Milt Greek's Blog: The River of Life - Posts Tagged "spring"

My wife and I share an annual tradition on Saint Patrick’s Day with a friend of Irish-Polish descent. We open for the first time an Irish Red Ale brewed the previous fall while snacking on cheese and crackers, then watch children perform Irish stepdancing at a local pub. It is a fun way we celebrate the new season as the sleeping Earth awakens in the growing light.

Our friend and I worked together on community volunteering and activism. While she and I shared many common values, we also disagreed strongly on key approaches and issues—in my mind, I was the more mild one, our friend more outspoken, more aggressive in her approach.

As our community work evolved, I found that many of the people I had started working with took disagreements to heart. Some of my relationships were strained because of it. But even though our friend and I would disagree strongly, at the end of each argument I knew that our friend remained our friend. Our relationship was stronger than the disagreements and I am grateful for that.

To reaffirm our appreciation of each other, we began to meet each Saint Patrick’s Day, enjoying the home brewed beer and sharing community traditions that have stood the test of time. In doing so, we take part in a seasonal celebration that is as perennial as gardeners like us sowing our early crops in soil warming in the rapidly increasing sunlight. Just as these traditions have endured, we seek to strengthen our relationship with a celebration of what connects us.

Such small traditions may seem unimportant in the view of the problems of the larger human world, but it is in the smallness of our lives that we often find the greatest strength. Lasting communities survive because people put aside their differences and build relationships of mutual respect, trust and affection. Traditional Catholics, neo-pagan seekers, sober-minded puritans and secular thinkers may argue over whether Saint Patrick’s Day is a holy day, one taken from earlier traditions, a blasphemous excuse for drinking or a meaningless religious tradition without any merit, but the importance for communities is that people set aside differences and remain loyal to each other. Seeking to win an abstract argument will not perpetuate one’s values; building a lasting community based on those values will.

When I moved to our town over two decades ago, I started hosting potlucks for neighbors and volunteered for projects to strengthen the community. Over the years, my wife and I devoted a lot of time and money to volunteer work. My wife has also been a loyal friend to others, providing emotional support and companionship to many women throughout her life. As a result, we have become surrounded by a community of friends and neighbors.

We are told that acting for a higher good is an act of self-sacrifice that costs the person much and only gains intangible rewards in some other world. I have found that is far from the truth; rather, to receive I must give. As sensitive people, my wife and I have often felt compassion that calls us to help others. By following our natures we have the good fortune that a caring community has formed around us, following the old adage that what goes around comes around.

By May Day, the increasing sunlight has made the day long and bright. Despite the old fashion cool weather this spring, the trees have buds opening into new leaves and a myriad of flowers—yellow, orange, red and purple tulips, purple money plants, blue and white violets, fuchsia and pale blue creeping phlox, purple redbuds, white and pink dogwoods, purple lilacs and purplish-red and white apple trees—are in bloom. The garden is providing the first tender greens and radishes, as it has most May Days since we began it in earnest almost ten years ago. We open Honey Golden ale we brewed a few months ago and share it with our friend from Saint Patrick's Day over a local salad of canned beets, boiled eggs and goat feta cheese atop Arugula with radishes, bread from a local bakery and rice burgers and a tart baked with local apples. To celebrate the season, our centerpiece is a four foot arching branch covered with large white crabapple blossoms that my wife placed in an old fashion white porcelain pitcher.

May, with the sowing of all-important grain for harvest in the coming fall, is robust with Earth’s fertility and the promise of the new season. In the Catholic tradition, May is the holy month of Our Mother with bouquets of flowers honoring Mary, Mother of God. According to neo-pagans seekers and many scholarly thinkers, in past centuries people celebrated May with fertility festivals seeking a bountiful harvest for the newly sown grain, including dancing around Maypoles. Our ancestors’ dancing and delight was not merely tomfoolery for their harvest-dependent lives; it was a celebration of the fertility of the soil and the seeking of the blessing of an abundant harvest to provide for the next winter.

For weeks in the woods, the birds have been mating and raising young. Beginning with territorial songs as early as mid-February, they have made nests and sought mates to begin families as part of the Earth giving birth to the new season.

One year, I saw two flickers sitting near to each other on a branch, facing each other and leaning forward, slowly moving their heads back and forth by the other’s ear. They took turns doing this, first on one side then the other, as if whispering sweet nothings. They sat, enraptured, for over an hour, closely sharing their time together. It seemed to me that they surely were experiencing the bliss of love, just as they would experience pleasure in eating food or fear of a threatening intruder.

Later in the season, a pair of flickers mated regularly for two or three weeks. The male would call to the female, who would fly to him and mate. Twenty to thirty minutes later they would repeat this, for hours on end, day after day, in an orgy of procreation.

As the season progresses, the mother lays eggs in the nests created as homes for this purpose, then the young chicks hatch and the parents are consumed with a whirlwind of parental caretaking, raising their children until the young birds venture forth into the large and mysterious world. Accompanied by their parents and other older birds, the young birds tentatively fly about the woods, with parents and family swooping in and cackling to protect them when the naïve, tired young ones land too close to potentially dangerous predators like me. The young birds grow older and move out from the woods where they were given life, perhaps making homes near their parents.

In nature, wisdom is embedded in lifestyles within the folds of the Earth. Sex is part of the sacred re-creation of life, taking part in relationships of love, with parents raising their young and watching over them as they explore the world outside their home. Do most young people in love want anything more for their families and futures?

Nature is intact enough around me that I can see lives in balance, where natural urges like love and sexuality are part of a larger, sacred re-creation of life that perpetuates the river of life into eternity. Sexuality, love and spirituality are in harmony in nature; only in the unbalanced human world do we encounter these urges as threatening to our young ones’ lives, as most parents of teenagers recognize.

Unlike chastity-minded puritans, I do not believe the sex drive itself is the source of troubles in the human world. In our out-of-balance society, men and women’s relationships exist within unconscious power-over structures where sex is degraded as “animalistic” while loveless sexual pleasure is often a private, cynical obsession. In this reality, many children suffer trauma and abuse that twists natural urges and damages the ability to have healthy, loving relationships. Our natural feelings exist within this jaded culture where we lack easy paths from young love into being parents with the resources and community support needed to care for a family. Meant to be a doorway into the bliss of being a parent in a happy, healthy and sustainable family, our natural attraction to fall in love and have sex often leads to heartbreak, single parenthood and many other hardships.

In the woods around me, where these natural urges are part of the sacred re-creation of life, I witness a wisdom greater than our patriarchal human constructs. In the balance of nature, there is harmony between spirituality, love and sexuality. However, most people pass by natural areas without considering the lessons we might learn from the joyous lives that flourish there during this abundant month of May.

The Dogwoods and Redbuds continue to bloom, with more and more trees budding out to create velvety lime green backgrounds to their white, pink and purple flowers. With a warm April ending in heavy rains needed to bring forth the early spring garden, we are at the very start of the “salad days” of May and June. On May Day, I took a vacation day to harvest some of the profuse outpouring of young greens from our garden. I harvested heirloom Arugula, Red Romaine and Grandpa Admire’s lettuces, grown from our own seed, and Beet greens, leaving Spinach, young Kale, Mustard and Turnip greens for the weekend.

For our May Day local meal, we opened a Honey Golden brewed in January, formed a salad of the day’s harvest with local Spinach and microgreen sprouts, made an Asparagus Quiche and had local Strawberries as desert. With the influx of salad and early spring crops, our daily meals will once again be filled with delicate, fresh, local foods.

May, in our region, is the time of the fertility of the Earth bursting forth, with many later flowers of spring soon to blossom, including sweet smelling Honey Locust and Honeysuckle. The Farmer’s Market and produce auction have a flush of seasonal foods, beginning a time of abundance of local food. Amateur gardeners like myself crowd into the garden shops and begin setting out tender summer crops like tomatoes, Basil, melons, and beans. For some of us, who sow cool-weather plants in the colder months of early spring, May marks the beginning of near-constant harvests.

For me, the magic of watching young plants grow from seed is mesmerizing. As a thinker, I often get caught in the falsehood that all things must proceed from a plan fixed through study and reason. Seeing a plant pushing its way blindly through the soil towards the warm sun, to become a mature plant and form seeds to perpetuate itself for future years contains the mysterious miracle of life in its essence. How many eons of time have passed with seeds sowing themselves into future generations in the river of life on Earth without humans pausing to understand the complexity of a sustainable natural community? How can I perpetuate this sustainability while harvesting from our garden both the crops to feed us and the seeds to provide for us in future years? Simple questions like these lie at the core of the challenges facing humanity.

At the same time that we are harvesting the first greens from our garden, our lives are filled with the children borne of the young mothers in our family and community. Two of the toddlers my wife cares for are children of a dear family friend and one is a six month old in our family. In addition to these, many more babies in our circle of friends have been given to us in the past few years, including an anticipated newborn this spring.

My wife, who dearly loves children and babies, is now babysitting six days a week most weeks. May Day is no different for us. After I harvested from our garden, shopped for local food at the Farmer’s Market, and prepared our meals, my wife and I cared for the six month old in the afternoon and evening. We both enjoy caring for the baby very much, who has been growing more active and observant and greets us with big smiles that touch our hearts. Just as having a meal of local food on May Day is a celebration of the joyous fertility of the Earth, spending time caring for this new life is a celebration of the wonders of human re-creation in the Earthly river of life.

In the Catholic tradition, May is the month of Mary, mother of the Christian god incarnate. Following the research of thinkers and feminist seekers, Mary is herself a retelling of the Mother goddess of religions prior to Christianity. As patriarchy sought the diminish the role of the sacred feminine from divine to mortal, the later patriarchal religion of Christianity took this Mother goddess and made her human, subject to a male, human-like deity envisioned by patriarchal priests. As this religion merged with older traditions, the fertility ceremonies marking the reawakening of the Earth were overlain with rituals honoring Mary, Mother of god. Traditions recognizing the joyous rebirth of the Earth and the fertility of spring were submerged under the Christian traditions.

Yet, for those close to the Earth and the human community around us, May and the cycle of birth and rebirth is a time of the celebration of the fertility of the natural and human communities. The gifts of spring and new life are for us to celebrate in their abundance. The privilege of being able to have enough land to grow some of our own food and the profound privilege of having new life in our family and our circle of friends calls for tremendous gratitude. Many people would long for a small plot of land to provide them a garden to tend; many more are lonely for the gift of young lives to celebrate the passage of time. My wife and I are fortunate to have these gifts of the fertile Mother in our lives, regardless of what words we use to describe the source. Taking the time to be grateful for the profound fertility of the sacred feminine that flows in our Earthly river of life is essential for my spiritual growth.

May has seen the full flush of beautiful flowers, filling the air with sweet smells. Delicately scented pink English roses, along with blue irises, given to us by neighbors, have reached full bloom in early May and have begun to give way for later flowers. Aromatic Honey Locust trees have blossomed, filling the evening air with the smell of their nectar. In our hollow, the waterway is filled with a carpet of yellow buttercups in full bloom. Huge pink, white and red peonies also began to bloom in mid-May, which my wife and stepdaughter are bringing inside to make our homes fragrant with their beautiful scent.

Our garden continues to provide an outpouring of early spring greens. Arugula, spinach, lettuces and turnip, beet and mustard greens are abundant, providing us with salads and stir-fries. In the rapidly increasing heat, our challenge is to keep up with the harvest.

As the season approaches the end of spring, our food club is gearing up for the summer; new members have joined old and sales have begun at the produce auction. We will begin, as we do each year, around Memorial Day, hoping to bring early crops of sweet Strawberries and buttery Asparagus back to the members. In every way, May is living up to its traditional reputation as the month of fertility and new life.

Our Mother’s Day, a secular celebration of divine motherhood, was spent with the new Mom in our family. She, her husband and young baby joined us for a meal at a local restaurant, followed by dessert at their home. We chatted and celebrated the baby’s and family’s new life, which has already made a profound difference to us.

Toward the end of the afternoon, the young Mom posed for a picture with her baby, creating a remarkably beautiful image to remember the day. The young Mom had carefully chosen the clothes and setting. She wore an aqua blue full length dress with a delicate coral blouse and an embroidered lacey headband reminiscent of a tiara. The Mom held her baby on high on her hip in a classic Mother-goddess pose. The baby, dressed in a matching pastel blue sweater and bonnet knitted by a recently passed on great-Grandmother of the child with a pink blouse, looked out at the uncle taking the picture with familiarity. The two stood under a trellis with rose bushes on either side, flowers at the Mom’s feet and the green Earth surrounding them, including a vast tree in the background that, like the great-Grandmother who had knitted the sweater, has recently passed away.

As my wife pointed out to me later, the image is filled with archetypical symbols chosen unconsciously by the Mom. In the rural background, Mother Earth is evident as a life-giver bringing forth the new life of spring, just as the young mother’s body has miraculously created and is sustaining the new life of her baby. The same sacred re-creation of life is occurring simultaneously for many lives this spring, ranging from the sweet-smelling flowers of May to human children like those of our family and friends, all flowing together in the Earthly river of life.

The young Mom’s choice to the photographed under the arching trellis with her baby is reminiscent of the trellises associated with the marriage ceremony. Like marriage, the young Mom is making a commitment to her baby for life. Seeing the Mom dressed and posing with many archetypes of the fertile Mother-goddess, I remembered my wife saying years ago she had read that marriage was important to a woman in part because it was the one moment in patriarchy that she is recognized as a goddess.

Seeing the picture with all the unconsciously chosen symbols of divinity made me understand the importance that becoming a mother held for her. Though I have known the woman for over two decades and her Mom had spoken of how important motherhood was to her, it is only now that I am beginning to grasp the profound significance of her chosen lifetime commitment.

Early in my exploration of concepts of sacred femininity, I thought all women who became mothers were imbued as incarnations of the Mother goddess. The simplistic thinking that marks psychosis and early recovery about these symbols and energies resulted naïve expectations that created disappointments and challenges when I recognized that all human mothers are imperfect and vary enormously in their personalities and impacts on their families.

Plato’s writing speaks of ideals existing in another realm imperfectly embodied in our physical world. Everyone I have known, especially myself, are imperfect vessels in our seeking our life goals and our deeper, higher roles in life. Recognizing that the bringing forth of life, whether as a parent, family member, volunteer, activist or other, is the essence of good works has been central to my happiness and insight. Celebrating the fertility of the Earth and of women and considering the unfathomable eons of lives—human, animal, plant, and other—recreating ourselves helps me wonder at the heavenly aspects of daily life we casually pass by in the hubbub of events. In this light, pausing to commemorate motherhood in May is a crucial celebration in our workaday lives.

The season has been unusually hot for late spring and rainy, so lettuce has been growing rapidly, filling our refrigerator and rows at the produce auction. Arugula and Spinach have bolted, flowered and begun to set seed, which I will gather for next year once the plant has died. Mushrooms have been growing, providing the basis for soups and omelets. Using dead leaves from last fall, I have covered some of the area between the rows in our garden, acting as a weed barrier, a fertilizer and a way to retain moisture.

The produce auction itself has been active, but with unpredictable results. Our first auction for the club saw above-market prices for strawberries and asparagus and our buyer—an experience and crafty bidder—made the difficult decision to walk away with nothing, cancel the delivery for that night, and to add a later auction to our schedule. Following that, I went to a sparsely attended auction with an abundance of early crops and bought many strawberries for less than half the price at the market. It was the luck of the draw, and I know that I would have not been as wise as the buyer who walked away empty handed, but left our season’s budget in good shape.

Watching the woods, buying produce at the auction, natural gardening and harvesting wild crops like mushrooms has given me first-hand experience with how nature adapts to death. When I first began to sit in the woods and watch, I noticed how woodpeckers used dead limbs and trees as homes. I also saw that trees and other plants were constantly making the soil more fertile for future lives. As leaves and limbs fell and trees died and fell to the Earth, the work of their lives left a legacy that would make the ground more fertile for the generations that would follow them. Their lives were more than sustainable—they actually enhanced the future for their offspring.

I also saw that life came from death, creating an afterlife that was unpredictable but important. Mushrooms grew on dead wood, turning the death of trees into opportunities to grow new life and to help the process of enriching the soil. The trees themselves did not magically reincarnate from their own rotting carcasses, but rather sacrificed their physical bodies in death to provide nutrition to bugs, mushrooms, and other life living off their death. In turn, these entities would turn the rotting corpse of the tree into richer, more fertile soil from which new lives—including perhaps the grandchildren or great-great-grandchildren of the trees would flourish. I learned more from the wisdom of trees and of the Earth than any human teacher, and my human teachers have been brilliant lights.

As I grow older, I consider more and more my own legacy and what I can do to provide a better future for my family and community. This includes attending financial seminars by money-chasers who help me plan an economic future for me and my family. In a recent seminar, a money-chaser listed a series of economic challenges and approaches to life, ending with leaving a legacy after death. A virtue of money-chasers is that many consider what impact they want to have on the children, their community, and the larger world after they pass on; a failure of many money-chasers is that they only consider their economic impact, or seek to control others with that wealth.

A challenge for many sensitive people, such as artists and activists, is that we are often so burdened by seeking to live in a human culture that is at odds with our inner selves that we do not consider our impact and legacy on those we love the most—our children, our dear friends, and our community. We may spend many hours and a lot of what wealth we have to make the larger world a better place, to take part in consciousness-raising events, to protest the hardness of the money-chaser-violent-man-puritan culture that runs the larger human world, and to help make the ecological future better.

A sensitive person will suffer at the thought of the harm that money-chasers and violent-men do to the larger human world, with rampant pollution, the perpetuation of traditional hatreds and injustice, and the oppression of innocents. A money-chaser will complain that many sensitive people live only for today economically and do not consider our legacy in economic terms. In my own case, I would never have considered the economic impact I would have on my family and community had I not developed schizophrenia and retrained in computer work to get off disability. I would have pursued a much less materialistic life, especially had I not joined with my wife and her family. The middle ground of responsible economic living has much to learn from money-chasers and activists and sensitive people.

As part of my work with our food club, I attended a meeting that featured solar enterprise entrepreneurs and activists, who are seeking to find that middle ground. The keynote speaker was a woman who had, with her husband, started a solar business, helped create a green energy credit union and an investment organization to help fund and foster renewable energy. The merger of economic and ecological insight was inspiring, especially compared to the bitter greed of some of the money-chasers I work with, who both seek wealth in the vain attempt to find happiness and are miserable in living lives out of touch with the spiritual values of affirming life, family and community.

I sincerely believe that while these money-chasing puritan violent-men consciously believe that they are pursuing a life blessed by their deity, that their bitterness comes from unconsciously knowing that by doing harm to attain wealth they cannot “buy happiness.” For all their hard work, their happiness can only last as long as their purchases and attainments can salve their inner pain. Unless they can escape their materialistic, money-first mindset, they will never know peace, bliss or lasting happiness.

It is not easy to face the difficulty that lies ahead, or to try to find a balance between the greed of money-chasers and the economic poverty of activists and sensitive people. In my own case, being forced to find some compromises between the two extremes has been a very fortunate gift I received in the aftermath of my psychosis. However, that balance—essentially how we can care for ourselves and our families and communities while enriching the future of the Earth and future generations—is the essence of the challenge of our historical moment. For the answer, I always feel that turning to the Earth’s wisdom of life adapting to death is the deepest, most potent source of insight.

As the daylight increases, the warming Earth is bringing forth early spring flowers. Purple and white crocuses, pale blue periwinkle, golden yellow and eggshell white Daffodils, and lemony Forsythia are providing beauty in the midst of the still cold and dark season. While the human world is in the throes of an unforeseen and all-engulfing crisis, the Earth continues the annual cycle of seasonal life, untouched by the worries of the human world.

For decades, people in the circles I’ve traveled in have mentioned the inevitability of a new pandemic, worrying that the widespread use of antibiotics would evolve a superbug, untreatable by current medical knowledge. Others, unimpressed by claims that the human world had conquered the Earth and made it bow to the human god, worried that history’s lesson that plagues arise without warning would be ignored because of the widespread belief that humanity had overcome the challenges of all-encompassing Earth.

Coming into the local foods movement decades after it had taken a foothold in my community, I quickly became aware that it was preparing for times when our international supply of luxurious foods would be interrupted. Most people in my community, confident in the intricate vulnerability of industrial abundance, never consider if the food we consume is from the neighboring county or another hemisphere. As long as the complex and narrow supply chains bringing fruit from Chile or Hawaii and olive oil from Italy remain intact, the source is unimportant.

When I was drawn into the local food movement by high gasoline prices in 2008, I quickly learned how vulnerable my community was. Activists working towards sustainability and resiliency pointed out that our stores only had a supply of three days of food on the shelves and that our county’s food production could not feed our population. We were, in our ignorance, vulnerable to any crisis that would interrupt these world-wide supply chains providing an abundance of foods to our privileged communities. Among the many threats to our delicately maintained abundance, the likelihood of a pandemic was commonly discussed in the local food movement.

As the United States woke to a world-wide crisis that had dominated the world press for weeks, I found myself waking up as if from a deep sleep to the cause that had taken over my life more than a decade before. The food club we had developed over the last ten years and my hobby of gardening had brought me into the local and bulk food movements in my community, preparing me for the challenge we are currently facing.

One announcement followed another revealing that our sleepy ignorance had left our society unprepared for the rapidly increasing crisis. One after another organization announced changes or cancellations. The university I work at raced to implement plans for an all-online and remote coursework, community groups, ranging from spiritual to self-help to entertainment to restaurants announced closures. My own family cancelled plans for a family reunion meal.

Meeting with another local activist on our food club, I was reminded of the value of the networks the club had developed in our community. I realized that while the rest of the community was shutting down, we had the opportunity to help. I called our bulk food supplier the next day and asked him if their supply chains had been disrupted.

“No yet,” he replied, “But we are expecting them to be.”

Later that day I sent out an email to our club, letting members know that local food activists had been preparing for situations like these. This was followed quickly by order forms for rice, flour, sugar, cooking oils and other staples that my area cannot produce our own. Within three days, there were orders for as twice as much as we normally order in two months.

For our own resources, my wife and I made several trips to grocers, supplementing our stores of food from local sources and choosing a balanced selection of foods to deal with a long-term interruption of our supply chains. Following discussions with local food activists, I selected products that are from distant sources that are likely to become costly or scarce.

I’ve watched as top leadership have shifted from denial to sudden recognition that a devastating wave of death may soon engulf us. As dire predictions mount, I’ve reflected on what has been the carefully maintained denial by many in the United States. It is easy to believe what I wish if I avoid contradictory facts. If it served me, I could say that Moscow does not exist and unless I am taken there against my will I can reject any evidence as deception. On the other hand, I cannot act on the belief that I do not need food or water. Physical need cuts through denial.

For over a generation, most people living in the United States have not faced physical hardships that challenge cherished beliefs, leading to a culture out of touch with the essentials of life. The physical reality of a pandemics and living through waves of deaths are likely to break through these delusional walls in the same way that a decade ago losses in war and an economic downturn caused the last Republican president and his family to lose political power-over-others.

The covenant of bad works, which allows leaders to temporarily—and only temporarily—escape from natural justice, breeds incompetence, cruelty and narcissism. As a result, crises erupt as slowly evolving consequences created by the Earth and humanity respond to the quick, short-lived force of power-over. The suffering this causes breaks people out of their shells of denial and they reject the delusions they had about their hero, finally seeing that the emperor has no clothes.

Considering the likely political outcome of this crisis, I thought of a simple “equation”: Trump = W. The two individuals are twin tips of an iceberg of the same large hierarchy of white violent men, money-chasers and puritans. Hierarchies like these dominate the societies of most nations, living out the same story retold over the millennia of patriarchies: They ruthlessly gain power-over others, bring about suffering and injustice while ignoring real challenges until a crisis cause them to fall unexpectedly. It is a story of the larger human world that is witnessed, recounted, ignored and witnessed again. But it is not an indictment of a few very power-overful men; it is a measure by which money-chasers, violent men and puritans blame problems on the leaders they choose, rather than the lifestyle and goals that cause them to choose those leaders.

While the crisis in the larger human world grew, in our small and unimportant lives my wife and I sowed our garden under dark skies, as we have during spring for over a decade. Turning over the soil, adding compost and manure, and planting lettuces, arugula, mustard, spinach, kale, beets, carrots, turnips, onions and peas, we quietly took part in the cycle of life and renewal. The feel of cool, wet soil on my hands as we planted precious food gave me comfort and joy. While the human world careens into chaos and crisis, the simple acts of bringing forth life give both our bodies and our spirits strength. The hardships of the mortal world bring on threats and worries, but being embedded in the Earthly river of life gives practical meaning to each and every day. In two months our garden will be providing us life-giving food each day—a precious gift of the Earthly flow of life into eternity.

In the rapidly increasing sunlight of early spring, the warming Earth is bursting forth with new life. Joining the light blue periwinkle, bright yellow and white Daffodils and lemony Forsythia are rows of beautiful white Cherry trees—a gift from decades ago of a sister city in Japan—and purplish Sugar Magnolias. For the second year in a row, the Sugar Magnolia have escaped the hard frosts that normally burn their delicate leaves, a result of our changing climate.

Reaching up from the still-cool ground, wild onions growing amidst grass, ramps, garlic, Lemon Balm, arugula, lettuces, peas, and many other plants of the early garden dot the still muddy ground with green. As we did last year, I have gathered wild onion sprouts that are found as a nuisance throughout our community and with ramps and other ingredients fashioned the “Appalachian French Onion Soup” of my wife’s creation. The soup is made two weeks earlier than last year, a mark of how early the spring has come in this year’s annual cycle.

As individuals and small communities, we can do little to alter the progression of history that is causing climate change. It is up to us to adapt to these changes through taking part in the promise of the Earth’s river of life flowing into distant and unforeseeable future generations.

This spring, our friend with the Maple Syrup farm provided us with hope that such adaptation can thrive in spite of the challenges. After a year of tremendous personal hardship and need, our friend faced a so-called winter that rarely saw the true, lasting cold essential to Maple harvests. Over the past decade, our friend has adapted to the changing of winter in our community, relearning her skills and schedules to meet the needs of the changing season.

This year, overcoming her hardships with the help of friends and her own native intelligence, skills and toil, she returned to her work with the Maple trees, tapping trees, maintaining pipelines and boiling the freshly harvested sap into delicious, sweet golden syrup. Despite all the challenges, her adapting to the changing conditions succeeded.

“It has been the best year ever,” she told my wife. Reflecting on her overcoming of travails, she said, “I could write a book.” In a world of trials and tribulations, her story provides an example of hope for transcending humanity’s many woes.

As our state moved towards a stay at home order to slow the spread of the worldwide pandemic, my wife and I hosted our annual Saint Patrick’s Day visit with our friend. We opened our Irish Red ale, which was light and enjoyable, and spent hours visiting with our friend. While the world increasingly turned its attention to the growing problem, we discussed our lives, our community and people we know. After I left to prepare for bed, my wife and our friend continued to talk and, saying their goodbyes, gave each other a non-socially distancing hug.

As the pandemic broke through the perennial political self-obsession of US media and increasingly crashed through the self-satisfied but disgruntled entitlement of our national consciousness, our local community began to respond with a gratifying strength. Using networks our food club had established to support the local economy, the club is in the midst of delivering over $1,500 of food to about 30 households. Our bulk food provider recorded over 300 orders, including ours, and, step-by-step, began to methodically fill the orders while maintaining its low prices and consistent quality. The club also began ramping up for the new season, reaching out to our summer produce supplier and preparing for contingencies for a new business model to deal with the challenges of the pandemic. To our community’s good fortune, the local growers promise an abundance of healthy, delicious produce in the face of the struggles of the outer world.

After about ten days of my wife and I remaining at home—where I worked remotely during the day while my wife spent her time cleaning our house and cooking—my wife decided to travel to her daughter’s family home to help babysit while her daughter took time to catch up on housework. Following discussions I had with my wife, I drove her out to stay at their home for several days, avoiding the risks of coming and going. I left my wife at the doorstep, not approaching the young family. I waved at the baby girl in my stepdaughter’s arms, calling out my love for the young life who could not understand why I didn’t greet her with a hug and kiss. My heart tugged at me, seeing the sadness in the eyes of the dear baby girl.

At the end of the week, when I go to pick up my wife, we plan a non-socially distancing meal. I have offered to make Appalachian French Onion soup from freshly harvested wild onion sprouts and ramps, along with rosemary roasted roots of potatoes, carrots, turnips, onions, sunchoke, sweet potatoes and daikon radishes. For all the precautions that I take so seriously, the prospect of a meal with loved ones in their remote country home is a gift that I cannot turn down.

The pandemic will undoubtedly take its toll on humanity and the arrogance of the urban human god, who constantly proclaims his omnipotence over the natural world. Those of us adults who survive will remember this time of worry and trauma in ways that those too young will not know. Yet, like all generational events and trials—the American war in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, the Civil Rights struggle, the fall of the Soviet Union, the crisis of 2001 and the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—these times will fade from future memory. The Earth’s river of life will proceed, bringing forth new life each year, celebrating the abundance of summer and fall, and returning to dormancy in expectation of the spring and the promise of the Earth. As time passes, the greatest threat to humanity will remain humanity: our ethno-religious and class wars, our rampant industrial consumption and patriarchy’s ruthless subjection of many women and children to the dictates of men who are bullies and sexual predators in their families or communities.

Waiting in a drive in teller at a bank, I happened to see an old friend and local food activist in the car next to me. I rolled down my window and called to her, catching up briefly on her life and trials. As we talked, she mentioned seeing the Japanese Cherry trees and other flowers of spring.

“Isn’t it funny,” she said, “All the beauty, like all this isn’t happening.”

“Yes,” I replied, “After all, for the Earth, it’s just another average day.”

“Yeah,” she said, turning away and pausing to consider the Earth’s providence.

Since midwinter, sunlight has been rapidly increasing, though wintry weather of beautiful snowfalls and seasonably freezing temperatures continued through most of February. Near the beginning of March, warmth began to return, bringing with it melting snows and, amid the melt, heavy rains that swelled to fill riverbanks and, in some cases, overrun some low-lying fields and roads.

After a cloudy and cold winter, the deluge was followed by sunlight bursting forth for several days, warming the still cool ground and bringing forth the first flowers of spring—yellow, white, and purple crocuses, blue and yellow miniature irises, ivory white snowdrops, and yellow and pinkish-purple Hellebores. Though still busy with schoolwork, my regular job, and ongoing projects, I managed to turn some of the soil in our long-neglected garden and my wife and I planted peas and spring greens—Arugula, Spinach, Mustard, Kale, and three kinds of lettuce—Grandpa Admire’s, Red Romaine, and a mixture of leaf lettuces. Most of the seeds we planted are heirlooms that we have kept and bred for years. I also cleared our asparagus bed of the small sprouts of invading plants, giving the two-year old asparagus opportunity to begin new growth.

Returning to the Earth’s flow of life—which we are also celebrating through weekly babysitting of my stepdaughter’s two-year-old daughter—filled me with joy that nourished me like cold water quenches thirst after hard work. In the Earth’s flow of life into eternity is the answer to the questions that we all seek but accessing that joyful and sacred source can be difficult in the workaday world for those, like me, who are mysteriously lucky enough to have received these gifts. An important part of receiving this gift is having begun a news and social media fast for the past six weeks, which has helped clear my mind of the continual hardships of the larger human world.

In my schoolwork, I am seeing once again that many people project onto the world and their larger world projects what they wish for their own lives. A social work professor sent an email for a meeting that intended to bridge university community members with people from other political perspectives and I attended a very small online meeting. The main organizer was a young co-ed whose desire for political harmony stemmed from severe rifts in her family. I mused that her desire for peace in her family was being projected onto the world and wondered if her well-intentioned energy might better serve her in facing the problems in her own life rather than seeking to save the huge US society. Both are laudable goals, but if she seeks to improve the world without facing her personal challenges head on, she is likely to face failure in both areas.

Meanwhile, the Social Work Department and profession loudly stated ideals of social and economic justice seem to be largely responses to social workers ourselves being cogs in the machine of social injustice. Yet, even their ideals contain many examples of social injustice, ranging from an “ethics” discussion where a white male authority tells a woman of color that she needs to accept and adjust to a client she cares about staying in an abusive relationship, despite the centuries long institutional rape and exploitation of women of color by white men, and a film supposedly portraying social and economic justice issues that had barely any women present and which featured a spurned woman vindictively lying about being raped. Most of the film had fictional characters and the Social Work Department head related to me that one of the real-life characters—one of the “heroes”—was having an affair with the wife of another real life “hero” and was thought to have arranged the husband’s death. I wondered how the department chair could be so blind to the murderous vindictiveness of the man, who was politically aligned with her concepts of “social and economic justice” and present a movie that romanticized him.

I was shocked at the depth of patriarchal culture permeating curriculum that claims to be insisting on social and economic justice, however, I came to realize it is the habit of seeking the solution in the larger world, in part, that lies at the heart of the problem. My wife, relating a conversation between her and her son, helped me recognize how the social work faculty seemed to easily overlook these things that disturbed me so much.

My wife and her son spoke of the problem of “teams” in the larger world. People with power-over-others recruit teams of followers and we are supposed to follow them loyally, compromising with evil around us to fight a greater evil in the outside world. We are never supposed to consider what would happen if a man who could kill his lover’s husband was given even more power-over-others, nor why a movie that trumpets “social and economic justice” contains stereotypic views of women commonly repeated by sexual predators. We are to ignore these smaller-world problems as we build a structure that will defeat a “greater” evil.

In my own life, during my brief involvement in local politics I witnessed corruption in my tiny microcosm of the world. In the political world, idealistic people mixed with bullies and corrupt functionaries, forcing the idealistic people to turn a blind eye to the actions of their allies. Witnessing this corruption at the county level in this sparsely populated area, I both marveled and shuddered to think of the mountains of corruption hidden beneath the hierarchies of power-over in the larger world. The Shadow of our Collective Unconscious, as Jung described it, ensures that the towers of power-over will always fall.

The Earthly flow of life through eternity exists in the Earth, in families and communities, with limited reach outside the harmony of a happy, healthy family. The human Goddess—in the sense of the incarnate sacred energy of our families re-creating ourselves through eternity—is bounded into small groups, with teams of all sorts compromising with the bullies and corruption around this flow.

If I join one team of power-overfull people against another, it accomplishes little, especially if there is violence. If “Our” team harms “their” team, we attack the sacred flow of Earthly life in both communities. The question is how we who are practicing good works communicate our good will to those on the “other” team who, likewise, want most of all a better future for their loved ones? This includes, most importantly, expanding the sphere of healthy, happy, and peaceful face-to-face communities living sustainably as part of the Earth.

Sowing seeds in the Earth, celebrating the spring, caring for our family and community, and living in harmony with the Earth, while doing as little harm as possible to all life—these are the tasks that can consume all the time allotted to our short lives. In the feeling of the cool soil of our garden, the quiet of the spring evening, and the joy we experience in caring for the next generation, the flow of life renews our spirits while the larger Earth spins of its own accord. Within that much larger flow of life through unimaginable eons lies the fleeting history of patriarchy and the rule of human power-over-others.

The rapidly increasing sunlight has continued from the spring equinox through mid and late April, bringing with it a succession of beautiful flowers, blossoming trees, and young sprouts. We gathered self-seeded Arugula that had wintered in our garden along with wild onions that grow throughout our town, followed by ramps, a garlicky early green that we used in omelets. In our garden, tender young plants including peas, red romaine, and oregano are rising from the still cool soil towards the life-giving light. The first asparagus stalks from a bed we started three years ago are appearing, hopefully marking the start of years of productivity.

The spring in our area, always beautiful, has been remarkably so this year. Pale purple periwinkle, bright yellow and white daffodils, beautifully scented ivory hyacinths, and lemony Forsythia have been followed by reddish purple money plants, yellow tulips, Virginia bluebells, white Star Magnolia, and pinkish-purple Sugar Magnolia. As usual, the beauty of the Sugar Magnolia trees was suddenly cut short by a hard freeze in early April. However, following the cool-down, the warmth returned and the Earth blossomed in earnest once again with abundant flowering Crabapples, purple Redbuds, and White and Cherokee Red Dogwoods. Amid the beauty, we experienced “Dogwood Winter” in true form—a cold snap that brought light snow to our area, forcing us to cover our tender young greens.

I asked another gardener whose family is from southern Virginia if she has heard of Dogwood Winter and she quickly spoke of her Mom’s “three winters of spring”—Redbud, Dogwood and Blackberry. Since Redbuds and Dogwoods bloom at the same time here, I imagine that her Mom’s Redbud Winter coincides with the hard cold that normally freezes our Sugar Magnolia’s in early or mid-bloom in late March or early April.

“My Mom insisted that there were three winters in spring,” she said. So far this year, her Mom appears to be correct.

In the midst of Dogwood Winter we drove out in the early morning to pick up our Granddaughter from her parents’ home. Patches of mist and fog came up from rivers and streams, shrouding the budding trees in velvety, white-blue clouds. As we drove the toddler back to our home, we pointed out the fog, the beautiful blooming trees, and cows and horses on the hillsides. The child was delighted with the new experiences, as we shared the beauty of the Earth with our young loved one. Seeing the Dogwoods, Redbuds, and other trees amidst patches of fog through her young eyes, we felt the magic of the living world that she is experiencing for the first time. And, of course, her friend Peter Rabbit came to our feeder, providing the youngster with even more delight—a gift that our older, more calloused hearts could experience through her love of life.

Paired with this beauty was a correspondence with an old friend, who I had not heard from since my early days of college. She comes from a puritan background, as many of the people from my original county do, but she and I have always had an affinity, a forthrightness, and a mutual sense of trust and kindness towards the other. Quickly we began to catch up on decades of life passed and to my great grief she related very hard trials endured in childhood and adulthood.

At the outset, I told her that I was glad that her faith had survived her trials, since I have known that faith can be a source of strength to all people. Long ago, I realized that our spiritual beliefs are rarely chosen. Rather, the connection that we have with the sacred is chosen for us by circumstances and our deepest natures. Her trials, like so many women and some men, were caused by hurtful, selfish men, and we found, despite our differences, a commonality that women should be empowered and older women should be respected, rather than tossed aside by the mainstream patriarchal culture.

As we talked, I saw that the universality of patriarchal oppression in the family frequently unites many of us across political divides—the divides themselves are ways that fellow travelers like my old, trusted, and kindhearted friend and myself are separated by patriarchal polarity.

The unity of oppression of the family and women by patriarchs and men of all political stripes—regardless of the lip-service so many men pay to respecting women and children in liberal or conservative ways—struck me. I considered that in my own frustration, I have vented about political issues without acknowledging the ideals of others.

Accordingly, when my old friend mentioned frustration with politics, I asked her to tell me of her ideals and how she applied them, knowing that we would again find common ground. We did so once again in the ideals of caring for children and others around us in a conscientious, family-and-community-oriented way.

Reflecting on my perspective, I emailed her this simple summary:

What I try to say, when I am doing it well, in my writing and blog is "Take part in 'Woman's Work' in daily life--it is a good thing to do and it will make your life happy and fulfilling."

My old friend, hard working and conscientious, far from me in background, culture, and other aspects of life, wrote back:

“Ah, well forgive me I have worked the last 3 nights and days so I am a little slow. But truer words were never spoken.”

As always, the modesty and simple acceptance of women doing the work of life speaks volumes for the casual disregard that our culture gives to bringing forth life in our personal world—yet none of us would have grown to adulthood or have experienced true happiness had not others, mainly women, provided it in abundance to us.

A twelve-step group I am a part of makes it clear that the group is focused singularly on the problem of addictions, explicitly saying that it does not endorse or support any other cause, political, religious, or otherwise. As I consider the commonality of my friend and fellow travelers through patriarchy, I wondered if there could be a way to singularly focus on the empowerment of the Feminine in the family, particularly of the women and children who so often are taken for granted at best and, tragically, frequently harmed by varying forms of abuse by bullies, who are mainly men. A common part of the essential is that our children and families must be supported and protected by our communities. If this goal and this goal alone were attained, it is likely that most of the unnecessary suffering we endure would fade into the past.

The longer days of May brought early spring greens of two kinds of Arugula, Spinach, Mustard, and young lettuces thinned from the rows, providing daily salads. Around Mother’s Day, the variegated green and white blades of Solomon’s Seal, a gift to my wife from a daughter of hers, carried flowering white flowers under them. Shortly later, pale bluish-purple irises bloomed in abundance, followed by a profusion of pink roses, honeysuckle bush flowers, and whitish lilacs burst forth, filling the garden and our home with the sweet smells of May. By late May, pinkish white peonies were blooming in abundance, which my wife brought in as a tabletop altar to her beloved mother, who passed after almost seventeen years of living with my wife, her family, and me.

My wife recalled as a very young girl taking irises given to her by her Mom in a procession with other girls bearing flowers as an offering at the grotto of Mary at their parish. She recalled the reverence she felt for a woman’s ability to give life and recognized her own special nature as a young girl who would grow into a mother taking part in the sacred re-creation of Earthly life.

Years later, my wife is a Mom not only of her children, but also a second Mom to several younger women, and a devoted friend to many. After decades of being a stalwart friend, a second Mom, and long-term babysitter to children and grandchildren of friends, my wife has one of the most robust webs of life I have ever seen. Still in contact with friends she has known in her youngest days, in high school, college, and throughout her life, she is one of the most loyal and nurturing people I have ever met. She simply says, “This is my activism.”

At the same time, I am continuing to have dialogues with people who I know who are from different political and cultural backgrounds. With one woman, we discussed her life as someone who responded to hardships in her childhood and adulthood with a Christ-like forgiveness, eventually helping a family member who had mistreated her feel remorse for his actions, though at great cost to herself. I told her, hearing of her travails and faithfulness, that her life story reminded me of a feminist theologian who said that in the millennia of Christianity, women had been living as Jesus while receiving the abuse and cruelty of men. I did not know how she would react. She took it as a high compliment, as her intention is to follow the example of Jesus.

Like many people, I faced a childhood filled with toxicity and some forms of abuse, which damaged me and made me angry. Some of the abuse and a lot of the hostility I encountered was from puritans who condemned me for being different from them, other abuse came from those closer to me. As I matured and sought to overcome my anger, so that I could be a better family man, I found it necessary to leave my original web of life, forgiving and forgetting an unhappy childhood. Rather than sacrificing myself, I devoted my life to good works, including being the best family man I could—which is not particularly good, despite my own intentions. I knew that the abusers, including the puritans, justified their abuse as somehow necessary for my own good, or a natural consequence of a fault of mine, so they would never be able to repent—the abusers, especially the puritans, believe that they are the chosen ones and they need not apologize to a fallen person like me.

When faced with the Christ-like question, who do we make sacrifices for? many people become caught up in maintaining relationships with toxic others in our families, communities, and romantic relationships, in oftentimes vain attempts to help the toxic people find a better life. For me, I made the decision that if I were to sacrifice myself, it would be not to die for others, especially those who had harmed me or others, but to live for my family and community, while doing as little harm to those outside of these centers. For all my failures on this path, and there are many, they would have been much greater had I remained in toxic relationships with the people from my past.

My wife does not believe she should sacrifice herself. Rather, her abundant love of life and younger people springs from her heart in increasing measures as she becomes older. Though she works hard to provide love and care to others, it is a joyous, if tiring, calling for her. Her ability to provide the mother’s love of May is an act of self-love as well as love of others, rather than a sacrifice. Her essential work of life, so constant throughout the decades, is rewarded by the love and companionship of those she has cared for.

For myself, the hazards of sacrificing myself and those around me to the toxicity of those in my original web of life has passed from my life, as have the people who harmed me during that time. However, my new life has created a different hazard: being consumed by activities in the human world away from my family. Unlike my wife, who has centered her activism on her family and home, I have ventured into the community around us, pursuing work and community goals that occupy my time. As a result, my expansion in the work and community world, which I trumpeted to myself as acting on faith, has lessened my connections to my wife and her family, including my step-granddaughter. I see this in my step-granddaughter’s greater distance from me, in an uncertainty with me that she does not have with my wife, and with an emotional distance from others in my wife’s family.

Years ago, my I wrote a story about families who wanted peace being driven into the deep woods to escape being used into war, as so many young people are. It is an ancient story, though many do not realize how common it is. At a peak in the story, I planned a speech by a matriarch, seeking to preserve her family and children from the emperor’s men who pursued them. After taking time to prepare us, I asked my wife to speak from her heart, asking her what she would say to the men of the warring patriarchal world. I wrote down what she said and used it as the speech of the peace-loving matriarch.

My wife spoke of the folly of war, but also said that there had been a time that men had to leave the home and hearth of their families to deal with the outside world. In our quest to make the world better for our families, we had become lost, failing to understand any longer the joyous needs of the family we had once belonged to. Though it was time for men to return to the hearth and home and give and accept the love of families, we no longer understood the importance of that sacred origin of our lives. The long-forgotten hearth was what men needed to focus on, for it is the heart-felt center of the family home.

What benefits it a man if he gains the world but loses his soul? What benefits a man if he gains power-over, wealth, and prestige but loses his connection to his family? To receive the gifts of May—the companionship of families filled with Feminine love and nurturance—I must give as a loving Matriarch. Whether I give lettuce from our garden, read my step granddaughter a story from Beatrix Potter, make a meal, or simply listen attentively to the lives and stories of those I love, taking time to be present and loving in the lives of my chosen family is the only way to receive the gifts of our Mother.