Monthly Archives: September 2011

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story

Fall Equinox

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Fall                                                     Waning Harvest Moon

Meteorological fall begins on September 1st, but the ritual calendar of many earth focused traditions places the beginning of fall at the moment when the sun’s equator and the earth’s align, the earth, just for a moment, losing its tilt relative to the sun.  This means we are half way through a cycle that began in June on the Summer Solstice and will end in December on the Winter Solstice.

Here’s an explanation from Wikipedia:  “In the half year centered on the June solstice, the Sun rises and sets towards the north, which means longer days with shorter nights for the Northern Hemisphere and shorter days with longer nights for the Southern Hemisphere. In the half year centered on the December solstice, the Sun rises and sets towards the south and the durations of day and night are reversed. Also on the day of an equinox, the Sun rises everywhere on Earth (except the Poles) at 06:00 in the morning and sets at 18:00 in the evening (local time).”

What are the marks of autumn for you?  Is it the return to school, the burst of energy, enthusiasm that comes from strapping on the cultural expectations of our youth?  Or, are the leaves changing, the senescence in the plant world a key moment for you?  Perhaps the chill winds and cool nights, the clear night skies.  For some it could be the nearing of deer hunting, or the start up of the NFL and the college football seasons.  Some find the gradual slide into darkness a time of increasing depression, the beginnings of Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Whatever marks this change for you it comes along with the seasonal ones; changes marked by decreasing solar energy per square foot and the attendant cooling.

This is the second of the three harvest festivals in the Celtic calendar, the first happening on August 1st, Lughnasa, and the final harvest festival marking Summer’s End, Samhain, on October 30th.  This was an other occasion for a market fair, settling of debts and entering into contracts.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Minnesota, Myth and Story

Seasonal Pilgrimage

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Fall                                           Waning Harvest Moon

Each turn of the Celtic seasonal calendar I find ideas, personal reflections, astronomical or traditional lore to pass along.

This time I’ll pass along one from Waverly Fitzgerald who maintains a website, living in season.

She suggests a seasonal pilgrimage, a visit each turn of the year to a place that, for you, embodies the energies and essence of the new season.  This recommendation struck me because I have a place myself, next to the Carlos Avery Wildlife Refuge, the Bootlake Scientific and Natural Area.

To get to my sacred area I walk back through a field, it formerly held a house, now gone, traverse a crescent of young oak and birch to emerge in a circular meadow filled with furze.  Across the furze and to the northwest is a path back into the woods, not long, that takes me to a parcel of land between a pond on the south and the marshy edge of Bootlake on the north.

On this land between the waters stands an old growth white pine, a white pine with a crooked top, probably the main trunk broke off in a storm or lightning strike and a secondary branch took over, but at an angle from the main.  My guess is that this deformity allowed the old giant to survive the woodsman’s axe.

In a ring around this older tree are its offspring, a small grove of younger white pines who now stand sentinel around their older parent, a conversation now lasting at least a hundred years of more.

A portion of Tully’s ashes came with me one day.  I scattered them around the base of the tree, then sat down with my back to its trunk, snugged in between two great roots while I gave thanks for this Irish Wolfhound who had taken a special place in my heart.

At other times, often on New Year’s Day, I have visited this sacred grove, the air often below zero, snow crunching, black crows watching me from high atop leafless oak.

This small place, away from the city and the suburbs, a place intact, has been a refuge for me for over twenty years.  I visit it still, though less in the last few years.  It’s time to return.

 

 

Aging, Humanities, Literature, Myth and Story

More Fun With Ovid

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Lughnasa                                                 Waning Harvest Moon

More fun with Ovid.  The curtain has begun to roll back a bit more.

Many of my friends have second and third languages, but until now I only had the one.  A bit of French.  A little Hebrew.  A little Greek.  But nothing solid.  The ability to look on a page filled with Latin words, words I would once have brushed over with little attempt at comprehension, and see meaning emerge delights me.

The words still look strange to me, foreign, but now they carry a pulse of meaning, one I can get if I look a bit longer, or turn to a book.

The same work I mentioned above, All Things Shining, that critiques Western individualism, has a section on the decline of craft, the disappearance of embodied learning, of skill at making.  Again, I find myself pushing against their analysis and in this instance Latin came to mind.

To translate requires a subtle knowledge of the original language and an idiomatic grasp of the home language.  This type of intellectual work is a skill, a craft like that of. woodworkers or, the example used in the book, wheelwrights.  It requires a mind numbing series of early, simple steps that build only gradually into a suite of skills.  My guess is that the traditional seven years to move from apprentice to journeyman is not far off for Latin.

 

Asia, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

How Are We?

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Lughnasa                                     Waning Harvest Moon

In preparation for my presentation, Spiritual Resources for Humanists, I have come across two mentions of a critique of Enlightenment thought’s emphasis on individualism.  In one instance the critique compares Western individualism with the more integrated person of Taoist thought, one with the Tao, or with the more communal sensibility of the East in general.  In another instance individualism lies at the root of contemporary nihilistic ideas.  Life’s a bitch, then you die.

These two critiques I know now only in their casual clothes, not in their full dress argument though I intend to hunt them down as I work.  My first instinct is to bristle, to lean into the obvious benefits of individualism:  creativity, activist politics, a chance to flourish as an individuals gifts and dreams suggest, personal liberty.  My second instinct is to note that even the most individualistic of philosophical stances cannot extricate a person from family, from socialization, from nation, from history.

Then, once my bristles lie back down and I quit pawing the earth, I move to a possibility that neither the more communal and integrated inflection nor the individually inflected position has it right, that the reality is more dynamic, at some times we Westerners are as communal and familial as the East while at other time the individuality of an Easterner comes to the fore, both depending on the particular situation, era, motivation.

This is all before I sit down to think about it.  At first I defend my intuitive position, then I ameliorate and finally I move to the dialectic.  All without benefit of much reflection or introspection.

That comes next.

General

Taxman

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Lughnasa                                         Waning Harvest Moon

Well.  Our accountant (whoa.  our accountant) has fired back at the IRS.  We disagree with the examination which said we had no mortgage interest deduction, see attached from submitted with original tax return, and that Kate had indeed paid income tax in 2009, see attached W-2 submitted with original tax return.

This baffles me.  We got a question on two of the common items in a tax return, withholding tax paid and mortgage interest paid.  Two items that falsifying would be so stupid as to render their falsification evidence of a much worse personal problem than tax fraud.  Almost makes me think the government doesn’t know what it’s doing.

 

Commentary on the news, Politics, US History

Let’s Stop It

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Lughnasa                                           Waning Harvest Moon

Death.  We generally agree it should come to us unbidden, at a time unknown and in a manner uncertain.  Cultures sanction the unwilling death of another, outside of war, as murder, the taking of life.

Laws provide penalties for murder.  They vary in length of prison time and occasionally in type, the instances of capital punishment.

Today in the news are two different executions, one in Texas and one in Georgia.  The first killed a white supremacist who attached a black Texan to his truck and drove until he died.  The second was a black man accused of killing a guard.  Many, many people had become convinced of his innocence.

Now both men have moved past the pale of earthly justice.  Their penalties render them forever beyond forgiveness, findings of innocence or redemption.

Here is my question.  Since their deaths were unwilling and outside of war, can the state be held as anything less than a murderer?

We have the rituals of justice, the patina of equity, but the rolls of those executed tell a different story.  It is a punishment most often meted out in the South and often, too often, to poor people and again too often, to poor people of color.

How we can turn aside this culture of death and state sanctioned murder is unclear to me.  I wish it could be done.  I’m sad tonight about the deaths of both of these men, just as I was sad to hear of the death of James Byrd Jr and would have been sad had I heard of the death of the guard.  I’m sadder still that I live in a time and a nation that cannot see itself through the eyes of those it kills.

 

Aging, Family, Great Wheel, Retirement

Changes

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Lughnasa                                                  Waning Harvest Moon

May I present Autumn?  It comes to us in russets and golds, grays and rain, with some chill and occasional warmth.  Autumn continues our seasonal review, following the spectacular summer with its heat and its emphasis on differing shades of green, a color wheel of blooms and food.

Autumn, like our earlier season, Spring, is a time of change, the gradual transition from the heat and bombast of the growing season to the bleak outer landscapes of the fallow months.

Autumn also marks the beginning of the academic year, a moment of new beginnings, a springtime of the inner world.  This part of the season has its own holiday, Michaelmas, the holy day for the Archangel Michael, and the traditional opening of the English academic year.

In my life change has blown in with the cold rain.  Mark will leave us sometime in the next few days, before the end of October.  The growing season has wound down with only potatoes, beans, leeks and chard left in the garden.  A long vacation grows closer by the day, less than a month away.

There is, too, a growing sense that a major life change may be imminent.  Just what it will be is unclear, though it feels like retirement may be in the cards, joining Kate in her journey beyond the world of work.  How would that manifest in my life, long ago cast off from the port marked Employment?

Leaving behind the era of productive engagement with the world feels premature for me, but a new freedom may emerge.  It may longer be necessary to lash myself to the mast while sailing between the Charybdis of success and the Scylla of ambition.

Mystery.  The once hidden ocean of mystery lies beyond the current horizon.  And I’ve already set sail.

Aging, Retirement, Travel, Weather +Climate

A Jumbled Up Day

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Lughnasa                                         Waning Harvest Moon

Finalized the Rio plans today.  Gonna stay in Ipanema, within a block of the beach.  Chose away from the ocean since we will have spent 39 days on it.  Plenty.  Our Brazil visas are classy, nice pictures, gold striping and good for ten years.  A bargain for $180 each.

Dentist today.  Regular cleaning.  My current dentist, Mahler, retires in two weeks.  Two years or so ago his partner, then my dentist, Moghk, retired.  The older you live the more the health professionals you’ve counted on begin to leave practice.  A bit unsettling. My internist of 20 years moved to Colorado three years ago.

The cloud gray skies around noon today appealed to me.  More of the coming inside, writing and research weather that I love.

We’ll miss much of it this year, but we have chosen to cruise during the peak hurricane season.  That’s why the prices were so good.  I’ve begun paying attention to NOAA.

Aging, Friends, Woolly Mammoths

The Woollys of September

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Lughnasa                                                       Waning Harvest Moon

Woolly Mammoths on reading.  We had a meeting focused on current books, readings underway or accomplished during the summer.  Guys brought out books recounting the Battle of Little Big Horn hour by hour, the agony of the war in Vietnam, a Chinese classic with the attendant multiple volumes, the built in adaptive structures in the below consciousness part of our awareness.  Woollys are readers.

We also learned Charlie has a solid offer on his condo atop a warehouse district building.  Scott has still not come back to Minnesota from his time in Colorado and Utah.  Frank still doesn’t like the nuns in the Catholic school he attended.  Bill’s focused on Regina’s needs rights now.  Stefan attended the Men’s conference this year and brought back Zack, an aspiring actor and writer, who read a powerful example of his work.

Ode’s knee has gone from good to worse and now will require a third operation.  Frank’s new granddaughter is roly-poly. Warren, in the humor highlight of the evening, realized he had not yet signed up for Social Security.  Why humor?  Well, he does cover aging for the Star-Tribune and has done so for a long time.

We also discussed, a favorite topic, our retreat.  Some want to be near water, others want tradition at the Dwelling or Valhelga.  We agreed on the last week of April, the first week of May.  That’s a start.

 

Aging, Health

Weighty

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Lughnasa                                            Waning Harvest Moon

It took me 3 tries to give up smoking after 13 years, and I was able to do it then only after I’d quit drinking.  Neither was easy, but they pale in comparison to the next, similar challenge.  Over the last few years I’ve gradually added a pound here, a pound there, until all of a sudden, to paraphrase Everett Dirksen, I’m talking about real weight.

Now, I’m not obese, but I have passed certain personal barriers and seem headed further south.  This means I have to deal with this somehow.

A while back I wrote about the simple method of losing weight.  Eat less food.  I did it. Lost 6 pounds and felt great.  Problem is, I found them.  Then added a couple more.

That out of control feeling has begun to sneak up on me.  Not a personal favorite.  At some point here a hook, a handle on eating has to be found; but, right now I’m not seeing it and we’re headed for a cruise, which means 24/7 food available.

My personal creed has always been not to die of something preventable.  So far, so good.