Fall and the Moon of the Thinned Veil
Monday gratefuls: Family and Friends. Ancient Ones. Johnsons. Kate and Mike. The Squid Game. Indigenous People’s Day. Mark Odegard, 77. Wow. A busy, but wonderful three days. Coyote HVAC. Feeling rested. Another frosty night. Winter is coming.
Sparks of Joy: Seeing Kate Strickland, whom I remember as a young child, all adult, with her husband, Mike.
Tarot: The Lovers, Number 5 in the Major Arcana
Fall and the Michaelmas Moon
Sunday gratefuls: Hit and Run, Netflix. Sourdough toast. The freezer. Ruth at her first homecoming dance. Jon, Gabe, Sarah, BJ. Zooming. Jon’s antifungal meds. George Will. Whatta mind. Eggs at 8 pm last night. Max. All the babies, the true Replacements. Shelf pruning in the bedroom almost finished.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Fall.
Tarot: The Lady, #3 of the Major Arcana. Again.
Moments. Decided to cook myself fried eggs last night about 8 pm. As I stood there waiting to turn them over, I had a sudden feeling of lonliness, of aloneness. I could cook myself dinner (breakfast?) late because I live alone. Oh, yeah. So I do. Without. Kate.
Grief seems more insistent. Rigel barks upstairs each evening. I think she wants Kate to come down and go to bed. Sometimes Rigel paces. Into the bedroom, around the coffee table, upstairs, back down into the bedroom.
Thought about equanimity practice. Name the context. Name the feeling(s). Choose whether to experience them.
Realized I’d zoomed with Sarah, BJ, Jon, and Gabe at 4. Oh. Yes. Churning the still soft soil of Kate’s life. So. Aloneness. A twinge of sadness. Real. True to my situation. I lived into it a minute, got out my spatula, turned the eggs over, waited. Plated them and had a late, quirky meal.
Also. wearing out toward the afternoon. One guy said, in essence, “No T, no energy.” Maybe. This feels like more. I’ll have a better idea this week.
Blood draw on Monday. PSA. Testosterone. A blood panel. A metabolic panel. I see Kristie on Friday. Orgovyx can raise blood sugar and triglycerides. In addition to hot flashes and fatigue.
Ordinary life now with the manageable cancer. The good cancer. Though from my perspective? Still cancer.
Once in a while I brush my left hip with my hand. Think of those prostate cancer cells in the lymph nodes. Weird having a predator living inside your body. Not a great feeling.
Oh, dude. Painting with the gloomy brush here, eh? Nah. Life and its permutations. Mine for now.
The news happens outside my awareness right now. Even though I read the Denver Post, the NYT, and the Washington Post each day. Not sticking. Like the Teflon Don, that crucial information slides right off.
Cancer. Grief. New life aborning. Tend to push attention inward, away from the blooming buzzing confusion. (W. James) Down into the realm of the Tarot, Kabbalah, the Ocean of our collectivity.
Again. OK. Not permanent, nor would I want it to be.
Agency is critical to life. Right now, my agency has an inward, personal bent. Makes sense to me.
Tarot: The Lady, # 3 of the major arcana
Summer and the Lughnasa Moon
Tuesday gratefuls: Rebecca of Conifer P.T. Stretches. New exercises. Shirley Septic Trash. Goodbye Mountain Waste. Bread Lounge Sourdough bread. Evergreen farmer’s market. Grant Property Medics. Money. Ruby. Kepler and Rigel.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Good bread.
Post-pandemic life. For those with vaccines. In countries where vaccines exist in large numbers. Getting back to it. Mussar without masks. Dinner at a friend’s sans masque. Going into the grocery store. Talking with Eduardo yesterday evening. Feeling good.
Not really post-pandemic though. The Delta Variant (a movie thriller title?) will chew through red states where enforced ignorance has replaced any need for public policy. Just say no to the 2020 election results. Support your local klan.
Ignorance of the law, the laws of epidemiology in this instance, will not be an excuse when the virus comes to call. Sickness and death will follow. A sad story in the Washington Post a couple of days ago about nurses in Appalachian critical care units. Patients dying of covid saying it was the flu. Their families devastated, not sure what happened. The nurses standing in grocery store lines hearing people joke about the hoax of covid. Unmasked. A woman quoted in the article saying that it was public knowledge covid was really a way for doctors and hospitals to make more money.
And those countries that can’t afford the vaccines. Poor India. A quote from today’s New York Times:
“Another wave of the pandemic is hitting many parts of the world, with countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America experiencing their highest caseloads, driven in part by the highly contagious Delta variant of the virus.”
No. It may seem like a post-pandemic world for those of us with our filled out vaccines cards and the Pfizer or Moderna or Johnson and Johnson shots ramping up our immune responses, but we’re experiencing a privilege of the developed world. Of course, 45 did try to match our treatment of the virus to the worst places in the world: Brazil, India, South Africa, Chile, Mongolia. An election intervened and a determined 46 has put us in a much better place. Thank him and mRna.
Intersectionality. Often the study of race, class, and gender bias as they interweave. Covid’s intersections add another to the mix: the politicized anti-science response to the politicized pro-science response. With mask policies in retreat around the country the guidance is that those unvaccinated need to wear masks. The rest of us, the vaccinated, the saved, no.
Does anybody believe those unvaccinated by choice will wear masks? I don’t. Which makes it hard to impossible to know who’s unmasked thanks to immune responses and those unmasked due to Trump induced brain trauma.
An interesting graphic from the Economist suggests that being out of the house and shopping has edged close to pre-pandemic levels in a sample of 50 countries. On the other extreme attendance at sports events, flying, and movie going remain severely affected.
We will never regain the old normal. A new normal, yes, but not the old one. What will change? Hard to know for sure but it’s clear the nature of work and where work happens will be one. Grieving families, nations will have to reorient themselves after great loss. Travel may change, too. Some believe business travel will never resume its former pace. mRna vaccines may provide a new frontier in the fight against viral illnesses, especially the seasonal flu.
I want to know what you think. What will change, what will remain the same?
Beltane and the Shadow Mountain Moon
The growing season turning red hot. Dry. Minnesota, that state of lakes and the Superior Lake, of -30 nights in January, of down coats and cabins, all red. And not a drop of rain to share. How can this be? It’s not Minnesota’s color. Brown is the color of the West, of the Mountains. Not 45 degrees latitude, half way to the Northpole.
We know these insults in the Rockies. Past that line where we all get less than 20 inches of Rain. For the whole year. Yes, we know. We suffer it, fold up a few tents, turn off the lawn sprinklers, run the AC. Fight Wildfires, hope they don’t burn our home. But. Minnesota? The world is out of joint.
On Oahu where I sit writing this we’re in the warmish dryish season where the temps tend to be in the 80’s and Rain still falls. Twice in the last two days. Then, there’s all that Ocean. The Mountains squeeze out purified Ocean drops, fling them at the already green, always green slopes.
Here it’s pretty much as usual. Or, maybe I think that because I know this world much less well. I recall reading that the tropics will be affected least by global warming. Sea level rise though. Vanuatu has advertised its extinction. Do not want to go the way of Atlantis. I understand.
As the world literally burns, Republican and capitalist violinists play on, from the pent house to the mountain retreat to the air chilled vaults of Swiss banks.
Ostara and the Ovid Moon of Metamorphoses
Wednesday gratefuls: Chipmunk wife. Snow. More. And, yet more. Vaccines. Diane and Mary. Formula 1. Netflix. Yin Yang Master. Biden at work. 45 in Florida, his natural habitat. The Woollies. Spring. The Great Wheel. Its turns. Celebrate.
Sparks of joy: Snow. Life itself.
The Snow coming down again. Like Minnesota rain, straight down in gentle punctuated lines. Sat watched it against the Lodgepoles yesterday afternoon. Their red Bark, their Branches beginning to droop, covered in Branch shaped dollops of white. The Japanese Ukiyo-e prints and some paintings often show Snow and Pine trees. This was the same. It was easy to imagine myself in the mountains of Akita Prefecture, Kep wandering around on genetic home territory.
Then. Spring snows. Not the harsh snows of December and January. Wet, yes, but coming as a confection rather than an invasion, even in the depths we’ve had over the last three weeks. It’s as if we’re being inundated by confectioner’s sugar, a big wire shaker somewhere overhead.
And, even better, as Kate just said: “I see Snow and I see no Fire.” May it be so. This helps. Better Spring moisture gives some protection during June, our month of greatest fire danger. Historically. In July the monsoons come and soak the afternoons. Though. Has not happened but once since we’ve been here.
Kate has swollen salivary glands. Chipmunk face. Or, mumps. But she’s not been anywhere to catch the mumps. She had mumps as a child, anyhow. Good thing we already have an appointment for her at 1:00 pm today. My annual physical follows. Good times at New West Physicians. Painful enough to require an Oxy. Unusual for Kate.
Boulder continues to be in the news. A Libertarian ethos reinforced by cowboy culture is in a scrum with the progressive politics of metropolitan Coloradans. Boulder is the epicenter of this Mountain state’s radical left, as Berkeley is to California. I don’t know if that has anything to do with the shooter’s motive, but even if not, it’s still a bloody metaphor for the tension.
I do think there are ways through this impasse. At least here. I’ll mention the primary one I see today. Coloradans are outdoor oriented. Even if you never get out to hike the trails, ski the runs, or camp in a Mountain Meadow, the Mountains loom in the background or foreground. The Skies turn blue and the Sun shines in that bright, cheerful Colorado way. We all care about the wildlife, the rugged valleys, most of which we will never see.
Rancher culture in particular loves the land, too. The way forward that I see presses this love of the outdoors, of the wild things that live here, into a compact for a Colorado future both wild and free. The drivers for this compact will include a need for better water policy, climate change, changes in the nature of agriculture, especially toward regenerative agriculture. Regenerative agriculture has a foot hold in the Flint Hills of Kansas. What they do there can work here.
This idea and its friends excite me, make me want to get into the mix. Colorado can lead the nation I think just because of the conflict and tension. Use the power and energy it generates to forge a covenant between metro and rural.
Ostara and the Ovid Moon of Metamorphoses
Sunday gratefuls: Justice. Ancient ones. Kate’s up. Snow coming. And, then, again. And, maybe, again. Living in the Mountains. Planning to stay. At least today. Billions, a TV show available on Amazon Prime Video. Korea. India. My beautiful and much loved Asians, Joseph and Seo-Ah.
Sparks of Joy: Vaccines. Seasonal change underway.
Justice, justice. If you want peace, work for justice. Justice has been a key driver in my life. It was the topic of conversation this morning among the Ancient Friends: Tom Crane, William Schmidt (most Ancient), Paul Strickland, Mark Odegard, and myself.
As I thought about it, I wondered where I got my ideas of justice, why does it burn so in my heart? My mother loved everyone she met. Or, at least my 17 year old self thought so. Then, she died. I’ve since learned that ever her version of love could be disfigured by prevailing prejudice. In particular the one in the 1950’s that found only shame in teen and/or unmarried pregnancy. That’s a side trip so I won’t go into detail right now. But my heart, the one shaped by her until she died, had love everyone imprinted upon it.
I didn’t, of course. I made fun of a Down’s Syndrome girl at school. Then, because I felt guilty (as I should have), I walked over to her house and apologized to her and her mother. Even so, the germ of condemning difference lived in me. And, still does.
Part of justice, an important, but insufficient part, lies in recognizing our own propensity to use second characteristics like level of wealth, skin color, country of origin, language, degree of hygiene as markers for a deeper truth about an individual. For example, just because racism might seem to allow it in the hearts of liberal/radical Americans, white trash is not an acceptable epithet.
So, a first step toward justice lies in owning our complicity, our own tendency to make assumptions about others, then act on those assumptions when we make decisions about friends, marriage, selection for a grade school baseball team, voting for elected officials, where we take our business. Choices that determine the shape and vitality of our communities, our lives need examination by an inner gatekeeper that asks the question, why this choice? Why this friend? Why this grocery store? Why this bike shop? Why this country to visit? Why this candidate?
Another, next level step toward justice, recognizes the myriad ways in which our culture (and, others, we didn’t invent the -isms) tilts itself toward certain groups and away from others. Mass incarceration of people of color far outside their percentage representation in the population. A criminal justice system that puts a thumb on the scales of justice for a Black offender, a Latinx offender, and lifts that same thumb for white offenders. The recent killing of six Asian women in Atlanta is an excellent example. “He was having a bad day,” said the police chief.
Many folks, perhaps most, stop here. They examine themselves and try to act in a just manner. They recognize the unjust nature of our education, health care, and military institutions. And, they decry it. They may even go to the length of choosing a Senator, or President because they promise action on these evils. And, as my buddy Paul might say, “Good on’em.”
Another, harder step takes you to the next level beyond personal recognition and recognizing bigotry and prejudice as part of the warp and woof our society. At this level you start trying for change. This is where If you want peace, work for justice aims you.
Working for change can be hard. You have moved beyond the personal to the systemic. No longer can you work on yourself only, but you must work on the system itself. This requires others. Education, health care, criminal justice, poverty, religious bigotry have roots.
Here’s a personal example. When my then wife, Raeone Buckman, and I bought a house in the Cooper neighborhood of Minneapolis, I got out the actual deed to the property and read through it. Just because. “No Jew or Negro may purchase this house.” Yes, a codicil on that deed. Words to that affect.
Thankfully the 1964 Civil Rights Act nullified that poisonous declaration. But consider, 1964! I was already 17 in 1964. My mother died that year. In other words, pretty recent. Until 1964 realtors could have used such a covenant to steer families of color to other locations. If pressed, they could say, well, we really can’t look in that area. Cooper was still pretty white when Raeone and I moved in.
Think about this. Those covenants, and they were very common across the U.S., got cozy with redlining and concentrated Jews in ghettos, Blacks in the same. 1964. Shakes head. Slaps forehead. Says, Jesus!
As a result elementary schools, which drew from the neighborhood, reflected those covenants. Police were much more likely to patrol 35th and Chicago than 41st and Lake where I lived. Why? Because a large Black community lives in and around 35th and Chicago. In Chicago many housing projects found police, paramedics, and other first responders refused to enter. Because they didn’t feel safe.
Pick up one of these threads. Segregated schools. Slow emergency response, too eager arrests, a lack of affordable housing. Look at it. Find an organization that has remedying that problem. Volunteer. Put your heart and body into it. Not a panacea. Doesn’t make you righteous, but it does mean you’ve gone beyond an individual response to a community oriented one.
Last step I’ll mention here though the Stairway to Heaven has way more than four. Get political. Yes, get your hands on the sausage. Elect candidates who want police reform, who want affordable housing for all. Go deeper. Organize with others to get delegates to caucuses, conventions elected. These delegates choose candidates, set party platforms. This is the party political step.
There are others. Become a member of a radical political group. Become a white ally to a Black organization, like Black Lives Matter. Work to build a different set of assumptions about all humanity. You can do it. But, you have to start.
Imbolc and the waning Megillah Moon
Monday gratefuls: The Ancient Friends: Paul, Tom, Mark, Bill. Women. Diane, Mary, Kate. Marilyn. Tara. Eve. Sarah. Anne. BJ. Women’s History Month. Chili. The writers for Billions. And, Vincenzo Cassano, Sisyphus. The golden age of television. Covid. Covid relief bill.
Sparks of Joy: Dr. Thompson. Rigel snuggling. Vaccines.
Women’s History Month. Starts today. Women hold up half the sky. Mao. Without women there would be no humans to hold up any portion of the heavens. At all. Glad to know this month exists. A lot we don’t know. Read The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner. 1986, but still explosive.
Hard to imagine today, but a central issue of the student revolution of the early 1960’s involved the doctrine of in loco parentis. A college or university would act in the place of parents. But, only for women students. Sexually segregated dorms, curfews, clothing restrictions. Got rid of that one at Ball State.
So much. Women expected to take all the responsibility for the consequences of sexual activity. Whether it was a reasonable decision or not, I took this seriously at the age of 26 and had a vasectomy. It did not seem then, nor does it now, that only one partner bore responsibility for reproduction.
As a direct result of that decision, Joseph entered my life, so for me it was a resounding success. I did try to have the vasectomy reversed, my first time ever in the hospital after polio. And, it worked. Sort of. My little guys were not very energetic. It had been 7 years of r&r and I guess they didn’t see any point in going back to the hard work of swimming all the way to the goal.
So many fronts. Child rearing. Domestic chores. Glass ceilings. Internalization of the oppressor. Domestic violence. STD’s. Unwanted pregnancy. Ratio of men to women in so many professions, workplaces. Or, in lower paid jobs, women to men.
The work far from done. The U.S. still has not had a female President. The Denver Post reported yesterday that the number of women on corporate boards in Colorado has moved toward the national average. Not far enough.
I see hope in our granddaughter, Ruth. Smart, politically aware, no bullshit. Yet, knows how to sew, cook. Women have come much further than men in this ongoing revolution. We males have so much work to do.
Generation Z, Ruth’s generation, has come of age in 45’s despicable term in office. They’ve seen the patriarchy in its unapologetic form. At its ugliest. Will they remember? I believe so. The country almost took a turn, may still, toward a crude reversion to male dominance. Reactionary politics, MAGA, always include returning to an era of privilege. For men. For white men in the U.S. For those who believe only a special minority can rule, should rule.
Every male heart needs close examination, by men. Especially those of us lucky enough to be born white. We need to peer into the dark recesses of our assumptions about women, about people of color, and put them aside, forcefully. I do not believe we can purge them, that is become pure feminists or anti-racists, but we can know them and choose not to act on them. We can do that.
Imbolc and the Megillah Moon
Sunday gratefuls: All the Megillah’s. More snow. More cold. A good sleep. Cold chicken. Red Lobster biscuits. My Ecuador alpaca coat. My new LLBean insulated plaid shirt. My duckies. Love the cold, don’t love being cold. Vaccines. Covid. 45 gone. 46 in. Judah and the Black Messiah.
Sparks of Joy: Fresh, white Snow. Rigel jumping up on the deck like a 5 year old. Life.
Those vaccines. Hard to come by up here in the mountains. Not yet. We’ll get them though. Sooner, I imagine. Haven’t gone the obsessive click now, click again, click now, click again route. We’ve survived Covid so far doing what we’re doing. Gonna keep at no visits, grocery pickups, only essential medical visits. Probably for a while after the vaccine, too.
Love that they’re out there. That we’re eligible. That others are getting them. That more will get them. Might be Happy Hanukah and Merry Christmas. Ho, Ho, Ho. or Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel. If that happens, I’ll still enjoy the darkness of the Winter Solstice, but I’ll be right there with the light worshipers, too. Can you imagine how festive a season that will be?
Meanwhile a hyper clean, car sized robot will roam Mars punching holes in its surface and storing soil in special containers for the second part of a three stage project. The second stage is a lander that picks up those containers and the third stage returns them to Earth for NASA and European Space Agency labs. 2025-2027. Far away from the virus infected planet it left last July. Smart Perseverance.
And, maybe, just maybe, our nation will have made progress on sorting out its painful contradictions. I watched Judas and the Black Messiah yesterday on HBO Max. Fred Hampton was 21 when J. Edgar conspired with the Chicago P.D. to eliminate him. 21. When I watched, I kept saying yes, Fred, yes. Power is people. Capitalists, no matter their color, exploit the people. A Rainbow Coalition. Yes, Fred. Then he died in his bed, never waking up, his pregnant Deborah arched over his body.
Of course, the move reminded me of the damning curse of racism, but it went further, much further. Fred brought together Puertoricans and poor whites. He saw the thread that wove together the oppressed and was able to speak to it, to help others see it. No wonder they killed him.
What if the Proud Boys and the Black Panthers saw common cause? They could. It’s corporate capitalism that keeps them both down. What if those of us on the far left joined, too. And Chicanos. And Asians. And Native Americans. There would need be no violence. That sort of self-awareness would win at the ballot box.
I know. Texas. How would you like a $16,000 bill for keeping the heat on? See the paragraph above.
Imbolc and the Megillah Moon
Saturday gratefuls: Simple roast chicken. So good. Red Lobster dinner rolls. Likewise. Shadow Mountain Israeli Salad. Cooking. Kate’s feeling better this morning. Rigel prancing in the snow. At 12+. Kep and his serious life. Perseverance. For all those at JPL. Yeah! For all those from Colorado who participated (a lot). Yeah! For the part of our soul that is curious, that wants to see, that wants to know.
Sparks of Joy: That roasted chicken when it came out of the oven. Vaccines. The love of and by dogs.
We live in an age of exploration. I know it got started even earlier, but we have good evidence of humanity leaving Africa and spreading out over the Earth. A long period of exploration that once begun, we have not been able to stop.
Yes, it’s had its bad moments. Many of them. Colonialism its worst, I think. But a lot of glorious ones, too. Rounding Cape Horn. Summiting Everest. Walking the land bridge from Asia to North America. LANDING ON THE MOON. Voyager. Curiosity. Perseverance. Down to the Mariana’s Trench. Into the microscopic, the sub-microscopic.
And there are the psychonauts who explore the mind on hallucinogens. The mystics, who do their exploration without technology. Scholars who roam libraries, tells, caves for evidence of our long pilgrimage, how we have handled it. Children who go down the block, turn right into the field, and leave this planet by means of their imagination.
We are explorers. Pilgrims. Wanderers. Always hunting for some new place to live our lives, or to visit to expand our life at home.
I celebrate each explorer. Each pilgrim. Each wanderer. In you, in us, we grow beyond this species and into the future. May it always be so.
Imbolc and the Megillah Moon
Friday gratefuls: Grilled cheese. Chicken. Snow Plows. Ted of All Trades. Snow. Cold. Like back in Minnesota. Holding Kate’s hand. Her feeding tube. 45 gone. 46 in office. Friends, ancient and new.
Sparks of Joy: NASA. NASA employees at JPL. Perseverance on Mars. Perseverance landing on Mars.
I watched it. Or, rather I watched as the scientists at JPL watched their instruments. One man’s leg jiggled the whole time. Up and down. Others went from screen, looking for information. A slight grimace there. What did that mean? All the more difficult to read because of the ubiquitous masks.
News about the parachute deploying brought cheers. Then, back to business. The heat shield disappeared. Perseverance was, according to a dial on the screen, 19 kilometers from the surface. Then, the dial read in meters.
“Perseverance has landed!” Arms went up in the usual touchdown, goal post signal. A clenched fist or two. Smile wrinkles at the eyes. Cheering. Backslapping.
How could they stand it? These folks work for years, in this case at least 8 years, to build a one-off machine, delicate and sturdy. A tough combination. Then they strap it to a tank of explosives and shoot it away from Earth. For a long, long journey. All of that can go perfectly. Did.
But. There’s that final mile. Oh, yeah. Atmosphere. Gravity. The potential for 8 years of work and billions of dollars to crumple in on itself, a wrecked car on a distant planet. Parachute. Heat shield. Navigation. Sky crane. All points at which things could go wrong.
As one NASA employee said, “Thousands of things have to go right. Only one thing going wrong could destroy all this work.”
That same employee said, right after the landing, “This is what NASA does! This is what we can do when we put our brains together. This is what this country can do!”
I was with them during the 7 minutes of terror as the lander went offline due to the extreme heat of entry into the Martian (get that, Martian!) atmosphere. Holding my breath, biting my lip.
Yes! I teared up. All that complexity. All that work. All those things that could have gone wrong. All those things that went right! Captain Midnight. Buck Rogers. Sputnik. The Eagle has landed. We are a space faring nation. My 10 year old heart filled up with dreams, impossible dreams, and spilled over into a 74 year old’s reality.
When we grew up, rockets were, well, not much in evidence. Sure there was Goddard. And, Von Braun. The V2. The winged bombs over London. John Carter was our Mars hero. But the thought of landing a machine on Mars. Any machine? Nope. Not in the mind of even the most space-crazed child of the ’50’s.
To live through the Russian space program. Sputnik. Then, Laika, the one way space dog. Yuri Gagarin. Mercury. Apollo. That wonderful Apollo 11. One small step for Man, one giant step for Mankind. A footprint. A flag.
My space eyes all along have been boy’s eyes. Eyes filled with wonder. Eyes filled with tears. Eyes that have seen things happen that were beyond even that boy’s hopes. It was his heart that leaped into the bodies of the NASA folks yesterday. His heart that felt the emotion. The success. The joy.
