Samain Thanksgiving Moon
He sits, early in the morning, while it is still dark outside, with his head in his hands. Orion, his longtime friend hangs in the sky visible to the southwest, Scorpio and Cassiopeia and the Drinking Gourd out there, too. A crescent Thanksgiving Moon, waxing toward its Super Moon event on November 25th, was visible last night.
If only the world could be quiet, serene, beautiful like the 5 am dark sky here on Shadow Mountain. No pussy grabbing. No complaints about raping 13 year old girls. No encouragement of political violence. No cynical comments about the validity of our electoral process.
Perhaps he could just slip away, go to some Trump Island in the the general area of Antarctica or maybe a luxury masted sailing ship forever circling the diminishing sea ice of the North Pole. Like Frankenstein’s creation. I would make a comparison between Trump and Frankenstein’s monster, but the monster was Frankenstein.
In this case Trumpism is the monster, a living candidacy patched together from a body of populist resentment, the brain of a nativist bigot, the nervous system of fearful white males and the legs of second-amendment worshipping other-phobic citizens. The arms, though, the arms are Trump’s, dangling like the tentacles of a squid, ready to grab, squeeze, embrace. Force. Trump is Frankenstein to this political moment in the Republican Party. The GOP provided the lightning that brought this monster to life and has paraded it with pride through this mockery of a campaign.
These are the most perilous political times in which I have lived. There are milita’s preparing an armed response to a potential Hillary gun-grabbing presidency. Our to this point normative peaceful transition of power after a Presidential election is under threat. This is a core feature of our democracy. The stakes on one issue, strangely absent from the campaign, are ultimate, the very survival of the human race may hang in the balance: climate change. The timer counting down the years in which we can still soften the blow of advancing global warming nears its alarm.
Race relations are in a visibly violent phase. Police kill black folks with so steady a drumbeat that it has become like Trump’s long string of insults to America, dulling our capacity for outrage. Misogyny is at its peak in the Donald, powerful at the same time as our first serious female candidate.
The Forever War has captured our youth, our money, our tolerance. We bomb and shoot and strike with drones, again dulling our capacity for outrage by desensitization.
I am not a man given to despair. Hamlet, that most existential of Shakespeare’s plays, offers a choice in the often quoted to be or not to be soliloquy. Do we suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them? I know my answer.
Rabbi Tarfon is credited with this quote: “It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work, but neither are you at liberty to desist from it” (Avot 2:21). wiki This is a wonderful thought because it drives directly against despair, relieving us of the expectation of finishing our political work, yet not letting us set it aside either.
So, when confronted with the potential momentary success of hate-filled, other-despising politics, those of us committed to a diverse, egalitarian world must not pull back, must not flee to Canada, must not despair. We are not, as Rabbi Tarfon said, at liberty to desist.
At 12:30 we drove over to Evergreen for mussar at Beth Evergreen. It was Rabbi Jamie’s birthday and each woman brought a cooked or purchased offering of some kind. We had cranberry juice with tea and mint, apple juice, brie and a wonderful soft cheese, warm carrots, pistachios, cashews, strawberries, grapes, melon, crackers, chips, guacamole, a birthday cake, sea-salt caramel and chocolate brownies (Kate, see pic), with Halloween plates and napkins.
We have reached the end of another Celtic year. Summer’s End, Samain, marks both the end of the growing season, really, the harvest season and the beginning of a new year. Rosh Hashanah and the Gregorian New Year celebration on January 1st, like the Celtic New Year, put the marker down for a new trip around Sol either at the start of the fallow season or in its midst. In these three instances the New Year seems to suggest a season of reflection, of inner work, as the harvest ends or is well over, while fall and winter stretch ahead.
So, what does my celebration of the Great Wheel mean? I began thinking about the Great Wheel when I chose to embrace my Celtic ancestry: Welsh and Irish. This was when I began writing novels a millennia ago in the 1990’s. As Kate and I began to garden seriously, joining our lives to the seasonal rhythms of the earth and its weather, the Great Wheel began to live. Time became, as it has remained for me, a spiral, a turning and returning to Beltane and the start of the growing season, to Samain, Summer’s End, and the end of the harvest.
There is life and the spirit of the sun residing in every green thing on this planet. There is life and the spirit of the sun in every insect, mammal, protozoa, fish and flying creature. We are all more alike, much more, than we are different. Think of it. We share this planet, third from the sun, in the goldilocks zone. As living creatures on this one planet among billions of other solar systems, our home is a source of unity, a source of fellow feeling.
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Divorce matters seem finally to be breaking Jon’s way. Can’t say more than that right now, but I’m glad.
Elizabeth itself is a small rural community that could have been anywhere, usa. It has a small historic downtown; that is, older retail buildings repurposed into boutiques and a fiber art store and antique shops. Mainstreet is Co. Highway 86 and there is the obligatory Walmart anchored, downtown killer of a strip mall on the edge of town.
My head says ethnobotany. Our culture chooses our diet for us, decides which foods are tasty, which gross, which taboo. Our bodies are neither obligate carnivore nor obligate vegetarian. We are designed by evolution as omnivores, able, thankfully, to eat what the world places in front of us, be it plant or animal. This is a great advantage for us as a species and has allowed us to thrive in many diverse climates. There is nothing wrong, then, about eating meat, either from a biological or cultural perspective. Meat is simply one source of food.
To purchase their meat was to kill them as surely as if I took a rifle out and shot them. Back in 1974 I moved onto the Peaceable Kingdom, a farm Judy and I bought in Hubbard County, Minnesota, the county home to the headwaters of the Mississippi. We had goats and decided we wanted to barbecue some goat meat. Johnny Lampo, the man who rented our fields and farmed them, gave me his rifle and I killed one of our our goats. I’ve not been the same since. I can’t even euthanize our dogs.
So this evening when Kate cooks the ribeye steaks thawing right now in our sink, I plan to add a small ritual to the lighting of the shabbos candles and the sharing of challah. We will remember the animal that died so that we may eat, so that our bodies might be strong. We will thank this particular individual for the role he or she plays in our daily life. We will acknowledge the cycle of life, the interlocking web of life and our mutual parts in it.
I now celebrate several distinct new years. The Jewish new year, just over, comes not long before the Celtic new year which begins on Samain eve, or All Hallow’s Eve, Halloween. The next one is the Western calendrical new year on January 1st and that is followed by the lunar Asian new year, which comes sometime in February. That’s at least four opportunities to assess the old year and make plans for the new one.
This fall season will end on Samain, the third of the three harvest holidays: Lughnasa, Mabon and Samain. The Celts began their new year with the end of the growing season, a last fruit’s festival, one marking the beginning of the fallow time. I like the specifically seasonal emphasis of Samain, tying the new year not to dogma or tradition or an arbitrary date like January 1, but to the cycle of life on earth, a cycle influenced by the sun.
Beth Evergreen’s sanctuary has multiple clear glass windows that offer views of Bergen Mountain and Elk Meadows. The view next to the Torah Ark had a mountain side filled with lodgepole and Ponderosa pine. Almost to the peak of the mountain though there was a small stand of aspen, golden still, in a perfect heart shape. All through the service I had a symbol, an accident of nature, created by my view, my perspective that synched up remarkably well with the overall theme of Yom Kippur, atonement. Also, up and to my right, at the roof of the sanctuary, a square window framed the tip of a Ponderosa pine. It looked like a painting by a member of the Kano school of Japanese art.
When Kate and I drove home from the kol nidre service at Beth Evergreen last night, the Hunter Moon lit up a sky covering labyrinth of white fluffy clouds. Occasionally, a few clouds would become very bright, then a hole would open, briefly, and the three quarter moon would not only backlight the cloud cover, but provide a luminous presence, too. It was a magical sky, a sort that seems particular to the onrushing fall. Aspens still blaze bright gold in some places, in others the leaves have turned brown and blown away leaving stands of naked branches as harbingers of the winter months.
I feel odd at Beth Evergreen. My physiognomy is out of place. The language of many of the prayers and songs is foreign to me. I don’t feel, and don’t expect to feel, part of the tribe. Yet, Kate feels, is, part of the tribe. Also, much of the content resonates with my own faith reimagining project.
Speaking of seasons, this is not the silly season; it’s the Insane Clown Posse season. When a reactionary like Mike Pence gets kudos for a stable debate performance, the world has gone seriously out of whack. This is a guy who tried to abrogate the first amendment, destroy unions, and denigrates women. The only reason he looked less than totally unappealing is the comparison to his running mate, Donald the Hair Trump. OK, Kaine wasn’t much better, but, hey, these guys were picked as Vice-Presidential candidates for a reason. Whatever it was.
Yesterday was a reading day, getting up to speed on the middot (character trait) of watchfulness. The notion of Mussar is to take character traits like watchfulness, explicate them, then practice them. Literally. Mussar encourages taking a character trait like watchfulness, then working over the period of a month to manifest it in your life or raise your observance of it to a higher level. Watchfulness entails what a Jesuit might call examen. Paying attention to your behavior, becoming conscious of it rather than letting it flow by out of habit unnoticed, that’s the first part.