• Category Archives Great Work

  • A Tea Master Selects Objects

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    44 bar steady 29.83 2mph WSW windchill 43

         Waxing Crescent Moon of Winds

    The snow mass has begun to recede.  Our north facing property retains snow longer than our neighbors, but the snow over the firepit area has shrunk below the top rail of the fence.  The temperature today gives us the general trend, though we may have a “major snow event” next week.  These late snows don’t last.

    The gardening season will begin soon and I’m ready to go to work.  Check on my baby trees, finish the firepit, begin the permaculture planning. 

    Had a break through on the Weber Collection tour.  I will use the notion of a tea-master preparing a tea ceremony for guests unfamiliar with Japanese art and its long traditions.  Together we will choose items that will give each of us a once in a lifetime experience together.  Let’s wander through our collection of possible tea objects and decide what will work best.

    The Great Work is many small works.


    Art and Culture Great Work 📎and tagged

  • Getting Rid of All the People

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    12  bar rise 30.37  0mph NNE  windchill 12

                New Moon (of Winds)

    When I was young, I visited my mother’s parents in Morristown, Indiana.  My grandpa Charlie Keaton was a character and grandma, his wife Mabel, was a bit loony.   She had some very cool children’s books though and one, the title I can’t recall, involved a Weatherman who somehow let loose all the winds at the same time.  The book had pictures of him flying the skies trying to rebag the winds.  The bags had colorful ribbons and he was an old, gnarled white-bearded man.  March always reminds me of the Weatherman.  And Mabel.

    Watched an hour’s worth of “Aftermath:  zero population” on Nat Geo.  Kate has the book The World Without Us which has the same premise.  Both imagine the world if humans just vanished, what would happen.  Toxic chemicals would release, zoo animals and pets would escape or die, nuclear reactors would melt down and so on. 

    The concept has me riveted right now, but as I watched the program I began to feel uneasy.  Granted we are anthropocentric. Granted that anthropocentrism has caused a hell of lot of problems for the planet and especially other animal species we eat.  Granted that we could and must find a way to flow with the movement of nature rather than push against it.  Having stipulated all that I can’t help but stand up for my species.  Humans are a successful animal. That may not be all we are, but it is certainly what we are.

    These programs feel anti-human to me and that steps over the line.  We have a responsibility to ensure our own survival just like every raccoon, cockroach and hippopotamus.  With our level of consciousness and awareness of our impact on our environment we have a positive ethical responsiblity to live with rather than against the planet, yes; but, we need to eat and breed and grow, too.

    The Great Work is not to eliminate humans, but to figure out a way for us to turn ourselves in alignment with Gaia rather than against her.


    Great Work 📎and tagged

  • The Days Look Potent

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    26  bar rises 29.93  5mph  NNW windchill23

           Waning Crescent of the Snow Moon

    The angle of the sun has changed; the days look potent, ready to burst open and let plant life smash through winter.  Even the snow today has a futile, last gasp appearance.  It is not the snow fury of midwinter when the drifts pile up and driving snow blinds motorists, making the home a cozy refuge.  Yes, temperatures will plunge the next couple of days, but we know this is just the Hawthorne Giant reluctant to let go his grip on the land.  The Oak King has already seized the season, opening the eyelid of nature wider and wider until one day soon the snow will melt and the ground begin to thaw.  Then, all hail breaks loose.

    This drama, the back and forth of seasonal change, is not felt in the tropics.  I remember the struggle my brother Mark had explaining snow to his classes of Thai students learning English.  How to grasp cold and frozen water falling from the sky when all you know is wet seasons and dry?  As a child of this land between the Rockies and the Appalachians, the vast Midwest, and as an adopted son of the northern reaches of it, the seasons long ago seeped into my bones.  The sun’s countenance changes and I know it; I know it in the animal part of my brain that tells me when it’s time to migrate toward the growing season or to put up stores for a coming winter.  The subtle variations between late season snow and the early spitting of snows in November have deep meaning for me.  We are, all of us, practitioners of meteoromancy, attempting to tell our futures through cloud cover, length of day and temperature.

    I would have it no other way.  Visiting the tropics is  wonderful, a chance to see another life way, another adaptation to the planet’s many faces, but to live there, to wipe out lifelong learning about spring and its puddles or summer and its heat, does not appeal to me.  This has been and will be my home.  As I said the other day, I am kama’aina of the heartland, a child of the Upper Midwest on the North American continent and this is where I belong.


    Faith and Spirituality Great Work Travel 📎and tagged

  • Kama’aina of the Heartland

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    15  bar rises 30.17  2mph WNW windchill9

        Waning Crescent of the Snow Moon

    “People who love soft methods and hate iniquity forget this, that reform consists in taking a bone from a dog. Philosophy will not do it.” – John Jay Chapman

    I would add to Chapman, it often means a taking a bone from a vicious dog and a strong one.  That’s why it’s fun.  And dangerous.

    Just made an attempt to sign up for the Sierra Club’s political committee for this election year.  I want to put my hand back in, but with Taoism as my mentor this time, rather than liberation theology or neo-marxism.  We’ll see what that means if I get selected.

    Slept late today.  Still getting used to the center of the continent. 

    One realization I had while in Hawai’i is that I am kama’aina of the heartland, the center of a large landmass, the actual geographic opposite of island life.  As a child of this land, I relish significant even sudden changes in weather.  The cycle of planting, growth, maturity, harvest and a fallow time is as essential to my Self as it is to the rhythm of life here.  I am, in every sense of the word, an American.  A Midwesterner.   A Northerner.  Each of those geographic identifiers impacts key aspects of my person, my approach to life and my deep values.


    Great Work Our Land and Home Politics Travel 📎and tagged

  • The True Radicals of Today Are Conservatives

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    7:45AM.  Bright sun.  Blue water.  Breeze off the ocean.  Mourning doves coo.

    The mourning doves have had it goin’ on the last week.  Males walk up to a female, bow, stomp their feet, then spread their tail feathers.  Oh, yeah.  I saw that move before.

    Last post from Da Fish Shack.  My bags are packed and I’m ready to go.  Just 12 hours until my jet plane.  Da Fish Shack check-out is 10AM and my flight doesn’t leave until 8:15 PM so I have time to do some more sightseeing, shop, visit the museum in Lihue, have lunch and dinner.

    One point of comparison I forgot between Da Fish Shack and the Hyatt was showers.  At the Hyatt the shower was an ordinary shower in a tub, found in most hotels.  Here at Da Fish Shack showers are al fresco although with appropriate screening.  Kate suggested I use flip-flops when I used the shower.  Although I would not want to take showers outside at home, here in Hawai’i’s wonderful climate, it provides a note of adventure to a routine task.  You can hear the surf and feel the wind all over.

    On driving back last Sunday night to Da Fish Shack after supper in Wailua, I turned on NPR.  Guess who was on?  Garrison Keillor and Prairie Home Companion.  Right here on route 56 headed north toward Princeville and Hanalei.  This morning I read the NYT while I ate breakfast.  Lead story in travel?  Skiing on the Gunflint Trail.  

    Something I’ve started rolling around.  It appears to me that the true radicals of today are conservatives.  No, not the George Buckley, Russell Kirkland variety or the neo-con versions that got us into this damned war, but conservatives who focus their conservative tendencies on species and eco-systems, on cultures and life ways.  These eco-conservatives are in fact conservative over against enlightenment liberals,  free-market economists and raging bull capitalists of multi-national corporate organizations.

    In tandem with this thought, which still percolates, is another.   Rather than the nexus of evil, the world’s faith traditions are vast resources that represent the human heart and mind at its most integrated, its most daring and its most compassionate.  Yes, the religious institutions that accrete around these faith traditions often become like the coral reef, rigid and sharp, but the faith traditions themselves preserve the world’s oldest stories and humankind’s most radical dreams. 

    When anti-religion dogmatists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens rail against these institutions, all they are doing is raising the enlightenment flag of REASON.  Well, here’s the big news guys, REASON is not all there is.  In fact, reason works its magic by dividing and parsing, by reducing the world to manageable portions, to forumlas and laws.  Not a bad thing as far it goes, but turn the process on its head and move out toward the whole, toward life and the solar system, the galaxy, the cosmos. 

    These things are.  And, they were before science and reasons and they will be after science and reason has passed away.  They do not need to consult either Newton or Einstein to go the speed of light or engage gravity.  It is this whole, the buzzing, blooming whole that is most precious and it will not be dissected because there are too many variables, too many data points moving in too many disparate directions.

    And so forth.


    Faith and Spirituality Great Work Politics Travel 📎and tagged

  • The Tao and the Islands

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    7:41AM  Cool breeze.  Overcast. Calm ocean, no surf. 

    Last full day in Hawai’i.  Time has passed more slowly for me than usual.  Often, I go on vacation and the next thing I know I’m back on the plane headed home.  This trip a variety of circumstances have slowed things down, among them Kate’s illness and my decision to get the full resort experience at the Hyatt.

    When I arrived last Saturday at Da Fish Shack, I was already on Island time.  Having a place this close to the ocean did, as I’d hoped, attune me to its rhythms.  Surf comes in, goes out, comes in, goes out night and day. 

    Nighttime breezes off the ocean cool the land to perfect sleeping weather and mountain breezes move the air during the heat of the day.  The slow warming of the day gives way to pleasant, dark nights with no traffic and no metro glow to dull the view of the stars.

    Last night I realized the true character of this little place.  It’s a Hawai’ian hermitage, a small cell on the ocean where the soul can come for a rest and rejuvenation. 

    The immediacy of ocean, mountain and lush plant life call out for malama ‘aina.  It’s not surprising that the first Hawai’ians heard the call.  Our home in Andover gives me the same sense of connection to the land, a place where Kate and I have, over years of gardening, become na kama’aina. 

    The Tao almost becomes visible here on Kauai.  That is, the ebb and flow of the cosmos, its inevitable course, has so much evidence on this ancient island, already long eroded and heading toward a new life as an atoll, then its permanent one as a seamount. 

     Here in Hawai’i land emerges from the ocean with hot rock and vitality.  Rain and the ocean combine with the wind to create soil.  On the soil plants take hold, sending out roots which further fracture the lava, creating more soil.  The island moves off the hotspot and this erosive process takes over as the primary shaper of the land. (excluding bulldozers and cement) As furthest along in this process of the main high islands, Kauai has the feel of a hermit, ravaged by time and wrinkled, yet bearer of the earth’s wisdom. 

    A few weeks here is only enough to catch a glimpse of the message Kauai has for us as we hurtle forward in our terraforming experiment.  The message may be, whatever happens, the earth herself will survive.


    Faith and Spirituality Great Work Travel 📎and tagged

  • Malama ‘Aina

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    When night comes, Maui or Pele or one of Them pulls the curtain fast.  Dark.  Stars.  Where there was light.  Fast.

    The Hawi’ians Great Work (see Thomas Berry’s book of the same name) was to manifest Aloha in their treatment of the land.  Malama ‘aina means to care for the land as one would a family member. 

    The land provides taro, the staple of the Hawi’ian pre-contact diet.  As a taro plant matures, offshoots known as ‘oha grow up around the plant and, in time, create new plants.  This gave Hawai’ian the word ‘ohana, family.

    The pre-contact kama’aina (kama=children, ‘aina=land, therefore, native born) “honored nature and the ‘aina as a possession of their gods.” from the Limahuli Garden self-guided tour booklet.  Over time this took the form of ahupua’a, a method of land division that ran from the coast into the heights of the mountains.  In essence an ahupua’a divided the islands by watershed.  This division allowed for self-sufficiency since each ahupua’a had fresh water from its source, usually a waterfall high in the mountains, land suitable for various kinds of agriculture and living along the gradient from mountain to shore and a spot from which to set out into the sea to fish.

    At the Limahuli gardens the NTBG wants to restore the Limahuli ahupua’a.  The gardens begin near the ocean and continue, in three large reserves, all the way to the source of the Limahuli stream which runs through the garden on its way to the sea.  On the garden tour the NTBG has recreated a large section, 5 beds, of taro irrigated in the traditional manner through small ditches connected to the stream, the guided through a series of waterfalls and sluice gates onto the taro beds.  As I walked among them today, the sound of the running water melded with the quiet but energetic plants to create a sense of peacefulness and abundance. 

    Watersheds as a political unit is an idea that’s been kicking around the environmental movement for some time now, but has not gotten much traction.  I’ve always liked it and the ahupua’a gives a real world for instance of how it could work.  I worked out the watershed for Andover.  It begins in Lake Mille Lacs and focuses on the Rum River as it heads into the Mississippi at Anoka. 

    Think what it would be like if that watershed was a state senate district and two state house districts.  Imagine congressional districts composed not of gerrymandered counties and chunks of counties, but as an agglomeration of watersheds.  Imagine the citizens of these watershed districts imbued with malama ‘aina.  Don’t know about you, but that sounds substantial to me.


    Great Work Travel 📎and tagged

  • So, This Guy Trips and Falls in the Ocean

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    7:12PM  Night.  Had the weird experience of seeing Oscar winners announced at 4:30PM. 

    Tripped and fell in the ocean.  Got wet. Of course.  Mumbled.  Then, ah, what would one expect when in the ocean.

    Have a burgeoning collection of coral, have found few shells here.  

    This morning on the way to Hanalei I had just passed the taro field after crossing the one-lane bridge and there in a field was a painted pony with an egret sitting happily on his back.  A few miles further on I noticed a field with horses had several egrets.  Is there something about their relationship? 

    It looked like a fable.

    The tao continues to make inroads into my thought process.  It’s almost Platonic, in that this feels like stuff I have always known.  My intuitive processes have led me here, in spite of my rational faculties which spent so many years concentrated on Christianity because I wanted to read religion in my own cultural idiom.  It didn’t occur to me that my own personal faith language may speak in a different tongue than the Judaeo-Christian.

    Here are a few things.  All things are one.  This means, in simplest terms, that things that may seem separate, light and dark, good and bad, men and women actually compose a whole when we realize each is necessary for the other to exist.  Without light, no dark.  Without women, no men.  Without bad, no good.  Those of us married to the Western logical paradigm which has the law of excluded middle, something is either this OR that, this concept may seem troubling, even scandalous.   As Alan Watts points out in Watercourse Way, our dichotomized thinking has lead to idealism which imagines that good must made bigger and bigger until there is no bad left in the world.

    As one whose path has followed that line of thought, it becomes clearer and clearer to me why Christianity surprised me with its intellectually sophisticated approach to reality.  Christianity linked up so well with my leftist politics because leftist politics are based on the linear view of time, a time that runs out and therefore seems to demand an ending; an ending which may be good or bad.  Yikes!  Better work for the good one. 

    All over Kauai there are churches with signs: Jesus Is Coming Soon.  If that’s your paradigm, that the big guy is on his way back and watch out, then you have to work on yourself and on your society to make sure that good triumphs over evil.  This is not true only of conservative Christians; it is true of liberals, too.  This thinking made me sick.

    How?  I began to see the world in black and white terms, with them over there and us over here.  Taoist thought helps me reintegrate myself, to find some of them here and some of us over there, until, gee, we all look like part of the same world.

    My first intuition of this came in high school when I wrote a bad poem, The Test.  In it I questioned the nature of a god who only gives a person 7o years plus or minus to determine how eternity will be spent.  The math didn’t work for me.  Not long after that I knew that if I could describe one flower I can describe the whole universe.  Today I discovered that Lao-Tze said, “If I sit in the house, I have the whole universe available to me.”  Hints of this way of seeing the world.  But I couldn’t put it together.

    So, I backed into it all by leaving Christianity, then becoming more and more Celtic.  When I found Unitarian-Universalism, I found Emerson.  His essay Nature demands that we find our own relationship with the gods today, rather than rely on the experience our ancestors.  Emerson and the Celtic embrace of cyclical time lead me further and further away from a progressive view of history, until it began to recede as the dominant view in my thinking.

    When I began to start art history, Chinese and Japanese art captivated me.  In studying them, I began to search in the various schools of thought that inspired the aesthetics of these two cultures.  The art that grabbed me had Taoist influences.  Song dynasty landscapes.  Chan Buddhism teaware.  Zen Buddhist prints. Chan Buddhism comes from Buddhism’s collision with Taoism in China. 

    As I do, I began to plow backwards, into Confucius and then more seriously into Taoism.  What had long attracted me finally began to occupy more and more of my thinking and, even more important, my heart.  Now I’m diving deep and it just may be I won’t come up at all this time.  At least not as the me I’ve come to know.

    Oh, well, if you read this far, it’s your own fault. I’m on a tear here, I know.


    Faith and Spirituality Great Wheel Great Work Travel 📎and tagged

  • Its Prettiest 5.1 Million Year Old Face

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    4:37 PM here.  81.  Sunny.  Clear.  Just another…

    Kate and I just got back from a trip to Waimea Canyon.  Clear this time. 

     Along the way we stopped at the Kauai Coffee Company Visitor Center and Museum.  Talk about underwhelming.  And not just because I shifted to tea a while back.

    The video explained how they took a 3,400 acre sugarcane farm with 400 workers and transformed it into a coffee estate with the same acreage and only 57 workers.  The magic ingredient?  Mechanization.  They have designed mechanical pickers and pruners.  The pruners are necessary because the pickers can only pick coffee berries at 4+ feet and below.  With the mechanization they can harvest 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.   This is, I got the impression, a good thing.  Fertilization, on Kauai’s rich volcanic soil, and irrigation, because Kauai’s rains come at an inconvenient time of year, winter, round out the why did I stop here in the first place list.

    We also stopped at Waimea Plantation Cottages for lunch.   We stayed there in 1998 and Kate has not forgotten a significant fact.  NO air conditioning.  When asked if they were air conditioned, our waiter looked bemused, “No.  No AC.  You have to go to a hotel for that.  Or, you could stay in the cabins up in Kokee State Park.”  

    Which reminds me that when Kate needed meds late in the evening, I asked the concierge whether there was a 24-hour pharmacy.  She looked at me with another bemused expression and said, “This is Hawai’i.” 

    Waimea Canyon had its on prettiest 5.1 million year old face today.  Red cliffs, sinuous streams and water falls so thin they get buffeted by the wind.  We drove on to the Kalalau lookout, near the end of the road, got out and went over to the railing which looks down into the Kalalau valley.  Ancient Hawai’ians lived there and in the 60’s and 70’s so did back-to-the-land types.  The state moved them out a while ago.

    Spectacular doesn’t described this lookout.  Knife edged walls of eroded stone creat a u-shaped valley with a beach and ocean view at the northern end and a steep 2,000 foot cliff face at the southern.  The lookout is atop this cliff so the view shows the valley below and the Pacific stretched out to the horizon.  It is in this valley where much of the Jurassic Park movies were filmed.

    We’re back now for the evening and night, then we check out tomorrow morning.


    Great Work Travel 📎and tagged

  • Long Boarders Paddling in the Bay

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Kate and I went into Lihue the back way.   A remnant of a volcanic cone stood between us and the ocean. The road wound back and forth, over one lane bridges and beside small farmsteads with NO TRESPASSING signs.  Can you imagine living in a place where folks felt like they could just walk onto your land? 

    Even 15 years ago when Kate and I came here the first time there was the beginning of the ohana (family) movement.  It has blossomed and resulted recently in some big gains for indigenous Hawai’ians.  It also fuels, and is fed by, a not too subtle hostility to haoles (strangers).   The beach sign at the County Park here had several slogans, Go Home!, Give back our land! written on it.

    I feel in turns sympathetic, even empathetic, and annoyed.  Empathetic from a justice perspective, knowing how we annexed Hawai’i and how our treatment of the indigenous people here has mirrored the despicable record on the mainland.  Annoyed because I have begun to see the earth as our mutual responsiblity and therefore all land and water as inherently the domain of all.  I too can love these islands, this ocean and cannot be denied these sentiments because of my geographic origin or the color of my skin.

    Over dinner Kate and I watched long boarders paddling around in the bay (in Lihue) and paddlers pushing outrigger canoes, four of them, down the beach head and into the bay.  Our waitress said they hold competitions on the weekends from Hanalei to Lihue to Waimea, a long way. Not so long, though, when you consider it was in outrigger canoes that the first Polynesians found the Hawai’ian islands.  An amazing feat when you consider the vastness of the ocean and that there were no road signs in the water.

    Lunar eclipse hidden by clouds. 


    Great Work Travel 📎and tagged