Abundance and Need
Posted: July 12, 2024 Filed under: Chronicles of a First Time Parent 4 Comments“Is that your Grandson?” he asked. “No,” I replied, proudly, “my Son. I have followed my own path in this life.” “Are you retired?” he continued. “No. My full time job is parenting. I do carpentry to pay the bills.”
My son and I volunteered this week at the South Portland Food Cupboard. We pulled two shifts: one in “Food Distribution” (handing out food) and one in “Food Rescue” (driving the van to pick up out-of-date items). The Food Cupboard operates seven days per week, serving 800 families per week, which equals about 3,200 or 4,000 people, every week.
In the world’s richest country, the most consumptive society ever on the planet, food insecurity is a very real problem. According to the USDA, 12.8 percent of U.S. households – one in eight households – are food insecure at least some time during the year. That means: 44 million people, 13 million children, 100% of counties in America experience food insecurity.
Peter, the Warehouse Manager, told me, “There is no shortage of food. It is a problem of logistics.” Such, then, is the mission of the Food Cupboard, with its two vans, to scour our County to gather, sort, then distribute the food. The abundance is mind boggling. The need is humbling.
In another time and place, say, along the Sea of Galilee, this was the loaves and fishes, 5,000 fed – lepers, prostitutes, the unwashed – the “deplorables” some would say, but on that day they were healed and then fed.
Here in South Portland, on the second Tuesday of July, many supplicants were old and infirm but others were young and hip, fashionably dressed, manicured nails, dyed hair. The only question asked is “What do you want?” Proof of income is not required.
My son has an aptitude and logic for logistics and he found the work – the sorting and packing, the order of sequence – compelling. The apple does not fall far from the tree. During the 1990s, while I lived at home with my Mother, we volunteered weekly with other women of her parish. We would drive north, then cook and prepare food to serve the many food insecure in Waukegan, Illinois. My son and I here can ride our bike to the South Portland Food Cupboard.
Adamantly opposed to any summer camp, he found the volunteer work engrossing, and we will continue to sign up and volunteer. Among a sea of retirees, at age 11 he substantially lowered the median age of the volunteers. My work-for-hire may take a back seat to my role now riding shotgun, as he learns the path of compassion, with food as the means to the end of helping his brethren.
Wonders never cease.
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8…
Posted: July 4, 2024 Filed under: Farming off the Farm, Gallery - Visual, Little Green Thumbs, Permaculture & Home Renovation | Tags: fibonacci sequence, golden ratio, phi 2 Comments
Donald J. Glaser was a rare bird, a beautiful soul, who loved beauty, and traveled the world in its search. My uncle, he was born in August 1924, studied at the Parsons School of Design in NYC, then entered the seminary but dropped out, remained a “permanent bachelor” and in 1951 found his calling as a buyer of art and antiques. In the golden age, when department stores were locally owned paragons of regional taste, at Stewart Dry Goods, in Louisville, Kentucky, he ran the home furnishings boutique.
For more than 45 years he circumnavigated the globe, annually, from East to West buying the best: silks in Hong Kong, brass in Bombay, furniture in Italy, paintings in England. “Good things last” was his motto. In 1972 Associated Dry Goods bought the regional company, and Don became the buyer, and had furniture made, for an entire national chain.
He was my Godfather, and sometime in the 1970s while traveling in the South of France, Don saw in a gallery a portrait that reminded him of me. It arrived at our house, an unannounced surprise from afar.
A truer portrait never was made. How many times I have pondered its meanings. It hangs now in the stairs to my son’s room. The young boy gazes into a flower, and what does he see in his hand, but the universe in stunning mathematical order. I speak, of course, of the Fibonacci sequence.
The Fibonacci numbers were first described in Asian Indian mathematics circa 200 BC by Pingala on possible patterns of Sanskrit poetry formed from syllables of two lengths. The Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa, also known as Fibonacci, introduced the sequence to Western European mathematics in 1202. Because the West has been dominant, his name has reigned supreme.
The Fibonacci sequence is a pattern wherein each number is equal to the sum of the preceding two numbers. The sequence begins 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233 … and goes on to infinity.
The Fibonacci sequence is manifest throughout nature, prominently in the spirals of Sunflower seed heads, that radiate from the center. The numbers of these spirals, when counted in opposite directions, are often consecutive Fibonacci numbers. The sequence also appears in the branching of trees, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, fruit sprouts of a pineapple, an artichoke, in pine cone bracts; a tiling of Fibonacci squares forms the nautilus shell, which appears also in the spiral of a hurricane and galaxies across the cosmos. The sequence does not appear everywhere but its presence is abundant.
Fibonacci is related, mathematically, to the golden ratio – 1.618 – which is ubiquitous, though hidden in plain sight; credit cards and every drivers license replicate this rectangular form, based on reciprocal numbers of height to width.
The Golden Ratio, also known as Phi, is found throughout art and architecture. Many find the ratio in the Great Pyramid of Giza, and the Greek Parthenon in Athens (although a mathematician at the University of Maine has challenged that). In Renaissance art it was present among many of the master works, notably in Leonardo de Vinci’s Mona Lisa. In the modern era, the golden ratio has informed the art of Seurat, Picasso, Gris, Duchamp, Debussey, Le Corbusier, and Mondrian, to name but a few.
When gathering flowers for a bouquet, pause to ponder the breadth of universal beauty, ever present, bundled within your arms.
Here at an art farm, our gardens are lush and due to the heat, fruits ripen almost two weeks ahead of schedule.
Growing up, the Midwestern mantra was corn “knee high by the 4th of July.” In Zone 5 coastal Maine, the snap peas tower at 5′ tall, tomatoes ripen, cucumbers flower while the grapes fatten; raspberries and cherries – radiant red – hang for the picking, while the coneflower and echinacea proudly display their Fibonacci ways.
NOTE: Credit here need be shared with Richard M. Neumann, a mensch and lover of mathematics, who shared valuable insights to Fibonacci and phi, including gifting me the book “The Golden Ratio: the story of phi, the world’s most astonishing number” written by Mario Livio, (c)2002.
The Underworld and its Archetypes
Posted: June 28, 2024 Filed under: Art & Healing, consciousness | Tags: consciousness, mythology, rational mind 1 Comment
Science began, many say, with the Copernican Revolution, 1543, when a Polish astronomer put forth that the earth revolves around the sun, rather than the Earth at the center. And so began the broader Scientific Revolution, whereupon the foundations were set, and modern science flourished as an autonomous discipline.
But science can be argued to have begun with Aristotle circa 350 BCE, or the heliocentric theories of Philolaus in 5th Century BCE, or even Thales of Miletus, born 626 BCE, one of the seven sages, who broke from mythology to explain the world through deductive reasoning. Science is based upon facts, and the Western Intellectual tradition is rational.
But all cultures have gazed up at the heavens, and tried to decipher meaning. The scientific astronomers – in the West – used Greek mythological figures to christen the constellations of stars, and so mythology towers overhead, still to this day. Stop and consider: science at best is 2,400 years old, while celestial divination is millenia older, common to all cultures, on all continents. We are wise to consider the archetypes in the sky above us, and what we can learn from them.
Pluto, the planet furthest from the sun, was discovered in 1930 and named for the God of the Underworld, of the dead, also known as the Great Destroyer, Transformer and Redeemer.
Pluto, the planet, was present above the United States on July 4, 1776 “When in the course of human events…” fifty-six founding fathers on that date set pen to paper, to sign and to state that, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” So our sovereign nation was declared.
Pluto has a very long arc – specifically 247 years to circumnavigate the sun – and it has now completed one full return, precisely exact on February 2022 through 2024. The Great Destroyer, Transformer and Redeemer is at high noon, dead overhead again, and who among us cannot say that the United States of America is being wrestled to its core, over “truths held self evident”?
What I say here is not scientific fact, but may be an archetypal truth and the question before us, what we the people must decide, is who we are, and who shall we be going forward? Scientific fact does little to help us here. The archetypes seem predominate, and we are wise to pay heed, to seek answers not in the political but at our deeper, more expansive realms.
Fear not. As Pluto is the God of the dead, so too he is the God of wealth and agriculture; the Destroyer, he is also the Redeemer. Persephone, his mistress, would bring back from the underworld new seeds to be planted each spring, to spawn a harvest come fall.
And so as we move through this dark season, may we also see at hand the seeds of an abundant future. Rather than fighting to the bottom, we the people can sow seeds of unity in diversity, we can move past an “either/or” mindset, to a “both/and” embracing and accepting a greater wholeness.
The choice, and its consequences, are ours.
Impeccable
Posted: June 21, 2024 Filed under: Chronicles of a First Time Parent, consciousness, Farming off the Farm | Tags: consciousness 2 Comments
When I was a child, the popular saying was “a man’s word is his bond.” I haven’t heard that expression now in decades.
King Solomon, David’s son, long ago commented “In all thy getting, get understanding.” For the better part of 40-years, the getting, it seems, has been primarily – for the few – immense material wealth. The 10 Commandments now seem laughably old fashioned.
Among ancient civilizations wisdom was rich, and we do well to revisit our past. The Toltec, a Meso-American culture that predates the Aztec, held four precepts to be key. Don Miquel Ruiz, a descendent of the Toltec, wrote “The Four Agreements” about “self-limiting beliefs.” The book, copyright 1997, has been published in 52 languages worldwide, and spent one decade as a New York Times bestseller.
The first precept, which he calls an “Agreement” is deceptively simple: “Be impeccable in your word.” He writes, “Your word is the power that you have to create. It is through the word that you manifest everything. Regardless what language you speak, your intent manifests through the word. What you dream, what you feel, and what you really are, will all be manifested through the word.”
“In the beginning was the Word, and the word was God” is the opening statement of the Christian Gospel of John. Ruiz explains and expands, “The word is not just a sound or a written symbol. The word is a force; it is the power you have to express and communicate, to think, and thereby to create events in your life. But like a sword with two edges, your word can create the most beautiful dream, or your word can destroy everything around you. One edge is the misuse of the word, which creates a living hell. The other edge is the impeccability of the word, which will only create beauty, love, and heaven on earth.”
As there is light, so there is darkness, which principle was embodied in the brilliant German orator whose message of fear and hatred manipulated a country of highly intelligent people. Again Ruiz, “He led them into a world war with just the power of his word. He convinced others to commit the most atrocious acts of violence. He activated people’s fears with the word, and like a big explosion, there was killing and war all around the world. …He sent out all those seeds of fear, and they grew very strong and beautifully achieved massive destruction.”
It is worth remembering that Hitler rose to power through a democratic election, via the German Workers Party, in 1932. Having campaigned as a populist, he consolidated power as a demon.
The Agreement’s verb is “impeccable,” which is derived from the Latin prefix in-, meaning “not,” and the verb peccare, meaning “to sin;” to be impeccable is to be without sin, but to the Toltec sin was different from the Christian meaning. Ruiz explains, “A sin is anything that you do which goes against yourself. Everything you feel or believe or say that goes against yourself is a sin. When you are impeccable, you take responsibility for your actions, but you do not judge or blame yourself. Being impeccable with your word is the correct use of your energy; it means to use your energy in the direction of truth and love for yourself.”
Simple truths are easily understood. Or are they? While driving on errands with my son, we talk about these. Again and again, to help guide his future, I draw from the past.
The Toltec had four agreements:
- Be impeccable with your word
- Don’t take anything personally
- Don’t make assumptions
- Always do your best
To this I would add two more:
- Let integrity be your bank account
- Let compassion, more than logic, guide your path
At this sun drenched solstice, fruits ripen and vines reach ever higher…
Garlic Scapes and Landscapes
Posted: June 15, 2024 Filed under: Child Centered Activities, Chronicles of a First Time Parent, Farming off the Farm, What is an Art Farm 2 CommentsBy the stars, it is late spring. By the warm temperatures and school having ended, it is summer. In our garden, it is the time when garlic stretches the curlicue scapes wildly upwards to the sun.
Summer brings heavy equipment to the farm, and equipment requires outbuildings, so we have been building, albeit in 1/16th scale.
And finally, a new lawnmower, for a field of dreams, also in 1/16th scale.
Planting Potatoes
Posted: June 8, 2024 Filed under: Farming off the Farm, What is an Art Farm | Tags: irish american 2 CommentsHere at our Art Farm, we have been planting potatoes, three varieties this year: Dark Red Norland, Kennebec White, and Russian Banana Fingerlings. We have some “volunteers” returning from last year, never harvested. The bounty continues. Norland are early to mature, Kennebec are mid-season, Russian Banana are late to produce, which means potatoes all summer long.
Although of Irish heritage, I plant potatoes because, like a foraging groundhog, it is simply divine to rummage through the dirt and pull up a bouquet of spuds, hanging upon the vine. Gaia’s abundance is never closer at hand.
My long-deceased father rarely or never spoke about his origins, and through ancestry.com we have learned the barest of an outline. Phillip Mahaney immigrated, we believe, from the city of Cork, in the County of Munster, Ireland to the United States in 1850. The Great Potato Famine impacted that region, and between 1845 and 1855 more than 1.5 million adults and children left Ireland seeking refuge in America.
Thaddeus Shannon was born in Kildimo South, Miltown Malbay, County Clare, Ireland at the ancestral home named “Annagh Bridge House.” Thaddeus was not the eldest and therefore would not inherit the family farm, so he immigrated to the United States in 1884. Both Phillip and Thaddeus entered America on the Eastern seaboard, but traveled west to Bourbon County, in the bluegrass region of Kentucky. Their descendants – my grandparents – were married in June of 1924 in Paris, Kentucky.
The railroads were major employers of the Irish, and for the Mahany and Shannon families that is certainly the case. The Louisville & Nashville Railroad – “The Old Reliable” – was a major carrier serving fourteen states throughout the southern USA, and between 1880 and 1950 no less than 21 members of our extended family worked on those lines. The list of positions includes: Laborer, Shop Laborer or Section Laborer; Yard Master, Track Supervisor or Section Foreman (Boss); Machinist, Clerk or Messenger; Car Inspector, Brakeman, Conductor, Engineer or Head Engineer. My father’s first job, in 1944 at age 16, was Messenger at the Paris, Kentucky depot.
The sheer physical labor of the rail crews must have been daunting and the saying “Beneath every railroad tie there lies a dead Irishman” describes the struggles of the emigres. Although we know virtually nothing of our ancestors’ experience, something that happened but 10 miles from our farm tells a bone chilling story.
In the winter of 1864 the Royal Mail Ship “Bohemian” sailed from Liverpool, England to Quebec, Canada via Portland, Maine. A 295-foot, three-masted, bark-rigged ship, the Bohemian was also equipped with a 500-horsepower, double-cylinder steam engine, a screw propeller and six watertight bulkheads; the vessel’s design was considered very safe. On that final voyage there were 219 passengers with 99 crew members on board. 19 of the passengers were in cabins, while the remaining 200 were Irish immigrants in steerage.
“Steerage” class, effectively third or fourth class accommodations, was named because these passengers slept in the mechanical rooms of the ships, rather than cabins or public spaces. The passengers in steerage were literally looked down upon by the upper class passengers traveling on the decks above. The following description, from 1906, describes the conditions:
“[They] are positively packed like cattle, making a walk on deck when the weather is good, absolutely impossible, while to breathe clean air below in rough weather, when the hatches are down is an equal impossibility. The stenches become unbearable… [and the] division between the sexes is not carefully looked after, and the young women who are quartered among the married passengers have neither the privacy to which they are entitled nor are they much more protected than if they were living promiscuously. The food, which is miserable, is dealt out of huge kettles into the dinner pails provided by the steamship company.”
At 8pm on 22 February, amidst heavy fog, the ship struck Alden’s Rock, just off of Cape Elizabeth, Maine. The hull plates were ripped open and fire broke out. The Captain tried to run the ship to shore, but ran aground on Broad Cove Rock. Panic ensued. The first lifeboat safely transported 80 passengers to land. The Captain’s command was not “Women and children first” but the crew and upper class English went first. The Irish immigrants went last, and many – including women and children – jumped for life over board. More than 40 passengers and two crew members died at sea. Twelve of the bodies, thought to be Irish steerage passengers, were buried in a mass grave in Calvary Cemetery, Portland, Maine. During the exodus from the Great Potato Famine, an estimated 17,000 Irish immigrants were lost at sea attempting to migrate.
The topic of potatoes can stir an Irishman to great passion. An Irishman from Kentucky, whose ancestors lived in Henry County, not far from our Bourbon County, Wendell Berry wrote an essay, published in the Whole Earth Catalog in 1969, about the Civil Rights, Anti-War and environmental movements:
“The mentality that exploits and destroys the natural environment is the same that abuses racial and economic minorities, that imposes on young men the tyranny of the military draft, that makes war against peasants and women and children with the indifference of technology.
“The Confucian Great Digest says that the “chief way for the production of wealth” (and he is talking about real goods, not money) is “that the producers be many and that the mere consumers be few….” But even in the much-publicized rebellion of the young against the materialism of the affluent society, the consumer mentality is too often still intact: …In this state of total consumerism – which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves – all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.
Most of us, for example, not only do not know how to produce the best food in the best way – we don’t know how to produce any kind in any way. Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato. And for this condition we have elaborate rationalizations, instructing us that dependence for everything on somebody else is efficient and economical and a scientific miracle. I say, instead, that it is madness, mass produced.”
Some among us may not agree with his sentiments, but certainly we all can agree that upon the topic of potatoes an Irishman will have much to say.
The Patriarch
Posted: June 1, 2024 Filed under: consciousness, What is an Art Farm | Tags: consciousness, spirituality 1 Comment
It is generally considered there were six cradles of civilization on Planet Earth: Mesopotamia; ancient Egypt, India and China; the Caral-Supe of coastal Peru, and the Olmec of Mexico.
Mesopotamia, known as the Fertile Crescent, is significant as the location of the Neolithic Revolution circa 10,000 BCE, from which arose the invention of the wheel, the planting of cereal crops, the development of cursive script, mathematics, astronomy and agriculture.
The Kingdom of Sumer, situated between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, is known for its innovations in language, governance, and architecture; the Sumerians are considered the creators of civilization as modern humans understand it.
The Akkadian Empire followed, reaching its political peak between the 24th and 22nd centuries BCE and generally regarded as the first empire in history.
The Babylonian empire arose circa 1894 BCE and became the dominant power under Hammurabi, an extraordinary leader who gave himself the title “King of Babylon, Sumer and Akkad and of the four quarters of the world.” Most well known for his detailed legal code, part of which remains on display in the Louvre, Hammurabai ranks highly among the great lawgivers of history. But he is not among the Patriarchs.
In southern Mesopotamia, maybe in the city of Camarina, or likely in the city of Ur, although most commonly believed to have been Ur of the Chaldeans was born, circa 1951 BCE, a male named Abraham, who once grown, heard the divine voice command, “And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee and make thy name great and thou shall be a blessing.” In an empire of polytheism, Abraham followed a singular voice and became the Patriarch of monotheism.
Abba Solomon Eban, the author of “My People: The Story of the Jews” tells the story of the Jewish odyssey as “…not a chronicle of remote, superhuman warriors. It does not resemble the vision a resplendent heroic world such as the Greeks and other ancient peoples saw as their original state. …In subsequent literature and memory the Hebrew nation looked back to its first ancestor as the prototype of two virtues: goodness and warmth in human relations and utter resignation, beyond mere humility, to the divine will. Both Christian and Muslim traditions accept the historic authenticity of Abraham and admit him as their spiritual ancestor. But to the Jews he is the first and unique Patriarch, the model of Hebrew excellence. Inspired by his covenant and welded together by the memories of three generations descended from his loins, the Children of Israel, precariously settled in Egypt, cross the frontier into established history in the middle of the second millennium B.C.E.”
Ancestry is important, and the loins of Abraham are central both to Judaism and to the Christian faith. Biblical tradition holds that the Twelve Tribes of Israel are the descendants of Jacob, descended from Abraham. Chartres Cathedral, considered the high point of French Gothic art, has stained glass windows on the west wall showing the genealogy of the Royal House of David, in the form of a tree which springs from the loins of Jesse – he, a descendant of Jacob, and thus of Abraham – to reach its flowering in the carpenter’s son from Nazareth.
There is neither historical nor archeological evidence of Abraham. More than one-hundred years of searching in the desert have produced no evidence of this man considered the founding father of the relationship between the Jews and God, the spiritual progenitor of all Christians and Eastern Orthodox, and in Islam, a link in the chain of prophets beginning with Adam and culminating in Muhammad.
With more than 2.6 billion Christians and Eastern Orthodox plus 1.9 billion Muslims plus approximately 15.2 million Jews, more than half of the world’s population regard Abraham as a central pillar of their faith. And Abraham’s heirs – whether biological or spiritual – have often been at war, among themselves.
War is of this world, not of the divine. Constantine, of In Hoc Signo Vinces fame, converted to Christianity, while commanding the largest Roman army. He hired as tutor to his son a philosopher named Lucius Caecilius Lactantius, who taught that the goals of any political power were always, “to extend the boundaries which are violently taken from others, to increase the power of the state, to improve the revenues,” by latrocinium, which in Latin means “violence and robbery.”
The Nazarene, avatar of consciousness, Abraham’s grandson – the 54th as counted by Luke or the 43rd as per Matthew – Jesus taught, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” The Holy Roman Emperor was a Caesar, and the teachings of latrocinium were passed down. The Empire would rule for more than 1,000 years, until the 1800s.
Pope Urban called for the First Crusade, in 1096, to slay the infidels in the Holy Land. With alacrity his orders were carried out, thirty thousand people killed in three days. Raymond of Aguilers described it, “Piles of heads, hands and feet were to be seen. Men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins. Indeed it was a just and splendid judgment of God that this place should be filled with the blood of unbelievers.”
Robert the Monk, an abbot in France, argued the Muslims were a “vile and abominable race,” “despicable, degenerate and enslaved by demons,” “absolutely alien to God,” and “fit only for extermination.”
Many of the Knights stayed closer to home, in Europe, as Abba Eban writes, “ ‘Kill a Jew and save your soul’ became the shortcut taken by many a zealous Crusader. A small number of Jews accepted baptism to remain alive; the majority refused, and died.”
To the slaying, the Muslims responded in kind, an eye-for-an-eye, and Holy Jihad began. Between 1096 and 1272 there were a total of nine Crusades, until 1291 when the Egyptian Mamelukes drove the Crusaders out of the Holy City.
The story of Abraham has played out over more than 120 generations, and one is tempted to wonder for how many more generations will the Righteous continue their brutally horrid and inhumane fight? We would do well to contemplate Abraham’s cardinal virtues: “goodness and warmth in human relations and utter resignation, beyond mere humility, to the divine will.”
Be like a cat
Posted: May 25, 2024 Filed under: Chronicles of a First Time Parent, consciousness, What is an Art Farm | Tags: consciousness, rational mind, spirituality Leave a comment
Back in the aughts, when I lived in Chicago, I studied Qigong with Dr. Paul Hannah. In Chinese, Qi means “air” or “breath” but in a metaphysical sense it is “vital energy.” Gong means cultivation. Qigong is the cultivation of that vital energy, as a non-martial art.
Dr. Hannah had grown up in the inner city projects in Chicago, and learned Tai Chi – the Chinese martial art – in order to defend himself, and thus avoid joining a gang; his ability to defeat the gang members in combat was his protection and way out of the projects. He became a board-certified psychiatrist, as well as a Tai Chi Master, with additional studies in acupuncture, Qigong and energy healing. https://www.hannahsholistichealing.com/
During my sessions he would have me stand in a half-crouched position, arms outstretched at shoulder-height in a circle, my finger tips almost touching, for an unbearably long time. He would leave the room, and later return with hot herbal tea. I believe he was training me to empty my mind and become aware of something else.
On the wall of the studio was a poster of a black panther, gazing forward, directly into the camera. He explained the concept of observing without becoming engaged, of being present with neither future nor past, neither time nor space. Dr. Hannah told me that poster had gotten him through college.
I did not then know the idea of mindfulness, but would now understand his instructions as my introduction. Thich Nhat Hanh has written, “When I eat an orange, I can eat the orange as an act of meditation. Holding the orange in the palm of my hand, I look at it mindfully. I take a long time to look at the orange with mindfulness. Breathing in, there is an orange in my hand. Breathing out, I smile at the orange.”
During that same period, I practiced Qigong with a practitioner of Chinese medicine, including acupuncture. During one session at his office, he introduced me to a colleague from China, who was considered a Master of Qigong. I was told this man had not eaten solid food for many years; he drank liquids, but metastasized the inner chi for his sustenance. Such a concept is beyond both my comprehension and experience, however, I was and remain willing to suspend disbelief. Perhaps such is possible, and I should not cut myself off from such a possibility. We have entered the realm of the suprarational.
Here in South Portland, Ryan Nitz is an acupuncturist with a community clinic. He treats many patients onsite at his clinic and, quite interestingly, has begun treating patients via remote. I do not mean by a tele-health zoom session, but rather, from his office in South Portland, Maine he treats patients in, say, Kansas or California. He does not use needles, but instead the “subtle energies” to manifest healing in the patient. https://www.mainecenterforacupuncture.com/
Essentially this is a form of Reiki, the Japanese form of energy healing; “rei” means universal and “ki” means life energy. Clearly now, we are beyond the bounds of western allopathic medicine. As Dr. Paul Hannah taught me, “be like a cat,” suspend disbelief and calm the mind while focusing on the energy present.
At the vanguard of energy, one meets some mighty cool cats!
Pro Pollinator
Posted: May 18, 2024 Filed under: Farming off the Farm | Tags: no mow may, pollinators 3 CommentsOn the one hand, the “No Mow May” movement encourages not to cut the lawn so the pollinators have more terrain to forage.
On the other hand, our son loves to use tools, and the lawn mower beckons.
Our negotiated settlement was (a) cut the grass and (b) leave the dandelions. A decidedly unusual look but it seemed everyone wins. He did well!
The pollinators are out in force at our art farm. The fruit trees are in full bloom, and dandelions abound.
In terms of sheer will to live, we must give an award to the milkweed pushing through the asphalt sidewalk!
And finally, behold the grandeur of fruit coming to be. It has been a cool damp spring, which means the flowers have thrived, for an unusually long duration. This week we will plant the warm weather starts: tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, herbs and sundry annuals.
The Alpha and the irrational
Posted: May 11, 2024 Filed under: Art & Healing, Farming off the Farm, What is an Art Farm | Tags: consciousness, rational mind, spirituality 1 CommentIf one subscribes to the Great Man Theory, then history is defined by the deeds of great men; highly unique individuals whose attributes – intellect, courage, leadership or divine inspiration – have a decisive historical effect. Thomas Carlyle developed the theory, and wrote:
“Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modelers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.”
Pythagorus of Samos, the ancient Ionian Greek philosopher and polymath, certainly ranks among these alpha males. He has been credited with mathematical and scientific discoveries, including the Pythagorean theorem, Pythagorean tuning, the five regular solids, the Theory of Proportions, the sphericity of the Earth and the identity of the morning and evening stars as the planet Venus. His ideas are ubiquitous: Plato’s dialogues exhibit his teachings, every high school student memorizes his theorem, and every carpenter or engineer uses the 3-4-5 triangle to square a room.
He saw beyond the material realm, and further developed ideas of mysticism. His “metempsychosis” – which means the “transmigration of souls” – holds that every soul is immortal and, upon death, enters a new body. He also devised the doctrine of musica universalis– literally universal music, also called music of the spheres or harmony of the spheres – which holds that the planets move according to mathematical equations and thus resonate to produce an inaudible symphony of music. The 16th century astronomer Johannes Kepler further developed this idea, although he felt the music was not audible but could be heard by the soul.
Aristotle characterized the musica universalis as follows:
“…since on our earth the motion of bodies far inferior in size and in speed of movement [produce a noise]. Also, when the sun and the moon, they say, and all the stars, so great in number and in size, are moving with so rapid a motion, how should they not produce a sound immensely great? Starting from this argument and from the observation that their speeds, as measured by their distances, are in the same ratios as musical concordances, they assert that the sound given forth by the circular movement of the stars is a harmony.”
Clearly, Pythagorus was a big thinker, and his ideas influenced Isaac Newton, another of the alpha males. Newton – who established classical mechanics, invented calculus, formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation – was a paragon of the rational scientific mind. Newton was a Great Man, by definition. He also was a leading alchemist.
In its purest form, alchemy is concerned not with turning base metals into gold, but as a symbolic language guiding the transmutation of the physical self into the ascendent consciousness of the anointed. Of an estimated ten million words of writing in Newton’s papers, approximately one million – 10% – deal with alchemy. This was more than a passing interest.
John Maynard Keynes, the Cambridge economist who restructured the post-WW2 global financial system – easily ranking him among the Great Men – had this to say about Newton:
“Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child born with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.”
Let us pause and consider: just as Pythagorus explained the physical realm he also saw celestial harmony beyond the physical; Newton mastered not only scientific thought but was a leading alchemist of his day. Two of the paragons of the rational alpha mind had secret lives as mystics.
The Western intellectual tradition is based entirely on the rational, and anything beyond the rational is defined by the negative form – “irrational” – which is decidedly pejorative. As wrote Carl Jung, ““Everything that the modern mind cannot define it regards as insane.” Pythagorus was denigrated as a cult leader. During Newton’s life, the English Crown considered alchemy to be a heresy, punishable by death. The burning of his alchemical writings perhaps was not an accident.
What if we expand our concepts and consider connections not defined by measurable facts? What if we begin to use the term “supra-rational”? No less than Albert Einstein – the modern paragon of rational thought – was compelled in this regard. In 1930 he published an essay “Religion and Science” which described the sense of awe and mystery which he termed a “cosmic religion” of “superpersonal content.” Einstein counseled to move beyond the anthropomorphic concept of god to “the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves in nature … to experience the universe as a single significant whole.”
For Einstein, “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” He said “God is a mystery. But a comprehensible mystery. I have nothing but awe when I observe the laws of nature. There are not laws without a lawgiver, but how does this lawgiver look? Certainly not like a man magnified. …some centuries ago I would have been burned or hanged. Nonetheless, I would have been in good company.”
The “Great Man Theory” was advanced in the 19th century Victorian era. In the 21st century we need to move forward, and expand the scope, even beyond gender, to all life, beyond the “either/or” and toward the “both/and” mindset.
I should like to propose that the “Great Man” be replaced by the “Great Soul,” and that we look beyond the rational, the material, the physical, and embrace the whole cloth, the harmony and music of “our higher angels,” the music of the spheres, “to experience the universe as a single significant whole.”
In fact, this “Great Soul” is in use; in the Hindu language, “Mahatma” from the Sanskrit word “mahātman,” literally means “great-souled.” Mahatma Ghandi is but one exemplar of this path.
The seeds of a new future surround us. We can be hopeful.
an Art Farm 