Category Archives: Memories

Aging, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Memories, Minnesota, Shadow Mountain, Travel

75

February 20, 2022 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc and the 3/4 Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Kep. BJ and the basket of fruit. The J.O.E. family gathering: Johnson. Olson. Ellis. Sara and Annie. Jerry. Schecky. Turning 75. Rigel. Now appearing in Kate’s personal heaven. Prostate Cancer. Erleada, currently kicking my butt with fatigue, low stamina, and maybe increased high blood pressure. Orgovyx. Kristie. Tom. The draft horse. (He’ll know what this means.) Roxann. Her struggles. Mornings.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Therapy

50th High School Reunion, Alexandria, Ind. 64

Haven’t written about turning 75. Too caught up in the doggie drama of Rigel’s death. Still sad. Like Kate’s death though Rigel’s had been coming for months, maybe a year plus. She pushed past the endocarditis but it could well have ended her. Also like Kate I’m sad she’s gone, but relieved she can run free, all legs working, appetite restored. No angels are ever destroyed. They just change location.

Last Thursday evokes what it means to turn 75. Fellow ancient wayfarer Tom Crane was here, helping me ease past the shock of Rigel’s death. Marilyn Saltzman and Irv had called the day before.

Tom and I had breakfast at Aspen Perks. Talked about life, our 35 year plus relationship. We’re brothers. Yes. Now and forever. 75 would be barren without him, without those other ancient brothers I see every Sunday. Without the other Woolly Mammoths.

In my therapy session David Sanders identified three issues he heard from our initial session: emptiness, potential future relationships, and creative work. The emptiness is there and will remain for some time. It doesn’t scare me or feel abnormal. I’m not ready for a new relationship, may never be, but certainly not now. That put us at door number 3.

David asked me to send him a copy of a novel I’d written. I sent him the first 50 pages of Superior Wolf. He sent me some interesting work sheets to fill out. I’ve done that. We’ll talk next Thursday. With the simple act of sending him that material, the stuff I’d sent out to agents, I felt ready to get writing again. Very soon. Maybe this week.

Also, had some ideas about emptiness and the Tao. In Taoism emptiness is what makes certain things useful. The void in a cup. The space of a door or window. The interior of a car. The room inside four walls in a house. The inside of a refrigerator, dish-washer, cabinet. Made me wonder if grief is an emptiness that lets us see through it to a new life.

2016, second from right, back row. Stillwater, Minnesota

In a class with Rabbi Jamie a while back (well before Kate’s death) I wrote a poem that had this line: Death’s door opens both ways. Perhaps grief is that door. Perhaps that emptiness is the vessel into which we pour all the ingredients necessary for a new life to emerge.

Therapy over, I waited for an hour and headed over to Evergreen to meet my new doc, Kristine Gonzalez. As I said in an earlier post, what a delight she is. As David took my now 75 year old psyche under his care, she listened to me about prostate cancer, post-polio syndrome, high blood pressure, radiation induced proctitis, peripheral artery plaque. And said, “Just live until 90. I don’t see anything in your way.”

At On the Move Fitness an hour after this Deb got that body back up out of the chair and onto the tread mill and the mat. Put weights in my hands. Had me huffing and puffing.

That’s all a window into my status as a 75 year old man, walking his ancientrail.

Anoka County, Dogs, Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Great Wheel, Health, Judaism, Kabbalah, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Mussar, Our Land and Home, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Weather +Climate

Charlie’s Difficult, Wonderful Week

February 18, 2022 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc and the 3/4 Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Rigel. Her death. Kep. That hole in my heart. Tom. Here. Cannabis. Leah. Marilyn and Irv. Susan Marcus and Thoreau. Rich Levine. Dr. Palmini. VRCC. The new kitchen. The new furniture and lamp. Snow. A good bit. Stopped early morning. Plowed Black Mountain Drive. Bright Sun. Robin Egg’s Sky. White Lodgepoles and a white Black Mountain.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Rigel’s death. And, her life.

My life flows on in endless song,
above earth’s lamentation.
I catch the sweet, though far-off hymn
that hails a new creation. The Hymnary

Yes, it’s surprising, but this is how I feel. Eager for the new creation while sad about Rigel, about Kate, about the life that included them in the body. No, I’m not moving out of the present moment. I anticipate nothing. I regret nothing. I yearn for nothing.

Part of this equilibrium I have Tom Crane to thank for. He came here, to Shadow Mountain. And cousin Diane Keaton, my best person when Kate and I married. I speak with her once a week. Part of it has to do with the Great Wheel which has turned for Kate and Rigel and will one day turn for me. Part of it has do with the loving and loved members of Congregation Beth Evergreen and the Ancient Brothers. They hold me in a fine net of their care, mystic cords of love.

And, of course, part of it lies within me. One now turned toward the earth rather the heavens of the old three story universe. One reading the torah of mother nature, listening to midrash about her. Her oral torah loosed in the songs of birds, the bugling of the elk, the silence of snow falling.

Leaving now for breakfast with Tom. More in a while.

No, the deep sorrow has not left me. If someone says something kind about Kate or the conversation turns to death and dying, sometimes tears will press up, coming from a holy well of honor for her, for us. This will, I imagine, lessen over time. It did with my mother. It has with each of the dogs. Vega’s death took the longest to assimilate because she died suddenly and after we had been gone for four weeks.

Tom’s willingness to be here and his actual presence has, as my Jewish friends say of the deceased, been for a blessing. We know each other. Pain. Flaws. Joys. Anguish. Inner compasses aligned.

Kep and I have begun to negotiate life after Rigel. Just us boys. He comes up to the loft, but he’s not eager to stay. He likes to roam. Gertie would lie down on her bed, from time to time gaze up at me, and leave with reluctance.

Today is body-mind-spirit day. Breakfast with Tom. Therapy with David Sanders. Annual physical with Kristine Gonzalez. New workout with personal trainer, Deb Brown.

Did not finish this yesterday. So, I’ll just go on from here.

David Sanders called me an exceptionally intelligent person. Nice to hear. In these tough days a few compliments help. He also noted my breadth of knowledge. OK. Enough back patting. He convinced me to send him some of my work. I sent him the first fifty pages of Superior Wolf. And, I admitted that I probably had a book in me about the Great Wheel, tactile spirituality, the ur-religion. Feels like he moved the meter in my head back toward creative work.

Saw Kristine Gonzalez, my new primary care provider. What a delight! She loves taking care of folks over 65, listened to me, discussed my health with me like an adult. To my Bill Schmidt inspired question about what I needed to do to love (meant live, but this works, too) until I’m 90, she said, “Just do it. Your prostate cancer is under control. You should be able to.” A big sigh of relief to be in a smaller medical practice and with a competent, caring doc. I told her Kate would have liked her a lot.

Dave and Deb, owners of On the Move Fitness

Then, over to On the Move Fitness for a kick start to my workout routines which I’d let slide. Deb is the person who lost her husband David to glioblastoma in June of 2020 as the Covid pandemic began to wrap its coils around our lives. Dave and I bonded over cancer recurrences and now Deb and I have over grief. She gently guided me back to a new routine. Slowly, slowly.

By the time I got home I was exhausted. Called Tom and said so. He graciously agreed to let me rest. He’s coming here for breakfast before his board meeting, then we’ll probably head over to the Happy Camper. Might go to Scooter’s for lunch.

One of the upsides of all the angst this last year has been an immersion in love. Folks from all parts of my life from high school to college, family to friends, Minnesota to Colorado, Evergreen to Conifer, Judaism to Christianity have reached out, offered or given me support. It’s had the result I’ve needed. I’m not alone. I’m both needed and accepted as I am. Good to know at 75.

Asia, Astrology, Cooking, Dogs, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Health, Kabbalah, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science, Shadow Mountain, Tarot

Mind Blown

February 13, 2022 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc and the 3/4 Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Past lives. Near death experiences. Mystical experience. Reincarnation. Ode. Cooking. The meister chef, Tom. Cabbage and beef soup. Catfish. Chicken potpies. Rigel. Drinking. Ruth, so much better. Jon, too. Gabe, puzzling. My mind twisting round. The lamp, Ruth assembled. Swapping out coffee tables, the new one down here. The old one upstairs.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Reincarnation

Mind. Blown. Where to? Don’t know. That ship haha has sailed. Into the area of the map famously identified by: Here there be monsters. Or, angels. Or, Grandma. Or, the Otherworld.

My buddy, Ode, who has long insisted that reincarnation is a fact, long proven, as might a friend of both Terence and Dennis McKenna, has finally pushed me aboard the good ship Beyond. As most of the scientists in the video below claim, I don’t know where the ship has set sail for, nor how to interpret the evidence in a definitive way. But I’m aboard, maybe as a reluctant stowaway, but I want in on this journey.

No accidents. Not sure this idea and the idea of post mortem consciousness belong together; however, it is the case that for the last four years plus I’ve studied kabbalah, an ancient Jewish mystical philosophy that includes reincarnation as a reasonable and accepted part of its world (otherworld) view.

Astrology, too, as well. A brand of this even more ancient discipline called Evolutionary Astrology which presupposes reincarnation and strong hints about yours revealed by the nodes of the moon in your natal chart.

You might say, well, Kate’s dead so these ideas have more traction? Or, this is the day before your 75th birthday. What better time to throw on a sash that reads, Reincarnated! An escape hatch at last.

Those could influence me, I suppose, but all my life I’ve thought on my own, accepting ideas and rejecting ideas because they listen well in my inner chambers of judgment. Or, because they seem like nonsense. The video below listens well there.

An old and strong aspect of my thought could be called flat earth humanism, or as Ed in the video rightly calls it, physicalism. Materialism in its fancy philosophical dress clothes. Existentialist me, a Camus influenced college part of me, faced the darkness unafraid. Willing to make my own meaning. Living because I wanted to live, not because I had to and not because anyone told me how.

That Alexandria First Methodist guy, a young one, had some notion of the afterlife. My mother’s death at 47 took it to the grave along with her. Not fair. Not fair at all. Therefore neither just nor loving, both attributes of the one, the true, the mighty.

A while later I picked up the Christian mantle again and threw it over my shoulders, but this time I was not interested in the next world, but this one. How might we live here? Right here amidst war, the Vietnam War, economic injustice, racial and gender discrimination? I found answers in old Jewish notions of just kingship and a New Testament that demanded extension of love and compassion to the poorest and most despised among us.

Nowadays the Great Wheel, that pagan metaphor of life’s seasons, including the long fallow one in which we temperate folks find ourselves right now, guides my thinking. I can fold this post mortem idea into it.

This is a willed rejection of Wittgenstein in the Tractatus when he says: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. I shared this chivalric reticence, its honesty, for a long, long time. Now I feel it reveals fear rather than expressing a stoic truth.

Over the course of the next few years I plan to continue my study of kabbalah, astrology, and tarot. I ordered the three books of Edward Kelly. Gonna read them. I’m also reading two new anthropological books reassessing human development from physical, historical, and genetic perspectives. Taoism is in there, too.

The Rockies and the complicated textbook about life and change that they are teach me everyday. Pursuing these investigations because they interest me. I may have a book in there, some way of showing others how the natural world can teach us what we need to know about life, and now perhaps, death.

Gotta do something with this extra time the oncologists have given me. May as well be of some use.

And, happy birthday to me!

Anoka County, Beyond the Boundaries, Cooking, Dogs, Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, General, Health, Jefferson County, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, Tarot, The Move, The West, Weather +Climate

The Consolation of the Natural World

January 30, 2022 Charles 1 Comment

Yule and the Moon of the New Year, at 4% Crescent

The Webb in its L2 orbit:

“Telescope deployment is complete. Webb is now orbiting L2. Ongoing cooldown and eventual instrument turn-on, testing and calibration occur. Telescope mirror alignment and calibration also begin as temperatures fall within range and instruments are enabled.

The telescope and scientific instruments started to cool rapidly in the shade of the sunshield once it was deployed, but it will take several weeks for them to cool all the way down to stable operational temperatures. This cooldown will be carefully controlled with strategically-placed electric heater strips. The remaining five months of commissioning will be all about aligning the optics and calibrating the scientific instruments.” NASA

Monday gratefuls: Mental health care for teens. Jon’s care for Ruth yesterday. The tenderloin roast. Yumm. The blizzard in Maine. The cold in Minnesota. The mind numbing 45 degrees we had here today. Ode in Mexico. Peak TV. All the wonderful series on now. Righteous Gemstones. Pennyworth. Bulgasal. Hotel del Luna. Qin Empire. New Book-Becky Chamber’s, A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Life

Tarot:

Tom asked me this morning how I got along so well with prostate cancer. With grief. With living alone. OK, he didn’t ask those last two, but I figure he implied them.

When first diagnosed in May of 2015, six months after we moved to Colorado, cancer hit me hard. I sat there in Eigner’s office listening. Who me?

When I got in the car to drive back home, the first thought was: Don’t drive when in the grip of strong emotions. Oh. Yeah. Sat there for a minute wondering if it was a good idea to pull out of the parking lot. But. How am I gonna get home?

The mountains were still new to me then. Amazing me each time I went somewhere. Still true, yes, but then my amazement was new, too. I chose to drive back Deer Creek Canyon Road, a sort of back way from Littleton to Conifer.

Turning left about three miles north of the Denver Botanical Gardens, I began the trek up the site, millions of years ago, of the Rocky Mountain Orogeny. Rocky Cliffs rose from the Earth and the road began to climb as Cliffs and Streams and Boulders began to dominate. Colorado Blue Spruce, Ponderosa Pine, Lodgepole Pine. Aspen. A few Willows and Dogwoods along Deer Creek

Numb. Yes, numb. But then. These Mountains. The layer cake of their formations. One strata on top of another pushed up, up, up out of the Bedrock during the Laramid Orogeny, 80 to 55 million years ago. This Rock was ancient then, resting in place, awaiting the slow changes that come even to the seemingly obdurate.

These facts were fresh with me because, as is my way, I’d been reading a lot about the Rockies before and after our move. I like to know where I am. And how it got to be there.

Huh. It hit me. I’m such a Mayfly. Even my cancer is such a small thing. Big to my life, sure, but in the scope and sweep of these Mountains, Granite and Gneiss and Marble and Shale exposed after a long, long sleep. A sweep of the second hand.

As is also my way my Body went out to the Mountains, following them as I drove. Embracing them as teachers, as guides on this Planet we share. I gradually became calm, understanding that my life and the life of the Mountains are not separate, but joined. Now and forever.

There is a Great Wheel not wedded to the Seasons of temperate latitudes, but one wedded to the creation, life, and inevitable doom of this Rocky, Watery place we call home. I am part of that Great Wheel’s turning. As are each of you who read this.

Before what I have long called the Consolation of Deer Creek Canyon, I experienced the Consolation of the Great Anoka Sand Plain, the shore of the Glacial River Warren. There in Andover I planted, Kate weeded. Flowers and vegetables grew. Dogs ran here and there in the Woods. Bees flew in and out of the Gardens, the Orchard.

Each fall I would find Folk Alley radio on the internet, turn it up so I could hear on our small brick patio outside the lower level. There I would replenish the soil with compost and other nutrients. Digging out onto a tarp, then shoveling it back in. When that was finished I would open the boxes of Bulbs, Corms, and Tubers and Rhizomes. They would go in the Soil, with a bit of fertilizer, at the right depth, then get tucked in with a hard pat. Next Spring there would be Lilies, Tulips, Iris brightly signaling a new growing season.

I loved that work on those fall afternoons. I’d often hear the Andover Marching Band practicing. The Garden of course had its rhythms. It was finishing as I planted the perennial Flowers.

The Garden fed us all year. Fresh veggies, canned veggies. Fruits, too. Raspberries, Honey Crisp Apples. Plums. Cherries. The Bees gave us Honey.

The Garden was part of me and I, after the eating the produce and the Honey, was part of it. I call this the true transubstantiation.

In all Seasons I would hike to my Tree in the Boot Lake Scientific and Natural Area. I would sit with my back against it, looking at all of its Children who grew in an irregular circle around it. I sprinkled Tully’s ashes there. She was a sweetheart and I wanted to honor her.

I’ve gone on too long. The point is, I long ago found my place in the Natural World, its bounty, its death, its ongoingness. And as the Mountains along Deer Creek Canyon reminded me, that was and is enough.

Aging, Anoka County, Dogs, Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Garden, Great Wheel, Health, Judaism, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Our Land and Home, permaculture, Plants, Shadow Mountain, Tarot

Impermanence

January 15, 2022 Charles Leave a comment

Yule and the Moon of the New Year

Where’s the Webb? 791ooo miles from home. 108000 miles to L2 insertion. 88% of the way. .1769 mps. Sunshield: 131 F. Primary Mirror: -328 F.

Saturday gratefuls: Snow. Fresh and white. A friend’s Dog, cancer. The house changing, transforming. The Hermitage. Brown. Color. Kep’s abundant, luxuriant, always growing fur. The Mountains in Winter. The Lodgepoles with heavy bows. The Arcosanti bell has a white fairy cap. The outdoor table has a round, snowy table covering exactly its size. Medical Guardian. Uncertainty.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: The love we have for our Dogs. And the love they have for us.

Tarot: Page of Arrows, The Wren

A friend’s dog diagnosed with inoperable cancer. A friend on her third or fourth round of chemo for ovarian cancer. Kate dead. My own, more tractable cancer. Life. Then death. The way of the animate world. It says something about our need, our lust for permanence that disease followed by death exacts such a toll. But it does. Death is no more, no less prevalent than birth and life; but, it insults us, destroys our fabricated lives.

When the snow fell today, all day, as it hasn’t in a while, it covered the driveway, my solar panels, this Shadow Mountain. Even our daily views are impermanent, changing often in the temperate latitudes where I’ve lived all my life.

Ichi-go, ichi-e. Every moment, every encounter is once in a lifetime. The tea ceremony is a beautiful expression, a reminder of this oh, so important truth. Kate will never be here on this plane again. Unique and significant in her quick intelligence, her dry wit, her chesed, her love for me, for Jon, Ruth, Gabe. My friend’s dog, whom I’ve met many times, likewise. Stolid. Built low to the ground. Attentive, but mostly arranging himself near Rich. Each time I met him was a whole moment. Complete and wonderful. As was each day with Kate.

This summer my friend with ovarian cancer made home-made strawberry ice-cream and we shared it at a table in Mt. Falcon Park, near Morrison. We both had the brand of the impermanent burned into our bodies with blood draws, sleepless nights, worry, treatments. If we could, as the Buddhists I think recommend, lean into the impermanence, grant it the piquancy it brings, the poignance of ichi-go, ichi-e as a home truth, if we could, we might still mourn and grieve, but we might also find room to celebrate the passing of each once-in-a-lifetime instance.

Each spring in Andover plants would push up from the cold, cold Earth. The Grape Hyacinths, the Daffodils, the Crocus, the Anemones. The Spring Ephemerals. Those plants whose strategy is to store food during a burst of growth before Leaves on Trees and Bushes, taller Flowers block them out. Such a joyous, brilliant, hopeful life. Yet, brief. Ephemeral. Gone in a couple of weeks, three, four at the most.

Oh, how I miss those delights of the cold, wet days of late Winter, early Spring. I no longer miss caring for the Gardens, but I miss them nonetheless. Those gardens were an immersion, like foreign language immersion, in the ongoing lives of plants, in the dance of life and the inevitability of death. Each fall we composted the dead stalks that delivered food to the roots of vegetables and flowers. They had more to give even though they were now lifeless.

The Earth gives us daily lessons in impermanence, but we rationalize, smooth over, just don’t see them. I’m writing this now in the 10th month after Kate’s death. Her memory blesses me every day. Her lessons, the things she taught me. The same. I leave the door open on the washer so it won’t mildew. I trust my doctors. I love Judaism and the Jews that I know. Impermanence has permanently changed me.

Cooking, Dogs, Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Health, Jefferson County, Judaism, Memories, Minnesota, Our Land and Home, Science, Shadow Mountain, Tarot

That Small Town Feeling

January 5, 2022 Charles Leave a comment

Yule and the New Year Moon

Where is the Webb? 2/3rds of the way to L2! 597000 miles from Home. 302,000 to orbital insertion. Still slowing at .2964 mps. Secondary mirror deployment begins. Mission day 11. Full mirror deployment scheduled for mission day 15!

Wednesday gratefuls: Small towns. Stephanie. My urology referral. Evergreen. The breakfast burrito. Kep and Rigel. Bowe. The cabinets. Getting there. Grief. Mourning. Kate, always Kate. Yellow Irises in the new kitchen. Cold coming today. Snow. Snow rake here. Gonna use it today. Ruby, riding down the mountain and back up. A sweet ride.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Small town feeling.

Tarot-January spread, Health: Page of Arrows, the Wren.

“Wren urges us to be the sort of person who keeps the curiosity of youth, to be attentive to our surroundings, and ready to learn when the opportunity appears.

The Druids considered that the wren, the smallest bird, was the wisest. So, wrens remind us to listen.” wildwood book

Simple things that make me happy. Moved my doc to Conifer Medical Practice’s Evergreen location. So, so happy. I drive a familiar road, down Black Mountain Drive and then Brook Forest Drive to 73. Into Evergreen to Stagecoach Boulevard. Stephanie, the PA I saw today, was chatty, friendly, unguarded, knowledgeable.

Didn’t have go down the hill, into suburban Littleton to a bigger physician’s group. When I got done, I found a breakfast burrito and coffee at the same place I buy the occasional chili cheese dog on my way home from mussar.

I’ll still have to down the hill for my ophthalmologist and urologist, gastroenterologist. But those are occasional appointments.

When I see Jackie in Aspen Park, my hairstylist, I get the same feeling. She knows me. I know her. We both live up here.

Going to Congregation Beth Evergreen expands the number of folks I know who live up here, too: Alan. Marilyn and Irv. Michele and David. Rebecca. Rabbi Jamie. Luke. Ellen. Elizabeth. Rich. Tara.

When I worked on the West Bank in Minneapolis. Same. I got to know residents, business owners, street people. We said hi. Sometimes stopped to talk. Seeing and being seen.

When I create Shadow Mountain Hermitage, it’s a hermitage embedded in a nest of familiar places and people. Alone, but not lonely. Grieving, not mourning. Life without ennui or angst. Small town, rural life.

Some folks might feel suffocated in such a small circle of people. Not me. Feels just right. Family comes from time to time. Friends, too. It has the emotional quality for me as walking downtown in Alexandria, Indiana. Indiana as a state appalls me. Yes. But growing up in a small community where seeing and being seen was a gift freely and often unknowingly granted to everyone imprinted me.

I’m speaking for myself. You might be an urban guy or suburban gal. I’ve lived in both and know they both have terrific aspects. When it comes to where my heart feels best though. I’m living in it.

A real afterlife exists in the mailing lists and databases of companies and institutions. Kate continues to get mail. Now 9 months after her death. The most peculiar one was this one and it made me think Kate may have been paying attention to Moira:

The kitchen remodel grows closer and closer to the finish. Bowe put up cabinets, got water to my dishwasher. Brian still owes us two cabinets, a few doors, and shelving for installed cabinets. He did the take the China display cabinet I’ve been trying to get out of our downstairs since we moved in here. Fist pump!

When I stood in the kitchen after Bowe left, I did another fist pump. Even unfinished it made me feel energy, desire to cook there. I’m excited. The new, hybrid space has begun to emerge from plans, boxes, waits.

Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Garden, Health, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Tarot

Forest Lovers and the World Tree

December 28, 2021 Charles 1 Comment

Yule and the Moon of the Winter Solstice

Webb at L2, all deployed. Launch + 29.5 days

Where is the Webb? Three days and two hours into its flight. Still slowing at .6555 miles per second. 296000 miles from Earth and 603000 miles to L2 insertion. 33% of its path behind.

Tuesday gratefuls: The cold. Some new Snow. A clear blue Sky. Water, a true holy trinity: liquid, solid, gas. And that unique property, the solid is lighter than the liquid. Makes life possible. Think about it. The Webb, traveling toward home. Science. The unseen. Life. Other humans, near and far. Prostate cancer. Jodi. The new backsplash, brick-like tile. Caution. Slippery Mountain roads.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Jamie’s Road Trip

Tarot: The Year Spread

Was gonna get my blood work done today. Nope. Icy Shadow Mountain Drive. 285, not as bad, but not good. Moved my trip till tomorrow. I’m also getting shot #1 of the shingles vaccine. No, I don’t know why I’ve never gotten it.

I hope the Orgovyx has pushed my T-score, testosterone, further down, and my PSA to undetectable. I’d like to let go of thinking about this for at least a few more months. A little nervous, yes. These quarterly blood draws ratchet up the excitement. Will it be down or won’t it? Not as bad now as the ones a few months ago when I still thought I could be cured. Now it’s a numbers game. PSA down. All good. PSA up. New treatment time.

A friend, Jimmy Johnson, has a PSA of 9.4. His doctor said not to worry about it, he’d die of something else. He’s 80. Made me wonder if I can back off the treatments when I reach a certain age. Whether I’d be comfortable with that.

Jodi came yesterday. She brought tile samples, the brick veneer. This time we could look at them with the counter top in. Made choosing easier. Went with a buff-gray. She says she can get those by early next week. If Brian does deliver the cabinets this week, it means Bowe can finish next week.

The sink works fine. The dishwasher not so much. Since Bowe came on Christmas Eve morning to hook them up, I’m ok with waiting a bit longer for the dishwasher. Will buy paper plates and bowls. Wash pans and cutlery in the sink.

Usually have my window wide open at night. Had to close it. My down comforter and electric blanket couldn’t keep up with the chill breeze. 3 am.

Love Helje’s work. Sweet. Evocative of a hidden world. Wintry. Scandinavian.

With Kep and Rigel next to me I was a Rocky Mountain version of this print.

The year spread. I’ve discovered these spreads with more than three or four cards are hard to summarize. I’ll try to condense the surprising and upbeat feelings I had after pulling twelve cards, one for each month, and an additional card, the first one I drew, for the year’s energy.

Seven of Bows “This is the time to make decisions and select your priorities. Focus on what you really need in life and things that it’s time for you to drop and cut down, especially if it’s old and broken, no longer fulfilling your needs on a life journey.” Not hard to see how this energy will fill the entire next year.

Already underway with the kitchen remodel and the rest of the redecorating. What else in my life needs pruning? What needs to be added?

Other information from this spread: I’ll post these cards as the months change and comment them then, but I want to focus on two this morning, the cards for April, when Kate died, and August, when she was born.

The April card is the Forest Lovers, number 6 in the major arcana. The August card is the final card of the major arcana, The World Tree.

April

“The Forest Lovers represent balance in the relationship and the gender link between the two heterosexuals. This Wildwood Tarot card contains the love of nature for humans, of both the ecosystem and each individual. We are the mysterious fractions of the universe.”

We lived in Andover as the Forest Lovers, eager for Spring and the growing season. Now Kate stands hand in hand with my anima, the three of us around the birch with green life reaching up toward the Sky. Her death transformed her from a mate to a spiritual presence in my inner garden. We tend it together.

August

“As a symbol of the bridge of consciousness between the great universe in outer space and the small universe inside every human mind. The World Tree marks the end of The Wanderer’s trip and the starting point for another journey. The Wanderer began his journey around The Wheel with an innocent, passionate curiosity. It is the journey that has brought wise experiences, along with the gift of knowledge. Now, The Wander is taking the final steps along the path of the maze of life, entering the heart of The World Tree to become an integral whole with the cosmic memory.”

In the month of Kate’s birth, her 78th birthday, the Tarot deck offers both of us the completion of our journey together, one we lived as guardians of the earth and seekers of justice. I’m imagining my grieving will change in August of next year. A fullness, a celebration of our life together. She has gone through the small door in the World Tree as I will one day. We are physically separate, but spiritually one.

Enough for now. Look for the first card in the spread, The Ace of Bows, for January on Saturday.

Art and Culture, Fourth Phase, Humanities, Letters, Literature, Memories, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain

Book-Wrapt

December 26, 2021 Charles Leave a comment

Yule and the Moon of the Winter Solstice

Where is Webb? At this moment it is 157000 miles from Earth, 742,000 miles to its orbit, and cruising at a stately 1084 miles per second.

Sunday gratefuls: The Webb. 17% of the way to L2. Our white Christmas. The Power of the Dog. Whoa. Jane Campion. Microwave. Sink, working. Dishwasher, working. Heart, working. Kate, always Kate. Travel. Jon’s prints. Kep’s bounteous fur. Rigel’s pique. Termination Shock, Neil Stephenson. Finished. Barrow spread. Finished. New life. Begun.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: The Barrow Spread

Tarot: Winter Solstice spread. The Barrow. My question: How can I replenish my fire? A second post, today or tomorrow.

Book-wrapt. A new term invented by a neighbor of Toni Morrison’s, a computer scientist who wrote a book on private libraries. Reid Byers: The Private Library. As those of you who’ve seen my loft know, this topic has a personal interest to me. If you clicked through, you’ll know this is a pricey volume. Uncharacteristically, I didn’t buy it. Yet.

“Entering our library should feel like easing into a hot tub, strolling into a magic store, emerging into the orchestra pit, or entering a chamber of curiosities, the club, the circus, our cabin on an outbound yacht, the house of an old friend,” he writes. “It is a setting forth, and it is a coming back to center.”

Mr. Byers coined a term — “book-wrapt” — to describe the exhilarating comfort of a well-stocked library.” NYT, Dec. 24, 2021.

The loft is such a place. It’s not an architect designed space. It doesn’t have the coherence that a purpose built private library might, but it is book-wrapt. Book-full. Book-stacked. A book place. When I come up here, the world shrinks away and I’m in book world, thought world, the Other World of my lived existence. The house is This World where food gets cooked, sleep happens, dogs lounge. A sick wife got cared for.

I have often commented on the strength of Rigel and Kep’s support during my grieving. And, it’s so true. Something I’ve forgotten, or perhaps not recognized until this article, is the support of my library.

Libraries are my happy place. While in Seminary, I had a favorite carrel on the third floor of the library. It overlooked the Seminary grounds, Highway 694, and the forested land across the freeway to the north. My heartbeat slows down, my mind concentrates. I find flow in libraries.

Perhaps that’s the key to my version of a hermitage. In addition to housing the hermit on a mountain top, it also holds books and art, a place to create art, a place to sustain the body. A place to write. A place to read. The library, the loft, is on the grounds, but not of the house. It is its own place, space.

When the living room area gets finished, an Arts and Crafts feel should permeate the house.Without knowing why, that era of design gives me a feeling similar to being book-wrapt. Something about its rich colors, floral patterns, sharp-edged furniture, stained glass. Maybe it’s the Victorian evocation? The Bloomsbury group? Not sure, but I am trying for some level of integration between my book-wrapt space and the This World focus of the house.

Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Great Wheel, Holidays, Judaism, Kabbalah, Memories, Myth and Story, Plants, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Tarot

Hello, Darkness, My Old Friend

December 21, 2021 Charles Leave a comment

Yule and the Winter Solstice Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: My slab, all fabricated, comes home. Jodi and Blue Mountain Kitchens. Jon. Birthday dinner at the Black Hat tonight. The darkest, longest, deepest night. Yule. The Winter Solstice. First tarot reading. Max, growing.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Fabrication

Tarot: going to create my first Celtic holiday spread, a Winter Solstice one. I’ll report later. This is the first day in my year long study of the Wildwood deck in particular and Tarot in general.

The quartzite fabricator has met his schedule, bless him. He will be here today to put in my new counter top. This is the piece I chose, the more expensive one, because I didn’t want the next few years working on a counter top I’d settled for. Excited to see it in place. Coming around 9 or 10.

Brian, the cabinet maker? Not so much. Looks like the promise of my kitchen coming home by Christmas ain’t gonna happen. My friendly cynic Alan predicted this. I chose to believe. Sigh.

I have asked Jodi if she can have Bowe come and connect my new sink and dishwasher if we’re going past this week.

Jon and I will attempt a reprise of the birthday dinner. I’m looking forward to it. Black Hat Cattle Company. I’ve had great meals and horrible meals there. Hope this is a good one. Planning to try to get a better bead on how he’s doing, where he’s going. With the family in the picture I’m feeling easier about him and about us.

Did my first ever Tarot reading yesterday for Luke, the Executive Director of Beth Evergreen. The Tree of Life spread I learned from Mark Horn. It was both harder and easier than I had imagined.

Harder in that I kept wondering what I’d say next. Each card has its own meaning and that meaning has a link with the sephirot on which it falls. My knowledge of the cards is still very sketchy and my knowledge of kabbalah, though better, is very far from deep.

Easier in that I found I could go from the images on the card and my understanding of the sephirot to questions that brought a point of reflection home to Luke. I think I talked too much and knew too little. Other than that, I’d give myself an attaboy for the first reading.

The Winter Solstice. The beginning of Yule. It’s my favorite time of the year! Darkness. Gets a bad rap. The longest night is as important to our soul as the longest day is to our crops. I think of this day as the culmination of the promise made on September 29th, the Saint’s Day of the Archangel Michael: This is the springtime of the soul!

As the darkness and cold of winter offers us a chance to sit by the fire, get warm, read, dream, the longest night offers us a chance to go as deep as we can into the inner structure of our becoming. Yes. Of course. You can do so at other times; but this day, this night reminds us of how deep we can go, how much of our life happens in darkness occulted even to our own consciousness.

Since I left the Christian ministry in 1991, I’ve stayed steadfast against transcendence as a spiritual goal. It takes us up and out of ourselves, away from this reality, away from life. It also reinforces the idea of a three-story universe with good heaven, to be suffered through earth, and a bad hell. And, with the Roman Catholic hierarchy leading us toward heaven, it has reinforced the patriarchy of Western culture.

In rebelling against transcendence I chose to go down and in, rather than up and out for spiritual sustenance. I wanted to sanctify this world, this place that we know. Existence before essence. That meant I wanted to know what happened in the interior of my life, how it could inform my journey.

So happened that the Great Wheel came into my life at the same time. When I started to write novels, Kate suggested I find something close to me as subject matter. At the time I was learning about the Correls, my Irish ancestors from County Wicklow. I chose to look into the Celts, their history, their mythology, their religion.

I learned so much. The Faery Faith, by Edward Evans-Wentz, took me into the daily, seasonal lives of 19th century Celts still involved with the auld religion. The holidays like Beltane and Samain, Lughnasa. My first awareness of them from this exploration.

Then I discovered the Great Wheel. The expanded Celtic calendar of holidays that includes the solar holidays, equinoxes and solstices, with the cross-quarter holidays peculiar to the Celts: Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasa, and Samain.

The Great Wheel was the key that unlocked the door to my new spiritual path. It’s seasonal and I’m a Midwestern boy attuned to their changes as they relate to the agricultural year. The Great Wheel is an agricultural calendar so it matched my lived experience in the corn and beans belt of central Indiana.

Now, thirty years plus later, I’m growing beyond my rebellion against transcendence. I still don’t want or need its reinforcement of patriarchy, of hierarchy. But. Transcendence can place us in this interconnected web of evolution, a literally universal process happening both in us and outside of us. Transcendence can be the way we come out of the comfort of our own interior to interact with the ongoingness of all things.

The Summer Solstice, the longest day, the promise of the Sun’s energy delivered to plants so that our lives might be sustained, is the holiday of transcendence. A time when we go beyond ourselves, feel beyond ourselves. Live in the web aware of the web.

The Winter Solstice, the longest night, the promise of fecund darkness, of fallow times, of the life that gathers in the dark world of the top six inches of soil, reminds us of our precious particularity, our uniqueness, our once and only time. We go down, down into what Ira Progoff called the Inner Cathedral. We knit together our shadow, our unconscious, our consciousness, go down the inner Holy Well that connects each of us to the collective unconscious. We knit them together, see them for the whole, the distinctive pattern, that is our Self. It’s a both/and, our uniqueness and our can’t get away from it interconnectedness.

Gone on too long. Sorry about that. Can’t wait for night to fall. This night, this Holy, Sacred, Blessed night.

Dogs, Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Health, Judaism, Memories, Minnesota, Shadow Mountain, Tarot, Torah

Vayigash and Gaetanos

December 12, 2021 Charles Leave a comment

Samain and the waxing Winter Solstice Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Shabbat. The Morning Service. Rabbi Jamie and his grief. The Minyan. The Snow. The cold. Rigel and Kep try to understand the kitchen remodel. Jon. His long nap. Gabe. Ruth. Sarah and Annie. BJ. Tom. The Ancient Brothers and the gift. Herme. The kitchen. Lower Gas bill.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: A teachable moment. Maybe.

Tarot: Seven of Bows, clearance. wildwood

No chicken pot pies. Yep. Not at Conifer Safeway or the Evergreen Safeway. My favorite. Marie Callender. Confirmed this on the way home from CBE after the Shabbat morning service. Laying in a supply of frozen entrees as the kitchen remodel goes into a caesura while more cabinets get made and the quartzite fabricated.

Jews read, then reread, then reread, then reread the Torah, the first five books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. After Sukkot in the fall comes Simchat Torah, joy of the Torah. The reading of the five books ends, then picks up again at Bereshit, Genesis.

This is a qualitative difference between Judaism and Christianity. Christians parse up the “old testament” and the New. Often three short readings readings on a Sunday morning. The result, and I did it for years, is a disjointed sense of the scriptural narrative. The power lies in the hands of the liturgical calendar makers.

Even in progressive synagogues like Beth Evergreen a new parsha is read every Sabbath, in a regular sequence. Parsha’s are long. For example, the December tenth parsha was Genesis 47:28–50:26. Vayigash. The result of this reading and reading is to create a shared story, a shared mythology, a tradition that joins all Jews. Cain and Abel, Babel, the Reed Sea, Pharaoh, the Golden Calf, Mt. Sinai, the 631 mitzvot, Moses watching from Mt. Pisgah as others enter the promised land. Each character from Abraham to Aaron has a lesson or lessons to teach, not as dogma but as human choices made in contexts that we still find in our contemporary humanness.

The morning service which I attended yesterday had some wonderful and memorable moments. After six years I still have almost no Hebrew so the chanting and singing in Hebrew appeals to me as music mostly. Rabbi Jamie’s haunting chants take me to a deep place whether I read the English translation or not.

At one point a note suggested we think of a person who loves us and imagine ourselves loved by them. I chose Kate. It helped me. Seeing myself through her eyes gave me a sense of breadth to my life, a sense of what loyalty means to a woman betrayed, a sense of my possibilities as real, rather than hoped for.

Jamie talked about Tony Haas, his mother-in-law, her death last Sunday, the work she did in rural education policy. He lived with her and she died with him and the grandkids around her bed. His love and affection for her was clear, as was his sense of loss. Even 9 months later, today actually, that early grief is so present and available to me. I was with him and his family.

After my unsuccessful journey to the frozen food aisle, I drove back home, up the Snowy and Icy road. Going up is so much easier than going down in those conditions.

At 4:20, after feeding the dogs, I took off for Gaetano’s and Jon’s 53rd birthday dinner. Still feeling a little rough, but much better than Thursday night and Friday. Got there about 5:10 after a puzzling traffic delay on i-70 and surprisingly good memory about how to get to the restaurant without navigation aids.

Jon never came. Later he texted an apology. He had gone to sleep around 2 pm and didn’t wake up until 7 in spite of having set the alarm. His medications and illnesses have variable affects on him. This may have been one.

I had a nice meal on my own, testing something I had not realized I needed to. Eating a nice meal without Kate. I enjoyed the food, but the combination of her absence and the cacophony made me not want to repeat that anytime soon.

Same on the way home. I drove back up Brook Forest and Black Mountain. It was cold and there was snow on the ground. Returning from Evergreen at night in the first couple of weeks we were here. Kate and me. I reached over to her seat, held her hand for a while, felt sad.

It was good to get back home to Kep and Rigel, to the new life I’m making here on the mountain.

Seven of Bows

“This is the time to make decisions and select your priorities. Focus on what you really need in life and things that it’s time for you to drop and cut down, especially if it’s old and broken, no longer fulfilling your needs on a life journey.” The Wildwood book

This is my journey right now. Pruning. Reshaping relationships. Leaning into the good ones. Ameliorating the effects of the not so good ones. Remaking the physical space here. Refining my life over all.