Category Archives: US History

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

Toxic. What else can you say?

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Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

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

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

Kavannah for 2025: Yetziratiut  Creativity

For January 1 life: Wonder, Malchut

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

 

I promised something less abstruse today. Here it is.

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

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

I read instead.

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

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

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

 

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

 

Family, Memories, Minnesota, Politics, US History

Arrival Day

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Yule and the Samain Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Mini-splits. Boiler. Hot Water. Well. Septic. Pipes. Electricity. Generator. Walls. Windows. Roofs. Floors. Driveway. Skylights. Solar panels. Great Sol. Orion. Andromeda. Polaris. Ursa Major. Vega. Rigel. The Moon and its phases. Shadow Mountain.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Our Town by Thornton Wilder

Kavannah: Persistence and love

One brief shining: Oh so long ago those days of old army jackets (cue the irony), work boots, jeans, work shirts, long hair and beards, joints and acid, Hell no we won’t go, Hey, Hey, ho, ho, LBJ he’s got to go, sweaty nights with the woman I met at that day’s rally, the Doors in the background playing Riders in the Storm.

 

the prompt: in psychedelic colors portray with kindness a group of gray haired activists protesting in the 1960’s

I suppose, sometime, is that enough equivocation, I might-a little more-write my own memoir of the 60’s, the war against the war. Another planet, another universe. Laid against Peter Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel. Those long red ties. Government as clown car. Cram all the horn honkers, the confetti cannonaderes, the yellow and blue and red frizzy haired ones in that you can. Then one more.

Central Indiana, where I spent my 60’s, though not my sixties, was not the pulsing epicenter of the movement though the 1968 Democratic convention happened not far away. Even so we did our part. Dressed up like all the other individualists marching together across the country. Listened to the same bands. Held fast to the same dreams. Not the Children’s Crusade, but similar. Older. Young adults.

Easy to cast a cynical eye back to those days. Say the obvious things about white privilege, a poor person’s war (aren’t they all?), the way we were. Yet my life turned away from the American establishment (remember the establishment?) for good. Turned toward justice as a life work. So much else. So much else. But not today.

 

No. Today I want to acknowledge another powerful event that shaped my post 1980’s life: the arrival, 43 years ago this night, of my son and his wicker basket partner, Willie. I’ve repeated the story often of the iced up fuel line in our orange VW Bug, sidelining us on the way home. And Angel, the Latino, rescuing me and towing me home, and as he came inside so I could thank him properly, an Angel became the first outsider to see my son in his new home.

Suddenly. A parent. That day earlier Raeone and I were a childless couple in our early thirties. At midnight on December 15th, that same day, we were parents. No nine months of preparation. Of course there was anticipation, but no pregnancy.

My son weighed 4 lbs and 4 ounces. He was so tiny. We both wondered if he would survive the first day with parents as clueless as we felt. Well. I talked with him yesterday. He’s made it 43 years past that night at Minneapolis/St. Paul International. I guess I can breathe now.

 

 

Asia, Family, Health, Mountains, Plants, Politics, Shadow Mountain, US History

See

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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.

Health, Politics, US History

What Have We Got To Lose?

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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?

Humanities, Politics, Shadow Mountain, US History

An Ontological Oncologist

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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.

 

Garden, Great Work, Politics, US History

A Victory Garden

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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.

 

 

Politics, US History

When it began

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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.

Fourth Phase, Politics, US History

Never Forget

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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.

 

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

An American Sannyasa

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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. 

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

I know

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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