Lughnasa Recovery Moon
“Trump’s base is more the people who used to have season tickets to the Roman Colosseum,” Mr. McQuaid wrote. “Not sure that they vote in great numbers, but they like blood sport.” NYT article, “Handwringing in GOP…”
Monthly Archives: August 2015
One Month Out
Lughnasa Recovery Moon
Now a full month out from surgery. Cancer made less threatening with clear margins, no cancer cells in the tissue around the prostate after its removal. Now kegels, those exercises vaunted in Cosmo in the 70’s, an upcoming PSA in September and healing wounds where the robot arms reached inside me are the physical remnants. The kegels strengthen muscles necessary for continence. And they’ve worked.
I thought I’d be back at it now: translating Ovid, writing Superior Wolf, investigating the mountains and the west, but I’m not. The catheter came out only three weeks ago. That required the kegels and a brief use of adult diapers, maybe a week and a half all told. Jon’s been putting the bookshelves together and shelving books has taken time.
There was, too, the steady flow of Ken of Boiler Medic and the boiler installation, Herb and John the plumbers running line for the new stove and the generator. Arranging with Eric for the generator move, then Herb back for the gas connection, then Eric back to install the automatic transfer switch and connect the generator, test it.
There is, as well, a niggling feeling that post-cancer me and pre-cancer me are no longer quite the same person. I’ve not had that sudden revelation of life’s purpose found, or a mission uncovered; but, I feel somehow different. It might be that my day-to-day won’t return to the old pattern, that some new mix will emerge.
One specific instance is a more co-ordinated reading program, using Nina Killham’s bibliotherapy recommendations, certain projects like re-imaging faith and neglected areas of reading like poetry and classical novels as guides. Then, too, there is the type of writing I’ve avoided, long form, essay like pieces on matters like reimagining faith, politics in our time, water, identity and self-hood.
I’m waiting for sign along the ancientrail of recovery from a dread disease. There is planning, goal setting and then there’s discovery. Right now I’m more focused on discovery.
Feel the Rain On Our Face
Lughnasa Recovery Moon
There are many ways of becoming native to this place. The one that worked for me involved a combination of following an ancient liturgical calendar based on seasonal changes in temperate latitudes: the Great Wheel and gardening. There are many other paths. Chado: the Way of Tea integrates the tea ceremony with a finely divided sensibility to Japanese seasons, some only two weeks long. Hunter/gatherers have to be native to the place where they are or they will not survive. Followers of the Tao, the way, lean into the rhythms of the natural world rather than away from them, flowing through the world as water does in a stream. Hiking and camping and canoeing. Forestry with an emphasis on forest health. Conservation biology.
Oddly though practitioners of modern agriculture are often as estranged from their place as residents of vast urban enclaves. And I recently read, in Foreign Policy magazine’s July/August edition, an intriguing explanation as to what lead current, often corporate, agriculture astray. When the population explosion gained prominence in the mid-1960’s, think Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb,” a concentrated focus on methods of improving agricultural productivity resulted. And it worked. More acres went under the plow, more chemicals went into the soil and onto crops, antibiotics filled food animals, food production became more sophisticated though not more nutritious, fast cheap restaurants bought and sold fast cheap food. There are real dangers in letting ourselves become strangers to our home world.
Becoming native to this place is analogous to being born again, revivified for the act of belonging to, being part of this planet. Second naiveté, Paul Ricoeur’s wonderful notion, can follow a state of critical distance:
“According to Ricoeur, the rational forces brought to our civilization through modernity have made it difficult to accept religion or scripture in the “first naïveté” sense. Once subjected to rational inspection, the literal meanings of religion really do not hold up…” exploring spiritual development
Modernity has put the fruits of enlightenment reason and modern technology forward as more significant, more important than the growth of a tomato, than the beauty of a wilderness lake. It has substituted the grace of a soaring condor with the stiff, hard brilliance of an airplane. That tomato, grown soft and juicy on the plant, got replaced by a hard-skinned, pre-ripe picked fruit designed for machine harvesting and long distance transport. Distances that used to require human feet and legs, or the same of horses, now demand only that we sit and wait.
Before you resist this. This is not a screed against airplanes, cars, computers, telephones or grocery stores. It is a recognition of the rupture, the critical distance, modernity has created between our lives and the world that sustains them. Food comes from soil and plants and the animals that eat the plants. Oxygen from the plants at work. Water used to be purified by the very wetlands we fill in or drain to build subdivisions or to plant more acreage of chemically injected crops.
Life, in other words, exists in a delicate balance with the inanimate; that balance is literally billions of years old and one we cannot afford to ignore. Yet we do. And so we must make an effort to again become native to this place, this place which in its wonder gave life a chance.
Following the seasons as they change and following within those changes emergence, growth, life and death became easier for me when I overlaid on spring/summer/fall/winter the four big solar events of equinoxes and solstices, then put between those the cross-quarter holidays of my Celtic ancestors: Samhain (summer’s end), Imbolc (in the belly), Beltane (the beginning of the growing season) and Lughnasa (the first harvest holiday). When I write the season at the top of this blog, I remember, for example, that we are now in the season of first harvests. And sure enough Kate brought home some wonderful heirloom tomatoes today.
The extensive gardens, both flower and vegetable, plus the orchard that Kate and I installed and nurtured in Andover reinforced the lessons of the Great Wheel. At Halloween, Samhain’s paler descendant, our garden would be finished, the beds covered, foods in jars in the basement, garlic hanging from rafters, onions and apples spread out. We were part of the turning wheel and the turning wheel shaped what we could and could not do. We lived then with the rhythms of the temperate latitudes, in some harmony with them.
Now we are in a new place, a more arid, less fertile place and the way of becoming native to it is still in process. But it will come.
We cannot all go back to the land. Cities dominate the living patterns for most of the world. But we must find ways, whether through community supported agriculture or urban hydroponics or organized trips to the countryside, to help us all feel the rain on our face. We all need to wonder at the slender green shoots that brave their way through the late snows of winter. Or, at the tropical lushness of equatorial jungles. Or the marvel of lives lived fully in the world ocean. Our lives and the lives of our grandchildren depend on our becoming, again, native to this place. To know our spot with a second naiveté so that we will care for, love this rocky, watery wonderful earth.
Becoming Native to This Place
Lughnasa Recovery Moon
The most ancientrail of all is becoming native to this place.
But, why must we become native to mother Earth? Aren’t we native simply because we are thrown onto the planet’s surface at birth? Yes and no. Yes, in that we are an organism designed to live in this gravity, breathe this concentration of oxygen, use plant matter and other animals as food. No, in that those of us thrown into a complex industrial/technology culture are native not to the planet itself, but to adaptations made over centuries by economies and governments. This includes the U.S., Europe, most of Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, as well as residents of urban areas on every continent.
In the U.S.A. we are native to electricity as Kate and I learned just this Monday. Our typical life ground to a halt along with 4600 others when the power went out. We are native to a night lit not by fire, but by bulbs. We are native to warm houses in winter, cool ones in summer. Our hunting and gathering takes place at King Sooper, Safeway, Lunds, Byerlys. We are native to antibiotics, surgery, dental care.
When we climb the additional 3,600 feet in altitude from Denver to our home on Black Mountain Drive, we sit comfortably in a moving chair powered by the ancient remains of dinosaurs and forests. We are native to telephones, computers, text messages. We are native to machines and carpenters and plumbers. We are, in short, native to almost anything but this planet where we live.
You could reasonably ask whether this matters. Our future lies in the stars anyhow, doesn’t it? Maybe so. Especially if we render the earth uninhabitable for humans. Which, with climate changing drivers still dominant in our world economies, we’re working hard to accomplish.
I believe it matters. Why? The short answer is that becoming native to this planet, again, is our best hope for throttling back those climate change drivers. We can escape to the stars while having a beautiful homeworld as our base of exploration.
The longer answer has to do with the nature of our humanity. Technological and industrial estrangement from the rhythms of the natural world is almost a canard, a cliche. We expect tomatoes in winter. We expect access to any part of the planet within hours. Even the colors of our sunrises and sunsets often have chemical pollutants to thank for their vibrancy.
We need to awaken ourselves to the essential, everyday miracles: photosynthetic conversion of sunlight into food, the transpiration of that same process, oxygen, being a gas we need to survive. And this consciousness that we have. How about that. Or the intricate and interdependent web of living things. The changing of seasons in the temperate zones. Water’s strange characteristics.
In the next post I’ll suggest one way of becoming native to this place.
Bibliotherapy
Lughnasa Recovery Moon
Bibliotherapy session with Nina from Melbourne this morning. Mostly I want another perspective on my reading, a possible way to organize and focus. It’s not so much that I need this; I can find books on my own and have done for years; but, I want to think through, with someone else, a way of concentrating my effort. Time is not infinite for us finite beings, at least not with the books available on this planet.
Skype has a magical quality. The old videophone of the bright cartoon illustrations of the future made real. Like space travel, landing on the moon. How it performs with no time lag in the conversation is still a mystery to me. This morning it will take me half-way around the world, to a continent I’ve never visited, to speak with a person I’ve never met. Nina comes as a referral from Simona in London where I connected with the School of Life.
Think of that. The colonies communicating with the old homeland for connection. In real time.
Well, about time to start. More later.
#thisisironic
Lughnasa Recovery Moon
Yesterday finally got Herb, the ex-Minnesota, ex-Andover resident, ex-USAF guy to put in the gas line for our generator install and the gas stove we intend to buy for the kitchen. Under the #thisisironic hashtag our power went out that morning around 3 a.m. It was out all day, not coming back on until around 10 p.m. If we’d been able to get this done last week…
Something happened to a power pole. The problem was, a Colorado mountain problem, that the pole was located at some high, distant location. This means they had to bring helicopters and crews that work from them.
Over the course of the day we heard small town gossip that power was out until today at the earliest. Maybe Wednesday. Doesn’t sound like much, I know. But we’re on our own well, like our neighbors. No electricity, no water. This was the primary reason for our owning a generator in the first place. Of course, it’s also true, no electricity, no heat. And, in our current, pre-kitchen renovation state, no way to cook hot food. Electric stove.
Before surgery I could not eat and thought only of food, yesterday, when we had no electricity, we thought only of the things we were missing. No stove. No lights. No water. No news. No way to recharge cell phones. No internet. No TV. No garage door opener.
We live a life of great privilege. It’s easy to forget that until something basic gets taken away, even for a short while. In Maslow’s hierarchy the very bottom of the pyramid is taken by the Hullian needs: air, water, food, the essentials of survival. If you don’t have them, that’s where your attention is. Electricity, in our technology/appliance dependent culture, is only one step further up the pyramid.
The world is big and most of it doesn’t have dependable electricity, huge swaths of humanity don’t have enough food or water. Like meatless Fridays, an electricityless day now and then is good for the soul.
Around the Bulge
Lughnasa Recovery Moon
Yesterday and today I opened my Latin texts, continuing to translate the story of Medea in Book 7. Yesterday my eyes crossed and my brain froze. Too hard. Today, though, much better. I did 4 verses plus in an hour, then ran out of motivation. My goal is to get back to at least 5 verses a day or more, which was my pace b.c.
Soon, sometime soon, Superior Wolf will return, this were creature loose in the Arrowhead of northern Minnesota. He’s proven as elusive to me as the author as he will to the people who hunt him and his kind. Different versions of this novel, always fragmentary, are in my files from before this millennium.
The gas lines tomorrow. And my new crown. Oh, boy. The final IKEA delivery for now comes on Tuesday. Jon will be up sometime with the base for my art table. I hope he has time to assemble and join the two additional tall bookcases and the cabinet section for my tea and coffee accessories before he returns to work. The mini-fridge is in the garage.
Life has begun to ease around the bulge of April, May, June and July. We ate at an indifferent Italian restaurant last night before the theater (see below). No medical conversation. Memories though of our honeymoon, the Italian food against which we compare every Italian place. And they almost never match up. The Italians have something special with their food and their coffee. And their art. And history.
I told Kate last night over dinner that it felt like my summer had finally started.
Lughnasa 2015
Lughnasa The Blue Recovery Moon
The first of the three harvest seasons begins today. Lughnasa, the festival of first fruits, or Lammas, as the Catholic appropriation of this Celtic holy day came to be known. On Lammas peasants would bring loaves of bread made from the first of the corn (wheat) harvest and place them on the altar.
Here is an intriguing account of Lughnasa’s mythic origin from Kathleen Jenks’ website:
“Lugh dedicated this festival to his foster-mother, Tailtiu, the last queen of the Fir Bolg, who died from exhaustion after clearing a great forest so that the land could be cultivated. When the men of Ireland gathered at her death-bed, she told them to hold funeral games in her honor. As long as they were held, she prophesied Ireland would not be without song. Tailtiu’s name is from Old Celtic Talantiu, “The Great One of the Earth,” suggesting she may originally have been a personification of the land itself, like so many Irish goddesses. In fact, Lughnasadh has an older name, Brón Trogain, which refers to the painful labor of childbirth. For at this time of year, the earth gives birth to her first fruits so that her children might live….”
This year, my first Lughnasa in the west, I’m aware of the contrast between the humid and agriculturally focused Great Wheel holidays and the rocky, desert, arid region which I now call home. On Shadow Mountain we have no harvest, no fields retrieved from ancient forests. We have stony cliffs, lodgepole and ponderosa pine, aspen. At the base of Shadow Mountain in Shadow Creek Valley there is a stand of alfalfa that was cut last week and baled this week. But the rationale is more fire mitigation, reducing the fuel load, than an agricultural one, though I imagine some happy horses will get those bales.
This year Lughnasa still has that Midwest feel for me. The vegetable stands are full of produce, farmer’s markets tables groan with the increasing yield of gardens all round the region. In fact, the week-long market holiday that began at Lughnasa in the Celtic lands inspired our agriculturally focused county and state fairs. The Great Minnesota Get-Together starts later this month on August 27th. No better latter day Lughnasa festival.
Adapting the Great Wheel with a western inflection may take a couple of years. I have no clear idea, for example, how to talk about Lughnasa on Shadow Mountain. An intriguing piece of work that lies ahead.