Category Archives: Commentary on the news

Cinema and Television, Commentary on the news, Coronavirus, Family, Friends, Great Wheel, Great Work, Humor, Poetry, Third Phase, US History

Speak Across the Years

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Samain and the Thanksgiving Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: The Clan. Gathering in an hour. Tom and his gift book. His thinking of Ruth. The morning darkness lit by the Thanksgiving Moon. Orion and his great Dog pursuing the hunt toward Mt. Evans. 50 days until Trump leaves. Vaccines. The holidays of light. Needed to dispel the four years of ethical darkness. The gas heater here in the loft/studio. Emerson. Lao Tze. Camus. Hesse. Aldo Leopold. Wendell Berry. Wes Jackson. Thomas Berry. Rilke. Saints in my short, very short, tradition.

 

And your world, it’s rapidly changin’. Wow. Trump defeated. Vaccines looking good. Kate with almost a month of good days. Add your own spectacular news here.

However. Even rapid change is sometimes not enough. This month, this December, will require all the good feeling we can muster. For ourselves, those we love, those in our neighborhoods and communities. It will require all the festivals of lights we celebrate: Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanza, New Year’s. It will require an extra effort to avoid a, “I’ll be dead by Christmas.” holiday season. Going home for Christmas may take on a new meaning unless we stay. at. home. wear. masks. distance ourselves from others. worship virtually. Flu. Covid. Cold. Holiday celebrations. = Potential disaster.

Why? Because the surge, that one where the Covid infections became a hockey stick graph like climate change? Is about to surge. According to the NYT this morning, all of California’s intensive care beds could be overwhelmed by mid-month. We’ve not seen the uptick from Thanksgiving travel. It’s coming. The same article says that we hit four million infections in November, more than double the previous record. 1.9 million. When? October. Both before the Thanksgiving holiday visits.

We’re in Monty Python’s Holy Grail. We can cross the bridge of death to a vaccine and Biden future but first we have to say just how fast the unladen swallow can fly. Or, Come up with capital of Assyria. If we’re wrong, well… I’ll give you a hint. Tell the gatekeeper that he needs to stay socially distanced, get his vaccine, cheer Biden at his inauguration (virtually), and, close the bridge, go home, and stay there.

Rereading some Camus. I’m mostly with him. His notion of the absurd. The universe rolls on with or without us. There is no meaning to life. In other words the universe does not have an Easter egg for us that, if only we look in unlikely places, will reveal itself, as in a computer game.

I part company with him on the notion that we cannot give meaning to our life. I believe we can give meaning to our own lives. We can choose, a critical idea in existentialism, to live for others, with others in spite of that ultimate absurdity of our situation.

Thanks to Tom for sending out this poem, Wendell Berry’s XI.

We can choose, as Wendell Berry asks us, to:

“Come,
willing to learn what this place,
like no other, will ask of you
and your children, if you mean
to stay. “This land responds
to good treatment…””  Wendell Berry, XI

He addresses this plea to these persons:

“The need comes on me now
to speak across the years
to those who finally will live here
after the present ruin…”

This is crossing another bridge of death, the one after Covid, the burning of our planet. I agree with Berry that there will be a life after we’ve ruined this one. It will be. So different. Not recognizable to us. Our grandchildren will know. And their children will know nothing else. Not that far away in human terms.

Go to a new tab, quick. Look up how fast an unladen swallow can fly. It just might save your life.

Commentary on the news, Coronavirus, Friends, Great Work, Politics, Third Phase, US History

Happy and Pleased

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Samain and the Moon of Thanksgiving

Sunday gratefuls: Alan. Tom. The Ancient Ones. Honesty. Clarity. Friendship. Kep and Rigel keeping us warm over a cold night. When I woke up this morning, Kep’s head was next to mine. Orion and his great dog headed over Black Mountain to hunt. The great bear pointing to Polaris. The North. The West. Two directions I know personally, deeply. Adulting. The isolated Covid life. Buh bye orange one. Old friends, docent friends. Art. All of it. Ode’s. Jimmie’s. Rembrandt’s. Noguchi’s. (first thing that has impressed me about Melania.) Coltrane’s. Mozart’s. Nabokov’s. Tolstoy’s.

Resolved. Happily. Detriangulated. Whew. Being an adult can be so damned hard. Even at 73. Key? Trust. And, a helpful Kate.

I’m getting there. Trying to understand why 70,000,000 plus of my fellow citizens voted for he who shall not be named except in an indictment. Trying to understand what that means for the future of our nation. This week I’m going to start sorting through the tea leaves. 538. Politico. NYT. WP. Even Newsmax, the new go to conservative (wacko conservative) news site. Books like Upswing by Robert Putnam. Seeing what my conservative friends post on Facebook. Listening to the wind. Where will it go? This may be he who will not be named except in an indictment’s true wall. A wall dividing the American people rather than that other one stiff arming the poor and the suffering.

Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall”:

“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’”

A quick reference to this poem pointed out that what doesn’t like a wall is frost. Or, Frost. Or, me. Or, maybe, you.

It will be decades before these wounds can be mended. Like Frost’s neighbor there are so many of us who believe “Good fences make good neighbors.” So many who insist each time a fence or wall gets breached, we have to run, repair it, make it tight. Perhaps if we weren’t so quick to defend our field. Maybe this field we could let lay fallow for a few years. Let the wall stay down for awhile. Maybe it would stay down. We could walk back and forth, visit each other’s farms. Yards. Political parties. Find a way that supports the nation rather than our faction.

I say that, yes, and mean it. But, I also say, burn their house’s down, salt their fields, and deport all of them. We are none of us one thing.

Let’s tear that Blue wall down. Replace it with a renewed culture of protect and serve. Yes, really. That slogan’s good enough already. Let’s figure out how to implement it for real in our cities.

Raise the minimum raise. Put a wall between our fellow citizens and poverty. Yes, wall it right out of our country. We can use the stones from taking down these other walls. This will require rethinking capitalism. I’m a fan, as I’ve said before, of a mixed economy*. Read Scott Nearing’s Living the Good Life. The question is the mix. We’ve not got it right here. And, we need to.

We’ll build solar farms, windmills, geothermal sites. We’ll switch off the internal combustion engines and leave the oil in the ground. Change the offshore drilling platforms to research laboratories, small countries, hell, even hotels. We’ll use carbon capture technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere. We’ll stop putting up a carbon wall between ourselves and space. Cool ourselves down.

That South Dakota nurse. Did you read her story about dying patients who still don’t believe in Covid? Well, here’s the wall we need right now. A wall around each home until at least January 2nd. Get the holidays behind us before we get over our self-imposed or state-imposed lockdowns. Or, maybe a wall until the vaccines have been given at least to us old folks and medical personnel. Or, maybe until, this is the one that makes the most sense to me, we flatten the curve. We’ve never done it. We can do it. We need to do it.

So. Let’s build a few walls, tear down others. Get to the point where we don’t need them. Soonest. But, hard.

*A mixed economy is variously defined as an economic system blending elements of a market economy with elements of a planned economy, free markets with state interventionism, or private enterprise with public enterprise.[1][2][3][4] While there is no single definition of a mixed economy, one definition is about a mixture of markets with state interventionism, referring specifically to a capitalist market economy with strong regulatory oversight and extensive interventions into markets. Another is that of an active collaboration of capitalist and socialist visions.[5] Yet another definition is apolitical in nature, strictly referring to an economy containing a mixture of private enterprise with public enterprise.[6] Alternatively, a mixed economy can refer to a socialist economy that allows a substantial role for private enterprise and contracting within a dominant economic framework of public ownership. This can extend to a Soviet-type planned economy that has been reformed to incorporate a greater role for markets in the allocation of factors of production.[7] Wiki

Commentary on the news, Coronavirus, Dogs, Family, Health, Jefferson County, Mountains, Politics, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, US History

Double/Triple Irony

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Samain and the Thanksgiving Moon

Thursday gratefuls: A good visit with a potential new doc. Our since we moved here doc, Lisa Gidday, retires January 1. 2020 was too much for her. Also a good visit for Kep with his dermatologist/allergist. Yes, even dogs. He has hot spots (allergies, I think) in addition to the infection he got from grooming. Orion headed for the evening sky, in the early morning now partly behind Black Mountain. Ruby. Snowshoes today. Oil change. Rear door diagnosis.

Happy to report that Kate’s had several good days in a row now. A crummy two day stretch, a Sjogren flare?, or it would be two weeks plus. When mama’s happy, everybody’s happy. Makes me smile.

Found this wonderful tribute to a brave dog and his friend on Next Door Shadow Mountain. A local story and a beautiful one. Hope you have a friend like Winston.

He’s flopping like a fish pulled untimely from his Whitehouse pond. Throwin’ shade. Dissing the election process which his own head of cybersecurity said was as good as it’s ever been. Which every election official in every state has certified as sound. The votes of which elected more Republicans than anticipated yet somehow screwed up the Presidential vote. On the same damn ballot? Call Rudy!

So. Tired. Of. His. Bullshit. Go away, bad President. Go away.

Rigel slept last night with her head on my pillow, her back snugged up against Kate. Believe she’s beaten the endocarditis. Worth it.

When I took Kep in for his vet appointment yesterday, it was 75 in Englewood. 75! November 18th. Thanksgiving next week. And, 75. The world feels off kilter for us old folks who really do remember snowy Thanksgivings, white Christmases. I did see in the Washington Post this morning that our carbon emissions will be at their lowest for three decades. Covid dropped them, of course. And, the orange excrescence. If people weren’t dying, I’d say it’s worth it. Over a quarter of a million now. That’s Winston-Salem or Norfolk disappeared from the map.

Lock yourself down.  This Atlantic article tells the truth about what we should be doing right now. But, we won’t. I get it, too. The Christmas retail season for a consumer based economy. Gonna trash that and still survive politically? I wouldn’t wanna be a governor right now. But. The other shoe will drop when kids come home from college for Thanksgiving and/or the Christmas holiday period. And. Of course. Families will still put aside common sense to embrace relatives, loved ones. I read the other day that this surge, 170,000 new cases a day, has been driven by small gatherings in homes and bars. We’re ramping up the number of infected just in time for the most volatile and problematic time in the whole year so far. Think about that. In all of 2020 we’ve got the worst time ahead of us.

Here’s the double/triple irony. The vaccines look good. Doctors are much better at treating Covid. But, so many will die and get sick simply because Trump will still be in office over this time of increasing vulnerability for so, so many. Cursed year. Cursed year.

Ta for now. Gotta get the snowshoes in Ruby so Stevinson can mount them.

Colorado, Commentary on the news, Denver, Jefferson County, Mountains, Myth and Story, Our Land and Home, Park County, Politics, Shadow Mountain, The Move, The West, US History

The New West

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Samain and the Moon of Thanksgiving

Wednesday gratefuls: Mountain Waste. Doctors. The one here and the ones out there. Roads. The builders of Colorado Mountain roads. His Dark Materials. Phillip Pullman. Friends. Caregiving. Tsundoku. Collecting books you have not read. William Schmidt. Bill. As he goes through the next 14 days. Tom on December 1st. Carne asada unthawing. Carnitas and beans for supper.

Red Sky in the morning through the Lodgepoles. A western greeting. When it’s red like this, I always think of Louis L’Amour. I’ve only read one of his. It surprised me. The prose was more like Dashiel Hammet. I think it was Riders of the Purple Sage.

When we moved out here, I expected cowboy hats, western shirts, cowboy boots, maybe guns on the hip. Bars with half-doors on spring pivots. Lotta chaw. I have been disappointed. There is the occasional Stetson. Cowboy boots are the most common of the things I mentioned. Very few western shirts, though attending the Great Western National Stockshow saw many of them. It’s the rodeo guys, the paid cowboy entertainers, who dress western.

Although. Yesterday when we got our hair done, Jackie showed me pictures of her son’s wedding. The minister, her son and his bride stood on a large boulder. Her proud father, all dressed in black with a black Stetson and belt with silver stood off to the side below as did the small number of wedding guests. The chairs were hay bales with Diné blankets. This western culture lives on among ranchers. It’s more of a rural thing.

Denver and its metro area, including the Front Range where Kate and I live, is the New West. Skiers, hikers, back country campers, and many millennials have added themselves to the state. In spite of the many bumper stickers like Native, Colorado: We’re full. This change irritates the hell out of “native” Coloradans. Who are, in my opinion, feeling a slight taste of the angst their ancestors gave the Utes, the Apaches, and the Comanches who lived here first. They’re not native here. No one is, in the longview. It took those wandering tribes from Asia a while to populate North America, but even the earliest of them weren’t here 50,000 years ago. But, as we used to say in the first grade, those early nations did have dibs on the land.

This change in the human population has changed both the physical and political landscapes. The number of hard rock mines here, hard rock mines with toxic runoff and piles of toxic tailings literally dot the mountainous part of the state. After the Indian wars, the settlement of Colorado got a big push from Eastern mining and railroad interests, plus one pulse of gold diggers. Pikes Peak or bust. Most, almost all, busted. There was gold here. And silver. And magnesium. So many minerals that a college, The Colorado School of Mines, has taken a storied place in both the states recent past and mining around the world. The mines, the railroads, even the stockyards that grew up around the ranches and the confluence of north/south rail lines, were not locally owned, nor locally controlled. Colorado was, back then, a vassal state of financiers, industrialists, and railroad owners like James J. Hill.

That’s the second big lie behind the nativist bumper stickers. These faux natives of Colorado did not “own” it. Those who saw the West, the Rockies in particular, as a source of resources for their own plans, did. They controlled the politics and the wealth. Those so-called natives descended from peasants who worked the land and mountains for Wall Street feudal lords. The New West, the new Colorado, has its own Fortune 500 companies. The space, technology and military presence here makes Colorado a unique blend of highly educated workers and outdoors enthusiasts. It also means that the state has gone from red to purple to blue over the last few decades. Again, a process highly irritating to those who want to close our borders to new residents.

Kate and I are part of the New West, the new Colorado. So are many of our neighbors. We have moved West as Horace Greeley once urged young men to do. Sort of. Many of us came from the humid east, but many come from Texas and California. Colorado, by a slim majority, became the first state to mandate by popular vote, the reintroduction of wolves. The natives were the chief opposition. The rancher crowd and the hunting oriented outdoors folks. This will not be their first defeat along environmental lines. We also elected a gay Governor, Jared Polis, two years ago, after having been called the Hate State not twenty years ago.

When I consider all this, I’m not surprised any more at the low relevance of old west motifs. My fleece and plaid shirt, denim and hiking shoes, are the dress of the New West. At least for me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Commentary on the news, Coronavirus, Family, Friends, Jefferson County, Judaism, Politics, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, US History, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

Joy, Joy, Joy Deep in My Heart

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Samain and the Moon of Radical Change

Monday gratefuls: 20 degrees. Some snow on the ground. A marathoner kicking past the house around 6:30 a.m. Training. A Trumpless Whitehouse. The Denver Post delivered. Those ribs from Easy Entrees. Kate’s scallops. The Johnson girls. As they get older. Their sis zoom bar. The Ancient Ones, with Alan added. That strong feeling I get now when I get in the kitchen. I’m a cook. The epitome of androgyny Kate said last night. A compliment in my eyes.

Meme: You know why your candidate lost? You didn’t put enough flags on your truck. Ha.

One thing I keep wanting to do and haven’t gotten around to: figure out how to display an American flag regularly. I don’t want the Gadsden flag crew and their Confederate battle flag allies to continue having exclusive rights. Displaying a flag does not make you a patriot, but its display almost exclusively by the right wing sends that message. The way to reclaim it for all America is for those of on the left, and liberals, too, to fly it. No, I’m not attaching twin gigundos to the back of Ruby. Not even an American flag decal. But, on the property here. Yes. I’ll figure it out. Maybe you will, too.

I will be ready for the post-election critiques. I will. But not just yet. I want to roll in the hay we made last week. Dive into it from the upper deck of the hay mow. Disappear in it, swimming through the hay like a happy, happy fish. That hay mow smell, that’s America, the old America, the one I grew up in.

The farm. Many of us had one in our family because many families created by WWII vets had farmers in their family. The farm in our family was just outside Morristown, Indiana. Family lore has it that Grandpa won it on a bet at the horse track. Its believable, he was that sorta guy, but I do not know the truth of it. Riley, the only boy out of my Mom’s four sibs, ended up living on the farm. I don’t know the story behind how that happened. Many summers I would spend a week or so there along with some time in town with my Grandma, Mabel.

Lots of good memories. The smell of cedar. The old artesian well that kept the milk cans cool for collection. The moss on it and the damp darkness of its shed. The corn crib with its shucked ears of feed corn. And, the hay mow. Of course, this was all a really long time ago. 60 plus years for some of the memories, but they feel current, alive. Just down the gravel road back toward town, after a bend in the road, is Hancock cemetery. Many of my Keaton relatives, including Uncle Riley and Aunt Virginia, Grandma and Grandpa, Aunt Barbara and several others are buried there. Richard, my first cousin, now lives on the farm, and, like Uncle Riley, is the main caretaker for the cemetery. Small town, rural roots. Me.

Those were good times, but of course they had their darkness. As does this election. This is not the time for either. Now is the time for connecting today with yesterday and through that lens seeing tomorrow. Enjoy the victory. I sure am.

Commentary on the news, Coronavirus, Family, Friends, Health, Politics, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, US History

Watch Him Go Away!

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Samain and the Moon of Radical Change

Sunday gratefuls: Pork loin chops from Tony’s. Butternut Squash. Rigel’s most excellent appetite. Kate’s infirmities quieting. The coming election. Throwing the bum out. Jon’s gate for the loft stairs. To protect Rigel from herself. Addiction. Never resolved, always lurking. The Trumpeter. The American Way. The American Dream.

A better week for Kate. Much, much less nausea. Stoma site looking good. Her smile. Buoys me.

Yet. When we talked yesterday about how we were, she said, “I feel sequestered.” Covid. And, her stamina. We realized, as I alluded to earlier, that weeks with several appointments wear her out. A lot. So, we’ll try to do no more than one a week for her. Her stamina makes even going for a ride an energy draining experience. With CBE’s in person activities limited and our own high risk category for Covid, that outlet won’t work. Jon had to come home from school due to an “exposed” first grader, an incident two weeks ago, but only discovered on Thursday. This is the already making the news holiday conundrum. Can we even see those we love?

Since I added back in resistance work last week, after cataract surgery made me stop for a month, my writing on Jennie’s Dead got lost. Trying to figure out how to make my days work is always a challenge for me. Not new. But, problematic again. Most of the issue is how to use morning hours.

Saw Dr. Eigner on Friday, my urologist/oncologist. I get a new PSA every three months, but now see him in six months. If I come up undetectable for several, I don’t know how many, I’ll return to every six month PSA’s. He said it could even go up as long as it doesn’t go beyond .2, .3, .4. Somewhere in there. Then they would still follow me. If it drifts up, as it did in February 2019, treatment will start again. I left his office feeling good. Cancer as a chronic disease.

The election. I’m going to buy a steak and fixings for Tuesday or Wednesday. Celebrate, celebrate, dance to the election returns. Yeah, I’m exposing myself to the downside of even bridled optimism. I feel ok though. 10% is a chance, a legitimate chance, yes, Nate. But, it’s not much of a chance. We must delete our President. Put him in the trash. Excoriate and damn him. Arrest him and imprison him. An actively evil person. Yes, I’m stoking the culture wars with these comments, but what the hell? It’s true.

Commentary on the news, Family, Health, Memories, Politics, US History

1968 – 2020

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Fall and the Moon of Radical Change

Friday gratefuls: Kate’s good week. Rigel’s returned appetite. Her getting on the bed last night, a bit wobbly, but there. Kep. So dignified and attentive. The sweetness of our life together. The approaching election. Ahi tuna from Tony’s. Pickup from Safeway. Covid, still changing our culture, our lives, our visions of the future. Climate change and those who work to limit and mitigate it. The Sun.

Kate’s had a week of no nausea, no appointments. A wonder. And, wonderfull. We’ve pushed into new territory, goaded from behind by Covid and being together. A greater appreciation for each other, for our, as Jim Harrison’s poem says, “…life of dogs and children and the far wide country
out by rivers, rumpled by mountains.” Carpe Diem. Thanks, Tom.

Brother Mark asked me to think about now and 1968. “Have the changes of 2020 been different from 1968?” It’s an interesting question. Both, I believe are capstones of an era. 1968 found many of us who were young throwing off the post-WW II culture of conformity, working and not thinking, easy racism and easy wars. Sex was not forbidden. Make love not war was more than just a slogan. It was a lifestyle. We were angry young folks, too. The war. The draft. In loco parentis. (look it up) We found protesting the war both necessary and liberating. See Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 on Netflix.

2020. Protests now seem to come in two flavors: Black Lives Matter and their allies, Proud Boys, the Klan, and their allies. There was some pushback in the 60’s from blue collar workers and straight parents, but for the most part the protests were anti-war in nature though the civil rights movement still had some energy after a hard, but productive first few years of the 60’s. A major difference now is that the alt-right impulses of the 60’s, and they were there, were seen as fringe and cuckoo. Now, with the agitator in chief the fringe has cover in the Whitehouse. That makes them think they are less fringy now. They’re wrong.

I have a lot of other thoughts and I know this is cursory, but I want to post it today. Get back on the board.

 

 

 

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Colorado

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Fall and the Moon of Radical Change

Thursday gratefuls: Kate’s stoma site looking good. Rigel off antibiotics. Her gut can relax. Rigel early in the morning, barking as loud as she can. Why? Oh, why. No idea. Mac and cheese with ham. Comfort food. The East Troublesome Fire. The Cameron Fire. The Calwood Fire. Reminding us that climate change is real and not tomorrow.

Wildfires are us. The West is burning. Precipitation blocked by warming oceans. Trees dried by low humidity, killed by pine bark Beetles. Grasses squeezed dry, lying ready for ignition. Rabbi Jamie’s home in Granby. The East Troublesome Fire. Evacuated. He posted pictures on Facebook. Scary.

Clouds this morning red from the Wildfire refracted Sun. We have moisture on the way. Hope it comes in time to wet down our Very High fire hazards. The National Forest Service closed the Arapho National Forest, the one in which we live, citing dry Trees and strained fire-fighting resources. This means no Denverites, no other out-of-towners at Lower and Upper Maxwell Falls. Well, it means there should be none.

Speaking of Colorado. Here’s a video from near Telluride.

Could have been worse. Think if the Jeep with the camera was a tiny bit further along on the trail. The woman who drove the falling Jeep is in a Grand Junction hospital with serious injuries. She bailed just before it went over.

Then, too. An election is coming. Like Winter. Did I say vote? Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote.

Aging, Colorado, Commentary on the news, Cooking, Coronavirus, Family, Feelings, Friends, Health, Jefferson County, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Science, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, US History

Fattening, Not Flattening

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Fall and the Moon of Radical Change

Wednesday gratefuls: New wheelchair. #19! Better comfort for Kate. Covid days and Covid nights. With the flu on its way. Hunker down, USA. A gift from Ancient One, Tom Crane. Safeway. Picking up groceries in my jammies. Cool weather ahead. And, snow! Drive down that fire danger. Yeah.

On the drive down the mountain to Safeway the Sun angle, the brown and gold Grasses, naked Aspen among the Lodgepole sent me back to trips to Aunt Marjorie’s house for Thanksgiving. Over the hills and through the woods.

Picked up some squash today. Yum. Also, thought I indicated I wanted 5 tomatoes. Got five pounds instead. Chili tonight. Safety wise pickup is the gold standard. As it is in terms of limiting impulse purchases. However.

The third surge of the first wave has come up hard against the rocky shore of pandemic fatigue. We have fattened the curve, instead of flattening. And, we are at it again. This time though with a broader reach in regions. That dovetails with three accelerants: the seasonal flu, cold weather and more indoor gatherings, winter holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah.

By the time 2021 arrives two months plus a little from now we might be ready to skip ahead to 2022.

The fall after college, 1969, Judy and I moved to Appleton, Wisconsin. My bakery job had me up at 4 am as my first Wisconsin winter closed in. The owner, almost joyous for a Norwegian (I now know.), used to sing, “I’ve got my love to keep me warm.” Yeah. But, he was the boss, you know. I can still hear him. Seems like the perfect song now.

Or, this. The weather outside is frightful, the fire is so delightful, and since we’ve GOT NO PLACE TO GO, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow! (caps mine, ya know.)

Did I forget to mention the election? An election is coming. Like winter. Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote.

Local satellite gathers dust from meteor. The Lockheed-Martin works off Deer Creek Canyon Road celebrated as their designed and built OSIRIS-REX blew on asteroid Bennu and collected (they hope) dust in an extended ring.

There is a robust space industry in Colorado and it will get much bigger if Trump’s Space Force decides to permanently locate its headquarters here. It has a temporary headquarters in Virginia but there are already several sites here: Buckley AFB, Peterson AFB, Schriever AFB with 10 of its fifteen units in the state already.

Back to writing. Kate read the first half of Jennie’s Dead and her response to it jarred me back to the keyboard. I can’t exercise until next Monday so the time is easy to find. I feel good, like I know I should. Writing buoys me up.

Beyond the Boundaries, Commentary on the news, Coronavirus, Family, Health, Humanities, Minnesota, Our Land and Home, Politics, Shadow Mountain, US History

Soul

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Fall and the Moon of Radical Change

Sunday gratefuls: Jon, Ruth, Gabe. Kate. Jon’s drawing for the gate at the bottom of the loft stairs. Ruth’s Apple fritters. Easy Entree’s beef stew. Borgen. Kate reading Jennie’s Dead, what’s written. The 8 point Buck in the back yard. Kep trying to decide what to do.

“When I think of soul of the nation,” Joy Harjo, the United States poet laureate and a Muscogee (Creek) Nation member, said, “I think of the process of becoming, and what it is we want to become. That is where it gets tricky, and that is where I think we have reached a stalemate right now. What do people want to become?” Elizabeth Dias, NYT, 10/18/2020, Biden and Trump Say They’re Fighting for America’s ‘Soul.’ What Does That Mean?

Highly recommended. Elizabeth Dias is smart and knows her soul history. Of all the wonderful reflections on what the soul of the country might mean, I found Joy Harjo’s the most cogent.

Our soul, our American soul, becomes knowable in the thousands of tiny decisions, and big ones, that we make every day. Where do we live? With whom do we live? What do we drive? What do we eat? For whom do we vote? Who deserves our attention?

It’s possible, in a country as affluent as ours, to get lost in the tiny decisions. Will we wear a mask? Whose mail do we read? Whose products do we buy? Where and how do we get our healthcare? These are all important questions in our daily lives, but we often forget that the aggregate of our choices has enormous consequences for our mutual well-being. If we don’t pay attention, we forget the other, imagine that our choices matter only to us, only to the ethical framework of our family, our work, our small community.

One way to infuse those tiny decisions with broader meaning is to become intentional about them. Remember think global, buy local? If you want peace, work for justice? Do I buy the gasoline powered car or do I buy the electrically powered car?

Our national soul gathers force, gathers power, gathers momentum for change in these choices. Easy to forget. And, I agree with Harjo that we’ve reached a stalemate of sorts now. Our attention has been distracted by 2020.

What’s next? Locust? Volcanoes? Asteroids? No. What’s next is November 3rd. This is a big decision. But it will be our collective choices that make it. America will announce to the world the state of its soul’s health on November 3rd.

Is our soul just an enlarged continuation of the white male project? Or, do others have a voice? Do those who value community, diversity, globalism have the strength to redefine our soul. We will see.