Love and Mystery Flanking War in the Night Sky

Moon, Mars and Venus in Conjunction

Tonight, the Moon and the planets, Mars and Venus, are hunkering down together in the dark sky. The ancient Neo-Platonists personified the heavenly bodies, ascribing human characteristics to the moon and the planets. Although I know little of astrology,  I can resonate with this celestial event and, like viewing a Rorschach figure, I can see the poetic imagery of the goddesses, Selene and Aphrodite, and the god, Ares, seated together, emotionally conjoined, in triadic reconciliation. How would war and violence and disruption respond to the embraces of love, as imagined through Venus, the harmonizing bond of the universe, and the Moon, the source of nocturnal cycles and mystery?

Current event are rife with violence and disruption. Not only the news cycle of Middle Eastern terrorism and police profiling in America, but also the disjunctive effects of inculcating competitive and self-promoting values within many societies, globally. Where is love and what happened to mystery as antidotes to and containers of martial narcissism?

Let us pause in the sable night, under the gleam of a crescent moon, to consider  the cyclic, the rhythmic returning of life experience, the ebb and flow of relationships, beyond individual achievement and aggression.

Let us celebrate lunar mystery in receptive openness, harnessing Ares toward the aims of peace, love and reconciliation across our communities, across the earth.

The Simplicity and Humility of the One: Religion without Walls

Trinidad Bay CA

While hiking along the bluffs of College Cove near Trinidad CA, a bold idea struck me. What if the notion of God's simplicity, oneness and all-powerfulness were non-starters, just human ways to recreate living metaphors of kingship, fatherhood or hierarchy. What if oneness were more akin to the sea or the wind--the humblest and least structured of the elements. Maybe, the aim of worship is just to relax and dissolve, to loosen the grip of everyday fears and anxieties on us, kind of like being in the shavasana or corpse posture that seals and concludes many Western yoga classes. Why extol the powerful and transcendent when a unifying breath or a dissolving immersion into the sea sends us into a healthier and more harmonious state?

Perhaps the Shabbat of Judaism is a mirror of and a pathway to this state of simple unity and restoration. Complexity and structure may surf on the wind and water, emerging from the primordial and fluid oneness. We, created in the image of the Divine, might alter our lifetime goals, if being like God were similar to merging with the breath or the ocean or taking Shabbat or lying in shavasana.

After experiencing this inverted intuition about the Divine, I returned to the hiking trail. I met a couple seated in rickety portable chairs right next to a verdant grove of Sitka Spruce. We talked about how these bluffs were like a church or synagogue or mosque without walls. One of the two said that he had written a poem entitled, "Holy Communion" about this very spot where they were sitting.

A religion without walls is a turning inward toward simple peace and a humble turning outward toward community--a community of rocks, spruce and other fellow wayfarers.