Monthly Archives: August 2008

Memories

The Old Barber with the Pump Chair and Slick Black Combs in a Pink Bath

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79  bar steady 29.95  2mph N dew-p0int 60  sunrise 6:04 sunset 8:32  Lughnasa

Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” – Thomas Paine

What does it mean to be an American?  This is the question I’ve set for the Woollies on August 18th, the gathering here.  Paine offers a perspective.  An American stands with his country in a time of trial, does not flinch from action when the stakes are high.

We’ve not had times like that often in the American experience, but enough.  The revolution.  The Civil War.  Reconstruction.  The Great Depression.  WWII.  The second Civil War, fought over Civil Rights and our presence in Vietnam.  There have been other, less heated moments, still difficult like the temperance fight and women’s suffrage, perhaps the feminist movement’s main time in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.

Still, when I think of what it means to be an American I trend toward adjectives, vignettes, moments rather than political or cultural conflict.  Fireworks on the 4th of July.  Yellow school buses.  Flickering televisions.  Traffic jams.  Grocery stores with that over abundance.  Kids headed to church in ill-fitting fancy clothes. Norman Rockwell moments.  The old barber with the pump chair and the slick black combs in a pink bath surround by glass and topped by shiny metal.  Drugstores and soda fountains.  The Statue of Liberty.  The Lincoln Memorial.  The Washington monument.  American football on Friday and Saturday nights or Sunday afternoon.  Hot dogs.  Hamburgers with cheese and bacon and fries.  Baseball cards.  Comic books.  Movies.  A bright, sunshiny California dreamin.  Surfin USA.  The Grand Canyon.  The Rocky Mountains.  The Catskills.  Rip Van Winkle.  Hudson River School painters.  Walt Whitman.  Moby Dick.  The Scarlet Letter.  Those kind of things.  Muscular.  Proud.  Sacrificial. Sad.  Arrogant.  Salarymen in gray flannel suits.  Barely hanging on to the corporate ladder.  Milk in glass bottles.  The Alamo.  Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett.  Log cabins.  Maine flannel shirts and lobster.  Disney lands.  Slave ships.  The enslaved.  The Emancipation Proclamation.  The Monroe Doctrine.  The Louisiana Purchase.  The Northwest passage.  Ice cream and popsicles.

Garden

Wanna See Some Pretty Pictures?

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78 bar steady 30.01 0mph NE dew-point 61  sunrise 6:04  sunset 8:32  Lughnasa

Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon   moonrise 12:10pm  moonset 10:37pm

“Beer will be (in) short supply, more expensive and may taste different as climate change affects barley production, a scientist says.”  News.com.au april, 2008

Now there’s a motivator for action.

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Punk Silk on our Country Gentlemen Corn

                          dryingonions400.jpg

Our Early Season Onions in the Second Stage of Drying

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Kate’s Purple Garden (a small part) in its 4th Year

Faith and Spirituality, Memories, Weather +Climate, World History, Writing

Qin Shi Huang Di

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67  bar steady 29.97  0mph NNW dew-point 58  sunrise 6:04  sunset 8:34  Lughnasa

Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon

Last night I stood outside for a while and listened to the wind rustle the leaves of the poplars and oaks, an invisible hand caressing these giants.  Tonight stars dot the sky and the air is quiet, the temperature a cool 66 (dropped a temp since I added the info. bar above.)  These nights, summer nights, have stories that reach back in time, memories of cars pulling into neon lit drive-ins, dances in school gymnasiums and midnight rides through the countryside seeking bliss.  A special place, the summer night.

Heresy Moves West will have two parts, I see no other way unless I perform drastic surgery on the introductory material, now seven and a half pages.  My plan is to finish the second half, the stories and threads of thought that directly result in the building of liberal congregations in Minnesota.  This is, of course, the assignment I originally gave myself, but I did not know then the complex of political, theological, institutional and intellectual lines necessary to make the story comprehensible at anything more than a superficial, potted history level.  After I finish part II, then I’ll see what can be done with the whole.

The last piece of the whole considers the future, projecting a possible trajectory for the liberal faith tradition in a time of what I perceive as thinness and altogether too disparate a theological base.  Here I will begin to answer the problem I addressed in my late night post August 3rd.  Ideas have come to me of late and I have a way to go forward, at least one that makes sense to me.

In the build up to the Olympic Games the History Channel and National Geographic have run programs on Qin Shi Huang Di, the unifier and first emperor of China (Qina).  His story makes for conflicted reading or watching since he brought the dreadful warring states period to an end by subduing the seven larger states that had survived.  He also standardized weights and measures, the width of axels, coinage, language and law.  As Chinese history developed after him, both the unification and these measures of standardization contributed to China’s long continuity in culture.  In these ways he is the father of China.

He was, however, a cruel man who killed millions to achieve peace.  He killed at least a million more building the Great Wall and at least hundreds of thousands building his mausoleum. The legal system he instituted was draconian and ran against the grain of the Confucian thought world that preceded him.  His dynasty lasted only one generation beyond his and even that, from his perspective was a failure since he spent the last years of his life in a desperate search for an elixir of immortality.

Garden

Laying Food By

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78  bar rises 29.99  4mph N dew-point 56  sunrise 6:03 sunset 8:34  Lughnasa

Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon

“The rest of the beans will dry on the plants!” Kate said yesterday, her brow perspiring from work over a hot pressure canner.  Yes, the beans produce and produce and produce.  Canned green beans now stock our larder, companions to the tomatoes, pickles, jams and assorted other 19th century farm food self lay-bys she has made.  The beans which dry on the plant will get picked after the plant itself dies and the pods begin to crack open a bit.

Later, as the snow flies, we’ll take those pods and thresh them, pick out the dried beans and pop them in hermetic glass jars.  Soups and other bean dishes to follow.

With the first harvest festival already past the garden goes into overdrive, testing the patience of even Kate, a long time canner and freezer.  Tomatoes and cucumbers have begun to pop out and ripen, the spaghetti squash has several fruits on the way, the peppers have begun the slow process of maturation and a second crop of beets has about six inches of greens up already.  This is when the sweat and the soil preparation and the weeding and pruning all begin to yield results.  A good time.

The hemerocallis, likewise, are in their glory:  many shades of purple in the front, orange and reds and yellows in the back and in the park.  Of course, I wonder how the garden will look when the Woollies come in two weeks.  I can’t recall that week from years past, but I imagine the daylilies will still be blooming and perhaps the clematis bushes will have begun to flower. I forget to mention here the begonias and geraniums, the sturdy plants that overwinter in the basement, moving happily outside after the last frost.  They add color and texture to the garden.

Up late today, so I’ve got to get to Heresy Moves West.  Bye for now.

Friends, Woolly Mammoths

Read the Writing on the Wall

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68  bar rises 29.89  omph NW  dew-point 64  sunrise 6:03 sunset 8:35  Lughnasa

Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon

Another Monday on the treadmill.  In Victorian England they used the treadmill as a punishment in the gaol.  Now I pay big bucks for one so I can do it voluntarily.  How times change.

Woollies tonight at the Black Forest.  Frank, Bill, Mark, Scott and me.  We discussed the peculiar propensity for conservatives to shut off their otherwise keen intellects when it comes to political matters.  Bill thinks it’s because they have propensity to believe authority.  Maybe so, but they pick the authority that agrees with their bias.  The part that bothers me about most of the conservative rant is their unwillingness to think critically, to evaluate evidence on its merit, rather than its fit with the ideological spin of the moment.

Mark’s stepson, Christopher, took him to a legal tagging wall.  It’s at Intermedia Arts on Lyndale near 28th Street.  The police have set up this free wall, supposedly the only one in the US (a tagger on an expensive bike with a thick chain worn across his upper body like the sacred thread of the Brahmin told us this.).  Taggers can sign up for a large chunk of the wall.  They then have the right to put an approved design (no porn, that kinda thing) for a month.  Christophers says at night there might be 200-300 people there watching the taggers work on the wall.  There were none at 7:30 PM when four old men stood around trying to read the writing on the wall.

I took Frank home.  We need to get together again for lunch.  Soon.

Dreams, Great Wheel, Great Work

Hoosier Bodhisattvas

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79  bar steady 29.85 5mph NNW dew-point  67  sunrise 6:02 sunset 8:35  Lughnasa

Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon

“What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?” – Langston Hughes

To continue the raisin metaphor the next line might include the fact that raisins are nutritious and can, with adequate moisture, grow plump once again.

The corn tasseled out last week late and tiny ears of Country Gentlemen have begun to form.  The corn stalks soar an elegant, but seemingly fragile 7 to 8 feet above the garden bed.  Though there are only three rows and the rows extend only 8 feet or so in length, still it calls up all those corn fields of my youth, green jungles that flashed by as we drove on   crushed gravel roads, spreading a fine chalky dust behind us.  There was, in that time, a union between the maturity of the corn and our maturity, both green, filled with promise, but not yet ready for the harvest.  Corn, of course, has a shorter life span than most teenagers, but some of my Alexandria classmates were dead soon after our senior year, their maturation hastened by the fertilizer of war.

Though those afternoons and nights are long ago, 43 years at least, the marriage between my faith and the earth finds its true roots there.  The farms around home and the 4-H fair in late July gave the life of the land a prominence even to those of us who lived in town.  The sheds at the fair had rows of corn, tomatoes, beans, beets and cucumbers among many others, set out for the judges to assess.  Not the judgments, but the pride and the reality of these fruits imprinted on me those Madison County fields and the seasons through which they passed.

The family farm outside Morristown, which I visited and on which I stayed from time to time as a boy, had the same effect.  The corn shed with its slanted, open sides filled with the hard yellow ears of field corn had a mystery to me.  This shed found late fall and winter made one, the harvest stored for later use.  I loved the cool moisture of the concrete pools that held the milk pails until the milk truck came.  This was like a Celtic holy well, a place where the water burbled up from the ground, plentiful and free.  In the late summer the hay mow would have bale after bale of alfalfa hay, sweet and pleasant.

Below the hay mow the Holsteins would stand patiently waiting to be milked, their placid ways suggesting a Hoosier Bodhisattva.

Not far down the road, visible from the hill on which the Keaton family home stands even today, is Hancock Cemetery. There the harvest of generations of Keatons and Zikes lay, row by row, in family groups.  Not all that different from the hay mow in late summer.

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, World History, Writing

Teasing Out the Pagan Lovesong

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76  bar rises 29.89  0mph NE dew-point 67  sunrise 6:02 sunset 8:35  Lughnasa

Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon

I saw the dentist today, oh boy.  He unscrewed a couple of fillings, refilled them, then closed what he insists on calling an “open contact.”  Does that sound like an oxymoron to you?  Does to me.  Dr. Mahler comes into my mouth unbidden, the occasion the retirement of the redoubtable Dr. Moghk, may he golf in peace.  Dr. Mahler is good, fast and communicative.  Sure of himself. Just what I want in a dentist.  No, seriously.  He’s a keeper.

The closing words of my last post have rung like a bell in my head since I wrote them:   This whole enterprise needs a rethink, a radical redo.  We have gotten thin and liberal, instead of profound and prophetic.

What to do? Part of the responsibility rests with me.  I have the task of articulating what I believe and have faith in right now.  This articulation must be clear and emotionally compelling.  And it is work I feel I can do, am ready to do.  Looks like I was off about ten years when I hoped for intellectual maturity in my early 50’s, it has come instead, in my early 60’s.  That’s all right.

The later maturity came because my individuation and maturation occurred more slowly than it might have thanks to alcohol and neurosis.  I regret the years I gave to anger, disappointment, drinking and smoking.  I regret the hurt I caused then and the overhang it left me.  Even so, I also know that regret is an emotion with no purpose, no forward motion, so I acknowledge it and set it to the side.  Today, the only time I have ever had and will ever have, is the day in which I take up this challenge, perhaps I could have ten years ago, but I didn’t.

Now it remains for me to tease out the pagan lovesong that courses through me when I  touch a lily or eat an onion grown in soil I have prepared.  There is an ancient language of love and awe for the natural world and for ourselves as part of and dependent on it.  This vocabulary of seasons, lunar changes, life’s stages, friendship and family has no nation, knows no creeds and depends on no books, yet it is as particular as the street on which you live and the air that you breathe.

This dream, what Thomas Berry called the Dream of the Earth, is a dream in the sense of the aboriginal dreamtime, it is a way of dreaming worlds into being and it is our great and primary gift as a species.  Like all gifts it can cause great good or great harm.   Over the next few years I will slip from time to time into the dreamtime and let you know what I find there.

Faith and Spirituality

This Whole Enterprise Needs A Rethink

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71  bar rises 29.77  0mph N dew-point 64 sunrise 6:02  sunset 8:37  Lughnasa

Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon
This website + $100, 000 will get you your very own jetpack.  Advertising says it can fly for  30 minutes.  Almost enough for the commute, but how will you refuel? 

When I quit writing at 5:30 pm today, I had four single-spaced pages done and I had not gotten off the east coast in this story of the move west.  This may be a two-part presentation.  As I said below, for me, context is everything.  Nothing happens without relationships.  In this case understanding the planting of liberal religion in Minnesota requires an understanding of interreligious conflict in the midterm past:  the Reformation and the long term past: say, Abram and the voice of YHWH facing down the Gods of Chaldea.  The near term past, the history of colonial America, the young United States and the westward expansion have their own threads to weave in this story.  It may be that the mid and long term past will require one Sunday and the near term a second.  Not sure yet.

As I wrote the above, I kept thinking about Buddhism in which the now is everything.  We are not, in Buddhist thought, the same self from moment to moment so how arrogant is it to lay out patterns over millennia?  Maybe a lot, but it is a contradiction I’m willing to risk.  If I can talk about it, this narrative has some meaning, even if, in the end, the now is all that matters.

My hope is that by the end of this work I will be able to illustrate five things.  1.  The conflict of orthodoxy and heterdoxy goes back at least as far as Abraham in the Judaeo-Christian tradition.   2.  The expansion of liberal religion had as much, if not more, to do with religious freedom guaranteed by the first amendment and spawned directly by the Reformation than it has to do with liberal religious thought in Europe.  3.  The westward expansion of liberal religion created a nurturing climate for its increasing radicalization, partly due to accidents of history and partly to the nature of the frontier.  4. Liberal religion in the west has a long and distinguished record of support for heresy.  5.  In the end all the conflict outlined in this presentation has at its roots the question of religious authority.

I have ended up in an odd place.  In the late 19th and early 20th century liberal religion in the west took risks, challenged both religious and cultural norms, but it feels to me like the latter part of the 20th and the early part of the 21st find us in trough.  Our faith does not quicken hearts, nor does it create much change.  It seems to me we fail on both important measures of a faith tradition, i.e. the ability to nurture the inner life and the power to affect change in the culture.  This is a finger of blame not extended from my hand or wagging in shame, but curved back at me and the leadership of this generation that I represent.

This whole enterprise needs a rethink, a radical redo.  We have gotten thin and liberal, instead of profound and prophetic.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, World History, Writing

Onion Drying, the Next Stage

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72  bar steady 29.81 1mph NE dew-point 65  sunrise 6:00  sunset 8:37  Lughnasa

Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon

A writing day so far.  I have started writing Heresy Moves West.  It will take a bit longer than I imagined, maybe quite a bit, because I have this propensity to place things in context, deep context.  In this case for example I have established the Protestant Reformation as the sine qua non of the development of Unitarianism and its westward expansion, at least I have established that to my content.   Not too much further along I intend to swing back to Abraham who listened to YHWH and left his Canaanite Gods for monotheism.  Since you can not just go back into the past and then jump into the present, the intervening time takes a paragraph or two (at least) to describe, and all this in service of the actual topic, the history of Unitarian and Universalist churches in Minnesota.

Why do I do this?  Sheer cussedness in part.  Simplistic explanations that ignore real historical paths irritate me.  I do not like to emulate them.  That means rooting my thesis about U-U expansion in Minnesota in the soils from which it sprang.  They have lots of topsoil, gathered from diverse times and places.  The process is sort of like archaeology.  In order to explain the top, most recent layer of artifacts requires continuing to dig down, down, down until the physical culture either stops or changes to something completely different.

Anyhow, all this means I’ll be writing for some time, maybe as long as 2 or 3 days.  That eats into posting time.  So, for the next few days it might be a little sparse here.  Might not.

In the past week AncienTrails had 2100 unique visits, about 300 a day.  You are not alone.

Kate and I carried the old sliding door screen into the front shed.  We had to take all the onions off it to get it inside, then move the onions back on it.  In addition I had to remove the remaining stalks so my hands smell like onions.  The onions must remain in the shed for two to three weeks, then they will go in tangerine crates.  Once in the crates the onions will await their turn in the kitchen on an old book shelf in the furnace room.  The garlic hangs not far from their future home.

When dead heading the last of the Lilium today, I found one that had bulbils.  These form at the junction between stalk and leaf.  They are another means of propagating lilies.  I will cut this plant down and use the bulbils inside to create stock for next spring.

Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays

Primal Eating

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71  bar rises 29.87 0mph NE dew-point 58  sunrise 6:00  sunset 8:38 Lughnasa

New (Corn) Moon

A vegetarian meal  tonight.  Spaghetti squash, golden beets, cucumber tomato and onion salad and cooked whole onion.  Colorful and healthy.  All but the tomatoes were from our garden, including the garlic and cilantro sauteed in olive oil as a dressing for the squash.  After the OMG tomatoes the plants have settled into production with many fruits, but none mature right now.

I know some perhaps many of you who read this cook things straight out of your garden or meat from your stock, but I haven’t done it much.  Flowers and shade plants, shrubs and trees have occupied my time.  I love them and will always tend them but the vegetables now have my attention.

Primal eating happens when you go pluck five beets out of the earth, take them into the sink and wash them off, trim the leaves and roots away, then slice these hardy roots into smaller pieces, add tarragon and balsamic vinegar, some salt, cook and eat them.  The same tonight with the spaghetti squash, the cucumber, the onion, both in the salad and the one I cooked whole.   I knew these plants when they were tiny seeds, barely bigger than the lead in a pencil or when they were small potted specimens.  The onions and the garlic went into the ground as what they would become, only larger.  In each case though the same hands that harvested them prepared for eating.

10,000 years ago some hunters and gatherers first planted seeds and tended crops.  The effect on human culture still gathers momentum even today.  Nomadic life began to disappear for those people.  Settled villages sprang up around the fields.   The keeping of animals for food was more predictable than the hunt.  In both cases though our ancestors had to give up the moving from place to place depending on season and game patterns.  Our bodies, developed in the paleolithic to survive predators and hunt for prey, found themselves out of place.

They still do.  So, while gathering and cooking goes far back in our history, it does not go all the way back to that earlier phase of the moveable feast.  This fall, however, when Kate and I pick wild grapes that grow in our woods and turn them into jam we will travel back to those ancient times, the ancient trail of seeking food where it decides to be rather than where we care for it.

This meal tonight was a Lughnasa meal, a meal of first fruits, the harvest we do not plan to store either through drying or canning.  As a Lughnasa meal, it put us in contact with those early Celts whose gardens might spell the difference between survival and starvation.  We live in a wealthier time, but not in one any less dependent on the gifts of mother earth.