Positively Glorious!

Every once in a while, I’m lucky enough to be reminded about the beautiful variety in life. The differences of opinion that set you off-center, shake you out of routine, and cause you to pause to look around and see. I had one of those moments yesterday, while reading a blog post of a friend.

So, since this is somewhat based on that, you should take a moment, head over to MorganPDX.com and read “I jaywalk because I’m Jewish.” Go ahead, it’s short, well-written, and will only take five minutes.

I’ll wait.

…

Back? Good. Now the reason I love this post is because it’s a perfect illustration to me of why people will never get along– even while it’s a perfect illustration of why they should. What am I talking about? Subtle, but it showed me that two people can have such similar goals, similar ideals, similar feelings on a subject, and can still arrive at completely opposing outcomes.

Talk about wild! Continue Reading »

Because it’s Christmas, and because this time of gift-giving is so difficult in so many ways, I wanted to take a moment to detail more about what gift-giving is to me. The focus of it being that gifts have meaning.

And, more importantly, the act of giving itself has meaning. Deep meaning.

When I give a gift, the responsibility of that gift lies with me, the giver. It is my responsibility to know this person, to take the time to seek and to listen. It is my responsibility to find that one thing that they secretly want, but would not share with themselves. That thing they feel they don’t deserve or can’t afford.

Then, having given them this gift, I thus remove their guilt of having this thing.

That is the real gift.

The gift of receiving the thing free of the burden of needing justification. If I gave an expensive but unwanted jewel, I’d be saying “here’s meaninglessness in our meaningless relationship.” If I give a treasured but inexpensive trifle, I’m saying “Here is meaning, in the depth of our relationship.” Continue Reading »

You all know them. The people who give gifts of toilet brushes, or gifts of a steak dinner to a vegetarian. As I sit in the house of my wife’s parents during this Christmas holiday, it comes that I have a few spare moments to contemplate bad gifts, culture, and the phenomenon of gift-giving.¹

There is kind of cultural nuance that intrigues me about gift-giving. It is a nuance that I feel every Christmas when traveling home to the culture of my in-laws. It strikes me that every family is a blending of two cultures– whether ethnic cultures as ours, or merely familial cultures. These variations become very pronounced during gift-giving, and Christmas is nothing if not a time of gift-giving.

Coming from a multi-ethnic family, a mixed-race person like me sees these variations from a strange, internal perspective. I’ve seen the nuances of gift-giving from early childhood and never realized them until my training in anthropology placed a lens on the incongruities I’d felt for so long. Though I’d felt the fact as assuredly as I’d felt my own bones and tendons, it was only then that I had words and expression for the fact: gifts have meaning.

Even more importantly: The very act of giving has meaning.

In fact, I realize more and more that it is the act itself that is meaningful, much moreso than the gift.

Continue Reading »

1. This phenomenon has seen it’s share of study in the anthropological field– a great many anthropologists have studied reciprocity in every culture, most famously Bronislaw Malinowski, who’s pioneering work in the Trobriand Islands led to new understandings of gift-giving, and of the highly complex and subtle cultural nuances of so-called “savages.” [↩]

Okay, people. I know you have the power to change the world now, but sometimes you want to change the world into something that’s just really dumb.

The current explosion of social media outlets sure has its problems. Well, more correctly, it has issues that we have not yet had time to process in such a way that those issues are truly incorporated into our culture.¹

Witness, for instance, the Facebook phenomenon. We can now choose to have a lifelong inability to distance ourselves from people. No longer do you have the opportunity to, say, naturally grow apart from a high school friend whom you haven’t seen in 20 years. Now they follow you forever. The problem here is that we, as a human species, have had roughly 1.5 MILLION YEARS of saying “you know, it’s alright if we don’t see each other anymore.” Continue Reading »

1. Anthropological aside: “Culture,” as used here, is a fairly nebulous, since social media as we use it spans multiple cultures. However, I’m reserving the right to speak of “human” culture in this instance, just as we can speak of, say, Western culture while ignoring the cultural differences between Western peoples or even families. [↩]

Due to a scheduling error that I made, I accidentally published this before “The Old Gods.” That post is supposed to be read before this one.

Having visited Germany, having read of such beauty in Pre-Christian Germanic culture, I felt that I wanted to honor those ancestors as well. So much of what Native people here cherish is tied up in stories of Salmon, Raven and Wolf. It’s interesting to know that what Native people in Northern Europe cherished was so similar. Salmon, Raven and Wolf show up a great deal in the stories of Northern Europe. Universality, commonality.

Humanity. Continue Reading »

Ack. This was supposed to be published before the “art as embellishment” post, but I accidentally scheduled that other post and it published while I was on vacation.

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of historical research on Pre-Christian Germanic culture. Much of this is what people think of as “Viking” culture, but that topic is such a jumble of confused ridiculousness that I try to avoid it. What I’m looking into is not “Vikings.” In fact, it’s a few hundred to thousands of years before that particular subset of Germanic travelers. What I’m seeking is an understanding of the underlying philosophical and spiritual framework of the Germanic peoples… before Christianity.

What I’ve been finding is, to say the least, mind-blowing. The long story is a topic for another post, or another blog, or a book, or even a series of books. It’s vast, as the universe of any culture is vast. One of the most interesting things, however, is that the early Germanic people– far from being the barbaric brutes of movies– were very deeply spiritual, philosophical, and thoughtful. Continue Reading »

Celebrate! Today is Lughnasað.

The word Lugnasað is Gælic in origin and hearkens the Gælic god Lugh:¹

In Celtic mythology, the Lughnasadh festival is said to have been begun by the god Lugh, as a funeral feast and games commemorating his foster-mother, Tailtiu, who died of exhaustion after clearing the plains of Ireland for agriculture.

The word is Gælic, but the time is universal. Every culture that noted the path of the sun knew this time, because it is the cross-quarter day, the midpoint between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox. The Anglo-Saxon celebration is called Lammas, Loaf-Mass day, the first wheat harvest of the year.

This is the beginning of the harvest season, and Lughnasað is a time for celebration and thanks. The first fruits of the harvest are here, and the warmth of the late summer sun will begin to wane into the golden glow of autumn. In fact, this is autumn. Harvest season. The summer solstice denotes Midsummer.

Each day, we feel the warmest part of the day in the afternoon, yet the sun is at it’s most powerful at solar noon. Just as the warmth of the day falls after midday, so does the warmth of the season fall after Midsummer. In agrarian societies, this cross-quarter day marks autumn, the season of harvesting.

And the season of celebrating! For we are full with the fruits of Earth as well as the fruits of our family and friends, so greet them, share food and wine with them!

Celebrate Lughnasað!

1. From Wikipedia [↩]

This is one of those essays that someone writes only because they have no plans on ever running for any public office, but I think it’s something important and something that needs to be said.

Our soldiers should die in war.

Now, before you fly off the handle and send one of Insitu’s unmanned aircraft to bomb my house, I’m going to lay a bit of foundation.

I’m a disabled veteran who’s served proudly in two branches of the U.S. military. I was in the Army– on the ground– in Operation Desert Storm. My unit was a combat hospital, and I have first hand experience with the stomach sickening experience that is war. So no, I’m not coming at you with some crazy disconnected viewpoint from an Ivory tower. I’m coming at you from the view of someone who was wearing those “boots on the ground.”

And yet, I’d say something at stupid and ignorant as “our soldiers should die in war?”

Yes. Because without that single fact, the toll of war will be so much worse, both physically and spiritually. Continue Reading »

For many people, writing is a therapy. I know that I’m one of those people and I always feel somewhat better when I find other people for whom that’s true as well. Reading the words of people like Morgan makes me feel more normal.

One thing I’ve learned about myself as time goes by…I write WAY more when I’m down and feeling crappy and bleh and stuff. When things are going right, I don’t ..well..write. I guess only one right/write can I handle at any moment. But I feel kinda remiss about not writing about the rightness, or increase of rightness at least, that’s going on for me. Especially when I’ve unloaded so much wrongness in this space!

We write more when we needs therapy than when we don’t. It’s a normal way to be.

Of course, it’s my brain telling me that it’s normal, so I’m not entirely sure that it can be trusted. Continue Reading »