• Tag Archives ritual

  • So, Why Get Up At 4 AM?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                 Waning Bee Hiving Moon

    As the bee hiving moon fades to black, it makes way for the last frost moon.  Our last frost up in the northern exurbs of the Twin Cities comes somewhere between May 15 and May 20 on average.  May 15 is the date I use because I haven’t experienced a later frost, but it could happen.  That’s the date the tomato plants go out, the kale and chard I’ve started (though I’ve also sown them outside, too), the beans, cucumbers and various annual flowers.

    Tomorrow the Celtic calendar, the one I follow in addition to Gregorius’s, turns over to the season of Beltane.  More on that Sunday.

    Today is a rainy, cool day unfit for working with bees.  Good for transplanting though, but I don’t have any more to do right now.

    There was a royal wedding, wasn’t there?  No, I did not get up at 4 am for a breakfast party to watch it, nor did I watch the 68 minute version Kate and Mark watched yesterday.  I did scroll through pictures on the LA Times website.  Got me wondering.  Why all the attention in this, the most plebeian of powerful nations?

    I stipulate the romantic notion of princess and prince, especially the steroidal version that involves a commoner elevated by marriage to royalty.  We have a 5 year old grand-daughter who would have no trouble seeing herself in Kate Middleton’s role.  Middleton, eh.  Even the name reeks bourgeois. I stipulate further the fascination of any marriage as a symbol for that fragile, wonderful, ordinary miracle of love.  I know these two play a factor, a large factor.

    But 4 am?  What’s up with that?   Rather, who’s up with that? Continue reading → Post ID 10196


    📂This entry was posted in Garden Holidays Humanities Weather +Climate World History 📎and tagged

  • A Tradition Thousands of Years Old

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    59  bar rises 29.84 1mph NE dewpoint 46 Spring

                 Full Moon of Growing

    Kate and I observed a tradition thousands of years old tonight.  We got out the Haggadh, put the horseradish, cilantro, haroset, boiled egg and lamb bone (we substituted a chicken leg.) on a Seder plate.  A small egg shaped cup held the salt water, the Elijah cup stood ready for his return.  We had matzoh and we hid the aphikomon for the dogs.  They were, as the passover ritual suggests, children unable to inquire.   We worked together within the limitations of our planning and availability of certain goods to produce a meal, to read the Seder ritual and retell the timeless story of enslavement and liberation, the Exodus.

    This Haggadh, the language and shape of the Seder laid out in book form, is hopeless.  It is sexist in the extreme; sexist where no law of faith requires it.  Kate suggested I write one of my own and I just might.

    It is a little strange for me, metaphysically speaking, to participate in this ritual with solemnity, which aspects of it requires.  Once I get in the flow of it though the ritual and the language and the songs blend together and become a hymn to the life of a people and their relationship with their highest and best sense of themselves.  It is a story which acknowledges human frailty as well as longing for the divine, bravery as well as fear.  It is their story, but also our story.  Bondage, liberation and the struggle for freedom belong not just to the Jews, but to everyone.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Family 📎and tagged

  • No Matzoh In Andover

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    47  bar rises 29.95  3mph N dewpoint 40 Spring

                         Full Moon of Growing

    No matzoh at Festival in Andover.  No lamb.  The butcher said, “We only carry it for holidays.  Can’t push it any other time.”  Not many Jews in Andover either, apparently.  This is a big one for Jews all over the world, but not big enough to create a market for lamb at the local supermarket.  No matzoh cake meal either.  All this  means a trip to Byerly’s tomorrow.  Plenty of Jews in and around Maple Grove.  It’s all about the market.  Plenty of Hindu’s in Maple Grove, too.

    I don’t imagine there are many Parsi here either.  Oh, well.  It’s probably fair to say that I’m one of a handful of the Taoist inclined, too.  May be a few Chinese folks and me.

    Just finished the Saturday workout.  This one’s a bugger and my muscles can tell they’ve had hard use.  It’s the only way to make’em grow and the only way to compensate for age related loss of muscle mass.  It’s important, but it doesn’t make it easy.

    The world is a strange, big place.  While I did my resistance work, I listened to a program on the evolution of the planet.  The irregular catastrophic punctuations in her history gives me pause.  The Chixilub meteor, fissure eruptions, super volcanoes, snowball earth, a few ice ages here and there and pretty soon, as Evertt Dirksen used to say, you’re talking about real extinction events.  It may be that we have come on the scene in a period of Pax Terra; but, based on our history as a planet, I’d say it won’t last.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Great Wheel Great Work 📎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. 


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Garden Great Wheel Great Work Our Land and Home 📎and tagged