Samain Thanksgiving Moon
This may turn out to be a pivotal week for our family. Jon’s coping well with the aftermath of his court hearing. And, ta dah, we have likely uncovered the reason for Kate’s problems with eating and weight loss. Stenosis of the superior mesenteric artery. Obviously not something you want, but now, after 18 months or so, we have a reason. And there are possible treatments, too.
This diagnosis came quickly. We went in yesterday morning for the imaging work. It was the ultrasound that found it. Dr. Rhee called in the afternoon.
If Jon and Kate can find ways to move on from their respective difficulties, life on the mountain will take on a different tone. And, a welcome one. In neither case is a positive outcome assured, but in my view both of them may have altered the direction of their lives. This week. Wow.
Yesterday evening I drove in to Swigert Elementary for Gabe’s 5th grade concert. The drive in is always an ordeal because Stapleton, the new urban neighborhood built on the grounds of the former Stapleton Airport, is all the way across metro Denver from the foothills. The concerts are at 6:00 pm which means driving on city streets during the height of rush hour. Big fun.
But, I made it just as the 5th graders filed into the gym and mounted the stage like scaffolding. After a drive of an hour and twenty minutes. Whew. I was there not only for Gabe, but for Jon who was prevented from going by a more restrictive version of the restraining order generated during his court hearing on Tuesday. I found a front row seat and Gabe saw me right away. They sang four songs, beginning with Bob Marley’s, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” Given the new information I had the song went right into my heart.
The third song, the name of which I don’t recall right now, involved twenty fifth graders coming out front to do a short dance piece from the musical Hairspray. Swigert will put on Hairspray in the spring. They danced and in their movements, their eagerness, their smiles radiated the innocence, the possibility of childhood.
It was a surprisingly powerful moment for me as was the thought that came as I watched. “We’ve failed these kids.” Though that sentiment is true of all generations to some extent, the world we hope for for our kids is not the one we’ve created, in this case I meant it literally and profoundly. Climate change. These kids, 5th graders, are ten years old. If they live a normal life expectancy, let’s say 80 years for convenience, they will be alive in 2088. Here’s the problem in a single for instance: “Most cities might be too hot to host the summer Olympic Games after 2085 because of climate change, according to an analysis in The Lancet1.” Nature
This is what we’ve done, allowed to happen. They will, of course, be responsible for how they handle the challenges we’ve left them. Maybe they’ll do really well at adaptation and mitigation. Maybe not. In either case their world and ours will be so different as to be almost unrecognizable. We should all bow our heads in shame.
Happy to have some good news to report about Jon. Went to his court date yesterday. His inner attitude seems to be shifting away from anger about the divorce (understandable, but not helpful) toward getting on with his life, accepting the constraints of the restraining order (unreasonable, but legally enforceable, as he just discovered). He wants to get his art in a gallery or up for sale. This is big because it’s a key part of his identity that lay fallow during the twelve years of his marriage. He needs positive reinforcement and he’s had more than his share of negatives over the last few years.
He’s a very talented, smart guy who can handle all the work necessary to remodel his home, replace an axle in his car, ski a great line down an A-basin bowl, teach elementary age kids how to express themselves. I hope he can organize his life so these thing line up, move him forward, and make him feel good about himself.
I’m feeling a bit stressed, a lot going on. Religious school tonight. I’m taking pizza makings and teaching a unit on holidays, especially winter holidays. The kids will reimagine, reconstruct a new winter holiday. Tomorrow morning Kate has two imaging studies, looking for zebras. Tomorrow evening is Gabe’s winter concert in Stapleton. A sequelae of the hearing yesterday is that Jon can’t, for the moment, attend. The old protection order carved out an exception to the 100 yards rule for events with the kids, things like parent-teacher conferences, concerts, doctor visits, but the law is a blunt instrument. Yesterday by default it eliminated those exceptions. Jon wants me to go to represent our side of the family. Important for Gabe. I’ll go.
Got reinforced shortly after the move out here when I had to deal with prostate cancer. That shook me. I worked hard to keep myself upright and maybe, in the process, began to consolidate a lot of learning. A major part of that consolidation came from the support I got from family and friends. Oh. Life can be good, even when it’s bad. Weird. Since the move, it’s been one damned thing after another, or it feels that way right now. Those things forced a going deep, being honest, being grateful a lot. Now, four years later, our move anniversary is the Winter Solstice, my Colorado Self, the one born in the alembic of all those insults, has asserted itself.
Mario is already in town, taking wildfire pictures with his usual acumen, traveling over mountain passes. Tom and Paul fly in today and we’ll have a slow cooker Irish stew up here on Shadow Mountain, all of us. These are friends of well over thirty years, men with whom I shared twice monthly meetings over that time, plus annual retreats. That bond was the toughest thing to leave behind when Kate and I moved out here.
The last letters of the Hebrew alphabet now have renderings in sumi-e, lying on my table ready for quotes and the chop. A member of Beth Evergreen last night referred to me as an artist. Oh. I thought he said audience. Artist is not a word I’ve ever associated with myself so my brain heard something else. A revealing moment. How others see us is not always, perhaps often, not the way we see ourselves.
It was also time to slough off some of the Minnesota based, second phase lingering work. Especially the political. I am going to the caucus this Tuesday; however, I no longer see myself as a dedicated activist. But, and I consider this great news, Ruth told me she was walking out on April 9th, standing outside Mcauliffe, her middle school, for seventeen minutes, one minute for each of the Parkland victims. She’s doing it in spite of the fact that adults tell her no one will listen. Go, Ruth!
The melancholy also uncovered a tension I’d been feeling between leaning in to the domestic, cooking, for example, and Kate and mine’s presence in the Beth Evergreen community, and what I consider my work. Recalibrating second phase expectations about work, which I have not yet fully done, feels like a task for this time. In fact, I enjoy the domestic part of our lives and it feels good to devote more energy to it.
As melancholy begins to lift, where does it go? Does it go back into memory, added to a store of melancholic episodes over a life time, each one different, unique, becoming part of the polyvalent stew that is our psyche? What triggers the end or, better, the gradual tailing off of doubt? Of the heaviness? Of the stasis? Where do all those moods and temporary inner states (and, they’re all temporary) go? Do they just float up into some neuronic cloud, then get washed away through the body’s toxic cleansing processes?
I’m not talking here about depression or anxiety or mania, serious and long lasting mental states; rather, I’m talking about fleeting, sometimes changing moment by moment, atmospherics. Joy. Sadness. Glad. Mad. Eager. Reluctant. Energized. Slow. Crisp or dull. They come and go like the lenticulars over Black Mountain or the high white mare’s tail cirrus. Sometimes they crowd our mind with the darkness of a thunder head or roar through us like a tornado. And then they go, pushed away by a high or low pressure system, perhaps a psychic La Nina.
Glaucoma stable. Did a visual field exam yesterday, space invaders with a clicker and dots of light flashing off and on, testing peripheral vision.
So. More flannels and plaids. Fleece vests. Another pair or two of blue jeans. Some new hat, though I don’t have a particular one in mind right now. There is a tiny part of me that relates to loggers, lumberjacks. Not the whole lumberjack look that spread out from Minnesota a few years back. That’s not still a thing, is it? But related to it. With all the chainsaw work I’ve done over my lifetime I feel I’ve earned some of that.