Imbolc Anniversary Moon
Category Archives: Great Work
My Holy Scripture
Imbolc Anniversary Moon
The World Is Too Much With Us
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
Red Flag
Imbolc Valentine Moon
Went out yesterday with the pole saw and began the task of trimming branches on our lodgepole pines. OMG. Working that saw, always over my head, wore me out pretty fast though I did get several trees limbed. Splintered Forest rents power pole saws and I might rent one for the rest of the work.
I did this work in honor of the red flag warning (highest fire danger) we had yesterday. Limbing up to ten feet prevents a grass fire’s spread into the trees. The branches below 10 feet act as ladder fuel, giving the fire a way to climb. Otherwise the trees are not nearly as combustible. It felt good to be outside, a sunny day, warmish but still cool.
There was a video clip of the recent Meyer’s Ranch grass fire on Pinecam.com. Meyer’s Ranch is near us. When I saw the fire licking up around the tree trunks, it prompted thinking about ladder fuel. The reality was very easy to see.
We chose to live here, so we have to take these matters into account. In a big fire, a crown fire or one whipped by the winds that often roar down mountain, we’ll probably lose the house anyway. This work means that in something less than that it might survive. Being close to the main road, Black Mountain Drive (aka Co. 78), and having a flat, short driveway means firefighters will work to save our house. That ups our odds, too.
And, on that cheery note, I’ll make all this a metaphor. Donald Trump is a red flag warning for our democracy. If we don’t do the important maintenance now and for the next four years, we might lose the White House and self-governance. Get out that pole saw and call your congressperson.
Psst. Looking for a Job? Look Up
Imbolc Valentine Moon
Moose Runs
Imbolc Valentine Moon
Speedy
Magnum opus
Imbolc Valentine Moon
Don’t know why it took me so long, but I know how to make America great again. It will not require red baseball hats or xenophobic bluster. No, it only requires listening to the ideas of a Passionate priest, Thomas Berry. Berry wrote a small book, The Great Work. It influenced a turn in my political activity from economic justice to environmental concerns.
This 258 page book is a quick read and it introduces The Great Work. Civilizations, according to Berry, have a quintessential role that only they can perform. The one he identifies for our civilization is this: Creating a sustainable existence for humans on this earth. That is our Great Work. It is the way to make America Great again.
The phrase, the Great Work, comes from medieval alchemy. The primary, original material of the universe, the prima materia, in the alchemist’s lab can create the philosopher’s stone. The philosopher’s stone could turn base metals into gold or silver and extend the alchemist’s life.
We can take the prima materia of the U.S., its citizens and its land, put them in the alembic created by our need for survival and our need for economic justice, and turn up the heat until we have our philosopher’s stone. When we have it, we can use it to heal the earth and create good-paying jobs for all.
Then, then America will be great. Not only again, but still and not only still but into the future as well. May it be so.
Imbolc, 2017
Imbolc Valentine Moon
Imbolc, or in-the-belly, celebrates the time in Ireland when the ewes would freshen. Their pregnancies meant milk would be available after the long fallow season that had begun at Samain, Summer’s End.
Imbolc lies halfway between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox, what the Celt’s called a cross-quarter holiday since it falls between two quarters defined by the solar year. That milk is also a promise, like the gradual lengthening of days after the longest night of the year in late December, that spring and the growing season will come.
It’s easy for us in our refrigerated, grocery stored world to gloss over these signals of the natural world. It seems like we don’t require them anymore. After all we can buy milk, cow’s milk, at any time of the day or night, 365 days a year. And the growing season particular to our latitude and longitude also seems irrelevant since it’s always the growing season somewhere on earth. The occasional gaps that even modern transportation can’t resolve can often be filled by greenhouse or hydroponically grown produce. We’re good, right?
I’m afraid not. Celebrating Imbolc or any of the Great Wheel holidays will not resolve our alienation from the sources of our sustenance, the sun and mother earth, but this ancient tradition exists to call us back home. The Great Wheel is a reminder that the cycle of life continues, even when the fields and animals are barren. The power of the sun, working in harmony with the soil, with plants, with animals that eat the plants does not disappear. It can be trusted.
It is though, that alienation, evident in so many ways, that drives climate change, that creates produce modified for harvest and storage, not human well-being, that underwrites the paving over of cropland and wetlands. We imagine that somehow the droughts in California will stop there. We hope they’ll be confined to somewhere else, somewhere where we’re not. Global agriculture means we’ll be affected wherever the damage occurs.
Right here in Colorado we have a key example of the interdependence for which the Great Wheel stands. Our snowpack, high in the Rockies where the Colorado River rises for its journey south toward its ancient destination in the Gulf of California, determines the amount of water available to nine states. Including California. Winter snowfall, melted by the increasing warmth of spring and summer, nourishes millions of people, cities like Las Vegas, Phoenix and Los Angeles.
In the age of Trump and rising nationalist, right wing populism, the need for the Great Wheel has never been more profound. It softens our in the moment, human conflicts by lifting up the long term, the cycles of life in which all humans, all life participate. The Great Wheel reminds us that there is no other when it comes to living on this planet. We’re all here and bound to one another, connected. My hope is that someday, perhaps someday soon, we’ll all realize that and adjust our politics accordingly.
A Druid and a Radical
Winter Valentine Moon
OK. I admit it. I occasionally take the quizzes that pop up on facebook. I mention this because one set of quizzes seems, well, accurate. The same quiz website offered two recently: What kind of ancient religion would you follow? What kind of philosopher are you?
Though I thought I’d saved the piece about ancient religion, I didn’t. Still. The ancient religion that matched my answers? Celtic Druidism. How ’bout that? In the year leading up to my leaving the Presbyterian ministry I was in spiritual direction with John Ackerman at Westminster Presbyterian Church. When I told him I no longer believed in Jesus/God/Holy Spirit, but was more focused now on how I fit into the natural world, he said, “Well, you might be a druid.” He meant it. Not a flippant observation. Prescient.
Since then, the Great Wheel has become my liturgical calendar. I’m much more like what I would once have critiqued as a flat-earth humanist. That is, the metaphysical realms of the world religions seem like poetry to me rather than statements about ontology. I am not a new atheist, a scorner of faith and its many, many permutations. And, yes, I recognize the role religion plays in human conflicts, but I know that most of the time religions gather people of similar demographic characteristics. When conflict emerges, it often has roots in economic and political realities that align closely with religious preferences.
I did save the note about which philosopher I’m most like.* This also seemed apposite. It surprised me, in both instances, how the 29 questions they ask managed to get somewhere close to how I see myself.
*Your mind works like the philosopher: Thomas Paine
An anarchist who championed reason and free thought, Thomas Paine was never afraid to speak his mind no matter how unpopular or revolutionary his theories were. Like Paine, you see life as full of possibilities and love to shake up the status quo by thinking outside the box. You are spontaneous and communicate confidently and fluidly. Could you write a post to inspire world-transforming events like Paine’s pamphlet ‘Common Sense’ influenced the start of the American Revolution? Who knows? (But we think it might be worth a try.)
I suppose
Winter Valentine Moon
I suppose.
Kate and I supplied bagels, schmear and fruit for the bagel table at Beth Evergreen yesterday. The bagel table is a casual shabbat service that includes the prayer book and the torah reading. Yesterday the parsha was va-er, Exodus 6:2-9:26, for the most part the story of the plagues sent by God on Egypt.
Rabbi Jamie said that in one instance the verb usually translated as go, as in Go to Pharaoh, is actually come. The meaning shifts a good deal with this understanding. Come to Pharaoh implies, according to Jamie, that God will be acting through Pharaoh. This falls under the difficult to understand category for me.
Kate and I talked about this idea as we drove up Brook Forest Drive. After some conversation, we decided that if you pull back, look from a historical view, then the actions of Pharaoh do work as part of God’s efforts on behalf of the Jewish slaves. His hardened heart provides the impetus, eventually, for the Exodus.
We then turned to our contemporary Pharaoh, the Trump. Could God (whatever you want to insert into this metaphysical placeholder) speak to us through the Trump? Jamie’s point was that we have to see the potential for God to speak us especially through those things or persons that we fear or despise. I suppose. Let’s try here.
Pulling back, taking the historical view, what possible liberating impulse could come from Trump’s presidency? (I take liberating impulse to equal God.) It’s true that Trump’s election highlighted the plight of the white working class, those with no more than a high school education. And, it may be, policies to address their concerns will lift all of the working class, high school educated folks. That would be an astonishing and welcome outcome, at least to me.
Too, we might consider the orders to build the wall, block Muslim refugees from certain countries, repeal the ACA, gut environmental regulations as a hardening of the heart, a so-obvious step away from justice and fairness, a big step away from a sustainable future for humanity on this planet, that the reaction to them will part the climate denying sea and create the political will for single payer health care, a return to Ellis Island immigrant welcoming that so many of us yearn for. Maybe. I suppose it could happen that way. May it be so.
As you can tell though, I’m skeptical. But, if it can be, I’ll be the first in line to admit my skepticism unwarranted.
Train Wreck
Winter Cold Moon
Imagine a long train, 130 hopper cars filled with Wyoming’s Powder Basin coal, moving at 50 mph with roughly 19,000 tons total weight. Imagine Washington DC as its terminus. We’re in the observation room of the Washington Monument, watching this train come into town. In slow motion it hits the Capital, plowing right through and heading on down Pennsylvania Avenue taking out other government office buildings and finally spending the last of its considerable energy demolishing the White House and the Executive Office Building.
This is, I’m sure, a conservative fantasy, one being enacted now in the Oval Office. The orange old man with the wondrous toupee has, with Executive Orders, supported the Keystone and DAPL pipelines, begun the rending of the ACA, will soon appropriate money for the great wall of fear and has eroded abortion protections. He has also gagged several government agencies and his nominee for Secretary of State has effectively threatened war with China. He’s not even been in office a week. That train will get a chance to leave town, pick up speed and return to get other cabinet buildings and pick off a few journalists and protesters.