Spring Anniversary Moon
There are shifts and changes going on, movement in my soul. When we moved here, I left behind relationships precious beyond words. Not entirely, no. I’ve stayed in contact through facebook, e-mails, occasional visits, especially from the Woollies, but the day-to-day, go to lunch chances for nourishing those relationships has disappeared. I was lonely here atop Shadow Mountain.
This in no way denigrates the most special relationship of my life with Kate. I couldn’t have, wouldn’t have made this move without the strong anchor of our marriage. That anchor has only gone deeper into the oceans of my inner world as we’ve been out here.
Neither does it denigrate the wonder and majesty of living in the Rocky Mountains, nor does it denigrate my introverted path, so happy in its loft, this library. That loneliness did not diminish these important parts of my life.
But it was real and significant. It manifested as a sense of yearning, a desire for companionship like what I’ve had with the Woollies and the docent corps at the MIA. I think, had it continued, that it would have become corrosive, perhaps even damaging to those core aspects of my life that remained solid.
Over the last couple of weeks though, perhaps a month or more, our engagement with Beth Evergreen has made that loneliness recede. In both the afternoon and evening mussar groups I’ve found a place to open myself up, to be vulnerable. To be seen. The study of kabbalah that will commence in May will deepen this experience, I’m sure of it.
To be in a religious community and have no professional responsibility for it is unusually freeing for me. Contra to the Dawkins and Hitchens of the world I find religion inspiring, most religions. I guess engagement with religion is a core facet of my self, too. Probably obvious to others, but only becoming so to me now. Beth Evergreen is the most authentic religious community I’ve had the privilege of knowing. In being part of it I’ve found a deep well to nourish the roots of my soul. A blessing.
Don’t know why it took me so long, but I know how to make America great again. It will not require red baseball hats or xenophobic bluster. No, it only requires listening to the ideas of a Passionate priest, Thomas Berry. Berry wrote a small book, 
The phrase, the Great Work, comes from medieval alchemy. The primary, original material of the universe, the prima materia, in the alchemist’s lab can create the philosopher’s stone. The philosopher’s stone could turn base metals into gold or silver and extend the alchemist’s life.
Zero K examines, in a minimalist world, our obsessions with death, immortality and technology while recounting a strained father-son relationship. It’s stark and strange, featuring, for example, a compound somewhere in the ‘stans. At this compound, mostly underground, is the center for a cryogenics movement funded by wealthy folk hoping to live forever, or at least until there’s a cure for whatever they have right now.
Underground Railroad imagines a real railroad, with tunnels and station masters, which carries escaped slaves. It is not so much the railroad though that commends this novel, but the story of the slaves who escape. This novel puts you inside the minds of slaves on the plantation and as they decide to flee and the ambiguous world that faces them even in relative freedom. Claustrophobic, scary, uncertain life on the run sometimes contrasted favorably with enslavement, sometimes furnished prisons and punishments that did not. I appreciated the chance to live in this world for the time it took to read this novel.
The Nix uses massive online video gaming, the Chicago protests of 1968, and the life of a disappointed assistant professor of English and his estranged mother to reflect on what it means to be human.
