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

This winter we bought and will plant a live Christmas tree, as we have for about a decade. As in the picture of the live Christmas trees and myself in the photo on my author pages, the trees have taken root on family land. This year, we will plant the tree at the home of family who recently brought a baby girl into the world, so the tree marks not only a happy holiday season but also the promise of new life amidst the trials of our human world and the cold darkness of winter.

Through our practice of planting live Christmas trees, we sustain the life of the tree and take part in the flow of life through time. Some live and some die, but as the years pass the surviving trees grow and provide food, shelter and oxygen to animals and the composting of their needles and branches to the fertility of the Earth. They also provide a place for children to play and beauty for all of us to be part of, even in cold winter weather.

The trees we plant will themselves give birth to young trees, forming a family of trees that humans call stands, spreading out from their center into the woods around them. In centuries and millennia to come, the family will reach out to other families of trees of their species, interbreed and make new families, just as animals and we humans mingle and mix our lineages. Lifetime after lifetime of trees will come and go, while the Earth sustains life into unfathomable eons of time. With that same hope, our family gathers around the baby we’ve been blessed to receive and seek to provide for her with the same love and nourishment that the Earth provides for plants and animals growing in natural communities.

As I work to increase my faith in the spiritual world, the planting of the live Christmas trees is part of my learning. In my experience, nature perpetuates itself through partnerships of what we call good works. Plants, insects and animals merge their daily lives, making natural communities that thrive on their mutual work of life. These partnerships and communities, called “symbiotic relationships” and “ecosystems” by scientific-minded thinkers, perpetuate themselves generation after generation, just as human families perpetuate ourselves in mutually supportive communities.

I know from my own, first hand observations that what goes around comes around. When I have acted harmfully, my harm returned to me. When I have acted kindly, I have received many gifts. The Covenant of Good Works is a principle that I have witnessed as a reliable part of life; forsaking it brings harm to those who seek gain without regard of others. Tyrants and tyrannical dynasties rise and fall in the covenant of bad works, in which those who take from others have their gains taken from them in crises and turmoil brought about by their own acts. This is as true for religions, ethnic groups, the wealthy, governments and political parties as much as despots and cruel ruling families. I regard these observations as clear facts of the mundane human world, evident in both the personal and the larger world.

Faith, which my skeptical, fact-minded thinking often lacks, is to believe that the Covenant of Good Works can somehow sustain our lives through the doors of mortality, just as the families of trees we plant will thrive for generations past our short lives. It is a small step to combine the strength of good works in the face-to-face human and natural worlds with the spiritual world I witness life through coincidences in daily life to a faith that through the doorways of death and turmoil lay a perpetuation of life and love.

In my fleeting, mortal and small life my mind cannot fathom the Earth and more than a few generations of lives in it; am I to deny myself the faith to believe in the wonder and beauty of the vast starry winter night and of the Earth as it composts and renews itself in the wintry cold? From a common sense point of view, faith in a benevolent spiritual world is as reasonable as recognizing the strength of the Covenant of Good Works in the vast mystery of the Earth and the nighttime sky. I cannot imagine my mind ever grasping the larger questions that puritan spokespeople claim they know the answers to; but in the beauty of nature and new life, faith seems much more reasonable than cynicism.

In the slowly growing light, the winter weather has been fluctuating between very cold and cool, with mixtures of rain turning into snow and melting a few days after. Some people grumble about the weather, especially if they have to drive in it, but the children always relish the snowfall and sled down the steep banks of our hollow with a joy that adults often forget.

We visited with a friend who mentioned that she was “going slow-mo” this month, but we noticed she seemed healthy and happy. In the season of cold, wintry weather, our bodies often ask us to go slowly and relish the internal life of rest, introspection and intimacy with family and friends.

Our concord wine has finished settling in glass carboys and we are racking it out of the carboys, adding potassium sorbate to kill any remaining yeast and bottling it to age in wine racks covered with throw rugs in our unheated basement. We are also bottling our Viking Winter Maple Porter, brewed on Winter Solstice to open next Winter Solstice, and with this batch adding a little vanilla extract to one case to experiment with a Vanilla Maple Porter. We will soon be brewing a Honey Golden Ale to open on May Day. I have also made a garden map for the upcoming spring and will be separating our dried seeds from their stems and pods for planting in late February or early March. Even in the depths of winter, we prepare for the coming season.

For our Candlemas (Midwinter) meal, we are looking in our stores to make food from local long-lasting crops like garlic, onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes, daikon radishes, sunchoke, beets, turnips, dried beans and canned tomatoes. We are also opening a Rye Stout brewed in the fall to go with the wintry cold and the hearty food.

Candlemas is a time of looking forward to the new solar cycle. In the dark and rebirth of the solar year, I choose to work on increasing my faith in a benevolent spiritual world. Now I am reflecting on this choice, considering both its source and how I can strengthen my faith and what that truly means.

In looking at where my intention arose, I see that two and three years ago, our family and community faced hardships that tested my strength. We underwent a wave of deaths, injuries, illnesses and crises that was unlike any other that I have witnessed. For months on end, family, friends, coworkers and acquaintances told stories of loss and suffering. In several families, multiple family members died within months and sometimes days of each other. Our own family suffered with the others and I despaired, my faith shaken in ways that I now deeply regret. This cycle’s focus on faith came not from a place of abundant strength, but rather of recognizing my profound lack of it.

In the last twelve months, the season of our lives has seen renewal that is as welcomed as unexpected—in place of waves of death and illness there are waves of birth. Newborns and young babies are filling our lives. Sweetly, children born of mothers who have known each other since before they can remember are meeting each other in infancy and, like their mothers, will grow up as friends that have known each other since before their first true memories. Today, three toddlers of these Moms shared time together after their naps and were fascinated by each other, as if recognizing old friends just now becoming reacquainted.

In place of uncertainty and trials, I feel a greater sense of love and belonging. My desire to increase my faith is in fact a statement that my faith has been strengthened. The hardships we faced have been endured and our lives are once again turning toward happier times. It is, in fact, an easy time to say I have faith because it is not being tested; rather it is renewing with our lives. The lesson is summed up by something a counselor told me after a wave of deaths over a decade ago had caused strains in my relationship with my dear wife—“Marriages have seasons,” she said, speaking from her knowledge as an older woman married for decades with a husband and family.

Like marriages and the Earth, life has seasons. Waves of deaths and new lives, of hardship and opportunity, flow in and out of our lives. Our families, communities, societies and human world travel through these waves, all the while we alternate between despair and the joys of hopeful renewal.

If I have faith in a benevolent spiritual world, perhaps I can be stronger for those I love during our next time of trials. Perhaps I can truly relish the joys of the present moment, indulging deeply in the sweetness of new lives during this cold time of our year. During the hard times, I am often unconscious of the working of the spiritual world that fills our lives, like the slumbering Earth composting new life under the winter’s snow. My faith, whatever it is, is vital to give me to strength for the younger generations in my family and community as they flow within the river of life on this hard and wonderful Earth.

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 slow, steady growth of darkness of the approaching winter has made for two snowfalls in December, giving beauty to the cold season. Once the solstice passes, the changing season will slowly bring new light even as the winter, lagging behind the light, will likely become colder and harsher before the awakening of spring.

We continue to feed birds and squirrels in the winter feeders, providing some food during the scarce season. On days where our granddaughter sleeps over, the toddler delights in feeding the birds and watching as they and a squirrel or two gathers to eat.

“Look, it’s Squirrel Nutkin!” I tell her, referring to a mischievous character from the young girl’s Beatrix Potter stories. Our granddaughter goes to the window and watches with delight, expressing her glee by chattering mixed with high-pitched squeals of joy.

Some older people in families, remembering disappointments about losing the enchantment of the Earth when they discovered that Santa Claus was a fake and forgery manufactured by deceitful parents, play down the magical world that children seem to live in. Having never really believed in Santa Claus myself, I am on the other end of the spectrum and excitedly tell the impressionable young one fable after fable of Santa Claus, elves, reindeer, and sleighs flying through beautiful, starry skies onto snow-covered rooftops.

“It’s easy to get into the spirit of Christmas when you have children in your life,” I told my wife, who, as usual, was busy with many Christmas decorating, craft, and baking projects.

”Um-hmm,” she replied, “It sure is,” diplomatically failing to point out that she shares the joy of the holiday with our family through hard work making the season special for all of us, while I often retreat into journaling and self-reflection. It is that work of family, hearth and home that makes so much possible in our lives, yet she has not been paid a dime for all her decades of devotion.

Like the traditional roles of family in our culture, my contribution to the season includes providing money from work in the outside world, small help with planning and a little baking. Since Christmas is, more than any other Christian holiday, a celebration of children, it is inevitable that women in our culture are more apt to focus it than men.

Like my own slow centering on Christmas, in Western history the holiday seems to be one way that patriarchy has begun to awaken to the joys of children. Beginning with an ennoblement of a special child deserving gifts and providing humanity with tremendous blessings, the birth of the son of Christmas, occurring at the rebirth of the Sun, deifies a child. So children are to old people such as my wife and I, who find solace and purpose in the joys of a grandchild while we face the loss of loved ones in our families and friends.

The story of the birth of a god at Winter Solstice, only to suffer death later in the year, is a retelling of stories of solar and human birth-death-rebirth stories like Hercules and Samson, as was common in the ancient world. The ennoblement of the child in the story of Jesus is an important improvement over what the prophets of the Babylonian Captivity, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, rightly called the abomination of child sacrifice that the Hebrews, like many warfare societies, practiced to please their god. This ennoblement of the sacrificial lamb, slowly growing in our history like the light following the darkness of the solstice, brought with it gifts not to a church or a shrine, but to our own children and families. Patriarchs have slowly, unconsciously begun recognized to recognize the sacredness of the lives of those in our families, celebrating our love for them in the indulgence of the magic of Christmas. In doing so, patriarchs and patriarchy have begun to awaken to one of the many long-neglected joyous responsibilities of the Feminine.

Following a hodgepodge of traditions and rituals, ranging from stockings and Christmas trees to following the death and rebirth of sunlight at the solstice, I consider the intention I make for the slowly coming year. Last year, I chose to act on faith. That decision led me into a whirlwind of career change, whose effects I will only be able to judge in time. The decision, like my self-reflection at the solstice, focused on my life and aspirations and only grudgingly, if at all, recognized my family and the crucial role they play in my life.

Accordingly, my intention for the new year is a three-fold reflection of my growing faith:

To have faith in my family
To create boundaries between myself and toxicity and toxic people
To focus on eliminating toxicity of thought, word, and deed within me

It seems to me that this is the best way I can improve as a member of my family. Talking about this to a twelve-step group I’m a member of, I said that it seems that this is the essence of the teachings of the Twelve Steps. After acting on faith to make a change in the outer world, it is crucial that the next change be within me, especially within my heart. According to many faiths, change within our hearts have the greatest ability to transform our lives as we face the hard human world in the slowly growing light of the cold, lustrous winter.