Thank You, February, Or What An Early Bird I Am

So this is my farewell to February. That cold and dry month, the death of winter and last death portal to spring (the vernal equinox is right around the corner!) This is to the sun moving back northward, that central fire that warms the hearth even in the dreary dead of winter. This is to the coming fecundity of earth, the lakes and ponds and grasses and fields and flowers and trees awakening once again to begin the cycle anew. This is to the polar bear who has come out of hibernation with his young and helpmeet. This is to warmer days and clearer nights, longer magical hours and shorter night hours. This is to the moon, waxing 97% full at this writing, tempting the entire heavens in the skies tonight. This is to the promise of bike rides and skateboard stunts, and meeting again with old friends and gaining new ones, and this is to action, where slumber will be eschewed for activity. This is for stored energy about to burst forth and good memories of all the winter snows and christmases past, all the recollections of family times spent round the table eating cookies and playing Clue (a new cycle of this has started as well)! This is to the necessity of death, without which we'd be unconscious of life, and the hope of a new beginning just when everything seems to be ended for good. This is to taking up the struggle once again, the spiritual sentinels being called for protection as yet another new journey begins. This is to the Ides of March, March Madness, and all things solar and daylight savings time. This is to the seed moon who presides over the plantings that will sprout, flower, and be harvested again. Yeah, onwards and upwards, I say, and it can only get better from here, and all that.

The Well Worn Path

Traveling is nice. Moving beyond one's comfort zone and worldview and discovering the many paths to take, this day, while taking others another day. You have so many options and various trails you can take on your trek through the day. But mine traditionally, however ironically here, has most definitely not been the well worn path. As a kid, I would always, when winding myself throught the woods, leave the road and stumble through the trees and plants and vines and sticker bushes and thistles, climbing over a trunk here, swinging from a vine there. And certainly, this is my modus operandi for making it through the typical day. I like to notice what isn't normally noticed, observe the solitary, ruminate over the arcane. I'd say recently, I've enjoyed noticing the mundane, and how it is connected to the sacred. All the cirularity of life, and the monads in just about everything. I've read the sacred is the center of the circle, which is everywhere, while the circumfrence of the circle is nowhere. This polarity is certainly found to be true, if one takes notice. Things are simultaneously big and small, sacred and profane, tall and short, infinte and concrete, where it's all in how you look at things that brings all this out.

What, or As If

What if something were so terrible, so beautiful, so real and true, it simply could not go away? What if, through destructions of temples, crucifixions and martyrdoms, and the wars and revolutions and new political systems which sought to extinguish it, showing what life was like without it, what if this something wouldn't go away? What if, the science you offer me is just as, if not more uncertain, than the truths I already held to be true? What if devotion, grace, love, brotherhood and equanimity were hallmarks of my truth, while the destruction of the spirit, the individual, the poetry and music of said individual were the hallmarks of your truth? What if I were provided not with an mainly empty cosmos, dead and meaningless and devoid of anything ultimate, but rather a universe charged with life and meaning and the hope of redemption for everyone? What if something were informed by magic, supported by dreams, promulgated by parables and made manifest in the Incarnation of God Himself, to the point history was divided by His death? What if an era were christian rather than common? I know, dear brother, this kingdom has been taken by force, that the church has been led by humans, and everything that that humanity entails, and that living in a fallen world, everything, including the church, is imperfect. But what if this were the most meaningful, most preferrable truth? The end of science can be sterility, mechanical, impersonal, soulless, and at the very least, destructiveness. So can, that be, of the church. But what if, the message had survived through the centuries, untarnished and revealed to all, despite the church's failings? What if love was now beginning to be preferred over strife? And the tide were turning?

Then, what if?

Mundus Imago Dei

It amazes me still there are people who can look at the skies, look at the world, look at themselves and animals and rocks and vegetation and still believe there is no God. He is everywhere! He is evident in the complexity first of our own bodies, then of the workings of nature, then of the 'mechanics' and fluidity of the unfixed and then fixed stars. Regularity, in the positions of the pole stars, the great bear, the constellations in their fixed heavens, along with the regular stability of the sun and the moon and the earth, all of this is a reflection of God Who desires to know Himself better through His creation, cuts through the unbelief of chaos, where there even now order has been found. There surely is an interconnectedness of all things since (and before) the discovery of gravity where everything is attracted to itself in an inverse relationship. Newton only manifestly reported what the ancients knew and wrote already. The Cosmos is organized in a way that what happens below affects what happens above, and what happens above surely affects what happens below. When one looks beyond the mundane drive to work, and sees the circular in it, or the same by brushing one's teeth, or taking a shower, or beholding another sunrise or moonrise, or whirl-back-around of Orion, and then see that all of these, mundane and celestial are in harmony with one another in that they are all circular, how can one not see that the Divine is preeminent and that we were not preordained and established in Him? Just a question, this was.

Vanity

Tribal man, perhaps initially due to lice and other nasties, began picking himself clean. Soon, he discovered this could be done by someone other than himself. He in return would groom his mate. Vanity, vanity all is vanity! There is something about this weakness that is primordial and ancient. As long as there has been a man and a body of water for him to gaze into, vanity has been with us. For the Hermeticists, Adam looked down from the pleroma and gazed down into Nature and Nature loved him so much, she embraced him as he fell into his resplendent reflection in the waters. This is where the earthly shell makes its first mischieveous entrance into the story of man. Ever since, we have been trimming our hair, clipping our nails, and applying scents to make ourselves smell better and be more presentable. Entire economies, now, are based upon this weakness, vanity. A garment is eschewed for fashionable attire. Shoes are bought in amazing multiplicities as are jewelry, hair adornments and personal products. One could say vanity invented the city, where the earthly shell and all it's needs and wants, needed to be organized into a society of other vain peoples. Religion, acting as a counterweight to this initial overdoing of the physical, could be argued to be the response to this vanity. It seeks transcendence of the seen. And felt and tasted and heard and smelled. An equilibrium resulted where faith restored the balance to man's self love, where instead, the object of veneration became the stars. The sun. The moon. The earth. The other. Beauty was found outside onesself in the multiple emanations of the One God.

I certainly take a renaissance view of the splendor of man. It seems to me that man is the center of the Cosmos, a being fashioned by none other than God Himself, and as such, is due much wonder and amazement, and yes, a little pride. We occupy a space, have a breadth and depth, that even the angels cannot participate in. For, we, like the angels, have an immortal and incorruptible nature, but in addition even to them, we have a mortal part that they lack. So perhaps much of our suffering can be described as encouraged by the powers that be, because they are jealous of our unique position in the Cosmos.

And perhaps this is where vanity is indeed first made a weakness, where we gaze at and into ourselves, and find we are magnificent, and then attempt to be self sufficient, and apart from God. Perhaps then this is where separation and physical space originates then, in that we, being creatures of God, behold ourselves and in our beauty, think we can make it on our own.

But history has shown that our inner nature, that truly unselfconscious center, will only allow our vanity to go so far in that we think our way is the only way, our way is better, our way shall prevail, before it rightens the body and humbles it to the point of suffering and demands we worship the divine and transcendent. Mystery will not evaporate so easily!

And thankfully, it is so.

Excuse Me, I Am A Bourgeois Polymath

Well, yes, I guess it's finally time admit it. I am unabashadly and now unashamadly bourgeois. If it weren't for the free market system and capitalism, I wouldn't have a roof over my head. I sell things. Things I believe in. Books. Movies. Music. My passion for all three enables me to traffic my favorites flagrantly, all to make a buck. But before you condemn me, dear reader, know that I take my job seriously. I read the books I sell, listen to the c.d.'s I recommend, and watch the movies I exchange for a profit, which provides me, along with the artists who create all of this, with a living. And yes, virtue is to be found in the bourgeois. When I'm at work, I'm not drinking, carousing, cursing, or hurting anyone. I am sober, temperate, considerate of others including my staff as well as my other external customers (the ones who pay the bills). One ammenity to being bourgeois is you're not tied up with society and social trappings of the upper classes. You work hard, do your best, and when you go home, your time is your own (and your family's). You may be lacking in upward mobility, and may always be threatened with downward mobility, but for the present, the bills are up to date and you can afford your leisure. This leisure allows you time to ruminate over not one, but many different subjects modern man wrestles with. Spirituality, History, Mathematics, Humanities, Technology, the Seven Liberal Arts or whatever else catches your eye. And to the bourgeois, much can catch the eye as you get a glimpse of the finer things the upper echelon enjoys, while remembering the basic things you enjoyed when you were poor. Yes, poor. Living downtown with five other broke people in a house you could literally see through when standing on the street, the cold wind whistling through the rooms during the winter because you couldn't afford such luxuries as heat. The manna from heaven was ramen noodles and the ambrosia was Blatz beer. So having tended to the middlin', you are one who's had the ups and had the downs that cumulatively, provide one with a rich, interwoven existence.

So it's just as desperate here in the middle as it is anywhere I suppose. And at times, the desperation becomes vulgar where it is not silent, where a voice is raised here, or a displeasure expressed there, with the way things are going, but it's desperation all the same.

But in the long run, you feel like though you lack a career, you will always have a job. If you keep a strong back. And don't upset the wrong people.

Stillness, Speak

It's been snowing in Evansville. We got around 3" yesterday. When winter is here, the animal instincts kick and you go into survival mode, eschewing anything that is not necesary. We made chili, baked chocolate chip cookies (I burnt them just a little) and played board games all day yesterday (I won in Clue). When the weather is this way, you walk outside with everything covered in snow, you get an idea of just how still Creation can really be, and you get a hint of how things used to be before machines. True, some would say boring. But if you pause for just a minute and slow everything down just a little, you can experience a quiet peace that is hardly found the rest of the time. Things are slow. Traffic is nil. Everything approaches the static. It's as if all of Nature is telling you to stop and smell the roses. And if you do, you are rewarded with an outward peace working inward, just a little pause in the day to day madness of everyday living.

Solve Et Coagula

The night is filled with dreams, flights of fancy, and all kinds of imaginations. The day is filled with logical and intelligent thought processes. What was experienced during the day melts into the night, and what was experienced at night melts into the day, each leaving their mark on one another.

Also, there are good things that happen, and bad things that occur. The bad, we attempt to dissolve and turn into the good concretely, the good, we attempt to make more of.

Minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, year by year, we are dissolving and solidifying what we see around ourselves and what we experience.

One thing not only leads to another, but melts into the next and solidifies into the following.

The Sacred and the Profane The Nature of Religion

In this book, Eliade writes first in an accesible, then in a most respectful style on religion, magic, initiation, mysticism, and the profane. From the outset, though the book's title states it concerns religion, in which the object of study begins with the Divine, and then continues on consequently to man, Eliade rather begins with man and then continues on consequently God. Man is shown to create himself, his house, his cosmos, and his existential situation precludes the religious right up until a.d. 1950. The author wisely points out profane man is a rather unique and new phenomenon in human history. Whether he is descriibing the initiation rituals of primitive societies, or the construction of a modern abode, Eliade skillfully shows like it or not, we are recreating the cosmos as the gods did before history. Without the slightest hint of a sense of humor, Eliade points out repeatedly that no matter how much modern profane man has attempted to divest Nature of the sacred, he still stubbornly, if unconsciously, sacralizes his environment.

Over and over again.

This is a nice little book that provides a glimpse into what we are stubbornly trying to leave behind, to our own obvious detriment

Irish

Well, through the luck of my dad receiving a family Bible from my aunt, God rest her soul, I have found that my paternal great grandmother's name was Margaret McCoy. They said she liked to be called Maggie. 'Maggie McCoy' sounded Irish to me, so I did a search on the surname and found it is indeed originally Irish and is a derivation of 'Mag Aodha' meaning 'son of fire' in the old Irish. I haven't yet found out if Maggie had red hair, but I'm going to take a wild guess that she did.

I know it's kind of silly to many, tracing family roots and that sort of thing, but I'm at the stage in my life where I've gained a little self wisdom and consequently, like having sugar in the system, I want more. This is just one more way in which to understand myself, that I'm part Irish.

I have to admit, I'm a little stricken by the Irish bug. I've read some books and discovered the rich, romantic history of the Irish and the Scotts, which apparently originally came from the Picts, and them from the Celts, on from them the Tuatha De Danaan, and mythologically on back to the Hyperboreans according to Aristotle, Plato and other Greek sources.

I've read up on Celtic Christianity and have discovered (see below my personal creed) an affinity with the tenets of this expression of the faith, and I've become more interested in Nature at large, and the heavens, discoverig I have quite an interest for things as they occur naturally.

As I've talked to people, I've found you don't have to go back very far in any family's history before you run across some very interesting characters, some very intriguing events, and a history that all are always great reading where the truth is truly stranger than fiction.

Personal Creed

I believe in the Spirit, that great Light that has existed before the Soul and the Animal, that was at One with Divinity before being enclosed in the Flesh. I believe in the Soul, the expression of thought, emotion and personality that unites the Animal to the Spirit. I believe in the Animal that breathes, produces heartbeats and is the house of imagination and flights of fancy. I believe that the circular, whereever it be found, is of Divinity. The wave rises from the ocean, crests and falls, returning to the ocean, the same in it's circularity as the motion of the Sun, the Moon, the Stars in their broad orbits, the Earth through it's angular path. I believe upon pain of Death, the constituent parts return to their One, the Animal to Nature, the Soul to Humanity, the Spirit to Divinity. I believe Certitude leads to Violence, where another is allowed his path to Divinity that may contradict mine, and that his view is deemed just as valid as my own, if his intentions be honest and true. I believe that Nature is the shadow of Heaven, and Art is the shadow of Nature, where the Divine is found to be One, and emanating, becomes several, and returns again to the One. I believe in the Dignity of Man, where all have all of these constituent elements I have listed, though some may be sleeping or unaware of their own makeup. I believe though God be One, He emanates into various, where we were created in 'Their' Image, as Genesis states. I believe in the the Feminine Aspect of God, Being the Shekhina, the Spirit of God. Regardless of shaky evidence, I believe in evolution at least of the Soul, and that Man is evolving even now into a new Creature. I believe that firstmost, God's Grace abounds, and upon penalty at Death rather than burn in hell, we would be allowed to return to make ammends and set things right, so that God's Grace may abound even more. I believe in order to understand the outward, one must first truly look inward, and will find that the individual mirrors the Cosmos, and the Cosmos, the individual. Just as the Heart sends out it's rays to all the planets (arms, legs, appendages), so does the Sun send out all it's rays to the planets. I believe in the Cosmos as it's name is defined, where it is rational, ordered and wholly regulated by a Divine Intelligence. I believe suffering is necessary in order to learn and to grow, and can be caused by events that happened centuries ago and is impersonal and morally neutral, visiting both the Good and the Bad. I don't believe evil is eternal, and thus being jealous, visits us in the realm of the temporal, where it is allowed it's season to operate in our lives. I believe the Spirit, the innermost Person, is absolutely hermetically and spiritually sealed and is immortal as well as incorruptible, and that therefore the best part of ourselves can never truly be harmed. I believe God is wholly immanent, found in Nature throughout, and that if you pluck an ear of corn, you have held an aspect of the Divine. I believe God is transcendent, where He is ineffable, and can only be represented symbolically, and that these symbols in turn are bourne with us when we are bourne. I believe that though all men are depraved, and that the natural motion of the Soul is downward (as we've fallen), I believe through knowledge and spiritual practice, man can reclaim his rightful position in the Cosmos, and be wholly and fully redeemed through the blood of Jesus Christ.

Hello, I Said, I'm Late

Hello, I'm late. So sorry for any inconvenience. It's okay they said. What have you been reading? Well, you won't believe this, but I just discovered King Arthur and the Knights of the Table Round. Yes, go on, they said. What do you think? Well, said I, I rather like Sir Lancelot and Galahad, two of the noblest characters I've ever found in literature. Yes, but how much literature have you really read? Um. Right. That's a good point, because not much, given the vast...Well so what else are you reading? Any other thoughts? Well, yes, before King Arthur, I read 'The Greek Way' by Edith Hamilton...Yes Yes Yes, but what did you think? Alright then, well I liked quite a lot the parts about tragedy and pathos, you know and the differences between the two, and yes the comparison between Aeschylus and Shakespeare, and on to Sophocles and Euripedes...Well, well, they said, then that's something! I found I had hit upon something. And I said, yes well the part about the gentlemanly society of Plato and Socrates, you know, they all being in repose and reclining, drinking and conversing about Love and the Gods, and Justice and so on, you know, was really quite enlightening. Yes, yes, well before, what had influenced you from before? Well I suppose Curious George, really. Oh yes and the Hardy Boys and Boxcar Children. So you're saying you last read children's stories before diving into Plato? You missed quite alot in between then, didn't you? Well, I did discover Chabon with his release of 'The Mysteries of Pittsburgh'. Liked him more than Ellis, who I never read. And you see how he's done. Right then. Any others? Well a girl did give me a stolen library book of Jerzy Kosinsky's 'Being There' and I quitle like it. They made, you know, they made a movie..

Inside / Outside

When I was younger, I was unitiated and inside. I viewed the world as being outside, while I was insulated by family, church, friends, fellows at work. But there comes your turn where you have to ditch all this comfort and come to terms with 'who are you'? Whou are you, really? In order to gain this self knowledge, you gotta suffer. Feel pain you never thought possible. And help is there, but slow in the coming.When you come through, you realize you're now on the outside of what you used to be on the inside of. But you're also inside something that before you were outside of. You trade one interior for another, and magically, what used to be object becomes subject, and what used to be subject becomes object. It's like you've gone through a mirror world or something. The sun looks different, as does the moon, the planets and the stars and the earth and rivers and oceans and hills and pastures. You hear snippets like 'we belong to the earth, the earth does not belong to us' and it all makes sense. Further, you find cause and effect operating in such plain sight, that before you didn't even take notice of it. But now, you do. And it's all the most beautiful, gorgeous, wonderful affair you've ever encountered.

Awakening, I'd call it if I had to put a name on it.

The Door

Every once in a while, it is interesting to consider the two great lights we have in our day and night skies. The sun has left through the door of the winter solstice and is marching it's way back again northward. Already, the days and daytime hours are getting longer, and if you discriminate, you can feel the air warming with the sun's rays penetrating through. Soon enough, the winter chill will give way to fair spring breezes and the earth will respond to the sun by bursting forth blooms, and greening the grasses and accelerating the saps through the trees. It will be wonderful to see the interplay between the sun and the earth, and how the two will give life and light to all of our known creation.

And then there is the moon. The passive and active mirror to the sun, receiving the solar light and reflecting it to the earth and the fields and the waters. The moon is waning gibbous right now, around 97% full according to my lunar calculator. So the sun is approaching and waxing while the moon is receding and waning.

I was thinking today how it would be a wonderful myth if the moon were the carrier of all the griefs, the frets, the disappointments, the doubts and other 'negative' emotions, and transmitted them all, manifesting in night, while the sun would be the carrier of all the blessed hopes, victories, right aspirations and new beginnings, thus resulting in the broad daylight. These emotions all ebb and flow, just as do the motions of the sun and moon, and there is always a little hope in dread, where the sunlight is reflected from the moon in the darkest night, and there's always a little dread in hope, where the moon can be seen during the daylight often times and the fact that there are lunar and solar eclipses.

So this line of thinking really falls into the macrocosm, microcosm theory where what we experience personally is manifested cosmologically, and vice versa. Jung called it synchronicity, in popular parlance it would be called coincidence.

I call it magic!

Pathos

I've been reading 'The Greek Way' by Edith Hamilton and have been impacted by the section on tragedy. Hamilton finds the tragic par excellance in Aeschylus. She notes that tragedy is the ability of a great soul to feel. It is not the innocent being punished. This, the innocent being punished, she categorically states, is pathos. When you hear the word pathos, you think immediately of pathetic, which sounds almost comic now that it is a word that has been misused for so long. Applying trajedy and pathos to the Iraqi war for example, I would conclude that the soldier doing the fighting is experiencing the tragic, in that he is a great soul who I'm sure is feeling deeply. I would apply pathos to the innocent child who has been killed under 'friendly' fire. The one whose picture doesn't make it into Time magazine, or Fox news, or some such other media outlet. In the tragic, there is hope, in that the great soul can feel great joy as well as great pain, and I suppose the Stoic would say it is not prudent to feel very deeply in either direction, whether happy or sad. But what is the poetic, philosophic soul to do, but feel deeply? On to pathos. This is the one that in real life is so heartbreaking. There is no hope. No supernal light in the blackness. There is just utter dispassionate and disinterested destruction and mindless extinction. Morally neutral, pathos is found in both the good and the evil, the result of fickle Fortune, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. An Iraqi child running down his street to retrieve a ball who gets caught in a hail of gunfire. Or from before, just one nameless child thrown into a mass grave with impunity, though the punitive would later catch up with the Despot who dug the nameless graves for the nameless. This is where one must walk cautiously if he is to keep his faith intact. The question of the heretic, 'whence evil'? Tragedy and pathos seem to be the conduit, the great regulators of evil. But I'm not going to delve any deeper here, but rather having stated the problem, will pose various answers in later posts.

'The Greek Way' by Edith Hamilton

The first thing one encounters when reading Edith Hamilton's 'The Greek Way' is her love and even exuberance for her subject. Her opening remarks describe the classical greek worldview; an ability to grasp the world as it is, and still find it to be beautiful. This grasp this people had on reality would allow them to create the pictorial art, the art of the stage, here not including the dialogue and the dinner/drinking party, all still enjoyed much in the same manner today as the greeks enjoyed them in 500 b.c.e. Plato and Socrates, and the way they experienced gentlemanly society, are highlighted as the crowning achievements of greek philosophy. It is the Ideal, Hamilton seems to say implicitly, that the greeks envisioned and carried forward philosophically, that would later influence western civilization in the way it did. Later, comparisons are drawn between Aeschylus and Shakespeare, where the influence of the former on the latter is striking by the examples Hamilton presents. Hamilton here defines trajedy, elucidates pathos, and the differences between the two. She goes on to draw similarities between Virgil and Sophocles in their poetry and subjects, a valid comparison, she makes it seem. Between this first and last, Herodotus is presented as a wide-eyed surprisingly objective first reporter who documents the cogitations and remarks of subjects as diverse as the delphic priestess and Cyrus the Great of Persia. Freedom is won in the face of the Persian threat, and is the singular hallmark of the classical greeks in Hamilton's view. It affects everything the personalities Hamilton brings to light accomplish. Every work of art, every stage play, every dialectical argument can be viewed either as being in the presence of, or having the lack of freedom and democracy. There is no question, Hamilton rightly defines the greatness of these greeks as a free, democratic people. But at the close of her book, Greece has become imperialistic and desires empire. Sophocles, the old conservative guardsman, documents poetically the zeitgeist of the former and current states of things, and a new era is dawning. But Hamilton wisely leaves off here, having presented a wonderful picture of a wonderful people during a wonderful time.

Loud

We prefer everything loud, in hopes that it will drown out the gnawing, nagging voice that dogs us. We are mortal. We are going to die. We owe Nature a Death. More, we deserve to die, it's our exchange for being born. In that we're still here, we've harmed many, this is sure. We've deprived others of happiness, wealth, peace, a roof over the head, all so we can come home and watch 'Lost' at the end of the day. Everything is just a bit ugly, and given enough glitter and noise, it all can fade to the background and we can create chimeras in it's stead. Joseph Campbell said it best. 'Life eats life' and we have the audacity to think we eventually won't get eaten. All we can do is resolve to cut our way through the belly of the whale when it swallows us whole in the sea. Such is the state of the soul of things, and has been from what I see, for about the past four thousand years. But if you sink through it all, there is a peace, the Spirit. The magical element that somehow sits atop of it all, yet supports from the bottom. It is Quiet, Still, in Repose. It can cut through the worst emotion, the most frightening thought, the most evil desire and tell you 'you don't need a thing'. Then, amidst the 'loud', you can experience Peace, and know that the best part of you is nothing less than incorruptible and immortal. And then, you can contentedly continue on.