Category Archives: Great Work

Family, Great Work, Minnesota, Our Land and Home

Grounded

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Fall                                    Waxing Harvest Moon

As many readers know, my sister and brother live in Southeast Asia, Mary in Singapore and Mark in Bangkok.  It’s different for me.  Kate and I have lived in Andover, in the same house with potato670050210the same land, for 16 years. I’ve driven the same car for 15 years and Kate’s driven the same truck for 10.  I’ve now been married to Kate much longer than the total of my first two marriages:  22 years versus 15.  I’ve lived in Andover longer than anywhere else:  Oklahoma-2 years, Alexandria-15 years.  I’ve lived in this house far longer than any other residence.

This came up today when Kate and I headed out to lunch.  I feel a part of this land, as if it’s part of me and I of it.  But.  I don’t feel the same about Andover.  There’s no here, here.  I have no memories of school here or my children in school.  My political involvement has been limited, recently to being an election judge.  Andover doesn’t feel like home to me, though 3122 153rd Ave NW does.

You might say I live a grounded life, if not close to the soil, certainly in partnership with it.  Perhaps the uncertainty and turmoil in my late high school and immediate post-high school years lead me to seek some stasis, I don’t know.  What I do know is that with Kate and with this land I have made a home.  And I’m glad.

Asia, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Humanities, Myth and Story

Let There Be Darkness

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Fall                                                Waxing Harvest Moon

Let’s try darkness again.  In Taoism the familiar Taiji makes my point about the essential and complementary nature of light and dark.  Taoism gives equal weight to the yin and yang* represented in the taiji, the small circle of yin within the yang and of yang within the yin, emphasizing the Taoist belief that all things contain their opposite to some degree.  So, one part of my argument simply notes that light and dark are both necessary, necessary to each other, nothing apart from each other.  In the Taoist taiji they represent the dynamic movement of heaven to which all things must conform.

In our Western cultural tradition, though, light has taken precedence over darkness, both in a physical and in an ethical sense.  Jesus is the light of the world.  Persephone goes into Hades and the earth mourns her absence until her return when it blossoms into spring.  Eurydice dies and Orpheus goes to the underworld to retrieve her.  Dante’s Divine Comedy finds Dante wandering, lost in the dark wood of error, before he begins his descent, guided by Virgil, into the multiple layers of hell.  The traditional three-story universe also reinforces these ideas:  Heaven above, earth, and the infernal regions below. Milton’s Paradise Lost follows the rebellion in heaven and the casting out of Lucifer, the Morning Star, into hell where he builds his enormous palace, Pandemonium.  Our common sense understanding of death involves hiding the body beneath the earth.  Why?

Coming out of the spiritualist tradition represented by Camp Chesterfield (see below) death involves a transition into the light, the spirit world.  Ghost Whisperer, a TV program, uses the trope from this tradition, as dead souls are led into the light.  It is, perhaps, no wonder that darkness, night and the soil come off badly in our folk metaphysic:  up and light is good; down and dark is bad.

I wish to speak a word for the yin, symbolized by the moon, the female, the cold, the receiving, the dark.  The moon illustrates the taiji perfectly.  In the dark of night, the moon, yin, reflects the sun’s light, yang, and offers a lambent light, neither yin nor yang, but the dynamic interplay between the two.  So we could look for art that features the moon as one route into the positive power of darkness.

Also, any seasonal display in a work of art, whether of spring, summer, fall or winter can open the question of each season’s value, its role in the dynamic of growth and decay, emergence and return.  This can lead to a discussion of the importance of the fallow season, the season of rest, the earth’s analog to sleep.  This can lead to a discussion of sleep and its restorative powers.

Art work of mother and child, or especially, mother and infant, can stimulate a discussion, in this context, of the womb, of the fecund nature of the dark where fetuses and seeds develop before their emergence into the world of light.

Similarly, death focused works of art can open up a discussion of birth and death as dynamic moments of change, yin and yang of human (or animal) development.  This could lead to conversation about the Mexica (Aztec) belief that life is the aberrant condition and that death is the vital, regenerative moment; we are here, goes one Mexica poem, between a sleep and a sleep.

Winterlight festivals represent a western imbalance focused on the light, the yang, and a tendency to cast the yin in a negative light, something to be avoided or eliminated or held in check.  As I said previously, this is understandable given the pre-historical science which made the return of the sun doubtful and therefore terrifying.  Many of these festivals are, too, our favorites:  Christmas, Deepavali and for a different traditional reason, Hanukkah.

In my own faith tradition, roughly pagan, I look forward to the dying of the light and celebrate as my most meaningful holiday, the Winter Solstice.  Of course, I also celebrate the return of the light that begins on that very day, but first I immerse myself in the long night, the many hours of darkness.  This affords me an opportunity to acknowledge the dark, to express gratitude for its manifold gifts.   In this way my idiosyncratic faith has a ritual moment that honors the taiji, utilizing the cues given by the natural world.

To find art that emphasizes this aspect of darkness I plan to walk the museum from top to bottom, searching for images and objects that can help our visitors understand that when they celebrate the festivals of light that darkness is the reason for the season.  I would appreciate any thoughts or ideas.

*In Chinese culture, Yin and Yang represent the two opposite principles in nature. Yin characterizes the feminine or negative nature of things and yang stands for the masculine or positive side. Yin and yang are in pairs, such as the moon and the sun, female and male, dark and bright, cold and hot, passive and active, etc. But yin and yang are not static or just two separated things. The nature of yinyang lies in interchange and interplay of the two components. The alternation of day and night is such an example.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics

A Voice At The Table

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Fall                                                  New (Harvest) Moon

Just back from the Sierra Club.  A real dilemma for me resurfaced here.  I manage the legislative process for the Club, as I said, and in that role I organize the legislative priority setting process, its fine tuning and the work of the committee and the lobbyist while the legislature is in session.  This means I do not have to have a very deep knowledge of the particular issues since my role has a mostly administrative/managerial focus.  Thus, in a meeting like the one this morning with a legislator, where ideas get floated and possibilities discussed about a particular matter, in this case, broadly, energy issues, I simply don’t have the details and background necessary to contribute.

As Kate said, I like to participate and have intelligent things to say, but in this context, I didn’t feel like I had a anything to say.  This is disempowering for me.  The obvious solution, to learn more about each issue, runs into my other intellectual pursuits, like art history and Latin and liberal thought.  Dividing time so I have enough to do solid work in those three areas has not left me with enough left over intellectual energy to dig into the scientifically and often politically complicated waters of particular issues.  The fix here is not obvious to me and has me questioning my role.  We’ll see where this goes.

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Humanities, Myth and Story

Photocentrism

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Fall                                              New (Harvest) Moon

OK,I made this up.  Photocentrism is a focus on the virtue of light that, by implication, puts darkness in a negative or bad relative position.  Just because I made it up, however, does not mean I’m joking.  The context:  the docent annual meeting today and the presentation of a new December of the month called Winterlights.  I agree that Winterlights is a complex noun that has a rich associative feel.  I even agree that the celebrations in what I have long called holiseason–Thanksgiving to January 6th, the traditional 12th day of Christmas, Epiphany (visit of the Magi to Bethlehem), and the date for the celebration of Christmas in the Eastern Church–offer an unparalleled opportunity to learn from other cultures about matters deep in the human psyche:  Thanksgiving, Advent, Deepavali, Hanukkah, Posada, Winter Solstice/Yule, Christmas, Western New Year on January 1, the 12 days of Christmas and maybe Kwaansa, though its constructed nature makes me a bit shy of it.  Eid al Adha, the Muslim holiday that marks the end of Hajj by celebrating the Irbrahim and Ishmael story, falls in November this year, but not within holiseason itself, so I’m going to leave it out of this discussion.

The festivals or holidays of light, in particular Deepavali, Hanukkah, Winter Solstice (although is a special case as we shall see) and Christmas (more for what it replaces, Saturnalia, than what it celebrates itself) do have a common thread.  Deepavali, Winter Solstice and Christmas all relate to the despair felt in subsistence agriculture communities when the light of the sun seemed as if it would wink out and perhaps disappear altogether.  This fear, of the Sun’s final rising, put its mark on well-known pre-historical landmarks like Stonehenge, Chichen-Itza and the great Newgrange dolmen in Ireland.  Without a knowledge of the physics and celestial mechanics of the earth’s orbit and the sun’s central place in our solar system, it was frightening to consider the possibility that this time, this winter, the gradual diminishment of daylight might proceed all the way to an apocalyptic darkness.  No light for the crops.  No crops for the animals.  Cold all the time.

What to do?  According to theories of sympathetic magic, like produces like, so the logical response to oncoming darkness was a bonfire, a torch, a brave manifestation of light and heat in hopes that the sun, since it is like light and heat, will either be rekindled or seduced into rising again.  And these practices work.  Each time the bonfires were lit, the torches paraded, the sun did not disappear, but returned to once again start the growing season and stave off starvation and freezing for another year.

All of this makes sense, granting the scientific understandings of these early peoples.  As cultures grew more sophisticated and astronomical knowledge became a bit more advanced, however, it did put out the lingering fear that the darkness would one day come and never leave.  So holidays that focused on light, especially, but fire, too, became integral parts of the cultural and religious traditions of many peoples.

They all leave out one important thing, though.  The virtues of darkness.  I first became aware of the following arguments when I began to research the goddess, the great mother goddess.  I won’t get into here the debate surrounding the contention by some that a great mother goddess preceded the monotheistic, patriarchal deities of the Abrahamic religions, though I’ll tip my hand enough to say that I don’t find the evidence compelling.

What I found out about darkness surprised me and changed my mind about how I view it.  Darkness is as necessary as light.  Seeds start growing in the dark soil, away from light and even after they penetrate the surface, their roots continue to press their way into the surrounding nutrient-filled earth.  Mammal babies live their first few months of life in the moist, nourishment rich environment of their mother’s womb. (OK, not in the marsupials and the platypus and the echidna’s instance, but you get the drift.)  Darkness creates the time of rest and restoration for us and for many animals.  It is when we sleep and when we dream.  Darkness is the natural condition of space, attenuated by billions of stars only in what amounts to a small total area of the vastness of the universe.  Light itself requires a degree of darkness to create vision.  Anyone who’s ever been in a whiteout where snow and sky mix to create a vertiginous world with no up and down, no distinguishing characteristics understands the problem well.  Or consider a bright, very bright light and its affect on your sight.

This argument can be cast as a feminist one in which the light represents patriarchy and the darkness the creative agency of women.  It can also relate to anti-racism work in that we tend to equate darkness, blackness with evil, with corruption and decay.  This denies the regenerative, restorative and generative nature of darkness and narrows our conceptual world in literally dangerous ways.

How could this relate to Winterlights?  Without this kind of background the celebration of light has a sinister side as well its assumed positive one.  The celebrations of light only make sense in terms of the deep cultural background and when we go there we need to understand the fear that created these holidays has also unbalanced our appreciation of the other state, darkness.  I’ve not given it any thought, but I imagine there works of art that make darkness a central theme, that could be used to help put the other holidays in a balanced perspective.

Hanukkah is a special case here in which the focus does not seem to be on the Winter Solstice but on a cultural achievement by the Maccabees, the expelling of the Greeks.  It does however beautiful-darknessshare a darkness dispelling theme with the others.

There is more to say here, much more, but I’m hungry.  Catch you later.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics

Booming One More Time

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Fall                                 Waning Back to School Moon

Metro Lounge                  Union Station

This is the first class lounge, folks who’ve bought rooms.  My next trip to Lafayette had no rooms, but I convinced the lady here to let me in since I had rooms on the Empire builder both ways.

Old folks pass by, some in the early years of aging, like me, others in the thin, papery skin and tottering walk phase.  How many of them in the former, I wonder, marched in Washington, fought for student rights, worked hard to end the Vietnam war, protested to achieve civil rights for African-Americans?  Age and accommodation hide the former marks of my kind, the long hair, the frayed jeans, the combat boots, the green book bags, the peace symbol pins,the flower print dresses and plaited hair.

We walk past each other, joined by other links, the cane, the gray hair, balding pates, bum knees, expanded middles.  Makes me think of another addition to symbolic logic:  the law of the expanded middle.

One of our own, Tom Brokaw, wrote a book, the Greatest Generation, talking up the folks of the WWII era as saviors of our culture.  Maybe they were, I don’t know, history is difficult to judge; but, the next spate of articles and books focused on how the Baby Boomers are not the Greatest Generation.  Somehow we have failed to live up to pundits self-made expectations of us.  Balderdash.

An article this month in the Atlantic offers a guide as to how we can retrieve our lost promise by solving the economic crisis at home.  C’mon.  A minimum sized group of greedy bastards almost sunk the American economy, a breed that, like the poor, has always been with us.  It is the chattering class that needs to fix the economy and they’ve worked at it in fits and starts.  The economy never was our forte.

No,we fought our battles for change at the level of the personal,the local, the national foreign policy level, not in the canyons of wall street or the board rooms of the Forbes 500.  We challenged US military policy so successfully that a generation of military leaders has vowed never again to make the same mistakes as Vietnam.  We supported the African-American community among us and Lyndon Johnson in a push for civil rights.  Women and men of our generation took the gender controversy into our private lives, struggling for a just place for women one bag of garbage, one diaper and one sink full of dishes at a time.

We have had our share, more than our share, of brilliant scientists and innovative artists.

Where we still have a big opportunity is not in the stock market or its ancillary phenomenon like the Department of Treasury.  No, our opportunity lies in the self same area we did early work in during the 60’s when we took the advice of such gurus as Scott and Helen Nearing and tried to go “back to the land.”

Climate change, local food, energy independence, forest and water health, these are the areas where our generation can still act and act forcefully, this time for the future of the unborn generations who will suffer from the profligacy of our time.  We know how to use the levers of popular power.  We know how important it is to speak truth to power and to use our personal lives as leverage in the pursuit of deep social change.

I hope we take the challenge and begin to acknowledge each other in the metro lounges and streets and lobbies and town halls and legislatures of our country.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work

The Great Wheel in the City

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Fall                               Waning Back to School Moon

How can city dwellers, big city dwellers, stay in touch with the natural cycles, with the rhythms of the Great Wheel?  This was on my mind yesterday as I walked around the loop.  There are, of course, the occasional plantings decorating outdoor cafes, the greenery of Grant Park and Millennium Park, even a lushly planted median on the boulevard of Michigan Avenue, yet these seem like captive specimens, botanical exhibits in a zoo for denizens of concrete, stone, metal and glass.

When I went out for a walk this morning, wandering down Jewelers Row, out to Michigan Avenue and down to State Street, building facades began to show themselves.  Here there were floral inspired Prairie School designs.  There were viny elements in tile and plaster ascending the column of a building.

At 30 Michigan Avenue an idea began to form.  There on a frieze perched above a  soulless slab of polished marble that defined a Walgreens were small medallions punctuated by a familiar face, the Greenman.  He looked like this one.  There were four, separated by the flowery medallions.  After that, the plant inspired architectural design appeared, as if by magic.  For those who have eyes to see, let them see.

In a flash I realized what I dislike so much about Modernist architecture.  It does not acknowledge the real context in which it exists.  This Bauhaus influence attempted to rid the world of the Greenmen, the vines, the flowers, the sinuous riverine shapes that the late 19th and early 20th century architects considered essential.

And they were essential.  Why?  In our cities we put on a brave front, raising  our forests of buildings that shade out the sun, paving over the earth so trucks and cars can move about with ease.  Tunneling electricity so even the night cannot dominate us.

We still need to eat. Our lives depend on the vast unbuilt land where the primary things that spring from the earth are corn stalks and wheat fronds.  Where animals may outnumber humans and the humans work with and for the plants.

We still need to breathe.  The lungs of mother earth, the circulatory system that cleans our air consists in large part of trees.  The forests lie outside our urban boundaries, though they do join their city cousins in their work.

We still need to drink.  Fresh water comes from rivers, lakes, streams and aquifers either far away from city centers or buried deep beneath them.  Care for the source of our drinking water means  caring for those ends of the earth from which it comes.

Thus, it is not an idle question to wonder how we connect with the Great Wheel, with the changes of season and the growing of food, the cleansing of water and air.

The design motifs inspired by green leafy beings recognized that dependence and writ its continuing message on the walls of the buildings which we use and which we see each day.  They inspire us and help us recall mother nature in  her beyond the city state.

There was. too, another reminder.  I looked down Washington from Wabash and my gaze carried up the  building led me to a patch of blue sky.  There was the moon, a half moon, the Back to School moon, framed by buildings with leaves and greenmen and flowers.  These are enough.

One thing more.  Remember Ozymandias, King of Kings.  Recall the ruins of Babylon, Xi’ang, Epheseus, Athens.  Cities do not last.  Nature reclaims them all at some point.  What seems so permanent, so imposing, so there only awaits its end.  Which will come, sooner or later.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, permaculture

Following the Old Religion

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Lughnasa                                            Full Back To School Moon

Summer has three endings:  Labor Day which marks the end of summer vacation for many school children; and, for many adults like myself, kicks us into serious mode as all those years of conditioning continue to affect our attitude;  Mabon, or the Fall Equinox, which comes tomorrow, that point when day and night balance each other, neither claiming dominance, though the trend matters and at this equinox, the balance tips toward night as the darkness increases, pulling us toward the longest night, the Winter Solstice on December 22nd and Samhain, or Summer’s End according to the old Celtic calendar which divided the year in half, Beltane-Samhain or the growing season, and Samhain-Beltane or the fallow season.  Samhain comes on October 31st and, like all Celtic holidays lasts a week.

The growing season has this triple farewell reflected too in the holidays of Lughnasa, the festival of first fruits, Mabon, the peak of the harvest and harvest home, and Samhain, the end of the harvest season and the end of the growing season.  No matter how you notice or celebrate it these real changes in the agricultural year still happen, they still have critical importance for our human community, and they still deserve our attention.  Why?  Because our ages old relationship with agriculture is what separates us from the hunter-gatherers.  Agriculture allows us to live in villages, towns and cities by producing surplus food on farms in much the same way that the honeybee produces surplus honey while still making enough for the colony to survive on throughout the winter.

Without those who farm, there would be no surplus food.  With no surplus food we would have to revert to subsistence agriculture, growing what we needed every year or hunting and gathering.  This would prove daunting since most of us have forgotten or never been taught how to grow food, how to hunt, how to identify edible plants.

This is the great hidden reality for many, if not most, urban dwellers, who make up, since 2008, over half of the world’s population, a projected 5 billion people by 2030.  Without  a healthy eco-system, one that can support intense tillage, that is, sustainable tillage, the world’s urban dwellers will be bereft of something they cannot do without:  food.  Add to that the pressure on the world’s fresh water supply and two fundamental sustainers:  food and water are at peril.

Granted following the holidays of the Great Wheel will not work magic–sorry to all my Wiccan friends–but it would remind us all, 8 times a year, of the source of our sustenance.  That would help.  Naming our days after these holidays (I do it in the upper left of each post) keeps that reminder fresh.  Our sustainers, mother earth and father sun, do not require us, do not need anything from us, yet they will support us if we live within their limits.  These holidays began when our ancestors realized the need to remind themselves of the delicate, fragile harmony required for human life to flourish.

Over the course of the years and centuries and millennia since, hubris has lead us further and further away from the old religion; we have replaced it with  idols, fetishes, really.  We will, at some point, pay the price for our blasphemy as we upset that harmony, creating an environment that will no longer sustain human life.  Only if we step back from our profligacy can we ensure our survival.

Knowing the rhythms of the natural world, of the agriculture that feeds us, of the systems that keep water fresh and available, is our only chance to avoid apocalypse.  Will we do it?  I don’t know.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, permaculture

A Green Neighbor

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Lughnasa                                               Waxing Back to School Moon

Early am picked wild grapes.  Kate makes them into a grape jelly.  The harvest was not as bountiful this year because we arrived about three weeks late to the banquet.  Others had gotten there first.  So it goes.  More than compensated for by the abundance of raspberries.

After the wild grapes I had an hour long session over skype with United Theological Seminary student.  I’m her mentor as she starts out on the long road to becoming a minister in the UU tradition.  The fact of listening to her, helping her sort through feelings and plans as she begins her internship, helped me remember why I agreed to do this.  Each person in a new endeavor needs someone who has walked roughly the same ancientrail.

After that time I went back into the garden and picked yet more raspberries, greens and some tomatoes.  While working in our raspberry patch, I came across this guy sitting high atop one of the raspberry canes.  frog6002_2010-09-18_0292He kept me company while I picked the ripe red and golden fruit.  He waited yet longer while I got Kate.  He waited even longer when I went back inside and got the camera.

One invasive close-up to many got him to move.  He leaped away and I lost my friend.  After a quick search, he appears to be a gray tree frog, Hyla versicolor.

We also have skinks, salamanders and toads, all reflecting a healthy eco-system here where no pesticides or artificial fertilizers contaminate the plants and wild life.

Having a chance to visit with this guy is one of the perks of that choice.

After lunch, I popped the garlic cloves from my largest garlic bulbs.  They go in the ground this afternoon or tomorrow.

Bees, Cooking, Great Work, Politics

Busy, Busy

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Lughnasa                                  Waxing Back to School Moon

Whew.  The new queen came today in a perforated UPS box, complete with a court of five worker bees.  After spraying them with sugar water, I took them out to the honey queen-bee-mdhouse where I pushed in the cork at the end of her wooden home, inserted a marshmallow (tiny) into it firmly, then opened the divide, took off the honey filled top hive box and inserted the queen in the middle of the second box.  This is called a slow release.  The queen and her workers eat away the marshmallow from one side, workers in the hive from the other.  Over the time this process takes, so the theory goes, the new queen becomes less threatening to the workers, who then allow her to come out and become their new monarch.  If it doesn’t work, they kill her.  I won’t check for another week.

With the queen in her new castle (hopefully), the grocery store was next on my list since Kate has a cold and she likes my chicken noodle soup when she’s sick.  While I made the chicken noodle soup, I also cooked lunch.  After we ate lunch, Kate went back to rest and I went outside and picked yet another several cups of raspberries.  Our bushes have been prolific this year.  The chicken noodle soup had our carrots, onion and garlic.

When the raspberries were inside, I worked downstairs answering e-mails while I waited for the soup to finish cooking so I could add the egg noodles and the peas.  At the end of that.  Nap.

After the nap I had to sort out a vote on legislative priorities for the Sierra Club and respond to a few more e-mails.  This took me up to the time to leave for the Minnesota Hobby Bee Keepers Meeting at the University of Minnesota.  The man who runs nature’s nectary, Jim, was there with a refractometer to measure moisture levels in honey.  Our capped honey was 16.9%, a little thick and the uncapped honey was 18.3%.  Since honey is anything below 18.6%, both of our batches were fine.

Home again where Kate and I ate some soup, watched a little TV, put the dogs to bed and then headed there ourselves.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, permaculture

A Real Boy

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Lughnasa                                               Waning Artemis Moon

Had an odd experience as I rode the lawn tractor back to the garage after putting all the no longer needed honey supers in the shed, putting the spun out frames back on the hives and heading back along the vegetable garden toward the truck gate.  I felt like a real boy.

A la velveteen rabbit, that is.  Something about having followed the bee-keeping from last year’s single colony, a package that Mark Nordeen helped me hive into hive boxes he loaned me, through the divide and hiving a package on my own this spring, over the course of the summer and the nectar flow, through to this moment, with the honey in jars, stored now at home, in the bee’s care no longer, triggered a gestalt, a deep link between my Self and this cycle of nature in which I had participated.  Somehow that made me feel real.

Now, I don’t go around in skeptical philosophical clothing all day wondering whether or not I exist.  At least not any more.  Joke.  I mean I have a developed sense of who I am and what I am, but this particular feeling, a oneness, an at-one-ment with this place and the work of another species, I’ve never experienced.  It may relate to my relatives who farmed, a now, finally, getting it, what it meant to milk the cows or bring in the corn harvest, even to gather a clutch of eggs in the morning.

Whatever it is, it felt good.  Right.