Category Archives: Myth and Story

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Memories, Myth and Story

At 50, What Next?

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3  bar steep drop 30.16  0mph  NE  windchill 3  Samhain

Waning Gibbous Moon of Long Nights

My brother Mark asked me my thoughts on turning 50.  This April 11th he has his 50th.  By then it will be, as it always is, twelve years since I had that birthday.

Twelve years ago is a long time and when I first started to answer Carl Jung came up.  He should have, but not in the positive way I had in mind.  I began that piece by reflecting on Jung’s notion of life’s  two halves:  an external, career and family half followed by an interior, reflective and calmer half.  Hmmm.  But that was the upbeat spin.

How Jung came into my turning 50 is less philosophical.  In 1996 I shifted my credentials from the Presybterian church to the Unitarian-Universalist.  In 1997, my 50th year, I had to take an internship to qualify for recognition.  I did.  Unity Church Unitarian (no relation to the Unity movement) in St. Paul and First Unitarian in Minneapolis both offered me internships.

It felt good to be wanted in a professional capacity again.  I had given myself 5 years to make it as a writer (with no real idea what making it meant) and I failed.  No sales.  Not even any bites.  Instead of the romantic I’ll stick with it no matter what I decided to go back to the trade I had learned.  I felt a need to earn money and to have recognition as a skilled and valuable person.

This whole episode was a mistake and a big one.  I crowned it with accepting a position as minister of development at Unity, essentially a fund-raising position.  I hate fund-raising and everything associated with it.  But I said yes because I was asked.  Pretty desparate.

That was how Jung came in.  Early on I could see I’d made a mistake but I needed to understand why.  What did it mean?  My long time analyst John Desteian, a Jungian, and I worked on it.  In the end we decided I had regressed, rather than moved forward.  I had regressed by returning to safe territory.  John said that most regressions occur because we have to go back and pick up something we needed.  In this case I needed to be reminded how much I’d wanted out of the ministry six years before and why full time ministry was a bad fit for me.

It felt wonderful to leave after the fund-raising goal had been met, an increase of 10% over the prior year.  I did it, but I did not want to do it again.

I came home and save for one brief relapse when we needed money I learned my lesson.

What was the lesson?  That the world of work and achievement had come and gone in my life.  Now I needed to pursue life itself.  That did include writing, whether I sold anything or not.  I have not.  It meant I needed to face life as myself, not as a role or job holder.

So, Mark, turning 50 for me meant a need to go back and relearn a lesson I had not grasped completely the first time around.  I don’t know what turning 50 will mean for you.  Perhaps reflecting on the expat life?  Perhaps following some abandoned or long cherised dream?  Maybe you’ll tell the story of South East Asia as only someone of your particular experience can.  Who knows?  I can tell you this.  Pay attention to what happens around this time because it has deep meaning for the rest of your life.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Myth and Story

An Old Faith Taking on New Raiment

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18  bar steep fall  1mph  SSW  windchill 18   Samhain

Full Moon of Long Nights

How do you stretch out the creative muscle, let the reins loose on the resources hidden somewhere beyond or under the rational wall?  When the Pegasus of new thought tries to rise from its tether inside the amygdala, the fear raiser of the brain, what can be done to smooth its way?  To calm the nakedness of the soul?

There is, I am sure of it, an old faith taking on new raiment.  It says nothing new; it proclaims nothing that is not obvious; it offers no new wisdom.  It cares not for written texts, for prayers or priests, for churches or temples.  It does not require protection under the first amendment or any amendment of any laws of humankind, for its law is writ in the language of the stars.

It has holy places.  Places we know by their Torii or their thick ropes.  Places we know by worn paths that lead us through forests, along rivers, up mountainsides, into the garden.  Places we know by the trembling sense of wonder they evoke in us.  A crashing waterfall.  An erupting volcano.  An opening tulip.  The birth of a howler monkey among the ruins of ancient Angkor.  Places we know by the care others have taken: paintings, poems, cairns and prayer ties.

These holy places were not decreed in some council or by a guru or selected by a committee.  No, they were decreed by the hand of Pangea, sculpted by the artisans wind and water. They were discovered, not made.

This old faith has so many followers, so many who take its truths with them into the fields, onto the lakes and oceans, alongside them in struggle, carried in wicker baskets into the flower and vegetable gardens.  So many followers.

There is no common book, save the verdant field.  There is no common book, save the flowing stream.  There is no common book, save the vasty deeps.  There is no common book, save the azure sky.  There is no common book, save the dark night sky filled with stars.  And these are more than enough.

If you are a member of this faith, you know it.  You need no congregation, you require no chant or hymn.  You need only a quiet moment beside a brook or a butterfly.

Faith and Spirituality, Myth and Story, permaculture, Weather +Climate

A Time for Thought and Contemplation

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20  bar rises 29.94  3mph  NNE  windchill 13   Samhain

Waxing Gibbous Moon of Long Nights

Snow falling again.  3-4 inches or so by morning the weather folks say.  Winter has come in earnest.

Each year over the last three or four Kate and I have moved further and further from the mainstream Christmas culture. We have little in the way of decoration.  We give small gifts if any to each other.  The kids and kin still get holiday related presents but our home is an oasis.

This pleases me for the most part since my focus at this time of year is on the Winter Solstice and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  I say for the most part because there is still a sentimental side that likes the songs and the lights and the presents under the tree.  Mostly though I find this time of year most conducive to introspection, meditation and creation.

The areas in which we will plant new shrubs, a shade garden and all the bulbs planted this fall are now under mulch, the first two under black plastic and mulch.  Finally done.  Feels good.

Finished the Host.  It’s a strange, thin book with many pages.  I liked it, but the veiled theology and the conceit wore thin as I got further into it.  A lightweight read.

Myth and Story

Stories Told By Mother Earth

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9!  bar steady 30.57  2mph WNW  windchill 9  Samhain

Last Quarter of the Dark Moon

“Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” – T. S. Eliot

When I ponder the amount of life I give to considering my weight, I wonder what Life I lose in obsessing.   Fat or thin we all die.  There may be a difference in quantity, may be, but what of the quality?  The constant examination of ourselves and our bodies for signs of health (ok, my constant examination) may be just a shadowed manifestation of the fear of death.  How will our world’s end?  Not with a bang, but a whimper

We live in an age awash in information and too few of us take the time to shape the information into knowledge, the useful form of information.  Even fewer of us take the knowledge we have earned, then sit with it in patience and compassion long enough to gain wisdom.

Here’s to a world where the most accessible wisdom, the stories told by mother earth right outside wherever you are, return gently to us.

Faith and Spirituality, Myth and Story, permaculture

Angels in the Dark

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70  bar falls 29.98  0mph S dew-point 58  sunrise 6:57  set 7:17

Waning Gibbous Harvest Moon rise  8:32  set 11:01

On Thursday nights I watch Supernatural on the CW.  My lifelong fascination with gothic tales, especially ones involving demons makes this irresistible to me, even more so than Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which I also enjoy.  I mention it here because it took a very interesting twist tonight.  An angel appeared.  This is not at all like touched by an angel, this is more like grabbed by an angel.  Anyhow, the entry into the program of the divine element in the supernatural separates Supernatural from everything that’s gone before on TV.  At least as far I can recall.  Should be interesting.

When I went out on the deck tonight, the smell of the dead trees was everywhere.  It’s not an unpleasant smell.  Sort of a green tobacco drying odor.  When it hit my nose though, I rethought my earlier comments.  About not missing the trees.   It feels important to me to do a ritual on Saturday, before we chip them.  They lived with us and we with them for 14 years.  They never asked anything of us and in return offered shade, their presence.  Their passing should not go unnoticed.