Category Archives: Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Family, Great Wheel, Health, Holidays, Judaism, Myth and Story, Plants, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Easter Morning

Leave a comment

Ostara and the Ovid Moon of Metamorphoses

Sunday gratefuls: Broad spectrum antibiotics. Kate’s will. Jamie Bernstein. Easter and Passover and Spring. Friends. Rabbi’s. Countryfolk. Mountains. Dogs.

Sparks of Joy: Kate’s blood cultures negative for infection. Exhaustion, but exhaustion held in the care and concern of so many others.

Kate at Mama’s Fish House

Been thinking, a lot, about the holidays: Ostara, Easter, Passover. How they hold the wonder and awe of Spring and apply it to our human lives. On Maundy Thursday (no, I never remember what that means) Kate was in severe crisis. She had a crowd of nurses, physician’s assistants, respiratory therapists, a pulmonologist. All working carefully, quickly, urgently.

I had a hushed conversation in the hallway with the physician’s assistant and Dr. Fenton, the pulmonologist, about resuscitation.  Asking hard questions. Trying to be true to the situation, to her wishes, to the possible.

She survived the crisis, her blood pressure down and her breathing more stable. She moved to the 10th floor where she could be treated with nurses who work with more complicated cases.

Her situation got better, but death still seemed as plausible as recovery. On Good Friday, her lucidity returned, she made it off the bipap (a small mask that is actually a treatment for the pneumonia, among other things), and her white cell count continued to come down.

Yesterday we found her blood borne infection was gone. Though it still needs a four to six week bout of IV antibiotics to make it sure it doesn’t resurface. She passed her swallow study so she can drink and eat. Prognosis still guarded, but less so now.

Her friend, Jamie, reported she looks good. Jamie stayed all night with her.

It’s Easter morning.

Garden, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities, Memories, Mountains, Myth and Story, Our Land and Home, Plants, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Weather +Climate

They Say It’s His Birthday!

Leave a comment

Spring! and the Ovid Moon of Metamorphoses

Shoutout to birthday boy Publius Ovidius Naso, or Ovid as we know him in the English speaking west. He’d be two thousand and fifty-four today.

Saturday gratefuls: Safeway pickup. Kabob skewers. Kate’s fluid flowing. Psalms class finish. New class start April 9. Writing poetry. Colorado Mountain Sun. Ancient ones on Justice. Vaccines. April Fool’s Day: shot II for me.

Sparks of Joy: Unclogging Kate’s feeding tube and avoiding another ER adventure. Wu wei, the Way of my life.

March 1, meteorological spring. No romance in that one. March 20, today, 5:37 MST, the Vernal Equinox. Spring. Ostara. Bunnies and crosses and parting of seas, oh my! Lots of romance, lots of theological pulling and hauling. This religion defining moment: resurrection and another: the Exodus. I settle these days for the Sun and the Earth’s celestial equator. See this explainer if you need more. More or less equal hours of Sun and night.

Yes. We’ve moved from the transitional time of Imbolc to the birthing blooming buzzing time. Spring. No wonder the Anglo-Saxons, those Northern European ancestors of so many of us, chose a fertility goddess, Eostre, to celebrate. Estrogen. Ostara. Easter. Yes, the Catholics took her name, added it to the resurrection celebration, and, voila: Easter!

Jesus as Eostre. A dying and rising God like Tammuz, Adonis, Attis, Dionysus, Osiris, or Jesus seem like good company for a fertility goddess. Any gardener can testify to the thrill of planting dusty brown clumps of vegetative matter in the Fall of the year and in the Spring of the next year, the rapture of a moistened bed pierced by green shoots, then Tulips, Crocus, Grape Hyacinth, Iris, Lilies in colorful flower.

Isn’t resurrection a matter of taking a dead thing, or what appears to be a dead thing, putting it away, and having it rise out at the right time? If you listened to the Southern Gospel Revival’s rendition of “Ain’t No Grave” )two posts below this one), you heard the line, “Ain’t no grave, can keep my body down.” Further on, “When that trumpet sounds, I’m a risin’ from the ground.” Could be sung by every Tulip bulb I ever planted.

This is the right time to celebrate those things you may have planted a while back, projects or dreams that have needed some time in the grave or the soil or the unconscious.

It’s also the right time to look at the bed you’ve tended, the one in which you planted them, your life. There might be weeds, or, as I prefer, plants out of place. Note that this means you may have good habits or plans or projects that have become plants out of place in your life. You may have to remove them so your new projects and dreams will flourish.

Ask Eostre for help. You might find her in your anima, perhaps buried in your shadow. She’ll burst out, give things a boost up, if you let her. I’m sitting right now on Shadow Mountain, imagine what lies beneath.

Commentary on Religion, Judaism, Kabbalah, Poetry, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

O Sullen God

Leave a comment

Late Wednesday. My Psalm of healing. For Friday’s class

 

A Psalm. A Prayer. A Theology.

 

O sullen divinity of my youth

You took away my legs

O silent god you made me lie down,

Unable to walk. You imprisoned me.

Lord of theft you stole my mother,

Left us without her. Crying without hope.

The abyss swallowed me.

 

And you let me disappear, fade away.

A blanket held in the depth’s chill.

I shuddered, unable to throw it off.

No joy. No walking with others. I stood alone

Trickster god, wielder of sacred bewilderment.

You had me. Oh. You had me.

 

And, I knew you not.

 

After the fallow time had drained the world.

That spring rhizomes, corms, bulbs and tubers awoke.

Shook off winter cold and threw green up, up, up.

Up toward the sky. Crowned it in colors so bright.

Purple crocus, yellow crocus, Grape hyacinth.

Stories of joy. Time to play!

 

The bees flew in and the bees flew out,

Out to the flowers, into the hive. Out to the flowers.

That ground hog high in the tree. The turtle on pilgrimage.

The dogs. Always. Barking, running, bowing, chasing.

 

On the garden bed: purpled beets, white onions, green leeks.

Curved beans, firm tomatoes, potatoes, carrots.

Soil clinging to them. The womb.

How could I not hear the sacred music? Take part.

Twirling as a dervish, ecstasy and freedom. Dance.

 

And you, silent god, still I knew you not.

 

But the one crowned with flowery garlands,

Tasting of sweet food made in the honeycomb,

This god, fried in my skillet and served with eggs,

Not silent. Not dark. But sacred, yes. Divine.

Family, Health, Literature, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Writing

The Other World. My True Home.

Leave a comment

Imbolc and the waning Megillah Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Easy Entrees. Kate on the vaccine hunt. Vaccines. Covid. Diane. Mary. Mark. Changing Kate’s bandage. Psalms. Poetry. Writing. Leaning into Kate’s changes. The Sun. The Blue. Black Mountain. Shadow Mountain. The road. The Creeks.

Sparks of Joy: Kep eager to eat. Rigel throwing herself on the bed, back next to mine. Vaccines and the vaccinated.

 

Forgot this. So back at it today, Wednesday. Gratefuls and joys will stand.

Kate had a better day yesterday.

I told her I don’t know what to say when folks ask me how she’s doing. “She’s holding her own,” she replied. There you have it. True.

We spent a long time talking about death. It’s our turn, soon enough. What do we want? How will we live if the other dies first? What do we need in that case? We’re not finished with the conversation. Perhaps we never will be.

Next to me right now I have a stack of books. No surprise. On the bottom of the stack is my yellow Westminster commentary on the Psalms. A gift from Bethlehem-Stewart Presbyterian church where I interned for a year. Above it is Emerson’s Etudes by Cavill. Above Cavill is the Murmuring Deep by Avivah Zornberg, a brilliant Jewish commentator on the Torah. Above that, the Tanakh. On the Tanakh, the Viking Spirit, a new book on Norse Mythology, and a very good one.

I mention them to illustrate what keeps pulling me back in, what is never far from my consciousness. The Other World. That place where the human mind goes when it tires, grieves, no longer knows any answers. Or, when it feels buoyant and joyful. A place that can seem hidden and faraway. At other times so close.

Next to these books are two small collections I purchased recently. Both of JRR Tolkien’s work. One is familiar: The Hobbit. The Fellowship of the Ring. The Two Towers. The Return of the King. The other less so: The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, Farmer Giles of Ham, Smith of Wooton Manor, and Roverandom.

See what I mean? My heart swings toward the fantastic, the religious, stories of the sacred, of gods and men and women and boys and kings and faeries. Where I live when not doing other things like cooking and taking the trash out.

Guess I’m not gonna get on with adulthood. Too late. Somehow though. I’m glad.

These places are not escape for me. That Other World gives us all, has given me, so much. What justice is and why it’s important. What love and loyalty and duty are and why they matter. What adventure and risk and danger offer. How humans transform into creatures and creatures into angels.

They even explain 45 and all his bullshit. Why he’s so unimportant, yet so damned troublesome. Think Sauron. The one ring. There will always be a Bilbo and a Gandalf, a Frodo and a Samson. A Joshua and Jesus. A Thor and an Odin. So much more than the darkness that always threatens to engulf us.

In my own way I write about and inhabit that Other World as much as possible. Not because of its metaphysics, not because of its promise about what we cannot see. No, not that. But because of its impact on the heart, my heart and yours.

Friends, Judaism, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Boo. It’s Haman. Boo.

Leave a comment

Imbolc and the Megillah Moon

Saturday gratefuls: Dr. Thompson. Kate. Always Kate. The Karma, her wheelchair. Psalm’s class. Kabbalah Experience. Earth. Animacy. Flying through space, yet with friends. Perseverance. Mars. The asteroid belt. Rockets. Satellites. Math.

Sparks of Joy: Odin. Ecstasy. The Moon.

 

 

What’s a megillah? A scroll. The third division of the Tanakh, the ketuvim, the Writings, has five books: Lamentations, Esther, Ruth, Song of Solomon, and Ecclesiastes, that are read from scrolls during certain Jewish holidays.

The scroll of Esther is read aloud on the holiday of Purim, which ended yesterday. Purim celebrates the story of Esther. Esther has risen to Queen of Persia through the advice of her guardian, Mordecai. The King, though, does not know she is of the Jewish minority in his kingdom.

Haman, the grand vizier, announces a campaign to rid Persia of Jews. Mordecai encourages Esther to reveal her ethnicity and foil Haman. She does this. Haman and his compatriots pay for their hubris and the Jewish community in Persia survives.

The first Purim I attended at Congregation Beth Evergreen the President of the congregation carried cases of beer and bottles of wine into the sanctuary. What?

Purim shares elements of medieval Christmas revelries, especially its Lord of Misrule. Conventions get upended. Drinking more than usual and during a worship service, for example. Folks dress in costume and often laughter, even derisive laughter accompanies the worship.

The whole megillah means reading the entire scroll out loud. On Purim that means Esther and it is read from a handwritten scroll, though often truncated. Whenever the evil grand vizier’s name, Haman, occurs, the congregation shouts, laughs, cranks on groggers, mechanical noisemakers. It’s fun.

Another part of Purim is the Purim spiel. A member of the congregation writes an entire play, always a musical at Beth Evergreen. In it is a retelling of the Purim story, but also moments that make fun of synagogue leadership. The Lord of Misrule idea.

I’m including a link to this year’s Purim spiel at Congregation Beth Evergreen. My buddy, Alan Rubin, his daughter Francesca, and his wife, Cheri play prominent roles.

The megillah of Esther is the only book in the Tanakh which doesn’t mention God. And, it’s a story of Jewish liberation from persecution. As such, over the centuries it has given hope to Jewish communities, almost always a minority of the nations within which they found themselves.

Cinema and Television, Commentary on the news, Coronavirus, Dogs, Family, Great Wheel, Health, Holidays, Judaism, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, US History, Weather +Climate

The Frozen Rose of Texas

Leave a comment

Imbolc and the Megillah Moon

Sunday gratefuls: All the Megillah’s. More snow. More cold. A good sleep. Cold chicken. Red Lobster biscuits. My Ecuador alpaca coat. My new LLBean insulated plaid shirt. My duckies. Love the cold, don’t love being cold.  Vaccines. Covid. 45 gone. 46 in. Judah and the Black Messiah.

Sparks of Joy: Fresh, white Snow. Rigel jumping up on the deck like a 5 year old. Life.

 

 

Those vaccines. Hard to come by up here in the mountains. Not yet. We’ll get them though. Sooner, I imagine. Haven’t gone the obsessive click now, click again, click now, click again route. We’ve survived Covid so far doing what we’re doing. Gonna keep at no visits, grocery pickups, only essential medical visits. Probably for a while after the vaccine, too.

Love that they’re out there. That we’re eligible. That others are getting them. That more will get them. Might be Happy Hanukah and Merry Christmas. Ho, Ho, Ho. or Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel. If that happens, I’ll still enjoy the darkness of the Winter Solstice, but I’ll be right there with the light worshipers, too. Can you imagine how festive a season that will be?

Meanwhile a hyper clean, car sized robot will roam Mars punching holes in its surface and storing soil in special containers for the second part of a three stage project. The second stage is a lander that picks up those containers and the third stage returns them to Earth for NASA and European Space Agency labs. 2025-2027. Far away from the virus infected planet it left last July. Smart Perseverance.

And, maybe, just maybe, our nation will have made progress on sorting out its painful contradictions. I watched Judas and the Black Messiah yesterday on HBO Max. Fred Hampton was 21 when J. Edgar conspired with the Chicago P.D. to eliminate him. 21. When I watched, I kept saying yes, Fred, yes. Power is people. Capitalists, no matter their color, exploit the people. A Rainbow Coalition. Yes, Fred. Then he died in his bed, never waking up, his pregnant Deborah arched over his body.

Of course, the move reminded me of the damning curse of racism, but it went further, much further. Fred brought together Puertoricans and poor whites. He saw the thread that wove together the oppressed and was able to speak to it, to help others see it. No wonder they killed him.

What if the Proud Boys and the Black Panthers saw common cause? They could. It’s corporate capitalism that keeps them both down. What if those of us on the far left joined, too. And Chicanos. And Asians. And Native Americans. There would need be no violence. That sort of self-awareness would win at the ballot box.

I know. Texas. How would you like a $16,000 bill for keeping the heat on? See the paragraph above.

Great Wheel, Mountains, Myth and Story, Our Land and Home, Plants, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Heal Yourself with the World

Leave a comment

Sent by friend Bill Schmidt. Good advice.

 

 

Advice  from María Sabina, Mexican healer and poet – “Heal yourself with the light of the sun and the rays of the moon. With the sound of the river and the waterfall. With the swaying of the sea and the fluttering of birds. Heal yourself with mint, neem, and eucalyptus. Sweeten with lavender, rosemary, and chamomile. Hug yourself with the cocoa bean and a hint of cinnamon. Put love in tea instead of sugar and drink it looking  at the stars. Heal yourself with the kisses that the wind gives you and the hugs of the rain. Stand strong with your bare feet on the ground and with everything that comes from it. Be smarter every day by listening to your intuition, looking at the world with your forehead.  Jump, dance, sing, so that you live happier. Heal yourself, with beautiful love, and always remember … you are the medicine.”

 

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Literature, Media, Myth and Story, Plants, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Travel, US History, Writing

Acts of Creation

Leave a comment

Imbolc and the crescent Wolf Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Beau Jo’s pizza. Easy Entree’s Chicago beef sandwiches. Keepin’ me sane. Kate. Somewhat better days. Trying new things with her nourishment. That crescent Moon. Sleeping through the night. Invisible City, a short Netflix series featuring Brazilian folklore. Latin American magical realism. 100 Years of Solitude. Marquez.

Folklore. Legend. Fairy tales. Mythology. Religion. Art. These are some of my favorite things.

Just finished the short series, Invisible City, on Netflix. It features Brazilian folktale creatures like the Saci, the Cuca, the Cucupira, the pink River Dolphin. Green Frontier, a Colombian series from 2017, focuses on the Amazonian forest and the supernatural.

Netflix and to a lesser extent, Amazon Prime and HBO Max, keep offering films and television series from all over the world. I love this, especially the original programming on Netflix produced by local creatives in their own language and in their own thought worlds. The supernatural dramas draw me in though they vary a great deal in quality.

I also love dramas and mysteries that show life in different places. Gomorrah, organized crime in Naples. The Alienist, turn of the century (19th to 20th) New York, Monarca, contemporary Mexico City, Wild District, contemporary life in Bogota and the lives of guerillas. Many others.

Since I can’t get out, get around, these days, travel comes to me. The anthropologist in me loves the folktales, the cultures, the different mores. And the ticket price is far lower.

Reading lately. Finished a few chess related novels after watching the amazing Queen’s Gambit on Netflix. Finishing Theodora Gossa’s European Travels for Monstrous Women and will pick up Kim Stanley Robinson’s, the Ministry of the Future next. Science fiction and fantasy also live in the fairy tale, folktale, legendary realm.

Writing. Jennie’s Dead. Ancientrails. Writing a Psalm for the Rabbi Jamie class. Not as much as I’d like, more than I’ve been doing. Just bought some Brazilian folklore books. Might be good basis for a new novel.

I have another novel idea I’ve been kicking around for years, one that would examine white supremacy, maybe militias. This one emerges not from the favorite things I mentioned above, but from my growing up years in Indiana. Like my buddy Mark Odegard this work sustains me, even though it may never see the light of day.

My birthday’s coming up and I’m playing with the idea of a podcast or a Patreon website on which I would read my own novels, figure out some sort of subscription service. Not a new idea, novels were sometimes published in newspapers, magazines, in serial fashion. Combine my speaking voice with my creative voice. The birthday part of this is buying items for a podcasting studio.

Friend Alan Rubin has a lot of experience in audio recording and has created a studio for himself to do voice overs and commercials. He’s advised me. I’ve watched Youtube videos and just bought Audio for Authors, a book about this sort of project.

So, yes, the creative me stays alive, is never far from my consciousness.

The only rule is to work. From a list of rules by John Cage. That’s the trick. Persistence.

Commentary on the news, Family, Friends, Health, Humanities, Judaism, Kabbalah, Literature, Poetry, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., US History, Woolly Mammoths

No More Checking on the Idiot

Leave a comment

Imbolc and the waning Wolf Moon

Friday gratefuls: Kate. Scott. Bill’s tough assignment for Sunday morning. Seeing into ourselves. And talking about it. Biden. Better than expected. He’s got momentum. And, public opinion. 45 fading out. His impeachment. Colder weather here. Sleep. The Psalms.

from 2016

No more checking on the idiot. Thank god. Still, for the duration of the impeachment his peculiar style of unthinking, thought garbling, strangled rationales is on display. Gee, his lawyers, the first group, didn’t think he could make a good argument that the election was a fraud. Hmm. The next set convinced him that a constitutional argument made sense. Doesn’t matter anyhow since Republicans (what does that word even mean) won’t calve a 17 vote iceberg to sink his Titanic. More’s the pity.

It’s important, I believe, to try him for inciting insurrection. No matter the political reality of judgement. If it were up to me, I’d have the Attorney General arrest him for sedition. Try him. Sentence him for as long as his unnatural life lasts. He likes orange so it shouldn’t be much of a hardship.

Rabbi Hillel

After some prodding by Rabbi Jamie, I’m going to pick up the study of Psalms this morning at 9:30 a.m. I’m three classes behind, but he assured me I could catch up, no problem. We’re going to work on the 23rd Psalm today.

One insight I’ve had in re-reading it, reading his translation, reading a couple of others. Walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Or, through death’s dark vale as another has it. I always imagined this as a personal confrontation with death, my death, your death. Not sure why I thought that, but I did.

Now, it’s clear to me that the issue is grief. Death’s dark veil thrown over life. Mom’s death. Regina Schmidt’s. 450,000 Covid deaths. We are in death’s penumbra as we have not been in my lifetime, save perhaps for the Vietnam War.

I shall fear no Trump, no matter what he doth.

Looking forward to this class. It’s been a long slog with Kate and with Covid, mostly life shaved down to workouts, sleep, cooking, shopping for food, TV. Not much intellectual challenge. It’s like meat and drink for me, learning.

When I look inside, as Bill has suggested we do for this Sunday, and define myself, I first see a student. A curious man. Not sure why I never moved from student to scholar, but I never did. I’m a fine student though and learning feeds my soul.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Commentary on Religion, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

And so it ends, on the Twelfth Night

Leave a comment

Winter and the Moon of the New Year

Christmastide ends, Day 12: The Epiphany, Twelfth Night

Wednesday gratefuls: Anger. Trust. Feelings. Love. Rigel. Kep. Kate. The comforter. Cooler. Murdoch’s journey. Christmastide. Pagans. Seekers. Mountain Waste. The stars in their courses. 30 Coins. Eyes. Ears. Brain. Heart. Feet. Hands.

If you’ve followed these, we are at the end, the Twelfth Night of Christmastide. The Orthodox celebration of the incarnation. The three kings came, found the Child of Wonder, left. But on their way out they spoke with King Herod. Yes, the Child exists. Yes, he’s a king. Then left by another route to return home, to say they had found their way to this signal of a new age.

Herod takes the news hard. No infant kings allowed. Male babies under the age of two must die. And so the slaughter of the innocents which we acknowledged and whom we celebrated on Day 3, Children’s Day.

In Merry England the Twelfth Night was another time for the emergence of the fool, for the inversion of roles, for letting go of the amazement of Christmastide in preparation for the now imminent return to ordinary time. We saw this same impulse on Distaff Day and in the male equivalent, Plough Monday.

Shakespeare’s play, Twelfth Night, follows these themes with an exotic setting, gender role reversals, and a role for Feste, the fool. Written in 1601, it was for a performance on Twelfth Night.

Matthews offers another Robert Herrick excerpt:

Ceremony on Candlemass Eve

Down with the Rosemary, and so

Down with the Baies, and Mistletoe:

Down with the Holly, Ivie, all.

Wherewith ye drest the Christmas Hall

That so the the superstitious find

No one least branch there left behind:

For look how many leaves there may be

Neglected there (maids trust to me)

So many Goblins you shall see.

Any needles or leaves left in the Christmas Hall would, on the day after Twelfth Night, turn into goblins. A sound reason to finish taking down all the decorations.

Mine are all stored away except two: a shelf sitting Victorian Santa and the string of colored lights over my south facing loft window. Not sure whether I’ll leave them up or not.

If we take the other thread, the pagan/supernatural thread, during Christmastide, Yule, this marks farewell for the Solstice, too. We now know the Sun has committed for another year, the crops and the livestock will feel the heat, the warmth, the energy, the vitality. Whatever fears we had as the nights grew longer and the days colder, have given way to confidence that Spring and Beltane will come once again.

We integrate in this new year the lessons of the darkness. The going deep within ourselves, down to our roots, considering ourselves and our Souls in the most radical way, will nourish our accomplishments in the light of the world.

I hope Christmastide has a somewhat new meaning for you. And that your new year, this ordinary time, will bless you and yours.