Daily Archives: September 16, 2010

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality

How Do We Open Ourselves to Mystery?

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Lughnasa                                      Waxing Back to School Moon

A very busy three days with something in the evening each night plus events during the day, too.  Glad to get a chance to get back to the bees and the garden.

Some autumn blooming bulbs came in the mail today, so I’ll get a chance to plant them over the weekend.  I need to get outdoors.  Fall bulb planting is one of my favorite garden chores.  Crisp weather and Folk Alley radio, sometimes the Andover Marching Band can be heard in the background.

I’m still trying to come to grips with the unsettling experience I had at the seminary tonight.  I have no patience for the God talk, less for the elaborate hermeneutical dance that goes on in such settings.  I put myself in the room as a favor to Groveland and to Leslie, but I no longer feel like I belong there, a strange feeling after 15 years in the ministry.  These used to be my people; it is my seminary; but, I feel more like an outsider now than I did when I began back in 1970 and I was very outside the norm then.

I hope I’ve not done Leslie a disservice by agreeing to do this.  I still respect the faith journey, the attempt to wrest some purpose out of life, to read the palimpsest of history and of nature, scraping away the latest scribbles to look even deeper, to find a way into the world of divinity, a trace of the sacred on the wind.  These represent the sweetest and the best of human endeavor, those moments when the human vessel becomes a vehicle for discernment.

The institutional expressions of religion, the rationalization of charisma as Max Weber said, do little or nothing, indeed often obfuscate the journey with the insistent demands of institutional maintenance:  credentialing of clergy, fund raising, dogma protecting, seeking new members, building buildings, routinized worship.  Where is the ecstatic?  The mystic?  The awe-some?  Where is the deep calling unto deep?  Where is the fearless acceptance of the human condition?  Dangerous, lovely, cloying, sensual, heady, brutal, wild and untamed, even in the most civilized.  The Methodists and the Presbyterians and the United Church of Christ and the Baptists and even, for no God’s sake, the UU’s have fashioned clay towers with bright windows but no doors and no way outside.

The journey happens at night as sleep comes, when a dream grabs you by the throat and won’t let go.  The journey proceeds as you walk to work, hold hands with a lover, dance in the rain, smile at the gorilla and the lion fish.  It goes forward along the ancientrails of art, literature, dance, music, theater.  Meditation?  Sure.  Quiet moments with fellow travelers?  Yes.  Finance committee meetings?  Don’t think so. Evangelism?  Nope.  The journey deepens when we become vulnerable to ourselves, to the world around us and I’m sorry, but I don’t see the support for that in the pews of any church I’ve ever attended.  Perhaps the monastery holds an echo of it.  The solitary parishioner at prayer.  The Jews at the wailing wall.  Muslims at the Kabah.  Maybe.

But the weak tea I experienced tonight? Unlikely.  And I feel bad about that, sad.

General

Tired.

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Lughnasa                                         Waxing Back to School Moon

The docent luncheon today.  It is always an event where mediocre food meets a droner of a program.  I’s only salvation lies in the persons seated near you.  This is like the platoon in the army.  You wouldn’t go into the trenches for the colonel (Debbie or Sheila), but for your buddies, the folks seated near you, you will endure the whole as if it were something you really wanted to do.  The food this time was Asian, a plus in my opinion, but in name only.  We also had the awarding of various things for various levels of service.  One woman, Sally Lehman had been a docent for 45 years.  That’s a long time.  Even my class got pins for our 5 years of service beginning in 2005.  It’s gold and I have it on the bookshelf beside me.  Beside the five-year pin from the Collection in Focus program.  It’s silver.  Shows ya.

After the luncheon I wandered through the museum and found Embarrassment of Riches under installation.  This is a new photo collection documenting the global expansion and concentration of wealth that has characterized the last 30 years. It looks like it will be a stunner.  The lecture and walk through are next week.

The continuing ed featured the Decorative Arts curator who I found funny and detailed in his knowledge.  He showed a wonderful silver cup that the museum purchased by a Strasbourg silversmith named Baer.  It is his masterpiece, that is, the piece he used to gain admission to the guild of silversmiths in the Silver City.  It is a tour de force of detail and skill, called the most important work in silver of the 20th century to come out of Strasbourg.  Worth a look.

Home for a nap.

The out to UTS for an evening in the field education class.  I have responsibility for an intern this year for Groveland UU.  A disappointing evening.  The talk the talk the talk, a long line of talk.  No wonder lay people get weary of the clergy.  The stuff is fuzzy, emotive and allusive–religious.  I’ve changed since I was in the Seminary in the early 70s.  A lot.

I now find most of the process tedious, though I look forward to working with Leslie.

Bees, Garden, permaculture

Integrated Pest Management

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Lughnasa                                Waxing Back to School Moon

It’s been a wet, cool few days.  The Apiguard I picked up last night only works above 60 degrees and 70 is better.  It recommends chemical resistant gloves.  I’m using this on two colonies, the parent and the divide.  I tested the divide and its high, putting the colonies winter survival at risk, though I did not test the parent since the divide began with a hive box full of parent colony bees, it seems reasonable to assume it has a high mite count, too.  I don’t like using the medication, but the UofM, which shares my bias toward Integrated Pest Management and leans against treating recommends it.  I did count my mites, too, so I know the divide has a high mite count.  The package colony, which had only 1 mite all together, I will not treat.

The fumigilin-B treats nosema.  In this case the only way to reliably test requires a 400+ microscope, an expensive counter and a bunch of dead bees beat up in a mortar and pestle.  The U, again, recommends treatment this year in particular so I’m following their advice.  Nosema and varroa mites are two of the culprits in colony collapse disorder and often combine to cause the winter loss of a colony.

Integrated pest management for mites and nosema includes using Minnesota hygienic queens, which I have done, and can include use of a drone frame which attracts mites because drones take longer to pupate.  When the drone frame has capped brood cells, the beekeeper removes and freezes it, killing the mites and the drones.  This reduces the overall mite load.

Integrated Pest Management (IPM) has been around for a while.  It’s sort of a middle ground between all organic and contemporary agriculture/horticulture/apiculture techniques.  The idea is to put any chemical treatments as last resorts, utilizing first techniques that either directly mimic nature or are supportive to it.  In gardening, for example, companion planting qualifies.  So does crop rotation.  So does soil improvement.  So does hand picking insects and pruning out diseased branches or plants.  Another involves acknowledging that some level of disease and infestation is a normal part of the natural world.  The problem comes when the level begins to interfere with the plant or animals productive ability or its ability to, say, survive a Minnesota winter in our case.

In apiculture it involves, in addition to what I’ve already mentioned, culling 20% or so of your woodenware as it reaches 5 years of age.  This reduces nosema because the nosema organism lays down spores that can last as long as 75 years.  Another technique involves making sure your colonies have adequate food supplies for the winter.  A colony that struggles for food in early spring has much higher susceptibility to disease.

I use IPM in our perennial flower beds, our vegetable garden and now in the Artemis Hives.  I’ve not started in the orchard yet because fruit trees are still a mystery to me.  Gotta resolve that over the winter.