Spring and Kate’s Yahrzeit Moon
Sunday gratefuls: Pesach. Chag Sameach. Easter. Ramadan. All together now. A time of high Winds. High Fire danger. Liberation. Resurrection. Revelation. Spring. Nowruz. Ostara. Beltane. The birth of Lambs. The Greening of Grasses and Trees. Blooming of Flowers. Bees hard at work. Snow and Cold in the Rockies. The fallow season becoming a distant memory. Fresh Milk. Seeds in the Ground. (not in Minnesota or up here.) Life triumphs. For now.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Family
The second day of Passover yesterday. Tell me that old, old story of Pharaoh and his slaves. Saw it on Zoom. Broadcast live from Congregation Beth Evergreen. Was gonna go. Got Covid feet at the last minute. Fear makes prisoners of us all. Also. Didn’t know what to wear. I don’t have fancy clothes. Well, I do. I don’t like to wear them. Jeans and plaid shirts. An LL Bean vest. That’s the outer decor. With a pair of Keens.
When I watched Rabbi Jamie go through the haggadah with the gathered (smallish) crowd in the sanctuary at Beth Evergreen, I both wished I was there and was glad I wasn’t. This is a long service. A couple hours until the meal.
I stayed with it both out of a sense of obligation these are my people after all and out of a desire to re-member an ancient tale of liberation. An ancientale of authoritarian rule and those who broke away from it. The ancient and lonely trail of trying to lose the slave mind, to take life in your own hands and live it responsively and responsibly.
It’s not easy being free. It takes work. Every day. Get food. Maintain health. Love family. And the Pharaoh’s of our day want their slaves to have just enough money to buy the things Pharaoh wants them to. Just enough to have some food, be healthiesh, maybe maintain a family. Buy gas, processed foods, over the counter remedies, pay rent.
Then there’s the lower caste. The people of the street. Who are either can’t or won’t play the Pharaoh’s game. Who suffer from mental illness, addiction, loneliness.
Those with privilege can navigate past the Scylla of money and the Charybdis of social expectations. Yet even most of the privileged founder anyhow. Crushed between the jaws of earning and wanting to fit in.
Judaism knows this in its traditions and works to keep the freedom. It’s hard though even for ones who know the true difficulty of the journey from Egypt through the Reed Sea and those days years in the desert and hardest of all-gaining the Promised Land.
Christianity went off on a tangent about mortality and its pain. Solved through a resurrected God who would take us all with him someday. Beautiful metaphor, resurrection. Death is not the end. Ain’t no grave can hold my body down. A little creepy in its bodies zipping up from cemeteries, or taken whole out of life in the rapture.
There’s a liberation message there, too. But you have to work to find it, embrace it, follow it. Would have been better without the sin. Making it seem that resurrection needed earning. By not doing this or that. Rather than by following a path. A via negativa toward heaven. Born good? Nope. Born bad. Work to put away the stain of the Eden rebellion. Wash, wash, wash the stain away. Shout it out!
We can take this wonderful wakin’ up morning and realize that death does not define us. We can take this pesach and gain our freedom. The resources of these two great faiths are available to us, but they come with so much damned baggage. So much institutional hoohah.
Even so. I’ll stand with those who find death only a part of the journey. I’ll stand with those who know Pharaoh lives in our own heart and the journey lies in turning him from dictator to collaborator.
Sure. I believe those things. They’re important.
I have a simpler heart I’ve learned. One not so enmeshed. I recognize the wonder, the miracle of elemental creation. I see the Sun and its life-giving power. I feel Mother Earth under my feet, responsive to my hands, bearing all I need for this life, the one right here, right now. Ichi-go, Ichi-e. I see the moon in the darkness. I feel its gentle lunar power ripping whole oceans from here to there.
I do not need to go further than these. I do. But I do not need to. I could live happily with giving only them reverence. With realizing awe only in their presence. With letting them think about my afterlife. About Kate’s.
Death and life. Oppression and liberation. Yes. Important, big questions. Journeys of a lifetime. But, too. Following the water course way. Living life as it comes, letting it flow beneath and around and with our feet, our body, our heart, our mind. I’ll flow with the Taoist while I stand with those others and their ways. Seems strange I know, but that’s the spot I’ve come to for right now.
Friday gratefuls: Luke. CBE. The Thursday mussar group. Gracie and Leo, two dogs also learning mussar. Kep, the sweet boy. David Sanders. Being where I need to be. Taking a breath. Or, two. To Speak for the Trees. Ancient Celtic wisdom. Relevant today. Thanks, Tom. The Lodgepoles and the Aspens on this property. The Willows along Maxwell Creek. The Bristlecone Pine on Mt. Evans.
Sorta strayed from the main point there. Though not without good reason. Part of my question about what comes next lies entangled with the process of grieving. But not all. Not even most. It is my life, no matter the thread of sorrow now woven into it.
A word about To Speak for The Trees. This book, which I discovered after reading 
Tuesday gratefuls: Luke. Rabbi Jamie. New Snow. March. The second month of Adar. Leap year in the Jewish calendar. Kate, my sweetheart, always Kate. The cleaning crew. Vince. My infrastructure folks, as Tom calls them. Becky Chambers. Ada Palmer. Ed Kelly. Psilocybin. THC. Cold Weather. 8 degrees on Shadow Mountain. Fatigue. Weakened stamina. Prostate cancer.
House cleaned. New workout proceeding. Back to five days a week. Still fatigued. Started thinking about this last night.
Be like a Lodgepile Pine Branch. When the weight gets too heavy, slough it off and spring back. Be like Maxwell Creek, allow gravity to take you back to the World Ocean. Be like Black Mountain. Stand firm in the midst of Storms, give some of yourself that others might grow, stand out on the horizon of your own life. Be like the Mule Deer, find nourishment up high and down low. Be like the Mountain Lion, hunt carefully and unceasingly for what you need. Be like the Black Bear, when what you need is scarce, slow down, way down and cut back your needs.
Activities to plan and execute MCC2 – the insertion burn for Webb’s L2 orbit. MCC2 corrects any residual trajectory errors and adjusts the final L2 orbit.
A Shrinking Band of Southern Nurses, Neck-Deep in Another Covid Wave. 
There is a small herd of Mule Deer Does who’ve been coming up the utility easement to eat needles off slash Derek dumped there. When they’re here, the scene becomes instant backwoods. An over the river and through the woods tableau. They’re here right now. The Buck, an eight-pointer, was here this morning. Neither Kep nor Rigel paid attention. Just as well. A chance encounter between a Dog and a Buck can result in injury or death for the doggy.
Deciding that next year and thereafter I’m going to focus my giving beyond CBE in a different way. My largest non-CBE donation was to the Land Institute where Wes Jackson and his crew push toward perennial Crops and no-till agriculture. I’m gonna lean toward these radical solution organizations, ones working with the Soil, with Plants, with agriculture. I value the courage it takes to stand against farming practices that seem so entrenched as to be unmovable. And I value the creative thinking that the Wendell Berry’s, the Mary Oliver’s, the Aldo Leopold’s, the Thomas Berry’s, the Wes Jackson’s represent.
Saturday gratefuls: Snow. Fresh and white. A friend’s Dog, cancer. The house changing, transforming. The Hermitage. Brown. Color. Kep’s abundant, luxuriant, always growing fur. The Mountains in Winter. The Lodgepoles with heavy bows. The Arcosanti bell has a white fairy cap. The outdoor table has a round, snowy table covering exactly its size. Medical Guardian. Uncertainty.
Ichi-go, ichi-e. Every moment, every encounter is once in a lifetime. The tea ceremony is a beautiful expression, a reminder of this oh, so important truth. Kate will never be here on this plane again. Unique and significant in her quick intelligence, her dry wit, her chesed, her love for me, for Jon, Ruth, Gabe. My friend’s dog, whom I’ve met many times, likewise. Stolid. Built low to the ground. Attentive, but mostly arranging himself near Rich. Each time I met him was a whole moment. Complete and wonderful. As was each day with Kate.
The Earth gives us daily lessons in impermanence, but we rationalize, smooth over, just don’t see them. I’m writing this now in the 10th month after Kate’s death. Her memory blesses me every day. Her lessons, the things she taught me. The same. I leave the door open on the washer so it won’t mildew. I trust my doctors. I love Judaism and the Jews that I know. Impermanence has permanently changed me.
The quartzite fabricator has met his schedule, bless him. He will be here today to put in my new counter top. This is the piece I chose, the more expensive one, because I didn’t want the next few years working on a counter top I’d settled for. Excited to see it in place. Coming around 9 or 10.
Jon and I will attempt a reprise of the birthday dinner. I’m looking forward to it. Black Hat Cattle Company. I’ve had great meals and horrible meals there. Hope this is a good one. Planning to try to get a better bead on how he’s doing, where he’s going. With the family in the picture I’m feeling easier about him and about us.
Did my first ever Tarot reading yesterday for Luke, the Executive Director of Beth Evergreen. The Tree of Life spread I learned from Mark Horn. It was both harder and easier than I had imagined.
The Winter Solstice. The beginning of Yule. It’s my favorite time of the year! Darkness. Gets a bad rap. The longest night is as important to our soul as the longest day is to our crops. I think of this day as the culmination of the promise made on September 29th, the Saint’s Day of the Archangel Michael: This is the springtime of the soul!
In rebelling against transcendence I chose to go down and in, rather than up and out for spiritual sustenance. I wanted to sanctify this world, this place that we know. Existence before essence. That meant I wanted to know what happened in the interior of my life, how it could inform my journey.
Then I discovered the Great Wheel. The expanded Celtic calendar of holidays that includes the solar holidays, equinoxes and solstices, with the cross-quarter holidays peculiar to the Celts: Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasa, and Samain.
The Summer Solstice, the longest day, the promise of the Sun’s energy delivered to plants so that our lives might be sustained, is the holiday of transcendence. A time when we go beyond ourselves, feel beyond ourselves. Live in the web aware of the web.
Monday gratefuls: Greg Lell, starts today staining the house. Susan, who will care for the dogs when I go to Minnesota, comes at 10:30. Marina Harris and her crew coming today to clean. RJ working on how much money I can spend. Coyote HVAC next Monday. Kate, always Kate. Those two Mule Deer Bucks. The beginning after the ending.
Bubbling and churning. My life a cauldron, happily. Eye of house stain. Leg of house cleaning. Fingernail of dogsitter. Horn of Mule Deer Buck. Feather of mini-splits. Bits of redo and redesign of kitchen. A dash of Orgovyx. One major arcana. A pinch of the ayn sof. A sprinkle of Stars. A slice of Woolly Mammoth Tusk. Two measures of Aloha. Tears of grief. Stir with family and Congregation Beth Evergreen. Simmer for a season or two.
Deviation from the norm. Got up and drove to Evergreen after feeding the Dogs. Didn’t come up to write Ancientrails which is my every morning habit. Why? Wanted to get a Pullman loaf of the Bread Lounge’s Sourdough. They sell out fast. Took my new book, Four Lost Cities. Sourdough French toast, applewood smoked bacon, black coffee. While learning about the reasons civilizations have abandoned their urban centers. Gonna be an interesting read.
On the drive back from Evergreen I turned off the radio. My usual habit, but I started listening to NPR again. Realized I’d slipped into always on. Not what I want. I noticed the light, small Aspen torches lighting my drive with golden Fire. Rocky outcroppings with brave Lodgepoles clinging to their crevices. Maxwell Creek pummeling the rocks. That mystery trail that seems to disappear into a Canyon.
