Imbolc Valentine Moon
A question for the Woolly Mammoth meeting of this Monday: “…think back over time – older and newer – was there a piece of music, a song, or a musical video that had an impact on you, or that shaped your thinking, or who you are in some way, at some important juncture in your life, or time in your life.” Scott Simpson
Here’s my reply:
I can still hear the others singing, feel the resonance of my voice joining theirs, marching, marching, marching. So many times. The song was the old spiritual, We Shall Overcome. I sang it in protests again Vietnam, in labor solidarity rallies, on the occasional Sunday morning. I sang it alone, in the shower, driving in the car.Whenever I hit the line, we shall over come someday, and even writing this, I tear up.
This song could be my heart’s theme song. It’s a musical answer to Shakespeare’s famous query, “To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them.” I’ve always been on the take arms side.
Though, parenthetically, I’m also a follower of the Tao which suggests wu wei, or non-doing as an answer. Both seem true to me. In the end I cannot just let things happen to me, or to the people and the society that I love.
“Our beloved Opportunity remained silent,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said Wednesday… Her power dropped to a trickle, and she was last heard from on June 10…Keri Bean was among those who helped send that last radio signal. Losing Opportunity, she says, is like a death in the family…But at least it was Mars that killed her — it wasn’t the rover failing or something else. It was Mars. And I feel like that’s really the only appropriate death for her at this point.” 
Chronic illnesses must have some similarity in their psychological impact. Maybe related to grieving. In the first days of a diagnosis there is confusion, distress, yet also relief that this thing has a name. Searching for a cure becomes a family enterprise, the internet glows red hot with old medical journal articles, new experimental this or that, group therapy by fellow sufferers. This serves to educate everyone, yet it also embeds the illness more and more firmly in daily life. There are no days or nights when the illness isn’t there. It hovers, even on good days or weeks, a known guest, but not a welcome one.
This is not the end. The armistice finally crumbles under a sudden resurgence of symptoms. Or, new ones. Or, the failure of a remedy. Despair. Perhaps depression. Maybe it is forever. I just thought that in a moment of exhaustion, but what if it’s true?
Better to suspend hope for results. Better to stay with the day-to-day. Better to focus on spirituality, on matters of the soul. Why this latter in the time of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, flat earth atheists? Because the one thing illness does not touch is our soul, that part of us that links us to the eternal, to the cosmos, to the ongoingness of things.
The waxing moon has not brought the weight gain I’d hoped. Maybe next month. We talked yesterday about eating disorders and their relevance to Kate’s situation. Through a combination of aversive conditioning, nausea and cramping triggered by eating, the dry mouth issues of Sjogren’s that can make food unpalatable, a generally depleted musculature that makes it difficult to work up an appetite, and a feeling of malaise we’ve not been able to shake, eating has become problematic. Sounds like an eating disorder. If it quacks…
Much as I like the dark, the cold, the snow, I also love the growing season. Imbolc, Feb. 1st, (or, as for all Celtic holidays, a full week of markets and dances), marks the turn from winter, the season just past, toward spring, or Ostara, which we celebrate on the spring equinox. That’s what Groundhog Day celebrates, Imbolc, and a European belief that if a furry rodent saw it’s shadow, there would be six more weeks of winter. In Germany it’s the badger that is the predictor. The Pennsylvania Dutch apparently shifted to the groundhog.
I’m responsible for the next lesson, tomorrow, as I was last week, but with Alan as back up this time. Last week we worked with the middah, character trait in the Jewish ethical discipline of 
I have had many encounters of this kind and they vary in which characteristic of the Holy they emphasize. I’ve written before about my mystical experience on the quad at Ball State. Fascinans dominated. I wanted to be there, in a state of total linkage with all. I wanted to stay. In high school I attended a summer church camp at Epworth Forest in Indiana. We learned a lot about communion and in particular I took to the heart the idea that if we didn’t reconcile with others, we might “eat and drink our own damnation.” OK. I was an impressionable guy in that moment. But the fear occasioned by that idea made me find a young woman whom I’d teased and ask for her forgiveness. Stepping into the Sistine Chapel. Awe. Driving to Bailey and seeing the Continental Divide capped with snow. Awe. Contemplating my own death. Fear moving toward awe.
Winter Waxing Moon
When I went downstairs yesterday after a hard day at the easel (hah), I had my hearing aid in, but still didn’t hear something Kate said. I asked her to repeat it. She waved me off dismissively. Most of the time, I get it. It’s no fun having to repeat yourself. It can feel like I’m not paying attention or being respectful. Over and over. For some reason though, the dark vessel constructed in those first days of my deafness in my left ear, a vessel built to carry the notice that my body would someday fail me altogether, surfaced.
In the wake of Kate’s dismissal 33 years of grief, of annoyance, of having to explain, of being handicapped-always, broke into consciousness. I felt overwhelmed by the accumulated sadness, anger, discomfort. Didn’t know I carried within me this complex. I’m imagining a black submarine navigating the seas of my inner world. When its bow first broke through the waters of my attention, it stunned me. Knocked me back. I took it out on Kate. Not good.
Gonna look at material for the religious school class on the 16th. Alan will be back from Argentina. Our lesson theme is yirah, awe. Getting fifteen inches of snow over 36 hours creates yirah. We do not impact the weather, at least not directly. Yes, climate change is effecting the sorts of weather we get, but we don’t get to choose the diverse effects of our self-genocide. Fifteen inches of snow is like a volcanic eruption or a tsunami or a tornado, sudden, unpredictable except just before the fact, a natural act that changes the immediate environment dramatically. Though not as devastating as those violent manifestations, a great snow storm does show the power of the natural world, something to which we have to adapt rather than something we can manage.
Yirah and kadosh, holy or sacred, go together. Rudolf Otto defines sacred as an experience of awe, yirah, and the mysterium tremendum et fascinans: 
Something experienced in ordinary life but also wholly other. I’ve been following a sailing race, the Golden Globe, in which several skippers competed against each other in solo jaunts around the world. Ask any sailor, solo or not, who’s navigated the roaring forties about yirah and mysterium. They’re manifesting every day, every hour in places most of us will never go; but, a few do. Wholly other, but also part of the same puzzling universe which coughed us up into life.
Kate’s wanting to get out and not just visits to medical facilities. Her stamina has improved some, she’s eating more. She’s still in the 80-82 zone, but I’m looking forward to her cracking 83. Then up from there. She’s laughing and smiling, things I didn’t see often over the last three months. Enjoying these moments. Both of us.
Richard Feynman, the physicist, had 
OK. Let’s start with food. Where does food come from? The grocery store. Well, that’s where we buy it. But where does the grocery store get the food? From trucks? OK. How about the trucks. Where do they get the food?
Did you notice that a lot of the food the animals eat comes from plants? Acorns, grass, roots, tiny plants that live in water? What about the rest? Insects, other fish? What do insects eat? Some do eat other insects, that’s right. Praying mantises, for example. But most insects eat plants. Grasshoppers do. Leafchewers. Some eat plant roots. Some eat the nectar, like bees.
How do they do it? Even scientists have a hard time explaining it, but somehow the leaves take sunlight, water, and other things from the soil and make what the plant needs to live. Amazing, right? Sunlight, water, and nourishment from the soil. Nourishment? What does it mean? It just means anything that helps you live, or helps plants live. And you know what’s also amazing? Guess what the plants send out into the air when they’re done making food? Oxygen! That’s right, plants feed animals and they give off the thing we need to breathe to stay alive. Wow. Go, plants!
I used to be a Christian, a while back. But, not anymore. What is a religion, do you think? There’s so many different ones that it’s hard to say. To me religions are about what is most important to you. What matters. It might be your relationships with your mom and dad, or Ruth, or your friends. How are you supposed to treat those close to you? It might be about animals and how you’re supposed to treat them. Do you remember when Herschel died? Your great-grandma? Your great-grandpa? Did you ever wonder what happened to Herschel and your great-grandparents after they die? Me, too. I’m not sure, but it is a question most religions try to answer.
Think of it, Gabe. The sun, that distant star that gives us daytime, the one we see everyday, provides us with the heat and energy to live. Mother earth, the ground we walk on everyday, that holds us up, that we see in parks and farm fields and mountains, provides a home for us and nourishment for the plants. The plants provide food for animals. And animals and plants make food for us. They also make our oxygen. You just breathed some in right now.
I think of the holy as something both amazing and mysterious. Imagine all the time you spent inside your mom’s womb, growing from two cells into the boy you are now. Amazing and mysterious. Think about a plant’s leaf taking energy from sunlight, mixing it somehow with water and nourishment from the soil to create food, give off oxygen. Amazing and mysterious. Or, how about the change from winter to spring when the cold goes away. Flowers come up. Trees put out their leaves. Grass turns green. Up here in the mountains you see fawns and elk calves. Amazing and mysterious. All holy.