Category Archives: Myth and Story

Holidays, Myth and Story

5 Useless Days

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Winter                                                          Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

Now we come to my favorite days of the year, those between Christmas and New Years.   When I used to work for the Presbytery (a part of the Presbyterian church analogous to the Catholic diocese), no one in the church world wanted to talk to judicatory staff just after the major work around Christmas.  That meant a holiday of sorts with a light work load.  Later, I learned that the Maya called these the 5 useless days at the end of the year.  I don’t recall why but they saw them as  problematic in some way.

Not me.  I view them as a sort of secular time out of time, a hole in the calendar when expectations are low, interruptions minimal.  Often I’ve used them for mini-retreats, focusing on some area or another I’ve wanted to give some in depth time.  Though I haven’t decided yet, I may choose to get deeper into Ovid.

Anyhow, enjoy these days.  They are a holiday from holidays.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Wheel, Humanities, Myth and Story

Missing Spirit

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Winter                                                            Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

Wondered if I was missing something.  Turned on the radio to 99.5 and listened to Christmas music, classical variety.  As I just to wrote to my brother and sister, there is some residual Methodist wandering around in my head, recalling those nights in the church on John Street, candles winking out as congregants extinguished them, leaving the sanctuary in darkness, a voice, in this particular instance, a voice from the Metropolitan Opera, a hometown gal who’d made it big in the big city, singing out of that darkness, O Holy Night.  Still sends shivers up my spine.

There is, too, a small boy waiting for Santa Claus and the luster of mid-day on objects below.  He misses the Christmas tree and the presents and the music.  And family.  Perhaps most of all family.

These both are, however, voices from my past, valued and warmly received when they emerge, but no longer vital in my present, just as the music of the 60’s or the cars of the 50’s still recall a good time, an important time, but a time now gone by.

I pressed the cd button and returned to the lectures on Big History, this time a review of the paleolithic, a historical era critical for our species, but often overlooked.  In this time we migrated first to the southern rim of Asia, then across the waters to Australia, and through Asia, across the land bridge to North America.  Each one of these migrations a test for our new specie’s capacity for collective learning, each one requiring a new set of skills, new tricks to wring energy and resources out of a new environment.  These were tests we passed and in that passing set the stage for our current dominance of the earth’s biosphere.

Christmastime and the Christmas spirit no longer enfolds me as it once did, sweeping down after thanksgiving and placing me in the confusing mix of retail extravaganza and high religious celebration.  Now the Solstice carries some of that numinosity for me, but none of the commercial buzz.  I don’t miss the maw of gifts and money and credit, false gods if ever there were ones.  Quiet, calm, still.  Dark, meditative, inward.  That’s the reason for the season for me now.

So, I’m glad for a place of peace as the Christmas machine churns anxiously all around me.  Still into the incarnation though.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Humanities, Myth and Story

Winter Solstice

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Winter Solstice Eve                                            Full Moon of the Winter Solstice

My friend Allison sent me a link to this article, There Goes The Sun.  It contains an excellent digest of solstice activity around the world and also explains some of the astronomical oddities attached to it.  Good reading.

Here’s another tack, a way of setting yourself in the context of the solar system, and, in that way, in the context of the cosmos, headed in one direction–out, external–and another that places you in the context of mother earth, the animal kingdom, mammals, hominids and your self, headed in another direction–inward.

As an astronomical event this solstice marks a transition, for those of us on earth in temperate latitudes, from a day with mostly darkness toward the inverse, experienced on the summer solstice when we make the transition from days with mostly light and again head toward darkness.  From the solar system perspective all that really happens is the earth returns to a spot on its orbit where its angle of declination spreads light out over a wider area, making its affect weaker.  The sun burns on, hydrogen turning to helium, vast amounts of energy released in this fusion reaction, radiating out from the sun toward the planets it holds in thrall.

The sun itself is one of 100-400 billion stars in our Milky Way Galaxy.  “Its name is a translation of the Latin Via Lactea, in turn translated from the Greek Γαλαξίας (Galaxias), referring to the pale band of light formed by stars in the galactic plane as seen from Earth.” Wikipedia.   How many galaxies altogether?  Estimates run as high as 500 billion.  I offer this to give you a sense of the particular significance of one moment in the orbit of one planet around just one of our galaxy’s suns.

Coming in toward you though, we can follow a different ancientrail.  This one responds to the specificity of the solstice and its impact on our northern home–winter.  Squirrels bury nuts.  Bears hibernate.  Dogs grow a coat of inner fur.  Human homes turn on furnaces and humans clothe themselves in ways designed to keep in heat.  Plants like daffodils, tulips, garlic, parsnips and lilies lie at rest in the soil during the cold period brought on by the solstice and the time just before and after it.  We have adapted to the return of the sun to this particular spot in the sky; and, without those adaptations this change in solar intensity would kill us.  In other words this event, so very insignificant when considered against the back drop of 500 billion galaxies, matters critically to those of us here, on Sol’s third planet, Earth.

There is a chance, tomorrow night, the Winter Solstice night, to abide with the darkness and the quiet, Stille Nacht; a chance to light a candle and meditate, take an hour, maybe more, to consider what has taken place in your life since light dominated the day, a time that ended on and around the fall equinox and how it may have changed as the dark began to grow more and more dominant.  This is not, and this is important, a once in a life event; no, this is a once a year time, a point where we can consider our lives, where we can go beyond our animal response to temperature and light, move inward toward the depth of our selves, that inner well where the uniqueness of you dwells.  You can spend time listening to the Self who contains not only who you are today, but who you could become tomorrow.

Or, you could pile up the wood, light the fire, dance naked under the stars and the full winter solstice moon, daring the sun to keep hiding, challenging it to start its journey, or, better to continue its journey, or, even better, challenge the earth to continue its journey so that the suns radiation will strike us with increasing intensity.  The Swedes have such celebrations, will be having them tomorrow night.  Seems a bit much for Minnesota, but there’s always a first time.

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

The Longest Night of The Year

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Samhain                                                            Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

In my sacred world the holiday season has begun to climb toward its crescendo, or, rather, descend.  Would that be a descendo?  As I gradually shifted my view of sacred time from the Christian liturgical calendar to the ancient Celtic calendar, at first I celebrated Samhain, Summer’s End, as my foremost holiday.  It is the Celtic New Year, representing the end of the old year, too, Janus like, like our January 1st.   The growing season ceases and the long fallow season begins as Beltane ends, the season of growth and harvest.  I liked this simple, incisive division of the year, growth and rest.  Samhain also sees the thinning of the veil between the living and the dead, between this world and the other world, between our reality and the reality of faery.  Life takes on a numinous quality around the end of October and the beginning of November.

In the years when I celebrated Samhain as my chief holiday I began novels then, ended projects begun in the earlier part of the year and thought a lot about ancestors and the delicate, egg shell nature of life.

Samhain still represents a key moment in my sacred year; but over time, as I worked with the Great Wheel, an expanded Celtic calendar that added Imbolc and Lughnasa to the solar holidays, equinoxes and solstices, my soul begin to lean more and more toward the Winter Solstice.  At some point, I don’t even know when, I began to look forward to the Winter Solstice as I once had to Christmas and after it, Samhain.  This was a quiet change, driven by inner movements mostly below consciousness.

Now the longest night has that numinous quality, angel wings brushing by, contemplation and meditation pulsing in the dark, taking me in and down, down to what Ira Progroff calls the inner cathedral, though for me it is more the inner holy well, that deep connection drawing on the waters flowing through the collective unconscious.  I’ve been to a few solstice celebrations, but none of them grabbed me, made me want to return.

I’ve become what the Wiccans call a solitary, practicing my faith at home, according to my own rhythms and my own calendar.  At times I’ve shared my journey through preaching at UU congregations or writing seasonal e-mails and sending them out, but now I write something on this blog and post it on the Great Wheel page.  Otherwise, on the Winter Solstice, my high holy day, it’s a candle and some reading, long hours of quiet.  This Tuesday.  The longest night of the year.

Faith and Spirituality, Holidays, Humanities, Memories, Myth and Story

Light and Dark

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Samhain                                            Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

The holidays.  Important for personal reflection, even have the ability to transform a life as we lay our lives alongside the possibilities suggested by Thanksgiving, Chanukah, Christmas, the Winter Solstice, New Years.  Birthdays, anniversaries, too, can reach into the deep part of your self, we can call it soul, and help you see yourself in the other.  Maybe, they let you see in there, too.  Holidays are a time out of time, a break in the straight ahead, up and at’em busyness of career, family, school.

There is, though, a dark side to the holidays.  All moments of possibility contain paths that lead not to transformation but to destruction, temptation, agony and pain.  The dark paths often emerge when the vulnerability and self-intimacy of the holiday intersects old ways of being, often ways learned in family settings, banished most of the year; but, as family and holiday conjoin, the vulnerability allows the past to rise quickly, to overwhelm.

This is as the Tao teaches us.  Even the dark side of the holidays offers a chance to become new, a chance to take the past and place it in a new frame, a way of understanding that puts the past in its own place and leaves the future open, perhaps even better for the relocation.

Darkness is not, in itself, bad.  Nor is light, in itself, good.  Too much light prevents our ability to see.  “Light is the enemy of art,” as the curator of the Thaw wing of the Fenimore museum said.  Darkness nurtures and heals, is a time for sleep, for seeds to germinate.  The holidays bring a special charge to the light and the darkness in our lives.  Our task is to open ourselves to what each has to offer us; to take it in and accept the possibilities.

Art and Culture, Dreams, GeekWorld, Myth and Story, US History

Ol’ John Henry Was A Pile-Drivin’ Man

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Samhain                                              Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

In the John Henry versus the pile driver, Watson versus Jeopardy competitions I come down on the side of the poor schlubs trying to prove we’re not over with as a species.  It comes as a special insult then when I can’t make a particular machine work.  After all, if the machine doesn’t work, we cannot prove our mastery over it.  Neither can we get anything done.

50%.  That was my results.  I got the snowblower going, coughing and sputtering, blowing blue flame from the air filter, chugging like an emphysemic senior citizen climbing stairs, but, nonetheless, blowing snow.  All the gasping and gurgling came from the year old gas still left in its system.  I siphoned the tank, but there was still gas in the engine itself.  It will, gradually, calm down unless the carburetor has too much varnish on it from the aging gas.

The chainsaw, on the other hand, would not come back to life.  I fed it new gas mixed with the proper amount of oil, filled up its chain lubricant reservoir, pulled out the choke, set the kick-back safety bar and yanked.  And yanked.  And yanked.  Not even a murmur.  At some point in the process I began to make physical fitness resolutions.  Lose 10 pounds.  Do resistance work.  A machine I can use and I can’t get the damn thing started.  So, after much huffing and puffing–me–I decided to let it and me rest for a while.

Now I’m back at a machine that I understand better than the chain saw, though not much better, but one with which I am much more familiar.  This is my 8th or 9th computer, orders of magnitude faster than the others with storage so great that I struggle to fill a third of it and programs that can do wonders.

Palmer Hayden and John Henry

In 1944 he embarked on what became a three-year effort to create his most famous group of paintings, the John Henry series. The idea, however, stemmed from his childhood when he heard his father and others sing the ballad of the “steel drivin’ man” and when he first made sketches of his hero.

His efforts to make the series were helped when his wife found a book titled John Henry: A Folklore Story by Louis W. Chappell which indicated the story of John Henry was based on a real person by that name. Hayden corresponded with Chappell. Chappell, an instructor at West Virginia University, answered Hayden’s questions and, in a letter, urged him to make John Henry’s woman a red head. He said, “I hope she will look like something fit to go home to when the day’s work is over and the night’s work is ready to begin, and such a woman is not altogether a matter of clothes.”

He also stressed the importance of John Henry’s hammer. “I have an idea that Henry’s hammer might well create a number of problems for the painter,” he told him. “I have yet to see a picture of Henry holding his hammer in his hands, or swinging it in driving steel, that has the slightest touch of reality in it.”

Hayden heeded Chappell’s urgings. The Dress She Wore Was Blue depicts a woman with red hair that probably satisfies the request to make Henry’s woman “fit to go home to”, while Hammer in His Hand shows John Henry holding his hammer in a realistic way.

The John Henry series was exhibited at the Argent Gallery in New York City, January 20 to February 1, 1947. A New York Times reviewer said “…the story of John Henry is unfolded in a dozen oils by Palmer Hayden, who has captured something of the combined literalness and imaginative quality in Negro spirituals in these paintings of that ‘steel-drivin’ man from childhood to his fatal competition with a steam drill….The artist has found and utilized illustratively the picturesque material in the saga of the black Paul Bunyan.”

Hale Woodruff wrote in the guest book for the show, “very good, Palmer!”

Hayden later said in an interview that Henry was “a powerful and popular working man who belonged to my section of the country and to my race.” He also related to him because Henry was so much like the men he grew up with. And, in The Seine at St. Cloud, the two symbols of Hayden’s hometown, the railroad and the river, appear in There Lies That Steel Drivin’ Man.

 

Aging, Art and Culture, Humanities, Myth and Story, Retirement

Still Learning

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Samhain                                                                    Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

The moon light, bright in the southern sky, casts shadows, thin skeletons of trees and shrubs splayed out upon the snow.

This Latin stuff is fun.  Going back and forth among dictionaries, grammars, websites, puzzling out the verbs and the nouns, trying to fit it all together into English, peeking inside Ovid, at least reading Ovid in his native language.  I know it’s weird, but I really enjoy it.

I feel about it like I feel about art history; I wish I hadn’t waited so long.  On the other hand the two together give this final third of my life mental vitality.  I’m only getting started.

Oh.  Picked up the novel I’d set aside, about a third done.  It has promise.  Need to find time for it.

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

Midwest Radicals

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Samhain                                          Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

Worked on learning the ablative absolute and the passive periphrastic.  This last one is also the name of a colon problem.  Not really.  But this is strange about it, periphrastic is a latin derivative from the Greek.  The actual latin equivalent is circumlocutio, to talk around something.  Do you see the irony here?

This goes to the work of translation and the ways in which literal renderings don’t always, in fact, often don’t, serve idiomatic English.

Also spent time today with Leslie Mills, the UTS intern for whom I have been supervisory clergy over the last semester.  She’s a young woman, growing into her sense of herself and her understanding of a very odd beast, the UU ministry.  UU gatherings mimic protestant forms, e.g. congregations, church buildings, clergy, Sunday worship, but have none of the underlying biblical or church historical rationale, at least in their Midwestern humanist incarnations.

It is a peculiar fact of Unitarian-Universalism that the true radicals in the movement are and have been in the Midwest for some time, since the early 1800’s as the east coast heresies of unitarianism and universalism followed the frontier.  In the time of Jenkin Lloyd Jones and his creation, the first World Parliament and Congress of Religions, the liberal faith tradition in the Midwest gained breadth.

In the post WWI years Minnesota and Iowa, respectively, Des Moines and Minneapolis in particular, became the center point for a non-theistic approach to the human condition, an approach focused on the human and the human experience, as it played out in this vale of tears not in the triumphant heaven of certain Christian beliefs. In this atheological turn the Midwest Unitarians gained depth.

(happy Minnesotans dancing around a local outdoorsman)

Now, in the first decade of the third millennium, the third thousand year period after the dramatic events played out in Palestine, the Midwest has come the front again, this time building on the humanist legacy, but moving the human from the center as the humanists moved God from the center.  In its place now the diverse world of pagan thought has put the natural world and our home planet within that world.  It has been, you might say, a Copernican revolution in metaphysics, moving first away from the heavens to the consciousness and lives of humans, then moving those same humans to a place in that world, rather than pride of place.

This dramatic, unusual chain of thought and faith experience makes the gathering places of those humanists now something other than churches, something different from the great cloud of witnesses, or the gathering of saints.  Just what they are is not clear, nor will it be for a while, I imagine, maybe decades, maybe centuries.  They may be unnecessary now, vestigial organs of the Christian traditions.  Or, maybe not.  Time.  Only in time will we know.

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

Hermes

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Samhain                                   Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

In my session with my Latin tutor today, Greg told me I’d made good progress.  For the first 4 verses or so, he had no corrections at all.  I’m learning something.

What I’m learning now, peeling back this onion one more layer is this:  figuring out the exact or closest to exact english that conforms to the Latin often fails to  make much sense.  There is a leap, a vault between the world of Ovid and his language and the third millennium English speaking world in which I live.  I’ve always suspected/known this and part of my purpose in setting out on this journey is to learn about that leap. More.  To investigate that process in a specific text that matters to me and to my understanding of the world.  Metamorphosis is such a text.

So, I learn the Latin, grammar and vocabulary.  Then, I apply what I’ve learned to the Latin text.  After I’ve done that, I can begin the task of translation.  It is, I suppose, exegesis and hermeneutics, my old friends from seminary classes on the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.  Each lesson I take another step on this journey.

Art and Culture, Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, Myth and Story, Politics

Day by Day

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Samhain                                                           Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

Thursday is art day; Friday is Latin day.  Today Greg and I will go over my (rough) translation of verses 36-48 of Book I of Ovid’s Metamorphosis.  Though slow going, I get a thrill each time I crack a phrase, write it down and it makes sense.  Even if Greg later points out I’m wrong.   I have a lot of opportunity for improvement and that makes the learning worthwhile.  Saturday is errand day and around the house work day.  Sunday, again, is Latin.  Monday is business meeting and Woolly day.  This leaves me Tuesday and Wednesday as buffer days.  So far, this schedule seems to work pretty well for me, though my lackluster performance yesterday made me wonder a bit.

(this graphic illustrates the verses I’ve translated for today.)

On the climate change front.  The world has begun to lurch forward on two aspects of climate change:  reduction of carbon emissions and adaptation.  In the more radical wing of the environmental movement adaptation or mitigation has been capitulation, something to avoid since it muddies the gravity of the problem we face.  A tipping point may be at hand.  Folks have begun to put forth adaptation in the context of realizing the global warming train has not only left the station, but is well on its way.  A certain, not insubstantial amount of warming is now inevitable, perhaps as much 2 degrees, possibly more.   Given that, mitigating projects that can help soften the damage, are not only a good idea, but necessary.  If proposed in the context of inevitable warming, mitigation projects can also underscore the need to take dramatic steps now to prevent more warming.  I’m hopeful we’ll see progress out of Cancun.

My comments above do fly in the face of polling numbers that suggest climate change has receded in the public’s mind, especially as the economic crisis has shoved personal financial peril forward.  Understandable, but not good.  My hunch about a tipping point comes more from the gradual roll out of an increasing consensus about the science.  We’ll see.