Category Archives: Great Work

Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home

It’s Beginning in Earnest

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Spring                                                                         Bee Hiving Moon

Scraping the mulch off the bulbs today, that scent, you know the one, decayed leaf matter mixed with the soil came up.  It says life is at work here, even in the midst of death. That smell alone brings me out in the early days of gardening. It was there when I raked off the mulch over the beds where I planted the carrots and the beets.

Then, under the leaves are pale green stalks emerging, starved for direct sun, happy to have their cover removed.  They’ll get a deeper green in just a day or two. We’re past the time for freezes of any serious sort now though frost is not only still possible, it’s still likely until around May 10, May 15.

The whole garden will gradually come back into full life.  The spring ephemerals shoot up now and will bloom soon. The carrots and beets will germinate and then in mid-May we’ll drop in the tomatoes, peppers, beans, chard, kale, melons, cucumbers and eggplants.  Meanwhile the fruit trees will bud, then flower, as will the currants and the elderberries and the gooseberries and the blueberries.

If the bees are alive, and I hope they are, they’ll be getting busy.  I’ll have a divide this year instead of a package, which means I’ll have to buy a queen for the divide. If they’re really going.  I’ll find out tomorrow.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

The Leaf In Place of The Cross

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Spring                                                                      Bee Hiving Moon

Final post on this series.  If you need a symbol of eternal life, let me refer you to the tree leaf and not the cross.  In this 74 degree day I just finished scraping the mulch from bulbs I planted last fall.  The mulch is tree leaves gathered in the same season.

The leaf works hard from early spring until fall capturing sunlight, drawing up water from the tree’s roots and combining them with CO2 in a true transubstantiation, photosynthesis. When the seasonal change indicates to the tree that conditions will no longer be good for photosynthesis, the leaf detaches from the tree’s vascular system and in so doing, its chlorophyll returns to the tree. This is the moment when the leaf changes color, revealing its other pigments.

As it withers from loss of water, the leaf changes color again and eventually detaches from the tree itself. That’s when I pick it up as a mulch. When I apply the leaf to the newly planted beds, the leaves perform two functions.  First, they insulate the bed, retaining the cold into the early days of spring so the earth won’t heave and throw the newly planted bulbs out. Second, they begin to decay and transfer their remaining stores of nutrients and fiber into the soil itself.

In this way the engine of transubstantiation, the leaf, even after it produces oxygen for us to breathe and glucose for the plant to use in its growth, gives up all of itself to the plant community in general, enriching the soil for the next generation.

So the leaf, a most ordinary miracle doer, does in fact what Christian’s claim Jesus can do, that is, give life through their death. You might say that in focusing on the cross Christian’s chose the wrong part of the tree.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Weather +Climate

Fencing Off Spring

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Spring (Ostara)                                                       Bee Hiving Moon

Friend Bill Schmidt found a helpful exposition on Ostara, an early fertility goddess, and her regular appearance in Christian households (among others) at this time of year. Here’s a link to this short, but well-researched piece.  After reading it, an odd thought occurred to me, perhaps because I also read this NYT piece this morning:  Saving Minds, Along With Souls.

The odd thought is this.  The church captured the renewal and invigorating power of spring as a metaphor for the resurrection, then demonized (quite literally) and punished pagan observances of the season, like those related in the linked piece Bill found.  The effect was to put a theological fence around the power of spring in Western culture, confining it within the garden of Christian orthodoxy.

By making church membership and belief a prerequisite for experience its power-through the Easter holiday-the natural celebration of a Great Wheel holiday, a real and joyous one, became dangerous, sanctioned as blasphemy.  The church accomplished this in fact through the burning of witches and the intentional extinguishing of earth focused traditions wherever it spread its missionary power. It accomplished it in theory through making spring only a metaphor for the resurrection.

Enough of that.  A temperate latitude Spring is a wonder, a life renewing, hopeful time when the earth shows that life comes again, and triumphs over the fallow time.  And more.  In doing so it assures life for the human race and all the animal kingdom that absolutely depends on its gentle, but unyielding power. It is an animal’s birthright to gambol when the grass greens and the trees leave out.  The joy is innate.

Business cycles come and go.  History rises and falls. Nations become great and then wither.  Religions prosper and die away. Note this, though. If even one spring failed to happen, it would cause a worldwide catastrophe more damaging than the failure of any of these. If two springs failed to happen in a row, there would be no need for business cycles or nations and history would record a near apocalypse.  Three springs? Well, just imagine.

(A Vision of Spring – Thomas Millie Dow)

So give me a bunny rabbit and some colored eggs. Let’s take off our shoes  and walk barefoot on the soil as it warms the seeds. I’ll dance with you as the shoots come up and starvation is banished once again.

 

 

Cinema and Television, Great Work, Humanities, US History

Wish I’d Known the Son-of-a-Bitch Wanted to be a Millionaire.

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Spring                                                                      Bee Hiving Moon

Kate and I saw Nebraska the other night.  This movie was pitch perfect for heartland small town dialogue.  The images it created of Billings, Montana, Hawthorne, Nebraska,  and Lincoln, Nebraska felt taken from my recent adventure driving between my surprise incursion point into Kansas and Highway 80 in mid-Nebraska.  Small rural towns in the midwest have suffered, a lot, over the last 50 years.  They’re run down and often sparsely settled though that trend has begun to ameliorate somewhat.

There were as well images of striking beauty, especially a wide-angle shot of a slightly rolling field with bales of rolled hay sprinkled throughout.  If not for the black and white, it could have been painted by Breughel.  The big sky and vast horizons of the drive from Billings to Lincoln are also beautiful, the stark aesthetic of the plains.

Not only because it was black and white, but because of its tight focus on family and strangeness (remember Mom lifting her skirt to the gravestone?), too, this film reminded me of Ingmar Bergman.  These were everyman characters dealing with everyday issues:  a desultory  job, American hucksterism and its unwitting victims, a long distanced father and son closing the gap, a slow revelation of Woody and David’s largeheartedness.

It will, unfortunately, only serve to convince bi-coastal sophisticates that the rural midwest is unredeemable, shabby and coarse, low-browed.  It cannot and does not try to show the agricultural culture that lies behind the small towns and cities and lives it portrays.  It also cannot show the slow but persistent erosion of rural life as farming has gone corporate and the kids leave home for Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, even Lincoln and Omaha.

This is not a criticism of the movie, but a wistful longing for an artful representation of growing food, tending livestock, some way of showing the heartland as just that, the heart of a great nation and a food producer for the world.

Garden, GeekWorld, Great Work, Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses, World History

An Afternoon

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Spring                                                             Bee Hiving Moon

Moving deeper into Book I of the Metamorphoses.  Next week I’ll set a schedule for translating, so many verses a day.  Plus I plan to set a schedule for certain additional research that will go along with this task, things like comparing Ovid’s stories with other accounts of the same myth, investigating key grammatical or etymological points and, the big one, getting deep into Roman history of the late Republic and early Imperial era, Ovid’s time.  Over the last couple of years I have purchased books about Ovid and his poetry, Roman poetry and comparative literature between and among Ovid and his peers.

(Deucalião_e_Pirra   Giovanni_Maria_Bottalla)

I’ve not been too willing to get into these areas in any depth until I felt the translating had reached some point, though I didn’t know what that was.  Well, now I’ve reached it.  And I’m ready to go the next step.

I spent a half an hour today and translated 5 verses, so my speed is picking up, though to be fair the difficulty varies, usually with regard to the length of a sentence.

Also in the mail today.  The nitrogen for the vegetable garden and my new Lenovo laptop. This replaces my old Hewlett-Packard, a sturdy and reliable machine that has been outstripped by cheaper processors and memory and the retirement of Microsoft XP.  It doesn’t have enough juice to run Windows 7 or Windows 8.  Tomorrow I plan to start it up and see what’s what.

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

Land of Enchantment

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Spring                                                      Hare Moon

Santa Fe.  The adobe here catches the eyes, then the scent of pinyon smoke and the art galleries.  Also, the number of thin gray-haired citizens moving around with purpose, as if channeling Georgia O’Keefe.  It’s easy to imagine a chunk of this Latin influenced culture breaking off and taking root in other places.  An emphasis on beauty, use of native products and Latin American diffusion carried by sophisticated Latinos, artists, writers and outdoor enthusiasts.  Maybe as Chaco Canyon was to the pueblo cultures of the 850-1150 period.

By this time in the trip the Garmin, once unwelcome, has made me her bitch.  I hang on her every word, follow her exactly.  I think the voice model they hired might have been a dominatrix at some point.  It does take away the anxiety of navigating, especially in cities and off the main highway systems.  I like that.

When I drove from Holbrook to Gallup at 4 am yesterday, a sickle moon hung in the sky with Venus about 4 degrees away in line with the bottom point of the sickle.  It is an image that I will work with in the journal.  The pueblo people emulate the clouds, building up communities, then dissipating and moving on.  This moon hung in a clear sky and it was not difficult at all to stand with the pueblo people and the dine of the last thousand plus years and see with them the blessing.  The clouds created by the heat of the day would extend this beauty into the blue reaches of a sunlit sky.

Our kiva sees the same moon and planet, sees clouds in the day and the procession of stars at night.  Yes, our seasons are different, but plants grow in both our kivas and so do animals.  We are different, yet we are the same.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home, permaculture

What Is Your Kiva?

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Spring                                          Hare Moon

Santa Fe.  Staying in a reasonably priced motel right in the heart of adobe filled Santa Fe.  The cathedral featured in Death Comes for the Archbishop is only a block or two away.  I came to Santa Fe after seeing Chaco Canyon.

Due to a weird late night mix up I checked into a motel-cheap-no phone, no wi-fi she said.  I didn’t mind.  She forgot to add no heat.  This in Holbrook, AZ high up just past the Mogollon Rim.  49 when I pulled in. I was too tired to hassle it so I went to sleep.

Fortunately, years of living with Kate have taught me cold sleeping skills.  It was fine until I woke up 4 am. I’d never shifting my bed time from home, nor my rising, so the 6 am Minnesota equivalent had me awake.  I decided to get in the warm car and drive to Chaco Canyon.  Which I did.

This is a haunting place, difficult to get to now as it must have been difficult to get to in the period between 850 a.d and 1150 a.d. when it flourished.  It was, for that time period the ceremonial for the pueblo peoples.  The architecture of Chaco County shows up in many other pueblo peoples sites, though much more modest in scale.

The Chaco folks built big.  And they built stone on stone, with a mud mortar.  The construction technique reminded me of dry stone fences in the East.

The part of each person’s inner life that reaches out to a particular patch of mother earth has created thousands of small kivas, I’ll call them.  The pueblo people go into the below ground circular stone structures called kiva’s as if returning to the womb. Each time they come out, they’re reborn.  So a kiva is a patch of earth where you feel reborn.  For me it’s our gardens and woods and orchard, for the pueblo people its Chaco Canyon and the Four Sacred Mountains.

Each patch of earth needs a kiva that holds it dear and feels responsible for its care.  And who, in turn, are reborn in the giving of that care by the earth.  This is a faith with so many worship sites and the worship is different for each kiva.  What kiva do you belong to?

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work

The True Apocalypse

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Spring                                                     Hare Moon

Tucson.  The Horse Latitudes.

The second of the three workshops, this one focusing on depth work, finished this afternoon.  Again, because of the nature of the workshops, they’re hard to summarize and its difficult to convey their spirit except to say its most like a contemplative secular retreat.  Which is, come to think of it, just what it is.

I can convey the spirit of this workshop by transcribing here the results of the next to last exercise. This one was to create a spontaneous statement, a testament, of what we believe to be true right now.  This was written following a long meditation, with no forethought.

Here are the things I know to be true:

Love forms the cross on which we all live.  The soil is the foundation of life. Our ancestors hold us up, have our backs. (FYI: those of you at Frank’s will know how this came to mind.)

The sun is a god who gives of himself wholly.  The light of the sun is holy and blesses what it touches.

The soil embraces the sun, marries the sun, goes into throes of ecstasy with the sun producing, producing, producing.

As the earth turns the soils embrace of the sun weakens and strengthens, weakens and strengthens and from these rhythms we get life eternal, abundant, gracious and undeserved.

We celebrate each other as moving, loving sons and daughters borne of the sun and the soils embrace-nothing more and nothing less.  We owe ourselves fealty to these two, our parents, our true god and our true goddess without whom we are nothing-brittle, cold, frozen, shattered.

We need no other religion, no other philosophy, no other politics than fealty to sun and soil.  They have given us what we need, they will give us what we need-unless we change their marriage to one which can no longer include the human family.  If we do, it will be the final anathema, the true apocalypse and the end of a long love affair.

Great Work, Travel

Sharp, Pointy Things

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Spring in the Horse Latitudes                         Hare Moon

After the workshop ended at 4:30 pm, I got in the car and headed east on Speedway, then north on Carmino Seco and after that ESE on the Old Spanish Trail.  It’s pretty curvy so it might really be an old Spanish trail.  My aim was to make the eastern chunk, the Rincon Mountain section of the Saguaro National Park, preferably before the visitor center closed.  I wanted a book or two cacti.

Missed it.  They were folding the flag when I got there, but the scenic loop, an 8 mile one way drive through a portion of the park stayed open until sunset.  I knew that and it was the other reason I went.

As the sun set, I drove slowly around the loop, stopping frequently for photographs and looking around.  This is the Sonoran desert, the driest desert in the U.S. and one of four deserts that have some portion in Arizona.  At several pull-outs I exited the car and stood looking across the valley floor where the saguaro, in their oddly human way stood embracing each other, cradling children or watching over them.  There seemed to be roughly equal distances around the big ones, as if, I thought, they had territories to defend.

There were streakies and jack rabbits with their thin erect ears.  This was evening and the critters had begun to come out for their daily life.  It cools down quickly and the contrast with the heat of late afternoon is evident.

I’m so glad to have my energy back after fighting that damned cold.  After the park I found a Mexican restaurant, not much of a feat here, and had a wonderful dinner for $13.00.  Leftovers in the fridge.

Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics, Third Phase

Burned

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Imbolc                                                             Hare Moon

Ross Douthat, a columnist for the New York Times, is a thoughtful conservative.  So is D.J. Tice, editorial writer for the Star-Tribune, though Tice often sets my kettle to boil.  Both had interesting pieces in their respective papers today, Douthat on individualism and the millennials, Tice on entitlement reform and the baby boom.

Tice writes as a baby boomer and asks us for another shot at society wide influence by seeking and seeing implemented reforms to both Social Security and Medicare.  I agree with him.  We need to solve this issue now, as the largest cohort to enter the python is only a fraction of the way in.  It is our responsibility to demand sensible changes and that our representatives in congress and the White House enact them.

What are they?  I don’t know the arguments right now well enough to recommend, but I know such arguments exist and I would stand with the fiscally responsible ones.  Tice and I agree this time.  I also appreciate his writing as a baby boomer and as one who calls for action.

Douthat read this Pew report on the millennials and concluded (though you have to read between his weasel words) that civilization as we know it is doomed.  This is a favorite conservative argument when societal trends point toward things they don’t like, in this instance, more individualism.

I don’t agree with Douthat.  Conservatives like to place individualism as an ethos over against communitarianism, the former eroding the latter until we’re all small, armed, loosely affiliated gangs.  The reality is much more complicated.  Individualism does not go over against communitarianism.

As an existentialist I believe we are each in this world alone, that our individuality is inescapable and incapable of being increased by any sort of belief or action.  Individualism is a definition of what it means to be human.  As an existentialist, I also know that we can recognize the remarkable affinity we share with others of our species.  And more, with a land ethic like Aldo Leopolds, we can recognize and act on the remarkable affinity we share with all of the natural world, animate and inanimate.  We are, after all, stardust.

Thus, the signal act of the aware universe (that is, you and me), is to bridge the abyss between the depths of one person and that of others, to acknowledge our solidarity as a creature aware of its own death.  We are all, as Camus said, in the river rushing toward our end, and we are in the river together.  It is this common bond we share that makes us compassionate toward the other and makes us want to ease their burdens in this one lifetime.

Now, here’s what’s really interesting in both of these columnist’s pieces today.  Both invoke a future disaster, one fiscal and the other communitarian, but both leave out the certain calamity that requires our action now, our action as a global community: mitigation and adaptation to climate change.  They both speak for the future, yet it is the heat and the storms and the floods and the rising oceans that reach from that future with the most destructive force.

Granted we have to multi-task, communities and nations can do that, though it’s very difficult for individuals.  But to bemoan the future without acknowledging the carbon in our atmosphere (so to speak) will only ensure a time in which individuals and poor old people will burn.