Milt Greek's Blog: The River of Life

As sunlight rapidly lengthens our days, the Earth has awoken into the full flush of yet another beautiful spring. Beginning with wild chives growing amongst the grass and ramps growing wild in the woods behind our home, the warming soil energized early greens growing in abundance. Following the yellow, antique white, and orange daffodils have been Virginia bluebells, bright yellow tulips, purple money plants, white and orange narcissists, lavender-blue creeping phlox, and violets growing in the grassy field. Apple trees, first beginning to bud nearly a month ago, have blossomed with pinkish white flowers, joining an abundance of flowering trees: bright white Bradford Pears, snow white flowering cherry trees, purplish sugar magnolia and light purple redbuds, white and purple flowering crabapples, bright red cherry trees, along with the later blooming Cherokee pink and snow-white dogwoods. With many sunny days of seasonable warmth and calm winds, spring has once again graced the human world with its beauty and promise.

The awakening Earth has already given gifts of its soil: ramps given to a restaurant owner made their way to our kitchen, where we used them for another round of Appalachian French Onion Soup. On Spring Equinox, we celebrated the start of spring with a meal of locally made bread, cheeses, a green salad, and beets and cabbage stored over winter to make a simple but satisfying borscht. We harvested our first Arugula, a favorite of my stepdaughter and wife planted in late winter with our granddaughter and gave it to her Mom. More Arugula has followed, along with Asparagus and Turnips Greens, marking the earliest beginning of what will soon be another season of abundance from the Earth around us.

In the brisk morning chill of Dogwood Winter, a reliable cool spell in mid to late April, I cleaned the greens while the birds burst forth in a cacophony of celebration for the renewing life of spring. Enduring the hard winter, celebrating their loving courtship prior to the wild rut of mating, young hatchlings have followed, born in the warmth of spring. The colored eggs of Easter and the Easter egg hunts of young children ritually celebrate the time that hens begin again to lay eggs regularly and harkens back to centuries ago when we would search for eggs laid by wild birds in the spring.

The joyful songs and mating rituals of the birds celebrate more than simple warmth and the renewing abundance of the Earth—they celebrate the joy of life in sustainable harmony with the Earthly flow of life into eternity. Unlike the contemporary human world, birds and the other animals of the natural world are in the center of the Earthly river of life, living day after day in the rough-hewn paradise of the cold yet beautiful Earth. Neither taking too much nor too little of the Earth’s gifts, the families of the plants and animals around us form natural communities we call ecosystems, living in partnerships we call symbiotic relationships that sustain their species for unimaginable eons.

In the warmth of spring my wife and I brewed a Chocolate Porter, to be opened on the autumn equinox. Once bottled, the porter will complete the set of beer that we will drink beginning on May Day with a Honey Golden and continuing for the rest of the season. While cleaning bottles earlier in the month for another beer, I realized that we have used the same bottles for our home brewed beer for over a decade. Using some quick calculations, I estimated that in the dozen or so years that we have been brewing beer we have probably reduced our emission of hydrocarbons by about 6 tons, mainly through reusing bottles and reducing transportation. Like the other aspects of a life focused on the local Earth, this practice is joyful and fulfilling, but also part of a more natural and less toxic way of life. Integrating my daily life into the cycles of the Earth enriches our lives.

With the growing light bringing forth the beauty of spring flowers and early food, heavenly moments unfold from simple joys like sitting in nature, walking along streets filled with flowering trees, harvesting the first gifts of the garden, and brewing beer in our backyard. Reflecting on the cycles of the Earth, I tell a friend, “Hope springs eternal in the hearts of fools, but spring springs eternal.”

In the long perspective of the Earth, I am considering once again the problem of violent men that interweaves itself in the human world. In my own small face-to-face world, I currently know women who have been or are in relationships with abusive men. The stories of families I know—ranging from my original family to acquaintances met through work—have often including physically, sexually, and/or emotionally abusive men and, much less often, abusive women. Many of the women I have known who endured abuse in their adult life grew up in abusive parents or siblings and are facing once again their early trials. Sometimes with little support from those around them, they are challenged to creatively learn a life lesson of self-preservation and self-love that was absent in their childhood home.

Seeing the parallels between relationships in childhood and adulthood draws to my mind a second parallel, between the secular psychology that observes that most of us cyclically repeat trauma until we learn to escape it and the spiritual viewpoint that we are living many incarnations in soul clusters, living a cyclic series of lives with fellow travelers. From the spiritual perspective, we choose to incarnate with previous life partners and soul mates to seek a higher, deeper connection or to work through past traps that we must learn to escape. The past lives of our childhoods, repeating in some form in our adulthoods, are our chance to free ourselves from the hardships of our past while building on our strengths.

The challenge of violent men in our communities is rooted in millennia of patriarchy, in which the right for the patriarch to be violent to his own family is legally recognized in the same way that presidents, kings, and emperors claim the right of life and death over the people they have power over. This reality forms the past lives of many of our childhoods and is repeating itself in the adult lives of many in our personal worlds. Evolving new relationships, through supporting empowered women and children, is a central renewal of our historical moment as much as the work of spring is turning the soil of the garden, setting in good compost, and sowing seeds. In the longer view, the millennia of patriarchy’s desecration of the family is a brief moment eclipsed by the eons of the Earth renewing itself with the annual cycle of spring.

Looking at this long perspective, the relationships in and around our homes are part of the spiritual evolution of people leaving past lives in patriarchy and learning life lessons to escape the cycles of abuse and violence of the past. For women and children, struggling to live empowered lives with supportive, loving, and gentle partners is as essential to the future of humanity as ecological sustainability. By doing this for our personal lives, women and people who love them are helping bring their lives and all of humanity closer to the center of the heavenly flow of Earthly life into eternity. In this way, women and children overcoming past oppression is central to our collective fate.

As the sunlight continues to rapidly increase each day, the unseasonably warm weather of late February returned to the common pattern of freezing cold days and nights in early and mid March. Like previous winters, the warmth of late February was followed again with cold and a little snow prior to the beginning of Spring.

Taking advantage of the soft, warm ground and the time my life is currently allowing, I used the warmth to sow early Spring crops, including peas, spring greens like Arugula, Spinach, Mustard, Kale, and lettuces, and radishes, carrots, beets, and onions. As soon as the cold returned, I placed sheets over the newly sown garden both day and night, allowing the fragile new life to be protected as best I could from the hardships of the season.

During the warm temperatures, early spring flowers including purple miniature irises, whitish-purple Hellebores, purple giant Crocuses, lemony yellow, antique white, and orange-centered Daffodils bloomed in abundance, filling yards and hillsides with displays of early Spring beauty. Along with the blooming flowers the sprouts of early plants emerged with the fragile hopes of early Spring.

Once the winter temperatures returned, a light coating of snow covered the blooming flowers, causing many to bend low. My wife and I brought in the weakened flowers and made large bouquets for our tables. In a brief warming of temperatures amidst the cold days, white, fragrant hyacinths bloomed. We brought them in to protect them from the harsh cold that followed, filling our home with their beautiful, delicate, and rich smell.

In the warmth of late February, we gathered wild onion sprouts with my granddaughter for use in my wife’s recipe of Appalachian French Onion soup. As the weather brought the return of cold temperatures, our meals were again drawn from our diminishing stores of food from the previous season of abundance. With little else than roots left, we made Hungarian Potato and Carrot soup, followed by a soup of potatoes, Daikon Radishes, carrots, and Kale, and a simple Borscht using beets bought at the auction last fall.

At the same time, we continued to brew beer and bottled our Concord wine, using the spare time of the season to create stores of beer and wine that will be our primary source for alcohol in the coming year. Currently at the mid-point in our brewing season, at the beginning of May we will have enough to be suppled with seasonable beer throughout the end of the year.

While I have focused on gardening, food, and homebrewing, my talented stepdaughter has honed her skills with embroidery using designs from Jessica Long Embroidery. Like everyone in my wife’s family, she has a remarkable hand and a gift for beautiful art. For Christmas gifts, she gave her Mother and I exquisite pieces, including an intricate snowflake and a circle of flowers bursting with bright colors and designs. As someone whose hands lack finesse and whose mind lacks patience, I marvel at her achievements.

While our home has been gifted with abundance and good fortune, my mind has turned to a far more difficult idea—that of thinking of boundaries between the heavenly world in our home and the hardship caused by violent men in the world. In part, this outer world of suffering exists in constant news of lethal violence, of advertisements of “entertainment” showing fictional battles and constant violent and sometimes lethal sports like boxing and football, and other outer world violence that permeates the patriarchal culture.

More importantly, the violence of men around our home is a constant reminder of the need to create boundaries between vulnerable people and those who would harm them. Coming from an abusive family in my childhood, an important point early in my relationship with my wife’s family was to exclude the men in my family from my new life, to protect my wife’s family from their domineering and hurtful presence.

In the decades that followed, as we built community around us, time revealed that men in our community were often hurtful, ranging from an executive at Ohio University who sexually harassed women out of jobs to a young man on our block who intimidated people and was said to be a serial date rapist, to emotionally violent men who were “Street Saints/Home Demons”, causing misery to the women who loved them. The goal of building a close-knit and inclusive community is challenged by these acquaintances, neighbors, partners of women who are friends of my wife, and, in a few cases, old male friends who threw fits of temper as their lives deteriorated.

The commonality of male physical, sexual, and emotional violence in our community is part of traditional patriarchy. Most of the men and many of the women they abused grew up in homes with some form of violence and in adulthood these family patterns returned. Women who as children naturally developed attachment to parents and siblings who were mean or very angry found themselves attracted to and in love with men who they were victimized by.

My own reaction is to exclude these men from our lives and avoid dealing with them, but at the same time their presence is so common that they sometimes include old friends of my family, boyfriends of young women in our circle and neighborhood, or others. In one case, a well-respected husband of a friend in our community I recognized as a disturbed, emotionally abusive man while his wife remained loyal and sought to give him one chance after another. In other cases, the abusive men were or are nearby neighbors who I encounter often during walks.

My wife, whose seeks to be as compassionate as possible, tends to ignore the failings of others, even to forgiving some of these men. She sees that many of them are themselves in wrecked lives, living adult lives as legacies of deeply unhappy childhoods, and choosing to withhold judgement while giving them the same kindness she would anyone else. My reaction—which sometimes borders on an anger that is destructive—does not have the patience that my wife has. Instead, I worry for the next generation of young people, especially women.

Like the delicate young seeds that I cover to protect them from the cold, the challenge is to protect the younger generation in my community from the harsh traditions of patriarchy that have victimized women and some men for millennia. Yet doing so, as family patterns slowly unwind in the form of ill-fated love affairs and marriages, is far more difficult than closing the door to our home, relishing the delicate beauty of the art of my wife and her children, and delighting in the innocent joys of our granddaughter.

As the rapidly increasing sunlight is accompanied by global warming’s unnaturally increasing warmth, the soil of the Earth has warmed more than previous winters. Daffodils, normally flowering in mid or late March, are, one-by-one, blooming in response. I tell our granddaughter that the Daffodils are part of the Earth waking up early.

“Silly Daffodils!” she exclaims, “What do they think they are doing?”

Accompanying the early Daffodils are bright yellow Crocuses and a purple Miniature Iris, all weeks ahead of their normal time. For our friend who harvests Maple Syrup, the unseasonably warmth causes the sap to be ruined by the trees budding, and for local orchards that risk loss of early flowering crops like peaches when the temperatures suddenly decline, these changes to our climate are risks to their livelihoods.

Though in most years we sow peas in early or mid-March, in a few years of warmer temperatures we sow our first peas on Valentine’s Day, a tradition from Northern Kentucky that a friend told us about. Since we babysat our granddaughter on the 14th, we invited her to join us in the planting, which she always wants to do.

“The Earth adjusts,” I say as she, my wife, and I sow the peas, “So we need to be smart and adjust to the weather.”

At four, my words pass through her like cottonwood floating on a light breeze, only faintly recognized as she focuses on poking the wrinkled, green peas into the soft, warm Earth. In her innocence, she has no knowledge of the challenges she will face or the seeds I hope to plant in her mind early in her life in preparation for them.

In our home, we continue to have seasonal meals, including a cream of sunchoke-potato winter warmer that I made during one of our brief downturns of cold temperatures, and a curried cabbage tofu stir-fry made almost entirely from stored items. We also continue to renew our practice of home brewing. The day after Valentine’s Day we bottled our Honey Golden ale in preparation for opening on May Day. Meanwhile, the Rye Stout we brewed a few days before bubbles and gurgles as it ferments in the ale pales.

As our granddaughter’s understanding of the world around her has grown, she has begun to be conscious of death, which is common for four-year-olds like herself. She stumbles onto the realization bit by bit, not yet realizing in what will be a traumatic moment, that her deeply beloved and desperately needed parents will someday die. In preparation for this growing understanding that she lives in a mortal world, her parents and we tell her that everything returns to the Earth, to become the soil from which we came. I also tell her, as part of the stories about the seasons, that the leaves fall and become soil, from which new leaves form and trees turn the soil into life, then fall and rot to become the ground that will feed new trees.

“So, that’s forever, in a way,” I add.

I also talk to her about dreams, which she hadn’t heard of before, so I explain they are stories she sees while she sleeps and when she wakes up she finds out they haven’t happened. I tell her about dreams coming true, like when her Grandmother dreamed she found a missing earring under my couch and walked into my apartment and immediately spotted the earring where she had dreamed it was. Slowly, as much as her young mind can understand, I hope to strengthen her perception of intuition and other aspects of the Spirit in Daily Life, which people can witness first-hand if they watch coincidences, intuitive events, and other mystical aspects of everyday life.

But what follows after we pass back to the soil? I know that no one can answer this fully and I try not to answer it at all—I have witnessed the Spirit in Daily Life firsthand for decades, but I only know brief reports from people who have died and returned, and I am content to recognize the mystery at the edge of my knowledge.

However, death for our four-year-old granddaughter is a still emerging and far distant part of life. For me, as an elder, I am hopeful that I will pass long before my stepchildren and step-granddaughter. But, as an elder, my role is to think into the future far past my own meaningless death and into anticipating the needs of my granddaughter, her family, and the community and Earth around them.

In our self-centered modern culture, the elder phase of life has been mistaken for a time of growing infirmity and irrelevance for the younger people. Yet, we are the creators of the world that future generations will be born into.

While most of the larger human world’s future is out of my control, I can still aid my granddaughter’s community by devoting these years to fostering more resiliency, more sustainability, and a stronger, more mutually supportive community for her and the other children in our community.

Money-chasers think of leaving legacies of wealth for their children, which is a virtuous act as long as the wealth does not come from harming the Earth or other people, or results in imbalances of power-over. Violent men think of expanding their nation’s power-over, often resulting in endless wars and traditional hatreds. Sensitive people offer works of art that they hope to be remembered for. To guide action as an elder for what I hope to provide past my death, I turn to the Essential:

The children must be cared for.
The community must help the parents in their work.
The community must live in lasting harmony with other communities.
The communities must live in sustainable harmony with the natural communities around them.

This journey into the future past my own death can be joyous and filled with heavenly moments by taking part in the Earthly River of Life that flows from Essential practices. Like sharing the sowing of peas into the rich Earth with my loved ones, living in harmony with the Essential gives strength in the face of our mortal world and helps provide gifts for an uncertain future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the long shadows of fleeting sunlight in the days following mid-autumn’s Halloween festivities, we have had seasonal cold weather. There have been moments of snow flurries and light sleet, leaving a dusting atop the fallen leaves. Last week, as I prepared to walk to work, I told my wife and granddaughter that the forecast was for snow mixed with light rain.

“Will the snow stick to the ground?” My granddaughter wondered hopefully in her soft, tremulous voice.

“No,” I replied, “The ground is still too warm.”

Later that day, my wife forwarded a picture texted by my stepdaughter. It was of our granddaughter, smiling joyfully, bundled in a pink winter coat and navy blue snowpants, standing amongst an inch of snow in the yard of her parent’s country home. So much for the all-knowing grandpa and his forecasting skills.

The Farmers’ Market is providing seasonal food, including apples, cabbage, carrots, garlic, daikon radishes, Brussel sprouts, and late-season broccoli and cauliflower. In addition to an Indian-spiced stir-fry and pumpkin and Dutch apple pies, we have jarred sauerkraut from local cabbage and replaced it in the fermenting crock with a spicy, sour traditional Korean Kim Chi. We have removed the buckets of Concord grapes from the freezer of friends and are letting them slowly thaw before we add sugar, yeast, and a couple of other ingredients to begin fermenting them into wine. Honoring the Earth, year after year, means preparing food in keeping with the season, taking advantage of the abundance that we are gifted to receive in a human world of want.

As I walk home in the long shadows of the season, I have felt a deep loss, an energy pulling me into the ground as if I were a piece of steel and the ground beneath me were a powerful magnet. I feel as a dying leaf pulled to the ground by the irresistible force of gravity. I am experiencing the death of a dream that I had a few years ago, and with it the separation from those I share the dream with.

Leaving my career in computers two and a half years ago, I took a job at an agency working with people like me, thinking I would find like-minded sensitive coworkers working hard to help those in need. In terms of some of the frontline workers and the peer support staff, I did find this, along with clients in need of companionship, support, and understanding. However, I also found many unforced errors and ongoing problems that impacted clients and staff. I was shocked to find that services were wholly inadequate not simply because of lack of funding, but lack of insight on the part of top administrators.

I dutifully reported, again and again, failures in care and urged review and changes in the approach being used by the system. I was met with double-talk, inaction, hostility, and an arrogant insistence that only the top clinicians had the expertise to comment on the agency’s approach. Rather than face the problems, I was told that the clinic was “doing amazing work.” I was repeatedly undercut because I failed to play along with the charade that the clinic practiced “recovery-oriented” care and “continuous process improvement.” Crucially, from a key administrator I faced continual opposition and frequent hostility.

I believe in principles that I consider self-evident from the empirical reality that what goes around comes around. The first, to do good works as much as possible, is thwarted at the agency because so much of the agency’s work fails to actually benefit the clients. While the administrators have good intentions, their work is based on ignoring client outcomes and insisting they are doing great work regardless of results. The second principle, to withdraw from conflict whenever possible, is to minimize the harm I do, even if I believe I am pursuing a worthwhile goal. Most importantly, the stress I was under was impacting my family, and it is my duty to shield them.

On the other hand, I had few alternative paths to follow if I did not work at this agency. If I left the agency my work to complete a Masters in Social Work during the last two and a half years might turn out to be a futile waste of time. I might never be allowed provide therapy to people like me and their families.

In facing this choice, I offered up my angst to my higher power and asked for guidance and strength. The answer was to protect my family and leave at all costs.

After I felt that the peer staff, who had felt threatened by prejudice and insensitivity, were in places of relative safety, I submitted my resignation. In the resignation letter I explained that when I had talked to others who had worked at the agency, a number of frontline workers had indicated that services actually placed clients in potential risk and, given the lack of recovery services provided to people like me, I believed that the risk of services the agency provided outweighed the potential benefits. I could not serve at the agency in these circumstances. I know I am not the first person to leave the agency for this reason.

Leaving behind the clients and coworkers I have grown to respect and know is the spiritual death pulling me into the ground. It is a trial of recognizing that a false dream is ending while separating from people who I deeply wish to stay connected with. It will be the first time I have not been employed for almost 29 years and while I relish spending the holidays with my family, it is a foreign and bewildering reality to not know the next step with concrete certainty.

To my surprise, even before I had formally submitted my letter of resignation, the principles I try to follow offered me a new beginning. I was approached by a woman with the credentials needed to supervise me in therapy for people like me—a necessary step before I have a private practice. Knowing my dilemma, she kindly offered to provide the supervision needed. The woman is a close friend of a woman in our community whose son years ago had experience psychosis and who I had volunteered to help the Mom understand her son and how to work with him.

The principle of doing good works had guided me to do this volunteer work over a decade and a half ago without consideration of a reward. Now, in my time of need, the energy I had offered was offered back to me. I was stunned by the unexpected offer, deeply honored, and filled with growing gratitude. Without this gift, pursuing the dream of providing therapy to people like me might be permanently out of reach; with the gift, the dream was made more likely than if had I stayed and undergone endless conflict and failure.

In the growing darkness of the season, I am looking back on the previous year of discord and suffering while I sought to reclaim many of the things that I had lost due to years of stress in my work life. Though good works are without thought of reward, the events of the past few weeks has helped me reclaim my faith that doing good works, building community, and withdrawing from conflict are all practical parts of Earthly spirituality. They are, for those who seek to follow a path of works, the means to enrich the garden of family and friends that Voltaire’s Candide reminds us we must tend.

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.

As the sunlight rapidly disappears from our daily lives, the cold nights bring patches of frost and while my breath forms mist in the cool air during my walk to work. With the coldness, the leaves of some trees are changing into red, yellow, and orange showing as spots of color among the still green hillsides.
As we enter the Halloween season, the cooling days and diminishing light reminds us that the Earth is falling asleep. In the long, slow dusk, the raspy songs of a few remaining insects call out for mates prior to ending their very short lives in the hardships of the coming cold darkness. The ghosts and goblins that are the childhood stories harbor the approaching season of death for animals like us.

At the farmers market and produce auction, fall harvests are still abundant with mums, pumpkins, and eggplants, along with tomatoes, potatoes, onions, winter squash, and other crops suitable for storage. With the fleeting abundance soon to become the barren ground offering scant food for hungry animals, the harvest season is marked by animals like us storing food. A squirrel diligently ate on and off for ten days a small pumpkin on our porch until it finally could gorge itself on the seeds at the pumpkin’s center. Meanwhile, overpopulated deer in our neighborhood are showing their ribs as they scrounge for food. Without efficient predators like wolves and many more coyotes, the deer overeat the green world around them, like gluttonous humans consuming the Earth.

The fall weather has allowed my wife and I perfect weather for hosting get togethers on our patio. Despite the beautiful weather, during a recent visit with a friend, the conversation turned to patriarchy, war, and women that helped me clarify for my understanding of the past and present human world.

Then and now, the mother and family community is central to the continuing of life through eons of time. From the central community, males would leave to hunt and sometimes protect the others. Like many species, men in our species are more expendable because the laws of fertility dictate that the more women in a community, the more babies will be born. Only a few men are truly needed, so fertility favors men taking lethal risks while women and children are to be safer—which is true in healthy communities embedded in nature, but not in patriarchy.

In the mother and family centered community love is a pre-eminent energy. When I was a teenager decades ago, a girl told me that she thought, “god is love.” When many people speak of their “god” they mean a mysterious, influential energy that acts out of love, creating phenomena we witness in the love of partners, children, families, friends, and others. Natural justice and the Covenant of Good Works are expressions of the energy of love that stems from what goes around coming around. In a very real way, when we experience love with our partners, our family, and others, we are experiencing the presence that people think of as evidence of god.

In prehistory, on the outskirts of these loving communities, males sometimes fought with outsiders over territory. Occasionally, lethal skirmishes like these have been seen in chimpanzees, with males sneaking into the territory of other groups and attacking and killing individuals. But the lethal males did not turn their furor on the families in their communities; love channeled their bloodlust for power-over and violence away from this all important center.

In opposition to the deity of love, the males’ bloodlust for violence and power-over is something of an original sin. But unlike the patriarchal concept of original sin, it is not in everyone, nor in the same degree; particularly, it is more common and in a much greater degree in men than women.

While some human communities like the Mbutu in the Ituri rainforest and the Kung San in the Kalahari, appear to have not practiced war in the millennia before Europeans invaded their lands, as human populations grew, the border skirmishes apparently turned into ongoing battles, with deaths on both sides traumatizing the warriors. In these communities, the men became bullies who invaded and brutalized the sacred and essential mother and family community.

Patriarchy emerged out of the sin of bloodlust, invading and largely destroying the loving community centered on the mother and family. Humanity was taken far from the center of the Earthly river of life as violent patriarchs invaded the Earth to expand their power-over-others.

In our contemporary personal world, many men and some women, also seek power-over others. Some do this directly as bullies who hit their partners and children or who use their money or the glamour of being a man to emotionally or verbally abuse people around them. For sensitive people seeking peaceful, loving harmony, one of the greatest challenges we face is creating boundaries that allow us to build families and communities that exclude these bullies, whether they abuse partners, children, vulnerable minorities, or women.

In abusive families, bullies—parents, older siblings, and others—harm sensitive people and other dependent people. As young adults sensitive people face both remaining quiet about the harm we’ve experienced and entering romantic relationships, friendships, and work relationships that threaten to repeat the harm. Sensitive people, trying to practice compassion and understanding, often fall victim to not creating strong boundaries with bullies, whether they are in our original families or our adult community.

The abuse and harm that has become embedded in families and communities in patriarchy threatens our place in the Earthly river of life. Allowing bullies—whether in our larger world, our community, or our families—into our lives disrupts the loving center of home and family. If lucky, we can successfully escape these traps through strong friends, counselors, and sometimes crisis centers that help us create the boundaries we need.

Taking in these lessons as a grandparent, I am trying to build an empowered, loving relationship for my granddaughter with me. I do this by obeying her wishes, even if it may be part of a game. I ask her when I am leaving, “Can I kiss you on the forehead?”

“Noooo!” she always says.

“Okay,” I reply, “What you say goes. I love you.”

It is crucial to me that she has a relationship with a man and authority figure who from her earliest memories empowers her and makes her as much of an equal as possible. This means less opportunities for me to play with her and be affectionate, but ensures the contact is her choice.

Recently, I was part of her playtime with friends and family in the hollow behind our house. She spent a lot of time with me, holding my hand to go up and down steep stairs and slopes, running to me for safety as she and the other youngsters played chase. At the end of the day, she asked for me to read her Beatrix Potter stories while she laid her head on my shoulder. It was the first time in over a year that I had read her a story and it was the highlight of my week. Her relationship of empowerment with me and others in our family may help her avoid the harm that so many children, women and some men endure in our personal lives. In doing so, she will move closer to the loving center of the river of life that creates spiritual meaning and bliss in our lives.

The rapidly diminishing sunlight has cooled the days and nights, with leaves beginning to fall onto the still warm ground. As we drive our granddaughter and witness the falling leaves, we say to her, “The nights are getting longer and the Earth is getting sleepy.” She repeats, “The nights are getting longer and the days are getting shorter!” again and again in a chorus confirming that at her young age she understands the changing season.

My wife and I have repeated our annual tradition of driving to a seventy-five-year-old family-owned orchard an hour north of us and harvested over 80 pounds of concord grapes to turn into wine. After returning with our abundant harvest, processing the grapes into buckets and placing them in the freezer of friends, we opened last year’s wine for the first time and shared it with our friends. This year, to my disappointment and my wife’s happiness, the wine is sweeter than past years, making it more a dessert wine and less of the fruit-forward slightly sweet wine we’ve had in past years.

The frequent rain of this year has brought forth more mushrooms than in past years, including ringless honey mushrooms that have a reputation for causing upset stomachs for some people. Looking at advice from experienced mushroom hunters, I selected only younger mushrooms, removed the stems, and cooked them for nearly an hour to make a mushroom ragu with garlic and onions, Marsala cooking wine, and vegetable stock, mixed with cream and asiago cheese. Much to our delight, the experiment worked well and we enjoyed a full and delicious meal.

At the auction and farmer’s market, abundant fall crops are filling the rows and stalls. Apples, cider, pumpkins, squash, and others are joining late season tomatoes, eggplant, cabbage, potatoes, peppers, corn, and onions. We have emptied a small crock of caraway-garlic sauerkraut and filled it two days later with more shredded cabbage, garlic, caraway seed, and salt. Within a day, the sound of fermenting cabbage bubbled through the watery airlock that seals the crock, beginning the process of preserving some of the gifts of the season of abundance.

The salt of the Earth, a long-repeated phrase, in Biblical terms referred to virtuous people who caused the urban human god to withhold his malevolence and preserve the Earth. Only through learning the role of salt in preserving food did I realize the full meaning of the phrase. Meanwhile, for millennia, followers of urban human gods have wondered if in this generation the salt would fail and the “creation” of Earth would be destroyed. Civilizations have risen and fallen, dynasties collapsed, and empires have arisen through tyrannical brute force, only to fall through the reliable return of the brutal energy they have sent out. Yet the Earthly river of life has continued, preserved from the hardships of the human world.

In my own, infinitesimal life, the human world has consumed my time in the last two years, with college work focusing my attention on the news of the day. Returning to daily reading of news outlets after decades of distance and long-term news fasts, I am struck by the reality that I recognized decades ago: human history has been and the current world are run by pathological madmen constantly unleashing their evil on common people, leaving few alternatives.

In the decades between then and now, however, I have become witness to the harmonious, sustainable perpetuation of life on the Earth. Spending long hours in the woods, witnessing the beauty and joy of each slowly passing day, I experienced bliss. Embedding myself in the flow of Earthly life into future eons through spending day after day in bringing forth life in my family and the community around us, I again experienced a bliss that had been waiting, patiently, for me to drink in like ambrosia.

In the intervening years, I have become very eccentric. My distaste for the culture of the urban human god reached a point of intolerance, causing me to ignore most human fictional works and entertainment and only wanting to focus on realistic portrayals of life This has included my leaving the room when my dear wife would watch all sorts of TV shows and movies, despite them featuring women in lead roles. I would explain to my wife that because of my experience of hallucinations and delusions years ago, I only wanted to focus on what I knew to be real, not fiction. Not even if my wife’s choices included fiction focused mainly on fantasies of idealized women’s relationships.

Realism, I insisted, was found in the impartial, detailed, and harsh reality of history, which my wife and I defined long ago as “the exponential growth of human stupidity.” In returning to the day-to-day news of the human world created by the urban male god, I see that growth continues. Our species has stumbled into the evolutionary dead end of large-scale warfare, bringing about a process of selection of societies that has made the evil of patriarchy exacerbated by vast populations controlled by corrupt hierarchies. Many common people have begun to recognize that our species is at a dead-end; the tyrants at the top of the hierarchies have yet to face the reality that while they cannot destroy the Earth their own actions will bring their ambitions—and possibly all people—to a bitter, permanent end.

In seeing once again this patriarchal insanity, I realized that is it in fact patriarchs that live in a fictional world of their own delusional non-creation. It is the Earth that provides realism to our lives, represented by the daily life of women and some men in families perpetuating life through eons and by the natural communities that provide all life with abundance of food, shelter, water, air, beauty, and bliss.

In our short-sighted lives, each of us wonder what the next day will bring and what may lie in the distant future for our individual and group lives. On the one hand, I am certain that we will all die. The hope we hold is that the human children of this world will pass long after the elders that I travel with. To that extent, devoting ourselves to the daily acts of bringing forth life—ranging from caring for children to gardening to planting trees to working for sustainable communities to helping people in need—is the best hope for the innocent children my granddaughter plays with. In that way, we can experience the blissful acts of helping preserve the human world like salt preserving food as the soon-to-fail ambitions of patriarchal fiction parades past us in dramas of daily news.

As the sun’s light slowly ebbs of the sky, we are in the heat of the “Dog Days of Summer”—late July and early August. The normal heat of summer, exacerbated by global warming making our temperate climate more subtropical with its weather. With hot, humid days punctuated by frequent and sudden downpours, our area has a preview of what will become more common for our children and grandchildren.

The global climate change, precipitated by urban humanity’s imbalanced consumption of the abundance of nature, is a dreaded outcome for humanity that is the procession of natural justice. Though incomprehensible to people believing the arrogance of urban god-kings who insist the Earthly world is a servant of humanity, it is a grim reminder to humble people that this Earth has made us, rather than was made for us.

The contemporary god-kings of the larger human world jockey for power-over through war, politics, and money, all the while maintaining that their cause is righteous and noble while the causes of their rivals are evil. The common people at the bottom of hierarchies struggle to survive in the midst of war zones, climatic change, and impoverished and oppressed communities, all abandoned by the god-kings as necessary sacrifices to their “higher” causes. For many common people, facing the natural justice of our collective future is too much, resulting in delusional visions that hide reality from our arrogant, human-centered minds. Yet, seeing the slow, predictable workings of natural justice, it is obvious that many current political and military conflicts are marked by the overreach of patriarchs trying to re-establish a world and cultural order whose time has passed.

Meanwhile, in my family’s personal world, the beginning of the season of abundance has brought us many gifts of food waiting to be processed. Cauliflower, Potatoes, Cabbage, Tomatoes, Cucumbers, Onions, Zucchini, Garlic, Kale, Turnip Greens, and more are filling our home, waiting to be turned into meals to feed out bodies and spirits. We have had meals of Turnip Greens and Tofu in Peanut Sauce and two Punjabi Indian Cauliflower meals, one with Potatoes and one with Peas, as well as turning Kale, Garlic, and Cheese into Toscano Pesto to be frozen for future meals. Cabbage has begun fermenting into Sauerkraut with Caraway and Garlic and Tomatoes, Cucumbers, Basil, and rice has been turned into Basil-Tomato Salad. In addition to Cucumber Sandwiches nearly every day, we have also made an Ethiopian Stew, Coleslaw, and Ratatouille.

By sharing our community with skilled, hard-working growers and a natural community to support their efforts gives us the gifts of healthy, fresh, and tasty food in our daily lives. Despite the hardships of the larger human world, our family and community celebrate abundance that many long for. We wish this for the whole world.

In our small, human community, we’ve also seen a miracle of natural justice through the hard and faithful work of a kindly and meek neighbor. Our neighbor and her husband moved in near us and next door to a troubled single father who seemed to delight in upsetting people, sometimes frightening them, and was said to be a serial date rapist. Despite a series of unnecessary and purposeful conflicts with neighbors and sometimes police, the man was supported by an enabling and apparently well to do Mom who bailed him out of trouble, sometimes literally, while he antagonized people and seemed committed to living the rest of his life in a community where he was locally infamous. Normally, such people will eventually wear out their welcome and decide to leave, but with his steadfast pleasure in causing conflict and being disliked, it seemed that he would never leave.

Meanwhile, his kindly and devout neighbor sought to work with him, set aside grievances again and again, and find ways to gain his trust and, potentially, influence him. Though the woman and her husband practiced peace and compassion with him, it seemed fruitless and there must have been many nights where their faith in natural justice was sorely tested.

Then, by a series of ill-fated moves, the neighborhood nemesis hired roofers who mysteriously disappeared while working on his roof, leaving holes in it while there were heavy rains. Whether this was purposeful on their part, perhaps in retaliation for some injustice he did to them, no one seems to know. However, the effect was devastating. The inside of the house, already in decline, was ruined by the pouring rain, making the house unlivable. Natural justice caught up to him and his mother’s stratagems, forcing them to sell the wrecked house and him to leave the community, much to the relief and joy of many.

However, the miracle of natural justice laid not only in his being expelled from the community; it also occurred in the form of the young man who bought the wrecked home. The young man, industrious and mild, was a friend of the brother of the kindly and devout neighbor who had sought peaceful co-existence with the entitled adult brat. The new neighbor, seeing that the peaceful and faithful couple have young children at home, made a point of asking them when the children’s naptimes were, so that he would know when not to use power tools during their sleep.

“I thought, ‘Wow,’” recounted the young Mom, “’This is going to be a big change.’”

As part of the reclamation of our nearby neighborhood, several new neighbors have bought houses in the last couple of years, living next door to people who have lived here for several decades. To celebrate the revitalization and welcomed change, my wife and I hosted an afternoon get together with the new and old neighbors. Much to our happiness, we found the neighbors enjoyed each other’s company very much, sharing food and conversation for three very pleasant hours.

As chance would have it, the only day that would work for the gathering was on my birthday, which normally is a low-keyed and somewhat private day for me. For my wife and I, the timing was part of the mystical nature of this welcomed moment. More importantly, we were privileged to see that the seemingly impossible attainment that “the meek shall inherit the Earth” was made real through the peaceful strength of the devout neighbors. The miracle of natural justice, so often overlooked in our troubled human world, provided us with more than we would have hoped for only a couple of years ago.