Category Archives: Great Work

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Poetry

What He Said

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Fall                                                                Harvest Moon

Hamatreya [excerpt]

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

EARTH-SONG

 

“Mine and yours;
Mine, not yours.
Earth endures;
Stars abide–
Shine down in the old sea;
Old are the shores;
But where are old men?
I who have seen much,
Such have I never seen.

“The lawyer’s ded
Ran sure,
In tail,
To them, and to their heirs
Who shall succeed,
Without fail,
Forevermore.

“Here is the land,
Shaggy with wood,
With its old valley,
Mound and flood.
But the heritors?
Fled like the flood’s foam.
The lawyer, and the laws,
And the kingdom,
Clean swept herefrom.

 

“They called me theirs,
Who so controlled me;
Yet every one
Wished to stay, and is gone,
How am I theirs,
If they cannot hold me,
But I hold them?”

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work

Ora et Labora

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Fall                                                               Autumn Moon

Frost last night, but no freeze.  Either way, not too damaging for us.  Our harvest of above ground bearing vegetables and fruits is almost over.  Left are root crops like leeks and carrots, a few onions, some beets and a late crop of kale and chard.  All of these are frost hardy, even freeze hardy.

I have another leek dish to make, a leek gratin.  Will have several leeks left after that so I may have to return to the chicken pot pies or leek and potato soup.  Both are good.

All in all a good gardening year except for the failure of my bee management plan and the theft of our honeycrisp crop by those #$!%XXX squirrels.  Looks like I pulled out a save with the bees by going with over wintering.  Just no honey this year.  Next year.  Good thing Artemis honey is not a for profit business.

Ruth Hayden commented on our gardening and bees as not about poverty, but “…about creativity.”  In the broadest sense, yes.  In the particular though Kate enjoys the Iowa farm mom aspect of putting food by:  drying, canning, freezing, storing.  Both of us enjoy and I find essential the spiritual aspect of gardening, the close connection to the soil, to the source of our food, to the seasons, to the vagaries of weather and the changing of climate.

You might say our garden is our church, or, better really, our meditation and our sutra, our bible.  Ora et labora.  Work and prayer is the Benedictine motto.  I like it too.  Work as prayer, especially work with plants.

 

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

Are You Trying To Start a Movement?

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Lugnasa                                                        Garlic Planting Moon
Presented Homecoming:  Faith of a Pagan at Groveland UU this morning.  They’ve honored me by having me come regularly for over 20 years.  Fewer and fewer times as I’ve moved away from the ministry, but still, each year, at least once, often twice.

There’s something about an immediate audience that makes writing fresher, harder, cleaner.  During the discussion after the presentation I found myself explaining my reimagining faith project and the more I said, the more enthused I became.  Strange, I know, but that’s what happened.  Partly I could see connections, heads nodding.  This was taking root as an idea.

“Are you trying to start a movement?” one long time Grovelander asked.

Made me stop and think.  No, I’m not.  But I’m trying to get clear enough to write down my thoughts, make them into a book, because I feel  this reimagined faith needs to be part of everyone’s inner tool kit.  I don’t mean it needs to replace your Buddhism or Christianity or Judaism or Sikhism.  It can be an adjunct, a both/and.  Or, like me, it can be whole deal.

An essential awareness of and responsiveness to the world in which we live, the planet on which we depend has too often been lost, especially in developed countries.   Now, too, developing countries like the BRIK nations.  Unfortunately, those are the very spots where this kind of earth mindfulness is most needed.  These countries are the ones that make decisions large and small that effect the future of human life on this planet.

Another Grovelander, a young Macalester student, challenged my pushing off against Christianity as an example of a metaphysic that distances us from the world.  She was right.  This message needs to penetrate especially religious and economic ideologies, be attractive rather than repulsive.  Yet still strong enough to bite.  Not an easy task.

But, hey?  If it was easy, someone would have already done it.

(illustration above:  The Green Knight Gesso tells the tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from the Green Knight’s perspective. The old ways are parting for the new, yet in the ancient there is wisdom to learn and to be retained. The Green Knight is symbolic of ancient wisdom.)

Great Work, Our Land and Home

The Exurbs post 1

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Lugnasa                                                       Garlic Planting Moon

When we turn north off of our street, 153rd Ave. NW, onto Round Lake Boulevard, we pass a small white house with cheap siding and usually a car or two parked in the yard and after it comes Field’s Truck Farm.

Our house sits on a peninsula of sand that once jutted out into a lake that extended from about Coon Creek Boulevard, a mile or so south of us, to county road 18, a mile or so north of us.  That lake is now a vast peat bog except for what was, I imagine, a deeper end, separated from what was the main body of water at this time by Round Lake Boulevard, and now far along in the eutrophication process itself, Round Lake.

Field’s grows corn, radishes, potatoes, tomatoes, onions and grass on the former lake bed.  It sits about 2 feet to 3 feet lower than the rest of the land around it and lower still when compared to the height of our land.  Just beyond the main sheds and buildings, including temporary housing for migrant workers, sit row after row of wood sided trucks, old tractors, some farm implements.  As we proceed north on Round Lake various plots of the old lake bed hold radishes and grass, a commodity for which Anoka County is the chief source in the state.

A right, or eastward, turn on county road 18 goes along the northern perimeter of Field’s farm taking us to Hanson Boulevard, where we turn north once again.  On three sides of the intersection here are large plots of wetland, covered mostly in bullrushes, a favorite habitat of the Baltimore Oriole.  North on Hanson finds us traveling along fields and forest, a countryside scene familiar to anyone who knows Minnesota’s northern region.  We are, in fact, the southern, or terminal end, of the great Boreal forest that extends north from here to the tundra in Canada.

The further north we go the more wetlands, forest and lakes.  Great blue herons float across the highway from one hunting ground to another.  If it were evening, we would have to be on the watch for deer and, of late, wild turkeys.

 

 

Great Wheel, Great Work, Poetry
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Lugnasa                                               Hiroshima Moon

 

The Spring Dumbledor

An August Midnight
by Thomas Hardy

I

A shaded lamp and a waving blind,
And the beat of a clock from a distant floor:
On this scene enter—winged, horned, and spined—
A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore;
While ‘mid my page there idly stands
A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands…

II

Thus meet we five, in this still place,
At this point of time, at this point in space.
—My guests besmear my new-penned line,
Or bang at the lamp and fall supine.
“God’s humblest, they!” I muse. Yet why?
They know Earth-secrets that know not I.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, US History

The Growing Season Begins to Wind Down

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Summer                                                             Hiroshima Moon

On Wednesday we move from the growing season emphasis of early summer to the harvest emphasis of late summer.  The Celtic calendar marks that change on August 1st which begins the season of Lughnasa, a first fruits time.  Yes, harvesting has happened before this, but now the inflection is on crops for sale, trade or preservation.

[ in precipitation in during the growing season (after Meehan et al. 2004 and Bowen et al. 2005)]

If any of you saw the opening ceremony of the Olympics, the first, agrarian phase of Great Britain before the industrial revolution is the time the Celtic calendar marks.  It is not a calendar for an industrialized or a technological society though it has an important place in both.  Industrialization and technology both move us away from direct experience of the
natural world and especially from the source of our food.  The Celtic calendar gets its seasons from the botanical and meteorological rhythms, not the work day or the academic year or the never asleep world of the internet.

Those other rhythms, the Taylorized day or the instantaneous cyber world, lead us away from natural rhythms into a cultural space dominated by rationality, science and human control.  In the Celtic calendar the natural world rules, just as it does yet today, though we hide ourselves from it with thermostats, electric lights and high speed broadband.

This is not an either/or situation; there is a dialectic between the world of human artifice and the world which brings the thunder and the lightning and the rain, which grows the food, which gives us night and day.  Yet.  So many of us, in our air conditioned, wired, well-lit by electricity homes, obscure or forget or ignore that our food grows in the soil, the flesh of mother earth.  That it depends on water either from rain or from irrigation, this dependent of rain and replenishment of hidden aquifers.  That the sun which gives food the energy we need does so without human intervention or assistance.

All of our civilization has as its foundation, its literal without which nothing support, the vegetative world.  And we do not control it.  We can help it, nurture it, bless it, curse it, but we cannot make plants grow.  We can only provide or protect the conditions under which they do so.  In our amnesia about this simple, stark fact we pave over farmland, alter the chemical conditions under which plants grow, change their genetic patterns trying to extend our control, but all this begs the question.  How did the vegetative world get along without us?

The answer?  Just fine.  This is not a rant, this is a reflection of our current reality.  It is the hope of ancientrails that it can serve as one reminder.  One reminder of the essential, unique and healing power of the world beyond our control.

Cooking, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Health

A Dream, Become Real, Become Dream

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Summer                                                Hiroshima Moon

“Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the action stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.” – Anais Nin

Horticulture.  When we moved in here now 18 years ago, we decided to spend money upfront on landscaping, figuring we could enjoy it over the life of our tenancy rather than putting in as an amenity at the time of a sale.  We hired a landscape architect from Otten Brothers and he put in a basic plan.  Two wild prairie patches on either side of a manicured lawn.  Norway pines, a spruce or two, some amur maples, a genus maple, an oak, some river birch.  Near the house he put on narrow beds planted with shrubs like euonymus, a dwarf lilac, shrub roses, viburnum among others.

A boulder retaining wall in the front shored up a long bed like a peninsula into the green ocean of our yard.  In the back we had them cut a three tiered garden, each tier marked off with boulder retaining walls and divided near the house by steps made of rail-road tie size square lumber.

The rest of our property, all now that is our “backyard”, was part woods and part scrubland covered with black locust trees, thorny and not visually appealing though very good for fence posts.  The first two years after our move I spent cutting down trees, using a commercial wood-chipper to  grind them up and hiring a stump-grinder to come in and rid us of the stumps.  The scrubland became, gradually, a place where we could build a shed, plant a vegetable garden and I dreamed of making it an expanse of prairie, as I had wanted to do with the entire property when we moved. Continue reading A Dream, Become Real, Become Dream →

Bees, Cinema and Television, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work

Tigers and Bees and The Great Mesh of Being

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Summer                                                   Under the Lily Moon

Thursday night Kate and I watched Conflict Tiger, a movie by Sasha Snow that followed the same story retold in the book, Tiger.  It’s a powerful, gritty movie about the reality of life in the taiga.  The characters in the movie, especially Yuri Trush and Ivan Dunkai, have a powerful presence, Trush as the hard-bitten but compassionate eco-policeman and Dunkai as a shamanic character with intuitive grasp of the tiger and taiga learned practical wisdom.

(Ivan Dunkai, Sasha Snow)

Today I did bee business.  Moved six honey supers, put two on the south colony and took the remaining four into the third garage bay.  The trailer on our lawn tractor is a handy piece of equipment.

Two colonies:  the south, filled with bees, boiling up out of it like angry vengeance, not wanting a stranger pawing around in their home; the other, docile and less populated.  When the south colony residents went into their angry buzz and started slamming against the veil and gathering on my right glove, my body zoomed back to last fall when I made a mistake.  You may recall that I decided to replace a honey super on a hive without veiling up?  OMG.  WTF.  OUCH.  My heart rate went up today.

Since I use nine frames in ten frame hive boxes, the bees often construct comb in the empty spaces and they had done this in the south colony.  Since I had to reverse the hive boxes on that colony today–this forces the bees to fill up both hive boxes with brood which makes for a better crew to harvest and make honey–one of the chunks of non-frame comb fell off.  It had honey it.

It’s now on the kitchen table.  Fresh honey in the comb.  Worth that bit of pit-a-pat.

Bee keeping is a collegial activity.  I keep the frames clean and coming while the colony builds up, adding sugar syrup if necessary.  Once the honey flow starts, if the colonies are strong enough, I put on honey supers and harvest the honey they make that is in excess of what they need to survive over the winter.

In other words I provide a home and its maintenance, they pay the rent with honey.  It is nothing less than a partnership with both parties putting in their own labor and each party getting benefit.

It is, in that way, a very tangible micro-instance of the relationship we have with our mother, the earth.  In that macro relationship we are the dependent party, yet we have work we put into the relationship, too.  It can be constructive work or destructive work, we choose, but the feedback systems in play make destructive work dangerous, too often causing mother to remind us of our place in the order of things, the great chain of being.

In fact the great chain of being does not run from earth to heaven, rather it runs around the skin of the earth, more like a great mesh.

 

Great Work, Literature

Tyger, Tyger’s Dying Light

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Beltane                                                  New Lily Moon

Finished Tiger by John Valliant.  It has so many great lines.  Hope dies last.  Russian proverb.  The only other warm blooded animal that rivals humans in total numbers?  Chickens.  The native people tell me I’m now marked by the tiger, Yuri Trush.  Trush is the dominant figure in the book who survived a direct assault by a tiger.  The story of that tiger and its death is the strong lineament of the book.

Because the tiger is an apex predator in the eco-systems it inhabits, the health of the tiger population serves as a, perhaps the, key indicator of the health of that eco-system. If the tiger population is healthy, then the prey species are healthy as are the complex network of plants and other animals that depend on these two, predator and prey, for their survival.  The sad news is that the apex apex predator, humans, has begun to push its competitors out of existence in the wild and that includes tigers.

A good book, well written and provocative.

Great Work, Weather +Climate

Presentiment?

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Beltane                                              Garlic Moon

Cleaned off the air conditioner, mulched the blueberries, asparagus, onions, mounded the leeks (2nd time), mulched the chard and the beets.  Also took notice of the garlic scapes.  Soon it will be time for spaghetti with olive oil and the scapes.  Put a bit of mulch down in the perennial garden.

Any particular day can be hot just because, but when a whole year, in fact, a whole millennium, think of that for a minute, trends warmer then it’s not just because.  A jump to 7.4 degrees above average points a bony finger at anthropogenic causes and if you can’t see that you haven’t been outside lately.