Category Archives: Friends

Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Mussar

Joy. Joy. Joy.

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Beltane and the Mesa View Moon

Thursday gratefuls: MVP. Simcha. Joy. The laughter and learning around the table last night. Going to one more CBE event this month. Snow! 33 degrees. Heavy rain last night. A solid workout yesterday. Cardio and resistance. Feeling good, in my body. Connection. Relationships. Nature. Self. Dogs. Animals. Citrus salad. Mark’s desert Pigeon. The real true desert outside his hotel window.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Joy. Joy. Joy.

One brief shining: Sometimes, once in a while, if the fates are kind, an evening turns from ordinary learning into a festival, a celebration of what it means to be human, to see into each other’s lives and learn in real time what throbs in the heart of another.

 

Last night was such a night at CBE. It was my turn to lead the MVP group, a monthly mussar evening. Simcha was the middah, the character trait we focused on both in MVP and the congregation as a whole. Simcha means joy.

I asked everybody to find two or three photographs that evoked joy for them. We wrote five minutes about them, then dove into what everyone wanted. Adult show and tell.

Pictures of siblings. Pictures of children at play. Pictures outside in the Mountains. Pictures of Dogs. Of family meals, of ourselves as children. Of parents being happy. Of survival.

We laughed. Smiled. Nodded. I asked how the photographs evoked joy. The connections. With our past. With relationships that held and hold deep meaning. A moment of being one with the Mountains. The profound love of Dogs. At a breast cancer walk. The Self in a moment of ecstasy. A life transforming moment. Play.

We pulled out of them connections, relationships, nature, and play as core components of what evoked joy for us in these pictures.

Then we moved on, as we do each month, to defining a practice. A practice is a measurable way we can increase the middah of the month in our life. One of us will set the sweet picture of young grandchildren on the ledge beside her computer and see it everyday. Another made a joy folder out of pictures from his favorites, set it to music and had the photo app sift through 25 or so in a creative way. He plans to see it first thing in the morning. Another will find joy in the moment instead of looking for a future time when joy will come. Yet another chose to remind herself of her natural, joyful reaction to events in her life and not let other emotions dominate that. I acknowledged finding joy with others and will attend one more event at CBE over the next month. (No, I am not turning in my introvert merit badge. I’ve earned it. I am saying yes to the joy I feel in the presence of others as well.)

I added something, something joyful, to folks lives last night. Felt really good. There’s life in this old man yet. What I mean by that is that I felt some of the juice from days of yesteryear. Leading by consensus, taking a group from one place to another and having everyone part of the movement. And feeling good about it.

Dogs, Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Great Wheel, Health, Hermitage, Judaism, Shadow Mountain

Friends and Acquaintances

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Beltane and the Mesa View Moon

Saturday gratefuls: Joann. Rebecca. Terry. Coal Mine Chinese Restaurant. Evergreen, my Mountain town. Grieving. Alan. The Wildflower Cafe. Anytime Fitness. Doug Doverspike, bit in the face by a Catahoula. Dave. Urku. Catacachi, Ecuador. Rabbi Jamie. Tal. Character Study class. Kate. Her Creek running full into Maxwell Creek. Daffodils. Red Tips on the Aspen Branches.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Friends

One brief, shining moment: A blossoming time for me, a Beltane aspect of my Winter years, friends becoming richer and more available, travel prospects offering themselves, workouts back to resistance as well as cardio, a hobby with F1 and motorsports for diversion, feels like coming out of Plato’s Cave.

 

Small groups like mussar, mvp, dining out with friends either one-to-one or maybe four at most. Yes. Needed. Appreciated. Loved. More than that? Draining. Exhausting. So. I don’t do those hardly ever.

Last night out with Joann Greenberg, Rebecca Martin, and Terry, Rebecca’s partner. The Coal Mine Chinese Restaurant in Evergreen. They all knew the owner and all the owner’s kids. Lots of Evergreen years among those three. A thick culture. And with Rebecca and Joann even more years as friends. Back before CBE. Both at its beginning. 50 years ago. Felt privileged to be included.

 

In the morning yesterday breakfast with Alan at the Wildflower Cafe. Sitting at at their outside tables on the Evergreen boardwalk. Breakfast nachos with carne asada, cheese, red sauce, Avocado’s. Coffee. Alan shaved his beard! For my craft, he said. He’s in a play that required him to play a younger character. Only the third time since 1977 he’s shaved. Grows back in about a month. No big deal. That’s Alan. He takes what comes and smiles about it.

After he left, I spent a little time wandering around the shops. I rarely do this because this part of Evergreen is touristy. Went into two places geared to separating the visitor from their money. Not interesting. However, the longtime shoe repair had a going out of business sale and I picked up a couple of pocket knives, nice ones, for $30.

 

Worked out for the second time at Anytime Fitness. Cardio at home, then 10 minutes over there. Swipe my fob. Hit the machines. Legs and upper body. What I needed. Not having to think about form. I already feel the pleasant exhaustion in my muscles afterward. Not sure how long I’ll use the machines because I’m used to using my own equipment. Though. Right now I need the ease of using the machines to get some strength back.

I did run into Dr. Doverspike there. He got bit by a Catahoula. And had the healing scars to prove it. The Dog launched himself at Doug’s face. Did not puncture his skull. But could have. Yikes!

 

Beltane celebrates the start of the growing season after the first renewal of Spring. Hand fasting marriages contracted for a year and a day. Farm labor hired. Sympathetic magic. Sex in the fields to encourage the union of the Maid and the Green Man. Jumping over fires for fertility. The May Pole.

I feel right in synch with the season. And it feels good.

 

Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Plants, Travel, World History

Pacha Mama

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Beltane and the full Mesa View Moon

Friday gratefuls: The Mesa View. The threshold. Liminal spaces. Dawn. The Omer. Day 29. Dismantling racism. Diane and Ecuador. Marilyn and Irv. At Primo. Sally. Thursday mussar. The tribe. BJ and Schecky under the huppa. Smashing a glass. At Sarah and Jerry’s in North Carolina. The cake with the wonderful floral display. A full day.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: The huppa woven of large branches by Jerry

One brief, shining moment: There are too few words in English, too many instances of this beauty, the Lodgepoles bathed in the Sunlight of early Dawn capture me every morning, standing gentle and upright, Branches swooping toward the Earth, the Light filtered through the stand catching this Tree, this Branch, and changing its touch as the Earth turns, presenting Shadow Mountain at new angles to the motionless Sun.

 

Talked to Diane yesterday. We might head out to Ecuador after the first of the year. For a couple of months. Early days but Sally, who’s already down there, has gotten excited and sent me a bunch of material. Marilyn visited Cotacachi, too, and has some great connections she plans to share.

When I told Marilyn, a traveler of note herself, of my plans to visit Joe and Seoah in Korea, then Israel in November, and Ecuador early next year, she said, “Seeing how many continents you can touch?” Hadn’t thought of it that way. But, yeah.

When Kate and I went on our circumnavigation of Latin America cruise after she retired, we visited two cities in Ecuador, Manta and Guayaquil. I remember distinctly the Iguanas in the town square of Manta, the friendly Ecuadorian who took Kate to some pharmacy so she could buy medicine, and the wonderful market where I bought my Alpaca coat and small, but detailed paintings that I later gave out as gifts to the Woollys.

In Guayaquil we drove past the white city, a huge cemetery with many white tombs on our way to a Cacao plantation. Kate and I met the friendliest pit bull ever there. Also tasted a drink made from the Cacao pulp that was extraordinary.

Ecuador, which means equator in Spanish, was the first country in the world to give legal rights to its environment in their constitution. Here is the clause:

Article 71.

Nature, or Pacha Mama, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes.

Gotta love a country that gives rights to Nature. What would you think about a country that privileges gun ownership in its constitution? Or does according to some interpretations of our second amendment.

 

BJ and Schecky married themselves underneath a huppa made of large Branches woven together by Jerry. I attended via zoom. Bellews Creek, North Carolina. They will be moving this fall to Driggs, Idaho. Leaving their almost fifty year rent controlled home in the Beacon Hotel on Broadway in New York City. It was close to Julliard, which they both attended.

Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Fungi, Hawai'i, Health, Judaism, Korea, Memories, Mussar, Sport, Writing

Stretched again. By love, by injustice.

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Beltane and the Mesa View Moon

Monday gratefuls: Josh. Rebecca. Marilyn and Rabbi Jamie. Beltane. May Day. The merry, merry month of May. Cubensis. Anger at injustice. Baku Grandprix. Sergio Perez. Charles Leclerc. Mountain Streams running fast and full. My son and his wife. No furniture. Aloha to Hawai’i. Workout today. Richard Powers.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: F1

One brief, shining moment: Those F1 cars, slim and downforced, all speed and bones, threw themselves around the street circuit in Baku, two hundred miles per hour past twelfth century city walls and the eighth century Maiden Tower, marrying, at least for two hours, the ancient history of Azerbaijan with the manic movement of twenty-first century high technology.

 

Quite a day yesterday. My first dose of psilocybin in about fifty years. A microdose. Floating. Peaceful. Glad to be alive and on the Mountain. Cubensis. Capsules from Josh. Delivered by Luke. Short lived, maybe two hours. The first step toward a psychedelic senior life. Feels right.

 

The Ancient Brothers wrote letters to their future selves and their past selves. Here are mine:

At 90

Hey, old man. I mean. Wow, dude. Look at you.

What? You’re 5’ 2” now? Sorry. I know. This spine, eh? How did you live so long?

Fish and chicken. Some pork. Lotsa veggies and fruit. Exercise. Good friends. With warm hearts.

I get that. That sounds like now. You know at our age, 76.

Well. There you go. Stay on the path. It’s working.

 

At 67

Guy, I wish I could prepare you for the next eight years. But I can’t. They’re gonna be tough. Rock bottom, knock the bottle over, don’t win any prizes hard.

Love. Death. Harsh illness. Family upset. All of that until you’re the only one left standing. With cancer.

And yet. Live into them, live into it all. As you face each one, your life will change. Pivot. Deepen. Grow sadder and yet more stable, too.

I love you and that gets you through, on the path.

 

Talked with my son and his wife. Their house is bare. Only the furniture that will go into storage is left. The nomadic life of a military career. Each time I see them I love them more, as if love can expand and expand, not only filling the vessel it inhabits but enlarging the vessel, pressing it into new, better shapes, shapes brighter, more luminous than the ones that came before. May this continue. A real blessing.

 

Watched the Baku Grand Prix on F1 TV. Slowly gaining a better understanding of race strategy, how drivers adapt to different tracks, how their cars get tuned for the specific challenges of the day. These F1 drivers are unicorns like all elite athletes. Reflexes and courage. Competitive. Glad to have this diversion, a hobby, I guess.

 

Later in the day Dismantling Racism at CBE. Oh, so hard. Even deciding how to talk with each other about it. One person spoke with some force and came up with what I think is the most succinct way of understanding anti-Black racism in our country I’ve ever heard.

We Jews, he said, left Egypt, left our oppressor behind. But Blacks in the U.S. have never had an Exodus moment, they have never left their oppressor behind and their enslavement follows them down to this day. Wow.

He went on to wonder what life would have been like for the Hebrews if they had been freed from slavery, yet never left Egypt. Also an interesting, very interesting question.

Which, come to think of it, makes me wonder how many instances in world history there are of whole peoples being subjugated as slaves.

Not sure where this class is going. It’s a new model, one that tries to use the wisdom of mussar for the inner work necessary to fight our own racism. My sense is that writers of the curriculum have underestimated the learning required to understand racism, first, then mussar, second, then meld the two into something that aids the actual dismantling of this peculiar institution.

I’m in it though, all the way. Trying to merge this round of struggle against racism with the reading I’m doing about the far right. Stretching. Yet again.

 

Acting, Colorado, Cooking, Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Hermitage, Jefferson County, Judaism, Mountains, Mussar, Politics, Shadow Mountain, Writing

The Time Has Come To Cross

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Spring and the Mesa View Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Luke. Leo. Rommertopf. Psilocybin. Younger friends. Tal. Character study class. Murphy and Pete. Kat. My son and his wife. Their furry one. Snow. Melting. A Mountain morning. Sunlight on the Lodgepoles. The Snow that stays on the north side of my house. That Mule Deer Doe.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: The threshold. *reposted the O’Donohue quote

One brief, shining moment: Liminal spaces, third spaces, often overlooked, undervalued, yet the Dawn and the Dusk, the doorway and the window, the death bed, the coffee shop, the neighborhood bar, churches and synagogues, neither home nor work, neither light nor dark, neither in nor out, neither life nor death, points of transformation, places where we can practice being another version of ourselves, meet people we would not otherwise know, thresholds between this life moment and the next, or between this life and what comes after.

 

I’m an old man. Been a lot of places. Experienced weirdness. I identify with the Grateful Dead’s: what a long, strange trip it’s been. Yet these last few days have left me marveling at what’s happening.

Now that I’m writing about it, I think it may have begun to crystallize when I spoke with my son last Sunday. Be spontaneous, he said. Go for it. Take the trip. We had been discussing my trip to Korea and the trip to Israel.

And, I did. I raised my hand. Yes, I’m going with you. I’ll be there in Jerusalem. Not an hour later.

Dismantling Racism class, a mussar approach came next. Mainlining my past with talk of injustice, the struggle, la lucha. Going down old pathways with new folks, from a new perspective.

A heavy workout on Monday. Another heavy one Wednesday. Where I was left shaky, feeling off. My resting heart rate actually increasing. Worried me. Made me feel vulnerable.

On Thursday I had breakfast with Alan, catching up. Then my massage and Thursday mussar. Where Rebecca and Leslie both kissed me on the head. After mussar I encountered Luke and Tal outside the synagogue. Tal told me the next acting class was going to be character studies. Sounds good to me. Ready to continue expanding.

On Friday I went to sign up at Anytime Fitness. With Dave, the 65 year old manager. Quite the talker. Where you from? Raised in Indiana. Really! Where! Alexandria. Anderson. Muncie. I know them. I was raised on the southside of Chicago. But we moved to Calumet. Ah, I said. Da region. He laughed. Right. My brother worked in the Calumet mill.

Not sure how the conversation veered to his life as a battery salesman working out of Madison, Wisconsin. His alcoholism, cocaine addiction. 25 years sober, he said. 43  years here. Instant deep connection. In the program. Lifers.

A thick, muscular young guy walked past. Clayton, Dave hollered. Clayton, meet Charles. 43  years sober. Clayton’s got 109 days. Clayton and I fist bumped.

A strange but instant fellowship, wrought by inability or unwillingness to contain appetites. Then, to wake up. See another way. And walk it. With others.

Went back home. Clicked on a zoom link. First time with the Dream group. Dreamers and dreams. The dream of of the White Tomb. Realizing the threshold had come to meet me. People on the call from Santa Fe, England, the Netherlands, Conifer, Evergreen.

Then. Later that day. In the desert of the afternoon hours. Feeling aimless. Projects around the house winding down. No Dogs or humans to care for. More hours than I needed.

Next morning. Off to Aspen Perks to have breakfast, begin my re-read of Why Liberalism Failed. Maybe see Kat. She was there. She smiled when she saw me, came over and squatted down. What  you reading? I showed her. I don’t agree with all of his arguments, but it’s a powerful read. She looked at it. Yeah, I have a Steven Hawking book like this. I put it down. Take it up. Well, I’m trying to really understand this guy’s arguments. So I’m doing something unusual. Rereading.

Ate my chorizo and scrambled eggs. Read Deneen. Got up to go. A tall man, maybe 50’s, sitting with an older man, closer to my age. Hey, I was wondering. What ya reading? I showed him the book. Gave him the two minute version. He reached over to shake my hand. Murphy. Matt Murphy. This is Pete. I want to have some time to bother you about that. What do they call ya? I told him. See you next time I come in maybe. We’ll talk.

Went over to Safeway. Picked up the Chicken, Carrots, Potatoes, Pearl Onions, Garlic for the Rommertopf Chicken. Back  home I did the prep. Soak the Rommertopf. Peel the Pearl Onions. Cut up the Potatoes. Slice and quarter an Apple. Stuff it in the Chicken. Put butter and Garlic under the skin of the breast. In the oven.

Luke came and stayed for three, four hours. Leo sniffing around. Finding things.

Can you feel the threshold moving toward me? I sure can. Definitely time. Gonna discuss a ritual with Rabbi Jamie, Tal.

 

*”At any time you can ask yourself: At which threshold am I now standing? At this time in my life, what am I leaving? Where am I about to enter? What is preventing me from crossing my next threshold? What gift would enable me to do it? A threshold is not a simple boundary; it is a frontier that divides two different territories, rhythms, and atmospheres. Indeed, it is a lovely testimony to the fullness and integrity of an experience or a stage of life that it intensifies toward the end into a real frontier that cannot be crossed without the heart being passionately engaged and woken up. At this threshold a great complexity of emotion comes alive: confusion, fear, excitement, sadness, hope. This is one of the reasons such vital crossings were always clothed in ritual. It is wise in your own life to be able to recognize and acknowledge the key thresholds: to take your time; to feel all the varieties of presence that accrue there; to listen inward with complete attention until you hear the inner voice calling you forward. The time has come to cross.” John O’Donohue in his book, To Bless the Space Between Us.

Dreams, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends

Dreamers

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Spring and the Mesa View Moon

Saturday gratefuls: Dreams. Dreamers. Dave. Wandering around. Aimless. Seeing more people, more often. Turned off my alarm. Warmer weather. Another 8 inches of Snow. Melting. The Colorado way. Baku F1. Ritual. Even the smallest ones have meaning. Anytime fitness. The dream of the white tomb.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Dreams and Dreamers and Dreaming

One brief, shining moment: Dreams rise and fall with the tides of our inner life, washing up on our sleeping shores, treasure from the great ocean of the collective unconscious, bearing gifts if only we can remember, if only we can understand.

 

Joined a dream work group led by a member of CBE. But the first rule of dream work group is you don’t talk about dream work group. Confidentiality. Yet, I can talk about my own dream. Here it is:

 

3/25  The Dream of the White Tomb

My body, in a white coffin on what looked like a white box top turned upside down slid down a snowy hill, coming to rest at the hotel where I was staying. I went around asking people what I should do with my body. “Do you have fifteen minutes to talk about a funeral?”

It was clear to me that it was my body in the coffin. As clear as it also was that “I” was the one wondering what to do with it.

 

We discussed this dream for an hour using the group’s other rule: Only speak in first person. Someone would say, if this were my dream, I would see… Or, in my projection I would wonder who the other guests were in the hotel? Did I know them? In other words no interpreting the dream for the dreamer.

The group also can ask clarifying questions. Could you  say more about the box top? It was like the lid of a gift box, shiny white paper over cardboard. Could you see your body in the coffin? No. I just knew it was in there. Or, they can also make observations. I’m struck by how much white there is in the dream.

It’s a fascinating way to drift in and out of yourself and in and out of another person’s dream content. The discussion went on for an hour. When it shifted to another dreamer’s dream, I found it hard to not say your dream suggests… The leader, Irene, gently reminded me. “I” Silently, mouthing it. I’ll get it, I’m sure.

As I’ve tumbled over what others said, what I learned, it seems this dream suggests it’s time to bury my old life and start living my new one. I related in the group about O’Donoughue’s  threshold idea. My ideas for a ritual. The moment is upon me. This month of Iyar, the month of the light, the first days of  May, after Kate’s second yahrzeit. Soon I will cross the threshold in a ritual of some sort.

 

Luke’s coming up today. Gonna make Rommertopf chicken with potatoes, carrots, pearl onions. It will be good to see Luke and Leo, his goofy dog.

 

 

 

Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Health, Mussar, Weather +Climate, Writing

It’s beginning to look a lot like…oh, wait. It’s almost May

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Spring (ha, ha) and the Mesa View Moon

Friday gratefuls: Grif. Second generation Coloradan, 4th generation Norwegian with cousins (distant) in Minnesota. Alan and the central coast wineries. Bivouac coffee’s espresso blend. The Bread Lounge and its multi-grain sourdough. Thursday mussar. Rebecca and Leslie. Kathy, another fellow traveler on the cancer journey. Campfire grill’s truffle mac and cheese.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Yet more Snow

One brief, shining moment: This challenge of Mark’s, to write more complex sentences, ones that glitter and shine on the page, perhaps sentences that belong more in novels written by really good writers, has stretched me, made me put writing in a new key, perhaps B sharp where my voice rarely strays above C.

 

Had that massage. Grif has a long, millennial hipster beard. Dark. A slightly dour expression. Sweaty palms when we shook on meeting. Perhaps not the most relaxing first sensation. A Norwegian. No kidding. Another one. I found a Norwegian in Colorado. Uff da. We have not yet discussed lutefisk. But, soon.

He’s a decent massagiynist. (I made that up. Can you tell?) I did not leave with that loopy about to melt into the floor feeling that I have after other massages, yet my body felt looser. This was, you may recall, a gift to myself after finishing radiation.

Decided to buy a five massage package, give Grif a boost. He seemed to need it. Going to try a different massage style next time. Neuromuscular. He asked me which of several types I wanted. I had no clue. My massage experience is limited. Not a Thai massage I said.

That’s a Bangkok story. Temple Wat Pho. That’s actually redudant since Wat means Temple. The day after I ruptured my Achilles tendon during a night time trip to a 7-11-I know, so mundane-I was in pain with what I thought was a sprained ankle. So, I thought. Get a massage. That could help me feel better all over. Right?

Nope. I paid $10 in bahts for a small Thai woman to attack me with multiple body parts. Elbows. Knees. Fingers. Shoulder. Oh, man. I don’t even remember if I felt better afterward.

 

Cheri, Alan’s wife, bought a trip to a California central coast winery at an auction to help the Colorado Ballet. In which Alan occasionally appears as an old guy with a white beard. When they need one.

They had a great time. It included a visit to the Victor Hugo winery, a boutique operation that produces only two wines, Quasi and Modo.

 

It was my first time back to Thursday mussar since January, maybe earlier. I’d attended on zoom some, but with Kep’s decline and the snow and other things, I hadn’t felt up to the drive. Two of the women, Leslie and Rebecca, both kissed me on the head! Not sure what that was about though it was clearly a sign of affection.

Kathy has stage four breast cancer. She’s had a mastectomy and 35 sessions of radiation. Sounds familiar to me. But the cancer won’t back down. She has scans every three months and blood work once a month. This last blood work had her tumor markers up. Not good.

But we both agreed our quality of life right now is good. That’s what matters. Cancer is a good teacher of what matters. Perhaps that’s its role in the larger culture, to strip away pretense and help us get down to the nub of life.

Perhaps.

Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Health, Judaism, Korea, Travel

Fitness, Psychedelics, and Travel

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Spring and the Mesa View Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: 1-2 feet of snow tonight. Canceled removal of my snow tires. Tom. Amber. Kate, always. Mark. Mary. Diane. My son and his wife. Movers next week. Ode’s challenge. MAPS conference in June. Getting right with those SOB’s over billing me. Today. Safeway pickup. Stinker’s milk. Anytime fitness. Israel. Korea. Getting out of town.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: A big Spring Snow

One brief, shining moment: Mountains so vast as to be incomprehensible by the human, yet here’s a comparison realized as a fighter jet flies across the Colorado morning Sky, how much fuel, energy of the Sun captured by Plants and cooked by Mother Earth for millions of years, it takes to keep them from falling to Earth, defying gravity, while the Mountain, too, rises into the Sky and required only an initial push.

 

Good workout yesterday morning. Still not doing resistance work. Need to. Decided to contact Anytime Fitness. Idea. Start back to resistance work on machines. Not have to worry about form. Just the workout. A few months, then back to my own dumbbells, kettlebells, TRX.

Went over there. It’s only 10 minutes from home. Talked to Dave. An older guy, the manager. Friendly. They have a good setup. I can go over after my cardio, which I’ll still do here. Put in 20 minutes on the machines. Start fighting back. Sarcopenia. Chemo. Inertia. Going on Wednesday for run through on the machines. Might talk to a coach there to get an initial workout. Might not.

Who knows? I might like it well enough to keep it up. Or, I’ll circle back to my own. Whatever keeps me at it. That’s the goal. Cardio’s a lock. I need the resistance work to get back there, too.

 

After I talk to my buddy Tom, I’m going to call United Health Care and I’m not getting off the line until my ghost bills have given up the, well, ghost. $430. $5,100. That. I. Do. Not. Owe. But that keep showing up. Frustrating does not describe it.

 

I’m planning a busy Summer and Fall. Going to attend the MAPS conference here in Denver. What is MAPS? Why, it’s the multidisciplinary association for psychedelic studies. This is the perfect time for the conference in my own renewed journey.

Friend Luke comes Saturday with some home grown LBMs. Little brown mushrooms. Psilocybin. Don’t think we’ll do them. At least not right then, but I do plan to try microdosing. More important. He’s bringing his dog, Leo. I need some doggy time.

 

Late summer, when my son and daughter-in-law give me the signal, I’ll fly to Korea for a month. Visiting them, seeing the peninsula. Take the bullet train to Seoul and Gwangju. Tourist time in Seoul. See the DMZ. See her parents and family in and around Gwangju.

Then in November. The Middle East. Israel. A tour with CBE. Probably go a week or so ahead of the tour and travel on my own before that. Take in Jerusalem, wander. I’m ready to open out again, see the world. And it feels pretty good.

 

 

 

Cooking, Denver, Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Shadow Mountain, Weather +Climate

Gabe at 15

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Spring and the Mesa View Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Gabe. Levi. Seyo. Benihana. My family of Ancient Brothers. Especially our brother, Tom, and his daughter Amber. Books. Magazines. Newspapers. The Atlantic. The New Yorker. MIT Technology Review. High Country News. Paonia. LBM’s. Psychonauts. BJ. Her political awareness. Radical days. Passionate nights. 5 inches of new Snow. Ice on the roads.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Gabe at 15

One brief, shining moment: Three teenage boys giggling, sharing silly photos of each other on their phones, punches and smirks, cause he’s a little bitch said by one, celebrating Gabe’s 15th at Benihana, Gabe’s idea of fine dining, all while escorted by grandpa who it turns out was 15 in 1962.

 

That was yesterday evening. Gabe loves Benihana. The grill. The flash of the cooks. Who flip cut off shrimp tails into their caps and pockets. Clatter the cutlery on the huge grill, the hibachi. Cook with a certain flare but really with a weak imitation of knife work in an upscale kitchen. With ingredients purchased in bulk. And cooked to, well, let’s just say not perfection. Gabe loves the food, too.

Peeking inside the lives of teenage boys now, almost voyeurism. Three of them, one old guy. Safely ignored. Talking about friendship groups. Who’s cool, but mostly who’s not. Like Abraham who brought cookies to the teacher. Suck up. Who expected more but all he got was a thank you. Chick-fil-a. That’s where the white boys go for lunch. While the baseball boys chose a different spot.

Girls inhabited the fringes of the conversation. Still mysterious and unknowable. I tried, but she said we were friends. Yeah. I’m friends with so and so, too.

Mostly a lot of giggling, faux arm wrestling, looking at their phones, then passing them around. Shooting a closeup of somebody’s eye or hair line or ear. Texting that back to the one in the photo.

When I dropped Gabe off at his Galena street home, Jen’s house, he said, “That was fun, Grandpa. I love you.”

 

Got back to Shadow Mountain around 10. Late night for me. Especially considering I went to the Grateful Dead shabbat the night before for Kate’s yahrzeit. Today is busy, too, but daytime busy. Israel trip info at 1:30, then Dismantling Racism class starts at 3.

 

Looking forward to a quieter week. Putting all season tires back on Ruby on Tuesday. Just when we’re supposed to get our next snowstorm. It’s always a judgment call. Late April, early May. Usually a little overlap on both ends of winter. Good news is that early season and late season storms melt quickly.

 

The Ancient Brothers on reading. We read. A lot. Stacks of books. At a time. Magazines and newspaper. Some dead tree, some online. The Guardian. The Atlantic. MIT Technology Review. New Yorker. New York Times. Washington Post. A few of the books: A sampler of Meister Eckhart. Slouching Toward Utopia. Why Liberalism Failed. Talking to the Ground. The last CJ Box novel. Many, many more. Reading. I wonder if it’s an old person thing now.

Then I remember Ruth. Who reads. A lot. She once said to me, you’re the only person I know who reads more than me. Kate and Claire Strickland, Michael Banker. Also readers. Not dead yet.

Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Judaism

Made me feel good

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Spring and the Mesa View Moon

Saturday gratefuls: Gabe, now 15. Earth Day. Kate Strickland, now 40. Her old man, Paul. Now 76. Tom and Amber. My son and his wife. Luke and Leo. LBMs. Little brown mushrooms. The Grateful Dead shabbat. Kate’s yahrzeit. Her candle still burning. Ginnie and Ellen. Ripple in Still Water. Another excellent workout. Radiation in the rearview. Snow and a cold night. Good sleeping.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Kate, my once and future wife

One brief, shining moment: Tears, the outer sign of inward longing, surfaced when it came time for the kaddish, the mourner’s prayer, Ripple in Still Water played during the Grateful Dead shabbat had ended and Rabbi Jamie read the list of deaths and then the list of yahrzeits, holding my breath until he read the very last name, Kate Olson. Oh.

 

Before I left for CBE yesterday evening, I lit a 24 hour memorial candle for Kate. It burns still. This is her yahrzeit. Her second.

Ginnie sat next to me last night. She’s a nurse I met online during a Kabbalah Experience class on astrology. Ginnie and her partner took the class together. She comes to the CBE services because she has an MFA in performance art, including opera. As a singer she loves the services. Was glad to have her next to me.

The Rabbi and music director of B’nai Havurah, the only Denver reconstructionist congregation, joined Rabbi Jamie and the CBE band which includes harmonica, bass, and drums. Sometimes piano, but not last night.

The Grateful Dead shabbat is a popular musical service and happened to fall on Kate’s yahrzeit. Appropriate since Jon was a Deadhead, a camp follower who had a large cache of concert tapes, a treasure Ruth has kept.

When Ripple in Still Water played, the lyrics came on the screen. My tears began when I read these:

There is a road, no simple highwayBetween the dawn and the dark of nightAnd if you go, no one may followThat path is for your steps alone

She left two years ago and I could not follow for that path was for her steps alone.

The kaddish prayer and the recognition of recent deaths and yahrzeits make sure that mourners do not go through their grief alone. Shiva takes the community into the home of the mourner, traditionally for seven nights. These are deeply compassionate features of Judaism and have helped me a lot during my own mourning and grief. Jews are not awkward when talking about death. They show up, initiate help. Follow through.

The drive home last night, one Kate and I made together many, many times, saddened me. I cried again, missing her in the seat next to me, commenting on the service, life, politics.

Oddly, and I imagine this is the point of yahrzeits, the tears and the sadness made me feel good. I’m still connected to her in a deep and everlasting way. These feelings honor our love.