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Dec 21, 2000
Solstice
The first day of Winter.Not the same as, but not distinct from, the New Year, or Christmas, for that matter. Both holidays articulate the fact of the Solstice, making a metaphor that likens lengthening days to birth: the year’s or something more. For all our materialism, we do not honor the objective occasion of the Solstice, but prefer poetic interpretations.
Astrology over Astronomy.
The Magi knew both.
The star they followed was seen somewhere other than the sky, else Herod wouldn’t have asked of its appearance. He’d have seen it for himself. But if the star was an astrological observation, you can be sure that the Magi also knew the visible heavens, and took the measure of the Solstice. Nor did they distinguish between their science and their art, but used the one to plumb the other.
Wise men, indeed...
Our prognostications are not so sophisticated.
Mostly we look for Christmas snow, and rarely find it. This Winter is coming on strong, though, with some snow already, and more forecast. Then again, we also saw sixty degrees last Sunday, with thunder and lightning and rainbows, so who knows? There’s even a solar eclipse occurring on Christmas, and the fact that I already know about it proves that we have learned to predict some things, after all.
But can we find that star?
Dec 12, 2000
Fall and Mount
Back from Iceland, with its skewed seasons; time distorted through the lens of northern latitude. The low-slung sun skids across the horizon for a few hours: morning, noon and evening indistinguishable. Here, too, the days grow short, or at least we intercept less sunlight. Autumn erodes until we reach the Solstice. There we may look ahead to better days; more sun; new seasons; a whole new year. And all these hopes bundled into what we call Christmas, a catch-all holiday, preeminent among our celebrations, if unfocused.Yes, the Holiday Season is here again, drawing us into another round of revelry. Most cultures have some extended holiday sequence, but we generally dole ours out one by one, a day off here and there, a few long weekends to mitigate our daily labors. Only now do we allow a sequence of occasions, each triggering the next, as Thanksgiving signals the approach of Christmas, which cannot come without the New Year on its heels. Taken all together, summation and a new beginning are implicit, but the form is pure Capitalism: a fever of expenditure to honor...what? The birth of God, or some such thing...
You’d think that Christians might regret our choice in making Christmas a bigger Holiday than Easter, but is being born any less miraculous than being reborn?
Birth is not so much on my mind this Christmas season, except that Death remains its other side.
Death has demanded too much of my time of late.
Unseemly greed,
if it but wait,
Death shall have all my time.
But now,
I live.
It is my father who is dead,
and I feel bad.
Such is the simple equation of grief.
Grieving distances me from the Holidays. Sharing in celebration unites us, vitiating our idiosyncratic concerns, but putting on the mourning cloak isolates me from the hum and whirl. Mourning was once an institution of some formality, with rules to observe, which, like the Holidays, served to define our place within the Mystery. Now, like so much of our spiritual technology, it is neglected; something to get through, or over; and not to burden others with.
I stood on the Mount, “going through it”.
The Mount is the hill rising behind (that is, West of) the Conservatory Garden. Once, it was fortified, and formerly it housed the Sisters of Charity, but now it is a ruin. More than a ruin, it is a disturbed site. The whole top of the hill has been scooped out, and is used for composting the Park’s dead trees, which are reduced to wood chips nearby. Unwholesome characters frequent the tangled and tumbled margins of the height, and a general air of disorganization and destruction hangs over the place, with its steaming piles of chopped up life. It seems a charnel house of trees.
Such associations, no doubt, induced me, there, to rummage in the charnel house of memory, finding memories not fully formed, still animated by lost life, arguing against my need to extinguish and encrypt them. I could see all sides of this thing, my father’s death, but I could not see through it.
In that oblique moment, I saw myself, and I saw his death, but I did not see him. Mostly I suffered remorse over the medical decision making to which I had been party. What was done was not wrong; merely humane, but I nevertheless served, along with the doctors, in an embassy of death, a role more profound than I am accustomed to, and one that taxed my capacities. I’d been forced into a direct observation, and thus, an experience of, the incompatibility between Life and Death. I had requested my father’s death, yet I could not hope for it. I wished him to live and to die at the same time, which is not a tenable position to think from, though it may be a place from which to begin praying.
It’s not that my prayers have gone unanswered;
I just don’t ask for much.
What I’ve gone through is only a natural duty in the course of Life. It’s not a happy charge, but I can hardly resent it. Not without resenting Life itself.
What I am left with is my father. Not alive, but as himself, transcending the ghoulish guise of his death. For though I attended on his death, I cannot share it. None of us can die for another. This we know, and though we aver that there is One who dies for us, our doubt is such that we honor best the birth, and leave the rest to hope. But my father remains with me, dead and alive.
I see him now less as my father, and more as a man with his own life, which he navigated in his own peculiar, but not unsuccessful way. No longer the exemplar that a child sees, yet still I find in him a standard that I will always measure myself by. His completion does not complete our relationship. It will go on as long as I live. And this I call “coming into my inheritance”, which does not have to do with goods or funds, but is the compensation paid for making one of Life’s darker passages.
So I mused, upon the Mount, amid the rot and ruin.
The landscape disturbed, but my thoughts now less so.
Life is subject to disturbances, but these are also opportunities of a sort. Just so, a place like the Mount is an ecological hot spot. New plants rush to sprout in the freshly turned earth, which also reveals worms and bugs, attracting a wide array of birds, and even some surprising mammals, like the Woodchuck I saw there recently.
And I’ve seen the Kestrel, perched atop the Mount, or hovering above it. The Kestrel is a little Falcon, hardly bigger than a Robin, but a puissant bird of prey nonetheless, and the only one that hovers. It used to be called the Sparrow Hawk, but the name has changed, or rather reverted to the traditional European one, I think for the better. This nomenclature was championed by Roger Tory Peterson, whose Field Guide to the Birds was a landmark in the popularization of birding, and a 1947 edition of which is a part of my inheritance from my father. Peterson doesn’t mention the alternative name of the European species, which is Windhover, as I only learned while looking into foreign birds for the recent trip. This bit of knowledge put me in mind of the poem by Hopkins, and if it did not fundamentally alter my understanding of his meaning, it did expand my vision of his imagery, as I had always pictured a larger bird, not knowing about tiny, fluttering falcons, until I had seen one for myself.
Being alive, I could appreciate the death-dealing bird, beautiful and terrible, like Life itself.
For mourning is not our reaction to death, but our reaction to being alive, in the face of death.
And I thought of a different poem by Hopkins, which aptly wraps these feelings in an Autumnal metaphor.
And I’ve decided to put the Arboretum into Holiday mode, as best I can, for my woes cannot cloak the bare trees in black.
The Seasons and the Holidays teach a rhythm we must abide,
and do not recognize my loss
as different from the fallen leaves.
They do not reflect me,
but allow me to project
Father and Falcon,
Peak and Pit,
the Living and the Unalive
that ceaselessly in me collide.
Nov 23, 2000
Thanksgiving
Happy Thanksgiving from Reykjavik, where trees are few and stunted, but a fine time is being had by all travelers.This is a relatively low-tech trip, and it´s about as much as I can do to get this minimal post up, but I do have things to be thankful for.
In the wake of my father´s death, I can safely say that the number one thing to give Thanks for is Life, with all its Mystery.
To live is to be caught up in a larger web of relationships. We have not just life, but Life. This is really what the Thanksgiving Holiday honors, by focusing on the food that sustains us, and binds us to the plants and animals we share our lives with.
To appreciate the colors of the trees, and not merely to harvest their fruits, is something I also give Thanks for, the gift of human consciousness.
The only way I know of thanking is to give back in kind what I have gained. So here, not from Iceland, but from Central Park, is one last glance at the colors of Fall.
Enjoy the Holiday.
Nov 17, 2000
Wow
Nov 04, 2000
An Autumn Funeral
The Eulogy for My FatherNov 01, 2000
My father died this day
in the first hour
as All Hallows Eve
slipped into All Saints’ Day.
Sainted his memory.
Hallowed his name.
The Love he lived
will power prayers for him.
He who taught me
now has learned
the Mystery.
Be at Peace.
Oct 31, 2000
Between the Living and the Dead
Oct 21, 2000
Falling...
Oct 09, 2000
Columbus Day
Columbus Day is a confused Holiday, but an important one.It's the New World Holiday.
It's not Traditional, but it honors the idea of Tradition, by connecting us with our ancestors. It commemorates the arrival of Europeans in America, at least in theory. Here in New York, it functions largely as a celebration of Italian ethnicity, disregarding the fact that Columbus sailed under the Spanish flag, and Italian power waned as the New World opened. The Pope presided over the division of South America between Spain and Portugal, but there were no Italian colonies in the West. Come to think of it, there was no Italy. The creation of the nation, and the flow of emigrants to America, were both 19th Century phenomena. In the meantime, the "Age of Exploration," of which Columbus is an exemplar, rendered the great port of Venice increasingly irrelevant. His voyages coincided with Italian decline, but our memories are short, and it doesn't seem to bother the paraders of today.
Not so sanguine are the so-called Native Americans, for whom this date marks not just decline, but decimation. Their story deserves to be told, but I have not the viewpoint to do so. My heritage is bound up with the conquering Europeans, though really with those from the North, not the Mediterranean. They came a century after Columbus, and their deeds were no less shameful than the Latins', but the true history of the peoples that they found here remains obscure. No one is really native to America, and controversy surrounds the debate over who came here, and how and when. We do know that Columbus was not even the first European, the Vikings having made it to Newfoundland five hundred years earlier. That knowledge was lost, or relegated to legend, like the history of the "Indians" (or "Skraelings," as the Norse called them) who wondered at the coming of the strangers.
We have only grown stranger since then.
We tend to think more about our Americanness than our Old World ancestry. This is not unfitting, but it may be incomplete. Incompletion is basic to the American identity, which holds out the promise of a dream yet to be realized. We are a people unsure of who we are, yet hoping still to become something more.
In this we embody the Mystery of Being as forcefully as any humans ever have.
The Land does not belong to us.
But by living on it,
and loving it,
we forge a bond that makes it ours in spirit.
Just as we belong to it.
Always it has new secrets to divulge,
teaching a Tradition of discovery.
The edge of the World is here.
Oct 06, 2000
Tutti Frutti
Sep 29, 2000
Passing Unseen
I’ll have to ask for forgiveness.I came in a little short of twelve hours for the Equinox,
but the DMTree feast was waiting, and instructions had been issued.
And it was raining.
Not a hard rain, but a fine mist permeated the afternoon. Morning wasn’t much drier, just not quite coalesced.
Not a glimpse of Sun the whole day.
You’d like to see some Sun on the Equinox, just to know the difference between the twelve hours of day, and the twelve hours of night. This was twenty four hours of gray.
It was a day like a Catbird, which is also gray, and which was found throughout the Park. But the day was gray and quiet, while the Catbirds were gray and loud, mewing their feline calls in defiance of the sound dampening dampness.
Catbirds are common enough. They breed in the Park, but numbers must be moving through on migration just now. They were ubiquitous.
For all it’s familiarity, the Catbird has a hidden feature seldom seen: it’s got a red rear. The undertail coverts, (to put it technically), are rusty red like a Robin’s breast. The area is generally shadowed by the tail, and the bird skulks in the brush, supplying few ventral views. You know the red is there, but it’s rare to get a good look at it.
That was the Sun, on the first full day of Fall; a Catbird’s butt; somewhere behind the clouds, but never showing. Slipping out the back door with Summer; off to Southern lands, leaving the burden of yellow to the Goldenrods in the Meadow.
Color without fire,
Fall without precipice.
Under the overcast,
seasons in passing
touch.
Sep 22, 2000
Autumnal Equinox
This day is the last of Summer, and the first of Fall.Autumn is Traditionally the season of consolidation, of harvest, and preparation for the hardships of Winter. We have made of it something different, another kind of New Year. Back to school and business; the new season of television; even the Federal Fiscal Year, turning over on the 30th. Actually, the fiscal year goes back to a time when harvest meant more than it does today, and accounts were settled in the Fall. Now it's just another incongruity in a world of overlapping systems.
Looking for an underlying system, I will spend the twelve daylight hours in the Park. At least I'll do so tomorrow, as I cannot take today off. The day should be more agreeable than the one I spent on the Vernal Equinox. It's a matter of thermodynamics: the heat of Summer lingers, even as it dissipates into the Fall, but Spring must bask in lengthening days before it fully warms. Sustained by the prospect of a fairer future, I made it through that day in March. Tomorrow should be nicer, yet it looks ahead to colder climes. Such is the balance of the year.
Maintaining balance is the goal.
A goal, anyway.
To balance is to center, or to offset.
The first works with, the other works against.
However built, a place of rest.
We need a balance point so that we will have someplace to take off from.
Like the Flycatcher, haunting a leafless snag, sallying forth to catch a bug, returning repeatedly to the same perch, we, in search of that which feeds our spirit, will go beyond balance, to a place where, unsupported, we must fall or soar.
And even soaring,
We need somewhere to return to.
Tradition provides this perch, and Tradition is a kind of ritual: ritual expanded to a way of life. In our fractured World, we need to rebuild our Traditions, and rituals are a beginning. The ritual of daylight, in honor of the Equinox, this I have learned simply by being in the Park. It balances the Year, between two equal spheres of dark and light.
And that’s a place to start.
With a place to start from, and to return to, we are in position to learn other, transient, rituals, ways of addressing Life’s vicissitudes, subjecting them to the balm of pattern. That, I think, is what happened to me at Point Pelee, and why I went there, though I did not know it.
To do a proper thing, and to do it unselfconsciously,
is to be in balance.
Half way between the poles,
this is the Wisdom of the Equinox.
****************************
Well, I see the weather forecast is deteriorating. Sixty percent chance of showers. Showers I can put up with. A certain amount of rain, in fact, can be beautiful on a misty, moisty morning. Being soaked for twelve hours, however, is not on my agenda. I’m dedicated, but not crazy. I’ve seen a lot of days turn out better than predicted, so we shall see. If we have to cut to the DMTree wine and food ritual, that shouldn’t offend any gods I know of.
(Late update: Forecast now looking a bit better, chance of rain down to 30%, here's hoping...)