Category Archives: Holidays

Commentary on Religion, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Judaism, Mountains, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

A Task

Leave a comment

Imbolc and the waning crescent of the Shadow Mountain Moon

When I first began reading Art Green’s Radical Judaism, I thought maybe my job would be to think Christianity through from his truly radical, non-supernatural perspective. Look at Christian civilization in the manner of Mordecai Kaplan with Green’s theology as a pathway, a halakha. The way to walk. Couldn’t get any energy up to start. Why?

Ah. I left Christianity behind long ago now. Of course, it still informs me and my life as the Torah informs the life of a Jew whether secular or religious. But, I don’t feel shaped by it in the distinctive manner my friends at CBE exhibit. Even if G-d no longer requires the hyphen, they still bow during the Amidah, wear the kippa, show up for High Holidays. I have no interest in Christmas or Easter services, that old life.

Huh, I thought. That’s weird. I spent all that time in sem, 15 years in the ministry, and I’m a product of Western civilization, profoundly shaped by Christian belief and thought. I like big projects. Why wouldn’t I want to go back and rethink all that?

It came to me slowly. Somewhere in Green’s book, I can’t find it right now and that frustrates me, he casually dismisses neo-paganism. It’s not clear what he meant, whether he’s taking a substantive jab at pantheists from his panentheistic position, or knows the shallow roots of Wiccan’s, witches, and druids. If it’s the latter, I agree with him. Silliness abounds in contemporary pagan practice and what passes for thought.

If it’s the former, he and I are in conversation with each other. In either case though it triggered a realization. I’m a pagan. Maybe not the best word with all its freight, but one I use intentionally. The pagans of the middle ages, rural folk (classical Latin paganus: rustic, villager, rural folk, peasant, unlearned, countryman, bumpkin), held onto their older religious practices and beliefs because the church had a more tenuous connection with them, less power over their daily lives.

In contemporary usage pagan is a very broad umbrella: Wiccans, latter day Druids, Asatru, Dianists, polytheists of many shades all fall under it. There are also pagans, see this page, who use the term much as I do, as a placeholder for a religious position outside the usual suspects of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam as well as outside other traditions, in particular Buddhism, Hinduism, and most shamanisms.

That’s it, I realized. My task is to use the theological tools of Art Green and the civilization leaning thought of Mordecai Kaplan to reconstruct paganism for a contemporary audience. That I have energy for. Stay tuned.



Aging, Art and Culture, Family, Friends, Health, Holidays, Politics, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Travel, US History, Woolly Mammoths

WWMD?

Leave a comment

Winter and the Future Moon

Monday gratefuls: Kate’s feeling better. Stefan and Lonnie on zoom. Tom’s gift of cartoons by Sack. Beau Jo’s pizza, novel and tasty. Driving in the mountains. The three deer I saw on the way to Evergreen, especially the tiny one. The bare rock, the cold streams, the lodgepole and aspen. Steep slopes. Florence and its art.

After a somewhat comical series of no-goes, I gave up on going to Vail to see Lonnie and Stefan. Stefan had a new hip done at the Steadman Clinic. Snow came to Vail on the first two days I offered. Not unusual, but enough to not make me want to do a two hour drive in it. Yesterday, my third choice, was MLK weekend. The second busiest of the entire year for ski traffic. And, Sunday, the Denver Post said, would be the busiest of the four day holiday. So, zoom.

Good to talk to them. Four years ago they decided to learn painting in an atelier in Florence. They’ve become patrons of the school as well as students, spending much of each year in Italy. Now they face an existential choice between remaining most of the year in Florence, where they’ve become part of an international crowd of artists and art students, or returning to the Twin Cities where their family lives. Would be a tough call for me.

The mood here is lighter. After a tough period of dog bites and exhaustion, I’m rested again. Kate’s had some issues, but eliminating tramadol from her daily meds has given her easier breathing. It’s nice to have a respite from angst.

Today’s MLK. I wonder what he’d do right now? Would he organize mass marches in the face of the rising right wing threat? Would he stay away from such events as the pro-gun rally in Richmond, Virginia today?

Will the MLK holiday become a neo-nazi, white supremacist rally day? A day to show “racial solidarity” and protest for the right to gun ownership. IDNK.

His dream, MLK’s, is mine and probably yours. I’ve always been soothed by his quote from Theodore Parker, Unitarian clergy and anti-slavery activist, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Still am though this seems to be a time when it’s not bending very much in the direction of justice.

Beyond the Boundaries, Commentary on Religion, Family, Friends, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Mountains, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Painting, Plants, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Merry, Merry Meet

Leave a comment

Winter and the Gratitude Moon, waning sliver

Christmas gratefuls: the silence on Black Mountain Drive. Black Mountain itself. The stars above Black Mountain. Shadow Mountain. Our home. This loft, a gift from my Kate, now five years ago, and still wonderful. Kate and her increased health. The sacred side of Christmas. The pagan (also sacred) side of Christmas.

When I went out for the paper this morning, it was dead quiet. No dogs barking. No cars or trucks on the road. No mechanical noises. The sky was the deep black of the cosmic wilderness, lit only by bright lights: planets, stars, galaxies. Silent night, holy night.

Those shepherds out there tending their flock, sheep shuffling around. A baa and a bleat here and there. Visitors on camel back. All that singing. As imagined, probably not a quiet night.

Here though, this dark Christmas morn. The deer are asleep. The elk, too. Pine martens, fishers, foxes, mountain lions might be prowling, but part of their inheritance is silence. Black bears went to sleep long ago. Millions of insects are quiet, too. The microbes in the soil, the growing lodgepole pines, the aspen organisms, their clonal neighborhoods, bulbs, corms, rhizomes all alive, all quiet.

Silent night, holy night. Yes. Sacred night, holyday night. Yes.

I read this long essay on consciousness by the president and chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. In it he says this:

” Yes, there’s this ancient belief in panpsychism: “Pan” meaning “every,” “psyche” meaning “soul.”…basically it meant that everything is ensouled…if you take a more conceptual approach to consciousness, the evidence suggests there are many more systems that have consciousness—possibly all animals, all unicellular bacteria, and at some level maybe even individual cells that have an autonomous existence. We might be surrounded by consciousness everywhere and find it in places where we don’t expect it because our intuition says we’ll only see it in people and maybe monkeys and also dogs and cats. But we know our intuition is fallible…”

Even silence, since it presumes an awareness of noise, is a proof of consciousness. All that consciousness around us here on Shadow Mountain. The trees and wild animals, grasses and microbes, dogs and humans, all here, all experiencing a self.

I take panpsychism a bit further than Koch with the kabbalistic idea of ohr, the divine spark, resident in every piece of the universe and the process metaphysical view of a vitalist universe creatively moving toward greater complexity.

This waking up mornin’ we can see the baby Jesus as an in your face message that, yes, of course we are holy. Yes, of course the universe sings to us from the depths of the sea, the top of the redwoods, and the person or animal across from us this morning. And, to get downright personal, from within the deep of our own soul.

Great Wheel, Holidays, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Cheery, eh?

Leave a comment

Samain and the Gratitude Moon

Monday gratefuls: The Evergreen Chorale and their Season of Light concert at Colorado School of Mines. The Undertones, a choral group from Northwestern. The Denver Children’s Choir. The folks who built 470, 285, 6. The geology that built the Front Range. The snow last night. All the brave lights and the coming darkness.

Haven’t mentioned it much this year, but we’re in holiseason. The Evergreen Chorale’s holiday concert. The trees lit with colored lights up and down Black Mountain, Brook Forest Drive. The not-so quiet desperation of brick and mortar retailers. Dreidels and menorahs. We’ve passed through Samain (almost), dia de muertos, all souls, Thanksgiving, Divali, the Posada, most of Advent. Some big ones still ahead: the Winter Solstice, Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanza, New Years, Epiphany.

Here in the mid to northern latitudes the gradual lengthening of the darkness has created fear and some mad ideas. Like, daylight saving time, for example. Some of this fear has gone into each Christmas light, each Divali light, each menorah lit for the holidays. We want to say: We are human. We can fight the darkness. Beg Sol to return with sympathetic magic.

Here’s the thing though. We can’t fight the darkness. No matter how many bonfires we ignite, how many strings of lights we hang, how many courageous songs we sing to the many gods we hope will bring us out of the darkness, the Winter Solstice comes. Its darkness compels us to consider the so-far away apocalypse, the one we know is coming.

About a billion years from now Sol’s luminosity will have grown bright enough to boil our oceans and disperse our atmosphere. Well before our star expands into the red giant phase, much further along in its lifespan, Earth will no longer be inhabitable. This is the end, my friends, and the winter solstice reminds us of the forever darkness.

Will humanity have migrated far enough away to survive? Hard to say. Most of the sci-fi ship propulsion systems are very, very far from practical. Maybe we can get far enough away by hopping from home to home: Mars, then Enceladus, then ? Maybe not. Perhaps this strange, weird experiment, life, will wink out then, never to be repeated.

No Christmas lights, no Divali lamps, no menorah will save us then. Of course the personal apocalypse of each of us alive now will have long passed, so the Winter Solstice can remind us of that, too. We are temporary, fragile, unique, wonderful. Why can’t that be enough?

Aging, Cooking, Family, Holidays, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Weather +Climate
Leave a comment

Samain and the Gratitude Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Jon and Ruth skiing. It was a powder day and Ruth said, “I needed that.” Jon’s 51 years. Seoah’s vegetable pancakes. The cattle that gave us the delicious New York Strip steaks for Jon’s birthday meal. The baker that made the carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. The laughter around the table last night.

Jon’s birthday was on the 10th, but we celebrated last night since Ruth’s play was that evening. I’d post pics but I’m still struggling with downloading pictures from my host server using FTP. It’s simple, they say. Oh, yeah, I say. Someday I’ll get it.

We got a bit of snow yesterday. When it came, it came straight down like rain in the Midwest. It still amazes me since I can’t recall, though it must have happened, a no-wind snowfall in Minnesota. This type of snow is so beautiful. It comes down quietly and layers itself on roads and roofs and the land. Giving us white trees, snow covered rock, enough snow for skiing, snowballs, snowpersons.

Ruth said skiing in powder is harder physically, but way more fun. She pointed to her hip and said, “It was up to here most of the time. It’s more difficult to turn.” “All that resistance?” “Yes.”

Gabe was here while Jon and Ruth skied. Family. And friends. Family first, SeoAh says. An Asian tradition for sure. Not so sure about the U.S. Does wealth make family less “first”? That is, is family first essentially welfare in a society where there may be no other? My guess is that wealth decreases the gluons that create strong extended families. Doesn’t eliminate them, but makes them less effective. What do you think?

Today I have to finish my work on tzedek. Justice. And, do a painting about hope. Later.

Art and Culture, Asia, Commentary on Religion, Family, GeekWorld, Holidays, Memories, Third Phase, Travel

Always Something to Celebrate

Leave a comment

Samain and the Gratitude Moon

Thursday (Thanksgiving) gratefuls: Annie, who came yesterday. The snow on Tuesday. The capon that gave its life for our meal. The winds that howl through the forests this morning. Orion, faithful friend and his good dog, Canis Major. The folks who designed and built our Rav4’s, especially Ruby, whose AWD makes her surefooted. Those who care for them at Stevinson Toyota. And, on this day in particular, for all those who sustain traditions and holidays, moments out of ordinary time.

I asked brother Mark and sister Mary what Thanksgiving, a very American holiday, looks like in lands Asian and Arab. Mark said Thanksgiving probably got celebrated in Aramco compounds. Here’s Mary’s reply from Singapore:

“The big hotels serve Thanksgiving dinner & it needs to be reserved way in advance; Brits have Christmas dinner which is also involves Turkey so food is authentic- with all the trimmings- here Halloween and St Patrick’s Day☘️are also widely celebrated- in addition to Asian festivals- so pretty much there is always something to celebrate“

Mary has made this comment, always something to celebrate, before. When I visited Singapore for the first time in 2004, I was there the first week of November. Christmas decorations lined Orchard Road, the big commercial street. It was also U.S. election week, so the American Club had a big breakfast spread so we could watch the returns live. You know how that turned out. We weren’t celebrating. (though right now GW Bush looks like a political genius)

These paled in comparison to the Arab quarters celebration of post-fast Ramadan. We found shisha smokers lounging on the sidewalks and had a good Arab meal, probably lamb and rice, but I don’t recall.

Little India had a huge arc of lights over its main road marking the holiday of Diwali, the festival of lights, also underway. There were stalls selling sweets, Diwali lights, and Hindu related religious artifacts. I bought a Kali medallion, a Vishnu and Shiva medallion. We had a vegetarian meal in a Tamil restaurant where we ate with our hands. Our right ones.

Not sure whether it was Diwali related or not, but much later that night, in the early a.m., Mary and I went to the oldest Hindu temple in Singapore, Sri Mariamman Temple, built in 1827. According to the Temple’s website the firewalking was on October 20th this year.

Due to changes in population over time it happens to sit now in the midst of Chinatown. There were lines blocks long of men in various sorts of clothing, all holding branches of some kind and, if I recall correctly, lemons or limes. At the very end of these line were a few women.

I stopped to talk with some of the women. “Oh, yes. Now we can go to the firewalking, too. But they didn’t want us. We insisted.” This was about 3 am or so. Mary and I walked along the lines of devotees waiting for their turn.

We got to the temple and watched folks walk across the bed of coals, then into a milk bath, and finally into the arms of priests and fellow firewalkers. The moist night air, the early morning quiet, and this strange (to my eyes) sight is a special memory for me. Afterward, Mary and I had Chinese food at a big hotel.

Ramadan, Diwali, Christmas, firewalking, and the American election. It was my introduction to Asia and underlines Mary’s there’s always something to celebrate.

Aging, Art and Culture, Cooking, Family, Great Wheel, Holidays, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

A landmark day

Leave a comment

Samain and the Fallow Moon

7 degrees and snowing here on Shadow Mountain. Means I must have a doctor’s appointment today. Yep, COPD follow up with Lisa. I’m interested in staging. I want to have a prognosis and a plan for what I need to do to manage this disease. Perhaps a referral to a pulmonologist. It’s been about two months since my diagnosis.

Yesterday was a landmark day here. We started prepping Kate’s sewing room for her return to this domestic art form. Gathered up cloth, moved embroidery thread, organized papers, put the repaired Bernini back on its table, cleared off her work surface. Exciting to see her willing and able.

Gonna need to cook Thanksgiving dinner. Thought I had SeoAh set up to do it, but turns out they won’t arrive until the day before. She’ll do her Korean holiday meal on Friday or Saturday. At least this Thanksgiving I feel able to do it. Last Thanksgiving, with Kate barely back from rehab, I didn’t. We catered from Tony’s Market.

Capon. I love capon, don’t like turkey. I’ll handle the bird, Kate’s going to organize side dishes and parcel them out to other cooks like SeoAh and Ruth. I might make a stuffing. Not sure yet.

We’ll have a full house with the Georgia three and Annie staying here. Jon, Ruth, Gabe will come up for the meal from Aurora. 8. Just right.

Painting. Right now I’m trying to recreate Mark Rothko paintings. I want to imitate him, figure out how he created the mood, the emotional resonance. At some point I’ll go off on my own, but right now I want to learn from one of my favorites. Autodidact color field painter. That’s me.

Aging, Great Wheel, Holidays, Original Relation, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Time To Go

Leave a comment

Samain and the Fallow Moon

The time clock, the early morning sky, has moved Orion further west. He will move below the horizon only to show up later in the Winter night. With the time shift his movement has become more obvious. I’m up at 4:30 still, but Orion knows not of saving time, only moving as the earth turns, all the while, too, rattling around our star, Big Sol, at speed. This timepiece is all we need; if only we could look up, see what we’re looking at.

I’m comfortable with clocks that tell of a broader version of time, a wider one. This is Samain, so we know the world moves toward darkness, cold. The Solstice of Winter. I could live with no clock, riding along with the seasonal changes. That would be fine. I do not need time. We are always in the moment, in a season, in a particular place. Enough.

Though of course others would counter this. How would I know when to zoom with my buddies? How would I make breakfast with Alan at the Lakeshore Cafe? I say I would know the same way the dogs know when to eat, when to get up, when to get their evening meds. I would say the same the way the cows on Bill Schmidt’s farm knew when to be milked. Why confuse all this knowing with long hands and short hands, digital numbers?

Life begins. We do not need to know the time, only the moment of slipping out of the watery world and into the airy one. Life ends. We will not know the time. The artificial measurements all cease to have meaning then. In between the schools, designed with early factories in mind, have bells and clocks and start times and end times. We go there to learn the constrictions, the tyranny of clocks. And, we learn well. Too well if you ask me. But, you do not.

I prefer the liminal spaces, another way of knowing the moment. When dawn breaks through the clouds turn pink over Black Mountain. I thought, oh, blue sky. Sky is male. Blue for boys. The clouds are pink. Does that connect to girls somehow? Couldn’t see it.

Or, as the sky bruises toward evening, twilight falls. Time to slow down, ease into the rest. No one needs a smart watch to know dawn or twilight.

What about the calendar? Easier, probably, to make notches on a tree branch. Day 1. Day 2. Day 43. Day 350. As Emerson said, the days are gods, so the calendar is their temple.

I could celebrate my birthday on the first morning that Orion is fully in the sky. Or on the new moon after the first big freeze. You could choose a marker for yourself. I’d agree with you.

Tradition is just peer pressure from the dead. (a facebook meme) All this fascination with dates and times, years and months, just peer pressure from the dead. We could work out our lives under other methods. Think of the billions who’ve died before us who did just that. It’s possible.

My stomach, for example, has sent a breakfast signal. That growly sound. Think I’ll replace seven o’clock with that growl.

Aging, Asia, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Bring Out Your Dead

Leave a comment

Samain and the Fallow Moon

The Feast day of All Souls. The Christian version of Samain. Diluted from the original with its tension between the dead/faery realm and the living world. In the Christian version All Souls are those faithful now departed from this plane. It attempts to place a limit, a passport on those dead we know. Only the faithful.

Not so the ancient Celts. They knew both faithful and unfaithful (in whatever way that term might have meaning to them) can return, impact our this wordly lives. Tomorrow on dia de los muertos the Mexicans and Latin Americans remind us again of the Celtic knowing: they, the dead, are here. Those who loved us and those who wished us harm. Those who were indifferent to us and those who desired us. Both. All. Not just those with acknowledged acceptance of creed and savior.

The Chinese festival of hungry ghosts is the inverse of the Christian All Souls, imagining a time when certain dead who’ve committed evil return with an appetite for bad deeds. It is celebrated in the 7th lunar month of the Chinese and Vietnamese calendars.

Contrary to what seems true, all of these celebrations imply, the dead do not leave us. Rather, they remain puissant, able to impact our lives for good and for ill. We know this whether we agree with the metaphysics of the various celebrations or not. That parent who loved you. The one who treated you with contempt. That aunt who sent you books. The friend who knew you well. They do not leave you. And they return at certain times, reminding you you were loved, or held in contempt, or known.

How are your dead remembered, puissant in your life? Do you ever set aside time to visit with them, to let them enter your life consciously? Even the frightening ones, the ones who disturbed and disturb your life need attention. Otherwise they work in the shadows of your life.

Aging, Beyond the Boundaries, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Poetry, Third Phase

Samain 2019

Leave a comment

The Wheel has turned full round again. Back now at Summer’s End, Samain. In very ancient times the Celts only had two seasons: Samain and Beltane. The fallow season and the growing season. Beltane on May 1st marked the start of the agricultural year and Samain its end. Later they added Imbolc and Lughnasa when celebration of equinoxes and solstices became more common. Imbolc, February 1st lies between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox while Lughnasa, August 1, is between the Summer Solstice and the Fall Equinox.

The Celts did not begin their year at Beltane, but at Samain, the start of the fallow season. Today. Happy New Year to all of you. Especially to those of you whose heart, like mine, beats to the rhythm of Mother Earth’s changes. And, I would add, to Father Sun’s constancy during her changes.

Rosh Hashanah begins the human new year for Jews as the growing season comes to an end. Michaelmas, September 29th, the feast day of the Archangel Michael, is Rudolf Steiner’s springtime of the soul. It’s not as strange as it may at first sound to begin the New Year in the fall after gathering in the crops.

This was the season in pre-modern times when the flurry of growing, gathering, fishing, hunting that marked the warmer months slowed down or ended. Families would have more time together in their homes. Visiting each other was easier. Time would stretch out as the night’s lengthened, making outdoor work difficult, if not impossible.

This is the season of the bard, the storyteller, the folk musician and it begins with the thinning of the veil between this world and the other world. Harvest and slaughter have the paradoxical affect of sustaining life by taking life, necessary, but often sad. Our need for the lives of plants and other animals reveals the fragile interdependence of our compact with life.

The veil thins. Those of the faery realm and the realm of the dead are close as the growing season ends. The Mexican and Latin American day of the dead and the Christian all souls day point to the same intuition, that somehow life and its afterwards are closest to each other now.

I’m recalling Gertrude and Curtis Ellis. Grandpa Charlie Keaton and Grandma Mabel. Uncle Riley, Aunt Barbara, Aunt Marjorie, Aunt Roberta. Lisa. Ikey. Aunt Ruth. Uncle Rheford and his wife. Uncle Charles. Grandma Jennie. Grandpa Elmo. And so many, many others extending back in time to England, Wales, Ireland. Before that as wanderers up out of Africa, those without whose lives I would not have had my own. Nor you yours.

There are, too, friends and their loved ones. The members of my high school class who have died. Regina, wife of Bill.

The Romantics say it best for me. Here’s the first few lines of Thantopsis by William Cullen Bryant:

     To him who in the love of Nature holds   
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks   
A various language; for his gayer hours   
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile   
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides   
Into his darker musings, with a mild   
And healing sympathy, that steals away   
Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts   
Of the last bitter hour come like a blight   
Over thy spirit, and sad images   
Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,   
And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,   
Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;—   
Go forth, under the open sky, and list   
To Nature’s teachings, while from all around—
Earth and her waters, and the depths of air—
Comes a still voice—
                                       Yet a few days, and thee   
The all-beholding sun shall see no more   
In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,   
Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears,   
Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist   
Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim   
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again…