Category Archives: US History

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

Tension

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Beltane and the Corona Lunacy II

Thursday gratefuls: Living in interesting times. Rain in the forecast. Kate’s reading the Talmud, too. Breakfast on zoom with Alan this morning. The fifth covenant. Ode’s starry night, which showed up this morning. The dogs pushing me to get outta bed, come on Dad. Kate poking me. Good sleep. Dandelions, good food for bees. Greening in the pastures and meadows and roadsides and creeksides.

We’ve been under lockdown here since March 25th. That’s all of April and now, for Kate and me, half of May. Our lives have not changed too much, at least our daily lives here on the mountain. I still pickup groceries as I have for a year or so. We don’t go out. We haven’t gone out much in the last two years. I see friends and family on Zoom. That’s increased, but also preceded the lockdown. Doctor visits have decreased, thank god. Every time we go to the doctor or for any other errand we mask, used hand sanitizer after. That’s a change.

I understand the desire of workers and small business owners to return to earning money. Our economy leaves so many on a paycheck to paycheck existence. Small businesses have economic struggles in the best of economies. I understand the pentup energy in kids and adults used to being outside, with friends, outta the house. There is no shame in wanting to be active, see family, go to work. That’s life.

Which is the point, though. Life itself sometimes places difficult demands upon us. This is one of those times. Death puts a distinct end to work, to being active, seeing family and friends. For all ages. Which means that this virus creates tension between health and wealth. Where is the balance point? No one knows.

It would be good if all those gun-toting defenders of the Constitution, maskless and defiant toward those tyrants trying to keep them alive, were right. That the virus would recognize their urgency, their sense of betrayal. That a long burst from a family assault rifle would kill it. That will not be true. Will the lesson of a second wave of deaths be enough to silence them? No. Their spinmeisters already have a script. We’ll hear it soon.

Coronavirus, Health, Politics, Third Phase, US History

“Are You Stupid?”

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Beltane and the Corona Lunacy II

Tuesday gratefuls: Kate. Just because. Rain yesterday. Hoping for more to drive that wildfire danger back down to low. Mark and Elizabeth are ok. Progress on loft reorganization. New workout (old one being recycled). A wet, not so hot week ahead. Lupron. Driving me down while helping me heal. Singapore. Riyadh. San Francisco. Aurora. Context for loved ones.

Tired this morning. Walked up the stairs to the loft thinking, god, I hope this is Lupron. If next month is the last month of Lupron, maybe my strength and energy will return. Hope so. Feel like an old man.

Feeling the pressure to resume “normal” life. Just go to the store. Get gas. Hike. Shake hands. Hug the grandkids. Pick up the restaurant meals with Jon. Go out to eat.

Interesting article about how pandemics end. Messy. Is the answer. A medical end happens when the smallpox gets wiped out in the human population, but that’s very rare. There’s a societal end when folks give in to the pressure, start going out again in spite of the risk. Trouble with the societal end? It risks more flareups, new peaks.

We’re not close to even the societal end of the Covid pandemic. Many folks want to maintain stay at home, don’t want to go back to crowded offices, have customers breathe in their faces. In spite of the pressure I feel I’m in that camp.

Got into an unnecessary and stupid Facebook argument. Thought I’d learned. Apparently not. Bad modeling was at issue. They’ve been wrong. All of them. Since the beginning. All this economy shattering social shuttering was too much response for the reality of Covid.

Predicted response. Sure the initial models proved wrong. Models are only as good as the data that feed them and the algorithms that control them. Early on in a pandemic the data is bad. Noisy. Inaccurate. But it’s the data available. As a pandemic goes on, the data should become better, but with the inadequacy, the gross inadequacy of testing and contact tracing, it’s impossible to get good data. Even now. The modelers try to correct, but it’s assumptions, not facts on the ground.

After several, “are you stupid?” replies, I did not respond to any of them though I really, really wanted to, I went back to the thread and wrote, I apologize for throwing this steak on the table. Trolls gonna troll. Especially when professional trolls are feeding them their lines.

Commentary on the news, Coronavirus, Dogs, Family, Feelings, Friends, Jefferson County, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Politics, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, US History

Up, down

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Beltane and the Corona Lunacy II

Thursday gratefuls: Kate’s slowly healing fingers. The bowl hot pads she’s making. Finding her in her sewing room. Yeah! Yeah! Seoah’s concern about what happens to us when she leaves. Rigel’s blood work. Good except for slightly elevated creatinine. Getting some of my workout in yesterday. New floods for the loft. LED. Blue skies smiling at me. Green Trees and Black Mountain. Shansin filled with love, canine and human. Two meat bundles from Tony’s bought before the oncoming crisis at slaughter houses. Ruby finally clean. Rigel back from her wobbly, painful Tuesday.

As states reopen, it is clear what will follow. Our numbers as a nation, for deaths, for infections, for carriers without symptoms, for increased division between the masked and the unmasked, will multiply. It’s the nature of infection, of putting a penny on one square of a chessboard, then two on the next, then four on the next. You know the result.

Whether or not Trump realizes this, he’s placing a huge, a mega-whopper wager, the worst wager, the worst bet of all time, that the economy will rise before his election chances sink under a sea of body bags. He’ll lose that bet, but not before thousands more die and the infection fills hospitals.

Instead of the United States, folks around the world will refer to us as Little Italy with a bigger problem. You may have heard, or even read, Fintan O’Toole’s column in the Irish Times, THE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE U.S. NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY IT. If you haven’t, here’s the link to a copy of it.

I go up and down. Right now down. Can’t think too much about the armed protesters in Michigan, the willingness to choose the economy over sensible precautions. Puts me out of the now and into a tomorrow I find distressing to imagine. Stay up, Charlie, on Shadow Mountain. With your Family and Dogs. With the Trees and the Mountains. Read the Talmud. Exercise. Write. Play. Let tomorrow come in its own time and in the way it will come.

Colorado, Coronavirus, Denver, Dogs, Family, Health, Jefferson County, Politics, Third Phase, US History

The Unmasked

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Beltane and Corona Lunacy II

Wednesday gratefuls: Rigel’s recovery from dental work. Seoah’s kind heart. All my friends and family who have avoided Covid. So far. The people who believe in Trump. Those of us who don’t, won’t, can’t. Angkor Wat. Bayon. Ta Phrom. Mary and her Singapore. Mark and his Riyadh. Diane and her San Francisco.

Into a theoretically still closed down Englewood/Denver for Kate’s appointment with Pullikottli. She’ll go in; I’ll drive off and read Middle Game. The doctor appointments have decreased. By a lot. Fingers this week. Lungs in June. Nothing else for her at this point.

I get another psa in early July and see Eigner later in the month. Last year at this time it was the Cancer Moon. May, the merry, merry month of May, 2019. Fights with the insurance company. Imaging studies narrowing down my treatment options. Driving to hospitals, lying down under expensive electronics. Drinking this. Having this injected. Waiting for results. Wondering.

Masks. A metaphor. Those who think they don’t need to wear one wear their anger and fear. I suppose masks are a willingness to be vulnerable in public, difficult. Wish the unmasked would realize the masks were to protect their parents, their grandparents. Those they love. For the men, it is an act of masculine protection. If we could make them see this, maybe they would put down the assault rifles. Maybe.

Diane voiced her concern about the new world abornin’. Guns in state capitols. The masked and the unmasked. I’m concerned, too. Basic American values like freedom, liberty, individual rights have been hollowed out and weaponized by a flagrantly stupid demagogue. When my body, my choice gets deployed to defend the right to infect other Americans? Not sure where we go from that point.

Commentary on the news, Dreams, Health, Our Land and Home, Politics, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, US History

Slow to Wake

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Spring and Corona Lunacy II

Monday gratefuls: Sweet potato pizza. No, really. Seoah found it on a Korean youtube cooking channel. Kate’s good days. Sleep. Lots of it. Bernard Cornwall and the TV adaptation of his Saxon novels: The Last Kingdom. The blue sky. The sun. Black Mountain. Cogency.

Sleep. Until 6:45. Usually up at 5:30 (or, 4:30 in the true time). Dreaming, unwilling to rise. Even though Kep jumped on me. Rigel barked. Kate poked me. Couldn’t. Get. Up. Finally. Still not awake. Writing anyhow.

Don’t know what to say next.

Check on the idiot. Who spent seven hours tweeting, retweeting. On Sunday. A nod to his evangelical sycophants? Not sure about that, but I am sure, after having read a Washington Post article that this guy is decompensating. He seems scared, isolated, unsure of what to do next. Imagine the prison a high profile, powerful job like President could be if you no longer felt you could do it. Instead of anger I’m beginning to feel sorry for DJT. Out of his depth, no tools. Months more in office with a crisis like no other roiling the waters.

If you love him, let him go. How his followers, his base base, should act toward him now.

Got further on reorganizing the loft. A periodic task which, when complete, energizes me. Will finish this week if the banker boxes come.

Of course, I have to wake up first. Soon. I hope. Things to do, but no places to go.

Great Work, Music, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Our Land and Home, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., US History, Woolly Mammoths

Echoes of Peace

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Spring and the Corona Lunacy II

Buddy Scott Simpson found this in Judson Baptist’s newsletter. (Minneapolis)

Echoes of Peace

This song was inspired by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and all the tribes, nations, people coming together in North Dakota to protect the water and halt the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. More about what’s happening: www.sacredstonecamp.org

“We are the river, and the river is us. We have no choice but to stand up.”
— LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, Founder of Sacred Stone Camp, Cannonball, ND

Lyrics

All my relations, come
Every nation, come
All my relations under the sun
We are one

We are praying, come
We are praying, come
We are the song and we are the drum
We are one

We are the river, come
We are the river, come
We are the boat, the paddle, the shore
We are one

Mni wičoni, sing (Mitakuye Oyasin…)
Mni wičoni, sing
Mni wičoni, “water is life” for everything

We are the water, sing
We are the water, sing
We are the water
We are where all life begins

We are the ancient ones
We are the ancient ones
In your breath and bones we sing on
We are one

We are the meadow, come
We are the meadow, come
We are the lark that sings
the new day has begun

We are the new day, run, run, run
We are the new day, run, run, run
We are the old and we are the young
We are one

Mni wičoni, sing (Mitakuye Oyasin…)
Mni wičoni, sing
Mni wičoni, “water is life”
for everything

We are the water, sing
We are the water, sing
We are the water
We are where all life begins

We are the earth and sky
We are the thunder cries
We are the fire,
We are the light in your eyes

We are standing strong
Like a rock, like a stone
On this sacred ground we belong, we are home

All my relations, come
Every nation, come
All my relations under the sun
We are one

—Sara Thomsen

Mni wičoni (Mni wi-cho-nee) —Lakota for “water is life”
Mitakuye Oyasin —Lakota for “All My Relations”

Coronavirus, Jefferson County, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, The West, Third Phase, US History

HOWL

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Spring and the Corona Lunacy

Tuesday gratefuls: All those protesters, Corona Lunacy in full bloom. Seoah shopping at Safeway. The vast amounts of creative energy flowing into peak TV. Game of Thrones. The earlier rising of the sun. Kep and Rigel, still on the 4:30 am clock. Now 5:30. Cool air. Books. Books. The coronavirus, cutting right through the veneer of civilization in the U.S. Friends. You know who you are.

Howling. 8:00 p.m. Go outside. Howl. Continue until it fades. Since early in the lock down neighbors throughout Conifer: Kings Valley, Aspen Park, Evergreen Meadows, up here on Shadow, Conifer, and Black Mountains, we go out at 8 and howl. Doesn’t last long, two minutes, three minutes, but the sound is authentic enough to get Rigel’s attention.

Started out in support of the medical personnel. Now, though. I’m here. I’m here. Still alive. Still ok. This is us. Like the old ladies in the Italian city who threw open their windows and sang into the plague. But this is the mountains, not the land of opera. So, we howl.

Reminded me. A night several years ago in January, north of Ely, on a lonely road leading into the forest. I stood with the eight other students and howled into the night. The wolves answered us. This was a week long educational program put on by the International Wolf Center.

Howling is about solidarity, about personal presence, about territory. It’s also a bit silly up here, and fun.

Aging, Commentary on the news, Coronavirus, Family, Politics, Third Phase, US History, World History

Never again

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Spring and the Corona Lunacy

Saturday gratefuls: Brenton and his concern for Murdoch. Nursing assistant skills I’ve learned. Kate’s reduced leakage. Rigel, that rascal. Her spring fever digging at the edge of our deck. The solar snow shovel. Thursday’s snow all gone on the roadways. Remembering Mom and the garden spider at our breakfast table window. Trips to Stratford, Ontario.

Watching Orwell come alive again. Still. With Trump. Using the word liberated to incite insurrection against legally elected government officials. LIBERATE MICHIGAN! Even Minnesota. Calm, orderly, polite, compassionate Minnesota. Treason is a capital crime, a crime emanating from our capitol. Playing to his base in the basest way possible: hand out money, fan understandable frustration into the flames of unrest. Friends, it’s alternate universe time.

Life in the slow, slow, sloth lane. While all that swirls around, we eat breakfast, feed our dogs, shake our heads.

And in the third year of a faux monarch’s reign came a plague, not just here, but all across the world. Before this plague our country, beautiful and vibrant, had become ugly, violent, cruel. Now we’re sick and dying. What the hellfire and brimstone preachers called Old Testament times. Yet it is not long ago, not in a world of different customs and languages, but in our time, in our nation. It makes my heart sick. My head ache.

How can we teach our grandchildren that this is not what a nation is? When the Wizard of Oz pulls the curtains aside himself and makes clear that all he has are levers and knobs and steam whistles where competency need to be, what do we say to them? How do we explain that we have stood for freedom, for true liberation, for inclusion, compassion for the poor, the sick, and the elderly?

It was true in my memory, I’ll say. No, of course it was never all this or all that, of course not, but never did we have a party and a President who made it their holy crusade to pollute the rivers and skies, cage children, glorify sexual predation, and those made ill by race hatred. Never did we have a President and a party who praised our enemies and blamed our allies. America, like any nation, has always had greed, servants of Mammon, but rarely have we turned our government into a mechanism for siphoning money from the poor into their hands.

No, I’ll say, this is not us. It just is not us and it will require your good will, your good sense, your compassion, your sense of justice to make right. I hope you, Ruth and Gabe, can muster all these, can grow into the leaders who remedy the failures of this time. I will support you and any of your generation who are able.

Coronavirus, Family, Health, Jefferson County, Mountains, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Plants, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, US History, Weather +Climate, World History

A Pagan’s Way

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Spring and the Corona Luna

Wednesday gratefuls: Ed Smith. His hands. Kate’s new feeding tube. Getting there on the leaks. Slowly. Glacially. But, getting there. Seoah’s concern, love for Kate. Her helpfulness. Rigel and Kep, always. Masks. Gloves. Those who hope the coronavirus will lead us to rethink society. Among them me. Mountain Waste Removal. Mt. Evan’s Home Health Care. The snow pack above average.

The spirit of 2019. An urgent doctor visit yesterday. The balloon that holds Kate’s feeding tube in place collapsed. Back to the surgeon. He put in a new, slightly larger tube and said anytime Kate had trouble to come see him. This was our first urgent visit since Bloody January though it was the norm in 2019. The gaps between visits are longer. May they continue and lengthen.

Since we went to a medical building I put on mask and gloves. Kate had a mask. These were the smaller masks, but Seoah’s sister’s husband found 50 NS95 masks for us. Just because. Her sister mailed 8 of them to us yesterday. The Korean government allows 8 a month to be sent out and then only to family. She’ll keep sending them as long as the crisis and her supply continue.

Can you feel the irony here? The world hegemon is getting medical supplies from South Korea. It’s a sixth of our size. And, can you feel the love? Family. Across oceans and cultures.

Hard to be sure but I think the newly administered Lupron, my third, has weakened me some. I had a tough time on my workout Monday. I had a two hour nap yesterday, then slept an hour or so long last night. We’ll see about my workout today. The hotflashs have been somewhat more frequent. Life in the chemo lane.

Been reading the book Braiding Sweetgrass. It’s the first book in the Rocky Mountain Land Library’s book club. Robin Wall Kimmerer is the author, a botanist and a member of the Potawatomi nation. Kate Strickland worked, I believe as an intern, at Milkweed Editions when they were publishing this book and got to know Ms. Kimmerer well. It’s a compilation of short think pieces, not quite essays, closer to memoir.

In the human narrative class with Rabbi Jamie we’re reading the last section of Art Green’s book, Israel. In it Green talks about the relationship between a people and the land. In wondering what I could learn from this chapter, I decided I would focus on how a people, all people, relate to the land.

That brought to mind both the Rocky Mountain Land Library and its unusual mission and my episodic work on reimagining, reconstructing faith. Increasingly this reenvisioning has come to focus on how to articulate my pagan way, not as the way, but as a way, one that might guide more folks back to the literal source all life, the sacred marriage between the sun and mother earth. And, in so doing, spur them protect our mother, or, more accurately, protect a space for humankind here.

I decided to read the four books in the Land Library Book club over the time of the Israel kabbalah class, which runs into June. I added a couple of other books I have, the Lunar Tao and Becoming Native to This Place.

A chapter in an often imagined book about my pagan way will be my presentation for the class. It’s tentatively titled, Becoming Native to This Place. Something to do while the world sinks into itself.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Health, Judaism, Memories, Politics, Third Phase, US History, World History

A Jew

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Spring and the Passover Full Moon (Corona Luna)

Friday gratefuls: For the lupron injection I’m about to receive today, I thank you. For an appointment with Dr. Eigner today, rather than April 17. For a memorable passover with Seoah, Kate, and 53 virtual guests. For Rabbi Jamie, whose soul shines. For the passover meal from Zaidy’s Deli in Denver. For that time, mythic and therefore real, when Hebrew slaves left bondage, crossed the Red Sea, and began 40 years of wandering in the desert.

If you find the passover the central story in your life, then you’re a Jew. Art Green. I’m a Jew. May as well claim it if this is the criteria.

Throughout my life liberation from oppression has been core to what I’ve done. Whether that oppression was modest as in the case of Juniors at Alexandria High School who couldn’t go to prom unless invited (we created a junior prom) or deep and pervasive in the case of women, the poor, sexual preference outliers, my instinct is to oppose it and if possible end it. Lots of Red Seas to cross.

Climate change is different, you say. Who’s oppressed by climate change? Living things, especially humans. And, as with the coronavirus, the catastrophe will fall often and heaviest on those too poor to adapt and with too little power to affect change.

This opposition of mine to oppression seems instinctual. Doesn’t seem to have an origin story in my psyche. I was neither abused nor oppressed as a child. I grew up with white privilege, white male privilege as my inheritance. The passover story, a universal one like Easter, puts liberation at the center of life. Until all are free, none are fully free.

Today I am a Jew, a pagan whose identity, whose soul, shares much with the tribes of Israel, their collective story and journey. Enough that I’ve become part of them, though not converted. I’m a close friend of the tribe, maybe, by Art Green’s definition, an actual member.

On a related but different topic, inspired again by Art Green, it occurred to me how Judaism and Christianity are complementary, very much so. Judaism differs, he says, from its close relatives Christianity and Islam in its communitarian essence. The message of god, of the one, listened to through Jewish tradition, is one which creates a people, a community. This is true at CBE and is a strength of Judaism invisible to me until I became part of this community.

Christianity and Islam, he says, deliver their message to the individual. God’s love heard through those traditions focuses on healing the soul.

Judaism puts the inflection on community, on liberation, while Christianity and Islam put the inflection mark on the soul; its need for wholeness, for realizing the one is that of which each of us is a part, while, paradoxically, being wholly within each one of us. These two inflections are not a reason for differentiation, but for mutuality. The world needs to know how to live in just communities; individuals need to find their way back to the one, to realize the oneness within them. These are not differences, they are parts of a whole.

I’m on a third path, but I’m coming slowly to recognize how it intersects with other paths.