SPRING IN OREGON OR ANY OTHER SEASON

If someone in a Home Depot store offers you assistance and they don’t work there, you live in Oregon.

If you’ve worn shorts, sandals and a parka at the same time, you live in Oregon.

If you’ve had a lengthy telephone conversation with someone who dialed the wrong number, you live in Oregon.

If you measure distance in hours, you live in Oregon.

If you know several people who have hit a deer more than once, you live in Oregon.

If you switched from ‘heat’ to ‘A/C’ and back again in the same day, you live in Oregon.

If you install security lights on your house and garage but leave both doors unlocked, you live in Oregon.

If you can drive 75 mph through 2 feet of snow during a raging blizzard without flinching, you live in Central, Southern or Eastern Oregon.

If you design your kid’s Halloween costume to fit over 2 layers of clothes or under a raincoat, you live in Oregon.

If driving is better in the winter because the potholes are filled with snow and ice, you live in Oregon.

If you know all 4 seasons: almost winter, winter, still winter, and road construction, you live in Oregon.

If you feel guilty throwing aluminum cans or paper in the trash, you live in Oregon.

If you know more than 10 ways to order coffee, you live in Oregon.

If you know more people who own boats than air conditioners, you live in Oregon.

If you stand on a deserted corner in the rain waiting for the “Walk” signal, you live in Oregon.

If you believe that if it has no snow or has not recently erupted, it is not a real mountain, you live in Oregon

If you can taste the difference between Starbucks, Seattle’s Best, and Dutch Bros., you live in Oregon. (That’s coffee, folks)

If you know the difference between Chinook, Coho and Sockeye salmon, you live in Oregon. (Especially if you know that fish are being discussed without salmon added to the description)

If you know how to pronounce Sequim, Puyallup, Clatskanie, Issaquah, Oregon, Umpqua, Yakima and Willamette, you live in Oregon.

If you consider swimming an indoor sport, you live in Oregon.

If you know that Boring is a city and not just a feeling, you live in Oregon.

If you can tell the difference between Japanese, Chinese and Thai food, you live in Oregon.

If you never go camping without waterproof matches and a poncho, you live in Oregon.

If you have actually used your mountain bike on a mountain, you live in Oregon.

If you think people who use umbrellas are either wimps or tourists, you live in Oregon.

If you buy new sunglasses every year, because you cannot find the old ones after such a long time, you live in Oregon.

If you actually understand these jokes and forward them to all your friends (Oregonians or otherwise), you live or have lived in Oregon.

CREATION NEVER STOPS

Picture by Angela Babby enrolled member of the Pine Ridge reservation.

“I have often said that God is creating this entire universe fully and totally in this present now. Everything God created six thousand years ago – and even previous to that – as he made the world, god creates now. All at once.” Meister Eckhart.

Eckhart’s patch of ground in what became Germany lies in the path the Irish monks took as they traveled across Europe. From Ireland to south coast of Italy they carried the Celtic way of seeing through Europe. A way of seeing radically different from the dominant mythology that God created in a one off act. Creation as a one time event, end of story.

Celtic spirituality appears to teach that Creation is not only a continuous act of Creation and renewal, but that if this were to stop the created universe, all of it, would cease to exist.

I wish I could find the picture on Astronomy Picture of the Day again. It was a Hubble photo of an expanding supernova remnant. As the gases expanded they created bow shaped shock waves around stars and pockets of gases. Pockets of gasses that may create new stars. Creation. Worlds without end. Amen. I’ll keep looking until then. A Native American artist has captured a wonderful image of Mother Earth. 

SHE WAS SO TINY

Just a reminder of what a tiny bit of fluff Midge was when she bounced into our home.

PEACEFUL AT THE MOMENT

Once in awhile Midget the Idget does stay still.

SLEEPING BEAUTY

Bandit has always loved shoes. Any shoes. Just loves, and loves and loves them For some reason she took a shine to my new Teva's. And fell asleep in mid love.

THANKS TO MAKER OF ALL THINGS

Creator of all life

You bless the earth, the earth that gifts us with the food, shelter, clothing and tools that we need to live our lives.

Thank you for these gifts and forgive us when we misuse them.

Creator of all life,

You bring water from the sky and from deep in the Earth. Water falling, streaming, bubbling, dancing. It is our life and our joy.

Thank you for this gift and forgive us when we use it as if it were endless and with little care for the damage we do to ourselves and to all those others who must share those waters with us but have no control over what we do.

Creator of all life,

You give days when the air is crisp and sweet scented, and days when it is heavy with dew and the scent of fallen leaves.

Thank you for these gifts and forgive us when we forget that others must share that air too. Even when it’s loaded with the poisons of our carelessness.

Creator of all life,

You nurture us in the long bright days of summer and in the rich darkness of night and winter, you teach us the mysteries of the moon and stars.

Thank you for these gifts and forgive us when we fail to raise our eyes to appreciate the jewels planted in the darkness, the mountains of clouds lit by the sun, the flight of birds across blue black of the sky at dusk or dawn.

Inspired by a prayer in  Yearning for the Wind by Tom Cowan.

THE EARTH IS OUR MOTHER-NOT AN INVENTORY LIST

“To those who followed Columbus and Cortez, the New World truly seemed incredible because of the natural endowments. The land often announced itself with a heavy scent miles out into the ocean. Giovanni di Verazanno in 1524 smelled the cedars of the East Coast a hundred leagues out. The men of Henry Hudson’s Half Moon were temporarily disarmed by the fragrance of the Jersey Shore, whiles ships running further up the coast occasionally swam through large beds of floating flowers. Wherever they came inland they found a rich riot of color and sound, of game and luxuriant vegetation. Had they been other than they were they might have written a new mythology here. As it was, they took inventory.” Frederick Turner. Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness.

I’ve never been to sea, so I’m not sure what we can smell now when we’re a hundred miles or so off shore. Diesel fumes. Gas fumes, hot asphalt, and industrial pollution? I’m betting the Jersey Shore has a much difference fragrance nearly five centuries after di Verazanno made his run up the coast. And the beds of floating flowers are a forgotten memory. Unless you want to count plastic bags, discarded bottles and cargo lost from containers as “flowers.” Well, there’s a riot of color and sound all right. We spend a great deal of time and energy trying to escape it. And, it looks like we finally did write that new mythology. Of the virtue and necessity of conquest and exploitation. Now, we find ourselves in a trap of our own making.

One industry develops low wattage LED’s and touts them a replacement for home light use while another industry finds a totally new use for light bulbs. Soon every corner bank and drugstore hosts a mini bill board advertising services. In firesale red. Electrical useage stays the same or goes up and visual pollution increases. Plant based bio fuels replace petroleum, at least in theory but it still takes more energy to produce the fuel than we’ll ever see in our fuel tanks.

Each appliance may take less energy but the number and SIZE of the appliances increases. Remember the TV’s with nineteen inch screens? Can you even get one of those these days? I may really like Tom Selleck, but I have no desire to count the number of hairs in his moustache.

And any suggestion that we might simplify our lives a little, just a little is met with that you’re a Marxist, Socialist, Fascist, nihilist trying to destroy the American nightmare. Whoops, pardon me, dream.

Which led me back to this little prayer in one of mom’s workbooks from her Methodist women’s group.

I am your mother: do not neglect me!

Children protect me-I need your trust;

my breath is your breath, my death is your death,

ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

I am your nurture; do not destroy me!

Love and enjoy me, savor my fruit;

my good is your good, my food is your food,

water and flower, branches and root.

I am your lodging: do not abuse me!

Tenderly use me, soothing my scars;

my health is your health, my wealth is your wealth,

shining with promise, set among stars.

The Creator is our maker, do not deny,

challenge, defy or, threaten this place;

life is to cherish, care, or we perish!

I am your mother, tears on my face.

Adapted from a prayer by Shirley Erena Murray 1996

SOUL DANCING

“Everything which God created millions of years ago and everything which will be created by God after millions of years-if the world lasts that long-God is creating that in the innermost and deepest realms of the human soul. Everything of the past, everything of the present, and everything of the future God creates in the innermost realms of the soul.”

Meister Eckhart. I wonder if I can find out if Eckhart actually used the term millions or if he just meant a very long time. In any case he probably won’t win any points with the American Creationist crowd.

Is the human soul isolated? One per customer? Or, as Tom Cowan writes of the teachings of Hildegard of Binger, does that soul stretch out, touch the soul of all Creation? Flowing in. Flowing out. Combining. Mixing. Dancing. Can my soul dance all the way out to Andromeda and surf the star stuff pouring out of the blue white giants? I’d like to think that it can. 

PAINTING WITH WORDS

This meditation, essay whatever was brought on by the news that Sarah Palin’s contract with Fox wasn’t renewed. And both sides are saying it was their idea. Whatever. A sorrier example of verbal illiteracy I’ve seen yet.

So, this is a bit  of a departure from what I’ve been writing, but maybe not so much. Back when the boys were little we picked out a few books that we thought would be fun to have on hand to read from. Turned out to be a complete flop. Kids that wore out my Sleeping Beauty tape couldn’t sit still long enough to listen to one of Kipling’s Just So Stories. I was entranced by The Elephant’s Child. They weren’t.

My generation were probably the last to be verbally rather than visually oriented. Read Kipling. Read Dickens. They drew word pictures and your imagination was free to run riot. Dicken’s intro to A Christmas Carol is really priceless. The winter cold. The fog. The growing dark at three in the afternoon. Fog so thick it was creeping through the key hole in the door. Scrooge, who went through life with an icicle hanging from his nose in the middle of July.

The elephant’s child with his ‘satiable curiosity and endless questions setting off to find out what the crocodile has for dinner complete with a supply of melons (green) Sugar cane (purple) and bananas (the little red ones) in search of the great, grey green Limpopo River all set about with fever trees, where, he’s told, the crocodile lives. On the way he meets a bi colored python rock snake… and the crocodile. Only to find that today, he’s on the menu. And did mention that up to this point elephants had noses that looked more like a boot than a trunk?

So, here’s the elephant finding himself in the middle of a tug of war between the crocodile who has hold of his nose and the snake who’s hanging onto the hind legs with all his snaky strength and advising

“Then the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake scuffled down from the bank and said, 'My young friend, if you do not now, immediately and instantly, pull as hard as ever you can, it is my opinion that your acquaintance in the large-pattern leather ulster' (and by this he meant the Crocodile) 'will jerk you into yonder limpid stream before you can say Jack Robinson.'

This is the way Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snakes always talk.

Then the Elephant's Child sat back on his little haunches, and pulled, and pulled, and pulled, and his nose began to stretch. And the Crocodile floundered into the water, making it all creamy with great sweeps of his tail, and he pulled, and pulled, and pulled.

And the Elephant's Child's nose kept on stretching; and the Elephant's Child spread all his little four legs and pulled, and pulled, and pulled, and his nose kept on stretching; and the Crocodile threshed his tail like an oar, and he pulled, and pulled, and pulled, and at each pull the Elephant's Child's nose grew longer and longer—and it hurt him hijjus!

Then the Elephant's Child felt his legs slipping, and he said through his nose, which was now nearly five feet long, 'This is too butch for be!'

Then the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake came down from the bank, and knotted himself in a double-clove-hitch round the Elephant's Child's hind legs, and said, 'Rash and inexperienced traveller, we will now seriously devote ourselves to a little high tension, because if we do not, it is my impression that yonder self-propelling man-of-war with the armour-plated upper deck' (and by this, O Best Beloved, he meant the Crocodile), 'will permanently vitiate your future career.” (Talented snake. He can do double clove hitches)

The crocodile the elephant and the bi colored python rock snake. 

I loved it. My nephews couldn't be bothered. They were too busy playing Super Mario Brothers. Heck I watch movies. I watch some TV. Not as much as I used to. But, we really lost something in the transition. The old authors painted pictures with words in a way that most film just can’t match. And that most writers can’t match either. No matter how many awards they get.

And that may be part what attracts me to the Celtic traditions. The old bards and poets were masters of the word. The best of the old poets could compose a satire that would topple thrones or cause a king who chose to ignore the rules of hospitality to break out in boils. It was not wise to insult a bard. 

THE SONGS WE SING...AND HEAR

What is in my mind isn't coming through with the words. This happens. But here goes anyway. 

The word enchant is from the Latin and the French. In those languages it means “to sing.” In English we use it to mean to cast a spell or to move deeply. Perhaps even in English enchant can have the meaning Caitlin Matthews give it ‘to infuse with song.”

In legend the bards of Britain maintained choirs that were constantly singing or chanting. The singing was intended to maintain the balance and connections between this world and the other world. Imagine hearing the tales of your land and your people Every day, every hour, every minute.

Hearing the  tales and stories that keep us grounded but what happens when we lose the songs. Lose the stories that connect us to each other and to the land.

So we have to write and sing our own songs. Lisa does it with her birds in the back yard. Including a beautiful bald eagle. And a very beautiful bald eagle it is. I’ve discovered a blogger or two who combine Quaker practices and what we usually call pagan practices. Quaker Pagan Reflections  is an excellent example. Try your hand at writing a poem. Feed the birds. Spend time chasing weeds in a garden, You might hear the universe singing. We can’t sing all the time, but we can listen. 

THE STORIES IGNORED AND THREW AWAY

“To live in a storied world is to know that intelligence is not an exclusively human faculty located somewhere inside our skulls, but rather a power of the animate earth itself, in which in which we humans along with the hawks and the thrumming frogs, all participate. It is to know, further, that each land, each watershed, each community of plants and animals and soils, has its particular style of intelligence, its unique mind and or imagination evident in the particular patterns that play out there, in the living stories that unfold in that valley, and that are told and retold by the people of that place. Each ecology has its own psyche, and the local people bind their imaginations to the psyche of the place by letting the land dream its tales through them.” David Abram quoted in The Salmon in the Spring.

Which is an elaborate way of saying that the stories told by say the Po Valley in Italy will be different from the stories told by the Willamette Valley in Oregon. At least what would have been told by the native peoples who lived in the valley, hunting elk and digging the camas roots before the European settlers arrived.

But, what stories are we telling each other in this modern America of ours? “For us, it's not about love. It's about domination. Of the world, of our fellow animals, of each other. It's about "this is MINE!" We don't love anything, and we certainly don't care if it loves us back.” This is from Lisa. And she’s right, at least for the national mythology that powers our economic and political actions.

We’ve heard some of the stories during the last election cycles. This is a Christian Nation. Well, yes; most of the original colonists were Christians. Too bad they came from wildly divergent sects; most of them didn’t get along with each other. Except for the Quakers, and everybody else considered THEM to be heretics and kicked them out of THEIR colonies.

The constitution is Holy Writ. Well again, yeah sort of. It’s really a well crafted set of compromises designed to get as many states to ratify it as possible. The Electoral College to mollify the little states like New Hampshire. Counting people who would never get a chance to vote as three fifths of a person to satisfy the southern states like South Carolina.

And worse, the majority doesn’t hear stories from nature. The natural world is there to be dominated and conquered. Anyone ever see the film How The West Was Won? Especially the epilogue. Granted it was released in the very early sixties. It’s a collage of images. Huge farms, multi layered freeways, strip mining, old growth trees being loaded on ships for export. It’s a tale of conquest and exploitation. 

Any stories that the valley’s of the Mississippi and Ohio had to tell were drowned out, the native peoples who knew the stories forced west away from their stories and the land that told them. We've buried the Snake River and the Columbia in water caught behind dams for flood control and power stations. The tribal fishing grounds at Celilo Falls. Gone. The valley of the Hetch Hetchie, gone to supply water for San Francisco. The stories gone. the tales the people and animals could tell. Gone. The tapestry ripped and torn. If we don't find a way to reweave the fabric our very humanity is in danger. 

And in spite of the damage we've done the mantra continues. A tree that doesn't make it to the mill is wasted. That you can cut logs over and over. You can but you've lost the ecosystem and its stories forever. Buried under logging roads, herbicides and pesticides. That fresh water that makes it to the sea instead of our faucets is wasted. Even though too many rivers are loaded with those same herbicides and pesticides so that we're slowly poisoning the waters that gave us birth. We clean up our air, but export coal and dirty oil over seas only to have the pollution ride the jet stream back to haunt us.

It's like trying to bail the ocean with a teaspoon, but I'll search out the stories and bellow them at the top of my lungs...or keyboard. Anybody got some good stories out there? Lisa's birds. My vision of a fox. Reweave the world. 

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.