As the sun slowly reached it’s zenith in the Northern sky, the last days of spring continued to be mild in temperature and fairly rainy, with trees, plants, gardens and flowers bursting forth with a thick celebration of the new season. In late May, pink and red peonies bloomed profusely, providing sweet scents and lush beauty. These were followed by lilies of all sorts—pink, red with white centers and brilliant Chinese Red, the last a gift my gruff and severely color-blind older brother provided to our Mom’s yard before my family suffered both of their passing far too early in their lives.

In addition to lilies, golden Stella d’Oro and snow-white Yarrow bloomed beautifully, along with tiny blue and yellow flowers growing wild underneath our winter bird feeder. They set seeds, but have not finished maturing, but they are already attracting Morning Doves. The parents are showing the young lives where they eat and the birds, friendly and gentle, look toward the maturing plants like a farmer inspecting his crops.

From the fertility of May baby Robins grew in a nest just outside our front door and a young doe left her newborn fawn sitting among the shrubs and weeds while she foraged for food to help her body nourish her young child. The fawn, new and innocent to the world, sat in quiet observation, taking in the Earth as new to her as she is to the Earth.

Much to my annoyance, my wife worried over the young Robins, concerned that they were not well. I chalked her anxiety up to irrationality and weariness from her own hard work caring for our grandchild in my stepdaughter’s home three days each week, a typical man’s reaction. Much to our concern, when the young hatchlings were but a week old, they suddenly disappeared from the nest, which had been disturbed and damaged slightly. While we hoped that the young birds had simply taken flight very quickly, it is more likely that a nighttime predator attacked the nest and innocent young lives were lost. My wife’s intuition, I came to realize, had appeared to her as worry that I did not take seriously until events showed her to be sadly correct.
Our garden, though beset by slugs that razed several rows of young sprouts while I was busy with work and the food club, is still abundantly producing lettuces, Sylvetta Arugula, Kale, and Turnip Greens. We made Udon-Style Noodles with Arugula and Tofu, a recipe my wife created. We also combined Spinach from the Farmer’s Market with Garlic Scapes and cheese, including a local Goat cheese, to make a large set of Pesto for freezing and use in the coming months.

Even with the crop losses, between our garden, the food club and a few items from the Farmer’s Market, our refrigerator is filled to capacity. I made my wife a list of over a dozen different local items we had for making meals and listed six possible meals. While the outside world roils with the health and economic catastrophe of the pandemic and people in our county and the whole world face a shortage of basic food needs, my wife and I have abundance of life, love, food and health. The randomness of our good fortune, along with the severity of multiple crises facing humanity, fills us with a deep gratitude mixed with concern. Looking out into the larger human world from our peaceful, diverse and healthy community, I am mystified and saddened by the state of inhumanity that is the normal condition of patriarchy run by princes and principalities.

As I have for a few years, I took ten days prior to the Summer Solstice to reflect on my life in the last year and to consider how I could improve myself. This year, as previously, the same failures cropped up in my review—being temperamental, lacking faith, having little compassion—all of which affected my relationship with my wife. At the same time, this year was different, since my wife had agreed, for my sake, to allow me to take the risk of retiring early and starting a new career working with seriously mentally ill people like me. My wife had made it clear that she personally preferred me working until I could fully retire and not have us risk the uncertainty that many people face, yet she came to believe that we would be happier and better off if I changed course.

For me, it was a decision very much an act of faith in good works, which has been limited by working for a deeply corrupt organization and with an almost entirely team of white men, several having had careers in the military. The team is led by a temperamental workaholic bully, notorious at work and in the community for his abusiveness. In many ways, the team is the polar opposite of the Feminine center of life that I seek to be part of. Their hard hearts, which neither give kindness (which they, of course, do not receive in return), are filled with material desires to acquire things with little regard for those outside their white, patriarchal, puritan circles. Though they, like my wife and I, have been given material abundance and the potential for happy lives, they appear to have never been truly happy. Cut off from the joy sharing in the Earthly flow of life by their angry, ungrateful personalities, they can only acquire possessions to momentarily salve their deep unhappiness.

In communicating to my ill-tempered puritan boss about his hostility towards virtually everyone he does not have under his personal control—his family and his team—I quoted Jesus’s response when tempted by the Devil—“What benefit it a man if he gain the whole world but loses his soul?” My boss, believing the malarkey of his self-defined interpretation of Christianity while living in complete disregard of the words attributed to Jesus, could not conceive that I was speaking of his self-created misery. Alienating many others and sabotaging his own career ambitions while he karmically tries to climb a ladder of material success, I do not think he is going to a doomed afterlife; rather he is sadly wasting his good fortune with a deeply unhappy Earthly life.

In my own life, I found myself becoming more and more like my nemesis at work. I was becoming deeply ungrateful and very temperamental, failing to successfully pursue a less lucrative career in good works for the material security of being paid too much for doing little of actual value. Fortunately, my long-time belief in the importance of good works and decades of volunteer and paid work in helping people with schizophrenia and their families has made a new career possible. Turning away from the spiritually depleting greed of the violent-man-money-chaser-puritan culture, my wife and I are embarking on a journey of faith in the strength of good works. I am deeply grateful to my wife, whose presence in my life has provided me with all the good that life can offer, for allowing us to take this risk.

In looking forward from where I have come, I can see that I owe my wife a deep karmic debt. Can I use this new freedom and opportunity to strengthen our relationship? Can I use my release from the patriarchal misery of my coworkers’ pursuit of the American Dream to be sensitive, loving and considerate of my wife and her family? Most of all, when I encounter places of disconnect and potential conflict with them, can I treat them with the same compassion and understanding that I will be expected to treat my clients and their families in my new career? It was this awareness—that I was treating my mean-spirited coworkers with more consideration and patience than I did my own wife—that made me realize my heart needed to act in accordance with a path of good works.

In her teachings, an Ohio mystic named Elizabeth Kelly speaks of faith: “IF YOU ASK PEOPLE if they believe in God, they will say, ‘Yes, I believe in God.’ But if you know them, you will see that they believe in liquor or sex or drugs or hard work or money—a million things—but not God.”

Following Elizabeth’s instruction that it does not matter what word we use for the spiritual presence she calls “God” I have sought to understand this profound lesson that begins her book, Spiritual Journey. I am certain that any entity that can encompass the Earth, much less the universe, is far beyond the grasp of my feeble mind. But I do see a spiritual presence in daily life, despite the suffering of the larger human world. Choosing to take part in this presence, act with both common sense and faith and use the gifts of Earthly life to gratefully celebrate all I have received, I will hopefully be able to be a better husband, family man and member of my community.

In my harmonious, diverse and close-to-the-Earth small town community, daily life can offer me spiritual gifts to strengthen my life. If I can take the time to earn and receive the gifts of life and love, I believe I can make my wife and I happier with less things and more joy. That is my challenge and my goal for the journey of the next cycle of the sun.