Category Archives: Third Phase

Aging, Health, Third Phase

A Visit to the Oncologist

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Samain and the Fallow Moon

Got in Ruby at noon and drove, once again, to Lone Tree. Through the everlasting construction project that is toll roads for 470 West. Wanted to drink water, get my bladder in shape for the next radiation treatment but no. That’s over with. August. Now it’s November and I’m on my way to a three month follow up with Anna Willis, Dr. Eigner’s physician’s assistant.

I have one question that matters to me. Is the cancer still there? The reason? I have two. First, that 0.03 result on my September PSA (test for prostate specific antigen). I thought, I’m on lupron which suppresses testosterone. I finished a course of 35 sacrifices under the Cyberknife. Shouldn’t this mean no cancer? Or, could it mean, that 0.03 is detectable psa, that the radiation didn’t work?

The second reason is Gertie. Gertie’s is our eleven year old German wirehair pointer. She’s deaf in at least one ear and her eyes have cataracts that cloud them. Her nose though works fine. During the time leading up both to the prostatectomy in 2015 and the recent recurrence Gertie sniffed my pee a lot.

I know, gross, right? Well, no. Not for dog owners. Dog’s get a lot of information from urine. That’s the whole fireplug thing. And, dogs can smell cancer. She seems fascinated again. Still. Could be my paraonia, I know. Still, it factored in to my hunch that the cancer was still there.

Yes, indeed, it is. That is in fact what the .03 means. There are still psa producing cells in my body which means prostate cells. They’re supposed to be eliminated by first, the surgery, second, the radiation, and third, suppressed by the lupron.

However. It’s ok. Dr. Eigner “stole” me from Anna Willis, his p.a. That is, he watched for my appearance on the schedule and arranged his day so he could see me in place of Anna. His schedule books far, far out so his schedulers won’t give me time with him. He checks and so far has seen me each time I’ve come in. That makes me feel good. He remembers me.

Good to see you! He’s in blue surgical scrubs, looking thinner than when I saw him last. He does seem glad to see me. I only have one question that matters to me. Is my cancer gone? Or, does the .03 mean that the radiation failed?

Well. Let me show you. He got a piece of blank paper and a ballpoint. At the top he wrote .2. Not so long ago .2 was undetectable. Then, .1. He inscribed .07, then a .05, then .02, and finally a .01. Each of these have in their turn described undetectable. So, 5 years ago we would have said your cancer was undetectable, but now our assays are more sensitive. That means your .03 is a really low number, but, yes, it also means there is still some cancer in your body.

Have you heard of secondary cell death? No, I haven’t. Radiation kills directly most of the cancer cells, but it continues working for a long time after treatment finishes. How? It damages the DNA of some cancer cells, but doesn’t kill them outright. Only when they go through mitosis, division, do they die.

Oh. Glimmer of hope.

He then drew a graph that showed the effect of lupron on my psa. PSA decreases rapidly, then flattens out near the bottom and remains there over time until it’s discontinued. At that point testosterone begins to rise again and psa goes up.

This line though is radiation. This line sloped down gradually, but where the lupron line began to go up, signifying its discontinuance and the resulting rise in psa, the radiation line continues to the bottom of the graph and stops.

Here is the critical time. He indicated the spot on the graph where the lupron line, going up, met the radiation line on its slope down toward zero. Your psa will rise here until the radiation effect takes over. This spot was well before the radiation line met the bottom of the graph.

Both you and I will be concerned until it flattens out, then begins to drop. That would mean a cure, right? Exactly. Sometimes, of course, it continues to rise, but even then we’ve knocked it back a long ways. Can you go back to the lupron then? Oh, yes. And there are other drugs, too. It’s the trend line over time that’s important.

OK. I see. How long do I need to be on the lupron? Ah, the great debate. One year, some say two years. What’s right? With you, a year. Your last lupron injection will be next March. Then, in June we’ll have a psa that will tell us where we are. Might still be going up some, then. Remember the graph? Then the psas following that will show us the trend.

I get it. Thanks.

Aging, Great Wheel, Holidays, Original Relation, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Time To Go

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Samain and the Fallow Moon

The time clock, the early morning sky, has moved Orion further west. He will move below the horizon only to show up later in the Winter night. With the time shift his movement has become more obvious. I’m up at 4:30 still, but Orion knows not of saving time, only moving as the earth turns, all the while, too, rattling around our star, Big Sol, at speed. This timepiece is all we need; if only we could look up, see what we’re looking at.

I’m comfortable with clocks that tell of a broader version of time, a wider one. This is Samain, so we know the world moves toward darkness, cold. The Solstice of Winter. I could live with no clock, riding along with the seasonal changes. That would be fine. I do not need time. We are always in the moment, in a season, in a particular place. Enough.

Though of course others would counter this. How would I know when to zoom with my buddies? How would I make breakfast with Alan at the Lakeshore Cafe? I say I would know the same way the dogs know when to eat, when to get up, when to get their evening meds. I would say the same the way the cows on Bill Schmidt’s farm knew when to be milked. Why confuse all this knowing with long hands and short hands, digital numbers?

Life begins. We do not need to know the time, only the moment of slipping out of the watery world and into the airy one. Life ends. We will not know the time. The artificial measurements all cease to have meaning then. In between the schools, designed with early factories in mind, have bells and clocks and start times and end times. We go there to learn the constrictions, the tyranny of clocks. And, we learn well. Too well if you ask me. But, you do not.

I prefer the liminal spaces, another way of knowing the moment. When dawn breaks through the clouds turn pink over Black Mountain. I thought, oh, blue sky. Sky is male. Blue for boys. The clouds are pink. Does that connect to girls somehow? Couldn’t see it.

Or, as the sky bruises toward evening, twilight falls. Time to slow down, ease into the rest. No one needs a smart watch to know dawn or twilight.

What about the calendar? Easier, probably, to make notches on a tree branch. Day 1. Day 2. Day 43. Day 350. As Emerson said, the days are gods, so the calendar is their temple.

I could celebrate my birthday on the first morning that Orion is fully in the sky. Or on the new moon after the first big freeze. You could choose a marker for yourself. I’d agree with you.

Tradition is just peer pressure from the dead. (a facebook meme) All this fascination with dates and times, years and months, just peer pressure from the dead. We could work out our lives under other methods. Think of the billions who’ve died before us who did just that. It’s possible.

My stomach, for example, has sent a breakfast signal. That growly sound. Think I’ll replace seven o’clock with that growl.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Poetry, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Writing

Hózhó

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Samain and the Fallow Moon

A fellow MIA docent posted a Navajo rug and it had this explanation of hózhó:

Hózhǫ́ is a foundational concept in the Navajo world, encompassing ideas of beauty, harmony, balance, order, grace, health, and happiness. It is a state of being, thinking, and acting. Navajo artists embody hózhǫ́ as they weave, and textiles are imbued with and become works of hózhǫ́.

Not a human being. No. A human becoming. Becoming with hózhó, with knowing ichi-go ichi-ge as the rich moment, with an ikigai of life as it is, not as we might want or wish it, but as it is, hózhó always. No matter what.

With wabi-sabi as a preferred way of seeing the world. Tarnished often, broken, yes. But even so a Velveteen Rabbit place. Repaired with gold where the cracks are. Walking this ancientrail of becoming which never ends. Walk along with me, friend.

Reading Zornberg on Genesis (see below), The Beginning of Desire. She found this title in a poem fragment from Wallace Stevens, his Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction:

“And not to have is the beginning of desire.
To have what is not is its ancient cycle.
It is desire at the end of winter…

It knows that what it has is what is not
And throws it away like a thing of another time…”

Sat down this morning to read Zornberg, but I printed out this poem, 23 pages long, yesterday. Thought I’d check where her fragment fit in the whole. Wallace Stevens is a giant to me though I know only a few of his poems. He hits me in a place I do not recall exists until I read him.

Anyhow an hour later I looked up. Read the whole thing. Yowzer. Let me repeat that. Yowzer.

A few lines:

The death of one god is the death of all.

Phoebus was a name for something that never could be named.

…the future casts and throws his stars around the floor

There was a myth before the myth began, Venerable and articulate and complete

The bear, the ponderous cinnamon, snarls in his mountain At summer thunder…

Stevens kept throwing in beautiful lines filled with the horror of nothingness and whether the Supreme Fiction can counter it. I’ve got to read it several more times. But, wow. This poem is something. It’s apparently considered his master work and I can see why.

Reading it reminded me that reading poetry, ancient texts, philosophy has a sustenance all its own. A castle of temporary meanings lodged in stony rooms, waiting for a visitor. Part of life now. Not what’s next. But, now.

Hózhó in this once in a lifetime moment and the next one, a wabi-sabi vision sufficient for ikigai.

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Judaism, Literature, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Zornberg and Denes

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Samain and the Fallow Moon

Brother Mark made a good observation. When remembering “my dead” yesterday, I did not include any dogs. He recalls, for example, “Vega’s woof.” I wrote him back and said, yes: Celt, Sorsha, Scott, Morgana, Tully, Tira, Orion, Tor. The Wolfhounds. Buck, Iris, Emma, Bridgit, Kona, Hilo. The Whippets. Vega. The coyote hound/IW mix.

My favorite version of the afterlife is that moment when all the dogs you’ve ever loved come up to greet you. If that could be so, I’d find eternity bearable.

Continuing to meditate, up to eleven minutes now toward a goal of twenty. And, read. First things.

This morning I read from The Human Argument, a collection of the writings of Agnes Denes. If you say, who? I understand. I’d never heard of her either until an article about her art in the Washington Post this week. This woman’s work is a stunner, combining science, mathematics, ecology, and art. I’m still not able to post pictures here (working on it), but you can see some of her work at the two links here. An important artist, IMO, but one I’d missed completely. Even the Walker has only one work by her and it’s a book. The MIA? Nothing.

Followed that with some more reading from Zornberg. Damn, this woman is so smart. And clever. The Beginning of Desire is a commentary on Genesis and its organized by parsha, the long readings required each week to get through the whole Torah in a year. The first parsha is named Bereshit since parshas take their name from the first word or phrase in the text. Bereshit is also the Hebrew name for the first book of the Bible, what I have known up till now as Genesis. Easily the best commentary I’ve ever read.

Here’s a quote from the introduction in which she talks about her method: “The aim of interpretation is, I suggest, not merely to domesticate, to familiarize an ancient book: it is also, and perhaps more importantly, to “make strangeness in certain respects stranger.”” She allows no definitive interpretation, rather she seeks a polyvalent conversation between reader and text, a dynamic reading that learns from the text and the life of the reader in dialectical tension.

Wondering now if staying immersed in Zornberg, in the world of ancient literature, the Greeks and Romans, too, might be the way forward for me. I certainly love it. Get excited.

Aging, Beyond the Boundaries, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Health, Judaism, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

The Narrow Room

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Samain and the Fallow Moon

Two important things. 1. I get now, in a gut way, that the Tao that can be named is not the Tao. 2. In the fallow time the harvest moves toward death and decay.

Been considering the text of Chayei Sarah again. Reading some interesting Jewish commentaries and sermons preached by various rabbis on the parsha. Immersion in biblical literature turns all my inner lights on. Woke, I guess.

Also had an interesting e-mail conversation with Rich Levine about Emerson’s notion of a religion of direct revelation to us, not the dry bones of theirs. He said he found revelation in the experience of joy. I had said much the same about awe. When I wrote him back, I introduced a thought. Could it be that access to the sacred, the divine, the world next to this one can come only through feelings? If so, could it be that words written about it might be barriers rather than illuminators?

In that exchange it hit me, the Tao that can be written is not the Tao. Oh, yeah. The name of God that can be written is not God. The stories about God and those who follow Her are neither sacred, nor divine in themselves. They may evoke an experience of the sacred, but they are not it.

The fallow time moves toward death and decay. These diseases that Kate and I have, the ones you will have, augur the fallow time for our bodies. They propose death, not as imminent necessarily, but as inescapable. And I hear them

The COPD is not an enemy, but a marker along the trail of mortality. So is prostate cancer. Interstitial lung disease. Sjogren’s syndrome. These sign posts show the way, the path toward a universal destination of the body.

Learning to live with these signals is a life long process. If we learn how to admit them into our awareness as signals rather than foes, then we can nod, say yes, I see.

No, this does not mean that we say, oh, I see, well then measure up my narrow room. (see Bryant’s poem below) This does not mean that we cease treatments that can prolong our life. Though it could mean that if you want it to. It simply means that we live with a clarity about the end.

Aging, Asia, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Bring Out Your Dead

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Samain and the Fallow Moon

The Feast day of All Souls. The Christian version of Samain. Diluted from the original with its tension between the dead/faery realm and the living world. In the Christian version All Souls are those faithful now departed from this plane. It attempts to place a limit, a passport on those dead we know. Only the faithful.

Not so the ancient Celts. They knew both faithful and unfaithful (in whatever way that term might have meaning to them) can return, impact our this wordly lives. Tomorrow on dia de los muertos the Mexicans and Latin Americans remind us again of the Celtic knowing: they, the dead, are here. Those who loved us and those who wished us harm. Those who were indifferent to us and those who desired us. Both. All. Not just those with acknowledged acceptance of creed and savior.

The Chinese festival of hungry ghosts is the inverse of the Christian All Souls, imagining a time when certain dead who’ve committed evil return with an appetite for bad deeds. It is celebrated in the 7th lunar month of the Chinese and Vietnamese calendars.

Contrary to what seems true, all of these celebrations imply, the dead do not leave us. Rather, they remain puissant, able to impact our lives for good and for ill. We know this whether we agree with the metaphysics of the various celebrations or not. That parent who loved you. The one who treated you with contempt. That aunt who sent you books. The friend who knew you well. They do not leave you. And they return at certain times, reminding you you were loved, or held in contempt, or known.

How are your dead remembered, puissant in your life? Do you ever set aside time to visit with them, to let them enter your life consciously? Even the frightening ones, the ones who disturbed and disturb your life need attention. Otherwise they work in the shadows of your life.

Aging, Beyond the Boundaries, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Poetry, Third Phase

Samain 2019

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The Wheel has turned full round again. Back now at Summer’s End, Samain. In very ancient times the Celts only had two seasons: Samain and Beltane. The fallow season and the growing season. Beltane on May 1st marked the start of the agricultural year and Samain its end. Later they added Imbolc and Lughnasa when celebration of equinoxes and solstices became more common. Imbolc, February 1st lies between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox while Lughnasa, August 1, is between the Summer Solstice and the Fall Equinox.

The Celts did not begin their year at Beltane, but at Samain, the start of the fallow season. Today. Happy New Year to all of you. Especially to those of you whose heart, like mine, beats to the rhythm of Mother Earth’s changes. And, I would add, to Father Sun’s constancy during her changes.

Rosh Hashanah begins the human new year for Jews as the growing season comes to an end. Michaelmas, September 29th, the feast day of the Archangel Michael, is Rudolf Steiner’s springtime of the soul. It’s not as strange as it may at first sound to begin the New Year in the fall after gathering in the crops.

This was the season in pre-modern times when the flurry of growing, gathering, fishing, hunting that marked the warmer months slowed down or ended. Families would have more time together in their homes. Visiting each other was easier. Time would stretch out as the night’s lengthened, making outdoor work difficult, if not impossible.

This is the season of the bard, the storyteller, the folk musician and it begins with the thinning of the veil between this world and the other world. Harvest and slaughter have the paradoxical affect of sustaining life by taking life, necessary, but often sad. Our need for the lives of plants and other animals reveals the fragile interdependence of our compact with life.

The veil thins. Those of the faery realm and the realm of the dead are close as the growing season ends. The Mexican and Latin American day of the dead and the Christian all souls day point to the same intuition, that somehow life and its afterwards are closest to each other now.

I’m recalling Gertrude and Curtis Ellis. Grandpa Charlie Keaton and Grandma Mabel. Uncle Riley, Aunt Barbara, Aunt Marjorie, Aunt Roberta. Lisa. Ikey. Aunt Ruth. Uncle Rheford and his wife. Uncle Charles. Grandma Jennie. Grandpa Elmo. And so many, many others extending back in time to England, Wales, Ireland. Before that as wanderers up out of Africa, those without whose lives I would not have had my own. Nor you yours.

There are, too, friends and their loved ones. The members of my high school class who have died. Regina, wife of Bill.

The Romantics say it best for me. Here’s the first few lines of Thantopsis by William Cullen Bryant:

     To him who in the love of Nature holds   
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks   
A various language; for his gayer hours   
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile   
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides   
Into his darker musings, with a mild   
And healing sympathy, that steals away   
Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts   
Of the last bitter hour come like a blight   
Over thy spirit, and sad images   
Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,   
And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,   
Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;—   
Go forth, under the open sky, and list   
To Nature’s teachings, while from all around—
Earth and her waters, and the depths of air—
Comes a still voice—
                                       Yet a few days, and thee   
The all-beholding sun shall see no more   
In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,   
Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears,   
Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist   
Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim   
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again…

Aging, Beyond the Boundaries, Commentary on Religion, Dogs, Family, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Our Land and Home, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Translating Metamorphoses, Weather +Climate, Writing

Change it up, dude

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Fall (last day of) and the Fallow Season Moon

-8. That’s right. -8 degrees here on Shadow Mountain, the day before Halloween. In October. We’ve had a taste of Minnesota winter the week before Halloween.

Been changing my morning routine a bit. Read an article that said the first three hours of your day are the most important. Mine starts between 4 am and 4:30 am. I wake up, the dogs get restless, Kep rolls over for a tug and tussle. Gertie comes up to check that I’M REALLY GETTING UP. Gives me a quick kiss to be sure. Rigel raises her head, looks at me. She requires a personal request to get out of bed.

That first half hour is dog feeding, getting the newspaper, and, on Wednesdays, today, taking out the trash. The trash has to be wheeled out through whatever has fallen on the driveway. Some snow today, not too bad.

One of the containers, the green one for recycling, testifies to America’s changed economy. It’s filled with cardboard from Amazon orders, Chewy dogfood boxes, boxes from Kate’s tube feeding supplies. Each home is now a shipping and receiving depot with the resulting obligation to handle no longer needed shipping materials.

After this work finishes, I go upstairs in our garage, to my loft, a 900 square foot space filled with books, art making supplies, exercise equipment and my computer desk. Over the last 14 years the first thing I’ve done in the morning is read e-mails, then write Ancientrails. That’s what I’d call a habit.

But, when learning is needed, the teacher appears. A writer whose blog I sometimes read suggested the first three hours make your day notion. He was making the common millennial complaint about spending too much on social media: facebook, instagram, snapchat, tiktok, whatever the latest is. That’s not me, but I took his point.

Ready for a change I switched up. First, back to meditating. Having done that on a regular basis in a long while. Goal is for 20 minutes. Up to 10 this morning. Then, I read. I’ve been wondering about why I’m not reading more. Oh, I read science fiction, the occasional novel, Tears of the Truffle Pig right now, but serious reading has become a difficult task. Fitting it in. Being able to sustain attention. Turns out the early am is wonderful for that kind of attention.

Reading this morning in the Beginning of Desire, by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg. Subtitle: reflections on Genesis. She’s amazing. A new thing under the sun of biblical commentary. Her method, which I’ll write about here at some point, is so subtle, so profound, so intimate, and very learned. I got hooked on her by plucking a book of hers somewhat by random off the library shelf at CBE. I opened, read a couple of sentences, and knew this was genius. Not a term I use lightly.

That was a year ago during the High Holidays, Yom Kippur, and Rabbi Jamie had just finished the whole High Holidays. A lot of work. He sank into the chair next to me. Nobody else there. All had left.

I enthused about Zornberg. He brightened. Yes, he’d met here. Yes, she was the best Torah commentator, maybe ever. He and his brother Russ, a Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, and professor at Regis University in Denver, who lives in Evergreen, had talked about a joint class using one of her works, a series of essays on biblical interpretation. Hasn’t happened yet, but when things normalize here, I’m going to see if I could give the idea a boost.

Anyhow, I got into her this morning and combined with some other thinking I’ve been doing, got into a revery about myth, fairy tales, long books, the true anchors of my inner life. This is my work, my lifelong work and fascination, the attempts we humans make to discern the occult, the hidden, the other world, the that beyond the this. This is my heart’s labor. Politics was reasons labor, fueled by the heart, too, of course, the misery of oppression, but calculating, power oriented, perhaps a diversion?

I’m writing this now, an hour and a half later than I would have in the past 14 years. So, changes. More to come.

Aging, Beyond the Boundaries, Family, Health, Original Relation, Third Phase

Climb the Mountain, Find the Sea

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Fall and the New Moon

Later in the day, Monday.

Drove carefully down Shadow Mountain, down 285 to 470. 470 was clear to South Denver Cardiology. When they called Charles, two of us got up. Charles Collins was the one they wanted. I sat back down.

Ellen came out ten minutes later. Charles II, me.

Back in the room she asked me if I’d ever been on a treadmill before. Yes, I own one and have used it for years. Take off your shirts, please. It’s easier to hook you up to the EKG. She rubbed my chest with a lotion to help the EKG pads stay on, then carefully separated the eight leads and clicked them into place after placing the pads all over my chest.

We waited for an initial EKG to run. A baseline. I stood there in the slightly cool room draped with long plastic cords attached to my body, feeling mildly ridiculous and science fictiony at the same time.

The treadmill was nothing special. Not as nice as mine. It goes up automatically Ellen said. In speed and elevation. On the wall ahead of me was a sign showing numbers and exertion levels. Fine to extremely difficult, 10 numbers. We’re heading to 126 beats per minute. I can do that. I just did, Saturday morning.

That’s arrived at by the quick and dirty way of subtracting your age from 220, then multiplying by some percentage (it varies according to your age, gender, physical condition). Age from 220 gives maximum heart rate.

I stayed on for a bit over 8 minutes. Felt I should I go past 7 minutes which was the average. Ego. We ended with the treadmill at 3.6 mph at 15% elevation. That’s way harder than my usual workout which right now is at 3 mph, going up to 6% elevation. I could have gone longer, but Ellen said she had enough data, so she set the treadmill to cool down.

When I was off, she had me sit on a table, still attached to the EKG. Time back to normal heart rate is a sign of fitness. Not so good as it used to be for me. After a fourth blood pressure reading, she said I was done.

Part of the angst I felt yesterday morning was about the medicalization of my life. Another test, another chance to find something new wrong. I’d like to get back to annual physicals. Might not happen.

A while ago I read a Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickled and Dimed, et al) short essay on why she’s not doing anymore medical tests at all: Why I’m Giving Up on Preventative Care. Her point is that she’s sensed she’s old enough to die. Good article. Just read Dr. Stephen Mile’s Testament. It’s his equivalent of a medical directive. He’s very, very clear about what he doesn’t want, most of it bring me back from the brink sort of interventions.

Death might be making a come back. Why not own our mortality? The tree dies. The dog dies. The human dies. Yes. The cycle finishes for the individual while the species lives on. Our individual existence has never been the point anyway, procreation is about the species, not about the individual, though paradoxically individuals are required to sustain the species.

Here’s something I found that gives another perspective on this conversation: 

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
     And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
     And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance. Kahlil Gibran, On Death.

Feelings, Health, Jefferson County, Judaism, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Weather +Climate

Real Winter

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Fall and the new moon (Heshvan)

Stress test today. Oh, boy. Hope they don’t catch it all. Feeling a bit down.

The combination of the COPD diagnosis, my stress test at 11:30, the very nasty road conditions between here and South Denver Cardiology in Littleton. Found myself reluctant to shovel the back deck and the stall mats. Achy. You know. Stuff accumulates. (no pun intended.) Did shovel the deck and mats though. Felt better.

Walked out to the paper. Nope. Snow stops the Denver Post. Only rain, sleet, hail, snow, and gloom of night prevents that sturdy carrier from his rounds.

This is real winter, pre-Halloween. Temp of 5 right now, headed down below that tonight and tomorrow night. Maybe 4-5 inches of new snow, more on the way.

Don’t want to start slogging through the slough of despond. Only makes matters more difficult. Looking for simcha in the beauty of the snow, the bounce of the dogs out the door in the morning, the reading I’m doing for Chayei Sarah.

Feeling it for the folks in California. The pyrocene, indeed.