• Category Archives Memories

  • Mountain Time

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    The Mountain Summer Moon

    Sunday gratefuls: The Ancient Brothers. Sleep. That nightmare with the undefeatable monster who kills everyone, enjoys it, and disappears at times. The Rockies. Gabe. Walking. RTD. My son and Seoah. Murdoch the languid. Bagel table yesterday. All Dogs. Everywhere. This benighted nation. The finished line. Blue Sky. Gentle Black Mountain.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: My Son

    One brief shining: We got here, let Rigel, Vega, and Kep out of the SUV after Tom’s marathon driving session from Andover to Shadow Mountain, the three Dogs ran around in the yard, peed, drank some Water, then ran right back to the SUV, jumped inside, and settled down for the ride home.

     

    Colorado has had many moments. The first one for me was that Samhain when I took possession of the house after closing. Walked out in the backyard. Three Mule Deer Bucks grazed quietly. I got closer to them than I would now, looked in their eyes. They looked back. By the time they turned and bounded away, I had the feeling that the Mountains had welcomed me, saying I belonged here.

    Acclimating to the altitude. While unpacking. Left Kate and me huffing and puffing. That one day in May the next year when I learned I had prostate cancer. The consolation of Deer Creek Canyon that followed. Prostatectomy in July of the same year. First time meeting Seoah.

    Finding CBE through the class on King David taught by Bonnie. Meeting Marilyn and Tara there.

    Doing the Fire mitigation, felling Lodgepoles with blue plastic ribbon tied to their trunk. The Durango/Mesa Verde trip with Paul, Tom, Ode.

    My son and Seoah getting married in Gwangu. Kate and mine’s last big trip together. Including Singapore and Mary’s kind gift of a stay in a hotel suite. The magic of Umar. Vega dying when we got home. Jon’s divorce. His decline starting.

    Cancer returning. Radiation. Buying Ruby for the A.C. while I drove to Lone Tree. Kate’s slow decline starting.

    Seoah coming in January to help out, having to stay until June. The pandemic. Gertie dying.

    Kate’s many hospitalizations. Her joyful time at CBE, living her Jewish life. Her death.

    Mourning and grief. Jon’s death.

    Somewhere in this time the start of the Ancient Brothers.

    Three years of visits to my son and Seoah in Hawai’i, then Korea after Kate died.

    Rigel’s death and Kepler’s death.

    The Elk Bull looked at me from within the Forest. In the rain. And the Mule Deer looking in my bedroom window late at night.

    My conversion and time overall at CBE.

    Trip to San Francisco.

    Now three years plus after Kate’s death, prostate cancer becoming more serious.

    Through all of this. The Rockies. Black Mountain. Shadow Mountain. Conifer Mountain. Bergen Mountain. Kate’s Creek and Valley. The Wild Neighbors. Black Bears. Elk. Mule Deer. Mountain Lions. Squirrels, Red and Abert’s. Marmosets. Chipmunks. Voles. Fox. Bobcat. Lynx. Rabbits. Rattle Snakes. Bull Snakes. Black Widow Spiders. Wolf Spiders. Maxwell Creek. Cub Creek. Upper Bear Creek. Bear Creek. Lake Evergreen. Evergreen, a Mountain town.


    Colorado Jefferson County Memories Mountains Plants Shadow Mountain Wild Neighbors

  • Fool’s journeys

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    The Mountain Summer Moon

    Wednesday gratefuls: Ruth and Gabe. 202 Thai. Maximalist decor. Going off to college with all its attendant worries and excitements. All first year students everywhere. Apical dominance. Phytochromes. New translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Ruth

    One brief shining: She sat on the William Morris reupholstery fabric she had helped me pick out, alert and sensitive as we talked of her upcoming time in Boulder at the University of Colorado, my heart lifted up and up as she spoke of duvets, meal plans, registration, the three person dorm room in Willville, anxiety and excitement mixing in that stew of I want to be on my own but I’d prefer it be at home.

     

    Ruth and Gabe have come up to the Mountains for three days. Cooler here. 102 in Denver on Friday. Ouch! 9 plus years they’ve come up to this house on Shadow Mountain. They both love it here. Lots of memories. Thanksgivings. Hanukahs. Birthdays. Overnights. Dogs. Grandma. Their Dad. Now time with me and the Mountain, the Mountains.

    This time has a different feel for several reasons. The most obvious being Ruth’s impending matriculation at UofC Boulder. She will no longer be down the Hill in Denver on Galena after August 20th. She moves to a dorm room in Williams Village East. Here’s a promo look. Oh, the anticipation.

    Williams houses first year students and returning engineering majors. Gee. How bout that Tom. Bill. Helen. Veronica. Ruth with all the budding builders of bridges, designers of safer propane tanks, forensic investigators of all sorts. Not to mention rocket scientists and managers of nuclear energy plants.

    Ruth and I share a trauma. Both of us had to leave home, make that big transition without one of our parents. Their deaths still fresh in memory. Unresolved issues with the parent at home. The dead parent the one who supported us, loved our uniqueness.

    I still remember the nightmares, the wobbly self-esteem, the feeling of working the trapeze without a net. I was not alone, Dad, Mary, and Mark came to see me. Reassure me. But my lived experience was of abandonment.

    Too, though, I also remember the first philosophy class, J. Harry Cotton smoking his paper wrapped plug of tobacco in a curved pipe. My mind undergoing the peculiar dismantling that only a good philosophy professor can enable. I fell in love with philosophy, a discipline that has, more than any other, defined my approach to life and thought.

    And Contemporary Civilization, or C.C. as it was widely known. A required course for all freshman. Yes, freshman remains correct. All male Wabash. In C.C. the broad sweep of history, well, to be fair, Western history, came alive. Though I would never be a history major, from that point on I took critical thinking and historical context as essential to good decision making, to life.

    What I’m saying here is that life is always polyvalent. Yes, I was in deep psychic pain around Mom’s death, about arguments with Dad, about my now muddled future. Yes, I found the life of the mind, a love affair that continues to this day. It was the beginning of a Fool’s journey.


    Family Feelings Memories

  • I’ve seen Fire and I’ve seen Rain

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer and the Bar Mitzvah Moon

    Sunday gratefuls: Shabbat. Leo. Luke in Jacksonville. Ginny and Janice. The Blackbird. Kittredge. In case of flash flood climb to safety. Black Mountain Drive to Brook Forest Drive. Down the hill to Evergreen. Passing a green Arapaho National Forest. Full Streams thanks to recent Rain. Seeing individual Trees like the Ponderosa growing alone on the side of a Cliff.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Rain

    One brief shining: Leo sleeps on the rug next to the computer, dreaming of Luke and bones and tennis balls with squeakers in them while I hit first this key then that, glancing up to spend a bit of time with my Lodgepole Companion, looking past them to Black Mountain and beyond to the milky gray of a Cloud resting above it, wondering if that means yet more Rain.

     

    We have had Rain. Seems like more than average though I can’t find data to support that. Hoping for a healthy Monsoon season which usually starts in July. Afternoon Rains. Whatever combination of precipitation types that keep our wildfire risk low.

    The Cloudy weather we’ve had on occasion over the last couple of weeks reminded me of an early problem I had with Colorado. Too many Sunny days. I missed good ole Midwestern gloomy, overcast weather. Weather that meant I needed to stay inside. Read. Write. Cook. Sunny days meant I needed to be outside, enjoying the limited moments of great weather. Which meant. I constantly felt like I needed to go outside, not dither around inside. So much so that I longed for a stormy week loaded with Thunderheads and pelting rain.

    Over that now. Except. When it’s Cloudy and Rainy. Then I revert to Midwest nostalgia, remembering Rainy days curled up in a chair reading. The world of the moment subsumed by the world of the text.

     

    Just a moment: Yeah. He should step away. Too much confirmation of stereotypes and GOP talking points about his capacity. Yes, I believe he can still do the job. But I don’t see him or Democratic chances in November recovering from the debate debacle. We need to win this election. It matters and we all know it. If Biden can’t win, we need someone who can.

     

    Friend Tom Crane found this. It had a profound affect on me as I watched it.

    “About 12 seconds into this video, something unusual happens. The Earth begins to rise. Never seen by humans before, the rise of the Earth over the limb of the Moon occurred about 55.5 years ago and surprised and amazed the crew of Apollo 8. The crew immediately scrambled to take still images of the stunning vista caused by Apollo 8‘s orbit around the Moon. The featured video is a modern reconstruction of the event as it would have looked were it recorded with a modern movie camera…”  Astronomy Picture of the Day


    Memories Minnesota Politics Science US History Weather +Climate

  • New Harmony. Fireflies.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer and the Bar Mitzvah Moon

    Shabbat gratefuls: The Billy Joel/Paul Simon shabbat. Veronica. Tom. Paul. Joan. Irv. Kaddish. Yahrzeits. Numbers. Parsha Beha’alotcha. Lisa. The James Webb. The Hubble. Euclid. The context provided by the Cosmos. Storm Before the Calm. Election year 2024. The June 22, 2024 life. Mezuzahs. Orion. Betelgeuse. Rigel. Vega. Polaris. Arcturus.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Our magnificent, short, wonderful life

    One brief shining: Each summer the ceiling fan in my bedroom makes sleep possible, yet it refused to turn on, so I called Altitude Electric who sent hipster bearded Karsten; no bueno, no bueno, he said to the work of the previous electrician who installed this fan, as he pulled its main body out of the ceiling and sparks flew, tripping the breaker.

     

    Home. This and that. Ceiling fan that doesn’t work. Grass needed cutting for Fire mitigation. Marina calling to ask how my roof was doing. Mini-split filters need cleaning. You know.

     

    Rappite Buildings, New Harmony***

    On some long ago trip back to Indiana I made a brief stop in New Harmony. It sits north of Evansville in the far southern part of the state and far enough west to be on the Wabash River with Illinois on the opposite bank.

    Whoa. What a place. Founded by Rappites, followers of a German Christian theosophist* and pietist, George Rapp, the Harmonist Society created three model communities, two in Pennsylvania and one in Indiana, now New Harmony. They held goods in common and were so successful in their business endeavors that Rapp sold Harmony, Indiana to Robert Owen, a Welsh industrialist. Rapp felt their secular success was compromising their religious mission.

    Rapp moved the Harmonists back to Pennsylvania while Owen found a number of scientists, artists and educators who left Philadelphia on a riverboat, bound for New Harmony. It became known as the Boatload of Knowledge. Owen was a utopian who wanted to create a socialist society in his New Harmony experiment. The experiment failed, but not before the United States Geological Survey was founded.

    Roofless church gate

    In its latter day existence New Harmony has become a conference center, an open air museum with buildings from the Rapp and Owen eras preserved. It includes, too, a large labyrinth created by the Harmonists.

    Phillip Johnson’s roofless church, a non-denominational walled compound, stands across the street from the Red Geranium Restaurant. Behind the Red Geranium lies Paul Tillich Park, the burial site of one of the twentieth centuries most prominent Christian theologians.

    There is a short street that runs between the roofless church and Paul Tillich Park. One evening on a subsequent visit to New Harmony I left the Red Geranium at dusk after a tasty dinner. Strolling I went into Paul Tillich Park, read some of the inscribed boulders, left the Park and continued down the road. It didn’t go much further until it entered a grove of Maple and Oak and Beech Trees which arched over it.

    Tillich Grave Site

    Fireflies. Thousands of them. Lit the arched space over the road, giving it depth and wonder. My then immersion into Celtic lore meant I could only see this as an entrance to the Otherworld. Walking towards the grove, I imagined myself coming out in Faery where time passes differently and returning years later to a changed New Harmony.

    Instead I chose to stop and enjoy this amazing sight.

     

     

     

    *Christian theosophy, also known as Boehmian theosophy and theosophy, refers to a range of positions within Christianity that focus on the attainment of direct, unmediated knowledge of the nature of divinity and the origin and purpose of the universe. Wiki

    **Philadelphia Academy of Sciences…President William Maclure, “father of American geology,” had gathered (members of the Academy) them all aboard the keelboat Philantropist [they used the French spelling]: scientists, artists, musicians, and educators, some bringing along their students, and all were eager to settle in Robert Owen’s New Harmony community on the Indiana frontier. JSTOR

    ***By Leepaxton at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9065488

     

     


    Feelings Fourth Phase Great Wheel Memories US History

  • Teshuva. Bar Mitzvah. Earth Rise.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane and the Bar Mitzvah Moon

    Shabbat: Shavuot. Moses. Torah. Rain. My Lodgepole Companion. Great Sol. Photosynthesis. Chlorophyll. Trees. Ruth and Gabe. Tom and Paul. Joanne. Clouds. The West. Less than 20 inches of Rain a year. Climate change. The Great Work. The Great Wheel. Shekinah. The Sabbath Bride. Caitlin Clark. Angela Reese. Sports. Election 2024. Reading

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Narrow mind, spacious mind

    One brief shining: Fear leaked out of some antediluvian part of my subconscious, reminding me with the certainty born of angst and nail-biting that no you can not sing, you can not chant, you will never learn the Hebrew, you are not able to, remember that time, what time, oh you know that time.

     

    Still turning over the toxic combination of cabin fever, melancholy, and little boy acculturation. It had me. For maybe March and April. Did not lift until I rode the train to San Francisco and back. Finally, like a dog shaking off water after a swim, I woke up.

    Teshuva accomplished. I had returned to the confident, can do it Self. The one I had moved away from in a subtle way, missing the mark of who I really am. This is a constant cycle for most of us. Forget, Turn away. Sink down. Somehow submerge the gift that you are to this world. Then, a moment of felt love, of self compassion, of changing perspectives and there. you. are. Welcome home prodigal Self. Here is a feast for you!

    Perhaps today is a teshuvah day for you.

     

    Practice for the Bar Mitzvah. This morning at ten. A run through for us all. The whole morning service. After meeting with Rabbi Jamie on Thursday, I now know what my parts are. And I’m able to handle them.

    I have a couple of introductions to make. One to the Mah Tovu. A prayer said on entering the sanctuary. It was a lesson about the Mah Tovu that prompted my conversion. I’ll read it in the transliterated Hebrew. The second to the Shema. The daily prayer said on rising and on going to bed. Also the prayer said when you are dying. Each mezzuzah contains the text of the Shema. Here’s one way of saying it in English:

    Hear, God-Wrestler. What was/what is/what will be is God. What was/what is/what will be is one.

    The four of us: Veronica, Kat, Lauren, and I will read two stanzas each of a Marge Piercy poem. I will read Psalm 118 as translated by Rabbi Jamie and another poem of my choosing.

    I’m glad for the practice. I need a rehearsal. Going to wear my new clothes from Bonobo’s. Why I bought them.

     

    Just a moment: Bill Anders is dead. Who, you may ask, is Bill Anders? An astronaut who took a photograph during the Apollo 8 mission. This is the photograph:


    Feelings Fourth Phase Hebrew Judaism Memories Science Travel

  • Memorial Day

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane and the Shadow Mountain Moon

    Monday gratefuls: Cool night. Memorial Day. Decoration Day. Parades. School’s over and summer starts. The World. Its many Wild Neighbors. Mountains. Lakes. Ponds. Tides. Tidal Pools. Forests. Trees. Plains. Rivers. Streams. Creeks. Meadows. Valleys. Cultures. Long evolution. Its oneness. Its holiness. Its sacred nature. Our Hullian needs. Our need for fulfillment and satisfaction.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Warriors

    One brief shining: Those parades when heat softened the asphalt on Harrison Street so it could accept treads laid down by the tank from the National Guard Armory, when the guys carrying the colors insisted on wearing their old uniforms, pale stretched skin showing where the buttons held, only just, when last year’s homecoming queen sat prim and straight on the folded convertible top of an impeccably restored 1957 Chevy, when we would stand along the parade route enthralled.

     

    Memorial day. Mom and Dad. Veterans of WWII. Uncle Riley, too. That generation that gave so much. War. A human horror engaged too often for too little reason. Though WWII was not one of those. To have had that great world spasm followed by the never finished Korean War and the unnecessary Vietnam War, then Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya has sullied the warrior class, making them too often pawns of geopolitical maneuvering by oligarchs, dictators, and short sighted politicians.

    Yet. They persist. Often frustrated and hemmed in by those who misunderstand their role. As I once did. Warriors and priests. Old, old roles in human cultures around the globe. Both often abused. Both in my immediate family.

    Easy to forget the purpose of the Lt. Col. who is my son. The USAF. Defense. Not offense. Oaths taken to defend the U.S. against all enemies domestic and foreign. Obedience to civilian authority delivered through the Commander in Chief, the President.

    The military does not define who the enemies are. That’s a civilian responsibility. Often lacking in both reason and ethical justification, yes. But it is the civilian authority who aims and then empowers our military. Only then can they engage.

    Warriors place themselves in harms way to defend their tribe, their people, their nation. This is an ancient and honorable role. Indigenous people in the U.S., in spite of their history, sign up in disproportionate numbers because the warrior class holds such high esteem in their cultures.

    Yes, war is terrible and often, perhaps most often, wrong. That is, engaged not for defense but for seizing land, control of another people, for vengeance. For reasons of profit and misguided fears. For this last think the domino effect.

    The warriors themselves continue on. Learning, training, readying themselves for what might be, for what even they hope may never be. Yet when called they will respond and respond with all that they have.

    I’m not thrilled to have a warrior son. Though I recognize the selflessness of his choice. And the values which led him to choose service to country. I wish he could have become a social worker, a lawyer, a physician. He was pre-med before turning to the Air Force after 9/11.

    Yet over the years I’ve come to appreciate the sacrifice in life-style, income, and personal freedom. I’ve met many of his colleagues and to a person they are warriors, too. Global politics are anarchic and still ruled by might makes right in the minds of many. We need a military, citizens willing to defend us.

    They are who we honor today. Especially those who died as a result of their service.

    All year after the parade we would drive over those tank treads, hardened into a feature of our main street. The slight rumble would remind us.


    Family Feelings Fourth Phase Friends Holidays Memories US History

  • Old Self Surfaces

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane and the Shadow Mountain Moon

    Sunday gratefuls: Ancient Brothers. Socrates Cafe. Irv. A cool night for sleeping. Candles. Rituals. Sabbath. Writing. Hanukah. Yahrzeit. Kate, always Kate. Politics. Justice. A just society. Could happen. My Lodgepole Companion waving their Branches, soaking up Great Sol. Presidents. Politicians. Self-driving cars. Teslas. Electric cars. The old kind. Change.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Electric cars

    One brief shining: Whoo, boy, every once in a while I put my foot in and forget to take it right back out, like yesterday at the Socrates Cafe when I, much to my surprise, felt a need to defend the reality of injustice and collective effort to remedy it, not my best foot to put in for the first time I showed up in person.

     

    Underneath it all I’m still a pretty unreconstructed ’60’s radical. The establishment has the power, oligarchs and millionaire politicians make policy that fits their needs and fail to address the systemic nature of racism, sexism, classism, ageism, and the Great Work itself. The only way to alter systemic problems lies in the realm of politics, something even the MAGA folks seem to intuit. But not the folks at the Socrates Cafe.

    This self, this radical self, mostly lies quiet these polarized days. Painfully gained higher emotional intelligence signals me when a situation will not be made better by my political analysis. And they are many. Something I often failed to notice in my working days. Yesterday though.

    All my mussar work, all my realization of appropriate venues for political discourse got shunted aside when the majority of folks in the group took up the position that there is no such thing as right or wrong, justice is always personal and contextual, by which they seemed to mean relative to a specific, interpersonal situation.

    I’m not used to having to defend the fact of injustice. Skin color for some was irrelevant. (Everybody was white.) It’s not possible to know the positive or negative effect of remedying injustice. (I have some empathy for this perspective, yet it’s an action killer.) Slavery didn’t matter. There was just nothing you could do unless you did it personally.

    Acting justly in interpersonal situations? Of course. A minimum as far I’m concerned. Yet. Imagining that even the golden rule will change systemic, historical imbalances in our culture is naive at best and a form of denial at worst.

    These folks all knew each other and have been doing this Socratic cafe twice a month since 2003. Afraid I violated their group norms. Didn’t mean to. But justice is a flash point issue for me.

    All began because my question was chosen. The method is this: whoever has a question writes it in on an index card and turns it in. Jannel reads the questions through once. Then, the one who wrote the question explains how they came to it. After those explanations, yesterday there were six submitted questions, a show of hands votes each question up or down. 15 people in attendance. My question was: Is a just society possible? The consensus, btw, was a resounding no.


    Feelings Fourth Phase Friends Memories Politics US History

  • Cookin’

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane and the Shadow Mountain Moon

    Friday gratefuls: Irv. Tom. The Ancient Brothers. Rabbi Jamie. The hidden me. Great Sol ablaze in morning glory. Kate, always Kate. Her Creek and her Valley. Kep, my sweet boy. The Redwoods. Bechira points. A long Pause. This Jewish life. Tara. Luke. Rebecca. Ginny and Janice. Back among my peeps. Alan and Joan this morning. Friendships. Music.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: a Pause

    One brief shining: Driving down the hill toward Evergreen, Black Mountain Drive becomes Brook Forest Drive, a couple of miles after what used to be the Brook Forest Inn a shallow cutout, good for maybe two or three vehicles, provides parking for a short Valley with a small Mountain Stream carving its way through, White Pines and Ponderosas, Wild Rose and Wild Strawberry and Wild Raspberry grown along its banks and up the steep Valley sides, this is Kate’s Creek running through Kate’s Valley, where her last physical remains began their journey to the World Ocean.

     

    Yesterday was session ten of ten conversion sessions with Rabbi Jamie. I will miss these. My Rabbi. There’s a phrase I would not have expected to come out of my mouth. Ever. Yet now I can’t imagine life without Rabbi Jamie in it. He’s a backstop. A validator. A friend. A guide.

    He opened me up again yesterday. I shared my guilt. Jewish guilt? About being a hermit by preference these days. Not wanting to engage politically. Or in any way really that’s not personal. As he often does, he went to what appeared to be tangent.

    “I researched creativity a couple of years ago. Prepping for a Kabbalah Experience class. I learned then that a creative block, or Pause, can be long. And you never know how long.”

    I had used a string of phrases: Not over, Not finished, Not complete, Not done to describe how I felt about my life. While affirming my joy at being alone within a crowd of friends.

    Slowly. Oh. I see. Kate’s illness intensifying in mid-2019. Her long, slow decline. Covid. Her death. Grief. Going this way into redecorating the house, that way into moving to Hawai’i, over there to empty the house of stuff, adjusting to my son and Seoah living so far away, taking the plunge into the mikveh and my year of living Jewishly. The trip to Korea and my back’s emergence as a limit. Feeling overtaken, if not overwhelmed, by all the learning, the focus required for conversion and my bar mitzvah. The trip to San Francisco.

    Like a caterpillar in its chrysalis, an imaginal self reorganizes for renewal, reemergence. Its container the years of a   whole life-lived experience, vital nutrient for a transformed nefesh. This paused version of me lives day to day. Happy. Joyful. Yet unfocused. Unlike the Great Southern Brood I have no 13 year clock ticking; the timing is uncertain. This Pause. A moment. Now five years or so in length.

    So freeing. So liberating. As Rabbi Shapiro said (I think.), “It’s all about freedom.”

     

     


    Family Feelings Fourth Phase Judaism Memories Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

  • Back

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane and the Shadow Mountain Moon

    Wednesday gratefuls: Shirley Waste. San Francisco. Waymo. Ruby. Kate, her Creek and Valley. Ruth, the graduate. Gabe. Jen. Sarah. Mia. Mia’s mother. Kep. His yahrzeit last month. A foggy cap on Black Mountain. Blue Sky above. Must be cloudy to the east. Great Sol. Muted. See’s chocolate. Michael Strassfield. His 3rd Jewish catalog. Mary in Melbourne. Guru.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Fog

    One brief shining: This morning Fog creeps down Black Mountain obscuring its view from my window, the Lodgepoles have a mysterious, shrouded, yet also illuminated look, the interplay of Great Sol and the dewpoint, which my in-home scientist, Kate, explained to me so I understood.

     

    Kate was so quick with math, with scientific knowledge, and medical knowledge of course. She could explain difficult ideas so I could understand them. I miss that part of our relationship. Along with many others. She was also my cooking consultant. My cribbage partner. Traveling companion. Garden planning and maintaining co-worker. Dog lover. Bee work assistant. Grandparent and parent. Most of all, a soulmate whose life meant as much to me as my own.

    In this photograph, taken in Songtan, Kate’s continuing her three years of work on a counted cross-stitch I bought for her in Washington, D.C. It says Love is Enough. Hangs in my lower level now. Also had t-shirts made with a print of it for her birthday celebration the year she died. An amazing woman on so many levels.

     

    Weird, looking back over the last two or three months. It’s like there was a shroud over my sense of self. I felt overwhelmed by the work for my conversion and bar mitzvah. Enough that I had real anxiety about it. Something I’m free of most of the time these days. I also reached into my bag of oh what a bad boy am I memories and ongoing concerns. Especially health and aging wise. Nope. You’re no longer able to take care of the house. Of feeding yourself. Too lazy. Too weak. Too inattentive. The back. Ouch. I’ll never travel again. That food poisoning. Showed how weak I am. Cancer. PSA blood draw yesterday. Probably mets everywhere. I’m in my tenth year after all.

    Gosh. Gee whiz. How am I able to get up in the morning?

    Then, much like the Fog slowly burning off Black Mountain as I write, the shroud faded away and I found myself back. Exercising. Confident about my daily life. My Torah portion down. Learning parts of the Morning Service that I can offer as my contribution on June 12th. Reaching back out from myself toward others.

    Another thing. My trip now has a golden memory. Gone are the stretches where my back taught me its lessons. Gone is the lingering emotional and physical residue of the food poisoning. Left in their place are time at the Asian Museum. The Redwoods. Japantown. Buying chocolate at See’s. Laughing and eating with Diane. Meals at Sears Fine Food and nights at the Chancellor Hotel.

    Why did this change occur? I think it was the trip. I needed a break from the seriousness that had become life. I needed some fun. A lesson in there. I’m pretty sure.

     


    Family Feelings Fourth Phase Health Memories Travel

  • This time for Ruth

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane and the Shadow Mountain Moon

    Tuesday gratefuls: Sky. Earth. Mountain. Stream. Deer. Dog. Elk. Moose. Bear. Mountain Lion. Fire. River. Lake. North. South. East. West. Life. Rock. Rain. Snow. The elementals. Joy. Sadness. Grief. Mourning. Feelin’ Good. Contemplative. Peaceful. Calm. Anxious. One. Echad. Bees. Honey. Kate. The Journey. Ancientrails. Writing. Living.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Awakening

    One brief shining: Each morning I wake up under the Sky, my home resting on Shadow Mountain not far from the headwaters of Maxwell Creek which flows full and strong right now, joining in this new life all those who will pray at least once during the day to whatever Gods may be that Fire will once again withhold itself from the Forest, leaving us to cook breakfast and wash our floors.

     

    Age 9

    Let me tell you. It was 1965, another century, another millennia. May. The end of high school. For me. 59 years later it’s May. The end of high school. This time for Ruth. Who I held as a baby. Who declared to me at age 3, on a shuttle bus to the Stock Show, that, “I want my mommy!” One whose entire life, like her Uncle’s, my son, I have seen reach this point. This time for Ruth.

    This Saturday. At Denver University stadium. The Northfield High School class of 2024. She will be there engowned and under a mortar board as so many of us have done so many times. Taking what may be in some ways the biggest step away of her young life, from public education, from childhood, from home.

    Do you remember? The eagerness. The fear. The ancientrail of adult life stretching out before you, unknown for the most part. So wanted. Yet so uncertain. Would I be good enough? Strong enough? Enough? Yearning to break free from the known constraints of childhood. To live into the arms of your Self and its future.

    Sure, there’s a path ahead for some of us. College. That factory job. Apprenticeship. But it is a path so far untrodden, so far innocent of our effort, our strength, our resolve.

    Ruth’s feet. Her art. Her hopes. Her memories of her dad. Of her struggles. That backpack filled with the detritus of divorce, death, anguish. Heavy on her back. Her path. She goes off to college carrying that backpack, perhaps at times slumped over because of its weight, at other points, hopefully more and more often as time goes on, buoyed up by her ability to have weathered its burden and chosen life.

    Her grandma. Her dad. Her dead. Will walk with her. Will receive her diploma, too. Will smile and their hearts will swell with pride. As will her mom’s. Mine. Most important of all, her own.

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    Family Feelings Fourth Phase Memories