KITTEN UPDATE, FINALLY.

It's very difficult to take pictures of something or someone that won't stay still long enough to focus on. Last night at dinner. Bandit did something noisy, mom did something noisy and I turned on the camera...all at the same time. She's right at that pay attention to EVERYTHING stage. Took five minutes to convince her that something new wasn't out to get her. 

One small kitten about three days after she came to stay with us. Hardly a handful. And so very puzzled by it all. 

At about four months turning into quite a lady  A golden eyed girl. And very careful to stay out of reach at bedtime. She still sleeps in the kennel. Bandit needs some peace part of the time, after all.

And it's very odd. Cat's with green eyes reflect green. Cats with golden eyes reflect gold. But, our blue eyed Bandit. Looks like a perfect demon with those red eyes when she's actually the biggest wussy pussy you'd ever come across. She does like to lay on top of the laundry basket play pen. When Midge is in it. Lay end to end and wave her tail down the back. And smile.

Now at five months a sleek, black lady with a tail almost as long as she is. Loves string, little plastic balls, socks,,, and toes.

ELEMENTALS

The veils between the physical and spiritual worlds seemed thinner in the past. There was a time when it was easier to believe that there were spirits in the rocks, the trees, the streams. A vision of the world that’s still often dismissed as “Nature Worship” by mainstream society.

I don’t believe that the old Celts worshipped Nature as I understand word, but they were much more in touch with the world, seen and unseen, around them. This immersion in the spirit world seems to have persisted longest on the fringes of Europe. In Ireland, where Rome’s writ never ran. Or in the highlands and islands of Scotland beyond Hadrian’s Wall. Even the people of Wales held onto most of their independence until the thirteenth century and the invasions of England’s Edward I.

I’m not even sure that the Celtic concept of creation or creator is the same as the world view I grew up with. They certainly have enough different words to work with. And heck, maybe it doesn’t really matter unless you’re trying to learn how to speak one of these jaw breakers of a language.

The word often used in Irish for creator, Duileamh (always capitalized and pronounced dool-yev) doesn’t have the root word for create. It doesn’t have the root word for God, or the Almighty, or Supreme Being; all those words our world view equates with a supernatural Creator.

This difficult, for us, to pin down word can mean “being in the elements,” or “one who is in the elements” or “one who is the elements.” To make it even more interesting the root duil can also mean desire, hope, fondness or expectation. They’re all related, I guess, maybe…….oh heck I’ll take their word for it. Try asking Who is fond of What? Who desires What? Careful, the next thing you know you just might decide that Creator and Creation are caught in a web of desire, hope, and fondness that we aren’t used to facing in our world view of the sacred confined to a few hours on a certain day and tucked in the closet the rest of the time.

The highlanders of Scotland used to bless each other in a way that turns the way we treat each other and the world around us on its head.

“The love and affection of the moon be yours.

The love and affection of the sun be yours.

The love and affection of the stars be yours.”

And work their way through all the things of nature around them until they end with

“The love and affection of all living things be yours.”

Adapted from Yearning for the wind.

Perhaps it isn’t so strange to feel a kinship with the sun. The sun feeds the plants, the plants feed the cows and the cows feed us. I guess you could say we carry a bit of sunshine with us through the day; and the night.

If we really believed that the local river had love and affection for us we might treat it like the irreplaceable creation that it is instead of as a sewer. If we could stretch our minds around the idea that the mountains and valleys might love us perhaps we’d think twice about carving off the top of a mountain to get at the coal and dumping the tailings in the valley below. If we truly felt the living web instead of seeing board feet when we look at an old growth forest maybe we’d be more careful as we harvest the trees we need. As it stands we don’t believe we have the love and affection of our fellow human beings much less the rest of the world and the creatures in it.

The elements of creation. “The Love and Affection of the Elements. The Pure Love of the Elements. The Being of the Elements. The One Who is the Elements.” Tom Cowan notes that the participants were trying to discuss these concepts at a workshop for Celtic Shamanism. One woman in the group wished our language had words like these. Another broke in with “Wouldn’t it be great if our culture had ideas like this.” Taken from Yearning for the Wind.

Just wouldn’t it though?

WHAT IS A RIVER

Where is a river born? A high mountain lake? A hidden spring that wise men keep to themselves? The trickles from a melting glacier? However it’s born it joins the great lacework of freshwater that eventually joins the ancient salt waters of the world’s oceans. Elemental water joins with sun fire and the vapors rise. Clouds form and drift. When the time is right, the rains fall and the cycle begins again.

But rivers and streams are more than the water flowing between the banks. It’s marsh and delta grasses that slow the floods and help to store high waters against the dry times. It’s the trees that shade the water and deadfalls that make hiding places for fingerlings and insect larva. The river is the kingfisher, the eagle and the osprey. The river is the mallard, the teal and the heron. The otter, the beaver and the muskrat. The river is the deer that comes to drink and the elk bugling in the water meadow.

The river is sunlight dancing through new leaves and the mist that rises in the early mornings of autumn hiding everything beyond the nearest bend except the water whisper through the reeds. The river is spring shower and summer thunderstorm, ice sprinkles in late fall and the deep snows of winter.

And some believe that because every drop of water is different, never standing still you can never enter the same river twice. And I wish I could find pictures to match what "saw" while I was writing this. 

THE DRY SPELL

Well, it looks like the dry spell is over, All it took was a little time and a few good books.

WHEN A LAKE IS MORE THAN A LAKE

In legend, the rivers of Ireland have a common source, the Pool of Wisdom in the Other World under the rule of Mananan Mac Lir. Around the pool are hazel trees, the nuts fall into the pool where the salmon who live in the pool eat the nuts. When the nuts are broken the juice turns the water purple and it flows into the rivers.

Mananan told a visitor that everyone drinks of the water from the rivers. But, only poets, those of vision and mystics can pierce the veil into the other world to drink from the pool itself. The information that feeds our senses comes not only from the world we can touch, but from the world we can only sense when the veils are thinnest.

Could it be that everything around us is more than we can see with our eyes and hear with our ears? And could it happen that what one sees isn’t quite the same as what another “sees.” There was an Irish hermit who lived by a lake. One morning he decided that fish for breakfast; well what could be better? So, he launched his boat a rowed out into the lake. He could see his neighbor’s hermitage on the other side of the lake just beginning to be lit by the early morning light. When he looked again, he saw is neighbor walking across the water. “Good morning, you’re out early.” “I need some flowers for my alter, and if you don’t mind my asking, what are you doing in the middle of the meadow sitting in a boat.” “Meadow, I’m going fishing, what are you doing walking across a lake.” Or words to that effect.

The second hermit pointed to some flowering bushes near the shore. “I think the fish are biting over there.”  In the end, one man got his fish and the other got his flowers. From the same place. One hermit’s lake, was another hermit’s flower filled meadow. I guess sometimes a lake is more than just a lake and a meadow is more than just a meadow.

Hermit story from Tom Cowan’s Yearning for the Wind. 

IT'S ALL ON LOAN

This message is true no matter who we call Creator. The president said pretty much the same thing last year and look what happened to him.

Pray for the whole world, pray this very earth become a heaven. Pray especially to be freed from the evil of greediness. Pray to recognize others who are in need-for there is no such thing as “my” bread. All bread is ours and is given to me, to others through me and through me to others. For not only bread but all others things necessary for sustenance in this life a given on loan to us with others and because of others, and for others and to others through us.

Whoever does not give to another what belongs to that other does not eat his own bread but steals that bread from that other. For nothing that we have acquired unjustly is ours.

All gifts of nature and of grace have been given us on loan. Their ownership is not ours but God’s. God never gave private property to anyone-not even to his own Mother or to any other person or to any creature in any way. Treat all things as if they were loaned to you without any ownership-whether body or soul, sense or strength, external goods or honors, friends or relations, house or hall, everything. For if I want to possess the property I have instead of receive it on loan, then I want to be a master.

I have told you this time and again, if a person were in a rapture as great as St. Paul once experienced and learned that her neighbor were in need of a cup of soup, it would be best to withdraw from the rapture and give the person the soup she needs. Meister Eckhart Thirteenth century preacher and mystic.

So, if we knew these things in the twelve hundreds…..no wonder the church labeled him a heretic.

SOUL WALKING

One day Tom Cowan (Yearning for the Wind) realized that he wasn’t carrying his soul around like a backpack. His soul was carrying him and he quoted the Welsh bard Taliesin. “I adore my God…who has infused a soul to direct me with its seven faculties; fire, earth, water, air, mist, flowers and southerly wind.” Well, that just about covers everything doesn’t it? Because those “faculties” don’t just infuse my soul. They infuse the soul of all Creation. And that soul reaches down and joins my soul and can carry me past the ends of the earth to the edge of Creation if I’ll just let it.

Remember someplace you’ve been that really reached out and touched you. A mountainside in spring when the flowers are just beginning to bloom and there’s still a nip in the air when the sun goes behind a cloud. Summer at the beach as the waves break over and over. And if you’re in Oregon, and it isn’t that special two weeks in August? Well, there’s still a nip in the air. While the sun is out. Maybe it’s fall and the leaves are at their best. Red, orange, burnt orange. Fire in the branches. Then there’s winter and the bare branches are hidden in the mist or covered with snow. Remember how you felt. Let it fill you with fire, earth, water, air, mist, flowers (I like that one) and southerly wind.

Irish or Celtic Druids and saints often asked the blessing or protection of the natural world. Patrick supposedly wrote this one.

I bind unto myself today

The virtues of the starlit heavens,

The glorious sun’s life giving ray,

The whiteness of the moon at even,

The flashing of the lightning free,

The whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks,

The stable earth, the deep salt sea

Around the old eternal rocks.

Now go beyond mere blessing. Get past asking for elemental protections. Stretch out your soul until you are the heavens, the sun, the moonlight, the lighting bolt, the wind, the rich life giving earth and the sea we all can call our mother. Walk out into the world knowing that you and all of Creation are one. 

CARRIED BY THE WIND

I think Lisa has posted this too. I suspect that we got it from the same place. Thanks Tom. The image is from the web.

IRISH KNOTWORK

Invoke: Call on (a deity or spirit) in prayer, as a witness, or for inspiration. This is secondary definition.

A variation of a poem attributed to Amergin, Druid and poet of the Irish mythological cycle. One of the Milesians who conquered the Tuatha De Danaan….as reworked by Tom Cowan. As beautiful and complex as a piece of Celtic knotwork.

I invoke the land of Ireland:

Forceful, the fertile sea;

Fertile, the lush highlands;

Lush, the showery woods;

Showery, river of waterfalls;

Of waterfalls, the lake of deep pools;

Deep pooled, the hilltop well;

Welling, the gathering of peoples;

Gathering, the tribes of Tara;

I invoke the land of Ireland.

This is almost like a helicopter flyover of the island. As you repeat it, you follow that knotwork around and around with those beautiful images. 

A POET INVOKES IRELAND

Invoke: Call on (a deity or spirit) in prayer, as a witness, or for inspiration. This is secondary definition.

A variation of a poem attributed to Amergin, Druid and poet of the Irish mythological cycle. One of the Milesians who conquered the Tuatha De Danaan….as reworked by Tom Cowan. As beautiful and complex as a piece of Celtic knotwork.

I invoke the land of Ireland:

Forceful, the fertile sea;

Fertile, the lush highlands;

Lush, the showery woods;

Showery, river of waterfalls;

Of waterfalls, the lake of deep pools;

Deep pooled, the hilltop well;

Welling, the gathering of peoples;

Gathering, the tribes of Tara;

I invoke the land of Ireland.

This is almost like a helicopter flyover of the island. As you repeat it, you follow that knotwork around and around with those beautiful images. 

FINDING HOMES FOR OUR SQUARE PEGS

What I wrote about the fall may have been influence by the introduction a colleague of Tom Cowan’s, Sandra Ingraham, wrote for Yearning for the Wind.

“Once upon a time a spell was cast upon people across the land. The spell made people believe we are all separate beings with no connection to each other and no connection with nature or the rest of life. … Happiness only came from financial gain, collecting material objects, and having power over people, the animal world and all nature.”

How else can you explain the attitude that would turn this country into an armed camp? That our neighbors and the people around us are so dangerous we have to be armed to the teeth.

We don’t know what made the Connecticut shooter tick. But, who knows? A thousand years ago he might have been happy in an enclosed monastic order copying manuscripts. At the beginning of the age of exploration he might have been a well known map maker.Two hundred years ago he might have been a mountain man. Who knows? I do know that there are fewer and fewer places in our society for the square pegs. And more and more people who would have been productive members of society in the past are labeled “defective” and shoved to the margins.

There must be a better way. There has to be.  

ADVENT STORY

I'm not a literalist when it comes to the Bible. And more than a few Quakers cross over and follow what are considered Pagan paths. But, every once in awhile something hits me.

When I was doing some reading during Advent using the Revised Common Lectionary for Year C. I realized that the original sin wasn't eating that pesky apple (or whatever it was). That was the result. The sin was a lack of trust.

Instead of taking a few minutes and going "hey, God there's this guy with a heck of a story." Eve believed the "I know something you don't know" and swallowed it hook, line and sinker. Side note. I've come across folks who contend that there was no death before. I never did run across the following conversation. "Uh, You said if we ate of the tree we'd die. What's death?" Something did die in that story. Trust died. The link that connected us to the natural and the spiritual worlds. And it's killing us.

And as far as I'm concerned something else "died" that day. Our stewardship or dominion over the rest of Creation. Many of us still claim it, but one look at the devastating mess we've made of doing it on our own proves how well that's working out. And I ran across a quote from Gandhi that runs something like this "the earth provides enough for man's needs, but not for his greed." And that is so true.

SPIRIT VISITOR?

I've started keeping a notebook on the bedside table. I get some of my best ideas at two in the morning and they're gone when I get up. Anyway, I made these notes last night. They'll be worked into something better later.

"Find a tree. Any tree, really, If you can sit down next to it, good. Best if you can lean your back into it. Fell the bark. Imagine your arms reaching for the sky. Your feet sinking down into the roots. Deeper into the soil, deeper into bedrock and the under ground springs.

Reach for the sky. Feel the sun. Bend with the wind. Endure the rain and snow. Welcome the spring, returning bird song, wind song. Watch the stars wheel through the seasons."

I got that far and put it away. Settled in for the night with the image of trees and undergrowth.  A sort of a clearing and into the clearing came a fox. Seemed to be following a track. Then the image ended. And I can guarantee that I was not thinking of foxes...or any other kind of furry critter at the time. I'll have to chew on this for awhile.

THE EARTH IS OUR MOTHER THE SKY OUR FATHER

This is from the Tewa Pueblo from a book on Native American remedies and healing rituals.

O our Mother the Earth,

O our Father the Sky,

Your children are we, and with tired backs

We bring you the gifts you love.

Then weave for us a garment of brightness;

May the warp be the white light of morning,

May the weft be the red light of evening,

May the fringes be the falling rain,

May the border be the standing rainbow.

Then weave for us a garment of brightness

That we may walk fittingly where grass is green,

O our Mother the Earth,

O our Father the Sky!

It hit me how beautiful this image is. Imagine a robe with all the shades of sunrise and sunset, fringed with all the shades of the rain from soft showers to drowning downpours with a border of all the colors of the rainbow. While I'm at it I'd add beads to the fringe. Beads that flash with all the colors of the stars and glow from within with silver of the moon and the gold of the sun. This is a beautiful image of the unity between the earth and all the life on it and around it.

And wouldn't any of us love to find this in our closets? And wouldn't we love to see everyone wearing this our in the world.