Samain Thanksgiving Moon
One more turn to Tarnas before my consultation with Elisa tomorrow. He made his move toward a synthesis of the modern mind and the Romantic–equivalent to the distinction between the self shaped by the Copernican disenchanted cosmos and the primal, ensouled (enchanted) universe that went before. His initial step came through depth psychology, tapping the collective unconscious and the idea of synchronicity to suggest a permeable self influenced by the cosmos and influencing it. Having opened the door between Self and cosmos with depth psychology, he turned toward astrology.
Over three decades ago he began to make natal charts, do the calculations, first for himself and several (40 or so) people he knew well. He began finding uncanny correlations between charts and people’s lives, people with whom he was familiar. He went further, expanding his investigations through students and colleagues to include many more individuals. Tarnas admits the difficult, often subjective nature of determining correlations and seems genuinely interested in an unbiased look at the claims of astrology.
I’ve only read Cosmos and Psyche, but he seems honest in his approach to scholarship, careful, not prone to easy enthusiasm. That counts a good deal for me in assessing his work. He’s an intellectual historian and a depth psychologist, a working intellectual with a Ph.D. Of course, none of that says he’s correct; but, it does mean he’s been vetted by other scholars. He offers the usual and some not usual objections to the direction of his research.
His argument about skepticism as a tool, not an end, was a wakin’ up moment for me. Oh, duh! Of course. Only I hadn’t seen it that way. Skepticism was a way of life for me and I treated the world of ideas as you might expect. I embraced almost nothing, held every philosophical and religious claim at a skeptical arms length. Yes. And no. I had let the tool use me, rather me using the tool.
Opening to the possibility of some value in astrology has not come easily for me and I’m still not sure about it, though I hope Elisa will help me when I see her tomorrow. I’m having an X-File’s moment: I want to believe. Tarnas, recommended by Tom Crane, has helped push me a bit further along the way, opening me. Even if I become convinced of its utility though, I believe there are more ways to heal the disenchantment. Tarnas has leaned into astrology, but why not the tarot, the i ching, using the same arguments.?
There are other, less esoteric methods to open the Self, to mutuality between Self and enchanted cosmos. I mentioned a few of those a post or two ago. Here are a couple more.
Most of you who read this are familiar with my story of mystical atonement after a class on metaphysics in college. It was a moment, maybe a minute, maybe two, in which I stopped and the world beyond became clear to me. I was connected to it and it to me. It was a vital, all engaging other, the other in this case being the whole beyond me, beyond my Self. Yet. It was not beyond me, but within me while I was within it. This was a visceral, embodied experience. It needed no mediation from sacred scripture, natal charts, or card reading. It just was.
Dig. I mean it. Go outside (wait til it’s warmer if you want). Take a trowel or a shovel or use your hand. Scrape away the surface matter, push your hand wrist deep into the soil.* By going down into the earth you can know the thin substrata that literally keeps us alive. Without this living soil we could grow little food. It is outside of us and yet, in what I’ve often called the true transubstantiation, will become not only one with us, it will become us.
My only point here is that astrology, especially one linked as Tarnas does to the concept of archetypes, may provide us with aids to self-knowledge, aids that light up an enchanted universe, help it become visible. And if it does, I want to use it, include it in my tool kit. Right there alongside skepticism. But I don’t see it as the only, or even the most important, clue to an ensouled universe.
Mysticism is more important to me. So is the tactile spirituality that requires no charts, no trines or alignments, to show me the way outside of my self and into an enchanted universe. This synthesis between the primal worldview and the modern one is a critical for our time. It’s what reimagining faith wants to build. It’s what reconstructing faith will look like. There is more. Far more.
*According to S.A. Waksman, a microbiologist, in just ¼ teaspoon of fertile soil you could find:
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50 nematodes;
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62,000 algae;
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72,000 amoebae;
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2,920,000 actinomycetes;
and -
25,280,000 bacteria! Youth Guide to Soil
Though I haven’t begun to read them yet, William Vollman’s two volume work: No Immediate Danger and No Good Alternative, the Carbon Ideologies paints a bleak picture. So does the 
If we cannot slow down the rate of climate change (which is the most we can do, since so much climate change is already baked in), then we move to mitigation and adaptation. Geoengineering will become a buzz word as various strategies are tried. Climate refugees will become more and more disruptive across the world, especially those moving from coastal areas into interiors and onto higher ground. The already underway shifts in plant and animal eco-systems, climate refugees all, will bring them with different disease vectors, disruption to agriculture and sea life.
We will not be known for Vietnam, civil rights, feminism, ruining health care, electing fascists to high office, but as the generation that allowed an earth compatible with human populations to slip away. Hard as it is to imagine the results of this inaction will be far, far more damaging than all the wars, holocausts and pogroms. How will we explain this to our grandchildren, to Ruth and Gabe in our instance? I understand the political and economic forces that have gotten us here, but explaining them will not alter the misery.
Meanwhile in the Trump dimension: “
Yale Environment 360 elaborates
Mentioned 
In addition to cooking, the sumi-e (ink brush painting), and working out, I mentioned the possibility of a greenhouse. Expensive, so we’ll see about that. But. I began reading a book I’ve had for a while, 
Buddy Bill Schmidt will recognize the quote that begins the chapter on Soil: “See what you’re looking at.” Carey Reams, an unlikely looking radical, used to say this. He was the founder of the outfit from which I purchase soil additives, the High Brix Gardening folks in Farmington, Minnesota. He contended, as do many now in the farm-to-table world, that agriculture went astray long ago, moving toward products that fit mechanized food production rather than human nutrition.
The vast wheat fields of the Great Plains grow an annual wheat, two varieties that work well in steel rolling mills. Not only have these annual crops destroyed the ten feet or more of top soil that buffalo and deeply rooted grasses developed there, but the steel mills which make this crop profitable separate the germ and bran from the kernel, leaving only fluffy white flour. What’s bad about that? Well, turns out the nutrition in wheat lies in the germ and the bran.
I guess this is the native Midwesterner in me. I grew up driving past corn fields, pastures filled with Holsteins and Guernseys, pigs and beef cattle. The Andover gardens, the orchard and the bees, along with our small woods satisfied this part of my soul. I’m going to investigate local CSA’s, see if that’s a route back into this world. We have to buy groceries anyway, so why not from folks who share a philosophical position close to my own.
It was also time to slough off some of the Minnesota based, second phase lingering work. Especially the political. I am going to the caucus this Tuesday; however, I no longer see myself as a dedicated activist. But, and I consider this great news, Ruth told me she was walking out on April 9th, standing outside Mcauliffe, her middle school, for seventeen minutes, one minute for each of the Parkland victims. She’s doing it in spite of the fact that adults tell her no one will listen. Go, Ruth!
The melancholy also uncovered a tension I’d been feeling between leaning in to the domestic, cooking, for example, and Kate and mine’s presence in the Beth Evergreen community, and what I consider my work. Recalibrating second phase expectations about work, which I have not yet fully done, feels like a task for this time. In fact, I enjoy the domestic part of our lives and it feels good to devote more energy to it.
Life still trickling by. A bit of snow over the last few days, colder now, in the Colorado measure of that term. So relative. Saw a facebook meme with Texans in parkas at 70 degrees. Could have countered that with a Minnesotan in shorts at ten below. Meanwhile 11, last night, felt pretty cold after three years here. These gross physical acclimatizations are easy to spot, but what about the more subtle mental adjustments?
This is all by way of becoming native to this place, a key element in my pagan creed borrowed from Wes Jackson at the 
Kate and I did it on the Great Anoka Sand Plain. Over the Andover years we listened to the soil, to the rhythms of the growing season. We stuck our hands in the soil, partnered with it. We planted trees and fruit bearing shrubs. There was the open prairie we cultivated on either sides of the more traditional suburban lawn carpet. Bees, with whom we partnered, for honey. Dogs who used the woods as their home and hunting ground. By the time we left we were native to that place. Its rhythms shaped our own and together we created a place to live.