Imbolc and the 3/4 Moon
Wednesday gratefuls: David Sanders. Rebecca. Claire. Bonnie. Elisa. Snow. Coming down hard. Shingles vaccination. Safeway pickup. Rigel’s meds. Kep’s good appetite. Kabbalah Experience. Their classes. The kitchen. Mostly remodeled. The Mountain roads in the Snow.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Language, mediator or creator? Or both?
Tarot:
Today. Trash out early in advance of snow too deep to move the bins through. First push for Vince, tomorrow. See how he’ll do. I’m hopeful.
Talked about soul mates in Torah and the Stars. Is there some one, perhaps only one, who can complete you? Kate considered me her soul mate and I considered her mine. Took me a lot of relationships to find her. Worth it. In the class following Torah and the Stars, Sefer Yetzirah II, David Sanders quoted Eric Fromm: love is being committed to the growth of another. Excellent. Kate and I fit that definition in so many ways.
It also allows for the sort of love I have with Kep and Rigel, with my ancient brothers, with Jon, Ruth, and Gabe. The sort of love that CBE has shown to me.
I felt energized after the two classes. I needed it because I still had to go back to Safeway, after a jaunt there around 8:30 am to pickup groceries and drop Rigel’s prescriptions at the pharmacy. After Mark Odegard’s bout of shingles, I committed myself to getting the vaccine(s). Did it. Got the first one. Two months later, the second one.
Picked up Rigel’s meds, muscle relaxant and oxy, got a poke in the right arm. Which hurt, btw. Came back home.
Next up tomorrow: getting started on kitchen reorganization. I plan to savor the opportunity to organize plates and silverware, herbs and spices, bread box and coffee maker. Getting them in places that will not recreate the clutter I had before the work began. When I see how long that will take, not long I imagine, I’ll call Modern Bungalow and schedule the furniture delivery.
Ellen Arnold, Jamie’s mother, served on a subcommittee of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) vetting the new social studies standards for Colorado Schools. She asked those of us in the Thursday mussar group to read the ADL’s positions and to comment to the school board.
This is what I submitted:
As an old man who’s seen the changes in our country since the early 1960’s, I’m proud to be part of a state that takes history seriously. But.
The ADL’s comments on these revisions, which I have read and with which I agree, make me remember the adage that history is written by winners. While this may be true in the short term, the job of historians and educators is to balance the winner’s version with the facts of how others were affected by the winner’s victories.
This would include at least the facts about Native American deaths and cultural cancellation by the United States Government. It would include at least information about slavery congruent with the information in the New York Time’s 1619 project. It would include factual information about the Yellow Peril era and the subsequent incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII. It would include factual information about US colonialism in the Philippines. It would include information about the Holocaust, Nazi’s, and other genocides that have occurred, e.g.the Armenian, the Rwandan, and the Cambodian.
This is far from trivial. The history that we learn in school becomes the bedrock against which we measure the veracity of competing claims in political campaigns, in discussions with friends, in making business decisions.
The trust given to you is not only to the truth, although it should first be that, but it is also a trust given to you by those not educated, by those not born, by all of us who need informed fellow citizens to make our democracy work. Don’t put the shackles on young minds. Set them free with the truth. Please.
Activities to plan and execute MCC2 – the insertion burn for Webb’s L2 orbit. MCC2 corrects any residual trajectory errors and adjusts the final L2 orbit.
A Shrinking Band of Southern Nurses, Neck-Deep in Another Covid Wave. 
There is a small herd of Mule Deer Does who’ve been coming up the utility easement to eat needles off slash Derek dumped there. When they’re here, the scene becomes instant backwoods. An over the river and through the woods tableau. They’re here right now. The Buck, an eight-pointer, was here this morning. Neither Kep nor Rigel paid attention. Just as well. A chance encounter between a Dog and a Buck can result in injury or death for the doggy.
Deciding that next year and thereafter I’m going to focus my giving beyond CBE in a different way. My largest non-CBE donation was to the Land Institute where Wes Jackson and his crew push toward perennial Crops and no-till agriculture. I’m gonna lean toward these radical solution organizations, ones working with the Soil, with Plants, with agriculture. I value the courage it takes to stand against farming practices that seem so entrenched as to be unmovable. And I value the creative thinking that the Wendell Berry’s, the Mary Oliver’s, the Aldo Leopold’s, the Thomas Berry’s, the Wes Jackson’s represent.
Wednesday gratefuls: Shirley Waste. Bowe. The grout and the backsplash. The farm sink. Inching closer. Closer. CORE. Generator. Kohler. Solar panels. Juice in the house. Computers. Induction Stove. Lights. Televisions. Mini-splits. Baseboard heat. Fans. Treadmill. Rigel’s stiff leg.
The hostage taking in Colleyville, Texas. Congregation Beth-Israel. A Britisher who believed Jews controlled the media, the banks, the government. Old tropes from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Yes. Propaganda has affect. Even after all its creators are long dead. Want to understand some of the white supremacists? Read The Turner Diaries. Words have power. Ideas have power. And, conspiracy ideas can kill.
I hope, without much conviction, that the Trump era brought in the clowns and we voters packed up their tents and hurried them off to the long time home of American circuses, Florida. Yet as the anti-semites pull themselves out of their darkened rooms, as the Klan and the Proud Boys and the 3%’rs and their enablers in the GOP take politics into a muddy, mucky, bloody brawl, as climate change bears down on us, I wonder how many it will take to pack up the tents and the menageries and the sideshows this next time?
Wednesday gratefuls: Cousin Diane of Clan Keaton. Hanwoo beef. Seoah. Bulgogi. Backsplash ready to go up. Slight snafu in my bank account. Oops. My error. All better now. Bowe. Marina Harris. Being right, being wrong. Tom’s theme. American Day of Atonement. Missed it. Kate and her handiworks. Luke and Elisa, Torah and the Stars. David Sanders, Sefer Yetzirah. Voice and letters as creative powers. Kabbalists. Judaism.
The filibuster. You know. Gumming up the works all by yourself. Of the Senate of the still most powerful nation on Earth. Sure, there’s a risk. Always. If and/when the GOP controls the Senate, the Democrats would not have the filibuster. But. Voting rights? The Build Back Better bill? Standing up for decisions as opposed to obstruction. Right now that looks pretty good to me. Ditch the filibuster.
This morning I had my first Winter semester classes. Torah and the Stars: Astrology and Kabbalah, Pt. II and Sefer Yetzirah, chapter 2. One starting at ten and ending at eleven fifteen, the next starting at noon and going until one fifteen. Both dense. Astrology is dense because folks have been fussing with it since early China, India, and Mesopotamia. Houses, planets, sun signs, north and south nodes, aspects. Natal charts laid out against the chart of the day. Telling stories with Uranus the renegade and that emotional Moon conspiring to challenge a stolid Taurean. Still learning, still unsure how I feel about it.
Bracket the comparison to esoteric physics and the Sefer Yetzirah, a very early Kabbalistic text, stands on its own. We dipped a toe in the idea that voice and sound, especially when combined with letters, can create reality. The underlying question is the creation of something from nothing. If God spoke the universe into existence, what came before God’s speech? In this case God equates to the ein sof, the infinite, the unending. God as undifferentiated, alone, eternal.
The implication of the shattered vessel is that all things contain a shard of ohr, of divine light. The great work of the creation involves reuniting those shards of ohr with their holy source. The Kabbalist’s Tree of Life shows both a downward emanation from the crown, or keter, that part of creation closest to the remaining ein sof, to malkut, this world, and an emanation in the other direction which bears those shards of light back to their source.
Our form of government, far from the only one, is in danger right now of losing the mandate of heaven by basing its survival on the mandate of money. The weird part is that many folks most damaged by the mandate of money are the ones rebelling against the old democratic regime. Yes, it was a center right thing all along, but at least some progress got made and people weren’t dying by the thousands. So here we have the strange circumstance of rebels insisting on more corporate influence, more oligarchic rule, yet rebels whose own jobs are often in jeopardy.
In the U.S. however the oligarchs have a situation where the white population sees its share of the population shrinking, the sort of jobs its middle and working class depended on disappearing, while increasingly restive ethnic politics like Black Lives Matter strengthen the influence of the non-white population. The road to power still runs through the valley of white privilege though for how long is anybody’s guess. Uncertainty feeds the politics of ressentiment. Ressentiment is “a psychological state arising from suppressed feelings of envy and hatred that cannot be acted upon…” Oxford online dictionary.
African-Americans and perhaps to a lesser extent Latinos look to different Mandates. African-Americans had the mandibles of slavery instead of a Mandate of Heaven. Latinos had sufferance for agricultural work, but met resistance to permanent immigration. Both hope for a new Mandate of Heaven whose arc of acceptance would include them. In the eyes of these communities the American Mandate of Heaven, its Manifest Destiny, has brought them suffering and oppression, not good crops and disease free villages.
It may be time to give up the shibboleth of democracy and ask the hard question: Is this an effective form of government for our time, for all of our people? If the answer is no, as I think it must be, then what form of government will serve all of us? This might be the real question rather than trying to prop up a republic with arcane rules that serve the rich and not the poor.
Another spot on card. Wednesday is my inbox, errands, chores day. The definition of domestic responsibility.I like having only one day. That means I can shunt those tasks to Wednesday without any fear that I’m procrastinating on something important. It will be there on Wednesday.
Here’s the big problem. After the nap, instead of feeling refreshed, I feel like it’s time to start slowing down for the day. I putz around, but if I get up around 3, the dogs want to be fed. I feed them, then me. And I go watch television. I know. But I like television. Even so, I watch more than I would if my schedule worked better.
Hey. Wanna scare yourself? Read this article: “
My classes are done for the semester. I will pick up two next term: Sefer Yetzirah and Torah for the Stars. The first is the ur-text for Kabbalah. The second a continuation of the astrology work I did this term. One of the reasons I want better control of my schedule is for study. I’ve not done my usual good job of reading ahead, going over notes, doing creative things with what I’ve learned.
Tuesday gratefuls: Marina Harris and Furball Cleaning. Ana and her partner. Conifer Post Office. Mailing Christmas. That retired pre-school teacher I met in line. Meeting strangers. Ali, the Will Smith biopic. Frozen entrees, even if they are a bit boring. The pause in the remodeling. Cousins. Especially, Diane. Mary. Mark. Holiseason. Next up: Winter Solstice.
Jon and I will try again next week for his birthday dinner. This time he’s coming up here and we’ll go to the Black Hat Cattle Company in Kittredge. Carnivores delight. Cardiologists’ dream restaurant. Good food, well made.
This Seth Levine, New Builders idea keeps itself alive. A sign I need to do something about it. I ordered the book, New Builders. Here’s my idea in a nutshell: Foundry Group (Seth’s venture capital organization) allies itself with a model synagogue, probably a big one like Emmanuel or Mt. Sinai, and a model Black Church, probably like or in fact, Zion which Rabbi Jamie has cultivated as a partner to Beth Evergreen. These three figure out how best to use the resources they each represent to nurture and support New Builder businesses.
No solution is the One. As in, if we fixed education, everything would be better. If we focus on mental health, we can end homelessness. No.
If I was paying full freight on my Orgovyx, $836 a month copay, my prostate cancer care would now be upwards of $10,000 plus a year with the auximin pet scan and the genetic testing. Which is, of course, a one time only. But the other two are ongoing.
All righty then. I’ve got my old totem animal, the Moose, and my new, sidecar totem animal, The Great Bear, and coming home tomorrow my neon sign of The Hooded Man, aka The Hermit.
And an odd insight has come to me. The little drummer boy for justice may actually be my anima, so, a little drummer girl instead. Justice is frequently portrayed as a woman and I can see (not sure about this yet) how my mother’s compassion toward and with the poor might have taken root in my soul as the constant song of a just world. Insistent. Rooted in feeling, not ideology. Instinctive. And, feminine. The yin impulse in my soul. Unexamined, strong, protective, nurturing. Insistent. A mother’s way.
These are not exclusive, no. The one refreshes, recharges, brings perspective and deep connection while the other gathers up that energy and throws it into the world, crashing down bowling pins as it does. But it’s the opposite of the stereotypes. The man wants to return home, cook, play with the kids, have a quiet and peaceful life while the woman wants to take up arms against the sea of troubles and by opposing end them.
I suppose this time might be a time when the two try to come into harmony, realizing how much each needs the other. Yet, I feel the Hooded Man wanting to claim more and more of our common life. Home. Family. Introspection. Calmness. That bomb throwing Emma Goldman, deeply loved and cherished, on the other hand, feels guilty sitting out when there are wars still to be fought.