All posts by Charles

GeekWorld, Mountains, Plants, Shadow Mountain, Weather +Climate

Day to day

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Beltane and the Shadow Mountain Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Great Sol. Light on the Needles of the Lodgepoles out my window. Black Mountain clear against blue Sky. The Elk Calves and their Moms on Lower Shadow Mountain Drive. That big Mama Bear and her two Cubs on Warhawk. It’s kiddy rearing time for our wild neighbors. Airline Websites. Travel details. Early Spring weather. Waiting for the sudden jump to Summer. Dandelions. Those three Elk Bulls. Waiting on their arrival. Soon. Travel agents. Crows and Ravens. Canada Jays. That fat Chipmunk. The Rabbits who live under the Shed. Mountain Lions.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Bear Cubs

One brief shining: In the Spring here in the Mountains Flowers emerge later Trees leaf out later but the Elk birth their Calves, the Mule Deer their Fawns, the Moose their Calves, the Mountain Lion their Kittens, the Black Bears their Cubs, the Fox their Kits while the Mountain Streams rush down, carrying the Water of Snow Melt and later Rains, while the temperatures fluctuate between warm and cold, while the days become longer and the nights shorter the Mountains and the Forests become a nursery for our wild neighbors.

 

In the morning I turn off my electric blanket, close the bedroom window, pick up my life alert button from its charging station, unhook my cellphone from its cable, turn off the oxygen concentrator, and go out into the next room for my hearing aid. I take my first pill of the day, synthroid for my funky thyroid, washing it down with some tap water. I set my phone’s alarm for one hour after the time I took they synthroid. That alerts me to take my morning meds which include my chemotherapy. Grabbing my phone I head upstairs to write Ancientrails in the home office. I often finish around the time my alarm rings, some days, like today writing takes longer.

Today I had to strip the sheets from the bed so Ana can put clean sheets on, arrange the blankets. Also I had to refill my seven day plastic pill containers. Took up some of the time I would have been writing.

I’m very aware of how dependent on electricity I am. Blanket. Charging for my phone, my life alert button, my hearing aid. The oxygen concentrator. And, medications. I’m alive thanks to the batches of pills I throw down each morning and evening. Life with cancer and hypertension. Life up high. 8,800 feet.

Bear comes next week to do the annual maintenance on my Kohler generator. It kicks in when heavy snows or lightning strikes take out my feed from C.O.R.E. Without it I would have no well-water, no cooking on my induction stove, no lights, no computer access. Electricity is the chi for my day-to-day life.

My life is quite a distance from the hibernating Bear in a rocky cleft or the Mountain Lion in their den. I am softer, less resilient than they are. Even though I can find food perhaps more easily, I require an automobile for the task while they rely only on their paws and their instinct. Which of us is more likely to survive global warming?

 

Cooking, Judaism, Myth and Story, Sport, Travel

Worth the Journey

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Beltane and the Shadow Mountain Moon

Monday gratefuls: The Rains. The cool nights. The Spanish Grand Prix. Those Nuggleheads. Max Verstappen, a phenom. Royal Gorge Railroad. Another rail journey with Tom. Israel trip becoming complicated. A bit. The Great Sol breaking up the gray Sky with Light. Brother Mark photographing his time in Hafar. Looks like a Nebraska small town with sand and Muslim architecture. Oh, and Arabic. Travel. Korea. A busy June. Life’s picking up its pace for me. And, why not?

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Cool nights

One brief shining: Tried to figure out a way to make Chicken tenders edible so I got out the tenderizer and smacked them a couple of times each, put a poultry brine in a gallon Ziploc and stuffed them in, let them sit in the fridge for a couple of days, put chorizo to cooking in my cast iron skillet, added the drained Chicken tenders and some cut up cooked potatoes, a short time for the Chicken tenders to heat through, then plated them with the potatoes and some collard greens.

 

Turned out well. The chorizo spiced up the bland Chicken tenders and the smacking and the brining plumped them up. Not overcooked, seasoned. A good meal.

Ate it while watching the second half of the Spanish Grand Prix. Max Verstappen drives to the front of the field from the pole, builds up enough of a lead to ensure that a pit stop won’t cost him his position and starts lapping the field. He makes it look so, so easy. Yet he’s so far in front of the best drivers in the world, the perfect union of man and Red Bull machine. Red Bull has won all of the Grand Prix’s so far this season, Sergio Perez has won two and Verstappen the rest. Dominance. It won’t last though. In a sport as demanding as Formula 1 it never does.

 

Looks like I may be in Israel on my own for five days before the group tour starts. I plan to fly in on October 27th, check in early to the group hotel. If a group trip to Petra happens before the trip, I’ll be on that, too. If not, more time to experience this ancient city. I love being on my own, wandering where I want, finding this and that, meeting locals, eating street food or in out of the way restaurants. This will be my first time in the Middle East, a place I studied extensively while in seminary and has been constantly present in my life since Joseph deployed to Bahrain, Mark started teaching in Saudi Arabia, and Kate and I joined CBE.

With me on this journey will be memories of New Testament stories like the Mount of Olives, the sites of Jesus’ crucifixion, burial and resurrection (The Church of the Holy Sepulcher), the garden of Gethsemane-that stained glass window in Alexandria First Methodist where my family sat all those years-as well as the Dome of the Rock where Muhammed landed after his night journey and then ascended to heaven. Jewish inflections too. The first temple site is coterminous with the Dome of the Rock. The wailing wall. The holocaust inspired push to create a contemporary homeland for the Jews. So much else of which I am ignorant.

Not to mention the crusades. A key focus of medieval piety. And early anti-Muslim bigotry. Lots of historical streams running this through this one spot on the globe.

Worth the journey.

 

Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Torah

The Hardest Problem

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Beltane and the Shadow Mountain Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Kate, her memory, her sweet and blessed memory. Jon, a memory. Another cool Night, good sleeping. 41 this morning. Spanish Grand Prix. Nuggets game 2 tonight. Another gray Morning with Clouds slipping over the peak of Black Mountain. Reading the Bacchae and the Iceman Cometh for monologues. Dionysus. God as metaphor. Consciousness. The hard problem. The waning Shadow Mountain Moon. Ingenuity, the little helicopter that could. On Mars. American space exploration. Yes. The James Hubble.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Consciousness, hard problem or not

One brief shining: So the brain takes in information from the senses to predict how to survive in the next few moments its job for millions of years and in the process has to build a map of reality-remember though the map is not the territory-and then move our enfleshed DNA to find food, hide from a predator, find a willing partner for reproduction all the while keeping track of its own reactions to better enhance its performance and in the process creating a narrator who can sift through and identify learnings, help in non-immediately crucial tasks like talking and laughing and wondering thus creating the Self?

 

Been having lots of various ideas over the last week or so. One of them tentatively expressed above. A summary of this article in Quanta, What Is the Nature of Consciousness?. Then a building notion, one nurtured over years of skepticism tempered by yearning. About God. Got this new idea from a book I’ve bought but not read, God Is Here. By a Reconstructionist Rabbi. Its thrust is to update metaphors about God. Fair enough. They need it. But, I realized. What if even an update has the wrong end of the stick? Makes more sense to me that God is the metaphor. Satan, too, for that matter. As Shiva and Vishnu and Brahma and Ganesh and Kali. Allah. The Tao. Chi. Prana. Soul.

Metaphors for this ages old dance between organism and environment. What is Fire? Water? Earth? Air? Death? Love? Sex? God as a metaphor for the wrestling organisms do with a problem even harder than consciousness, how to survive in an often hostile world, a world accessed only through the mediation of the senses, a world we cannot know directly-Kant’s ding an sich, the thing in itself-yet in which we must move and love and have our becoming. A mystery compounded of mystery. The ineffable world critical to our next action. Did that work last time? Why? Will it work again? Why? Is there a way to optimize my/our reactions to ensure our life? At least for now?

One of my favorite Torah stories: Jacob wrestling with the Angel at the Jabbok Ford. Yes. Our moment to moment struggle. Leaning into behaviors that have served us in the past yet finding ourselves blocked by new circumstances, ones inscrutable based on our learnings to this point. Or Abraham and Isaac. What must we be willing to give up to continue. To make our next actions a bit more likely to avoid serious injury or death? And, critically for God as metaphor, who or what says this behavior is the right one? That is, the one most likely to advance our DNA into the future?

Guess this work is appropriate to Sunday morning. Would not preach in a Presbyterian church, but a UU church or a Reconstructionist synagogue might hear it.

Family, Politics, Shadow Mountain, Travel, US History

Small Town Life

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Beltane and the Shadow Mountain Moon

Saturday gratefuls: Mark deep in the sands of the Arabian Peninsula. Mary coming here on June 16th. Korea. My son’s new apartment. Huge. Working on details for Israel pre-tour. A gray Sky. An El Nino on its way. Better weather for us here in the Mountains. Acting class. My monologue. Hunting for restaurants in Jerusalem. Traveling. An Ellis family trait. Marina Harris. Ana. Furball Cleaning. Taking myself out for breakfast. Aspen Perks. Reading Birchers. Finished Fever in the Heartland. Reading One Thousand Nights and the Mahabarata. Took a break from Korean, back to it today.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: This year in Jerusalem.

One brief shining moment: Gray skies put a shroud over Black Mountain and the bowed Branches of the Lodgepoles seem subdued this weather so different from June of years past when hot dry Winds raced across Shadow Mountain drying out the Grasses and the Needles of the Lodgepoles pushing Smokey the Bear to move his pointing paw into the high or extreme Fire danger positions now we Mountain dwellers can relax a bit as his paw remains where it has been since Winter-on low.

 

Taking a break here. Off to Aspen Perks with Birchers.

Met Murphy and Pete again. I slid into the booth with them. Murphy’s a South Carolina transplant as of four years ago. A handyman, but obviously well educated. He’s got a New England accent, slight, but as he said his wife reminds him he was lucky enough to marry a Southern gal. She’s a horse trainer currently back in South Carolina working with horses they still own. They sold their property but kept some horses. Near a little town just across from Augusta, Georgia in South Carolina.

Pete’s around my age, maybe a bit older. He’s a native Coloradan. Born in Denver. A happy right winger to Murphy’s gregarious lefty. Just before we got up to go I said my son was in the military. Pete had indicated he was, too. Yeah I said I was an anti-Vietnam war protester and my boy goes in the military. Pretty sure I saw Pete wince but he was headed up to pay and we were all leaving. Some stories remain fraught. Will have to have that conversation with Pete next time.

Nice to make a random connection up here. Like with Kat. Whom all three of us agreed is a top of the line waitress. She warned me, while they could hear, that these two are dangerous. Small town life.

 

Almost getting ready to spend real money on the Israel trip. I’ll go 6 days early. Explore Jerusalem on my own and take a before the tour starts trip to Petra with others who want that as a side journey. First step is an airline ticket. Then travel insurance. After that the two installments for the group tour.

 

Saw the new apartment near Osan. 4 bedrooms. Looks even bigger with little to no furniture in it. My daughter in law sent me a video. Murdoch followed her often showing up in the shots.

 

With Birchers and Fever in the Heart Land I’m beginning to get a great historical perspective on the odd and fraught political moment in which we find ourselves. A clear lesson is that there is no underestimating the darkness of the human heart when it fills with fear and narrows its intake valves.

 

Health, Sport

Cancer News

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Beltane and the Shadow Mountain Moon

Friday gratefuls: Cool nights. Good sleep. Those Nuggets! Jokic and Murray. The Spanish Grand Prix. OK, shoot me, I can be a guy, too. Mussar. New metaphors for God or God as metaphor. Yourself as metaphor. Cancer. Griff and neuro-muscular massage. Diane in Ohio. Mark O. in Aspen with Dennis. Brother Mark exercising his eye with his camera. Mary coming here in mid-June. Jon Bailey, mobile car detailer. June 10. Getting details done on Israel trip, Korea. Brining tenderized Chicken tenders. Disinfecting my cutting boards in the sunlight. Seoah’s influence. Three days with little on the calendar. House chores. The Grand Prix. Like that.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Shadow Mountain Home with its art mostly hung.

One brief shining: You know sports basketball motor sports baseball football watching somebody else do something they are really, really good at can become an all consuming self-absorbing activity so passive so self-denying what would anybody watch me do that I am really, really good at you know pay good money sit in the nosebleed seats to see me handle my fingers on a keyboard I don’t know or sit down and listen to someone, listen hard for the big prize maybe sit in my chair reading with great concentration no I don’t think so.

 

For all you cancer watchers out there. New PSA is in. Still undetectable. Testosterone well below 10. I feel great, more energy. Lost five pounds. Kristie, oncology p.a., says the drug holiday looks like a go sometime in August, starting probably before I take off for Korea. The drug holiday is necessary because the androgen deprivation therapy drugs I’m on, Erleada and Orgovyx, wane in effectiveness if you’re on them too long. During the drug holiday my testosterone will bounce back which should give me more energy. Although. It also gives my dormant cancer cells food.

The question then becomes how well the drugs have pushed those cells into quiescence. Apparently in rare cases the PSA never starts to rise again. A sort of cure. That was the concept in radiating the two possible sites of active cancer in my lymph node and on my T3 vertebrae. Kill those active sites and if the other, less energetic cells stay quiet my PSA may stay down. Possibly for ever. Not counting on that though I would be pleased of course. The other benefit of killing those active sites is that even if my PSA does start to rise it should not be as soon as it would have been if those sites still existed.

Even if my PSA stays down for a good while, I’ll still have to have regular blood draws for PSA levels. Because my cancer will never be gone now, but it might stay quiet for a long time. May it be so.

 

Thought about going down to Brooks Tavern last night to watch the Nuggets game. Covid wariness and my general evening inertia found me following the game through regular updates on my phone. This could be the start of something big for the home team.

Feelings, Fourth Phase, Great Wheel

Lunacy

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Beltane and the Shadow Mountain Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Kristie. Prostate Cancer. Orgovyx. Erleada. Drug holiday. Chatbotgpt4. A marvel. Adirondack chairs. Cool nights. Whacking all the moles. My son, working hard. Always. Advocates at AARP Advantage. Psilocybin. Gabe’s new yellow Converse tennies. Murdoch. Kep, my sweet boy. Kate, her memory a blessing. Jon, a memory. Hearing aid hard reset. Amy, my audiologist, following her soccer world to New Zealand. KFC. Mark in Hafar, Saudi Arabia. Getting ready for summer. Diane in the Hoosier State. Fever in the Heartland. A must read for all Hoosiers. Hate. Demagoguery. Trump was not the first.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: The night Sky, the Shadow Mountain Moon with Spica, the brightest star in Virgo. May 30th.

One brief shining: Entering a zone of yearning a place captured by that German Romantic painting Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog if you turned him around right now he would have my face my hand would be on his cane and I would be happy with all that hair while looking at the Mountains in the distance in my case the Continental Divide wondering what crossing this threshold will bring into my life and eager to find out.

 

Here’s an aha you may have had long ago. Probably did. Insights don’t come on any particular schedule. The Gregorian calendar, which fixed the problems of the Julian. Ubiquitous now. The calendar of business. The standardization of the year. But at what cost? A heavy one, I think. It abstracts time, pretending we can define a day, a particular day, with a number and a month’s name, a so-called year. Of course we can. We do. But this is only a framing of natural cycles, ordering them according to our need for precision instead of admitting the messiness of accounting for time using the phases of the Moon as Lunar calendars do.

If we continued to use Lunar calendars, we would be attuned to the Moon, to the night Sky. We would have to acknowledge with the addition of leap months that time has no precision as well as no real linearity. Each month the Moon waxes and wanes. And it continues this lighting up and darkening down every time our Earth turns. We can walk outdoors and see its dark new Moon phase or wonder at its brightest fullness during the Autumn. Each lunar month the Moon repeats while on the Earth it graces with its lambent light seasons change. Then themselves repeat.

A Lunar calendar would remind us each month of the Moon’s presence its current phase. Then we could notice its phases against the backdrop of Spring’s build up to the growing season. See the Moon rise over Corn and Wheat fields, over Gardens lovingly tended. Watch as the Harvest Moon again shines down on the combines and the Corn pickers. Feel the Winter season’s Solstice that dark night and its relationship to the phase of the Moon.

We would once again feel our lives writ in the language of the Great Wheel. Birthed in the Spring. Growing strong and tall in life’s Summer. Maturing in the Harvest time. Becoming Sage and Elder as whiteness comes to our hair and to our fields. Then repeats in our grandchildren and their children until the fallow season for the Earth herself.

Acting, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Judaism, Shadow Mountain

What a character

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Beltane and the Shadow Mountain Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: Alan. Noi. Lid. Joan. Marilyn. Rebecca. Tal. The character study acting class. Deborah and Abby, too. My passport, expiring 2029. The Conifer Cafe, tamale and egg with green chili. Ode, trippin’ thru Colorado. Psilocybin spores. On their way. Happy Camper. How do I feel. Or, personal inventory. The amphitheater at CBE. Finding a hermit character. Stretching the Self. My son and his wife. Murdoch. My dishwasher. Refrigerator. Induction stove. Sink. Solar Panels. Mini-splits, heat pumps.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Being There with Peter Sellars

One brief shining: We sat in a semi-circle in the social hall of Congregation Beth Evergreen the Rabbi’s son teaching us to move as an ensemble, to balance the space, and how to sit with a cracked egg running down our head loosening each part of the body it touched, running our tongues around our mouths to taste our last food, sniffing trying to smell ourselves, putting our hands on our knees to notice how it felt to the touch, listening listening listening as usual I could not hear much, finally opening our eyes and seeing something we hadn’t seen before looking looking looking closing our eyes and drawing it in our mind’s eye a Lee Strasberg exercise outside the usual Stanford Meisner work Tal prefers.

 

Yes. Back at it again. Acting class. Third one with Tal. I skipped the Winter semester. This one is character study. Met Noi a local artist and photographer. Lid, who identifies as non-binary and has their happy place in a city park in Nebraska. Alan is in it, coming in a bit late and when asked what his happy place was said having breakfast with Charlie. Joan Greenberg, the author of several published novels including her most well-known, I Never Promised You A Rose Garden. Like Alan a long time member of CBE. Rebecca a former oil and gas lawyer is also in the class as she was in the two other classes I took. Deborah and Abby also in the class were not there last night.

At some point we all have to pick a character. Tal last night went through archetypes often used in playwriting classes: the Caregiver, the Hero, the Sage, the Jester, the Outlaw, the Ruler, the Member, the Lover, the Creator, the Explorer. Alan would like to study Lear. I’m interested in a hermit character, a Chinese scholar/sage type. Wanting to explore myself and my current situation. Might work this character study into my planned Crossing the Threshold ritual on October 8th.

These classes push me into a different place. More emotional. More thoughtful about my body as an instrument of artistic expression. Into the Charlie who took many theater classes as an undergraduate. Who did modern dance. Acted in high school and seminary. Who went with the family to Stratford, Ontario many summers to Shakespeare on the Festival stage. Who had season tickets so many years to the Guthrie. All the memorable performances there. A place of modest discomfort sometimes. Growing edge.

BTW: my happy place is my home.

Acting, Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Great Wheel, Health, Hermitage, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Sport, Weather +Climate

Life in its brilliance and in its everdayness

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Beltane and the Shadow Mountain Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: My passport. The post office. Kristie today. Acting class tonight. The Heat and the Nuggets. The Monaco Grand Prix. Max Verstappen. Fernando Alonso. Esteban Oco. My son and his wife. Fever in the Heart Land. Thanks, Ode. A quiet, restorative Memorial Day. A good workout. Korea on the schedule. Israel getting closer to dialed in. Ecuador still in the planning phase. All the poems coming in from the Ancient Brothers. Ritual ideas.  Acting class tonight. Diane in Indiana.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Great Sol, lighting up a Shadow Mountain Morning

One brief shining: Or, the Great Soul, Sol, source of light, source of power, source and sustainer of life itself why shouldn’t the Human soul, the Animal soul, the Plant soul, the Mountain soul be like their progenitor brilliant, a source of sustenance and warmth, a source of chi, a source of energy, yet every so often eclipsed by the turning of our inner lives, still there yes, waiting only for what Jews call teshuvah, a return to the ohr, the light of the sacred within us and to our sacred path, this orbit around our true God.

 

Got to get going, pick up my passport from its safe spot at the Ken Caryl branch of Wells Fargo. Safety deposit box. In case of fire, down the hill. Going to eat breakfast out, come home and try to take down the last outstanding bill, then talk to Kristie, my oncology P.A.

I’ve succeeded in reducing $14,000 worth of medical bills to $240. A victory although one I shouldn’t have had to win. One refractory $429 bill. Turned over for collection. Nope. Have disputed it, am disputing it, will dispute it until they back down. Could tell you the story, but trust me it’s only about one hand not knowing what the other one is doing.

A day of life chores. You know the kind. They come up like whack a mole. As you finish off one round of them, another few arise. By 76 you’ve seen them come and go, talking of Michelangelo. Even the most persistent and troublesome of them get dealt with, fade into the blob of things past no longer necessary to consider. I wear my trousers rolled while whacking each mole.

 

I’m loving the Sunshine, the blue Sky, the warmth of approaching Summer. Thought  yesterday though. Would I love the summer without the backdrop of winter? Could I tell the good without the bad? Would I know beauty without the ugly? I know we wouldn’t need a word for justice without injustice. Rasputin belonged to a Russian sect that believed the more you sinned the more God was able to bestow grace upon you. That’s the sort of rationalization that makes for a strange life.

 

Nuggets versus the Heat. I’m excited. Might try to find a tv package that will let me watch the NBA finals. I love basketball. And F1. Watched the whole Monaco Grand Prix yesterday. Wow. That Max Verstappen. Is. A. Monster.

 

Asia, Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Hermitage, Judaism, Korea, Politics, Shadow Mountain, US History, World History

Introversion. Remembering.

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Beltane and the Shadow Mountain Moon

Monday gratefuls: The Indy 500. The Monaco Grand Prix. Grandsons. Granddaughters. Kate, missing her this Memorial Day. May be for those fallen in war, yes, but I take it too for those fallen from that most terminal of diseases: life. A second bright blue Sky in a row. The thirst quenched Lodgepoles green and healthy. Aspens beginning to Leaf out. The Iris emerging from the Soil. Kate’s Lilacs have bud’s. Korea. A high apartment. Moving day for my son and his wife. Baseball, America’s game, like basketball, now played all over the world. Neither though as big as soccer.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Gabe, his sweet smile

One brief shining: Sometimes I doubt my introversion since I enjoy being with people, talking, listening, laughing, learning then I have a week like last week Dismantling Racism, lunch with Marilyn and Irv and Heidi, dogsitting Leo, getting Kep’s remains, Rabbi Jamie, then Rebecca, Leslie’s funeral, Ode and Dennis that night, a missed massage due to traffic delays in Evergreen, mussar, breakfast with Alan in Denver, three hard workouts, and then baseball with Gabe even with some down time interspersed the emotional intensity of last week drained my social battery, left me with no charge and I thought oh I see yes you introverted guy.

 

Glad to have a full day here on Shadow Mountain with nothing to do. Saturday the same helped but baseball wore me out all over again. The driving. All the people. Those hard seats. Dealing with parking. Yeah. Fun, sure. But also. Oh, my.

Days with nothing on the calendar shine for me. I can work on Ancientrails, cook for myself, maybe do some chores. Read. Watch a movie. Hike. I’ve begun too putting these on my calendar: go anywhere days. Also days with nothing in them but days I can get up in the morning and drive to Gunnison, see the Black Canyon. Stay overnight somewhere if I want. Short trips, beginning to see Colorado. None yet but coming up this summer.

Today has these elements: breakfast, workout. Watch the Monaco Grand Prix on F1 TV. Recorded. Make some lunch or not. Dinner if not. Start reading Fever in the Heartland. Thanks, Ode. Get outside some.

 

A word about Memorial Day. Imagine all the graves, all over the world. The dead from wars of all kinds. Colonial wars. Wars for land, for slaves, for God and country, blood and soil. Wars of liberation. Wars between Kings, between countries, between tribes. Economic wars where the winners scoop up all the wealth and leave hardly any for the gleaners who work in filling station convenience stores, bag groceries, run the cash register at Walmart, Petsmart, Subway. We speak here of lives cut short, lives worn down death coming from exhaustion and depression.

Dennis Ice. Richard Lawson. Others from my high school killed in Vietnam. So. Damned. Senseless. Those WW I and II veterans who lie in Europe in the fields of Normandy, in the Argonne Forest, along the Maginot line, in Germany and Italy and northern Africa. The victims of the Holocaust. Also memorialized here this day.

We remember of course to acknowledge sacrifice, yes, but can we also remember to learn? I hope so.

 

 

Colorado, Denver, Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Judaism, Mountains, Sport

October 8th. Baseball.

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Beltane and the Shadow Mountain Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Gabe. The Rockies. The Mets. Rockies win! 11-10. Driving down the hill again on a beautiful Colorado day. Back aching as I drove back after a lot of time in a non-comfy stadium seat. Ancient Brothers this morning, poetry on aging, on celebrating and reflecting aging. I plan to post these poems over time here. Rains have paused. The Streams have begun to catch up, not quite so swollen. A catch in my throat as I crested the last Mountain on I-70 before the Continental Divide becomes visible. Home.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: The games men and women play

One brief shining: Why Gabe asked did we have to leave the Rockies game at 3 well I said I haven’t spoke to my son and his wife since they left Hawai’i and they have can talk at 5:30 pm Colorado time which means I have to take you home, drive back home up the hill before then. Oh. He said.

 

The Ancient Brothers responded to my request for poetry. Lots of poetry discovered and read. About aging. About living until you die. About the common fate we share with the families of all living beings. Reading or reciting as Paul does so wonderfully gave these poems the shape and resonance of both the poet’s voice and the Ancient Brother who read them. A special and powerful morning.

In part adding possible content for the October 8th Crossing the Threshold ritual I plan here at my house with Rabbi Jamie. Trying to figure out how to honor and name this time of life for men, men who have gone past career and the raising of family with health and vitality yet who have no cultural road map, no role to help guide their Winter season.

In part digging into each Ancient Brother’s experience and claiming of this time, a time I referred to as the best time of my life. To nods. Yet it is a mystery, a cultural lacunae. Undefined and for many confusing, dispiriting.

With your help perhaps we can figure out a ritual to help us move from the time of succeeding and achieving, of building and developing, of nurturing children to the time of… What? Fading out? Easing into oblivion. Or something more, something richer and deeper. If you have ideas for such a ritual, please forward them to me. If you have more poetry, other content that might either be read during such a ritual or inform it, please send them along.

Also. If you want to come on October 8th, this is an invitation. The more we have the better the moment will be.

 

Picked up Gabe a Rockies cap stuck amidst his luxuriant locks bought for him by Uncle Joe last year at a game. We drove to Coors Field, found parking, got into our shaded seats and proceeded to eat hot dogs, peanuts, and ice cream. One game a  year is more than enough given that diet.

Speaking of rituals. Going to a baseball game, at a stadium. A most American though hardly only American outing. Ticket takers. Seats cascading down toward the green diamond. Blue Sky above. Vendors with hot dogs pretzels beer cotton candy Rockies shirts baseball bats ice cream in small plastic Rockies’ hats. All manner of folks in and around, up and down. Young mothers with babes in bjorns. Grandpas with grandsons. Those certain late 20’s, early 30’s women who have the body and aren’t afraid to share it. The loud and beery regular fans. America, the mixture of all for all. In that sense so wonderful.