Category Archives: Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Wheel, Holidays, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Nocturne

September 22, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Equinox New (Falling Leaves) Moon

For those of us who love the night, this is a fulcrum holiday. We enter the long period that starts with the final harvests and does not end completely until the vernal equinox. From today, till then, the night will gain dominance, peaking at the winter solstice, but not relinquishing its grip until the sun hits 0 declination in the east next March.

It’s not that I do not love the light, I do. It is rather that I prefer the dark, the quiet, the solitary. I’m also entranced, quite literally, by what I call Holiseason, that period beginning at Samhain and running through Epiphany. As we move into the dark, we also move into our fears, our paleolithic uneasiness with the reliability of the heavens.

These fears have driven humanity across time and across the globe to create brave holidays that feature the light. Yes, you could say that the emphasis on them really underscores our fears, rather than challenges them, but I choose to go with the perspective that they hit the fear directly. No, night, you cannot have us, not for all the day, never, and surely not for all the year. In the words of Battlestar Galatica, so say we all.

From late October to early January a parade of festivals bring us lights and gifts and warmth and family celebrations. What a delight. Good music, too. And theater.

It all starts tonight.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science, Third Phase

Mabon 2014 and the Springtime of the Soul

September 22, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Equinox Leaf Change Moon

Today the earth’s celestial equator (the earth’s equator projected into space) passes through the sun’s ecliptic (the sun’s apparent path throughout the year, actually caused by earth’s orbit.) You usually hear this put the other way around; that is, as the sun passing through the earth’s celestial equator, but that represents the stuckness of paleolithic astronomy that assumed the earth was the center of the solar system. From the diagram above you can see the sun’s declination (degree above or below the celestial equator) is 0 on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.

This same diagram is very clear about the solstices, too. You can see that when the earth’s orbit tilts the northern latitudes toward the sun, the sun is highest in the sky-the summer solstice. When the sun is lowest in the northern sky-the earth tilts away from the sun and gives us the winter solstice.

Since the summer solstice day time has exceeded night time. In theory the autumnal equinox is the point of equilibrium between light and dark, but at our latitude that day actually occurs on September 25th this year. This is, however, the day the Great Wheel celebrates and it does so because of the sun’s zero declination at earth’s celestial equator.

This week then the victory of the sun, made complete on the summer solstice, begins to wane. The dark god of deep winter gains greater and greater authority as the sun’s rays spread out over a larger area of earth, thus weakening them, and the number of hours that the sun is in our sky, even in its weakened condition relative to the soil, decrease steadily until the night of the winter solstice. Thus comes the fallow, cold time.

It is no accident that the harvest season is now. Over the 475 million years (give or take a hundred million) since plants made it out of the oceans and onto land, plants have adapted themselves to the conditions that work with their particular genetics. Key aspects of a plant’s life include carbon dioxide, soil nutrients, available fresh water, adequate sunlight and temperatures adequate for all these to work with the plant’s life cycle.

Thus, as the earth’s orbit carries it to different relationships with solar strength, temperatures change along with it. At its maximum when the earth tilts toward the sun and the sun is highest in the sky, the sun’s rays fall on a smaller area of land. Here’s an excellent simulation. University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Plants have had the past 475 million years to refine their growing season so that it takes maximum benefit of the sun’s strength. In a very real sense the growing season is a clock, or an astronomical observatory directly correlated to the earth’s orbit around the sun–The Great Wheel.

On a spiritual level, if we follow the ancient calendar of the plants, the season of external growth, flowering and seed making, is waning now. Just as the plant either dies out and anticipates its rejuvenation from scattered seed or goes dormant and waits with stored energy below ground in roots or corms or bulbs, so we might consider this season as the one where we shift inward, away from the external demands upon us and the expectations put on us there.

Now we shift toward the interior life, the Self becomes more of a focus, our spiritual life can deepen. We can see this shift in the human life cycle if we compare the second phase of life with its emphasis on family creation and nurture and career, to the third, with its pulling back from those external expectations. The third phase is a post growing season time of life, not in the sense that growth ends, but that its focus is more down and in rather than up and out. The third phase is the fallow time. Michaelmas on the 29th of this month is known by followers of Rudolf Steiner as the springtime of the soul.

The third phase marks the beginning of the springtime of the soul for the individual.

Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Enough

September 21, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa (last day of 2014) College Moon

The raspberry plant. Source of the brambles, an imperial sort of plant that colonizes, then absorbs patches of land. Just realized today what an elegant form of evolutionary engineering it is.

In the spring it shoots up from last year’s cane or from seed. Then it grows up and up toward the sun, its spiny stalk with its thick, bark-like cover strong. During the summer months it spreads out its leaves, increases the size of its stalk, sinks its roots deeper into the soil. As the growing season begins to dwindle, it throws out small blossoms on thin, spindly branches. The resulting fruit at first weighs down the spindly branches just a bit, the whole still upright, able to drink in the sun.

As the fruit matures, however, it gains water weight and the spindly branches begin to bend toward the ground, overwhelmed by the cumulative mass of the maturing fruit. Once a large number of fruits are ripe, the weight of the whole may bend the tip and even the thinner part of the upper stalk toward the ground.

Think of it. At each stage of its presence during the growing season the raspberry has an optimal design. Firm and upright early to catch the sun, to get it above neighboring vegetation. As the fruits turn their soft golds or their beautiful magenta, the raspberry’s fruits gradually lower themselves so the seeds, which they exist to nourish, get closer to the ground. If a bird or animal doesn’t grab them for the taste of the fruit, they simply drop off and fruit and seed start more raspberry plants right there.

Picking raspberries in the cool of a sunny fall afternoon, the air sweet with the scent of snakeroot blooming nearby, the dogs waiting at the fence for fruits thrown over. Enough. That’s all. Enough.

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

Powerful, Scary Ideas

September 16, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa College Moon

Reading an important document, a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy essay on authenticity. Kierkegaard, the essay says, defines the self in relational terms: “The self is a relation that relates itself to itself…” A pioneer in the concept of authenticity Kierkegaard defines the purpose of life as “becoming what one is.”

This definition of self and of life’s purpose make sense to me. Heidegger, the inventor of the term authenticity, makes a similar point with his concept of dasein: “…human being is a “relation of being”, a relation that obtains between what one is at any moment (the immediacy of the concrete present as it has evolved) and what one can and will be as the temporally extended unfolding or happening of life into an open realm of possibilities. To say that human being is a relation is to say that, in living out our lives, we always care about who and what we are.” from the same Stanford essay.

What both of these northern European thinkers suggest is that the idea of Self is dynamic and by definition relational, somehow linking our past with our present and our hope or anticipation for the future. This means that our notion of who we are-and therefore who we can hope to become-lies in a web of feelings and thoughts connecting experiences in the external world and our internal understanding of them, with those experiences occurring only in our interior world and their relations with those stimulated by the external world.

Thus, in Heidegger’s terminology, what we are is always at stake. The choices we make and the experiences we have and the past we carry with us are always in vibrant collision, shaping and reshaping our Selves, second by second. I suppose you could see this as daunting, but for me it is exciting, meaning that my Self is not fixed, not bound to the past or to any particular future, and not only not fixed, but malleable. That is, I can make choices now, right now, that affect my Self. I can even alter the past by recalibrating the frames through which I view it.

As we discussed in the Nietzschean conversations below, once we understand this fluid, vital nature of the Self, we cannot help but live dangerously. Why? Because in every action, in every moment of contemplation, even lurking in the past are events, experiences, thoughts that change who we are. And who we can become. Powerful, scary ideas.

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

Down, In

September 10, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

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

September 10, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

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

September 9, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

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

September 8, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

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

September 5, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

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

August 28, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

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.