Monthly Archives: March 2015

Memories, Minnesota, Politics, US History

Peek-A-Boo

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Imbolc                             Black Mountain Moon

Reading in the New York Review of Books about FBI surveillance of the anti-war movement. There was paranoia about the Feds all the time, with new folks coming under suspicion. The times were rich with focus, focus that made sense and focus that did not. The two were sometimes hard to separate.

Anyhow, the article reminded me of the funniest instance of FBI surveillance in which I personally participated. Back in ’72 or ’73 a bunch of us conceived the idea of a human chain around the Federal Building in St. Paul. There may have been a court case then, I don’t recall, but we showed up bright and early, joined hands and made a circle around the building. OK, almost the whole building. We didn’t have enough to close off the loading docks.

Anyhow, the Kellog Square apartments were under construction across the street from the Federal Building. They were mostly complete, several stories of apartments with glass windows facing the street. All of the apartments, up, I don’t know 20 floors, were empty. No curtains on the windows. No furniture. No renters yet.

Except. About six stories up, one unit had curtains. And, peeking between the curtains were cameras. The lenses were visible to the naked eye. Once we noticed them we waved, of course.

Very subtle of the FBI to hide behind curtains. In the only apartment that had them.

Oh, those were the days.

Latin, Third Phase, Translating De Bello Gallico

Plateaus

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Imbolc                                  Black Mountain Moon

Struggling with Caesar. Two things keep me at it. This quote: confusion is the sweat of the intellect. And, struggle is the first and painful step toward flow. There is, too, that stubborn insistence that I can learn this.

I’ve not discussed learning plateaus in the Latin for some time, but I passed one last week, when I began to be able to read the Latin without referencing vocabulary or grammars. This lasted only for a couple of sentences, but I did it. This capacity has resurfaced since then, but the ease I experienced last week is gone. For now. What I mean here is that I’m struggling on a much different plateau than in the past.

This process has been excruciatingly slow. It’s very similar to working out though. You keep at it, do a certain amount regularly and the benefits slowly accumulate. Right now I’m doing an hour to an hour and a half of Latin a day. That’s about all my mind can tolerate without becoming resistant to further work.

I’m midway through today’s work in the Gallic War, book 4, section 26. Caesar’s troops have landed near the White Cliffs of Dover and are fighting their way ashore. It’s tough going for them right now.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Mountains, Myth and Story, Poetry, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Spring

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Imbolc                                      Black Mountain Moon

“Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly–and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.”
–  Omar Khayyám

March 1st is the beginning of meteorological spring. The three coldest months of the year are over and the next three are a transition between the cold of winter and the heat of the growing season, the three warmest months of June, July, August. Meteorological spring, though, is a creature of averages, a soulless thing with no music. I prefer the emergence of the bloodroot (in Minnesota) as the true first sign of spring.

On March 20th Imbolc will give way to Ostara, the Great Wheel’s spring season, on the day of the vernal equinox.

I do not yet know the traditional first signs of spring for the montane ecosystem, but I will. Nor do I know the tenor, the rhythms of the seasonal change here in the mountains. I look forward to learning them.

I’m reading the Thousand and One Nights again, a new translation, so right now Arabic and Persian stories, poetry fill my head. Khayyam’s Rubaiyat was my earliest introduction to Persian culture and one I found magical from the beginning.

There is, today, the slightest touch of spring longing in me. And so I wrote this.

Beyond the Boundaries

Beyond the Boundaries

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Imbolc                                                Black Mountain Moon

“Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Introduction to his essay, Nature

Two new categories appear today on Ancientrails: Beyond the Boundaries and Original Relation. They come from this paragraph, the first of Emerson’s introduction to his essay, Nature. When I first read this paragraph, I was just beginning to grasp the radical nature of Emerson’s thought and the liberal religious movement which claimed him. Since that first reading, it has become a steady source of inspiration and more. It has become a sharp knife for my own thinking, my own willingness to walk out to the boundary of what I have learned, what I believe, what I know, to walk out to the boundary then step over it and walk in the meadows beyond.

Now I want to try and give systematic attention to that work, to collect the thoughts I’ve had, the experiences I’ve had out beyond the boundaries. In a way you could call this an attempt to create a personal testament, a summing up, but by the nature of the work those categories are too limiting. Instead this is more in the way of an adventure, following ancientrails out to their terminus, then investigating the terrain beyond them.

What happens after religion, for example? I do not share the current negative assessment of religion, in any of its forms, not even Emerson’s. Religion is the great poetry of our species, the language in which the common person can give voice to wonder, to awe. It is, too, and at the same time, a way to congeal values and create a code of behavior, a way to define who we are and what we do.

Most religions I have studied, or at least become familiar with, have great learnings that all of us can use though we may not be so enamored of the codes of behavior that come along with them. No, I’m not trying to reduce all religions to some universal value like love your neighbor, or love, such work denies the particularity, the native genius in each of them.

I have found in my own searching certain key ideas, even revelations perhaps (if we are careful about what we mean) in various religious traditions that I have incorporated into my own thought. Let me give you an instance: incarnation and how it manifests in the Christian tradition, especially the birth narratives for Jesus. This is a god, in the Christian tradition—the God, becoming human. It’s a mind rattling idea, an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent being funneling Itself down into the frailty and limitations of a human body. What are we to make of that? What if we walked up to the notion of a god coming in from the outside, looked around the edges of that idea, and stepped over the fence line? You might get a result like the one below.

Here’s three paragraphs from a Christmas time post:

Three wise men, shepherds, angels and gospel writers of all kinds should take note each time a new human is born. Each of us is the universe looking on and through itself. That is god-like, making the universe a true polytheist.

Each of us has the full potential of a new Self, a Self that may be the next Madam Curie, Ghandi, or Doris Lessing. Or, that Self might be the next loving mother or father, the next hero or heroine, the kind big sister or the thoughtful big brother.

Whatever he or she becomes, each birth could be greeted with: Hallelujah, this day, a new divinity is born.

Beyond the Boundaries and Original Relation are part of a trinity of ideas with Reimagining Faith. In posts to these categories I hope over the next year or so to lay down enough material for a book, not a new religion, not at all, not even a new philosophy, hardly, but an idiosyncratic vision, seen from within the life and mind of one man, as he walks up to various boundaries and crosses over them.

 

Colorado, Great Work

Mother of Rivers

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Imbolc                                      Black Mountain Moon

Just spent a half an hour tracing the Rio Grande from its source in Colorado to the Gulf of Mexico. Then, the Colorado. The Platte River rises here, too, as does the Arkansas. Colorado may in the national memory be mountains, but in the national and international geography it is the mother of rivers, much like the Himalaya are the mother to India’s famous rivers.

It’s interesting to think of the snow hanging right now on the lodgepole pines in our yard melting, then later in the spring finding its way down the mountain into the South Platte and then on to the Mississippi and the Gulf. A mountains seems isolated, feels isolated but gravity and density make what happens on it run down hill.

 

 

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

And Then Is Heard No More

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Imbolc                               Black Mountain Moon

Let’s paint the same message as below, but with a different brush and color. Gray fading to black dominated the last post. Let’s use blue fading to dark, dark blue here.

Life is the time between the first rays of dawn and the last, bruised hours of twilight. At its brightening life comes with expansiveness, light revealing first this and then that, all new. These are the hours of Heidegger’s being thrown into the world. We see first a soon-to-be familiar face, then faces. Realize at some point a home, then the home in a particular place. That place is in a larger frame which sometimes takes a while to come into focus. At some point we know that the 1950’s, this time of childhood is neither, say, the the 1930’s of our parent’s time nor is it the middle ages with knights and castles and it is not, either, the future. Not 2000. Not 1984.

Over the next few years we learn that our unique self will have its hour upon the stage over a certain span of time, not any we wish, but this one and this one alone. Who we are to become, what we are to do must fit into these years, years that have their own shape, their own special challenges, their own significant opportunities. We choose this path, that person, those places. They fit or they don’t. If they don’t, we choose again.

As the years accumulate and our hour ticks down, the choices become fewer, narrower. Our own history now shapes our future. This is a time of reaping, of being the person you have chosen to be, the unique mixture of your Self and the times into which you have been thrown. When the reaping is finished, our hour is up.