• Category Archives Holidays

  • A Holimonth Filled With Holy Days

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Kate and I will head over to Beisswingers in a few minutes.  The lawn tractor has had a checkup, gotten set up for winter storage and had its blades sharpened.  It will go in the machine shed, the one back on the wood’s edge.

    After that, we will start laying the black plastic.  I cleared the area of standing weeds, trees and brush over the last three weeks.  I want to get the plastic down before it snows.

    Though by my reckoning we’ve been in Holiseason since Samhain, the pace does pick-up between Thanksgiving and New Years.  A real holimonth filled with Holy Days.  The sacred puts itself before us in so many ways over the next few weeks.

    The article I posted yesterday from the magazine Orion points to a key locus of the sacred:  home.  At some point over the weekend I’m going to post some thoughts about home and ge-ology.


    Faith and Spirituality Great Work Holidays permaculture 📎and tagged

  • One-Hour Thanksgiving Meal

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    21  bar steady 30.04  0mph NNW  windchill 21  Samhain

    New Moon (Moon of the Long Nights)

    Kate produced a wonderful, one-hour Thanksgiving meal.  Cornbread stuffing, turkey breast with a chili-rub and an herbal seasoning under the skin, mashed potatoes, our own green beans (canned) and sweated mushroom gravy. She explained sweated, but it passed over my head.  I was already in to the green beans and the cornbread stuffing.

    Tomorrow she wants to watch the Macy’s Parade because of her home town of Nevada, Iowa will have a horse team in it, someone her sister, BJ, knows.  Pretty exciting.

    I’m going to try an earlier bedtime again.  Surely I can reset my body clock.

    Happy Thanksgiving to you all.


    Family Holidays News of the Strange Weather +Climate Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • The Ancient Trail of Gratitude

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    quick note:  Boy, the pace of life accelerated with the coming of autumn.  This last week it felt like I’d gone back to full-time employment.  I’m glad the week-end is here.

    Mine is a small life, no encyclopedia entries or feistschrifts, no monuments.  Ordinary.  I’ve been lucky so far.  The major stumbles I made got turned around by mid-life.  Kate came along and made the journey forward companionable.  There are few friends, but good ones.  The things I do, I love.  Dig.  Plant.  Harvest.  Write.  Preach.  Tour.  Spend time with the kids and their kids.  Read.

    Thanksgiving is not a one-day holiday, but, rather, a life way, the ancient trail of gratitude.


    Faith and Spirituality Family Friends Holidays 📎and tagged

  • The Earth, a Sacred Place

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    79  bar falls 29.96  0mph NE  dew-point 56  sunrise 6:10 sunset 8:25  Lughnasa

    Waxing Gibbous Corn Moon

    I got this off the Permaculture listserv.

    “(I find this is a good reminder to recite every morning.)
    Diadra

    A Prayer for Gaia by Rose Mary O’Malley

    As I breathe in your air, eat your fruits and drink your water, let me be sustained and nourished so that I may serve.

    As I use your resources for clothes, shelter and warmth, let me be strengthened so that I may give back more than I have taken.

    As I drink in the beauty of your oceans, flowers, blue sky and stars, let me be so filled with beauty that I will bring only love and joy to your inhabitants.

    As I am nourished, taught and loved by your inhabitants, let me so filled with love and knowledge that I joyfully work to assure a fair distribution of your treasures.”

    It is an example what I believe to be true, that is, many many people consider the earth a sacred place and have the intention of reverence and worship toward her.  The whole neo-pagan movement with its mix and match invocation of Europe’s ancient pantheons and perhaps some Egyptian influence does not reflect the rootedness of this sentiment in American soil. (That is, the American manifestation of it.  I believe this is a global phenomenon.) It is also not the case that the Native American reverence for the earth is other than a salutary reminder since their experience is so different from that of us boat people.

    We need a way of following the seasons that respects our American experience of this vast and wonderful land.  We need a way of honoring mother earth that borrows, yes, from other cultures, but does not presume to make their ways our ways.  We need, as Emerson said, a religion of revelation to us, not the history of theirs.   And that revelation comes from two sources:  our experience of the outer world–this land, its peoples and our experience of other peoples and other lands; and, our experience of our inner world and its own universe, added to our resonance with the outer world.

    This is the pagan lovesong that I hear in the hearts of so many people, one that needs articulation and expansion.  This is like Brian Swimme’s work, too.

    This faith, this reverence and worship of the earth, as in Ms. O’Malley’s prayer, is an ur-faith, or a proto-faith, a faith that comes prior to others,  a faith whose acceptance does not contradict the Mulism or the Buddhist, the Taoist or the Christian, but complements, supplements them.  For some, like me, it is an adequate faith, enough to sustain me on my journey and as I contemplate the life after this one, or others, it is not enough, but one that needs some salvation instrument or some philosophical cleanser.  That’s all right.


    Faith and Spirituality General Great Wheel Great Work Holidays 📎and tagged

  • Remember The Sabbath Day And Keep It Holy

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    76  bar steady 29.97  0mph NEE dew-point 58  sunrise 6:10 sunset 8:25  Lughnasa

    Waxing Gibbous Corn Moon    moonrise 1633 moonset 0040

    Strange how I have to relearn, sometimes again and again, simple home truths.  A day of rest is good for the soul.  The Jews knew it.  The traditional Christian community knew it.  It may be a Western contribution to humanity.  I’ll have to check, but I don’t think the Asian communities have a similar notion.  Yes, they have festivals and holidays, that’s for sure shared, but the notion of a weekly day of rest?  I don’t know.  Those of you who read from Southeast Asia, what do you know?

    Anyhow, I woke up today recharged and ready to go.  This in spite of my lingering doubts yesterday.  Remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy.  Quite a while back I got interested in the idea of sacred time, my commitment to the Celtic calendar is an example.  I also observe a week long retreat at the end of each year thanks to the Mayan concept that the last five days of the year are best left alone in terms of work.

    I took from the Spanish cultures, especially Colombia and Mexico, the siesta.  A nap a day continues to be a cornerstone of how I live daily.

    The religious communities with whom I shared a vocation for a time convinced me of the value of regular retreats.  The retreats and the Sabbath day have been honored more in the breach than the observance, but I believe that is about to change.  Our body needs sleep, perchance to dream, and, it turns out, our mind does, too.  Recent research shows that the mind sifts, weighs, analyzes and interprets the days events while we sleep.  I suspect the same thing occurs when we take a regular caesura from the usual rhythms of our week and our year.

    Please note I’m not talking about vacations here.  Those exist for a different reason, I believe.  Vacations allow us to vacate the norm and experience another world.  They are more for fun and for education seen as fun.

    The holy rhythms of which I write here are different.  They focus on the spirit, the care and maintenance of our soul.  Our doubts about such a metaphysically evanescent idea may have contributed to our immersion in and the stickiness for us of the material, outer world.

    Well, time to put this regathered energy to work.  See you on the flipside.


    Asia Faith and Spirituality Great Wheel Holidays 📎and tagged

  • How I Work

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    76  bar falls 30.01  0mph SW dew-point 58  sunrise 6:06 sunset 8:30  Lughnasa

    First Quarter of the Corn Moon  moonrise 1326  moonset 2226

    “More Americans are likely to suffer kidney stones in the coming years as a result of global warming, according to researchers at the University of Texas.”  Agence France-Presse, July 2008

    N.B. All these quotes about global warming come from this website:  The Warmlist.  Here’s the webmasters explanation:

    “This site is devoted to the monitoring of the misleading numbers that rain down on us via the media. Whether they are generated by Single Issue Fanatics (SIFs), politicians, bureaucrats, quasi-scientists (junk, pseudo- or just bad), such numbers swamp the media, generating unnecessary alarm and panic. They are seized upon by media, hungry for eye-catching stories. There is a growing band of people whose livelihoods depend on creating and maintaining panic. There are also some who are trying to keep numbers away from your notice and others who hope that you will not  make comparisons. Their stock in trade is the gratuitous lie. The aim here is to nail just a few of them.”

    So, don’t say I didn’t fess up.  The Star-Tribune turned me onto this site.

    Shifted focus. Gonna work on that firepit.  I decided Kate can help me transplant day lilies when she gets home and I’ll still have time to transplant the iris.  I get on a task and sometimes don’t lift my headup to check whether it makes sense.  Heresy Moves West is an example.

    The research alone would take a good bit of time, I knew that.  That meant I could not hope to research and write it in the week prior to September 14th.  Knowing that I began to develop this knot in my to do lobe.  It began to insist, get it done.  Get it done now.  Right now.  This even though the date was 8 weeks away at the time.  Anyhow, I finally opened up and let the lobe have its way.

    Once begun, research and writing, at least for me, need to be one fluid motion, the research followed by the writing.  In my case this is because as I research various ways of slicing and dicing the information comes to me throughout. At night before I go to sleep the data often floats up and demands consideration.   Sometimes I make note of these patterns, sometimes not.  Often I don’t because I want the order and interpretation fungible to the last possible moment.

    Why?  In between the research and the writing there is a creative time in which the data and the various arrangements of it begin to pull other information, other paradigms out of my memory.  This process can change the data’s relevance.  Let me give you an example.

    At first I imagined a straight chronological presentation.  The Unitarians began at such and such a place at such and such a time.  The westward expansion of the US began in this time period.  It rolled out according to these stages, in this place at this time and another place at another time until the whole shebang ended up encountering Minnesota. This came to me first because historical movement often seems cleanest presented in chronological order.

    Soon though, as the pieces began to swirl, it became clear to me that the historical progression would have to start earlier, then even earlier.  I wrote about this a while back, my need for context.  When I realized there were big ideas at play here, the order of things changed again.  Then it was a history of ideas approach that made more sense, capturing the development of the peculiar notion of religious freedom in the US.  As that became clear, a second important dynamic rose to the top, the rolling dialectic between orthodoxy and heterodoxy.

    To highlight the ancient character of this dynamic I decided to find its beginnings in the Abrahamic tradition with Abram’s call away from polytheism to allegiance to YHWH.

    Both of these decisions meant that the data in the presentation would have to show how the westward movement of heresy (the rolling dialectic of orthodoxy and heterodoxy in Unitarian history) advanced thanks to the first amendment and how it continued the long arc of dogma challenged by new thought.  This lead to the realization that the westward expansion of heresy intensified in the  atmosphere of freedom and pioneer energy found on the frontier.  So, when we end up in Minnesota, the presentations show how religious freedom and the rolling dialectic not only manifest themselves here, but in fact gain strength and intensity.

    Finally, that lead to a desire to push the dialectic one step further, beyond the bland everything’s in bounds soup of current day Unitarian-Universalism to the articulation of a new heterodoxy, one opposed to the dogma of one size fits all faith-lite.  This piece is the unwritten one at this point.


    Faith and Spirituality Great Wheel Great Work Holidays Writing 📎and tagged

  • Primal Eating

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    71  bar rises 29.87 0mph NE dew-point 58  sunrise 6:00  sunset 8:38 Lughnasa

    New (Corn) Moon

    A vegetarian meal  tonight.  Spaghetti squash, golden beets, cucumber tomato and onion salad and cooked whole onion.  Colorful and healthy.  All but the tomatoes were from our garden, including the garlic and cilantro sauteed in olive oil as a dressing for the squash.  After the OMG tomatoes the plants have settled into production with many fruits, but none mature right now.

    I know some perhaps many of you who read this cook things straight out of your garden or meat from your stock, but I haven’t done it much.  Flowers and shade plants, shrubs and trees have occupied my time.  I love them and will always tend them but the vegetables now have my attention.

    Primal eating happens when you go pluck five beets out of the earth, take them into the sink and wash them off, trim the leaves and roots away, then slice these hardy roots into smaller pieces, add tarragon and balsamic vinegar, some salt, cook and eat them.  The same tonight with the spaghetti squash, the cucumber, the onion, both in the salad and the one I cooked whole.   I knew these plants when they were tiny seeds, barely bigger than the lead in a pencil or when they were small potted specimens.  The onions and the garlic went into the ground as what they would become, only larger.  In each case though the same hands that harvested them prepared for eating.

    10,000 years ago some hunters and gatherers first planted seeds and tended crops.  The effect on human culture still gathers momentum even today.  Nomadic life began to disappear for those people.  Settled villages sprang up around the fields.   The keeping of animals for food was more predictable than the hunt.  In both cases though our ancestors had to give up the moving from place to place depending on season and game patterns.  Our bodies, developed in the paleolithic to survive predators and hunt for prey, found themselves out of place.

    They still do.  So, while gathering and cooking goes far back in our history, it does not go all the way back to that earlier phase of the moveable feast.  This fall, however, when Kate and I pick wild grapes that grow in our woods and turn them into jam we will travel back to those ancient times, the ancient trail of seeking food where it decides to be rather than where we care for it.

    This meal tonight was a Lughnasa meal, a meal of first fruits, the harvest we do not plan to store either through drying or canning.  As a Lughnasa meal, it put us in contact with those early Celts whose gardens might spell the difference between survival and starvation.  We live in a wealthier time, but not in one any less dependent on the gifts of mother earth.


    Garden Great Wheel Great Work Holidays 📎and tagged

  • Tending to Plants and Animals, So They Will Tend to Us.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    79  bar rises 29.79  0mph WNW dew-point 64   Sunny and warm

    Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

    Finished The Thief of Baghdad last night.  This movie, a 1940’s special effects pioneer, has its roots, loosely, in the Arabian Nights.  Just occurred to me that the same title might be used for a documentary on the Bush years in Iraq.  It is an engaging story,  though the actor playing Ahmed, a co-star with Sabu, who plays the thief,  Abu, didn’t seem heroic enough to me.  My favorite character was the Sultan of Basra (this movie has many contemporary reference points), who has a Wizard of Oz like persona.  He loves mechanical toys.

    I bought the Criterion Collection discs.  This is all in my hit and miss attempt to educate myself as a cineaphile.  I have a small library of books on cinema.  It has books on theory, history, technique and genre, but I’ve done little with them as a group.  The most I do now is watch the occasional old movie, like the Thief of Baghdad.  My 60th birthday present was 50 films chosen by the Janus Corporation as the most influential art films distributed by them in the last century.  I’ve watched 4 or 5.   I have to figure out a routine for watching more movies and I find that difficult because it interferes with my TV jones.  Problems, problems, problems.

    Don’t know about you, but some residual collective memory got triggered by the photograph of folks lined up outside the IndyMac bank to withdraw their savings.  A bank run signals danger to this child of depression era parents, a danger sign I didn’t know existed until I saw this picture.  The older man sitting on a metal folding at the front of the line, thick soled black shoes, gray trousers and a white shirt, worried look.  Ooff.

    Kate’s in food preservation mode.  She bought a pressurized canner to complement her older, hot water canner.  She’s been busy making jams and preserves, canning green beans and in general wiping her hands on a calico apron while waving a wooden spoon in the air.

    As the crops begin to mature, we are both more focused on how to preserve what we have grown and the lessons we have learned from this year’s crop.   Fewer onions next year, for one.  Do not know why I got so carried away on planting onions.  More beets and carrots.  About the same on beans and peas.  Garlic again, descaping this time.  Add some crops, though what, I do not know.  Harvest is the fun part.

    On August 1st we celebrate Lughnasa.  This is a first fruits festival that provides a festival around the time of the first maturation of crops.  There are three harvest festivals:  Lughnasa, Mabon (Fall Equinox) and Samhain, the Celtic New Year on October 31st.  A full quarter of the year has the harvest as a dominant theme and idea.  An old acknowledgment of the value and necessity of tending to plants and animals, so that they will, in turn, tend to us.


    Cinema and Television Faith and Spirituality Great Work Holidays Writing 📎and tagged

  • The Night After

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    74  bar steady  29.73  0mph ENE dew-point 56  Summer night, too warm

    Waxing Crescent of the Thunder Moon

    This is the night after the fourth of July.  No bangs, pops, whistles, booms, showers of color, whirling fountains.  No patriotic music or patriotic festivals on the TV.  A night whose character takes its shape from the night it is not.

    When I thought of this earlier, it made me reflect on all those night afters.   Each have their unique caste.  The night after Labor Day school begins for many, the serious, get-to-it season commences.  The night after Halloween the candy gets eaten or dumped, the costumes stowed, the lights taken down.  The Celts have begun their new year.  The night after Thanksgiving many of us groan and roll around on the bed or the couch, one too many turkey legs or dollops of mash potatoes or pieces of pecan pie still harbored somewhere in the digestive track.  The night after Christmas Santa has returned to the North Pole (where will he go if the ice melts?), no more presents and no more anticipation.  The night after Hanukkah the menorah goes back to it usual spot, the family gatherings end.  The night after New Year’s we settle into the next year, the hangover finished, the streamers and screamers and auld lang syne all put away until next year.

    In each case we leave the sacred or festive time and return to what the Catholics call ordinary time, a phrase I love.  The value of ordinary time comes from the leavening, the spice that holidays bring to it.  On the night after the frisson between ordinary time and the festive, sacred time of holiday is at its most poignant, the memory still fresh, yet the moment has passed.  So, happy night after the fourth of July.  I hope the sense of patriotism embraced by the revolutionary generation seeped a little bit more into your bones.

    While exercising today, I finished Lust,Caution by Ang Lee.  This film pushes boundaries like Brokeback Mountain, sexual boundaries and the question of love ignited in impossible situations.  It is a brave film, both for the director and for the two lead characters.  The context is the Japanese occupation of China.  Most of the film takes place in occupied Shanghai.  The struggle between the resistance and the Japanese, which forms the overall storyline, portrays the complex choices people make in situations that test loyalties at their core.

    The technical skills in Asian cinema–Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese, Hong Kong, Korean, Singaporean, Thai–has developed over many years.  We are now beginning to see films that push into the east/west osmotic filter from both directions.  This is a rich and interesting time for cinema from Asia and I feel lucky to participate.


    Cinema and Television Holidays 📎and tagged

  • Bozo the Clown and Jesse Helms Die

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    77  bar falls 30.01 1mph SW  dew-point 50  Summer, pleasant

    Waxing Crescent of the Thunder Moon

    Sometimes coincidence says things that would have not occurred to me:

    Larry Harmon, longtime Bozo the Clown, dead at 83.

    Former Sen. Jesse Helms dies at age 86.

    Mulch goes down today.  Old leaves and grass clippings from last year stored in plastic bags.  Straw baled on a farm.  Organic matter that will blend into the soil, enrich it and give it better composition.  Before it does that, it will suppress weeds and keep the soil beneath it cooler, helping plants fight the extremes of summer heat.  An all purpose good deal, mulch.

    A columnist referred to the 4th as the happiest of holidays.  It has sparklers, band music, cookouts, fireworks and family gatherings.  As for me, a solid northern European intellectually, I find it a sober holiday.  Our government, at its least competent level in decades, has not made tiny, forgivable, do over mistakes; no, they have blundered on the world stage as well as the domestic.  They have tanked the economy, made citizens suspicious of Washington, politicized the judiciary and made WC Fields and Mark Twain look like optimistic boosters.  On the foreign affairs we have reversed and three upped Teddy Roosevelt.  Now we speak loudly and shoulder nuclear RPG’s.

    In light of this July 4th is, for me, a time to redouble my own efforts to bring down these clowns (apologies to Larry Harmon, mentioned earlier) and to change policy at the national, state and local levels.  My own focus now is the natural world, the world that can go along on its own without human interference, if it does not have human interference, that is.  In times past issues of war and peace, civil rights and economic justice were stage front in my political world.  They remain critically important, but I choose to pass that torch to another generation of activists.

    On a lighter note I look forward to charcoaled hamburgers, potato salad, corn on the cob and cold watermelon when Kate comes home.  We also have a cache of sparklers to set out in the yard and light.  Star spangledness will live on in our Andover backyard.


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