Daily Archives: September 9, 2014

Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Something Swims Up

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Lughnasa                                                                                   College Moon

Something is swimming in the deep ocean of my Self, circling higher and higher, moving toward the surface. It’s tempting to view it as a condor, swooping in wide circles, riding the thermals, seen by my mind’s eye, but that’s an illusion. In fact what I see with the mind’s eye is only a clue, a reminder to look down, into the interior.

( at the foot of Wu Shi Mountain (Five Lion Mountain), located beneath the spectacular Qiandao Lake)

There in the Holy Well that connects me to the All That Is the waters bubble slowly, often still for moments at a time, then roiled a bit by the artesian pressure the cosmos brings to bear on all its creations. It is in this water that something swims, something big and commanding, I think though I can’t be sure. This is where the novels live, somewhere in the benthic realm. Could be a novel moving around.

Or, it could be, well, I don’t know what. But I can feel it riding the change in the seasons. It’s sensitive to the decreasing daylight and to the increasing weakness of the Sun’s light. Might be melancholy. This is its season.

Whatever it is, it keeps pressing up, sending small waves to jolt the surface of the holy well. I look forward to its arrival.

Cooking, Health

A Small Thing

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Lughnasa                                                                               College Moon

Kate’s got some kind of malady that made her want my chicken noodle soup. It’s my signature dish. And the recipe is an old family recipe, maybe. The soup recipe is on the Golden Plump chicken label.

Making it is a small thing. Cut onions (ours) one cup. Cut carrots (ours) one cup. Put in a full clove of garlic cut and smashed (ours). This last is my addition. A cup of celery. Some olive oil. Sautee for five minutes. Then add the chicken and the corn (frozen). Bring to a boil, reduce to simmer and cook for one and a half hours. Remove chicken. Remove skin. Cut chicken meat into small pieces and restore it to the pot with the egg noodles and peas (frozen). Boil for ten minutes. Freezes well and since there are ten cups of water, makes a bunch.

Growing the onions and the carrots and the garlic is a small thing, too. These sort of small things are our lives. Yes, there are the grand gestures: winning an election, bringing home a fat paycheck, building a business, designing a house, getting a degree. Yes, there are these. But without the small things, done by someone, there is no body, no energy, no health for the grand gesture. And the small things must be done every single day while the grand gestures occur only occasionally.

So this is a nod to the small things that make our lives.

Dogs, Family, Garden, Health

Fire and Raspberries

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Lughnasa                                                                          College Moon

Finished the fire pit repair this morning, spreading mulch over the landscape cloth. The IMAG0751landscape cloth covered the sand that filled the hole. The cobblestones from an old Minneapolis street in front of a former Kenwood mansion are clear of soil. We can now summon fire.

Picked raspberries, too. The golden berries have begun to ripen and they are abundant. Fewer red berries, but they are large and fat, juicy. Most of the garden is in now, a few tomatoes, all the egg plants, some peppers, the third planting of beets and carrots and the leeks are all that remain. When the leeks come in, I’ll my chicken and leek pies which we’ll freeze for over the fallow months dining.

Vega has returned to her tail wagging, bouncy self just as the vet feared when he wrote guarded on the prognosis. We have to keep her from running. She’s supposed to go out on a leash, but we never leash our dogs except for trips to the vet and the kennel. Otherwise they have free roaming rights to our woods. This means  that keeping a dog quiet whose surgical wounds need to heal can be difficult. So far, though, the wound has begun to close.

Kate’s down with a stomach bug I had last week. Used to be she shared all the illnesses she contacted at work with me, now I’ve done it to her.

Humanities, Translating De Bello Gallico, World History, Writing

A Celtic Neo-Renaissance?

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Lughnasa                                                                                           College Moon

Two matters Celtica in my life right now, causing my early writing interests in things Celtic and ancient to resurface. The first is Caesar and his commentary on the Gallic War. There is, in fact, a Roman gauze thrown over the lives of the Celts, first by Caesar and Tacitus, then by that other world dominating super power, the Roman Catholic church. After the Romans left around 400 or so A.D., the Roman church filled in behind them.

It was these two literate oppressors who recorded both the religion and folkways of the Celts. There is, as you can imagine, considerable disjunct between the likely reality of the Celts and their description by people looking down from positions from authority. Especially in the case of the Catholics who combined power with a demand to change the old ways.

The second is the upcoming vote, on September 18th, on Scottish independence. The English, in some ways the political and national extension of both the Romans and the Roman Catholics into the contemporary world of the British Isles, overthrew Celtic lands (Wales and Ireland) and later merged with Scotland.

They first took Wales, which never managed to govern itself as a nation, divided too much by its steep mountains. That was Edward I, Longshanks, in 1284. In 1536 Henry VIII took Ireland and, ironically, tried to supplant Catholicism by sending over Protestants. That is, members of the Church of England, a church created by his famous conflict with the Papacy over his failed attempt to find a wife who would give him a son. Then, in 1707, through a dynastic inheritance by the Scottish king, James Stuart, of the throne of England, Scotland joined England.

Over the course of the last century and this one those bonds have become loosened, first by the Irish struggles, not entirely over even today, and the independence movements in Wales and Scotland. The Welsh movement has not got much momentum, but the Scottish one seems to be gaining favor with the country. If Scotland shakes loose, we might see again a more recognizable Celtic culture with both Ireland and Scotland looking both back to their roots and forward to their own, independent futures.