Category Archives: Myth and Story

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Health, Humanities, Myth and Story, Politics

The Death of an Honest Man

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Samain                                      Moon of the Winter Solstice

Christopher Hitchens died.  An honest man, Diogenes would have stopped searching.  He faced death as a non-believer, a man whose God Is Not Great made him a name in the theist–anti-theist debates of this millenia’s early days.

His angry anti-religious bias fit in well with the Richard Dawkin and Sam Harris crowd, agreeing with their totalizing, methinks-they-protest-too-much screed.  If religion is so bad, why has it persisted for so long?  A scathing atheist has backed himself into a metaphysical box, one much like the box he insists all religionists occupy.

To adamantly claim God’s non-existence is just as silly and unwarranted as the claim of God’s existence.  Neither can have, by definition, empirical validation, so, in each case we enter the realm of faith, of conjecture believed because it feels right, true.

Faith in its purest forms is a beautiful aspect of human culture, allowing us to transcend the often bleak realities of the day-to-day, finding a blissful reality where others see only pain and boredom.  Marriage, for example, requires faith in another human being, another human being as wonderful and amazing as yourself and as awful and horrible.

Monotheism as practiced in the dominant Western religious traditions is only one item on the menu of faith as offered by human culture and even it comes in three flavors:  Christian, Jewish and Muslim.  The ancient traditions of the West synch up better with the pluralist pantheons of India, Nepal, Tibet, Africa and the indigenous Americas.

Monotheism, rather than religion per se, seems the better target, since it makes definitive and often absolute claims, claims which sometimes pose as divine law, unbreachable and final.  The nature of monotheism’s claims rather than its actual content or institutional form are the problem.

With one deity and one book the temptation to sure knowledge, certain dogma too often overwhelms these believers, though in all three traditions there are, too, the more measured, more humble ways.  In fact, strange as it may seem given the all too charged dialogues of the past twenty years, the liberal orientation–former mainline Christianity, reform Judaism and the Sunni/Sufi mainstream Islam–is numerically dominant.

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Holidays, Humanities, Myth and Story, Travel

The Dark Time

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Samain                                   Moon of the Winter Solstice

Samain in Lima, Peru.  We came back through Lima from a point on the far side of the city just as evening fell.  Even there, Samain’s pale memory, Halloween, saw children in Mickey Mouse costumes, princess costumes, carrying plastic pumpkins, many of them walking toward a large shopping mall in one area, a Halloween party rocking the joint.

These Latin cultures have a certain affinity with Samain as a festival when the veil between the worlds thins and the dead can cross, come back to visit family or to haunt them.  Cemeteries had fresh flowers at grave markers, grass had been cut, masses said, loved ones remembered.  In the White City, the vast and prominent cemetery in Guyaquil, Ecuador, the mausoleums and the multiple, tall columbariums, the markers climbing the hill in the back all speak to an engagement with death, a sort of living and ongoing engagement with death, so very different from the sterile, hospital based, don’t look culture we’ve created here.

Next week, a week from Wednesday, comes the Winter Solstice and Samain will be at an end.  In sorting material about the Winter Solstice, about Yule, about Saturnalia and even Deepavali and Hanukkah the emphasis is mainly on Sol Invictus, as the Romans called him, the Unconquerable Sun.  An emphasis on the long march of daylight that begins on the longest night.

Another, equal concept celebrates the Winter Solstice as the longest night of the year, the culmination of a steady progress by darkness to push back the realm of light.  Both have their mirror in the human mind.  The light of reason shines itself on the questions we have about the way things are.  How things work.  Why this happens and that does not.  Yes.

But.  A child lives in the warm dark for nine months before coming to the light.  Ideas often lie hidden, tucked away somewhere in the darkness of the mind, back there fermenting, gathering weight.  Dreams sometimes pick those ideas up and play with them.  Too, our life is not all rational, not all light, perhaps not even very much so.

Most of life comes from the irrational, the emotional, the intuitive and to worship the light can be a denial of these important elements in our everyday life.

The Great Wheel shows us the way.  We need the fallow time, the restfulness of winter and the cold, just as we need the sunny time, the growing season, the time of thinking.  These needs are not occasional but persistent, coming into our lives again and again and again just as the earth wheels through the sky, repositioning the sun’s light.  Blessed be.

Bees, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Humanities, Hydroponics, Myth and Story, Our Land and Home, permaculture, Politics

Reimagine

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Samain                          Moon of the Winter Solstice

Jon sent these two links.  Wish I’d had’em when I owned that farm up near Nevis, Minnesota.  I might still be up there, motoring around on some of these very clever inventions.  They show what an ingenious mind can do when rethinking what appear to be over and done with ideas.

http://opensourceecology.org/
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/marcin_jakubowski.html

Makes me wonder what other ideas need a complete rethink.  Computers have followed a pretty standard architecture up to now, one based on a central processing unit.  I read an article in Scientific American last week about a neural computer which, in essence, gives each unit of a computer a cpu, allowing for massively parallel processing as an integral part of the design. It’s modeled on, but not attempting to replicate, the human brain.

How about housing?  Cars?  Or, my personal quest and long time obsession, religion?  The family?  Electrical generation?  I’m interested in distributed generation where a cul de sac or an apartment building or a couple of blocks city residential units might get their electricity from, say, a combination of wind, solar and geo-thermal units sited in their immediate vicinity.

Here’s another one that could use a complete overhaul, reimagining:  nations.  The nation state is a relatively new phenomenon, most experts date its rise somewhere around 1800, perhaps a hundred years earlier in the instance of Portugal and the Netherlands.  In the wake of the globalization of economic life national boundaries have much different meanings that they did, say, 50 years ago.

Let’s go back to religion for a second.  Over the last several years, 23 to be exact, I’ve wrestled with the hole left by Christianity in my life and sought to fill it through what I call a tactile spirituality, one wedded to the rhythms of the seasons, of flowers and vegetables, of bees.  This direction took its initial impetus from an immersion in Celtic lore while I sifted for writing topics.

Then, I began to follow the Great Wheel of the seasons, a Celtic sacred calendar focused on 8 seasons, rather than four.  That led me to integrate gardening with my sacred calendar.  In the wake of these two changes in my life, I began to see the vegetative and wild natural world as more than tools for food or leisure, rather I began to see that they were my home, that I lived with them and in them, rather than having them as adjuncts to my anthropocentric life.

This whole change, this rethink of what sacred and holy mean, what the locus of my spirituality is and where it is, has had a long maturation, much thought and experimentation.  My hope is that my reimagining might provide a common religious base, a sort of ur-religion, which all humans everywhere can embrace.

As in times past this base religion could certainly have others layered on top of it, its essence after all is to be non-exclusive.  What I hope further is that reasserting, inviting, even luring others to see the sacred and the holy in our planet and its other living beings, they will be more likely to join in to see it healthy and vital.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Myth and Story

Humanism

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Fall                                                      Waxing Autumn Moon

Spiritual Resources for Humanists.  Been thinking about this from an odd perspective.  Humanism is often characterized as anti- or post-Christian.  It is, of course, easy to see why this should be so in such Christian marinated cultures as those of the United States and Europe.  Easy, yes.  But accurate?

Think about it this way.  If there were no monotheism, no polytheism, no reaching out beyond the natural world to a supernatural (anti-natural?) realm, then raising a Christian theology would be seen as anti-Humanist or, maybe, post-Humanist.

If you, like me, find the idea of a God out there, beyond us and our world, no longer viable, then we have to consider that there has not been a God out there right along.  That means, further, that Christianity, Islam and Judaism, among many others, have never had their metaphysics right.  In other worlds there was no God in Israel, Ephesus, Corinth or Rome.

In that case, humanism is counterpoised not to a deity, but to a story, rather stories, about deities; narratives that, like kudzu in the south, overgrew everything, changing their shapes and appearance until all that could be seen was a green, viny realm.

These are narratives with a great deal of power, narratives that inspire devotion, sacrifice, even war, yet, for all that, narratives not substantially different from the very best fiction.  The difficult part to keep in focus here is the difference between the narrative as fiction and the history of the narrative’s power.

In other words, even though the Biblical material, from this perspective, has the same metaphysical punch as Hesiod and Ovid, compilations of Greek myth and legend, the historical actions of those who imbibed this narrative from their birth and acted on it in complete confidence of its veracity is nonetheless real, just as are the actions of Periclean Athens, Sparta and Corinth.

The historical depth and reach of Christians cannot be dismissed as fiction and reveals, in it all its vitality, the true force of myth and legend.  A story like the passion of Jesus, because it includes compassion, sacrifice, redemption and the defeat of death, resonates energetically with daily life, in particular the daily life of those on the wrong side of history.

Nietzsche recognized this and called Christian morality slave morality, a morality meant to bring down the strong and the good, a morality meant to turn on its head the way to power. ***

We do not have to give up the mythic power of the Christian story as humanists.  No, we can reach into the Biblical material and read these narratives with the same keen eye and open heart that Christians do.  We don’t have to buy the notion of Olympus to be inspired by the story of Hercules, saddened by the story of Orpheus and add depth to our understanding of  fall and spring through the story of Persephone.

Aging, Dreams, GeekWorld, Humanities, Memories, Myth and Story, Weather +Climate

Strange Weather

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Fall                                                 New Autumn Moon

A strange weather time.  A storm system and winds blowing in from the east.  Our weather systems almost always come from the west, following the planet’s rotation and the jet stream, but this raggedy storm system got stuck over Wisconsin and has begun to retrograde, head back west.

The quiet of night.  A healing time, the darkness.  A moment when the cares of the day can slide away and the still, small voice can speak.  The body can collect itself, relax, replenish.

Think of sleep.  Almost a third of our lives, maybe 25 years, think of that, 25 years asleep.  We are all, in this sense, Rip Van Winkle, unaware as the world changes around us.

In the sleep time our minds create the worlds we inhabit, pluck scenes from stored memories, movie clips, fears and joys, wishes and needs.  Vivid life, times of ecstasy and insight flow through our brains, a stream of cobbled together life, chunks of invention.  We are each novelists while we sleep, drafting narratives with characters about whom we care deeply.

Here’s the tricky part.  If I understand modern neurology, we do the same thing when we’re awake.  Our minds take sensory data and create worlds.  Narratives form so we can keep the world we create coherent, so we can remember the plot of our lives.

There are parts here that elude me, standing just outside my peripheral understanding.  Who is that watches the movie?  Who is the narrator?  Where is the narrator?  Is he a reliable or an unreliable voice?  Can we count on this movie?  By that I mean does it conform to what we, at least in a common sense way, take as real.  True.  Out there.

 

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Work, Humanities, Literature, Myth and Story

Breaching the Walled Garden of the Self

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Fall                                               Waning Harvest Moon

Prepping for a presentation on Spiritual Resources for Humanists.  Reading books, articles, letting ideas slip past as I get ready to sleep, keeping my antennae out for what feeds me now.

The book I mentioned before, All Things Shining, has convinced me of one thing.  It’s important to know why we need resourcing in the first place.

The title offers a rationale, unpacked.  Humanism embraces a world shorn of its medieval metaphysics; the Great Chain of Being has met Nietzsche’s Bolt Cutter, God is dead. God is dead, of course, was not an argument, but an observation, a sensitive man’s awareness that the God drenched era of the ancien regime had been drained by the empirical method, reason and the strangely acidic effect of the Protestant Reformation.

This world, a world with a strangled sense of the sacred, gave birth to the angst and anomie of the existentialist 20th century, a world with no center, or rather, a world with millions of centers, each person a godhead struggling with their own creation.

What can buttress the Self that must navigate these empty places?  Does our supernatural vacuum hold enough air to nourish the isolated self?

We stumble toward wonder, toward joy, hope for a glimpse of the sacred, of the moment that can lift us out of our isolation and put us in communion with others, with the natural world, with the stars which birthed the very atoms which constitute us.

These things we seek not out of some vestigial institutional memory, an anachronistic impulse to live again in a God drenched world.  No, we seek these things because the essential paradox at the heart of our lives is this:  we live alone, the only one with our world; yet we live together, up against galaxies of other worlds, sometimes with other worlds so close that they seem to intersect with ours.  We seek the venn diagram, a mandorla labeled self and other, where the other is another person, a flower, a sky, a lightning bolt.

So, spiritual resources in this context, then, would be those fragments of culture that can weaken or penetrate the walled gardens of our Selves, not in order to breach the walls, but to let in companion armies, allies in our quest.

The quest seems to similar to the one Sir Gawain faced when he beheaded the Green Knight and, in a year and a day, had to bend his own neck before the Green Knight’s sword.  That is, we somehow must will ourselves into a vulnerable, ultimately vulnerable position, to those we have beheaded.  Interestingly, as the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight proposes, this vulnerability is not only, perhaps not even mostly, a human to human one, rather, it is human to the whole Green world.

So we seek allies who will keep us strong in our vulnerability, mighty in our humility.  We seek at least love.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story

Fall Equinox

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Fall                                                     Waning Harvest Moon

Meteorological fall begins on September 1st, but the ritual calendar of many earth focused traditions places the beginning of fall at the moment when the sun’s equator and the earth’s align, the earth, just for a moment, losing its tilt relative to the sun.  This means we are half way through a cycle that began in June on the Summer Solstice and will end in December on the Winter Solstice.

Here’s an explanation from Wikipedia:  “In the half year centered on the June solstice, the Sun rises and sets towards the north, which means longer days with shorter nights for the Northern Hemisphere and shorter days with longer nights for the Southern Hemisphere. In the half year centered on the December solstice, the Sun rises and sets towards the south and the durations of day and night are reversed. Also on the day of an equinox, the Sun rises everywhere on Earth (except the Poles) at 06:00 in the morning and sets at 18:00 in the evening (local time).”

What are the marks of autumn for you?  Is it the return to school, the burst of energy, enthusiasm that comes from strapping on the cultural expectations of our youth?  Or, are the leaves changing, the senescence in the plant world a key moment for you?  Perhaps the chill winds and cool nights, the clear night skies.  For some it could be the nearing of deer hunting, or the start up of the NFL and the college football seasons.  Some find the gradual slide into darkness a time of increasing depression, the beginnings of Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Whatever marks this change for you it comes along with the seasonal ones; changes marked by decreasing solar energy per square foot and the attendant cooling.

This is the second of the three harvest festivals in the Celtic calendar, the first happening on August 1st, Lughnasa, and the final harvest festival marking Summer’s End, Samhain, on October 30th.  This was an other occasion for a market fair, settling of debts and entering into contracts.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Minnesota, Myth and Story

Seasonal Pilgrimage

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Fall                                           Waning Harvest Moon

Each turn of the Celtic seasonal calendar I find ideas, personal reflections, astronomical or traditional lore to pass along.

This time I’ll pass along one from Waverly Fitzgerald who maintains a website, living in season.

She suggests a seasonal pilgrimage, a visit each turn of the year to a place that, for you, embodies the energies and essence of the new season.  This recommendation struck me because I have a place myself, next to the Carlos Avery Wildlife Refuge, the Bootlake Scientific and Natural Area.

To get to my sacred area I walk back through a field, it formerly held a house, now gone, traverse a crescent of young oak and birch to emerge in a circular meadow filled with furze.  Across the furze and to the northwest is a path back into the woods, not long, that takes me to a parcel of land between a pond on the south and the marshy edge of Bootlake on the north.

On this land between the waters stands an old growth white pine, a white pine with a crooked top, probably the main trunk broke off in a storm or lightning strike and a secondary branch took over, but at an angle from the main.  My guess is that this deformity allowed the old giant to survive the woodsman’s axe.

In a ring around this older tree are its offspring, a small grove of younger white pines who now stand sentinel around their older parent, a conversation now lasting at least a hundred years of more.

A portion of Tully’s ashes came with me one day.  I scattered them around the base of the tree, then sat down with my back to its trunk, snugged in between two great roots while I gave thanks for this Irish Wolfhound who had taken a special place in my heart.

At other times, often on New Year’s Day, I have visited this sacred grove, the air often below zero, snow crunching, black crows watching me from high atop leafless oak.

This small place, away from the city and the suburbs, a place intact, has been a refuge for me for over twenty years.  I visit it still, though less in the last few years.  It’s time to return.

 

 

Aging, Humanities, Literature, Myth and Story

More Fun With Ovid

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Lughnasa                                                 Waning Harvest Moon

More fun with Ovid.  The curtain has begun to roll back a bit more.

Many of my friends have second and third languages, but until now I only had the one.  A bit of French.  A little Hebrew.  A little Greek.  But nothing solid.  The ability to look on a page filled with Latin words, words I would once have brushed over with little attempt at comprehension, and see meaning emerge delights me.

The words still look strange to me, foreign, but now they carry a pulse of meaning, one I can get if I look a bit longer, or turn to a book.

The same work I mentioned above, All Things Shining, that critiques Western individualism, has a section on the decline of craft, the disappearance of embodied learning, of skill at making.  Again, I find myself pushing against their analysis and in this instance Latin came to mind.

To translate requires a subtle knowledge of the original language and an idiomatic grasp of the home language.  This type of intellectual work is a skill, a craft like that of. woodworkers or, the example used in the book, wheelwrights.  It requires a mind numbing series of early, simple steps that build only gradually into a suite of skills.  My guess is that the traditional seven years to move from apprentice to journeyman is not far off for Latin.

 

Humanities, Myth and Story

Zealots

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Lughnasa                                            Waning Harvest Moon

More time today on Ovid.  Working on Book III:570-574.  This chunk, starting at 509 and running through 579, introduces the story of Pentheus, a cautionary tale about religious zealots.  Pentheus criticizes the seer Tiresias as an alarmist and disses the God Bacchus and his Bacchante as driven by potent drink, irrational, anti-military and decidedly non-Roman.  Later in the story Pentheus will be torn apart by his mother and her fellow maenads in a fit of religious frenzy.

This story warn us to understand religious zealotry as a serious political force and one often prone to violence.

I can feel my Latin muscles growing, a slow process, fed by numerous encounters with various words, sentence constructions, parts of speech.