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

The growing dark night has brought a near-wintry cold, including a brief snow shower that covered the ground and remaining crops. Temperatures have mainly been in the 40s and 50s for highs with frosty nights in the 20s and 30s. The gardens have had most of their crops harvested, with winter root crops like parsnips, turnips and sunchoke left in the soil to be harvested in the next months. Growers of corn and beans have harvested their crops; Anabaptist (Amish) growers have gathered their corn stalks into pyramidal sheaves, left in the fields for animals to graze on during winter pasture and return the nutrients to the precious soil.

In the cold frosts the leaves from most trees have fallen, to rot and replenish the soil in the dark nights of winter. In our climate, the damp, cold, rotting stillness of winter is an essential time of rest and nourishment of the most basic elements of life—the ground that is the basis for all life.

Knowing that a cold snap was on its way, I harvested the last of the Arugula from the garden, a tangy treat of greens that both begins and ends our growing season. A few days later, I was surprised by the snow that accompanied the cold days and decided to gather the last of our Lacinato kale, a very hearty dark green that had ice and snow on some of the leaves. I shook most of the ice off the kale and stored the cold leaves in our refrigerator for a few days to allow them to recover from the shock of transitioning from freezing cold to the luxurious warm of our heated home. I removed stems, froze a large bag of kale leaves for use in winter soups, and turned the rest into Pesto Toscano, using garlic, cheese and olive oil to create a savory paste. Like the leaves, I froze the pesto for future use.

As the fall weather continued, a large flock of Cedar Waxwings flew into our yard and gorged themselves on red berries from the honeysuckle bush in our front yard. For several years, the large shrub’s berries remained on the branches through fall into winter, left uneaten by the surrounding animals and birds. This year, however, the Cedar Waxwings discovered the bountiful crop and delighted themselves in a feeding frenzy. As always with the produce of nature, simply by plants offering up the gift of life, animals and others discover the gift, digest the fruit and pass the seed on elsewhere in partnerships of life the spread the range of both plants and animals. It is an affirmation of the power and wisdom of good works to bring forth life simply by offering themselves to the abundant Earth.

In the slower times of late fall, with our food club ending its season in October, I turned to reviewing notes for the next book I intend to publish, Fulfillment. Feeling daunted by the title itself, I looked through the notes and found that my younger self had left me important advice for my present workaday life. Rather than focusing on outward achievements, the book begins with the importance of creating a sanctuary and living fully within it, thereby strengthening my life through inner peace and joy.

In the past few years, the hubbub of my life, accompanied by the normal dramas and hardships of mortal life, has taken me far from my own sanctuary. My time at home and with my loved ones have been spent with a pre-occupation not with the joys we can share but with worries and frustrations in the human world around us. I had let challenges from the outside world into our lives, rather than seeking to protect that sanctuary from those same challenges.

Following the advice of my younger self, who apparently had insight for me to learn from, I began to practice having sanctuary time in my home. I woke each morning and listened to pleasant music while I had tea and breakfast. I paused after coming home from the day’s work before engaging with my dear wife, so that I can shake off the frustrations and worries of the day and connect with her. After a couple of weeks of doing this, I decided to enter into a news fast, having decided that I knew enough about the outside world.

After a month of practicing my sanctuary time, I began to feel true ease. Rather than pondering the frustrations of the moment, I found myself enjoying plans about the food I would cook for a meal, or making notes about gardening, brewing beer, and our family life. In doing so, I emptied my mind of the clutter of problems outside our home and found peace and joy waiting for me to celebrate.

While sounding indulgent to many, the sanctuary time I am practicing and enjoying is much more than selfish hedonism. The time and place of the sanctuary gives me strength to be a better person in my family and my personal world, to take stock of what I can and cannot do, and to strengthen my spirit. It is my experience that as I gain peace, joy and insight, I can be a better, more effective person.

Whatever I have to offer is strengthened by the sanctuary I seek. Taking time to truly feel the joys of life gives me deep gratitude for all our good fortune in this hard and wonderful world. That, in and of itself, makes me a better person, a better husband and stepfather, and a better member of our community.

May has had a long cool spell, extending for most of the month, all the while the sun has been slowly reaching towards its zenith in the northern sky. Despite many days of cloud cover and rain, the month of our mothers has seen a myriad of flowers burst forth. Beautiful bluish-purple irises, a gift from a neighbor, bloomed in early May, followed by wonderfully fragrant pink English roses, a gift from another neighbor in our friendly, close-knit community. Along with these many flowering trees, bushes and vines have made May full of beautiful colors and scents.

The weather has slowed the garden’s growth, allowing early spring greens like Arugula and Spinach to last longer than usual. Along with baby Red Romaine thinned from a row of lettuce, the Arugula and Spinach has provided many salads.

On MayDay, I took a meal to my stepdaughter’s family to share with them, my wife and stepson. The seasonal meal of Arugula, canned beets and local Feta, along with our Honey Golden Ale and homemade Garlic-Rosemary Focaccia, was so enjoyable that it was requested a week and a half later to be part of our Mother’s Day celebration. We also found a seasonal spring salad of Arugula, Spinach, Strawberries and Feta cheese online, which we served later in May.

Saddleback mushrooms grew from the rain, allowing us to make a favorite spring meal, Hungarian Mushroom Soup. While saddleback mushrooms are as flavorful as more famous counterparts, we have made delicious mushroom soups and omelets from the bountiful harvests we’ve received for over a decade of it growing on the remains of an ancient Elm that sadly passed years ago. We transplanted a young Elm next to the huge trunk of the older Elm as it showed signs of passing and, fortunately, that young offspring—perhaps a child or grandchild of the elder—has grown wonderfully in the past fifteen years and is providing shade, beauty and supporting the natural community in our back yard. As always, life passes yet flourishes, as it has for unimaginable eons of time on the Earth.

Robins built a nest under a gutter on house and gave life to their babies, making us careful not to frighten the meek birds. Later in May, we saw Robins eagerly procreating, part of their joyous work of life to bring forth more offspring in this hard and wonderful world. May, the month of fertility, continues to offer that gift despite the many challenges that humanity faces.

In mid-May I went to our local gardening store for extra compost and noticed that the seed racks were virtually bare—at least 90% of the seed was out of stock. Gardening, which like the food club has seen a surge in activity, has stressed the supply lines and caused shortages. I mused that my work in local foods and gardening over the past decade included accumulating Heirloom seeds from our own crops, including lettuces, spinach, arugula, pumpkin, muskmelon, beans, peas, and a few others. Over the years, the seeds have piled up, so that I have stores of seeds selected for color, size and being slow to bolt that we can rely on. Participating in this wonderful cycle of life has prepared us for the ongoing crisis, making our work of life all the meaningful and significant.

Our food club has ramped up for new season, with new members filling the club to its limit. The club’s summer schedule begun in late May, spending over five hundred dollars buying strawberries, asparagus and other items for the thirty households in the cell.

As time allows, I am returning to work on a short book, the second in my self-empowerment series given the daunting title of “Fulfillment.” The book, behind schedule, was set aside for other work, including the rush for the food club caused by the pandemic.

As I reviewed the text, I realized that I had failed to fully cover an important part of fulfillment, which is to be thickly embedded in the work of life, moving my life, family and community more toward the center of the river of life flowing through the Earth over time. My own bias as a young, patriarchal man seeing himself as an isolated entity seeking to make his mark on the larger world had affected my view of fulfillment, decades after my journey toward the rich life of the Feminine started.

I respect the teachings of Buddhism exemplified by the Tibetan people and their leaders in exile, however, I diverge in that the crucial concept of “emptiness” as I understand it: that we are the creation of outside energies, without which we are empty of a true self. Accordingly, our attachments to our momentary connections to the short-lived, mortal world are deceptions that interfere with our eternal spiritual purpose.

From the vantage point of my journey toward the Feminine, this view pulls us away from being embedded in our families and communities. These “attachments” are not transitory to me, but rather are part of the essential re-creation of life of the human and natural soul clusters I share my journey with. It is in the work of life that fulfillment is truly attained.

As many people struggled with the emotional consequences of the crises caused by the pandemic, I found myself and my family experiencing deep fulfillment. Our lives in our close-knit family and community have been brought into deeper focus. My wife, babysitting for three days a week in her daughter’s family home, has experienced a connection with her family that many seek. My work in the community with the food club has given me activity and strengthened our organization as we helped with the work of life. This depth of life is in strange contrast to the trials and tribulations of the larger world. We simply deepened our roles in crucial life-giving good works, providing us with even more joy in our personal lives.

There is a wisdom that the idea of emptiness and non-attachment teaches, however. Because I am the creation of my surroundings, my soul might have been born into any other life: as a woman, a child raised in poverty or in an “enemy” country my nation has turned into a war zone, as a African-American or a Native American, as someone developmentally disabled, or many other challenges that I do not face. The teaching—that those we are taught are inferior or an enemy to us could in fact be our own souls in another incarnation—is at the heart of compassion and understanding spiritual consequences. Undoing the injustice of patriarchal history is a way to strengthen our future by embracing the lives of those we might have been incarnated as.

This wisdom of emptiness teaches that not only do I need to embed myself deeply and lovingly in my human and natural family and community, but also to minimize harm as much as possible. This allows our abundance to be shared throughout the wide and deep Earthly river of life. This practice is not only a way to lessen the injustice brought on by the cruelty of patriarchal invasions, dictatorships, slavery and other evils, but to embrace life more fully by extending our love of life outside the small family and community we celebrate our lives within.

Eastern religions teach that personal attachments only set the stage for suffering in our mortal world. This is undoubtably true. To love in a mortal world is to know we will lose the most important parts of our lives: our family and friends. Yet, by taking part in the work of life and embedding ourselves deeply in it, our daily lives gain a joy that cannot be given by any other gift. This reward of the work of life is the essence of fulfillment.

As sunlight has ever-so-slowly diminished following it's peak during Summer Solstice, the normal heat and humidity of early summer has returned, bringing on white and bright pink Lillies, red Bee Balm, purple Coneflower, white Queen’s Anne Lace, red Trumpet Vine, deep purple Morning Glories, pale blue wild chicory and purple Butterfly Bush. The warmth has caused mid-season crops to burst forth, providing summertime favorites like corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, onions. In addition, harvests of garlic, turnip greens, lemon balm, zucchini, yellow squash and a myriad of other foods has filled our homes and dinner plates with wonderful food. In place of the cooler and more tolerable temperatures earlier, the joy of the season is now in the luscious, fresh and healthy food provided by local growers.

With the change in my schedule, I have had more time to accompany my wife on her work as a babysitter and helper with my stepdaughter's young family. I have pitched in with some yard work and preparing some meals, a couple of weeks ago including local sweet corn and tomatoes. The choices seemed popular with my stepdaughter, so I brought more the next week. After telling her this she said, "I was hoping you would bring corn and tomatoes." I was glad that this simple gift of the abundant season pleased her and her family.

Despite the plentiful harvest, the effects of the pandemic have challenged produce buyers in our food club. Normally, the club will pay wholesale prices for wonderfully healthy and tasty food sold in large lots by the local growers at the auction. This year, however, global and local supply lines have been shifting rapidly. While some restaurants and suppliers have closed or lessened orders, there has been an influx of large food clubs and emergency food aid grants, bringing many more big-budget buyers to the auction.

Our community’s local food donation hub was approached by a ten-county community organization given emergency aid money to food security to many dislocated workers. As a result, the hub is now bringing two large buying accounts to the auction. Meanwhile, a nearby medical provider began a large food club, buying food for nearly 150 households and providing bidders a buying budget triple our club’s substantial clout. As a result, for the first time in the auction’s history, prices for premium products like sweet corn, tomatoes and other items have doubled or tripled from previous levels and are at or above the prices at our local Farmer’s Market. The auction itself has reached out to additional growers, some of whom have seen their markets close, seeking to meet the upsurge in demand. As I left the auction after buying for our club, I sincerely thanked the auction manager for his more than decade-long work to develop this crucial local food source. He kindly thanked our club, since our participation over the past decade has helped ramp up the auction’s capacity to serve our region during this crisis.

Ironically, while the growers at the auction are for the first time since its inception receiving fair market prices for their wonderful, life-sustaining produce, the rise in prices creates huge challenges for our club, which markets itself as an affordable source of local produce. Our buyers are discussing strategies and options as we seek to supply our 60 or so households with the same amount of high quality, local produce that we have consistently provided for nearly ten years. Despite the challenge and worry, it is a deep fulfillment to be a decade-long contributor to a vital service in the midst of a world-wide medical and economic crisis.

Meanwhile, in my spare time, I have reflected on my career change, which includes returning to college to gain credentials to work full time in the field of mental health and recovery. It is area I have devoted many hours to over the past two and a half decades, volunteering, researching, writing books and providing training and presentations, but it is one that I have not been able to work in full time. For the past two decades, well-meaning and good-hearted people suggested that I pursue a career like this, where there is so much need, and I have long felt guilty that I have led a more financially rewarding path while failing to do good works in my career. I imagine that more than one person has felt the change was long overdue.

In the spiritual abstraction of good works, I can see the argument that I should have made these changes sooner. After all, advocating good works is about more than urging others to be kind--it is about living a devotional daily life. However, in the context of my life, I felt that my responsibility was first and foremost to provide a stable foundation for my chosen family.

For years, my wife's family including caring for my very dear and kind mother-in-law, who in her later years provided joy and love to all her knew her. It also includes my wife's chosen family, who have kindly accepted me as a somewhat goofy, odd-acting person from a foreign family culture far different then their own. Where they have practical skills, my original family has educational theory; where they have humor, my family has sober reserve; where they have diverse musical and artistic talent, my family is centered on words, numbers and news.

Yet, they could see, for all our differences, I struggled to help my wife and her family from the earliest times of our relationship. This was the application of an early lesson from my experience of patriarchal arrogance, which had been deeply, but unconsciously, ingrained in my youthful ambitions.

As a young man, I placed my career plans ahead of any relationship, including with a young woman who I thought I loved. This, of course, is not uncommon in patriarchy, where the fathers have announced that it is the will of the god of the universe that women serve men, especially as obedient wives.

Though I thought of myself as a liberal, pro-feminist young man, I was narrowly centered on my personal ambition, causing me to act with little regard for those I claimed to love. This was simply an extension of the patriarchal culture in which men usually see ourselves as in a personal struggle with the larger human world, seeking to take the world by storm and assuming happy relationships and harmonious families as our birthright.

Forced to face my arrogant shadow during my psychosis, I realized that I had little actual understanding of the Feminine or women I knew. Seeing the importance that I, as a man, embraced the Feminine, caused me to spend many years earnestly learning from the women around me and studying the philosophy and spirituality of modern women theologians. Eventually, my journey led me to my wife and her family. It is a gift that few men truly receive and fewer appreciate.

Applying my abstract ideals to our lives, I decided that I would try to be a helpmate to my wife in strengthening her family. This made intuitive sense--I knew that as our family thrived, my wife, and thereby me, would be happier; as the family suffered, so would my wife and I. In time, I expressed this journey as the first two tenets of The Essential:

The children must be cared for.
The community must help the parents in their work.

Since my wife was the primary caretaker of her family, I was to be her helpmate, though I was not their biological father. This was of no matter; their fates are intricately interwoven with ours. The essential failure of patriarchy is that the wife is to serve her husband and their children are to be under his domain, draining time, energy and strength from the family center and into centers created by patriarchy, such as the pursuit of war, money, partying, religion, abstract education, sports, and other things. These male-dominated centers often have no real value to the children of the world and, in some cases, are anathema to the needs of a happy home.

As an arrogant and privileged young man in patriarchy, I sailed expectantly into one of these centers, constantly complimenting myself on my supposed virtues and assuming my personal ambitions would automatically make the world a better place. These lofty goals were more important than my brief and emotionally distant but often sexual relationships with the young woman I dated. I did not need to really think about the relationships around me, or consider those whose lives I touched, because I thought I was acting on “higher ideals”.

This essential failure of the patriarchal culture blinds many into a way of life with little concern for future generations. A partier need not worry for the hearts he breaks or the children he fails to care for while fulfilling his lusts; a money-chaser need not worry about his carbon footprint to be become rich; a violent man need not consider the "collateral damage" he does to win his "glorious victory"; a puritan need not consider the harm done by abusive husbands and fathers to fulfill his view of holiness; a thinker need not consider the harm his discoveries do in the hands of violent men and money-chasers to be a respected scholar. In these male-created pathways, rather than serving the family and future generations, individual men and compliant women have created an unsustainable larger human world as a direct consequence of the pursuit of their goals.

On the other hand, a childless gay man may seek to reduce bullying of youths; a childless feminist may work tirelessly to help women and children escape abusive families; a childless straight man like me may seek to help his wife's children. Our lives are made better for the effort and our family, friends and community around us are strengthened. The promise of acting in accordance with The Essential principles is the good works will return to us in some way. Moreover, it makes daily life joyful because it brings us into the true center of Earthly life.

The privilege my past career has allowed me to provide a financial foundation for my family, focusing my good works on that center. It has brought a depth to my relationships because it was paired with sincerity and vulnerability. The greatest risk is that I would become a corrupt money-chaser, forsaking good works and the well-being of my family for the pursuit of money. For all his anger and arrogance, my younger self would maintain that is exactly what has happened to the older man who has led a largely materialistic life.

In looking back at the unhappiness and stress I felt in my old career, which common among of the money-chasers I worked with, I can see that my change into a career of good works for much less money is essential. A true money-chaser, prizing acquisition above all else, would have worked many years in declining health and bitter unhappiness. He would have found that not only he can't "take it with him", but that he also never really attained true happiness. The Feminine's reward I’ve received over the years is that by following The Essential principles to care for my family and community I’ve experienced the deep happiness of taking part in the Earthly river of life. Had I walked this same path primarily for acquisition and satisfaction of my own ego, I would have never experienced the bliss I have been given. It is this true happiness that must, as is commonly said, be given to be received.

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.

Fulfillment, the second short book in the Empowering Ourselves as Sensitive People trilogy, is being prepared to be published soon. The book proved daunting to me to write, in part because of my busy schedule, and in part because I realized that the claim to have experienced fulfillment is justifiably rare. I had to consider if I really could claim I have and needed to place the experience within the context of the many events outside myself that created and affects it. In doing this, I spent an extra year and a half rewriting and revising the book, including when my wife made the very important observation that the “final” draft was written in the wrong voice, causing me to extensively rewrite it.

The short book describes the key elements supporting fulfillment, which I more-or-less stumbled onto experiencing. The path that led to fulfillment was described in Source for Sensitive People, which I wrote in the late 1990s, following the revolutionary changes in my life brought about by meeting my wife. It was eventually published in 2018 as the first in the series; Fulfillment describes the next step following Source for Sensitive People.

Though some in the mainstream culture might think of this way of life as an unrealistic retreat from the challenges of the contemporary human world, it actually led me to profound personal and spiritual experiences. Fulfillment describes the experience of completing the life lessons that my childhood challenged me to attain and the deep bliss that I’ve experienced as part of attaining it. That journey continues on in my life, with cycles away from and back to those lessons, as well as new challenges that have arisen since then. Once Fulfillment is available, I will publish the links here.

The final book in the trilogy, Creating a Spiritual Center will hopefully be published in about a year, completing the Empowering Ourselves as Sensitive People circle. That book will focus on the lessons of the first two books in the series and sees spiritual centers emerging from how we live our lives.

In the darkness growing through December, the weather was marked by rapid shifts of extreme cold and unseasonably warm temperatures, with the cold snaps accompanied by frozen ground lightly covered with white snow. From our home, we saw many animals, including squirrels, deer, Cardinals, Blue Jays, Mourning Doves, Titmice, Chickadees, Juncos, and assorted small sparrows, scurrying for sparse food.

In the season of empty coldness when the Earth sleeps and food for hungry animals is scarce, green lichen, moss, and fern remain amongst the white of snow and brown of fallen leaves and plants. The purpose of the season, centered on the cycles of the Earth, is to turn the nonliving rock and dead plants into fertile soil for the new life of spring. For those living with the cycles of the season, it is a time of eating stored food. Our food has included cauliflower, potatoes, cabbage, onions, garlic, dried beans, pumpkins, beets, and other staples of the late autumn and winter seasons. These have been used for fortifying winter meals, including Ethiopian and Indian foods, chili, pumpkin and bean and potato soups, and canned beets, as well as a traditional New Year’s Day meal of beans, potatoes, and faux sausage and sauerkraut.

At the peak of darkness, we returned to brew our first beer since the pandemic. “Viking Winter”, a dark, complex Maple Porter brewed on Winter Solstice, aged for a year in our cellar, then opened on the following Winter Solstice while we brew the next batch. The return to homebrewing is part of my intention for the new year to reclaim the core essence of my life—the self-in-the-world called “Dasein” by German Existentialists.

With time for a whirlwind of holiday celebrations and activities made possible by my decision to leave my employer gave me time to focus on my home and family. As I became immersed in my homelife, I recognized that the greatest challenge I faced in the past decade or more was the lightning pace of my life outside our home. My thinking and feeling had largely lost touch with the essence of life—the center of hearth, home, family, and the Earth that I seek to celebrate in my writings.

The Existentialist term, “Dasein” literally translates as “The One” of the Self-in-the-World. For me, the Dasein is myself, my immediate family, my home, the Earth around us, my relationship with the Earth in the form of gardening, local food and preserving, and home brewing and winemaking, all united in what I call the Spirit in Daily Life, connecting the Dasein to each other and to the mysteriously, unfathomable vastness of the Earth over imaginable eons, itself is an infinitesimally tiny part of vast time-place of the universe. I have been using the pause in my activity to focus on my mind completely on the Dasein and to integrate myself fully into it; to reclaim it with a humble recognition that I am a small part of my family, my home, and the Earth around us so I can once again feel the gift of waking up in the season of cold darkness with gratitude of all I have in this tiny flash of mortal life.

I focused on Dasein by rereading the section on creating and maintaining a haven or a sanctuary that begins the new book, Fulfillment. In many ways, I’ve let thoughts and feelings from the outside, troubled human world invade my home, distracting me from the gifts of home and family that I have received. Thinking that I would first reclaim Dasein through working with the Earth in the long-neglected garden and our yard, I found first I needed to focus my consciousness on my wife and family. Dasein is really a gestalt of the essential core of our lives, in which I am only one, equal, member to the rest of my immediate family.

The Dasein of my immediate family, however, includes others lives and parts of the Earth, including other family, friends, and pets, that are not part of the Dasein that I share. For me to care for others I share Dasein with, I need to not just think of my relationship with them, but with my relationship to others they share their Dasein with. For someone whose narrow focus is part of a purposeful strategy to remain small and in the here-and-now, it was a shocking recognition of the complexity of loving others. Yet, within the Dasein, all is one; the happiness and sadness happening to those I share it with will also happen to me.

I realized that in the Dasein, we are each other’s sanctuary. Inside my home, I am reminding myself that “I am in my sanctuary, safe in the company of loved ones.” When we babysit our granddaughter, I realized that we are part of her sanctuary and she, her parents, and we all share a collective fate. Venturing outside of this warm home means risking bringing back the troubles of the outside human world, as so many patriarchs have done to their innocent families for millennia.

In a few short months, I will complete accreditation that will allow me to become a therapist and I will rejoin the workforce, making these few months of frequent contact with my family, most especially my wife and step-granddaughter, all too brief in our lives. Using the time to ground myself thoroughly in my home, family, and the Earth is central to our future wellbeing. In eighteen months, my step-granddaughter will begin school and her time for her grandparents will be much shorter.

Conscientiously, with deep appreciation, sharing our lives in this brief respite before time pushes her and I outside our sanctuaries is the essence of reclaiming Dasein of my family, the Earth around us, and the spirit that unifies us. It is an ironic gift of leaving an intolerable worksite that more people should be forced by fate to receive.