Fall (High Holy Days) Hunter Moon
Yesterday included three separate trips into Evergreen. First, I took Kate in for the morning Rosh Hashanah service at Beth Evergreen. Then, I came back to answer questions, be available for the electrician and the painter. At noon I went back to pick up Kate and eat the after service lunch with her. All these trips included waits in two spots on Brook Forest Road for culvert repair. Stop. Slow. Stop. Slow.
It was a glorious Colorado day with brilliant blue punctuated by puffy white, a soft wind, then a brisk wind blowing and temperatures in the mid to high sixties. Low humidity.
The service, as services often do, ran 20 minutes over so I sat on a concrete patio outside of Beth Evergreen’s event hall. The brisk wind stripped pine needles from the huge ponderosa’s on the hillside sending flotillas of the connected two needle bunches at me. Round top tables set outside on the patio had rocks on their table cloths. A table near where I sat blew over; the tablecloth, I think, acting as a sail.
There were kugels in aluminum pans, bagels with lox and cream cheese or chopped egg, fresh cut vegetables, fruit. Paper plates and plastic forks. Lots of eating and greeting. Some very short skirts. Some men carried small cloth pouches containing prayer shawls and yarmulkes. Kids ran around,
teenagers laughed knowingly to each other. The wind continued to blow.
Back home we napped while Caesar finished painting. The big thing unfinished is installation of the shower door. That will probably happen today. The result is even more pleasing than I imagined it would be.
The third trip into Evergreen was for the Evergreen Writer’s Group at Where the Books Go. Writing groups are fragile things, easy to get wrong. They focus on critiquing work, the very work you’ve been laboring over in private for hours, days, sometimes weeks and years. The internal stakes are high, no matter the outward stance individuals take.
If one of Kate’s sewing groups was similar, the women would bring in their current project and ask others what they thought. How are the seams? What about color choice? The fabric. Their intention for the work and whether they seemed to be achieving it. Most important, the event would not be collaborative as these groups are, but critical.
There might be something to learn here. Perhaps the writing group could be more collaborative, be more a place where we could write together, work on current projects or doing writing exercises together.
Anyhow this trip to Evergreen was without the stop. slow. stop. slow bit because the Jeffco work crews had shut down the skip-loaders, dump trucks and road graders and gone home.
Kate went with me, dropping me off at the meeting and going on to the Lariat Lodge where we ate a couple of weeks ago. She managed to get most of the reading done for our Mussar group, four chapters worth! She also bought supper for me.
With the grandkids coming last Friday night and leaving at 2 pm on Sunday, then erev Rosh Hashanah that night, and the three trips into Evergreen yesterday, it’s been a very busy few days for us. And, we’re not done yet.
This morning I’m seeing Lisa Gidday, our internist, to discuss knee replacement. We’ll also get our flu shots. The week calms down some after this.
This conforms to Michaelmas as the springtime of the soul. Sadness is a way we consolidate past experiences and sort them out, learning from them and choosing which aspects of the past to embrace and which to let go. When our tears are over, we are cleansed and renewed, ready for the next phase of life. Autumn gives us an annual opportunity for self-renewal. This Great Wheel, natural cycle phenomena matches up exactly with Rosh Hashanah and its climax, Yom Kippur.
My fellow traveler shoes are beginning to get a lot of mileage on them at Congregation Beth Evergreen. The Rabbi there, Jamie Arnold, is a very sweet guy, empathetic, bright, learned, good singing voice. At the Mussar midday session yesterday we looked again at the first chapter of Mesillat Yesharim. There are many important ideas in it, two stand out for me right now.
The second idea is that we can be tempted, pulled away from delight and joy, by both prosperity and adversity. Recalling this simple, but far from obvious truth about the human condition helps us see that our material advantages are not the core focus of our lives. Our material success is incidental to the spiritual journey-unless it distracts us from it.
Interesting intersection of past and present yesterday. In my Christian days, I explored many different forms of spiritual practice, including a Benedictine form called lectio divina. Turns out a Rabbi is teaching a version of lectio to other rabbis for use, in particular, with Torah study. Bonnie, a rabbi in training who attends Beth Evergreen, modified it to use in our Mussar study.
Black Mountain, which is covered in lodgepole pine and actually green as a result, has small gold flecks this morning. Those few aspen groves on its slopes have begun to turn, as have more and more aspens between here and Evergreen, but not those on our property. Too, Orion appeared in the southern sky a week or so ago, the early morning southern sky. On Shadow Mountain Orion and the changing of the aspens are true harbingers of autumn.
Mussar is defined here by Rabbi Ira Stone, of the 
Politically I feel and have felt in, but not of, mainstream American politics. That is, political action has been another key ancientrail in my life, but I’ve had to engage it from a stance left of even the further edges of liberalism.