Category Archives: Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Mountains, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., The West, Third Phase, Writing

Learning Colorado

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Imbolc                                         Black Mountain Moon

Signed up for 4 Colorado Native Plant Master programs: one in the foothills, one in the montane eco-system (ours) and one in the high plains. 3 of these are 3 session 8:30-12:30 classes. The fourth is a two session, 9-3, course on plant sketching. Don’t really want to qualify for the Native Plant Master program since it has requirements for volunteering that I don’t want to fulfill, but I want the content and the chance to meet some people involved in botany here.

All part of becoming native to this place. Starting this week I plan to keep a nature journal, hand-written, a record of our yard, hikes, these courses, geology lectures and field trips, meteorology notes. I’m not much of an artist, but I think with some practice I can draw plants and animals, maybe sketch geological features, at least well enough to call them to mind when I review the entries.

We drove into Evergreen for our business meeting at the Wildflower Cafe. It was good to see those folks again. Afterward we drove around Evergreen a bit, going out to the I-70 entrances and seeing in the distance snow covered peaks. Our mountains around here have snow, but are not snow covered.

 

 

Beyond the Boundaries, Health, Latin, MOOCS, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase, US History

It’s All Real Stuff

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Imbolc                              Black Mountain Moon

Prep days. Yesterday reorienting my workouts, today moving back into Ovid with the Latin. Prep is important but I find I want to hurry through it, press on, get to the real stuff. But, it’s all real stuff, isn’t it?

When doing the Latin, for example, I want to work fast, translate easily, get it. But, most often I have to work slowly, translate with difficulty, struggle to understand.

In the MOOC I’m taking from McGill University the current section is on physical literacy. An amazing insight for me. Literacy in the alphabetic, language based world, yes. Numeracy in the numbers based, mathematical world, yes. But physical literacy? That is, learning basic moves and physical actions that can later be strung together to play a sport, keep one fit, teach us how to fall, no. The idea never occurred to me.

It apparently surfaced in the 1930’s in America whereas numeracy only emerged as an idea in the 1960’s. It’s not surprising, I guess, since the move from the farm to the town and city was weighted against the old, physical ways that had existed since hunting and gathering gave way to the neolithic revolution.

Perhaps, come to think of it, becoming native to this place is a component of physical literacy, a tactile spirituality. As we move less and less, we interact with the natural less affectively, less often, less well. Perhaps play is a big component of becoming native to this place, wandering aimlessly in the woods or by a pond, in the mountains, on lakes.

Anyhow, I’m excited about this idea, a human trilogy necessary for a satisfying life: literacy, numeracy and physicality.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Latin, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Translating De Bello Gallico, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Back At It

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Imbolc                                  Black Mountain Moon

I’ve found my rhythms. Back at Latin, going to turn today back to Ovid from Caesar. Writing. I’m 4,000 words plus into Superior Wolf and my brain is buzzing, following trails here and there with characters, research, narrative structure. Working out is back, too, 6 days a week right now. I’m not where I was in terms of fitness, not sure how the altitude has affected me, but I’m improving and that’s the key. The whole fitness area is still in flux, but I have a pattern I’m using.

A new element, too. I’m going to make some art. Not sure what quite yet, though I’ve got some ideas and lots of material. When my center room work space gets finished, I plan to get at it. There’s also, with art, the research and work with art history, theory. Not there yet in that work, but it will come.

Even, if you managed to get through my long posts under Beyond the Boundaries, Original Relation and Reimagining Faith, you’ll know, my reimagining project has finally begun to take off. Why now I’m not sure, but there you go.

This blog, of course, has remained a constant.

Now, if we could just sell that house.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Mountains, Myth and Story, Poetry, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Spring

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Imbolc                                      Black Mountain Moon

“Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly–and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.”
–  Omar Khayyám

March 1st is the beginning of meteorological spring. The three coldest months of the year are over and the next three are a transition between the cold of winter and the heat of the growing season, the three warmest months of June, July, August. Meteorological spring, though, is a creature of averages, a soulless thing with no music. I prefer the emergence of the bloodroot (in Minnesota) as the true first sign of spring.

On March 20th Imbolc will give way to Ostara, the Great Wheel’s spring season, on the day of the vernal equinox.

I do not yet know the traditional first signs of spring for the montane ecosystem, but I will. Nor do I know the tenor, the rhythms of the seasonal change here in the mountains. I look forward to learning them.

I’m reading the Thousand and One Nights again, a new translation, so right now Arabic and Persian stories, poetry fill my head. Khayyam’s Rubaiyat was my earliest introduction to Persian culture and one I found magical from the beginning.

There is, today, the slightest touch of spring longing in me. And so I wrote this.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

And Then Is Heard No More

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Imbolc                               Black Mountain Moon

Let’s paint the same message as below, but with a different brush and color. Gray fading to black dominated the last post. Let’s use blue fading to dark, dark blue here.

Life is the time between the first rays of dawn and the last, bruised hours of twilight. At its brightening life comes with expansiveness, light revealing first this and then that, all new. These are the hours of Heidegger’s being thrown into the world. We see first a soon-to-be familiar face, then faces. Realize at some point a home, then the home in a particular place. That place is in a larger frame which sometimes takes a while to come into focus. At some point we know that the 1950’s, this time of childhood is neither, say, the the 1930’s of our parent’s time nor is it the middle ages with knights and castles and it is not, either, the future. Not 2000. Not 1984.

Over the next few years we learn that our unique self will have its hour upon the stage over a certain span of time, not any we wish, but this one and this one alone. Who we are to become, what we are to do must fit into these years, years that have their own shape, their own special challenges, their own significant opportunities. We choose this path, that person, those places. They fit or they don’t. If they don’t, we choose again.

As the years accumulate and our hour ticks down, the choices become fewer, narrower. Our own history now shapes our future. This is a time of reaping, of being the person you have chosen to be, the unique mixture of your Self and the times into which you have been thrown. When the reaping is finished, our hour is up.

Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Second Naivete

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Imbolc                                       Black Mountain Moon

You may think, if you plowed through my three posts on becoming native to this place, that I’m some sort of latter day hippie, wanting everyone to move on to their own plot of land, get a few goats and some chickens. Not at all.

I love cities, their density, their bubbling creativity, their opportunity, their mashing together of various arts institutions, their unique cuisines and architecture. Cities have a distinct sense of place, they’re the baltimore oriole nests of our species, baggy, unusual, idiosyncratic.

When I argue that we all must once again become native to this place, this earth, I mean we must go through what Paul Ricoeur called a “second naivete.” That is, we must bracket the electric light, the central heating, the walls and streetlights, the grocery stores and the sidewalks. We must bracket the car, the bus, the train, the plane, the subway and the streetcar or light rail.

We need to see once again the night sky filled with stars. We need to smell once again clover growing in a meadow. Stand in the shade of great trees. Imagine the soil beneath our feet and remember that it produces our food. Wander in the wilderness and recall that once this was all there was. We must become of the planet, native terrans. We need to become vulnerable again to the changes of the seasons, to the fall of night as a time of darkness.

We must reinsert ourselves into the ecosystems of this planet, but this time in a healthy way, not as a pathogen intent on destroying all so that only we might live.

How do we go about this? How do we once again become native to this place? I’m not sure, not right now, but it’s something I think about every day. I’ll keep at it. Maybe you will, too. And maybe you’ll have some ideas about it, too.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Becoming (again) Native To This Place

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Imbolc                            Black Mountain Moon

Becoming native to this place is a phrase I’ve borrowed from Wes Jackson of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. Wes and his researchers are trying to develop perennial food crops so plowing will become unnecessary. No till agriculture.

As I’ve thought further about reimagining faith and proceeding from the heart or from the Self’s vast interior rather than reason or sacred deposit (holy books, dogma, pronouncements of religious leaders), it has occurred to me that the reimagining process might be described as becoming native to this place.

Here’s what I mean. Until very recently, maybe the last 150 years or so, most of earth’s inhabitants lived much closer to the means of food production, but by 1900 both England and the U.S. had become predominantly urban nations. Since that the time the pace of urbanization has rapidly increased and half of the entire population of the planet lives in cities.

Urbanization added to the mechanization of farming has removed more and more people from the land, distancing far more than the half who now live in cities further and further from the earth as a productive and vital center of life. It’s no accident that the same processes have seen automobiles and roads, trucks and trains, airplanes and ships become both, as the Old Testament said, a blessing and a curse.

Compounding the psychological distancing and the actual physical distancing from the earth is the pernicious effect of the carbon fuel cycle that has been central to global climate change. In this reimagining of faith we can see the carbon loading of the atmosphere and the warming effect it is already having (along with a whole cascade of other negative effects like ocean acidification) as the externalizing, the reification of our estrangement from our home. We are so far removed from the day to day life of other living things that we can harm them-and ourselves-without even noticing.

Thus, to reimagine faith, that is to reimagine how we might discover our true position in the world (again, defined as broadly as you want), must include becoming (again) native to this place, this planet that is our only home. We must experience atonement for our estrangement from the planet. We must become at-one with her again.

Within the urbanized, mechanized, carbon releasing zeitgeist we need not an intellectual assent to the needs of mother earth gathered from books and prophets like Bill McKibben, Wendell Berry or Wes Jackson, for this kind of assent is no different from the scholastic defense of Christianity mounted by St. Anselm or Thomas Aquinas.

No, we must atone, become at-one with her in our own way, in a way that proceeds from within, that follows our heart and not our head alone. We must (again) become native to her rhythms and her cycles, to the way she breathes, the way she distributes water, the way her soil replenishes its own nutrients, the way winter differs from fall and spring from summer. Only in this way will we able to take the necessary actions, not the necessary actions that will save mother earth, she will survive our worst insults, but the necessary actions that will allow human kind to flourish here, to flourish here at least until other, natural forces wipe her clean of all life.

Only in this way can we have the possibility, the hope that our species might perform the miracle of leaving this planet for good, for other places, other planets or moons. But note, even there, wherever there might be, we will, again, have to become native to that place.

Faith and Spirituality, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science, World History

Living in the Long Now

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Imbolc                                                 Black Mountain Moon

Between now and the time when Pipe Creek fills the lake that will cover all of human artifice here on earth there is a long interim. It may well be that humanity will fan out from this planet, seeking a home somewhere in space, perhaps on Mars or a moon of one of its sister planets, perhaps even out beyond the Oort belt, the furthest reach of Sol’s solar wind. I cannot see that far and, though I hope it turns out to be our destiny, I do not rely on such exploration in considering how far I can see.

We know from astrophysics that in about 7.5 billion years the sun will expand in its red giant phase, its bulk then extending past our orbit. That is a sure and certain end to the planet. Before that, though, several other extinction events loom. This brief Wikipedia article outlines several of them.

These future disasters (from a human perspective) limit the time of human habitation on earth, not by theological fiat, but by the laws of physics. In that they represent the working out of fundamental laws of this universe they are neither apocalyptic nor commentary on human failing. There are future disasters, perhaps of an extinction event level, that might have the human fingerprint, yes, but even these only advance the end of human life on earth, a certainty in any case.

Considering this certainty without placing an exact time frame upon it, we can then work backwards to consider faith, positioning ourselves in the world, however broadly you may define that term. We live in the long now between the emergence of life on earth and its end. Humanity is an extension of that true miracle, that enduring mystery, life’s creation ex nihilo from chemicals inert, as far as we know now, since the very birth of the universe.

Over our evolution, lengthy from the perspective of our species, but a wink in the time since earth’s creation we have developed into an animal capable of reflecting on its fate. That’s what I’m engaged in here. Does our fate really matter? Yes and no.

No because our duration as a species on earth has limits, ones we can define and foresee, even if we can not predict those limits exactly. Yes because our need to know ourselves as part of the universe, as part of life on this planet seems to be a human universal, most likely triggered by meditation on our own, individual limit: death.

If we accept (and you may not), that this world is wonder enough, miracle enough and, further, that any next world, no matter what its shape and character might or might not be, is hidden behind the pale of death and the inescapable veil created by our senses, then we must consider how we fit into that long now currently underway, the one between the creation of the earth and then life upon it and our emergence, and that certain end to this planet and its life which physics demonstrates.

That consideration will be the content of the next post in this series.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

fides quaerens intellectum

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Imbolc                         Black Mountain Moon

Reimagining faith surfaces, then falls back, behind other projects. Latin, books, art. This surprises me somewhat. I spent 20 years, 5 in seminary and 15 in the full-time ministry, focused on matters of faith. After I retired at 44, there was always some engagement, at times strong, then smaller and smaller though in the liberal religious tradition, not Christianity. All that investment of time suggests a deep commitment to the mystery of faith, one that you would think would keep me engaged.

And it has, if I read the trajectory of my life correctly, (A difficult task to do from inside the life, I grant you.)  but in unusual or atypical ways.

Faith seeking understanding (fides quaerens intellectum) was the motto of St. Anselm of Canterbury the 12th century Catholic who attempted to move beyond scripture and the holy fathers in “proving” Christianity. Anselm, like many in the scholastic tradition, took as certainty that the search proceeded from faith to understanding. That is, faith came first, then human reason sought to understand it.

Reason seeking understanding prior to faith defines the period of the Enlightenment and its deconstruction of the Christian scaffolding built up in the 1600 years that had followed the death of Jesus. As Anselm and others inside the church feared, a search for understanding that does not proceed first from faith can-and did-lead to knowing without need of religion.

There is a third route, one which proceeds from intuition or from inner light. It does not proceed from faith, nor does it rely on reason first, rather the heart leads from inside the human experience.

This is, perhaps, Emerson’s “revelation to us” in his well-known introduction to his essay nature. It means starting with the deeply felt, the unreasoned, perhaps the irrational, pushing aside books and dogmas, theorems and the laws.

Here’s one such thread in my own life. In Madison County, Indiana we had two main economic sectors: farming and manufacturing. We had the remnants of the great pioneer push west, now growing beans (soybeans) and corn, raising cattle and pigs, and producing milk. We also had the American equivalent of England’s “satanic mills”, huge automotive factories that employed thousands working three shifts a day.

So from young childhood the dialectic between agriculture and technology grew within me, not as an intellectual argument, certainly not as a matter involved with religious faith, but as a felt and experienced reality.

Pipe Creek ran through Alexandria. It was the creek (pronounced “crick”) that took a dogleg turn through town. In the rains that came in late summer it often flooded, putting the high school’s football field underwater. Some locals could be counted on to take their fishing boats out and putter along the 50-yard line.

It was, in that sense, wild, literally untamed. Yet its name called up not wilderness, but the factories and their waste. That it may have been named for an Algonquian speaking chief of the Delaware nation, Hopocan, who was also known as Captain Pipe, is a late learning and does not negate the long association I have between factories and the running water near my home.

Pipe Creek runs through my life, carrying in its compromised waters the tension between natural and artifice, a fruitful tension that has spilled out now in my third phase as a deep lake. In that deep lake artifice lies submerged, Atlantis like, civilization that triumphed for a time, then disappeared beneath.

Faith positions us in the world, however widely this term might be applied. Many faiths, including Christianity, posit a world beyond this one, one to which we more properly belong and to which we can retire after the last mystery has visited us. My reimagining of faith is in this regard simple. It positions us as in and of this world, the one in which we participate daily.

Pipe Creek in this reimagined faith fills the lake. Its waters rise over all human endeavor, taking them in as it takes in trees and rocks and sand and skeletons. This is neither an apocalyptic view nor a judgmental one, rather it is descriptive.

 

 

 

Colorado, Great Wheel, Holidays, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Weather +Climate

Imbolc 2015

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Imbolc                                                                          Settling Moon II

Our first full day on Shadow Mountain was the Winter Solstice on December 21st. Now the earth has moved further along its orbit, the Great Wheel come round to Imbolc. Longtime readers of Ancientrails will know that Imbolc=in the belly, a phrase focused on the quickening of ewes around this time and the reintroduction of milk to the Celtic diet. The fallow season, begun on Samhain, October 31st, continues for another six weeks, but the pregnancy of the sheep is a clear and visible sign of the coming spring.

Imbolc also celebrates the triple-goddess Bridgit, who rules the hearth, the smithy and poetry. It is, therefore, a fire festival-the domestic fire, the craftsperson’s fire and the fire of creative inspiration. At Kildare 19 nuns kept a perpetual flame going in honor of St. Brigid, the Roman Catholic appropriation of the Celtic goddess. The assumption is that the 19 nuns continued a practice already in existence, women of the Auld Faith maintaining a perpetual flame for the goddess.

Though in Ireland Imbolc would come as temperatures were in the 40’s and rising (fahrenheit), here in the continental mid-latitudes it often comes in the coldest part of winter. We had about 6 inches of new powder here in Conifer last night and the temperature was 9 degrees, for example.

The message of Imbolc has two basic levels. The pregnant ewe represents earth’s fertility, the natural world’s ongoing creative force. Imbolc sends a declaration that the natural world will not be denied, not by cold nor by a time of barrenness.

In the same way Bridgit’s domains: hearth, smithy and poetry underwrite the human aspect of this natural creative impulse. In our homes we have and raise children, feeding them from the fire of our hearths and hearts. In our work we use the fire of our crafts to adapt to and be part of the natural order. (Yes, we can also use the fire of our crafts to burn fossil fuels, clear cut forests and poison the oceans. But this is not the way we celebrate on Imbolc.) Finally, we can use the fire in our souls to bring poetry, song, painting, literature into the world, manifestations of the human that delight us all.

Imbolc then is a time for considering garden and agricultural plans, planning how you might co-operate with the earth’s creativity. It is, too, a time for considering the new at home, at work and in your own poetry, your own music, your own art. This Imbolc is a time for finding those small seeds that will grow, over the coming growing season, into something substantial.