thing dancing to the music of cold and heat, wet and dry, light and dark.

Yes, it is, of course true, that we run our air conditioner in the summer and our furnace in the winter. Yes, we refrigerate some of our food. We close our doors so that we don’t dance to the buzzing and whirring of insects also part of nature’s minuets, gavottes and tangos. So, no, we are not pure, but that is in fact the human dilemma. We are part of nature, able to respond to and participate in her rhythms, yet we are also creatures of culture, the complex web we weave to make our home on this planet.

This tension creates an angst we sometimes know only when we stand on a cliff’s edge, look out toward the ocean and see the sun sink below the water’s blue margin. It is an unresolvable angst, this in but not entirely of nature realm we inhabit. It is, I would argue, an angst that we must embrace, not push away. Why? Because pushing away our delicate problem has created an ecological disaster that just may scour us off the face of mother earth. That’s a good reason, I think.

Bees, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work

Bee Diary: May 16, 2010

May 16, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Waxing Planting Moon

The bee project here has two active workers, a woodenware maker and a bee keeper. Kate has put together 7 honey supers and 70 frames plus four, and counting, hive 05-15-10_bees_woodenware1 colony31 boxes and 26 frames. Without her patient and careful craftswomanship, the hives would not exist. I’m just no good at the fine, repetitive tasks involved in woodworking, but she is. She brings an artisan’s hand to her work. As a result we have beautiful hives.

A possible identity for our hives has begun to take shape. Artemis is one of the many bee goddesses, but she is a familiar name, at least to some, so Artemis Honey is a strong possible name. A common offering to Artemis was honeycakes, so we might be: Artemis Honey, The Honeycake Honey. When we start getting enough honey to exceed our use, including gifts, then we’ll start selling at farmer’s markets. We’ll need a name, a label, a brand. We’ll include a honeycake recipe with every container sold and Kate has agreed to bake up some honeycakes to use as samples at our stands. Let us know what you think.

Checked the crops today and harvested parsnips. One resisted leaving its happy home in the raised bed. It came out well over a foot long. Smelling the tiny roots off the parsnip just after pulling, amazing. A sweet, earthy, pure scent. Wish I could bottle it.

When I left the MIA on Friday, I noticed on my walk back to the car, a migration of caterpillars. I believe they were swallowtail butterflies in there can’t fly yet stage. All of them, scores if not hundreds, chose northeast as their route across the warm concrete sidewalks that run between the Children’s Theater and the MCAD campus. At first I just noticed their numbers, then I saw their common journey.

Where I wondered, did they begin? So, I followed them back, moving against the small, humping crowd until I found a crabapple tree along an MCAD sidewalk. Looking up I noticed caterpillars soon to head north by northeast eating their way out to the end of small branches, then, as the branch bent under their weight, falling to the grass. Why they decided on their direction, I have no idea.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Health

Death Came Calling

May 11, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Waning Flower Moon

Yesterday death came to call. Dizziness and nausea took over my body while my mind raced back to October, 1964, trying to inhabit, again, the mind of my mother as the stroke hit her, trying to imagine the transition from vitality to powerlessness, wondering what thoughts came to her as she fell to the floor in the basement of the United Methodist Church. Pushing this thought back, far from me, get thee behind me death, I wondered if she had done the same, imagined that this was like all the other times, a bit more severe than most perhaps, but surely something that would lift. It didn’t. She died a week later.

Death had come to call on me as a reminder of the future in the guise of a dark moment of the past. All that work on Latin, I thought. Then, just as quickly, would you have done something else? No. The answer is no. At that moment a peace settled over me, if this was my time, so be it. It’s just fine. If not, I’ll get downstairs and study my i-stem nouns and ablatives.

Then, today, in a lecture, Nietzsche posed a hypothetical: What if a demon came to you and said, “You will live and relive your life. All of it. The pains and the sorrows, the joys and accomplishments, all of it, even this visit from me. And you will relive it not only once, but over and over.” What is your response? If you can say, Thank you, oh divine one, then you have lived an authentic life and have come to rest with who you are. Nietzsche called this the myth of eternal recurrence.

I find I’m on the Thank you side of the demon question. Yes, I’d like another helping please.

Much of my attitude toward life seems to have its roots in Nietzschean thought. Strange that I’m just now discovering this.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities

Beltane: 2010

May 1, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Waning Flower Moon

The old Celtic calendar divided the year into two seasons, Summer and Winter. Summer began on Beltane, May 1st, and ended at Samhain, Summer’s End, at October 31st. Summer is the growing season, the time when a subsistence farming economy like that of the Celts in Britain and Ireland raised food stuffs that had to last throughout the long, fallow season of Winter.

As my inner journey has changed over the years since Alexandria, Indiana and my received Methodist Christianity the wisdom of these early earth based faith traditions means more and more to me. The technology of food raising and preservation has changed dramatically, it is true, but the human need for food has not. We still need enough calories to sustain us throughout our day and most of those calories still start out in the form of plant material.

Taoism emphasizes conforming our lives to the movement of heaven. At its most obvious level this means making the rhythms of our lives congruent with what the Celts called the Great Wheel of the Seasons. If you care for flowers, have a vegetable garden or raise bees, then the biological imperative of their seasonal needs tends to pull you into the season. If you enjoy the gradual and beautiful transition in Minnesota from the growing season to the depths of Winter, the cool days and leaves may call you outside, perhaps to hunting and fishing, perhaps to hiking and birdwatching, perhaps just for the changing colors. As fall changes to winter, you may, like the bears, begin to hibernate, turn away from the cold and begin to do inside work.

Taoism also encourages us to conform our lives to the possibilities of the moment. That is, when standing in a river, pushing it back upstream is foolish, but it is possible to dig channels for it and divert it’s energy.

The Great Wheel is often seen as a metaphor for the human journey: baby (spring), youth (summer), adulthood (fall), elderhood (winter). The tao of human life is to act as the moment in life you are in suggests. A twist on this might be to consider what the adult stage finds calling to it when the season of summer is upon us. There are many levels.

Beltane offers us a chance to reflect on those things in our lives that have begun to take on real form, that seem poised for a season of growth. In my case bee-keeping and the translation project come to mind. I’ve done preliminary work with both of them and it may just be this summer that they grow into regular parts of my ongoing journey. I hope so.

Whatever it is for you, whatever things in your life need a long hot summer for maturation, give it to them. This is the movement of heaven.

Kate’s colleague Dick, whom I have mentioned occasionally here, has come close to the end of his painful last days. The cancer has proved more than his body and the medical wisdom we have now could defeat. What comes to maturation for him in these first days of summer is the whole of his life and the transition of death. None of us know what lies on the other side of the grave, or even if there is another side, but all lives end. Vale, Dick.

Aging, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Humanities, Weather +Climate

The Great Wheel

April 26, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Waxing Flower Moon

As spring winds down toward Beltane on May 1st, the green up has taken on an accelerated pace. We have leaves on trees like the Amur Maples, ash and feathery new leaves on the oaks as well. The daffodils and tulips have brightened our April for some weeks now. The more integrated I become to this property and its transitions, the more I can layer them in my head. That is, as this moment of greening and flowering promises a new season, the needed resurrection of the plant world, I can also see late August and September when the florescence begins to yield to brown, to decay, to dieing back. The two are not polar opposites but places on a continuum that extends not only from season to season but from year to year, decade to decade, century to century.

This layered sensibility is one of the privileges of staying in place, where the rhythms of the land call different things out of me. As Rachel Carson said, “There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrain of nature–the assurance that dawn comes after night, spring after winter.”

This rhythm, the Great Wheel, teaches us about our experience of life, about life’s ongoing struggle against entropy, a struggle always lost, yet a struggle always valiant and often joyful even though destined to end in tragedy.

I hope your life has a springtime right now, one in which the trees have begun to leaf out, the daffodils have bloomed and the first vegetables have started their journey toward your table.

Cinema and Television, Great Wheel, Humanities, Literature, World History

Cry the Beloved Country

April 18, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Waxing Flower Moon

The crescent flower moon slung itself just beneath the tree to the west, over Round Lake. A thin cloud passed across it, perhaps a cloud like the one Muhammad rode through on his way to Jerusalem and the Holy Mount. These crescent moons have South Carolina and the Arab world in their wake, calling to mind on the one hand a new meaning to hiking the Appalachian trail and on the other lakes and rivers of sand, desert nights with stars so numerous no Caliph could count them all and tents raised near a palm filled caravan serai.

Kate and I watched Cry, the Beloved Country, only about 15 years after it made it to the screen. I’ve never read this book though it’s one I’ve had on my list a long time. Richard Harris and James Earl Jones are titans as far as I’m concerned, able to bring gravitas, authenticity and depth to movies in which they appear. In one of the more memorable scenes in the movies, James Earl Jones and Richard Harris, the father of a murderer and the father of the victim, unknown to each other, yet coming from home ground close to each other, speak about the murder. If you can watch this scene unmoved, you’ve lost touch with something important. Four stars.

On a less elevated note I’ve begun watching Spartacus: Blood and Sand. It’s on the instant play feature Netflix has available through the wii. It’s compelling tv, not as good as Cry, the Beloved Country but as a sand and sandal adventure yarn, it’s pretty damn good.