Category Archives: Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Down, In

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Lughnasa                                                                          College Moon

Something I haven’t done since Tucson. Meditate. Thought I would, but, like every other Journal workshop I’ve collected and acted on the insights, then shelved the process.

Got back at it this afternoon for a bit. Had an interesting interior journey. I walked into an ancient building made of stone, maybe a castle, and inside it I found a spiral stair case, stone, that went straight down into the earth. There were no rooms around it. A pit the size of the stair case was dug, then the stair case was built inside it. The stair case went down hundreds of feet and ended in a domed room with a mosaic roof, stone walls and benches around its circular walls.

In the center was a holy well, the water bubbling gently. I knelt before it, why I don’t know. Tilting over my body fell into the well and swam out of the well into the deep ocean.

The deep ocean was the cosmos itself. At one point I feared finding my way back, would I be consumed, depersonalized in this vast oneness. The Brahman, I suppose. No, it came to me, no matter where I was in the wholeness, I could be no other than me.

Sure enough, when I swam back I found the well easily and leaped out of it, drying before I landed on the stone floor. There were others there now, all in capes. We acknowledged each other, then I climbed the stairs, went out of the ancient building into the room where I sat.

Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Memories, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., The Move, The West

A Milestone

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Lughnasa                                                                                College Moon

Well. A milestone. Every bookshelf except the one beside my computer, stacked with books I use frequently, has been cleared, sorted and boxed. I thought I would be done in late August, early September works, too.

(New Harmony as conceived by Robert Dale Own in 1833)

As I passed these last books from shelf to box, new arrangements for them cropped up, new reading projects and writing projects, too. I have, for example, a collection of historical documents about New Harmony, Indiana. They are records of the Harmonist era 1814-1824 and documents from the Robert Owens era soon after that. There are, too, maps, Indiana Historical Society monographs, photographs and notes of my own journeys there.

(stone labyrinth in current day New Harmony)

New Harmony features in my novel, The Last Druid, and continues to interest me, both as the site of two utopian communities, one very successful, the other a successful failure and as a present day historical site with an emphasis on spirituality. Reading through those would definitely spark something.

There are, too, a collection of books, stacked up on each other, concerning the west and Colorado. These are the first tools I’ll use to get up to speed on our new home and the historical context that made it what it is now.

Now I move to file sorting, magazine culling. After that, objet d’arts.

Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Something Swims Up

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Lughnasa                                                                                   College Moon

Something is swimming in the deep ocean of my Self, circling higher and higher, moving toward the surface. It’s tempting to view it as a condor, swooping in wide circles, riding the thermals, seen by my mind’s eye, but that’s an illusion. In fact what I see with the mind’s eye is only a clue, a reminder to look down, into the interior.

( at the foot of Wu Shi Mountain (Five Lion Mountain), located beneath the spectacular Qiandao Lake)

There in the Holy Well that connects me to the All That Is the waters bubble slowly, often still for moments at a time, then roiled a bit by the artesian pressure the cosmos brings to bear on all its creations. It is in this water that something swims, something big and commanding, I think though I can’t be sure. This is where the novels live, somewhere in the benthic realm. Could be a novel moving around.

Or, it could be, well, I don’t know what. But I can feel it riding the change in the seasons. It’s sensitive to the decreasing daylight and to the increasing weakness of the Sun’s light. Might be melancholy. This is its season.

Whatever it is, it keeps pressing up, sending small waves to jolt the surface of the holy well. I look forward to its arrival.

Faith and Spirituality, Memories, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Sounds Pathological, But Feels Blessed

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Lughnasa                                                                              College Moon

Understanding of more than the motives of the moment seem more and more elusive as the third phase of life wraps itself around me. The deep reasons for liking, say, the classics and dogs and reading are lost in the fog of memory darkened by time into near opacity. There was a time when understanding felt more accessible, more relevant, perhaps as a lever with which to change personality, to affect a less tangled future.

Now though the past, my own past, not that long a time by historical reckoning and none at all in the sweep of geological time, not only seems to recede faster than the clock’s ticking, but happily so. It’s as if the meaning of the past, my intimate past that is, has begun to detach itself from my present, floating off like Sandra Bullock in Gravity, untethered and weightless.

This sounds pathological, but it feels blessed. This man that I am now is just who he is, not explainable by his past nor excused by it, but who he is either in spite of it or to the side of the past. Perhaps it is always like this: that the person we are now seems only distantly related to the person we were ten years ago, forty years ago, even an hour ago. That untethered feeling comes with a sense of liberation, of not being bound to the threads, the strings, the ropes, the cable of yesterday; not being bound and free to go where today goes, not captive to yesterday.

Oh, this is not to say that the past does not still have its effects. Of course it does. Just that they are no longer determinative, destiny creating. They are, after all, in the past.

Colorado, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., The Move

The Ties That Bind

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Lughnasa                                                                       College Moon

We’re gathering little clutches of cash together for moving related expenses. We cashed out some non-performing CD’s, have sold various items we didn’t want to move and just sold Kate’s silver from her first marriage plus some assorted gold pieces.

There are a lot of sunk costs in this process. The maintenance we’re having done outside, whatever inside work needs to be done, working with SortTossPack (which generates revenue, too) and then the move itself. There will be, too, various packing costs like crates for our big paintings, special boxes for the tv’s and other electronics. All come out of our pocket before we sell the house (if we buy in Colorado before we sell).

None of this is a surprise, all components of any move that involves selling and buying real property. We do these dances with material things, dances that mimic George Carlin’s famous skit. Yes, I suppose we could shrug off the house, the furniture, the books, the art, the quilting machinery, the pots and pans, the garden implements. I suppose we could.

But we will not. Because the world reels us in with the hand of a grandchild, the bark of a dog, the growth of a garlic bulb, we will not. Our life, our path, is not that of the ascetic, though the ascetic teaches us not to confuse our things with our lives. Our life, our path, is not that of the hedonist, though the hedonist teaches us to love certain things which give us pleasure. Our life is a thread, a small part of the larger tapestry being woven of our time.

We’ll add our thread, tied already to those of children and grand-children, land and plants, the lives of dogs and friends. The weft shuttles us across the warp threads laid down by the physical and larger political changes. Our presence is subtle, as is that of any particular thread in a tapestry, but consider, without each thread the tapestry will not emerge. There will be only warp threads sagging with nothing to hold them together.

We matter-and so do you-even though we are, each of us, only tiny instances in the even larger tapestry being woven now by our galaxy, our cluster, our super-cluster and that one part of another so vast we cannot comprehend it. This is what the Greeks knew when they composed their great masterpieces. Fate is not a hand from the future that plucks your thread toward a necessary spot; rather, fate is the story of stories already told, visible only after the thread is in the tapestry.

 

Art and Culture, Asia, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Minnesota, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Midwest Lughnasa Festival

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Lughnasa                                                                      College Moon

We’re off to the fair today. The last hurrah as residents of Minnesota. I’ve gone many times over the years, probably a bit more than half of the years I’ve lived here, say 25. As I’ve gotten older, stamina has become a modest issue, but a bigger one is sameness. Even with the amazing number of new food products and the changing line-up in the 4-H buildings and the animal barns there is a regularity, a predictability. On-a-stick! Blue ribbon! Necessary kitchen gadget!

Of course, that very predictability is one of the fair’s charms, too. It will always have that slightly wacky, down-home feel. The Midway will have lights; machinery hill will have tractors and the GOP/DFL booths will have politicians racing their engines for an upcoming election. And, there will be cheese curds.

For a guy trying to figure out how to connect Americans with the land, with what I think of as a kami-faith for this land is our land, the state fair is a huge ritual moment. Too often an opportunity lost to take our head out of the work-a-day cubicle world and go outside, to look down, to see the amazing, miraculous things happening in the soil and among the plants. And cows. pigs. llamas. rabbits. horses. In that sense it’s the ur-moment in the year for effecting change.

 

 

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Harder Choices

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Lughnasa                                                                    New (College) Moon

Listening to outlaw country as I pack boxes full of books on Romanticism, American religious empiricism and Hindu thought. It’s harder in here, in the study where I’ve concentrated the books that have captured part of a long term idea. Wondering, for example, where the threads of the Classics, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Modernism come together. Are there clues there about tomorrow, about critiquing today? About laying bare the bones of this time?

How does religion play against this whole backdrop? Does it have a future, a non-dogmatic, non-institutional future or is it an anachronism with unusual vitality?

Or, on another tangent, how does the environmental movement and its thinkers weave into the Reimagining Faith work I’ve been doing for awhile. Does Jung matter in this or any of these threads? Maybe you can see how having books at my fingertips, books not obtainable outside university libraries, is important to me.

Again, you could rightly ask why I bother. Don’t know. This is just stuff that interests me and has interested me for a long time.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Our Land and Home, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Weather +Climate

Wild, Wild Grapes

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Lughnasa                                                                 Lughnasa Moon

500P1030676A cool breeze predicted autumn as I picked wild grapes this morning . These wild grapes have overgrown our amur maples and will get cut back when the lawn restoration work is done later in the fall. That will hardly diminish their presence though because wild grapes grow all over our woods, some branching out from vines thicker than my upper arm. The woods also provides morels in the spring.

Over the years I’ve highlighted the opossum, the great horned owl, wild turkeys, pileated woodpecker, woodchuck, salamander, newt, toads, frogs, dragon flies, deer, rabbits, chipmunks, squirrels, bumblebees, raccoons and snapping turtles that live on this property, too. A significant aspect of living in the exurbs is the diversity of wild flaura andIMAG0506 fauna, often on the chunk of land on which you live. This is a melding of the human built and the wild.

The Denver Post recounts encounters with bears, mountain lions and rattle snakes. In Minnesota residents encounter bears and wolves, perhaps the occasional lynx. Most of these encounters occur because human habitation encroaches further and further into formerly wild lands.

These predators are certainly part of the wild eco-system, but the bulk of wild life are prey species, amphibians, reptiles and birds. It’s these we humans encounter most often and which we often discount, as if their small size or lack of tools for killing make them less significant. Yet the woodchuck, or land-beaver, that occupied a tree here for a day, is a wild animal just as much as the wolf or bear. So, too, the opossum and all those others that flee when humans arrive, who try to keep their visibility to a minimum.

We are co-habitants, not owners really, of this land. Though we will sell it to other humans, we are not selling the wild life. Their lives will adapt to the new humans just as they adapted to us, either by leaving or hiding or just going on about their day.

The wild flaura includes not only morels and grapes, but ironwood, jack-in-the-pulpit, oaks white, red and burr, elm, ash, black locust, cedar, nine-bark and rhus radicans, or poison ivy. Barring a clear cut of the woods, which I consider unlikely, they, too, will remain.

Commentary on the news, Family, Feelings, Health, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

A Cloud Blocking The Sun

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Lughnasa                                                            Lughnasa Moon

A word about depression. I’ve experienced melancholy and perhaps one bout of true depression, back in 1975 after my first divorce, but I know the real deal when I see it. As I think I’ve written here before, three of my aunts were manic-depressive. One aunt spent the bulk of her life in a mental hospital, another was in and out and the other starved herself to death. It’s a subtle beast, depression, not at all like the usual presentation of the slump shouldered, gloom faced lump in a chair.

No, the depressed person can push right up against life, engaging in work and social life, perhaps with less energy, but that’s often not noticeable. A mix of obligation, habit and denial can even make a depressed person seem normal, even to those closest to them. Robin Williams worked hard, it said in the paper today, in spite of his depression. This suggests that yesterday might have been different, worse than the other episodes of addiction and depression he suffered, but that may not be true.

This might be the time when the impulsive met the depressive, the time when, just for a terrible moment, the idea of death outweighed the struggle for life. It could be that had someone accidentally interrupted this moment he could still be working today. This is not at all blaming someone else, rather I’m pointing to the deadly consequence of entertaining, even for a moment, the notion of self-extinction.

Yes, existentialists, and I count myself among them, see suicide as a possible affirmative choice in a meaningless world. If life has become unbearable, for whatever reason, the decision to end it needs to be taken seriously, not discounted or abjured. And perhaps especially because I feel this way I’m sensitive to the effects of a momentary mood, a flight of dark fantasy, that may have irrevocable results. These moods are not the same as an existential choice, being overtaken by a feeling of worthlessness or dead-endedness is not a choice; rather, these are situations of capture when the self becomes hostage and even victim to psychic weather.

Moods, as the weather systems of the psyche, have great power and in our interior world we often mistake weather for climate. That is, we take the mood as indicative of a general state of existence, when it is really a thunder shower or a cloud blocking the sun.

We humans, and our lives, are so fragile, so vulnerable.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Family Themes and Existential Aloneness

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Lughnasa                                                                Lughnasa Moon

Two widely divergent thoughts today. The first about family. Families have themes, melodies that play themselves out in different keys and different arrangements, using the instruments available.

Take mine for instance. Both mom and dad had a desire to travel, to see the world. Mom realized hers, making it to Italy and northern Africa as a WAC during WWII. Dad had a dream, a boat, some time in the Gulf of Mexico, then a book about it. Yet he never left the U.S. with the exception of Canada until very late in life when he flew to Singapore to visit my sister. He did, however, take short trips to odd places in Indiana, making do with what was available.

So, travel is a theme. I’m the less traveled of my siblings, only visiting foreign countries, never staying anywhere longer than a week. Mary has traveled a lot, spending years in Southeast Asia working, visiting Tibet, India, Indonesia, Europe, the Emirates. Mark has lived the travel theme most adventurously. He’s been across Russia on the Trans-Siberian railway, picked olives in a kibbutz in Israel, taught in Thailand, Cambodia and Saudi Arabia. We’re a gradation of the wanderer archetype, the one who visits but doesn’t stay.

Then, there’s the fascination with writing and language. Dad was a journalism major and well thought of at Oklahoma State University, a school with a respected journalism department. He wrote professionally, as a reporter and an editor, most of his life.

Mary and Mark advanced this theme by teaching English as a second language (ESL). I’ve advanced this theme through novels, short stories, sermons, essays, this blog. In this instance we’re a spectrum of the Hermes archetype, the one who takes messages and delivers them.

Mom was a teacher. Many of my cousins are teachers, on both sides of the family. Mark has taught ESL as an instructor while Mary has advanced from that role to that of University professor, teaching teachers of ESL for the nation of Singapore. I’ve never taught formally, but many of my roles have involved teaching of one kind or another. Here, we’re a spectrum of the elder archetype, when the elder is one who passes on the tradition.

There are other themes, some more subtle, but these three: wanderer, Hermes and elder seem most predominant. We did not engage these archetypes; these archetypes engaged us, shaped us, set us on our paths.

The second thought is about being alone in our interior. Reading an article in the New York Times today about Hinduism, a comment made me stop, think. The interior life is one path to liberation, the interviewee said, but at bottom the life of devotion and meditation is decidedly anti-individual. What? Yes, he said, at bottom we find in ourselves a deep oneness with all creation, with the brahma. So, at our most interior we are also at our most connected.

So this bounced around for a while. Then, a thought occurred to me. How does he know?  We can say for certain that we know each person’s interior life is unique and private. We can say this much based on our own experience and the mediation of other’s interior experience through interaction. Since those interactions are not identical, hardly identical, we can infer with confidence that the interior life of those we know is different from ours and different from others. It is also self-reported as different by those we know.

It’s an attractive idea, the idea of a substrata of oneness to be found at the end of our meditation, an idea known in the west through Carl Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious. But I don’t see how it can possibly be proven and without proof the notion of a layer of oneness underneath it all seems far fetched to me; as does, too, a layer of oneness that transcends our individual state.