All posts by Charles

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Judaism, Talmud

Seven years, five months, 26 days to go

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Winter and the Future Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Kate removing my sutures. Shelly for a quick and relatively painless shot of Lupron. Ali Baba for great gyros, hummus. Those who built the mountain roads. Those who built and maintain the mountain power lines. Golden Solar for installing our solar panels.

Fourth day of Daf Yomi. Only seven years, 5 months and 26 days to go. I’ve always liked long books, long movies, long tv series. Daf Yomi has a similar resonance though its length puts it in a class all by itself. Well, wait. Not quite. Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the great Chinese classic novel, is well over 2,000 pages, too. It’s not, however, as dense and clever as the Talmud. It took a long while to read, but not years. Months.

Reading the Talmud, as a first-timer, is a challenging and intriguing experience. It swerves from topic to topic, sometimes in apparently unrelated ways, but seems to come back to a particular issue.

Let me give you an example. The major question since the first page has been when to recite the Shema: Hear o Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. (longer, but this is the essential verse.) The affirmation of monotheism is bedrock for Jewish faith and practice.

Reciting the Shema during the night, when to do it, has taken up the first four Talmudic pages. The questions are many. When is it night? When is it midnight? When is it morning? How do we know the three (or, maybe four) watches of the night? In a time before precise clocks these were urgent questions if reciting these prayers was critically important. And, their recitation was critically important.

In the discussion about how we know when it’s midnight, one rabbi answers that David got up at midnight to pray and study Torah. How did he know it was midnight? He hung his lyre by his bed and when the north wind blew on the lyre its sounds marked midnight. On the question.

But then the question becomes one of David’s piety. Raised, I suppose, by the fact that he got up at midnight to pray and study. Several paragraphs go back and forth on the question of his piety, then we return to the central issue, how do know when to recite the night time Shema?

This may sound dry, even Jesuitical (eh, Bill?), but it’s actually lively, full of stories and a certain kind of logic chopping that I’m familiar with from philosophy. In short, I’m liking it.

Better than a Lupron shot in the butt. Which I also got yesterday.

But wait. I can hear one of the Rabbi’s say, the Lupron shot was to save your life, how is reading the Talmud better than saving your life? Because its significance goes beyond life to matters of the soul.

This is tricky for me since my belief system shuttles away from particular traditions, but I recognize the questions and love the playfulness with which they are addressed. Reading Talmud for me, like reading Torah or the New Testament is a lesson in metaphor, analogy, not in prescriptions. More on this later, too.

Talmud

Daf Yomi

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Winter and the Future Moon

later Monday gratefuls: The Talmud, the extraordinary reach of Jewish history, CBE, Rabbi Jamie, Alan. Mussar. Kabbalah.

Because the time seemed propitious I’ve embarked on a seven and a half year journey called Daf Yomi. A Daf is both sides of a page, A and B, in the Talmud. Daf Yomi means “daily page.” It’s an old, old discipline of reading through the entire 2,711 pages of the Babylonian Talmud at the pace of Daf Yomi, a page a day.

A cycle begins every seven and a half years. Jews and other interested folks all over the world follow the Daf Yomi schedule. It’s easy in that Sefaria, an online library of Jewish traditional texts, has the entire Babylonian Talmud (there’s a Jerusalem Talmud, too) online. MyJewishLearning has a set of brief e-mails, one a day, that provide a link to the text on Sefaria, and a short commentary.

Not sure what this will bring, but it’s another way of learning about the tribe among whom I live.

Aging, Cinema and Television, Commentary on Religion, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Health, Myth and Story, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Cancer on my mind

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Winter and the Future Moon

Monday gratefuls: Those who discovered and manufacture lupron. The makers of the Cyberknife and those involved in radiation therapy. Dr. Gilroy, Pattie, Camela, Nicky, all those who took care of me then. Dr. Eigner. Anna Willis. Shelley, the lupron lady from Georgia. And a second time on the clear PSA.

Yes, cancer is on my mind this morning. At eleven I have my third lupron injection. Not sure about half-lives, but this will kick me back up into therapeutic range. Which means, a chance of mood swings and scattered hot flashes followed by continuing sarcopenia. Inner weather influenced by true chemtrails.

With the recent PSA I’m more sanguine, that much more willing to put up with the side effects. If I have another clear one in March, that will be my last lupron injection, setting me up for the critical PSA in June. It should tell the tale of the radiation. Did it burn out the fire that had kindled?

No, cancer is not all consuming. Most of the time I don’t think about it though it’s always lurking in the background, skulking like a thug in a dark alley.

In other medical news my bandages are off and Kate takes out my stitches today. A week ago this evening. We have become that much more vigilant. Doors closed, intercom calls to check on Kep’s location before moving Murdoch.

Kate felt good enough last night that she wanted to go out to eat. She felt cooped up in the house. A good sign. She has the psychic reserve to realize a need to get out. We went to Brook’s Tavern. Sort of tired of it, but it’s close.

There was some poignancy, realizing how little we get out together now. Also a realization that eating out has lost a lot of its luster. Too much of a production and the food’s not as good as I can make at home. IMHO. At least at Brook’s.

Resurrection: Ertugrul. Wow. This is a really long commitment. I’m on episode 84 of season 4. There is a season 5, too. Which I’ll watch. I’m a completist here. Why would I do this?

Fascination. Religion is so much at the core of this show: Islam, the good religion of the Turks. Christianity, a bad religion when it consists of Crusaders and Knights Templar, tolerable when its villagers, merchants, craftspeople. Paganism for the Mongols, portrayed as crude, barbaric, bloody, mystical. Definitely bad. Representing the polytheists who assaulted Mohamed in Mecca, I think.

I find it very interesting to watch the writer’s portrayal of Islam, how it effects daily life, political life, inner life. I don’t have much experience of Muslims living their lives. A bit, but nothing like the insight available in these shows. The history may be somewhat fanciful, the characters sometimes stereotypical (though there’s a lesson in stereotypes, too), but Islam is treated respectfully and fully.

More on all this when I read Season 5, the end. Sometime in the not too distant future. In shallah.

Dogs, Family, Health

?

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Winter and the Future Moon

Saturday gratefuls: Jackie, our hair stylist. Kate’s ability to get into Jackie’s place without the rollator. Ruth’s text yesterday. No more bandages. Pickup at King Sooper. The long nap. Good fitness. Makers of Blizzak snow tires.

Wow. Funday Monday wore me out. That plus the fatigue from the Lupron. And, not getting the fitness boost while waiting for my stitches to come out. This Monday Kate will take them out and I can get back to it. I need the psychic charge from working out. Not to mention that I’m grateful to those workouts for my ability to be in the mix with Kep and Murdoch.

On intervening in dog fights. Conventional wisdom, don’t. If it was a random dog fight, I probably wouldn’t. Unless. It looked like a smaller dog was going to get killed. Then, I might. Haven’t encountered this. I have encountered fights among our dogs many times over the past thirty years.

I’ve intervened in every one of them. Tully, a sweet IW girl otherwise, tried to kill our whippets. Often. Before we figured out a good management plan, I had to pull her off. Vega and Rigel had Gertie between them. I pulled them off of her. Got a small scar. Kep has attacked Gertie a half dozen times. Again, I intervene.

Kep and Murdoch. I intervened. I said why before, so I won’t belabor it. Their situation was different than the others however. Murdoch did not have a collar. On me. I hadn’t put it on. When I grabbed Kep to pull him away from Murdoch, his collar came off over his head.

They were roiling, snarling, tumbling, biting and I had no handles, just what purchase I could get with my hands on their fur. Finally Kep grabbed Murdoch by the lower jaw and hung on. That gave me a chance to get the scarf wrapped around their mouths. Still twisting and bucking. It was hard to keep Kep’s head between my legs. I sat on Murdoch’s head.

I got up, accepting that I couldn’t do anymore; they split, backed off, and I was able to get Murdoch in the house. Until. Snarling, biting again. Upstairs. Oh, Kep had come in through the open back door and Murdoch had found him again. This time I got them apart right away with a full voice bellow, NO!

With Kep back in the sewing room with the door shut and Murdoch up in his room, the incident was over. Kate was out of breath. Adrenaline pushed through me, warding off pain and fatigue.

Slowly an awareness of my arm, not pain, wetness. Removing my shirt, I saw into my left arm. It was a triangular gash that would take 10 stitches to close, 5 inside, 5 out. The wound didn’t bleed much. It would have been a different incident if the ripping tooth had nicked the blood vessel that showed through the subcutaneous fat and skin. Lucky, in that regard.

Darkness had fallen. Urgent care was ahead.

Since then. What was I thinking? I wasn’t thinking. I acted. Later, it was over and I had driven out to Highlands Ranch and back. The dogs remained separated and we got ready for New Year’s Eve. Had to flag off Sandy, our housekeeper, from coming that day because our doggy population was still jumpy. Not a good time for a relative stranger to be in the house.

Was it worth it? Yes. I did what I could, neither dog sustained serious injury. My bite was much, much worse than anything on either of them. Saving them from seriously injuring each other was the point and I succeeded. Can’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t stopped it, but I know one of them would have been mauled. Probably Kep.

Still reverberating all the way into the next decade after it happened.

Dogs, Family, Health

Ouch

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Winter and the Future Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: the folks at OnPoint Urgent care, especially Leah and Trevor. Jon, for coming a long ways. Adrenaline. Murdoch and Kepler, that they didn’t kill each other. The replacement of Kate’s feeding tube. That 2019, not a great year for us, will soon be in the rearview.

Life odder than fiction. Here’s a story. A while ago a dog came to visit for a year. His name is Murdoch. He’s young, bouncy, a genuine joy. On Sunday he bounced his way down the stairs and got tangled up in Kate’s feeding tube while she was walking on the lower level stairs.

Pop. The feeding tube came out. Not out of the feeding bag, which hung suspended from her shoulder, but from her body. Geez. It’s the second time a feeding tube has come out, so it wasn’t quite the shock it might have been, yet it’s still her primary source of nourishment.

Call the oncall doc. Go visit your primary care doc on Monday. We did. They found a place to have a new feeding tube put in, but I only heard Adventist hospital and took us to the one closest to the doctor’s office. Wrong one.

Found the right one about a half hour late, but the doc had been working on someone else anyhow. Kate went in and came back out in twenty, thirty minutes, new tube in place, able to take nourishment again. Not a pleasant process, but not a huge deal either.

By the time we got home we’d been out of the house since 10 am and the clock had ticked over 6 hours plus. It was close to 4:30 pm. We were tired. It was a long day already.

I asked Kate to let Gertie and Rigel out while I put the Rav4 in the garage and let out Murdoch who had spent the time in the loft. He was bouncy and happy and at the door when I got up here, so I let him out. Meanwhile, unknown to me, Kepler had squirted out the door with Rigel and Gertie. Uh oh.

When I came out of the loft door after putting Radical Judaism and my notebook on the table next to the computer, I heard squeals. There, in the snow, in 20 degree weather, a brown, black, brown, black furry action movie was underway. Kep and Murdoch, finally in the same space, had done what we feared, gone for each other.

I ran down the stairs, deposited my book, Automatic Eve, and my phone on the cement landing at the bottom, and rushed over to the two fighting dogs. Never intervene in a dogfight. Well, sure. Unless the dogs look like they’re going to kill each other. And, these were two Akitas, bred to guard. When they bite, they’re serious about it.

Besides, who would want to call their son in Singapore and say, sorry about Murdoch? Not this guy, for sure. So, I intervened. It was red in tooth and claw. Kepler and Murdoch had already wounded each other and were snarling, way past growling, as they grappled. Collars came off in my hand. No handle.

I sat on their heads. Kepler had Murdoch’s lower jaw in his mouth. My scarf was all I had. Taking it off I tied it around their jaws, limiting their movement. Kate couldn’t help. Too far out in the yard for her oxygen. Besides, the feeding tube.

It went on about 10 minutes. Not sure I helped at all because I finally had to give up and stand up. They sort of quit on their own.

In the melee however I sustained a bite. The worst bite the p.a. who sewed me up said she had ever seen. Oh, good. It was a triangular gash, opened to the fatty tissue underneath and with a fortunately intact, but visible blood vessel right in the middle.

Jon came to the emergency room and helped me. I drove myself there and back. Got home about 9:30 pm, ten or eleven stitches later. Leah, the p.a., sewed my inside skin together first, then closed the gash. Lidocaine kept it from being impossible for me.

Not sure about doggy injuries though I know Kep’s rear left leg is hurt and Murdoch has a slash on his cheek. I left for Urgent Care after we got the dogs situated and when I got back everybody was asleep.

Come to me, 2020. 2019 be gone.

Art and Culture, Family, Health, Painting, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Artistes

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Winter and the Future Moon

Monday gratefuls: (I like this practice, so I’m going to continue it for awhile. Maybe keep it here.) Being with Ruth yesterday. Going to Meininger’s Art Supply with her. The stuff in Meininger’s. Stanley Market Place. Maria’s Empanadas. Coming home to the mountains after driving in the city. The bare rock on Berrian Mountain. The flocked trees.

Took Ruth to Red Herring Art Supply. Again. Seoah was with us the last time. Like last time, it was closed. The holidays. We drove along Colfax, “the longest street in the U.S. that doesn’t turn into a highway,” she said. Makes me think of Lake Street. Colfax runs through several ethnically diverse neighborhoods and changes its character as it does. Near its ends, west and east, are old tourist motels now the cheaper equivalent of SRO’s.

We took it into downtown Denver, turned right at the State Capitol Building, and followed Broadway to Meininger’s, Colorado’s primary art supply store. Ruth educated me again. Explaining the use of mediums for oil paints, why she likes synthetic brushes, and a type of paper on which you can do oil painting.

We bought some of that paper, a small bottle of medium, and some brushes. The next time she comes we’ll cut up some of the paper into sizes she would like to use.

The ancientrail of art is not only for the gifted. Making things with our hands is a primary human act, from houses to Space Shuttles, quilts to sculptures. When creating objects that reflect our inner life, make the world beautiful, show and enhance our ability to see, we expand our own life.

We got Gabe a Chromebook for Hanukah, a very low end, yet still useful laptop. Jon predicted he would be, “very happy.” After he opened it up, Gabe said, “I’m so happy.” Sometimes grandparents are the wish genie.

We both have concerns about Jon. Still. He inherited depressive genes from the Johnson line, maybe the Olsons, too. Very bright, creatively gifted, incredibly self sabotaging. And, 51. I hope in this next decade he can find the traction he needs.

His art is wonderful, colorful and conceptual, using old smashed metal pieces he finds along the road as objects to print. His grasp of politics, of the workings of his school, of home renovation is keen. When he’s not down, he’s a lot of fun. He skis and makes his own skis.

Tough, very tough, situation.

Aging, Family, Health, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Weather +Climate

Easy, boy

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Winter and the Future Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Ruth’s mint candy. Her delight in staying with us. The snow storm that could. All the delivery people in the mountains. Rest time from working out. Being easier with myself. The clear, cold sky.

Ruth. Our favorite granddaughter. Our only granddaughter. She stayed Friday night after a day of skiing with her Dad. She slept with Rigel and Murdoch since the guest room now belongs to them. But, they were willing to share.

It snowed yesterday. An unpredicted round which exceeded six inches. A frequent poster on Pinecam.com, Weather Geek, lives on nearby Conifer Mountain. He says we’ve had 55 inches this season, before yesterday’s snow. Say 61 inches now. 5 feet, 1 inch. Deep enough to bury Kate. That’s since October.

Being easier. Over the past year plus I’ve been pushing, pushing, pushing. Do this. Get that done. Keep doing this. And that. And that. Don’t let up. Keep moving. Realized I’d put myself in an impossible situation.

Even though they’ve reduced in the last month or two, doing the activities of care giving put me in a peculiar tension. I viewed all the domestic activities as necessary, good in themselves, but as barriers to creative work, work I did for me. The tension between caregiving and writing, caregiving and painting, caregiving and reading made me devalue the domestic, not resenting it, but feeling pulled between the needs of my Self and the needs of our home. When I talked about this with Kate, she said yes, the housewife’s dilemma.

Though it came rather late, my solution was to be easier on myself. To let up on the pedal. Immediately things got better. It was enough, this cooking. This workout. This grocery pick-up. The tiredness was ok, not something I needed to shoulder past, but an indication that it was time to rest.

I’d robbed myself of the satisfaction in cooking, shopping, running errands, and in the creative work by feeling always pulled between them. This is life now. Kate and the dogs and the house. They come first. The rest is bonus, important, but secondary.

Anoka County, Colorado, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Garden, Great Wheel, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Myth and Story, Our Land and Home, Plants, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Death and Resurrection

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Winter and the Future Moon

Saturday gratefuls: The snow, coming down hard. The temperature, 17. All 8,800 feet above sea level. Two weeks of consistent workouts, 5 days, 3 resistance, two with high intensity training. Ruth’s being here. (she’s sleeping with Rigel and Murdoch right now.) The Hanukah meal last night. Hanukah. Whoever conceived and executed Resurrection: Ertugrul. The internet.

Been thinking a bit about resurrection. Not as in Resurrection: Ertugrul, which is about resurrection of the Seljuk state, but in the New Testament mythology. Birth, life, death, resurrection. Christmas, Ministry, Black Friday, Easter. The Great Wheel. Spring, growing season, fallow season, spring. Osiris. Orpheus.

Death is being overcome every spring. Life emerges, blooms and prospers, then withers and dies. A period in the grave. Spring. Resurrection is not only, not even primarily, about coming back from death. Resurrection is a point in the cycle of our strange experience as organized and awake elements and molecules.

Saw an analogy the other day. Twins in the womb. Talking to each other about whether there was life after delivery. How could there be, one said. What else is all this for, said the other. Do you believe in the mother? Yes, she’s all around us. I can’t see her, so I don’t believe in her. How would we get food after delivery? How would we breathe? I don’t know, but I believe we’ll do both.

We know, too, the story of the caterpillar, the chrysalis, and the butterfly.

Might resurrection itself be an analog of these ideas? Could be. Easier for me to comprehend is the death of a relationship, the period of mourning, then a new one, different from the first, but as good or better. The death of a dream. Having to sell the farm, a period of mourning, then a new career, different, but satisfying, too. The death of a certain belief system. Say, Christianity. A period of confusion and mourning. Then, a new way of understanding. The way things are. Consciousness and cycles. This comes; that goes.

A Minnesota life. Well lived and full. Dies. A period of mourning and confusion. A Colorado life. Different, but satisfying, too. The gardens of Andover. The rocks of Shadow Mountain. The lakes of Minnesota. The mountains of Colorado. The Woolly Mammoths. Congregation Beth Evergreen.

Are there other resurrections? Of course. Is there a resurrection like that of Jesus? Unknown. I choose to celebrate the resurrections that I know, rather than the ones I do not. The purple garden that emerged in the spring. The raspberries on the new canes. Those apples growing larger from the leafed out tree. This marriage with Kate, a notable resurrection of intimacy in both our lives.

What is dying? What are you mourning? What resurrection awaits?

Health, Kabbalah, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase
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Winter and the Future Moon

Friday gratefuls: Quest labs. Einstein Bagels. Tony’s Market. Walgreens. The Shell station carwash. Ruby, the new Rav4 and its heated seats. The cattle that gave their lives for the meat at Tony’s. Kate’s good seal on her feeding tube last night. Jon and the grandkids coming up for a brisket meal after skiing.

Went to Quest labs yesterday, order in hand for the sensitive PSA test that will tell how well the lupron has worked. As I walked into the lab, everything seemed ordinary, the parking spot behind the Audi, the automatic doors that slid open, the stairs up to the lab. The friendly young lady with the needle.

And, of course, it all was ordinary. Except. This was about cancer. Mine. I’ve become familiar with the dissonance between the ordinariness of these visits and my stake in their outcome. It produces an out of body feeling, not anything dramatic, but a sense that this is happening to someone else. Not true, however.

Will find out soon. My next lupron injection is on January 6th. Great fun. One more in the glutes.

While out I bought bagels, a couple of ribeyes for a New Year’s surf and turf meal, some adhesive bandages, and got the car washed. Just more errands. More ordinary.

Signed up for another kabbalah class, this one using Art Green’s Radical Judaism. Art is a mentor of Jamie’s, still alive in his eighties. His book appeals to me. My own thinking has gone along similar lines though Art’s done a systematic job. Not my style. I lived out my changed attitude toward religion and tradition, writing about it only in shorter pieces. Looking forward to this.

Thought readers of this blog might appreciate these:

The Eleven Awareness Practices of Kabbalah Experience

  1. Pay attention to what shows up as a reflection of what you still need to learn and grow into.
  2. Be present to the moment. This includes fully processing emotions that come from the past and how plans for the future impact your present living.
  3. Accept reality as it is. Live with a deep sense of gratitude. Seek and offer forgiveness in your everyday experiences.
  4. Live by setting intention. Be open to possibility—one door closing opens another. Measure success by effort not by outcome.
  5. Hold opposites and recognize that those qualities you may judge in others are mirrored in you. Seek common ground with others.
    6. Set limits to access greater intimacy and focus in your relationships.
    7. Expand your concern and love for the “other”.
    8. Recognize the multiplicity of masks you wear (so they don’t wear you).
    9. Perceive and understand the metaphors that underlie your life choices.
    10. Witness the masks and metaphors and enter a state of no-thingness.
    11. Flow in the paradox of being and non-being in every moment.

Politics, US History

Liberal and Conservative Together

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Winter and the Future Moon (it will take us into 2020. expect a flying car on your roof.)

Boxing Day gratefuls: for liberals and conservatives. for the divine ohr within you. for all those who, with Ram Dass, got walked home in 2019. for this still great nation and its painful troubles. for the decade now ending. for pick-up service at King Sooper. for The Happy Camper and Colorado’s marijuana laws.

Columnist Max Boot of the Washington Post wrote, in a column extolling the mores of Downtown Abbey, that it shows:

“…a humane, instinctual conservatism that embodies the wisdom of philosopher Michael Oakeshott: “To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to Utopian bliss.” Present-day “conservatives” must rediscover this sensibility if they are to rescue their movement from its populist-nationalist abyss.” washington post

This is a crie de couer and I hear it. If we reverse the dialectics, to be liberal, then, is to prefer the unknown to the known, the untried to the tried, mystery to fact, the possible to actual, the distant to the near, the superabundant to the sufficient, Utopian bliss to present laughter.

Not quite. I do not prefer the unknown, the untried, mystery over fact, the possible, the distant, the superabundant, or Utopian bliss. No. I, too, live mostly with the familiar, the tried, fact, the actual, the near, the sufficient. In fact, I live mostly within these “conservative” parameters. It would be difficult not to.

Trump, whom Boot was decrying rather than liberals, is neither liberal nor conservative. He is a reactionary. It’s right there in his motto: Make America Great Again. Unpack Great. He meant then and means now, an America untroubled by women, by visible minorities, by unions, by environmentalists and their regulations, by governmental niceties like taxes and legislation and democracy and, especially, by the rule of law. He meant an America who is a friend to the authoritarian and in struggle with its allies.

The reactionary is a foe of the liberal and the conservative alike. We can join arms because in the end we both want a civil society. Yes, I may want, too, a more just civil society than even Obama’s America. I may be more comfortable with the mysteries of the universe, with the unknown, with the untried, but that is because I know we can be better than we are. That does not mean I prefer them. It means they are tools, time telescopes to see a better future.

Certainly, a future without Trumpian disdain for decency and justice, yes, at least that. But also a future without an upstairs/downstairs division. A future where the old can age with dignity and without fear. A future where the world marks collaboration and opportunity as ascendant values over political competition. Most of all, right now, an anti-dystopian future where the capitalist class is not allowed to rend and tear our planet without regard to human prospects.

I’m with Boot though. First our nation must be delivered from the “populist-nationalist abyss” into which it has sunk. This may not be the Mariana’s Trench of our history, but it’s as far beneath the surface as we’ve been in my lifetime. This maelstrom of greed and envy and unchecked desire is anathema to both those who prefer the familiar and those who yearn for an unfamiliar, but just society. Let’s rise up from this pit together. Then we can argue again, check each other’s baser impulses, and get back a world that has a future.