Samain Thanksgiving Moon
Warmer, 31, and cloudy. The waning Thanksgiving Moon lit my morning walk to the loft through a veil of patchy cumulus. The neighbor in the rental put up an inflatable turkey with a pilgrim hat a week or so ago. Now there’s a Northpole sign on their mailbox, a Santa Claus and Christmas lights. They did wait until Thanksgiving was over. Most of us on our stretch of Black Mountain Drive have less glam. We have lights on at night all year, but just a strand in the front and along the walkway up to the loft. Holiseason brings out the inner kid. That’s Eduardo and Holly’s lights in the distance.
Kate’s still struggling. Her weight seems to have stabilized in the 80 to 81 pound range. She can’t get weight on in spite of eating and snacking. The nausea and the abdominal pain have returned. Her spirit seems good most of the time, but the lack of progress has begun to wear on her. I can see that. What happens next is a couple of more imaging studies this Thursday. Not really expecting that they’ll show anything. If they don’t, Dr. Rhee has agreed to consider tube feeding. She needs to get calories somehow and the traditional way isn’t working.
I’m finding a peculiar satisfaction in domestic work. Dishes in the dishwasher right after use. Throw a load in the washer when I get up in the morning. Cooking what we have. There’s a thread through the day, things to do that are active and loving. I’ve come to like it. One of the things I noted a long time ago was that women’s work (in a stereotypical sense) dealt with life’s basics. Eat. Clean. Support. Repetitive. The clothes always get dirty. The dishes come after cooking. No matter what groceries and other supplies have to be purchased. Rinse and repeat. It makes sense to me now how homemaking is a noble art, a task unfairly distributed by past gender roles, yes, but so important to the well-being of a family.
Maybe if I’d ever paid attention to fixing things, I’d get traditional male role satisfaction there, too. But, I haven’t. Oh, I have my moments. The jerry-rigged deck with wooden palettes and horse stall mat walking surface. The cabinet doors finally fixed with longer screws. But really it just frustrates me to try make the physical world conform to what I want.
One thing that is different now from when Kate had shoulder surgery back in April is that we have a functioning dish washer. Boy, does that make a huge difference. When I cooked then, the dishes went into the sink, glaring at me until I did them. The added step after cooking and clean up wore me out. Now I get the dishes and pans in there right away and they’re off my mind. A mind saving as well as a labor saving device.
Annie goes home today. She’s had her hands full the last couple of days making funeral arrangements for a sort of ward of the Fatland family, Kate’s mom’s family. Barb was 98. Annie’s also doing a counted cross stitch of the Devil’s Tower. Fine work. She’s out of the jail now after 30 years inside, as a guard. A lot of adjustment as any major life shift like that requires.
Around 8:30 this morning I’m into Denver to the Denver City/County criminal court. Jon’s court date for the restraining order violation. Not sure what to expect. Jon seems to think it will not be too harsh. I hope he’s right. He has enough going on with his house and his car, being a single parent.
We put out our best aluminum tins from Tony’s. Mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, sage stuffing, green beans almondine. I plunged the plastic bag of turkey gravy in boiling water. The turkey breast went in a shallow pan with a 1/2 cup of water. We have two ovens and the top one, the smaller of the two, did its job well for the potatoes and the stuffing.
On the table sat our finest paper plates, a big turkey printed on them saying gobble, gobble, gobble. The napkins had pumpkins and vines and stuff. The meal was very good and aside from the now suspect ovens (I won’t mention that the other one went wonky, too.) exceeded my hopes.
Kate’s two months from hell. A modest amount of this excellent meal sent her straight to bed. Not sure where we go from here. Smoothies and Korean food, maybe.
Woke up this morning and did my gratitude practice. At night I consider all the gifts I got during that day, all the gifts I gave, and any trouble I caused. In the morning I start out with what I’m grateful for right now. Both practices seem to soothe me, put me in a place to receive and accept blessings. Life’s a hell of a lot better when I’m in that sorta space.
There is also a more general, vaguer issue for me. As Kate’s life continues to revolve around pain and nausea, weight loss, it restricts her movements. She’s in the house, often in bed or in her chair or on the bench upstairs at the table. This has a centrifugal force for me, too, pulling me in, keeping me here. No, I do not resent it, that’s not my point. I’m speaking now of a more subtle influence, a coloring of the spirit, a darkening of it. I find myself tired, sleepy, more than makes sense to me unless I factor this in.
retrograde, 9th House.
Like the study of kabbalah with Rabbi Jamie it’s easy to get overwhelmed with all the new information since astrology and kabbalah are centuries, millennia old. Both have multiple competing schools and a good deal of learning necessary to fairly evaluate them. That is, they both require a certain suspension of disbelief in order to get traction. Kabbalah has enriched my understanding of Judaism in many ways, none more important than its insistence that all the Torah is metaphor, but it took me a good ways in to the study to learn this. By undermining a literal interpretation of the Torah, kabbalah gave me a way to appreciate and use the biblical material without having to contort my own thinking. In my world that reopened those old stories that we know so well, made them available for my own growth.
To give you a taste of the possibilities here are a few lines from an analysis of mercury retrograding into my 9th house: “Re-examine what you believe as Mercury backs up into the 9th house. Your beliefs create what you experience. It’s time to consider the future. What you do now effects the outcome. What’s your overall philosophy of life? Are your really living it?…During this transit you may be called upon to re-assess what the truth really means.”
Wonder what the stars (and the planets) have to say about reading my full chart for the first time today? We could look it up. I’m going to Golden, under Table Mesa, to the Bean Fosters coffee house. Elisa, a petroleum geologist, dean of academics at a consortium of community colleges and a member of Congregation Beth Evergreen has done whatever astrologists do with my birth information. She says the consult lasts as long as I have questions. She really doesn’t have that long, so I’ll restrain myself.
Bacon also points out that the path of facts and induction may be slow, but it heads in the right direction. No matter how fast you go down a path without facts, you will never reach the truth.
His emphasis on depth psychology, in particular synchronicity and the collective unconscious, as partial evidence that the modern Self need not be wholly isolate makes sense to me. I had many years of Jungian analysis and find the non-pathological approach of Jungian thought very congenial. I’m not sure how many outside the world of depth psychology would agree with him on this point however. But, I do.
Neither an obvious nor an easy matter. “I’m going to have my chart read this afternoon.” “I know.” “Yes, you know, but you don’t approve.” “Oh, I think it’s fine to read your chart. But, believing it?” She shrugged. Kate and I share a strong or high version of the modern Self, reason uber alles. I have flirted, however, for a very long time with a Romantic view carrying an aesthetic and spiritual seeker’s heart inside a rationalist’s body and mind. This is not a synthesis. It’s a carrying of opposites, learning from both, knowing the parallel, never touching rails down which they run.
The weather gods have chosen an apt offering for the last day of fall, 8 inches of snow. In true Colorado fashion it will probably be here tonight and tomorrow, gone by Thursday if not late Wednesday. Looking forward to it. A difference between Colorado and Minnesota exists in forecasting snow. Here in Colorado people pant for the snow, welcome it, do celebratory dances. In Minnesota, not so much. It means work and slick roads in the Gopher State; here snow means beauty, tourist dollars, and will be gone conveniently.
Went to mussar yesterday for the first time in three weeks. Lots of hugs. Lots of obvious caring for Kate. One of the ironies of this whole situation is that three weeks ago yesterday Kate and I co-taught a mussar session on compassion, rachamim. The next morning at 6 a.m. she was in the E.R. at Swedish. She’s been gone from home ever since.
It was not the content of the discussion, but its nature that finally lifted my stress. Considering the meaning of truth, identifying the Jewish take on it, relating the search for truth to loving-kindness all stimulated my thinking, made me go deep. And that was the solace. Leaving the squirrel-in-a-cage stressors behind for a while, I went into that realm of memory and creativity where old ideas and new conditions meet, changing each other.
There is, I’m coming to understand, a unique Jewish epistemology, one which places a possible truth on the table and passes it around to the many gathered in its presence. Each one comments, shares the part of the elephant that they can see. The process iterates since commentators will comment on others reactions. It does not mean that there is no truth, this is the key move, but that truth itself is multi-perspectival. It takes a village to know a truth.