Samain and the Holiseason Moon

Saturday gratefuls: The electrician and his dog, Lulu. Omega Electric. The mini-splits with power. Jodi. Brought a copy of the quartzite Taj Mahal and some of the brick backsplash. Plus, cabinet samples. One with the stain. Which is very close to the Stickley. Missed workout with all the busyness.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: New kitchen by Christmas

Tarot: Three of Swords, Druid Craft

Electricity out in the loft all day. Running conduit to the mini-split. Forgot to ask the electrician’s name, but we bonded over Rigel and Kepler. He has a Shibu Inu/Husky mix, Lulu. She’s a cutey. Looks like a miniature Husky.

I have a new, larger electrical panel in the garage. More space. David will come on Monday or Tuesday to walk me through operation and maintenance of the mini-splits. From Tom and his colleague to my walls in less than four months. The spring will be a much happier experience. And, perhaps, this winter, too. Though. Not counting on that.

The other project, the kitchen remodel, got a check written yesterday. That means matters have gotten serious. Right now it will be rich brown, espresso cabinets, a brick backsplash, and a slightly veined white cabinet top. And, a farmer’s sink. Jodi says it will be underway the week after Thanksgiving and finished before Christmas.

I’ve got boxes by the fireplace. I have to clear out the kitchen before the demolition begins. That will take awhile. Gonna look for a reupholsterer for the couch so it can be gone during the kitchen work. I’ll have enough money left over to buy an additional chair for the upstairs. Not sure if I will or not. Might just go with the Stickley and the leather chair I’ve used for several years.

Although I’ve not used the fireplace much, especially since Kate got sick and I got diagnosed with COPD (later changed to post-polio syndrome), I couldn’t resist ordering, from Ireland, a box of peat logs. Gotta get some firewood, too. The post-polio diagnosis means a little smoke from a fireplace is not gonna create a problem.

The reason for the peat logs? The Faery Faith, the book By Evans-Wentz. He gathered stories of the auld Celtic faith in Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and Breton homes. The Irish heated with peat and I want to smell it.

They came yesterday while I talked with the electrician. A heavy box, though not very large. Maybe 2 feet long and six inches square.

Kep and Rigel slept back to back with me. A cool night with warm dogs. Perfect.

Three of Swords:

“Keywords: Heartache. True growth. Wisdom from suffering.

Meaning: True growth and transformation. Heartache, out of which can come healing and emotional maturity.” DCB

Heartache? Oh, yes. Suffering. Quite a bit. Growth? Feels like it. Quieter. Calmer. The worst has happened. I’ve had to integrate Kate’s death into a new life. On the cusp. Learned to lean on those who love me. While loving them back. Perhaps that’s all the wisdom we need?

Transformation. We’ll see. I feel different, my life feels like its contours have changed. But. Am I different? Hard to say from the inside. In many ways my life and I are the same.

I come home to 9358 Black Mountain Drive. Kep and Rigel get fed, cared for. I see folks from CBE, commune with my ancient friends at the electrical hearth. Family, too. I buy groceries, cook, pay bills. See to my own medical issues.

What’s different? Kate’s gone. And, my physical, in this world, relationship with her. It’s now Kep, Rigel, and me. I make decisions on my own, without my partner. Though. I do hear her voice. The responsibilities here are now all mine. To be fair, however, that was true for quite a while before now.

I’m not sure I can define the transformation well. At least this morning. Maybe later. I’ll ask others, see what they see. Some significant things have changed, I know. But what they are? Not sure.

Samain and the crescent moon of the thinned veil

Wednesday gratefuls: Carol and Bill. Easy Entrees. Frigidaire. Ruby. Kep and Rigel. Cold air. Diane. RJ. Kate’s bequest to me. Jon. The Subaru now a donation. Bay empty. Jodi comes by Friday to show me a cabinet stain sample and a counter top possibility, Taj Mahal. Heheh. Fancy. Great workout this morning. Life. Death. Family, friends, and community.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: The Hermit neon sign

Tarot:  The Moon, #18 in the Major Arcana

Got up late. 7:28 am. Zoom with Diane at 8, then RJ at 9. Workout after. Lunch and nap. 5 pm and here I am writing today’s post. Feel like a delinquent. But, a well rested delinquent.

Life has begun to have flavor again. A sweet taste. No longer a mashup of love, duty, sleeplessness, stress. No longer a grief dominated over burden. Just life. This mayfly moment. And that feels pretty damned good.

Tomorrow I’m going in to Morry’s Neon to decide on colors for my hermit sign. Glen insisted, saying that neon colors are different than those that can be rendered in an image. True, I’m sure. Anyhow an interesting time, to see the inside of a neon sign shop.

Jon and I will have lunch since I’ll be in Denver. He says he’s feeling better. Like his endocrine system has quieted down, gone back to its job. The Subaru left the property early this morning. On its way to CPR coffers as a donation.

Jodi plans to come by on Friday around 1 with the cabinet stain sample and a new counter top possibility. All means the kitchen project has momentum. In the new kitchen by Christmas, she hopes. Because of my increasingly Jewish family and friend base, in by Christmas doesn’t have quite the same zing it might’ve. But, still.

I’ll spend some of Christmas with the Colorado and the Maine Stricklands. At Mike and Kate’s on Christmas day and at the Buckhorn on the day after. Looking forward to that.

Well. Rigel is being a pest, barking, barking, barking to go inside. So I’m going to end this here. See you on the flip side.

Samain and the Crescent Moon of the Thinned Veil

Monday gratefuls: Kep and Rigel. My friends. That crescent Moon with Mercury nearby. In the morning fog. Aunt Hecate and the Weird Sisters. BJ in her Queen of the Night costume. In Rebecca’s mink stole. LOL. Gabe and his very big hair as Bob Ross. Ruthie as the invisible woman. My costume, all made by Kate. Arlo the Almost Magnificient. The veil itself. The Otherworld. Celtic myth and lore. Religion.

Sparks of joy and awe: The Crescent Moon of the Thinned Veil in fog

Tarot: The Three of Pentacles

The Saga of Roger. As some of you may know, Roger spirited himself away from me at Gaetano’s. Or, perhaps, a latter Smaldone snatched him. Maybe I should check Bobby the Fence? Anyhow, even after a C note reward, his disappearance remains a mystery. A $1,400 mystery. Until yesterday evening I had decided to pull up my big boy pants and spend another $1,400. I like the Roger.

But. The Samsung washer, always a bit crazy, has gone full bore loon. On occasion it would show an error, but one I could eliminate by repeated pushing of the off and on button. A bit of a hassle, but NBD. Over the last six months the periods of crazy have far outstripped the times of working. Call a repair guy you might say. Sure. But this is the electronics, the motherboard and all its little washer chilluns. A repair guy told us, way back when Kate began complaining about it, that the only fix is a $900 replacement electronics unit. Still true. And the washer is now 7 years old.

Consumer Reports, oh, Ouija of the appliance world, tell me what washer I should buy. Yeah. It’s down to that. I have a load of towels and sweatshirts in the washer, but over the last day plus I’ve not been able to convince the damned thing to do its job.

Tired of it. So, instead of a Roger, I’m going to get a new washer. I know about the Roger now and perhaps I’ll get one in the future, but for now I’m going to eat my loss and move on. To cleaner clothes. Done. New LG on the way from Best Buy. Delivery November 8th. Seoah, ever the wise Korean consumer, told Kate and me that Samsung makes great phones and terrible appliances, LG is the reverse. After losing a Samsung dryer and washer to strange issues, I’m following daughter-in-law wisdom. And, Consumer Reports.

Next up. Medicare advantage policy and home owners insurance. At 9 am I talk to Julie Freshman again. I’m leaving New West Physicians and probably the particular AARP plan I have. Got to set that in motion. This morning.

Later, I’m going to contact an independent insurance agent to get quotes on home and car insurance. Traveler’s boosted my home insurance into the stratosphere, $4,500. Car’s high, too. While Kate was sick, I just didn’t have the energy to go after better rates. I do now. This week or next.

This all Malkut, pentacles work. Here and now, this reality. Physical stuff.

Three of Pentacles

“Meaning: Work flourishes as you build on previous efforts. The skilled use of matter and intelligence to create works of beauty and value…Work may still need to be done but support is at hand.” DCB

Mini-splits recommended by Tom and his colleague. Kitchen remodeling help from Jodi and Mike. Consumer Reports and Seoah for appliances. Marina Harris for house cleaning. Years of experience managing domestic matters also in there. Julie on Medicare insurance. An independent agent to check on insurance.

As Tom said yesterday, these are life infrastructure matters. And, it pays to have good agents for them. Pentacles, the suit of earth, of stuff happening here and now.

Lughnasa and the Lughnasa Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Shortness of breath. Prostate cancer. Vascular disease. Post-polio syndrome. As long as I have them, I’m alive. Kate, always Kate. Rigel. The slows this morning. Kep, snuggled last night. That steak and Romaine salad I made. Cooking. HVAC appt. next week.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Tarot

Tarot card drawn: Queen of Pentacles*

Excited about my call with Social Security today. Shows you what my life is like now, I guess. No, really. I want to get this one finished and those SS checks fatter and getting deposited. They want me to prove my marriage to Kate. Fair enough. Ordered a copy of the marriage license two weeks ago from Ramsey County. No joy yet.

Eye exam yesterday. Every six months for glaucoma. Dr. Repine, who is quick, but solid, said: “Stable. Everything’s stable. Your pressures are good. The retina photograph shows the same status as 2019. Stable.” They always look for those holes Jane West drilled in my eye. “Patent.” Considering the previous fate of cataract and glaucoma sufferers, I’m glad to have good ophthalmological care.

Tarot and Kabbalah class yesterday. 52 cards. 52 weeks in a year. 4 suits of 13 cards each. A quarter of a year, a season. Rabbi Jamie’s correlation of pips and royals with the Tree of Life.

This class. Surprisingly good. Digging deeper into the archetypal, the daily introspection offered. Finding the tarot and the kabbalistic inflection of it provocative, evocative.

Beginning to peel back the layers. The cards, the Tree of Life, the Torah, poetry are all mirrors in which the subconscious and the unconscious can, occasionally, be seen.** Dreams, too, of course. All symbols, numbers, art can serve the same mirroring function, pushing us to access matters we’ve hidden, suppressed or repressed, or matters that exist in the pool of symbols Jung calls the collective unconscious.

Not all serve us equally. Some might find the Bible essential when held lightly, not as a rule book, but as a mythic text about humanity’s inner journey. Others, astrology. Others, Mary Oliver or Rainer Marie Rilke or William Yeats. Jungian analysis.

Right now I’m discovering that the Tarot cards work for me. Don’t know whether I could ever read for others. Maybe. Could be fun to try. I do know that when I pull the cards, consider them, check possible interpretations I find myself enlightened, an unseen portion of my psyche made visible to me. Not unlike the Johari window.

The Queen of Pentacles: Pentacles correlate to Earth, to the Body, to action, and to nefesh, the soul that we are, as a whole person. The Queen represents the anima of those correlations. She is mother Earth. She is the body. Her actions bring us close to mother Earth, reassure and nurture us.

This morning my mirror showed me independent Charlie, living within family and community, but on my own. A calm and balanced life can come from the underworld experience of grief. Grief plows through the subconscious and the unconscious, turning up furrows. Oh, love hurts. Yes, indeed. Love sustains. yes. Kate sustained me, nurtured me, loved me. Now I have to incorporate that Kate into my own psyche so she can still sustain, nurture, and love me.

Death, where is thy sting? In loss. In silence. In absence. Kate’s no longer at the table doing her crossword, writing checks to pay bills, laughing with me, kissing me. God, I miss her. Yes. She was my Queen of Pentacles, a grounding, nurturing force.

Now I have to consider that any subconscious or unconscious doubts I have about my own worth, my love worthiness, my creativity must dissolve under the Queen’s reign in the court of my soul. Why? Because Kate saw me as worthy, creative, lovable.  And that challenges any doubts early illness, parental conflicts, relational slights, alcoholism raised.

So for now, I’m a follower of the way of the Tarot. A western I-Ching. Still gotta learn to throw the yarrow sticks. Maybe next year.

*”…the Queen of Pentacles suggests that it is important to you to live independently, with a stable income and with enough time and space to also nurture your loved ones. You may be trying to strike a better balance between your home and work lives, giving it your all in both domains. At the same time, you find time for yourself and prioritise ‘me’ time in between all of your other commitments.

This Queen asks you to maintain a compassionate, nurturing, practical and down-to-earth attitude when dealing with others and your present circumstances. Focus on creating a calm and balanced life for yourself. Be resourceful and practical, dealing with issues as they arise using straightforward solutions that fix the problem with minimal fuss.”  biddy tarot

**”If you’re to better understand and accept yourself, as well as the concealed motivations governing maladaptive behaviors, it’s critical that you access the internal forces dictating them. There’s no way that you can reach your full potential until you gain entry into much of what exists below your awareness—that is, make both the unconscious and subconscious conscious—and, at last, come to positive terms with what, unknowingly, has been sabotaging you.” Psychology Today

Imbolc and the Megillah Moon

Friday gratefuls: Vaccines. Stable lung disease. Purim. Esther. Psalms. Easy Entrees. Valentine’s Day. Duncan, Oklahoma. Watonga. Alexandria. Connersville. Muncie. Crawfordsville. Appleton. Nevis. Center City. Minneapolis. St. Paul. Andover. Conifer.

Sparks of joy: Birthday coming. Inogen on Mark’s big sketch book page. Gratitude. Waxing crescent Moon. Cold and snow on the way. The possibility of vaccines.

Rabbi Jamie asked us to take six words out of Psalm 23 then write 6 verses using them. I took words from his translation: Death’s door, solitude, fear, harmonies, valleys, and grace. Here is my psalm/poem using them:

Death’s door opens both ways

Into my solitude and back out

Erasing my fear

From its threshold cosmic harmonies spill out

Filling the valleys of our lives

With the grace of eternity.

I’ve been thinking about radical aloneness coupled with necessary linkages. As humans, our skin bounds us, binds us. Only we know the inner life of our Self, our soul, our unique journey through this random gift of sentience. Yet. We have no language to know the journey without the necessary linkage to another, to others. We have no food to eat without the necessary linkage to the products of the soil. We have no learning without the quickening of our senses by necessary linkages to reality. (whatever that is.)

It’s a peculiar and often devastating truth, our radical aloneness. It’s both ironic and salvific that we cannot be radically alone without necessary linkages to others, to food, to the world beyond us. Covid has made the global scope of our linkages evident in spite of our radical aloneness.

I would say each one of us IS an island surrounded by an ocean of others. On our island are the structures we’ve built, the colors we’ve used to paint them, the roads that lead forward and backward through the story of our life. It is a mobile island. We have to take it with us wherever and whenever we go.

It has rickety bridges, poorly maintained causeways for the transport of food and air. There are several viewing platforms and from our island we can see other viewing platforms. Are they on other islands? A quirk of perception makes it impossible to know.

Even so we are often at our platforms, looking out, using flags to send signals. The others use flags too but we cannot be sure their flags mean the same as ours. They often look similar, but it’s impossible to know for sure.

I’m signaling right now. Arms flashing, plucking flags from their stanchions, returning others. Thinking of you, imagining you and your island. I hope things are ok there.

Imbolc and the waning Wolf Moon

Monday gratefuls: Kate speaks her heart. Rigel starts eating again. The Monk Manual. Wind. And the weather it carries. Black Mountain. Maxwell Creek. Upper Bear Creek. Cub Creek. Shadow Brook. Waning crescent Moon. The stars of early morning. The heart that beats in my chest.

Points of joy: Kep eager for breakfast. Being with the Ancient Ones. Imagining more of Jennie’s Dead. Exhaustion after the new workout. Using the Monk Manual.

When I started on the post yesterday, it focused on art, religion, legend, mythology, fairy tales, folklore. Got distracted while writing and shifted away from my main idea. Back at it this morning.

My library has three full shelves of mythology and folklore, its historical context. Another two full shelves of books on art. Another two of religion and philosophy and poetry. The bookshelf immediately to my right has texts about the intersection of religion, philosophy, and the natural world. That represents an ongoing investigation for me, how to reconcile humanity to a sustainable presence on this earth.

Just to be complete my library also includes shelves of fiction, a full shelf of works on Lake Superior and its context, travel, gardening, the military, American and Western history, including a good deal on the American Civil War.

I used to think religion and folklore and legend and mythology and fairy tales occupied different terrain. Art, too. But the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve stripped dogma from my approach to religion, the more the boundaries disappear. Of course religion is this generation’s mythology. To be studied later in the classics department of a long away in the future university. Fairy tales and folklore and legend were the work of scientists, humans seeking patterns in nature, explanations for the forces that influence, shape, and sometimes take our lives.

Perhaps my immersion, my lifelong immersion, in these fields means that I reject the Enlightenment, at least in its empiricist modality. It might. The question. How can I find knowledge and truth in physics, biology, astronomy, geology yet retain a naive faith in the possibility of something all those disciplines cannot explain?

The new atheists like Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett have a flat earth attitude toward wonder, mystery, delight, whimsy. In their mean and stolid world only that which can be seen, measured, replicated has meaning. They are descendants of the logical positivists and the language philosophers. Perhaps the best expression of this attitude is Wittgenstein’s famous quote: “Whereof we cannot speak, we must be silent.”

Whether or not he meant it that way, most thinkers who want to discard the mantel of dogma and its many obfuscations believe he meant, if it’s not empirical, we can know nothing and say nothing about it. This follows from Kant’s understanding of the ding an sich, the thing in itself. Kant believed there was a reality, he was no idealist, but he also believed that since we could only know what our senses brought us we could never know that reality itself, just the effects it had on our eyes, our hands, our ears, our nose, our taste.

There is a bald truth here. Our sensorium equips us to navigate a world delivered to us through our bodies. We can learn a lot about this world by being very careful about what we perceive. Yet at the end of theoretical physics, at the end of cosmology, at the end of life’s study of itself, at the end of consciousness, we have only an elaborate construction based on empirical data. As we know, any specific instance of that construction is often wrong, because science itself proceeds through revolutions in thought paradigms as much as it does through the empirical method.

In Celtic mythology the world of Faery, the world of pixies, faeries, goblins, the dead, and the divine is The Other World. What a world it is. I’ve recently imagined it, in my underway novel Jennie’s Dead, as a vast and open land where old gods go after their followers abandon them. Where characters of myth and legend still have adventures. Where travel between lands may take thousands of years or be finished in an instant.

What an impoverished, skinny world the new atheists and their philosophical forbearers inhabit. I prefer the company of Aladdin, of Shiva, of Lao Tze, of Herman Hesse, of Zeus and Lycaon, even of Jesus and Moses.

My sense of wonder awakens daily as I do. The Lodgepole pines out the bedroom window sway in the Wind. The Stars twinkle and shine above them in a black early morning Sky. A Mountain Lion coughs far away. In the fall the strangled call of a bugling Elk might make its way here. I’ve just come from the land of dreams, another non-empirical realm, and my Other World senses are on high alert, having spent a nighttime tuned to the flashes of neurons, the pulsing of brain cells switching on and off.

Poetry sweeps away the cobways of linear thought, carrying the reader into the realm of aha. Of, oh, I see. Of distant caverns unimaginable to man. The room of the Raven exists first in Poe’s mind, then on the page, then in ours. But how does it exist, ontologically? If you say only in ink on paper, my how little you know.

I’ve traveled Russian cart tracks holding hands with the staret of the Pilgrim. I swam the waters deeper than the Mariani’s Trench with the Megladon. I’ve walked on foreign worlds and spoken with aliens. Harry Seldon and I together pondered psychohistory. I’ve played the glass bead game, gotten into a Louisiana bar with a bottle of Trublood in my hand. The Caliph and I entertained Jinn. Huck Finn and I tossed a line in the waters of the Great Muddy.

These eternal inhabitants of the Other World are our guides. They know the ancientrails on which we humans travel and want us to use them to our utmost benefit.

You and I were a speck of ohr during the obliteration of the ayn sof. We’ve traveled together and apart for billions of years, been part of so many things, witnessed so many others. When God is repaired, we may join up again and sit with Rumi, a jug of wine at hand, blessed to be in that far off land beyond right and wrong.

Fall and the Moon of Radical Change

Saturday gratefuls: Voted. Voting. Democracy under threat. Polls. Nate Silver: Democrat chances of winning Senate have increased. Kate’s really good day yesterday. Her reading the first half of Jennie’s Dead. Down to 2 drops of yellow stuff in my right eye. Can start resistance work again after next week. Vision. Clarity. Not going blind.

Close. Covid’s getting close. Jacquie, our hair stylist and friend, called on Friday. We had appointments at 10:30. I’ve got Covid. Oh, s***. Kate said, What if our appointments had been Thursday? Yikes. A wake-up slap in case our attention had drifted. It has not.

We have entered double jeopardy for the Covid pandemic. Now, coming to a sneezer and cougher hopefully not near you: the Flu! Until late next Spring there are two viruses that seek lodging in your lungs.

How we play this Jeopardy round will make history. My guess? On the down side of good. Are you ready to die?! The key: don’t move on to Final Jeopardy.

A day without appointments. Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow. And, the whole next week! Yes. New wheelchair comes Tuesday. Bought a good one. A taste of socialized medicine for us. We waited 5 weeks for a referral to a Medicare approved vendor. We called. We waited. We heard nothing. We called. Nothing. We were renting a wheelchair. Waiting. Hell with it.

We do have a choice, bureaucracy or capitalism. I still choose bureaucracy. If we all had to wait five weeks, well, that’d be ok. We’d know in advance. Expect it. This hybrid version those of us over 65 have has its merits, but it also has a lot of demerits. The biggest? The referral system.

Political observers, long time ones like myself, have a phobic response to polls this election cycle. Nate Silver, 538, whom I said before I trust, says that the polls in 2016 were not that far off. Within the margins of error. We ignore those margins at our peril. That’s the 2016 lesson. Not to ignore polls. Several polling companies made changes anyway to reduce complicating factors in 2016.

As I have reviewed what Silver says and read NYT and Washington Post articles about current polls, I believe not only is Trump headed for a loss, but the GOP, too. This could be their Whig moment.

Not so far away.

VOTE

Fall and the RBG Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Cat scan today. A quiet day yesterday. Safeway grocery pickup. Salmon and Asparagus. A butter and brown sugar plus soy sauce topping. Yahrzeit candles for mom. Covid. Trump. Alt-Right. Climate change. Black Lives Matter. A shaken nation, forced to reconsider its purpose and future.

In the year of the rat Magawa lifts up rats and smashes our prejudices. A feel good story for a difficult time.

Had a quiet day yesterday. The only trip was to Safeway to get a pickup order. Read some more in Rage, almost done. Painted again for the first time in three or four months. Not my best nor my worst. Needed to pick up the brush again.

A while back I ordered an internet course on growing Sacred Mushrooms. The course emphasizes Mushroom culture. It seemed odd to the folks at Visa security. They put a hold on my credit card and gave me a call. Yes, I ordered that. Oh, ok, sir. Thank you.

Got started on it yesterday. Growing Mushrooms is something we can do without a greenhouse. We both like them, so I’ll give it a go. I’ve always been fascinated with decomposition, how necessary it is and how elegant the living things that make it happen. Took a UofM course on Lichens years ago.

Kate’s had a bad couple of weeks. Mostly in bed, though she does get up each day. The shortness of breath has made moving a challenge. We look forward to the cat scan today and the thoracentesis tomorrow, hoping together they will provide relief and better knowledge.

Got some feedback about Sunday that helped a lot. Thanks, Ancient Ones. My men.

Hard to know what’s affecting me these days. Stress from Kate’s struggles. Eye drops and adjustments in vision from the cataract surgery. Lingering Lupron. Two years of thc at night. Need for a vacation with no possibility of one. I do feel slower, tired. My mindset is strong though.

I’m healthy in my own way. Good heart rate, blood pressure. COPD controlled. Exercise, now aerobics only for a month, continuing. A PSA next month. Not depressed. A bit dysthymic at times. Referented, I believe.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…