Category Archives: Health

Cinema and Television, Commentary on Religion, Coronavirus, Health, Myth and Story, News of the Strange, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Ättestupa

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Spring and the Corona Luna

Wednesday gratefuls: Garbage collectors, workers at power plants, cleaners in all places, showing us how important “menial” labor can be. Kate in her sewing room!! Yeah. Sewed on some buttons, made some mug rugs. Seoah doing grocery shopping for us. Brenton and his many pictures, videos, obvious joy being with Murdoch. Concerned friends. Upcoming PSA blood draw, Lupron, visit with Eigner.

Another, grimmer topic. Wanna sacrifice yourself for the economy, grandpa? Any of my readers of a certain age going with Dan Patrick? “‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?…If that is the exchange, I’m all in,” Patrick said.” Patrick is Lt. Gov. of Texas, Dan Patrick. The quote is from a Fox News interview with Tucker Carlson.

Patrick made his senicidic comment after Trump declared he wanted to get the economy going by Easter, “This country’s not made to be shut down.” Only after being told that if he did, deaths would be in the hundreds of thousands, and his lackey Lindsey Graham said, “You would own those deaths.” did he pull back. OK, we’ll open it up on April 30th, he decided. Why April 30? Who knows?

Last year when Kate had a period of feeling better we went to see, first, “The Kitchen”, a women take over the mob movie with Elizabeth Moss and Melissa McCarthy, in return Kate agreed to go see Midsommar. “It’s Scandinavian,” I said.

Hmm, yeah. Sorta. I’m a fan of horror movies (not slasher flicks. Ugh.). Hammer Films. The Thing. The Fly. Rosemary’s Baby. The Exorcist. The Shining. The Omen. Creature of the Black Lagoon. Not many get made that are thoughtful, even beautiful. The Horror of Dracula, a 1958 Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee movie in the Hammer Film series, was beautiful. So was Polanski’s 1967 The Fearless Vampire Killers.

There are now two that are both beautiful and thoughtful: The Wickerman (1973) and Midsommar (2019). The Wickerman has a Celtic folklore background while Midsommar uses Swedish themes. I’ve learned in doing some research that these are folk horror movies. A new genre to me by name, but not by preference.

Anyhow, in Midsomar, Ari Aster, director and writer, draws on Swedish folklore. Some of the ideas there are familiar to you like the Maypole, the colorful Swedish garments, white trimmed in flowers and runes, all that blond hair, and festive bonfires outdoors. And, yes, naked Swedes can be seen dancing around midsommar bonfires. Look it up on your interweb.

Aster also draws on one aspect of Swedish folklore embedded enough in the culture to give a name to certain high cliffs and promontories: Ättestupa. In prehistoric times, Swedes believe, elders threw themselves from the attestupa when they were no longer able to care for themselves or assist around the camp. Senicide. Though attestupa may have been challenged among folklorists, senicide is/was real. Elders wandering away from the village to starve, active euthanasia of the elderly, or, as Lt. Patrick suggests, economic senicide.

The most disturbing scenes in Midsomar come during the attestupa. The Harga collective using seasonal language for life’s stages: Spring: 1-18, Summer: 19-36, Fall: 37-54, and Winter: 55-72. This last season, Winter, is the mentoring season. At 72 Winter ends, and so do you. That, for the Harga, was when you headed for the attestupa.

Midsomar is on Prime Video right now, free. If these kind of movies fit into your cinema way, I’d encourage you to watch it. It’s a very good example of the folk horror genre. If you watch it, let me know what you think of the last scene.

Friends, Health, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

Restitution

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Spring and the Corona Luna

Tuesday gratefuls: Midsommar, the movie. Korean pancakes. Working out. The endorphins. Nap. Kate’s string of better days, except for that damned leaking feeding tube. Reconstructionist webinar on zoom. Your strong coefficient of restitution. (see below) The Talmud. Beggars in Spain, a sci fi novel I’m reading which Kate also read .

A conversation among old Woollies, gray haired Mammoths, about resilience went from Paul’s etymological observation about resilio, leap or spring back in Latin, to Tom’s engineering vocabulary: the coefficient of restitution. After looking it up (Tom sent a definition, but I can’t copy it.), I found this, which explains Tom’s familiarity with it: “The coefficient of restitution is largely absent from undergraduate Physics textbooks but is HUGELY useful for problems involving collisions.”

Here’s a bit more: “The closer the coefficient is to one, the bouncier the object is. An object with a coefficient close to zero would have very little bounce.” What’s your restitution coefficient after colliding with the social distance pressure waves of Covid-19? Are you closer to one? Still bouncy and vibrant. Or, closer to zero? Laid out flat by the whole experience. Maybe you even have covid-19.

My coefficient varies during the day and day by day. Most of the time I’d say its .85 or so. Occasionally though. Thinking of Gertie. Realizing the hassle of getting groceries. Getting the call that the practice is closed: my ophthalmologist, for instance. Feeling the world’s sigh. Maybe down to .5. But not for long.

Coronavirus, Dogs, Family, Friends, Health, Jefferson County, Judaism, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, US History, Woolly Mammoths

Seeing

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Spring and the Corona Luna

Monday gratefuls: Corn dogs. State Fair corn dogs. The Minnesota State Fair. The Great Minnesota Get Together. The Great U.S. stay apart. The bailout. I think. Being alone with Kate and Seoah. Those pictures of Murdoch from Brenton. Life in a world historical event. Life. Death. The power of Monday.

Here’s what I’ve seen. A black SUV, a Lexus, next to me at a stoplight. Latex gloved hands on the steering wheel. On the road to Loveland Saturday all the LED road signs read: Avoid Non-Essential Travel. A cascade of it’s gonna be later messages from Instacart. So many maps and graphs and charts. Fewer cars on Black Mountain Drive, especially when I go out for the newspaper around 5:30 am. Empty parking lots. A closed outlet mall. So many e-mails starting with we care about you and that’s why our business is doing X. Friends and family on zoom. The rabbi on zoom, singing about breath. A sign at Bergen Bark Inn. We’re taking care of the dogs of essential workers like doctors, nurses, firefighters, police, grocery store workers. The worker at Starbucks extending a credit card reader so I could insert the card, then remove it on my own. My own gloved hand on the hose nozzle at the Phillips 66. That bottle of hand sanitizer in my cup holder. Seoah with her lysol spray hitting each package that gets delivered.

When will it ever end? When will it ever end?

And, yet. A moment in time like no other. Yes, the Spanish Flu. Yes. But, no. Not in this millennia. Not in my lifetime. Not in this century.

The first quarter of 2020 has not gone so well. What with all the dog bites, then Gertie’s death, then the plague. Yes, the Moronic plague. And, the virus. True.

However, I find it exciting, too. What will happen next? How bad can this get? Wow. Really? The ways people are coping. The empty streets of big cities around the world. The bravery. The stupidity and the cupidity.

Like one facebook meme said: This is the first time we could save the world by watching television.

Commentary on Religion, Family, Friends, Health, Judaism, Politics, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, US History, Woolly Mammoths

Let It Be

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Spring and the Corona Luna

Sunday gratefuls: Technology, not our savior, but a friend. Brenton and his 3,500 steps. Bob Dylan and his new song, Murder Most Foul. The Weight, by the Band. Pictures of Murdoch coming from Loveland. Zoom. Over the wires, over the air, over the ocean and across the desert. Wow. Each one of you, readers. Whoever you are. I love you.

Zoomed. Again. The new hang out, like the ol’ Kid Canteen on Harrison Street. Mark in Riyadh. Mary in Singapore. Diane in San Francisco. Kate. Me. On Shadow Mountain. Bombs over Riyadh, Mark said. Have you heard? Singapore’s like normal, almost, Mary said.

Diane was cold, doing a Mark Twain version of the coldest night he ever spent. We talked, decades of back story, going back even into the 19th century. All of us linked by genetics, by fate, by Indiana. Kate looked good.

Paul in Maine. Tom, Bill, Mark in the cold place. On Shadow Mountain. Cranes flying up, up, weighted and buoyed. The mystery of flight. Caretaking, its weight. Wondering how we can survive. Can we keep it up?

All of us gone viral. Lives infected. The future uncertain. How can we survive?

We’re all monastics, huddled in our apartments, our camps, our homes. Rattlin round in them like ol dry bones. Is it life without others? I would say yes. I would say no. I would say, well, I just don’t know.

Fear the moronic plague the most. He and his will kill us all if it might lift the Dow. Plenty of money for some, for most, none at all.

Hear, oh, world. The one is the lord god, the lord. Can you follow an ancientrail created by slaves, crossing seas, and wandering? I thought so for a moment last week. Put Kate in a prayer, held her there. Tears came to my eyes, I wanted it.

But, no. No longer me. No way back into Easter, either. Following the bird, the rock, the sky, the lake, the trout, the love of one for another, all the spirit in all the things all the one. Must be enough.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Cooking, Family, Feelings, Health, Judaism, Kabbalah, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Breathe in, Breathe out

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Spring and the Corona Luna

Saturday gratefuls: Murdoch jail break. Seoah’s spring rolls. Kate’s good day. Her referral to an ostomy nurse (for her feeding tube). The white, confectioner’s sugar look on Black Mountain, our lodgepoles, the solar panels. Rabbi Jamie’s Maladies and Melodies zoom session yesterday. These days of our lives. Learning new things about society, about ourselves, about our globalist reality.

Some miscellaneous things.

Cousin Diane sent out this message about how to care for groceries. Then I read that those of us over 60 should not be going to the grocery store at all. Will keep on using pickup when I can (not delivery), but Seoah may end doing up most of our in-store shopping. Anyhow, here’s the video. I found it helpful.

On the subject of resilience here’s a link to a Harvard Business Review article, “That discomfort you’re feeling is grief .” It helped me name a complex of feelings that come and go, stimulated by the virus, yes, but not exclusively about it. The more we can grasp the emotional, the psychological impacts of the pandemic, the less they will cause us unwanted and unexpected trouble.

In a soothing and, at the same time, provocative hour on Zoom Rabbi Jamie took us through a modification of Jewish morning prayers. Maladies and Melodies. Songs he’d written, psalms he’d translated. His thoughts along the way.

Two things stood out for me. He began with the idea of moving from a narrow mind, like the narrow, confined space of Egypt for the Hebrew slaves, (Passover is two weeks away.), to a broad, expansive space. From a narrow, pharaoh mind to wide vistas and open hearts. How do we move, I wondered, and I imagine he intended this, from a lock down state of mind to a broad mind even though fear and actual confinement are the norm for people around the world?

In a meditation (He’s a Buddhist, too, and spent time in Nepal on pilgrimage.) he had us focus on our breath. Breathe in, breathe out. Don’t force it. Follow it. He mentioned breath as neshama, that part of our soul most directly connected to the one. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. It’s a respiratory virus. It affects the lungs, our ability to breath. Breathe in, breath out. I thought this. I imagine others did, too.

Can anything separate us from the one? No. Not even something that blocks our breath, because our neshama remains linked to the one even if our breathing ceases. So what is there to fear? A death? Still one with the one. Breathe in, breathe out.

Coronavirus, Family, Friends, Health, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, US History

Resilience Strategies

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Spring and the Corona Luna

Thursday gratefuls: Kate’s fingers healing, slowly. (due to her Reynaud’s disease) Zoom. The wire that brings in the internet. The internet, making this whole situation more bearable. Books. Authors like Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling, Isaac Asimov, Neal Stephens, William Gibson. Emotions like sadness, grief. The notion and practice of resilience.

Here’s an excellent written out Tedtalk on resilience by Lucy Hone*. Three strategies are the focus of the piece: 1. Know that suffering is part of life. 2. Carefully choose where you’re directing your attention. 3. Ask yourself: “Is what I’m doing helping me or harming me?”

1. Know that suffering is part of life. At seventy plus number one is a lesson most of us have learned. Parental deaths. Serious illness. Depression. Failure. Divorce. Life has difficult, damned difficult moments. The book of Job is an object lesson in recognizing suffering as part of life, not as something happening only to you. That’s the main point here: you’re not being picked on, Covid19 is not the first, nor will it be the last instance of suffering.

2. Carefully choose where you’re directing your attention. Number two may not be so obvious. I’m going to quote the first paragraph from Ms. Hone’s talk:

“I’ve found that resilient people have a habit of realistically appraising situations, and typically they manage to focus on the things they can change and learn to accept the things they can’t. This is a vital and learnable skill. “

And, she says further on: “Whatever you do, make an intentional, deliberate, ongoing effort to tune in to what’s good in your world.” If your media choices right now focus on the next coronavirus news, you might want to consider a diet. Say, reading the newspaper or watching the news or listening to the podcast at a certain time, for a particular length of time.

I have, for years, kept a good news file. I toss in there certain birthday cards, notes from friends, anniversary cards and notes. Notices from things I’ve helped make happen. Pictures of kids and grandkids, dogs. Anything that’s personal and positive. If I start to turn down the blues trail, I take it out. This could be done on a computer, too. Just open a file, cut and paste into it.

3. Ask yourself: “Is what I’m doing helping me or harming me?” I read this article several months ago, then slipped it into my resilience notebook on Evernote. I’d forgotten the first two strategies, but this one stayed with me.

It’s so easy to slip into patterns, habits, routines that are unproductive or down right harmful. With this question though you can challenge yourself, ask yourself, is this worth it?

I know, for example, that if the melancholy I felt yesterday were to continue, it would be harming me. It’s very instructive to have this question to pose. If it’s not helping me, what can I do to alter it? How can I choose to focus myself differently?

Once in a while I get stuck in an anger loop with Kate. A perceived slight, an argument, just the frustrations of being together most of the time. I’m imagining this is an issue right across the country now. This doesn’t help resolve whatever is bothering me, or help her. It hinders me, hinders us.

This question helps me remember that I can choose a different path. We can talk it out, decide to handle things in a different manner. We’re not destined to stay in a negative place.

Resilience is a key to staying afloat at any time. In this, the time of the virus, it is a necessary skill, one which, if you don’t have it now, it behooves you to learn. More on this later.

*Lucy Hone is a codirector at the New Zealand Institute of Wellbeing & Resilience and a research associate at AUT University in Auckland. She is also the author of the book Resilient Grieving.

Coronavirus, Politics

Evil Bastard

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Mammon’s dumbest disciple wants to become Moloch’s agent, too. Today’s Washington Post: “Trump says he may soon push businesses to reopen, defying the advice of coronavirus experts” Since infants and the elderly die most, he’s trying to feed infants to the Dow Jones average. I don’t know any gods that wanted elderly sacrifices, though there must have been one.

Cooking, Coronavirus, Family, Jefferson County, Talmud

Thanks for coming to work

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Spring and the 1% sliver of the Leap Year Moon

Monday gratefuls: A chicken! King Sooper had a chicken! I got the second to last one. Drug makers. Pharmacists. Nurses, especially nurses. All health care workers, all around the world. Politicians, in particular U.S. governors and mayors, actually confronting the crisis. Democrat senators holding the line for working people. Fear. Keeps people inside.

Grateful for Brother Mark, confronting a difficult time in Saudi Arabia, doing well. Staying in touch with his colleagues, learning new tech. So many of us have to make dramatic changes in our working lives. Those who can. Hurray!

I think about all those folks like waiters and chefs and busboys and retail store workers whose jobs have disappeared. A good time to be retired. A good time to have sold your company. Though there is that falling market thing.

I’m on daf 8b, the second side of page 8, of Shabbat, the second tractate of the Talmud, a collection of commentary on the mishnah, written legal theory from the older oral tradition. I just got daf 17 of Shabbat today, so I’m closing in on being current. I’ll get back to one a day this week for sure.

Went to the grocery store, King Sooper, yesterday. Found, 9 days after I started looking, a whole chicken. That means I can make the chicken noodle soup that Kate likes so well. After my workout this morning. No more than 3 chicken products, no more than 3 ground beef. Signs. King Sooper looked somewhat less devastated than Safeway did last week. Perhaps the panicked ones have begun to calm down, realizing this is a marathon, not a sprint.

Pharmaceuticals. I went to King Sooper because I needed to pick up an albuterol inhaler that I use for exercise. Oh, the clerk said, I have two for you. Of the same thing? Yes, I’ll take the $10 one. She laughed. The other, brand name inhaler, was $94. Same drug, same amount, same delivery method. Which one would you choose? Everybody got a good laugh.

I tell each clerk thank you for coming to work. We need you and you’re here. At the liquor store I asked the guy how business was. Slow today, but really busy last week. Well. You might have to help out the other small businesses. You’re right, he said. I might.

King Sooper was not crowded unlike my Safeway trip. In Safeway the aisles were full, people looked dazed. At King Sooper yesterday folks looked like purposeful shoppers, finding what they needed, not in OMG I gotta get to the toilet paper aisle mode. The tables were gone, but the in-story Starbucks was open.

Tried to get some takeout from Rocky Mountain Wraps, but they had closed. Sunday hours. We’re encouraged here to get takeout from restaurants and tip well, try to help the small business folks. I plan to over the next weeks. It’s nice to have some variety. Seoah made a shrimp and pasta meal last night that was very good.

Saw today that restrictions need to get tighter if we’re to control the viruses spread. OK with us.

Commentary on the news, Family, Friends, Health, Talmud

Cut Precious Stones

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Spring and the Leap Year Moon

Sunday gratefuls: the long shabbat. the damage being done to Trump’s presidency. By himself. The solar snow shovel. Scott Simpson’s note about his journey back from Colorado. Ode’s crane stories. Crane. Again, still, the truckers, shelvers, nurses, clerks, doctors, cleaners, gas station attendants. Hope we remember their service afterward. The loft.

Shelter in place. Not yet an order here in Colorado. But. I looked at its parameters in California. Only essential visits: medical facilities, groceries, outdoor activities with others 6 feet away, caring for others who need in home assistance. Then I thought. Huh. Kate and I have been doing shelter in place for more than a year and a half. CBE events being the only major deviation. Odd, but the case.

Reading the news is like watching a slow motion car wreck. Can’t watch. Can’t look away. A mathematics professor from the U.ofCo.’s Biofrontiers Institute compared our current situation to those in Florida awaiting a predicted hurricane. Everything looks normal, feels the same. But 8 days away is a powerful disrupter. It’s not a question of whether, but when.

Got way behind on reading the Talmud, but the stay-at-home mode has allowed me to begin catching up. Maybe today. Wondered the other day about why I was doing this. It’s a huge commitment and it isn’t my tradition. If I found it uninteresting, I would quit. And, some of it is pretty boring. Berkahot, the first tractate which I finished yesterday, had many entries about the times for prayer, about where to pray, how many folks it took to pray. It ended strong though with many entries on modesty and where to defecate. Yes, really. The Talmud finds all of life worthy of commentary.

It’s like travel for me. Immersing myself in a strange world, one complete unto itself. Not mine, but human. Therefore interesting. There’s another aspect of it that’s like travel. I can say I’ve been there. Outside the world of Judaism nobody would care, but within Beth Evergreen, in other Jewish places, having done the Daf Yomi is like having gone on the Haj. It’s a mark of honor.

Perhaps the most salient reason is that the Talmud provides context for my life on the ancientrail of former slaves from Egypt, a people whose wandering is not over.

Here’s an example from near the end of Tractate Berkahot: “Bar Kappara taught: A person should always teach his child a clean and simple craft. The Gemara asks: What craft is considered clean and simple? Rav Ḥisda said: Cutting precious stones.”

Cinema and Television, Commentary on the news, Health, Humanities, Letters, Music, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

As Happy As Can Be

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Spring and the Leap Year Moon

Saturday gratefuls: Bright sun. White snow. Sturdy mountains. Gov. Polis. All workers in essential jobs, risking themselves for the rest of us. Tough decisions, made well. Governors and mayors. Drugs. Rigel, who practiced non-violent resistance last night when I moved her off my pillow. (100 lbs. of limp dog.) Seoah with her spray can of Lysol. Seoah for cleaning and soup and pancakes (veggie, Korean type). Kate for good attitude in spite of, well, all of it.

Lyrics from a Warren Zevon song:

I want to live alone in the desert
I want to be like Georgia O’Keefe
I want to live on the Upper East Side
And never go down in the street

Splendid Isolation
I don’t need no one
Splendid Isolation

Michael Jackson in Disneyland
Don’t have to share it with nobody else
Lock the gates, Goofy, take my hand
And lead me through the World of Self

Goofy and I have set out on this quarantine journey. It’s the Mickey Mouse club hike for us older Mouseketeers, now latch key elders stuck at home while the young ones go to work. What kind of mischief can we get up to? Been rummaging around for that chemistry set with the REAL piece of uranium. We can wave at the other seniors through the window. Hey, there, hi, there, ho, there.

We can also follow Goofy down the yellow-brick road to that ego wizard living behind the green curtains of our fear. Let him/her out. We’re all afraid now. Maybe not quaking or shaking, but definitely concerned. No reason to hide.

Here’s an elder countryman, speaking of a different time, but also of ours:

“THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated” Thomas Paine