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

After a long and hot beginning of fall, the temperatures recently dropped. Frost thickly covers the grass each morning and leaves are beginning to change to yellow and red, several weeks behind the natural rhythms of our climate. My wife has observed that in the last few years, the seasons have been getting later, with fall, winter, spring and summer all beginning and ending later than normally. A few days ago, we saw yards with crocuses, the early spring flower, blooming, creating a strange beauty out of sync with the natural cycles of the year.

Still, fall crops are being harvested and we will go to the last produce auction of the season soon, seeking potatoes, winter squashes, beets, turnips, cabbages and daikon radishes if available. We have already canned over two dozen quarts of Roma Tomatoes and in our unheated basement an authentic German crock given to us by a friend has a hot and sour Korean Kim Chi aging in it for the winter. A Rye Stout is fermenting in pales for opening in mid-winter and the grapes we harvested and froze in September are thawing, to be made into wine for next fall.

As the Earth cools and the plants fall into a deep sleep for winter, humanity recognizes the season with traditional holidays. All Hallows Eve, the Day of the Dead, Samhain, and Halloween, among others, mark the beginning of the season of cold darkness and scarcity, a season where animals like us often face death more directly than the robust seasons of spring and summer. In my own family, mid-winter marks the anniversaries of five deaths in my immediate family in the past two dozen years, a reminder that for mortal bodies, the cold darkness takes a toll that is very real and, in many ways, an inevitable part of the joys of a full family life. Each in their own way, the seasonal holidays of mid-fall commemorate the season of death and recognizes our gateway into the unknown darkness. As the Earth sleeps and enrichens itself with the compost of fallen plants and leaves, we animals contend with hardships we do not wish to face.

In the past few years, a wave of deaths, injuries and sickness swept over our web of life with a power and affect like never before. In our personal knowledge of family and friends, extended families lost over two dozen loved ones, including my own dear mother-in-law and her brother within days of each other, with another immediate family member suffering a severe injury and a lasting health crisis. Parents, grandparents, older siblings, friends and tragically a young child all were taken from our web of life and many other illnesses and health crises occurred. I had seen waves of death and misfortune before, but the enormity of the losses were shocking, shaking our personal web of life and changing families and friends deeply.

Then, gradually, the wave subsided in our personal web of life. People who had fallen ill or suffered injury began recoveries. Mourning did not cease, but was lessened by happier times. The wave of deaths and injuries was replaced by a slowly growing wave of healing, pregnancies and births. Babies and young children began to take the place of those we had lost and we found ourselves once again renewing our lives and love of others while still feeling the loss of those who has passed.

As the Earth falls asleep and the scarcity of the coming season renews the season of death for animals, the Earth composts the season’s growth, fertilizing the ground in preparation for the renewal of next spring. In the larger human world, many are distracted by the political challenges, with sensitive people and other traditionally powerless people feeling threatened. What the media dominated by white males calls identity politics is really the politics of traditional power-over, with inequalities of traditional society challenged by the growing strength of women, people of color and other traditionally oppressed people.

The history of the United States is largely the telling of the struggle between the forces of traditional power-over against the growing democratization of society, with our own Apartheid system ending with a finally democratic government in the mid-1960s through the passage of the Voters Rights Act. Recognizing that their numbers are dwindling, the people who adhere to traditional power-over relationships are more desperate to retain their privilege, making their flaws more apparent for a younger generation of more liberated people. Just as the winter composts to make the ground more fertile, I sincerely believe that the challenges of these times will be followed by a greater awakening.

Meanwhile the seasonal cycle continues, the Earth slumbers and nourishes itself, walking into the dark underworld and reincarnating in the new life of next spring. We continue to prepare for winter with harvests of long-lasting storage crops and canning, freezing and fermenting food for the coming season of scarcity. We await, with great anticipation, the births of more new lives into the circle of our friends and family and prepare for the joyful, exhausting work of the season of renewal and new life. For those who prepare for the cold darkness, it can be a time of nestling in, introspection and the warmth of a happy home. In these hard times, I wish the same for all the Earth.

As the sunlight wanes, the temperatures have turned cold and we’ve had our first thin layer of snow on top of the yards and sidewalks. With cloudy, below freezing days, the snow remained briefly, with more snow lightly falling at dusk as I walked home into the increasing darkness.

“Sungod religions exult the growth of the mighty sun from Winter Solstice through Summer Solstice, filling the Earth with abundant crops and energy. At Summer Solstice the Sungod’s half-brother—a weird named Mordred, Judas, and other names—seeks to kill the noble Sun. Their struggle diminishes the light till the Eternal Sun dies and is born anew at Winter Solstice, once again defeating his weird. So humanity has walked the path of Sun cycles for millennia, seeing the divinity of the Sun.”

I recently sent this message to one of the most important people in my life who is deeply connected to the Sun and often slowed by the wintry cold darkness. I have heard that all people are affected by the darkness of winter, which seems reasonable since it is a time of dormancy for many animals and plants.

Thinkers and neo-pagan seekers trace the agrarian origins of the seemingly all-powerful sun god, whose warmth and light gives forth the abundant crops that humanity needs to survive and thrive. As millennia passed, later stories involving the death or near-death and renewal of long-haired men such as Hercules, Samson, King Arthur and Jesus were placed over the previous traditions.

This overlay of our historical moment onto traditional, iconic stories is a common religious practice, such as when modern puritans declare what God, Allah, Krishna, or Buddha would do in the modern moment and insist that only those who follow their interpretation are the sanctified followers of the long-passed messenger of god. For millennia, religious leaders have reinvented their own faith, making it contemporary and leading it astray from it natural Earthly origins.

In facing the times of darkness in which the Earth sleeps and we animals walk in the valley of the shadow of death, the answer to the challenges of the dark times is to learn from and follow the Earth. For those of us fortunate enough to have some connection to the Earth, this a time of rest, reflection and preparation for the coming seasons of abundance.

I have been gathering fallen leaves to put on top of the garden after I turn it over, helping the Earth compost the soil and prepare for the coming spring. Later I will sort and prepare seeds from the previous year, in my covenant with the plants that they provide my family with food in exchange for me preserving their family through gathering their seeds, trading them with others and planting them in future gardens.

We have been transplanting native trees and shrubs—Virginia Pines, Virginia Junipers, White Cedars, Dogwoods, Butterfly Bushes, Redbuds and Milkweeds, along with the non-native heirlooms of Lilac and Chaste Tree—during this dormant season to provide a privacy hedge and flower garden to attract birds and butterflies. Soon we will buy a live White Pine Christmas tree to plant in a family member’s yard to commemorate the birth of her and her husband's first child, making a special celebration of the season. So the cycle of the Earth into the cold darkness is also a time of preparation and promise for the future.

We completed the brewing of Irish Red for our Saint Patrick’s Day tradition with our friend and have racked wine off its sediment into carboys to settle for bottling in January. I hope to reach out to local growers, including Anabaptists (Amish), to supplement our supply of foods in our unheated basement, including more Turnips, Beets, Cabbages, Daikon Radishes and Long Island Cheese squash. I am slowly learning to live on what the Earth offers, rather than choosing to indulge myself with a myriad of food from unsustainable practices. My wife and I have also begun to spend time at the homemade fire pit she designed, warming ourselves and watching the fire while we drink homebrewed beer, resting and considering our good fortune during the dark times of the dying sun god.

To an estranged mind, these joyous, reverent acts seem mundane, yet they are part of sacred re-creation of life. While the religions of patriarchy have overlain these traditions with words, concepts and sentiments of the urban human world far from a life in harmony with the Earth, this way of life awaits whomever has the privilege of a life close to the land. The cycles of light and dark remain and beckon us all, even though our modern human consciousness may fail to recognize these ancient, life-affirming ways.

During the dark nights, the temperature has dropped and the short days have remained cold in the waning light. Despite the human-centered holidays of the season, the larger human world remains, as almost always, facing crises and hardships. In our personal web of life, the joys of newborns and toddlers filling our lives are mixed with the declining health of elderly family and friends and the threats of tragedy for some whose lives face challenges found hard to endure. It is a time of cold darkness with more to come, causing us to nestle in to our homes and find the good and bad that awaits us there.

The Earthly season calls us to live in ways that the hubbub and distractions of the modern world finds foreign. Rather than go outward, we are called to go inward; while we can still celebrate the good things in our lives, we need to look ahead, through hard times, prepare to make sacrifices and face the threat of loss. It is a time of giving up to the cold darkness ahead so we can build a better future.

On warm days, I have begun to turn the soil in our garden, placing leaves over the soft earth to prevent unwanted seeds and plants from taking root and allowing extra nutrients to return to the soil. Our garlic, planted last fall to grow during the cold times of winter for harvest in early summer, is one of the few crops that show signs of life still; otherwise, it is a time of dormancy for the Earth. During these times, I will plan the garden for the next year and prepare seeds for planting in the spring.

In keeping with our traditions, we are planning a solstice meal of local foods, which I hope will include the seasonal storage crops of Butternut squash, beans and corn frozen during the summer harvest—the Three Sisters of Native American foods. With this strong foundation, we will open a Maple Porter we call “Viking Winter”—a heavy, complex beer that we brew each Winter Solstice and open a year later. In these Earthly hard times, we are fortunate to have abundance and reasons to celebrate.

Though many consider this season difficult, my wife, who loves winter and nighttime, celebrates them and maintains a home marked by happiness and hope during this time. Years ago, on the Winter Solstice, we held a “Longest Night of the Year” party with candles lit throughout the house and many friends and family in attendance. Following ancient and recently revived traditions, in the center of the party was a table with paper for notes, pencils, matches and a skillet for ashes of burned notes. We explained to our guests that the cold darkness is a time of winnowing, of giving up what is not working, so our lives will have room to grow a new, better life. We invited them to write what they wished to give up in their lives on a piece of paper and burn it, allowing that part of their life to transform into something better.

This year, I reflect on what I’ve realized is one of my greatest failings—a lack of faith in my daily life. While I have repeatedly received good fortune, kindness and abundance and seen in small, personal webs of life that consequences often follow from life choices: that what goes around often comes around. I grew up with a lack of faith and an underlying belief that altruism was foolish. In my daily life, I struggle with worries and anxieties that make me less effective, less able to be a kind family man and to enjoy the gifts we have received.

In my growth as a sensitive person, I came to realize that puritans in my personal world had claimed the concept of faith as theirs—that to have faith in a spiritual world and positive spiritual energy like the Covenant of Good Works, one need to follow one of the puritan religions, such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism or Buddhism. As someone who does not see humanity as having a special relationship with the spiritual world, but rather an equal child of that world with all other forms of life, these religions seemed to claim faith as theirs and not allow me to have it as one of my virtues.

Such lack of faith is common with sensitive people, thinkers and even mystical seekers, who see the corruption of religions used for power-over-others to also corrupt faith itself. How can we have faith in the darkest hour, when humanity’s history is filled with the mistakes of the past being repeated in the present? When all life and all things will pass into an unknown future?

Yet, faith is a powerful foundation to all spiritual life and daily living. Faith is used by puritans to strengthen their lives and move them forward. It is supported by their personal experience, where they see their prayers answered frequently enough that they recognize the power of thought manifestation. This recognition by puritans is a key virtue in how they conduct a spiritual life of their choosing.

As I have studied my personal life in thinker fashion, observing the smallest coincidences and seemingly minor events, I have seen a spiritual world in our daily life. While I cannot say there is a deity, nor would I dare attempt to speak for that possibly existing deity, I witness a spiritual world nearly every day. I don’t have to believe in it—by watching coincidences, I see it.

For me this Winter Solstice, I will seek to give up my cynical, anxiety-causing lack of faith. In place of this, I will seek to build a strong faith to provide a foundation for further growth and a more spiritual life. My wife and I are extremely fortunate, despite my own failings. My faith in the goodness of the spiritual world, long dormant in my life, is a recognition of the kindness I have received again and again in this hard but wonderful world. Building on that recognition and the Covenant of Good Works allows me to believe that in all of our journeys through the spiritual world that there can be a better, unknown future, even at the darkest hour.

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.

During the dormant season, I am slowly working on our family land in harmony with the weather. I am working to finish turning over the soil in our garden, I’ve cut vines from trees in the woods near us and we’ve transplanted our Christmas tree in a field on the land of family who have brought new life into the world. I’ve also wrapped leaves and wool sacks received from an Anabaptist (Amish) friend around fig trees to help them survive the winter. In the cold morning woods, I hear occasional songs of birds and see squirrels climbing on vines and bare trees and deer wandering through, all living harmoniously in the flow of Earthly life into eternity. With the cool weather and the long nights, it is a time of less outer activity and more reflection inside our home.

I’ve removed fermented Kim Chi from an authentic German crock given to us by a friend and will replace it with the last of the local cabbage, garlic, caraway seeds and salt to make sauerkraut. We are cooking seasonal dishes from long-lasting storage crops like winter squashes, dried beans, potatoes, onions, garlic and turnips and adding sauerkraut and canned tomatoes from the previous summer of abundance.

Despite all of these gifts, in the past year I have lacked faith and happiness due to stresses, too much activity and a lack of spiritual routine. As I begin to renew these practices, I am reflecting on the decades of my spiritual journey from an angry, selfish young man.

Many years ago, while deeply in psychosis, I had a hallucination of meeting Jesus. The experience focused me on facing harm I had done to others and how my actions were making my own life and future miserable. The experience, magnified by psychosis, helped me reconsider my life. It cured me of a young, narcissistic self that arrogantly focused my thoughts on my supposed virtues and rarely considered my effect on others, even those I thought I loved. This transformation was largely brought about by the tremendous kindness and generosity of spirit that I was receiving from people who had befriended me in my college community, even though they knew I was hallucinating and psychotic.

A couple of years later, after returning to sanity and on my way to buy hundreds of sleeping pills to kill myself, I realized that my parents would be heartbroken if I killed myself. I decided I could not do that to them. Instead of killing myself, I worked out three principles to would guide my new life:

All life is sacred.
Women are especially sacred because they bring forth life.
Men like me can approach the sacred by helping women bring forth life.

I found work as a computer analyst and began to volunteer for causes I supported. I learned to practice good works from meeting Christian Pacifists who were working to help homeless people and to bring about a more peaceful and just human world. When I returned my college community, I was inspired to practice good works to repay the gifts I had received. To my surprise, I found that good works—bringing forth life—resulted in me oftentimes receiving gifts.

At the same time, I met my wife and her family, giving me a chance to live my ideals of helping bring forth life in a family. This gift—the magnitude of which I cannot measure or express—revolutionized my life. I am grateful to my chosen family for allowing me into their lives and giving me a foundation for my life. I might never have had all this without the transformation that psychosis and loving kindness had given me. From this profound good fortune, I have learned that the Covenant of Good works is active in the webs of life I have traveled in. I have witnessed this spiritual reality in my daily life for decades.

I am not so naïve as to believe that the Covenant of Good Works is active in all human webs of life—the story of Archbishop Romero and the other martyrs of El Salvador is but one example. Those of us gifted to live within these fortunate webs of life are obligated to provide support to those who are not. At the same time, bringing forth life in my own web of life gives me rewards that I cannot experience otherwise.

From these gifts, I receive the joys of working the soil of family land, transplanting trees, turning over the garden and preparing for the season of renewal. During this time of nestling into our home, my wife and I are caring for very young children of family and friends, filling our days with the gift of new life flowing into the unknown future. By taking part in the Earthly sacred river of life, everyday can contain a blessing of life and love. This simple yet crucial reality, long recognized by the traditional feminine culture, is something that eluded me as a young man from a patriarchal background. By opening to the sacredness of bringing forth life, I have received gifts that only that source can provide.

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.

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.

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.

In mid-December, cold weather brought our first real snowfall, covering the ground and trees with a beautiful coating of white. With the natural abundance of the season picked through by feasting birds or covered with snow, we decided to begin our winter setting out of birdseed to feed the hungry birds. Running errands when I thought of this, I returned to our yard and saw a Morning Dove standing under the feeder where families of doves had gathered last winter. The Dove, too, knew that it was time for us to replenish our seeds.

I gathered Sunchoke, the last harvest from our garden. It was a huge crop, so I shared some with a neighbor and began to make new recipes to accommodate the abundance. A lesson from nature, like deer whose coats darken to blend with the wintry brown and grey landscape, and those who live close to the Earth like the Amish and other growers, is to adapt to what the Earth is offering, so I will seek to use the abundant crop in more dishes than usual this winter.

Our beer brewing season is beginning in earnest. We have bottled Irish Red to open on Saint Patrick’s Day and brewed a Robust Porter for Candlemas. On the Winter Solstice, we brewed a Maple Porter—“Viking Winter”—and opened the Viking Winter we brewed on last year’s solstice. It is a heavy, sweet porter that goes well with the long, cold nights of Winter.

As part of the seasonal gatherings, my wife hosted a mother-daughter reunion party for friends of her daughter, their Moms and other women friends of my wife. When my stepdaughter was in high school, my wife and other Mom’s hosted mother-daughter parties, which I viewed as important ways to strengthened their lives. This time, the gathering was an elaborate affair, with rich food, sparkling wine and English-style Crackers that my wife had handmade special for each Mother and Daughter pair. My wife also made what she calls a “tower of power”—nuts, sweets and cookies on several layers of beautiful glass dishes set atop each other.

Though my wife has made clear that I am welcomed—especially now that there are babies and toddlers sharing time with the generations of women—I have always stayed away. In doing so, I follow the teachings of radical feminists and others who explained that to overcome the burdens of patriarchy, women need “a room of their own” to empower themselves and strengthen the lifeblood of their relationships with each other.

For my family and web of life, we are in the aftermath of waves of death, illnesses and accidents that shook our web of life like earthquakes, ending not only lives but several relationships between those that remained. Following the upheaval and sorrow, a wave of new lives began, almost simultaneously as the wave of deaths reached its peak. These new lives have drawn our webs of lives back together, acting like gravity to attract us through the love of children to each other. Our daily lives are now filled with babysitting and strengthening the relationship with the parents and grandparents, much as the mother-daughter parties strengthen the web of life that has brought the new lives into this hard and wonderful Earth.

In this time of change, of deep darkness, rotting leaves and dead plants, and slow beginnings of Earthly renewal, I am considering what I have learned since the last ending/beginning a year ago. At that time, I began a study to find out how I might have greater faith. Last winter, still feeling the raw pain of mortal loss, with the new lives only beginning to take root in our family and community, I recognized that I have little faith. Faith is a spiritual strength and enables a person to leap chasms of hardship and fear and land unscathed on the other side of new life and new beginnings. For all its ability to deceive those who cling to it for denial of life’s hard truths, it is still a strength to be emulated and used for good.

Over the year, I saw the workings of faith in my own life; new practices for a person raised with a blindly skeptical disregard for the spirit of life around me. In particular, I faced trials based on risks we took to follow good works in the world of money around us—not only through charity, but also through setting short-term gain aside so that we could use our good fortune to aid those in need. It led to challenges that I was not prepared for.

In moments when there seemed little hope of things working out, I prayed for a sign about good works in the economic world. Though I once thought of prayer as being practiced by weak-minded people dominated by irrationality, almost as soon as I had prayed for a sign my family received a blessing, leading to a resolution of our long-term worry. Clearly, the spiritual world was responding with an emphatic “Yes!” Good works can work in the world of money, if it is applied wisely.

During the interim, an African American family, pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps and showing grace, calm and understanding that often eludes me, managed to buy their own home and move out of a rental apartment. We left on good terms and I was grateful that they had found a home of their own and inspired by their success and friendly natures despite the burdens laid upon them.

They posted quotations from the Bible in places in the apartment, and I asked for them to leave them behind, so I could understand what inspired them. On the inside of their front door was a quotation from their translation of Timothy, which read:

“For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” (2 Timothy 1:7).

I reflected that these African Americans and their young children walked out into a world of hardship and challenges that I cannot fathom; their message to themselves and their children in facing a world not of their creation was powerful to me. I am grateful for knowing them and gladden by their success.

Though I was bullied and psychologically abused during my childhood by bigoted, wealthy whites who claimed to be Christians, I seek to learn from all traditions. During my recovery from psychosis, I met people who truly sought to follow the teachings of Jesus, rather than use it to seek power-over-others, as the hypocritical whites did in my childhood community. This discovery, and treatment for the trauma of my youth, enables me to be inspired by that which inspired these faithful African Americans.

As I consider this year’s lesson and next years’ spiritual journey, I hope to find ways that I can act on my faith in good works and in the spiritual strength of the Feminine. To me, acting in this way is the essence of flowing with the Earthly river of life into eternity.

I have learned that there is reason to have faith, yet it difficult to maintain when it is most needed—during our trials in the mortal human world. Acting on faith is to not be daunted by the fears of the hardships of the world, but rather I need to act in line with the spiritual strength of the Earthly and human world. How to do this without bringing harm to myself or the family that needs me, that is the question to ponder in the sleepy darkness of the winter nights.

As the daylight increases, the warming Earth is bringing forth early spring flowers. Purple and white crocuses, pale blue periwinkle, golden yellow and eggshell white Daffodils, and lemony Forsythia are providing beauty in the midst of the still cold and dark season. While the human world is in the throes of an unforeseen and all-engulfing crisis, the Earth continues the annual cycle of seasonal life, untouched by the worries of the human world.

For decades, people in the circles I’ve traveled in have mentioned the inevitability of a new pandemic, worrying that the widespread use of antibiotics would evolve a superbug, untreatable by current medical knowledge. Others, unimpressed by claims that the human world had conquered the Earth and made it bow to the human god, worried that history’s lesson that plagues arise without warning would be ignored because of the widespread belief that humanity had overcome the challenges of all-encompassing Earth.

Coming into the local foods movement decades after it had taken a foothold in my community, I quickly became aware that it was preparing for times when our international supply of luxurious foods would be interrupted. Most people in my community, confident in the intricate vulnerability of industrial abundance, never consider if the food we consume is from the neighboring county or another hemisphere. As long as the complex and narrow supply chains bringing fruit from Chile or Hawaii and olive oil from Italy remain intact, the source is unimportant.

When I was drawn into the local food movement by high gasoline prices in 2008, I quickly learned how vulnerable my community was. Activists working towards sustainability and resiliency pointed out that our stores only had a supply of three days of food on the shelves and that our county’s food production could not feed our population. We were, in our ignorance, vulnerable to any crisis that would interrupt these world-wide supply chains providing an abundance of foods to our privileged communities. Among the many threats to our delicately maintained abundance, the likelihood of a pandemic was commonly discussed in the local food movement.

As the United States woke to a world-wide crisis that had dominated the world press for weeks, I found myself waking up as if from a deep sleep to the cause that had taken over my life more than a decade before. The food club we had developed over the last ten years and my hobby of gardening had brought me into the local and bulk food movements in my community, preparing me for the challenge we are currently facing.

One announcement followed another revealing that our sleepy ignorance had left our society unprepared for the rapidly increasing crisis. One after another organization announced changes or cancellations. The university I work at raced to implement plans for an all-online and remote coursework, community groups, ranging from spiritual to self-help to entertainment to restaurants announced closures. My own family cancelled plans for a family reunion meal.

Meeting with another local activist on our food club, I was reminded of the value of the networks the club had developed in our community. I realized that while the rest of the community was shutting down, we had the opportunity to help. I called our bulk food supplier the next day and asked him if their supply chains had been disrupted.

“No yet,” he replied, “But we are expecting them to be.”

Later that day I sent out an email to our club, letting members know that local food activists had been preparing for situations like these. This was followed quickly by order forms for rice, flour, sugar, cooking oils and other staples that my area cannot produce our own. Within three days, there were orders for as twice as much as we normally order in two months.

For our own resources, my wife and I made several trips to grocers, supplementing our stores of food from local sources and choosing a balanced selection of foods to deal with a long-term interruption of our supply chains. Following discussions with local food activists, I selected products that are from distant sources that are likely to become costly or scarce.

I’ve watched as top leadership have shifted from denial to sudden recognition that a devastating wave of death may soon engulf us. As dire predictions mount, I’ve reflected on what has been the carefully maintained denial by many in the United States. It is easy to believe what I wish if I avoid contradictory facts. If it served me, I could say that Moscow does not exist and unless I am taken there against my will I can reject any evidence as deception. On the other hand, I cannot act on the belief that I do not need food or water. Physical need cuts through denial.

For over a generation, most people living in the United States have not faced physical hardships that challenge cherished beliefs, leading to a culture out of touch with the essentials of life. The physical reality of a pandemics and living through waves of deaths are likely to break through these delusional walls in the same way that a decade ago losses in war and an economic downturn caused the last Republican president and his family to lose political power-over-others.

The covenant of bad works, which allows leaders to temporarily—and only temporarily—escape from natural justice, breeds incompetence, cruelty and narcissism. As a result, crises erupt as slowly evolving consequences created by the Earth and humanity respond to the quick, short-lived force of power-over. The suffering this causes breaks people out of their shells of denial and they reject the delusions they had about their hero, finally seeing that the emperor has no clothes.

Considering the likely political outcome of this crisis, I thought of a simple “equation”: Trump = W. The two individuals are twin tips of an iceberg of the same large hierarchy of white violent men, money-chasers and puritans. Hierarchies like these dominate the societies of most nations, living out the same story retold over the millennia of patriarchies: They ruthlessly gain power-over others, bring about suffering and injustice while ignoring real challenges until a crisis cause them to fall unexpectedly. It is a story of the larger human world that is witnessed, recounted, ignored and witnessed again. But it is not an indictment of a few very power-overful men; it is a measure by which money-chasers, violent men and puritans blame problems on the leaders they choose, rather than the lifestyle and goals that cause them to choose those leaders.

While the crisis in the larger human world grew, in our small and unimportant lives my wife and I sowed our garden under dark skies, as we have during spring for over a decade. Turning over the soil, adding compost and manure, and planting lettuces, arugula, mustard, spinach, kale, beets, carrots, turnips, onions and peas, we quietly took part in the cycle of life and renewal. The feel of cool, wet soil on my hands as we planted precious food gave me comfort and joy. While the human world careens into chaos and crisis, the simple acts of bringing forth life give both our bodies and our spirits strength. The hardships of the mortal world bring on threats and worries, but being embedded in the Earthly river of life gives practical meaning to each and every day. In two months our garden will be providing us life-giving food each day—a precious gift of the Earthly flow of life into eternity.