• Category Archives Judaism
  • It’s Survivable

    Beltane and the Greenhouse Moon

    Friday gratefuls: Halle. P.T. Rain. Thunder. Overhead. Shadow. Her protection of her territory. The Greenhouse: door and windows framed in, rafters up. Nathan. Vince. The Jangs. Fatherhood. My son. Seoah. Israel. Iran. Red tie guy. Jim Butcher. Fully leafed Aspens. Lodgepole Pollen. Yellow, yellow, yellow.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Fawns, calves, kits, cubs

    Week Kavannah: Gratitude. Hakarot Hatov. (recognizing the good)    “Who is rich? Those who rejoice in their own portion.” Perkei Avot: 4:1

    One brief shining: Alert, front paws on the head of the bed, the danger detector Shadow looked out over the backyard, her lean muscled body ready, there: bark, bark, bark, bark, bark. 1:15 am

     

    Dog journal: Shadow came inside. Her outside work done. The Doe had left the yard. She seemed happy to see me, to be back inside. Last night, as she has for previous nights, she crawled up on the bed, only to look out the window.

    And what to her wandering eyes should appear. Lots of Trees and, another Mule Deer? Whatever it was, it needed warning. Get out of my yard. Right now. At least she was inside the tent barking out, rather than outside barking in.

    Shadow.

     

    Israel/Iran: Netanyahu survived a close vote in parliament. Next step? Bomb Iran. I understand the attack on Iran and its nuclear program. One nuclear weapon could take out Jerusalem.

    I also understand that for the first time in several decades Hezbollah no longer threatens northern Israel as it once did. Hamas has suffered degradation in the forever war in Gaza. The Houthis have taken strikes from both the U.S. and Israel. This means that the Iranian proxy armies no longer have the punchback power they did a year ago.

    Yes, I get all that. But what about a year from now? Two years? Ten? Israel has become an aggressor state, no longer acting only in its own defense. The Arab states will remember. Will plan. Will fight back. Perhaps not now, but later? It’s a certainty.

    Better to have brokered peace deals with the Emirates, the Sauds, Jordan, the new regime in Syria, maybe even Egypt.

    Now the way forward lies littered with bomb craters, terror attacks, regional tensions remaining high. This is not a victory. It’s a powerful statement, yes, but only one statement in a centuries long dispute. The only way out is peace.

     

    Just a moment: I asked Halle, my p.t. therapist, if she would miss the Mountains. She leaves for Dallas in August.

    Her smile lit up, “I sure will. But if I want to preserve my tax status I have to leave for four or five months. I’ll be back in January for snowboarding!” Something about choosing a tax home and the rules for traveling nurses, physical therapists.

    Halle’s parents were up here last weekend. That’s when she found out about her grandfather’s prostate cancer. He’s in his mid-eighties. Most likely they won’t treat him.

    I told her to tell him two things: it’s survivable and he has lots of company.

     


  • radical roots II

    Beltane and the Greenhouse Moon

    Rough Draft for my Radical Roots of Religion class project.

     

    Inflection points. Distrust of previously treasured institutions. Colleges and Universities. Religion. The U.S. Government. Labor unions. Science and scientists. A sense that the game of life has a cheat code known only to certain races and genders. An at the most basic level knowing that the game no longer needs new players.

    Too. That moment in history, ours, when extravagant corporate and consumer spending pushed onto, then well beyond, the boundary between sustainability and self-destruction. Sea levels. Hurricanes. Shifting garden zones. Coral bleaching. The sixth great extinction. And, in spite of clear evidence, no effective measures taken.

    Also, paradoxically, a time when individuals report feeling alone. Lonely. More people, less relating. A time when any moral or ethical sense gets shredded by those in positions of power meant to ensure them. A time when the future is not all it used to be.

    Yes. Our time. And a propitious time it is. There’s a saying in politics, never waste a good catastrophe. Why? Because when the zeitgeist sinks lower and lower, people will be open to a change. Sometimes any change.

    Look at all the MAGA voters who support the peaceful transfer of wealth from the poorest to the wealthiest. Who applaud the pulling back of American support from a world riven by factionalism and despair.

    We are at an inflection point. A political, climatological, religious inflection point. This is not the time for incremental change, tweaking old menus for social change. No. This is a time for dreamers and schemers. For people willing to reconstruct, reimagine, re-form their own most basic assumptions about life and its purpose.

    The four figures we studied in this class: Kaplan, Heschel, Reb Zalman, Art Green each had radical rethinking to do. And they accepted the task.

    As Jews in that tradition and yet liberated from it as a constriction, we find ourselves the ones alive now. Thrown, as Heidegger put it, into this inflection point, with sages as guides, but as guides only. They cannot walk this path for us.

    It is up to us to find a new way, one that encompasses Gaia consciousness, a non-supernatural God, action against injustice, and Art Green’s embrace of old forms with new meaning.

    A new way that shakes the foundations of metaphysics-as Kaplan did. One that sees the points of cleavage in the religious world and embraces them, challenges them. As Kaplan and Reb Zalman did. One that lives into Judaism as a reservoir of knowledge and ritual, yet a Judaism always adding new knowledge and reconstructing old rituals. As Art Green and Rabbi Rami Shapiro are doing.

    And, we must do it together. How? If I have time left, let’s discuss.

     

    Here’s an example of a place to start metaphysically:

    Addenda: “A new proposal by an interdisciplinary team of researchers challenges that bleak conclusion. They have proposed nothing less than a new law of nature, according to which the complexity of entities in the universe increases over time with an inexorability comparable to the second law of thermodynamics—the law that dictates an inevitable rise in entropy, a measure of disorder. If they’re right, complex and intelligent life should be widespread.

    In this new view, biological evolution appears not as a unique process that gave rise to a qualitatively distinct form of matter—living organisms. Instead, evolution is a special (and perhaps inevitable) case of a more general principle that governs the universe. According to this principle, entities are selected because they are richer in a kind of information that enables them to perform some kind of function.”

    They argue that the basic laws of physics are not “complete” in the sense of supplying all we need to comprehend natural phenomena; rather, evolution—biological or otherwise—introduces functions and novelties that could not even in principle be predicted from physics alone.

    Hazen came across Szostak’s idea while thinking about the origin of life—an issue that drew him in as a mineralogist, because chemical reactions taking place on minerals have long been suspected to have played a key role in getting life started. “I concluded that talking about life versus nonlife is a false dichotomy,” Hazen said. “I felt there had to be some kind of continuum—there has to be something that’s driving this process from simpler to more complex systems.” Functional information, he thought, promised a way to get at the “increasing complexity of all kinds of evolving systems.””

    Wired


  • Grading Life on the U curve

    Beltane and the Greenhouse Moon

    Thursday gratefuls: Diane. Shadow. On the bed. Ethical concerns about her. Back and leg pain. SPRINT. MRI. PET scan. Kylie. Ruth in Alaska. Gabe reading. Mary in Seoul. Guru in K.L. Mark in Al Kharj. His summer school job. Shadow Mountain Rain. Cool night. Halle. Good at her job.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Natalie

    Week Kavannah: Wholeness and Peacefulness. Schleimut. Not in spite of but with pain

    One brief shining: Shadow I call not even seeing her Shepherd’s lantern white tipped tail and she comes, full speed, mouth open in a wide smile, her legs barely touching the ground. Good girl.

     

    Unrelenting stories of pain and suffering. Not material designed to keep readers coming back. Let’s engage shleimut today and find our wholeness and peace with it, but without focusing on it.

    Our lives, all of our lives, experience sine waves of calm, anxiety, gracious acceptance, and tense rejection of circumstances. There is no stable mood. We travel in a bath of feelings, some felt, some repressed, all having their moment to stand with our consciousness, color the terrain.

    Natalie says scent adds color to a dog’s world. In the same way feelings add color to our inner lives. Give it snap and rustle. Pop. No such thing as a bad feeling. Only a poor response to it. Also like the weather. No such thing as bad weather. Just inadequate gear.

    On the U curve we sink toward middle years of career stress, family complexity, striving, only to rise toward death with acceptance of our limitations, our inability to change the past, a broader understanding of joy, and what constitutes shleimut for us.

    A wonderful thing. Good news for the human spirit. Perhaps a long and strong message to all ages.

    What is the message? That life’s purpose does not lie at the office. That family can and does heal, provide a backstop. That friends and companion animals matter. That the world is trustworthy. That pain and illness are always temporary.

     

    As we learn these messages on our upward journey toward death our end gains context, breadth and depth. We move forward through aging with short intakes of breath as we realize our family loves us. Our friends complete us. That life’s purpose is found in living, not in dogma or ideology. That death is valuable, not awful.

    Once we embrace these learnings we can take in the various insults our body suffers and know them for what they are.

     


  • It’s Personal

    Beltane and the Greenhouse Moon

    Monday gratefuls: Buphati. MRI results. The Ancient Brothers. Shadow. Water. Food. Natalie. Tom. The Happy Camper. Driving, painful. Ruth in Alaska. Mary in Seoul. Guru in K.L. Me on Shadow Mountain. Great Sol. The bird of morning. BJ. Pammy. Gabe. Family, flung far.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Books

    Week Kavannah: Wholeness and Peacefulness. Shleimut. Integrating pain into my daily life.

    One brief shining: The greenhouse has more than plants and memories; it will be therapy and prayer, too, an everyday exercise in tactile spirituality, joining with the evolved life of plants in an act of co-creating abundance: Lettuce in a bowl with dark red Brandywine heirloom Tomatoes, rings of Red Onion, a diced orange Nantes Carrot, not yet, no, but soon.

     

    Judaism in trouble:

    Front page news from Boulder. A fiery assault on demonstrators bringing attention to hostages still held by Hamas. This apparently not Nazi nostalgia, but Palestinian weariness with the long, long war and its murderous execution.

    Not only Boulder, but the home of UC-Boulder, Ruth’s university.

    You may recall that my conversion was to have taken place in Jerusalem, October 31st if I recall correctly. That pleased me because it married my pagan observance of Samain with my immersion in an ancient mikveh in the holy city.

    You do recall, I’m sure, why it didn’t happen. On October 7th, Hamas attacked kibbutzim near the border with Gaza, killing and raping as they went. A horrific act of terror. Really, a brazen pull on the nose-ring of militant Israelis.

    For many dark reasons, Israel stepped into the trap Hamas had made. Netanyahu needed to avoid corruption charges. A never-to-be-realized war aim of eliminating Hamas. Frustration with continued anti-semitic activity by Iranian supported actors like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. The out of proportion political influence of the Jewish ultra-right in Israel that wants genocide. The perilous location of Israel.

    The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) continues to pound Gaza, killing civilians, civilians, because Hamas hides among them. Many (most?) of us who love Israel as a needed safe place for Jews long ago stepped away from support of this “war.”

    The immorality of bombing starving women and children. Using up whatever goodwill Israel had accumulated. Being tone deaf to the world’s critique. Bad, sad days for all.

    No wonder the anger and frustration has spilled over into the U.S. No wonder, too, that this same anger and frustration has served as fuel for the alt-right with its white supremacist views, its Hitlerian hagiographies, and not only them, but American Muslims, college students who see an asymmetrical war, politicians who want any lever they can find to bring the East Coast elites to heel.

    In the same ugly way that testosterone feeds prostate cancer, the war over Gaza feeds hatred and bigotry all over the world. We will all be poorer when it ends.

    Boulder is an hour from Shadow Mountain. I’ve been there many times over the last year plus for breakfast or lunch with Ruth. She’s a Jewish student in a time when Jews, again, are persona non grata.

    This attack was not something I read about. It’s personal.

     


  • This Is Not the Way

    Beltane and the Greenhouse Moon

    Sunday gratefuls: A day of no-things. Shadow and I outside, drop, walk, stop, drop, turn, walk, drop. Her eagerness. Her five o’clock licking. Sciatica. Morning darkness. The morning service. The Shema. Tara. Ruth, home two days ago, leaving for Alaska today. Gabe, now a senior. Whoa. Mary in Seoul. Seoah, Murdoch. My son. Mark walks to downtown Al Kharj. Shadow Mountain.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: MRI

    Week Kavannah: Wholeness and Peacefulness. Shleimut. Integrating pain into my daily life.

    One brief shining: Sorry, Marines, pain is not weakness leaving the body, no; but, it is a constant reminder of being alive, of still having a body that can identify itself through the jolt that starts in the hip, gathers intensity around the knee, and on occasion flashes to the foot.

     

    Back and cancer: Get MRI results tomorrow. Buphati at 3 pm. On Friday I see Kylie my Army officer retired P.A. for preparation. I have a SPRINT device in my future. The bogo MRI. Checking for cancer and readying me for a pain reduction, elimination procedure. Rare confluence of medical care.

    Ouch, ouch, ouch. ouch. Sciatica is a son of a bitch. Above 10. A crescendo, then a falling away. I. Do. Not. Like. It.

    If the SPRINT device works, I will send up hallelujahs in the name of its inventor, Kylie, and the doctor who installs it. If it doesn’t? I’m no worse off than before. Probably nerve ablation.

    If there’s cancer in my hip? Don’t know. But Buphati will have things to recommend, I know.

     

    Reading: I’m on a run of science fiction and magic. John Scalzi’s Starter Villain and Kaiju Preservation Society. Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files. The Gray Man and Daniel Silva set aside for the moment.

    My serious reading of late has been for my two Kabbalah Experience classes. A New Story for Human Consciousness and the Radical Roots of Religion. The first, learning to retell, reimagine the story of Adam and Eve. And, in so doing, realizing we can reframe, reconstruct any story, including the one we tell ourselves about who we are in this world.

    The second investigating moments when Judaism received a radical refit. Focused on Mordecai Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Reb Zalman, and Art Green, but looking backward to Maimonides, the Bal Shem Tov, the destruction of the second Temple and the rise of Rabbinic Judaism.

    I’m excited about these classes. I want to retell the story of Adam and Eve. Maybe my own story, too. Most of all I’m excited about considering what the next revolution might be in Judaism, imagining it, perhaps helping to build it.

     

    Just a moment: Whoo, boy. We’ve crossed over and I didn’t really get it until I read this paragraph in an article titled: “Why Trump’s push for ‘gold-standard science’ has researchers alarmed.”*

    Crossed over to what? An age of ideology, a time when political thought, doled out by political commissars, trumps (see what I did there?) decision making for any other reason.

    This is a direct route to a Stalinesque, Mao Tse Tungesque form of governance. It is, as George Will observed in his strange opinion piece about Trump as a progressive, a form of Statism.

    I admit I’m an Enlightenment, scientific method guy. But. I know that science does not occur in a political vacuum. Its funding, its direction, even its focus often has political influence. Look, for example, to the Agricultural and Mechanical universities dotted around the U.S. and delivering junk methods to farmers that kill the soil and enrich Big Ag.

    Even so. I support science and the scientific endeavor to understand, to grasp the world around us as it is, not as we either imagine or wish it to be. No political commissar will know scientific facts better than scientists themselves.

    I do agree with one facet of this critique of science, however. Many Americans have lost faith in science and we need, as a country, to help restore it. This is not the way.

     

     

     

    ” “And in a “Gold Standard Science” executive order last week, President Donald Trump outlined a new level of oversight over what counts as quality evidence and what does not, (emphasis mine) putting “a senior appointee designated by the agency head” in charge of overseeing “alleged violations.” Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in a briefing that the goal of the executive order is to “rebuild the American people’s confidence in the national science enterprise … the status quo of our research enterprise has brought diminishing returns, wasted resources and public distrust.”” Washington Post, June 1, 2025.


  • Artemis: A Riff on Tactile Spirituality

    Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

    A Tactile Spirituality

    “I live at 8,800 feet in zip code 80433. I’m having a greenhouse built in my backyard. What vegetables will grow well in it. Look for heirloom varieties. Include recommended planting dates. Mostly I want salad ingredients and greens. Tomatoes.”

    This is the prompt I gave chatgpt for a quick assist in knowing what to plant. I got back 21 pages of detailed recommendations, including specific heirloom varieties of Tomatoes, Lettuce, Radishes, Carrots, Beets, Onions, and Herbs.

    Spirituality has the curse of the three-story universe, René Descartes, and destructive deconstruction. That is, Abrahamic prayer and devotional practice has historically “aimed” its prayers up toward the heavens and away from the corruptions of the flesh. Descartes’s dramatic division of the mind from the body reinforced a religious path focused on the immaterial mind, released from the body. And, in turn, Mother Earth. While deconstruction did unveil the power dynamics involved in how our agriculture works, how choice of books for a syllabus reflected white privilege, and the patriarchal symbolism of the three-story universe, it also made demythologizing a knee jerk way of removing mystery and grace.

    As a result a tactile spirituality seems, at first look, an oxymoron. The mind. The heavens. Transcendence. Those are the domain of spirit. Not the soil. Not the forests. Not the feet or the hands. Not the world of this reality, this busy, noisy, fussy, often bloody and violent reality. How can we gain the peace, the calm, the centeredness where spiders crawl, illness ravages, and death dominates?

    That’s where Artemis Greenhouses comes in. About as down and dirty a human activity, or I should say, human aided activity as I can imagine. Soil (no, not dirt) under the fingernails. Nurturing small plants. Beets. Spinach. Lettuce. Radishes. Plucking off predating insects. Blocking out Deer and Elk. Harvesting the red and white Radish. The red Beet. Rainbow colored Chard. Green Kale and Spinach. Eating them.

    Fuel for the body. That most inelegant of spiritual residences, the body. Full of blood and waste, nutrients and foreign matter. Under some understandings only a vessel for the soul, a way to keep the mind alive.

    No. Souls are us. Our living flesh ensouled. Sacred. Hardly ordinary unless you call, as I do, the ordinary sacred. What we touch feels the hand of a god, the god. What we embrace knows the warmth of a god, the god. The soil in which we plant seeds quickens when we work it.

    The Mule Deer Doe who feeds her newborn fawn feeds a divine presence, a unique and precious never to be repeated instance of god made flesh. Maxwell Creek filled with Spring Rain pulls bits of Rock and Earth from its bank as the god-in-water, returning the Rocky Mountains to the World Ocean.

    Sure. The Torah. Yes. Talmud Torah. The hands of living gods have written it and the minds of living Jews finds god within, upon its pages, in its stories. It teaches us. Yet, it teaches the same message as Maxwell Creek. That god rushes to the Sea. That god fills every molecule of Water.

    I read the scripture written in the bark of my Lodgepole companion. I see the yellow Flame of the Aspen Catkin against the blue Flame of a Colorado Sky and read of life’s elegant and graceful re-emergence in this, the wet season.

    In my world all spirituality is tactile. In Shadow jumping on my legs. In turning the pages of a Torah commentary. In hearing the voice of Luke or Ginny or Janice. In tasting a bit of Lettuce, an Onion, a fresh heirloom Tomato. All of the tactile is spiritual.


  • Another Place I Could Be Happy

    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.


  • A Good Friend

    Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

    Tuesday gratefuls: Detente with Shadow. Ruth with all A’s to finish her freshman year. Sweet Sue, my PCP. Abby, med tech and phlebotomist. Dr. Buphati’s quick intelligence. Rich, a good friend. A second MRI, hips this time. And, for good measure, a PET scan. As many images as a celeb out for a party evening.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Rich

    Week Kavannah: Enthusiasm. Zerizut.

    One brief shining: On the way back from a Mountain hike, he mentioned Bees, explained his hives-on-a-wire (Bear protection), invited me over right away to see his setup; Rich and I have developed a friendship, one rooted not only in Bees, but in the work of mussar, his work as my lawyer, his kindness after Kate died, his presence at my oncology appointment, a mensch.

     

    Another one of those days. A medical day. With Sue in the morning and Dr. Buphati in the afternoon. Sue has to see me every 3 months because she’s managing my tramadol prescription. A regulated substance. She’s a delight. A caring person and a good doc. She has an FNP-BC which is a souped up nurse practitioner certification.

    Nothing new this visit. But still reassuring to see her.

    After my time with her, I drove over to Rich’s office and we went to lunch at the Nepalese/Himalayan place in Bergen Park, the downtown Edina of Evergreen.

    We ran into his 86 year old mom who had come shopping there. She had her helper, Linda, and her dog, Sparky, with her. Obviously bright and with it, she’s become frail, and Rich coaxed her to come up two steps. He’s a kind man.

    Rich drove us into Englewood for my visit with Dr. Buphati and came in with me. My blood work showed stability in my cancer. Always good news. Concerning though was my right hip which threatens to buckle under me at times.

    “We’ll need an MRI of that hip to see if it’s arthritis or cancer. I’m also scheduling another PET scan.”

    Even with an open-sided MRI I now know I’ll need medication. Claustrophobia. “I’ll prescribe an ativan.”

    Rich volunteered to drive me to the MRI. After a procedure with sedation, state law requires a driver. I’m learning to accept help; Rich and Alan and Tara have made it easy.

    I’m feeling settled with the cancer. It continues, as it will. My medical team and I push back at it and it slows down. Matters will progress at whatever pace they do.

    The back pain much less so. It continues and offers now a stabbing pain in my left hip followed by a thrill of pain that descends from the hip, along my left thigh, past my knee and down to my foot. While sitting down. Sitting down used to have no pain.

    Physical therapy, round two, starts today for my back. As Rich suggested yesterday, I need to develop enthusiasm for working out. Again. A substantial practice for this month. And, a necessary one.

    I know. An organ recital with too many notes. Still…

     


  • A New Pope

    Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

    Friday gratefuls: Marilyn and Irv. Alan. The Cheesecake factory. Shadow, the night Hawk. Pope Leo XIV. A Chicago boy. Exhaustion. Ritalin. 12″ of heavy Snow. Melted. The Solar Snow shovel. That long nap yesterday. Cookunity.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: An American Pope

    Week Kavannah: Enthusiasm. Zerizut.

    One brief shining: After a late night from MVP, Shadow kept me up even later, past midnight, then licked my head and whined at her usual 5 am time leaving me more than exhausted yesterday and napping through the morning missing Diane and my class at Kabbalah experience.

     

    Also failed to pick up my ritalin, I realized. No wonder I crashed on Thursday. Gotta switch those meds to Safeway. Can’t get ritalin or tramadol through the mail. Controlled substances. Walgreen’s made sense when my doc was in Evergreen, but the clinic is moving here to Conifer.

    Anyhow Thursday was a washout, rest and relax day. Unintentional since Thursday tends to be my busiest day of the week with Diane, Kabbalah class, and Thursday mussar.

     

    How bout that Leo XIV? Chi town. A south sider. A naturalized Peruvian. Another Pope from Latin America. One with a bias toward the poor, the left out. The marginalized.

    An adroit move if the consideration went: Trump is a big problem for the world. For the poor. Look at USAID. Francis sensitized us to the needs of the marginalized as a world church. How about an American pope with strong ties to the Third World? Multi-lingual. And familiar with the Vatican and its ways. Prevost was that guy.

    He headed the Vatican department that vetted bishop candidates. A gatekeeper role for future church leadership. He also spent decades among the poor in Peru. While there he twice became leader of his order, the Augustinians.

    I’m heartened by his selection. We need more voices for the poor, for justice. No, I won’t agree with all of his views, nor he with mine; but, we share core values, too.

     

    Meanwhile on Shadow Mountain. Shadow of Shadow Mountain has regressed in her coming in and going out. Unpredictable. I may have to open the door for her several times before she feels comfortable coming in the house. Why? I have no idea. If I did, I might be able to figure out a solution.

    Too, the twelve inches of heavy, wet Snow that fell on Tuesday and Wednesday has melted off roads and driveways. Still some patches in my north facing backyard. Enough to move Smoky’s hand from high fire risk to low.

     

    Just a moment: I’ve been pondering a view of the human from the stand point of mussar and Jewish thought.

    Here’s some preliminary work. The neshama, the pristine soul, our link to the whole, still must engage the world. That’s what the nefesh does. Spurred by the pristine connected neshama, the nefesh moves me out into the world through desire. Desire for food, for safety, for love, for education. Desire without valence.

    Our yetzer hatov, our good inclination, and our yetzer hara, our selfish inclination, try to influence how we live our desires. Our will recognizes both the desires and the yetzer’s attempt to direct our action. That is the bechira point, the moment when we actively choose to satisfy a desire following a healthy, just path, or a selfish, self involved path.

     

     

     


  • Freedom. Often painful. Always difficult.

    Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

    Sunday gratefuls: Joe. Bill. Rob. Seth. Matt. Jim. Allan. Jamie. CBE men’s group. The Cow Elks and Bull dining while we talked. Berrigan Mountain and Elk Meadow behind us. Sanctuary outdoor porch. The wonderful Ponderosa with its twisted limbs. A breeze. My son. Donyce. Rich. Shadow, greeter of the dark Morning.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Men, talking

    Week Kavannah:  Enthusiasm. Zerizut.

    One brief shining: As Mother Earth kept turning toward the east, Berrigan Mountain slid across the horizon and Great Sol seemed to move lower in the Sky, the Air around us grew chilly while we talked on of 8 year old sons, narcissistic ex-husbands, mothers who shamed us, the isolation of Covid, getting caught driving while drinking, hoping that somehow our story would intersect with another’s lev, allow us to be seen and heard.

     

    A young Bull Elk with only two points had a harem of ten Cows, unlike Marlon Brando in Waterfront, he was already a contender. His virility displayed itself as I turned past the Life Care Center of Evergreen and drove up the asphalt road leading to the synagogue. Men’s group.

    We’ve begun to open ourselves, still easy to move into the head, Jewish men after all,  acculturated to hide vulnerability, paper over feelings with work and vain glory. American men.

    Some lonely. Some afraid. Some eager. All glad for the presence of other men, a rarity for most. Like Shadow trust will not come without time, without bravery, without tears and laughter. Well begun.

     

    Torah study in the morning. Ten tests of the freed Hebrew slaves as they move through the desert wastes of the Sinai. Taking the slaves out of Egypt. Yes. Taking Egypt out of the freed Hebrews. Hard. Liberation begins in the lev. Backsliding, fear, regression. Part of the package.

    Why bring us all the way out here? So far from the familiar life. This cannot be what freedom is. Or, if this is freedom, I prefer the certainty of servitude. Let me go back. I’m scared. What if I’m not strong enough, good enough. Enough.

    To move away from oppression to liberation requires sacred awareness, awareness of the power and resilience beneath the beaten down heart, the overworked, over stressed body. Realizing, yes, that fear of liberation, of gaining personal freedom and responsibility can cripple us, too. As much, early on maybe more, than the dull routines of our personal Egypt.

    Not different from the confinement of maleness in America.

     

    Just a moment: Men showing off their brute strength by deporting the weak, the outcast, the poor yearning to be free. Mocking the great Lady of New York Harbor, inverting the American promise, slashing the preamble of the Constitution into shredded parchment. If it’s aesthetic or academic or kind. No. If it’s crude, cheap, destructive, dogmatic, malicious. Yes.

    Can you hear the slaves wandering in the desert where capitalist shrouds constrain all the loving-kindness, all the justice, all the mercy, all the rational and life-saving thinking? If it’s not good for the bottom line, what good is it? The Egypt of an extractive, idolatrous economy. Killing all of us while making some very comfortable in the funeral procession.

    No. He will not be the Pope. But. He’s already Pharaoh.