Category Archives: Myth and Story

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Memories, Myth and Story

An Entrance to Faery

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Summer                              Waning Strawberry Moon

My cards were good.  I won some hands.  But.  Boy, did I screw up when I took a chance on a hand where winning would have offered double points, but losing, as I did, with below a minimum, quadrupled the penalty.  Ouch!  Sigh.

The night was glorious.  A warm summer night, a clear sky, the kind of night when everyone is a child, just waiting for the other kids to come out, to play one last game, perhaps wave a sprinkler around or sit down and talk.

A night much like the one I experienced in New Harmony, Indiana when I walked down a lane past the only open air Episcopalian church in the country, designed by Phillip Johnson.  This astonishing church is on one side of a lane that runs back into a woods.  Just across the lane, behind a wonderful small restaurant, The Red Geranium, is a grove of conifers planted on small drumlins.  Inside a modest maze created by these trees lies, improbably, the grave of one of the 20th centuries finest theologians, Paul Tillich.

It was just after dusk, night had come softly, but definitely.  The lane only ran for no more than half-mile on past the church and Tillich’s grave.  As I wandered back, moving away from the main street and toward the woods that lay at the end of the lane, I began to notice the fireflies.

Right where the lane met the woods, fireflies congregated, blinking off and on, creating an arc of bioluminescence.  Then others began to blink, further back in the woods.  There were thousands of them and as the ones further in began to blink they created the effect of a tunnel of light, blinking on and off.

(this pic is similar, not the night I describe)

Walking toward this between two holy places, the possibility that this was an opening to faerie seemed very plausible, even likely.

I stood there for over a half an hour, neither entering the woods, nor leaving the lane, captured as I was by the sense of a veil between the worlds opened where I was.

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Myth and Story

What Time Is It?

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Summer                         Waxing Strawberry Moon

A bit more on time.  Cybermage, Woolly Brother and sheepshead player William Schmidt begs to differ on the notion of cyclical time.  He references the geology of Minnesota and, I imagine, the information about the evolution of the universe which he so wonderfully makes understandable with lights and rope.

It is difficult to understand the two apparently conflicting ways of understanding time, the cyclical view that I suggested yesterday over against the deep time recorded in our genes,  our own earth’s mantle and the red shifted lights in the heavens.  Let me see if I can be a little clearer about what I think.

Instead of time as a characteristic of the natural world, that is, an experience of things occurring in sequence:  t1, t2, t3, t4 out there, beyond the reach of our sensory apparatus, I see it as a means of ordering that same sensory experience, a means imposed on it by our mind’s need for order, order that can have a useful meaning for us.  In other words, time and space, both, in this view, exist to help us survive in a world of chaotic events happening in overwhelming numbers.

They create a sort of mental short hand that gives us a way of predicting, in a probabilistic manner, the outcome of things we perceive as happening outside us, things important to us as an animal:  will that animal be beyond that tree when I shoot this arrow? will the arrow actually travel through the apparent intervening distance and strike the animal?  how long will it take me to hike to the berry patch?  Or, contemporary equivalents:  do I have enough time to go to the grocery store after work and before the kids get home?  Can I fit in a round of golf before the rain predicted at 3 pm?  how long does this flight really take?

Does this a priori understanding of time and space invalidate deep time?  I don’t know.  Does cyclical time invalidate deep time?  I don’t know.  I admit there is one part of me that says, Oh, come on.  The earth is 3 billion years old or so.  The universe 13.5 billion years.  Whatever those words mean, they mean the beginning of  both was a long, long time ago.  Yet, another part of me, ascendant right now, wonders if our conclusions about the passage of time mean what we think they mean.

This much I know for sure, on this planet, at this latitude and longitude, in 365 + days, we will spin around to the summer solstice again.  This I can experience as a non-linear mode of time, a mode of time that relies on the cycles of the natural world rather than on the progression of anything through vast stretches of the  past and on into the infinite future.  This cyclical mode of time I can referent, whereas the notion of yesterday and tomorrow seem to me to be no more than place markers, file cabinets for data.

Aging, Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Humanities, Myth and Story

Summer. It’s About Time.

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Summer Solstice                                      Waxing Strawberry Moon

 

The longest day of the year.  Light triumphant, streaming, steaming.  The darkness held at bay.

Summer Solstice

This is an astronomical phenomenon transformed and translated into a spiritual one.  We humans have over millennia taken solstice and equinox alike as moments out of time, a sacred caesura when we could review our life, our path as the Great Wheel turns and turns and turns once again.

The Celts first divided their year into two:  Beltane, the beginning of summer, and Samhain, literally summer’s end.  As their faith tradition developed, they added in both solstices and equinoxes.  Since Beltane and Samhain occurred between the spring equinox and the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice respectively, they became known as cross-quarter holidays.  Imbolc and Lughnasa filled in the other two cross-quarter spots.

It is the eight holidays, the four astronomical ones and the four cross-quarter, that make up the Great Wheel.  In the most straight forward sense the Great Wheel emphasizes cyclical time as opposed to linear or chronological time.  This seems odd to those of us raised in the chronological tradition influenced by Jewish and Christian thought in which there is an end time.  With an end to time the obvious influence on our perception of time is that we progress through the days until they become years, which become millennia until the Day of the Lord or that great risin’ up mornin’ when the dead live and time comes to a stop.

That this is an interpretation rather than a fact rarely crosses the mind of people raised on birthdays, anniversaries, celebrations of one year as it comes followed by the next.  Our historical disciplines from history itself to the history of ideas, art history, even geology and the theory of evolution all reinforce the essentially religious notion of time as a river flowing in one direction, emptying eventually into an unknown sea which will contain and end the river.

Immanuel Kant, in attempting to reconcile the dueling metaphysics of two apparently contradictory philosophical schools (rationalists and empiricists), hit on the notion of time and space as a priori’s, in a sense mental hardwiring that allows us to perceive, but is not inherent in the nature of reality.  That is, we bring space and time to the table when we begin ordering our chaotic sense impressions.  My interest in the Great Wheel and in the traditional faith of my genetic ancestors came in part from a long standing fascination with the question of time.  We are never in yesterday or tomorrow, we are always in now.  What is time?  What is its nature and its correct interpretation relative to the question of chronological versus cyclical time?

I have not settled these questions, not even in my own mind, and they continue to be live topics in philosophy.  Learning to pay attention to the Great Wheel, to the now, and to the specific place where I live has pushed me toward the cyclical view, as has gardening and now the keeping of bees.  It is, today, the Summer Solstice.  Again.  As it was the last time the earth visited this location in space (ah, yes, space.  another conversation which we’ll bracket for now) and as it will be the next time.  This is a literally cyclical view of time based on the earth’s orbit around the sun, one which returns us, over and over to much the same spot.

Next summer when the solstice arrives the asiatic lilies will be ready to bloom, Americans will be getting ready to celebrate the fourth of July and kids will be out of school.  The mosquitoes will have hatched, the loons returned and basketball will finally be over.  These kind of phenological observations depend on the repetitive, cyclical character of natural events.  There is a real sense in which this time does not move forward at all, rather it exists in a state of eternal return, one solstice will find itself happening again a year later.  Is there any progress, from the perspective of the solstice, from one to the next?  Not in my opinion.

I don’t deny the intellectual value of arranging knowledge in what appears to be a rational sequence. It aids learning and explanation, but it may well be a mistake to think that sequence exists outside our mental need for it.  It may just be that time is, in some sense, an illusion, a useful one to be sure, but an illusion none the less.

Even if it is, we still will have the Summer Solstice and its celebration of light.  We will still have the Winter Solstice and its celebration of the dark.  We can see each year not as one damned thing after another, but as a movement from the light into the dark and back out again.  We can see the year as a period of fallowness and cold (here in the temperate latitudes) followed by a period of fertility and abundance.  This is the Great Wheel and it currently makes the most sense to me.  That’s the light I have today anyhow.  Let’s talk next year at this time.

Art and Culture, Humanities, Literature, Myth and Story

One or Many?

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Beltane                           Full Planting Moon

Finally.  A morning with no other responsibilities so I can go out and plant the remaining veggies.  After that, it’s time to get to work on all the things I’ve neglected, the flower beds.  We have more flower beds than we do vegetable garden, so I’m talking a lot of stuff to do.

I’m not yet feeling great, but I feel better.  Sluggish, tired, but not wasted.  The sun will feel good.

Here’s a weird idea.  It may have no basis, but it flitted through my head the other day.  I’ve been reading the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of the most popular books of Chinese classical literature.  The Dream of the Red Chamber and Journey to the West are two others, both on my list and in my house.  This is a long book, really long and its narrative style takes some getting used to, not to mention the Russian like propensity for having way more names than this guy can recall easily.  But. It does show a clear thread of Chinese culture, that is, obedience to the state is the norm, the heroic “side” in a conflict.  If you’re a rebel in the Three Kingdoms, you’re a bad guy.  If you convert from being a rebel to being a loyal follower of the Emperor (the last of the Hans in this case), then you’ve taken a step toward redemption.

I’m reading this literature to get a sense of the Chinese geist, the recurring themes that define and shape their sense of themselves.  Chineseness, I guess you could call it.  This has been a long project, lasting many years for me, and engaged in a very unsystematic way, but I have covered a lot of history, film, art, literature including poetry and even a tiny bit of language.

OK.  Let’s juxtapose this rebel bad, obedient good theme to a consistent thread in American film and literature, that is, rebel good, obedient bad.  Our founding story after all is one of rebellion, foisting off the cloying grip of mother Britain.  Think of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter where Dimsdale pales morally when compared to Hester Prinn.  An anthropology professor of mine, David Scruton, said Americans are infracaninophiles, lovers of the under dog.  Unions against big business.  Slaves against masters.  Women against men.  Incumbents versus challengers.  Rebel Without a Cause.  Twelve Angry Men.  The American individualist.

This seems to be a fundamental polarity between the Chinese, submit to family and state (a Confucian ideal), and Americans, the rugged Individualist, Self-Reliant, Don’t Tread on Me types.  Right?  I’ve always heard it put something like this.  Admittedly these are sweeping generalizations, but that’s what I’m after here, the broad stroke that has some anchors in culture and history.

Here’s the weird idea.  What if the broad strokes mean exactly the opposite of what we take them to mean?  In other words, the Chinese emphasize in literature, film, Confucian thought and political rhetoric obedience to the state and family because the Chinese are, in fact, a nation of rebels, individualists.  I know this seems like an odd position, but it comes from a surprising encounter I had with MingJen Chen about a year ago.  Jackie Chan had just said that he thought the Chinese people needed to be controlled.  I asked Mingjen about this and she surprised me by agreeing with Jackie Chan.

What if American’s emphasize individualism in literature, art, film, novels and political rhetoric because we are, in fact, a nation of conformists who use the veneer of rugged individualism to cover a submissive spirit, one that will not struggle with what Emerson called the establishment.  Or, at least, won’t struggle so hard with it that it fears its foundations in jeopardy?

A weird idea, I know, but perhaps a useful one nonetheless.

This idea comes in part from the Jungian notion that we often emphasize in our reading, our writing, our attempts to interpret the world those things that are missing in our life, the thing we would like to live towards or into.  It also comes in part from the realization that, like most things, the notions of individualism and collectivity are not unrelated, isolated realities, but ones that bump up against each other in everyday life.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, Minnesota, Myth and Story, Politics, US History, Writing

Staying Within My Skill Set

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May 22, 2010              Beltane                    Waxing Planting Moon

While reading an article about Trevor-Rope, a British historian,  I learned that Gibbon wrote Decline and Fall in an attempt to answer the problem raised by the Enlightenment’s idea of progress.  This triggered, for some reason, an echo of the talk by Siah Armajani at the MIA a couple of weeks ago.  A successful artist and philosophically inclined Iranian, he said, “I don’t know how to make legs. [this in response to a question wondering why there were no legs on the figure he said represented himself in an installation currently on display at the MIA in the Until Now exhibition.]  I try to stay within my skill set.”

I’ve not tried to stay within my skill set in that I’ve lived what I call a valedictory life, one typified by reaching to another skill, like say, beekeeping or vegetable gardening or becoming a docent, rather than following the trail laid down by my more obvious gifts:  scholar, poet, writer, political activist, monk [that is, a person oriented toward the inner world].  That’s not to say I’ve abandoned them, I haven’t; but I keep myself off balance by continually being on what I love, a steep learning curve.

This lead me to wonder just what my skill set is and what I would be doing if I chose to remain within it.  A notion came to me, though it’s not the first notion along these lines that I’ve had, but I thought some about what it would mean to stick with it, see it through to the end.

My study contains stacks and shelves of books arranged because they speak to a general interest I have:  the Enlightenment and modernism, the Renaissance, Carl Jung, American philosophy, matters Chinese, Japanese, Cambodian and Indian, Poetry.  You get the idea.

Ian Boswell, a recent Mac grad, and pianist for Groveland UU, said he loved my presentations because they presented a “clear stream of ideas.”  I said, “The history of ideas.”

There is a core skill set:  I have a decent grasp of the history of certain big ideas in Western thought and a much less comprehensive, but still extant, notion of the history of certain ideas in the East as well.  I can communicate about these ideas in a manner accessible to most.

So.  Put that together  with new definitions/understandings of the sacred, the reenchantment of the world, an earth/cosmos oriented approach to the inner life, an historical and ecology examination of Lake Superior, Thomas Berry’s Great Work, a long immersion in the Christian and liberal faith traditions, a now substantial learning in art history, an awareness of and some skill in the political process and work on translating Ovid’s Metamorphosis, an idea begins to present itself.

A series of essays, monographs loosely tied together through a historical, ecological and political look at Lake Superior might use the Lake as a particular example.  It could be the thread that held together thoughts on emergence as a redefinition of the sacred, a symbol reenchanted in another {this is where the work on Ovid could play a role.], a place where the Great Work can focus in another [this is where the political would be important], a look at the history of ideas related to lakes and nations, placing Lake Superior in an art  historical context by examining photographs, drawings, paintings, poetry and literature related to it.

It’s a thought, anyhow.

Art and Culture, Garden, Myth and Story

Burn your bag, boy?

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Spring                                          Awakening Moon

Two stories from the world around us.

Michele Yates, a docent colleague, toured a group of second graders last week.  At the James Ensor expressionist piece, “Intrigue”, a little boy raised his hand, “Look, you can see the paint.  It’s still wet.”  Turns out this young art connoisseur believed we had a basement filled with producers of art, crankin’em out every so often for the delight of the viewing public.  A time when it would have been delightful to be inside his mind and see the imagined works underneath the museum.  I see trolls and gnomes and dwarfs hard at work.  How about you?

(Frejya and the dwarfs)

An l.e.d. sign for onion sets drew me off  Highway 35E and put to Beisswinger’s Hardware Store.  Beisswinger’s is a great old style hardware store with lots and lots of stuff cared for by employees who actually know how to use it all.  When I took my brown sacks of red, yellow and white onion sets inside, it occurred to me that I still need a fence tester for our electric fence; the high voltage pulse knocks out ordinary voltmeters.  I know.  I did it.

Anyhow, he’d never heard of one, but agreed to look it up.  Both of us were surprised when he found not one, but two.  On the way to the electric fence tester aisle, he started this story exactly like this:

“So, Charlie Brown and I were in New Hampshire on my uncle’s farm.  He’s an old guy, over 70, but wiry.  We’re going out hunting [I’m thinking this is a joke, so I’m preparing to laugh whether it’s funny or not.  He seems like a nice guy.] and the old man scrambles over an electric fence.  Charlie Brown steps over it, but gets a jolt.”  In his red Beisswinger store shirt, this guy seems believable.  He goes on,  “The old man hollers back over his shoulder, ‘Burn your bag, boy?”

I had students from Eau Claire and New York Mills today.  Both groups were fun, interested and engaged.

Faith and Spirituality, Myth and Story

Pyrrho of Elis

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Imbolc                                          Waning Wild Moon

OK.  So I’m listening to the history of Western Philosophy on the way into the museum today.  The lecturer starts going on about Pyrrho of Elis.  I thought.  Cool.  Not only is the name of his hometown near my own, he was the originator of radical skepticism, which boils down to my own philosophical position.

Not only those two interesting things, but I also found this interesting note:

Elis was the only city that built a temple to Hades in one of its precincts. The Eleans were the only one to worship him. The construction was built after Heracles’ war against Neleus in Pylos. Only once a year, the doors to the temple of Hades would open, but no one would enter the temple except the priests.

So, here’s a nod to a philosophical ancestor, pictured here.  And to his hometown of Elis and to the temple of Hades built there.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Myth and Story

Jung

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Winter                                 Waxing Cold Moon

“The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.” – Carl Jung

Jung has been central to my later life and this quote shows one reason.  He recognized the indescribable complexity of the lived experience and never tried to simplify it.  We live into problems, rather than roll over them or change them.  If we’re lucky, we make the problems part of our lives, otherwise they eat away at our lives.

Life from 17 to about 37 was difficult for me.  Sometimes in the extreme.  When Mom died, though I couldn’t see at the time, my world fell apart.  It didn’t have to, but I let it.  I internalized my grief, took up drinking and smoking and completely screwed the pooch when it came to making use of a pretty good academic career.  I ended up in the ministry, a place I should probably have never been and it took me 20 years  to extricate myself from that.  Along the way I got married twice, to women for whom I was a bad fit and who were a bad fit for me.  I drank myself into alcoholism, got cleaned up, but didn’t get better until I realized my second marriage was a bad one.

In that process I found John Desteian, a Jungian analyst.  He guided me on a journey of self-exploration and honest self-reexamination.  Much of what I learned about myself was painful, some of it exhilarating.  In the end, I left the ministry, started writing, found Kate and got myself headed off in a direction that fit who I was then and am now.

Jung’s metaphysics may be wrong, who knows?  The collective unconscious has no falsifiable reality.  The Self, as Jung understands it, stretches into neo-platonic realms.  Could be wrong.  His naming of complexes and archetypes likewise have no tangible referents. Doesn’t matter.

What does matter is this.  The blend of thought that Jung put forward encourages me to take mySelf seriously, yet to do so lightly.  It acknowledges the essentially messy and chaotic nature of both inner and outer life, yet makes clear that the only through it is eyes open, heart open, with forgiveness for yourself and others as humans struggling together.  That worked for me, works for me, and will see me through to the end of my life.

Thanks, Carl Jung.  I needed what you offered.

Family, Great Work, Myth and Story, Sport, Travel

Going Rodeoing

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Winter                              Waxing Cold Moon

The Rodeo!  Began with a bang.  Fireworks and laser lights.  The first event was bare back bronc riding.  These horses rear back, jump off, all four hooves off the ground, then plunge back to the sawdust.  It’s a brutal experience for a rider though the horses seem to enjoy it.

After this big men with horses went after one poor calf with ropes, hoping to stop it–the header–and bind the rear feet with a lasso, the footer. Must have been hard because most of the teams failed.

Somewhere in here Ruth said, “Granpop, this is fun!”

Next came the saddled bronc riding.  This was very similar to the first event only with saddles.  Punishing.

Then came a horse and rider against a calf.  The rider lasso’s the calf, hops off the horse and ties three of the calves feet together.  The horse pulls on the rope to keep the calf subdued.  This too proved difficult since most missed.

Barrel racing had barrels with Qwest painted on them.  I thought this was appropriate because the contestants had to run in circles to win.  Just like dealing with Qwest.  The barrel race horses were fun to watch because once they’re around a barrel, they really dig in an move.

The last event of the evening involved grown men attempting to stay on the backs of large bulls.  Just why they do this was not explained, but it takes the whole bronc riding thing and put a lot more weight behind it.  This too must be hard because only cowboy stayed on the bull the required amount of time.

There were some novelty events.  Mutton busting involved children from 5-7 trying to stay on sheep as they run around the arena.  Most fell off immediately, but one 7 year boy held on while his sheep ran all the way across the arena.

Another children focused event had 12 tweens, girls and boys.  12 calves were let loose and each kid that caught and subdued a calf would get a calf to raise and have an opportunity to show it at the next Western show.  In this instance all the kids received help from adults and all got a calf.

While I was in Mexico City in the late 90’s, I went to a bull-fight at the Plaza del Torres, the largest bullfighting arena in the world.  Though it was, in a sense, more violent than the rodeo, the bulls die, I liked it better.  It had a sense of ritual, of grace, even elegance while rodeo seems almost entirely brute force applied in difficult circumstances–riders on bucking horses or bulls, ropers chasing down and wrestling calves to the ground.

Maybe rodeo is too young as a sport to have much ritual, but to me, it lacked the gravitas of the bull ring.  Why does this matter? Well, again, to me, the rodeo seemed about imposing human will on animal nature with cattle ranching as the context.  Bull fighting, on the other hand, is a ritual involving life and death, even art.  It takes the bull and its death with great seriousness with the context of Celtic culture as the back drop.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Myth and Story

It’s About Time

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Fall                                      Waxing Blood Moon

On the I-Google page there is a widget that shows the progression of night and day across the globe.  In Singapore it is Friday already, 12:30 p.m. Lunch time.  Here in the middle of North America we have blackness.  This is another of the rhythms of nature, the one so familiar it can come and go for weeks, months, even years with little remark.

Yet imagine a 24 hour period when the day/night cycle changed in some unexpected way.   What if at 12:30 p.m. it became night?  Or, what if, at midnight the sun came up?  No, I don’t mean the poles, I mean right here on the 45th latitude halfway between the equator and the pole.  Earthquakes challenge a core assumption we carry unknowing, especially those of us in the relatively quake quiet Midwest.  The assumption?  That the earth beneath our feet is solid, unmoving.  The regularity of day and night is also a core assumption, one we carry unaware.

It is these rhythms, day and night, the changing of the seasons, the growth of flowers and vegetables, their constancy that gives us stable hooks on which to hang the often chaotic events of our lives.  Even if a death in the family occurs we say the sun will come up tomorrow.  Flowers will bloom again.

Bringing these changes into our consciousness, the moon phases for example, can give us even firmer anchors.

They give me a feel for the continuity that underlies the messiness of human life and the apparent vagaries of time.  It is a continuity of positive and negative, yin and yang, dark and light, the dialectical tension between these opposites which cannot be without the other.  Taken all together they can give us a confidence in the nature of the 10,000 things.

They make understanding space-time possible for me, in spite of my lack of mathematical sophistication.  That space and time create a matrix which holds everything makes sense in a universe where day follows night and winter follows fall, then happens all over again in the next cycle.  This is not a linear model, it is not chronological, it is deeply achronological.