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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the long days and heat of midsummer the local harvests are flowing into our lives like few other times of year. Tomatoes, sweet corn, potatoes, peppers, cucumbers, onions, peaches, early apples and much more appear in long rows at the produce auction, providing variety and abundance for us. This year with our local midsummer meal we will open an IPA brewed a few months ago, its crisp, light flavor especially satisfying in the heat of the day.

For years, I have gone into the woods to meditate in all seasons, allowing me to witness the wisdom of natural communities. One aspect of this is partnerships that foster life, such as in the lives of coneflowers, bees and birds.

At the height of summer, three foot tall orange coneflowers with pale purple petals bloom in our flower garden. As always, we will let them mature, grow seeds and become brown and dry, honoring the full life cycle of the plant. In doing this, we learned about how natural communities practice sustainability with an ease that out-of-balance humans find nearly impossible. During their midsummer blooming, the flowers are pollinated by bees and other insects gathering nectar. I imagine the insects gathering the nectar find it to be sensually delightful, since it is pleasant and sweet. Their bodies have been trained by time to find the sweet nectar and gather it for honey, and just as we find the taste of honey delightful, I imagine the bees find the nectar wonderful. While we use the honey for sensual pleasure, the bees’ sensuality is part of providing for themselves and the children of their hives, making their pleasure part of the sacred re-creation of life.

After the coneflowers mature and turn brown, beautiful yellow and black goldfinches gather on the stands and eat the seeds that the bees’ pollination have created. Like the bees, the goldfinches delight in eating the seeds and strengthen their bodies in doing so. Yet, there is something more in their digestion of the seeds.

Flying away from the coneflower stands, the goldfinches will naturally excrete the remnants of the seeds, including in some cases an intact core containing the beginning of a new coneflower. This new coneflower, delivered to the ground in a fertile packet that we find obnoxious, can start a new life and a new stand of flowers to feed future bees and birds, extending the community of all three. Through the simple and sensually indulgent acts of digestion, these partners in the re-recreation of life increase the sustainability of their species without conscious awareness, simply by seeking out their sensual pleasure—a sensual pleasure that is part of the sacred spiritual quest to re-create life through generations of time. Modern humans, out of balance with each other and nature, cannot match such ease of sacred re-creation of life.

In the woods, there are thick partnerships like these overlapping with each other, creating communities of mutual support that spread themselves outward in simple acts such as squirrels burying nuts in the ground. Life in nature can be difficult; wind can knock down nests with babes falling onto the ground and predators can strike without warning. The wisdom of the woods teaches that we die as individuals and families, but we sustain ourselves as communities of win-win partnerships re-creating ourselves in the river of life.

In the human world, partnerships like these exist through good works extended by people towards our families, friends, neighbors and coworkers. Good works, like the bees pollinating flowers while gathering life-giving nectar and birds spreading seeds while indulging themselves in eating, are the central gravity that connects lasting human communities. In a human and natural world, where what goes around comes around, doing good works that bring forth life sustains our communities, which is essential to sustaining our lives through future generations.

Delighting in caring for children, growing tasty food, sharing a good meal with family and friends, and other daily acts is both a celebration of life and centers us in the river of life flowing in our lives. We build a lasting community around us by our good works, making the future for the children of the community more secure and hopeful. It is by the sacred work to bring forth life that our lives become full while our futures and the future of our children become more secure through the community our work builds for us.