Sap Moon

Full Fasting Moon

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I walked out of my house at 6:30 this morning and was greeted by the bright light of the rising old crescent moon. It was lovely, and a beautiful sight in the predawn hour, but it also reminded me just how late in writing this blog post I am.

This month is the Hunger Moon in Annette Hinshaw's calendar and the Sap Moon in Jessica Prentice's. It is the late winter moon where resources are scarce but the first joyful gift of spring - sugary sap from maple, birch and other trees - is starting to flow. Even in the harshest of climates, spring is starting to show itself. Heck, in milder climates like mine spring has sprung! I saw the first car-covered-in-fruit-tree-petals of the season yesterday and daffodils are popping up in many yards around town. We did have a freak snow storm earlier this week, but it melted into a warm, soggy rain by the end of the week.

The interlocking themes of the Sap Moon and the Fasting Moon have been fascinating me this month. One of the first connections that jumped to mind in thinking about these two moon themes is the connection between sugar consumption and poor health. It is getting clearer and clearer to both medical professionals and the general public that consuming too much sugar (and other refined carbohydrates) is really bad for your health. Dr. Joseph Mercola, the well known counter cultural medical doctor and businessman, recently wrote an article claiming sugar is the cause of everything from obesity and diabetes to high blood pressure, kidney disease and fatty liver disease.  Other researchers have evidence that sugar interferes with mineral and protein absorption, an acidic digestive tract, food allergies and distracted, hyper or anxious behavior. A classic favorite New York Times article from 2002, What If It's All Been a Big Fat Lie by Gary Taubes, also puts forth the idea that it isn't fat that is making us sick and fat, but carbohydrates like sugar and white bread. Even if none of those fantastical claims are true, the uber-main stream USDA's My Plate campaign still count "reducing your kids' sweet treats" as one of their 10 tips for healthier eating (though there is almost nothing else worth commending about this plan. Ugh). The general consensus among thinking people is that the American habits of sugary foods and sugary drinks are not helping our chronic public and private health problems (check out this AWESOME infographic about sugary fruit drinks).

Mait Jüriado

So, we can agree that we should be eating less sugar than we currently do. But sugar tastes so good. It reminds us of mother's milk, sweets we had as children and general lovely and happy feelings. They are an important part of our food rituals and traditions. As a blogger I love noted the other day, sweets make you smile. Imagine trying to have a sugar free Christmas (no cookies, or candycanes!) or birthday (no cake, ice cream or soda!). But to be skinny, cavity free and healthy it might be worth it.

We can look back into progressive tradition to find another group of people who abstained from sugar for a good reason. 19th century abolitionists in America and Britain launched strong and successful campaigns to convince people to refrain from sugar on the grounds that it was produced by slave labor. An anti sugar leaflet was published by a man named William Fox in 1791 and by the next year as many as 400,000 people claimed to be abstaining from slave grown sugar. In March of that year, a Quaker merchant from Suffolk named James Wright put out an advertisement informing his customers that he would no longer be selling sugar. 

 “…..Therefore being impressed (as I have said) with the Sufferings and Wrongs of that deeply injured People, and also with an Apprehension, that while I am a Dealer in that Article, which appears to be a principal Support of the Slave-Trade, I am encouraging Slavery; I take this Method of informing my Customers, that I mean to discontinue selling the Article of SUGAR, (when I have disposed of the Stock I have on hand) ‘till I can procure it through Channels less contaminated, more unconnected with Slavery, and less polluted with Human Blood…….”

Abolition Project

Those "channels less contaminated" included, for some people, the more expensive sugar produced by free laborers in India but for many it meant natural sugars like honey, sorghum and maple syrup. As early as the signing of the Declaration of Independence, abolitionists like Benjamin Rush along with some more early Quakers, were agitating for families to use maple syrup instead of slave produced West Indian sugar. Maple syrup, made by small farmers in New England and Canada, was free of these bloody associations with slavery and very patriotic. Maple syrup is still a valued food, known as an artisanal, local specialty and considered much more healthful than white sugar. A wonderful homeschooling family just did a whole unit on maple sugaring this winter and blogged about the whole, fascinating process. Go check out what they did and what they learned. 

Buying local sweetners instead of slave produced ones was a a matter of deep held principal for these abolitionists. They knew that all men are born of God and thus all men are entitled to the same respect, rights and love as all others. To be economically entangled with an industry that is so guilty of the disrespect of these rights and duties towards mankind was morally indefensible. Is it any more defensible today? There are still enslaved Africans producing our chocolate and many other goods are produced through the blood and sweat of economically indentured workers or grotesque and inhumane treatment of sentient beings. Still others come at the price of environmental degradation that most of us are appalled at. How can we spend our money on such dirty things?

Hadleygrass is asparagus

Then I am back to the perennial question of how do we idealistic liberals continue to live in this culture (rather than abandoning it for Utopian communes or private Edens) while still holding to our core beliefs and values? The beloved 18th century Quaker John Woolman, in his essay Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes, placed his finger right on the crux of this issue: 

 "When self-love presides in our minds our opinions are biased in our own favour. In this condition, being concerned with a people so situated that they have no voice to plead their own cause, there’s danger of using ourselves to an undisturbed partiality till, by long custom, the mind becomes reconciled with it and the judgment itself infected. "

When we love ourselves more than we love God (God-in-others, God-in-nature, God-in-ourselves or any other kind of God we can think of) we find a way to justify our actions. We find a way to believe that it is all OK, we don't make a difference, it's not that big of a problem anyway. In December I addressed this very question and offered the idea of making connections with other people, other genuine, connected to God, honest to goodness people would help rebuild webs of community. Building or rebuilding the structures we want in the world are important, but the Fasting Moon this month points to the fact that we can reject that which we don't want, too. 

Sometimes, we just have to buck up and say no. It is important that people say no to slave grown sugar and chocolate, factory farmed meat, and destructive industries of all kinds. Sigh. That is just so hard, and I don't have much energy leftover right now for another hard challenge in my life. Part of Grabbing the Tiger by the Tail is knowing when to walk away from the tiger... knowing that you will return someday. 

What is your relationship with sugar? Do you watch how much you consume or do you pack in the sweets whenever possible? Are you worried about health implications or do you have other moral issues like the early abolitionists? Have you ever tapped maple trees or raised bees? How are you Grabbing the Tiger by the Tail this early spring? 

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Full Fasting Moon 2009: Full Moon in the Fasting Moon

Full Fasting Moon 2010: I didn't post a Full Fasting Moon post in 2010, but Spring is Springing is a New Fasting Moon post for that spring.

Full Fasting Moon 2011: Of Peacocks, Pride and Park Rangers

It is Christmas

Winter Solstice

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It's Christmas time again! They claim it is the most wonderful time of the year, and in some ways I am apt to believe them. The month of December is full of a heady mix of memories of childhood Christmas wonders, of comforting 

White Christmas

rituals of sweets, songs and good cheer and the palpable divine mystery that both the Christian Christmas and the pagan Solstice celebrations commemorate.

Don't get me wrong, there is plenty wrong with Christmas. Finding a balance between the "putting Christ back in Christmas" religiosity on one side and the crass consumerism on the other is difficult. I was actually nauseous the other day, seeing someone's lawn decorations of five foot tall inflated snow globes and light up Santa's sleighs on the roof and fifteen miles of electric lights. The money and resources wasted on such displays is so very needed by poor and starving people all over the world. How can we look ourselves in the mirror when we spend money on that? But neither does the austere, focus on the infant Christ born of a Virgin to die for our sins type of Christmas appeal to me. And then there are the

A Charlie Brown Christmas

smaller, more intimate and familial land mines to navigate during this time of year. Sometimes I wonder if I should call the whole thing off. 

In her wonderful story, Visions of Sugar Plums, Margaret Morrison struggles with this dilemma. She is cleaning up after her Wiccan coven's Winter Solstice ritual when who should come to the door but jolly Old St. Nick. She tells him in no uncertain terms that she doesn't believe in Santa Claus, or baby Jesus or any of the other things that Christmas is all about but he... well, you should go read it to find out what he says to her. Let's just say, that friend speaks my mind.

Rivkah from the blog Bat Aliya, in her post on Sukkot, wrote in other places Jews celebrate Sukkot, in Israel it is Sukkot. In thinking about Christmas this year, I realized how it is important to me to celebrate the festivals of my culture. I don't have any particular desire to be a cultural outsider and really enjoy being a part of the larger activities and celebrations of the people around me. I see enough of the earth based or pagan spiritual impulses in many of the majority culture holidays that I have never been uncomfortable with any disagreements in theology, and in fact, find great comfort in reliving, reinventing and rebuilding childhood traditions around holidays like Halloween, Easter and Christmas.

A Muppet Christmas Carol (the best Christmas movie ever!)

I've said in years past, Christmas is all about treats and traditions, Santa and Sinatra, a tree and a nativity scene and puppies in Santa hats. It's about the Muppet's Christmas Carol, Charlie Brown's tree and candy canes. As I build traditions that come out of my Quaker community it is getting to be more about O Come, OCome, Emmanuel, but I sing about all that snow in Vermont with my other friends.

How does your family celebrate Christmas? Do you have to reconcile theology with culture or do the two mesh well at this time of year? What are your family traditions for food, movies, songs or activities around Christmas time? What did Santa bring you this year?

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Winter Solstice 2008: Good Morning Sun! and also Solstice Creche

Winter Solstice 2009: Christmas and Advent, Awaiting the Birth

Winter Solstice 2010: Christmas, 2010, Solstice Story, and The Dark of the Dark 

Winter Solstice 2011: Advent and The Long Nights of Winter

Fourth of July

The Fourth of July is a Father's Moon holiday if there ever was one. I've recently found myself describing the energies of this time of year as the hot, dry, aggressive, shooting, yang energies of All That is Manly and Good in the World. If that doesn't describe this quintessential American holiday then I just don't know what does.

• Reasons I'm proud to be an American: The Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, the transcontinental railroad and the Eisenhower interstate system, jumbo jets and the Gemini Moon missions. We are a people who rise to a challenge and are proud of our successes.

These masculine energies (I almost prefer "yang" to "masculine" because it allows the concept to be separate from maleness. Humans of any sex or gender encompass both yin and yang energies in their beings) have gotten a bad rap in the recent years, but they are essential to meeting our true potential as an individual or a society. These are the energies that instigate building, planting, and harvesting. These energies incite young adults to strike out on their own and communities to revolt against unjust rulers. They are the impetus for contests and challenges of all kinds as well as the acts of culling and decision making. In fact, most of the things we Americans have to be most proud of are born out of masculine, yang, Father Moon energies.

• Reasons I'm proud to be an American: Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and all the black, white, young and old people who used non violent resistence to break the back of opressive segregation in our country.

The American Fourth of July holiday celebrates all these energies as we Americans express them so essentially. Our country was born out of a belief that we can live life on our own terms as individuals and as communities. Our Founding Fathers were wise men who worked hard to craft governing documents by culling and winnowing words and ideas until only the most important were left in. Despite the repercussions that we can see so clearly from this side of history, the expansion of our territory across the continent was driven by people who were willing to take chances to be free from oppression and the constriction of "society." The great American fortunes were built by men who took chances and built companies, factories and industries to harness the great natural resources of our land. As the pioneers saw it grass is just grass, but a cattle ranch or a farm is money in the bank and a chance to live in freedom.

• Reasons I'm proud to be an American: The native people of this land who, despite centuries of explicit attempts to annhilate them, are still here, still living and still succeeding in adding their voice to our American story.

Last summer I wrote that the Father Moon energies might just be the root of all the evil our culture has wrecked upon this earth. Expanding, conquering and controlling energies are behind environmental degradation, oppression of minority groups and massive scale war that have marked this era in our history. Our American history is so full of tales of Father Moon energies that they are, of course, equally full of the tragic consequences of these energies unchecked. The anti-war, minority rights and environmental awareness movements of the last 30 years have all been directly and explicitly working against these tendencies in our culture.

• Reasons I'm proud to be an American: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B Anthony, the people of Wyoming, and all the women and men who worked tirelessly and peacefully to assert the right of women to vote in this country's elections.

We should be sure though, in our work at bringing balance to our lives and to the world that we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. We need the penetrating and constricting action of the Father’s Moon energy to form the formless potential of the Mother’s Moon energy into something useful. You can argue the environmental impact of dams and irrigation projects but those projects have allowed vast areas of this country to support much larger populations than the virgin land could support. The same is true of the industrialization of the Northeastern United States and the diking of rivers in the Midwest. A field, even a beautiful one full of grasses and flowers can not support the same amount of people or cattle as one plowed and planted with grain. These are the Father’s Moon energies at work.

• Reasons I'm proud to be an American: Irving Berlin, I.M. Pei, Carlos Santana, Bob Hope, John Audubon and all of the other immigrants who have crossed oceans or deserts to come to this country and lend their talents to our ever changing society.

So let us celebrate these fiery and explosive, constricting and controlling, penetrating and culling forces of All That Is Manly and Good In the World. Let’s do it now, at the height of the sun’s power in the heat of the summer. Let’s celebrate our ability to create fireworks and sky scrapers, to plow fields and teach children. Let’s make some noise and be a little dangerous. Sometimes it is just necessary.

• Reasons I'm proud to be an American: levels of wealth, health and freedom of conscience unprecedented in history which allow us to pursue even greater levels of just wealth, universal health and freedoms of all kinds for all people. Happy 4th of July!

Photos by one of my best good Flickr friends graygoosie. Thanks to her for letting me use them. Go see what she's up to this summer by clicking on the photos!