Category Archives: Great Work

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work

Why Does Gardening Inspire Us?

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65  bar steady  29.78  0mph E  dew-point 64  sunrise 6:11  sunset 8:24  Lughnasa

Waxing Gibbous Corn Moon  moonrise 1816  moonset  0130

Rain all night.  After a night of moisture the air is cool and the garden looks replenished.  The lily bubils I set out in their soil plugs yesterday got a good drenching.  Forgot to mention yesterday that I also planted a stem with the bubils on it, apparently this was the old method of regeneration.  It makes sense because it’s what the plant intends.  After die back the stem and its bubils would fall to the ground and sprout from there.

While looking at the tomatoes yesterday, I had a realization, one you’ve probably made already.  When the tomato fruits are not ripe, they blend in with the bushy plant and its leaves.  Once they are ripe, that is, ready for distribution by hungry critters, they turn red.  Then, they stand out against the green.  Mother nature reverses the human traffic light, for her green means stop and red means go.

When I set aside a book review to purchase the book The Brother Gardeners, it made me think about gardening from a different perspective.  That is, why does gardening inspire us, over and over again?  We do not write books of a philosophical bent about agriculture, at least not many.  I can’t recall any, but there must be some.  So why does gardening get so much ink; it is an act usually irrelevant to economic fortunes.

Here’s one answer.  Gardening is a unique experience for each one who engages it.  The topography of your land, its winter and summer extremes, annual rainfall, the microclimates, the amount of work you put in to the soil, your ability to match plants with all these variables, the time you can devote, all these factors plus many more make certain that even the person gardening next door has a different experience than you do.

Within that unique experience though, there is a universal moment, an archetypal moment.  Each time we provide support and care to a plant, any plant, we relive a defining event in all human history, the neo-lithic revolution.  Somewhere, around 10,000 years ago or so, somebody, probably a woman, noticed that plants grew from seeds.  Little by little this led to tending the first gardens, a bulwark against the vagaries of hunting and gathering.

This changed the world.

Gardening, too, remains the most common activity, perhaps after parenting, that gives us the sense of co-creation with the forces of life.  In each unique experience, from tending African Violets in a windowsill to tomato plants and corn outside, we have to live on plant time.  We wait for the seeds to sprout.  We wait for the leaves to grow.  We wait for the blooms.  We wait for the fruits to set.  We wait for the fruit to mature.  Though we can, and do, fiddle with these factors most of us allow the plant to lead us.

In this cycle, as old as plant life itself, older than the animals, is the paradigm for our own lives.  Thus, when we weed or harvest, prune or feed we know ourselves part of the vitality of mother earth.  That’s key, we know ourselves as part, not the whole, not the most important part, only a part.

Faith and Spirituality, General, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays

The Earth, a Sacred Place

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79  bar falls 29.96  0mph NE  dew-point 56  sunrise 6:10 sunset 8:25  Lughnasa

Waxing Gibbous Corn Moon

I got this off the Permaculture listserv.

“(I find this is a good reminder to recite every morning.)
Diadra

A Prayer for Gaia by Rose Mary O’Malley

As I breathe in your air, eat your fruits and drink your water, let me be sustained and nourished so that I may serve.

As I use your resources for clothes, shelter and warmth, let me be strengthened so that I may give back more than I have taken.

As I drink in the beauty of your oceans, flowers, blue sky and stars, let me be so filled with beauty that I will bring only love and joy to your inhabitants.

As I am nourished, taught and loved by your inhabitants, let me so filled with love and knowledge that I joyfully work to assure a fair distribution of your treasures.”

It is an example what I believe to be true, that is, many many people consider the earth a sacred place and have the intention of reverence and worship toward her.  The whole neo-pagan movement with its mix and match invocation of Europe’s ancient pantheons and perhaps some Egyptian influence does not reflect the rootedness of this sentiment in American soil. (That is, the American manifestation of it.  I believe this is a global phenomenon.) It is also not the case that the Native American reverence for the earth is other than a salutary reminder since their experience is so different from that of us boat people.

We need a way of following the seasons that respects our American experience of this vast and wonderful land.  We need a way of honoring mother earth that borrows, yes, from other cultures, but does not presume to make their ways our ways.  We need, as Emerson said, a religion of revelation to us, not the history of theirs.   And that revelation comes from two sources:  our experience of the outer world–this land, its peoples and our experience of other peoples and other lands; and, our experience of our inner world and its own universe, added to our resonance with the outer world.

This is the pagan lovesong that I hear in the hearts of so many people, one that needs articulation and expansion.  This is like Brian Swimme’s work, too.

This faith, this reverence and worship of the earth, as in Ms. O’Malley’s prayer, is an ur-faith, or a proto-faith, a faith that comes prior to others,  a faith whose acceptance does not contradict the Mulism or the Buddhist, the Taoist or the Christian, but complements, supplements them.  For some, like me, it is an adequate faith, enough to sustain me on my journey and as I contemplate the life after this one, or others, it is not enough, but one that needs some salvation instrument or some philosophical cleanser.  That’s all right.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Writing

How I Work

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76  bar falls 30.01  0mph SW dew-point 58  sunrise 6:06 sunset 8:30  Lughnasa

First Quarter of the Corn Moon  moonrise 1326  moonset 2226

“More Americans are likely to suffer kidney stones in the coming years as a result of global warming, according to researchers at the University of Texas.”  Agence France-Presse, July 2008

N.B. All these quotes about global warming come from this website:  The Warmlist.  Here’s the webmasters explanation:

“This site is devoted to the monitoring of the misleading numbers that rain down on us via the media. Whether they are generated by Single Issue Fanatics (SIFs), politicians, bureaucrats, quasi-scientists (junk, pseudo- or just bad), such numbers swamp the media, generating unnecessary alarm and panic. They are seized upon by media, hungry for eye-catching stories. There is a growing band of people whose livelihoods depend on creating and maintaining panic. There are also some who are trying to keep numbers away from your notice and others who hope that you will not  make comparisons. Their stock in trade is the gratuitous lie. The aim here is to nail just a few of them.”

So, don’t say I didn’t fess up.  The Star-Tribune turned me onto this site.

Shifted focus. Gonna work on that firepit.  I decided Kate can help me transplant day lilies when she gets home and I’ll still have time to transplant the iris.  I get on a task and sometimes don’t lift my headup to check whether it makes sense.  Heresy Moves West is an example.

The research alone would take a good bit of time, I knew that.  That meant I could not hope to research and write it in the week prior to September 14th.  Knowing that I began to develop this knot in my to do lobe.  It began to insist, get it done.  Get it done now.  Right now.  This even though the date was 8 weeks away at the time.  Anyhow, I finally opened up and let the lobe have its way.

Once begun, research and writing, at least for me, need to be one fluid motion, the research followed by the writing.  In my case this is because as I research various ways of slicing and dicing the information comes to me throughout. At night before I go to sleep the data often floats up and demands consideration.   Sometimes I make note of these patterns, sometimes not.  Often I don’t because I want the order and interpretation fungible to the last possible moment.

Why?  In between the research and the writing there is a creative time in which the data and the various arrangements of it begin to pull other information, other paradigms out of my memory.  This process can change the data’s relevance.  Let me give you an example.

At first I imagined a straight chronological presentation.  The Unitarians began at such and such a place at such and such a time.  The westward expansion of the US began in this time period.  It rolled out according to these stages, in this place at this time and another place at another time until the whole shebang ended up encountering Minnesota. This came to me first because historical movement often seems cleanest presented in chronological order.

Soon though, as the pieces began to swirl, it became clear to me that the historical progression would have to start earlier, then even earlier.  I wrote about this a while back, my need for context.  When I realized there were big ideas at play here, the order of things changed again.  Then it was a history of ideas approach that made more sense, capturing the development of the peculiar notion of religious freedom in the US.  As that became clear, a second important dynamic rose to the top, the rolling dialectic between orthodoxy and heterodoxy.

To highlight the ancient character of this dynamic I decided to find its beginnings in the Abrahamic tradition with Abram’s call away from polytheism to allegiance to YHWH.

Both of these decisions meant that the data in the presentation would have to show how the westward movement of heresy (the rolling dialectic of orthodoxy and heterodoxy in Unitarian history) advanced thanks to the first amendment and how it continued the long arc of dogma challenged by new thought.  This lead to the realization that the westward expansion of heresy intensified in the  atmosphere of freedom and pioneer energy found on the frontier.  So, when we end up in Minnesota, the presentations show how religious freedom and the rolling dialectic not only manifest themselves here, but in fact gain strength and intensity.

Finally, that lead to a desire to push the dialectic one step further, beyond the bland everything’s in bounds soup of current day Unitarian-Universalism to the articulation of a new heterodoxy, one opposed to the dogma of one size fits all faith-lite.  This piece is the unwritten one at this point.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, GeekWorld, Great Work, Writing

Just When I Discovered the Meaning of Life, They Changed It.

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64  bar rises 30.00  0mph NNW dew-point 60 sunrise 6:05  sunset 8:32  Lughasa

Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon

Just when I discovered the meaning of life, they changed it.  George Carlin, RIP

Kate takes off tomorrow for Grandparent land.  In our world that means Pontiac Avenue in Denver, just across Quebec Avenue from the old Stapleton Airport now enjoying a rebirth as Yuppieville.  She will visit with Gabe whom she hasn’t seen since his birth and Ruthie.  Ruthie runs up to her and says, “Grandma!”  Enough to make a grandparent keep coming back for more.

An electronic distress signal has sounded three times since I came down to make this post.  It finally dawned on me that it might be my cell phone.  Yep.  It needs juice and has used some of its last to tell me so.  Good boy!  Since I have a computer, a UPS, a router, two printers, a weather station and a modem all close by, it took a bit to sort out.

Writing has occupied me three days in a row full time.  That’s draining, at least for me.  I’m about 3/4’s done, perhaps a bit less.  As always, I have learned far more than I can compress, in this case even into two presentations.  There is a tendency to use all of it, or at least try, but that makes the piece turgid, reportorial.  It needs to have drama and depth, not breadth and length.

There is a cosmology kicking around, a soteriology, an anthropology, an ethic, a tradition with an American twist and the energy to work on it.  This is the stuff I tried to get at when I took the Paul Tillich course a couple of years ago.  Not yet finished.

And, to finish this post, an alien reaches for the sky.  (our wisteria)

wisteriareach500.jpg

Dreams, Great Wheel, Great Work

Hoosier Bodhisattvas

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79  bar steady 29.85 5mph NNW dew-point  67  sunrise 6:02 sunset 8:35  Lughnasa

Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon

“What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?” – Langston Hughes

To continue the raisin metaphor the next line might include the fact that raisins are nutritious and can, with adequate moisture, grow plump once again.

The corn tasseled out last week late and tiny ears of Country Gentlemen have begun to form.  The corn stalks soar an elegant, but seemingly fragile 7 to 8 feet above the garden bed.  Though there are only three rows and the rows extend only 8 feet or so in length, still it calls up all those corn fields of my youth, green jungles that flashed by as we drove on   crushed gravel roads, spreading a fine chalky dust behind us.  There was, in that time, a union between the maturity of the corn and our maturity, both green, filled with promise, but not yet ready for the harvest.  Corn, of course, has a shorter life span than most teenagers, but some of my Alexandria classmates were dead soon after our senior year, their maturation hastened by the fertilizer of war.

Though those afternoons and nights are long ago, 43 years at least, the marriage between my faith and the earth finds its true roots there.  The farms around home and the 4-H fair in late July gave the life of the land a prominence even to those of us who lived in town.  The sheds at the fair had rows of corn, tomatoes, beans, beets and cucumbers among many others, set out for the judges to assess.  Not the judgments, but the pride and the reality of these fruits imprinted on me those Madison County fields and the seasons through which they passed.

The family farm outside Morristown, which I visited and on which I stayed from time to time as a boy, had the same effect.  The corn shed with its slanted, open sides filled with the hard yellow ears of field corn had a mystery to me.  This shed found late fall and winter made one, the harvest stored for later use.  I loved the cool moisture of the concrete pools that held the milk pails until the milk truck came.  This was like a Celtic holy well, a place where the water burbled up from the ground, plentiful and free.  In the late summer the hay mow would have bale after bale of alfalfa hay, sweet and pleasant.

Below the hay mow the Holsteins would stand patiently waiting to be milked, their placid ways suggesting a Hoosier Bodhisattva.

Not far down the road, visible from the hill on which the Keaton family home stands even today, is Hancock Cemetery. There the harvest of generations of Keatons and Zikes lay, row by row, in family groups.  Not all that different from the hay mow in late summer.

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, World History, Writing

Teasing Out the Pagan Lovesong

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76  bar rises 29.89  0mph NE dew-point 67  sunrise 6:02 sunset 8:35  Lughnasa

Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon

I saw the dentist today, oh boy.  He unscrewed a couple of fillings, refilled them, then closed what he insists on calling an “open contact.”  Does that sound like an oxymoron to you?  Does to me.  Dr. Mahler comes into my mouth unbidden, the occasion the retirement of the redoubtable Dr. Moghk, may he golf in peace.  Dr. Mahler is good, fast and communicative.  Sure of himself. Just what I want in a dentist.  No, seriously.  He’s a keeper.

The closing words of my last post have rung like a bell in my head since I wrote them:   This whole enterprise needs a rethink, a radical redo.  We have gotten thin and liberal, instead of profound and prophetic.

What to do? Part of the responsibility rests with me.  I have the task of articulating what I believe and have faith in right now.  This articulation must be clear and emotionally compelling.  And it is work I feel I can do, am ready to do.  Looks like I was off about ten years when I hoped for intellectual maturity in my early 50’s, it has come instead, in my early 60’s.  That’s all right.

The later maturity came because my individuation and maturation occurred more slowly than it might have thanks to alcohol and neurosis.  I regret the years I gave to anger, disappointment, drinking and smoking.  I regret the hurt I caused then and the overhang it left me.  Even so, I also know that regret is an emotion with no purpose, no forward motion, so I acknowledge it and set it to the side.  Today, the only time I have ever had and will ever have, is the day in which I take up this challenge, perhaps I could have ten years ago, but I didn’t.

Now it remains for me to tease out the pagan lovesong that courses through me when I  touch a lily or eat an onion grown in soil I have prepared.  There is an ancient language of love and awe for the natural world and for ourselves as part of and dependent on it.  This vocabulary of seasons, lunar changes, life’s stages, friendship and family has no nation, knows no creeds and depends on no books, yet it is as particular as the street on which you live and the air that you breathe.

This dream, what Thomas Berry called the Dream of the Earth, is a dream in the sense of the aboriginal dreamtime, it is a way of dreaming worlds into being and it is our great and primary gift as a species.  Like all gifts it can cause great good or great harm.   Over the next few years I will slip from time to time into the dreamtime and let you know what I find there.

Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays

Primal Eating

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71  bar rises 29.87 0mph NE dew-point 58  sunrise 6:00  sunset 8:38 Lughnasa

New (Corn) Moon

A vegetarian meal  tonight.  Spaghetti squash, golden beets, cucumber tomato and onion salad and cooked whole onion.  Colorful and healthy.  All but the tomatoes were from our garden, including the garlic and cilantro sauteed in olive oil as a dressing for the squash.  After the OMG tomatoes the plants have settled into production with many fruits, but none mature right now.

I know some perhaps many of you who read this cook things straight out of your garden or meat from your stock, but I haven’t done it much.  Flowers and shade plants, shrubs and trees have occupied my time.  I love them and will always tend them but the vegetables now have my attention.

Primal eating happens when you go pluck five beets out of the earth, take them into the sink and wash them off, trim the leaves and roots away, then slice these hardy roots into smaller pieces, add tarragon and balsamic vinegar, some salt, cook and eat them.  The same tonight with the spaghetti squash, the cucumber, the onion, both in the salad and the one I cooked whole.   I knew these plants when they were tiny seeds, barely bigger than the lead in a pencil or when they were small potted specimens.  The onions and the garlic went into the ground as what they would become, only larger.  In each case though the same hands that harvested them prepared for eating.

10,000 years ago some hunters and gatherers first planted seeds and tended crops.  The effect on human culture still gathers momentum even today.  Nomadic life began to disappear for those people.  Settled villages sprang up around the fields.   The keeping of animals for food was more predictable than the hunt.  In both cases though our ancestors had to give up the moving from place to place depending on season and game patterns.  Our bodies, developed in the paleolithic to survive predators and hunt for prey, found themselves out of place.

They still do.  So, while gathering and cooking goes far back in our history, it does not go all the way back to that earlier phase of the moveable feast.  This fall, however, when Kate and I pick wild grapes that grow in our woods and turn them into jam we will travel back to those ancient times, the ancient trail of seeking food where it decides to be rather than where we care for it.

This meal tonight was a Lughnasa meal, a meal of first fruits, the harvest we do not plan to store either through drying or canning.  As a Lughnasa meal, it put us in contact with those early Celts whose gardens might spell the difference between survival and starvation.  We live in a wealthier time, but not in one any less dependent on the gifts of mother earth.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Writing

A Bell That Cannot Be Unrung

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61  bar rises 29.87  0mph N dew-point 53  sunrise 5:59  sunset 8:39  Lughnasa

New (Corn) Moon

Outside tonight the sky has no moon.  This illustrates the paradoxical nature of light.  We think of light as illumination enabling us to see, but it has another, not often recognized property; it can obscure as well as reveal.   The night sky during the dark moon shines with stars, many invisible when the moon is brightest.  A cool night with a clear sky, a panoply of stars, ancient messages from faraway places gives a northern summer its true character.  Able to burn with heat in the daytime, the northern summer can cool down, remind us of the coming fall, just as Lughnasa, the Celtic first fruits holy day does.  A convergence of a new moon, Lughnasa and cooling temperatures make this a night made for myth.

The research for Heresy Moves West will probably end tomorrow.  I hope I can get at writing, too, but I doubt it.  Sunday.  This is a big task, one I set for myself, but I’d like to get a first draft done, so I can set it aside for awhile.  I have Stefan’s poems to edit and the Africa tour, too.  Not to mention a firepit to dig, hemerocallis iris and lilium to move.

A piece of this project troubles me.  Maybe troubles is not the right word, provokes, that could be it.  When Channing and the others split from the Standing Order Calvinist orthodoxy in New England, they started a cascade of controversy that has not ended.  Not long after the Unitarians had left the congregationalists behind, Emerson began writing his essays and giving his lectures.  With the strong push Transcendentalism got from Theodore Parker, there was soon a split over natural religion versus theistic religion.  The Civil War obscured this problem for the first half of the 1860’s, but it re-emerged as the Western issue as the more radical, Parkerite ministers began to dominate the Western Unitarian Conference.  This led to constant conflict with Eastern conservatives (used to denote those who wanted to retain Jesus as Christ, keeping Unitarianism’s original perception of itself as liberal Christianity).  The Free Religious Association and The Ethical Culture movement kept the Western issue alive in the east.  This split healed with a broad understanding of liberal religion, only to be sundered again in the 1920’s with the rise of humanism.  Humanism set aside theism for good in the interest of a scientific and humanistic approach to the ethical life.

Here’s the problem.  Conservatives predicted the gradual erosion of religious sentiment if there was not at least the glue of Jesus to hold the center.  Their predictions came true as the shift away from theism took its incremental, but, looking backward, inevitable progress toward an essentially secular movement focused on ethical living.  This leaves the field free for radical inquiry into the nature of the human experience.  A great, not small thing.

But, it can lose the faith that burns in the heart, that seeks the reality next to or beyond this reality; it can lose it in the same kind of scientistic move that linguistic analysis made, that Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris make.  It is, though, a bell that cannot be unrung, so we must seek this faith that burns in the heart elsewhere than in tradition.  Good.  Emerson thought so, too.  The question is, where?

Investigating this question will occupy some time, perhaps the next few years.

When I went out to check the drying onions, I found one with a bit of a soft spot.  I brought it inside to cut up for a salad for lunch.  Cut open I put my fingers on the white flesh.  It was very warm, almost hot.  That drying would take place inside the onion had not occurred to me.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work

The Beginning of Summer’s End

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77  bar rises 29.83 3mpn NNW dew-point 61  sunrise 5:58  sunset 8:39  Lughnasa

New (Corn) Moon

As I note in the Lughnasa entry now posted on the Great Wheel page, we have come to the beginning of summer’s end.  The Celtic word for summer’s end is Samhain, also the name for the last of the harvest festivals celebrated on October 31st.  August 1st finds those of us with gardens and farms involved in some manner or another with our early harvests.  The first tomatoes, the garlic already in here, beans, beets, carrots and onions.  This is a time of thanksgiving, a day of gratefulness for the earth and for the plant life which offers itself to us and to our fellow creatures so that we might live.

A dish of green beans, onions in a salad perhaps garnished with tomatoes, garlic used to flavor a sautee all remind us that food does not emerge from the ether, rather it grows with care and attention, care and attention meted out over a growing season, not all at once.  It is not a matter of a moment to grow food.  Vegetables only reward those willing to practice attentiveness, to stay in the now.  The plant needs what it needs today, not tomorrow.  The pests that infest today will become worse tomorrow.  Act now.

Today is an all Heresy Moves West day.   The story of Unitarians and Universalist as they follow the frontier, especially the pioneers from New England, makes an American saga.  America’s exceptionalism often takes the form of manifest destiny, our version of Kipling’s White Man’s Burden, but a truer idiosyncrasy of this country lies in our embrace of religious freedom.  We take it for granted, imagine that if it’s not the case in another place, they just haven’t gotten around to it yet, but in fact we are very much the outlier when it comes to the firewall between the state and religious institutions/faith traditions.

That a peculiar brand of new thought that changed the flow of a millennia old faith tradition–the Judaeo-Christian–could not only flourish but spread as the country grew, that the new thought itself would become fractious and splinter along unpredictable lines, and that it would find its most radical expression in the Midwest rather than its place of origin in Boston and surrounds could only happen here.   The chance to tell this story makes me glad, for it is a story of vision, of unfettered thought, of reaching beyond the boundaries of the mind, a story that transcends its makers by breaking open new sources of authority for those searching for a place in this vast universe of ours.

Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Great Work

Water, Water Everywhere. Even on Mars.

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LOS ANGELES (AP) – The Phoenix spacecraft has tasted Martian water for the first time, scientists reported Thursday.

By melting icy soil in one of its lab instruments, the robot confirmed the presence of frozen water lurking below the Martian permafrost. Until now, evidence of ice in Mars’ north pole region has been largely circumstantial.

In 2002, the orbiting Odyssey spacecraft spied what looked like a reservoir of buried ice. After Phoenix arrived, it found what looked like ice in a hard patch underneath its landing site and changes in a trench indicated some ice had turned to gas when exposed to the sun.

Scientists popped open champagne when they received confirmation Wednesday that the soil contained ice.

“We’ve now finally touched it and tasted it,” William Boynton of the University of Arizona said during a news conference in Tucson on Thursday. “From my standpoint, it tastes very fine.”

Phoenix landed on Mars on May 25 on a three-month hunt to determine if it could support life. It is conducting experiments to learn whether the ice ever melted in the red planet’s history that could have led to a more hospitable environment. It is also searching for the elusive organic-based compounds essential for simple life forms to emerge.

The ice confirmation earlier this week was accidental. After two failed attempts to deliver ice-rich soil to one of Phoenix’s eight lab ovens, researchers decided to collect pure soil instead. Surprisingly, the sample was mixed with a little bit of ice, said Boynton, who heads the oven instrument.

Researchers were able to prove the soil had ice in it because it melted in the oven at 32 degrees—the melting point of ice—and released water molecules. Plans called for baking the soil at even higher temperatures next week to sniff for carbon-based compounds.