Chickens in Life and Death

The Full Mating Moon

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Do you have any idea how amazing chickens are? They are chatty and cute, constantly moving, interested in the world and did I mention cute? This spring my students and I were able to experience the amazingness of chickens first hand in our classroom. Birth, life, growth and even death happened right here in middle school. May 14 was the full Mating Moon, a time of growth and birth, of coming together of opposites into new vibrant wholes. And a time of chickens.

It all started when one of my wacky science teacher coworkers (all science teachers are weird, you know that, right?) mentioned that he was incubating eggs in his classroom. He graciously offered to let me use his incubator, provide me with fertile eggs from his flock and take the chicks back when we were done. Heck yes! In the middle of April I did a lesson on eggs and chicken incubation for my kids and then we got everything set up and eggs incubating. It takes 21 days for chicken eggs to hatch and my students and I were on the edge of our seats counting down the days.

I was expecting the chicks on a Tuesday but when I walked in the room on Monday morning I was greeting with a muffled peep! peep! peep! from the incubator. One had hatched hours earlier and was already fluffy, a second was wet still and a third still pecking at it's shell. The kids were over the moon - we got no work done that day. One student, who lived across the street from the school, stayed all afternoon and got to actually watch the third chick break open its shell and tumble out onto the mesh floor of the incubator. It was amazing to see them fluff up, learn to walk, learn to eat and, as all babies do, develop their individual personalities so quickly.

For a whole week we were chicken obsessed. Every day the kids asked questions, brought in information, watched the babies grow. We talked about the various strategies for making babies and how a chicken lays an egg every day hoping some will make it to adulthood while humans put tons of energy into just a few children. The kids named them, though I never endorsed any official names, and came to watch them eat and peep at each other in their free time. After a few days I started letting kids hold the chicks and we applauded every time anyone got pooped on. Turns out, chickens poop a lot. The babies grew, the kids were enamored and I couldn't stop talking about them.

But all was not happiness and roses. One of our chicks, the middle one who was sickly from the first day, did not grow like the others. He was visibly ill and by the middle of the second week he was getting worse. He'd stopped eating and his sick bowels had turned to open sores. During chicken news on Tuesday I let every class know that the sickly chick was quite sick, and not likely to make it through the night. We had good conversations that day - can we take it to the vet? How do you know it's sick? What if it gets better? And everyone got to say a bit of a goodbye.

That afternoon I googled "how to euthanize a small pet". Turns out, this is something people have to do regularly. Like I talked about with the kids, when we take responsibility for an animal we are always weighing costs and benefits and sometimes a vet is a big cost. Too big for a chick. One website had a method utilizing carbon dioxide from a vinegar and baking soda reaction. That seemed do-able so after the kids all left I set things up and got the sickly chick out of the tub with the others. He was starting to stagger from weakness, I'm pretty sure it hadn't eaten or drank anything in two days. The process was not as easy as the website made it seem and after what felt like too much time, memories of a recent flubbed death penalty case in Oklahoma very ripe in my mind, I broke the chick's neck with my hands.

Time had seemed to stop during the time when I was struggling with the chick. It was sick and dying. It probably would not have made it through the night if I had left it alone, but in those last moments it struggled hard to stay alive. Living things simply do not want to die. When it finally did die, in my hands, at my hand, I had the experience like coming out of a pool of water. My senses worked again beyond the tiny thing in my hand. And I was nauseous.

One of my co-workers, upon hearing the tale of the sickly chick, said something like "oh, you are just so strong! I could never have done that!"  I don't know if I really am strong, but I think I am pragmatic about life and death. I can intellectualize the process; chickens are the kinds of creatures that get born in large numbers with the expectation that many will die. If every chicken egg became an adult chicken the world would be overrun with chickens. Every creature will die eventually. But I am not as stoic as all that. I was physically ill and quite distressed over the death of this little chicken. In middle school I caught my pet rat's foot in the door of her cage and when she limped away I cried, worried I had hurt her permanently (I hadn't - she was fine) and in college I cried buckets over the death of my pet guinea pig. I might be more afraid of my dog's future death than that of some of my family members. I am not a cold intellectual in the face of death, I'm really not.

In her interview with Krista Tippet, Eve Ensler is quoted as asking "What if our lives were precious only up to a point? What if we held them loosely and understood that there were no guarantees?" She was talking about life with cancer, about seeing herself and begging to be seen as a human in the middle of a transition rather than a patient with a diagnosis. But these words have stuck with me as I struggled through the process of caring for the life of, and stewarding the death of, my baby chickens. Every creature knows its life is precious. We humans have a particular kind of self knowledge and fight like mad to maintain our lives and our integrity but all animals, and probably many other organisms, know they are alive and work hard to stay that way.  Death was probably a welcome respite for my chick. The kids commented the next day on how quiet the remaining chicks were, suspecting that they were sad. I think it was just that the sick one had been distress calling for six or seven days non stop. It had been in pain and still fought against death with every ounce of its being. In the grand scheme of things, though, that little chick was really just a way to turn plant and bug energy into meat energy for the purpose of making more baby chickens and feeding baby foxes. 

The core of my pagan theology is the dance between opposing forces; light and dark, summer and winter, life and death. This is explicitly the theme of this month's Mating Moon - how do opposites move together to create the fertility of the Earth and human culture. In my work with the chickens this spring I was reminded of this other set of opposing elements - the individual and the community. Individual organisms are not the unit of natural selection or the unit of ecological stability. As far as evolution and the energy flow on Earth are concerned, my individual self is inconsequential. My genes and my population are important so as long as my close relatives survive, I am expendable (and as long as I survive, they are expendable). But the individual is the unit of awareness and of social change. Art and science, though collaborative human enterprises, occur because of individuals. We make changes in our human cultures by individual actions that then spread. The chick's life was inconsequential, but also the most important thing imaginable to it. Mine, too.

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Full Mating Moon 2013: National Poetry Month 2013

Full Mating Moon 2012: Happy Hours and Pirate Queens

Full Mating Moon 2011: The Green Month

Full Mating Moon 2010: Mercurial

Full Mating Moon 2009: The Flower Moon

The Columber

Full Birth Moon

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The Colomber

Dino Buzzati, translated by Lawrence Venuti

     When Stefano Roi was twelve years old, he asked his father, a sea captain and the owner of a fine sailing ship, to take him on board as his birthday gift. 

     “When I grow up,” the boy said, “I want to go to sea with you. And I shall command ships even more beautiful and bigger than yours.”
     “God bless you, my son,” the father answered. And since his vessel had to leave that very day, he took the boy with him.
     It was a splendid sunny day, and the sea was calm. Stefano, who had never been on a ship, happily wandered around on deck, admiring the complicated maneuvers of the sails. He asked the sailors about this and that, and they gladly explained everything to him. 

    When the boy had gone astern, he stopped, his curiosity aroused, to observe something that intermittently rose to the surface at a distance of two to three hundred meters, in line with the ship’s wake.
     Although the ship was indeed moving fast, carried by a great quarter wind, that thing always maintained the same distance. And though the boy did not make out what it was, there was some indefinable air about it, which attracted him intensely.
     No longer seeing Stefano on deck, the father came down from the bridge, after having shouted his name in vain, and went to look for him.
     “Stefano, what are you doing there, standing so still?” the captain asked his son, finally perceiving him on the stern as he stared at the waves.
     “Papa, come here and see.”
     The father came, and he too looked in the direction indicated by the boy, but he could not see anything.
     “There’s a dark thing that rises in the wake every so often,” Stefano said, “and it follows behind us.”
     “Despite my forty years,” said the father, “I believe I still have good eyesight. But I see absolutely nothing.”
     And the boy insisted, the father went to get a telescope, and he scrutinized the surface of the sea, in line with the wake. Stefano saw him turn pale.

     “What is it? Why do you make that face?”
     “Oh, I wish I had never listened to you,” the captain exclaimed. “Now I’m worried about
you. What you see rising from the water and following us is not some object. That is a colomber. It’s the fish that sailors fear above all others, in every sea in the world. It is a
tremendous mysterious shark, more clever than man. For reasons that perhaps no one will ever know, it chooses its victim, and when it has chosen, it pursues him for years and years, for his entire life, until it has succeeded in devouring him. And the strange this is this: No one can see the colomber except the victim himself and his blood relations.”
     “It’s not a story?”
     “No. I have never seen it. But from descriptions I have heard many times, I immediately
recognized it. That bison like muzzle, that mouth continually opening an closing, those terrible teeth. Stefano, there’s no doubt, the colomber has ominously chosen you, and as long as you go to sea, it will give you no peace. Listen to me: We are going back to land now, immediately; you will go ashore and never leave it again, not for any reason whatsoever. You must promise me you won’t. Seafaring is not for you, my son. You must resign yourself. After all, you will be able to make your fortune on land too.”
     Having said this, he immediate reversed his course, reentered the port, and on the pretext of a sudden illness, he put his son ashore. Then he left again without him.
     Deeply troubled, the boy remained on the shore until the last tip of the masts sank behind the horizon. Beyond the pier that bounded the port, the seas was completely deserted. But looking carefully, Stefano could perceive a small black point which intermittently surfaced on the water: it was “his” colomber, slowly moving back and forth, obstinately waiting for him.

     From then on, with every expedient the boy was dissuaded from his desire to go to sea. His father sent him to study at an inland city, hundreds of kilometers away. And for some time, distracted by his new surroundings, Stefano no longer thought about the sea monster. Still, he returned home for summer vacations, and the first thing he did, as soon as he had some free time, was hurry to the end of the pier for a kind of verification, although he fundamentally considered it unnecessary. After so many years, even supposing that all the stories his father told him were true, the colomber had certainly given up its siege.
     But Stefano stood there, astonished, his heart pounding. At a distance of two to three hundred meters from the pier, in the open sea, the sinister fish was moving back and forth, slowly, raising its muzzle from the water every now and then and turning toward land, as it anxiously watched for whether Stefano was coming at last.
     So the idea of that hostile creature waiting for him day and night became a secret obsession for Stefano. And even in the distant city it cropped up to wake him with worry in the middle of the night. He was safe, of course; hundreds of kilometers separated him from the colomber. And yet he knew that beyond the mountains, beyond the forests and the plains, the shark was waiting for him. He might have moved even to the most remote continent, and still the would have appeared in the mirror of the nearest sea, with the inexorable obstinacy of a fatal instrument.
     Stefano, who was a serious and eager boy, profitably continued his studies, and as soon as he was a man, he found a dignified and well-paying position at a store in the inland city. Meanwhile, his father died through illness, his magnificent ship was sold by his widow, and his son found himself the heir to a modest fortune. Work, friends, diversions, first love affairs- Stefano’s life was not well under way, but the thought of the colomber nonetheless tormented him like a mirage that was fatal and fascinating at the same time; and as the days passed, rather than disappear, it seemed to become more insistent.
     

     Great are the satisfactions of an industrious, well-to-do, and quiet life, but greater still is the attraction of the abyss. Stefano was hardly twenty-two years old when, having said goodbye to his inland friends and resigned from his job, he returned to his native city and told his mother of his firm intention to follow his father’s trade. The woman, to whom Stefano had never mentioned the mysterious shark, joyfully welcomed his decision. To have her son abandon the sea for the city had always seemed to her, in her heart, a betrayal of the family’s tradition.
     Stefano began to sail, giving proof of his sea-worthiness, his resistance to fatigue, and his
intrepid spirit. He sailed and sailed, and in the wake of his ship, day and night, in good weather and in storms, the colomber trudged along. He knew that this was his curse and his penalty, and precisely for this reason, perhaps, he did not find the strength to sever himself from it. And no one on board, except him, perceived the monster.
     “Don’t you see anything over there?” he asked his companions from time to time, pointing at the wake.
     “No, we don’t see anything at all. Why?”
     “I don’t know. It seemed to me…”
     “You didn’t see a colomber, by any chance, did you?” the sailors asked, laughing and
touching wood.
     “Why are you laughing? Why are you touching wood?”
     “Because the colomber is an animal that spares no one. And if it has begun to follow this
ship, it means that one of us is doomed.”
     But Stefano did not slacken. The uninterrupted threat that followed on his heels seemed in fact to strengthen his will, his passion for the sea, his courage in times of strife and danger.
When he felt that he was master of his trade, he used his modest patrimony to acquire a small steam freighter with a partner; then he became the sole proprietor of it, and thanks to a series of successful shipments, he could subsequently buy a true merchantman, setting out with always more-ambitious aims. But the successes, and the millions, were unable to remove that continual torment from his soul; nor did he ever try, on the other hand, to sell the ship and retire to undertake different enterprises on land.
     To sail and sail was his only thought. Just as soon as he set foot on land in some port after a long journey, the impatience to depart again immediately pricked him. He knew that outside the colomber was waiting for him and that the colomber was synonymous with ruin. With nothingness. An indomitable impulse dragged him without rest, from one ocean to another. 

     Until one day, Stefano suddenly realized that he had grown old, very old; and no one around him could explain why, rich as he was, he did not finally leave the cursed life of the sea. He was old, and bitterly unhappy, because his entire existence had been spent in that mad flight across the seas, to escape his enemy. But the temptation of the abyss had always been greater for him than the joys of a prosperous and quiet life.

     One evening, while his magnificent ship was anchored offshore at the port where he was born, he felt close to death. He then called his second officer, in whom he had great trust, and ordered him not to oppose what he was about to do. The other man promised, on his honor.
     Having gotten this assurance, Stefano revealed to the second officer the story of the colomber that had continued to pursue him uselessly for nearly fifty years. The officer listened to him, frightened.
     “It has escorted me from one end of the world to the other,” Stefano said, “with a faithfulness that not even the noblest friend could have shown. Now I am about to die. The colomber too will be terribly old and weary by now. I cannot betray it.”
     Having said this, he took his leave of the crew, ordered a small boat to be lowered into the sea, and boarded it, after he made them give him a harpoon.
     “Now I am going to meet it,” he announced. “It isn’t right to disappoint it. But I shall
struggle, with all my might.”
     With a few weary strokes of the oars, he drew away from the side of the ship. Officers and
sailors saw him disappear down below, on the placid sea, shrouded in the nocturnal shadows. In the sky was a crescent moon.
     He did not have to work very hard. Suddenly the colomber’s horrible snout emerged at the side of the boat.
     “Here I am with you, finally,” Stefano said. “Now it’s just the two of us.” And gathering his
remaining strength, he raised the harpoon to strike.
     “Uh,” the colomber groaned, imploringly, “what a long journey it’s taken to find you. I too
am wasted with fatigue. How much you made me swim. And you kept on fleeing. You never
understood at all.”
     “What?” asked Stefano, with the point of his harpoon over the colomber’s heart.
     “I have not pursued you around the world to devour you, as you thought. I was charged by the King of the Sea only to deliver this to you.”
     And the shark stuck out its tongue, offering the old captain a small phosphorescent
sphere. Stefano picked it up and examined it. It was a pearl of unusual size. And he recognized it as the famous Perla del Mare, which brought luck, power, love, and peace of mind to whoever possessed it. But now it was too late.
     “Alas!” said the captain, shaking his head sadly. “How wrong it all is. I managed to
condemn myself, and I have ruined your life.”
     “Goodbye, poor man,” answered the colomber. And it sank into the black waters forever.
 

     Two month later, pushed by an undertow, a small boat came alongside an abrupt reef. It was sighted by several fisherman, who drew near, curious. In the boat, still seated, was a sunbleached skeleton: between the little bones of its fingers it grasped a small round stone.
     The colomber is a huge fish, frightening to behold and extremely rare. Depending on the sea and the people who live by its shores, the fish is also called the kolombrey, kahloubrha, kalonga, kalu-balu, chalunggra. Naturalists strangely ignore it. Some even maintain that is does not exist.

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I first read this story in the journal Parabola: Myth and the Quest for Meaning. I found their May 1983 edition in a library and the story sang when  I read it. I found it a number of places online (like here, here and here). The images are Gustav Dore prints done in 1876 to illustrate Coleridge's epic The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I found them at this site, where you can purchase them, if you are into that sort of thing. I clearly don't own any of these pieces of art, and am clearly not making any money off reposting them here.

I will post more about my thoughts on this story soon. I promise. 

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** This winter was tough and I got messed up in my calendar. I wrote this thinking it was the Milk Moon but it was really the Birth Moon. Since the post itself is more about the the new year of 2012, I just changed the tags and labels. For more on my thoughts about this, see this post. **

Full Birth Moon 2008: Outer Darkness and Inner Hope

Full Birth Moon 2009: New Year! and A Story for the Birth Moon (these posts are dated 2010, but are for the year that took place mostly in 2009)

 Full Birth Moon 2010: The Dark of the Dark.

Dia de los Muertos Altara

Halloween

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It's been really nice to have the nature table set up in the dining room. It has become a real part of the house in a wonderful way. In the past, I have decorated an altar in my bedroom for the seasons, including Day of the Dead/Halloween/Samhain but it is really nice to have it in the main living space. Part of the idea of a traditional Mexican altara is that it is a place where the spirits of the beloved dead can come and visit the family, be invited back into the home. Having the seasonal table in the main living area really does that better than having it in my own room.

The altar cloth is a piece of crochet my mother's mother's mother made. On it is a Virgen of Guadalupe candle, seasonal nuts, leaves and feathers and a couple other candles.

The photos in the upper display are of my mother's mom and dad (Grandma Jean is still alive, but this was the best picture I could easily find of my grandfather), my mother's father's mother, Myrtle, and my dad's dad at sea in WWII.

Pictures of two family dogs, Lacey and Lucky are here as well as a little black lab figurine representing a number of other dogs I've known and loved who are no longer living.

On the left is a postcard I bought at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts. One of the coins is a Canadian coin with a polar bear on it. Samhain seems like an excellent time to remember the individual animals and entire species that are no longer living thanks to Western culture's actions and practices. The fossilized ammonite brings this same thought, only with more focus on the natural cycle of birth and death even beyond the individual level.

There is a wooden owl behind the red candle, almost under the oak leaf. Owls are often used to symbolize the passage of spirits into the underworld, and are always symbols of wisdom, knowledge and the people who seek those attributes.

There is a piece of tangarine quartz laying on the crocheted cloth. I chose it specifically because of its festive orange color, but tangarine quartz is also known for its healing properties. It is said that tangarine quartz can help a person see the underlying order in an apparently chaotic world and find compassion for the events and people who bring sadness or pain. It is said to help a person be able to leave the past in the past. All of these sound like excellent qualities to be mindful of during this season of commemorating the dead and working through grieving and questions about death.

My jade buddha is there on the right and the copper colored ganesh is over on the left. They, along with the namaste and gratitude engraved stones are pretty much always gonna be here :)

The skull card is an invitation to a Halloween party.

How do you celebrate Day of the Dead? What do you, or would you, put on your altara?

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Halloween 2008: When the Veil Between the Worlds is Thin

Halloween 2009: What Do You Really Want to Be?

Halloween 2010: Doggy Heaven (one of my all time favorite posts - it still makes me choke up a little every time I read it) and The Power of the Dog.

Halloween 2011: Day of the Dead

The Full Death Moon 2009 post mentions the Halloween season and the posts Martinmas and Nurturing Warmth at Martinmas are about another holiday associated with this point in the Wheel of the Year.

Day of the Dead

Halloween

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This Samhain season I've been called to explore more of the Day of the Dead aspect of this important holiday. I certainly picked out a pumpkin at the pumpkin patch and dressed up and went out with my friends over the weekend, but the month of October has had a real theme of dealing with my ancestors and other beloved dead. My older sister has been spending some real effort to discover family stories and tracing our geneaology in recent months and she asked me to look through our dad's photos for a picture of our grandmother. That search spurred me to do a major overhaul of his photo albums which were in dire need of repair or updating. My grandmother had put two albums together for my father sometime in the 1950s and they were physically falling apart. I've spent many hours over the last month or so taking the photos off the disintegrating paper and putting them in new albums, a process that has led to a number of very fruitful conversations with my dad about his life history and family (Ok, those conversations have been as fruitful as possible with a man who generally considers "grumph" a reasonable response to most inquiries).

Neither side of my family really has close intergenerational ties. Both of my grandfathers died decades before I was born and my father's mother died when I was a young child and had lived my entire life across the country from her. Both of my parents were part of the Baby Boom generation that rebelled in many ways against traditional family structure and values, a movement I still believe is valid and valuable, but that has caused irreparable rifts in family ties. Two years ago, when I wrote about my Halloween altar I noted that I had a picture of an extinct species because I almost felt that loss more strongly than the loss of my own family members.

This puts me in a place that is inherently different from the vast majority of humans over time and across the globe. In many, maybe even most, cultures, ancestors are a close and vital part of each individual’s community. Grandparents and maybe even great grandparents would have played a strong roll in raising a child and those people’s deaths would give the young adult an intimate connection with other ancestors who were no longer living. People very often lived in the same community, or even the same homes, that their ancestors had lived in and followed daily practices and traditions that they shared with those ancestors. This is not, in any way, my reality.

My first real cognition of that strong, shared connection with my ancestors came from my study of cell biology and genetics. I realized that the mitochondria in every cell in my body was exacly the same as the mitochondria in my mother’s body, and those in her mother’s body and her mother’s body. Something as intimate as my own DNA was shared with these women who I knew only barely or not at all. Later in my life, through conversations with my father’s sister, I had a realization that habits of mind and speech, childhood baggage and other less tangible aspects of what I consider myself are passed down from generation to generation in a family.

won tickets earlier this month to see a play at a theater here in Portland that focuses on Hispanic culture. The play, their Dia de los Muertos production, was a billingual story about a young woman experiencing revolution in a 21st century middle eastern country being visited by her ancestors who tell their story of experiencing revolution in 19th century Mexico. One of the things that struck me in the play is how present her ancestors were to her, both physically and emotionally. This morning I listened to an interview with a prominent Mormon journalist and blogger and she said she felt the same presence of her ancestors. Their stories of conversion and migration to live out their Mormon spirituality felt very heavy to her and she said as a young person she experienced “visitations” and proddings from her ancestors who seemed quite invested in her daily life. In talking about difficulties in her relationship with her father she was very clear that her tradition believes that families choose to be together, that they somehow know each other before their earthly births and come together to have certain kinds of experiences together. This thought is held in Waldorf communities, too, and is one that, despite it’s issues (does anyone choose to be born in extreme poverty, with debilitating illness or deformity, or into abusive situations?) provides some level of comfort to me.

I don’t have the strong intergenerational connections of a traditional Mexican family and I don’t believe in eternity spent with my current family, but I do know we are in this particular journey together. My parents are a deep part of me, and through them so are their parents and their parents. Other branches of my family are a part of me, too, even the parts that I share no blood with. I believe that my purpose here on earth is to, through my incarnation into this body and self, have a physical and relational experiences that the non-physical spirit of god can not. Humans have their core physical and relational experiences within the family and so, no matter how difficult it may be, those relationships are vitally important.

What are you celebrating this Halloween season? Were or are you close to your grandparents and other ancestors or have you had a journey of discovery like mine? When do you feel closest to your ancestors? Is it now, during the time of the year when the veil is thin between this world and the other? Rob Brezsny's homework assignment this week was "Which ofyour dead ancestors would you most like to talk to?Imagine a conversation with one of them." Which ancestor would you most like to hear from this early winter? What did you dress up as for Halloween?


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These photos are my personal family photos. If you would like to know more about them please send me an email.

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Halloween 2008: When the Veil Between the Worlds is Thin

Halloween 2009: What Do You Really Want to Be?

Halloween 2010: Doggy Heaven (one of my all time favorite posts - it still makes me choke up a little every time I read it) and The Power of the Dog.

The Full Death Moon 2009 post mentions the Halloween season and the post Martinmas is about another holiday associated with this point in the Wheel of the Year.

The Book of Nature

New Nesting Moon
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When I was 21 I began observing the moon. I was well versed in the natural history and geology of my environment, but was woefully ignorant of how the sun and the moon cycles worked. Maybe I was inspired by the months on end of clear skies in Southern Oregon or maybe it was my continuing interest in nature based spirituality. Maybe it was God tapping me on the shoulder and pointing her finger at something I should check out. Whatever it was, I faithfully watched the moon for cycle after cycle that year.

What I found amazed me. I was enthralled by the shapes the moon takes, the patterns on its surface and the relationship between the moon and the sun. I watched the moon wax and wane, and also found myself watching the seasons wax and wane. I saw the sunset move up and down the crest of the hills and the angle of light rise and fall with the seasons. I felt how the earth seems to wake up, be full, release its energy and then hibernate as the seasons wax and wane like the moon herself. I kept watching, kept observing month after month, year after year. The rhythms of day, month, season and year started to feel natural and deep, like my own heart beat and breathing.

I have felt God's presence in nature for much longer than I have ever felt it anywhere else. I knew the liturgy of growing plants long before I knew any church liturgy and heard God's voice in song birds and streams long before I heard it in a meeting for worship. Today, my primary language for accessing God is still the language of the living earth and especially of the natural rhythms of the sun and the moon. I see all life moving in these cycles, from the compact and huddled seed in winter, to the shooting growth of spring, the fullness and flowering of summer into the dissipating, conserving, slowing comfort of autumn. Gardens, creative projects, human lives and even civilizations move in these cycles. Breathing into these cycles, living fully in them and allowing them to unfold seems to me to be the best, highest and closest to God way to live my life.

Our culture seems to be an always on, always up, always growing kind of culture. But do you remember what cells that don't stop growing are called? Cancer. Plants that don't stop growing, like kudzu or English Ivy, are choking weeds. Sun that doesn't stop shining creates deserts like the lifeless land of the planet Venus. I feel deep in my bones that cycles of growth and constriction allow a chance for starting over, for assessing the last period of growth and for resting. I know God is in all parts of this cycle. I feel her in the pruning and contracting of autumn just as much as in the growth and light of spring. God is even in the hibernation and death of winter. God, my mother, knows and loves me through all parts of the cycle. God, my father, uses the cycle to encourage me to grow and challenge myself. The book of nature and the book of time are, to me, the fullest and most beautiful books God has written to help me navigate my life. And all I have to do is watch.

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This post was inspired by both my Quaker Meeting's literary journal query for the Autumn and a Rob Breszny horoscope from a couple weeks ago. The query is "How have you experienced god's presence in nature?" (which I chuckled at a bit - I've been writing about that twice a month for three years and still haven't exhausted all I could write about) and the horoscope is below:

Storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estes loves life's natural rhythms just as they are. She says we can avoid a lot of suffering if we understand how those rhythms work. "The cycles are birth, light, and energy, and then depletion, decline, and death," she told Radiance magazine. In other words, everything thrives and fades, thrives and fades. After each phase of dissipation, new vitality incubates and blooms again. According to my analysis of the astrological omens, Virgo, you are currently going through a period of dwindling and dismantling. The light is dimmer than usual, and the juice is sparser. But already, in the secret depths, a new dispensation is stirring.

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New Nesting Moon 2009: Breathe a Sigh of Relief

New Nesting Moon 2010: Ramadan

My Summer Solstince/Pagan Value's Blogging Month post from this summer is on a similar theme of cycles in nature: Circles, Cycles and Pulses: Pagan Values Blogging Month

The Power of the Dog

The Power of the Dog

by Rudyard Kipling

There is sorrow enough in the natural way

From men and women to fill our day;

And when we are certain of sorrow in store,

Why do we always arrange for more?

Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware

Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.

Buy a pup and your money will buy

Love unflinching that cannot lie--

Perfect passsion and worship fed

By a kick in the ribs or a pat on the head.

Nevertheless it is hardly fair

To risk your heart to a dog to tear.

When the fourteen years which Nature permits

Are closing in asthma, or tumour, or fits,

And the vet's unspoken prescription runs

To lethal chambers or loaded guns,

Then you will find--it's your own affair--

But ... you've given your heart to a dog to tear.

When the body that lived at your single will,

With its whimper of welcome, is stilled (how still!)

When the spirit that answered your every mood

Is gone--wherever it goes--for good,

You will discover how much you care,

And will give your heart to a dog to tear.

We've sorrow enough in the natural way,

When it comes to burying Christian clay.

Our loves are not given, but only lent,

At compound interest of cent per cent.

Though it is not always the case, I believe,

That the longer we've kept 'em, the more do we grieve:

For, when debts are payable, right or wrong,

A short-term loan is as bad as a long--

So why in--Heaven (before we are there)

Should we give our hearts to a dog to tear?

Lucky died on Monday, October 25, 2010. My dad found her at the Oregon Humane Society in August of 2005 and she lived 5 happy, happy years with us. She was old and sick and though we are all grieving and sad, she is no longer stuck in her failing body. Good bye, Luck-a-muck.