Daily Archives: September 19, 2013

Art and Culture, Asia, Literature, MOOCS, Myth and Story, Poetry, Writing

Loki and Scansion

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Lughnasa                                                                                                            Harvest Moon

“Someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”  C.S. Lewis

After a day with Loki and scansion, I got tired and was happy to have supper and watch Wire in the Blood with Kate.  Loki’s fascinating, an original bad jotun, and just can’t help making mischief, a festering ball of chaos.  He’ll make a great character once I figure out how to include him in the story.

(Gullinbursti, the Golden Boar.  Part of the Loki saga)

Scansion, on the other hand.  Oy vey!  I find recognizing meter, the stressed and unstressed syllables difficult.  I’ve never learned it and I need to now in order to finish my essay on Dickinson’s poem.  After locating some handy brief exercises, my head hurt.  So, I stopped.

Tomorrow.

The gong fu cha goes well.  I have a rhythm with it now and I produce six pots of tea out of a single batch of tea leaves.  The last two infusions, surprisingly, are the best.  At least so far.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Weather +Climate

A Coarse, Tactile Spirituality

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Lughnasa                                                                    Harvest Moon

While out preparing beds for bulb planting later this fall, I thought over the post I’d made below.  Spirituality is not the best word for describing what I was talking about, I realized. At least it’s not in metaphysical terms.  I’m talking about a here and now, sensory delivered experience.

In a broader sense, and as I think it is often used, spirituality refers to a mode, event, ritual that makes present, even if momentarily, our connectedness.  In traditional religious circles that connectedness links up to what Kant would have called the noumenal realm, the realm beyond our senses.  Nietzsche put a stop sign to philosophical consideration of the noumenal, a problem for Western philosophy since the Platonic ideal forms, when he said God is dead.  That is, the noumenal realm is not and never was accessible.  If it ever was at all.

Using spirituality in this latter sense–the revelation of connectedness however it comes–then my use of it was just fine.

Just now I looked out my study window and to the north the sky was black and to the east a sickly green cast hoovered near the horizon.  When my eyes read that green, my stomach sank, just a bit, the fear engendered by growing up in tornado alley struggling to assert itself, demand my attention.  Survival at stake!   Red alert.  This was a moment of awe, a reminder of the power nature can bring to bear.  It was a spiritual moment in its sense of immediate connectedness between my deepest inner self and the world within range of my vision.

These are small epiphanies, yes, but they are available. This coarse, material spirituality, tactile in its immediacy reminds me, in definitive manner, of who I am and of what I am a part.  Do I need more?

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work

A Coarse Spirituality

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Lughnasa                                                                   Harvest Moon

Yesterday in the midst of wet raspberry canes, plucking fruit from thorny yet fragile IMAG0955cropped1000branches, the spirituality of the moment grasped me.  The canes stuck to my sweatshirt sleeve; the water soaked into my jeans.  This was the real in all its obstinate presence.

Last February Kate and I did some winter pruning and I cut last year’s canes down to the ground.  We were late getting this done, but the timing was alright.  Now, eight months later, those same plants had burst up, some over my head and drooping with golden and red-purple berries.

The garden, the orchard, the bees each reward us: tomatoes, carrots, onions, apples, cherries, pears, honey.  A virtuous circle, we care for the soil and the plants and the trees and the hives, they in turn offer something we can eat.  Eat.  Think of that.  This is the true and definitive instance of transubstantiation.   Eat this cherry and remember me.  Eat this IMAG0956cropped1000carrot; it becomes me.  It becomes me to eat this carrot.  The soil and the plants here give of themselves that I may not perish.

Thus, to be among them, feeling them pluck at me, rain water dripping off them onto me is a coarse prayer, a baptism by holy water made clean and pure in the clouds then delivered unto us by the morning rain.

Amen.