Category Archives: Mountains

Feelings, Fourth Phase, Hawai'i, Health, Judaism, Mountains, Paganism

Another Place I Could Be Happy

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Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

Friday gratefuls: New, piercing pain. Left hip and leg. Shadow. Natalie. Alan and Joanne. Dandelion. Donyce. Rich. Ruth’s 529. Now available. Lifealert. New fob. Diane. Jogging again. Living with aging bodies and alert minds. Halle. New physical therapist. Mary, coming today. My son. Seoah. Murdoch.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Ruth and her first international trip

Week Kavannah: Enthusiasm. Zerizut.

One brief shining: A busy, physical week of doctors, long drives, filling out forms for the cancer support trial, Amy, two zoom classes, that would have been a decade ago a light week, the difference pain can make.

 

All I can say is, damn it! Now the left hip, so painful. Wasn’t sure I could get down five stairs holding onto the rail and a cup of coffee. That’s beginning to get in the way of daily life.

Sorry. Don’t mean to leave a trail of agony on these pages, yet honest reporting requires acknowledgment of what’s going on. After seeing Buphati, I’m left wondering if both hips might have metastatic cancer. Sure hope not.

We’ll know soon. Next P.E.T. scan June 3rd. Not yet scheduled for my open-sided MRI. But in the next week or two.

This cancer/pain path I’m on demands a lot. Got accepted into a Sloan-Kettering trial to determine the better of two therapeutic protocols for cancer patients over the age of 70. Filled out pages and pages of a survey about anxiety and depression, other mental health matters. I’ll have eight phone therapy sessions with somebody. Then, booster sessions after that for four months.

There are nuances to managing my mental health and my spiritual health (which I see as more important than either physical or mental health). I look forward to discussing them with someone paid to listen to me.

Why is spiritual health most important? Because it contains the broader context in which both mental and physical health reside. Being one with the Tao, allowing the wu wei of physical illness and pain to run their course without stiff-arming them. Experiencing the occasional fear and dread as part of my inner work, work strengthened by mussar, by being part of two sacred communities. Taking the solace of Shadow Mountain, its Lodgepoles and Mule Deer and Aspen and late season Snow as it offers itself to me. Seeing the whole sacred world as my home.

With those as context neither pain nor death can have permanent control of my psyche. Because pain and death are momentary, passing, but my location in the sacred unity of all things will remain.

 

Just a moment: I find myself watching TV shows set on Islands. Death in Paradise. Hawai’i 50. Deadly Tropics. Moana and Moana 2, movies. I know, low brow in the extreme. Yet I love the combination of lightly considered mystery and the sights and sounds of Islands.

Something about Island life calls to me. Not over against Mountain life which I also love, but as another place I could be happy. Why Hawai’i itself reached out to me not so long ago.

Great Work, Jefferson County, Mountains, Quotes, Seed Keepers, Shadow Mountain, US History, Weather +Climate

The Great Work

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Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

Monday gratefuls: Stevinson’s Toyota. Snow and rain. Now 8 or 9″. All moisture accepted and appreciated. My son. Shadow, the regresser. Her 15 minutes on the treat (shh. Leash.). Common Ground. Heal the soil. The Great Work: create a sustainable presence for humans on Mother Earth.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Rain and Snow

Week Kavannah: Enthusiasm. Zerizut.

One brief shining: A cold rain has fallen; on its cool breath came a good night’s sleep, up at 5 am with a lick of Shadow’s tongue, a deep whine, unusual for her, so I moved as creaky quick as possible to get her outside.

 

The coming Snow. Leaving her Snow shoes on. Ruby will still get her 60,000 mile service with all fluids replaced. Means I will sit. Wait. Not easy, but necessary. Keep Ruby on the road. She’s already been built. I’ve gotten at least 250,000 miles on the Toyota’s I’ve driven. Probably my last car. Now seven years old.

A devil’s bargain I didn’t know I made back in 1963 when I got my first driver’s license. A carbon footprint, cabrón. All those years on the road. Helping send carbon up, up, up. Insulate Mother Earth.

The freedom of driving carrying such a high cost, higher even than Dead Man’s Curve or Teen Angel. Back then car wrecks were the worst we could imagine. Now: each car a tiny Chicxulub meteor. Death by a thousand infernal combustion engines.

 

Kate used to talk about an adrenal squeeze. Saw in my USPS advance notice I had a letter from Traveler’s Insurance, carrier for my home, auto, and personal liability. Stamped on the outside of the envelope: IMPORTANT INSURANCE INFORMATION.

Was it my turn to scramble for another carrier? The envelope didn’t show up that day. I checked online. Found nothing. It came the next day.

Conditional renewal. I have to accept a $5,000 deductible for Hail and Wind damage. Well, all right. I can do that. I’d read that insurers for Colorado homes see our hail threat as much more dire than Wildfire. Here’s proof.

 

Just a moment: Do all people deserve due process? I don’t know, said our President. It might mean, he went on, one million, two million, three million trials. What was that oath again?

Perhaps he thought then, right at that moment. What if I could be Pope? Hey, let’s get AI to see how I’d look. Tone deaf doesn’t even begin to describe that. It’s the religious equivalent of saying if you’re famous you can grab them by the pussy.

 

On a more upbeat note. I watched, at Tom’s suggestion, Common Ground. A documentary on Prime Video. I felt tears well up often at the savage rending of our most important resource: top soil.

Joy with the clips of regenerative farmers growing corn in fields with legume cover crops. With the 7,000 acre farm in Williamsport, Indiana. Disturbing the soil with cattle grazing, mimicking the buffalo. Turning a profit by not feeding Monsanto, Bayer, John Deere. Lower input costs. Higher return on investment. This is the way.

Friends, Jefferson County, Mountains, Weather +Climate, Wild Neighbors

On the Way to Breakfast

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Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

Shabbat gratefuls: Talmud Torah. Shadow. So early. Morning, early early Morning. Back and leg pain. Exquisite. Teeth gritting. PSA. OK. Medical care moving closer. Subway. Cookunity. Dandelion. Alan. Driving down the hill to Evergreen. Green green Grass. Trees waking from their Winter slumber. The Bears are out. A sure sign of a Mountain Spring. Snow overnight yesterday. Melted and gone.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Knee replacement

Week Kavannah: Enthusiasm. Zeal. Zerizut

One brief shining: Opening Sefaria means stepping into the long, disputative history of Jewish thought where a thousand flowers of interpretation and commentary and imaginative flourishes thrive, feeding off each other, sparking new insights, all in the service of living today.

 

Out with a right turn toward Evergreen. Ruby’s snowshoes hissing a bit on dry pavement even though 2 inches of Snow lay in my backyard and the temperature hovered in the mid-twenties. Downshifting, brake preserving. These curves as well known as my own body’s, when to brake, when to accelerate learned over ten years. Concentration focused on the roadside for Mule Deer, Elk. Respect for the Wild Neighbors.

Great Sol had driven off the Snow on south facing Lodgepoles, but on the right, the north side of Black Mountain Drive, Winter Trees stood with white, drooping branches. Higher up on Black Mountain its now distinctive ski runs held on to the Snow even though facing south.

Maxwell Creek ran free of Ice, its rushing waters from earlier Snow melt now calm. Full. Eager. When I passed the Upper Maxwell Creek trailhead, I began talking to Kate. Telling her about Ruth’s decision to go to medical school. About Gabe waking up. Shadow waking me up. How much I missed her knowledge and wisdom, her love. About my back pain and how I now understand from the inside her own struggles with it.

Passing Kate’s Valley and Kate’s Creek, my attention turned to the clock. Oh. I was a half hour early. Hmm. Get a car wash? Why not.

Lake Evergreen and its views of Bear Mountain, Great Sol glinting off light Wind raised ripples, blue as the Colorado Sky. The gray Rock of the roadside a somber contrast. No Elk grazing this morning.

The car wash’s robotic voice said: the car wash is closed. Oh. Decided to take a look at Elk Run assisted living. I need to look at a couple of these places in case circumstances change. Still haven’t done it.

This place sits walking distance (for most people) from CBE. After passing the Life Center of Evergreen, Bergen Bark Inn, Mt. Evan’s Hospice,  and the section 8 housing where Anne lives, I realized this was a social service neighborhood.

Past it was the Tanoa Way residential area with dead ends and no outlets and mansions with the Mountain equivalent of Widow’s Watches, high windows facing a view of nearby Mountains.

After I had visited spots I’d wanted to see, but had never driven to, I turned toward the Dandelion and a breakfast with my friend Alan.

 

Great Wheel, Mountains, Paganism, Plants, Weather +Climate, Wild Neighbors

It’s the Merry, Merry Month of May

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Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

Thursday gratefuls: Mary coming to visit. Beltane. Snow. 32 degrees. Gnawer of Bones. Slow to trust. Shadow. Roxann who knows. Tom. Tramadol and two acetaminophens. Helps. Fantastic Four. Adam and Eve. Mordecai Kaplan. Abraham Joshua Heschel. Learning. Staying mentally sharp.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Amy

Week Kavannah: Persistence and grit. Netzach.

One brief shining: We float sometimes above our life, hovering over it like some household God, hoping to change directions or circumstances with a twist of the divine hand, a twirl of the sacred finger but we know all along that only our body bound to the earth can achieve miracles.

 

Beltane. When those crazy Scots and those blue-eyed Swedes take off their clothes and dance naked around a bonfire. Enacting the magic of sympathy for Mother Earth as she takes in seeds, embraces them in her fertile womb, and kisses them into growth. Why not? She provides for us. Sustains us. Gives us water to drink and gravity to keep us grounded.

I’ve not written many Great Wheel posts in the last few years. Like Taoism and now Judaism though, the pagan in me never sleeps. I stay alive to these seasonal changes, to their meaning for our daily lives. Even if we get Snow and freezing temperatures here on Shadow Mountain. I know the Lodgepole catkins, the Aspen leaflets, fawns, calves, kits, bunnies will emerge, small flags of life’s own Great Wheel waving the colors of renewal.

Beltane honors the marriage of the Lord and the Lady. A maiden no more the Earth takes a lover who warms and quickens her. On Beltane ancient Celts would make love in the fields. Leap over small fires. Drive their cattle between bonfires. All to advance fertility.

Love realizes its biological imperative. Souls join as bodies dance together in the rites of Spring. Are we ever more than then? When our hearts fill with passion and our senses brighten to the other. The one who shares our oneness. As the One shares with us all. What an orgasm. Can you imagine how it feels to be Mother Earth in the Spring?

We cannot stay sad about death. Not when green shoots up from black Soil. As the Spring Ephemerals throw up their colorful flowers. As the Cherry and Plum offer their delicate blooms only to shed them in Snow like Storms so Fruit can grow. As the Honeybees leave their Winter Hives seeking Nectar and spreading Pollen, these matchmakers of the Sky. When Cutthroat and Rainbow Trout push out their Roe for the milky Semen’s discovery in cold Mountain Streams.

Death does not mark a finish, rather a continuation howsomever it might be. And Beltane marks Nature’s covenant that this is so.

We know not how it is. We mortal creatures. Beltane celebrates mortality with its promise of living abundantly. If only we care for ourselves and the land.

Get outside and visit the marks of this glorious, this wondrous, this most yes of seasons. You deserve the lift.

Art and Culture, Bees, Cinema and Television, Fungi, Garden, Mountains, Plants, Wild Neighbors

All. All of it. Sacred.

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Spring and the Wu Wei Moon

Ramses II. By Djehouty – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

Tuesday gratefuls: Needles into my spine. 11 am. Paul in Salt Lake City. Mary in Eau Claire. The wide world. The newly opened Grand Egyptian Museum. The National Museum in Taipei. The Frick’s renovation. The Isabella Stewart Gardener museum. The Phillip Johnson. The MIA. The Walker. Being a dramaturg.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: All the art in all the world

Week Kavannah:  Sensibility. Daat.

One brief shining: So many museums, the quiet time early in the morning before the crowds come, walking into the Bruegel room at the Kunsthistorisches, or the Botticelli room at the Uffizi, even walking with the crowd into the Sistine Chapel, the Sistine Chapel!, my favorite moment to spend time with the Dr. Arrieta by Goya at the MIA, there are raptures and revelations there for those who can see what they are looking at.

 

Imagine a street in any major city. Bangkok. Kuala Lumpur. NYC. A busy street filled with pedestrians on their way. Somewhere. Vehicles in the street. Bicycles. Taxis. Private cars. Delivery trucks. Businesses fronted on the sidewalk. With offices above them.

All those vast inner worlds. As vast your own. Never to be known. Not by you. Not by anyone else. Unless. Perhaps. A lover or therapist. Or, if one of them is an artist. Doesn’t matter what kind. Painter. Writer. Musician. Dancer. Playwright. Sculptor. Artisan. Any.

Artists need to, have to reveal themselves, their inner worlds. Can’t help it. It’s not quite the same as conversation between lovers, but it can be pretty damned close.

That Goya above? That’s the painter himself being treated. For what was apparently a not very serious ailment. Did he know that at the time of his treatment? Doesn’t look like it, does it? Vulnerable. Needy. Confident doctor.

Or, that statue of Ramses II. The sculptors, I imagine there were many, knew they had to give this work all the power and majesty they could find within themselves. Only then could it meet the demands of their God-King.

Doryphoros

I cherish those times when I can be with an artist and their work. Why? Because then like speaks to like. Inner worlds connect. Oh, yes. Anguish. Despair. Shame. Grief. Joy. Celebration. Deep contemplation. Reacting to surface beauty. Or, the lithe musculature of a Panther, the mystery of time caught forever in the Doryphoros as he steps forward.

Reading. Listening. Seeing. Tasting. The artistry of a well-made meal. What a wonder, the world of the arts.

And even so. My Lodgepole companion. My friends at CBE. Black Mountain after a heavy Snow. Maxwell Creek filled with Snow Melt. A bull Elk in the rain. Yes. These, too. Reveal the inner world of the whole wide world. In those moments before a painting or listening to an orchestra or sitting on a Rocky overhang in the Arapaho National Forest. When a newborn Fawn looks up from its first meals of tender new Grass. We get that jolt, that moment of knowing. Oh. Yes. It’s all sacred. I remember. I’ve known this all along. The press of life sometimes makes me forget. But I know it. Again. Now.

 

 

Commentary on Religion, Kabbalah, Mountains, Myth and Story, Plants, Torah, Wild Neighbors

Wildness in the Garden

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Spring and the Wu Wei Moon

Friday gratefuls: Select P.T. Rick. Ginny. Luke. Jamie. Marilyn. Ratzon. Mussar. Shadow, the eater of bones. Kate, always Kate. Breakfast for Shadow. Cookunity. Vegetables home grown. Nathan. Marilyn and Irv. Steroid injections. Anavah. Diane’s healing. Mark and his ESL students in Al Kharj. Snow, a lot. Easter and resurrection.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Snow

Week Kavannah: Joy. Simcha.

One brief shining: A Mountain Spring includes 70 degree weather yesterday and 19 this morning; Sunshine and greening grass yesterday and Snow coming straight down, already covering my backyard this morning; at some point a sudden shift will occur and a Mountain Summer will have begun.

 

My Wild Neighbors like to eat Garden produce. My new Greenhouse will have net covering to foil them. Besides I let my Dandelions go to seed and multiply offering dainty treats for the Mule Deer and Elk who love this briefly available food. I also offer plenty of Grass and other Plants desired by my Ungulate friends over the course of the growing season.

Shadow’s amusement will include this year Voles, Mice, Rabbits, Chipmunks, and the occasional Squirrel, either Red or Aberts. My guess is that she’s not the predator Rigel and Vega were, but she’ll still have fun chasing these Mountain Mammals for whom speed is safety.

I’m not fully in the Wild, but I am fully in the Wildlands Urban Interface and the Arapaho National Forest. No Grassy yard expected or desired. Only what grows on its own. My happy place.

 

chatgpt

Third new human story class. Holding the Genesis accounts of creating humans to closer account. For example. You can’t eat of the Tree of Good and Bad. How would either Eve or Adam know what that meant? They have no experience, no prior knowledge of those words. Good and Bad are empty vessels.

The voice, as Twain calls God, may as well have said don’t eat of the Tree of Rocks and Scissors.

And that Snake that gets all the blame? Well, guess who made him. Why make a sneaky Snake in the first place. Then to blame and punish him for acting as the Snake God created him to be? Doesn’t really seem fair, does it?

I wonder, too, about God’s observation about the human (adam). It’s not good for the human to be alone. Hmmm. From a Kabbalistic perspective that sounds like God’s contraction in the ayn sof, the emptiness that preceded everything. God pulled back to leave room for the universe. Was God lonely, too?

There are more, many more questions about this old, old story. All of them echoing down the millennia since it’s inclusion in the Torah. Original sin, for example.

Here’s a new take on original sin (in which I have never believed) that came to me yesterday. When Adam and Eve eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Bad they become self-conscious. They need clothes. Might the original human sin have been self-consciousness?

That is, could the awareness of themselves as beings separate from each other and the rest of the Garden’s plants and animals, be the fall. The illusion that our separateness is real and total. That we are somehow wholly independent from the natural world and other humans, too?

I could easily draw a line through all of human history that would link this fallacy with all the major sins our flesh is heir to.

Dogs, Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Garden, Great Wheel, Health, Judaism, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Paganism, Plants, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, The West, US History, Weather +Climate, Writing

Living. Not dying.

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Spring and the Wu Wei Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Shadow. Her kindness. Amy. Her understanding. Cookunity. Colorado Coop and Garden. The Greenhouse. Gardening again. Korea. Malaysia. Australasia. Wisconsin. Saudi Arabia. The Bay. First Light. 10,000 Lakes. The Rocky Mountain Front Range. Where my people live.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: The Greenhouse

Week Kavannah: Joy. Simcha.

One brief shining: Nathan and I wandered in my back yard, his app that shows Great Sol’s illumination searching for a good spot to plant my greenhouse, until we neared a spot close to the shed, that was it with decent morning Sun and an hours worth of afternoon Sun more than anywhere else.

 

 

That picture is not quite what I’m getting. Mine will have an outdoor raised bed on either side and shutters that move themselves as the greenhouse heats up and cools down. It will also have an electric heater for Winter and a drip irrigation system inside and out.

This guy Nathan, a Conifer native, started his business Colorado Coop and Garden to give folks like me an opportunity to grow things up here. Working a garden at ground level is long past for me. But Nathan can build the raised beds at a height where my back is not an issue.

Guess I’m regressing here in some ways. A Dog. A small Garden. Andover in miniature. The greenhouse will have a sign: Artemis Gardens. Artemis Honey was Kate and mine’s name for our bee operation.

 

I’m loving my classes at Kabbalah Experience. Reaching deep into the purpose of religion and Judaism in particular. Reimagining the story of Adam and Eve. My life, my Jewish life and my Shadow Mountain life, have begun to resonate. Learning and living an adventure in fourth phase purpose.

No matter what the near term future holds for my health I will not succumb to despair or bleakness. As I’ve often said, I want to live until I die. This life, I’m coming to realize, is me doing just that.

If I were a bit more spry, I’d add a chicken coop and a couple of bee hives, but both require more flexibility than I can muster.

I’m at my best when I’m active outside with Mother Earth and inside with a Dog, books, and new learning. All that leavened with the sort of intimate relationships I’ve developed both here and in Minnesota and with my far flung family.

That’s living in the face of autocracy and cruelty. I will not attenuate my life. Neither for the dark winds blowing through our country and world, nor for that dark friend of us all, death.

 

Just a moment: Did you read Thomas Friedman’s article: I’ve Never Been More Afraid for My Countries Future? His words, served up with a healthy dish of Scandinavian influenced St. Louis Park Judaism, ring more than true to me. They have the voice of prophecy.

We are in trouble. No doubt. Trouble from which extrication will require decades, I imagine. If not longer. Yet. I plan to grow heirloom vegetables year round on Shadow Mountain. To have mah Dog Shadow with me in the Greenhouse.

I also plan to write and think about the sacred, the one, the wholeness of which we are part and in which we live, die, love. I will not cheapen my life with bitterness, rather I will eat salads, read, play with Shadow and dine with friends, talk to my friends and family near and far.

Asia, Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Holidays, Judaism, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, Travel

Passing on Passover? The Jangs.

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Spring and the Wu Wei Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Second day of Passover. Kate, always Kate. Shadow the toy mover. Her zooming in the back yard. Liberation. Freedom to choose. Egypt. The many Egypts we are heir to. Tara. Arjan. Robbie and Deb. Sandy and Mark. Eleanor. Kilimanjaro. Jungfrau. Black Mountain. Shadow Mountain. A Mountain night.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Liberation

Week Kavannah: Joy. Simcha.

One brief shining: The Haggadah had wine stains; the seder plate had a kiwi because we can; we dipped the parsley into salt water, tears for the suffering of the slaves, of all oppressed people, spread dots of wine or in my case grape juice for each plague, retelling each part of the passover story as if we were there, as our story.

 

Talmud Torah in the morning. (Torah study) A focus on the maggid, the telling of the passover story in the Haggadah. Complete with midrash, interpretation and expansion.

Later, around 4, over to Kilimanjaro Drive. Tara’s house. Steep driveway with cars parked at various spots along the way. All the way up to the top where I found a spot in front of a Tesla.

Thirty minutes before I had almost chosen not to go. Coming home in the dark. General inertia. A long standing aversion to parties. But this was Passover. At Tara’s. I’d be happy once I got there.

So I went to the liquor store, picked up a bottle of mid-range red wine and drove past Evergreen Meadows and past Evergreen Funeral Home where both Jon and Kate lay after death, down curvy N. Turkey Creek Road to the Mountains and roads leading to her house.

And I was happy to be there. Until we sat down to the table. Then the noise level, the angle of the voices, the general clash and clamor of a meal with eighteen other people. I began to recede. Off in my own quiet room of acoustical challenge. Nodding and smiling. Trying to keep up. Too often failing.

Now having to rethink even Passover, at least in people’s homes. Where it means the most. Where my friends want me. Where I want to be. The congregational Passover has round tables, more distance among the guests. Kate and I usually attended. I may need to go to it just so I can hear.

 

Talked to my son and Seoah on Friday night. Murdoch’s getting crate training. Seoah’s running, happy. We talked about Kate, her death, her wonderful life.

My son and I discussed details for the Jang family visit this summer. Money is, as you can imagine, an issue. 5 adults and two children. Seoah’s Mom and Dad, her brother, her sister and her two kids. Airfare, lodging, transportation. Food. That’s what we’re working out now. Need to make some decisions soon because Air BnB’s begin to fill up for the summer in this time frame.

Will be the trip of a lifetime for the Jang’s. The U.S. The Rocky Mountains. Deepening connections with my son’s side of the family. Myself, Ruth, Gabe.

Stay tuned.

Colorado, Friends, GeekWorld, Mountains, Politics, Shadow Mountain, US History

The Last Roundup

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Imbolc and the 78th Birthday Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Rich. Doncye. Ruth. Ginny and Janice. Dogs. Annie. Luna. Leo. Gracie. Findlay. Rufus. Tom and the finding of the phone. My phone, back home. Ruby. New computer. Granby. Going on a short trip. Parsha Bo. A mussar approach to parsha’s. MVP tomorrow night.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Dogs

Kavannah this week: Curiosity   Sakranut

One brief shining: Why don’t you turn off your hearing aid, Tom suggested, and I did; he kept calling and I walked slowly through the house until, finally, in the newly set up downstairs exercise room, on the black top tray of my treadmill, my all black phone bleated at me, wanting to come home.

 

And so it ended. A day without my phone. Revealed an Achilles heel. My phone is at the hub of communications in my life. Without it I couldn’t reach out to ask for help. I couldn’t change anything on my computer that required two-step authentication. I felt strange, as if a necessary part of me had been amputated.

After going all Taoist on it, the phone will reveal itself when it’s ready, Tom called. Thought later I’d given up on the Taoist idea, then realized that no, I’d decided to be calm until the situation resolved and it did. Thanks to Tom and a dash of wu wei.

 

Vince and Levi came over on Sunday and moved my treadmill, weight bench, weights, stall mats, and kettlebells down to Kate’s old sewing room. Levi was a big guy. Professional football player sized. Vince, on the other hand, is my height, but wiry, strong.

Levi brought all of my kettlebells down at once, gripping them in two hands, and carrying them like they were a children’s flower basket. As he said, I’m good at picking things up and setting them down.

He told a story about the Black Mountain Roundup. This Black Mountain is near McCoy, Colorado, north of I-70 and beyond Vail. He and his buddies once a year go to a ranch near Black Mountain. On Friday night they put their stuff in a bunk house, get drunk, and go shooting at the firing range. The ranch chef cooks meals for them. On Saturday they get on Horses to drive in the last of the ranch’s Cattle, then there’s a big meal. And more drinking. Then, he said, the women come because they know Levi and his crew get rowdy.

He lifted his shirt to display a large rodeo sized belt buckle with Gitt’s Last Roundup on it. it was Gitt’s ranch. He died of cancer a few years back. Colorado, eh?

 

Just a moment: Even Heather has started calling this a coup. In her Letters From an American today, she said:

“The replacement of our constitutional system of government with the whims of an unelected private citizen is a coup. The U.S. president has no authority to cut programs created and funded by Congress, and a private citizen tapped by a president has even less standing to try anything so radical.”

 

 

 

Art and Culture, Fourth Phase, Memories, Mountains, Tea, Wild Neighbors

Seeing, not looking

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Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Ruth. Snow. More. Another full night’s sleep. In a row. Art Green’s Guide to the Zohar. Mysticism. Art. Lascaux. Venus figurines. Minoan. Grecian. Phoenician. Early Christian. Egyptian. Hittite. Babylonian. Roman. Celtic. Norse. Anglo-Saxon. Qin, Han, Tang, Song dynasties. Goryeon. Kang school in Japan. Ukiyo-e. Nayarit. Jalisco. Benin. Early Hindu. Nepalese. Tibetan. Nahuatl. Mayan.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Art

Kavannah 2025: Creativity

Kavannah this week: Chesed (loving-kindness)

Rachamim practice: Listening for the melody of others

One brief shining: Love that kid, my now 43 year old son, seeing him across 9,000 miles, his hair a bit longer on top, a fade on the sides, talking about Seoah at the gym, Murdoch staying on base for their trip, Hawai’i-a mutual dream, his transition to command, the nod to the Vikings living up to expectations, a visit to Minnesota to see his mom, old friends, skiing and his racing turns, sore legs.

 

No. Got that out of my system yesterday. Mystical me. Today, let’s talk literature. Nah. How about art? Haven’t gone on that ancientrail for quite awhile. Chatbotgpt and I have had fun over the last few weeks co-operating on image making. I provide the idea, 4o provides the image. With wildly varying results, as you’ve already seen.

Here is the depiction of a 60-year-old version of you in a room filled with traditional Japanese teaware, capturing a serene and tranquil moment.

A bit of nostalgia. Trafficking in the past these days as I continue to write stories in the Storyworth app. 14 so far. Story is too grand a word for these 500 words or so excursions on roadways back into the last millennium. The last century. More like lightning flashbacks, brief illuminations of moments of a life.

Thinking this morning about those Monday mornings as a guide, a docent in training, then a docent when I could go in for a lecture in art history by an expert in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts lecture hall. After. I loved the in depth, detailed way of looking that art historians and curators brought to specific objects.

Never thought of it this way before but a lot of my life has been about seeing, really seeing, what was in front of me. Yesterday I discussed the revelation I find in each and every instance I encounter. Sometimes I see clearly, sometimes, most often, through a glass darkly. Perception clouded by bias, distraction, assumption, all those ills to which the human sensorium is heir to.

Anthropology offers a sort of x-ray vision into human behavior, how culture shapes us, defines us, supports and limits us. Philosophy sees questions where others see answers.

Here is the portrait inspired by our conversations, rendered in the dramatic and textured style of Francisco Goya, reflecting your life and connection to the Rocky Mountains.

Radical politics means looking into the truth of our economic and political relationships with one another and seeing the patterns, the flaws that create distortion, inequity. Gardening opened my eyes to the language of plants, how they express themselves, tell us what they need. Our long interrelationship with them. Having so many Dogs over the years opened my eyes to their distinctiveness, their majesty as fellow creatures, my deep love for them.

Living in the Mountains has turned me toward Wild Neighbors, toward Rock. Pines. Aspens. Fox and Moose. Beaver and Marmoset. Toward Mountain Streams in their dramatic seasonality.

Judaism has given me new lenses for viewing friendship, metaphysics, history, tradition, and myself.

Kate. In a true love affair which helped her understand herself in new ways, to see herself, not just her profession as she helped me see and be my whole self.