Category Archives: Great Wheel

Aging, Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, permaculture, Woolly Mammoths

Becoming Native To This Place

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Summer                        Waxing Green Corn Moon

westorchard709

The next meeting of the Woolly Mammoths will be here in Andover.  That means it’s theme and subject matter time.  The theme will be, Becoming Native to this Place, the title of a book by Wes Jackson of the Land Institute.  The subject matter will focus on the gardens, permaculture and the local food (slow food) movement.

At the Seed Savers Exchange conference held two weekends ago in Decorah, Iowa a commercial grower told of his change to the local foods idea.  A grower of greenhouse foods for various distributors who took his foods far from northern Iowa, he recounted attending a meeting sponsored by folks whose agenda was local foods.  They showed that, due to commodity based agriculture, northern Iowa was a net importer of food.  That astounded him.  He switched his focus then to growing vegetables for local consumers, working on niche markets like institutions, restaurants and grocery stores in the northern Iowa area.

He didn’t mention Michael Pollan by name but the subject matter was similar to Pollan’s recent work, In Defense of Food.  The Woollys have read the Omnivore’s Dilemma and the Botany of Desire.  We’ve also looked at the notion of Homecoming and the Great Work by Thomas Berry.  This August meeting, only 17 days after Lughnasa, the first fruits festival of the Celtic calendar, will celebrate the Woolly’s interests in home, food and continuity.    southgarden709400

Continuity?  Yes.  The Woollys have a 20+ year record of perseverance with each other and, by implication, an interest in this place we have  chosen to call home for those same number of years.

To the Woollys who read this:

Please choose one of the books or websites indicated and take a look.  While looking pick out two things:  what surprised you?  what would you like to know more about?   If you want, also look for something that seems off or misguided to you.

Aging, Family, GeekWorld, Great Wheel, Woolly Mammoths

Woollys, Grandkids

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Summer                     Waxing Summer Moon

Tomorrow we get the full on Summer Moon.  We’ll have a warm, but not hot night with a brilliant satellite.  No good for astronomy, but great for moon viewing, a favorite activity among the Japanese.

Woolly’s met tonight at the Black Forest.  Mark, Stefan, Bill, Tom, Frank and myself showed up.  Mark got the dam site job.  He reports next Monday morning to Lock and Dam #1, the first official lock on the Mississippi River.  The job runs until the river ices over and the barges cannot come.  Stefan’s been giving himself fits over his children.  A potential liability of parenthood.

I showed off the Kindle.  I’m a fan.

Jon, Jen, Ruth and Gabe are back from a weekend in Chicago.  There was a Bandel family reunion with rooms at the Doubletree and visits to Grandma and Grandpa, Ruth and Gabe’s great-grandparents.  They are back here for four days, then they strike out for home in Denver.

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

Hi and Lo

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Beltane      Waning Flower Moon

Hilton Head Island, S.C.

Cloudy again today.  Yesterday afternoon, for a couple of hours, the sun shone.  I just looked at the forecasts for Panama City.  Thunderstorms followed by thunderstorms.

It finally came to me yesterday why this weather looked so familiar.  It looks like the pre-hurricane footage from the weather channel.  And for good reason.  There is a tropical depression slowly twirling off the east coast of Florida.  Its northeast quadrant, around Jacksonville and the panhandle, has already dumped a lot of rain.  2 ft. in one location over two days!  Remember Florida barely has a grip on the surface;  a lot it will go early when the oceans rise.

As I worked out today on hard sand just above the surf racing ashore, I felt another of nature’s cycles, the tides.  They pull in and out four times a day, hi and lo.  These cycles remind us of the cycles in our own bodies and in our lives.

Last night at the Jazz Corner the crowd’s age showed in the gray heads dominating the room.  We are the outgoing tide for this generation of living humans.  We washed ashore in one of the biggest birth events in US history and we will go out as one of the biggest death events.  Cycles,spirals. Change.

Family, Great Wheel, Health, Holidays

Beltane Has Begun

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Beltane                Waxing Flower Moon

As is the case with all Celtic holidays Beltane began at sundown.  Over the years that I have kept the Celtic calendar, now 14 years at least, Beltane signals a real shift from the getting going of spring to the active growth of summer.  Some years that’s more obvious than others and this year the change has been slower than the recent past, yet the emergence of the daffodils, tulips, garlic and the blooming of our magnolia all point toward summer.

Kate’s back from work with new rules for influenza A(H1N1) novel.  They had a sick hallway at the Coon Rapids clinic tonight and they were, again, swamped by persons concerned about the flu.  She said a case has been reported at HCMC.  Tomorrow, however, her attention moves from pandemic to garage sale, the sort of odd shifts we all make between our work and domestic lives.

Great Wheel, Hydroponics

Garage Sales

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Spring    Waning Seed Moon

In spring mom’s across the land turn their minds to Garage Sales!  The mom in this house has.  That means I’ve spent most of this warm, almost early summer day cleaning out the garage, sorting junk from stuff to sell and trying to make the to keep pile as small as possible.

I started though with planting 5 varieties of heirloom tomatoes, two of heirloom cucumbers and one heirloom tomatillo. They go in small soil + peat plugs, onto a warming mat and under the soothing light of a fluorescent lamp.

Afterward I pushed a broom in the garage and moved items from one place to another, a favorite task in spring.  The intent is to keep some of the things moving right on off the property.  We have the stuff of George Carlin’s famous sketch and we need a place to put it.  Or to get rid of it.

It is 71 right now.  71!

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Hydroponics

Let Our Revels Now Begin

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Spring         Waning Seed Moon

We are far enough into spring that its first full moon, the Seed Moon, has begun to wane.  The snow is gone and even though the land here is dry bulbs have begun to break the earth with the tips of their small green spears.  The daylilies, those hardy, reproductively agile flowers are already up six inches or so (hmmm, time for the cygon on the irises).

I pulled up stakes but we’re not moving.  Nope, each year these stakes get taken up when the last snows of the season, at least any that will last, are behind us.  They are three feet high, sharpened on end and painted a fluorescent orange on the other.  Put in the ground after Halloween (for obvious, trick related reasons) they guide snow-plowing crews away from the edges of our yard.  This preserves lawn and sprinkler heads.  Out in Rocky Mountain National Park their equivalent is a seven foot or so sapling lashed to mile marker or outside lane marker.

We have our peculiar seasonal rituals.  Next comes the removal of the snow blower to the machine shed and the draining of its gasoline tank.   In its place comes the riding mower, ready for another season of grass beheading.  Somewhere in here the cold weather plants get started outside, tomato plants inside.  Windows get washed and gutters cleaned. We like to give ourselves a fresh face for nature’s season of abundance.  We will put the spiritual asceticism of winter behind us, ready now to revel in green, fresh fruits and vegetables, warm breezes.

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

Imbolc: The Great Wheel Turns

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Imbolc  Waxing Wild Moon

Imbolc.  The celebration of lamb’s in the belly, imbolc and the festival honoring Brighid*. (see information below from the Encyclopedia Mythica.This is my favorite web source for quick, accurate information about Gods and Goddesses.)

When I came back to my Celtic roots during my transition out of the Presbyterian Ministry (the state church of a Celtic country), Brighid became central to the spirituality I began to develop.  As a fire goddess, her Imbolc celebration symbolizes the quickening of the earth as the reign of the Caillieach, the crone, recedes under the sun’s (fire) unrelenting return.

As a fire goddess, the blacksmiths worshiped her, as did the housewife with her hearth-fire and the poet, the filid and the bard, roles critical to ancient Celtic society.   Brighid inspired the poets.  Thus, she supported craftspersons, domestic life and the spark of genius that kept kings and the ruling class in check and still gives Ireland fame in letters to this day.  She became associated with fertility, hence the ewe and the lamb in the belly.

In one interpretation of the Great Wheel, the earth goes through three phases:  the first, or the virgin/maiden takes prominence with the beginning of the agricultural year, Imbolc.  The second, the Mother, takes the God as her husband at Beltane (May 1) and reigns over the growing season.  As the harvest comes in the Cailleach, the old woman or crone, takes charge.  The year proceeds in this way through virignity, motherhood and old age; a procession repeated over and over, as this archetypal linking of the year and the maturation of humanity repeats over and over in human society.

On this February 1st, as the business cycle continues its skid, the Great Wheel can teach us that the cyclical nature of human events will right this plunge and prosperity, too, will return.  You might see the business cycle as going through its crone phase, except the crone was a wise woman and as near I can tell this phase of the business cycle represents foolish men.

Time has many puzzling aspects, not the least is its appearance of linearity while we experience, too, and more profoundly, its cycles.  I see the cyclical nature of time as more true to my experience and more hopeful.  The Great Wheel, the natural cycle, does not require a cataclysm at the end to right injustice and imbalance, as do faith traditions invested in chronological time.  Each year each season brings its own opportunities for renewal, for celebration and each season is only that, a season.  In regular succession the next season will come.

I used to close my e-mails with this quote I discovered carved into the Arbor Day Lodge wooden border in its reception atrium:

There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrain of nature–the assurance that dawn comes after night, spring after winter.    Rachel Carson

This is the great and wonderful gift the Great Wheel can bring to your life, if you let it. Continue reading Imbolc: The Great Wheel Turns →

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work

Falling Deeper Into Darkness

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12  bar steady 30.27  0mph  ENE  windchill 12   Samhain

Last Quarter of the Moon of Long Nights

As you can tell by the temperature, we have a heat wave in progress.  12 degrees!  Break out the shorts and t-shirts and sandals.  This is a good old-fashioned Minnesota winter so far and I’m liking it.

I spent this afternoon reading material for part III of Heresy Moves West.  This one will explore what I sense is an emerging new faith, one rooted in the soil of the Midwest and given space by our skies.  It is not unique to us, nor is our embrace of it unique.  What is unique is our location, a place from which this new faith can take wings and begin to test the air of this 3rd millennia after the West focused on Jerusalem.  With 2,000 years of Christianity and 500 or so of reason, we need a new way to view our situation in the universe.

Those of us who live among the wheat fields, corn fields and dairy farms of the Midwest have grown up with this faith attached to our Selves.  The very factors which make the bi-coastal crowd smirk as they fly over over our green land are the ones which give us a birthright understanding of ourSelves as part of, rather than apart from, the natural world.

As we fall deeper into darkness, heading toward the Winter Solstice now only three nights away, our time underground, Persephone-like, reaches it deepest point.  This is a time for meditation and contemplation.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Politics

Star Filled and Wonder Saturated

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-4  bar steady 30.28   0mph SW  windchill -4   Samhain

Waning Gibbous Moon of Long Nights

I have a run of almost 3 weeks with no outside obligations.  This is a time of the year, even when I worked for the Presbytery, that I would stay home, take up a research project or a book I’d wanted to really absorb.  This habit probably started during the Presbytery time because no congregational folk wanted to talk to judicatory people during the Christmas holidays and immediately afterward.  Which was fine with me.

Right now it’s quiet.  It has been dark since about 4:30 PM.  The long nights have begun to swell and take over the rhythm of the day.  This means more silence, more time to enjoy the darkness of mid-winter.  This is a time of year and a natural cycle that draws us all inward.  This inward pull pushes some of us to string up lights, go to multiple parties, perhaps drink to excess, spend money beyond our means.   We’ll wake up sometime in the new year, ought 9 in this case, with a hangover wondering how the season got so out of hand.

The season can be filled with holy nights, silent nights.  Starred filled and wonder saturated nights.  It matters how we come to the season.

Instead of driving in to the Sierra Club meeting tonight I chose to participate by phone, as did all but two of the other legislative committee members.  By the time I got done with my workout and shower, a lassitude crept over me, borne of the tensions and aches of the last couple of days.  If I had driven in, as it turned out, my trip would have taken twice the time of the meeting.  Not very efficient.

My original reason for driving in, to match peoples faces with names, would have been thwarted, too.

As it was, I was on the phone for 45 minutes, took notes, then hung up and went upstairs to read the Story of Edgar Sawtelle.  Without the long drive it felt like I’d cheated.