Beltane Moon of the Summer Solstice
While the world burns, at least the Trump world, kabbalah suggests a bigger world, more worlds, right next to this one. There is, as Rabbi Jamie said, a bigger picture. I learned a similar lesson from Deer Creek Canyon during my cancer season two years ago. These Rocky Mountains, still toddlers as mountains go, were and will be present when we are not. In their lifetime humanity will likely have come and gone.
It’s tempting to use this perspective-and I believe it’s real, I want to emphasize that-to diminish the swirl of issues like climate change, decent health insurance, jobs that no longer pay a living wage. In time they will be finished, one way or another. We were neither present during the Rockies orogeny, nor will we be present when they become as smooth as the Appalachians. Just so, you may say.
Yet. We do not live either in the deep geological past nor in the distant geological future, we live now. Our lives, our mayfly lives from the vantage point of geological time, come into existence and blink out, so we necessarily look at the moment, the brief seventy to one hundred year moment into which, as Heidegger said, we are thrown.
This is all we know of life, this moment. In it our whole awareness comes into existence, matures, then winks out. From that mayfly perspective then climate change, decent health insurance and a living wage are not insignificant. Albert Camus spoke of the great river which carries us toward the ocean of all souls. Ram Dass reminds us we’re all just walking each other home. And Lord Keynes famously said in the long run we’ll all be dead.
Somehow we have to realize that though our lives are small compared to the immensity of the universe and the imponderable nature of time, they are everything while we have them. As for me, I find all this comforting. Putting my efforts in the larger perspective gives me peace, putting them in the immediacy of my life gives me energy. We will not complete the task, no, we will not. But we are not free to give it up either.
Came home last night from studying the mysteries of the universe in kabbalah. A nearly full moon of the summer solstice hung high in the sky, giving the lustre of, well, not midday, more like late evening, to the forest below. Brook Forest Road, which becomes Black Mountain Drive, winds along Bear and Maxwell Creeks through a long valley before it gets serious about gaining 1500 feet of elevation. A couple of miles from home, after it has turned to Black Mountain Drive, this two lane asphalt heads uphill through the Arapaho National Forest.
A welcome headline in the Denver Post yesterday: Cool spring dampens fire risk. It looked bad back in February and March when we were dry and unseasonably warm, then it began to snow. And snow. Then rain. The temperatures have been seasonal or below for the most part since late April. May it continue.
On Thursday night Jon and I drove into Stapleton. Ruth’s 5th grade class had presentations and exhibitions for class projects, then there was the oddly named “continuation” ceremony in which each 5th grader got a diploma. This was their last event at Schweigert elementary because next year each of them will be in middle school.
Ruth is a gifted student, a rebel and a usually sweet kid. She has a depressive side which can make her angry, sulky. She also resists, stubbornly, talking about her feelings, refusing to open up to counselors in the aftermath of the divorce. Her 5th grade teacher referred to her as a “little spitfire” whom she would remember forever. That’s Ruth in a phrase.
This was important because the material I had prepared focused on deeds of loving kindness toward grandmother earth. Bonnie and Tara, both fluent in biblical Hebrew, gently put me back on course when I made a mistake. Their helpfulness made me realize, just now as I’m writing this, that there is a different way of being a presenter, one that relies on others as well as on preparation. I know, obvious right? Not to me because in the Christian religious culture and even in the UU culture the clergy presents and others react. The process can be dialogical, yes, but usually involves only reactions to the ideas of the presenter.
Here are a few of the latter that I found especially moving:
Again, from Buber, “Judaism does not divide life into the holy and the profane, but into the holy and the not-yet holy.” Another scholar, a man named Finklestein, adds, “Judaism is a way of life that endeavors to transform virtually every human action into a means of communion with God.”*
White and gray. The 18 inches or so of snow lies thick on our roof, solar panels hidden from our star. That unusual characteristic of snow to move upwards with the shape of an obstacle like a fence post, a statue, mailbox, or birdbath has created several objects in our yard with white caps reaching skyward, simulacrums in snow of the surface beneath them.
The storm seems to have quieted overnight. No snow falls now. The sun, already well up over Denver, has begun to light the clouds over Black Mountain, accentuating the blue sky. The whiteness of the scene from my loft window seems to impose a silence borne of the color itself, soundlessness corresponding to the fresh, but otherwise colorless, snow. Along with the silence comes a profound stillness, as if for the moment nothing moves. Perhaps the mountain lion has retreated to its den, the bear to its former place of hibernation, the mule deer and elk bedded down among the willows and dogwood out of the wind.
