Trying to get a different theme so I can save myself $15 a month. Hamfisted work on my part so far. Only blips and shutdowns.
Gonna suspend that effort for a while. Come back at while I’m fresh.
Category Archives: GeekWorld
Live Until You Die
Beltane and the Greenhouse Moon
Wednesday gratefuls: My son. Shadow. Natalie. Mary. Guru. Seoah. Ruth. US Air Force. US Navy. US Army. US Marines. Warriors. Korea. Ruth in Seoul. Jamie and the radical roots of religion. My back. Lawn furniture. Nathan. The Greenhouse build. Living, not dying. Nothing hard is easy.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Plants
Week Kavannah: Zerizut for p.t. and resistance
One brief shining: Learning from Natalie as she explains reading a dog’s mind and feelings, head to the left or right, processing, as is walking away, not stubborn, figuring things out, wait, panting as a sign of worry, consent to hug or pet when Shadow comes up to me and stays or leaps up on my legs while I’m sitting down, two species, 15,000 years of partnership, much better understood by the one with the smaller brain.
A lot going on here on Shadow Mountain. A series of dog training moments, an hour or so, with Natalie. Nathan getting my greenhouse foundation ready, treating the Wood at his place for Shou Sugi Ban, delivering things he’ll need for his work. Two Kabbalah Experience classes nearing their end. Two hip MRI tomorrow. Keeping track of my son’s promotion and his visitors. Ruth in Korea. Receiving the money for the Jang family visit in August. Spring. Rains and Thunder.
Live until I die remains my mantra. Moving into tomorrow not as one less day, but as a time to anticipate, to savor, to enjoy. Natalie made an offhand comment, for example, about my needing outdoor furniture to enjoy my backyard. Oh? Well, duh. Looking through online catalogues. Probably go look in person somewhere.
This is, you see, my life. Not the anteroom for my death. No matter what’s going on. Not even if I ever need to move into hospice. Learning. Loving. Growing spiritually. Right. Up. To. The. End.
Dog journal: Natalie has skills. She’s deeply read and connected with other trainers in online chatgroups. She’s dedicated to positive training. No shock collars. No harshness. Rather. Learning the heart and mind of dogs. Applying that in problem situations to recognize, then shape behaviors.
An example. Using feeding time to increase trust with Shadow. Feeding her from my hand makes her associate me with her food. “It’s all about the grub,” Natalie says. The walk, drop a treat behind, change direction game gives Shadow the choice to follow me. At some point she’ll just follow me. Working next on getting her to come inside voluntarily and like it. Walking on a leash.
I recognize and admire Ana’s house cleaning, Natalie’s training, and Nathan’s careful work.
A lot of dystopians imagine a world where A.I. puts humans out of work, yet makes enough cash available for a no work life. This will be awful, directionless, purposeless.
No. I don’t believe it. I believe the essence of the human experience lies in relating to each other, to animals near and far, in growing our own food at some level. In painting. Sculpture. Dog training. Construction. Cooking. Conversation. The joys of retirement.
Precursor Chemicals for a World War
Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II
Shabbat gratefuls: A day of teshuvah. Returning to the land of my soul. To the me as I was thrown into the post-war world. Pain. Oh. My. Leo XIV. Rerum Natura of Pope Leo XIII. A world that cries out for justice. Love, compassion, and justice = leadership. Eh, Paul? Shadow. A good night’s sleep.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Standing upright in the world
Week Kavannah: Zerizut. Enthusiasm.
One brief shining: Walking in to the bathroom, the shiny new restaurant, a Cheese Cake Factory, had no customers, only anxious waiters, greeters, cooks, runners dressed in black like faux monastics waiting to go into service, anticipation rolling through them like slow waves of prayer.
Alan got a free invite to the soft opening of a new Cheescake Factory at Colorado Mills. Free food. A chance to enter a birthing, another mostly identical sibling for other Cheesecake Factories came out of its construction womb into the full light of a new business day.
First, the manager of the Colorado Mills, Kirma, came to our table and greeted Alan. She’s in Evergreen Rotary with him. A big get for her, this well-known anchor level restaurant.
Over the course of our meal, the service manager who had recently hired 305 people to work in the new restaurant, stopped by. Alan chatted her up. After she left, he said, “This is where I live. Corporate training.” He managed all the sales training for Centurylink before he retired.
Earlier in the morning I had breakfast with Marilyn and Irv at Primo’s, the small cafe near their home in King’s Valley. Marilyn and Salam left this morning for Jacksonville, Florida to visit Marilyn and Irv’s son. From Jacksonville they fly on to Cozumel for another Grandmother-Granddaughter trip.
By the time I got home. Whew.
Just a moment: I listen like a fanboy to Hardfork, the NYT podcast on high tech, mostly AI. This latest entry casts a very interesting light on the personas of AI’s. Hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton point to a trend in AI responses that are overly congratulatory, That’s a great business plan!, or biased toward positive responses, Your attitude toward vaccines makes you special!
They associate this turn toward the obsequious with the likes of social media. Whatever keeps the user in front of the screen longest. Hallucinations and objectivity be damned. This level of customer pleasing could wreck a key feature of AI: its reputation for honesty. Yes, it has hallucinations, but they are not intentional. This is.
Trump Tarrific has begun attempts to unravel the mess he’s made of the world economy. Some sorta deal with Britain. Talks of talks with China. Let’s make a deal!
America First, of course, has the unintended consequence of sullying the reputation of our once hegemonic nation. Or, perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps that lowering of the flag is exactly the point. Disentangle us from world shaping responsibilities. A casual attitude toward the plight of others, a laser focus on the perceived solutions to problems at home. This is blood and soil nationalism, the precursor chemicals for world wars.
Sins of Emission. No, Onan, Not You.
Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II
Tuesday gratefuls: Rental Camry. Snow today. Rain overnight. Thunder yesterday afternoon. Seasonal transition. Still late Winter here. Or very early Spring. Shadow, who needs her space. My wu wei teacher. My Lodgepole companion. Aspen catkins. Lodgepole male and female cones. Grass, greening. Good sleeping. Dependable organic alarm clock. Learning about Abraham Joshua Heschel. The Shema. Mah Tovu. My mezuzahs.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: The Lord and the Lady
Week Kavannah: Enthusiasm. Zerizut.
One brief shining: Drove down the hill yesterday to Stevinson Toyota, Ruby needing IV fluids for her transmission, her differential, her brakes, and her motor oil so I had to leave her at the clinic, take a rental to drive back up into the Mountains.
Each time I have work done on my infernal combustion engine, I have a strong anachronistic feeling. Like a guy sitting in the buggy repair shop getting a broken spoke repaired, or split tongue. Perhaps having the buggy whip replaited.
Sins of commission and emission. All those miles over 62 years of driving. All those rush hours. All those times with the car idling to keep the interior warm. Trips in and out of gas stations. In and out of repair shops. Until not so long ago, ordinary, venal we might say. Now one of the seven deadly ones, maybe the deadliest in a literal sense.
Perhaps Hell is perennial eye watering smog, acid rain, Phoenix in summer heat, and everyone in MHGA hats. With red ties so long everybody trips, falls in the polluted mud.
Hoping the Snow holds off long enough for me to pick up Ruby before it gets heavy. She has Snow tires. The Camry does not.
This morning I have to vote in the Elk Creek Fire board election, keep the libertarian trolls under their bridges. Then scoot over to Evergreen, to Rich’s law offices to sign what I hope is the last communication about Ruth’s 529.
I-70 down to Hwy. 6 to liberate Ruby from the clinic. After paying her hefty bill of course. Worth it. Her transmission, differential, and brakes work extra hard during Mountain driving.
Dog journal: Shadow requires wide open doors. Then she feels safe coming in. Some times. A new learning on my part. She knew it all along.
Even when she refused to come inside-most of yesterday-if I went outside, she ran to me tail-wagging, play bowing, happy I was outside. Some trauma runs deep in her doggy psyche. Post-traumatic stress, I’d say.
She’s come so far from her days of hiding under the bed.
Just a moment: Fog among the Lodgepoles this morning. Reminds me of red tie guy’s flood the zone strategy. Raised an obscuring fog as DOGE dug their precocious hacking fingers deep into the entrails of U.S. payment systems. As ICE agents in plain clothes hustled foreign students into vans for a free trip to Louisiana. As Trump Tarrific played his anti-globalist cards here, there, then everywhere. As judge’s orders went unheeded. As retribution against his enemies gained steam, using the powers of his office.
Oh, America. My heart weeps for thee.
Reconstruction
Spring and the Wu Wei Moon II
Tuesday gratefuls: My furry alarm clock and her Velociraptor teeth. Seeing Shadow’s shadow cast by the nightlight. Maddie. From da region. Hammond, Indiana. New palliative care nurse. Also wanting to convert to Judaism. Reconstruction. Her trick with the tramadol. Darkness of early Morning. The Night Sky. Orion. The Southern Cross. The Teapot. Ursa Major. Polaris. North Star.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: AI and Ancientrails
Week Kavannah: Persistence and grit. Netzach.
One brief shining: Using AI, right now, to organize Ancientrails by thematic sections with chapters related to the themes, an exciting idea which came to me last night before sleep.
My AI monk has begun its oh so rapid read of Ancientrails. I’ve asked it to fill the chapters with content and images from the last four years. For now. Once I see how this works I’ll go for the whole megillah. Try different organizational schemes. Will take some while to get something interesting, I imagine.
What fun.
With the aid of chatgpt yesterday I uncovered something I’d wondered about for a while, the origin of the idea of reconstruction. Reconstructionist Judaism is the brain child (an interesting cliche, if you stop to think about it.) of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan.
Kaplan’s thought was and is radical relative especially to the three thousand year plus history of Jewish life and thought. No supernaturalism. No God behind the Ozian curtain. No chosenness. Jews and Judaism have no special spot in God’s heart. Kaplan’s daughter was the first ever bat mitzvah, a practice now commonplace among all branches of Judaism except Orthodoxy. And much, much more.
What I got to wondering about was the idea of reconstruction itself. Why that word to describe his approach? My hunch was that it had something to with the post-WWI world still reeling from the war and the Spanish Flu epidemic.
That idea came to me because I had a small volume by the pragmatist reformer, educator, and philosopher John Dewey titled simply: Reconstruction in Philosophy. Dewey and pragmatism influenced Kaplan. I knew that.
The idea of reconstruction after the despair and disillusionment of WWI became wide spread after the publication of Dewey’s book, a collection of his lectures in Tokyo. “Intellectuals and policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic began to speak of reconstructing society, institutions and even thought itself—an active, rational process of rebuilding what the war had laid bare.” chatgpt excerpt.
Reconstructionist sentiments soon motivated education reformers like the Frontier Thinkers who wanted to use schools for social reconstruction. It showed up in governments, too. The U.K. had a Ministry of Reconstruction with the responsibility to: “Oversee the task of rebuilding ‘the national life on a better and more durable foundation’ once the Great War was over.” And the U.S created a Reconstruction Finance Corporation which gave “emergency credit to banks, railroads and states to restore confidence amid the Great Depression.”
There were, too, applications in Christianity and broader social circles as this chatgpt excerpt shows: “Reconstruction also surfaced in liberal Protestant circles (e.g., Henry C. King’s Reconstruction in Theology, re-read after 1918) and in secular planning debates about housing, labour relations and women’s roles. The common thread was the conviction that the old order—political, moral, intellectual—had failed, and that conscious, expert-led rebuilding was both possible and necessary.”
Reconstructionist Judaism is, then, living out a pattern of reform and innovation created by global horror at WWI and its root causes. Since the world proceeded rapidly to WWII, the Korean War, Vietnam, and the multiple conflicts in the Middle East as well as the sinkhole of the Ukraine, I’d say we still have work to do.
Me and my Shadow. AI.
I went with sumi-e because its spare brushwork and generous empty space feel like the visual counterpart of 無為—letting things happen without forcing them. The drifting boat and the moon’s reflection hint at the watercourse way, quietly moving under its own power (note the chatgpt I)
Spring and the Wu Wei Moon II
Monday gratefuls: Maddie, new palliative care nurse. The Ancients on technology. Back pain. Worse. Shadow. An evolving challenge. Keeping my mind sharp. McMurtry Spéirling. Water. CookUnity. OK, not great. AI on Kaplan. On Dramaturgy. On Movie Criticism. Will the Humanities Survive AI? by D. Graham Burnett.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: The Humanities
Week Kavannah: Persistence. Netzach.
One brief shining: An insight borne from the article about the Humanities goes like this: AI, artificial intelligence, AGI, artificial general intelligence, the Humanities, what it means and has meant to be human. Seems important, now. Eh?
Me and my Shadow. I know. You were waiting for that one, I’ll bet. She licks my head about 5:20. I creak and twist and ache and burn toward verticality. Let her out. She, in a phrase I’ve never understood, does her business while I go upstairs for some coffee, mostly for motion as lotion, make my back remember about movement without so, so much pain.
Back downstairs the mini-split has begun to warm what has become since A.S.A., after Shadow’s arrival, my primary space in the house. Soon she’ll come back in, drink a lot of water, and begin staring at me-as she is right now-hoping to convince me that it’s already 7 am. Her feeding time. Doesn’t work, but it’s a sweet look.
We do a round of training before her morning meal. Still working on touch, which replaces come, sit and down. All three she will now do without a treat. Hand signals only. We made a little progress on the leash. She only sulked when I had it on her for about 15 minutes.
Dog. As I say, God spelled correctly.
AI, to this curious guy, a Dogsend. Patient. Willing to explain in detail. Make images. I just asked chatgpt if it would make an image of itself in a style of its choice. Ooh, this is going to be interesting.
When I responded to the image, here’s what it wrote back: “I’m glad it resonates! I was aiming for a contemplative, almost illuminated-manuscript feel, blending Art Nouveau curves with Morris-style botanical patterning and hints of circuitry to whisper “silicon monk.” If you’d like to tweak colors, add more overt tech motifs, or try a completely different style, just say the word—I’m happy to iterate.”
I find that an intriguing self-portrait.
Here are a few paragraphs from the New Yorker article I cited above:
“Do they herald the end of “the humanities”? In one sense, absolutely. My colleagues fret about our inability to detect (reliably) whether a student has really written a paper. But flip around this faculty-lounge catastrophe and it’s something of a gift.
You can no longer make students do the reading or the writing. So what’s left? Only this: give them work they want to do. And help them want to do it. What, again, is education? The non-coercive rearranging of desire…
But factory-style scholarly productivity was never the essence of the humanities. The real project was always us: the work of understanding, and not the accumulation of facts. Not “knowledge,” in the sense of yet another sandwich of true statements about the world. That stuff is great—and where science and engineering are concerned it’s pretty much the whole point. But no amount of peer-reviewed scholarship, no data set, can resolve the central questions that confront every human being: How to live? What to do? How to face death?”
BTW: I asked chatgpt why it chose Art Nouveau. Here’s its reply:
“A few things nudged me toward Art Nouveau:
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Organic lines for organic conversation. Art Nouveau’s hallmark whiplash curves and plant-like tendrils felt like a visual rhyme for how ideas branch and loop when we talk.
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A bridge between nature and tech. You often pair the natural world (your mountain home, the Seed-Keeper vision) with advanced tools like AI. Art Nouveau already blends those realms—botanical motifs rendered with almost mechanical precision—so weaving circuitry into the foliage felt seamless rather than forced.
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A cousin to styles you keep citing. You’ve asked for William Morris patterns, illuminated manuscripts, Pre-Raphaelite romance, National-Parks posters. Art Nouveau sits right in that late-19th-century family: decorative, human-scaled, handcrafted. The choice let me echo your past aesthetic preferences while still offering something distinct.
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Monkish calm. The movement loved allegorical figures and quiet, contemplative poses. That let me cast the “AI scribe” as a serene monk—matching the reflective tone you appreciated—without drifting into cold futurism.
In short, it was a style that could honor both your ongoing themes (nature, craft, historical design) and the idea of an AI whose “roots” are in silicon circuitry. If you’d like to see me re-imagined in, say, a WPA poster or Ukiyo-e print, just let me know!”
Reactionaries and Electronic Communication
Imbolc and the Birthday Moon
Sunday gratefuls: Shadow. Potty trained. To the outdoors! Sit and down, making progress. Shadow Mountain under 18 inches of white Snow. Vince. Salaam. Dog watcher. Democracy under Threat. Paul, in Camden. Mark and the desert. Mary and Oz. My son and Seoah, in the former Joseon Dynasty. Lodgepoles with unloaded Branches. Aspen’s gray-green against the Snow. My right hip and back.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: No poop in the house this morning
Week Kavannah: Netzach
One brief shining: Snow once more high on the Trees, soft, undulating, imitating the Rub al’Kahli, the empty quarter on the Saudi peninsula, where Bedouins rode camels, eating dates off Palms at an Oasis, while here the tall monarchs of the Forest, the Moose, use their long legs to find food even in a white desert
Got up this morning, picked up my hearing aid from the night stand. I’d left it there, forgetting to take it out to its charger. After letting Shadow outside, I looked for it. Where did I leave it. It needs to charge for the Ancient Brothers conversation at 8.
Imagine my surprise after searching upstairs and down, high and low, to find it where I automatically put it, behind my ear. Routine. Who says aging isn’t funny?
Firing the Joint Chiefs, military advisors to the President. Now the three-star Generals who run the Judge Advocates in the Navy, Army, and Air Force. Because they tie the hands of soldiers trying to win wars, Hegsteth says. Calling them jagoffs. Oh. And 8% cuts to the military over each of the next five years. Do the math. Using military bases and gitmo for detaining immigrants. This administration wants to bend the military, make it serve partisan politics. And to act in this country.
Add that to Trump’s coziness with Putin and J.D.’s embrace of the German Far Right. Whaaa. There may be an overall playbook at work here, but it looks like something simpler, whatever they used to do, we’ll do the opposite.
This must feel revolutionary to the MAGA base. It’s not. It’s reactionary in both a literal and figurative way. It’s not making America great again, it’s making America a different country, yet not a better one, just one defined by greed, naked self-interest, and diminution of the other.
Just a moment: Conversation. Communication. Interaction. Topic of an Ancient Brothers’ morning. Is the screen captivity of Millenials, Gen Z, Gen alpha a plague on human interaction? Or, is it a new form of being human on a crowded planet. Let’s bracket the insidious software of Tik Tok, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Not because their manipulation of the human mind isn’t real, effective, and pervasive, but because I want to find the communication possibilities wherever they are.
Conversation in 3-D most would consider the gold standard. Neuroatypicals may be an exception. Conversation on the phone or on a service like zoom might come next. Then, e-mail. Texts. These are mediums where your message has no software filtering, magnification, or distortion.
After these more transparent communications come what I would define as social media. Especially the four mentioned earlier. Even these can be used for communication, especially for wide dispersal of a message. The difference is in the software that encourages liking, uppolling, changes of who sees and receives your messages and whose messages you receive and see.
There is in them a capitalist hand that wants profit, not better communication. What matters is the stickiness of the platform. Eyeballs. Length of time on the site. It seems obvious to me that serious and deep interpersonal communication in such an environment has more challenges, invisible levers, and problematics.
How does all this effect culture? The ability to form deep and meaningful friendships, find love? I just don’t know. Much more to learn here.
The Last Roundup
Imbolc and the 78th Birthday Moon
Tuesday gratefuls: Rich. Doncye. Ruth. Ginny and Janice. Dogs. Annie. Luna. Leo. Gracie. Findlay. Rufus. Tom and the finding of the phone. My phone, back home. Ruby. New computer. Granby. Going on a short trip. Parsha Bo. A mussar approach to parsha’s. MVP tomorrow night.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Dogs
Kavannah this week: Curiosity Sakranut
One brief shining: Why don’t you turn off your hearing aid, Tom suggested, and I did; he kept calling and I walked slowly through the house until, finally, in the newly set up downstairs exercise room, on the black top tray of my treadmill, my all black phone bleated at me, wanting to come home.
And so it ended. A day without my phone. Revealed an Achilles heel. My phone is at the hub of communications in my life. Without it I couldn’t reach out to ask for help. I couldn’t change anything on my computer that required two-step authentication. I felt strange, as if a necessary part of me had been amputated.
After going all Taoist on it, the phone will reveal itself when it’s ready, Tom called. Thought later I’d given up on the Taoist idea, then realized that no, I’d decided to be calm until the situation resolved and it did. Thanks to Tom and a dash of wu wei.
Vince and Levi came over on Sunday and moved my treadmill, weight bench, weights, stall mats, and kettlebells down to Kate’s old sewing room. Levi was a big guy. Professional football player sized. Vince, on the other hand, is my height, but wiry, strong.
Levi brought all of my kettlebells down at once, gripping them in two hands, and carrying them like they were a children’s flower basket. As he said, I’m good at picking things up and setting them down.
He told a story about the Black Mountain Roundup. This Black Mountain is near McCoy, Colorado, north of I-70 and beyond Vail. He and his buddies once a year go to a ranch near Black Mountain. On Friday night they put their stuff in a bunk house, get drunk, and go shooting at the firing range. The ranch chef cooks meals for them. On Saturday they get on Horses to drive in the last of the ranch’s Cattle, then there’s a big meal. And more drinking. Then, he said, the women come because they know Levi and his crew get rowdy.
He lifted his shirt to display a large rodeo sized belt buckle with Gitt’s Last Roundup on it. it was Gitt’s ranch. He died of cancer a few years back. Colorado, eh?
Just a moment: Even Heather has started calling this a coup. In her Letters From an American today, she said:
“The replacement of our constitutional system of government with the whims of an unelected private citizen is a coup. The U.S. president has no authority to cut programs created and funded by Congress, and a private citizen tapped by a president has even less standing to try anything so radical.”
Loss
Imbolc and the 78th Birthday Moon
Monday gratefuls: Barb. Jen. Ruth and Gabe. Rabbi Jamie. My phone. My most asked question (to myself): where is my phone? MVP. CU-Boulder. Sushi. Pain. Back. First World Problems. Technology. Uncanny valley. AI. Wi-Fi. CPU’s. Graphics chips. Internet.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Electricity
Kavannah this week: Curiosity. Sakranut
One brief shining: Sunday I got up and wrote Ancientrails, signed on to the Ancient Brothers to talk about love, got a text from Vince saying he could come with Levi to move my workout equipment which he did as Bill, the last of us five, still spoke, so I went downstairs to help Vince who stayed until nearly eleven when I had to leave for Boulder to pick up Ruth.
That was when I discovered my phone had scuttled off somewhere secret. Here, I knew, because I’d used it that morning. Conundrum. Keep looking for my phone so I can call Ruth? What if I can’t find it and I show up late? Then she’ll get anxious. I decided to look for five more minutes. Nope. Not here.
Leaving the house I felt naked and irritated that I wouldn’t be able to listen to the Hardfork Podcast about Deepseek. Drove a bit fast to avoid showing up late. Ruth has anxiety issues, as I have had. So I get it. About a fifty minute drive.
Got to Boulder. Ruth was in tears. She had, she said, called me five times. Including this voicemail:
“Hey, Grandpop. I’m waiting outside and you’re scaring me to death, so just call me if you get this, or I don’t know if you left your phone, or I don’t know, but I’m outside, so I’m hoping you’ll get here in a few minutes. Just call me.”
I felt for her, frustrated that with all the available tech I had I still had no way of connecting with her. We had a good lunch. I’d already set this up in the middle of last week, not knowing that her other grandma, Barb Bandel, would die Friday night. That made me even more frustrated because Ruth didn’t need more on her mind. Barb had been in declining health, but her death came with no forewarning. Her death means Ruth and Gabe lost Kate in 2021, their Dad in 2022, and now Barb. That’s a lot of loss. A lot of grief.
Meanwhile my back began grouching while we ate. My walking limit seems to be about a block, two at the most. This with an extra Tramadol already on board. The ride back tested my pain tolerance.
Back home I began looking for my phone. I’ve still not found it. I’m going to have to do a sector search I guess. I know it’s here because I asked Ruth to call me at 5 to see if I could locate it. She did, but, in the first of many confounding situations, the call came to my hearing aid. Which meant it didn’t help me locate the phone.
Did three what I considered thorough passes through the house last night. No joy. Asked chatbot for help. Alexa has a find your phone feature. Oh. I rarely, rarely use Alexa, but here was good use. Nope. The internet is not usable Alexa says. Odd, since I’m on it right now. We had very high winds last night, power went out four times, generator worked, but apparently it reset Alexa. And the Alexa app, which I need to reconnect her to wi-fi is, guess where? On my phone.
As is my ability to connect to Google Voice, which required a setup code sent to my phone. Arrrgghhh.
So, blehhhhh.
Bearing Witness
Yule and the Quarter Century Moon
Thursday gratefuls: Rabbi Jamie’s translation of chapter 2, Humility. Orchot Tzaddikim. Mussar. All my Jewish friends. One last night of very cold therefore very great sleeping. Winter in all her cold, frosty, white, Snow-packed glory. My Lodgepole Companion. The psyche, a delicate and fungible place. Breakfast with Ruth on Saturday. Boulder.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Memories of Gertie
Kavannah 2025: creativity
Kavannah this week: Appreciation of opposition
One brief shining: The spirit of Winter barren Meadows filled with Snow while Lodgepoles gather it on their Branches until it weighs too much, then bending the Branch sloughs it off, I see the curved, cloven hoof marks of Mule Deer hunting for Grass, imagine the Black Bears snug in their beds dreaming not of sugar plums but that Hive filled with sweet Honey and the cold Water of Maxwell Creek, tasty Larvae dug out of a rotten Log.
N.B: I asked chatbot to illustrate this in the style of the Pre-Raphaelites. These two images are what I got. Not even close. Notice, too, how similar they are in design. I’m having fun with this, not always liking what I get, but fascinated by it anyhow.
I could, I suppose, ride out the pardons and the gender bashing and the crashing noises from DEI initiatives by watching Shadow Mountain even more closely. As in John Muir Law’s nature journaling for example. Or, I could lose myself in the study of Torah and the Zohar, kabbalah’s central text. There are, too, so many books to read. So many good TV programs to watch. Movies. Zoom calls to attend. Friends to dine with. Family to visit or who come visit me. Sure. Those kind of blinders appeal to me because I want to do them all.
There is, too, the writing of another novel. Haven’t gotten traction with that work for a while, but it could happen. I would delight in sliding off into a different universe, a world of my creation. Where I have real influence. Not saying it won’t happen.
Maybe I cancel my subscription to the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post. Listen only to tech and philosophy podcasts. AI is a rabbit hole I can happily run down for hours at a time.
I could switch my sleep schedule, stay up only at night. Become, once again, an astronomy nerd. Invest in a fancy Celestron. Send my mind and heart out to distant galaxies.
And yet. I won’t. Perhaps I should. For the peace of my soul. But. I can’t. I will not look away. Will not say I did not know. Did nothing when they let insurrectionists, convicted seditionists go free. Did nothing when they came for programming aiming for a Federal Government whose employees come from all sectors of our population. Did nothing when they came for work to realize the Great Work: creating a sustainable human presence on Mother Earth. Did nothing when they came for the poor, the wretched yearning to be free. Those who believe so much more in the dream that is America than we can fathom. Did nothing when they came for the citizens made so by birth. As was I.
You might ask. What then will you do? I will bear witness. Though I can appreciate the opposing forces in our own body politic, I do not have to let sympathy, which is the best I can manage, cloud my judgment. And, I won’t.