Category Archives: Politics

Commentary on the news, GeekWorld, Politics, US History

Bearing Witness

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Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Rabbi Jamie’s translation of chapter 2, Humility. Orchot Tzaddikim. Mussar. All my Jewish friends. One last night of very cold therefore very great sleeping. Winter in all her cold, frosty, white, Snow-packed glory. My Lodgepole Companion. The psyche, a delicate and fungible place. Breakfast with Ruth on Saturday. Boulder.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Memories of Gertie

Kavannah 2025: creativity

Kavannah this week: Appreciation of opposition

One brief shining: The spirit of Winter barren Meadows filled with Snow while Lodgepoles gather it on their Branches until it weighs too much, then bending the Branch sloughs it off, I see the curved, cloven hoof marks of Mule Deer hunting for Grass, imagine the Black Bears snug in their beds dreaming not of sugar plums but that Hive filled with sweet Honey and the cold Water of Maxwell Creek, tasty Larvae dug out of a rotten Log.

N.B: I asked chatbot to illustrate this in the style of the Pre-Raphaelites. These two images are what I got. Not even close. Notice, too, how similar they are in design. I’m having fun with this, not always liking what I get, but fascinated by it anyhow.

I could, I suppose, ride out the pardons and the gender bashing and the crashing noises from DEI initiatives by watching Shadow Mountain even more closely. As in John Muir Law’s nature journaling for example. Or, I could lose myself in the study of Torah and the Zohar, kabbalah’s central text. There are, too, so many books to read. So many good TV programs to watch. Movies. Zoom calls to attend. Friends to dine with. Family to visit or who come visit me. Sure. Those kind of blinders appeal to me because I want to do them all.

There is, too, the writing of another novel. Haven’t gotten traction with that work for a while, but it could happen. I would delight in sliding off into a different universe, a world of my creation. Where I have real influence. Not saying it won’t happen.

Maybe I cancel my subscription to the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post. Listen only to tech and philosophy podcasts. AI is a rabbit hole I can happily run down for hours at a time.

I could switch my sleep schedule, stay up only at night. Become, once again, an astronomy nerd. Invest in a fancy Celestron. Send my mind and heart out to distant galaxies.

And yet. I won’t. Perhaps I should. For the peace of my soul. But. I can’t. I will not look away. Will not say I did not know. Did nothing when they let insurrectionists, convicted seditionists go free. Did nothing when they came for programming aiming for a Federal Government whose employees come from all sectors of our population. Did nothing when they came for work to realize the Great Work: creating a sustainable human presence on Mother Earth. Did nothing when they came for the poor, the wretched yearning to be free. Those who believe so much more in the dream that is America than we can fathom. Did nothing when they came for the citizens made so by birth. As was I.

You might ask. What then will you do? I will bear witness. Though I can appreciate the opposing forces in our own body politic, I do not have to let sympathy, which is the best I can manage, cloud my judgment. And, I won’t.

 

 

Mussar, Politics

Incremental Change

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Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: Tom. Paul. Cold again. Working on my week kavannah. Not going well. Borzoi. Irish Wolfhounds. Whippets. Akitas. German Wirehairs. Coyote Hound/IW mix. Dogs of all sorts and sizes. Dogs I’ve known and loved. Dogs I haven’t known but would love if given the chance. High Mountain Winds. Shirley Waste. School Bus Drivers. Snow Plow Drivers. Rural Mail carriers. Doing jobs that make our lives easier.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: History

Kavannah 2025: Creativity

Kavannah this week: Appreciation of Differences   Haarecha shel machloket

One brief shining: How to see the humanity in the inhumane, how to see kindness in the cruel, how to see truth in the liar, how to know the faith in the hypocrite, how to find justice in the unjust, how to do all these things without losing a sense of outrage and personal conviction about inhumanity, cruelty, lies, hypocrisy, injustice will be the challenge not only of this week’s kavannah, but a work of the next four long years. At least for me.

 

I freely and without reservation admit that yesterday’s post did not advance my appreciation of the differences I find between my own values and cousin Donald and his crew. Satire is not kind. Can be cruel. At best, even if it is these two, it neither lies nor is unjust.

When drill, baby, drill becomes a battle cry, I can acknowledge my own complicity in our fossil fuel supported economy. When a flat, uninformed dictat like: From this day forward there are only two genders, male and female, in America comes out of the mouth of a President on inauguration day, I can hear the pleading for a simpler, easier to understand relational world. When racial justice will occur in a color-blind, meritocratic society, I can feel the fear of the other advancing, gaining traction. When the leader of the law and order party pardons those who assaulted officers of the law, well, you got me here. How do we square that circle?

What I’m trying to say is this. Even in the darkest of his and his minions purposes, there lies a sentiment or conviction I can find within myself. In this way I can stay in touch with the humanity of Stephen Miller. Bannon. The Q-Anon shaman. Does this change my direct opposition to their actions, their intended actions? Not at all.

We serve different gods. My god lives and acts only through human and natural life, through the processes and systems of the natural word. My god opposes inhumanity, cruelty, injustice, lies, and hypocrisy. But not the humanity of those caught up in these acts.

Not knowing this is the abyss of which Nietzsche spoke, the one that stares back. And the monster that when fighting you do not want to become.

Mussar suggests small, incremental changes get us where we need to go. This is my small change today. Acknowledging the need for this sort of reflection about our public life. Amen.

 

Politics, US History

Oh, dear

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Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Oligarchs at play. That hat. Barron. He who would be king. -10 last night, 18 this morning. Ruth back in Boulder. Gentleman Mark teaching future engineers. Mary in Melbourne. Diane, healing. Me, on Shadow Mountain. Great Sol. Sunlight. Snow. Grass under the Snow. Voles. Rabbits. Chipmunks. Salamanders.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Melania’s Hat

Kavannah 2025: Creativity

Kavannah this week: Appreciation of Opposition   Haarecha shel machloket

One brief shining: Barron with his oiled and brushed back hair, much taller now, stood next to his mother and her visible disguise, she Rosemary to his Damien, behind them those powerful men come to lick the boots of the orange haired, fake tanned one: Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk.

Here’s the Vaudeville-style illustration based on your description. the first iteration.

The trillion dollar trio. Like Tinkers to Evers to Chance. Bezos to Musk to Zuckerberg.  They shuffled around nodding to those who have sworn fealty to them, dukes in a contemporary medieval amorality play. The royal family included Jared and Ivanka who were not named on their way in. Also, the two sons who kill large animals with big guns. None though, not even cousin Donald, who could match Melania’s hat. A model who understands the power moves which fashion can reveal and conceal. All hail the queen of mean.

I couldn’t look away. I didn’t want to watch the coronation. But I did. I even listened to the speech. America’s golden age starts right now. I. I. I. I. I. I. Bad people. Bad policies. I. I. I. I. Drill, baby, drill. Look at me. See me. Acclaim me. And, we won’t forget God. Yes, he actually said that.

After his speech. America’s tenor? Sang of America the Great. Following him. The most chilling part of the event for me. A military chorus moved down the aisle starting their musical offering with the first verse of the Battle Hymn of the Republic:

the second iteration. after I asked for a spell check

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword,
His truth is marching on.

CHORUS:
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.

As I heard these words, I knew who cousin Donald believed this song referred to. And I feared for us. Even for myself.

Amy Klobuchar, the relentlessly vanilla senator from my former home state of Minnesota, though. She who spoke truth to power on that accursed day. Reference after reference to the peaceful transfer of power, the value of the Constitution, the norms of our democracy, the people’s will. I was proud to have lived in her state, to have voted for her.

I think of FDR. A paraphrase:

YESTERDAY, January 20th, 2025, a date which will live in infamy. The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the crudest and vilest of our own citizens.

Make no mistake. This man means to bring retribution to his enemies, succor to insurrectionists, and more money to the oligarchs who sat near him.

Friends, Health, Politics, Sport

The Great Game

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Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

Monday gratefuls: MLK Day. Inauguration Day. Cold -9. Senate Navy Bean Soup. Another batch. Catfish fillets. Beets. Peskyfowlatarian. Fish and Seafood and Chicken for protein. Making life easier. The thousand mile journey to Trump’s last day in office starts today.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: This land, our land

Kavannah 2025: Creativity

Kavannah for the week: Appreciation of Opposition   Haarecha shel machloket

One brief shining: Oh, watching football with Lake effect Snow, Bills and Ravens pounding away at each other, two young boys at quarterback who came into the league together in 2018, cold hands and slick footballs, not to the death gladiators leaving it all on the floor of our modern day Coliseums, our American Plaza del Toros.

 

Here is the vintage movie poster illustration inspired by your description

We did not invent the spectacle of grown men hurting each other or themselves for our entertainment. Far, far from it. That ball game the Mayan’s played. Sometimes sacrificing the winners. Toreadors. Gladiators. Buzhaski, played with the headless, stuffed body of a goat. Or now. Motor sports. Rugby. Lacrosse. Hockey. Even Basketball. Called games.

Suppose if you wanted to stretch the definition we could include traders on stock exchanges, commodity exchanges. C-suites. Hedge funds. Anywhere men, almost always men, put themselves at risk for some reward. Always a reward. A super bowl ring. A bull’s ear or tail. Death in order to play with the gods. Living another day. Trophies.

I’d like to say I have no interest in such things. That men concussing each other didn’t captivate me. But it does. Athleticism, yes. Of course. But the brutality? That, too. A non-evolved part of my brain I suppose.

Feeling for Mark Andrews, a dependable tight end, who fumbled in the fourth quarter, and most miserably of all, dropped the game tying 2-point conversion with less than 2 minutes left. Glad he’s not a gladiator.

 

Just a moment: No, I’ve not forgotten. Today is the first day. Only four more years to go. I hope. A lot of excellent material being written about liberalism, Democrats, what’s needed to restart the engine of our democracy after all these would be fascists put sugar in the gas tank.

I recommend a book Tom Crane sent me: The Storm Before the Calm. George Friedman. Without going into his argument he predicted a transformational presidency after which a new American Way would arise. Along the lines of Teddy Roosevelt’s reaction to the first Gilded Age. May it be so.

 

When the polar vortex heads back north Vince and his helper will come. They will move the dining table and three of its chairs upstairs to my loft, shift some wire shelving to the weird niche between my window walls and the pony wall, then bring downstairs my treadmill (so, so heavy), three stall mats, weight bench, kettle bells, exercise balls. No more schlepping up the garage stairs to workout.

They will also move a TV into that room. And they’ll switch out my new Morris Chair, taking it upstairs, while moving my old favorite leather chair downstairs. Finally, they’ll lift my new desktop tower next to my old one so I can start the change over to a new Windows 11 unit. Not sure quite yet when I’ll get the new 32″ curved monitor up and in place.

In yesteryear these last few things I could have and would have done myself. Not today. Far too weak.

 

 

Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Judaism, Politics, US History, World History

New Apostolic Reformation. Oh my.

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Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

Shabbat gratefuls: 1 degree. 3 inches of new Snow. Talmud Torah on Zoom. Tech meets that baby in the reed boat. Joseph and Moses. Compare and contrast. That hygge feeling as Snow falls and the temperature sinks. Love it. NFL playoff games. Another Gray Man novel. Zohar volumes. The sacred world as we see it. Everyday.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: My son and Seoah, visiting next month

Kavannah 2025: Creativity

Kavannah this week: Appreciation of Opposition   Haarecha shel machloket

One brief shining: As the calendar rolls on toward the inauguration of cousin Donald, the movement of his big day inside the Rotunda shows who rules this country and the world, Mother Earth.

 

Expect a long Ancientrails sometime in the near future about the New Apostolic Reformation. After reading the Atlantic article about it, which came just after the Anti-Social Century article I talked about on the 16th, I found what might be a purpose for me over the next four years. Being in opposition to it. Partly why I chose appreciation of opposition as my kavannah for this week. The other one being so, so obvious.

Here is the illustration in the style of a National Parks poster, reflecting the contemplative and thematic connections of your paragraph.

If you look at the Wikipedia article about it, you’ll find that it references C. Peter Wagoner as its founder and chief influence. Hard for me to believe but I studied with this guy back in the 1980’s. In Pasadena at Fuller Theological Seminary. At the time he was a guru in the church growth movement and one of my tasks as an Associative Executive for the Twin Cities Presbytery involved consulting with churches on just that topic.

I discovered in the Atlantic article that part of their work began as a counter to the Liberation Theology movement then ascendant in many Latin and Central American Catholic churches. In 1974 I attended a weeklong conference focused on bringing Liberation Theology to North America. Cornel West was part of the conference. My sentiments were then and are now with the spirit of the Liberation Theologians, not the New Apostolic Reformation, yet I seem to have connected with key figures in both movements. Odd. To say the least.

Just a moment: A hostage deal. Back home in the Hoosier State we’d say, day late and a dollar short. October 7th 2023 is a long way back. 94 hostages remain alive and in the hands of Hamas. The cease fire? Bout time. I hope this leads to a full stop to this horrendous chapter in Israeli and Palestinian history.

At some point the pieces have to get picked up, if they can be found, and a new era in the Middle East will slowly emerge. What will it look like? No one really knows. A weakened Iran. Syria without Bashar and with a new government of Islamic jihadists. Houthis still firing missiles toward the Persian Gulf. Lebanon with a weakened Hezbollah. Israel with Gaza and the West Bank still Gaza and the West Bank. Hamas weakened.

I’d like to see a Saudi Arabia/Israel brokered diplomatic initiative, though I don’t expect one. And of course, cousin Donald now enters. What could possibly go wrong?

Fourth Phase, Friends, Politics, Weather +Climate

Ways of Healing

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Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

Friday gratefuls: Alan. Charlie’s dying, too. This disease will run its course. Phrases offered as billboards in my mind. Ruby on Mountain curves. Polar vortex slumping. Arriving soon. Snow first. Cancellations. Gunflint Trail coffee mug, over 35 years old. Ancientrails approaching its twentieth anniversary. The value of conversation. My interlocutors, all of you. Including readers of this blog.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Being heard and seen

Kavannah 2025: Creativity

Kavannah this week: Wholeness and peacefulness

Here is the image inspired by your paragraph, created in the style of Minoan art. It reflects the vibrant colors, flowing lines, and intricate details characteristic of this ancient artistic tradition, capturing the warmth and connection of the moment. 2nd try, still not quite what I wanted. Anyhow.

One brief shining: Ears offered in gentle wholeness, eyes turned toward me, body relaxed, yet engaged, an occasional smile, grimace, nod across my coffee cup and his red plastic keep the coffee warm thermos, as I did what the mussar practice for this week (from the Thursday group), suggested and told my friend Alan, in response to his how you doing, how I was doing.

 

Normal, or rather, traditional Minnesota winter weather coming to the Mountains. Snow and below zero cold. Cancellations. I’m glad. My Coloradification has been complete for a while now. Cold starts in the mid-20’s. Below zero? Head for the thermostat. Snow and ice on Mountain roads, especially at night? Nope. Not anymore. Even with my Minnesota skills I know too big a risk when I see one. For me.

 

Breakfast with Alan this morning. The Parkside. Next to the Evergreen Arts Center where Alan’s Rotary meets early on Friday mornings. This week, I said, had challenges. Mostly in the ever changing world of cancer. As I wrote a few posts back in Overburden, I have strategies for these moments. And they work. To varying degrees. This week I’d say they worked reasonably well since the challenge level was high.

Kristie said, as I wrote, this disease will run its course. Recognition, yet again, that my cancer is incurable. And, if something else doesn’t take me out, it will be happy to step up. When? No one knows. I’m in as good a place as a stage 4 cancer guy can be according to Kristie. That’s welcome news. Yet it has a grim underlayment.

So I told Alan the whole current context for my feelings this week. He listened. I listened, too, to myself. As I spoke, I grew lighter. Brighter. Remember that bit about the healing power of conversation? No, it cannot cure my cancer. But. It can cure my soul.

 

Just a moment: Wanted to issue a sort of correction. I wrote cousin Donald did not have his hand over his heart at Jimmy Carter’s funeral. And he didn’t. But. I did notice later where his hand was. It was over his stomach.

3 days and counting. Still no glimmer about whether I’ll engage, ignore, or run wildly about my house, hands in the air, screaming for no apparent reason.

Great Work, Health, Politics, US History

Blunted Dagger Rattling

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Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: Rich Levine. Marilyn. Dr. Whited. Tom. Paul. Alan. Cold, single digits. Vince, plowed driveway. Rabbi Jamie. Writing. Kavannahs. Ukraine. Iran. Iraq. Turkey. Israel. Palestinians. Syria. Jordan. Egypt. Yemen. Saudi Arabia. Lebanon. China. Russia. South and North Korea. Japan. Taiwan.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Aortic Artery

Kavannah for 2025:  Creativity

Kavannah for this January 8th life: Foresight   (roeh et hanalod)

One brief shining: Aortic artery aneurysm they say, spreading, mom’s brain aneurysm, a visit today to a cardiac surgeon, the past coming forward to haunt me, not as a synaptic engraved memory, but as a body recapitulating my mother’s, weakened arterial walls threatening to let my blood run free.

 

Yeah. Keeping the world of doctors, nurses, technicians, phlebotomists, and billing departments in a steady flow of the green blood which runs through their veins. That’s me. Today’s contribution will go to Dr. William Whited, a cardiac surgeon, who will reveal to me the amount of danger I’m in from a slowly thinning aortic artery. A new issue for a new year. Yay.

 

After about a five hour break from that last paragraph I can write off my aorta as an issue. At my age, Dr. Whited said, most likely will never be a problem. I liked him a lot though I admit I’ll like not seeing him again even better. I’ll need a CT scan in the next few weeks, just to make sure measurements are up to his standards, but he expects no trouble. Would that cancer and my back held such casual futures for me.

 

From a geopolitical point of view I can see a certain logic in Trump’s desire for Greenland. Warming of the Arctic. The great northern passage opening up. Rare Earth elements. Sure, as a parlor game. Like, say imagining Canada as our 51st state. When we consider a rules base global order, maybe our NATO treaty for example, it’s not only flat out bonkers but a reflection of the Trump doctrine: keep your friends at arms length and your enemies close to the Oval office. Do favors for your enemies and take what you want from your friends.

Of course, as one commentator noted, this blunted dagger rattling has a bread and  circuses appeal to his followers. Watch me stand up to Denmark and Canada. What a strong guy am I. All the while his real work will be cutting taxes for billionaires, expanding his family’s net wealth, and punishing all who dared to stand against him.

Gonna be a long four years. And they haven’t even started yet.

 

Just a moment: Apocalypse Now. I love the smell of wildfires in the morning. I feel for all those whose lives, whose homes, whose work places may have to yield to the fury of a Mother Earth grieving for her finely tuned climate.

One way to reach the Great Work, a sustainable presence for humans on this Earth, lies in disaster after disaster until a more reasonable population size is left.

Great Work, Plants, Politics, US History, World History

Noble? failures

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Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

Friday gratefuls: Mini-splits. Elements and Elementals. The abyss. Sisyphus’ rock. Nietzsche. Whitehead. Plato. Socrates. Democritus. Diogenes. Thales. Xeno. Even Descartes. Kant. Maimonides. The Talmud. The Mishnah. The Torah. Coleridge. Wordsworth. Keats. Lao Tze. Chuang-tzu. Moses. Israel. Joseph. Miriam.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Our core story

Kavannah for 2025: Creativity

Kavannah for this January 3rd life: Joy

One brief shining: Went to Stinker’s Sinclair yesterday to buy some milk, but there were no quart containers available, so I took four of the 16 ounce plastic bottles to the checkout where the clerk offered to make sure there were not any quarts in the back; while he did that, I looked across the counter to the other clerk, a thin guy with slightly long dark hair, maybe early twenties, and noticed that he carried an empty holster on his hip, tied to his right leg with a carefully knotted strand of leather.

 

I’ve had a quiet week. Spoken to a few friends. Breakfast with Tara and with Alan this morning. Otherwise getting well back into a new workout routine, this time ensuring I do two full body resistance sessions a week and still aiming for the 150 minutes of moderate cardio. Not all the way there yet, but I can feel it coming.

Reading. Finished the Tao of Pooh and ready to start the Te of Piglet, Hanukkah gifts from Ruth and Gabe. Von Bek, stalled in the story of the second Von Bek, The City in the Autumn Stars. Parsha in Bereshit (Genesis). Commentaries. The NYT. The Washington Post.

Watching The Outpost, Seal Team, and Archer. Hawai’i 5-0 when I workout.

Listening to Mozart quartets.

Exchanging e-mails here and there.

 

Listening to the voices of my past as they continue to bubble up. Wondering why I tend to focus on the noble failures more than the successes. At least I see them as noble.

An example. We (odd, but I don’t who recall who “we” were.) heard one of the last remaining local seed companies, Northrup King, had entered into negotiations with Sandoz, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant. This purchase followed a trend of Big Pharma and Big Ag Chemical companies buying the smaller companies who sold seeds to farmers for each year’s new crop.

Why? The smaller companies owned patents on the seeds. When there were many local seed companies, the hybridization processes were sensitive to regional and even local variations in soil, weather, pests, and other variables important to good crop production.

The companies buying up the patents wanted two things (at least): control over the seed patents for crucial crops like corn, wheat, soy beans, and rice. Corn, wheat, and rice provide about 50% of the world’s calories according to chabotgpt. That control was step one. After they gathered (harvested?) these patents, these companies could centralize hybridization and begin the process of working on their genomes. This was in the mid-1980’s, when genetic manipulation was still in its infancy.

We organized. Tried to form a local co-op to purchase Northrup-King and keep them out of Sandoz’s hands. We protested at the Northrup-King building which is now a wonderful space for artists. I met a person from the General Accounting Office of the Federal Government and tried to get her interested. We looked for a local buyer.

This was prior to the internet so I subscribed to a company, a clipping service, that would provide relevant information published in magazines and newspapers throughout the U.S. We developed crude information packets for local media.

All this over the course of 9 months to a year, as I recall. We were way out of our league. Barely had an effect on a process more critically handled in the world of finance than of local radical politics.

In my mind a noble failure. We did, for a while, raise consciousness of the issue. We discovered novel ways to fight big corporations and their capitalist driven desire to dominate markets by any means necessary. Still, in the end, Northrup-King disappeared into the world of chemists and genetic engineers, their seed patents with them.

 

Commentary on the news, Holidays, Memories, Minnesota, Politics, US History, World History

Yesterday’s Lives

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Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Reconstructionist Judaism. Judaism as jazz. My White Pine companion at Boot Lake Scientific and Nature Area-Minnesota. Those elms I had to cut down and debark in Andover. Emma’s fallen cottonwood. The Seven Oaks out my study window. The dead Ash Tree where the Morel’s grew. The Ironwood that was so tough to cut. Honeycrisp. McIntosh. Plum. Pear. Cherry. Trees in our Orchard.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Mountain Winds

Kavannah for 2025: Yetziratiut  Creativity

For this January 2nd life: Netzach  Perseverance and grit

One brief shining: A hand on her back, a flinch, you scared me, oh wondering what could have made her flinch since she knew I was there, right behind her, sad that touch took her into flight mode, the snow blew busily across my driveway.

 

We’re almost done with Holiseason. I count January 6th, Epiphany as the end of this wonderful time of year that began on Samain, October 31st. Here’s a connection I’d not made before. January 6th, day of the insurrection, when MAGA stormed the Capitol building carrying weapons and looting like vandals. January 6th, day of the Epiphany, which celebrates the visit of the three Magi bearing gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Sorta different, eh? Now wedded by history.

 

Not sure why, but yesterday’s lives have begun seeping into my present. Not in a regret or shame or guilt way, but as a remembrance of time’s past. Could be the stories I’m writing in the Storyworth application. Maybe not though. At breakfast with Tara I told Ball State movement stories that I rarely tell. Today in my gratefuls Trees I had known in Minnesota kept coming to mind. A few days ago I took the Artemis Honey jar out of the cabinet and went into a combination of grief and joy, of remembering life with Kate and the persistent joy then which brought grief about its loss and about Kate’s death.

Most lives, like mine, are ordinary. Most lives, like mine, are extraordinary. Ordinary because they will sink under the burden of history, little known and less remembered. Extraordinary because only I could live my life which makes it, like yours, wonderful, another full-on, head down, legs moving experiment in what it means to be human.

May as well lean into it, the onrush of old lives. Seems to be what’s happening in my psyche.

 

Just a moment: That truck. Near Cafe du Monde. Jackson Square. ISIS? Geez, guys. Read the room. So yesterday. And the irony, the maybe intended irony, of an ugly Tesla cybertruck blowing up in front of a long red tie guy hotel in Las Vegas. Why can’t China or Russia be the great Satan? Or at least share the honor.

I can already feel the aggrievement wheels turning in cousin Donald’s meanness machine. What if he decides to turn the full weight of the U.S. military against Muslim terrorists? He’s capable of that. And trust me someone in his sphere of malevolence has probably recommended it already. What if?

 

 

Commentary on the news, Friends, Great Wheel, Health, Judaism, Mussar, Politics, US History

Toxic. What else can you say?

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Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

New Year’s Day gratefuls: Tara. Ron. Ruth and Gabe. Veronica. 5 degrees this morning. Good sleeping. Snow. A new year. Kinda. The Realm. Von Bek. The Grail. Snowplows. Another Mountain Day, another Mountain life. Ruby in her winter shoes. MVP tonight. Family. Love. A new Zen calendar. Enlightenment. Not hard. Not easy. See what you’re looking at.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: The feel of a fresh slate

Kavannah for 2025: Yetziratiut  Creativity

For January 1 life: Wonder, Malchut

One brief shining: Sitting with Tara over sausage patties, home fries, eggs over easy, and sourdough toast, coffee steaming, the noise almost too much, I felt yet again love, again chesed, again the presence of one who sees me as I am and accepts me, as I see her and accept her.

 

I promised something less abstruse today. Here it is.

Carried the three largest split Oak logs in with the intention of burning them last night, starting a new tradition, burning Yule logs on New Year’s Eve since I missed the Winter Solstice. As in love with the night as I am, I no longer experience as much of it. I go to bed early, too early I felt for burning the Oak. Or, maybe I’m just too set in my ways. Whatever. I didn’t do it. Again. That’s twice.

On a related note: I was gonna go upstairs and hit 30 minutes on the treadmill. Thought about it right after I got back from breakfast with Tara. Almost. Knew it was my yetzer hara, my selfish inclination saying nah. You worked out yesterday. You can work out tomorrow. Take a rest already.

I read instead.

We make these sort of decisions at bechira points, choice points, and whichever way we decide we reinforce the likelihood of making that same choice again. I had two bechira points yesterday and chose the easy way. The good news here is that the yetzer hatov, the generous inclination, the possibility directed yetzer, will always have a chance to change that decision at the next bechira point, reinforcing the way that nurtures becoming.

Mussar expresses a medieval psychology, yes. But. Clyde Steckler, professor of pastoral care at United Theological Seminary, said you can explain the workings of the mind using any system of thought you want and still come up with useful, meaningful ways to understand it. Mussar exemplifies this idea.

I no longer live in a world of bad and good, right and wrong, but in a world of possibilities and potentials reinforced or thwarted. Maybe it’s that field that Rumi talks about. The one out beyond right and wrong. Where we can meet. My practice this month helps reveal this reality: this too is for the good.

 

Just a moment: Driving a pickup truck into a crowd of revelers on Bourbon Street. These newer pickups look like weapons to me. Their massive grills. Cabs high above the rest  of us tooling along in our SUV’s and sedans. And aggressive driving? Speeding. Impatience. Road rage. Seems baked into the I’m bigger and stronger than you are toxic masculinity cast in steel and named Ram. About to get stroked by the red tie guy. Who will attempt to make normative an unthinking, insensitive, domineering version of maleness.