Category Archives: Holidays

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Wheel, Great Work, Health, Holidays

Be Glad You Exist

Leave a comment

Samhain                                                            Thanksgiving Moon

Thankful.  Grateful.  Still here.

Yes, that’s the  prerequisite to all that follows, my living presence to write these words. And, yes, damn it, I’m grateful to be alive.

When I visited Constanta, Romania a year and a half ago, I went there as a pilgrimage to the place of Ovid’s exile.  This is a city that has Roman (Romania!) roots.  Outside an excellent museum of Roman and Greek antiquities (it was a Greek trading port first.), there was a collection of grave markers.  On one of them was this line:  Be Glad You Exist.  That’s what I would call ur-gratitude.  Thankfulness for living.

It’s where I’ll start.  Beyond consciousness and good health in my own case I’m thankful for the same in Kate, the dogs, family, friends and even a few others.  Our home.  Our buddies and colleagues the bees, the soil and the plants which grow in it, those past and those to come.  The orchard and the trees in our woods.  All the critters, sleeping and active that call it home.

Extending all that in a generally cosmic direction, I am grateful for the physics that allow us to exist at all, the sun for its energy, the planet for its hospitable climate (sorry about that hot pack, Gaia) and the North American continent for its wildness and its cities and towns.  Yes, the suburbs, too.  Even Andover.

Language.  English.  Being able to communicate with each other, even through such a flawed and miraculous medium.  What would life be without language?  Western medicine.  Often maligned, but my fav.  Western civilization.  Also often maligned, but mine and yours.  At least most of you who read this.  And just as worthy a human artifice as anyone else’s.

Of course the internet.  Cyberspace.  What a wonder to an old man raised with bakelite phones, 6 digit phone numbers, a time before tv.  So much.  So much to say thank you for. More than can be expressed in any list, no matter how long.

How about, for example, oxygen?  Or the properties of water?  We are made of stardust, animated elements spun out so long ago at the birth not of our nation, not of our planet, not of our solar system, not of our galaxy, but of our universe.  And now they walk, talk, consider their origin.  How damned amazing is that?

So.  Thanks.

 

Family, Holidays

The Most Unusual Holiday

1 Comment

Samhain                                                                    Thanksgiving Moon

In long ago still Christian days I sought advice from a spiritual director, a Jesuit nun whose name I have forgotten.  I have not forgotten her advice, however.  “Keep a gratitude journal.  All spirituality begins in gratitude.”

Thanksgiving has become a primary, if the not the primary, American holiday.  As such, it is one of the highlights of holiseason, a family focused festival celebrated across religious, class and ethnic lines.   Its emphasis on gratitude, now long unmoored from its ironic relationship to the natives of the East Coast,who reportedly provided the food for the “first Thanksgiving,” enhances it.

It is a holiday with a focus on thankfulness, not getfulness, and as such, might be the most unusual holiday of them all.  We come together with a desire to eat together, of course. Festive banqueting is an ancient way of honoring a god, a king or a queen, a birthday, a national or religious observance, but here that banquet instead honors the land, its fruits, and the relationships which matter to us. It may be  the central American holiday, one more evocative of an American civil spirituality than the guns and bluster 4th of July or even the more narrow celebrations of Labor Day and Memorial Day.  There will be no time in our common life when stopping for a day of thanks will be inappropriate.

 

Family, Feelings, Holidays

Holiseason Rising

Leave a comment

Samhain                                                      Thanksgiving Moon

Can you feel the holiseason spirit rising?  I can.  Presents for Hanukkah lie on the bed ready to go in the truck for their ride to Denver.  Joseph’s coming to Minnesota.  The Byerly’s order will come today.  I’m headed out to Festival for the last of the list.

(Lyon)

Kate’s packed, audio books ready.  Cooler to fill.  Then Grandma will head over the plains and through Nebraska.

Meanwhile I’m closing in on Missing 5.0.  The holiday week should see that put to bed.  Celebration all round.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Memories, Music

Holiseason Begins to Put the Pedal Down

Leave a comment

Samhain                                                              Thanksgiving Moon

We’re in that pre-holiday time when the air begins to take on a certain quality.  It’s part hope for a Thanksgiving (this time) that we both recall and imagine, a desire for an ideal time with family, with busyness, with good food and good memories made.

There are those other times, the times before, when the magazines had turkeys in their ads and the Whitehouse spared a turkey.  This year it will be a Minnesota turkey.  The times when we all had to put on our Sunday clothes even though it was Thursday and drive to an Aunt’s or to Grandma’s or to a friends.  Football and stuffing, a browned turkey and mashed potatoes.  Too many people around a too small table.  That drowsy, sleepy feeling, a tryptophan haze.  The turkey drug.

Those times mesh with hope, give it a flavor, a scent, a sound, a cast.  Those are, for me at least, good memories.  They give the time, this time, a pleasant before hand buzz, a family inflected smile.

This is holiseason.  It has these moments one after the other.  Times when others and the world of commerce and the world of religion and the world of small children all begin to bang into each other, making the world merry.  Yes, it’s chaotic and capitalistic. No doubt of that.  But it’s also fun, filled with good songs and lights.  Gifts and cold weather.  At least here.  Not so much in Singapore and Muyhail.

To all of you headed over the hills and through the woods.  Have fun.  Eat too much.  Laugh a lot.  Drive safely.

 

Cooking, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Wheel, Holidays, Travel

Over the Plains and Through the River

Leave a comment

Samhain                                                               Thanksgiving Moon

Beginning to get that over the river and through the woods feeling.  This coming Sunday we head out for Denver.  Kate discovered, in a drive to Denver that she made this spring, that if she drives, her back doesn’t give her fits.  So, she’ll drive and I’ll watch.  Lot of good book thinking between here and the Rockies.

Holiseason has begun to assert itself more and more.  I’ve heard the occasional Christmas song, seen the articles about Hanukkah and Thanksgiving, been asked what we’re doing for them.  Now the feelings, those old, yet always new feelings, Holiseason feelings have begun to bubble up.  They’re positive for me, though I know they aren’t for a lot of folks.

As a pagan these days, I focus on the lights, the many festivals of light, the Christmas tree, the Yule log, the Thanksgiving medieval banquet, the turn of yet another new year, but reserve my real longing for the Winter Solstice.  It has become my favorite and most significant holiday of the sacred year.  I’ll be writing more about it as it approaches.

Now it’s Thanksgiving.  When growing up in Indiana, we went to my Aunt Marjorie’s for Thanksgiving.  She was the acknowledged queen of the kitchen in the Keaton family universe, consistently turning out great meals.  The kids got the card tables in the family room while the adults had the dining room table.  After the meal, the men would retire to watch football and smoke cigars.

I would read comic books, generally try to huddle in a corner somewhere, usually overwhelmed by the mass of people.  Too many and too little chance to escape.  Even so Thanksgiving was a strong part of the glue that held the Keatons together, me and my 21 first cousins.  It’s now a shared memory, several blocks in the quilt that covers our generation.

Later on Kate and I cooked many Thanksgiving dinners here in Andover, for many different configurations, but those days have waned with the movement of the kids to lands far from here.  So now we pick up and go to Jon and Jen’s who cook in their renovated kitchen.

We’ve done a couple of family Thanksgivings at Lutsen and I hope we can again.

And I don’t even like turkey.  Go figure.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities, Latin, Poetry, Translating Metamorphoses, Weather +Climate, Writing

Everything You Need

Leave a comment

Samhain                                                                                                         Thanksgiving Moon

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
Cicero

I’m set.  The library surrounds me as I write this and the garden is two weeks into its winter slumber.  Cicero and I agree about life’s necessities, books and a place to grow food and flowers.  Between them they service the body and the mind.

It’s a dull, grey November day. Rain dribbles out of the sky, unwilling to commit.  The temperature remains in a warmer trend, 45 today, a trend our weather forecaster says will remain until early December.  I hope so since we’re headed out across the plains a week from tomorrow, exposing ourselves to the wind driven weather coming down, with no topographical resistance, from the Arctic.

Finishing up ModPo and getting off the Latin plateau I had inhabited for many weeks has left me in a satisfied Holiseason state of mind.  Before them Modern and Post Modern ended and the garden got put to bed, the Samhain bonfire held.  So this is a time of endings, as Samhain celebrates, and festival season beginnings.  The unusual confluence of Hanukkah and Thanksgiving means the whole last week of November will be celebratory. In December then we can focus on Yule, the Winter Solstice and the pagan side of Christmas.

In the coming weeks I look forward to finishing Missing’s 5th revision and getting it off to the copy editor, learning Dramatic Pro and using it as I develop Loki’s Children while I continue to work in the new “in” the Latin style that Greg pushed me towards.  This will also be a time when I consolidate my understanding of the Modern and the Post Modern and do some more writing around that, especially as it changes and informs my Reimagining My Faith project.

Reading poetry more regularly will also be part of the next few weeks, too.  I want to continue my immersion in poetry.  One of the ModPo teaching assistants, Amaris Cuchanski, said poetry is the leading edge of consciousness and I believe she’s right.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Around and Around and Around We Go

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                       Samhain Moon

Interesting convergence.  In Ovid today I translated some verses about the silver age in which Jupiter created four seasons from summer, brief spring, winter and autumn.  After finishing this work, I went out and joined Kate, already at work in the garden.  Small pellets of snow fell.

(The Close of the Silver Age by Lucas Cranach the Elder, c. 1527-35)

We went into the orchard.  Kate pulled back the landscape cloth around the remaining trees while I broadcast the fertilizer, sprayed with biotill and then worked them both into the top three inches of soil.  While she replaced the landscape cloth, I shoveled soil, mostly sand, back into two large holes dug by our energetic girls, Vega and Rigel.

At one moment I looked up at a tall Norway pine and felt a kinship with Ovid and those farmers in long ago Latium.  We had similar things to do at similar times of year.

The word annum popped up from today’s translating.  You know, I imagine, that it translates as year, but you might not know that its primary meanings are: a circuit, circular course, periodical return.  In one sense this is obvious of course, but that term we use frequently could orient us not to linear time, as we tend to use it, but to cyclical time.

When I say, I am 66 years old, we tend to think, oh.  Born 66 years from this date.  But that’s not what it really means.  It really means I have experienced a full year 66 times.  The year itself, if we’re true to its Latin roots, is not a one after the other marker of chronos, but a complete set, 4 seasons here in the temperate latitudes, finished and done with each winter, begun anew each spring.  Or whenever you want to break beginning and ending.

We then start over again.  Another year as we often say.  Yes, just so.  Another year.  This time in the next year I’ll be fertilizing the orchard.  As I have this year.  So that moment of apocalypse when the earth becomes changed and brand new?  Spring.  When the earth becomes desolate and barren?  Late fall.  Happened before, will happen again.  Amen.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Darkness Approaches

Leave a comment

Lughnasa                                                            Harvest Moon

The night takes on a different quality as fall approaches.  In my study I’m half below ground with windows opening out at waist level, the lawn sweeps toward me.  An animal safe in a warm burrow, protected from the storm and cold, or, I would be if there were any storm and cold.

(Giovanni Battista Ciolina – Melancholy Twilight (1899)

The change in light, the lower night time temperatures, the scudding clouds like there were today change the seasonal tone from brightness and beaches and growing things to  darker and more forbidding shades.  As this shift deepens and the night begins to overtake the day, as happens at Mabon, the Fall Equinox, most of us feel a bit uneasy, perhaps even a good deal.

By late November and well into December this uneasiness has intensified, perhaps that paleolithic fear that the sun would no longer rise at all, or that it would remain in its pale and weakened state, never again to warm us and encourage the plants.  So we fight back with bonfires and candles and festivities, lamps and decorations, gifts and food, celebration in spite of the vague menace.

Thus, by some wry twist the darkest and bleakest days of the year have the most joy, the most song, the most brave gestures we know.  We will move, around Thanksgiving, into Holimonth, a season stretching from then until Epiphany that features many of the best loved days and nights of the whole year:  Hannukah, Christmas, Posada, Winter Solstice, New Years, Deepavali.

Perhaps I would even go so far as to declare a Holiseason beginning on September 29th, the feast of the archangel Michael and lasting from then right through Epiphany.  All of October, November and December months of special observance with holidays as peaks lifted up from a plateau of enhanced sensibilities that lasts the entire time.  Why not?

Holidays

Just the Two of Us. Watching the Fire

Leave a comment

Summer                                                                  Solstice Moon

Well.  We had a whiz bang 4th here at Artemis Hives and Gardens.  The two of us sat out by the fire, which roared for awhile, ironically on the same day that our neighbor had the fire trucks out for what appears to have been a kitchen fire.

We roasted wienies, had deli salads and a Katy Did It corn relish that goes very well with hot dogs.

Kate bought some super sparklers and couple of fountains.  She set them off.  That was about it.

The fire pit with its iron fire ring reminds me of a state forest campsite and the woods that surround it add to the illusion.  It’s like going away for a fire then being able to sleep in our own bed.  Ideal.

Holidays, US History

Citizen

Leave a comment

Summer                                                                  Solstice Moon

Some heat.  A few flags.  Fireworks.  Gotta be the 4th of July.

In summer my thoughts often turn to our nation, its history, its struggles, its meaning.  Something about ice cream, watermelon on the front step, fried chicken that stirs up thoughts of Bunker Hill, Paul Revere, Antietam, Shiloh, O, Pioneers.  Often I follow those thoughts into books or movies, then at some point later a journey.

Like one I took down to Vicksburg to better understand the Western campaign and the true battle that determined the war.  Or, that time I stopped in Abilene, Kansas to see Eisenhower’s library and later in Independence, Missouri to see Trumans, then Springfield, Illinois where I saw Lincoln’s grave, the historic district, the new library and the village.  Just this year I wandered through Mount Vernon and saw the Washington and Lincoln Monuments.  Again.

This time, this year not so much of a jolt, U.S. history seems dormant for me right now, though the coming of the 4th does nudge me some.  Over the years I’ve been part of the radical left critique of Amerika, cruel hegemon, flawed defender of freedom and liberty.  And most of those critiques were true.  We keep down the poor, set aside people of color and women, too often intervene in other countries when we should stay at home, tending to our bridges and roads and epidemics and children requiring villages.

Yet now, older and more rooted here.  A devoted Midwesterner of some 66 years residence.  Yet now, I find this country my country and I do love it.  No, that does not mean I’ve slapped a love it or leave it bumper sticker on the Rav4.  It simply means that this is my home.  That I am an American, a citizen and a proud of these United States.

If love means unquestioning obedience to the government, then, no, but if love means standing alongside no matter what, without giving up the right to act as a citizen must, then yes.  These are my people and I am of them.

Here’s an interesting look at what it means to be an American now by scholar Terry Eagleton.  Worth the read.