• Category Archives US History

  • See

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samain and the Yule Moon

    Shabbat gratefuls: Rabbi Jamie. Ginny and Janice. Luke and Leo. Torah. Aviva Zornberg. Art Green. Rami Shapiro. My Lodgepole Companion and their Companions. My son. Shabbat. Bereshit. Brother Mark in Bangkok. Mary in Oz. All Dogs. That Buck.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Perception

    Kavannah: Joy and Enthusiasm (zerizut)

    One brief shining: What’s that, over there by the neighbors, my eyes caught movement in the Lodgepoles, Branches moving, but no Wind, wait, wait, wait, oh, yes, there he is, that eight point Mule Deer Buck, the one whose photograph I posted; he comes often, always majestic, proud.

     

    Often I am reminded of our hominid ancestors, how their life on the veldt trained them to pick up on the slightest motion, the smallest movements of Grass, twitches in Leaves. A something out of sight, almost, at the very periphery of our vision. My ancestral brain lights up as it did yesterday when I saw a disturbance, not in the force, but in the Lodgepoles next to my neighbors.

    First check. Are other Branches moving? Could be Wind. No. No Wind. What then? Nothing was visible. It was moderately high up from the ground. Maybe a neighbor? No. The movement seemed to press forward without stopping and a human would have been scratched, bothered, maybe hurt. Wait.

    I stood there at my kitchen window. A spot where Kate and I still look out to our front on occasion. As we used to when she was alive. She would have wanted to see this. I waited and in his slow, purposeful way the Buck emerged, his rack having caused the Lodgepole Branches to sway. This is his Land, his Mountain. And he displayed that with each careful, but not hesitant step he took. Unlike the Does that come he did not scan his environment often, confident in his years and his weapons.

    Thanks again, Kate, for finding this spot on Shadow Mountain. In the Rocky Mountains and the Arapaho National Forest. Kate, always Kate.

     

    Just a moment: Following the Korean weirdness with less detachment than the usual American. Daughter-in-law Seoah has expressed her contempt for the current President, Yun Suk Yeol, comparing him to long red tie guy. She’s not alone among her compatriots as can be seen in the many photographs from Seoul featuring protesters in the streets.

    Also my son works alongside Korean military personnel. They’re not ones likely to get called out to enforce martial law, but they are under the overall command of the South Korean President.

    Yun survived his impeachment vote, but only just. His political power is gone. Will be interesting to see what happens next.

     

    Also following the continuing uproar over Brian Thompson’s murder and the virulence toward the whole health care system it has unleashed. Heather Cox Richardson’s post of December 5th placed the shooting in a long historical context which included this paragraph:

    “Today provided a snapshot of American society that echoed a similar moment on January 6, 1872, when Edward D. Stokes shot railroad baron James Fisk Jr. as he descended the staircase of New York’s Grand Central Hotel. The quarrel was over Fisk’s mistress, Josie, who had taken up with the handsome Stokes, but the murder instantly provoked a popular condemnation of the ties between big business and government.” Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, December 6th, 2024

    Once again, I condemn the taking of a human life. Yet. I also hope that a cleansing movement might arise from this shooting, a total restructuring of our oh so broken health care system. So many lives end too soon, come to debilitation because our health care system lacks transparency, empathy, and rationality. And again, I remind us that violence does not only come from a gun. It can also come from a letter in the mail, we have denied this procedure, that medication.


    Asia Family Health Mountains Plants Politics Shadow Mountain US History

  • What Have We Got To Lose?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samain and the Yule Moon

    Friday gratefuls: Rabbi Jamie. Making art. Friends. Ichi-go, Ichi-e. Health insurance. The failure of capitalism. Failing institutions in the U.S. 45/47 already tripping over his long red tie. Plants. Plant intelligence. Consciousness. Materialism. How shall the twain meet? Scrabbling off a 2-D life. With a little help from my friends.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Making art

    Kavannah: Joy (simcha)

    One brief shining: Sitting at the end of the long table between Gordon and Ellen, I reinforced for myself, yet again, the over the top value of my Phonak hearing aid, having forgotten it in its charging cradle back home, voices from mere feet away arrived muffled, testing my puzzle solving skills and reminding me, too, of how socially distancing bad hearing can be.

     

     

    The murder of Brian Thompson of Maple Grove, Minnesota. Yes, United Health Care, formerly known as Group Health, a colossus in American health insurance, has its roots and headquarters in my former home state of Minnesota. My AARP Advantage health plan is a United Health Care product. I have experience with it as a user, an insured, and as a source of news from time to time when I was in Minnesota, often about how much the executives made in salary and bonuses.

    Dr. William McGuire, former CEO of UHC, donated $10 million for Gold Medal Park near the Guthrie Theater. He also owns, in retirement, the Minnesota soccer club, the Minnesota United. A billionaire.

    How much of that money is literal blood money? Money “earned” as “profits” by holding back coverage to plump up the quarterly P&L. In 2016 I was denied an axumin scan that would have accurately targeted the location of my resurgent cancer. Experimental, UHC said. That meant I entered 35 sessions of radiation with the powerful beam aimed at the area, the prostate fossa, or bed, statistically most likely to harbor active cancer cells. That wasn’t where they were.

    After a prostatectomy and 35 sessions of radiation, if prostate cancer returns, it is incurable. Where I am now. Since 2019. Would a more targeted bout of radiation cured mine? I don’t know, of course, but I was not given the chance to find out. And, it was my last hope for a cure. Yes, I do carry some anger about that.

    With what the NYT described as a Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry exploding across social media, it occurred to me that we might see in that vitriol a clue to Trump’s victory. A toxic stew of anger about health care, inflation at the grocery store checkout and the gas pump stirred into a broth of white supremacy, anti-semitism, homophobia and misogyny. A generalized and deep upset with the way things are.

    Institutional distrust sweeps in there, too, not just for the health care “system.” The church. Higher education. C suite salaries compared to those in their employee.

    I can imagine a person saying, this is too much. Harris sounds like the old boss; Trump sounds like a different boss. What have we got to lose?


    Health Politics US History

  • An Ontological Oncologist

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samain and the Moon of Growing Darkness

    Tuesday gratefuls: Marilyn and Irv. Paul. Mark in K.L. Gettin’ stuff done. Snow. Cold. Back to working out. Aches to prove it. My Lodgepole Companion. That young Buck with the spike Antlers. Visiting again. Mary getting ready for Summer. My son, Seoah, and Murdoch. Thanksgiving in Songtan. His generosity. The Water Grill. 2:15. Ruth, Gabe, Jen, and me.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Thanksgiving

    Kavannah: Perseverance and chesed

    One brief shining: Opening a book and beginning to read starts a journey into the unknown, what if this paragraph changes my life, oh no, he didn’t, picked up one yesterday recommended by NYT conservative columnist, Ross Douthat, a dialogue between Olympian Gods favoring an idealistic, almost Bishop Berkeleyan, metaphysic in which all is mind or forms as mind pushes itself into forms. Or something like that.

     

    Got my house cleaned yesterday. Ana wielding her dust cloth, vacuum, and other tools of her trade to give me that spiffy home feeling. Not cheap but Furball Cleaning, owned by my friend Marina Harris, shows up and on time, and does better than average work. Hard to calculate how much psychic difference a clean house makes, but it’s a lot.

     

    That book I opened yesterday is All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life. Haven’t read a philosophy text in a while. This one is thick, thick, thick. As near as I can tell David Bentley Hart wants to make the case for something like Bishop Berkeley’s: Esse est percipi. To be is to be perceived. A solution, Hart believes, that could solve the four hundred old mistake in Western culture most often blamed on Descartes: The mind-body split.

    I agree with Hart’s definition of the problem. And, how you define is how you solve so we’re halfway to agreement from the start. I might even agree with a version of his solution, but not one that ends up providing a comfortable berth for old fashioned Thomistic theology. Which is where I suspect he is headed.

    My agreement with Hart lies in his insistence on a unitary metaphysic, it’s all one, and a rejection, because of this, with dualisms as final expressions of the nature of reality. My difference with him so far? I suspect him of having a static ontology. I may be wrong about that though. I’m a Whiteheadian, Jewish fan of the notion of all becoming new, every moment, in every instant.

    BTW: This might be the place for Paul’s addition to my stable of oncologists: urological, radiation, and medical. Paul thought I should add an ontological oncologist. Perfect. Static ontologies are the cancers of a process metaphysic.

    I know. I’m sorry. But it’s what I’m thinking about today.

     

    Just a moment: So. 25% on Mexico and Canada. 10% on China. Tariffs. First day in office. Dictator day if I recall. Whatever. As the teenagers say. Or, said. Probably a while ago.

    As a seed-keeper, I’ll continue reading Thoreau and Emerson, Dickinson and Melville. Madison and Monroe. Throw in a little Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

     


    Humanities Politics Shadow Mountain US History

  • A Victory Garden

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samain and the Moon of Growing Darkness

    Thursday gratefuls: Tara. Arjean. Tom. Diane. Paul. Workouts. Diet. Conifer Cafe. Aspen Perks. Primo’s. Dandelion. Parkside. Wild Flower. Bread Lounge. Breakfast. Still an important meal out for me. Mussar. Veronica. Mineral Water. 8,800 feet. Mountains.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Visits

    Kavannah: Perseverance Netzach  נֵצַח tenacity, grit; literally “to last”

    One brief shining: Above the fold and a dagger to the heart, Matt Gaetz for Attorney General and Republicans take the House, wish I’d built that bunker oh so long ago, a Rip Van Winkle place where I could lie down in a futuristic pod, go gently to sleep, and wake up when this is all over, but no, being a Seed-Keeper is more important than ever.

     

    The waning years of my fourth phase have climate change and a MAGAnified country. Not what I wanted for Christmas or Hanukah. So let’s look again at the Seed Keeper idea. I finished the novel which inspired this thought. Recalled after reading the acknowledgments (what an odd word, I just realized) that Kate and I had lived a Seed-Keeper life. We used only heirloom Seeds from the Seed Saver’s Exchange, planted our Orchard in the permaculture way, kept Bees, gathered Wild Grapes and Morels from our land. Loved all our Wild Neighbors and all our Dogs. It is a beautiful way to live.

    I no longer have the oomph or the desire to resist what’s coming. I will write about it, will talk about it, sure, how could I not? But my focus will be on loving and supporting those younger than me. Helping them remember why loving the neighbor still makes sense. Why no one left behind should not be a slogan only for the military. Why equality before the law remains an essential American value. Why a nation of laws dedicated to the lives of all its citizens has not vanished as an ideal. A nation of laws that guide us toward love, justice, and compassion. Why those values are not only worth dying for, they’re also worth living for.

    These are the three sisters of our country: the Corn, Beans, and Squash out of which a new nation dedicated to old propositions can grow. You and I are the Soil to mound and out of which the strong Corn stalk can push toward the Sky, the Bean Tendrils can clasp that strong stalk for support, while the bountiful Squash with its huge leaves grow over the Ground.

    We will plant a Victory garden.

     

     


    Garden Great Work Politics US History

  • When it began

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samain and the Moon of Growing Darkness

    Wednesday gratefuls: Being able to type. See a blue Sky and Great Sol lighting up my Lodgepole companion. Take care of myself. Tom. Diane. Brother Mark. Trash day. Cold night. Toyota. Snow tires. All weather. Tara. Marilyn and Irv. Differential/AWD fluids replaced.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Cold chicken

    Kavannah: Compassion

    One brief shining: Marilyn and Irv sat across the table at the Blue Sky Cafe, one of Marilyn’s old haunts when she worked nearby for the Jefferson County school system, menus opened, we ordered coffee, and I laughed at one of the menu items, a specialty coffee named The Flying Elvis.

     

    Stevinson’s Toyota. Snow tires. AWD. Reading Seed Keepers. Hiding from the ubiquitous television screen. Background noise. Marilyn and Irv picked me up and took me out to breakfast. A nice break from the normal routine of the waiter. I did have an hour plus of reading. A good, sad, hopeful book.

    Not ignoring the fact that Stephen Miller will be deputy chief of staff. Or, that Uncle Elon has already got his talons in. Paying attention, not absorbed. Looking at the Democrat’s analysis of what went wrong.

    I know when it began. 1974. General Motors began shuttering its supply chain factories like Delco Remy and Guide Lamp, two near my home town that employed most of the people in Alexandria. Foreign cars began to dominate the US market. I drove one, a VW Beetle, the old kind, not the spiffy newer one.

    Working class guys began to lose their jobs en masse. Many white, many of color. Flooding unemployment rolls, creating a glut of persons vying for the few remaining jobs, those often paying a half or a third of their old jobs. No health care. No pensions.

    Proud homeowners drew the drapes in their homes and left in the middle of the night, another property for the bank. Scroll forward ten years and plywood covered storefronts, those homes had no paint, front doors hung crooked, roofs began to leak.

    The Democrats forgot their core working class constituency. Let them drift into McJobs, the bottle, confused anger. Creative destruction. Ha. My friends from high school, their parents. Only a handful of us went onto college, untouched by the grim hand of a capitalist economy chewing through another generation of workers.

    And the Democrats. Where were they? A shifted focus. Not bad in and of itself. Continuing the Civil Rights era successes, focused on African-American realities, on women’s rights, later on the rights of LGBT folk. Important work, sure. And pretty successful.

    But we took our eyes off the folks who put us in office, the working class. Eventually working class whites drifted and/or were prompted into believing their continuing plight was the fault not of cold capitalistic calculations, but of the somehow evil machinations of African-Americans, immigrants, others.

    And who had the Democratic parties focus: others. Including persons with sexual preferences outside the experience and compass of most working class folks.

    Let me be clear. Championing the rights and fortunes of the other is a critical and necessary political act. But in the perception of the former base of liberal politics, union represented working class folks, they were the enemy.

    Perhaps a difficult circle to square, but we didn’t even try.


    Politics US History

  • Never Forget

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samain and the Moon of Growing Darkness

    Shabbat gratefuls: Yet more Snow. Election week. At least it’s over. Tara. Weariness. San Francisco. St. Francis. Authenticity. Rabbi Jamie. Avram and Sarai. I am content with who I am. I am content with what I have. Mezuzahs. The Winter of our discontents.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: The quiet after a big Snow

    Kavannah for election week: contentment and joy

    One brief shining: While talking to Tara on zoom, a knock on the front door, Vince carrying a King Sooper’s bag with milk and English muffins, two friends seeing me, helping me; the very thing I believe we need to nurture right now, holding each other close, bearing each other’s burdens.

     

    Not going to go scree here. Yet I can’t help this much. Story header in the NYT: the Elites Had It Coming. Yeah? Showing up the elites by putting U.S. oligarchs like Trump and Musk and Adelson and Thiel in charge of dismantling the barriers between themselves and yet more rapaciousness? A burlesque. A 1920’s black and white dark comedy.

     

    Marilyn recommended An Unfinished Love Story: A personal history of the 1960’s. Started reading on Sunday or Monday. Almost done. I graduated from Alexandria-Monroe High School in 1965. After the Civil Rights movement was well underway and as Vietnam began to grow like a cancer, killing my friends and our “foes” alike.

    The 60’s were my decade of becoming a man. It was a bumpy ride. I was in it from a less lofty perch than Dick Goodwin and Doris Kearns, both of whom worked closely with Lyndon Johnson, LBJ. Goodwin as a speech writer and Kearns as a Whitehouse Fellow who wrote her first, well-received work on LBJ, in 1976.

    Sixty years ago. 1965. Almost. 65 years ago, 1960. The sad irony of reading about the dreams of the Kennedy years and their realization under LBJ in the Great Society legislation, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act. The sad, sad irony of reading about that era as their inversion gained power, not by a coup, not by cheating at the election booth, but by the will of 74,264,010 of our fellow citizens.

    On every page I turned I found fellow feeling with the aims and intents of the actors, JFK, LBJ, MLK, Bobby Kennedy, John Lewis, the Freedom Riders, the anti-war protesters of whom I was one. Sure there were disagreements as to emphasis, tactics, but what shines from these pages is a belief that government has a distinctive and necessary role in redressing wrongs, ones like entrenched racism, ones like stopping an ill-advised war. Ones like rebuilding America’s inner cities, cleaning its water and air of pollutants, giving national recognition to American art and artists.

    Sixty, sixty-five years ago. In my decade of high school and college, of growing up from a small-town boy to a man committed to those same ideals. Ideals learned from the politics of that time. And now. This Tuesday last. A shocking repudiation of all of them as white supremacists and misogynists and felons and nativists plan to use the same government for their unjust and bigoted policies.

    Hard to fathom. That I’ve lived through this transition and may not live to see it die away.

     


    Fourth Phase Politics US History

  • An American Sannyasa

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samain and the Moon of Growing Darkness

    Friday gratefuls: Snow, and more Snow on the way. Harris and Waltz. Liberals. And, radicals. Politics. Changing in big ways. History. Always moving and shifting. The One, taking it all in and forming a new world. Cold nights. Diane. Tom. Irv. Paul. My son. Seoah. Murdoch. Shadow Mountain. A Snow globe week.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Purpose

    Kavannah for election week: contentment and joy

    One brief shining: May have seemed odd to you that I chose contentment and joy as my intentions for election week, that most fractious and unhappy of weeks for one side or another, may have seemed odd especially to have continued with them after the elevation of an anti-liberal mean of our collective culture; yet, I have found them good for me, instead of being angry about a situation now beyond my reach, I have been able to draw to myself a lesson about my life’s purpose.

     

    A while back I borrowed the idea of a fourth phase of life from the Hindus.* I don’t define it in the same way, but I find the idea of a stage after retirement-our version of the forest dweller stage-makes sense.

    The commonality between my view and Hinduism’s lies in death and acceptance. Readiness for death and seeing it as not only somewhat imminent, but as welcome.

    This week I not only learned that the orange one will be our next President. I also learned that my cancer is not aggressive, and not hormone resistant. Which gives me a longer possible lifespan. And, I’m glad. Even so. Death lies over the horizon, but not nearly as far as it used to.

    I would not know if I was fully enlightened and I’m not detached. I may have some wisdom but that’s for others to know, not me.

    The rise of a populist anti-liberal agenda, a rise that came with unexpected force, has clarified my fourth phase. Though I am a Forest dweller and though that remains a central part of who I am, I passed, as I said a week or so ago, into Sannyasa when diagnosed with prostate cancer. Over the almost ten years since then I’ve been conflicted at a core level.

    Some of the conflicts. In but not of Judaism. No longer an activist but feeling like I should be one. Wanting to hike in the mountains but being constrained first by shortness of breath, now by a gimpy back too. Wanting to travel more. But. See s.o.b and back. Learning to live without Kate and without dogs.

    Resolutions. Converted to Judaism. Election 2024 has made see my role in culture and politics. I am a seed-keeper, not an activist anymore. (If this isn’t cultural appropriation. I hope not because it fits so well.) Hiking and traveling. Can do some with good drugs and patience, but it’s never gonna be easy for me again. I have lived into a life without Kate and without dogs. Difficult, of course. At times it still is. Yet I have a Herme Harari Israel life defined now:  An introverted Mountain man who struggles with God. However you want to fill the God bucket. Or, even if you want to live it empty.

    So I will continue to write. Continue to read. Continue to study mussar and be with my CBE friends. Continue to love them and my other friends and family. All this is enough for me. My fourth phase. An American Sannyasa.

     

    *Brahmacharya The student stage, when one focuses on learning and gaining knowledge. This stage is the time before puberty and up until marriage.

    Grihastha The householder stage, when one is occupied with family and household matters. This stage is when one starts a family and maintains a healthy marriage.

    Vanaprastha The forest dweller stage, when one retires from business as usual.

    Sannyasa The stage of renunciation, when one is wise and fully enlightened, detached from everything, and ready for death. A Sannyasi is a religious ascetic who has renounced the world by performing their own funeral and abandoning all claims to social or family standing. 


    Aging Asia Fourth Phase Health Judaism Mountains Seek-Keepers Shadow Mountain US History

  • I know

    Posted on by Charles 1 Comment

    Samain and the Moon of Growing Darkness

    Wednesday gratefuls: Generator. Electricity. Snow. America. Our coming time of growing darkness. Harris. Troubled. Elections. Democracy. My son. Mountains. The West. Minnesota. Colorado. The Left Coast. History. Coffee. Prostate Cancer. Hibernation. Bears. Mountain Lions. Mule Deer. Elk. Wild Neighbors.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Friends and Family

    Kavannah for election week: Contentment and Joy

    One brief shining: The oxygen concentrator coughed and turned off as the fan’s light blinked on, then off, I waited a moment, and heard the chug-chug-chug of the generator kick on as the automatic transfer switch did its job and the oxygen concentrator returned to duty and the fan bathed me in light. Time to get up.

     

    There will be time, too much time, to sort out the implications. Yes, he won. I know. Yet I still seek this week contentment and joy. I will still enjoy and celebrate the holidays of light and the one of darkness, most important to me. Thanksgiving will find me looking back over my gratefuls, finding the ones appropriate to that day.

    I love my son, Seoah, Murdoch. Mary and Mark. Luke and Leo. My Ancient Brothers. Ginny and Janice. Marilyn and Irv. Alan and Joanne. Tara and Arjean. The MVP group. CBE. This country. Now more than ever. All Dogs and Wild Neighbors. All members of the Tribe wherever they may be.

    Relinquishing my equanimity, my joy, my contentment to the fevered anxieties of those losing their status and power. No. I will not do that. This morning on a Snow covered Shadow Mountain I am at peace. Neither angry nor despairing. Ready though.

    A suffering world has drunk the toxic waters of he who would save them. The USA has not shrugged off this trend, instead it has leaned into it. As always when history turns this way, the need for those who will carry the flag of justice and democracy and freedom through and beyond these days reaches its high tide.

    We need each other. We need to stand up and to sit down with each other. To continue our lives. To embrace beauty and wholeness. To seek and find the sacred in each moment and in each person we meet.

    We must not raise the cup of bitterness and despondency. Instead pour it out and refill the cup with whatever gives your life fullness, satisfaction. This is what we will need to ensure our children and grandchildren inherit a world not driven by fear.

     

    Just a moment: Found out yesterday that I’m not in hormone resistant prostate cancer. At least not yet. My PSA has continued to go down, though it’s not yet undetectable. Means my metastases are not growing.

    This news was welcome and it came on Election Day.

     

    Watched the tenth and final episode of 1883 yesterday, too. Cried through it all. This is transcendent television, showing what the medium can do. Over these next four years I want to channel Elsa’s spirit of embracing the moment, embracing joy and pain, seeing this wild and often strange world for what it is. Our home.

     

    Herme Harari Israel

     

     


    Acting Cinema and Television Family Feelings Fourth Phase Friends Health US History

  • Seeking Contentment and Joy. Losing them.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samain and the Moon of Growing Darkness

    Tuesday gratefuls: Sadness. Unhappiness. Dismay. Prostate cancer. Dr. Buphati. That P.A. Kristie. Contentment. Joy. Pain. 1883. Ilsa May. Her role as Elsa Dutton. Cold Nights. Snow. Wild Neighbors. The West. Comanche. Lakota. The Great Plains. Buffalo. A Wild and undiscovered country still. The West of my heart.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Home

    Kavannah for election week: Contentment and Joy

    One brief shining: In a small office at Rocky Mountain Cancer Care I experienced dismay, unhappiness, a strange intersection of politics and self care, and again, as I did on the drive home three weeks ago from RMCC, I felt alone, this time in the usual patient’s chair listening to the P.A. say they had no PSA for me.

     

    First jolt was seeing a P.A. instead of Dr. Buphati. I liked him, was counting on his knowledge to guide me through what came next. She offered to go get him. She said she did not care either way. This was the strange intersection of politics and self care. I wanted to see Buphati, but I didn’t want to deny her skills, her right to be there. Feminism strong in me. In medicine especially. Kate.

    Second jolt. We have no PSA for you. I deflated. This appointment was supposed to define the next steps in a journey that had made confusing turns over the summer and early fall. Why not? How can you not know?

    She said (I don’t remember her name, if it even got through the fog.) I just got assigned.

    Then I got unhappy and said so. I’m unhappy and disappointed. I don’t understand how after three weeks you don’t have it. My expectations about knowing what comes next had me in knots. I wanted, no needed, to know and I couldn’t. But why? In the end it didn’t matter.

    Go ahead, I waved my hand dismissively. Still trying to reorient. She handed me the results of the DNA results for my cancer cells. Nothing of significance. That means no clinical trials, no targeted therapies. Oh. I took the papers, glanced at them, wondering where my readers were. Nothing of significance. Oh.

    In the end she went to get Dr. Buphati. Who came in masked, as was she. Making it difficult for me to hear. He agreed I had every right to be upset. That somehow the lab didn’t have the results. I told him my upset had started back in June when my PSA went up after my drug holiday. Then went down after going back on Orgovyx. My visit to the radiation oncologist who said I had hormone resistant cancer. After which Kristie said, no. Not without rising PSA on two drugs. Erleada came next. This was the PSA measure that would tell the difference. But there were no test results.

    We talked for a bit more. His knowledge and clarity helped me calm, but the dismay and the sadness had already burrowed their way into my feelings of the moment. When the phlebotomist, a kind Latina, young, asked me how I was, I said feeling down. And I was. She knew that already. Helped me put on my jacket.

    I wanted contentment and joy. They were/are my intentions for this week, but I lost them at the words no PSA results. I wanted to be calm, clear, kind. But I wasn’t. I felt let down by Dr. Buphati, by RMCC. No mussar moves came to mind.

    So the valet got my car and I drove away toward the Mountains, wanting only to be home.

     

    Just a moment: That was yesterday. I got some Chicken wings, cole slaw, and Potatoes at Safeway, drove to Shadow Mountain, and binged 1883. Soothing myself. Letting myself feel sad, disappointed.

    In 1883 I witnessed one of the best dramatic performances I’ve seen. Ilsa May, a young actress, plays Elsa Dutton who turns 18 as her family makes their way as part of a wagon train headed to Oregon. Her arc from bonneted, piano-playing Tennessee girl to cowgirl, then wife of a Comanche warrior and becoming a warrior herself was an alembic for my feelings. In seeing Elsa take the real agonies and the ecstasies of young maturation I rode with her. Seeing a way through the self-inflicted responses I had. Better this morning. Much better. Thanks, Elsa.


    Cinema and Television Feelings Fourth Phase Health Judaism Mountains Mussar Shadow Mountain US History

  • It’s almost here. That most feared day of the year!

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samain and the Moon of Growing Darkness

    Sunday gratefuls: Yes, I remembered. Digital clocks. In blind obedience shifting for me so I don’t have to cuss. Great Sol. Mother Earth. Will not change their dance. Rosh Chodesh service at CBE. New men’s group. Maybe. 28 degrees. Snow on the ground. Ginny. Janice. Luke. Leo. Laughing. Hopeful. Primo’s. Elephant Company. Elephants. Loving animals. Non-Human Rights. The Colorado Supreme Court.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Leo

    Kavannah: חֲבֵרוּת Chaverut: Partnership, camaraderie  אַחְדוּת Achdut: Unity, solidarity, togetherness

    One brief shining: A long playing discordant symphony with many cadenzas, downbeat jazz riffs, and teen age tragedy songs from the 1960’s will climax on Tuesday, dragging us all into a world none of us would choose, but in which we will all have to live guided, I hope, by the better angels of our natures.

     

    The moment you’ve all been waiting for! Civil War or Fascism! Or, both. Hey. I have no idea what’s gonna happen and best I can tell? Nobody else does either. Nothing like having the waning years of my life held hostage to the worst Presidential candidate in American history. Gotta love it.

    Even so. I’ve been considering my life under a Trump regime. Do not intend to let the Donald ruin the last years I have on this amazing journey. Should he win, and I really can’t tell who’s favored, let alone will win, several things have occurred to me.

    This would be the time to maximize my white male privilege by using it on behalf of all Americans belittled and pushed aside by MAGA/Christian Nationalist assaults. How to do that?

    First I will increase my daily and weekly attention to the politically vulnerable. Of whom, oddly, I am now one as a Jew. I say oddly because up until a year ago I could have hunkered down and passed as an old white guy. Was with Luke yesterday and he’s begun wearing a kippah in public. I might, too. Not to inflame the anti-semites among us, but to show that living with difference is not only possible, it’s wonderful.

    Second. I will strengthen my personal bonds with folks I know who might be vulnerable. Spend more time with them if they want. At a minimum be available. Remember the safety pins in the first weeks of 2016?

    Third. I will write more. I believe I have a perspective of value to those who will carry on the American project after the MAGA movement burns through its vitriol. And, yes, I believe that will happen. The American project, flawed as it has proved, still holds my allegiance. A country of many peoples, many national origins, many religions, many colors and sexual and gender preferences. All responsible for each others well being.

    Fourth. I will continue on my ancientrail as a son of Abraham and Sarah. Herme Harari Israel. Learning mussar. Supporting Jewish institutions and friends.

    Fifth. Perhaps most importantly. I will live joyfully. I sacrifice my pleasure at being alive, in these amazing Rocky Mountains, with all my Wild Neighbors and the human ones, to no man and no movement.

    Are you ready?


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