Daily Archives: November 13, 2007

Great Work

What is the Great Work?

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54  44%  37%  2mph windroseW  bar steady dewpoint32  Waxing Crescent of the Snow Moon   Ordinary Time

Thomas Berry, an ecological visionary and Passionist monk, has written several books concerning the way forward to a healthy planet.  He summarizes his ideas in The Great Work. In this wide ranging, readable book, Berry, a cultural historian, defines a great work.  The Greeks had a great work in applying reason to the natural order.  The Romans had a great work in bringing order to their known world.  The Chinese have a great work that has created a humane and human scale culture.  Native Americans have a great work in their symbiotic relationship with the natural world in which they live.

Our Great Work, the work of our generation, lies yet before us.  It is this:  create a  relationship between human beings and the planet in which our presence is at least benign and at best a positive good.   I have begun work, in fits and starts, on this, because in the end it has to be each of us, acting in concert, who will call this new world into being. 

There are many actions we can take, but they need to move beyond recycling and buying green products at the grocery store.  Here a few I’m trying to work into my life:  being a locavore (eating food grown in our region), rationing trips by car and plane, planning for a hybrid car as our next purchase.  In the main though I believe I need to become political again, working on my old issues of economic justice, but this time in a way that will move a double agenda forward, justice for those left behind captialism and rethinking our economic order so that it develops positive signals for ecologically friendly business decisions.  More on this at another point.

Faith and Spirituality

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I will post, from time to time, sermons and short works, sometimes fiction, sometimes non-fiction and link to them here.  

Groveland UU fellowship asked me to focus this year on history of the liberal faith tradition. 

Just prior to the Civil War Unitarianism had bottomed institutionally.  A creative response to the war boosted Unitarianism into a rich post-war period of growth.  Meet Henry Bellows, Frederik Olmsted, Dorothea Dix and Elizabeth Blackwell.

Unitarians and the Civil War period

Our Land and Home

Mincing and Adzing

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56  34%  36%  1mph windroseS  bar steep fall  dewpoint28  Waxing Crescent of the Snow Moon   Ordinary Time

In cooking and in outside work I am an optimist.  When I get ready to prepare a meal, I look at the recipes and think, no problem, a cinch.  Only later do I notice that everything has to be minced smaller than a flea and the broth watched every minute for 30 minutes.  When I went outside this morning to dig the firepit, in my mind’s eye I saw the spade cut cleanly into the soil, the pit growing as more and more soil left to level out the surrounding land.  Back inside now I see I might have anticipated the large root structures underlying much of the area I’ve chosen.  But, I didn’t.  Back into the tool shed for the adze.  Cut the root, then pick up the cut end and pull, pull, pull.  Turns out this slows down the process quite a bit and ratchets up the strain on the shoulders and upper back.  Tired.

Travel

Reservation Frustration

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51  41% 37%  1mph  windroseS  bar steep fall  dewpoint27  Waxing Crescent of the Snow Moon   Ordinary Time

Like most of you, I imagine, I have served as my own travel agent for quite a long while.  Sometimes that’s a good thing, more flexibility, choice; sometimes it’s a bad thing, frustration and headaches.  Getting this Hawai’i trip together for Kate may fall in the latter category.  In her case it means dealing with two providers of Continuuing Medical Education and their pecularities regarding travel and accomodations, then dealing with the pecularities of Allina’s CME regs.   After all that, I have to match my travel to hers, though I’ll leave later and return later.  It will come together.

Along this line, I’ve become a fan of open table, the online reservation system.  Open table covers a lot of restaurants, all of them I’ve tried of late.  It allows you to check times and availability of reservations without being put on hold and spending a lot of time on the phone.

Finished the business type stuff for this AM, now I’m headed outside to remove wood from our metal fence for recycling and to dig a fire pit.  Catch you later.