Monthly Archives: December 2011

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Humanities, Myth and Story

Solstice Celebrations. What Might They Mean?

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Winter                                  Moon of the Winter Solstice

Something new seems to be happening.  Not sure if I’m reading the rustling in the ether of our culture right, but it feels like the Great Wheel may have begun to reemerge.  Not in a Wiccan or alt-pagan way, though that’s certainly there, but in a from the ground up way (so to speak).

A friend called me tonight to wish me a salubrious solstice.  Kate wants to do a fire tonight. First Universalist has a solstice celebration as do many UU congregations.  There has been, for a while now, solstice celebrations on the continent.  I’m most familiar with ones in Scotland and Sweden.

These celebrations, rituals whatever we might call them are not confined to the Winter Solstice though the spreading knowledge of Christmas’s relationship to the Saturnalia, itself a winter solstice holiday, has given the Winter Solstice a cultural leg up, as has a more general appreciation for the other festivals of light around this time:  Deepavali, Hanukkah, Christmas trees and home decorating–neither one of which has any obvious link with the Christian holiday.

I don’t know quite how to go about measuring the cultural penetration of solstice and equinox awareness, or the depth of its relation to individual’s religious yearnings, but my own sensibilities suggest the penetration has gone far past the surface and has, for some folks, like myself, reached the point of religious sentiment.

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, in a somewhat ham-fisted way, changed its holiday traditions focus from a sort of Victorian dress up for Christmas to what is now called a Winter Lights celebration.

I’d be interested to know what you think, what you see from your standpoint.

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

Winter Solstice 2011

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Winter                                           Moon of the Winter Solstice

Darkness has fallen.  The solstice has begun.  The longest nights of the year occur over the next few days.

The summer solstice, now a half year away in either direction on our orbit around Sol, has faded, faded, faded until the longest day of the year has become the longest night; in the other direction, toward which we move, the summer solstice is a half year away.

Starting now, we will begin, second by second, minute by minute, then hour by hour to turn ourselves toward the light until, at the moment of light’s triumph on June 20th at 6:09 pm, we will begin again a sure glide into winter.

On the Great Wheel it is neither the longest night nor the longest day by itself that matters, rather it is the certainty of their coming, light followed by increasing darkness, darkness followed by increasing light.  This reality, as metaphor, reminds us that no light is so fulsome that it is without darkness and no darkness so total as to be without light.

Too, we can see our lives as a turn of the wheel. In late winter we quicken, growing small within the mother.   We emerge during Beltane, the sun’s heat and the day’s length increases and we mature, grown into adults, as the turn moves toward Mabon and Samain, summer’s end.  Our lives develop fruit and we harvest; as Summer’s End moves toward the Winter Solstice, our hair turns gray and our bodies decline.  In Winter we move toward the darkness, back to the enveloping womb that is our mother, the earth.

Tonight we celebrate the winter season of our lives, the time when our life finishes its run.  This bears no sorrow, nor any fear, since we know that on the morrow, as it has since time begun, the light will again gain strength.  Living or not, it will shine on us, too.

Writing

Rereading

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Samain                                  Moon of the Winter Solstice

Today, the novel.  Rereading old work, this material is from the beginning of this year, has an odd flavor.  Some of it I read and, boy, what was I thinking?  The pencil scratches out words, lines, paragraphs.  Sections get moved, some eliminated.  Other parts.  Hmmm.  The bones of something is here, not all bad.

This world, Tailte and the mythos of the Great Goddess, has an expansiveness to it, a rich and textured feeling, as if I might write in it for a long time.  That aspect of this work feels very good.

Rereading though goes slowly and until I’m done I won’t start writing new material.  I have about 2/3’s of the novel written, maybe a little less.  If all goes well, I might have a manuscript finished by May.  Then, I’ll set it aside for another six months and return to either Superior Wolf or Jennie’s Dead, two novels I’ve had underway for several years.

The other feeling, maybe inescapable unless you write like Maughm, Kafka, Tolstoy, is the considerable insignificance of the work.  It feels small, as if the world it is in might matter too little, be of too small a consequence.

No writer can make that judgment for their own work, no artist can, but the thought of laboring for years and cranking out filler, well, that can be deadly.  At times this notion, the matter of mattering, has stopped me.  Knocked me out cold.  Sent me to reading or politics or volunteering at the art museum or growing a vegetable garden.

Not this time.  In the end this is my work.  For whatever value it has beyond me, it is my work and it is the best that I can do.  That’s enough.  It has to be.

Friends, Woolly Mammoths

Woolly Mammoths Tramp Through The Marsh

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Samain                                      Moon of the Winter Solstice

Woollies tonight at the Marsh in Minnetonka.  We met in the moon room, a dining room with several tables overlooking, I imagine, the marsh, but it was dark.

Tom Crane gave every one a sharp bladed pocket knife with a mammoth bone embedded in the handle.  Nice.

Kate and I gave a half pint of honey to everyone and I passed out the small paintings I picked up in Ecuador.  It was a Christmassy sort of moment.  Scott gave Kate and me gift tags that Yin had found.  They have bee hives printed on them.

We caught up on family matters and projects around the table.  Discussed the Edo Pop show at the MIA.

A short meeting, but a good one.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Literature, Myth and Story

The Simple Life. Bah, Humbug

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Samain                               Moon of the Winter Solstice

“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. I say let your affairs be as one, two, three and to a hundred or a thousand. We are happy in proportion to the things we can do without.” – Henry David Thoreau

(Walden Pond, 2010)

When I bought my farm up near Nevis, Minnesota, Thoreau and I would have been on the same page.  The Peaceable Kingdom had its own well, a septic system and heat provided by the forest I owned.  Of course, that year the simple life saw a divorce, the temperature hit -50 and a heavier yet reliance on beer and scotch.

Don’t get me wrong.  I think simplicity is a beautiful thing.  Then again, so is complexity.  If my body simplified itself, there wouldn’t be much me left.  If my consciousness simplified itself, the rest would slip away.

There will always be, of course, the few who take the Taoist monk approach, a life lived close to nature.  There will be, too, those folks who just find wilderness better company than the rest of us and who’s to say they’re wrong?

Me, though, I love samsara, this whole roiling, boiling mess we have for a place to live.  I love computers and television and movies and books, philosophical and political thought and action.  I love relationships, messy and unwieldy and complicated as they can be.  I love art, often complex and difficult.

I suppose this means I’ll never have a Walden experience or the insight of wandering through the Tao.  I’m ok with that.  If you need simplicity, then seek it, make it so.

As for me, give me complexity or give me, well, what?  Greater complexity.

 

Politics

Five Fists In the Air

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Samain                                  Moon of the Winter Solstice

Protesters as Person of the Year.  Tyranny comes at a price, at first often with an invisible price.  Who can see thwarted dreams, diminished freedom?  An early reaction to tyranny may be to turn anger toward oneself, increasing domestic violence, suicide, anxiety, depression.

If tyranny has an effective enforcement arm, then the early reactions can change to despair and, worst of all, resignation.  Eastern bloc countries under Soviet rule.  Native Americans on reservations around the turn of the last century.  Nanking under the Japanese.

Even despair, though, masks, does not eliminate, the human desire for liberty.  Any tiny crack in the casing of despair or fear can bring outsized responses.  Just ask Qaddafi, Mubarak, Assad, Wall Street.

Protest speaks the language of despair, gives visibility to the invisible.  Protest changes our perceptual range so we can see into the infrared end of the political spectrum, the place where the oppressor’s hand lies heavy but hidden.

Some Occupy Wall Street folks say their time in the occupying camps are the highlight of their lives.  Of course.  Whenever we stand up, say enough, our lives themselves become visible, tangible, even to ourselves.

 

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends

Suffering and Loss

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Samain                              Moon of the Winter Solstice

My cousin Leisa, second youngest of all the Keaton cousins (mom’s side of our family), has had an aneurysm found, repaired and then slipped into a coma as a result of a stroke.  Part of her skull has been removed to reduce pressure on the brain from swelling and a second aneurysm has been found, too small to repair right now.

This is eerily reminiscent of Mom’s stroke back in 1964.  Mom was 46, though, younger than Leisa who is in her late 50’s.  Here’s the link:  Mom had two congenital aneurysms, one just below each temple.  In 1964 stroke care and aneurysm repair had no where near the sophistication, armamentarium and clinical experience available today, 47 years later.

Mom might have survived her stroke, might even have had her aneurysms discovered before one burst, with 2011 treatment.  Leisa’s fortunate in that regard, though no one ever wants to test the standard of care.

Even sadder and more distressing my friend Jane’s daughter, Em, 42, died this week of lung cancer.  Never a smoker, a runner, a healthy lifestyle in place she never really had a chance.  She received a diagnosis of stage 4, meaning metastatic, in 2008.  She rallied and did well for a time, but the disease had become too well established and finally overwhelmed her.

Death and suffering are common notes in the symphony of each of our lives, bass notes, struck down in the resonant lower registers of our souls.  No matter how common, how usual or how expected both reverberate, clang around in our depths.

Reading Em’s Caringbridge entries brought me to tears, the anguish of a younger mother’s death; one I know, know too well.  Loss can throw us down a dark well; it did me, one it took several years and a lot of help to crawl up from.

The hope we all can share and that those who will grieve us can, too, is the multiple ways in which our lives continue to ripple out through our children, our family, our extended family and friends, through our work and our works.  As far as I can tell, this legacy is our immortality.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Health, Humanities, Myth and Story, Politics

The Death of an Honest Man

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Samain                                      Moon of the Winter Solstice

Christopher Hitchens died.  An honest man, Diogenes would have stopped searching.  He faced death as a non-believer, a man whose God Is Not Great made him a name in the theist–anti-theist debates of this millenia’s early days.

His angry anti-religious bias fit in well with the Richard Dawkin and Sam Harris crowd, agreeing with their totalizing, methinks-they-protest-too-much screed.  If religion is so bad, why has it persisted for so long?  A scathing atheist has backed himself into a metaphysical box, one much like the box he insists all religionists occupy.

To adamantly claim God’s non-existence is just as silly and unwarranted as the claim of God’s existence.  Neither can have, by definition, empirical validation, so, in each case we enter the realm of faith, of conjecture believed because it feels right, true.

Faith in its purest forms is a beautiful aspect of human culture, allowing us to transcend the often bleak realities of the day-to-day, finding a blissful reality where others see only pain and boredom.  Marriage, for example, requires faith in another human being, another human being as wonderful and amazing as yourself and as awful and horrible.

Monotheism as practiced in the dominant Western religious traditions is only one item on the menu of faith as offered by human culture and even it comes in three flavors:  Christian, Jewish and Muslim.  The ancient traditions of the West synch up better with the pluralist pantheons of India, Nepal, Tibet, Africa and the indigenous Americas.

Monotheism, rather than religion per se, seems the better target, since it makes definitive and often absolute claims, claims which sometimes pose as divine law, unbreachable and final.  The nature of monotheism’s claims rather than its actual content or institutional form are the problem.

With one deity and one book the temptation to sure knowledge, certain dogma too often overwhelms these believers, though in all three traditions there are, too, the more measured, more humble ways.  In fact, strange as it may seem given the all too charged dialogues of the past twenty years, the liberal orientation–former mainline Christianity, reform Judaism and the Sunni/Sufi mainstream Islam–is numerically dominant.

 

Politics, US History

When Satire Seems Impossible

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Samain                            Moon of the Winter Solstice

Republican presidential candidates.  Gingrich writes alternative history fiction, some of which I understand is very good.  As long he sticks to fiction, I’ll pay attention; when he blurs the line, taking the fictional world of alternative history into the day to day world of real politics, I shudder.

Mitt Romney has the charisma of a cheese cloth, but hey, we Democrats nominated Michael Dukakis, John Kerry and Al Gore.  Combined they have the charismetrics of soggy diapers.

Michele sees Romney, Gingrich and Perry as the same.  This might be one of those times when Michele and I agree.  Problem is, I’d lump her in right in there with those three.  Loony or boring.  Quite a combination of attributes.

Right now, with the Iraq war ended, Osama dead, the economy showing signs of life and congress with a lower popularity rating than, than, well, than the Freshkills landfill, I can see a situation where Obama backs into a second term.  Might happen.

 

Aging, Health, Weather +Climate

It’s Beginning To Look a Lot Like…March?

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Samain                                 Moon of the Winter Solstice

It’s beginning to look a lot like….March.  Geez.  Rain?  In mid-December?  47 degrees.  Come on guys.  We need that climate deal now.

(this was the scene out my study window on December 11, last year)

How would Robert Frost write “Stopping by Woods on A Snowy Evening” for the Winter Solstice?  Somehow the carriage sunk in mud while the rain beats down just doesn’t carry the same poetics.

Annual physical finished.  Tom Davis, the internist whom I see, enters the State Fair art contest every year in photography and has never got admitted.  He has one of his pieces in his office and it’s pretty damn good.  A pensive work in Galena, Illinois.

Each year after the physical, since fasting is required, I go to Hell and have breakfast.  Hell has its Minneapolis location in the basement of the building next to the Medical Arts parking ramp.  An all punk wait staff, classic movies projected on a big screen and broadcast over TV’s, and an imaginative menu make Hell a bigger draw than you might imagine.