Category Archives: Shadow Mountain

Dogs, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Health, Judaism, Politics, Shadow Mountain, Travel, US History, Weather +Climate, Woolly Mammoths

I’ll report back

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Spring (ha) and the Mesa View Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: Vince. Dave at Anytime Fitness. Jose with United Health Care. Creeping my way past balance billing. A foot or so of Snow. More coming down and more on the way. Go Colorado! Fill those aquifers, plump up that Snow pack. Tom and Amber. Warren’s new knee. Kep, my sweet boy. Spring ephemerals waiting. Here. Spontaneity. Like my boy suggested. Israel.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Snow

One brief, shining moment: Late spring Snow falling, falling, falling while the cracked Rock beneath my home drinks it in, filling up ready for the pump when summer dryness emerges, when the Grass turns brown, the Lodgepole Needles lose their lustre, and the Wild Neighbors come to the Mountain Streams hoping to find Water.

 

Signed up for the MAPS conference. Not cheap. Yet. It is. Because. Don’t have to fly to get there. Might check into a hotel for the three days. Just for fun. June. That’s big event one already prepared.

Plan to put down a deposit on the Israel trip next week. Want to wait a bit because of travel insurance. Gather a bit more information.

Checking out Kayak for Korea and Israel. Not too bad. Gonna spend some money on travel this year and next. Maybe as long as I’m able. Not having dogs frees me up. No leaving them behind. No kennel or house sitting fees.

 

I’m seeing the threshold more clearly now. Cancer managed. Fit. Healthy by the AARP definition: mobile, independent, cognitively sound. House painted and the art will get hung in May. Money available. Grief calm, never gone, but calm. No dogs. A chance to lean back into Korean and calculus. Write more. Love more. CBE. Ancientbrothers. Family. Live. A last, hopefully long chapter lies no longer ahead, but is present. Right now. I’m in it.

Want to celebrate this threshold. But how? Not sure yet. Considering.

 

Spent a long time on the phone yesterday. My very favorite thing. I’ve stamped out the $420 bill and the $5100 one has been elevated. Meaning the insurance company will deal with Centura Health. Not convinced it’s over yet. We’ll see.

I did learn that my insurance will pay for my gym fees at Anytime Fitness. Means I’ll join when I go over to checkout the machines today. Having that as a backup for my resistance work will make the difference I think.

 

After I finish Pogue’s Chosen Country, I plan to re-read Why Liberalism Failed. A rare thing for me. However I believe Deneen’s diagnosis of our woes makes sense on one level. That is, why many of our problems today turn on the question of individualism. And, I believe his explanation of the roots of those problems probably makes sense. That’s one reason I want to re-read it. History of ideas is a strength of mine and I can trace thought like he can.

Where I don’t believe I agree with him is on his understanding of liberty as the key. It feels too pat, too reductionistic. I’ll report back after round two.

Cooking, Denver, Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Shadow Mountain, Weather +Climate

Gabe at 15

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Spring and the Mesa View Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Gabe. Levi. Seyo. Benihana. My family of Ancient Brothers. Especially our brother, Tom, and his daughter Amber. Books. Magazines. Newspapers. The Atlantic. The New Yorker. MIT Technology Review. High Country News. Paonia. LBM’s. Psychonauts. BJ. Her political awareness. Radical days. Passionate nights. 5 inches of new Snow. Ice on the roads.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Gabe at 15

One brief, shining moment: Three teenage boys giggling, sharing silly photos of each other on their phones, punches and smirks, cause he’s a little bitch said by one, celebrating Gabe’s 15th at Benihana, Gabe’s idea of fine dining, all while escorted by grandpa who it turns out was 15 in 1962.

 

That was yesterday evening. Gabe loves Benihana. The grill. The flash of the cooks. Who flip cut off shrimp tails into their caps and pockets. Clatter the cutlery on the huge grill, the hibachi. Cook with a certain flare but really with a weak imitation of knife work in an upscale kitchen. With ingredients purchased in bulk. And cooked to, well, let’s just say not perfection. Gabe loves the food, too.

Peeking inside the lives of teenage boys now, almost voyeurism. Three of them, one old guy. Safely ignored. Talking about friendship groups. Who’s cool, but mostly who’s not. Like Abraham who brought cookies to the teacher. Suck up. Who expected more but all he got was a thank you. Chick-fil-a. That’s where the white boys go for lunch. While the baseball boys chose a different spot.

Girls inhabited the fringes of the conversation. Still mysterious and unknowable. I tried, but she said we were friends. Yeah. I’m friends with so and so, too.

Mostly a lot of giggling, faux arm wrestling, looking at their phones, then passing them around. Shooting a closeup of somebody’s eye or hair line or ear. Texting that back to the one in the photo.

When I dropped Gabe off at his Galena street home, Jen’s house, he said, “That was fun, Grandpa. I love you.”

 

Got back to Shadow Mountain around 10. Late night for me. Especially considering I went to the Grateful Dead shabbat the night before for Kate’s yahrzeit. Today is busy, too, but daytime busy. Israel trip info at 1:30, then Dismantling Racism class starts at 3.

 

Looking forward to a quieter week. Putting all season tires back on Ruby on Tuesday. Just when we’re supposed to get our next snowstorm. It’s always a judgment call. Late April, early May. Usually a little overlap on both ends of winter. Good news is that early season and late season storms melt quickly.

 

The Ancient Brothers on reading. We read. A lot. Stacks of books. At a time. Magazines and newspaper. Some dead tree, some online. The Guardian. The Atlantic. MIT Technology Review. New Yorker. New York Times. Washington Post. A few of the books: A sampler of Meister Eckhart. Slouching Toward Utopia. Why Liberalism Failed. Talking to the Ground. The last CJ Box novel. Many, many more. Reading. I wonder if it’s an old person thing now.

Then I remember Ruth. Who reads. A lot. She once said to me, you’re the only person I know who reads more than me. Kate and Claire Strickland, Michael Banker. Also readers. Not dead yet.

Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Health, Shadow Mountain

Attacked

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Spring and Kepler’s Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: The Cyberknife. Kim and Patti. Ruby. Going for radiation trips again. Ivory, now at home with Ruth. Good sleep. A Mountain Morning, Sun, blue Sky, alert Lodgepoles. Black Mountain. And its ski runs. Marilyn and Irv, brunch at 10. Radiation #6 today. Good workout. That Landice treadmill. Hiking. Burning Bear Creek Trail. An excellent resting heart rate. Perry Mason on HBO Max. James Pogue’s Chosen Country: A Rebellion in the West.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: This Day, this Wild and Precious Day. The only one we’ve got.

One brief, shining moment: The Lodgepoles this morning put their best Bark forward, Branches swooped down as always, drinking in the true food, the only food, the radiation that feeds us all wrought in the massive fusion furnace of our not too close, not too faraway Star.

 

Continuing a theme from my Robot Overlords post. Radiation #5 was the first of three targeting my thoracic vertebrae. My third.

It creeped me out. The beak of the Cyberknife’s head, fitted with a camera like aperture that opens and closes with clicking sounds, hovered the whole time near my chin. Aiming beams of radiation from 50 different positions determined by Dr. Simpson and the medical physicist.

Irrational, yes. I felt under attack. Not to the point that I felt actual fear, but it was too close to my head. As long as the beams got aimed at my abdomen, well. I had 35 sessions of experience with that. We protect our heads from harm, both a learned and instinctive response to perceived dangers. Remember duck and cover? Putting hands over your head in case of nuclear radiation from a bomb. See.

Also, I could watch the aperture open and close. What its leaves held back was radiation that spilled in the wrong spot would do me harm. So close to my head.

After a bit of that I closed my eyes and listened to Bob Dylan. Who added this to the mix in my mind:

How does it feel, how does it feel?To be on your own, with no direction homeLike a complete unknown, like a rolling stone

Triggered a moment of self-pity. Yeah. On my own here. Like a complete unknown. Just me and the Cyberknife clicking away. How does it feel? How does it feel?

Self-pity. I prefer self-empathy. Chesed for myself. So with loving kindness I ratcheted myself back from the clicking of the Cyberknife, the feeling of mild dread, and recalled this. I do have a direction home. Back up the hill. To Shadow Mountain and Shadow Mountain Home.

I’m not on my own. I’m being walked home by so many, so many. Family and friends. Wild neighbors. Lodgepole Pines. Aspen. Black Mountain. The Sun. Orion. All those Dogs of blessed memory. This ancientrail we all walk together winds further up the hill until we reach the cloudy summit and disappear into the fine, dark realms. Realms we know not at all because they begin where this world ends.

Oh. BTW. On the way home on Hwy 470 a jet black Escalade passed me. I thought it was a hearse. In big gold Gothic letters on its back window though was this: FUCK CANCER.

 

Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Health, Hermitage, Judaism, Mussar, Shadow Mountain

Round Three

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Spring and the Kepler Moon

Thursday gratefuls: MVP. Tara. Marilyn. Susan. Jamie. Rich. Ron. Bitachon, trust. Kate’s memory, a blessing in all ways. Cooler today. Snow. Good workout. Furball Cleaning. Ana and friend.  A clean house. The new colors. That threshold. Coming closer. Irv. Adoptable dogs. Radiation #3. Joy. Simcha. Embracing joy. Living joyfully.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Eudaimonia

 

Hit the treadmill for 65 minutes. 101 total minutes of exercise with the 2 minutes for every intense minute calculation. Felt good. Coffee and albuterol, oatmeal and peanut butter on board before hand.

While I exercised, Ana and her friend cleaned the house. It needed it. The last of Kep’s hair. The leftover from Doug’s painting. Ruth, Gabe, and Mia’s visit. Plus it had been three and a half weeks since it was last cleaned. Feels so good to have a clean house. A clean house with a fresh look. Mental health. Moving forward, over that threshold.

 

MVP last night. The topic, the middot, was bitachon, trust. I said that I trust everyone. To be who they are. Realized I need to modify that. I trust everyone to be who I know them to be. I can’t truly know another’s essence. But I can know how I experience them. In the moment and over time.

This means I have varying levels of trust, many of them. None blind. All based on experience, not hope. If you tend to show up late, I know that. If you do what you say, I know that. If you anger easily, I know that. If you steal things, I hide what’s valuable to me. Either emotions or goods.

We all agreed we had trouble, for various reasons, keeping our mouths shut about others. Not that we gossip, but that some circumstances arise. Ones where we start sharing things about others that aren’t ours to tell. Not necessarily secrets or negative things. Just things that belong to others. One person gave the example of a neighbor asking about a divorce. She found herself offering more detail than she needed. Wanting to keep the friend. That sort of thing.

So our mutual practice for this month is. Value the vault. Keep what we know to ourselves. Allow others to tell their own stories. If they want to.

 

Round three of radiation on my left hip lymph node today. Though the radiation itself is both invisible and non-tactile at my sensory level it’s still powerful. Find myself sleeping longer and harder. Fatigue, not awful, but there. The thing about radiation is that its side effects can show up a year, two years later. And I won’t know for sure whether it killed my two mets until later this year when I have a P.E.T. scan. An odd form of therapy. You can’t feel it and you can’t tell if it worked until sometime after. Glad it’s available though.

Next week we get started on my T3 thoracic vertebrae. This is the one where the possible side effects become dire. Including, but not limited to, paralysis. After several conversations with docs, I decided the risk made sense. There is a chance, albeit a small chance, that if we kill these two mets I could be cured. Wouldn’t that be something?

Not counting on that. But I will extend my time off Erleada and Orgovyx when I go on a drug holiday later this year.

Neil Young for music today.

 

Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Health, Shadow Mountain

Kate

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Spring and the Kepler Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: Kate, who died two years ago today. Kep. Radiation #2. Jon, a memory. Ruth. Gabe. Both a year older this month. Another bright Mountain morning. Heat. Melting snow. Floods likely. The Colorado River. The Compact. Water and the West. The humid East. 10,000 Lakes and that really big one. Moose. Wolverines. Grizzly Bears. Gray Wolves. Coyotes. Great Horned Owls. Pine Martens. Minx. Mountain Lions. Black Bears.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Life after Kate’s death

 

Two years ago today I got the call from Sarah. She’s gone. Kate was the one. And no longer with me day to day. Of course I hear her. Have you zipped up? Do you trust the doctors? Turn the heat down and it’ll be fine. Add some vinegar. I love you. Flashed, too, with the ASL. I see her presence here in Jerry’s paintings, the few turtles I’ve kept from her collection. The Karastan rugs in the lower level. The Portemerion dishes we bought at the Reject China shop in London. The Stickley furniture we both loved. And most of all in Ruth and Gabe, her living legacies.

No memory, nothing tangible, however, can replace her presence. Her love. Her wisdom. Her wry humor. Her honesty. I miss all those to this day. She was my cooking consultant, offering me the lessons she’d learned as a great cook. We talked thing through together. Made joint decisions. Also had our separate lives. Her sewing room. My loft.

We began living her Jewish life from the first night at CBE. A class on King David. She gifted me the community that now sustains me here. Her IRA, earned over many years of work taking care of children, has given me financial stability. She’s far from absent in my life.

Last night I had a long dream. Kate and I had gone to a conference. I left the conference and went out to deliver a note to a guy that ran a drugstore nearby. It was London. A down at the heels and no straight roads at all London. With people struggling, kids trying to steal things from me. I wandered, hunting for the drug store. Thieves got my phone and my wallet. Got very, very lost. Night began to fall and I couldn’t call. I asked some folks about Randall Street. Oh, it’s very far away. How do I get to it? The directions made no sense to me. Then I woke up.

 

Yesterday, lying on the thin metal bed of the Cyberknife treatment room, I looked up at the rich wooden slats above me. The Cyberknife whirred and danced around delivering radiation according to the medical physicist’s plan.

I had asked for Southern Gospel Revival, a band, but I guess Kim only heard gospel. Oddly the second tune that came up was He Touched Me. Written by the Gaithers. My old high school French and English teachers. Put me in an odd, nostalgic place.

That transformed into a moment of existential aloneness. The Cyberknife clicking its way into different positions. Oh, I realized. This is a matter of life and death. And I’m in here alone on the altar because no one else can see the face of this modern God and live.

The moment passed. But in that moment I felt the truth of our essential isolation, limited to experiences mediated through our senses. Did not feel bad. Just real.

 

Friends, Health, Hermitage, Judaism, Politics, Shadow Mountain, US History, World History

Good News

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Spring and Kepler’s Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: A good colonoscopy report. Tara. That catfish po’boy and beignets. Susan, my nurse. Luke, the doc. Propofol. Little pictures of the inside of my insides. A really long nap afterward. Sleeping in this morning, a bright one well underway at 7 am. Melting snow. Dark Sky communities. 5 in Colorado. The Milky Way. Our Galactic neighborhood. The Spiral Arm. Our street. The James Webb. Science. Community. The Humanities. A sad time.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: That Threshold, becoming more clear

 

Small polyp. Benign, Evans said. But. Sent to pathology anyhow. That propofol. A white solution injected into my iv. I watched as the fluid went in and woke up later back in the same small curtained off area I had left for the exam room. In between Evans had pumped CO2 in my intestines and run a scope up them looking for cancer. None. Good news. Also. You’ve graduated. No more colonoscopies. Yay! But. Can I still do the prep every once in a while, just for fun?

When I did wake up, I wanted to go back to sleep. I felt so good. So good. I go back to sleep. Charlie, are you ready? Huh? No, not yet. A bit more time went by. Charlie! Are you ready? Oh, uh, yeah. Getting up now. (I wasn’t.) Charlie. A frustrated gal. Ok, ok. Swing your legs over the edge of the bed. Ok, ok. How do you feel? Dizzy. Sleepy. But. I’ll get dressed. I promise. And so I did.

Tara, who took me, smiled when I came out. She took me to Nono’s and bought me a catfish po’boy and two beignets. Then home. A sweet woman and important in my life. I was at her house for a seder last week.

We discussed the history of Christianity. A bit fuzzy if your life orientation is Jewish. Also parenting. Jon, Vincent, Sofia. And, just. Life. You know.

Back home I ate my sandwich and the beignets. Watched TV. Took a three hour nap.

 

Now that Doug has finished, I can begin making decisions about where to put my art. Going to take my time. Not rush. Maybe get in some work on the loft, too. Clear off my art table. Maybe reshelve some books. Move files downstairs to the home office. Have Ana clean it when I get done. When I get the art figured out, I’ll get Vince to come over and hang everything.

I have a list of property management chores for him and as soon as it warms up I’ll get him started on those.

 

My journey into the dark and confusing reality of our current political situation continues. Why Liberalism Failed will help me crystallize my understanding. Without getting too far into Deneen’s argument right now I will say that he’s coming at liberalism as a political philosophy and not using the term as we do in the U.S. for party politics. In his broader argument most U.S. conservatives are liberals, too. That is, both parties (bracketing Trumpists and the new Far Right) support free enterprise, science as a way to gain dominion over nature, the autonomous individual, and government that derives its authority from the consent of those individuals.

Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Health, Hermitage, Holidays, Judaism, Mountains, Shadow Mountain

Oh. Huh.

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Spring and Kepler’s Moon

Friday gratefuls: Alan. Doug. Nearly done. Snow melted. Low fire danger. Tara. Ofer. Jack. Adam. Cheka. Andrew. Savannah. Robbie. Arjean. Tara’s seder. The Cyberknife. The CT. Diane. Kim and Patty. Carmela. The medical physicist. Norbert, Tara’s dog who died suddenly. Julie and Sophia. Jayden. Safeway pickup. A blue Sky early morning.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Cheka and Andrew

 

Patty, a sweet lady and the lead radiation therapy tech, told me yesterday, as I left the CT room zipping up my jacket. Have a good Easter. I smiled. Jolted. No I said in my head I’m more of a passover guy now.

A strange moment. My reaction, that of an outsider to a cultural norm assumed so easily it’s not checked, surprised me. I didn’t realized how far down the Jewish path I’d traveled in my heart. This was not intellectual, it was visceral. Nope, wrong holiday.

When I mentioned it to Tara last night at her seder, she nodded. Yes. And it doesn’t get easier. Sometimes you smile. Sometimes you say something. Sometimes you’re just frustrated.

Tablet Magazine is an online magazine for Jews. I read it off and on. Yesterday I took a quiz titled what kind of Jew are you? For a goof. With little variance from my truth, that I’m not Jewish, I answered the questions. Are most of your friends Jewish? Certainly here yes. Have you attended a Jewish function in the last week? Of course. Do you belong to a synagogue? I do. I came out an affiliated Jew. Huh.

Still don’t want to convert, but I may have already. I thought of the old ways of becoming a lawyer, a physician. You read the law, worked in a lawyer’s office until you grew proficient enough to set out on your own. Same with physicians. I may have read Judaism as I’ve attended mussar, gone to shivas, been part of one for Kate, have two Jewish grandchildren.

Certainly there’s a deep reality in me now that identifies with Jews. With Kate’s loved faith. With the people and the community I’ve come to know as a result.

Hope you have a good Easter. Unless you’re more of a passover sort.

 

First radiation treatment yesterday. Cyberknife again. The same place where I had 35 sessions in 2019. Lone Tree. Anova Cancer Care. Chose The Band for my music. The Weight. The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. Up on Cripple Creek. Music to be radiated to. An atomic playlist.

Afterward I drove over to Sally Jobe and got another CT. This one to facilitate the planning on my T3 met.

When I left the room after my session, my images were still up on the computer screens. I asked Patty what they were. She showed me my hips, my femurs. A blue grid with small squares over lay the area just away from my left hip. On the grid were brown marks. The points the Cyberknife uses to follow the medical physicist’s plan.

I’m at the start of this journey, ending now on April 19th. Probably eight sessions in all. I don’t know what might occasion another session or two.

 

Doug has begun painting my bedroom. The final piece of his work. He may finish today. Furniture rearranging after. Then some time to take art out, find the right places for various pieces. After that some help to hang it.

 

Tara’s house, 6060 Kilimanjaro Road, accessed off Jungfrau Drive, overlooks Mt. Blue Sky (formerly Mt. Evans). A steep driveway that I would not want to have to plow or have plowed. But a beautiful location.

The seder began at 4 pm. I left at 8:30. Tara presided over a teaching seder. Being the former director of religious education at CBE. We retold the Exodus story. Learned the symbolism of the objects on the Seder plate. Dipped parsley in salt water and ate it. The tears of oppression. Put horseradish, maror, on matzah and tasted the bitterness of slavery.

Every year Jews not only celebrate, but relive the experience of the Exodus. The moment of their birth as a free people.

Powerful.

 

Dogs, Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Health, Hermitage, Politics, Shadow Mountain, Travel

Guns and Poses

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Spring and Kepler’s Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: Jackie. Patty. Carmela. Cyberknife. Dr. Simpson. Mary voting. And winning. Wisconsin Supreme Court. The late season wet Snow on the Lodgepoles. More than predicted. Doug. Starting on the lower level. Mark in Hafir Al Batim. Settling in during a slow period at the University, Ramadan. Kep. Kate, always Kate. Gabe and Benihana. His 15th. Ruth, now 17 + a day.

 

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Black Mountain white

 

Doug came. I had to move upstairs to the third level, my new home office. He’s painting the lower level. I can still sleep down there for now.

It’s a lot to have somebody working on your home for this long. Constant disruptions. Some mild. Like clearing the common room surfaces. Others not. Getting the dining room cleared. Another person working in the house. Doug’s easy. Friendly. Competent. Even so.

I chose this. I know. And I like the result already. Good thing, eh? I’ll like it even better when the arts rehung. Not yet. Not for a good while yet.

After that one more round with Robin and Michele. Then I’m going to let things be for a good long while. Enjoy the house. The Mountain.

 

Kep’s death does open the door to travel for me. I no longer have to worry about someone else coming in while he’s in decline. Chose to not do that.

There is a Southern saying. When the last dog dies. Now I feel the love and pang in that. Also the release. Thinking about some day trips once the weather turns away from Winter. Maybe longer trips. Around the state, the region.

The first time in over thirty years that I’ve had no one to come home to. And the first time in a few years when I’ve had no one to care for except myself. An odd feeling. Untethered. A bit floaty. Is this real life if no other life depends on me? Suppose I’ll get used to it, but right now I feel, what, almost irresponsible.

 

Look at the Wisconsin Supreme Court election map. It’s a tale, again, of rural and urban except for the southern tier of the state. Because I lived in Wisconsin, I happen to know that southern tier accepted immigrants, especially from Bismarck’s Germany. They were socialists and anti-draft. Bismarck had instituted the first draft which prompted a wave of emigration. Their political legacy lives on. Wisconsin politics, like Colorado, are complicated.

Mad City = Boulder. Milwaukee = Denver. Southern tier of Wisconsin = Front Range and the wider Denver Metro. Wisconsin’s Lake Superior counties = Aspen, Vail, Copper Ridge, Breckenridge

There’s a populist streak in both states though Colorado has more of the Western libertarian, leave me alone ethos.

These maps, with the counties filled in by dominant party (or, inclination), tell one more tale. At least. The story of how difficult a slow civil war (Sharlet), an American Divorce (Marjorie Taylor Greene), RAHOWA (White supremacists) would be. Cities against outlying rural areas. Villages against villages. Neighbors against neighbors. Within one state.

This would not be the simple geography of The civil war. No. It would be the geography of a chess board or a go board.

It would also be the gunned against the largely ungunned. Though of course how many of the armed would fight? Hard to know.

Any such civil war (an oxymoron I just realized) would probably end like a pandemic. When we tired of it and quit.

 

Dogs, Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Health, Hermitage, Literature, Myth and Story, Shadow Mountain, Sport

Mythic

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Spring and Kep’s Moon

Monday gratefuls: Kep. His life and mine together. Diane’s sweet e-mail. Tom’s call. Ruth and Gabe and Mia. The days after. Learning to be alone. Max Verstappen. The Australian Grandprix. My son and his wife. Reading Undertow. Dark Sky by CJ Box. Furball Cleaning. Marina Harris. Ana. Cook’s Venture. Regenerative agriculture. Wild Alaska. Safeway. Stinker’s.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Being alone, yet accompanied

 

The Ancient Brothers on myths that shaped our lives. Aboriginal song lines. Dream time. Animal archetypes and totems.* Jesus. The American myth. The Velveteen Rabbit. The Celtic Faery Faith. Ragnarok. We each had a myth that had shaped our lives. Of course more than one, but these worked on and in our lives. In deep ways.

As a young boy, Ode said, his Jesus walked on water. Rose from the dead. Fed the five thousand. A mythic life reaching deep into a boy’s heart and imagination. Tom talked about Animals as bearers of archetypal power. Which  reminds me of the Breston quote below. Bill retold the story of the Velveteen Rabbit. Love makes us real. Aussie Paul, raised in Texas but on stories of Aboriginal life, made the song lines and Dream Time real. Before this creation and after it passes away there will be the Dream Time. I talked about how the Celtic Faery Faith reshaped my spirituality and led me away from Christianity. Going down and in, rather than up and out. A rich morning, one filled with wonder and awe. Our church.

 

Afterward I watched a thirty minute recap of the Australian Grandprix. Listened to the post race analysis. A crazy race with 3 restarts. Verstappen won again in the Red Bull car. Sergio Perez, his teammate, worked his way up to 5th from 20th. Lewis Hamilton, 7 time world champion, finished second, and Fernando Alonso, 2 time world champion, finished third for the third race in a row. There was speculation that Red Bull could run the table this year, win all the Grandprixs. Whether it happens or not, that speculation tells you about the dominance of the Red Bull cars so far this 2023 season.

 

Cut up boxes for the trash. Finished sorting all of our dog stuff. Donation and throw away. Rearranged furniture in the common room. Did a Safeway pickup. Talked with my son and his wife. Weekend things.

 

Radiation approved. Finally. Start tomorrow. Not daily. Continues through the third week of April. That lymph node by my left hip and the T3 vertebrae metastases.

 

Tomorrow Ruth turns 17! A dancing queen. So happy to see her stable and present. She has been such an important part of my life for all of those years. Even more so of course since we moved to Colorado in 2014. Gabe, too. 15 on Earth Day, the 22nd of this month.

We celebrate life even in the midst of death. Like Max’s birth so soon after Kate died. A bit of her soul to him. Ruth and Gabe have seen a lot of death over the last two years. Their Grandma, their Dad. Rigel. Sollie. Kepler. We have sustained each other. As family. And this month we celebrate their young lives. In this moment. The only one we ever have.

 

 

 

* “We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”  ― Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

Dogs, Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Shadow Mountain

Fears and Regrets

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Spring and Kep’s Moon

Sunday gratefuls: My son and his wife. Murdoch. A loving conversation about Kep yesterday. Diane’s kind e-mail. Kep. Gone into the mystery. A day of cleaning up after Ruth, Gabe, Mia. Kep. Punctuated by rest and the occasional TV show. Picking up groceries at Safeway. Grief. Mourning. Again. Still. Housecleaners coming this week. Alan today at the Bread Lounge. Dogs. Caring about animals.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Kep and his consolation

 

I have some regrets. About fearing Kate’s corpse. About not being there when she died. About not being able to stay with Kep, or any of our dogs. These are regrets that do not haunt me, or at least not much. But they are real. And they reveal a fear around death that, as I’ve said before, I don’t understand. The fear is about the moment of death, not death itself. Or, maybe better, the moment of surety about death. As it happens.

When I was in vet’s office, in the special room where euthanasia is performed, I reach to pet Kep. Dr. Doverspike came in the room with two syringes. I froze. And said out loud, I don’t know what to do! Anguished. I needed to stay with him and yet I couldn’t. Left me torn between responsibility and a deeper love. A love that could not bear to see him die. Oh. So. Hard.

Ruth made it ok. She said she was filling in for Grandma. And she was. Kep had the comfort of a familiar and loved human. Just as Kate did with Sarah. Proxies for my presence. My love never in question, but at that moment putting me in excruciating pain.

Facing our fears is best. I’ve read that. And mostly I believe it. If fear rules our lives, we cease to live our lives. Rather we pinball away from this job interview and this possible relationship and those oh so critical moments in the lives of ones we love. Yet I also believe that there is an ok-ness to allowing a loved other, like Ruth, like Sarah to face your fear for you. The love held between us helps us through. They know I care. They express my love for me.

As near as I can tell, these moments are the only ones where I’ve chosen, or allowed, proxies for my deepest feelings. I face my fears otherwise. Most of the time.

A fear I had after Kep’s death. Coming home to an empty house for the first time in over thirty years. No Kate. No dogs. Just me. I needed to to go in and so I did. Turned out ok.

In fact it was memories surfacing as I drove up Shadow Mountain that were harder. Kep waiting at the back door for me. Tail wagging. Or, later lying down at the back door waiting. His paw prints in the snow. Once I opened the door and walked in, I was home. My place of refuge.

Of course his presence was everywhere. His collar. Leashes. His hair from a blown coat. His food. His food bowls. His medicine. His beds. I cleaned those up yesterday, readying some for donation, some I threw away. Not to be rid of him or his memory, but to start anew. I did the same thing with Kate’s stuff. Yet she’s still here. Everywhere. As are Vega, Gertie, Rigel, and Kep. This is their home, too. And will be as long as I am the carrier of their memories.

As I write, my current form of therapy, I realize that my absence at the death beds of those I love changes nothing about how much I love and love them. I do not dismiss, do not shun memories. I open myself to them. Remembering Kate in the garden. Or in the bed with her feeding tube. Kep running the fences. Lying with his head on my feet. Gertie sleeping next to me. Rigel and Kep, too.

Neither however do I wallow in them. If I need to cry, I cry. If I laugh, I laugh. They are components of who I am now. The bearer of these lives still living.