Category Archives: Myth and Story

Commentary on Religion, Family, Humanities, Myth and Story

The Blood of the Lamb

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Spring                                                   Mountain Spring Moon

There are historic occasions that are of major cultural significance, then there are occasions of historic significance on a smaller scale. Last night Jen  hosted her first seder. It felt good to drive over to their home (see above for the route) for a holiday, especially passover. One of the characteristics of Judaism that has long appealed to me is its emphasis on worship and holidays centered in the home.

Many of the most memorable holidays like Hannukah and Sukkoth are observed in the home. And, in fact, passover, a key holiday for Jewish identity along with Rosh Hoshanah Purim and Yom Kippur, is largely a home based celebration. I’ve been to several over the years, but none of them were as sweet as this one.

A Rabbinic Haggadah guides those gathered through this old, old ritual. Traditional estimates place the Exodus, the story at the heart of pesach, or passover, in 1300 B.C.E. Perhaps three thousand years old pesach links each Jewish family and their seder guests to a time of liberation from bondage, making freedom from slavery an essential part of Jewish identity.

To join family in a celebration with this much history makes my heart glad. Though the metaphysics of Judaism do not appeal to me, the long march, the ancientrail of Jewish identity held constant throughout millennia by these very same observances does. And I felt privileged to be there.

 

Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Medea

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Spring                                       Mountain Spring Moon

Medea. The more closely I follow her story in Ovid, the better I understand why she inspired so many works of literature and painting. In a time when women worked the looms and managed households (Penelope, for example) Medea was a strong woman in every phase of her life. She seduced Jason and literally brought new life to Aeson, his father.

She is a magician, a sorceress, a witch, one who walks alone in the night. She banishes the clouds and calls for the clouds to return. She shatters living rock with a word and calls the winds, then bids them go. She is the female equivalent of the heroes of the age of heroes.

I’ve not yet gotten to the portion of Ovid’s account where she kills her children, so I won’t comment on it.

More to come.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Holidays, Myth and Story

Éirinn go Brách

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Imbolc                            Black Mountain Moon

N.B. The “snakes” that Patrick ran out of Ireland were the Druids, priests of the Auld Celtic faith, so I’m celebrating Celtic heritage today, not Patrick. Though he did have the good sense, when returning to Rome after his missionary work in Ireland, to take several Irish Wolfhounds with him.

We’re getting ready for our second party in two months. That’s approximately two more than we hosted all last year. Today our neighbors Eduardo and Holly, Ann Beck (real estate agent) and Jon, Jen, Ruth and Gabe will eat corned beef, cabbage and other fixings with us.

This is a holiday I have celebrated at Frank (the Mic) Broderick’s for many years. It’s a Woolly traditional meal and the one tomorrow night will be the first one I’ve missed in a long time. Having a Celtic meal of our own might be the start of a new, Colorado tradition for us.

Just got done mopping the floor, after vacuuming. I can do this now with minimal huffing and puffing though there’s still a ways to go on being fully acclimatized. Kate’s got corned beef in the slow cooker, cabbage and potatoes ready to boil and a mango popover for dessert. I made an Irish soda bread yesterday that looks pretty good.

In a nod to the digital age I just retrieved my Pandora password from my password program on this computer. That way, I can go downstairs, enter it on our TV! (Roku) and provide some holiday appropriate music.

69 degrees here in Conifer, a sunny bright day for St. Patrick’s. Strange. And, when I just checked, I’m very surprised to see that in Andover it will be 71 today. Stranger yet.

 

Health, Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Pole Vaulting

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Imbolc                                                   Black Mountain Moon

Working on Latin today. A plateau pole-vaulted. For the first time, I worked from the text in Perseus alone, writing nothing down, looking up words in the usual click-on-the-word style with Perseus, but assembling the translation in my head, then typing it into my Evernote file for Medea and Aeson. This is the private equivalent of sight reading and I’m becoming facile at it, at least in Ovid.

If you were here in the room, I’d ask for a high five. This feels like a culmination, a passing through one of the key doors on my way to the amateur classicist tower. Still a good ways to climb, but I’m far beyond the half-way point. Amazing.

Another positive note. After each night’s sleep and each nap, I get a reading on my resting heart rate thanks to my Basis watch, my 2014 birthday present. Before leaving Minnesota I had my resting heart rate down to a 62-67 bpm average, leaning more toward 62. Which is pretty good for a guy in his late 60’s. After being without exercise for almost two months, I began again last month and my heart rate showed up in the 70-73 range and stubbornly stayed there. Just when I had begun to get frustrated with it, it began to drop. Now, I’m running 67.

Feels like a victory, especially at 8,800 feet.

Art and Culture, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

A Childhood Fascination

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Imbolc                                                Black Mountain Moon

First Latin session since November 14. Greg and I used Skype and, as a result, for the first time in over 4 plus years, actually saw each other. I’ve moved back into Ovid, Caesar just didn’t keep my interest.

Right now I’m in book VII, translating the story of Medea and Aeson. Aeson is the father of Jason, he of the Golden Fleece, and Medea’s husband.  Jason asks Medea to make his father younger, “Subtract years from me and add them to the years of my father.”

The Metamorphoses is  like a prism for Greek mythology. Greek myths and epic poetry shined out of the classical and heroic eras into the mind of Ovid. He collected their light, gave it his own cynical twist, then shined the light on to developing Western culture, especially during and after the Renaissance. To read the great poem in his own language and to grapple with making his Latin meaningful in contemporary English plants each one of these stories deeply into my own memory.

Where does it take me? I don’t really know, but I do know that the world of Augustan Rome and the world of Greek mythology has fascinated me since I was little and has not ceased to fascinate me even as I push well into my third phase.

 

Beyond the Boundaries, Myth and Story, Original Relation

From the Slumber of the Everyday

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Imbolc                                             Black Mountain Moon

From the dog to the human. Seeing the dogs yesterday, 100% clicked in to their genetic heritage and feeling great about it, made me wonder what circumstances create the same integration of body, mind and spirit in humans? Two ideas occur to me right away: sex and flow, yet those don’t seem quite right. Sex is instinctive and common among mammals, for the purpose of reproduction. Lions and tigers and bears and humans, dogs, too, all engage in sex, so it’s not distinctive, it’s instinctive. Flow is closer, but in its case it’s too distinctive, too idiosyncratic, too much a marker of an individual’s uniqueness and only rarely achieved.

Perhaps the trigger is hunting. After all, we share with lions, tigers, bears and dogs a predatory nature. We are not rabbits, squirrels, mice, voles. In this case I wouldn’t know since I’ve never hunted. But I can imagine. A true hunt, one where finding food is a necessity, would concentrate the mind, require attention to even the smallest physical movement, both on the part of hunter and hunted.

Or, perhaps, defending loved ones. This could explain the attraction of the warrior ethos. Though these are both traditionally male roles. What would be the female equivalent? Or, is there one trigger that unites men and women? Women hunt and fight, too.

Of course, there can be more than one trigger, I’m sure. Or, maybe we’ve evolved ourselves past a distinct trigger, become too socialized, too far distant from our veldt past. Still, watching Rigel yesterday afternoon come up to her purpose from the slumber of the everyday, I wonder.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Latin, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Translating De Bello Gallico, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Back At It

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Imbolc                                  Black Mountain Moon

I’ve found my rhythms. Back at Latin, going to turn today back to Ovid from Caesar. Writing. I’m 4,000 words plus into Superior Wolf and my brain is buzzing, following trails here and there with characters, research, narrative structure. Working out is back, too, 6 days a week right now. I’m not where I was in terms of fitness, not sure how the altitude has affected me, but I’m improving and that’s the key. The whole fitness area is still in flux, but I have a pattern I’m using.

A new element, too. I’m going to make some art. Not sure what quite yet, though I’ve got some ideas and lots of material. When my center room work space gets finished, I plan to get at it. There’s also, with art, the research and work with art history, theory. Not there yet in that work, but it will come.

Even, if you managed to get through my long posts under Beyond the Boundaries, Original Relation and Reimagining Faith, you’ll know, my reimagining project has finally begun to take off. Why now I’m not sure, but there you go.

This blog, of course, has remained a constant.

Now, if we could just sell that house.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Mountains, Myth and Story, Poetry, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Spring

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Imbolc                                      Black Mountain Moon

“Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly–and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.”
–  Omar Khayyám

March 1st is the beginning of meteorological spring. The three coldest months of the year are over and the next three are a transition between the cold of winter and the heat of the growing season, the three warmest months of June, July, August. Meteorological spring, though, is a creature of averages, a soulless thing with no music. I prefer the emergence of the bloodroot (in Minnesota) as the true first sign of spring.

On March 20th Imbolc will give way to Ostara, the Great Wheel’s spring season, on the day of the vernal equinox.

I do not yet know the traditional first signs of spring for the montane ecosystem, but I will. Nor do I know the tenor, the rhythms of the seasonal change here in the mountains. I look forward to learning them.

I’m reading the Thousand and One Nights again, a new translation, so right now Arabic and Persian stories, poetry fill my head. Khayyam’s Rubaiyat was my earliest introduction to Persian culture and one I found magical from the beginning.

There is, today, the slightest touch of spring longing in me. And so I wrote this.

Faith and Spirituality, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science, World History

Living in the Long Now

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Imbolc                                                 Black Mountain Moon

Between now and the time when Pipe Creek fills the lake that will cover all of human artifice here on earth there is a long interim. It may well be that humanity will fan out from this planet, seeking a home somewhere in space, perhaps on Mars or a moon of one of its sister planets, perhaps even out beyond the Oort belt, the furthest reach of Sol’s solar wind. I cannot see that far and, though I hope it turns out to be our destiny, I do not rely on such exploration in considering how far I can see.

We know from astrophysics that in about 7.5 billion years the sun will expand in its red giant phase, its bulk then extending past our orbit. That is a sure and certain end to the planet. Before that, though, several other extinction events loom. This brief Wikipedia article outlines several of them.

These future disasters (from a human perspective) limit the time of human habitation on earth, not by theological fiat, but by the laws of physics. In that they represent the working out of fundamental laws of this universe they are neither apocalyptic nor commentary on human failing. There are future disasters, perhaps of an extinction event level, that might have the human fingerprint, yes, but even these only advance the end of human life on earth, a certainty in any case.

Considering this certainty without placing an exact time frame upon it, we can then work backwards to consider faith, positioning ourselves in the world, however broadly you may define that term. We live in the long now between the emergence of life on earth and its end. Humanity is an extension of that true miracle, that enduring mystery, life’s creation ex nihilo from chemicals inert, as far as we know now, since the very birth of the universe.

Over our evolution, lengthy from the perspective of our species, but a wink in the time since earth’s creation we have developed into an animal capable of reflecting on its fate. That’s what I’m engaged in here. Does our fate really matter? Yes and no.

No because our duration as a species on earth has limits, ones we can define and foresee, even if we can not predict those limits exactly. Yes because our need to know ourselves as part of the universe, as part of life on this planet seems to be a human universal, most likely triggered by meditation on our own, individual limit: death.

If we accept (and you may not), that this world is wonder enough, miracle enough and, further, that any next world, no matter what its shape and character might or might not be, is hidden behind the pale of death and the inescapable veil created by our senses, then we must consider how we fit into that long now currently underway, the one between the creation of the earth and then life upon it and our emergence, and that certain end to this planet and its life which physics demonstrates.

That consideration will be the content of the next post in this series.

 

Colorado, Great Work, Minnesota, Myth and Story, Writing

Superior Wolf

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Imbolc                                                    Settling Moon II

Began filing today. Deciding how to organize files to support what comes next. And what does come next? Damned if I know. I’ll pass the post for the 68th time tomorrow and what is past is gone, all 67 years. That means tomorrow I start fresh. No entanglements, no regrets. Another day, the start of another year’s trip on spaceship earth.

While taking files out of the boxes used to transport them, mostly plastic rectangles with supports for hanging files, a sudden thought about a next project did come to me.

The file on the wolf hearings at the Minnesota State Legislature a few years back when de-listing the wolf (from the endangered species list) and the file on wolves as part of Minnesota’s eco-system were among the first ones I retrieved and placed in the horizontal file cabinet. They were fat with government documents, maps and material from a wolf course I took even further back at the Wolf Center in Ely. (where friend Mark Odegard’s exhibit still greets visitors)

These files, along with several books on wolves and Minnesota’s Northwoods, supported a project I’ve had in mind for a long time: Superior Wolf. Several chapters have been written, many rejected. But for some reason I could never find the right line to continue.

Superior Wolf. That’s one I really want to finish. Or, better, one I want to discover how to write. It occurred to me that the distance between those files, those early chapters and now the literal distance between me and the Minnesota Northwoods might help.

I’d like to get a novel going again and the Latin. I’m close on both counts, I think.

Once I get that filing done.