Category Archives: Feelings

Acting, Cinema and Television, Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Health, US History

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Samain and the Moon of Growing Darkness

Wednesday gratefuls: Generator. Electricity. Snow. America. Our coming time of growing darkness. Harris. Troubled. Elections. Democracy. My son. Mountains. The West. Minnesota. Colorado. The Left Coast. History. Coffee. Prostate Cancer. Hibernation. Bears. Mountain Lions. Mule Deer. Elk. Wild Neighbors.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Friends and Family

Kavannah for election week: Contentment and Joy

One brief shining: The oxygen concentrator coughed and turned off as the fan’s light blinked on, then off, I waited a moment, and heard the chug-chug-chug of the generator kick on as the automatic transfer switch did its job and the oxygen concentrator returned to duty and the fan bathed me in light. Time to get up.

 

There will be time, too much time, to sort out the implications. Yes, he won. I know. Yet I still seek this week contentment and joy. I will still enjoy and celebrate the holidays of light and the one of darkness, most important to me. Thanksgiving will find me looking back over my gratefuls, finding the ones appropriate to that day.

I love my son, Seoah, Murdoch. Mary and Mark. Luke and Leo. My Ancient Brothers. Ginny and Janice. Marilyn and Irv. Alan and Joanne. Tara and Arjean. The MVP group. CBE. This country. Now more than ever. All Dogs and Wild Neighbors. All members of the Tribe wherever they may be.

Relinquishing my equanimity, my joy, my contentment to the fevered anxieties of those losing their status and power. No. I will not do that. This morning on a Snow covered Shadow Mountain I am at peace. Neither angry nor despairing. Ready though.

A suffering world has drunk the toxic waters of he who would save them. The USA has not shrugged off this trend, instead it has leaned into it. As always when history turns this way, the need for those who will carry the flag of justice and democracy and freedom through and beyond these days reaches its high tide.

We need each other. We need to stand up and to sit down with each other. To continue our lives. To embrace beauty and wholeness. To seek and find the sacred in each moment and in each person we meet.

We must not raise the cup of bitterness and despondency. Instead pour it out and refill the cup with whatever gives your life fullness, satisfaction. This is what we will need to ensure our children and grandchildren inherit a world not driven by fear.

 

Just a moment: Found out yesterday that I’m not in hormone resistant prostate cancer. At least not yet. My PSA has continued to go down, though it’s not yet undetectable. Means my metastases are not growing.

This news was welcome and it came on Election Day.

 

Watched the tenth and final episode of 1883 yesterday, too. Cried through it all. This is transcendent television, showing what the medium can do. Over these next four years I want to channel Elsa’s spirit of embracing the moment, embracing joy and pain, seeing this wild and often strange world for what it is. Our home.

 

Herme Harari Israel

 

 

Cinema and Television, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Health, Judaism, Mountains, Mussar, Shadow Mountain, US History

Seeking Contentment and Joy. Losing them.

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Samain and the Moon of Growing Darkness

Tuesday gratefuls: Sadness. Unhappiness. Dismay. Prostate cancer. Dr. Buphati. That P.A. Kristie. Contentment. Joy. Pain. 1883. Ilsa May. Her role as Elsa Dutton. Cold Nights. Snow. Wild Neighbors. The West. Comanche. Lakota. The Great Plains. Buffalo. A Wild and undiscovered country still. The West of my heart.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Home

Kavannah for election week: Contentment and Joy

One brief shining: In a small office at Rocky Mountain Cancer Care I experienced dismay, unhappiness, a strange intersection of politics and self care, and again, as I did on the drive home three weeks ago from RMCC, I felt alone, this time in the usual patient’s chair listening to the P.A. say they had no PSA for me.

 

First jolt was seeing a P.A. instead of Dr. Buphati. I liked him, was counting on his knowledge to guide me through what came next. She offered to go get him. She said she did not care either way. This was the strange intersection of politics and self care. I wanted to see Buphati, but I didn’t want to deny her skills, her right to be there. Feminism strong in me. In medicine especially. Kate.

Second jolt. We have no PSA for you. I deflated. This appointment was supposed to define the next steps in a journey that had made confusing turns over the summer and early fall. Why not? How can you not know?

She said (I don’t remember her name, if it even got through the fog.) I just got assigned.

Then I got unhappy and said so. I’m unhappy and disappointed. I don’t understand how after three weeks you don’t have it. My expectations about knowing what comes next had me in knots. I wanted, no needed, to know and I couldn’t. But why? In the end it didn’t matter.

Go ahead, I waved my hand dismissively. Still trying to reorient. She handed me the results of the DNA results for my cancer cells. Nothing of significance. That means no clinical trials, no targeted therapies. Oh. I took the papers, glanced at them, wondering where my readers were. Nothing of significance. Oh.

In the end she went to get Dr. Buphati. Who came in masked, as was she. Making it difficult for me to hear. He agreed I had every right to be upset. That somehow the lab didn’t have the results. I told him my upset had started back in June when my PSA went up after my drug holiday. Then went down after going back on Orgovyx. My visit to the radiation oncologist who said I had hormone resistant cancer. After which Kristie said, no. Not without rising PSA on two drugs. Erleada came next. This was the PSA measure that would tell the difference. But there were no test results.

We talked for a bit more. His knowledge and clarity helped me calm, but the dismay and the sadness had already burrowed their way into my feelings of the moment. When the phlebotomist, a kind Latina, young, asked me how I was, I said feeling down. And I was. She knew that already. Helped me put on my jacket.

I wanted contentment and joy. They were/are my intentions for this week, but I lost them at the words no PSA results. I wanted to be calm, clear, kind. But I wasn’t. I felt let down by Dr. Buphati, by RMCC. No mussar moves came to mind.

So the valet got my car and I drove away toward the Mountains, wanting only to be home.

 

Just a moment: That was yesterday. I got some Chicken wings, cole slaw, and Potatoes at Safeway, drove to Shadow Mountain, and binged 1883. Soothing myself. Letting myself feel sad, disappointed.

In 1883 I witnessed one of the best dramatic performances I’ve seen. Ilsa May, a young actress, plays Elsa Dutton who turns 18 as her family makes their way as part of a wagon train headed to Oregon. Her arc from bonneted, piano-playing Tennessee girl to cowgirl, then wife of a Comanche warrior and becoming a warrior herself was an alembic for my feelings. In seeing Elsa take the real agonies and the ecstasies of young maturation I rode with her. Seeing a way through the self-inflicted responses I had. Better this morning. Much better. Thanks, Elsa.

Aging, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Great Wheel, Health, Holidays, Judaism, Literature, Mussar

Contentment and Joy

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Samain and the Moon of Growing Darkness

Monday gratefuls: Dr. Buphati. Snow. 4-5 inches. Powder. Or, as the skiers say: Pow. Vikings win. The Ancient Brothers. Walking Each Other Home. Mark in K.L. The Brickfields. The lives of all the Wild Neighbors. Everywhere. And, all the domesticated Animals. The Great Wheel. The Tarot. Kabbalah. Living in joy. Cosmic voids. Sculpture. Rodin. Brancusi.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: First substantial Snow of the season

Kavannah for election week: Contentment and Joy

One brief shining: At night I crank open the casement window over my bed, letting in the  smell of Lodgepoles and Grass as the Night Air streams over my head, when Snow begins to fall like it did last night Snowflakes come through the screen, shower me in a light experience of the weather outside, and often, like last night, make the window hard to close.

 

Without knowing. Without certainty. I claim today my joy and my contentment. I seek today those moments that delight my heart, tickle my inner child. Like my Lodgepole Companion holding the powdery Snow as an early seasonal decoration. Thinking of lights, Christmas and Diwali and Hanukah and Kwanza and Yule. Remembering sliding down the hill at the end of Monroe Street and taking my sled over the jumps we kids created. Of the farm outside of Nevis, Minnesota on a Snowy day, air-tight stove crackling with good, dense Oak logs, the cook stove boiling water for coffee. Of standing by the Shadow Mountain kitchen window with Kate by my side, watching the Snow come down. How lucky we are to live here, she would say. Yep, I would reply.

Also enough coffee in the pot this morning for a full cup. The mini-splits keeping the house warm. An early Dawn, at least according to the clock. Life, this precious and wonderful gift.

Reading, that most amazing skill. Example: The Emptiness of the Universe Gives Our Lives Meaning. I loved this short piece. The cosmologist Paul Sutter chose for his life work the study of cosmic voids. The apparently empty spots between and among galaxies, local clusters, superclusters. How innovative and creative, to study negative space. It’s as if an art historian chose to study only the negative space in sculpture, in paintings. Or a musicologist specializing in rests and stops.

I am content. I’ll have Fire in the Fireplace tonight. Toss some Pinōn on for a scent treat, thinking of the clay stoves in the corners of rooms in New Mexico. I’ll have a good book, probably An Unfinished Love Story by Doris Kearns-Goodwin recommended by Marilyn.

I’ll take in what Dr. Buphati has to say at 2:30 today and I will see it as the next steps necessary to claim the life I have yet to live. Not as the first steps toward death. Which comes anyhow.

Realized the other day that after my Bar Mitzvah, literally the day after when I had my unsettling telehealth visit with Kristie, I’ve been living with the notion of a shortened life span, an inner focus on decline. So much so that I gave up exercising. Wanted to privilege spontaneity.

My year of living Jewishly had its capstone moment and I voluntarily took the steps down into my Cloud of unknowing. And reified it. Since that day, June 12th of this year, until last week, I’ve had a focus on less than, what would soon be missing. Me. I made a pivot from a deep plunge into Judaism to a dive into the shallow end of lack. Broke my heart for a while.

Then I began to understand that the Cloud of unknowing was the true and only way to view life. Whether shorter or longer, I don’t know. As has always been the case. I came up from the mikveh a Jew. I came up from the shallow end of lack attentive again to today, to this life as I have it now. As I will until I don’t.

Herme Harari Israel

Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Woolly Mammoths, Writing

No. Yet, Yes.

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Mabon and the Sukkot Moon  (Yes, I missed Sunday.)

Monday gratefuls: Ruth. Gabe. Alan. Blackbird Cafe. Kittredge. An unsystematic theology. Snow in the forecast. Gray white Skies. Skeletal Aspens. That evening zoom with my son, Seoah, Murdoch, Ruth and Gabe. A family moment. Diane back in the USA. Mark still in K.L. Kate, always Kate. Irv and Marilyn. The Night Sky. Kepler and Gertie.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: That moment with Ruth

Kavannah: Compassion rachamin

One brief shining: We were all there, this patched together family, Ruth in my red leather chair, Gabe on its ottoman, me in my blue Stickley chair, my son, Seoah, and Murdoch on zoom in Songtan, Korea talking and laughing as my son opened his birthday present from me, Seoah told Ruth she was beautiful, Gabe mentioned theater as an interest of his, and I luxuriated in the normality, the sweetness of a family joined together with almost no blood ties, but love, oh yes, love.

 

So much yesterday. Forgot to post. Ancient Brothers. Ruth and Gabe. Going out for lunch with Alan only to discover after waiting for a bit that muscle relaxants had put him to sleep.

 

Learned that two of the Ancient Brothers had the power of positive thinking, Dale Carnegie, as a deep and lasting influence. Another conceptual therapy. How to train the mind toward a positive and successful mindset. Felt a slight twinge of envy. If I’d had something like that, would I have persevered in marketing my books? Might I be published by now?

In my case I’ve always gone for mantras and prayers and rituals that investigate my life, my inner life, and encourage me to act, yes, though success fell long ago outside my grasp. Not sure why. Of course there was school. Where success was long past being a goal and had become an expectation. One that tired me out, wore me out, burned me out. And btw my Dad had me read Dale Carnegie because he believed I needed to learn how to get along with people. I did. But because he required me to read it, I pushed its lessons away.

Even writing. I wanted to get published. At first a lot. And publication would have been success of a sort. I did try, but I let I can’t get there become truth. As one of us said, if you believe you can or if you believe can’t, either will be true. I let myself believe my writing wasn’t good enough. That no agent, no publisher would want it. I tried to achieve 100 rejections in a year. Couldn’t stay with it. Didn’t stay with it. I stopped trying.

Those stories where the young writer sends manuscript after manuscript over the transom, never admitting defeat, always crampons on, ice ax in hand scaling the slippery cliff to publication. Not me. I used to be embarrassed by this fact. That’s how I decided it was my writing and not my perseverance. Easier to take, I guess.

So here I sit at 77 with no artistic successes to my name. On me. Perhaps on my talent. Not really sure. That’s not to say I haven’t led a satisfying and purposeful life. I have. Cue the no blood ties family. The gardens and dogs and earthy life of Andover. Of political battles fought and won. Organizations created. Deep thinking maintained, emotional stability attained and sustained. Personal relationships made and sustained. My life with Kate.

 

Feelings, Fourth Phase, Health, Writing

Not sure at all

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Mabon and the Sukkot Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: Garbage out. No garbage back in. Shirley Waste. Nights in the thirties. Jennie’s Dead. Dead. Phantom Tollbooth. Most excellent. Coffee in the morning. Mineral Water. Spoons. Forks. Knives. Especially Japanese knives. Fruit. Clementines. Grapes. Bananas. Honeycrisp Apples. Pears. Tomatoes. Dragon. Jack. Durian. Asia. Begging bowls.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: The Mind. Whatever it is.

Kavannah: Netzach in its sense of persistence

One brief shining: Sitting on a knife edge, no, wait, standing on a narrow path, chasms on either side, a Mountain Meadow at the end of the path, I’m walking shakily, old man legs weakened by sarcopenia and easy distraction, needing to cross yet another hazard in the video game Life, will I keep on exercising? Or, not.

 

When I considered stopping my cancer treatments, I stopped exercising. Felt a whoosh of freedom. I have time in my days for creative work, taking care of domestic tasks, living my life of tasks, of agency. Why, you might ask? Well, I exercise, which I have done since turning 42, 43, now only in the mornings. It’s when I have energy.

Dilemma and the source of the freedom feeling. That’s also when I feel good to write, make phone calls, pay bills, do difficult reading, load and unload the dishwasher, pick up around the house. I also have regular breakfasts which break into the morning as well.

By early afternoon, two or three at the latest and that if I had a full night’s sleep-which I usually do-my energy wanes into watch TV, read fiction, light tasks. Often a nap.

You can see the problem. Does the exercising provide enough benefit to me to use up valuable morning energy? When life has begun to look shorter. Which I admit could be wrong. I feel like the answer to this question is yes, it does. Because. Vitiates sarcopenia. Lifts my mood. Improves my heart rate. Helps my bowels.

But. I also want to write. In particular. And writing requires a rhythm. Which I find best now in the mornings. The fog of the afternoon and evening is subtle. Some of the obfuscation comes from fatigue. Pure physical weariness. Better now with the celebrex, but still enough to slow me down. Some of the obfuscation though, and this is the critical one, is mental. Not in my mind doesn’t work as well then, at least mostly not that. But a sort of brake, a diminishment of will.

Example. Today I need to call the MnSaves folks to continue the process-the now toooo looonnnggg-process of transferring Ruth and Gabe’s education money into my name. I can handle the phone call, the waiting, the repeating of information, the yet one more thing to do in the morning. I won’t do it the afternoon. If I absolutely had to, I could, but I don’t feel emotionally ready to put up with bureaucratic bullshit later in the day.

Example. I tried to workout in the afternoon a couple of weeks ago. Made sense to me since I used to workout at 4 pm for about twenty years. Nope. My body does not want to do that.

It is true that I can engage others just fine though. Like MVP Monday night. Like Mussar at 1pm on Thursdays. But. If I do that more than once or twice a week, or if, like Monday I don’t get to sleep until late, it cuts into my morning time.

Not sure how to handle this. Not sure at all.

 

 

 

 

 

Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Health, Minnesota, Mountains, Shadow Mountain

Love is more powerful than discomfort.

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Grandma. At Chief Hosa lodge

Mabon and the Sukkot Moon

Monday gratefuls: Boulder. Ruth. Snarfs. The Flatirons. The greens as Great Sol sank below the horizon. Grandpopping. Podcasts. One on crime and disorder. Another on Walter Benjamin. Falling. Of the Aspen Leaves. The dry Willow Leaves blow away, many carried downstream by Maxwell Creek. Samain only 10 days away. Simchat Torah Wednesday.

Sparks of joy and awe: UC Boulder

Kavannah: Compassion  Rachamin

One brief shining: Ruth and I sat at a blue metal table on Pearl Street, Boulder’s main drag, our paper wrapped sandwiches spread out in front of us, mine a french dip sans jus, hers something with nothing animal, a few cars drove by since we were far from the Mall, Leaves finished with their seasons work lay scattered on the sidewalk as we spoke of painful childhoods, death, deception, and treachery.

 

Our initial impetus for moving to Colorado came after I attended an Ira Progoff retreat in Tucson. In a meditation on the next stepping stones of my life I realized Kate and I needed to be here in Colorado for the kids. Reinforced on the drive back when I showed up at Jon and Jen’s with no warning to Ruth. She saw me, turned and ran back in the house. That was April of 2014.

Kate agreed. We gave ourselves two years to make the move. Momentum took over though and by that October Kate had been in Colorado as our scout, finding a house. I knew I would dither and Kate was decisive. 9358 Black Mountain Drive. In the Mountains as we both wanted. Jen called it Mountain fever and was mad that we’d not moved closer. We however were not coming to be babysitters, but grandparents.

Andover and its gardens, its bees, its orchard, its woods had become too physically demanding for us. Kate had retired three years before. It was an inflection point for us. We still had four dogs: Kepler, Rigel, Gertie, and Vega. As the Winter Solstice neared Tom Crane and I got in our Rav4 with tranquilized Kepler, Rigel, and Vega. Drove straight through. Rather, Tom did. We talked the whole way only stopping when one mammal or another had to pee. Kate left a day or so later in a van I had packed full with items we didn’t trust to the movers. She had Gertie with her, feeding her Whoppers on the way out. Well. Parts of Whoppers. Which Kate reported Gertie approved.

In the Garden Andover

Leaving the Twin Cities after forty years, a bit longer for Kate, was tough. I had friends, especially the Woolly Mammoths, and I had immersed myself in the cultural life of the Twin Cities: The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra where Kate and I met. The Science museum which Joseph and I loved. The Children’s Theater, The Guthrie, the MIA, the Walker. Both of us had spent hours and yet more hours planting, weeding, living with dogs, caring for bees and extracting honey. Sitting by the firepit. Just being together in a place we shaped from our first days there.

Yet. The call of being with our grandkids as they grew up in what we knew were challenging circumstances with an angry mother and father felt compelling.

Kate and Ruth developed a strong, strong bond. Kate helped Ruth learn to cook, sew, be a Jew, and a young woman. I took Ruth on adventures to museums, the National Western Stockshow, hikes in the Mountains. Gabe, too. When Kate died, then Jon, Barb, Jen’s mother aka Tennessee Grandma, and I were left. Barb had to move to into an assisted living spot and sees the kid’s less.

I would have gone to Hawai’i in spite of all this had I not figured out that my son and Seoah’s return there was not certain as I’d initially thought. Glad it turned out that way. Ruth and I have become close, Gabe as well. I’m an important, stable, calm presence in both of their lives. They both love Shadow Mountain Home, being up here.

Now I drive to Boulder once or twice a month. Gabe comes up and stays for a couple of nights. Critical for them, I believe. And, me. When I think about them, about my son and Seoah, about Mark and Mary and Diane, then about cancer, I can see keeping up with treatments as long as they are life extending. Love is more powerful than discomfort.

Aging, Feelings, Fourth Phase

My Recipe

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Mabon and the Sukkot Moon

Sunday gratefuls: My good and fulfilling life. Dogs. All Dogs. Especially Kep, Gertie, Rigel, and Vega. The Colorado Dogs. Kate, always Kate. Her smile. Ginny and Janice. Laughing. Television. A lot of very good material in Jennie’s Dead. That silly fan light. Neon gone dark for now. Vince. Fingers that still type with ease. Eyes that see. Ears? Well…

Sparks of joy and awe: Senses

Kavannah: Joy

One brief shining: It’s his birthday week, my son, far away in Songtan, Korea, turning 43 in the same week as his CT scans and blood work, checking for damage caused by Hep B which he contracted at birth, leaning in to his work keeping our ally safe, mentoring his airmen and women, prepping for the switch to command next year, Murdoch follows him from room to room, sleeping at his feet.

 

On Friday I drove down the hill to Mile High Hearing, lower, much lower than I am here on Shadow Mountain, to see Amy, my soccer coaching audiologist. Three year mark on the Phonak which works very well for me. Warranty ending. No thanks to extended warranty. I get to send it back to the folks at Phonak for a refurbishing. What’s a refurbishing, I ask? Oh, they basically replace everything with new parts. Huh? Then I figured it out. They’re three years away from this model technologically. This is a way to cheaply enhance their products with now outdated parts, making it more likely I’ll choose Phonak again. Smart.

I have a loaner hearing aid now. How bout that?

 

First. Know yourself. Live from that self. Be authentic. Take the hits, take the applause but stay true to who you are. As life begins to lengthen, do more and more of what brings you joy. Shed the gloom as best you can. Knowing that life flees so rapidly.

Second. Be content with the Self that you are. Be content with what you have. Learn the meaning of the word enough. Act on that.

Third: Work, yes work, at sustaining and maintaining key relationships: partner, family, friends. Spend time with all of them, time with laughter and tears and wonderings and dreams.

Fourth: Meditate on your corpse. Take a dia de los muertos attitude toward death. A phase change. And, a certainty. Sad and painful when it’s ones you love, a one person journey for your authentic, unafraid Self. Celebrate this punctuation mark. Grieve it. And greet it.

Fifth: Dance and clap. Twirl and grin. Laugh as much as you can. Do what hones the gifts you have. Use those same gifts for the world and for your own health.

Sixth: Don’t worry about your legacy. Hold your life and your health lightly. See number four.

That should do it. My recipe for a fulfilling and good life. Whether it’s a happy one or not doesn’t matter. Happiness and hope are illusory, momentary, wisps of the heart. Stick to what matters. Living your life. You’re the only one who can and we all need the unique presence you are.

Commentary on Religion, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Health, Judaism

Writing and Connecting

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Mabon and the Sukkot Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Sukkot. Lab tests. Jennie’s Dead. Clipping out a large section. Sleep. Lunch with Joanne on Friday. 44 degrees. The Leaves. Blowing in the Wind. Colonies of Aspens with Golden Leaves. Colonies of Aspen already skeletal. The changes of the Arapaho National Forest. My home. Less than three weeks until our long national nightmare either gets worse or better. The smell of just brewed coffee.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Tom’s visit

Kavannah: Yirah

One brief shining: Phlebotomists with butterfly, I. V. needles, phlebotomists with the more usual empty barreled needle, both swapping out one plastic tube, then another, sometimes another and another, an alcohol swap, a small piece of gauze and a piece of tape or a brightly colored wide wrap and bob’s your uncle, more of my vital fluids are ready for a centrifuge, a slide, a reagent that give up messages in the bottle.

 

Been reading Jennie’s Dead. It has two long sections I wrote because I got excited about translating Ovid on my own, a story in the Metamorphosis about Zeus and a council of the gods. I wanted to use that material because I myself had wrested it from the Latin into my native tongue. I like it, too. A piece in Jennie’s Dead that gives backstory to the power of Typhon, the many armed, snake-legged giant who challenged Olympus and cut out Zeus’ sinews. However. It complicates the narrative flow and is, at least to the me reading Jennie some year’s later, extraneous. To this story. Might become one of its own. Like I want to write a story focused only on Lycaon, the ancient Arcadian King turned into a Wolf by Zeus. I overcomplicated an otherwise good narrative with a sidebit about American Immortals as Emanuel Ezekiel named them. Superior Wolf.

So now Jennie’s Dead will become a straight forward narrative about good witches trying to survive against a very strong mage, one with the powers of Loki. Needs more character development, more backstory. I have time to do that and I will as soon as I finish my reread. Probably this week.

 

The new year, 5785, has found me reaching out to Derek, my neighbor. Long neglected. Calling Joanne and setting up lunch. Stopping my silliness with not liking phone calls. Leaning into my writing, privileging it. Doing some cooking. Not resolutions. After effects of teshuvah, returning to the land of my soul. No longer mired in grief. Seeing the cancer clearly. Changing but not terminal. Also ongoing effects of the pain reduction occasioned by the celecoxib and the tramadol. The support I feel from palliative care.

A good bit of spontaneity thrown in, too. Doing things just because. Because they’re fun. Fun has not been high on my list. Not that I don’t have any. I do. Just didn’t seek it out in a casual, playful way.

Being a Jew has given me a new lens through which to view being human. It’s given me a new understanding, especially Reconstructionist Judaism, of the word religion.* Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionism, said the great need of contemporary life was belonging.

I converted due to my strong friendship links at Congregation Beth Evergreen. I imagine it is strong bonds like these that draw people into religious communities and it’s certainly those that keep them there. Understanding religion as deriving from the Latin religare*, meaning to bind or connect, may have been taken in the wrong sense. That is, religion is more about binding and connecting humans to one another than it is about dogma or belief.

 

*The English word “religion” originated from the Latin word “religio,” which meant “obligation,” “bond,” or “reverence.” However, the exact meaning of this term is still subject to debate among scholars. Some experts suggest that the word “religio” may have derived from the verb “religare,” meaning “to bind” or “to connect,” while others argue that it may have originated from “relegere,” which means “to read again” or “to carefully consider.”  Wordorigin

 

Feelings, Fourth Phase, Health

Even so

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Mabon and the Sukkot Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: Brother Mark. Ode in my dream. Dr. Buphati. PSA. No news. Labs today. Metabolic. TSH. Testosterone. Phlebotomy and me. Rich, red blood. Vampiric profession. Kate’s ABD. Kenton. Kate’s last days. Signing love. Kate, always Kate. Old man’s voice. IHOP. Tony’s Market. Vegetable soup. & with Chicken. The slow beauty of leaf abscission. Gold coins spread on roadways and Mountain Meadows.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Freeing myself

Kavannah: Patience

One brief shining: Another spontaneous morning found me on the road for a nostalgia breakfast at an IHOP in Littleton, then a visit to Tony’s Market where I picked up pre-cut Vegetables for my Bean and Vegetable Soup, a large antipasto salad, lox, a long baguette sandwich with roast beef and cheddar, and a can of Lemon Rose Tea; on the way home I considered matters of life and death.

 

A dream last night. Disturbing. My old and good friend Mark Odegard showed up. We went somewhere together and he told me he was disappointed in me. I didn’t get it. Yet he persisted. All right, I said, let’s take a break then. Made me sad and a little angry in the dream.

 

Brother Mark wrote me a touching response to yesterday’s post. In sum encouraging me to think of the people with whom my life is entwined. I appreciated the reminder to see the decision from outside my own considerations.

Drums of impending doom. This is the aspect of having cancer that is difficult to convey. Especially when you’ve had it for ten years and counting. The many tests. Of all sorts. Blood Draws. CT’s. Bone Scans. Axumin PET Scans. Then, PET scans with a newer isotope for a tracer. Getting the results. With breath held in just a bit. The treatments. Surgery. Radiation. Drugs. More radiation. Learning the results of the treatments. Side effects that are not pleasant. The continuous reminder, as if I’d forget, that within lurk cells that have their own future in mind. Death to the host if necessary. The statistics that now include me. My actual life. How likely am I to conform to the mean?

Getting a new doctor, another oncologist to add to my urological and radiation oncologists. Those relationships. Regular visits with them. Wondering about their work load, their skill sets. All throwing up uncertainty as if it were a chew toy.

No, these drums do not beat all the time. Often they go silent for long periods. But surveillance always finds them awakened. Not necessarily funereal, but not calming either.

The cumulative effect is an overburden, one that grows with each passing year. News that is rarely unalloyed good news. The only real good news I got over the last ten years was clean margins, no cancer outside the prostate when it was removed. That one proved untrue only a year later.

Not complaining. I want to emphasize that. All this has made cancer a chronic disease for me. And I’ve lived a full and complete life during all of these years. Not crippled by depression and not often despairing. Even so.

 

Aging, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Health

Why I hope to die at 75

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Mabon and the Sukkot Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Dr. Buphati. Cancer genetics. More treatment options. Do they make sense? Even exercise? Why I hope to die at 75. Encourage any of you to read this, tell me what you think. Jennie’s Dead. Further into reading, some revising. The American Immortal. Great Sol. Dependable. Brilliant. Warm and caring. A good parent. Mother Earth. Tempestuous and nurturing. An exciting parent. Those of us their children. Living as their creations. Aware of them and grateful for the gift of life and consciousness. Evolution, their primary parenting technique, has stood the test. And will continue too. Did you really think we were the end of evolution? It’s highest and best? Nope.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Medical care

Kavannah: Yirah

Dr. Buphati

One brief shining: Seen a lot of rooms like this over the last few years, first with my cancer, then with Kate, now with my cancer yet and still; this one belongs to Dr. Buphati, a medical oncologist, young, well respected, thoughtful, objective, who spoke with me yesterday not half a block from the 10th floor of Swedish Hospital where Kate died, telling me it’s not time to have dying conversations yet, so many treatment options still exist, no matter my PSA which he drew blood for, eager to get at it, and for the DNA of my cancer itself, so he can see if treatments tailored to the cancer’s DNA might be part of future plans, a kind man, and yet when I left his office a full body sadness took root in me and stayed until I got home. And after that, too.

 

After my visit to my friend Sunday, seeing the end stage of life enduring past awareness focused on faux Fall pixels for hours and hours, after reading through the article by U. of Pennsylvania oncologist, Ezekiel J. Emanuel, Why I hope to die at 75, after my root and branch sadness, not despair, not depression, but weariness with the drumbeats of impending doom, after watching TV as an analgesic for psychic distress, and after a good night’s sleep in the cool Mountain temperatures of mid-fall in the Rockies, I’m wondering whether to adopt, perhaps in a modified for me form, the philosophy Emanuel presents.

I’m already there with the DNR order, only pain and suffering care at the end. I’m getting palliative care already for my spinal stenosis. If I read his article correctly, he wants to move toward only palliative care after 75. That would mean, in my case, forgoing anymore tests for other illnesses, any vaccines, probably anymore cancer treatment except for palliative care, giving up exercise and fussing about my diet.

Right now, as I consider it, this seems extreme. Vaccines for example. And I’m not sure I’m there yet for stopping cancer treatment. Though I’m closer to that idea today than I was a year ago. Giving up exercise and fussing with my diet? Maybe. It does seem like gilding a dying lily. No antibiotics for easily treatable infections? Nope. That seems silly to me. Although his point about pneumonia as the friend of the elderly was one Kate made often.

What makes this attractive to me? I’ve been aware for a long while now of what Ezekiel nicely phrases as the American Immortal. Our curious obsession with health and exercise as a means not only of extending health span, but of avoiding death. The proof of this subtext to the whole health and wellness hoohah comes leaping off the page of the articles about billionaires and their anti-aging, anti-death regimens. 100% The death rate for each generation. Now and forever. And, it should be.

I could easily write and I’m sure someone has, a novel about a world where a few trillionaires live on, collecting the world’s assets like sturgeon cleaning the bottom of a lake, until the concentration of wealth becomes .000001% and the rest of the world has effectively medieval levels of well-being.

This is a conversation I’d like to have with any willing to entertain it. What’s appropriate? What’s really needed? Is 75 the cutoff? Maybe 80? What do you think?