Christmas Spirit Shake It Up

Christmas Spirit Shake It Up

Do spiritual entities we believe in need corporeal presences?

Maybe ... then again, maybe not.

Over the years the Coke company has managed to come up with some excellent marketing campaigns. Recently they commissioned Train for a Christmas song to be used in some of their Christmas advertisements called Shake Up Christmas. You can purchase the whole song on I Tunes. I have featured a sound byte of some of the songs lyrics above with a little holiday ornament eye candy. I am doing this because I found this song plucked a huge chord within me.

"I know your out there. I hear your reindeer. I see the snow where your boots have been."

-Train Shake Up Christmas 2010

YES VIRGINIA THERE IS A SANTA CLAUS

It awakened my thoughts about a non-religious but spiritual figure, Santa Claus. Of course the modern Santa Claus is based on Sinterklaase who was created to honor Saint Nicholas. This means that Santa Claus is not entirely devoid of any religious significance. That said, the lyrics in the sound byte reflect on the fact that something can be quite real with or without clear physical proof.

The most read editorial in the world is the famous "Yes Virginia there is a Santa Claus" see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes,_Virginia,_there_is_a_Santa_Claus

a brief excerpt from this stunning piece of writing:

"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy" - Francis Pharcellus Church The Sun 1897

It is worth reading the whole editorial every once in awhile.

Whatever spiritual figure or figures you believe in, does it really matter if they actually had a physical presence?

Of course it matters. ... But ... then again, maybe not.

My young niece recently participated for the first time in her church's annual Children's Christmas Pageant by singing in her Junior Choir. Parents and relatives of the the young children participating in the Pageant are allowed to come to the dress rehearsal just before the service and therefore obtain front row seats in a church that will have standing room only by the time the actual pageant and service begin. Sitting through the dress rehearsal and than the actual Christmas Pageant and mass means you will be in church for about three hours. This gives you a lot of time to reflect on inspirational and spiritual things.

Just before the beginning of the service the ushers asked if all sitting but fit gentleman could give up their seats and stand along the walls of the church so that those who were older or infirm could be seated. Obviously this was a request that I could not resist but it turned out to have its own reward...

This is a very modern church which has dimensions side to side that are three times that of the distance from the front to back. It can hold at least five to six hundred people when not crowded. By standing up in the back I could see and marvel at the whole tightly packed assemblage of folks who had come out on a cold winter night to join together and practice their spiritual beliefs, confess their sins, and for at least an hour or two honor and share in the highest ideals of mankind.

THE CHRISTMAS TRUCE

Many modern Christian churches have included the practice of having members of the congregation shake hands and wish each other peace. On this Christmas eve the handshakes and greetings of peace from strangers reminded me of the story of the spontaneous Christmas truces that occurred along World War I trenches in 1914. Right in the middle of one of the most violent of modern wars the Christmas Spirit shone through and for one evening enemy combatants spontaneously sang carols to each other, exchanged gifts in no-man's land, played games of soccer, and and held joint memorial services for their recently dead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce

Does it really matter if our spiritual entities ever had a corporeal presence?

Maybe ... but maybe not.

ArcAngel Michael

ARC ANGEL MICHAEL

I have recently challenged myself to try and more systematically sort out my feelings about things more spiritual. HMMMM....... Let me see how many lifetimes do I have? If I had more than one I am sure it would not be enough so the whole task seems a little empty and pointless if you insist on finding The Answer. I have decided that I do not need to find The Answer but just enjoy the journey.

While I am going to try and stay playful, lighthearted, and mirthful I am also going to try and stay very respectful. If I cross the line and seem disrespectful I apologize it was not my intent.

I have an insatiable curiosity about everything. Deciding to examine spirituality is like being a kid in a candy store for someone with an insatiable curiosity. Every time you run into something that can serve as a source of new information you suddenly come across several others. If all you did was study just the Bible you could devout every waking moment of the rest of your life and still not grok it. And then there is the matter of needing time to learn celestial navigation, quantum mechanics, all the sports teams statistics, world history.............

I have only just started this journey but already I find that yesterday's awesome revelations often look simple-minded and naive. I think it may be fun to look back at some of these posts in the future and chuckle at how silly they seem. In the meantime I will just try to describe my gestalt of the moment.

Today's gestalt of the moment has to do with very specific Christian beliefs. For whatever reason I have no problem in believing in a creator that is an ultimate force for good. This makes it easy to believe in the Christian concept of God. Since the Holy Spirit is kind of ethereal, I can buy into believing in it as well. It is the Christian concept of Christ being both mortal and Divine that I am having trouble with. Of course this is a pretty central theme to being a Christian.

At the moment I am perfectly willing to believe that there was a man who lived around two thousand years ago who was as close to being divine as a man can get. Someday I might be willing to believe that a divine entity came and took the form of a man (while still being divine). I am just not sure I will ever be able to believe there was an entity who was both mortal and divine. It would be hugely cool and blissful to be able to join the club of believers. There are very few devout Christians I would not be proud to count as a friend. Maybe someday I will share in their beliefs, maybe not?

In the meantime my journey has re-introduced me to a Biblical figure that I can fully identify with and embrace, Arc Angel Michael. Arc Angel Michael is my kind of divine being. While he is both tolerant and just, he also relishes getting into a good righteous tussle. So for at least the immediate future I am going to embrace Saint Michael. I am going to try in my own humble way to join Saint Michael's army.

Formative Years A Background For My Girls

A FEW MEMORIES OF YOUTH
Double Click Pictures For Higher Resolution

Sorry folks this post is mostly for my daughters and myself. It will not be of much interest to most readers. My girls did not get to visit or know this side of their heritage as they were growing up. I have shared lots of verbal history with them but with the exception of when they were very young they have not had a chance to visit these places.

Below are pictures of the house that I grew up in from age 13. Not only did I grow up in it, but I invested between five hundred and one thousand hours a year in labor to help build it.  As a related aside, Miranda Lambert's  The House That Built Me can get me choked up.

All the stone in the house and in the landscaping was harvested by myself or my dad from old local farm foundations built out of the limestone readily available in the area.

REMODELING AN OLD FARMHOUSEMy folks started with an old farm house which they completely gutted and rebuilt. After stripping off all the walls, floors, ceilings and windows we redid all the electric wiring, windows, insulation, floors and walls. In addition to gutting and rebuilding the portion of the house that was originally built in the early 1900's, major additions and build-outs like dormers and bay-windows doubled the total square footage of the house. Everything was rebuilt to extremely high quality standards. The new windows were all top of the line Andersons. The sub-floors are all double half inch plywood with direction of the two layers rotated ninety degrees. The vertical walls and interior ceilings are all insulated to at least R20-R30 and the ceilings facing the outside elements are insulated to R30-R40. Instead of drywall the whole house was redone with rock lathe and then sand plaster. All new electric, heat detectors, intercoms, smoke detectors and centralized vacuum cleaning ports were installed.

All the major addition construction was done by contractors but all the demolishing and rebuilding of the old house was done one or two rooms at a time by family labor while we were living in the house. For approximately a year we had to have a mobile home set up next to the house so that we would always be guaranteed availability of heat, indoor plumbing and a working kitchen. I am sure that as a grown up I would have found all this very uncomfortable but as a kid it was like a year long camping trip right at home.




My folks started out with about forty acres and then purchased neighboring land until they owned around two hundred acres. This is the view from the fence line behind the house. The house sits at 2,200 feet on top of a ridge line halfway between Cazenovia and Hamilton (home of Colgate college) New York. Even enlarged it is hard to get an appreciation for the view but the distant horizon is about 30 miles away and in the winter the night lights of two local ski slopes can be seen about 20 miles away. This is looking west and there are pretty good sunsets. Nothing compared to those from the summit of Old Rag but probably better than 95% of the world gets to see on a daily basis.
Here you get a little bit of a glimpse of old barn which was converted to a three bay car garage.

Yee HAH. First snow for me this fall. Just a dusting but definitely first snow. While I was home a local news station had a contest going on for people to send in films of their best snow dances. This is skiing and snowmobiling country and while snow brings its share of misery it also brings lots of fun recreation and first snow is joyously welcomed by all those anxious to dust off their skis and tune up their snowmobiles. At some point over the next five months the snow banks in front of my parents home will reach a minimum of eight feet and if it is a record winter they might get to fifteen feet. Of course the snow depth in the fields never exceeds around three feet but because of blowing winds the plows have to plow back snow almost every day and the banks just build up bigger and bigger until a big thaw comes along.

The next picture is a look up the road in front of my folks home. Our nearest neighbor lives in this direction. They are about twice the distance away as you can see in this shot. Too the right is the house and the thirty mile view. In my youth the left side of the road had five hundred acres of commercial Christmas tree farm which in turn bordered on five square miles of State Forest. I was able to get a lot of winter work cutting and dragging hundreds of Christmas trees out to large flat bed trucks in the fall. For about three years I spent about six hundred to one thousand hours a year earning around $2.85 per hour trimming these same Christmas trees.

Christmas Tree Trimming And The Sound Of The Wind

I would go from tree to tree one row at time. Sometimes I would have the company of another tree trimmer but most often it was just me and nature. There is almost a perpetual breeze of five to ten miles per hour blowing around my parents home. This wind and the other sounds of nature were often my only company. I can not explain it but this is where I learned to listen to the song of the wind. It speaks to me at a very deep level. I say speaks because it definitely feels like it is communicating to me but not in a way that I have any language to explain. Not having the constant sound of the wind singing to me is one of the things I miss the most living here on the flat lands of the mid-Atlantic. Being able to hear the breezes and winds sing is one of the things that gives me great comfort and rejuvenation during my circuits on Old Rag. The first time I heard Allen Menken's and Steven Schwartz's Colors of The Wind I was alone with my I-Phone and the song touched a very deep part of my soul. I cried up a storm of ecstatic tears.

.

When I was about 25 I vacationed with some Sperry Univac coworkers of the same age on a car camping vacation to western national parks. It was fascinating to me that when we were in the Dakota Badlands my coworkers who had grown up in the Long Island suburbs confessed they were incredibly uncomfortable, stressed, having trouble sleeping with the wide open spaces and with no signs or sounds of other humans. The very reasons I was feeling relaxed, comfortable, rejuvenated and happy was the very thing that made them feel stressed and uncomfortable. I had never really been conscious of how different and even weird my formative years had been. Being totally alone way out in the backcountry feels like being home to me.

.

During my early school days I was picked up by a station wagon school bus that would pick up about five outlying kids and then drive us to a point where we would transfer to the classic big yellow school bus. Because of drifting snow on our road there would be days when only those on the station wagon school bus route would have an official snow day. Unfortunately my Dad would always make sure that he would get us to school on his way to work in Syracuse.

.
.

.

Below is a picture of main street Cazenovia the town I consider my hometown. Even though the hamlet of Erieville is just three miles away from my folks house and Cazenovia is nine, Cazenovia is where I went to school, where our church was and were we shopped so I consider it my home town. Before my parents could afford to buy the home shown above we rented various homes all within the Cazenovia School district so from first grade through graduation from high school I attended Cazenovia Central Schools with mostly the same 130 plus class mates. When I would walk down these streets in my youth I knew 80% of the people I would see on the street along with pretty deep backgrounds on their friends and family. This is a town whose local paper used to have announcements about children returning home to visit with their parents. "Bobby Look will be visiting his parents for Thanksgiving." Of course there are downsides to everyone knowing so much about everybody else but one of the pluses is that as a kid of even nine or ten I would often bicycle to a friend's home three to eight miles away and both I and my parents knew that there were watchful eyes that would pick up a phone if anything was amiss or I was up to any mischief.

http://www.cazenoviachamber.com/

.

.

.

From first grade until now Saint Peters Episcopal of Cazenovia church was my parents place of worship. I have incredibly fond memories of my times as a choir boy in what was a fun and very good junior choir. I was a member of this junior choir from age seven until about age twelve. We had very wonderful and creative junior choir directors who made sure our little group had a lot of fun and produced some pretty good singing. I remember that in third grade I saw a TV show about the Vienna Boys choir after which I harbored a dream that I could find a way to become a member. After sixth grade I became more interested in sports and left the junior choir but those years of having fun and producing music with close friends were very special times. Wearing the choir robes and the silver crosses with the different colored lanyard ribbons(color represented your years in the choir) was kind of cool too.

I include the next picture as an example of the size of the hundreds of trees I planted as eighteen inch saplings in my early teens.

Good old Cazenovia High School. It does not show up well in this picture but what is now Cazenovia Middle School is attached in the back right of the picture. In my youth what is now a Middle School was the Elementary and had grades K-6 and the high school building contained 7-12. The two buildings are attached by a common kitchen facility. Despite its small town status it was a special institution. My graduating high school class of 130 plus had seven National Merit semi-finalists (including me). I was told by my local representative that through his office I had a guaranteed entrance to West Point if I wanted it. I often wonder how my life would have gone if I had chosen the military academy route. At the time I had no idea about how special either of these two things were. In my mind they were just things that normally happened to high school kids that did well in school. It was not until I was raising two high school children of my own that the light bulb went on.

The next picture is of Tuscarora Reservoir AKA Erieville Lake. My parents home sits on top of the hills on the right hand horizon.

This is a picture of the community pier on Cazenovia Lake. During the summer months this park serves the role of a pool and I took swimming lessons all the way up through Senior Life Saving. I am not sure if they still do it but a popular activity/test for the advanced swim class was to swim from the pier to the other side of the lake and back. This is about a total distance of two miles. Not in this picture but just up the lake shore to the right is Willow Bank Yacht club. This is where I learned to sail, Swordfish, Sunfish, Comets, Lightnings and Flying Dutchman.

http://www.sailfd.org/sails_fd_president_preface.php

http://www.sunfishclass.org/

Quite often the lake is covered in white caps.

During my youth my parents belonged to the Cazenovia Ski Club which while it is called a private ski club it is better to think of it as a co-op where everyone pitches in to groom slopes, make snown, man lifts and so forth. There are minimal volunteer hours and membership fees that keep it running but you can ski for as long and as often as you want for no charge. I skied intensely here for one year when I was six and then discovered hockey at age seven and did not go skiing again until after I graduated from college. We had an outdoor hockey rink that the town operated and there was no charge for being on the ice and it was not unusual for me to spend 20-30 hours on ice per week depending on game schedules ect. My siblings and parents did make use of the ski club though. One of the few things I regret a little is that I did not avail myself of the Cazenovia Ski Club because of my single minded focus on hockey.

Here is a link to Cazenovia Ski Clubs web site:

http://www.skicaz.com/cazskiclub/

Time To Learn To Fly

TIME TO LEARN TO FLY
(IF FEAR DOES NOT GET IN THE WAY)

Just before I was married at 32 my life was an intense whirlwind of work, rock climbing almost every weekend, and skating and martial arts during the week. I met my ex during a public skating session and a new whirlwind began. I was married nine moths later and my first daughter was born ten months after the marriage. Between two very demanding careers and raising two wonderful daughters there was no time for much else for the next 22 years.

During this time my old climbing partner and still very good friend Pete took up hang gliding. He became very good at it as in launching from mountain tops and flying on thermals for both hours and tens of miles. Just last weekend he had a Red Tail Hawk fly feet from his wing tip for a few minutes. I have always had a fear of heights but it did not prevent me from rock climbing hundreds of feet off the ground. I am hoping it will not keep me from serious hang gliding thousands of feet off the ground either. I will have to follow my heart and see how things go. I am lucky that I will have Pete to guide my progressive learning.

I have a feeling that this will be another activity that will capture my soul:

High Flight by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth Of sun-split clouds...and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of...wheeled and soared and swung High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there, I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung My eager craft through footless halls of air. Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace Where never lark, or even eagle flew. And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

THE LEAF

About a quarter mile up the Ridge Trail from the now closed old upper lot I decided to take a break and sit next to the trail on a boulder. Almost all the leaves were off the trees but there was an occasional oak holding on to some leaves. As I was enjoying my break on the bolder a gust of wind came up and around 300 leaves came drifting down to the ground from the top of a tall oak. After the gust, the air was still and I was looking up marveling at the tops of the trees when a single solitary leaf way up near the top of the canopy, highlighted against bright blue sky, broke off and started a slow drifting journey to the ground. I was fascinated by the way it floated on the air. At times, hanging motionless. Its slow downward journey seemed to take forever. At the end of its journey it landed gently in my lap. I was filled with wonder and glee.
Thank you Yahweh.

ONE OF THOSE SIMPLE BUT SPECIAL MOMENTS ON THE MOUNTAIN

Litter As My Muse

Wonderful serene unspoilt nature then,

Empty plastic water bottles, orange peels, egg shells, bananna skins and tissues suddenly fill the view.

Tranquility is interrupted by just the briefest of tiny flashes of anger.

Capturing that flash with my emotion camera I put it in photoshop and amp it up to maximum just for fun.

.

I feel:

MURDEROUS RAGE!!!!!!!!!!
FIERY ANGER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

.
I think:

.

I WILL FIND THE GUILTY

.

I bellow:

.

"I WILL GRIND THEIR BONES TO MAKE MY BREAD!!!!

AND I WILL EAT THEIR LITTLE DOGS TOO!!!

HAW!!!!! HRHHH!!! HRHHH!!! "

The moment passes.

Hikers approach.

"OH HELLO THERE"

"HOW'S IT GOING"

"NICE DAY IS'NT IT? "

;-)

CHARACTERS WELCOME

As I start this Blog.
.
For a fleeting moment, maybe a Dulcinea.
.
Oops she is called away.
POOF.
.
Sancho and Rucio are in need of their siesta. Yet, I am not tired.
.
The quest beguiles, captivates and energizes my mirthful soul to play.