Category Archives: World History

Ancient Brothers, Family, Fourth Phase, Friends, Politics, US History, World History

Holding Opposites

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Imbolc and the Moon of Tides

Monday gratefuls: Ancient Brothers. Shadow, my downward dog. Iran. Israel. U.S. Gaza. Hezbollah. A cool, dark morning.

Rene Good. Alex Pretti. Say their names.

Sparks of Joy and Awe:  The Deep Blue Sea

 

Week Kavannah:   Shleimut.   The alignment of the inner self with outer actions, bringing a sense of completeness to life.

 

Tarot: Three of Bows, fulfillment       Teshuva, alignment between neshama and the Self, a power that flows through me.

One brief shining: Fulfillment. Satisfaction. Not happiness. Joy in writing with more precision. Nouns. Fragments. Revising, a process with which I still struggle. My Shadow life. My Ancient Brothers life. My Jewish life. Engaged with Iran and with Mark, close by in Hafar.

 

Painful. To see Iran and my Ancient Brothers. The same day. Mary, down under. Joe and Seoah far away. Mark far away from me but near war. Grocery shopping and day care. A man pets his dog. While death races along the streets of Tehran. The One, yes, but. Pain and love, together again. Always.

A danger. Exhaustion from the steady, too steady beats of killing, of government acting in Iran and not acting at home. Epstein files. Rising health insurance costs while medical care disappears. Hospitals close. Cost of living rises. The cost of war.

So easy to turn away from accelerating drought in the Rockies. From those who need the Mountain Resource Center. ECHO’s food bank. Easier to launch Cruise missiles, Tomahawks. Drop bombs.

Ruth coming up to make me breakfast. Her specialty, French toast. This Saturday morning. Gabe sharing the poems he wrote in Oregon. Ruth in college, Gabe getting ready. Their lives full with preparation. Classes. Applications. Learning. Testing. Readying themselves for a future with dramatic climate change, increasing acts against Jews and Blacks and Latinos. What they have been thrown into.

I work. My candle is lit. These words. Those words. A Hansel and Gretel trail leading to, leading to what? A record of an Alexandria boy grown into a man. A man who acted. In theater. On the streets. In the soil. On the page.

A man whose life unfolded in the shadow of war. Whose maturation, delayed, came when conservatives began to gain ground. In 1981 Joseph’s plane landed. The wicker basket. Reagan inaugurated.

Fatherhood. Joyous. Daunting. Inspiring. Joe turns 45 this year. Seoah 48. I turned 79. Ruth will be 20. Gabe 18. That thin, yet strong line of love expressed as Ruth masters chemistry, Joe watches North Korea. I learn to write.

Too late?

We braid our lives into each others. French toast. Sunday morning themes. Breakfasts at Aspen Perks. Eleanor and Shadow playing hard. Parallel. Our braids. Their braids. The wider world. Iran. Israel. Minnesota fighting ICE.

Ruth goes to class. Bombs drop. Joe goes to work. ICE leaves Minnesota. I write. Cartels ship fentanyl. No life independent of another. The web of life woven by photosynthesis, by kisses and hugs, by acts of war.

Life. Lived in paradox and irony. Always. Holding opposites.

 

Judaism, Poetry, Politics, US History, World History
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Imbolc and the Moon of Tides

Sunday gratefuls: A restful Sabbath. Tara’s home. Eleanor will come. Iran. Israel. U.S. Khamenei. Morning darkness. The power of myth. Rumi.

Rene Good. Alex Pretti. Say their names.

Sparks of Joy and Awe:  Superman

 

Week Kavannah:   Shleimut.   The alignment of the inner self with outer actions, bringing a sense of completeness to life.

Tarot: Six of Arrows, transition

My inner world. Moving to the clinical trial and to a focus on draft 2 of Superior Wolf. With confidence.

One brief shining: Fusing the clinical trial decision with the ongoing evolution of my writing style. A sail like the Six of Arrows, full with the winds of agency, of growth, of resolve.

When I was in college in the last millennium, I met four students who identified as Persian. 1967. Street theater. Guerilla theater. Their Tehran was a place of deep culture and tradition. Long standing Persian culture in contemporary dress. A place of creativity contained and encouraged. They inspired me, then involved in a theater minor and modern dance.

At each turn of Iran’s fortunes, from the self-coronation of the Shah to the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis and to this morning’s headlines, I go back in time to those vibrant students. Their Iran has always stuck with me, especially as the cold hand of Shia dogmatism tried over and over again to crush it.

Talk about civilizational erasure. Bearded clerics. Covering women. Killing dissenters. Funding resistance to Israel and to Sunni Islam. Hezbollah. Hamas. Houthis. Persian culture in a burkah.

Khamenei assassinated. A part of me is so happy. I imagine those students, now in their old age, feeling an opening, a moment for theater of the people. A theater of liberation, one opening possibilities. How I wish I’d stayed in touch, remembered their names.

Part of me grieves his death. Not as a rigid dogmatist, but as a man. His life stopped.

Yet another part of me gets a thrill seeing the muscular actions of the U.S. and Israeli militaries. Taking the fight to Iran instead of suffering blow after blow from terrorists funded by Iranian oil. Take that, fundamentalists. Oh, to live in a world of black and white. Good U.S. Bad Iran. Too old for that.

I admit it. I don’t know what to do with those parts of me. A long time anti-war activist. Fighting American imperialism decades before our own authoritarian grabbed power. Ironic. Work for self-determination. Vietnam. The Lakota. Persians in a closed and throttled Islamic state.

I will not even use war metaphors for cancer treatment. Not a fight, or a struggle, rather a wounding. Needs healing, not gun-boat metaphors.

The problem? A pre-emptive war with no defensive justification. Gun-boat diplomacy. Reactionaries succeeding. Naked imperialism. Might makes right. It doesn’t.

In this frame? A more intellectual reaction. I’m appalled. No matter the apparent rewards, reinforcing the king is bad. Bad for the U.S. Devastating for nations around the world. Don’t catch his attention.

We contain, as Whitman said, multitudes. I see mine in reaction to this brutal smackdown. The dominant male in me. Yes. Yes. Yes. A patriarchal part of me. One I know to not entrust with the steering wheel. In there though.

Dawn arrived on Shadow Mountain. Shadow got fed.

 

Minnesota, Myth and Story, Reimaging revelation, Seed Keepers, Weather +Climate, World History

Is This a Friendly Place?

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Yule and the Moon of Deep Friendship

Shabbat gratefuls: Shadow, chewer of bones. Ruth and phlebotomy. Gabe beginning to grasp leaving home. Rabbi Jamie, grieving his dad. Tom and Jessie. Roxann. Star Trek: Discovery. Joe and Seoah. Afar Hafar. Down Under Melbourne. Up high Shadow Mountain. Minnesota. Its culture.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Science Fiction

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei    Shadow, my Wu Wei mistress

Year Kavannah: Creativity.   Yetziratiut.   “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” ― Pablo Picasso

Week Kavannah: Rachamim. Compassion.

While chesed (lovingkindness) often refers to a choice of action, rachamim is deeply tied to visceral emotion and empathy—feeling the pain of another. 

Tarot: Page of Bows, Stoat

  • Spirituality: It represents a free spirit, a prodigy, and the realm of dreams and visions.
  • Connection to Nature: The Stoat serves as a guide to help you reconnect with the sacredness of the ground beneath your feet

One brief shining: Waiting outside while a loved one is in a surgical suite, a shiva minyan, a young man looking into the future, a young woman educating herself with joy, people close to me at inflection points, moments when life can feel the wind shear of change, perhaps moments after which the journey alters in a significant way. Bless them all.

 

First. Minnesota. Land of 10,000 protesters. A general strike! From the yesteryear of the labor movement. Wonderful. Chesed, loving kindness in concrete action. Solidarity. Across racial, class, and sexual preference lines. Our America live now on the streets of my former, yet forever home.

100 clergy arrested at the airport. Those who know justice will roll down like a Spring Mountain Stream. Those who feel the oneness, who pray for peace and acts of compassion. Those who risk themselves to say NO to this Stephen Miller fever dream, this Trumped up version of law enforcement. My peeps.

I could not be more proud of this out of the way state, on nobody’s well traveled path, up north, bordering Canada. Yes. That Canada. Who also stood up to our naked would be autocrat.

Minnesota, the only state in the lower 48 which never lost its Wolves. Landed sister to the great Gitchee Gummi. Where the Boreal Forest sweeps around crystalline Lakes carved out by receding glaciers. Where the Anishinaabe and the Lakota  have lived for centuries. A beautiful, proud state with a long history of radical politics, of caring for the other, of owning the past and its failures. Of looking for solutions that include, not divide.

These cruel, cold weeks we are all Minnesotans. Melting ICE. Showing love for our neighbors. Standing tall against injustice.

 

Second, is the universe a friendly, unfriendly, or neutral place? A question Einstein saw as the most important of all as humanity advanced into an increasingly technological future.

Perhaps since late high school, certainly since my first philosophy class, I’ve been in the neutral camp. I never believed in a god that reached into human lives and changed them. Or, one that changed history. My gods were abstract expressions of human projection. Merciful, demanding, angry, loving, just. As we are.

Once I disabused myself of gods altogether, I saw the universe as awesome, wondrous, and indifferent. How could it be otherwise? An infinite game of pool with one atom striking another, repeat, form something new, repeat, until without a guiding hand, on this Rocky, Watery world evolution took hold. As wondrous and awesome as the creation of the universe, but still random. Mutations, extinctions. until, in a rare geological epoch, a goldilock moment favored a bipedal life form with a big brain. Could have been otherwise, eh?

Well, yes. It could have been. But it wasn’t. This last week I’ve considered all the same data and have come to a different answer to Einstein’s question.

Friendly, I now see. The universe is friendly. How could it be otherwise. Random its working may have been, yet can I deny that those random acts of Star creation, solar furnaces in which the elemental structures of the universe were brought into being, did not seed the Galaxies and Solar Systems with the needed material to create Water, Mountains, Land, life?

And, can I deny that over the 4 billion year history of this single Planet-one of trillions captive to those solar furnaces-the interactions of gravity, erosion, freezing and thawing, lightning strikes, volcanic explosions made it possible for the vagabond continent of Africa to become home to the hominid evolutionary path that led to Homo Sapiens.

Further, can I deny that that evolutionary path led some early humans out of Africa and into what is now Europe, India, China and that further travels of my/our ancestors eventually found what is now the Americas.

Lastly, can I deny that if the long, amazing chain of atoms striking atoms, the kindling of Stars, the subsequent creation of Planets and solar systems, the emergence of life on Earth, and the long, long, long path leading to Mom and Dad, which led to my birth proves the universe to be friendly? I cannot. Neither, however, do I believe that the universe qua universe works as a somehow god, finding our everyday actions a place to intervene.

Yet, we are all part of this marvel, this miracle and in that connectedness find our mutuality, not only with other humans but with the Bear, the Lion, and the Platypus, the Ocean and the Desert, the fertile Land and the frozen poles. And even the most distant Stars and Galaxies.

Judaism, Politics, US History, World History

Greenland

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Yule and the Moon of Deep Friendship

Wednesday gratefuls: Tom recovering. Dick Arnold. Ellen. Jamie. MVP group. Death. Kate, always Kate. Jon. Regina. Pronoia. Shadow and her treat ball, her bones. Mussar. The Dog run. Our Snowless Winter. Christopher and transcranial magnetic stimulation. Hafar from afar. Mary down under with animals that attack. Murdoch. Annie and Luna. Eleanor.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Greenland

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei    Shadow, my Wu Wei mistress

Year Kavannah: Creativity.   Yetziratiut.   “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” ― Pablo Picasso

Week Kavannah: Daat.    The Bridge Between Mind and Heart

“If Chokhmah (Wisdom/Inspiration) is a seed and Binah (Understanding/Analysis)  is the soil that develops that seed into a plant, Da’at is the nervous system that carries the vital life force from the brain to the rest of the body. It is the point of transition from “thinking” to “being.””

Tarot: Ten of Arrows, Instruction

  • Focus on the “Why”: Connect your current hard work or training to a larger guiding principle or long-term goal, much like following a “Pole Star”.

One brief shining: Thresholds, liminal spaces, liminal moments like dusk and dawn, a babies first breath, that moment when liking turns to loving, when a thought passes into understanding and action, like death on a cold Evergreen night when it came for Dick Arnold.

 

Rabbi Jamie’s dad died Monday night. He went to sleep around eight p.m. and when Ellen, his wife, went to check on him he was cold. Dick’s death has hit the congregation hard.

Dick, as Tara noted, lived in the back ground. A master carpenter, a licensed consulting psychologist, and an accomplished golfer, Dick specialized in showing up. When shelving needed putting up. When Tara needed help working with drywall. When LGBTQ+ youth needed a psychologist.

Had we gone to Israel on our ill-fated 2023 trip Dick and I would have been roommates. His funeral takes place Thursday at 11:00. Shiva minyan Thursday night.

Just a moment: Our President, denied the “Noble” prize, admitted in a letter to the Norwegian Prime Minister that he could now think about things other than peace, like seizing Greenland.

I can’t improve on this Robert Reich piece sent to me by his Substack:

“Friends,

It could be a Monty Python skit from forty years ago: A demented U.S. president demands the Nobel Peace Prize (which he initially spells “Noble”), after converting the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War and abducting the president of a Latin American country by force.

When he doesn’t get the Prize, he says he’s no longer in favor of peace and decides to invade Greenland. When Greenland refuses him and Denmark and the rest of Europe make a fuss, he goes into a rage, raises tariffs on Europe (which are really import taxes that cost Americans dearly) and threatens war on NATO. The president of Russia is delighted.”

A five-year old playground bully who will brook no dismissal of even his most outlandish wishes and wants, red tie guy had better retake that cognitive test followed by one gauging e.q.

 

Dogs, Family, Travel, US History, World History

I mean, really?

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Yule and the Moon of New Beginnings

Shabbat gratefuls: Shadow of the morning. Snow at last! Cold. 10 degrees. Winter. Vince. Joe coming this week.  Ruth and her wrist. Dean’s list again. Gabe. Starting his last semester of high school. Ginny and Janice. Luke and Leo. Minnesota. Colorado. Blue state resisters. My homes.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Minnesota

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei    Shadow, my Wu Wei mistress

Year Kavannah: Creativity.   Yetziratiut.   “Inspiration exists, butten-bows-wildwood-tarot it has to find you working.” ― Pablo Picasso

Week Kavannah:  Wholeness. Shleimut.                                                “The concept of shleimut extends beyond the individual, applying to relationships (finding a life partner with whom one feels complete) and the community (mending societal cracks to achieve collective creativity and flourishing).”

Tarot: Ten of Bows, responsibility.

  • The central meaning of the card is shouldering a significant weight of duties, obligations, or stress, either for yourself or others. Although the burden is heavy, the card also suggests that you are close to the finish line of a major project or life cycle. The end goal is in sight, and persistence is needed to reach it.

One brief shining: Shleimut and the ten of bows resonate with each other since another meaning of shleimut involves tikkun olam, or repair of the world; the joining of these two ideas in these, the years of devastation and degradation of a once great nation, remind us that though the path winds ever upward and our burden can seem unbearable, our journey toward wholeness, restoration demands much of us, perhaps all of us.

 

Dog journal: Shadow now trots inside as if the threshold, what threshold, dad?, were no longer a vampire-like barrier which she had not been invited to cross. Oh, happy day! Well, most of the time. Sometimes she needs a bit of encouragement. But only very occasionally. Thank you, Natalie, Dr. Josy, prozac, and those pheromones. Oh, and Nathan, too.

Her life and mine. Again, together.

 

Family: Set up a zoom call with my sister, Mary, in Melbourne, and my brother, Mark, in Hafar, Saudi Arabia. Not many time slots when we’re all awake. To make it work, I agreed to start the call at 9 pm, MST. Well past my bedtime. 3 pm for Mary and 7 am for Mark.

If you draw a triangle using Shadow Mountain, Melbourne, and Hafar as its points, it would almost be an equilateral with 8,000 miles on each side. That’s sibling dispersion. Little bits of Alexandria, Indiana spread apart from Alexandria and each other.

After looking up those distances, I decided to look for Shadow Mountain’s antipode. According to this website, antipodes map, tunneling straight through Mother Earth from here would land me under the waters of the Pacific, somewhere east of the main island of New Zealand. So, I won’t do that cause I’d drown.

 

Just a moment: So the only limits on red tie guy’s foreign policy is, in his own words during an NYT interview, “My own morality.” Oh, my.

Yeah. This from the guy who’s said he would “accept” the Nobel Peace Prize if Venezuela’s winner of this year’s prize, María Corina Machado, offers it to him. Managing to combine ignorance (of who gives the prize) with narcissism, greed, envy, and lust. I mean, really?

 

Dogs, Friends, Judaism, White Supremacy, World History

Time to Leave?

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Yule and the Moon of New Beginnings

Thursday gratefuls: Tramadol. Snowblower away. Eleanor playing with Shadow. Shadow, “What threshold?” Tara and Sinterklaas. Puerto Rico dreaming. Vincent and the politics of youth. Veronica. Francesca. CBE’ers in NYC. Mamdani. Democratic Socialism. Greenland. Cuba. Colombia. Mexico. Can Canada be far behind?

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Arjean’s bread

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei    Shadow, my Wu Wei mistress

Year Kavannah: Creativity.   Yetziratiut.   “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” ― Pablo Picasso

Week Kavannah:  Patience.  Savlanut.  “Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tarot: Back at it soon

One brief shining: Opened the Dog run door to let Eleanor and Shadow out into the larger backyard, Shadow’s first time out there since her return, each chasing the other, around and around, Shadow leading, Eleanor behind, then some wrestling, going their separate ways for a bit, coming back together,  jumping on the Dog run fence, wanting back in and after being let in, needing to go back out. Kids, eh?

 

Tara and Arjean may move to Puerto Rico. Arjean, a dual Dutch/naturalized U.S. citizen, has had it with being associated, even by residence, with Trump, et al. The nature of his work requires him to stay within the U.S. and Puerto Rico feels as far away culturally from the mainland U.S. as he can get. Tara loves beaches, so…

Makes me wonder how many others have fled or are considering it. I know the conversation has happened among many Jews across the U.S. To be clear Arjean is not Jewish. Friends at CBE have looked at property in Costa Rica. Many others wonder when the tilt toward sanctioned bigotry becomes dangerous enough to force a move.

Jews have had to have these conversations often throughout the centuries. In Russia. In Spain. In Germany. Austria. Hungary. Poland. Even France. A CBE friend’s great-grandfather, a rabbi in Warsaw, had three sons. In the 1930’s he sent one son to South Africa, one to Brazil, one to the U.S. Over time he dispersed his congregants to the places where his sons had gone. Prescient.

This long history of forced removal, whether by governments or fear for personal safety, remains a key, a defining part of the Jewish experience. My older friends here have decided, as have I, that we’re too old to flee, start over. We’ll remain and do our part in resisting.

What about Ruth and Gabe though? Their generation. Their Jewish life has been upended by something else, the Israel/Hamas war. Many of them have taken the side of the Palestinians against at least the IDF and the Israeli government. Some have gone further, declaring themselves anti-Zionists, some even questioning Israel’s right to exist.

Here though is the always paradox. When the anti-Semites come, they don’t care if you’re Orthodox, Reform, or secular. They don’t care you’re anti-Zionist or pro-Palestinian. All they care about is Jewishness. Very like ICE and people who look somehow Mexican. This is the old, old story.

 

Politics, Seed Keepers, US History, World History

Seed-Keepers

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Yule and the Moon of New Beginnings

Wednesday gratefuls: Tara and Eleanor. Vince and Arjean. The snowblower finds a new home. Dangerous Fire weather. The Dog run. Shadow, the snuggle bunny. Ruth learning a new job. Gabe finished his jigsaw puzzle. My boy comes on the 14th. MVP.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Shrimp and White Bean Soup

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei    Shadow, my Wu Wei mistress

Year Kavannah: Creativity.   Yetziratiut.   “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” ― Pablo Picasso

Week Kavannah:  Patience.  Savlanut.  “Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tarot: Back at it soon

One brief shining: In the first week of January-January!-we have no Snow, down the hill Denver temperatures have been in the seventies, as the onrush of a changing climate washes over us even in the mid-continent and high up in the Mountains while sea level cities and nations watch salt Water fill municipal Water systems, subways flood, and the center will not hold.

Hard to sort out the emotions. Despair as the World burns, Carbon emissions continue to hit record highs. Anger and deep sadness at the politicians spinning the clock backwards, disorienting even the most optimistic. Frustration and rage at matters like economic injustice, bigotry, infrastructure side lined while science and medicine lose momentum due to budget cuts. Melancholy over a life’s work shunted into a back alley of history. No need for doom scrolling when reading the front page of any newspaper accomplishes the same task.

Yet. Shadow returned home a more snuggly, biddable Dog. Our relationship strengthened. I made a White Bean and Shrimp soup yesterday. My son has a short visit planned this month. Paul and Tom have a visit planned for my birthday. Pain is gone from left hip, lower back, and leg. Shadow Mountain home is warm and book filled.

Yet. My sister Mary has a chance to return to her first love, library science, in a special project for the University of Melbourne. She’s settling into a diverse neighborhood along Sydney Road. My brother Mark has worked his first full calendar year in the sands of Araby.

Yet. The Lodgepoles grow. The Aspens clone. Mule Deer and Elk Cows carry the next generation of their species. Maxwell Creek rests, frozen for now, waiting for Spring. The Mountains hold us all in their valleys, slopes, and peaks.

Yet. Democratic socialists have won Mayoral races in Boston, NYC, Seattle. The No King’s movement has grown. Approval ratings for Red Tie Guy’s command of the economy, his gunboat diplomacy, even his immigration policy have tanked. His own Presidential ratings as well.

While those of us who embrace economic fairness, ethnic and  gender and religious pluralism, globalism, a sustainable human presence on Mother Earth have neither given up nor backed away from the hard work of readying ourselves for the next era.

If you’re one of us, a Seed-Keeper, I hope you can live your best life right now. And. That part of it be sustaining the vision of a world ruled by love, justice, and compassion rather than greed, lust, and the will to power.

Far Right, Politics, US History, World History

Shriveled

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Yule and the Moon of New Beginnings

Tuesday gratefuls: Shadow, crosser of thresholds. Ginny and Janice, Annie and Luna. Colder. Red Flag Day. The rise of neocolonialism. Gunboat diplomacy. The ravaging of our nation. Never waste a crisis. A dusting of Snow. Notebooklm. The Great Work. Thomas Berry. The Nature rights movement. Crooked media. The Bulwark.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Furious Minds by Laura K. Field

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei    Shadow, my Wu Wei mistress

Year Kavannah: Creativity.   Yetziratiut.   “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” ― Pablo Picasso

Week Kavannah:  Patience.  Savlanut.  “Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tarot: Back at it soon

One brief shining: More snuggle and cuddles, this less reactive Shadow wants more hugs, more together time; she also takes the threshold as a much less absolute barrier, sometimes prancing in, most often coming with a bit of cajoling, less often I have to go out and she follows me in, Natalie having done the difficult work at her home and the Dog run limiting Shadow’s options. All good.

“We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Stephen Miller to reporter Jake Tapper of CNN, NYT, 1/6/2025

Oh, Stevie. Go back home and embrace those guys who bullied you. Don’t imitate them. Not very evolved. This naked claim about history, from everybody’s favorite xenophobe, lays bare, like a copper wire exposed under a far too thin insulation  of civilization, the motive force for Trump’s reign. Power begets might. Might begets right.

Want Greenland? We’ll just take it Miller said in the same article, who’s gonna stop us. Here is the rationale for changing the name of the Defense Department to the War Department. For changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. For scooping up human beings striving for a better life and depositing them in countries, any country, that will take them. For ignoring Federal Judges, how many divisions does the Pope have. For ignoring norms, allies, decency.

Let Trump be Trump. Let Miller be Miller. Let RFK by RFK. Let Vought be Vought. No guiding mission or vision necessary. The only question, can we make it happen? If we can, that makes it the right choice.

It is not lost on me, or on you, I imagine, that this brazen claim by a Jew who ignores the reality of the holocaust, gets front page placement on this, the fifth anniversary of January 6th’s insurrection. Remember that word? And, treason? And, the convictions, in our courts, following legal investigations and trials with juries and judges? The pardons proof Miller’s claim. The big guy understands.

I’m sorry Miller and his kin missed out  on love, justice, and compassion as guiding forces in their lives. How shriveled and withered they must be inside.

Cancer, Dogs, Far Right, Fourth Phase, Health, Politics, US History, White Supremacy, World History

Link Arms Against This Sea of Troubles

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Samain and the Shadow Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Rising PSA. Shadow, seen. Natalie and Dr. Josy. Winter is coming. (next week) Hanukah. Ruth and Gabe. Joe. Seoah. Murdoch. What I want. Death. Other life punctuation points. Hawai’i. Nathan and the Dog run. Venezuela. Latin America. Central America. North America. The Gulf of Mexico.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Joe

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei    Shadow, my Wu Wei mistress

Week Kavannah:   Netzach   “Endurance and Tenacity: Netzach represents the inner strength and fortitude required to pursue a goal or a passion over a long period, especially when faced with obstacles.”

Being a metaPhysician

One brief shining: Shadow cast her presence toward me, casually, too absorbed in other nearby dogs and her trazadone pall to greet her Dad when others of her kind, so many of them, were nearby, crossing behind Natalie’s FJ Cruiser with its DOGS4LIFE license plate, in the Flying J parking lot human companions holding leashes, some pulling toward Shadow to say hi, I’m here, too.

 

Dog journal: First I’d seen Shadow since a week ago Friday. She greeted me, but with little enthusiasm. A little bit of my heart broke. My hope for an enthusiastic smile, a jump, kisses set aside. I noticed, in a bit, that she moved a little slowly, that spark in her personality tamped down.

I’d forgotten the trazadone/gabapentin she was on while the prozac reaches therapeutic levels. Didn’t like it, but I understood the rationale. Reduce her reactivity and help her learn new behaviors. Like letting a leash on. Like easily crossing thresholds. Temporary. Similar to chemical constraints for humans in an agitated state. Shadow exists in an agitated state most of the time.

Natalie said Shadow acted the same at her place as she does at mine, vis a vis thresholds. Made me feel good. Not me. Some psychic gremlin gripping Ms. Shadow when faced with crossing from the outside to the inside.

Natalie, an empathetic and kind person, said she’d come pick up Shadow if I had appointments, keep her for the day and return her. How blessed am I. So many loving folks in my orbit.

We parted after about twenty minutes, Shadow with Natalie.

Good-bye.

 

Health: Yes. My labs showed my PSA jumped, in spite of the radiation, from 0.3 to 2.7. At first I saw the 2.7 and thought, yes! Only later wondering, opening the lab report again. Oh. Not 0.27.

Probably means new drugs. New side effects. Still many options between me and ordinary chemotherapy. Erleada is technically chemotherapy, says so on the pill container, but its side effects have been slight.

There again, blessed. A cancer with many treatments, slow progression. And, for me so far, no symptoms. Happy Holiseason to me!

 

Just a moment: Make Western civilization white again. A sad dream, a dream of the desperate, of the frightened and deluded.

Even the Asian civilizations with which I have some familiarity exhibit strong evidence of liberal ideals. Look at the young women of Korea on a virtual Lysistratan sex strike, wanting their autonomy. Or, young women and men in China. Many of the women rejecting traditional Chinese female roles, many men disillusioned by them and the job market, pushing back against their heritage of centralized control. Taiwan, too.

And here’s the paradox, the irony. Those of us strong with the force of liberal/enlightenment/renaissance ideas of no kings, individualism, small d democracy, individual freedoms and rights as human beings are the ones that recognize most the need to link arms against this tide of civilizational troubles and by opposing end them.

Yes, the liberal journey is not toward a fractious libertarianism, but toward a democratic socialism where the commonweal balances as best as possible with liberty and freedom for all. Not an easy project as our imperfect America has shown since its birth, but an inevitable one pushed forward by the creative tension between individuals and the collective. That’s what I see, what I have lived for.

 

Family, US History, World History

A Military Family

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Samain and the Summer’s End Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Dr. Patel. MVP. Cabbage and Butter Beans. Shadow and her dreaming. Paul. The Maine Coast. The St. Croix. The Bay of Fundy where the Tides sometimes reach a height of eighty feet. New Brunswick. Champlain Bubbles. The Camp. The Farmhouse. Findlay. Toby. Lobster pots. Lobster rolls.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: MVP

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei

Week Kavannah:  Chesed.  Loving Kindness.  “Kindness is the language the deaf can hear and the blind see.”  Mark Twain

Tarot: Being a metaPhysician

One brief shining: Feeling the stirrings of another novel, or novel revision, perhaps both, rereading my work featuring the Edmund Fitzgerald, learning about Wolf 21 and unzipping Superior Wolf to focus on Lycaon and his descendants, then adding the Rockies and the Denver metro, anyhow it feels good to have something bubbling, rising.

 

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Veterans Day:  The first Ellis in the New World, Richard, who came here in 1707, (no, I can’t explain the birth date on this headstone) fought and attained the rank of Captain in the Revolutionary War. His father was a Captain in the occupying army of William and Mary in Ireland. His mother sent him to an uncle in Virginia from Dublin, but the ship captain, in a practice apparently common at the time, kept his fare and sold him into indentured servitude in Massachusetts. As you can see from his headstone, he founded the town of Ashfield, Ma.

The first Spitlers (my Dad’s mom’s maiden name) fought on the side of the British as Hessian mercenaries. They never went home and became respected woodworkers in Virginia. And owned slaves.

I have relatives whose names I don’t recall who fought in the Civil War. Don’t know about WWI.

Both of my parents and my Uncle Riley (cousin Diane’s Dad) were veterans of WWII. Joseph, when he retires, will be a veteran. Neither Mark (my brother) or I served, so we’re outliers in this family history.

My mom served as a W.A.C. in the Signal (intelligence) Corps. She spent time in Algiers, Capris, Rome, and, I think England. My sister Mary found her name on a veteran’s memorial wall at her alma mater, and mine and Mary’s, Ball State University.

Dad flew liaison planes, spending his whole time in the U.S. He dropped bags of flour on troops in training to simulate bombs and ferried from place to place many of the key players in the Manhattan Project. He never flew afterward.

A military family. Patriots. Who served their country at critical moments in their young lives.

When I and so many others opposed the Vietnam War, we mistakenly and wrongly put the blame on those men and women now veterans of that war. Our opposition should have focused solely on the old white men in Washington sending among others, poor Black men to die for their sins. I regret that error.

My son’s military career has given me a chance to be on many Air Force Bases from Georgia to Korea. On those bases I’ve met his fellow officers who have been, to a person, thoughtful, kind, and devoted to the U.S. They have humanized the military for me in a way even Mom and Dad did not.

So this day I honor all those who served, who fought, who gave portions or all of the lives to defending this county.