Since mid-winter, we have had colder temperatures with fleeting, light snow, quickly melting in the following warmth. While cooler than the first half of winter, February has been marked by short cold spells with warm, rainy weather quickly cycling afterwards. Without the normal extended cold, our winter has been more like a rainy season than our normal winter season.

I encountered an old friend of my wife’s in a store and she said that her allergies, which normally lessen in the cold of winter, had acted up much more this year. We agreed that without the normal cold of the season to limit growth, the molds and other sources of allergies were more active this year. As with all things involving the Earth, changes in climate are much more profound than simply the warming of the seasons.

I have noticed carrots at our local Farmer’s Market, which diminished in past winters. The growers, hearty and resourceful, are adapting to the changing climate even as skeptics deny the reality about us. At the same time, local greens grown in high tunnel greenhouses have flourished and, as always, apples harvested in fall and kept in near-freezing temperatures in coolers are still in supply at the market. Crisp, flavorful and moist, the apples are far superior to those at supermarkets at any time of year. The greens, likewise, are fresh and flavorful, a testament to the skill of the local growers.

As during previous winters, we bottled our wine made from Concord grapes harvested at the orchard where our apples also come from. For a decade, we have traveled to the orchard in September to gather the luscious, sweet bluish black gems from the vines and process them into wine. This coming fall, as in previous years, we will open this year’s harvest and enjoy the simple pleasures of life.

Despite the warm winter, the birds began to sing territorial songs on sunny days around midwinter, as they have in previous years. The males call out, “I have a place for us, come join me, let us fall in love, build a home and raise our children in this wonderful world.” Like so many that live in balance with the natural community around them, birds focus on the simple joys of life as they flow with the Earth in the river of life.

My wife has been using tomatoes we canned last fall as the base for sauces for pasta that we take to the young parents in our family as part of the support we give to them. Their child, some sixteen months old, delights everyone with her spattering of words and her wonder at all the ordinary parts of life that adults take for granted. Meanwhile, the parents scramble to care for their child, earn the income they need to live, and do the chores of a household. Fortunately, they have family and friends nearby, so they receive some of the essential support they need.

Importantly, another new life has been brought into our family. A boy, barely seven pounds, delivered by another young woman in our family, bringing grandparents, great-grandparents and others into an orbit around a new center of life. My wife, who has made a number of quilts over the years, worked for hours on end to create a beautiful quilt for the baby, completing it just a couple of days prior to the birth.

After the parents and baby returned home from the hospital, my wife and I drove up to the parents’ new home and, along with grandmothers, brought food to help with the family’s needs. My wife gave the new Mom the quilt in a colorful gift bag covered with colored tissue paper, with the underside of the quilt—where the baby’s initials and birthdate were embroidered in a corner—showing out. The mother marveled at the underside of the quilt, which is a beautiful pastel fabric with images of furry baby animals and a diamond-shaped patchwork center of blue and tan panels, then turned the quilt over to find a remarkably beautiful patchwork of hand-sewn pastel pieces. Furry baby animals—rabbits, baby bears looking like teddy bears, and foxes—adorned the top. The young Mom, weary from a hard labor and sleepless nights, cried with joy at the site of the work of love for her and her child.

A few days later, my wife and I made a meal for the other young parents in our family. Using our winter stores of food, I pulled the white tendrils of stalks from the wrinkled potatoes I have kept in the paper bag in our unheated cellar since last fall and cleaned and chopped the potatoes for soup. I also used onions bought at the produce auction in October, cutting away some rotting pieces and chopping up the stems of new growth that shoot up from the center of the bulb. Adding soaked and boiled beans from our garden and a local mill, I made a thick cream of potato and bean soup, pureeing some of the vegetables and adding cream and flour to thicken it. My wife made a tart from local apples and we added a salad of local Arugula and Spinach. We took the meal to the young parents and helped babysit their young daughter while the parents did chores.

As the younger couples among our family and friends have brought new life into the world, our lives have become more and more about the care of young ones. We are watching these innocent lives grow and expand, feeling joy in sharing their love of life. The nearly four year old child of a close friend who my wife has babysat since he was three months old is continuing to grow in ability and personality. Recently, he completed a major accomplishment for his age: with only a little help from me, he constructed a large multi-story house from magnetic plastic tiles. I took a picture of the house to commemorate his achievement.

The children in our lives are tremendously vulnerable, as all young lives are, and wholly dependent on the family and community around them. Fortunately, these children have many family and friends around their parents, providing extra help with these all important young lives. This essential community to help the parents is part of the river of Earthly life flowing into the unknowable future, part of eons of generations that have lived on the Earth in the past. Taking part in this river of good works by bringing forth life is like sipping the cold, crisp water of a deep spring, quenching the thirst for life of all but the most hardened spirits.

During this time of deep spiritual satisfaction, I found myself encountering a version of my younger self and, in seeing my own youthful failings, thought of my wife’s philosophy that “most people just want to live, but some people want to rule.” Through work I am beginning in the community around these young lives, a meeting was arranged between myself and a young college graduate who had started at the university in town five years ago. The young man, who had stayed in our community for a year after he graduated, is hard-working, analytically intelligent, and very political in his approach to life, much as I was prior to psychosis knocking me off my college career path.

The young man has volunteered extensively with local political leaders and on various community boards, building up his resume and pushing for political solutions through his connections at the top of local hierarchies. He sincerely believes his efforts will improve our community and he is gaining influence with leaders, all the while having little contact with ordinary people in our community, except when he canvasses for political campaigns.

I met with him to discuss a plan he has been advocating with his political connections, but the meeting ended quickly and badly. I asked him how long he intended to stay in the community he is working so hard to affect and he indicated that he might leave within six to twelve months. I argued with him that if he wanted to affect a community he should do the work he is advocating be done and live with the consequences of his own actions.

I advocate this with everyone, since protection from the consequences of our actions results in narcissism. Hierarchies, carrying out the will of people who rule, protect the rulers from these consequences, leading to spiritual corruption perpetuated by the covenant of bad works. The young man, who sincerely has good intentions, is using his privilege as a well-to-do, well-educated and ambitious white man to seek to change a community he is not really a part of nor is likely to stay in for long. Like my younger self prior to psychosis, he is seeking to rule over people for their own good, to use the principalities of power-over-others to enact his will, but will never truly know the effect of his actions.

As I came to understand his view, I should have immediately asked him to leave. Instead, I became angry and insulted him, resulting the meeting ending quickly, much to my satisfaction. After the meeting I reached out to others more connected to the political and organizational hierarchy and found he was fairly well known to leaders, but unknown to ordinary people in our community.

In doing this, I realized clearly how foreign the views of ordinary people who “simply want to live” are to the hierarchies of “people who want to rule.” In our human world, the idea that leaders should live with the consequences of their actions is simply impractical. How can leaders of hierarchies—affecting communities throughout the world—possibly know their effect in meaningful terms? Yet how can anyone seek to control their own fate without interacting with the hierarchies that channel money and power-over-others?

One of the most faithful things a person can do it to support our families and communities in bringing forth life without seeking to control other communities and other people. Can ordinary people like us who simply want to live avoid being the tools of people who want to rule while also avoiding being their victims? In the millennia of patriarchy, the worship of the man with power-over-others has become deeply embedded in our culture; our larger culture and traditions knows little else. Our culture’s solution is for the righteous to mount these hierarchies and right the wrongs of others. Paths into the higher reaches of these hierarchies are walked by young people with good intentions and an ignorance of corruption that power-over-others breeds in those who the urban human god gives it to, perpetuating our sad history.

As a young person, my own journey toward the centers of power-over-others was aborted by my psychosis. In looking at my younger self, I tend to see not only the good intentions that I spoke so passionately about, but also my unconscious desire for power-over-others. From my older vantage point, thickly embedded in a family and small community that is seeking to bring forth and celebrate life, I am grateful that my early failures led me to people who just want to live and away from people who want to rule.