Spring and the Corona Luna

Tuesday gratefuls: Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn above the ridge of Conifer Mountain this morning. Brenton, who will probably take Murdoch this Saturday. The Talmud, weird and wonderful. Dante’s Divine Comedy, which I plan to re-read soon. Yes, I read the whole thing. Mark Odegard, who said, “On many levels I like to be in mystery, there is much I will never understand, and that feels right.” Kate’s wonderful resilience.

When Kate’s health took a turn for the deep south, I went into plunge ahead, head down mode. I drove to the hospital almost every day, came home to take care of the dogs, got the Rav4’s oil changed, bought take-out. Hospital. Talk to doctors. Talk to Kate if she was conscious. Drive home. Feed the dogs. Eat a hamburger. Sleep. Again. Again. Again.

At one point Kate had to have an emergency operation to stop the bleeding that had caused her to receive ten units of blood through transfusion. This was late at night, the nuclear scan had failed to pinpoint the source of the bleed, so the surgeon was going in blind. Exhausted and wrung out, you might imagine I would decompensate. It was clear she could die during the procedure, but would die certainly without it.

Not sure exactly when it occurred to me, but I realized that I’d faced this situation before, in 1964, October. Mom had had her stroke seven days before and was now in the ICU at Riley Hospital in Indianapolis. It was 3 am. Dad and I were exhausted. The doctor’s told us they had no more things to try. She was in vegetative state. What did we want to do? Yes, I had faced this crisis before and experienced the worst possible outcome. Mom died after we told the doctors to take her off the ventilator and the feeding tube.

I was not resilient. Her death crushed me, sent me into a black hole that I would try to fill with alcohol and academics. Our little family went into survival mode with Dad going back to work, Mary, Mark, and me back to school. Heads down, plunging ahead, not counting the cost.

Dad and I became estranged. Mary and Mark lived with him until they finished high school and went off to college. I moved to Wisconsin after college and rarely contacted anybody in the family.

It took years for me to rebalance my psyche, shake alcohol and cigarettes. Those cigarettes, I smoked for several years, often at 3 packs a day, revisited me last fall when my doctor diagnosed me with COPD. Mild, yes, but still a lung impairment. You know what that means right now.

In October of 2018, 54 years to the month after mom died, my wife, my love, my best friend, my partner, was also in peril. This time though I knew life was possible on the other side of tragedy. I knew the sun rises, spring comes, even in the worst circumstance.

That was when my own resilience began to kick in. I could make decisions, take care of myself, our dogs, our life while Kate faced a struggle to survive. She made it; so did I.

Only, of course, to come to this. A pandemic of a respiratory illness. Nice, universe. Real nice. More thoughts about resilience will come. I’d like to know what helps you in tough times. What helps you rebalance?

Imbolc and the Full Leap Year Moon

Didn’t change a lot, but I did make some significant alterations.

                                Shadow Mountain Midrash

“We need to reshape our religious languages in such a way that they will inspire the great collective act of teshuvah, “return” or “repentance,” required of us at this moment.” Radical Judaism, Art Green, p. 8

Green’s book is honest and radical, character traits I admire. His rejection of supernatural theology stated baldly and often, makes this a radical work. His commitment to remain, however, within the Jewish condition makes it honest. He is what he is. Perhaps the most radical claim in the book is this, “As a religious person I believe that the evolution of the species is the greatest sacred drama of all time.”[i]

I want to make two moves that are different from Green. First, I want to push the scope of his sacred drama all the way back to whatever is the beginning, bereshit. The Big Bang. Or, its equivalent as science and kabbalah press further into its truth. I believe that evolution of the cosmos is the greatest sacred drama of all time. Second, I no longer have a pathway home, back to the tradition of my childhood, or my professional ministry. I cannot follow him into a tradition.

That means I’m left with my Celtic inflected paganism.[ii]

I’m using the word in its sense of outside religious institutions, or religious outsider. A Latin word for rustic, villager, or peasant pagan got its current connotations in relation to the accelerating reach of the Roman Catholic church. The Roman Catholics were relentless and traditional religions found themselves sequestered among stubborn believers who often had to hide the practice of their beliefs. The old religions held on among villagers and peasants, pagans in the Latin usage.

Paganism, as I use it, is a placeholder for those of us who share with Green his notion of the sacred as “an inward, mysterious sense of awesome presence, a reality deeper than we normally experience.”[iii]; and, his commitment “(to)…trying to understand our relationship to the evolving truth of the natural/divine order: ‘We discover, it reveals; it reveals, we discover.’”[iv]  Instead of panentheism, then, I’m neologizing: panenpneuma.  Soul in all and all in soul.[v] You might have a better idea.

“There is a love of wild Nature in everybody, an ancient mother-love ever showing itself whether recognized or no, and however covered by cares and duties.” ― John Muir

Could there be a pagan midrash? Is this even a sensible question to ask? I think so, since Green himself says: “We thus make the same claim for Torah that we make for the natural world itself: remove the veil of surface impressions, go deeper, and you will find there something profound and holy.”[vi]

A friend of mine often quotes a mentor, “See what you’re looking at.”[vii] A good beginning for a midrash of the natural world.[viii]

How to do this? Midrashim of the Torah rely on repeated words, etymological similarities and differences, gaps in the flow of a text, gematria, the meanings of individual Hebrew letters. Can we make these same creative moves in relationship to nature? Perhaps, but we need to look at the spirit of midrash, which as I understand it is to find connections where no apparent connections exist.

The naïve viewer of nature might, for example, see the wonderful cumulus clouds over Black Mountain and think, they’re so high, so far away that they don’t have any connection to me at all. She might, though, wait and watch. When the rains begin, she might wonder. Hmm. They water the forest, don’t they? They soak my clothing. Cool the air. Shade out the sun.

Consider the bumblebee and the butterfly. The bumblebee, according to aerodynamic theory, shouldn’t be able to fly. So, which is right, aerodynamic theory or the bumblebee? Later information has sorted out the problem. Turns out bumblebees don’t flap their wings up and down, but back and forth. This was learned in 2005 when high-tech cameras and a robotic bee model investigated the question. See what you’re looking at.

What if you were a child like me, who watched caterpillars intently? I followed them as they munched on leaves, as they put themselves in splendid isolation, as that isolation got broken by a creature as light as the caterpillar was stolid. And, it could fly!

The lodgepole pines on my property have a clever snow removal trick. When the snow gets too heavy on a branch, the branch dips down, the snow falls away.

Those are all scientific observations in one way or another, but they meet Green’s criteria, at least to me, of revealing the profound and the holy.

Here’s another midrashic method for nature. When we bought our house on Shadow Mountain, I came here from Minnesota for the closing. It was Samain, Summer’s End, the Celtic New Year. October 31^st. At Samain the veil between the worlds thins and creatures can pass both ways, out of the Other World to our world and out of this world to the Other World.

On the morning of the closing I went out on the rocky soil behind our new house. There stood three mule deer bucks. I looked at them. They looked at me. I moved a bit closer and they didn’t shy away. I’m not sure how long we stood there, but it was long enough to establish a wordless communication.

As I considered this remarkable (at least to me) event, I decided the mountain had sent these angels (messengers) to say Kate and I were welcome on Shadow Mountain. I’ve felt welcome among our wild neighbors ever since.

Second event. I have prostate cancer and am right now going through a recurrence. Last June I started radiation therapy, five days a week for seven weeks. The morning before I started radiation two elk bucks jumped the five-foot fence around our back and began eating dandelions. They stayed in our yard that night and left the next day. They were the only wild animals I’ve seen in our back since the mule deer visitation five years ago. The mountain had come to reassure me, calm me. It worked.

A friend challenged me to find a name for our property. I’d thought about it before but most of what I considered seemed corny or pretentious or just silly. Then my Korean daughter-in-law came for a long visit. Her presence led me to pay more attention to things Korean and I realized the person she’d called her mentor was in fact a Korean shaman.

When I looked up muism, or Korean shamanism, I found Sansin, a guardian spirit residing in mountains. Seemed right for our house.

From another, very different angle. Transubstantiation. The Catholic doctrine that the host and the wine are the body and blood of Jesus Christ. OK on the mythic level, sure, but in reality? Odd at least. There is, however, transubstantiation of a different sort. When you eat bread, the wheat becomes you. That steak. You. Brussel sprouts. You. Even chocolate. You. Everyday we transform food into our own bodies. How amazing, profound, holy is that?

What midrashim do you have about the natural world? What methods could we identify to help people see what they’re looking at?

Creating a sustainable presence for humans on this earth is the Great Work for our time. Thomas Berry

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[i] Green, p. 16

[ii] Neo-paganism, Wicca or Druidism or Asatru (Nordic), for example, has shallow roots, most in nineteenth century Victorian fancy. I’m not referring to this sort of paganism.

[iii] Green, p.. 4 

[iv] Green, p. 119

[v] I’m not happy with the word soul. It has a lot of baggage, too, just like God.

[vi] Green, p. 116

[vii] Carey Reams

[viii] I’m using natural world here in a restricted sense, that is, the non-artificial world, the non-humanbuilt world. This is wrong on the face of it since humans are of the natural world and our homes, for example, are no different than a swallow’s nest or a bear’s den in meeting our particular requirements. I believe we should avoid anthropocentrism if at all possible, as Green says we are neither the pinnacle nor the end of evolution.

Samain and the Gratitude Moon

Here’s a bit about Singapore and colonialism. The video. The naked Zapata painting is interesting, too.

Samain and the Fallow Moon

Got a workout in. Some more work on the bagel table. Here’s a couple of quotes I’m using as resource material:

“Paul Ricoeur speaks of the vertigo of “being already born that reveals to me the non-necessity of being here.”” Zornberg, p. 127

“The problem of Sarah’s death is, profoundly, the problem of her life, of chayei Sarah-of the contingency of the already born, the all but dead. Her perception of moral vertigo is displaced onto Isaac’s kime’at shelo nisbhat* experience. In a real sense, as the Sages put it, “His ashes remain piled on the altar.” Zornberg, p.128 *“a little thing decided his fate”

I’m going for the big fish in this bagel table plan. Our own vertigo about our own non-necessity of being here. The abyss into which we all stare. And the reasons to live on in spite of the vertigo.

“And Isaac brought her (Rebecca) to the tent of Sarah his mother, and he took Rebecca, and she became his wife, and he loved her. And Isaac was comforted for the loss of his mother.” Gen. 24:67

Isaac has his own vertigo as Sarah’s only child, the child of her 99th year. He was also the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham to make his descendants like the stars in the sky, the sand on a beach. In spite of both of these his own father, Abraham, agreed to and would have carried out his sacrifice. Could he trust any love from his father?

When Sarah dies, Isaac must have been devastated. She dies before he returns from the Akedah, so he has no chance to talk with her, get her healing. I imagine the abyss was staring back at him. When he finds sexual satisfaction and love with Rebecca though, he is comforted. Perhaps that’s where we all find the courage to stare into the abyss of our own horrors, the non-necessity of our being here: intimacy and commitment.

Fall and the Sukkot Moon

With Kate’s 8:30 appointment in Denver yesterday we got to drive in rush hour during the season’s first snow. In our Minnesota tuned experience Colorado drivers, natives and sunbelt immigrants alike, have never learned the art of driving on snowy roads. We crawled down 285 with folks clearly frightened by the white stuff.

Had a near ditch drop myself going down Shadow Mountain. At the very bottom, on almost level ground, going about 30, I skidded toward Shadow Brook. Corrected just a bit, teased it back toward the other lane, slid across the road almost, then got it straightened out. Lucky no one else was coming. Heart pounded a bit.

As I drove some more, I began to really like this all-wheel drive. It’s more sure around corners and helped me pull out of the skid.

Made it to the appointment on time. Barely. An hour and fifteen minute drive. Normally forty-five.

Guber had some encouraging things to say. At last! First, the bleb on the c.t., the new one, which he showed us while trying to toggle images between two competing programs, he thinks is part of her scarring process on the left lung. May it be so. A new c.t. in early November will provide more guidance. As physicians say, it will declare itself. “If it stays the same, it’s scarring. If it gets bigger, it’s not,” he said, “But I think it’s scarring.” To his eye it was the same in two images 5 months apart.

Also, he felt confident Kate could handle the lung biopsy. When asked if she might need a ventilator, he said, “It’s possible. Not likely, but possible.” Kate. “Would I come off of it?” “Oh, yes.” He was sure. That’s the biggest concern we both had.

Though there will be another c.t. scan and a visit to the pulmonologist, Taryle, we went ahead and scheduled the lung biopsy for November 18. Finally. After it’s done, a definitive diagnosis will spell out which drugs may help her. Get her some life back. A long, slow process. Too long, too slow.

We got about 4 inches of snow. I’m gonna wait on the solar snow shovel. 50 later today, 14 right now.

When I went out for the paper about 5:20, Orion was higher to the right, moving toward Black Mountain. The air was cold, crisp. Reminded me of Minnesota, as did some of the driving yesterday. This storm has moved on to the Plains and the Midwest. Enjoy, you guys.

Fall and the Yom Kippur Moon

Fall and the Rosh Hashanah Moon

And, yet more medical news. Went in for my second Lupron shot in the morning, at Swedish. Then, drove back in later in the day with Kate to the E.R. (see below)

Talked to Sherry, the nurse practitioner for prostate cancer at Urology Associates. Turns out the protocol for the Lupron works like this. Get two undetectable PSA’s in a row, that is, 0.01, and they stop the Lupron. Mine was 0.03. Low, but not low enough to give me one undetectable. That means I’ll get at least a third Lupron shot in January, January 6th.

New PSA the week before each Lupron shot. This means the earliest I’ll know about the efficacy of the radiation is June, 2020. Possibly not till August or September.

Sherry did say that the hot flashes do tend to tail off. Hope she’s right about that.

A bit disheartened. With some detectable psa, even though low, does it mean the radiation didn’t work? Seems like it to me since the idea was to cure me. If the radiation is over, and successful, shouldn’t there be no detectable psa? Guess I’ll get clarity on this in early November when I visit Anna Willis, Dr. Eigner’s P.A.

Fall and the Rosh Hashanah Moon

How cool is this Starhopper trial?

Lughnasa and the Harvest Moon

Yesterday morning I filed accident reports with Colorado State Patrol and Traveler’s. Their forms don’t anticipate a foreign national driving a rented RV. Made for an interesting session. Opened the Rav4’s back door. Works fine. The damage is superficial, but probably enough to make them replace the whole door and bumper.

Since we missed seeing Debra on Saturday due to the accident, we took her out for lunch. Ohanagrill. A Hawai’ian eatery on the shore of Sloan Lake. It was hot, a bit muggy. Felt like Maui just a little bit. I had kalua pork and cabbage. We shared four Portuguese donuts.

Debra’s headed to Uganda for a two-year stint in the Peace Corps. She’s sixty and wants an adventure. Sure she’ll get one there. Business development. Unless. She also picked up her ESL credentials and might try to get work in that way.

Coming back from Lakewood where Debra lives the battery on Kate’s portable O2 concentrator died. She was not worried as long as we were at the relatively low Denver altitude (still a mile high, though), but when we began to climb the mountains toward home her chest felt heavy and she started to get a headache.

I drove faster than the speed limit, which I rarely do, getting her back to our home concentrators. I ran in, turned one on, and got her the tubing as she came in the door. Much better. Not gonna let that happen again.

Pretty tired today. It was a busy, overly busy, week. Lots of driving here and there with Gabe’s glove crisis and Kate’s pulmonology appointment plus Tom’s visit. Good tired, though. Friends and family.