Spring Rushing Waters Moon
Missed yesterday. A very busy two days for both Kate and me. A visiting scholar at Beth Evergreen, Rabbi David Jaffe, came into town on Thursday morning. His first event was a potluck, then a mussar (Jewish ethics) session. Kate and I went early to set up.
Then, that evening Rabbi Jaffe walked the board and other leaders of the synagogue through what he called a soul curriculum for the organization as a whole. I resonated most with this presentation. Kate and I were there because I’m a member of the Adult Education committee. Both of us contributed soups to the soup and salad meal. I made chicken noodle soup and Kate made Vietnamese Pho.
After getting home around 9:30 (our bedtime is 8pm) we got up the next morning and drove into the Denver Performing Arts Center to see grandson Gabe perform in the Denver Public Schools Shakespeare Festival. This ended up taking longer than intended, but we got home in time for a nap before returning to Beth Evergreen yesterday at 4:30. This time we helped set up for Rabbi Jaffe’s lecture, preceded by a congregational meal.
After helping set up tables, arrange flowers, distribute utensils to each place, we attended the James Taylor shabbat. Rabbi Jamie Arnold, Beth Evergreen’s rabbi, is a talented musician who does covers and writes his own music. He often modifies familiar songs with Jewish prayer book language and writes Hebrew verses for them, too.
The meal, catered by Ali Baba, a Golden Lebanese restaurant, and paid for by a generous congregant, fed about 80 people. The tables filled the social hall plus a table set up in the entry way. It was exciting to have that many people together, eating and sharing stories.
Afterward Rabbi Jaffe gave a lecture on mussar. It was more sparsely attended than it might have been due to the heavily falling snow and the predictions-now fulfilled-of around a foot of accumulation.
We again got home around 9:30pm. Late to bed twice in a row. Harder and harder these days.
Today was the People’s Climate March in Denver, which I intended to attend, but the roads going down the hill are icy and snow covered. Climate change is, as I said in an earlier post, once again the focus of my political energy so I’ll only miss the gathering, not the action.
This late spring snow challenged our Rav4 on the way home last night. Hwy. 78, aka Brook Forest Drive/Black Mountain Drive/Shadow Mountain Drive winds up the mountains from Evergreen. It was snowing hard, the roads were not plowed and the shoulders are narrow. No sudden plummets, but sufficient curves and changing elevations to make the drive interesting. Plus, I was ready to be asleep an hour before we left Beth Evergreen.
Today, though, and the next week, too, we have a quieter time. No grandkids this weekend and only one scheduled event in the next week.
Tomorrow, Earth Day, April 22nd, is Gabe’s 9th birthday. He wants to eat at Sam’s #3 and so we will. A good day to celebrate the grandkids.
Yesterday in mussar Jamie gave us a writing prompt: write about a want that occupies a lot of inner time and attention, then to try to find the root of that want. This was a lead in to talking about avarice.
I’ve looked up the idea of the hungry ghost and I don’t think it really applies to me, but the caution evident in the bookstore example certainly does. Buying books represents a deep seated want, too. But what is it?
So, the books represent my own struggle with the nature of mortality, my way of structuring my inner world. And, yes, it can be a problem if I refuse to recognize it for what it is. But, and here’s the liberating possibility for me in both books and writing, if I acknowledge what they are for me, if I embrace the underlying motivation, yet not its anticipated result, then I can continue writing and reading, using them not as shields against disappearing, but as ways of being in the world, not as ways of protecting myself.
Well. The sun is out, the snow has melted on the roads and it’s a cheery day here on Shadow Mountain. The changes here are fast and often extreme.
Switched my work routine around, now writing on Superior Wolf in the early morning, breakfast, Latin, workout, lunch, nap. So Ancientrails comes later in the day. Like now, at 3 pm.
The loft is near it’s final configuration, at least for now. I do get the urge to move things every once in awhile, but I’m liking this setup. Just some art hanging and rearranging, pull-up bar installation, book reordering, a bit of moving boxes down to the garage below and it will be complete. Two and a half years later it feels wonderful.
