Category Archives: Writing

Family, Great Work, Writing

What Should I Do?

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30  bar rises 30.00  1mph  windchill 28   Samhain

Waning Gibbous Dark Moon

Kate is my wife, friend and partner.  I had a conversation with her this morning.

“Kate,” I said, “I want to do something substantial before I shuffle off this mortal coil. (Dad used that phrase a lot.  I don’t  know where he got it.)”

She smiled and waited, her face turned a bit up to ease the strain on her neck.

“It’s not that I don’t like my life and what I do with it.  I enjoy diverse things that require different skills.  I’ve accepted that’s the life likely to be lead by a valedictorian.  Good at many things, deep in none.  Still.  I’d like to work on and complete a substantial writing project.”

“What’s your question?” she asked.

“What should I do?” She’s good at answering questions like this.  Most people are not, but I trust her and have trusted on these matters for years.

“Lake Superior.  That’s the first thing that popped into my mind,”  she said, “We could have monthly Lake Superior meetings.  Get a large paper pad and work on the project at least once a month.  We could make a point of going once or twice a year to different parts of the (true) north shore and  pay close attention to it for a week or so.”

“Thanks,” I said, “That’s what I needed.  Now I’m going to go get groceries.”

On the drive over I considered her suggestion.  It was a good one.  We could work on it as partners.  I have a shelf full of books and two large file drawers filled with information on Lake Superior.

A few years ago I started in earnest on an ecological history of Lake Superior.  I made three trip around the lake, visiting local historical societies as I went, purchasing books and making notes.  Taking picture.  I made notes, created an outline and a research plan, dug up many good websites.  I still have all this material.

I may have stalled the first time around because I’d made my objective both too specific and inflexible.  Lake Superior as myth, as geological feature, as water, as story, as an expression of a coming zeitgeist are all rich avenues to explore.  Painting, music, lore.  Some mix of these, positioning Lake Superior at the heart of the continent and the center of a worldview.  Something along those lines.

Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Writing

Right Regrets

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62  bar rises 29.84  0mpn NEE dew-point 61  sunrise 6:29  sunset 29.84  Lughnasa

Waning Crescent of the Corn Moon

“Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.” – Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller.  Once married to Marilyn Monroe.  A right regret?  Who knows.

His point seems apt.  Until scientists convince us we do not have free will (another time), all we have in life are the choices we make.  Since the world and its manifold dynamics function chaotically (thought not without a kind of order), making choices that reflect our true values and our authentic Selves are the best we can do.  Results have so much to do with accidents of birth, i.e. man, woman, white, black, Latino, Asian, African, poor parents, middle class parents, rich parents, country of origin:  USA, Namibia, Brazil, Bangladesh, France, Georgia, era: middle ages, reformation, 19th century, 23rd century, not to mention genetic endowments and psychological environment, the crucial forks in the road for each individual life.

This reality gives Taoism a special resonance for me.  Conforming ourselves to the movement of heaven means recognizing all these various factors as they come to a point in an individual life, our life.  Attunement rather than atonement.  We scan the heavens, using the I Ching, the Tao Te Ching, our minds and discern where to adapt and where to use the times as leverage for our choices.  Even a perfectly attuned Taoist, a sage, may have no result in their life if the times and the heavens have no room for their ambitions.

leaves.jpg

Thus, we can only choose.  Our choices, not the results, define our regrets.  If we choose paths consistent with our values and our authentic Selves, then we will have only the right regrets.   Why?  Because we will have not betrayed who we are and we  will not have betrayed those values we clasp to our hearts.  The results come from the movement of the heavens as  our choices either align with them or bump into their hard reality.

It may be that I have added one step too many.  If we align ourselves with the Tao, the movement of heaven, then our values may be of no importance.  If a value serves to set one in conflict with the movement of heaven, then, if I understand the Tao, it can force one out of alignment with the Tao.  This can violates conforming ourselve to the movement of heaven.

This is what I mean when I say life does not need meaning, it is meaning; life does not need purpose, it is purpose.

Faith and Spirituality, Literature, Writing

Dark Energy

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67  bar rises 30.17  0mph NNE dew-point 58  sunrises 6:15  sunset 8:19

Whole Corn Moon

“We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and winter, we stand by the old; reformers in the morning, conservers at night.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

One of the beauties of Emerson is his immersion in the rhythms of the natural world.   Any farmer, any gardener, even any denizen of the farmer’s markets has a visceral sense of the way human activity changes with the seasons, at least in temperate latitudes.  Once the growing season begins, and for a bit before it does, our attention begins to move outside.  At first we watch temperatures, frost dates and the warming of the soil.  Then, we begin to watch for plant emergence, the ephemerals.  Once spring is in full gear with last frost date past, the growing season begins in earnest.  This means we are outside, working.  In this work we express, as Emerson subtly suggests,  our confidence as changers of the world.  We plant corn here and corn grows.  We plant tulips there and color blossoms.

Then, when the all the plants save the ancient firs and pines have begun to die back and the vegetables have given their harvest, we turn back toward the inside, reading and crafts and puttering in the workshop perhaps, or focusing on our work for pay.  As the nights grow longer, as they do even now, we light our fires and gather in our modern caves, lights on against the dark.

Still, I part company with Emerson a bit at the end of this quote.  The night, as it grows longer and deeper, heading toward the winter solstice, the heart of mid-winter, encourages creativity.  The metaphor of the day goes from verdant field to fecund womb.  As we slow, pull in our senses and live more in our interior, seeds planted long ago begin to sprout.  The novel we muttered about while weeding the tomatoes begins to demand a place in our lives.  The child we wondered about in the spring begins to insist, pushing us toward family.  The painting influenced by the play of light on brown and withering plants takes on shape and color.

Hecate. Persephone. Jesus in the tomb.  Osiris scattered among the reeds.  The rebel angel in Pandemonium.  The shadow within our own psyche.  All these are night time, dark energy forces.  Their energy often sublimates when the external world draws us; but when winter or melancholy strikes,  they can draft upward, burst out into full awareness and with their explosive power drive us either toward self-destruction or acts of creation.

Garden, Literature, Writing

Du Fu, Li Bai and Wang Wei

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79  bar steep drop 29.95  0mph S dew-point 54  sunrise 6:06 sunset 8:30  Lughnasa

First Quarter of the Corn Moon   moonrise 1326 moonset 2226

Each day of the Olympics I will post a poem from a famous Chinese poet.  Du Fu, Li Bai and Wang Wei are the three most admired T’ang dynasty poets.  It is so easy to forget that this last century is only a tiny portion in the sweep of Chinese civilization.  In all the sturm und drang about the rise of China the fact that China has risen and fallen many times over the last 5,000 plus years often remains buried.  That’s right, 5,000 years of a continuous culture, sometimes dominant, sometimes ruled by foreigners, many of whom embraced Chinese civilization.

It is arrogant of us to judge China by our standards, standards that have stood nowhere near the test of time.  In China the collective always comes before the individual, at least that has  been true historically.  This is not to say that there have not been individualists in Chinese history.  Taoism tends to produce them, as does the famous literati system of rule by intellectuals.  Many painters and poets also walked their own distinctive paths.

Well, anyhow, China doesn’t need my defense.  I just want to add a bit from the depth of Chinese culture as we go through Olympics which often seem more about air pollution and human rights than sport.

Yes, I know.  This seems like a conservative position, but in reality it is a position informed more by anthropology and history, a position not too different from walk a mile in the other person’s moccasin.

I spent an hour or so this morning admiring the work of the Irishmen who dug ditches.  Put the shovel in the earth, push it down, lift it up, heave.  Repeat.  Not back breaking, but a workout.  I had a good nap.  The fire pit has begun to appear.  It will be deep enough for a fire when the Woollies come, though whether the area around it will be is another matter.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Writing

How I Work

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76  bar falls 30.01  0mph SW dew-point 58  sunrise 6:06 sunset 8:30  Lughnasa

First Quarter of the Corn Moon  moonrise 1326  moonset 2226

“More Americans are likely to suffer kidney stones in the coming years as a result of global warming, according to researchers at the University of Texas.”  Agence France-Presse, July 2008

N.B. All these quotes about global warming come from this website:  The Warmlist.  Here’s the webmasters explanation:

“This site is devoted to the monitoring of the misleading numbers that rain down on us via the media. Whether they are generated by Single Issue Fanatics (SIFs), politicians, bureaucrats, quasi-scientists (junk, pseudo- or just bad), such numbers swamp the media, generating unnecessary alarm and panic. They are seized upon by media, hungry for eye-catching stories. There is a growing band of people whose livelihoods depend on creating and maintaining panic. There are also some who are trying to keep numbers away from your notice and others who hope that you will not  make comparisons. Their stock in trade is the gratuitous lie. The aim here is to nail just a few of them.”

So, don’t say I didn’t fess up.  The Star-Tribune turned me onto this site.

Shifted focus. Gonna work on that firepit.  I decided Kate can help me transplant day lilies when she gets home and I’ll still have time to transplant the iris.  I get on a task and sometimes don’t lift my headup to check whether it makes sense.  Heresy Moves West is an example.

The research alone would take a good bit of time, I knew that.  That meant I could not hope to research and write it in the week prior to September 14th.  Knowing that I began to develop this knot in my to do lobe.  It began to insist, get it done.  Get it done now.  Right now.  This even though the date was 8 weeks away at the time.  Anyhow, I finally opened up and let the lobe have its way.

Once begun, research and writing, at least for me, need to be one fluid motion, the research followed by the writing.  In my case this is because as I research various ways of slicing and dicing the information comes to me throughout. At night before I go to sleep the data often floats up and demands consideration.   Sometimes I make note of these patterns, sometimes not.  Often I don’t because I want the order and interpretation fungible to the last possible moment.

Why?  In between the research and the writing there is a creative time in which the data and the various arrangements of it begin to pull other information, other paradigms out of my memory.  This process can change the data’s relevance.  Let me give you an example.

At first I imagined a straight chronological presentation.  The Unitarians began at such and such a place at such and such a time.  The westward expansion of the US began in this time period.  It rolled out according to these stages, in this place at this time and another place at another time until the whole shebang ended up encountering Minnesota. This came to me first because historical movement often seems cleanest presented in chronological order.

Soon though, as the pieces began to swirl, it became clear to me that the historical progression would have to start earlier, then even earlier.  I wrote about this a while back, my need for context.  When I realized there were big ideas at play here, the order of things changed again.  Then it was a history of ideas approach that made more sense, capturing the development of the peculiar notion of religious freedom in the US.  As that became clear, a second important dynamic rose to the top, the rolling dialectic between orthodoxy and heterodoxy.

To highlight the ancient character of this dynamic I decided to find its beginnings in the Abrahamic tradition with Abram’s call away from polytheism to allegiance to YHWH.

Both of these decisions meant that the data in the presentation would have to show how the westward movement of heresy (the rolling dialectic of orthodoxy and heterodoxy in Unitarian history) advanced thanks to the first amendment and how it continued the long arc of dogma challenged by new thought.  This lead to the realization that the westward expansion of heresy intensified in the  atmosphere of freedom and pioneer energy found on the frontier.  So, when we end up in Minnesota, the presentations show how religious freedom and the rolling dialectic not only manifest themselves here, but in fact gain strength and intensity.

Finally, that lead to a desire to push the dialectic one step further, beyond the bland everything’s in bounds soup of current day Unitarian-Universalism to the articulation of a new heterodoxy, one opposed to the dogma of one size fits all faith-lite.  This piece is the unwritten one at this point.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Writing

Moving

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78 bar falls 30.03 4mph NNW dew-point 53  sunrise 6:05 sunset 8:31 Lughnasa

First Quarter of the Corn Moon

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize that half of them are stupider than that.  George Carlin, RIP

Finally.  The first drafts of Heresy Moves West and Heresy Moves West II are in the digital file cabinet.  They did not end where I had  hoped though they cover in very broad strokes the topic I set myself in the beginning.  There is a third, unwritten piece that will continue the Heresy, adding one of my own, or, at least, one articulated in my own voice.  I will not start on that one anytime soon, however.

Tomorrow AM I plan to take shovel in hand and get to work moving day lilies.  This is so I can clear a raised bed of its iris and true lilies by moving them where these hemerocallis live right now.  Kate wants hemerocallis to fill the bed out front because she’s tired of weeding that large island east of the driveway.  Can do, and I’ll get a start on the morrow.

Onto the treadmill.

Faith and Spirituality, Writing

A Romantic Hymn to the Universal and the Particular

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72  bar rises 30.07 1mph N  dew-point 57  sunrise 6:05 sunset 8:31  Lughnasa

First Quarter of the Corn Moon

“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.” – Virginia Woolf

In this case you have to remember that Virginia put rocks in her pockets and drowned herself in the closest flowing water.

Here are some notes.  A new direction for liberal religion.  Cosmology:  a nature centered (including humans) faith that has local manifestations, i.e. this galaxy, this solar system, this planet, this nation, this province, this place, this particular location. (Our Town)  Anthropology:  we are universes,   one self, many selves.  Whitman.  We grow toward a Self that can contain and nourish all of our many selves, yet paradoxically extinguish them all.  Existentialism.  Nexus.  Ethics:  the Iroquois medicine man at Theology in the Americas.  Soteriology-see ethics and anthropology.  A decadent salvation, from stardust to stardust.

We must answer the thin faith of the empiricist, the sad faith of the secular humanist, the mad faith of the fundamentalists and the mind-only faith of those outside the faith traditions of their youth.  Our response, our new direction folds together the empiricist and the humanist with a pagan lovesong, a romantic hymn to the universal and the particular.  Its flower symphony trumpets forth from home altars all across the globe, a fragrant and colorful melody that weaves us all together, a magic fabric with each individual, yet each part.

This has legs in my heart, it wants to run and jump and play with others.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, GeekWorld, Great Work, Writing

Just When I Discovered the Meaning of Life, They Changed It.

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64  bar rises 30.00  0mph NNW dew-point 60 sunrise 6:05  sunset 8:32  Lughasa

Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon

Just when I discovered the meaning of life, they changed it.  George Carlin, RIP

Kate takes off tomorrow for Grandparent land.  In our world that means Pontiac Avenue in Denver, just across Quebec Avenue from the old Stapleton Airport now enjoying a rebirth as Yuppieville.  She will visit with Gabe whom she hasn’t seen since his birth and Ruthie.  Ruthie runs up to her and says, “Grandma!”  Enough to make a grandparent keep coming back for more.

An electronic distress signal has sounded three times since I came down to make this post.  It finally dawned on me that it might be my cell phone.  Yep.  It needs juice and has used some of its last to tell me so.  Good boy!  Since I have a computer, a UPS, a router, two printers, a weather station and a modem all close by, it took a bit to sort out.

Writing has occupied me three days in a row full time.  That’s draining, at least for me.  I’m about 3/4’s done, perhaps a bit less.  As always, I have learned far more than I can compress, in this case even into two presentations.  There is a tendency to use all of it, or at least try, but that makes the piece turgid, reportorial.  It needs to have drama and depth, not breadth and length.

There is a cosmology kicking around, a soteriology, an anthropology, an ethic, a tradition with an American twist and the energy to work on it.  This is the stuff I tried to get at when I took the Paul Tillich course a couple of years ago.  Not yet finished.

And, to finish this post, an alien reaches for the sky.  (our wisteria)

wisteriareach500.jpg

Faith and Spirituality, Memories, Weather +Climate, World History, Writing

Qin Shi Huang Di

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67  bar steady 29.97  0mph NNW dew-point 58  sunrise 6:04  sunset 8:34  Lughnasa

Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon

Last night I stood outside for a while and listened to the wind rustle the leaves of the poplars and oaks, an invisible hand caressing these giants.  Tonight stars dot the sky and the air is quiet, the temperature a cool 66 (dropped a temp since I added the info. bar above.)  These nights, summer nights, have stories that reach back in time, memories of cars pulling into neon lit drive-ins, dances in school gymnasiums and midnight rides through the countryside seeking bliss.  A special place, the summer night.

Heresy Moves West will have two parts, I see no other way unless I perform drastic surgery on the introductory material, now seven and a half pages.  My plan is to finish the second half, the stories and threads of thought that directly result in the building of liberal congregations in Minnesota.  This is, of course, the assignment I originally gave myself, but I did not know then the complex of political, theological, institutional and intellectual lines necessary to make the story comprehensible at anything more than a superficial, potted history level.  After I finish part II, then I’ll see what can be done with the whole.

The last piece of the whole considers the future, projecting a possible trajectory for the liberal faith tradition in a time of what I perceive as thinness and altogether too disparate a theological base.  Here I will begin to answer the problem I addressed in my late night post August 3rd.  Ideas have come to me of late and I have a way to go forward, at least one that makes sense to me.

In the build up to the Olympic Games the History Channel and National Geographic have run programs on Qin Shi Huang Di, the unifier and first emperor of China (Qina).  His story makes for conflicted reading or watching since he brought the dreadful warring states period to an end by subduing the seven larger states that had survived.  He also standardized weights and measures, the width of axels, coinage, language and law.  As Chinese history developed after him, both the unification and these measures of standardization contributed to China’s long continuity in culture.  In these ways he is the father of China.

He was, however, a cruel man who killed millions to achieve peace.  He killed at least a million more building the Great Wall and at least hundreds of thousands building his mausoleum. The legal system he instituted was draconian and ran against the grain of the Confucian thought world that preceded him.  His dynasty lasted only one generation beyond his and even that, from his perspective was a failure since he spent the last years of his life in a desperate search for an elixir of immortality.

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, World History, Writing

Teasing Out the Pagan Lovesong

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76  bar rises 29.89  0mph NE dew-point 67  sunrise 6:02 sunset 8:35  Lughnasa

Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon

I saw the dentist today, oh boy.  He unscrewed a couple of fillings, refilled them, then closed what he insists on calling an “open contact.”  Does that sound like an oxymoron to you?  Does to me.  Dr. Mahler comes into my mouth unbidden, the occasion the retirement of the redoubtable Dr. Moghk, may he golf in peace.  Dr. Mahler is good, fast and communicative.  Sure of himself. Just what I want in a dentist.  No, seriously.  He’s a keeper.

The closing words of my last post have rung like a bell in my head since I wrote them:   This whole enterprise needs a rethink, a radical redo.  We have gotten thin and liberal, instead of profound and prophetic.

What to do? Part of the responsibility rests with me.  I have the task of articulating what I believe and have faith in right now.  This articulation must be clear and emotionally compelling.  And it is work I feel I can do, am ready to do.  Looks like I was off about ten years when I hoped for intellectual maturity in my early 50’s, it has come instead, in my early 60’s.  That’s all right.

The later maturity came because my individuation and maturation occurred more slowly than it might have thanks to alcohol and neurosis.  I regret the years I gave to anger, disappointment, drinking and smoking.  I regret the hurt I caused then and the overhang it left me.  Even so, I also know that regret is an emotion with no purpose, no forward motion, so I acknowledge it and set it to the side.  Today, the only time I have ever had and will ever have, is the day in which I take up this challenge, perhaps I could have ten years ago, but I didn’t.

Now it remains for me to tease out the pagan lovesong that courses through me when I  touch a lily or eat an onion grown in soil I have prepared.  There is an ancient language of love and awe for the natural world and for ourselves as part of and dependent on it.  This vocabulary of seasons, lunar changes, life’s stages, friendship and family has no nation, knows no creeds and depends on no books, yet it is as particular as the street on which you live and the air that you breathe.

This dream, what Thomas Berry called the Dream of the Earth, is a dream in the sense of the aboriginal dreamtime, it is a way of dreaming worlds into being and it is our great and primary gift as a species.  Like all gifts it can cause great good or great harm.   Over the next few years I will slip from time to time into the dreamtime and let you know what I find there.