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

Now that Midwinter has passed, sunlight is increasing more rapidly than earlier in the year. The Earth, fluctuating between warmer and cooler weather, is showing signs of the renewing spring. As has happened commonly in the past couple of decades, February is seeing an unusually warm spell, causing concern for those who rely on the Earth for crops like Maple syrup and early fruit. Meanwhile, the cycles of nature continue. On sunny, warm days, Cardinals and other birds are singing to announce territories. Soon, birds will build nests to provide homes to their offspring, even as snow falls intermittently onto the cold ground.

The waves of loss and renewal that affected our family, friends, coworkers and acquaintances over the past few years has focused my thinking how deeply affected I am by the lives I share in my face-to-face community. More than anything else, for me the spiritual is in the relationships I share with others. I witness the spiritual reality best in the small, personal world and find ideas that translate easily between the mundane, observable physical world and more ethereal and speculative spiritual possibilities. What I can see in this world may contain clues to the spiritual world and, if not, still is worth recognizing in this one.

I think that if we continue before births and after deaths that we probably travel in soul clusters, just as stars and galaxies orbit each other in clusters. This may be one reason that we commonly experience waves of deaths and births, as fellow travelers leave and join the Earth in sync with each other. In the mundane world, the webs of life I have lived in through my lifetime make up my spiritual neighborhood and are the most direct form of destiny. The family and community I grew up in, who I’ve married and what communities I’ve lived in have had profound effects on my personal fate.

Many traditional male perspectives see spiritual life as I and Thou—my single, isolated soul in relationship to a spiritual code or progression created by a deity. This doesn’t match my common sense observation of the impact of surroundings on my life. From a soul cluster perspective and from a mundane human perspective, we are deeply shaped by the lives around us. My spirituality seeks to recognize the crucial importance of others in my face-to-face world; for me, who we travel through life with and how we treat them is central to our spiritual journey.

A woman I knew was raised in the United States as a devout Christian, who, hearing on the radio in 1959 that the “god-king of Tibet was making his way through the Himalayas to escape the Chinese,” felt moved to pray for him, though she knew nothing of him. Decades later, she happened to see a show with Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell speaking about Tibetan Buddhists. She felt an immediate connection. She traveled to volunteer at a Tibetan refugee center in her state and, when she retired, moved to the center and spent the last twenty years of her life coordinating for the monks and providing related help while they cared for her in her declining years.

This fateful movement of the woman’s physical body was caused by her spiritual attraction for Tibetan Buddhism and the concern she felt for the struggles of the Tibetans. A mundane explanation for her choices is difficult—why would someone raised in Christianity in the United States become so interested in a foreign culture and religion? Why would she spend so much time and effort helping strangers based solely on her interest in them begun by a television show? Why did she feel moved to pray for the Dalai Lama when she knew absolutely nothing about him?

A much more speculative, spiritual perspective is that the monks that she shared her later years with were, in fact, part of her deeply connected soul cluster. Her compassion for the “god-king of Tibet” was a deep but unconscious spiritual connection. Just as comets circle stars and swing in orbits from far away to close by stars, perhaps her soul was incarnated physically far from her soul cluster in the Himalayas and was drawn by her soul’s love for her fellow travelers to return to a close and intimate life with them. The woman’s movement into a harmonious and deeply caring soul cluster was a central success in her life’s spiritual journey.

In my view, a central part of our life’s spiritual journey is uniting with our native soul cluster and having happy, healthy and harmonious relationships with them. Our choices of who we marry, the children we bring into the world, the community we share and how we treat the lives we affect are all deeply spiritual questions with profound impact.

From a mundane perspective, the interpretation of the woman’s journey through this spiritual lens is a fantastic and fanciful view of the physical world and this woman’s journey in it. However, in terms of the emotions of the woman, whose love and admiration for the Tibetan people and religion caused her to join them, it is more accurate than a cold, psychological analysis of possible environmental factors that would explain her fateful life choices. In mundane terms, we all seem to have people and communities with whom we are more harmonious and where our better selves emerge. Seeking these centers of fulfillment is an important part of our destiny. Arriving at a place where we can feel at home and do work to bring forth life is a true spiritual attainment, which this woman accomplished in a very real, physical way.

Each of us are drawn towards those we love. This love, like gravity, pulls people toward each other in fateful choices of where in our spiritual neighborhood we choose to spend our lives. Likewise, our attraction to things in the outer world—college, career, friends, communities, and so forth—deeply affects our lives and the lives of others. How do these choices served our relationship with the cluster of souls with whom we share our lives and affect each day?

While patriarchal religions tend to view our spirits as isolated in an egoistic and special relationship with a mysterious deity, I think a more feminine oriented spiritual recognizes the essential importance of our relationships with lives in our face-to-face community. What value is an afterlife if I do not share it with those I love? What good are spiritual practices if I do not treat others, especially those around me, well? In looking at my life as shared with a soul cluster, how I treat those who I love and others in my face-to-face personal world seems central to my fate.

During an unusually long warm spell a few days ago, a friend said that her peach tree had started to bloom and the cold afterwards would possibly ruin her peach crop. Maple trees in our town also seem to be budding weeks early, potentially ruining Maple Syrup crops. Fortunately, for a friend of ours, the cold of winter returned quickly enough and with enough vigor that her maple syrup farm was still producing good sap. Though many adults complain about winter cold, the seasons serve a purpose and the wintry cold is an important part of the cycle of life.

We have brewed a Honey Golden for opening on May Day and it is settling in glass carboys before we bottle it in a few weeks. My tentative garden map is complete for now and in coming days I’ll be preparing peas and seeds of lettuces, arugula, spinach and other early greens for planting. I will also turn over the garden again to bury the leaves that covered it during the winter and prepare the soil for sowing in early to mid-March.

Earlier this winter, a kindly neighbor allowed me to retrench a small waterway that was jumping its channel and flowing into our hollow. Recently heavy rains from our unusual weather caused water to rush down the cleared channel and overflow into an alleyway at the other end of the hollow, prompting a neighbor to text me. Debris in the rushing water had blocked the water’s underground entry into a storm sewer running below the alley. I cleared the opening to the pipe twice while it was raining, then, after the water had subsided, dug the eroded soil and rock away from the opening. It will no doubt need cleared again, as the new pathway for the water is scourging out soil and rock and leaving eroded silt downstream. It is a reminder to me that in our webs of life, all things affect all things. Every change I make will return to me, for good or ill. It is especially important that I weigh each choice to be destructive carefully, since everything that exists has some place and function in the Earth’s web of life.

The heavy rains also caused the hillside for another neighbor to subside. Suddenly his drive was impassable and he and his wife scrambled for two days to make stopgap fixes. As my wife and I saw the mess on our walk, the neighbor said that he needed to build a large retaining wall and his insurance covered nothing. Our own problems are minor compared to our neighbor’s crisis.

As we walked on, I reflected with my wife on a conversation I had with an Anabaptist (Amish) friend. My friend had remarked that larger communities of relatively affluent Amish were “losing their identity” and that smaller communities like his were seeking to be more conservative. I asked him what this meant, thinking that it may mean dress codes, church attendance or other rules, but instead he surprised me by saying that the small communities needed each other to survive, but “if someone has a nine to five job he doesn’t need his neighbors to help him.” For my friend, each family needs to need the rest of the community so that they will all thrive or fail as one. The Amish, who do not carry insurance or Social Security, rely on their community to be their insurance and Social Security.

“If our community were like that,” I said, “The whole neighborhood would be there with shovels and stones, working together. But because I work forty plus hours a week and have other commitments, I don’t have time to help.” The strands in the web of life of our community are, for all its abundance, tenuously thin compared to the strong web of life that unites my Amish friend’s community.

My choice, years ago, to be with my wife affected the family and community I am in—it determined what part of my lifetime spiritual neighborhood, my soul cluster, I would spend this life with. My choice of a life partner, a family and a community contained in it decisions about whether I repeated family, community and worldwide problems or reacted to them. For me, feminist spirituality was the path that led to my relationship with my wife, an intellectual choice that guided me like a star into my relationship with my wife. My ideas, so important to me as a thinker, was really a vehicle to bring me to the soul cluster I am in now.

My romantic and community choices over time had re-occurring, cyclic alternatives. I might have repeated my childhood problems and moved into a dysfunctional, unhappy and karmic web of life, as I did in my first marriage, or confront with my negative, shadow self, as I did during psychosis, and follow a path toward a beloved partner and a happier and more harmonious family. On the second path, I have been able to embed my life in our community and move toward more sustainability with the sacred re-creation of Earthly life.

A neo-pagan feminist seeker handbook I read years ago spoke of praying to be reborn with loved ones. I was struck by the love-centered view of eternity. Finding webs of life where we are loved and love others in action is a central spiritual attainment. Part of building my faith in the spiritual world is this movement toward love, harmony and sustainability will hopefully continue through the doorway of death as our souls migrate from unhappy webs of life to happy, healthy and more sustainable ones.

A friend of ours does not have a partner or children, despite being a wonderful person. She is a tremendously giving and caring community member, someone who is constantly helping others, and who is beloved by many people in our community. Her good works have built a strong and grateful community around her. From a spiritual view, her life is a success; hopefully she will be reborn with the souls whose lives she has enriched, including ours.

The Christian Bible speaks of “building treasures in heaven.” For me, this means trying to build lasting, happy and harmonious relationships so we may travel together into a better spiritual future. Earthly attainments like wealth, power-over-others and coming into the public eye are, at best, only a means to accomplish better relationships with human and natural webs of life. This spiritual hope—that by acting to bring forth life, we can be welcomed into a happy, harmonious human and natural community in a future lifetime—is the core of faith. Loving my family in action, strengthening our community, moving toward greater harmony with nature and seeking peace with all life are the deeply spiritual practices that will move our lives toward a better spiritual future.

As daylight grows more rapidly, the approaching spring is bringing a bustle of activity. Birds are singing territorial songs to attract mates and bring forth new life as a beautiful part of the sacred re-creation of Earthly life. I am about to begin turning over the garden and adding composted manure and preparing seeds for sowing. I will soon spray organic fungicide to work against the cedar-apple rust disease that affects our fruit trees, elms and junipers. Our friend with the Maple Syrup farm is bustling with her work, as the rising temperatures causes the trees to draw sap from the roots upwards towards their new growth.

We have put over 40 bottles of Concord wine into our basement covered by throw rugs to age until next fall’s harvest. We have put our Viking Winter Maple Porter and White Winter Vanilla Maple Porter in our basement to condition until we open them next Winter Solstice. I have opened the fermenting crock and jarred 3 ½ quarts of garlic-caraway sauerkraut from the last local cabbage and garlic of the season. We will soon brew Rye Stout to open on Halloween.

My wife is babysitting a 2 ½ year old and two children less than a year old, filling our lives with happiness and the touch of innocence. I help out, adjusting my work schedule and taking a little vacation sometimes, causing my patriarchal coworkers to tease me, saying a young father on our team is willing to have me take his children anytime. In my mind, it’s a mark of their estrangement from the joys of the sacred re-creation of life.

Love is a central part of the sacred re-creation of life with our lives pulled toward those we love, including romantic partners, family, friends and communities. My wife has observed that the baby in our family is drawing the family closer, with aunts, uncles and grandparents visiting the newborn and her family more often. Love of the newborn draws us toward her like a sun’s gravity causes planets to circle around it and distant comets to be drawn close.

Though we often think of love as between romantic partners, love also exists within families and between friends and community members. All these love relationships are crucial parts of the sacred recreation of life, just as sex, romantic love and parenthood is part of the sacred magic of the world.

An important part of the sacredness is to find a balance with all these manifestations of sacred love. Recently, I considered working at a job that more directly benefits the community and ecology, but pays much less than my present one. This has caused concern, as my wife and I try to find a balance in our priorities.

My present coworkers are patriarchal in nature and I spoke with one who is a violent man, a money-chaser and a puritan who has been very unhappy with his job for years. I reflected on my wife allowing me to consider the lower-paying job and asked my coworker, “How would your wife react if you told her you wanted to take a job that paid so much less?”

“She wouldn’t let me do it,” said the man, who adores patriarchal masculinity and has expressed chauvinism toward the feminine.

For money-chasers, being good providers for their families is a central duty of manhood and parenthood; am I, who consider myself a feminist, not as good a husband and stepfather as this patriarchal man?

In some ways, I think this is true; though we are very different people, it is important for me to recognize his virtues and learn to emulate them as much as I can. It places my decision about the lower-paying job in sharp focus. In my family, I am the sole breadwinner while my wife has cared for family members in our home for many years; my work is part of my sacred duty to support her and our family.

Sacred aspects of life like love are very powerful and many of the problems I’ve experienced and witnessed have origins in me and people around me not treating love and/or sex as extremely sacred aspects of life. Instead, many problems arise because we do not give these extremely important and powerful aspects of life the respect and reverence that they require.

For me, a metaphor for the power of sacredness comes from the Torah, which early Christians took as part of the Old Testament, in which the sacred objects of the altar were said to have a dangerous power for those who were not priests—these sacred objects would harm those not holy enough to handle them. As a metaphor for sacred aspects of love and sex, how we as people approach these very powerful things is essential to our personal fate and happiness.

My journey toward the sacred feminine involved a lot of soul searching about my romantic, family and personal life, becoming aware of how I as a man had both been privileged and been traumatized by circumstances where love in all forms were not being treated as sacred. The lack of credence I gave to the importance of love and my responsibilities both to those I love and those who love me led to many problems when I was younger.

I cannot say that I have overcome these youthful challenges, though I am decades older. Rather, I have learned that as a romantic partner, a family man and a community member I need to try as earnestly as I can to respect the sacred power of love. Our millennia-old patriarchal culture, focused on the isolated, achievement-oriented male, has discounted love as of lesser importance than other aspects of life. It is a challenge to have the time and energy to fully embrace loving my family, my friends and my community to the degree needed. However, like any other form of good works, the more that I can give to sacred relationships of love, the more that I will be very fortunate to receive.

As we prepare our hollow for spring, including turning over the garden and planting seeds, I am once again seeing that my role in aiding the sustainability of the hollow’s natural community is very small. In terms of changes, I only need to plant a few trees, remove vines during winter and be careful to take as little of the hollow for my own purposes as needed, so that the natural community can thrive through its own flow of good works in the Earthly river of life.

The Earth is a vast network of natural communities like our hollow sustainably flowing through imaginable eons of time. In the same way, human families and communities can sustain ourselves through loving each other in our daily actions.

A necessary part of sustainability is that parents care of their children and the community supports young families. For me, my journey toward the feminine helped me see that as a man, I had a role to be a helpmate to my wife in caring for her children. Likewise, as a community member, loving my neighbors means caring for young families and seeking a community that supports the Earthly flow of life into eternity.

In traditional patriarchy, which has held sway for millennia in most of what is called civilization, this is reversed in an unsustainable way of life. The woman, already tasked with caring for her children, is supposed to serve her husband and the children to obey them. This creates a society where isolated male egos determine the direction of the community and larger society and where many women seek to become more like patriarchal men. Rather than communities supporting all families as needed we are divided into haves and have-nots with a privileged group of ethno-religious (or ethno-philosophical) puritans, violent men and money-chasers destroying natural and human resources through vain glory displays of consumption and millennia of wars fueled by traditional hatreds and misuse of power-over-others.

Just as larger societies can be unsustainable, our families can be unsustainable when one or both parents do not love each other and their children in daily actions. It is in this hard reality that I see negative consequences carry through, creating harsh poetic justice like Shakespearean tragedies where parents suffer the consequences of our mistakes, whether we consciously recognize our culpability or not.

In my own experience, I have witnessed the evolution of intergenerational abusive families that, as time passed, turned out to be unsustainable, much to everyone’s suffering. In one family, the children of an abusive puritan Grandmother were abused in their marriages or became abusive. Another child died young. As her children’s abusive families went through tragedy and upheaval, including addictions, injuries, physical and mental illnesses and early deaths, she continued to play games, pitting her abused daughter against her abusive son.

Marriages broke up. Families frayed and became estranged. All of her children and three grandchildren died before her. Though she remained unrepentant of the harm she had done, her family life was filled with suffering and she, too, eventually suffered greatly. The surviving families splintered into physically and emotionally distant units, connected only by their DNA.

In other instances, heavy-handed puritan parents had children who defiantly and unrepentantly rebelled through decades of alcoholism and addictions, causing their parents to suffer and, in some cases, experience the ultimate revenge of dying with the belief that their unrepentant children would be condemned by their deity. In the same way, I’ve witnessed children of abusive thinkers or addicted partiers repeat the chaos of their childhood and then react into sober puritanism, causing their parents to suffer through estrangement and accusations of ungodliness from their children. The cultural icons of our societies—puritan religion verses skeptical thinkers and wild partiers—are weapons in these families’ internal wars against each other, much to everyone’s loss.

Since I am a stepfather in a family culture very different from my original one, I’ve learned what works in my original family can be counterproductive in my chosen one. I can say that I can’t count all the mistake’s I’ve made as a partner and stepfather because I have yet to stop making them. All I have to offer is my love for our family and my new learning each day.

In addition to our own failings, when we see other family members failing the family, there are limits to what can be done. Knowing that in a family what goes around comes around with a great power, I receive both a faith that conscientious, thoughtful love will return and a warning that whatever mistakes are made will also return.

Of all the webs of life where what goes around comes around, it is in the family that this principle is most evident. Narcissists and abusers may try to use their egos to callous themselves to others, but they still suffer the consequences of their actions with their families. In the personal world, words are rarely necessary. Events around us speak their truth without us needing to comment.

My dear mother-in-law, who I knew as a model of serenity, quiet devotion and joy, probably understood this dynamic more than most others I have known. Her simple faith made her a joy to be with; her many years in our home are fondly remembered by all. In times of trouble and joy—which almost always happen together—emulating her faith in conscientious love is a high peak for a skeptical thinker like me to climb.

As spring begins, many early flowers are blooming in yards and on hillsides: Yellow and purple Crocuses, blue and purple miniature irises, pale purple periwinkle and lemony yellow and eggshell white Daffodils are all heralding the slowly warming Earth. Ramp sprouts are appearing among the fallen leaves covering the ground and I hear, as I do each March, the throaty rasp of Redwing Blackbirds near the small waterway running along the side of our hollow. Despite lows in the 20's for several nights, in our garden the first Arugula seeds are sprouting, reawakening with the Earth from the cold darkness of the dormant season. Using old sheets, we cover the garden bed most nights to protect the fragile seedlings as they begin new life.

This year, as we have in the last few years, we will add over a thousand pounds of compost and manure to the garden to strengthen the soil that our seeds depend on. When we began the garden about ten years ago, we discovered that the clayish soil contained buried bottles, broken plates and other trash thrown out decades before. Our first harvests were poor, but as we added manure, compost, leaves and other organic fertilizers, our harvests improved.

Our Saint Patrick’s Day tradition with our friend happened the Friday before the actual holiday due to a schedule conflict. As we drank beer and listened to Irish music, our friend, my wife and I talked about what the “American Dream” had meant to her family and community, as opposed to my understanding of it. The phrase, so commonly used in our culture, has a very different meaning to our friend than to me. For our friend, the dream is one of community and unity made possible by the rewards of hard work; from my viewpoint, many who pursue the dream emphasize wealth at the cost of community. We agreed to meet again, so I could hear more about her experience growing up in an ethnic working class community.

The violent men-money-chasers-puritans I work with practice good works in their communities as my wife and I try to, though some of them are hostile to outsiders and disregard the Feminine. As a result, they live in communities that both support them within it, but which are at odds with other communities of violent men-money-chasers-puritans of other religions, nationalities, and so forth. Living my childhood as an outsider and scapegoat in a community like this taught me the importance of building both community and inclusion.

As we have gotten older, my wife and I have watched people around us building or damaging the webs of life around them. In some cases, men have abandoned their wives or girlfriends in affairs with younger women, only to end up alone and lonely in their later years. Other people have been affected by addictions or other problems, creating hardship. The strands of life around these people and their families have been broken or weakened, making a more difficult life for them and their children. While the intolerance of puritan communities can create conflict, the lesson of practicing good works within our community is an essential one. This is especially important for the children and grandchildren of my generation, who will live in a human world that they will inherit from us.

Like looking at the soil where we sow our early spring seed, looking at the strength of a web of life is an omen of the strength of the people in it when long-term crises arise. Renewing inclusive, supportive communities and the fertility of our Earth is an essential practice. In doing so we are undoing the harm of previous generations, both to the Earth and to humanity.

For most of us, these challenges exist within our own families and communities and the Earth around us; our stories are the stories of history slowly unfolding. Choices by our elders to work through issues—to overcome addictions, to work through anger issues, to release racial and gender privileges, to provide a stable home for our partners and family—were crucial to our lives. Failures of our elders to work through these same issues often means that we are faced with overcoming them within ourselves; our failures are likewise passed on to future generations.

As I learned the inter-generational stories of families, it was sometimes possible to foresee trials and hardships years before they would arise. I sometimes imagine elder spirits watching us as our lives unfold and thinking, “I will check in with this person in two or three years, when a crisis will force him to choose between repeating the mistakes of his elders or finding a new path for himself. Until then, I can see all will continue as it has.”

My wife’s frequent babysitting and caring for others in our family and community and my volunteer work are attempts to strengthen our soul cluster just as compost strengthens our garden. Perhaps, if I live past the doorway of my own death, I will pass into a happier, stronger web of life than when I was a child—but that is not so important. What is important is that our actions, combined with the positive works of our generation, will strengthen our family, community and Earthly webs of life for my stepchildren and all the young people around them. On days that I am weary, it is easy to worry that this cannot be attained by good works; on days when I take part in the seasonal miracle of life arising from the still wintry Earth, I have faith that the strength of good works can overcome the mistakes of my generation.

Following almost two weeks of warmer weather, a flush of early spring flowers are blooming. Red and yellow Tulips, white-blue and purple Violets, Grape Hyacinths and some remaining Daffodils are abundant. Flowering trees are bursting into bloom, including white Star Magnolia, pinkish-white Cherries, White Bradford Pears and others. From our hollow, we are harvesting wild chives that grow as weeds throughout our community; from the woods, we are harvesting garlic-flavored Ramps to become part of an omelet with pieces of canned tomatoes, mushrooms, cheese and local eggs.

After a very rainy winter, March and April have been dry. With our unusually stable warm spell and nights without frost, Sugar Magnolia trees—usually burnt by frost in our community—are reaching full bloom. The moisture left in the ground and warm temperatures have done wonders to the garden, where lettuces, arugula, kale, spinach, mustard, turnips, beets, onions, carrots, garlic, peas and parsley are all flourishing with early growth.

After years of growing the garden, we’ve discovered that some vegetables do well, particularly greens, while crops that need more depth or greater fertility, like tubers, large radishes and cabbage, do poorly. Over the years of improving the soil with compost and manure and experimenting with different crops, we’ve learned what our garden likes to grow and what is presently outside its limits.

Just as we learned what is compatible with the Earth, I’ve learned what I’m compatible with as a sensitive person. Though I work with violent men, puritans and money-chasers, each in their own way are not compatible with my deeply felt emotions and desires for a peaceful, harmonious, sustainable and equitable world.

While I strive to see the good qualities of these individuals and to learn what I can from them, it is difficult to socialize with them—their emotions are simply too rough and callous for me; what they seem to want out of life and the life choices they make because of that make absolutely no sense to me.

As I explored the human world as a young adult, I found that the community my wife and I are now in was compatible with my sensitivity and ideals. This was an important lesson to apply to my life. When I returned decades ago after working elsewhere to rebuild my life economically, I found that not only did the community support my needs as a sensitive person, but it was also a refuge for artists, activists, seekers and others attempting to create a new way of life. Among these idealistic people was my wife, who I fortunately met in this colony of sensitive people.

As our lives passed in our community, I learned that some webs of life bring out our best, healthiest, happiest futures while others do not. This question—where and with whom we choose to live—is central to the fulfillment of our higher selves and, like the soil of the garden, is as important at the seeds of good works that we attempt to plant.

If we choose unwisely, partnerships and communities can become sources of hardship and crises, as commonly happens when addicted partiers or domineering and dependent people come together as partners. Just as I learned from a book given to me by a stepdaughter that companion planting of parsley and carrots near tomatoes fosters growth, human companionships and communities can help or hinder us. This is especially important for sensitive people, who are a minority in patriarchy and have needs that the mainstream culture ignores.

For sensitive people, recognizing where we fit and where people appreciate our good works is essential. A dependent person can waste years kowtowing to a domineering, ungrateful person; “social working” women, as my wife calls them, can spend years trying to save someone from their addictions and other self-created problems, only to find that their good will has been used to rob them of years of spiritual generosity. Giving up on relationships and communities that don’t work for us is crucial.

My own view of our present culture is shaped by the knowledge that as a man who is attempting to be sensitive and reach out toward the sacred Feminine that I no longer fit into the larger human world. Finding a community where I can thrive has been an extremely fortunate gift that I received even before I was conscious of my own sensitivity.

In the larger world, incompatible personalities, like partiers verses puritans and violent men verses sensitive people, have traditional rivalries spanning generations. The challenge for us is to learn from the better parts of these rival people while protecting ourselves from harm they might do.

For many, it is common to jump from one aspect to another as our lives progress. Many partiers become puritans to control addictions; some violent men have sensitive inner selves arise and react into pacifism or similar points of view; some money chasers become philanthropists or activists. In my life, the personality transformation beginning in my psychosis allowed my inner sensitivity to emerge, making the crises of that time one of the most important spiritual gifts of my life. Those perilous times led me to the family, community and life I have today.

For all our differences, each of us face deep spiritual challenges that are the true substance of our lives. Finding friends, families and communities that support our better selves is as crucial to us as the compost we put in the garden is to the seeds we plant. It is in our personal web of life that our most important choices—who we share our lives with—has the most powerful impact. Our lives may seem minor in the larger world, yet they are the place where we can apply our ideals and seek our dreams most directly. Consciously choosing who we share our lives with and how we can make each other’s lives better determines most of what we will harvest from our lives.

As we prepare for our Easter meal with family and friends, the yellow of Forsythia, Daffodils and early Tulips has largely passed, replaced with a wave of purple. Bright reddish-purple Redbuds, mixed with white and pink Dogwoods, appear throughout the woods around our town and in our community’s yards and hillsides, alongside sweet-smelling Lilacs. Light blue Periwinkle, violets, purple Moneyplants, bluish and fuschia Creeping Phlox, and darker hued purple and peach Tulips are all in full bloom. White and ruddy purplish Flowering Crabapples are blooming profusely and our apple trees in the hollow are opening their white blossoms as part of setting fruit.

As the Dogwoods have begun to reach full bloom there’s been a dip in temperatures, as is common in our springtime cycle. “Dogwood Winter,” as a coworker explained to me years ago, is a feature of the cyclic warming and cooling of our region’s early spring weather. After nearly a week of not using the furnace, we turn it back on to warm our home in face of the cool, damp nights. While we humans live with such comforts, the deer, rabbits, raccoons, possums, squirrels and many birds of the woods around us endure the cycle in the rugged, joyous beauty of the Earth.

The garden and woods are bringing the first harvests to our table. Using wild onions and ramps, my wife designed a vegetarian French Onion soup, using hearty vegetable bullion in place of beef broth. The soup, relying mainly on ingredients we gathered from our hollow and woods, is remarkably good. For our Easter meal, my wife is making Borscht with beets we’ve canned from the local produce auction, wild onions from our yard and Crème Fraiche from a local dairy. In addition to the Borscht, the meal will include a large Arugula salad harvested a day before from our garden. I am making a cinnamon-raisin Spelt bread using a recipe my wife adapted from a bread recipe passed to me by a friend. Some of the friends coming to the meal are musicians, as are some of our family, and as always at our family meals, the musicians will return the gift of food and companionship with music on our piano.

Recent events, along with memories of the Easter celebrations that we shared with my dear, devout mother-in-law, has made me consider the story of Easter from my view as an outsider to Christianity. In my work world, a leader who alienated many employees and customers was suddenly removed, causing joy to the staff below him. It was, from a compassionate point of view, a tragedy for him, since the career he had worked so obsessively has faced a tremendous setback. The man, younger than me, ignored numerous warning signs, blinded by the Hubris of early success, and was undone by his own actions, as the ancient Greeks observed in their stories of Nemesis destroying those suffering from fatal pride.

From my point of view, the leader failed to consider the feelings and lives of those who were affected by his power-over-others. The hierarchy around him, like all hierarchies, delayed him from suffering the consequences of the harm he did to staff and customers, but because what goes around tends to come around, his career has suffered a huge setback. Meanwhile, more telling, his loss is seen by many as their gain—if there is a future lifetime when he will again travel in the soul cluster of his former employees and customers, he will probably face harsh consequences from some spirits who unconsciously recall the harm he did to them in this lifetime. Not only has his harm-doing damaged his life in this incarnation, but if there are further lifetimes for him with these same people, he will almost certainly again suffer from his actions in this life.

At Easter, Christians recall the horrific torture-murder of Jesus during Passover and celebrate his denial of death with the resurrection on Sunday. This story, grisly and heartbreaking, is to both tell of the transcendence of death and of the earnest desire of the Christian deity to sacrifice for humanity. Rooted in a culture where child sacrifice, exemplified by Abraham and Isaac and in Chapter Eleven of Judges, was seen as a holy act rewarded by the deity, the death of Jesus is said to represent the deity’s sacrifice to humanity. In our modern culture, the story of an all-good, almighty deity torturing his beloved child is difficult to make sense of.

When I read the Bible years ago, seeing it as a patriarchal work, I was struck by the bleakness of the narrative. Generation after generation of violence, corruption and suffering is told, and, at the end, the nicest, kindest person in the millennium-long saga is tortured to death. It is a story of how the human world functions in communities where the Covenant of Good Works does not hold sway. Injustices that come from this imbalance is commonplace; in modern terms, the martyrdom of Archbishop Romero, Stephen Biko, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr—to name only a few—speak of the wrongs of the larger human world.

These stories break the heart of those who know them. From my outside point of view, the telling of the murder of Jesus communicates that those who lovingly seek peace and justice will suffer and those who use the quick, temporary violence of power-over-others will prevail against those practicing the slow, lasting works of love, charity and compassion. It becomes a moral telling that greed and violence will always rule our human world.

However, when I look at my personal world, I see clearly that the Covenant of Works is active in the web of lives I have traveled in. In my youth, my angry Hubris blinded me to my own harm, till the hallucinations of psychosis fortunately projected my shadow self into my conscious mind and made me aware that what I had sent out was returning to me. Like many views of karma/consequences, I was terrified to face the wrongs I did with the recognition that they would come back against me. Yet, decades later, I now see the Covenant of Works as a promise that by seeking to do good works I can receive good fortune. Unlike the story of Jesus, I need not be a martyr to transcend the human world; I need merely to think of others, seek to hear from them my true effect on their lives, and seek to align myself with the higher good of those around me. This is especially true in the close, personal world of family and friends.

I have the good fortune of living in a web of life where the Covenant of Works holds sway, which was not true for Jesus, Romero, Biko or King. In my personal world, when people do harm to others, that harm eventual becomes their undoing, whether or not they acknowledge their part in it. By seeking to be a good friend, neighbor, coworker and, most importantly, a good family member, I am given great rewards. Overlooking such good fortune and thinking that harming those around me will not return to me would be foolhardy and blind to the true workings of the soul cluster I am in. Like the Earth that wild onions, ramps and arugula grow in, the web of life I am fortunate to share with others nurtures my better self and reminds me through my own pain and joy that both the harm and good I do will return to me.

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.

Since the bright, hot days of midsummer of early August, the sun’s rapid descent from the sky has brought early darkness and seasonally cool temperatures. I commonly see the mist of my breath as I walk to work in the early light of the day. The days of abundant harvests are ending, and birds and animals have gone from gorging on feasts of seeds, berries, and nuts to scrambling for the remaining morsels of fall.

Replacing the abundant harvest has been an abundance of golden yellow, lime-green, radiant orange, and deep red leaves, providing a spectacular autumn unmatched for a decade or more. The moist ground, cool temperatures, regular frosts, and absence of heavy fall rains has provided a long and glorious montage of autumn beauty, filling the eyes and hearts with joy even as the cold darkness creeps over the Earth.

The ghosts and goblins of Halloween, marking the entry of the season of death for animals like us, are preparing us unconsciously for the sleeping Earth’s frozen fields, harsh winds, long nights, and hungry animals seeking the scarce food of winter. It is a time of seeking shelter from the encroaching cold nights and blustery days to come, of settling in and settling down for long hours in our homes.

For many, the coming time can mark loneliness, despair, and heartbreak, especially if we are isolated in our homes. It is during these long hours that decisions of who, if anyone, we have settled down with are most keenly felt and reflected on. The journey of the heart from childhood to our adult home is often tumultuous and can be filled with desperation, fear, and regret. If we are lucky, our journey brought us into the lives of a deeply kindred spirit who we can nestle in with on the cold, dark nights of fall and winter.

As a young man, I foolishly placed an egoistic pursuit of a career ahead of a committed relationship, learning through trial and loss that it was the love of my heart, not the accomplishment of my career, that I needed to focus on. This mistake is common with men, while in my generation many women balanced their concerns of making a living with finding a partner to share their lives with. This is reflected in discussions ranging from advice columns to questions asked of mystical people: “What do I need to get a better income?” ask the men; “Will I find my soul mate this year?” ask the women.

When I think of Earthly spiritual questions, I think of parallels between social psychology and the contemporary ideas of mystical women. To think mystically, I flip a switch and say to myself, “Let’s say all the lives I know are spirits living many generations of incarnations; how does that view parallel my understanding of social psychology?” In a mystical view, the people we know are part of our soul cluster—our nearby spiritual neighborhood of spirits traveling in repeated incarnations together.

One of the greatest questions is where this lifetime takes us in that cluster—who do I spend my lifetime with and, in our next lifetime together, will the other souls feel love, hate, or be indifferent towards me? These fellow travelers—the other spirits we impact with our lives—will be our most crucial judges when we incarnate with them again. Flipping the switch back to social psychology, how our partners, family, friends, and community feel toward us is central to a happy and harmonious life.

Coming slowly to spiritual thinking, I realized in my forties that I traveled through a series of webs of life—college friends, social circles, groups sharing pastimes, coworkers, neighborhoods, and other groups—and in only some of these did I actually maintain a lasting friendship, date for very long or feel the start of true love. Some in this soul cluster I shared only a momentary connection, some I saw repeatedly on the boundary of my life, and with some I shared long hours in groups of friends or coworkers. In retrospect, there were only two or three women I might have committed a lifetime to, and these, as well as the others, were variations on the theme of whether I would choose someone who would help me be a good life partner or with whom I would repeat the tragedies and trauma of my childhood? Only a few had the potential of being the mystic’s soul mate who I might have settled down with, shared a new family, and risked all I might offer in the fateful, involuntary gamble of falling in love.

From a social psychology point of view, the people in my family and community, the childhood trials and traumas, and the feelings and thoughts that make me a sensitive person all combine to create the attraction to others whether as platonic friends or romantic partners. The all-important question of where I travel in my soul cluster and who might be my soulmate is largely determined by events outside my conscious will. From the spiritual view, all these external factors were choices my soul made prior to birth to guide me to face the ultimate spiritual question—whom shall I deeply be drawn to like a parched desert nomad seeking to quench his thirst in the ambrosia of true love?

This choice—the riskiest emotional chance of our lives—represents one of the most profound aspects of destiny in our mortal lives. It is one of the most important spiritual decisions we make in this lifetime. If there is a spiritual journey in this lifetime that carries past this life’s fleeting mortality, who our journey leads us to and how we treat those we settle down with is the central undertaking of our lives. Do we repeat tragedies from our childhood homes, do we fail to love, do we mistreat our partners, or do we choose partners who mistreat us? Or are we some of the lucky ones who find a soul mate to share a loving home, family, and life with?

For some, life may take them far from their childhood home, only to find the hardship they grew up with echoing in the wintry winds of bitterly cold nights. For others, unseen energies draw us into the right web of life where, without consciously realizing it at first, we join the love of our life.

It is one of the hardest aspects of patriarchy that happy marriages and loving families are rare. The public world turns and twists with many manmade tragedies and distractions from our fateful decisions of who, if anyone, we will settle down with. In the backdrop of ambition and mistaken priorities, young men do not look into this ultimate question often enough: How will I find a lasting love who is good for me and who I return this goodness to?

Were most young men to look into their futures with fearful recognition of the coldness of lonely winter nights and wonder if we will be fortunate enough to meet our soulmate, the underpinnings of patriarchy would collapse like brittle branches heavy with frozen snow. In surrendering our lives to serve the partner and family we love, rather than a cause or ambition, men can receive the most important gift that this lifetime offers: the companionship of a soul mate to light our homes in the cold darkness of the wintry world.