Milt Greek's Blog: The River of Life - Posts Tagged "home"
The Gift of Returning to Home and Hearth
The darkness of early winter has reached a peak while I—focused on completing graduate work to solidify a new career—have spent hours late at night completing papers and studying for tests while working a nearly fulltime schedule. During the Halloween season, I saw most again people placing gravestones and skeletons around their houses in unconscious preparation for the season of scarcity and death for animals such as us. Connected to the human world’s whirling news cycle, particularly statistics about COVID-19, it was apparent to me during the time of the wailing ghosts of Halloween that once again, this winter will be a season of death in the United States.
The natural world, which dwarfs the passing achievements of humanity, continues with its cycle of life and death, despite humanity’s preoccupation with itself. Despite my own desires to embed myself in the woods and Earthly life so generously offered to me, I found myself racing from hurdle to hurdle on the journey into a new career, without enough time or careful thought about our home, family, community, and the natural communities that we depend on for life.
Over the past few years, my focus and my life has increasingly been away from the abundance and happiness given to me by my family, our home and community, and the natural communities that we are surrounded by. My choice to begin a new career and to take on far too much work to jump-start it, has been a great relief to me in many ways and has made me appreciate my good fortune. After all, I work with people with the same diagnosis I have, but our clients have so little to provide them with a happy home, a family of their own, and a meaningful life. My passion for the work, long delayed by the economics of caring for a family, drove me past a fall of colorful leaves and the bounty of a good harvest, and into the intellectual world away from the here and now of family.
Soon after the start of the fall semester, however, my wife was told that routine tests had caused concern and she would need more extensive testing. I tried to assure her and her family that these additional tests were common and no one should be alarmed. Taking time off work to be with her, I found myself one Friday morning alone in a hospital waiting room, praying for her well being and shocked by having to consider what would happen if the assurances I had given everyone—including myself—were wrong.
I would later tell people the good news was that the intrusive and expensive procedure was entirely unnecessary. Fed up with endless and needless tests and medical solutions that would do more harm than good, my wife and I went a local herbalist who has repeatedly healed problems that the Western medicine could not and stopped listening to the Western for-profit medical system.
However, it was not true that the tests had been entirely unnecessary; as my wife has pointed out to me numerous times, things happen for a reason. The worried waiting alone in the hospital awoke in me a renewed desire to be sure that I spent time with my wife and her family, despite the all-engulfing pace of the work and school outside of our home. For the day of the test and the next, I spent almost all my waking hours with my wife, grateful she was well and appreciative of her presence in my life. Over the months since then, I have made extra effort to give my wife and her family more attention and time. These re-entry into our family’s home and hearth continued to be a stark contrast to the suffering and endless anger of the human media.
As the darkness of the season increased, my appreciation of my wife has grown and our family relationships have deepened. Unlike many estranged or isolated from family and friends during the pandemic, my family’s closeness geographically and as a family has made this horrific time for the human world has been filled with poignant, wonderfully sweet, profoundly appreciated family time. While so many struggled with the reality that the Earth is greater than humanity, my family has been able to simply reach out to each other and spend time face-to-face that has been like an oasis in a parched desert of COVID isolation. As the holiday season fell into full swing, my newfound commitment to make time for my family was filling me with gratitude for them and for my mysterious good fortune.
In the last month, my wife has been watching the holiday classics that she has watched year after year for decades. In watching them, I began to see a parallel that I had missed before. In “It’s a Wonderful Life”—a racist, sexist story that has the hero saved by the community his good works has helped create—I recognized that the stereotype attitudes mirrored the hero’s patriarchal blindness. Starting as an arrogant but earnest young man who wanted a million dollars, to travel the world, and have a harem or two, his widowed mother directs him towards a woman who will give him the answers. To his dismay, he finds the answers lie with a woman who adores him but wants to stay close to her home and family in their measly one-horse town. He cannot fathom how she could be so uninterested in the adventures he seeks. Over time, he finds himself with her, caring for their family of young children while trying to preserve the wellbeing of many others in their little, unimportant town. He changes from the headstrong, patriarchal adventurer to a man deeply in love with his family and devoted to their community, but his work constantly draws him away from the home and hearth he shares with them.
During a crisis, the hero wishes he had never been born, and by a miracle he is shown his community without his presence in it. Just as he was drawn into the home and hearth provided by his wife—who had the answers he needed—his life’s work mirrored that journey. Without his presence helping working men get homes for their families, the community is a stark, highly patriarchal, and chaotic place, a town named for a cruel leader filled with men who drink hard liquor so they can get drunk fast, cheap dancehalls displaying young women, broken families, poverty, and vices barely hidden by 1940s standards. Just as a self-involved patriarchal young boy matured into a loving family man, his work had helped many others do the same. In the end, the community of good works he had helped forge saved him and his family—something that would have been impossible in the bleak, cheap, vice-filled alternative reality.
Many people refer to the honoring of a baby at Winter Solstice is a clear reference to the rebirth of the Sun/Son, making the Christmas Nativity a retelling of the same agrarian Son/Sun-worshipping stories from millennia before. For me, however, I also believe the traditions of Christmas stem from the patriarchal men realizing in their brutal blindness the transcendent joy provided by children in our lives. Celebrations of children and babies are celebrations of the discovery by men that the profound joys of a family home are more important than our distractions of money, power-over-others, and fame that many seek.
Viewing these antiquated, sexist, and racist movies, I can see that the progress in the decades since has also been marked by losses. The public world of social media, twitter, and internet anonymity is filled with obscenity, vices, harshness, and a spiritual corruption that “It’s a Wonderful Life” warned us about. In place of face-to-face communities and focus on what families of all sorts need for the future is a patriarchal cultural wasteland of vice and anger. The sexism of the 1940s, exemplified by conservative media voices like the late Rush Limbaugh, has been replaced by the sexism of the current times, exemplified by media voices like Howard Stern. For women who have the answers—a love of family, home, children, and closeness—finding men who follow neither the Limbaugh’s nor Sterns of the modern world is rare. Yet for men who are lucky enough to stumble into the lives of these women and are drawn away from our outside world distractions into a loving family, the answers are as clear and beautiful as the stars of a clear winter night.
The natural world, which dwarfs the passing achievements of humanity, continues with its cycle of life and death, despite humanity’s preoccupation with itself. Despite my own desires to embed myself in the woods and Earthly life so generously offered to me, I found myself racing from hurdle to hurdle on the journey into a new career, without enough time or careful thought about our home, family, community, and the natural communities that we depend on for life.
Over the past few years, my focus and my life has increasingly been away from the abundance and happiness given to me by my family, our home and community, and the natural communities that we are surrounded by. My choice to begin a new career and to take on far too much work to jump-start it, has been a great relief to me in many ways and has made me appreciate my good fortune. After all, I work with people with the same diagnosis I have, but our clients have so little to provide them with a happy home, a family of their own, and a meaningful life. My passion for the work, long delayed by the economics of caring for a family, drove me past a fall of colorful leaves and the bounty of a good harvest, and into the intellectual world away from the here and now of family.
Soon after the start of the fall semester, however, my wife was told that routine tests had caused concern and she would need more extensive testing. I tried to assure her and her family that these additional tests were common and no one should be alarmed. Taking time off work to be with her, I found myself one Friday morning alone in a hospital waiting room, praying for her well being and shocked by having to consider what would happen if the assurances I had given everyone—including myself—were wrong.
I would later tell people the good news was that the intrusive and expensive procedure was entirely unnecessary. Fed up with endless and needless tests and medical solutions that would do more harm than good, my wife and I went a local herbalist who has repeatedly healed problems that the Western medicine could not and stopped listening to the Western for-profit medical system.
However, it was not true that the tests had been entirely unnecessary; as my wife has pointed out to me numerous times, things happen for a reason. The worried waiting alone in the hospital awoke in me a renewed desire to be sure that I spent time with my wife and her family, despite the all-engulfing pace of the work and school outside of our home. For the day of the test and the next, I spent almost all my waking hours with my wife, grateful she was well and appreciative of her presence in my life. Over the months since then, I have made extra effort to give my wife and her family more attention and time. These re-entry into our family’s home and hearth continued to be a stark contrast to the suffering and endless anger of the human media.
As the darkness of the season increased, my appreciation of my wife has grown and our family relationships have deepened. Unlike many estranged or isolated from family and friends during the pandemic, my family’s closeness geographically and as a family has made this horrific time for the human world has been filled with poignant, wonderfully sweet, profoundly appreciated family time. While so many struggled with the reality that the Earth is greater than humanity, my family has been able to simply reach out to each other and spend time face-to-face that has been like an oasis in a parched desert of COVID isolation. As the holiday season fell into full swing, my newfound commitment to make time for my family was filling me with gratitude for them and for my mysterious good fortune.
In the last month, my wife has been watching the holiday classics that she has watched year after year for decades. In watching them, I began to see a parallel that I had missed before. In “It’s a Wonderful Life”—a racist, sexist story that has the hero saved by the community his good works has helped create—I recognized that the stereotype attitudes mirrored the hero’s patriarchal blindness. Starting as an arrogant but earnest young man who wanted a million dollars, to travel the world, and have a harem or two, his widowed mother directs him towards a woman who will give him the answers. To his dismay, he finds the answers lie with a woman who adores him but wants to stay close to her home and family in their measly one-horse town. He cannot fathom how she could be so uninterested in the adventures he seeks. Over time, he finds himself with her, caring for their family of young children while trying to preserve the wellbeing of many others in their little, unimportant town. He changes from the headstrong, patriarchal adventurer to a man deeply in love with his family and devoted to their community, but his work constantly draws him away from the home and hearth he shares with them.
During a crisis, the hero wishes he had never been born, and by a miracle he is shown his community without his presence in it. Just as he was drawn into the home and hearth provided by his wife—who had the answers he needed—his life’s work mirrored that journey. Without his presence helping working men get homes for their families, the community is a stark, highly patriarchal, and chaotic place, a town named for a cruel leader filled with men who drink hard liquor so they can get drunk fast, cheap dancehalls displaying young women, broken families, poverty, and vices barely hidden by 1940s standards. Just as a self-involved patriarchal young boy matured into a loving family man, his work had helped many others do the same. In the end, the community of good works he had helped forge saved him and his family—something that would have been impossible in the bleak, cheap, vice-filled alternative reality.
Many people refer to the honoring of a baby at Winter Solstice is a clear reference to the rebirth of the Sun/Son, making the Christmas Nativity a retelling of the same agrarian Son/Sun-worshipping stories from millennia before. For me, however, I also believe the traditions of Christmas stem from the patriarchal men realizing in their brutal blindness the transcendent joy provided by children in our lives. Celebrations of children and babies are celebrations of the discovery by men that the profound joys of a family home are more important than our distractions of money, power-over-others, and fame that many seek.
Viewing these antiquated, sexist, and racist movies, I can see that the progress in the decades since has also been marked by losses. The public world of social media, twitter, and internet anonymity is filled with obscenity, vices, harshness, and a spiritual corruption that “It’s a Wonderful Life” warned us about. In place of face-to-face communities and focus on what families of all sorts need for the future is a patriarchal cultural wasteland of vice and anger. The sexism of the 1940s, exemplified by conservative media voices like the late Rush Limbaugh, has been replaced by the sexism of the current times, exemplified by media voices like Howard Stern. For women who have the answers—a love of family, home, children, and closeness—finding men who follow neither the Limbaugh’s nor Sterns of the modern world is rare. Yet for men who are lucky enough to stumble into the lives of these women and are drawn away from our outside world distractions into a loving family, the answers are as clear and beautiful as the stars of a clear winter night.
The River of Life
We are all born into a river of life that has created us from unfathomable generations of life before us and is likely to continue in some form for eons past our own time. Taking part in this Earthly
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