Milt Greek's Blog: The River of Life, page 5

Strong Webs of Life and the Wisdom of Trees

Midsummer, traditionally marking the beginning of the harvest season, has been filled with food, family and close friends, as well as the continuing beauty of the Earth. Rose of Sharon and Butterfly Bushes are blooming, bringing bees, butterflies and hummingbirds to enjoy their sweet nectar, returning the gift of the flowers by bringing new life for the shrubs. In the hollow, many more rabbits have emerged than in past years, quietly grazing on green grass and resting peacefully under evergreens we transplanted from live Christmas trees. Our annual harvest of onions from the garden has gone well, with over 150 bulbs dug up and placed in the hot sun to cure before being stored for the winter.

At the produce auction, row upon row of corn, tomatoes, muskmelons, watermelon, peppers, onions, potatoes, squash and much more are offered by local growers, providing the community with abundant sources of food in an area marked by poverty, malnutrition and addictions. The food club has been paying rock-bottom prices for the wonderful produce, a gift of the season of abundance. As regular buyers at the market, the food club is appreciated for the steady demand we give in exchange for the excellent food; we have been repeatedly thanked for our attendance at the auction.

In years of abundance like this, when our region’s crops have been plentiful, I worry that we are paying too little for this gift of life. Unlike typical buyer-seller relationships, we do not necessarily wish to get the lowest price possible; rather we want to pay our fair share, to provide a good deal for our members while sustaining the livelihood of the growers who we depend on. We want the communities of producers to thrive and sustain themselves in exchange for sustaining our community of consumers.

As midsummer approached, our refrigerator and kitchen table was full of food from the auction, the farmers’ market and our garden. We contacted our family and suggested we bring a midsummer meal to the home of the parents of our family’s newborn child. The parents agreed and soon a meal was planned with the uncle, aunt, the aunt’s daughter and the daughter’s partner joining the new parents and their baby. We brought a meal including local dishes of veggie patties with marinara sauce and cheese on top, sweet corn, two kinds of beet and potato salads, and much more.

After over an hour of visiting, we ate the meal while the baby slept briefly. The young one awoke and cried out to join us. She was sat in her high chair and fed while we continued to enjoy our meal. Afterwards, we went to the living room where, as times before, the newborn entertained us with her love of life and zest to move around, play and explore the world new to her.

During a pause, the young Mom brought books on pregnancy she had to her niece, who is pregnant with her first child. They chatted briefly and the pregnant young woman took the books to prepare herself for the time to come. This small, simple act of kindly family consideration is at the heart of the traditional women’s culture and speaks volumes of the value of family and love.

After a full day of visiting and celebrating the gift of family and life that we have received, we returned home, remarking on the beauty of the day. The newborn’s uncle said that he thought his sister was the happiest she has ever been and we agreed, thankful for the gifts of good health and love we have all received.

As midsummer continued, we opened an IPA brewed for the hot weather of August, enjoying the light taste in the summer heat. After years of brewing beer, we have found recipes that we enjoy for each season, with the lighter beers of Pilsner and IPA for the summer and dark beers such as Porters and Stouts for the cold of winter. Like the seasonal food, we choose our beer in harmony with the time of year.

As the midsummer continued, we also shared a seasonal meal with a boy who my wife and I babysat several years ago whose family has since moved away. As part of a week with his grandmother, the eleven year old, his grandmother and a friend joined us for a meal of ratatouille and pesto with other dishes. The mélange of tomatoes, zucchini, yellow squash, peppers, onions, and garlic seasoned with fresh basil and parsley—all from the produce auction or our garden—was a filling meal to share. With his grandmother the young boy made a bread pudding and watermelon salad for desert, returning our gift of food with his own offering.

At the end of the visit, we wandered down to the hollow to show the young boy the place he’d played and sledded in years before. With trees growing tall and rabbits in the field, the abundance of the Earth—created by the good works of trees and other plants and animals bringing forth life from the inert soil—was evident. The hollow provides food, beauty, a place for children to play in and adults to enjoy nature, all in exchange for us allowing the Earth to peacefully re-create life with as little interference from the human world as we can allow. As time passes, the Earth makes the hollow a more sustainable, richer and stronger web of life, through simple, joyful acts of butterflies and bees gathering nectar and birds, rabbits and others mating and raising young.

Even as midsummer reaches its peak, the signs of fall and the cold season of Earthly sleep are appearing. The leaves of Black Walnut trees are turning yellow and falling, soon to be followed by Box Alder and others. Sweet autumn apples are ripening, as are grapes in local orchards and vineyards. The time of sunlight is fading, soon to be replaced by rapidly growing darkness.

As the elders in our families, we are privileged to share in the beginning of new life with younger family and friends, providing us true joy as we become more aware of the shortness of our lives. I take comfort that I can see, for all my failings, some of my actions as a family member, a friend, an activist and a member of my community has helped strengthen the web of life that children around us—whether human, rabbit, trees or others—are born into. Regardless of my isolated, personal fate in some other, unknown realm, helping to create a stronger natural and human web of life is a gift that my faith in good works has helped provide. For the next generation, that is what is important.

Across the street from where I work, a natural field of grass and trees, some decades old, has been razed and turned to dust, with earthmovers destroying the natural community to provide buildings for the university’s medical college. The natural community, based on gift-giving of life by plants and animals, is being replaced by lifeless concrete and steel, soon to be followed by roaches, mice, and other urban members of the industrial human community that is based on consumption.

Our region needs skilled medicine, but the destruction of the natural community and the many people I know who have found remedies to health problems that providers of western medicine could not solve makes me wonder how much wisdom will be taught in the near-lifeless hallways of concrete and steel. Will it compare with the wisdom of trees and flowers offering their gifts and good works to insects, birds and animals? How much can humanity itself learn, were we to turn away from urban, human teachers and consider other sources of knowledge in the abundant, joyous Earth?

The Supreme Importance of Communities

As the summer stretches into mid-July, beautiful all white and fiery, rosy-red lilies my wife planted are in full bloom. Like the other flowers, pollinators are attracted by the sweet aroma and begin the process of new life for the flowers simply by the sensually-rich act of drinking the flowers’ nectar.

The flower seeds will become the food of birds and some animals, who are nourished by the digestion and carry the seeds to other locations, expanding the range of the flowers, pollinators and themselves. In their simple daily lives, the natural communities of plants, insects, birds and animals harmoniously build a better life for their children in a joyous re-creation of life.

These natural communities are essential to the individuals and families that are part of them. From years of observing life in the woods, I have learned that without communities, no individual or family can be sustained for more than a brief time. Our natural and human communities flow together through the river of life and largely determine the paths our individual and family lives will take, now and in the future.

When I moved back to the community that had saved me during my psychosis, I began to host potlucks to support the community. I had heard that the United States had weak communities compared to other countries and hosting potlucks was an easy way to give back to the web of life that had provided me with so much. I had been an outcast and a scapegoat for the puritan-money-chaser community I grew up in, so I had known hardship and yet could see the strength communities provided.

As our potlucks grew, our neighbors and my wife and I became friends and a small, face-to-face community formed around us. As time passed, a small but important piece of natural land next to our street came up for sale and we became concerned it would be developed, harming the natural area we took for granted and damaging our neighborhood with overcrowding, noise and short-term, disruptive and drunken student renters.

Our neighbors and we discussed buying the land collectively, but the attempt stalled and my wife and I, with another neighbor, explored buying the land ourselves, though we had little spare money.

During this hard time my mother passed and we knew we would receive a small inheritance. One day, a neighbor who knew we were interested in buying the land called me with word that a developer was very close to purchasing the land. He only needed approval of a couple of documents from the city to proceed.

Our neighbors and we faced the possibility of our quiet, enjoyable homes being inundated by noise, traffic, pollution and rowdy student partiers. We would either have to sell our home and move away or find a way to stop the sale. Emailing the city code office to discover what was going on and adding more and more neighbors and friends to the emails as we added one message to another, we realized that the only option would be to buy the land as soon as possible.

Committing the yet to be gained inheritance to pay a portion of the costs, my wife and I moved forward to buy the land and, by as much good luck as anything else, managed to buy the land a few days before the developer could complete the work he needed to finalize his deal.

In retrospect, I realized that my Mom’s untimely death had led to benefit for our family and community and, in that way, had served a tragic yet necessary purpose in the flow of life into the future. It did not make my sorrow less, but it provided greater understanding of the larger purpose of the death of elders, human, animal and otherwise, in our lives.

Being saved from a hard fate by our neighbor was also a lesson to me about the importance of human communities and the value of good works in building them. Intending to support our community through potlucks and parties to bring people together, that same community was essential in helping us protect our home by providing information and support during a crisis. Without it, the natural and human communities around the land would have been destroyed by money-chasers seeking wealth without regard to the consequences for the Earth and our community.

In a very important way, this lesson of the strength of good works taught me to have more faith in the workings of the spiritual world. I can see from events like these that good works are often rewarded in small, face-to-face webs of life, giving me hope that good works may extend pass my own mortal life.

To celebrate our good fortune, my wife and I began to host celebratory potlucks for neighbors, friends and family on the land every other year. Most years there have been around a hundred people, including children, in attendance, despite the potluck being held at the height of summer’s heat. We also let the neighborhood children play on the land, giving them woods to explore and a grassy area to play in during the summer and a steep slope to sled down when it snows in the winter. It has become a natural area for the community, akin to the Commons of centuries ago.

This year, we again celebrated our good fortune with about 120 people providing food and fellowship. Many who came were young families who are friends of the parents of the newborn in our family, giving our picnic the joy of ten children three years and younger with their parents and some grandparents with them. As the older children played on a slip ‘n’ slide and doused each other with cold water set in buckets for them, the adults gathered, ate, talked and shared fellowship. Many people thanked us for our work and said it was great to have a regular community gathering.

To be able to give is a tremendous gift to receive.

The Abundance of the Earthly River of Life

As mid-summer is passing, the season continues to be rainy. While some growers have been affected and sweet corn is still sparse at the Farmer’s Market, local growers appear to be resilient in the face of the challenging weather. Meanwhile, our garden has been flourishing, with harvests of beets with luxuriant greens, dark green Heirloom Lacinato kale and elephant garlic. At the same time, the produce auction has been abundant and between our garden and food from the club, our refrigerator has been filled to capacity. We’ve made a half dozen or more dishes in the last ten days--Ratatouille, Pinto Bean and Beet Green soup, Potato Salad, Cucumber-Tomato Sandwiches, Peach Tart, and Sweet Corn, plus Kale and Romaine salads—all using ingredients almost entirely from local sources.

We are freezing and preserving the abundant extras, including blueberries, extra soup, Korean-style Kim Chi, and Kale leaves for winter soups and looking forward to additional dishes—Beets, Greens and Onions with Tofu and Turnip, Greens, and Mushroom stir-fries, Borscht, and many other seasonal dishes.

Bright red Bee Balm mixed with white Queen Anne’s Lace, pale purple Coneflowers and coral-pink Swamp Milkweed in the waterway down the hill have begun to flower, bringing hummingbirds and butterflies. Pinkish Hollyhocks and Golden Coreopsis are continuing to bloom, all of which provide food to insects and birds in partnerships of life. The Earthly River of Life flows together in natural communities through generations, and in our area reaches an abundance in summer like few other times of the year.

Our good fortune in terms of healthy, abundance sources of local food cannot be measured. In a world where hunger, malnutrition, poverty and curable diseases run rampant, the abundance of the Earth around us gives the chance for a healthy and sensually satisfying life. The challenge is to provide this same abundance in a sustainable way for our family and community.

Part of this is to embrace the new generation of young lives that younger women in our family and community have brought forth, providing new hope in the face of our own aging lives. My wife, after losing our beloved mother-in-law, has fully embraced the new lives through babysitting several times a week, including for a boisterous baby in our family.

We had a family gathering recently where the eight-month-old girl was a delightful center of the time together. My wife and I brought potato salad and kale salad and made veggie burgers, with the meal timed with a brief nap for the toddler. Toward the end of the meal, the baby awoke and cried out for company.

The father brought her to the table and we watched her as she fully woke. She became lively and despite her young age began to move about, so we went to the living room where she crawled and walked around a coffee table, waving her hands, seeming to dance to music, beating the table with a hand and excitedly calling out with delight as the family watched her every move. For over three hours she delighted the young parents, her uncle and my wife and I, merely by being a young, beloved life learning to move about on her own. She herself was full of vigor and joy, exuberant in the love of life and the new abilities of her growing body. Seeing the child’s growth from a newborn only eight months ago into zestful, joyful and strong child as part of the sacred flow of Earthly life into eternity has been one of the most profound, joyous experiences of our family’s life.

After the gathering, my wife and I reflected on the wonderful day and I said that in my family babies of that age were set aside in playpens and cribs during family gatherings. Rather than spending three hours being entertained and delighted by the new lives, they were put out of the way while the adults—particularly the men—discussed their outer world focus. In my family, it would be news, politics, philosophy, education, business plans and sports as the main topics, all of which were seen as more important than “child’s play.” Yet, many of these outer world, patriarchal centers do little to move forward the sacred Earthly river of life and some make our families and communities less sustainable, damaging the future of the young lives who are—tragically—not the focus of our daily lives.

In our contemporary, patriarchal consciousness, we are trained to focus our attention away from the river of life that flows through our lives and onto temporary attainments—business, military, political, media and artistic successes; accumulating money, gaining power-over-others, becoming better known—much to our long-term loss. Part of the greatest challenge of our culture is that it is at best irrelevant to the needs of sustaining the Earthly river of life of family, community and Earth around us; at worst, it harms that sacred flow into eternity, moving us away from the joys that radiate from that center.

Whether one has children or not, there are many ways people contribute to the flow of life through eternity. Activists, community volunteers, good neighbors, child-care workers, philanthropists, healers, growers, and many others whose lives directly support a sustainable flow of Earthly life practice the essence of good works—to bring forth life in daily activity. This constant labor of life—which is oftentimes ignored yet given hollow, insincere praise by patriarchal leaders—is a center of the flow of life through eternity.

In a very real way, my own journey back to this wonderful center began when, in first seeking to practice feminism rather than claim to follow it, I began to help my Mom and Grandmother with holiday meals. I quickly discovered while oftentimes lazy men in the living room watched TV and pontificated on the way that the world should be, the women in the kitchen were sharing stories, catching up on family life, recalling family and community history and deepening their relationships while cooking a meal to feed our family. These first few ventures into the woman’s world began a decades-long quest toward that center of life that is the toddler walking around a table, exploring her growing abilities in her new world and delighting her family with the joy of abundant life. It is a journey of joy and love, still far from completion, towards a more sustainable family and community at peace with the human world.

Summer Solstice and the annual life review

In our garden, Chinese Red and pink lilies, pinkish hollyhocks, golden and red marigolds, bright yellow coreopsis and golden Stella d’ Oro are blooming in abundance. The beautiful red lilies were a planted as a gift by my brusque, colorblind brother to our mother to beautify her yard two decades ago. When each of them passed on at young ages as part of a wave of deaths and illnesses over nearly fifteen years ago, I transplanted them into our garden and learned a lesson about how my brother expressed love.

Peas and lettuces have also been abundant, but heavy rains have delayed planting later crops. As June continued, our lettuce harvest changed from thinning of young plants, to harvesting full heads, to leaving the best heads to bolt and set seed. I have begun succession planting of tomatoes and basil in rows where arugula and spinach have bolted and set seeds, completing their lives by maturing the seeds I will use for next year. I have also sown Hutterite and John Allen Cut Short heirloom beans in the rows where the summer’s heat is slowly withering our Thomas Laxton heirloom peas. I have also saved overripe peas, especially those with many peas in a pod, to use as seed next year.

The Solstice marks a transition in our area from delicate, perishable crops such as lettuces, asparagus and peas to hardier, more lasting crops like beets, carrots, onions, tomatoes and kale. Replacing crops in succession planting and gathering seed from dying plants, along with my own life, has caused me reflect on transitions in my life from a larger lens.

Before the Summer Solstice, I conducted my ten day annual life review, a practice I started each June in 2015, to consider how I can improve. Looking over past notes, I saw that many of the issues that have affected our lives have been out of our control, but by pondering these aspects of fate I clarified what I do have some ability to affect. Ironically, though I think of myself as having free will, many of the things within myself that I wish to change are tenacious and appear in my annual reviews each year as works in progress.

Fortunately, many of the changes outside my control has been for the better, but there was a nearly constant wave of deaths, injuries and crises for a year and a half in our web of life. To our good fortune, this devastating wave was followed by a series of births of babies among friends and family. Like the garden, our lives are moving in succession, with young spirits replacing we who are incarnate now. Only when lives are lost young, with great suffering, or unnecessarily is the hardship of death not part of the flow of the sacred river of life of the Earth.

During my life review this year, I could see the unfolding of the streams of life of our families—our grandparents, our parents, ourselves, and the younger people in our blended family—along with the communities where we are living out our lives. From this intergenerational view, I could see that many of the events, for good or ill, have been part of inevitable flow of our family and community cultures. A slow motion flowering of the consequences of our histories and our own actions.

The good times have contained seeds of trouble and eventual crises that were overlooked at the time, like weeds in a garden that go unnoticed until they choke out the plants we have sown. During the crises, we struggled, cried and felt bitter remorse. During these hard times, I argued more with my wife and suffered from a lack of faith as we struggled to keep to a course that would maintain a happy, healthy family.

During these crises, we learned. We made different choices, sometimes out of bleak necessity, and focused our minds on managing events one by one. The wave of deaths, illnesses and crises brought to light my own failings and demanded solutions. Whether my choices during this wave were the best for my family will only be known in time.

As the wave of births and new lives took hold, joy returned from the shadow of death and our lives are now filled with the near-constant caring for young children who all-too-soon will venture away from their homes and into a human world not of their creation. They will succeed us, passing farther down the stream of life than we do, gaining from what we do right now, suffering from our mistakes.

For the most part, I have reacted poorly to the challenges. Yet, there has been a succession of good fortune and the bliss of new lives. If anything, most of the benefits that we have received have not been of my doing alone; rather they have been what skeptically-minded people would call luck or random chance and what—often in a self-serving way—some religious people would call grace.

In the larger human world, the dramas of princes and principalities have played out, as much out of the control of sensitive and ordinary people like me as the winds of the sky. For decades, my mind has been focused on the small human world around me—my family, community, and workplace—and I have put forth a lot of effort in that small world. It is in that small, precious world of loved ones and others who we share daily life with that I see my failures and good works have the greatest effect. It is in that world—where I have the greatest impact—that my annual life review focuses on.

In the larger human world of international trials and tribulations, the princes and principalities continue on, perpetuating mistakes and vainglory attempts to succeed through the Covenant of Bad Works. Like my own failings, whatever benefit these leaders seek through power-over-others will pass from them through the seeds of their own actions. The lesson in my personal world is the same: the more that I work to improve myself, to love in action those I care for, act with respect and consideration towards those in my community, pull my own weight at work and in my family, and to seek a sustainable relationship with the Earth, the more we all will prosper. The challenge is not in the saying; the challenge is in the doing.

As for my resolutions?—I have already failed in seeking to live according to them. Fortunately, I have the rest of the year to steer my course toward a better future for me and the loved ones who will succeed me in the sacred flow of life on Earth.

Life adapting to death

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.

Mother’s Day with a Young Mother

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.

Gratitude for the Gifts of May’s Fertility

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.

The Harvests of Easter

As we prepare for our Easter meal with family and friends, the yellow of Forsythia, Daffodils and early Tulips has largely passed, replaced with a wave of purple. Bright reddish-purple Redbuds, mixed with white and pink Dogwoods, appear throughout the woods around our town and in our community’s yards and hillsides, alongside sweet-smelling Lilacs. Light blue Periwinkle, violets, purple Moneyplants, bluish and fuschia Creeping Phlox, and darker hued purple and peach Tulips are all in full bloom. White and ruddy purplish Flowering Crabapples are blooming profusely and our apple trees in the hollow are opening their white blossoms as part of setting fruit.

As the Dogwoods have begun to reach full bloom there’s been a dip in temperatures, as is common in our springtime cycle. “Dogwood Winter,” as a coworker explained to me years ago, is a feature of the cyclic warming and cooling of our region’s early spring weather. After nearly a week of not using the furnace, we turn it back on to warm our home in face of the cool, damp nights. While we humans live with such comforts, the deer, rabbits, raccoons, possums, squirrels and many birds of the woods around us endure the cycle in the rugged, joyous beauty of the Earth.

The garden and woods are bringing the first harvests to our table. Using wild onions and ramps, my wife designed a vegetarian French Onion soup, using hearty vegetable bullion in place of beef broth. The soup, relying mainly on ingredients we gathered from our hollow and woods, is remarkably good. For our Easter meal, my wife is making Borscht with beets we’ve canned from the local produce auction, wild onions from our yard and Crème Fraiche from a local dairy. In addition to the Borscht, the meal will include a large Arugula salad harvested a day before from our garden. I am making a cinnamon-raisin Spelt bread using a recipe my wife adapted from a bread recipe passed to me by a friend. Some of the friends coming to the meal are musicians, as are some of our family, and as always at our family meals, the musicians will return the gift of food and companionship with music on our piano.

Recent events, along with memories of the Easter celebrations that we shared with my dear, devout mother-in-law, has made me consider the story of Easter from my view as an outsider to Christianity. In my work world, a leader who alienated many employees and customers was suddenly removed, causing joy to the staff below him. It was, from a compassionate point of view, a tragedy for him, since the career he had worked so obsessively has faced a tremendous setback. The man, younger than me, ignored numerous warning signs, blinded by the Hubris of early success, and was undone by his own actions, as the ancient Greeks observed in their stories of Nemesis destroying those suffering from fatal pride.

From my point of view, the leader failed to consider the feelings and lives of those who were affected by his power-over-others. The hierarchy around him, like all hierarchies, delayed him from suffering the consequences of the harm he did to staff and customers, but because what goes around tends to come around, his career has suffered a huge setback. Meanwhile, more telling, his loss is seen by many as their gain—if there is a future lifetime when he will again travel in the soul cluster of his former employees and customers, he will probably face harsh consequences from some spirits who unconsciously recall the harm he did to them in this lifetime. Not only has his harm-doing damaged his life in this incarnation, but if there are further lifetimes for him with these same people, he will almost certainly again suffer from his actions in this life.

At Easter, Christians recall the horrific torture-murder of Jesus during Passover and celebrate his denial of death with the resurrection on Sunday. This story, grisly and heartbreaking, is to both tell of the transcendence of death and of the earnest desire of the Christian deity to sacrifice for humanity. Rooted in a culture where child sacrifice, exemplified by Abraham and Isaac and in Chapter Eleven of Judges, was seen as a holy act rewarded by the deity, the death of Jesus is said to represent the deity’s sacrifice to humanity. In our modern culture, the story of an all-good, almighty deity torturing his beloved child is difficult to make sense of.

When I read the Bible years ago, seeing it as a patriarchal work, I was struck by the bleakness of the narrative. Generation after generation of violence, corruption and suffering is told, and, at the end, the nicest, kindest person in the millennium-long saga is tortured to death. It is a story of how the human world functions in communities where the Covenant of Good Works does not hold sway. Injustices that come from this imbalance is commonplace; in modern terms, the martyrdom of Archbishop Romero, Stephen Biko, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr—to name only a few—speak of the wrongs of the larger human world.

These stories break the heart of those who know them. From my outside point of view, the telling of the murder of Jesus communicates that those who lovingly seek peace and justice will suffer and those who use the quick, temporary violence of power-over-others will prevail against those practicing the slow, lasting works of love, charity and compassion. It becomes a moral telling that greed and violence will always rule our human world.

However, when I look at my personal world, I see clearly that the Covenant of Works is active in the web of lives I have traveled in. In my youth, my angry Hubris blinded me to my own harm, till the hallucinations of psychosis fortunately projected my shadow self into my conscious mind and made me aware that what I had sent out was returning to me. Like many views of karma/consequences, I was terrified to face the wrongs I did with the recognition that they would come back against me. Yet, decades later, I now see the Covenant of Works as a promise that by seeking to do good works I can receive good fortune. Unlike the story of Jesus, I need not be a martyr to transcend the human world; I need merely to think of others, seek to hear from them my true effect on their lives, and seek to align myself with the higher good of those around me. This is especially true in the close, personal world of family and friends.

I have the good fortune of living in a web of life where the Covenant of Works holds sway, which was not true for Jesus, Romero, Biko or King. In my personal world, when people do harm to others, that harm eventual becomes their undoing, whether or not they acknowledge their part in it. By seeking to be a good friend, neighbor, coworker and, most importantly, a good family member, I am given great rewards. Overlooking such good fortune and thinking that harming those around me will not return to me would be foolhardy and blind to the true workings of the soul cluster I am in. Like the Earth that wild onions, ramps and arugula grow in, the web of life I am fortunate to share with others nurtures my better self and reminds me through my own pain and joy that both the harm and good I do will return to me.

Taking root in the good Earth

Following almost two weeks of warmer weather, a flush of early spring flowers are blooming. Red and yellow Tulips, white-blue and purple Violets, Grape Hyacinths and some remaining Daffodils are abundant. Flowering trees are bursting into bloom, including white Star Magnolia, pinkish-white Cherries, White Bradford Pears and others. From our hollow, we are harvesting wild chives that grow as weeds throughout our community; from the woods, we are harvesting garlic-flavored Ramps to become part of an omelet with pieces of canned tomatoes, mushrooms, cheese and local eggs.

After a very rainy winter, March and April have been dry. With our unusually stable warm spell and nights without frost, Sugar Magnolia trees—usually burnt by frost in our community—are reaching full bloom. The moisture left in the ground and warm temperatures have done wonders to the garden, where lettuces, arugula, kale, spinach, mustard, turnips, beets, onions, carrots, garlic, peas and parsley are all flourishing with early growth.

After years of growing the garden, we’ve discovered that some vegetables do well, particularly greens, while crops that need more depth or greater fertility, like tubers, large radishes and cabbage, do poorly. Over the years of improving the soil with compost and manure and experimenting with different crops, we’ve learned what our garden likes to grow and what is presently outside its limits.

Just as we learned what is compatible with the Earth, I’ve learned what I’m compatible with as a sensitive person. Though I work with violent men, puritans and money-chasers, each in their own way are not compatible with my deeply felt emotions and desires for a peaceful, harmonious, sustainable and equitable world.

While I strive to see the good qualities of these individuals and to learn what I can from them, it is difficult to socialize with them—their emotions are simply too rough and callous for me; what they seem to want out of life and the life choices they make because of that make absolutely no sense to me.

As I explored the human world as a young adult, I found that the community my wife and I are now in was compatible with my sensitivity and ideals. This was an important lesson to apply to my life. When I returned decades ago after working elsewhere to rebuild my life economically, I found that not only did the community support my needs as a sensitive person, but it was also a refuge for artists, activists, seekers and others attempting to create a new way of life. Among these idealistic people was my wife, who I fortunately met in this colony of sensitive people.

As our lives passed in our community, I learned that some webs of life bring out our best, healthiest, happiest futures while others do not. This question—where and with whom we choose to live—is central to the fulfillment of our higher selves and, like the soil of the garden, is as important at the seeds of good works that we attempt to plant.

If we choose unwisely, partnerships and communities can become sources of hardship and crises, as commonly happens when addicted partiers or domineering and dependent people come together as partners. Just as I learned from a book given to me by a stepdaughter that companion planting of parsley and carrots near tomatoes fosters growth, human companionships and communities can help or hinder us. This is especially important for sensitive people, who are a minority in patriarchy and have needs that the mainstream culture ignores.

For sensitive people, recognizing where we fit and where people appreciate our good works is essential. A dependent person can waste years kowtowing to a domineering, ungrateful person; “social working” women, as my wife calls them, can spend years trying to save someone from their addictions and other self-created problems, only to find that their good will has been used to rob them of years of spiritual generosity. Giving up on relationships and communities that don’t work for us is crucial.

My own view of our present culture is shaped by the knowledge that as a man who is attempting to be sensitive and reach out toward the sacred Feminine that I no longer fit into the larger human world. Finding a community where I can thrive has been an extremely fortunate gift that I received even before I was conscious of my own sensitivity.

In the larger world, incompatible personalities, like partiers verses puritans and violent men verses sensitive people, have traditional rivalries spanning generations. The challenge for us is to learn from the better parts of these rival people while protecting ourselves from harm they might do.

For many, it is common to jump from one aspect to another as our lives progress. Many partiers become puritans to control addictions; some violent men have sensitive inner selves arise and react into pacifism or similar points of view; some money chasers become philanthropists or activists. In my life, the personality transformation beginning in my psychosis allowed my inner sensitivity to emerge, making the crises of that time one of the most important spiritual gifts of my life. Those perilous times led me to the family, community and life I have today.

For all our differences, each of us face deep spiritual challenges that are the true substance of our lives. Finding friends, families and communities that support our better selves is as crucial to us as the compost we put in the garden is to the seeds we plant. It is in our personal web of life that our most important choices—who we share our lives with—has the most powerful impact. Our lives may seem minor in the larger world, yet they are the place where we can apply our ideals and seek our dreams most directly. Consciously choosing who we share our lives with and how we can make each other’s lives better determines most of what we will harvest from our lives.

Renewing Life in the First Days of Spring

As spring begins, many early flowers are blooming in yards and on hillsides: Yellow and purple Crocuses, blue and purple miniature irises, pale purple periwinkle and lemony yellow and eggshell white Daffodils are all heralding the slowly warming Earth. Ramp sprouts are appearing among the fallen leaves covering the ground and I hear, as I do each March, the throaty rasp of Redwing Blackbirds near the small waterway running along the side of our hollow. Despite lows in the 20's for several nights, in our garden the first Arugula seeds are sprouting, reawakening with the Earth from the cold darkness of the dormant season. Using old sheets, we cover the garden bed most nights to protect the fragile seedlings as they begin new life.

This year, as we have in the last few years, we will add over a thousand pounds of compost and manure to the garden to strengthen the soil that our seeds depend on. When we began the garden about ten years ago, we discovered that the clayish soil contained buried bottles, broken plates and other trash thrown out decades before. Our first harvests were poor, but as we added manure, compost, leaves and other organic fertilizers, our harvests improved.

Our Saint Patrick’s Day tradition with our friend happened the Friday before the actual holiday due to a schedule conflict. As we drank beer and listened to Irish music, our friend, my wife and I talked about what the “American Dream” had meant to her family and community, as opposed to my understanding of it. The phrase, so commonly used in our culture, has a very different meaning to our friend than to me. For our friend, the dream is one of community and unity made possible by the rewards of hard work; from my viewpoint, many who pursue the dream emphasize wealth at the cost of community. We agreed to meet again, so I could hear more about her experience growing up in an ethnic working class community.

The violent men-money-chasers-puritans I work with practice good works in their communities as my wife and I try to, though some of them are hostile to outsiders and disregard the Feminine. As a result, they live in communities that both support them within it, but which are at odds with other communities of violent men-money-chasers-puritans of other religions, nationalities, and so forth. Living my childhood as an outsider and scapegoat in a community like this taught me the importance of building both community and inclusion.

As we have gotten older, my wife and I have watched people around us building or damaging the webs of life around them. In some cases, men have abandoned their wives or girlfriends in affairs with younger women, only to end up alone and lonely in their later years. Other people have been affected by addictions or other problems, creating hardship. The strands of life around these people and their families have been broken or weakened, making a more difficult life for them and their children. While the intolerance of puritan communities can create conflict, the lesson of practicing good works within our community is an essential one. This is especially important for the children and grandchildren of my generation, who will live in a human world that they will inherit from us.

Like looking at the soil where we sow our early spring seed, looking at the strength of a web of life is an omen of the strength of the people in it when long-term crises arise. Renewing inclusive, supportive communities and the fertility of our Earth is an essential practice. In doing so we are undoing the harm of previous generations, both to the Earth and to humanity.

For most of us, these challenges exist within our own families and communities and the Earth around us; our stories are the stories of history slowly unfolding. Choices by our elders to work through issues—to overcome addictions, to work through anger issues, to release racial and gender privileges, to provide a stable home for our partners and family—were crucial to our lives. Failures of our elders to work through these same issues often means that we are faced with overcoming them within ourselves; our failures are likewise passed on to future generations.

As I learned the inter-generational stories of families, it was sometimes possible to foresee trials and hardships years before they would arise. I sometimes imagine elder spirits watching us as our lives unfold and thinking, “I will check in with this person in two or three years, when a crisis will force him to choose between repeating the mistakes of his elders or finding a new path for himself. Until then, I can see all will continue as it has.”

My wife’s frequent babysitting and caring for others in our family and community and my volunteer work are attempts to strengthen our soul cluster just as compost strengthens our garden. Perhaps, if I live past the doorway of my own death, I will pass into a happier, stronger web of life than when I was a child—but that is not so important. What is important is that our actions, combined with the positive works of our generation, will strengthen our family, community and Earthly webs of life for my stepchildren and all the young people around them. On days that I am weary, it is easy to worry that this cannot be attained by good works; on days when I take part in the seasonal miracle of life arising from the still wintry Earth, I have faith that the strength of good works can overcome the mistakes of my generation.