• Category Archives Great Work

  • Liminal Zones

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Sunny.  Blue.  Temp perfect.  Relaxed.

    Cyber gremlins here, as on Maui.  Not only is this connection expensive, it’s episodic and occasionally slow.  OK.  Done wit dat.

    Last night the moon was nearly full and Orion stood high in the sky with her.  The moon was bright, but in the way only the moon can be, nacreous and gentle, not harsh and brilliant like the other great light in the sky.

    A large chunk of black lava provided a seat as the ocean pounded in at high tide, wave after wave after wave.  This ceaseless, persistent character of the ocean erodes the land, our habitat to make room for more salt water.  A graphic of the sea mounts and islands in the Hawai’an chain, all the way out to Kure, some 1600 miles from Hawai’i shows them growing smaller and smaller until, after Nihau, most of the former islands are now sea mounts with nothing above the surface.

    Liminal zones have always fascinated me and the shore, where ocean and land meet is no exception.  Being a light skinned Northern European the daytime beach holds no interest for me, but the night time beach is ideal.  There I can meditate on the convergence of these two great elements, water and earth, and watch a third, the sky, at the same time.  At night there are few to no people and little heat.  A moment made for me.

    This morning we went to Koloa and took Kate to the doctor. She does not like to go to the doctor, go figure.  Anyhow the local guy agreed with her that she has a sinus infection, faxed a prescription to Long’s Pharmacy and off we went to Lihue for the drugs.  We got them and drove back to the Hyatt where I dropped Kate off for her lectures.

    Now I’m just kicked back, after getting the server to recognize me again.  Later.


    Faith and Spirituality Great Work Travel 📎and tagged

  • Liminal Zones

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Sunny.  Blue.  Temp perfect.  Relaxed.

    Cyber gremlins here, as on Maui.  Not only is this connection expensive, it’s episodic and occasionally slow.  OK.  Done wit dat.

    Last night the moon was nearly full and Orion stood high in the sky with her.  The moon was bright, but in the way only the moon can be, nacreous and gentle, not harsh and brilliant like the other great light in the sky.

    A large chunk of black lava provided a seat as the ocean pounded in at high tide, wave after wave after wave.  This ceaseless, persistent character of the ocean erodes the land, our habitat to make room for more salt water.  A graphic of the sea mounts and islands in the Hawai’an chain, all the way out to Kure, some 1600 miles from Hawai’i shows them growing smaller and smaller until, after Nihau, most of the former islands are now sea mounts with nothing above the surface.

    Liminal zones have always fascinated me and the shore, where ocean and land meet is no exception.  Being a light skinned Northern European the daytime beach holds no interest for me, but the night time beach is ideal.  There I can meditate on the convergence of these two great elements, water and earth, and watch a third, the sky, at the same time.  At night there are few to no people and little heat.  A moment made for me.

    This morning we went to Koloa and took Kate to the doctor. She does not like to go to the doctor, go figure.  Anyhow the local guy agreed with her that she has a sinus infection, faxed a prescription to Long’s Pharmacy and off we went to Lihue for the drugs.  We got them and drove back to the Hyatt where I dropped Kate off for her lectures.

    Now I’m just kicked back, after getting the server to recognize me again.  Later.


    Faith and Spirituality Great Work Travel 📎and tagged

  • Meeting Luke, the Clydesdale

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    We had Kashi cereal and papaya for breakfast this morning.  They no longer stock the refrigerator with absurdly expensive items and wait for appetite to increase their income, so we loaded it with stuff we want.  Much better.

    Outside Lihue we went into a shopping center and bought some supplies:  water, Zicam (for me) and yogurt.   Headed north we passed the airport and found Wailua where we turned mauka (toward the mountains) and headed up to Opeeka’a Falls.   We ate our yogurt there and discussed the day.  Kate decided we should head back toward Poipu beach and stop at the Gaylord Plantation.

    Way over-priced.  Some nice stuff, but boy they did see us coming.  We bought nothing, but did meet Luke, a Clydesdale who was on carriage duty.  What a great animal.  Gentle, soulful, big.  He reminded me, a lot, of our Irish Wolfhounds. He’s way too big to fit in the suitcase.  Darn it.

    Lunch was take-out eaten at a pavilion overlooking a long, bare expanse of Pacific.  It was high-tide so the waves lapped up further and further.  Several Bantie roosters shared the pavilion with us.  After lunch a couple of young Hawaiian girls came along and picked up the roosters who seemed to like being carried, their red-wattled heads going this way and that.

    While hunting for shells, I slipped into the water and went on, only in ankle deep water.   Found a couple of gorgeous shells, a cowrie, brown with speckles, and a spiral shell with little horns along the spirals.  A bit of beach glass worn smooth by the waves and a nice piece of drift wood.  Beach combing, for some reason, can occupy me for hours on end.  I love trudging along, looking down, finding this or that.

    After lunch we went to the visitor center of the National Tropical Botanical Garden, http://www.ntbg.org/ .  We will tour Allerton Gardens next Saturday.  They were the royal gardens when Hawai’i was a monarchy.   Around the visitor center are several garden beds with various local and endemic plants:  sugar cane, plumeria, bougenvillea, Sumatran cherry, banana, many palms.  Of the plants native to Hawai’i over 80% are endemic and all of these are under pressure from encroaching environmental change.   Most of the plants we associate with Hawai’i like palms, ginger, plumeria are not native and they have tended to crowd out the local species.

    Tonight there is a large welcome dinner for the crowd here to study infectious diseases. I’m invited. Oh, boy. 

    Later.


    Garden Great Work Travel 📎and tagged

  • Opah, Mahimahi, Ron Baton and Star Fruit

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Today Molokai, across the channel, stands clear and tall, well, sort of tall.  No clouds to shroud its ancient volcanoes.  The ocean is calm and no breeze stirs the palms.  Blue, blue, blue Hawai’i.

    As has happened 61 times for me, the planet has moved on in its orbit, past the spot that marks February 14th.   Today Kate and I bid aloha to Maui and aloha to Kauai.  I’ll write next from the Hyatt Resort on the south shore of Kauai.  On the 24th I’ll move to Da Fish Shack when Kate leaves for home; it’s on the north shore.

    Last night Kate and I made our way to Mama’s Fish House, where, to my surprise, they now recognize us as repeat customers.  I say made our way because Kate drove and I navigated using the %$@!! navigator in my phone.  Which got us thoroughly lost.  When I drive, my inner navigator works fine, I’ve found Mama’s several times, but as a passenger I got thrown off and relying on technology didn’t help.  Sigh.

    We did, however, make it.  It was Valentine’s Day so Mama’s had a full house.  The bay on which Mama’s sits is the best wind surfing in the world (or so they claim) and the waves and wind were monster yesterday.  Must of have been good.  We arrived after dark. We have seen the windsurfers, propelling themselves on surfboards fixed with sails, leaping from wave to wave.  Very balletic and colorful.

    Mama’s is a polished island wood structure with walls made of drift wood and flotsam, the occasional old door and whatever struck the owner’s whimsy.  Inside, it has rattan light shades and tables covered with blue cloth decorated with white ginger leaves.  They have expanded by 100% since I’ve been there, but managed to retain the intimate South Sea ambience.

    We had an Island meal of opah, mahimahi, lauau pork, seared banana, ron baton lychee nut, star fruit and a surprising fresh coconut.  Quite a birthday treat.  The waiter brought out my macadamia nut crisp with six candles, special ones Kate brought, the flames burned the color of the candle.   A happy birthday.

    On the way back we ran into a road construction project that cost us 30 minutes at a time when we were both pretty sleepy.  Not fun.  Looked to me like they were laying fiber optic cable.

    Final, and sad, note.  Maui has grown too much.  It is too crowded, too built up and  not as much fun.  The road construction was only the last inconvenience created by this development during our trip.  I will be glad to get to Kauai.

    Aloha.


    Family Great Work Travel 📎and tagged

  • Is It a Time to Advance or Retreat?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    27  66%  18%  1mph ENE bar29.95 falls windchill26  Imbolc

                Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    A strange, sometimes troubling struggle has broken out in the responsible section of my Self.  The sometimes subtle, sometimes hammer blow obvious skirmishes have me puzzled about what actions to take, if any.  The formal study of Daoism I began a couple of weeks ago has begun to push me in a way that I hope will resolve this matter, or at least give me a way to handle it.

    The struggle is over politics.  As I’ve written elsewhere politics defined my life during my late teens, 20’s, 30’s and early 40’s.  That is to say, by my junior year in high school I was a political animal, a politician and an activist.  President of my high school class for my freshman, junior and senior years, a favorite teacher pushed the Little United Nations Assembly of Indiana to accept me as the presiding officer for the 1965 Little United Nations.  The year before I represented the Republic of Chad.  In the fall of 1965 we protested the CIA recruiters on the campus of Wabash and I never looked back. 

    Draft eligible and permanently active from that point forward I got involved in civil rights, student rights and anti-war politics. I was a student senator for three years at Ball State, then ran an unsuccessful campaign for president of the student body.  I helped organize and lead anti-draft and anti-war rallies, marches and teach-ins. 

    In seminary I pushed the seminary on anti-war politics, became an early feminist and began a ten year involvement with anti-racism training.

    While working at Community Involvement Programs as their janitor and weekend counselor, I lived in the Stevens Square Neighborhood.  There I got involved in neighborhood level politics, leading an effort to push General Mills out of the community and organizing the Stevens Square Neighborhood Association.  Made a lot of friends and few enemies.  It was fun.  This was the 1970’s. 

    In 1978 the Presbytery of the Twin Cities Area hired me to work on the West Bank as a community minister.  I got involved in community based economic development, building affordable housing, organizing against unemployment and for broader community involvement in the management of philanthropy. 

    In 1984 I left the West Bank and took over urban missions for the Presbytery which expanded the arena of action.  In various ways I was still at it when I met Kate in 1988. 

    Over all this time I had a very active hand in DFL politics working at the precinct, congressional and state levels.  Then I left the Presbytery in  1991.  Not long after that Kate and I moved to Andover.

    Since then my political work has shrunk to near nothing.  I send the occasional e-mail, make a phone call, show up (sometimes) at the precinct caucus, but I’m part of no ongoing, organized effort to make or change policy.  The whole climate change issue is fraught with political issues of real import, many of them.  I’m interested, especially in water related issues and Lake Superior.   Yet I do almost nothing.

    The 1960’s was a “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” era.  My political superego came into maturity in those times and this notion became a benchmark for my own assessment of responsible behavior. 

    Thus, the struggle.  I wonder, sometimes, where this guy went, this political guy. It’s like he crawled under a rock, but that’s not so.  No, this is a struggle that has moved back and forth in my mind since the move to Andover.

    Now the Daoist studies I’ve engaged propose a way of addressing it.  Daoism suggests that there are times to retreat and times to advance, times which call for more yang, times which call for more yin.  The wise man, Daoism says, adjusts his inner life to what it calls the temporary conditions, the way the Tao manifests itself.  This area of Daoist studies has my attention right now.  I’ll keep you informed because this struggle is not productive and it’s not over.

              


    Great Work Memories Politics 📎and tagged

  • Gulf Streams Stops

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    -3  44% 17% 1mph WSW bar30.24 rises windchill-5  Winter

                     Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    The day continues cold.  We reached -15.8 this morning at 6:24AM.  Since then, we’ve gained about twelve degrees. The windchill all day has been brutal. 

    Kate finished cushions for the window seat in the kitchen.  I put Hilo on it while it was on Kate’s worktable to see if she would like it.  She seemed nervous.

    This week I’ve slept like a rock.  An odd phrase, but apt in the nothing till morning meaning I intend here.    

    Yesterday I finished Fifty Degrees, the second in Kim Stanley Robinson’s eco-thriller/near future sci-fi trilogy which begins with Forty Days of Rain and ends with Sixty Days and Counting. His Mars trilogy is better as science fiction; it’s wonderful; but, this trilogy strikes closer to home and imagines a time period when we pass some of the tipping points talked about in the news these days.  The Gulf Stream stops because the thermohaline barrier breaches.  Weather patterns swing wildly from one extreme to the other.  The West Anarctic Ice Shelf begins to leave land and drift into the ocean, causing several centimeters of sea level rise. 

    The book imagines a loose team of scientists, policy wonks and politicians who in their various spheres create solutions and fight to realize them before the worst becomes worse.  There is also some Buddhist material, too.  The characters are interesting and make the books worth reading, as was true of the Mars trilogy.  Robinson imagines, however, a science  triumphant, even dominant which I find suspicious.  It was industrialists and technocrats who got us in this mess, with our individual complicity, and to imagine that rationalism, their primary tool, will dig us out seems suspect at the core.

    The facet of it that rings true to me is the paradigmatically American approach of, keep trying until solutions come.  That the scientific will play a necessary and perhaps even lead role I don’t question.  I just don’t want an approach that leaves aside the many individual decision makers, those of us in our cars and at home with our dishwashers.  This is science-fiction, not political-fiction, or a novel of manners (though it has some aspects of this genre), so the focus is congruent, yet I want to see us stretch all the way out for solutions.


    Great Work Politics 📎and tagged

  • A Sacrament From Mother Earth

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    35  91%  23%  2mph ESE bar29.06 steady windchill34  Winter

                  Last Quarter of the Winter Moon

    Something I’ve thought about for a while.

                                                       A Sacrament

    water from our well, bread from local grain and cheese from Minnesota, candles

    Light candle(s).

    Say to all:  See this light, not as symbol, but as energy brought to us by fire from the sky and fire from deep beneath the earth.  By the light of this fire we see this water, this bread, this cheese.

    On the table or altar have the pitcher, a cup, a plate with bread not broken and cheese not broken

    Water in an earthenware pitcher. Pour into a single cup.

    To each person as they take the cup:  take this and drink it, not as symbol, but as substance, the necessary liquid of all life as blood is the necessary liquid in our body.

    Break the bread and hand pieces to each person

    Say to all:  Eat this bread, not as symbol, but as substance, the marriage of earth and sun which gives birth to grain.

    Break the cheese and hand pieces to each person

    Eat this cheese as a gift from one mammal to another, food which sustains us.

     Say to all:  This water, this bread, this cheese transforms itself even now into your body, one link in the sacred chain stretching back to the one-celled organism, our common ancestor, and forward to our descendants, who may be as different from us as we are from that one cell.  This is a miracle.

    Go now in peace. 


    Faith and Spirituality Garden Great Wheel Great Work Our Land and Home 📎and tagged

  • A Gospel for These Heavens and This Earth

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    -10  59% 23%  0mph  WSW bar30.36  steep rise windchill-12  Winter

                  Waxing Gibbous Winter Moon

    How low will it go?  Pretty low.  These are the days for staying inside, watching movies, drinking hot chocolate, reading and studying.  I’ll do all these tomorrow.

    Driving into the MIA this week, on Monday and then again today, I saw sundogs.  A sundog creates a rainbow like lens, in this case pointing toward the west.  As I understand the presence of a sundog indicates ice crystals in the air which act as a prism.   Just checked, that’s right.  Also, it says they always form at 22 degrees on either side of the sun. 

    Both days an earth centered faith was on my mind, as it often is these days, in fact, these last few years.  It is not, perhaps, most accurate to say earth centered, since the  sundog itself is a good reminder that any faith which grounds itself in the material reality of this world also relies, for life itself, on the heat and energy received from the sun.  So, I don’t know, perhaps a solar system centered faith.  The earth’s orbit around the sun orchestrates the seasons and the moon pulses the oceans through bays and onto beaches with tidal flows.  Even a rudimentary understanding of the creation of the solar system acknowledges the intimate nature of our relationship to other planets that share Sol.  So, there’s a puzzle here in terms of where to focus, but I don’t think the parameters are much wider than the solar system, although there is the whole star formation, interstellar dust cloud thing which makes us part of the ongoing galactic reality. Even so, those relationship are distant both in distance and in terms of direct affect, if any on our daily lives, where Sol makes our life possible and its planets are our neighbors.

    Anyhow, more thoughts on the notion of Ge-ology.  What I might write, rather than a Ge-ology, is a gospel for these heavens and this earth, a faith focused on the intricate and delicate and complex interdependence between and among life and the inanimate yet critical context in which it exists; a celebration of the wonderful and the awesome we experience each day.  Our heart beats.  The winds blow.  A lover or a child smiles.  The sun warms our face.  We recall times that seem long ago; we think and imagine.  The stars shine.  Snow falls.  These are miracles which do not require walking on water, a Pure Land or a night ride to Jerusalem.  No exodus or burning bush. 

    Gospel means good news.  I see this faith as good news for all humankind and for all living creatures on our planet.  It means we can turn our face toward each other and our hands toward the earth in love, not lust. 

    As I see it, this is the ur-faith, the one prior to all the others.  It came naturally to indigenous communities through faith traditions like Taoism, Shintoism, Native American faiths, the faith of those who painted Lascaux and who erected Stonehenge.  Are all these the same, no, of course not; are they all similar in their insistence on loving attention to the reality within which we dwell and move and have our being? Yes.  This is the ur-faith because it was one we all know in our deep heart; it is not exclusive, if you want to follow the path of this ancient faith and the way of Jesus or Buddha or Shiva or Mohammad, there is no conflict. 


    Faith and Spirituality Great Wheel Great Work Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • A Root Cellar in Andover

    Posted on by Charles 1 Comment

    19  65%  26%  1mph W  bar30.10 rises  windchill19  Winter

                    Waxing Crescent of the Winter Moon

    I like Sundays.  My workout schedule is 6 days a week and Sunday is a day off.   Much of my life Sunday, especially Sunday morning  was a work day, so to have the day off is a special treat in my world. 

    Of course, like most Sundays, I will write today and spend some more time on the garden plan.  Might even watch a play-off game.  How ’bout them Packers?  Winning in the snow.  Northern football.  Brett Favre comes from Mississippi; must have been a shock when he first started in Green Bay.

    Yesterday I looked over plans for root cellars.  Kate and I plan to put one in this next growing season.  I’m not sure where quite yet.  One book recommends digging into a hill, which makes sense, and I have a hill right outside the window here.  The problem is, if I dig it by hand, there are difficulties.  First order of business is to kill and remove the poison ivy.  Then, since this hill has seven oaks trees on its crest and a few stubby ash and oak there will be woody roots to remove.  Not to mention the actual digging.  That could be a good workout, though.

    None of this is impossible, of course.  The question is whether I’m willing to do all the work by hand.  If we put the root cellar in the back, we could have a backhoe come in and do the heavy lifting, then all we’d have to do is frame it out, make steps and a floor, put in a roof and call it a cellar.  To get to the hill area I’d like to use, any heavy equipment would have to come over lawn and I’m not sure I want to do that.

     Noticed in the paper today that the election has world attention.  As well it might.  Having spent the last presidential election in Singapore, however, I can report that even then taxi drivers gave a damn about whom we elect as President.  Many foreign nationals are eager to see the Bush era come to an end.  I’m with them. 


    Great Work Our Land and Home 📎and tagged

  • What is the Great Work?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    54  44%  37%  2mph windroseW  bar steady dewpoint32  Waxing Crescent of the Snow Moon   Ordinary Time

    Thomas Berry, an ecological visionary and Passionist monk, has written several books concerning the way forward to a healthy planet.  He summarizes his ideas in The Great Work. In this wide ranging, readable book, Berry, a cultural historian, defines a great work.  The Greeks had a great work in applying reason to the natural order.  The Romans had a great work in bringing order to their known world.  The Chinese have a great work that has created a humane and human scale culture.  Native Americans have a great work in their symbiotic relationship with the natural world in which they live.

    Our Great Work, the work of our generation, lies yet before us.  It is this:  create a  relationship between human beings and the planet in which our presence is at least benign and at best a positive good.   I have begun work, in fits and starts, on this, because in the end it has to be each of us, acting in concert, who will call this new world into being. 

    There are many actions we can take, but they need to move beyond recycling and buying green products at the grocery store.  Here a few I’m trying to work into my life:  being a locavore (eating food grown in our region), rationing trips by car and plane, planning for a hybrid car as our next purchase.  In the main though I believe I need to become political again, working on my old issues of economic justice, but this time in a way that will move a double agenda forward, justice for those left behind captialism and rethinking our economic order so that it develops positive signals for ecologically friendly business decisions.  More on this at another point.


    Great Work 📎and tagged