• Category Archives Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.
  • Walk Toward the Light

    Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

    Sunday gratefuls: Shadow. Her behavior. Spring springing. 50 degrees at 7 am. Greens. Lodgepole Needles. Grass. Yellow-green Aspen Catkins. The side of Black Mountain. Clump Grass. Bearberry. Along Maxwell Creek, Willow Leaflets on bright yellow new growth. Red Osier Dogwood. My Greenhouse. Soon. Planting again. Yet new pain. Great Sol, supporter of photosynthesis since 3.8 billion years ago. Mother Earth, supporting life since around the same time. Homo sapiens, trying to understand it all for over 300,000 years.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Warm Days

    Week Kavannah: Zerizut. Enthusiasm. II

    One brief shining: Shadow’s night out began in an ordinary way with her going outside around 4 p.m. and ended with her finally coming inside at 7:30 a.m. for her breakfast while in between those hours she rejected coming inside in spite of the door being opened every fifteen minutes until 9 pm and three times later in the night.

     

    Dog journal: Officially and with chagrin I’m beyond confused about Shadow. She no longer sits beside me, runs from me when I approach her, and last night, as I wrote above, she refused to come inside. In another location this last may not seem a safety problem, but up here in the Mountains we have Mountain Lions. Dogs are a good meal.

    I can’t see inside her doggy brain and oh I wish I could. What of my behavior has she interpreted so negatively? I use all positive training. I don’t yell at her. Though the occasional sigh of frustration or damn it does slip through.

    With all my years of experience with Dogs I’ve never encountered anything even close. I love her and I know she loves me. Even though something has come between us right now. I feel sad and frustrated, having already spent a lot on personal training sessions.

    I’m considering putting her in a holistic, two-week, all positive training program. It would be a boarding situation, but with the promise that “In this 2-week (14 days) program your pet will learn all of our “Foundation Skills” ( Sit, Down, Place/Stay, Come when called, Walk on a loose leash, Leave it, Drop it, Off )”

    The location is not far from here, in Pine. And they only accept one Dog at a time for this program. Shadow would live in their house. I’m considering this because I’m not sure I can keep her without those commands. It hurts like hell to get out of bed, even to get up from a chair and having her refuse to come in could be a deal breaker.

     

    Just a moment: Talking with my Ancient Brothers about how we sustain our spirit in these times. Yes, darkness seeps from the news. Yes, the country feels sick, even in despair. Yet. My life has so much light. So many friends. So many Wild Neighbors. So many Dogs. Great Sol. Books and art. Movies and television shows. Family. Jewish civilization.

    Look for the light in your life. It can, no, it will dispel the darkness. Let it be so.


  • Mystical Experience Inverted

    Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

    Thursday gratefuls: MVP. Zerizut. Marilyn and Irv. Joanne. Ron. Jamie. Music. The hard work of creativity. Back pain. Homo religiosus. Snow. Rain. Even slush. All welcome. Kaplan. Heschel. Green. Jewish Renewal. Cookunity. UPS. Counting the Omer. Netzach of Netzach. Ruby in the Snow. Rich. Donyce. Ruth, finished with finals. Gabe.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Friends

    Week Kavannah: Enthusiasm. Zerizut.

    One brief shining: Dull, tamped down, as pain makes the day a Torquemadaen chamber of stairs, painful twists, getting up and getting down, never easy, always a price for movement.

     

    A dull evening. MVP. I was there, wishing I was home. Loved the food, the friendship, the conversation. But my body drained my attention. Focused on my hip, my left leg. Some bloat.

     

     

    My radical roots of religion class has begun to change me. Or, better perhaps, helped me articulate who I am as a human, as an activist, as a mystic. Who I am as a religious human. Who I am as an American, a pagan, a Tao de Jew, and as Israel Harari, a Mountain Jew who struggles with God.

    Let me see if I can be clear about this. Awe or Yirah begins the sixteenth-century text Orchot Tzadikim’s-the Ways of the Just-long list of middot, character traits in mussar.

    The author places awe at the beginning of our soul growth journey. Abraham Joshua Heschel, a 20th century Jewish thinker and activist, gives awe, or yirah, the same prominent spot in his own thought.

    As does, in his own way, Emerson:

    “Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” Introduction to his essay Nature

    I believe we can enjoy an original relation to the universe, to the One, to God if that word occurs in your vocabulary.

    How? Through mystical experience. Inverted. When I see the Mule Deer Bucks in my backyard. When I see the Elk Bull on a rainy night watching me from just inside the forest. When I walk the quad in Muncie and stop for a moment, filled with a brilliant light and the certainty I connect with each and everything in the universe, in those moments I experience awe.

    Here’s the inversion. I no longer believe these moments pull back the veil to reveal a sacred world behind this one. That’s dualistic, not monistic thinking.

    Instead these mystical moments reveal the sacred nature of ordinary reality, the world we experience in our waking moments. These mystical excursions show the simmering divinity that vibrates in every leaf, water droplet, human, fox, rock, and tree. If only we choose to see what we’re looking at.

    Mystical moments educate us, elevate our perception so that the Bee landing on the Tulip stands out as a holy instrument of pollination, of flight, of caring for a whole organism, the hive.

    So that Dog sleeping on the carpet exudes her sacred love even in her inaction. So that my hand shows a marvel of evolution, dexterous, small, so useful. So that the Lodgepole stands reveal their godly role as a pioneer species, preparing the way for more diverse forests of the future. All connected through the mycorrhizal threads that binds us all each to the other, the other to each. Always and amen.

     

     

     


  • Freedom. Often painful. Always difficult.

    Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

    Sunday gratefuls: Joe. Bill. Rob. Seth. Matt. Jim. Allan. Jamie. CBE men’s group. The Cow Elks and Bull dining while we talked. Berrigan Mountain and Elk Meadow behind us. Sanctuary outdoor porch. The wonderful Ponderosa with its twisted limbs. A breeze. My son. Donyce. Rich. Shadow, greeter of the dark Morning.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Men, talking

    Week Kavannah:  Enthusiasm. Zerizut.

    One brief shining: As Mother Earth kept turning toward the east, Berrigan Mountain slid across the horizon and Great Sol seemed to move lower in the Sky, the Air around us grew chilly while we talked on of 8 year old sons, narcissistic ex-husbands, mothers who shamed us, the isolation of Covid, getting caught driving while drinking, hoping that somehow our story would intersect with another’s lev, allow us to be seen and heard.

     

    A young Bull Elk with only two points had a harem of ten Cows, unlike Marlon Brando in Waterfront, he was already a contender. His virility displayed itself as I turned past the Life Care Center of Evergreen and drove up the asphalt road leading to the synagogue. Men’s group.

    We’ve begun to open ourselves, still easy to move into the head, Jewish men after all,  acculturated to hide vulnerability, paper over feelings with work and vain glory. American men.

    Some lonely. Some afraid. Some eager. All glad for the presence of other men, a rarity for most. Like Shadow trust will not come without time, without bravery, without tears and laughter. Well begun.

     

    Torah study in the morning. Ten tests of the freed Hebrew slaves as they move through the desert wastes of the Sinai. Taking the slaves out of Egypt. Yes. Taking Egypt out of the freed Hebrews. Hard. Liberation begins in the lev. Backsliding, fear, regression. Part of the package.

    Why bring us all the way out here? So far from the familiar life. This cannot be what freedom is. Or, if this is freedom, I prefer the certainty of servitude. Let me go back. I’m scared. What if I’m not strong enough, good enough. Enough.

    To move away from oppression to liberation requires sacred awareness, awareness of the power and resilience beneath the beaten down heart, the overworked, over stressed body. Realizing, yes, that fear of liberation, of gaining personal freedom and responsibility can cripple us, too. As much, early on maybe more, than the dull routines of our personal Egypt.

    Not different from the confinement of maleness in America.

     

    Just a moment: Men showing off their brute strength by deporting the weak, the outcast, the poor yearning to be free. Mocking the great Lady of New York Harbor, inverting the American promise, slashing the preamble of the Constitution into shredded parchment. If it’s aesthetic or academic or kind. No. If it’s crude, cheap, destructive, dogmatic, malicious. Yes.

    Can you hear the slaves wandering in the desert where capitalist shrouds constrain all the loving-kindness, all the justice, all the mercy, all the rational and life-saving thinking? If it’s not good for the bottom line, what good is it? The Egypt of an extractive, idolatrous economy. Killing all of us while making some very comfortable in the funeral procession.

    No. He will not be the Pope. But. He’s already Pharaoh.


  • Reconstruction

    Spring and the Wu Wei Moon II

    Tuesday gratefuls: My furry alarm clock and her Velociraptor teeth. Seeing Shadow’s shadow cast by the nightlight. Maddie. From da region. Hammond, Indiana. New palliative care nurse. Also wanting to convert to Judaism. Reconstruction. Her trick with the tramadol. Darkness of early Morning. The Night Sky. Orion. The Southern Cross. The Teapot. Ursa Major. Polaris. North Star.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: AI and Ancientrails

    Week Kavannah: Persistence and grit. Netzach.

    One brief shining: Using AI, right now, to organize Ancientrails by thematic sections with chapters related to the themes, an exciting idea which came to me last night before sleep.

     

    My AI monk has begun its oh so rapid read of Ancientrails. I’ve asked it to fill the chapters with content and images from the last four years. For now. Once I see how this works I’ll go for the whole megillah. Try different organizational schemes. Will take some while to get something interesting, I imagine.

    What fun.

     

    With the aid of chatgpt yesterday I uncovered something I’d wondered about for a while, the origin of the idea of reconstruction. Reconstructionist Judaism is the brain child (an interesting cliche, if you stop to think about it.) of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan.

    Kaplan’s thought was and is radical relative especially to the three thousand year plus history of Jewish life and thought. No supernaturalism. No God behind the Ozian curtain. No chosenness. Jews and Judaism have no special spot in God’s heart. Kaplan’s daughter was the first ever bat mitzvah, a practice now commonplace among all branches of Judaism except Orthodoxy. And much, much more.

    What I got to wondering about was the idea of reconstruction itself. Why that word to describe his approach? My hunch was that it had something to with the post-WWI world still reeling from the war and the Spanish Flu epidemic.

    That idea came to me because I had a small volume by the pragmatist reformer, educator, and philosopher John Dewey titled simply: Reconstruction in Philosophy. Dewey and pragmatism influenced Kaplan. I knew that.

    The idea of reconstruction after the despair and disillusionment of WWI became wide spread after the publication of Dewey’s book, a collection of his lectures in Tokyo. “Intellectuals and policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic began to speak of reconstructing society, institutions and even thought itself—an active, rational process of rebuilding what the war had laid bare.” chatgpt excerpt.

    Reconstructionist sentiments soon motivated education reformers like the Frontier Thinkers who wanted to use schools for social reconstruction. It showed up in governments, too. The U.K. had a Ministry of Reconstruction with the responsibility to: “Oversee the task of rebuilding ‘the national life on a better and more durable foundation’ once the Great War was over.” And the U.S created a Reconstruction Finance Corporation which gave “emergency credit to banks, railroads and states to restore confidence amid the Great Depression.”

    There were, too, applications in Christianity and broader social circles as this chatgpt excerpt shows:  “Reconstruction also surfaced in liberal Protestant circles (e.g., Henry C. King’s Reconstruction in Theology, re-read after 1918) and in secular planning debates about housing, labour relations and women’s roles. The common thread was the conviction that the old order—political, moral, intellectual—had failed, and that conscious, expert-led rebuilding was both possible and necessary.”

    Reconstructionist Judaism is, then, living out a pattern of reform and innovation created by global horror at WWI and its root causes. Since the world proceeded rapidly to WWII, the Korean War, Vietnam, and the multiple conflicts in the Middle East as well as the sinkhole of the Ukraine, I’d say we still have work to do.

     

     


  • A New Credo

          Hercules wrestling Thanatos

    Driving to Lone Tree this morning. Spine injections. Struck by the notion of Israel Harari. The Mountain man who struggles with God. Of Jacob/Israel as an archetype. The trickster transformed into wounded man of faith. Peniel-where I saw God face to face.

    I’ve focused on Israel, on the struggle, but not considered or not fully considered the after moment, when Israel, newly named, limps away having seen God. Who names this ford on the Jabbok river after his realization.

    So I decided to do that. I’ve struggled with God since I was young. Too small. Too violent. Too obscure and ineffable. Dead. I don’t experience God. What good can God be? And this stupid, stupid idea of a seventy year life as a test for residing in Heaven or Hell for eternity? No.

    Then, the last 30 years or so, pass. Focused on the Soil, the Seed, the growing miracle of Plants, Dogs, grandchildren, love. No need for God. I feel the sacred when I amend the Earth. Pluck Onions and Carrots from their hidden places and spray them off with a hose nozzle. Food. The true transubstantiation.

    What if I felt my way into the Goddess? Her Earth. Me as part, yet not part. Unique, but not unique. A Wave above her Ocean, ready at all times to return. What if I admitted to myself that my  feeling of separateness is the original sin. The hubris of independence. Of individuality.

    What if. The yetzer hara, the selfish inclination, speaks to us of separateness. Of our needs. Of our unique demands. While the yetzer hatov speaks to our interdependence, our awareness of the needs of others, of the World around us.

    Could I find the sense of support, of sustenance, of forgiveness, of grace, of embeddedness in the whole, the One? Could I pray? I drove on, watching the Trees, the Hogback, remnants of the orogeny that preceded the rise of the Rocky Mountains. Striated. Weathered. Shrunken. But still there, millions upon millions of years after its emergence.

    Was I really, truly part of it? Was all the artifice of highways and cars part of it? The houses and stores. Doctor Vu, the kind and careful man who inserted needles into the narrow spaces of my bulging spine. And all his tech? The rotating bed. The living x-ray. Michal, his variously adorned assistant. Even the steroids shot toward my nerves? All of it?

    What difference might it make if I leaned into this most pushed away notion. Or, is it the embrace I’ve already made of the chi, of wu wei, of the mystical revealing the ordinary as the sacred? Do those feelings find me already in her arms?

    You know, it does. I’m a man of this short moment, a Wave cresting on the Ocean of the whole, going only from emergence to absorption, not needing to understand how. Yet as that man I’m also in and of the Ocean, of the Goddess, her instrument in this troubled part of her cosmos.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     


  • Tao De Jew

    Spring and the Wu Wei Moon

    Sunday gratefuls: Shabbat. Torah. CBE. Sacred community. Where everybody knows your name. Shadow and the canoe cut marrow bone. Cold Night. A Mountain Dawn. Great Sol shines again. Being able to buy seeds and plants again. Easter. Matthew. Mark. Luke. John.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Gabe at 17

    Week Kavannah: Sensibility. Daat.

    One brief shining: In their waning years Taoists left behind their jobs in the court bureaucracy for small dwellings in the Mountains where they practiced calligraphy, played the Qin, wrote poetry, studied the sages, and lived close to the natural world.

     

    Tao De Jew. With a dash of Alinsky and street focused organizer. The Reverend Doctor Israel Harari. That would be me. With a domestic side of Gardener, Beekeeper, and Docent.

    Try to work with the flow of chi, the energetic and transformative aspect of our oneness and our sense of uniqueness. Look for the path that emerges, that asks and invites. Follow it. This ancientrail, then that one. With the ease of Water running toward the Ocean.

    Find the moment when chi has found you. Act with its already organized aim. If Shadow gnaws the bed at 5:20, get up and let her out. Saves cleaning up. Makes her happy. Gives the day an hour head start.

    Reconstructionist Judaism, Paganism, Taoism.  Sacred Community, Mother Earth, and a follower of the Way. When the Mule Deer comes. When the bull Elk bugles. When Fawns and Calves play. As the Mountain Lion strikes. As the Bear paws a Bee hive. Yes. When tender shoots break through the soil. When friends gather over breakfast. When Torah study opens new human insights. When the Breeze through the Lodgepoles whispers follow me. Yes.

     

    Have you been following the Adventures of Trump Tarrific? I know I have. Sort of. There was the all tariffs all the time moment. Then there was the oh wait not on tech stuff moment. Now there’s, what is it again? 10% on everybody and a whole lot on China. Yeah, I don’t get it either. Lucky I’m not alone. Business leaders. Economists. Inflation wary members of the Fed. For a start.

    Then there’s Trump the Depo Man. Proving his masculinity by using the military, ICE, and millions of dollars to sweep people off college campuses, out of their janitorial and dishwashing jobs, making a mistake or two along the way, but hey that’s ok, omelets and eggs, eh, and not getting many folks deported except the most vulnerable.

    That what it says in the Gospels: find the poor, the stranger, put them on a plane and send them to prison in El Salvador. Oh, Jesus. Oh.

     

    Just a moment: Yes. It’s Easter. Easter eggs. Chocolate and marshmallow Bunnies. Ham. Cute dresses and boys in ties. All the holiday essentials. Wonder how that whole egg business has worked this year, the year of Bird flu?

    Remember Ukrainian Easter Eggs. Wonder if anybody’s on that this year? Or will Putin target little old ladies with eggs and candle wax.

     

     


  • Living. Not dying.

    Spring and the Wu Wei Moon

    Thursday gratefuls: Shadow. Her kindness. Amy. Her understanding. Cookunity. Colorado Coop and Garden. The Greenhouse. Gardening again. Korea. Malaysia. Australasia. Wisconsin. Saudi Arabia. The Bay. First Light. 10,000 Lakes. The Rocky Mountain Front Range. Where my people live.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: The Greenhouse

    Week Kavannah: Joy. Simcha.

    One brief shining: Nathan and I wandered in my back yard, his app that shows Great Sol’s illumination searching for a good spot to plant my greenhouse, until we neared a spot close to the shed, that was it with decent morning Sun and an hours worth of afternoon Sun more than anywhere else.

     

     

    That picture is not quite what I’m getting. Mine will have an outdoor raised bed on either side and shutters that move themselves as the greenhouse heats up and cools down. It will also have an electric heater for Winter and a drip irrigation system inside and out.

    This guy Nathan, a Conifer native, started his business Colorado Coop and Garden to give folks like me an opportunity to grow things up here. Working a garden at ground level is long past for me. But Nathan can build the raised beds at a height where my back is not an issue.

    Guess I’m regressing here in some ways. A Dog. A small Garden. Andover in miniature. The greenhouse will have a sign: Artemis Gardens. Artemis Honey was Kate and mine’s name for our bee operation.

     

    I’m loving my classes at Kabbalah Experience. Reaching deep into the purpose of religion and Judaism in particular. Reimagining the story of Adam and Eve. My life, my Jewish life and my Shadow Mountain life, have begun to resonate. Learning and living an adventure in fourth phase purpose.

    No matter what the near term future holds for my health I will not succumb to despair or bleakness. As I’ve often said, I want to live until I die. This life, I’m coming to realize, is me doing just that.

    If I were a bit more spry, I’d add a chicken coop and a couple of bee hives, but both require more flexibility than I can muster.

    I’m at my best when I’m active outside with Mother Earth and inside with a Dog, books, and new learning. All that leavened with the sort of intimate relationships I’ve developed both here and in Minnesota and with my far flung family.

    That’s living in the face of autocracy and cruelty. I will not attenuate my life. Neither for the dark winds blowing through our country and world, nor for that dark friend of us all, death.

     

    Just a moment: Did you read Thomas Friedman’s article: I’ve Never Been More Afraid for My Countries Future? His words, served up with a healthy dish of Scandinavian influenced St. Louis Park Judaism, ring more than true to me. They have the voice of prophecy.

    We are in trouble. No doubt. Trouble from which extrication will require decades, I imagine. If not longer. Yet. I plan to grow heirloom vegetables year round on Shadow Mountain. To have mah Dog Shadow with me in the Greenhouse.

    I also plan to write and think about the sacred, the one, the wholeness of which we are part and in which we live, die, love. I will not cheapen my life with bitterness, rather I will eat salads, read, play with Shadow and dine with friends, talk to my friends and family near and far.


  • Still Learning

    Imbolc and the Snow Moon

    Sunday gratefuls: Shadow. Cookunity. Cold night. Drinking the Golden Calf. Midrash. Torah. Religion and its ignorers. Ginny and Janice. Tethering. Salmon and white Bean salad. Battle Mountain, Joe Pickett. The many sided crystal of perspective. Lenovo laptop.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Midrash

    Week Kavannah: Social Responsibility. Achrayut.

    Practice: Working on Seed Keepers, Seed Savers

    One brief shining: Working with AI, an odd by which I mean new and novel experience, to give form to a Seed Keeper’s Almanac, a self-help manual to recreate an America always longed-for, yet never lived in, a hybrid format in paper and on the web, replenished and renewed by its users, focused on dreaming America as neither an utopia, nor as a replica of a faux golden age, rather as a stewpot where different ingredients in different amounts blend together into a powerful, compassionate whole.

     

    An issue for me. How to reconcile my lower energy, dog-distracted, hermit favoring life with a steady felt need to stand upright in this most ridiculous and chaotic of times. Not be absent.

    I write, yes. I talk with friends and family, reinforcing their desires to get out there and do something. I’m part of a religious community dedicated to a just and compassionate world. Yet. What is mine to do?

    The more I futz with chatbotgpt, the more I find possibility in the idea, the bringing into reality of a self-help manual for that world I’ve worked for my whole life. A connected hermit. A dog-distracted but still alert old guy. Using my energy as I can.

     

    Thinking about those isolated from this dystopian new world disorder. Trappist Monks in the Gethsemane Abbey. Amish families around Lancaster, Pennsylvania and Fort Wayne, Indiana. Subsistence farmers. Those of us old folks with adequate financial resources. (mostly. Though Social Security and Medicare…) Expatriates like Mary and Mark. Wilderness dwellers in the North Woods, in the Mountain Ranges of this great land. Oddly perhaps some Native American nations. Probably some recluses and communal living folks far off the grid.

    And, of course, the oligarchs.

    The rest, even cousin Donald’s base. Nope. Vulnerable. Without cover. That includes my son and Seoah. Ruth and Gabe. Luke. Ginny and Janice. Anyone unfortunate enough to be poor. Or different in a way that the oligarchs and their tattered army dislike.

    This struggle will continue for the rest of my life. That alone means something to me. A need to not kneel. Not acquiesce. A need to do what only I can do. Now.

     

    Just a moment: I had a no good week in part. Feeling down, dog defeated. Weak in body and mind. Took wrassling and seeing others to bring myself back to level.

    That’s ok, though. Learning how to live through the troughs as well as the highs is a key lesson. OK. Learning to live through the occasional abyss as well as the getting along just fine days. Glad I’ve advanced enough for that.

    Back to working out. For example…

     


  • The Center. Can it hold?

    Imbolc and the 78th Birthday Moon

    Wednesday gratefuls: Shadow. My son. Seoah. Today! Ruth on Friday! -8 this morning. Snow. Red Lodgepole Bark against White Snow. Eating and drinking. Celebrex no more. Tramadol. Sue Bradshaw. Thyroid Stimulating Hormone. Kaylor. Prostate cancer. Spinal stenosis. Mark in Al Kharj.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Shadow

    Kavannah: Love. Ahavah.

    One brief shining: My son texted me from the airport, they’re about to board soon, and a thrill ran through me, those two, precious cargo on their way here to Shadow Mountain, my family.

     

    Annual physical yesterday. Key learning. No more celebrex. My kidney functions showed deterioration. And, as Sue said, we need our kidneys. That leaves me tramadol and a referral to a pain management doc. Their options will be limited to. Next best treatment: narcotics.

    The pain has grown incrementally since its break out moment in Korea a year and a half ago. Not having Celebrex will mean increasing limitations for my mobility. Not a happy thought. Will be adjusting to this for a while. Unsure what the future holds.

    To complete a medical trifecta of dermatologist, pcp, and oncologist I have a telehealth visit with my medical oncologist’s p.a. Kaylor, today at 3. Big fun. PSA stable. Testosterone low. Should not be any surprises.

    OK. Enough about me. How are you feeling?

     

    Just a moment: Breaking heart. The specter of a President flaunting judicial decisions may happen this week. My head spins at that thought. I mean that.

    All my life, 78 years tomorrow, I’ve lived in a rule of law society where courts arbitrate the most difficult, thorny problems and adjudicate between adversaries. Disrespecting a court decision? Unthinkable. Literally.

    Never on my horizon. Now the President has spent a business career dodging and weaving from the courts. Even when finally cornered and convicted he trashes the legitimacy of the legal process. This from the leader of our government.

    My inner gyroscope, the one that orients me to my place in the United States, has a serious tilt. My lev, too.

    I prefer Margaret Renkl’s response. (see yesterday’s post). My America has begun to shatter. Its culture losing its moorings. This place, these United States, are my home and my home now feels like it’s built on a cliff soon to erode from a rising sea of political thuggery.

    Maybe there’s help in the world of song lyrics about lost love.* Or, in poetry:

    Yeats, The Second Coming

    Here is your medieval illuminated manuscript-style illustration inspired by W.B. Yeats’ The Second Coming.

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre

    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

    The best lack all conviction, while the worst

    Are full of passionate intensity…

    now I know

    That twenty centuries of stony sleep

    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

     

    *I can’t believe what i just heardCould it be trueAre you the (country) I thought I knewThe one who promised me her loveWhere did it goDoes anybody ever know
    How do you heal a broken heartThat feels like it will never beat this much againOh noI just can’t let goHow do you heal a broken heartThat feels like it will never love this much againOh noTonight I’ll hold what could be rightTomorrow I’ll pretend to let you go   Chris Walker, 1993

  • Aging Resistance

    Yule and the 78th Birthday Moon

    Thursday gratefuls: Diane, healing. New computer getting setup. New ottoman. Studying parsha Bo. With Zohar and Zornberg. Finished reading Conclave. Now another Gray Man. PSA stable. Kidney functions a bit off. A1-C a bit high. Nothing too concerning to me. Vince. Alan coming to Conifer this morning. Talking with Tom. My life as a conversational flaneur. Moods. Emotions. Art Green. My son and Seoah coming. A birthday this month. Year of the Snake.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Mussar friends

    Kavannah 2025: Creativity

    Kavannah this week: Rachamim, compassion  practice-listen for the melody of the other

    One brief shining: Aging resistance, a less frenzied, hot breath sorta response, a more relaxed, we can survive this attitude, yet still feeling to me like my way is to call out certain actions, especially those injurious to the planet and vulnerable people, while also tending these seed packets: pluralism, globalism, economic and racial justice, feminism, importance of the common good, support for the individual and individualism.

     

    This political disaster feels different from the first Trump infection. Even though he may be sort of more organized with Plan 2025 held in his French fry greasy hand, his Burger King kid’s meal crown slouched rakishly on his orange haired head, and even though he and his cronies have-who can pass up the sports metaphor, football!-flooded the zone; as someone I read in the Washington Post said this is the imitation of competence. In reality it’s a scatter shot series of nods to the base: no to birthright citizenship, freeze all Federal money going out, hammer General Milley, Hegsteth, Kennedy, Gabbard.

    This is not governing. It’s the politics of petty revenge. We’ll have to wait for days, those famous first hundred days, to see the metamorphosis, if any, of our nation’s institution. At some point the executive order Sharpie, a Sharpie!, will have to rest and cousin Donald will have to try for legislation. Court fights will be ongoing. We don’t know what’s happening quite yet.

    This much I do know. My world, a world in which meanness and cruelty have a bad connotation, a world where the American dream of a people joined together by adherence to the idea of equal opportunity, equality before the law, of a nation that welcomes the poor, the huddled masses yearning to be free, will not perish.

    We will tend with care the seeds of this remarkable and yes flawed experiment. Seeds like the Constitution. Also flawed, yet a reminder in its amendments and in the expansion of its protection through the courts, that it is our flawed document. Seeds like FDR’s New Deal which expanded the Federal Government’s role as protector of the least of those among us. Seeds like our liberal Christian churches, synagogues, mosques, Buddhist temples and retreat centers. Seeds like our academic institutions, like the NIH and the CDC. Seeds like our real history: slavery, slaughter of the indigenous, colonialism and those who have stood against these sins of our fathers and mothers now passed down to us the third and fourth and fifth and sixth generations.

    And we will tend to ourselves and each other. Not allowing despair to take hold for too long. Encouraging the forms of declaring our dream still alive and vibrant. Supporting those who take up direct action. Donating funds. Showing up at protests and marches. Maybe forming bookclubs that focus on American history, on the American renaissance, on American authors of all colors, gender preferences, and religious backgrounds.

    We are not down. We are not out. Our dream still guides this nation. We just have to  help people wake up to the chances to embrace it.