Category Archives: Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Feelings, Fourth Phase, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Reimaging revelation, US History

Eternal Life

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Spring and the Moon of Liberation

Shabbat gratefuls: Morning pages. The Artist’s Way by Julie Cameron. The Socrates Cafe. The Morning Service. Bar Mitzvah prep today at CBE. Parsha Tazria. Lighting the candles. Saying the blessing. Learning my Torah portion. My son and Seoah’s 8th anniversary! Wowzer. Their meal yesterday. I have pictures. Murdoch at the Dog park. Honeybee rides. Scheduled for April 24th. Which, as it happens, is the wrong date. Sigh. I played with different dates. Didn’t check.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Torii

One brief shining: I look through the Torii that is my back door, seeing the deck and garage beyond, my gaze goes up, to the left and sees the mezuzah placed there by Rabbi Jamie not long after the Hamas raid into Israel, but this day I remember the Shema, that most prayed of all Jewish prayers: Shema Israel, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echad, Hear O Israel, Our God, Our God is one, tucked into the mezuzah on a kosher scroll and that the mezuzah blesses each going out and coming in as sacred acts so I can look through my own back door from the inside and see a sacred outside, and through it from the outside and see a sacred inside, knowing then that all is one and all is sacred in this moment and in all others.

 

On this calendar Tom sent me. It is eternity now. Oh, well. That’s true. By definition. We don’t have to wait for our time in eternity. My Lodgepole companion and I exist in eternity, as do the brilliant rays of Great Sol shining on us both. As do all three mezuzahs here on Shadow Mountain. As does Shadow Mountain itself. And Black Mountain, too. All cohabiting in eternity.

Eternal life is this life, these fingers, this heart beating right now. Will my life as I am go on further into eternity’s vast expanse? Hell if I know. Yet I’ve participated in, been part of eternal life. So, maybe? A little bit of head scratching definitional play here. Sure. But, hey! We created the words and the ideas which they express. We might know more than we think we do. In fact I’m confident we do. Hope this eternal idea is one of those things in which we intuit more than we can express.

 

Just a moment: Biden creeping up on Trump. Oh be still my political heart. All we need to do is thump this orange tumor clothed in baggy blue with too long red ties. Thump him and his at the ballot box. Then we can get back to politics as forever changed, but perhaps not ushering in the American Empire quite yet.

Trump is no Caesar. On the basis of competence alone. I doubt he measures up to even Mussolini and Hitler. An inferior autocrat. That’s what he is. And he’s come along when a certain demographic felt hopeless. When all would be dictators arise. Tell me a story, a story in which I’m better than those other guys. Or those other women. Or those others. And I’ll vote for you. Always.

 

Feelings, Fourth Phase, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Reimaging revelation

SEE

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Spring and the Moon of Liberation

Thursday gratefuls: Poetry. Rodger Kamenetz. Jewish poetry. Irish poetry. U.S. poetry. Resident scholars at CBE. On dreams tonight. At our mussar today. Morning pages. Julie Cameron’s Artist’s Way. Have to claim it. So, here. I’m an artist, a writer. Artist’s date. A cleared out freezer. 13 bean soup with ham hock. Thanks, Tom. The eclipse. Such a peculiar event.

Sparks of joy and awe: The size of the Moon and the distance of Great Sol

One brief shining: The Japanese know about gates, about Torii, marking the transition from the mundane to the sacred, those red and orange Wooden portals so familiar from photographs, Shinto saying beyond here the realm transmutes, and yet if you look through a Torii the view beyond it is a continuation of the one in which you stand, like the rain on the night I saw that Elk Bull on the Forest’s edge, he was not in a different realm, yet he could have been a red and orange Wooden portal because what began at his presence was the sacred realm, revealed in all its glory and majesty as nothing more than the stone path leading to the temple, but, and this is crucially important, nothing less.

 

You see. We all see. But do you see? Do you see what you’re looking at? In all of its mundane grittiness? That ragged line of cloth, where the old coat has begun to fray. The too pitted asphalt of the road, its shoulders cracked. The place on the Lodgepole where the Bark peeled away? Those solar lights now lying on the ground, tipped over by a season’s worth of snow pushed and pushed again by plows and road graders. The all too many Trees, too close together, not a natural Forest, but a clear cut of long ago now replaced with thinner, weaker individuals.

Do you know that gritty look is a mask, a persona for the world? The road will disintegrate, disaggregrate. The solar lights will get re-placed. The coat will go to a tailor. And the Forest? Well, it will burn, thin itself and the two-leggeds who live within its boundaries.

Nothing stays as it is in this moment though in this moment, this eternal moment, it is unnecessary to know this.

And yet if you can see tomorrow through the lens of right now, then you can see the stone path, the one that passes through Torii gate, revealed as sacred on both sides of the gate. The gate’s true purpose. To reveal, to remind, to reconstruct the natures of the mundane and the sacred. Both the same, yet different. The incarnation, yes. That’s it. The capture of the sacred reality in the most mundane, the most gritty of all things. Like Black Mountain Drive. A Forest of thin Trees. A wet and staring Elk Bull. Even, and yes, please hear this as well as see it, even in that hand that types, that clicks the keys and sends these pixels out, these sacred pixels, to you.

Health, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Reimaging revelation

Seeing what you’re looking at

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Spring and the Purim Moon

Friday gratefuls: Space invaders headset. The future is now. As is, btw, eternity. Diane and San Francisco. Amtrak. BEI Wyndham. Asian Art Museum. Tallit. Joanne. Ruth in adulthood. Gabe reaching toward 16. Kate, of blessed memory. Jon. Rigel. Kep. Gertie. Vega. My Colorado dead. Travel. The World as the Sacred World. Oneness. Metaphors.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Toba Spitzer, her book God is Here: Reimagining the Divine

One brief shining: Went to Toni’s, my favorite market, parked near the shell of a Bed, Bath, and now gone to the Beyond store which crossed the Bankruptcy Bridge to business hell not long ago, got a cart and moved past some of my favorite things to the deli counter where I ordered an Italian sub and a large tub of tomato and pasta salad for MVP later, moving past the cheeses, and into the pastries, cookies, and candy aisle in which we wait for a cash register to open.

 

No retinal nerve photos on Wednesday, visual field instead. You may have played this ophthalmologists game. Put your chin on the rest. Cover one eye with a patch. Focus on the light in the center. Hold a clicker and press it as lights flicker off and on in various parts of your peripheral vision. Not any more. At least not at Colorado Eye Consultants. Now a virtual reality headset with a pleasant female A.I. getting you ready, guiding you. Very futuristic.

Dr. Repine also placed a small glass object she held on a metal rod up against my eyeball. Unpleasant. This to look into my eyeball and gauge the spots where vitreous fluids drain out. Narrow angle glaucoma, my kind, rare, features a blockage of the drains. Dr. Repine pronounced them good. As well as my pressures. Not going blind. Not yet.

And, in other health news, my PSA doubled since six weeks ago. Back to treatment soon, I imagine.

 

Here’s looking at you, Christianity. My vision clearer from the base of Mt. Sinai. Wanting to take on a new task, reviewing and reinterpreting my former faith. Not sure I should, but I know I could. Not in a critical way, but in a let’s look at this from a new perspective way.

For example. Incarnation. Here’s a wikipedia definition: Incarnation literally means embodied in flesh or taking on flesh. It refers to the conception and the embodiment of a deity or spirit in some earthly form or an anthropomorphic form of a god. That manger. The three Magi. The Star in the East. God made flesh. Christmas!

A new perspective. Each birth, each hatched Egg, each Cellular mitosis. Incarnation. Each drop of water or snowflake, each Tree sprouting from a seed, each Grass and Seaweed and Corn plant, each sunbeam. Incarnation. The divine, the sacred embodied in flesh or other form. Creating the World and being Created in it.

No longer an exclusionary principle but an inclusionary one. Bringing us all and all things, too, both into and as the body. So many Christmases.

Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Judaism, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Reimaging revelation, Woolly Mammoths

Alembics

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Spring and the Purim Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Diane. San Francisco. Bechira points. MVP. A family. Rich, powerful conversation last night. Blintzes. Joanne. Marilyn. Irv. That wide open Spring feeling. Anything is possible. Blood draw today. PSA and testosterone. Blood pressure. The Iliad translated by Emily Wilson. Formula 1. Baseball’s opening day. Feeling significant.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Deep friendships

One brief shining: We gather once a month, driving from our Mountain homes beside Streams and through Forests, to the synagogue, arriving as the Hebrew School ends, kids bouncing off walls, sliding on handrails, put down what food we’ve brought, perhaps as I did last night, the material for the discussion, too, and slowly ease ourselves into the presence of the others.

 

                                      Alembic

Not sure the activity matters. What matters is persistence. Showing up. Listening. Speaking your own story. Even if only between songs, or whacks at the golf ball, or over the sound of crochet needles thwacking. Over and over. As years go by the stories become familiar. Even our own story. The polished versions, the ones we use when unsure of the crowd, fall away and the tarnished ones slowly reveal themselves.

This is the way of kehillah. Of sacred community. Of friendship. The Woolly Mammoths, for example. Not knowing what we were doing. Well over 35 years in now. No longer needing to know what we’re doing, embracing the becoming, the deepening. All really because of persistence. We showed up. Two nights a month for years and years.

Could have been a poker game, I suppose. Maybe a print-making co-op. Instead it was a bunch of guys who Velveteen Rabbited themselves into real men, often exposed and dangling from another of life’s precipices, yet still welcome, still seen whole. Gathered in.

Memories of time together. At Villa Marie. At various spots on the North Shore. In each others homes. In restaurants. At the Nicollet Island Inn in that one room decorated for Christmas. You might call it a form of group marriage, within this meeting I pronounce you man and men. As long as you all shall live. What sacred time has joined together, let no man pull asunder.

An alembic. That’s what these community choirs are. These sheepshead games. These exercise mornings. These rummy cube games. These gatherings on the first Wednesdays at CBE. Alembics for the soul. A place of transformation, of transmutation, of lasting change.

I’ve been privileged to be part of several. Where the heat of vulnerability softens and opens a soul. Allows it to see itself anew, or, better, as it truly is. That’s where we’re going in these alembics. Running not away from ourselves but to ourselves. Feeling and getting support for who we most truly are. After the polish wears off. After the achievements drop away as inconsequential. As we do, the journey becomes easier. Lighter. Less burdened with expectations.

If you’re part of an alembic right now, cherish it. Persist. By staying in you achieve the alchemist’s dream. You can turn lead into gold.

Dreams, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Holidays, Humanities, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Reimaging revelation, Sport

The Day After

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Spring and the Purim Moon

Monday gratefuls: And yet more Snow today. Sigh. Yay! The day after Easter. Incarnation. Another big religious idea. April Fool’s day. The Fool in the Tarot deck. April. The cruelest month. Dawn. Spring. Choice points. Choice points that build community. Talking Story. Clan Keaton. San Francisco. Amtrak. Defeating inertia. Lucille’s New Orleans cafe. Alan.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Ruth turning 18

One brief shining: The day after Easter has a dawn, too, can you imagine that day when the disciples and others gathered around the resurrected Jesus, wanting to touch him, to deny, to embrace, to wonder, to laugh, you’re back, and we thought, well, we thought…

 

No. Again. Does not have to be a historical event anymore than the story of Persephone and Hades, or the Bremen Town Musicians, or Hansel and Gretel. We can still lean into the story, imagine what it might have been like. Use that imagining to flesh out our own response to the idea, in this case, of resurrection.

Wouldn’t you want to test resurrection? Kick a tire? Look under the hood? See if the idea could unwrap dead selves, dead gifts, dead hopes? I would. I did. Many years of Jungian analysis found me sifting through dreams, through active moments of my imagination, reexperiencing the traumas of Mom’s death. Of the strained and then withered relationship with Dad. Of that moment when I dropped German for fear of a low grade. Of fear itself trapping me in its silk web, bound and trussed, waiting only for the spider to finish its work.

Then there came that dream, a big dream, as Jung called them. In front of a large crowd I held a sword, lifted it with both hands above my head. He has the power they whispered. He has the power. And I knew I did.

Yet this use of resurrection is not one and done. No. Throughout our lives we continue to let fear or regret or guilt or shame wrap key moments in a soft protective shell, imagining it’s better that way. There, there. You don’t have to worry about that. We’ll just put a bow on it and place on the shelf here.

The Easter story says, hey! Unwrap that box. Roll that stone. Take your shears and cut that web, let it drop away. Though your fear sought to protect you it’s time now to say its work is over.

This is the work of the day after Easter. Work that can only be done in the light of a day when resurrection has become a settled reality for us.

 

Just a moment: My Midwestern heart loves basketball of all sorts including the reigning NBA champs the Denver Nuggets and the plucky women of Iowa, especially Caitlin Clark, and it beats strong today as Iowa faces LSU, replaying the NCAAW championship game from last year. Go, Hawkeyes!

My American heart grieves for the people of Baltimore, an already difficult urban area hit with a one hundred thousand ton body blow.

 

Feelings, Fourth Phase, Judaism, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Reimaging revelation, Shadow Mountain

Wakin’ up mornin’

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Spring and the Purim Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Spirited Away, my biopic for the Ancient Brothers. Dawn and the longer days. Spring in an adagio, playing slowly toward its late April, early May crescendo. A short season in the Mountains. Each living thing up here, the Wild Neighbors, the Humans, all the Plant life, the Fungi and Lichen, the Soil Microbes, Streams and Rock Faces, Boulders and Talus has begun to respond, to anticipate the changing temperatures, to give birth, to run a little fuller, to find more light and the increased warmth of Great Sol each day.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: That great wakin’ up mornin’

One brief shining: What in my inner Shadow Mountain needs to have the stone rolled away from its tomb, what dark and hidden fear or regret or failure has lain too long on the stone slab of its occultation, waiting for an Easter morning of the nefesh, a push toward consciousness of that shard of my past buried because its edginess could not be accommodated in a forgotten moment of psychic pain?

 

Yes, it’s Easter morning. The most famous Jew in the world has his special day. Resurrection. What a splendid piece of mythology, one we need, have always needed. Will always need. It is not blasphemy to recognize that resurrection need not be a historical event for it to be a profound reality. Its mirroring of the vegetative cycle, of course. But also its blatant affirmation of the human journey from inner darkness to enlightenment.

What do you fear about the course your life has taken? Did you shame your parents? Push down your gifts in service of the material God, Mammon? Hurt the one you loved? Loved the one you never had the courage to talk to? Which death bed in your life shook your inner world, perhaps opened a crack into the abyss? Steal or commit fraud or murder? Sure, it could be that tenebrous.

All of these and so much more we tuck away, morticians for our own pain, placing rock after rock over the fearful and shameful. Like Jews even when we visit the grave we put yet more rocks on. Can’t let that get out. Gotta keep that crucified part of our past away from the living parts of ourselves. Because it could ruin everything. Couldn’t it? Wouldn’t it? Shouldn’t it?

That Shadow Mountain of yours, how many sites does it have? Perhaps a mausoleum? Two? The ashes of your past still preserved in small urns of repressed memory.

Here’s the Easter sunrise service promise. Humanness is glorious, all of it. Even the moments of pain and shame. I left my dreamed of college, Wabash, for a state school. Ball State. A teacher’s college. I drank myself through my early twenties. I had two marriages and a sort of third. Judy. Tina. Raeone. I went to seminary because I needed a trade, a place away from the papermill. I couldn’t bear the sight of Kate’s corpse, of Vega’s pleading look. And so much more. All put away in the mountain that is my Shadow. Yet as I have called these and many others to the light, as I have put my shoulder to the stone once rolled across their tombs, I have become more not less human.

We are not only good. We are not only the worst things we have done. We are now the result of all those moments pushing against each other, shaping and forcing our growth. All of my previous marriages prepared me for the ancientrail of intimacy I found with Kate. And ensured that I know how fortunate I was. At Ball State I majored in two disciplines, philosophy and anthropology, which had few majors. The result? A close and careful journey through two departments with full professors. Both Kate’s corpse and Vega’s pleading reminded me of the limits of my own ability. An oh so important learning about aging. And death.

 

 

Commentary on the news, Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Great Work, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., World History

Tradition

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Spring and the Purim Moon

Shabbat gratefuls: My son and Seoah and Murdoch. Kathy. Cancer. Morning darkness. Taxes done. Ruth and Gabe. Barb. Alan. Joanne. Tallit. 77. Blood pressure low. Ruth’s graduation on May 18. Surrender. Dreams. Irene. Mountain melting. Slow. Snow. Graupeling.* Yesterday. Spring. The scent of Soil, the odor of sanctity. Mountain Streams ready for their big show.

*A precipitation that forms when supercooled droplets of water condense on a snowflake.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Taxes

One brief shining: Heated up the simple Pinto Beans, got out some crackers and a mineral Water, peeled a Tangerine, carried them downstairs, and sat down weary from a day of writing, working out, dreams, and rituals. Ah.

 

The days of our lives. Three days with Ruth and Gabe. They come, deposit their various shoes at the door. Gabe purple Converse tennies. Ruth oxblood boots. Go to their respective rooms, designated by long habit. Gabe in the mural painted “children’s” room. Ruth in the guest room.

Ruth drove them up in her Subaru, the official car of Colorado. They stopped at King Sooper’s to buy groceries. I thought they’d buy food for meals. Forgot they’re teenagers. Mostly snacks. In addition vegetarian corndogs, a box of mac and cheese.

Gabe is an early riser; Ruth a night owl like her dad. We talk. Laugh. Go out to eat.

At the 202, a Thai spot in Aspen Park, I ordered a spiciness level of 1. They both went with 4. Jon would have, too. Ruth remembered and wanted the Sticky Rice Custard. Oh, so good.

The two of them have been coming up here since Kate and I moved here in late 2014. Ruth was eight and Gabe six. Jon brought them up here frequently, often to avail himself of our washer and dryer, but we got to see the kids.

When Jon and Ruth went skiing at A-Basin, many times Jon would drop Gabe off with us and pick him up later that night after a full day of skiing. Ruth told me she finished her first Harry Potter on those trips.

Skiing bonded Jon and Ruth. As did art.

 

Just a moment: Timber framing. Traditional carpentry. The route of an American Jew to the restoration of one of Roman Catholicism’s most well-known cathedrals, Notre Dame. Found this article fascinating. Timber framing is a traditional form of carpentry that any one familiar with Japanese or Chinese woodworkers would recognize. It uses mortise and tenon joints, wooden pegs to hold joints together. It was also the most advanced form of construction available when Notre Dame was built. The restoration of this Paris landmark has focused on original materials and methods, meaning work for timber framers, stone masons, stained glass artisans, sculptors, and metal workers focused on techniques of the high middle ages.

Hank Silver’s story fits in with Charlie’s List. These pre-modern building technologies could reduce the currently heavy carbon footprint of contemporary construction. Let’s build homes from stone and timber framed roofs. Stores and office buildings, too. Let’s employ, at a living wage, those folks for whom college holds no interest, but working with their hands does.

Commentary on Religion, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Great Wheel, Holidays, Judaism, Memories, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Reimaging revelation

A Great Wheel look at Easter

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Spring and the Purim Moon

Friday gratefuls: That white Water Buffalo in Bangkok. The museums of San Francisco. Amtrak. Ruth and Gabe. Mussar. Ginny and Janice. A week of meals with friends. Upcoming. Warmer weather. Still plenty of Snow on Shadow Mountain. Korea. Birth rates. Climate change. Dawn. Bechira and Kehillah. Jesus. Good Friday. Easter. Pesach.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Resurrection

One brief shining: Mussar yesterday with Ruth on my left and Gabe on my right both participating, Gabe read, Ruth said you had to choose among your expectations of yourself and the expectations of others, not let either one have authority over the other, out of the mouths of teenagers.

 

Brother Mark asked if I had any reflections on Good Friday.* Made me wonder what was good about it. See below. Not sure why I didn’t know that already, but I didn’t. The crucifixion. No thoughts on the crucifixion make sense without consideration of the resurrection. Related by blood.

Let me put this out there, then go on. Good Friday and the New Testament account of it has led to most of the anti-semitism experienced in history. Jews in these accounts, the High Priest in particular, not only participated in the crucifixion but caused it. The crowds want Barabbas. Jewish authorities ask Pilate to crucify Jesus for blasphemy. These stories have shaken Jewish communities throughout Europe and the West. Deicides. God killers. Unfortunately the history of Jews in the West has taken place in parallel with the history of Christianity, so Jews have always been considered over against the Christian story. Wonder what the cultural reception of Jews could have been without this.

OK. Bracketing those thoughts. It’s a profound and important religious mythology, the story of the dying and rising God. Osiris. Inanna. Dionysus. Jesus. The vegetative cycle writ in mythological tales. The death of the fallow time. The rising to new life of Spring. The growing season and its devolution toward harvest and the next fallow time.

In other words all those good Friday services with the sorrow, the black cloth over the crosses, the recollection of the crucifixion itself, can be read as a ritual reenactment of plant death as winter approaches. Then, like Persephone Jesus descends into the fallow time, into death, into the soil, only to have a glorious waking up morning in late March or early April just as Spring arrives in the temperate latitudes.

I find it interesting to see these holy days for Christians through this lens. Why? Because it underscores the powerful hold the cycle of vegetative life has on both our bodily life and on our mythic imagination. This is “real” religion, of course, not the pagan Great Wheel. Right? But what if it is the same story told with different actors?

 

 

*’Good Friday’ comes from the sense ‘pious, holy’ of the word “good”.[10] Less common examples of expressions based on this obsolete sense of “good” include “the good book” for the Bible, “good tide” for “Christmas”… wiki

Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Asked and Answered

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Imbolc and the last crescent of the Ancient Moon

Shabbat gratefuls: The Socrates Cafe. Irv and Marilyn. The dark of a Mountain morning. Cold night. Sleeping through the night. Morning blessings. Fiery Joe Biden. Criminal 45. Parsha Vayakhel. Art Green. The Shema. Mah Tovu. Ritual. Lighting the candles. Choosing shabbat. Tom’s knowledge of cars. Creativity. Painting. Writing. Thinking. Acting.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Morning blessings

One brief shining: Tara pops up on zoom, her curly hair trying as it always does to escape, smiling, and we get down to it, saying my Torah portion, she has me repeat vowel sounds I flub but mostly she’s positive even agreeing with me that learning this stuff is boring.

 

A friend asked me a question I don’t often get. Like never. Who’s your favorite philosopher? Fair enough. I did study philosophy and it’s never far from my awareness all these years later. Over 54 years. I guess it stuck with me.

Anyhow, I immediately said when he asked, Camus. Another friend said he thought I would say Alfred North Whitehead. Well, ok. Two favorites. And there are even more.

Camus though has pride of place in my pantheon. After Philosophy 101 had dismantled for good the naive theology developed in my home church, I flopped around for a while. No oar. No direction home. Not unusual for those bitten by the philosophy bug. When I found Camus, I gave existentialism, existence before essence*, a glad embrace.

As the Stanford article I quote below says, no essence given in advance, we create ourselves as we go. There are other facets to existentialism summarized in this helpful article, but this is what caught me. Meaning and purpose come from engagement with the world.

Also, Camus had a way with words: “What is a rebel? A man who says no.” “Do not wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.” “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” “Nothing can discourage the appetite for divinity in the heart of man.” “For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.”

No matter where I’ve ended up in my life, I’ve always found existentialism an ally, a ground truth. Why? Because it reminds me to act, to learn my own truth, to stay in touch with the day-to-day wonder of living. I find Judaism very compatible with existentialism in its eschewing, for the most part, an afterlife, for insisting that religiosity demands engagement, for its focus on character and social justice.

That’s why I said Camus. No other philosopher has impacted my life as much.

Brief note on Alfred North Whitehead. The primary metaphysician for me. Existentialism, by its nature, ignores metaphysics. But Whitehead found a way to turn thousands of years of philosophical thought on its head when he proposed his process metaphysics. Prior to Whitehead ontologists had focused on being, a static understanding of reality. Whitehead says no, becoming is the nature of ontology. Change is the underlying nature of reality. Everything is always in the process of changing into something new.

I’ve loved this idea since I first encountered it in 1968. Seems obvious to me. But it’s radical in so many ways.

So, yes Whitehead is a favorite, too, but in a more abstract realm than Camus’ influence.

 

*Existence Precedes Essence: Existentialists forward a novel conception of the self not as a substance or thing with some pre-given nature (or “essence”) but as a situated activity or way of being whereby we are always in the process of making or creating who we are as our life unfolds. This means our essence is not given in advance; we are contingently thrown into existence and are burdened with the task of creating ourselves through our choices and actions. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Surf’s Up!

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Imbolc and the waning half Ancient Moon

Shabbat gratefuls: The second soul. Calm. A peaceful, easy feeling. Lighting the shabbat candles and saying the blessing. Shavuot. June 12. My torah portion. My conversion parsha. Tara. A gentle teacher. Joanne’s tangerine jelly. United Health Care. Sue Bradshaw. Alan, feeling better, but not well. His new electric Beamer. Bread Lounge.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Calm

One brief shining: Great Sol has reappeared, Black Mountain glows, my Lodgepole companion sways with its grovemates as wind gusts from the West, my fingers, of long use, press first this key then that and out pops a word, then two, then three, then more.

 

Yesterday I began saying my torah portion with the torah text. No vowels and a different, more florid style for the Hebrew characters. No punctuation either. I have a ways to go. Tara guides me toward my best work. June is less far away now. I can feel it. Bar mitzvah boy at work.

 

Been thinking about God as the creative advance into novelty. Some ways of thinking about how to act within this metaphor for how things are. Got the image of everchanging reality as an ocean wave. Instead of hiking, pressing forward in a direction I choose, perhaps surfing captures it better. Paddling out into the water, standing up for a better view, and riding with the wave’s energy. Requires balance, courage, caution, and the Taoist virtue of wu wei. Going with the flow of change.

Or. Guiding.  Not seeing ourselves as shapers of the future but as guides, even for ourselves. Folks who know some of the terrain, can offer information about it, yet depend on others to draw their own lessons, to find their own way. As we all must do anyhow for ourselves. Helping each other get comfortable with the inevitability and hopefulness in change.

Maybe a better metaphor is the organizer. The organizer identifies with the people a goal, say affordable housing, or jobs in a situation of high unemployment, then draws from them their own solutions to how to reach their goal. The organizer may be a member of the group or not. The key is that both people and organizer recognize the power inherent in acting together, following the pace and direction of change identified by those who need a new reality.

These thoughts have thrust me back to the good old days when America was great. During the 50’s and 60’s when the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement were organizing. Give America Ganga Again. GAGA. A green hat with bright red initials. When my guides were Paolo Freire and his learner center pedagogy of the oppressed. Paul Goodman. Summerhill. The psychology of Carl Rogers, Rollo May, Abraham Maslow. And, Alfred North Whitehead. Guess they still are.

Anyhow. Sparks. Fire yet to be lit.

 

In Shabbat. A week ago tonight, my lousy night. No sign of more to come. But, that time came with no warning. Health insurance has helpfully denied my meds for proctitis. Which help. Sigh. Forward and backward.

 

*Freire proposes a reciprocal relationship between the teacher and the students in a democratic environment that allows everyone to learn from each other. The banking method of education is characterized as a vertical relationship:

teacher
↓
student

The relationship developed through the banking method between the teacher and the students is characterized by insecurity, suspicion of one another, the teacher’s need to maintain control, and power dynamics within a hierarchy that are oppressive. The critical pedagogy that Freire proposes allows for a horizontal type of relationship:

teacher ↔ student

This relationship is democratic insofar as both the teacher and the student are willing and open to the possibility of learning from each other. With this type of relationship, no one is above anyone, and there is mutual respect. Both the teacher and the student acknowledge that they each have different experiences and expertise to offer to each other so that both can benefit from the other to learn and grow as human beings.   ICP