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01/05/11
RINGING THE CHANGES AT CANDLEMAS
Filed under: General
Posted by: @ 6:41 am

I’M BUSY down at my little canyon-country office
doing website housekeeping & redesign. (Any suggestions,
just let me know . . . !)

One of my primary metaphysical concerns is what I
think of as the colonization of both Space & Time.

The former is to most of us by now painfully
obvious. For example, where I’m working right
at the moment, was first colonized by the Europeans
with the 1805-06 Lewis & Clark expedition. That’s
only two hundred years, five or six generations. But
more dramatic change could hardly be imagined.

Time, we give less attention to. Think of natural
time, how we mark the season, how we attune
to the rhythms of natural change.

I’ve had the privilege to live in a traditional
mountain farming community in the Alps for
many years, am still very close with what I
think of ‘my village’ there. One of the things
watched or meditated on very closely is the
movement of the traditional Catholic Calendar.
Especially how the later simply over a period
of two thousand years came into a much older
alpine culture — think Ötzi — and took over or
colonized the metaphysics of time.

This was just a forceful and violent act as
was the Jeffersonian utterly contradictory concept
of “Empire of Liberty.”

In short, one of the primary tasks of cultural
philosophy, as I see it, is to free ourselves of
this colonial baggage. Why? Because it distorts
and takes away, in my opinion, far more than
it gives.

Thinks of Christmas. For me, Winter Solstice Time,
and it is a time, that is, a period of one or two weeks,
like a special place in a cathedral of time, and not just
a sliver of time, or a day. I dislike the Christian colonization
of this special time for its own propagandistic ends,
well, to no end. Especially how the end-phase of
total commercialization lets us ‘drop dead’ after
New Year’s Day in a black hole of nothing. Take
down the tree. Turn off the lights. Return the gifts.

Well, what I did come to appreciate in the Alps, is
how the traditional solar calendar looks ahead.
A Solstice, one looks ahead to Candlemas, around
the 1st of February. This is about 1/8th of the solar
year. My sense is that this is an important rhythm.
A movement of change that is good to be aware
of. And perhaps to celebrate in some new way,
free of the corrupt and corrupting reach of Rome.

That is what this little meditation below is about:

RINGING THE CHANGES AT CANDLEMAS

Perhaps empty time
has structure,
just as wood has a grain.

The central moments
of the natural year
manifest much like
springs chanced
upon in a journey
of a thousand miles.

How shall we
rediscover
and celebrate
such things?

Drifting, cold, deep snow everywhere,
filling all the unseen cracks in the houses.
The furry snow bunnies are meeting up on
winter mountain, and the priests have run
out of money and have all gone home.

The children light candles for each
star in the night sky while the
grownups drink hot coffee, sit at
the round table, and speak in earnest
of getting rid of all the tanks.

Heavy metal, slow metal, cold metal,
the sound of bells, thousands
of bells, swaying back and forth,
a wave of joyful sound,

passing on from city to city
to city, some say,
as swiftly as
the turning of the Earth itself.

http://picture-poems.com/week7/freefall.html

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