Milt Greek's Blog: The River of Life, page 2

Considering Self-Assertion at the Beginning of the Season of Abundance

As the sun approached its apex in the northern sky, waves of very hot global warming days, separated by times of more seasonal temperatures, provided an early start of the summer’s heat. Paired with frequent downpours, the season of abundance began with a flurry of growth. In past winters, with snow on the ground, I have repeatedly told our granddaughter that “the Earth has gone asleep” to have “a long winter’s nap.” In the spring, I told her that “the Earth is waking up” and we are receiving “early gifts of strawberries and asparagus” from that source.

Now, as flowers bloom and the fields and gardens provide us with abundant food, I tell her “The Earth has awakened and is giving us many gifts.” Pink early Lilies, bright yellow Stella d’Ora and Coreopsis, vibrant orange Day Lilies, and fiery Chinese Red Lilies mixed with deep-hued red Bee Balm have followed one after another in the progression of days. The red Lilies, a gift of my hard-bitten, colorblind brother to my silently self-victimizing Mom were salvaged from her yard after she passed, only a couple of years prior to my brother’s passing, serving me as a reminder in this season that love can be expressed so subtly behind the defensive masks we wear that it is sometimes only visible in the reflection of our shared pasts.

June has provided many gifts from the Earth, including an ongoing abundance of Asparagus, Lettuces, Sylvetta Arugula, Kale, Turnip Greens, early Tomatoes, and many other foods, including a surprise of a robust and perfectly shaped Chicken of the Woods mushroom. The season has provided numerous salads, Udon Noodles with Tofu and Arugula, frequent servings of Asparagus as a side dish and in Quiches and other main courses, Turnips, Mushrooms, and Turnip Greens stir fry, Potato and Beet Salad, Peas and Cauliflower Masala, and Hungarian Mushroom Soup. The gifts of the season’s abundance, likely to continue into the peaks of mid-summer and the harvests of fall, begins a luxurious time of our daily lives.

This has been the first year of full harvest from our Asparagus patch, which I set in with my stepson three years ago. Last year I ceased the harvest at 40 large stalks to preserve the patch’s growth in anticipation of this year, a gift my younger self gave to this year’s harvest. The abundance of this year’s harvest has surprised me, beginning in mid-April, and ceasing in mid-June—though more would have been possible—and gave us over 160 large stalks, with another 15 taken by deer.

In his victory garden book, A Manual of Home Vegetable Gardening, Francis Coulter wrote, “When a gardener cuts the first substantial asparagus stalks of his own planting and growing he may be said to have graduated in the art of vegetable cultivation. He has shown his skill and demonstrated that his interest is not the fleeting enthusiasm of a single season but is supported by the patience of all true gardeners, so that he is content to work for a deferred reward and looks forward to producing for many years one of the finer luxuries of the table” (pp. 84-85).

For me, I just wanted to supply my family with produce that they all loved. A byproduct of this has been a lesson in sustainability, reflecting the intelligence of squirrels who have for eons sown gifts of forests of nut trees for their descendants. At the same time, patriarchy’s urban god-kings have veered humanity into an unsustainable lifestyle while flattering ourselves as brilliant compared to the tiny-brained squirrel’s stewardship.

The beginning of season of abundance has been paired with my annual life reflection and atonement for my failures in the past year. This year I reread notes from the reflections of the years since 2015, when I began the practice. Reading the reflections were interesting in that many of the challenges I spoke of and feared seven years ago have changed, been met, or passed through losses, such as the passing of my dear mother-in-law a week after the passing of her beloved and only sibling. Yet, for the profound losses, our family and community has received the mysterious gifts of abundance and growth, largely moving on from the challenges and worries that haunted my mind.

I noticed that challenges appeared, fell into crises, and prompted us into action. This time-immemorial approach of humanity—to avoid sowing gardens until hunger threatens and ignore threats to the essential needs of life until we cannot sustain ourselves much longer—threatens us individually and collectively. It is the profound, mysterious, and somewhat random luck given to our family for many years that our challenges have largely been resolved. Seeking to reflect on this past, I looked at the events of past years and my role in them.

After reflection, I came to the surprising but not-so-surprising recognition that central to my failures in the past has been a lack of self-assertion when it was needed. To gently, but consistently, advocate for my family and our needs, as I did in fits and sometimes temperamental piques in the past. While I did attempt this, there have been times I failed miserably, making difficult situations worse or failing to achieve what my family needed.

My wife has said that in the marriages she feels are best the women are strong-willed and outspoken and the men are milder that most men. I see this a little differently, harkening back to the early years of my relationship with my wife, during which I learned a lot about what was needed from me to support a strong and loving family, setting aside the crude and self-obsessed pursuits of my younger self. Reflecting on this with another family man, he and considered our transformation from youthful, self-centered, and sometimes impetus men seeking to “take the world by storm” and being drawn through our desires for companionship, love, and sex to mature into men who seek to be helpmates to our lifelong partner and the family and friends that came to surround that center.

In fact, I do not view myself as mild per se. Rather, I seek to be extremely passionate and persistent, using the resources we have while avoiding bluster and fits—if I can control my temper—and sustain a life around my family and community that builds the future of our lives. My challenge is to assert myself in the way that a squirrel grows an abundant forest for her descendants, providing them a gift of stewardship and the habits and resources to sustain them for eons in the joyous Earthly river of life flowing into eternity.

Honoring Life in the Month of our Mother

The sun of early May, slowing in its ascent in the sky, gave increasing warmth to the Earth. The Earth awakened into full glory, bringing forth the first gifts of life for the new season. Arugula, Mustard, Spinach, young lettuces thinned from thickly growing rows, as well as our first full season of Asparagus, all gifts of the awakening Earth.

We celebrated Mother’s Day with my stepdaughter’s family, including her husband, our granddaughter, both grandmothers, my wife’s son, and my stepdaughter’s sister-in-law. A celebration of life, I made a special meal of roasted beet, feta, and Arugula salad with local microgreens, asparagus quiches, garlic, rosemary, and olive oil focaccia, and a fruit salad. The celebration, with pleasant weather and a shared love of family and children, marked an annual tradition of May as the month of our Mother, a time when the awakening Earth is bursting forth with life. In honoring these mothers and the sacred act of bringing forth life through eternity, we experienced the joy of taking part in the Earthly river of life that flows through human and natural communities. In a quiet but very real way, we celebrated and honored life itself.

As the sunlight grew, so did unseasonably hot days and a dry spell, throwing the Arugula and Spinach into early flowering. The plants, sensing the heat and dryness, hurried themselves in fertility, like all youths fearful of lives that will be too short, too tenuous to receive the gift of a long and easy life. Replaced by early lettuces, Turnip, Mustard, and Beet Greens, and a nearly continual flow of Asparagus from our garden.

The flowers of May burst forth in celebration of the new season, celebrating new life as always. Deep Purple Siberian Irises, pink English Roses, white lilacs, pink peonies, as well as red and white peonies given as gift by a friend all offered beauty and sweet, abundant scents filled with the desire to celebrate and perpetuate life.

In the final days of May, heavy rains came from the sky, providing the much-needed water to sustain the new and growing crops of the garden. At the same time, our food club began its season with a very fortunate harvest from the auction, including a pound of asparagus and three quarts of melt-in-your-mouth strawberries. These simple gifts, provided by hardworking, gentle, and peaceful Anabaptists (Amish) in our larger community, give us sensual pleasure that strengthens our bodies and spirits.

While the Earthly world awakens, providing beauty and sustenance, the human world twists and turns in throes of suffering brought about by the acts of violent men. Ranging from international and civil war to very young men using the weapons of war to randomly murder wholly innocent people, including young children, violent men inflict immeasurable suffering while sensitive people weep from the tragedy. The month of our Mother ends with a holiday memorializing the violent men who have died in wars by our government; it is quite purposeful that the women, children, old men, and other “collateral damaged” who were lost in these wars are not memorialized, only the violent men who did the bidding of power-overful patriarchs and died in doing so. I do not mind memorializing all the victims of war, including violent men, but realize the focus solely of one nation's violent men's deaths is a way to distract us from the immense suffering war and violence does to all of humanity.

The ending of the month of our Mother has seen the human world filled with senseless violence by violent men. When gun users cause completely needless suffering to their fellow human beings, gun users insist that the problem is not the guns they love, but gun users who use them. I agree, and in my own words, the problem is violent men, many of whom seek to invade boundaries and do grievous harm—as the violent men of the United States, Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Germany, Russia, China, and Japan have done for centuries.

The power-overful nations of the world have built their pre-eminence on violence, with bullying leaders akin to the bullying violent men who wreak imaginable suffering on the innocent bystanders. It is the essence of the millennia of patriarchy that power-overful empires have arisen through the practice of evil works, achieving passing moments of so-called greatness, and falling victim to the inevitable return of the energy they inflict onto others. Each empire has celebrated itself as superior in some way to the other nations, using this superiority to justify their invasion of other people’s communities.

As sensitive people witnessing the long history of failure after failure of the short-lived power-over of violent men, one of our greatest challenges is to remain sensitive people. It is the view of violent men that everyone should be violent, carry lethal weapons, and be ready to kill our fellow human beings. As sensitive people, we know that what goes around comes around—a restatement of the law of physics that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If we resort to violence, we, too, will receive that violence. This reality horrifies violent men. Puritans of all faiths assure violent men that this will not apply to the violent men who follow their faith in a delusional rejection of that inevitable return, creating a cultural alliance between puritan religious patriarchs, power-overful political patriarchs, and violent men.

Many sensitive people, like my wife, cannot bear the thought of the violence that some men inflict on humanity. Her strength—imagined as weakness by spiritually empty violent men—makes her unable to pick up a lethal weapon, much less use it against a fellow human being. The challenge, in the face of a human world dominated by violent men, money chasers, and puritans, is to follow our hearts and expand our sensitive world with kindness, forgiveness, and spiritual strength. This is the work of life, the celebration of mothers, and the joyful labor of re-creating life through eons of passing time.

This includes supporting the Essential practices of re-creating life in our own daily lives. By re-creating the Earthly flow of life into the unimaginably distant future, we ally ourselves with all but the most damaged and lost of humanity. Who does not have a young life that they wish to see flourish in this hard and wonderful world? In seeing this practice among our so-called enemies, as well as ourselves, we can find common ground with those different than ourselves.

At the same time, being aware that patriarchy has infused in the male culture deep and abiding practices of one-upmanship, boundary invasion, and aggression that affects us at all levels of our lives. This includes in my young granddaughter. As she explores the human world outside our small family she is meeting a young neighbor boy her age who, for unknown reasons, wants to take her toys, push her, and dominate her. The parents, neighbors and friends, seem to accept their very young son being aggressive, waiting too long to set limits and boundaries on his extremely young attempts to dominate those around him. Even in this very small personal world, this baby man seeks to control and dominate those around him.

My wife points out that most of our granddaughter’s young male friends are gentle and do not do these things. In her circle, it is only this little boy who acts this way. A violent man might say that it is important that our granddaughter respond to the little boy with equal force—making her capable of equal aggression. A sensitive person would wonder what is wrong in the family or community of the young boy to make him aggressive. I am content to say, simply, that people are different, and some people grow up to be violent men and some people grow up to be sensitive. Whether this very young boy becomes more aggressive or turns toward greater sensitivity will only be known as his hopefully long and happy life unfolds. For my sensitive granddaughter, it is important that she be protected so that the little boy does not teach her to be intimidated by and kowtow to males—as patriarchy seeks little girls and little boys do from the earliest times of our lives.

My wife and I talked and agreed that I would talk to the Mom of the young boy. I will explain, gently, that as adults we need to be more attentive to the play of the young children. This is to prevent the young boy from intimidating my granddaughter or get her to accept being dominated and invaded by more aggressive children around her. For the sake of the Mom, who I like and have a friendship with, I will not explain the larger issues of patriarchal dominance and its parallel to violence men in our adult world. I will be brief, supportive of her, and gently but firmly protective of my granddaughter’s toys and freedom from dominance.

As sensitive people like us look out into the human world filled with violence at so many levels, we are prone to feel helpless. Our spiritual strength is in the essential acts of bringing forth life—as caregivers, community volunteers, family members, good friends, activists, artists, social workers, and many others—uniting us with the better parts of most of humanity, including many families of violent men, money chasers, and puritans. At the same time, we can look in the personal world around us and find situations where we can gently, firmly, and peacefully push for vulnerable people, including children, to be safe to be sensitive and free from bullying.

It may seem that such small acts are trivial in the face of constant violence by power-overful bullies and the young violent men who blindly obey them. Strengthening our communities through the essential acts of life while gently but firmly expanding the ability of vulnerable young people to be safe from bullying, we can act in concrete and meaningful ways to transform patriarchy from its senseless and ultimately self-destructive path. While we celebrate and honor the Earthly river of life, the power-overful empires of patriarchy will rise and fall in the inevitable outcomes of every action bringing about an equal and opposite reaction.

The Earthly River of Life Flowing Through a Child’s Birthday Party

As the now plentiful sunlight slows in its daily increase, the warming Earth has begun to give us the first, very early, harvests. Young radishes, young Grandpa Admire’s lettuce, Mustard, and Arugula, and a few sprouts of Asparagus have been given to us from the abundant Earth, whetting our appetite for more.

The sunlight and warmth has brought forth an outpouring of snow white and rich purple flowering trees—a white crabapple, sown by some passing bird, provides an abundance of large-petaled blossoms. An apple tree, planted with a dearly beloved niece, provides beautiful white flowers with the hopes of a full harvest of delicious apples, while purplish redbuds, purplish-pink lilacs, and a bluish-purple flower from a plant spreading from a neighbor’s yard, provides a rich beauty to the season of renewal.

Though I have been busy with finishing another semester of college as part of my new career, my wife and I had a chance to attend a birthday party for a four-year-old boy, surrounded by a small group of young friends and family. The parents, living in the relative isolation of the country that provides their century-old home a beautiful setting, had found themselves two years ago separated from the trials of the human world in the throes of a deadly pandemic. While the human world turned and twisted in the devastating virus, they discovered, as the father told me, that their isolated family world, was “what we have wanted”—to focus time and work on their precious child.

They slowed down, learning to live on less so they could spend more time with their young son, and worked to make their home a refuge that would allow their child to thrive. The mother grew food and flowers in the garden, providing them some of their needed nourishment, while the father worked less and took time to build his son a playhouse.

Two years later, their family and friends gathered to celebrate the center of their lives, their young son, celebrating his fourth birthday. My wife and I joined the party, largely made up of younger families. The mother’s mom and her sisters were all there, along with my stepdaughter, her husband, and their child, as well as other friends and family. I was the only grandfather there, while my wife, the boy’s grandmother and her sisters were women of our generation taking part in the celebration of the young life.

At one point during the party, I saw the center that is the Earthly flow of life into the future clearly in the circles that formed about the children. There was a small wading pool that was a center for the young children, who played in the water and stood around the pool in a circle of very young lives. These young children—three, four, and five years old—are the future of the human world; the lives that will take over from their elders as we pass back into the Earthly soil that sustains our bodies and souls.

Around this circle of future lives were the mothers and fathers of the new, innocent lives, chatting with each other as they carefully watched their children, making sure they did not come to harm in the exuberance of their play. In a third circle were my wife and I and the other elders of the group, silently watching the parents and children living out the joyous time as they had done with their children-now-parents a generation ago. So the Earthly river of life flows into eternity, with elders such as my wife and I approaching the years of our passing while the children we helped raise now raise their children, the future of our collective lives on this hard and wonderful Earth.

While sitting in the outer circle of the flow of Earthly life into eternity, I notice that I was the only male of my generation at the party. The elder women—the birthday boy’s mother’s mother, her sisters, and my wife—had come to honor the young life. The mother’s mother and her sisters had done most of the work for the party, making the family time special for all who attended.

For the other men of my generation, as well as the younger uncles and friends of the family, there was something they viewed as more important that took them away from this center of life. In the outside human world, especially in the larger human world, the patriarchs who felt there more important things to do than celebrate a young child’s life were busy with their own lives. For some this meant playing or watching sports, tinkering on cars, chasing money, or—in some tragic cases—making war on each other, with their bullets and bombs ruining the lives of families like these as the god-kings vent their “righteous rage” in murderous onslaughts.

As I have lived my life, I have, again and again seen the strength of the life-giving Earth to provide sustenance, joy, and meaning for those who take part in the essential tasks of living. I have also seen, in the smaller, personal world, the bitter regret of those who do not share in these tasks or who harm that flow.

As the Earth again provides the early gifts of spring, it seems more certain that embracing the Earthly flow of life into the future is an essential task, not just for the children, but also for those of us who are in the circle of parents and grandparents. At best, not sharing in the joyful celebration of the youngsters cuts the patriarchs off from joy their might have; at worst, it makes the patriarchs irrelevant to the children’s lives and outsiders to the essence of life.

For all the sound and fury of the larger patriarchal world, without honoring the center of life, the works of the patriarchs only contribute to the passing rise and fall of power-overful leaders and empires, doing harm to the children of the Earth. But, like so many passing trials, the flow of life continues ever onward while the leaders of the world become the Ozymandias of our time.

Seeking Unity of Our Essential Communities

Sunlight has increased rapidly since the mid-winter, with our spring’s weather cycling through warmth and renewed cold and snow, the light slowly warming the Earth and bringing forth the hardy growth of delicate late winter and early spring plants. Moss on our backyard steps, thick from moisture and years of shadowy cold, continues to wear down the stone and brick, turning that which is not alive into the rich earth that will foster all life.

The warming Earth has given beauty amongst the bleak remains of winter: blue and purple Miniature Irises, purple Crocuses, yellow and purple Hellebores, and a few yellow Daffodils all blossomed with the fragile hopes of spring, followed by a couple of days of heavy snow and cold. The snow, heavy on the flowers and other plants of early spring, lasted only a couple of days, receding as the expanding sunlight continued to bring warmer days.

As the sunlight melted the snow, light purple Periwinkle, an abundance of white and yellow Daffodils and white, yellow, and purple Hellebores blossomed, along with wonderfully fragrant white Hyacinths that my wife cut and brought into our house to fill it with the sweet smell of spring. Then, as surely as night follows day, another cold snap followed, coating the wealth of flowers with a dusting of freezing snow. Winter waned, but like the outgoing tide, returned to the Earth again and again in slowly declining waves.

In the warmth that followed, pinkish purple creeping phlox blossomed among the hard and dry bricks of our retaining wall, a reminder of the beauty that the rugged Earth offers us. Bluish purple Violets and Grape Hyacinths burst forth with the renewing growth in our garden, along with bright yellow Tulips glowing in the still-long shadows of early Spring. Meanwhile, in our long-neglected garden, sprouts of heirloom Red Romaine and Grandpa Admire’s lettuces grew from the cool ground, abundant in the cool but warming Earth.

Ramps growing on the hillside behind our home and wild chives growing in clumps in the hollow at the bottom of the hill, grew rapidly in the early spring. We gathered them and added butter and cheese from Ohio, along with our homemade Concord wine, to make our springtime Appalachian French Onion Soup, a rich warming soup from the cool Earth’s gifts.

In the warmth and longer days of spring, I wandered the hollow behind our home whenever I had the time, appreciating the years of growth of trees we have planted there. In the field we have planted several live Christmas trees, watching them grow into the future, adding their essential gifts to the Earthly river of life that will determine the future of all of humanity and the natural world.

While the Earth has slowly, in waves, renewed itself in the warming light, our family and community have continued to grow and change. My wife and I have continued to have the joyous privilege of caring for my stepdaughter’s daughter each week, with my wife bearing most of the work while I have done support work, running errands, caring for the darling girl while my wife naps, and helping with odds and ends.

Our granddaughter has embraced the work we do in her play and activity, insisting on peeling her own eggs, buttering her bread, and helping us make meals as best as she can. Continuing a tradition she began last year with planting Money Plants and Beans in our garden, she has enthusiastically helped with sowing seeds in the garden, including peas, spring greens like Arugula, Spinach, and Kale, Radishes, Beets, Carrots, and Turnips, the last three with children of a neighbor. The children—another three-year-old like our granddaughter and a six-year-old sister—eagerly helped turn the soil, remove the remaining weeds, and sow the seeds in the rows. Their young selves, wanting to learn the traditions of their elders, made their play the essential work we elders do to contribute the flow of life into eternity.

During the last week, a friend who has been an essential and tireless part of the local food club, offered to let us take peach trees a friend of hers dug up from his compost pile. The good works that she and I have shared rewarded us with a pair of robust peach trees which will, if my family is fortunate, provide luscious fruit to us for years to come. Built on the partnership of good works, our human communities share the practice of good works of natural communities—what scientists call the symbiotic relationships of ecosystems.

Meanwhile, in the larger human world, violent men arose from the depths of horrors of the pandemic and sought refuge from the reality of that hardship with vainglory seeking of military conquest at all costs. Seeking to turn the good works of our communities against their “enemies”, violent men have divided the human communities of good works for millennia, creating longstanding hatreds between people to gain short-lived dynasties and empires. Such vast hierarchies of power-over, seemingly invincible in their moments of “glory”, inevitably tumble to dust as the consequences of harm catches up to the violent men at the top of the hierarchies.

Though the violent men in our communities may be enamored with the false promises of their violent leaders, they become exhausted by needless wars and suffering for their god-kings, leaving their self-worshipping leaders without the support needed to continue the endless wars. So, it appears that both the foot soldiers of the US and Russian empires have become exhausted after decades of senseless and needless wars, causing the US to be routed in recent years from the US empire’s foreign commitments and the Russian conscripts, longing more for home and peace than conquest, have confounded their power-overful oligarchs with a faint-hearted invasion that has been forced onto them. In doing so, the pathological Russian leader, only believing in power-over and cruelty, has sowed the seeds of his own undoing. Such is the fate of leaders who stray too far from the essential practice of good works.

It is easy, as someone in this country, to stand with the victims of a traditional enemy’s aggression. The violent men and the sensitive people in our country can easily agree on a common enemy and a common hero. It is not so easy for sensitive people in Russia to speak out against the evil their power-overful leaders do—violent men strike out against them with heartless fury. Likewise, it has not been easy for sensitive people in the United States to speak out against aggression in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Central and South America, and many other regions where the US’s power-overful leaders have sought to use our communities of good works against their communities of good works.

In the Earth’s progression through eons, communities of good works have formed and maintained life flowing into unfathomable futures filled with offspring, warm spring days, and abundance amidst the challenges of mortal life. As sensitive people, activists, and others who resist our community being used against the people of other communities, we face the twin tasks of taking part in the slowly evolving Earthly flow of life into the future while lessening our connections to the violence against innocent people, whether the aggressors are traditional enemies of our government or in our own government, ethnoreligious group, or class.

Simply attempting to create a safe space for women, children, ethnic, religious, immigrant, and other minorities in our own communities may seem an endless task, but, like the growth of evergreens through the seasons of the Earth, there has been growing strength in recent generations. Relishing our families and communities among the hard and cold stone of mortal life lies perhaps the most important solution to the woes of the larger human world. Setting aside the distractions of the larger human world to embrace and nurture those in our families and communities lies the strength of the moss turning hard cold stone into life-giving Earth.

Reclaiming Heavenly Moments in the Earthly River of Life

The sunlight has, day after day, begun to return a little more each morning and evening. Despite the growing light, the cold of winter has continued through early and mid-February, providing us with snow and ice, including a storm that dwarfed the capacity of humanity to maintain “business as usual.” The heavy ice and snow knocked out power, closed roads and many businesses, and allowed children to once again experience magic and wonder in the hard season of cold darkness.

The birds and squirrels have been coming to our feeder regularly while the snow-covered ground made many sources for their food impossible to reach. Blue Jays, Cardinals, family flocks of Mourning Doves and many little birds—assorted brown and whitish Sparrows, grey and buff Titmice, white and black Nuthatches and Chickadees, Brown Creepers, and more—have stopped by the feeders in waves of early, mid-day, and late afternoon scavengers, while squirrels have gorged themselves on cracked corn we’ve thrown on the ground in vain hopes that they will leave the food on the feeders to the birds.

As the season of cold darkness has many people returning within and thinking of spring, my wife and spent days around the holidays isolated in our home with a mild strain of Covid, giving me time and sparing me enough energy to prepare seeds for spring. The seeds—early spring greens like Arugula, Spinach, and Mustard with lettuces and peas—are part of my life that I have long neglected during the drive to change my career into social work. The headlong process of a new career while attending college has given me little spare time, and as I approach the college work winding down after May to a manageable level, gardening in the cool spring ground is one of several things I wish to reclaim.

Part of this reclaiming included my wife and I racking our Concord wine from last year’s harvest into bottles. The bottles will be upright for three weeks in our home, then placed in racks in the basement to age. Though the wine is tart to the taste now, after months (and perhaps more than a year) of aging, it will become a mild, full flavored and fruit forward wine for sharing with friends and family. This gift of the abundant Earth is a reminder of the simple pleasures that can come from living close to the land.

Most importantly for me to reclaim is time with my wife and her family, which for years has been plagued by the tension at my old worksite and unhappiness there. While the year and a half since my leaving has given me opportunities for more time with my wife and family, the college work on top of the new job has also made these times snippets of what I long for. Prior to leaving my old worksite, the emotional impact of the toxic work situation made me very difficult to deal with and oftentimes found myself having to cut myself off from my family so my ill mood did not spoil these crucial times.

In the aftermath of leaving work and the new career, my softness has increased, especially as the new job allows me a full weekday to be with my step granddaughter and my wife. I have found my old work culture and personality to be at odds with the work culture in the new profession. The work I do now is of the heart, rather than the head, and so instead of drinking a lot of caffeine in the morning to sharpen my mind, I have begun to drink soothing herbal teas like Chamomile and Lemon Balm to soften my heart.

Despite all the bus-i-ness of school and the new job, my satisfaction with work, release of stress, and time carved out to be with the family has allowed me to reclaim more and more heavenly moments in the Earthly flow of life into eternity. The essential tasks of caring for family, community, and the Earth strengthen this center and brings fulfillment to daily life. These unpaid daily tasks of life build stability and joy in our lives through strengthening the web of life around us.

A moment of harvest from my wife’s commitment to this path was a Valentine’s gathering my wife and I hosted this year for her daughter’s family, her son, old friends, and the family of my stepdaughter’s oldest friend—a woman who she has known since before she can remember. At the gathering was two three-year-olds and a five year old, children of my stepdaughter and her friend. They are the youngest members of a group that, for most of us, goes back decades. The fathers of the children are the newcomers to this web of life—each having about a decade as part of the center of our lives. I am the next newest member, having been in the lives of my wife and her family for twenty-six years. I marveled at the tender feelings and love we all felt, as the children delighted in their play and we gathered and talked of our lives.

The mother of my stepdaughter’s friend sat at the open seat at the head of the table I was at and asked if it was alright that she sat there.

“Of course,” I replied, “You are one of the matriarchs.”

Decades of my wife and this grandmother’s lives have been spent caring for children and grandchildren. Their love of their family, hard work, and constant caretaking has been essential for this very fortunate web of life. In a world of hardship and suffering, many are not fortunate enough to be part of a gathering of loving, multigenerational families. My good luck in being allowed into my wife’s life and family has been to take part in many heavenly moments in the Earthly flow of life, despite the larger human world often suffering in needless conflict. This change for me—to step into the Earthly River of Life and seek to aid its flowing through the generations—has returned a harvest that is the essence of fulfillment.

The Gift of Returning to Home and Hearth

The darkness of early winter has reached a peak while I—focused on completing graduate work to solidify a new career—have spent hours late at night completing papers and studying for tests while working a nearly fulltime schedule. During the Halloween season, I saw most again people placing gravestones and skeletons around their houses in unconscious preparation for the season of scarcity and death for animals such as us. Connected to the human world’s whirling news cycle, particularly statistics about COVID-19, it was apparent to me during the time of the wailing ghosts of Halloween that once again, this winter will be a season of death in the United States.

The natural world, which dwarfs the passing achievements of humanity, continues with its cycle of life and death, despite humanity’s preoccupation with itself. Despite my own desires to embed myself in the woods and Earthly life so generously offered to me, I found myself racing from hurdle to hurdle on the journey into a new career, without enough time or careful thought about our home, family, community, and the natural communities that we depend on for life.

Over the past few years, my focus and my life has increasingly been away from the abundance and happiness given to me by my family, our home and community, and the natural communities that we are surrounded by. My choice to begin a new career and to take on far too much work to jump-start it, has been a great relief to me in many ways and has made me appreciate my good fortune. After all, I work with people with the same diagnosis I have, but our clients have so little to provide them with a happy home, a family of their own, and a meaningful life. My passion for the work, long delayed by the economics of caring for a family, drove me past a fall of colorful leaves and the bounty of a good harvest, and into the intellectual world away from the here and now of family.

Soon after the start of the fall semester, however, my wife was told that routine tests had caused concern and she would need more extensive testing. I tried to assure her and her family that these additional tests were common and no one should be alarmed. Taking time off work to be with her, I found myself one Friday morning alone in a hospital waiting room, praying for her well being and shocked by having to consider what would happen if the assurances I had given everyone—including myself—were wrong.

I would later tell people the good news was that the intrusive and expensive procedure was entirely unnecessary. Fed up with endless and needless tests and medical solutions that would do more harm than good, my wife and I went a local herbalist who has repeatedly healed problems that the Western medicine could not and stopped listening to the Western for-profit medical system.

However, it was not true that the tests had been entirely unnecessary; as my wife has pointed out to me numerous times, things happen for a reason. The worried waiting alone in the hospital awoke in me a renewed desire to be sure that I spent time with my wife and her family, despite the all-engulfing pace of the work and school outside of our home. For the day of the test and the next, I spent almost all my waking hours with my wife, grateful she was well and appreciative of her presence in my life. Over the months since then, I have made extra effort to give my wife and her family more attention and time. These re-entry into our family’s home and hearth continued to be a stark contrast to the suffering and endless anger of the human media.

As the darkness of the season increased, my appreciation of my wife has grown and our family relationships have deepened. Unlike many estranged or isolated from family and friends during the pandemic, my family’s closeness geographically and as a family has made this horrific time for the human world has been filled with poignant, wonderfully sweet, profoundly appreciated family time. While so many struggled with the reality that the Earth is greater than humanity, my family has been able to simply reach out to each other and spend time face-to-face that has been like an oasis in a parched desert of COVID isolation. As the holiday season fell into full swing, my newfound commitment to make time for my family was filling me with gratitude for them and for my mysterious good fortune.

In the last month, my wife has been watching the holiday classics that she has watched year after year for decades. In watching them, I began to see a parallel that I had missed before. In “It’s a Wonderful Life”—a racist, sexist story that has the hero saved by the community his good works has helped create—I recognized that the stereotype attitudes mirrored the hero’s patriarchal blindness. Starting as an arrogant but earnest young man who wanted a million dollars, to travel the world, and have a harem or two, his widowed mother directs him towards a woman who will give him the answers. To his dismay, he finds the answers lie with a woman who adores him but wants to stay close to her home and family in their measly one-horse town. He cannot fathom how she could be so uninterested in the adventures he seeks. Over time, he finds himself with her, caring for their family of young children while trying to preserve the wellbeing of many others in their little, unimportant town. He changes from the headstrong, patriarchal adventurer to a man deeply in love with his family and devoted to their community, but his work constantly draws him away from the home and hearth he shares with them.

During a crisis, the hero wishes he had never been born, and by a miracle he is shown his community without his presence in it. Just as he was drawn into the home and hearth provided by his wife—who had the answers he needed—his life’s work mirrored that journey. Without his presence helping working men get homes for their families, the community is a stark, highly patriarchal, and chaotic place, a town named for a cruel leader filled with men who drink hard liquor so they can get drunk fast, cheap dancehalls displaying young women, broken families, poverty, and vices barely hidden by 1940s standards. Just as a self-involved patriarchal young boy matured into a loving family man, his work had helped many others do the same. In the end, the community of good works he had helped forge saved him and his family—something that would have been impossible in the bleak, cheap, vice-filled alternative reality.

Many people refer to the honoring of a baby at Winter Solstice is a clear reference to the rebirth of the Sun/Son, making the Christmas Nativity a retelling of the same agrarian Son/Sun-worshipping stories from millennia before. For me, however, I also believe the traditions of Christmas stem from the patriarchal men realizing in their brutal blindness the transcendent joy provided by children in our lives. Celebrations of children and babies are celebrations of the discovery by men that the profound joys of a family home are more important than our distractions of money, power-over-others, and fame that many seek.

Viewing these antiquated, sexist, and racist movies, I can see that the progress in the decades since has also been marked by losses. The public world of social media, twitter, and internet anonymity is filled with obscenity, vices, harshness, and a spiritual corruption that “It’s a Wonderful Life” warned us about. In place of face-to-face communities and focus on what families of all sorts need for the future is a patriarchal cultural wasteland of vice and anger. The sexism of the 1940s, exemplified by conservative media voices like the late Rush Limbaugh, has been replaced by the sexism of the current times, exemplified by media voices like Howard Stern. For women who have the answers—a love of family, home, children, and closeness—finding men who follow neither the Limbaugh’s nor Sterns of the modern world is rare. Yet for men who are lucky enough to stumble into the lives of these women and are drawn away from our outside world distractions into a loving family, the answers are as clear and beautiful as the stars of a clear winter night.

Not Knowing

The summer light has reached it’s peak and begun a slowly increasing descent into night. The warm temperatures and abundant rainfall have provided us with many wonderful meals during the season of abundance. Corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, green peppers, cabbage, potatoes, peaches, berries of all sorts, and much much more has made me aware once again of the good fortune of living a small, rural community surrounded by hardworking growers.

I often think about how little I know. Why I am in the life I am, rather than a child suffering through tragedies, a hungry, homeless person, or a victim of abuse—I do not know.

There is so much in the human language that speaks of things we cannot understand: “Infinity”, “eternity”, “fate”, “luck”, “deity”, “grace”, “galaxy”, “universe”, “immortality”. All attempts to put words on things that are beyond our life experiences to grasp.

I happened to send a friend some scribblings—two poems and one prose piece—that were some of my favorites. As art, they are dull concepts, with little flare or value. But, in a sense, I realized they expressed a central part of what I understand: that humanity is in a state of not knowing the sacred flowing of Earthly life into “eternity”.

Mortality

A songbird’s song
A waterfall’s cascade
A rainbow’s colors
--alchemy of sunlight and raindrops

How sweet to think an unseen rainbow remains
after sun and rain have gone away

Earth

Hurry on past
the bird singing in the tree
Hurry on past
the woods at the end of your street
Hurry on past on a sunny Sunday
morning

Go and worship
a man-god in a man-made temple
Hurry on past
the Deity you wish to meet

The Flowing of Water

In a forest no one has ever seen, a waterfall formed on a twenty foot high rocky ledge. The water cascaded over the rocky wall and fell onto the rocks below. As time passed and seasons came and went a pool formed at the base of the waterfall.

About the waterfall grew tall trees, grass, and moss, all fed by the flowing water. As the years passed the trees died and fell and in their place grew new trees, the children of the children of the trees once living there. Sometimes the falling trees let in the sunshine and in the mist of the falling water a small rainbow formed.

On the ground the rotting trees formed mulch and loan upon which the tiny flowers of spring grew, their scent given to the wind and their nectar to the bees of early spring. During some springs the waters of the falls flowed so heavily that they swept away the flowers, the loam, and the mulch, leaving nothing but the bare, hard rock. In time, other trees fell and formed mulch and loam and flowers again grew in the mists of the flowing water. Again and again heavy waters swept away the loam and flowers and again and again new loam formed.

As the ages passed, the flowing of the water wore down the hard rock wall and dug deeply into the bedrock below. In time there was no more wall, no more rock, no waterfall, rainbow, or flowers. All that was left was a gully and the flowing of water. In the long and full time of the waterfall no person ever tread in the forest surrounding it nor knew of its beauty, perseverance, or death.

Receiving and giving the gifts of May

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.

Sharing the Essential Work of Life

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.

Renewal in the Earthly Flow of Life

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.