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.