Summer and the Aloha Moon
Saturday gratefuls: Living at 8800 feet. Cooler than down the hill. Sealed driveway. Hawai’i. Jet planes. Masks. Santa Fe art crawl. Gabe. A sweetheart. Ruth. Sad. Jon. Jon. Kep. More inside work done. A week with less going on. Kate’s memorial Iris bed in bloom. Best week of exercise in a long time. Sleep.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Iris
Tarot: Two of Stones, Challenge
“The Two of Stones asks us to consider: Who and what are the challenges and challenges in our own lives? Do we handle them from a grounded and well-balanced place?” tarotx.net
Down the hill yesterday to Santa Fe Drive, the first and largest of Denver’s Arts Districts. On the first Friday of every month they have an Art Crawl. I asked Jon, Ruth, and Gabe if they wanted to go, eat at the food trucks that line up at several spots on and off Santa Fe. We met in front of the Dart Gallery where Jon had a print exhibited for a show back in March.
We got food from various trucks and sat on a concrete structure that had absorbed a lot of heat during the day. It was uncomfortably hot and humid. 82 when I left for home. When I got to Shadow Mountain and it was 57 degrees, I put it down in my record book (here) as the largest temperature spread between down the hill and back up since I moved here. 25 degrees!
Wandering here and there we went into galleries and workshops and centers for the arts. One gallery had a tall, finely crafted lamp encased in a metal and wood surround for a mere $12,000. This guy’s work was meticulous. Still…
Gabe said he was really sorry they missed my performance. Everybody’s phone was shut off because Jon chose to wait until his check came to pay his phone bill. I messaged them several time and had grown concerned. Sarah and BJ connected with them somehow and alerted me. Glad that’s all it was.
Ice cream cones in hand we wandered back to our vehicles and I left the urban heat island for the Mountains.
This morning I took off for Evergreen to have breakfast with Rebecca. Almost to 73 on Brook Forest Drive I saw what at first appeared a large dog off leash. Nope. A medium sized Black Bear, the second I’ve seen since we got here. It loped along unconcerned about traffic. I watched until it disappeared in the tall Grass, going about its Beary business.
The thrill of seeing these wild animals never wanes. No matter how long you’ve lived up here seeing the animals who live on their own by ancient, ancient rules of which we have no part stops us in our tire tracks. They are the past and the future. Their lives would only improve if human civilization shrank or disappeared.
The Bear had a shiny coat, moved with the ease of a healthy animal in its place, following its own designs. What a privilege to be here.
On a less sanguine note. The Extremes, for sure. But enough about them. How bout that Xi Jinping in Hong Kong:
“Political power must be in the hands of patriots,” he said, after swearing in a new leader for the city, a former policeman who led the crackdown on huge anti-government protests in 2019. “There is no country or region in the world that would allow unpatriotic or even treasonous or traitorous forces and people to take power.” NYT, 7/2/2022
Except maybe in that beacon of liberty, the dis-United States of America.
I’m beginning to feel energized. Maybe it’s the Synthroid, yes, that’s possible, but I love a good bare-knuckle fight where good manners and courtesy go by the wayside. Not energized enough to do what I would have, organize resistance, but energized enough to keep writing, keep poking the corporate/capitalist/right wing Christian demagogues, keep rallying the folks who still have some empathy with the poem on the Statue of Liberty.
Blue state values advance. Red state values retreat. This will become more and more evident as the years go by. Whether we accept and reinforce this sorting or try to reclaim a United States may be the biggest political question of the next decade.
Friday gratefuls: Blue Sky over Black Mountain. A fading contrail. Sun hitting the solar panels. Wind. Muscles still healing. Luke. A sweet guy. So talented. Rabbi Jamie smiling, easy. Mussar. Kate’s yahrzeit tonight at CBE. Her plaque on the yahrzeit wall lit up. Kya. The road trip to meet her tomorrow. Ode on the Road.
Saturday gratefuls: Kate, always Kate. Pete and the chandelier. Better than I thought. More exercise. Call from Ode. Breakfast with Alan on Monday. No Mouse in the kitchen Rat zapper! Cool night. Wild dream. New Acorns. Still reading Amanda Palmer. Qin Empire: Alliance. TV. Outer Range. TV. High Country News. P-22, the Mountain Lion of Griffith Park in LA.
Presentation tomorrow for Groveland. Zoom. Quite the thing. Something I couldn’t have done otherwise. Devolution. Trying to follow David Sanders advice. Write as I talk. Still working on reimagining faith after all these years. Getting very close to what I saw originally. The key move may be asking why privilege faith in the unseen when the seen has as much power in our daily lives? Our whole lives. I will post Devolution after I’ve presented it. Happy for critiques, thoughts.
Ode called from the road yesterday. On his way to Taos. Blown away by the West. His sketchbooks, my blog. A daily discipline. Influenced by life in the moment. A confidant. To whom we tell our story. While other people listen in. Or see. Native to each of us. Over many years. A friend. He saw this similarity.
Healthspan. Asked Kristie about it. She said I could live 10 plus years with the treatments available for prostate cancer. Kristen, my PCP, said 90 was reachable with my current health conditions. Both positive and sobering. I mean, geez, even fifteen years. That would get me back to only 60. Not that long ago.
Saturday gratefuls: Award Winning Pet Grooming. Beautiful Rigel. Shaggy Sheep’s carnitas taco. South Park and the Continental Divide. Beautiful with Snow. McKesson Biologic. Erleada. Happy Camper. Cheeba Chews. Making dreams come. Driving on a Snow packed highway. Like old times. Park County. The Mountains. The Valleys. The blue, blue Sky. Warmer. Getting stuff done.
In a very real sense I don’t live in Colorado, I live in the Rocky Mountains. Colorado is the Denver Metro, the big ranches on the Eastern Plains, and the even bigger ranches in the Western part of the state. Here the dominant reality is Mountains. Streams. Valleys. Pines and Aspen. Mule Deer, Moose, Elk. Mountain Lions and Marmosets. Sudden changes in weather that can breathe bone chilling cold, bursts of vehicle covering Snow, hot and dry winds, and glorious clear blue Sky.
Wednesday gratefuls: David Sanders. Rebecca. Claire. Bonnie. Elisa. Snow. Coming down hard. Shingles vaccination. Safeway pickup. Rigel’s meds. Kep’s good appetite. Kabbalah Experience. Their classes. The kitchen. Mostly remodeled. The Mountain roads in the Snow.
It also allows for the sort of love I have with Kep and Rigel, with my ancient brothers, with Jon, Ruth, and Gabe. The sort of love that CBE has shown to me.
Next up tomorrow: getting started on kitchen reorganization. I plan to savor the opportunity to organize plates and silverware, herbs and spices, bread box and coffee maker. Getting them in places that will not recreate the clutter I had before the work began. When I see how long that will take, not long I imagine, I’ll call Modern Bungalow and schedule the furniture delivery.
The ADL’s comments on these revisions, which I have read and with which I agree, make me remember the adage that history is written by winners. While this may be true in the short term, the job of historians and educators is to balance the winner’s version with the facts of how others were affected by the winner’s victories.
This is far from trivial. The history that we learn in school becomes the bedrock against which we measure the veracity of competing claims in political campaigns, in discussions with friends, in making business decisions.
Wednesday gratefuls: Cousin Diane of Clan Keaton. Hanwoo beef. Seoah. Bulgogi. Backsplash ready to go up. Slight snafu in my bank account. Oops. My error. All better now. Bowe. Marina Harris. Being right, being wrong. Tom’s theme. American Day of Atonement. Missed it. Kate and her handiworks. Luke and Elisa, Torah and the Stars. David Sanders, Sefer Yetzirah. Voice and letters as creative powers. Kabbalists. Judaism.
The filibuster. You know. Gumming up the works all by yourself. Of the Senate of the still most powerful nation on Earth. Sure, there’s a risk. Always. If and/when the GOP controls the Senate, the Democrats would not have the filibuster. But. Voting rights? The Build Back Better bill? Standing up for decisions as opposed to obstruction. Right now that looks pretty good to me. Ditch the filibuster.
This morning I had my first Winter semester classes. Torah and the Stars: Astrology and Kabbalah, Pt. II and Sefer Yetzirah, chapter 2. One starting at ten and ending at eleven fifteen, the next starting at noon and going until one fifteen. Both dense. Astrology is dense because folks have been fussing with it since early China, India, and Mesopotamia. Houses, planets, sun signs, north and south nodes, aspects. Natal charts laid out against the chart of the day. Telling stories with Uranus the renegade and that emotional Moon conspiring to challenge a stolid Taurean. Still learning, still unsure how I feel about it.
Bracket the comparison to esoteric physics and the Sefer Yetzirah, a very early Kabbalistic text, stands on its own. We dipped a toe in the idea that voice and sound, especially when combined with letters, can create reality. The underlying question is the creation of something from nothing. If God spoke the universe into existence, what came before God’s speech? In this case God equates to the ein sof, the infinite, the unending. God as undifferentiated, alone, eternal.
The implication of the shattered vessel is that all things contain a shard of ohr, of divine light. The great work of the creation involves reuniting those shards of ohr with their holy source. The Kabbalist’s Tree of Life shows both a downward emanation from the crown, or keter, that part of creation closest to the remaining ein sof, to malkut, this world, and an emanation in the other direction which bears those shards of light back to their source.
Our form of government, far from the only one, is in danger right now of losing the mandate of heaven by basing its survival on the mandate of money. The weird part is that many folks most damaged by the mandate of money are the ones rebelling against the old democratic regime. Yes, it was a center right thing all along, but at least some progress got made and people weren’t dying by the thousands. So here we have the strange circumstance of rebels insisting on more corporate influence, more oligarchic rule, yet rebels whose own jobs are often in jeopardy.
In the U.S. however the oligarchs have a situation where the white population sees its share of the population shrinking, the sort of jobs its middle and working class depended on disappearing, while increasingly restive ethnic politics like Black Lives Matter strengthen the influence of the non-white population. The road to power still runs through the valley of white privilege though for how long is anybody’s guess. Uncertainty feeds the politics of ressentiment. Ressentiment is “a psychological state arising from suppressed feelings of envy and hatred that cannot be acted upon…” Oxford online dictionary.
African-Americans and perhaps to a lesser extent Latinos look to different Mandates. African-Americans had the mandibles of slavery instead of a Mandate of Heaven. Latinos had sufferance for agricultural work, but met resistance to permanent immigration. Both hope for a new Mandate of Heaven whose arc of acceptance would include them. In the eyes of these communities the American Mandate of Heaven, its Manifest Destiny, has brought them suffering and oppression, not good crops and disease free villages.
It may be time to give up the shibboleth of democracy and ask the hard question: Is this an effective form of government for our time, for all of our people? If the answer is no, as I think it must be, then what form of government will serve all of us? This might be the real question rather than trying to prop up a republic with arcane rules that serve the rich and not the poor.
Friday gratefuls: Tina at Morry’s Neon. Master Benders. Fun. Making the house mine. Finding Morry’s Neon, an urban pathfinding adventure. Jon. Cardio. Gut bombs. Jodi coming today. New washer coming on Monday. None too soon. Cities. I love them. But no longer want to live in them. The Pandamndemic. Orgovyx. Prostate Cancer.
Then, when Tina flipped a switch, look what showed up. Could have been Times Square or the Vegas Strip. I love neon and neon signs.
