Category Archives: Great Wheel

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel

Spring Ephemerals

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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.

Art and Culture, Great Wheel, Woolly Mammoths

Tea Master for a Day

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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.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Travel

So, This Guy Trips and Falls in the Ocean

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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, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Our Land and Home

A Sacrament From Mother Earth

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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, Our Land and Home

A Sixty Degree Temperature Swing

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24  87%  21%  0mph  SSW  bar29.96  steady  Winter

           Waning Gibbous Winter Moon

As the winter moon wanes, a warm up heads our way.  Tomorrow the temperature will hit 40.  That’s a sixty degree swing within the week.  Not unusual for Minnesota, but impressive anyhow.  I’ve read that we have the most significant temperature and weather type fluctuations of anywhere on earth, though Siberia is similar.  That’s Siberia.  As in the place to which you were exiled as to the lonliest and most inclement place on earth from Moscow.  One of the most inclement places on earth.  So….

On this point Paul Douglas, local weather sage, whose long term eye is better than his short term one, has a website up that is worth a visit, www.climatespot.com. I’ve added it to the blogroll, too.

The sun shines today and small dimples have begun to show up at the base of trees, shrubs and the winter remnants of last year’s flower garden.  As the weather warms, the snow sinks away first at the point where something that can warm up meets the ground.  I hope that this warm up will bring a fresh snowfall, one that will fill in the dimples and freshen up the sagging snow.  It looks, and feels, like early March, deceptive though.  In March I can look out the window, notice the same changes and get the feeling, as I did momentarily this morning, plants have begun to stir underneath, that buds will open on trees and maybe a few early daffodils and the bloodroot will break the ground.  In March that is a fond hope, one with the chance of reality in a month or so, two at most.  In late January, not true.  February can have cold and snow like January.  March often has big snow, but the snow doesn’t last.  That feeling today only leads to dis-ease.  It is not a hope that can sustain itself in the near term future.

I continue my study of Taoism, look for some new additions to the Taoism pages. 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel

A Night of Moon Shadows

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-11 61% 16% 0mph  WSW  bar30.34 windchill-11  Winter

                 Full Winter Moon

It is, again, a night of moon shadows, crisp in outline.  In its reflection of the sun’s light moon as mirror gives us a cool, silvered glow for the dark time.  Stripped of its life giving powers, this light instead comes to us as a pure light, with no other purpose than to illuminate.  It is a deep mystery, the moon.  Its light casts fairy dust on trees and shrubs, rocks and snow drifts, otherwise common in appearance during the day, but in the moonlight, marvelous wonderful.  It also pulls us, drags us a bit on our cosmic journey, sloshes our waters.  The moon’s magic spell cast over millennia of human imagination remains the same, strong.

A couple of days ago I signed up for what is in essence a correspondence course in Taoism.  I have had my second lesson from Teacher Jiahan and he has already clarified some things and created questions about others.  This is a five course package so at the end I should have a decent introduction.  Taoism is an ancient trail, by definition.  The Tao is the Way, but the Way that can be known is not the Way.  Teacher Jiahan says this well-known first line of the Tao Te Ching actually means that the Way is not fixed or rigid, since a central tenet of Taoism is the ever changing nature, of, well, nature.  It is the nature of nature to change. 

The smells of jacaranda, plumeria, gardenia and suntan lotion come to me know.  The smell of moist earth and ozone, leis thrown over newcomers, smiles.  All this plus the memories of heiaus, volcanoes, whales, surfers, fish, meals beside the Pacific, quiet time away from the office.  Not far away now. 

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel

Not a Good Sign

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-6  68%  29%  2mph  WNW  bar30.24  steep rise  windchill-8  Winter

                              Full Winter Moon

“Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.” – Albert Camus

When I went out to get the paper this morning, the full winter moon again hugged the horizon, this time a bright silver coin visible through the bare trees of our woods to the west.  Our paper comes, like most of us in the ‘burbs, to a rectangular box below our mailbox, perched on the road so both paper delivery and mail delivery can happen from the seat of a vehicle. 

The trash man cometh at about the same time I goeth to get the paper.  As I stood and watched, the trucks long robotic arm moved out and away from the truck, gripped our black plastic trash container, moved a bit further out, then swept up and over the truck, inverting our container in mid-air causing the lid to fly open and the trash to spill out, white plastic bags full, into the maw of the truck.  The process reversed; I waved at the trash man as he pulled away, grabbed onto the handle and pulled the container on its ridiculous plastic wheels up the 100 foot incline of our driveway.  It scrunched in the below zero temperatures as it rolled and slid behind me.

On the paper’s front page I could see a picture of our central banker, Ben Bernanke, with his head in his hands.  Not a good sign.

Though I’ve done it less than Kate in recent months, getting the newspaper in the morning is an immersion in the weather and season at a point when it all seems fresh, just as dawn begins to break.  It is a meditation, at least for me, since I do it half asleep and therefore more open to the subtle messages of partially hidden moon, the screech of snow and the bite of the wind as it blows across my ungloved hands.

This morning finds me at work on a safari tour for 2nd graders.  2nd graders are great; they respond and most without an inner censor.  I plan to use:  Moche pelican, Benin leopard, (the mummy, because the teacher wants it), the Cambodian lion, Corot’s deer nibbling leaves in a tree, Copley’s Fishing Party, Gaugin’s Under the Pandanus, Picasso’s Baboon and, perhaps the installation of children’s photographs.  Also today I’ll plan a calligraphy tour for 4th graders who’ve used ink, inkstones and brushes while learning brush painting and calligraphy.  Both should be fun.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel

Transcendentalism and the NFL Playoffs

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-5  61%  17%  0mph W  bar30.64  Windchill-5  Winter

     Waxing Gibbous Winter Moon

Got out the discussion materials for the religious influence on art session with the docent book club, March 17th.  That’s one item finished.

While I watched first the Patriots beat the Chargers and, then, the New York Giants beat the Packers, I read snatches of material I printed out about transcendentalism.  Gotta admit, I’ve had a backward idea of it for a long time, unless I learned it once and forgot it.  Always possible, how would I know?  Here’s the backward part. I thought the transcendent was about leaping the surly bonds of earth and heading for the Platonic/Gnostic heavens.  Nope.  It was about opposing the empiricism and rationalism of John Locke, et al.  Transcendental refers to the Kantian notion that there are important a priori structures in the mind that allow it to function at all.  This rules out the empiricist idea that our understanding (reason) works only on data brought to the mind through the senses.  First, there is the mind and its structures like time and space that order and create intelligibility with sensory data.  Besides, Kant believed that we can never touch  reality, the ding an siche, the thing in itself, since all we ever really know are the data our senses bring to us; in other words we (our mind) never reaches the source of the sensory data which are secondary to the thing in itself.

There is, of course, much more to the debate and the idea, but getting this straight will help as I write a presentation on Transcendentalism for Groveland UU.  By happenstance I also read today an article about Shinto in the work of Japanese anime artist Miyazaki published in the journal, Religion and Popular Culture.  The close correlation between Transcendentalist treatment of nature and Shintoism was so obvious it took my breath away. Likewise, if we add Taoism into the mix we have a sort of triad of nature focused faiths that I think speak profoundly to our current reality.

The Giants/Packers game had my attention the whole way. (I read during the commercials.)  The two teams played more or less evenly for four quarters, though the Giants looked better.  With the score tied at the end of regulation the Packers won the toss and elected to receive.  Favre threw an interception, then Eli Manning took the Giants down to the field for a shot at a 47 yard field goal.  Tynes, the Giants field goal kicker, had missed two shorter kicks in the fourth quarter.  He hit it.  And the crowd went wild.

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

A Gospel for These Heavens and This Earth

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-10  59% 23%  0mph  WSW bar30.36  steep rise windchill-12  Winter

              Waxing Gibbous Winter Moon

How low will it go?  Pretty low.  These are the days for staying inside, watching movies, drinking hot chocolate, reading and studying.  I’ll do all these tomorrow.

Driving into the MIA this week, on Monday and then again today, I saw sundogs.  A sundog creates a rainbow like lens, in this case pointing toward the west.  As I understand the presence of a sundog indicates ice crystals in the air which act as a prism.   Just checked, that’s right.  Also, it says they always form at 22 degrees on either side of the sun. 

Both days an earth centered faith was on my mind, as it often is these days, in fact, these last few years.  It is not, perhaps, most accurate to say earth centered, since the  sundog itself is a good reminder that any faith which grounds itself in the material reality of this world also relies, for life itself, on the heat and energy received from the sun.  So, I don’t know, perhaps a solar system centered faith.  The earth’s orbit around the sun orchestrates the seasons and the moon pulses the oceans through bays and onto beaches with tidal flows.  Even a rudimentary understanding of the creation of the solar system acknowledges the intimate nature of our relationship to other planets that share Sol.  So, there’s a puzzle here in terms of where to focus, but I don’t think the parameters are much wider than the solar system, although there is the whole star formation, interstellar dust cloud thing which makes us part of the ongoing galactic reality. Even so, those relationship are distant both in distance and in terms of direct affect, if any on our daily lives, where Sol makes our life possible and its planets are our neighbors.

Anyhow, more thoughts on the notion of Ge-ology.  What I might write, rather than a Ge-ology, is a gospel for these heavens and this earth, a faith focused on the intricate and delicate and complex interdependence between and among life and the inanimate yet critical context in which it exists; a celebration of the wonderful and the awesome we experience each day.  Our heart beats.  The winds blow.  A lover or a child smiles.  The sun warms our face.  We recall times that seem long ago; we think and imagine.  The stars shine.  Snow falls.  These are miracles which do not require walking on water, a Pure Land or a night ride to Jerusalem.  No exodus or burning bush. 

Gospel means good news.  I see this faith as good news for all humankind and for all living creatures on our planet.  It means we can turn our face toward each other and our hands toward the earth in love, not lust. 

As I see it, this is the ur-faith, the one prior to all the others.  It came naturally to indigenous communities through faith traditions like Taoism, Shintoism, Native American faiths, the faith of those who painted Lascaux and who erected Stonehenge.  Are all these the same, no, of course not; are they all similar in their insistence on loving attention to the reality within which we dwell and move and have our being? Yes.  This is the ur-faith because it was one we all know in our deep heart; it is not exclusive, if you want to follow the path of this ancient faith and the way of Jesus or Buddha or Shiva or Mohammad, there is no conflict. 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel

And then I knew: earth is the “Blessed Sacrament,” and always has been.

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28 93% 25% 0mph ESE bar 29.66 steady  windchill27  Yuletide

            Waning Crescent of the Cold Moon

We have come to the Twelfth night of Yuletide.  Epiphany is tomorrow and tonight is the end of the Yuletide season.  Our neighbors, the Perlicks, are Orthodox Christians.  They celebrate Christmas according to the old liturgical calendar which put the nativity on the same day as the Epiphany.  We bought cheese, bread and wine for their Christmas gift today at the grocery store.

Tips for the day

Preparing for Twelfth Night: For generations, at least since medieval times, Epiphany has been the day the season of Christmas traditionally comes to an end. A final night of feasting and merriment, gift-giving in some cultures to echo the gift-giving of the Three Kings, plays and mummery that echoed ancient ways. Then the decorations come down and we set forth into the new year.

And in a custom dating back to at least to the 12th century, and possibly as far back as Saturnalia, a King Cake is baked, containing a pea or a bean. This traditional continues in New Orleans with King Cakes baked from now through Mardi Gras (February 5 this year). Candlegrove contains one such recipe, here are others.

Next year I want to be more intentional about two seasonal things:  celebrating Yule and sending holiday gifts in time for New Years.  Both will reduce stress and deepen the occasion for me.

Here is an interesting paragraph from MythingLinks, by Kathleen Jenks.  It tells of her spiritual journey, which feels, and has felt for some time, a lot like my own.  The whole essay gives the context:  

And then I knew: earth is the “Blessed Sacrament,” and always has been. When Jesus, born in Bethlehem (bet lehem, “house of bread”), later took bread from earth’s threshed grain and wine from earth’s fermented grapes, and said, “This is my body which will be broken for you…this is my blood which will be shed for you,” there was no transubstantiation after all. That would have been an unecessary extra step. I think he meant it literally. Like the ancient Egyptian male earth-god, Nun, I think Jesus was saying that he is earth, and all that comes from it — thus, the wheat, the grapes, the olives, the maples, the sparrows, the fishes are literally his body and blood. They are, and always have been, of the substance of the divine, manifesting some 2000 years ago on the temporal plane as a specific male, Jesus, who was Earth’s emanation, avatar, deva, or emissary, for only a few decades, but now, since he has been “transubstantiated” back into the earth which birthed him, earth has grown as anguished as he once was — torn, abused, polluted, ravaged, broken and bleeding-out at a perilous rate.