Category Archives: Judaism

Coronavirus, Dogs, Family, Feelings, Health, Judaism, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

So Lucky

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Spring and Corona Lunacy II

Friday gratefuls: New tricks for an old dog. Appreciative inquiry. Kate on the board, planning for the next five years. Kate sewing. Kate smiling. Kate. Seoah and her sadness. The coronavirus, what has it done for you today? My life’s quieter, less strained. Got me into spring organizing for the loft. Has laid bare the true fault lines in our country: economic and racial inequity, the emissions which poison us and are overheating our planet, yet another wave of know nothingism. The virus is only a medical crisis and it will pass.

This morning about 5 am I came awake as I usually do around that time. The electric blanket warmed me, the cold night air streamed from my open window. Rigel was asleep, her head between mine and Kate’s, her long body stretched out. Kep curled up at the end of the bend. Kate was asleep, too. I laid there for about a half hour, feeling so lucky. So lucky.

About 5:30 Kep jumped on me, as he does every morning, eager and happy, pressing down, saying hello, good morning, let’s get up! Rigel, a very heavy sleeper, lifted her head. Oh, no. Not now. Let me sleep a little longer. Come on, Rigel, time for breakfast, let’s get up, big girl! Her head sinks back to the bed. Nope. Not right now.

Rigel! Get up. Time for breakfast. She slowly rises and shakes herself, standing on Kate’s legs. All right, all right. I’m coming. I let the two of them out by the downstairs door. They run off, their bladders full, like mine. We’re all just mammals, doing what us warm blooded animals do after waking.

The early morning goes on. Let them back inside. The clink of food in dog bowls. Treats. Kep goes back down to sleep with Kate. Rigel stays in the sewing room. I get the paper, put it at Kate’s place. Pour some cold coffee into the big Santa Claus mug, grab my phone. On the way out of the house and up to the loft I turn on Kate’s upstairs oxygen, make sure the canula is around the newel post nearest the downstairs.

There’s a light coating of snow. I felt it during the night on my head. That open window. A bit of ice on the stairs up to the loft. Careful with my feet, that hard-earned Minnesota knowledge of how to walk on slippery surfaces.

It’s around 6 when I open the door, switch on the lights. Things are in a bit of disarray, more so than usual that is, because I’m rearranging furniture. Yesterday and the day before I moved my computer to a different spot. It had been in the same one for almost five years. Books related to Judaism going on a freshly cleaned off bookshelf. Reading chairs now with their backs to the window overlooking Black Mountain and Black Mountain Drive.

When my order of five banker’s boxes get here, I’m going to store all my object files from my docent days in them, take the boxes downstairs to the garage. Never used them. The plastic bins they’re in now will receive the two million words of Ancientrails printed out last fall. The pages will have cardboard year separators like a comic book store. That will free up the desk which Kate used for study during medical school. It will go parallel to the art cart and on the rug. On it will go my painting and sumi-e supplies, freeing up the whole surface of the art cart for painting, working with ink.

The manuscript of Jennie’s Dead is on the round table next to the computer, partially edited, awaiting more work. It’s only now, in retrospect, that I can see through the cloud that settled over me, a fog hiding the creative impulse, the simple joys.

So lucky.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Health, Judaism, Memories, Politics, Third Phase, US History, World History

A Jew

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Spring and the Passover Full Moon (Corona Luna)

Friday gratefuls: For the lupron injection I’m about to receive today, I thank you. For an appointment with Dr. Eigner today, rather than April 17. For a memorable passover with Seoah, Kate, and 53 virtual guests. For Rabbi Jamie, whose soul shines. For the passover meal from Zaidy’s Deli in Denver. For that time, mythic and therefore real, when Hebrew slaves left bondage, crossed the Red Sea, and began 40 years of wandering in the desert.

If you find the passover the central story in your life, then you’re a Jew. Art Green. I’m a Jew. May as well claim it if this is the criteria.

Throughout my life liberation from oppression has been core to what I’ve done. Whether that oppression was modest as in the case of Juniors at Alexandria High School who couldn’t go to prom unless invited (we created a junior prom) or deep and pervasive in the case of women, the poor, sexual preference outliers, my instinct is to oppose it and if possible end it. Lots of Red Seas to cross.

Climate change is different, you say. Who’s oppressed by climate change? Living things, especially humans. And, as with the coronavirus, the catastrophe will fall often and heaviest on those too poor to adapt and with too little power to affect change.

This opposition of mine to oppression seems instinctual. Doesn’t seem to have an origin story in my psyche. I was neither abused nor oppressed as a child. I grew up with white privilege, white male privilege as my inheritance. The passover story, a universal one like Easter, puts liberation at the center of life. Until all are free, none are fully free.

Today I am a Jew, a pagan whose identity, whose soul, shares much with the tribes of Israel, their collective story and journey. Enough that I’ve become part of them, though not converted. I’m a close friend of the tribe, maybe, by Art Green’s definition, an actual member.

On a related but different topic, inspired again by Art Green, it occurred to me how Judaism and Christianity are complementary, very much so. Judaism differs, he says, from its close relatives Christianity and Islam in its communitarian essence. The message of god, of the one, listened to through Jewish tradition, is one which creates a people, a community. This is true at CBE and is a strength of Judaism invisible to me until I became part of this community.

Christianity and Islam, he says, deliver their message to the individual. God’s love heard through those traditions focuses on healing the soul.

Judaism puts the inflection on community, on liberation, while Christianity and Islam put the inflection mark on the soul; its need for wholeness, for realizing the one is that of which each of us is a part, while, paradoxically, being wholly within each one of us. These two inflections are not a reason for differentiation, but for mutuality. The world needs to know how to live in just communities; individuals need to find their way back to the one, to realize the oneness within them. These are not differences, they are parts of a whole.

I’m on a third path, but I’m coming slowly to recognize how it intersects with other paths.

Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Coronavirus, Jefferson County, Judaism, Music, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Narrow, Pharaoh Mind

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Spring and the Corona Luna

Wednesday gratefuls: The garbage collectors. Zaidy’s Deli for Seder fixings. Jewcy for the Haggadah. Kate’s no leak bandage routine. Seoah’s potato and sausage soup. New kabbalah class starting today. Learning and the ability to learn. Books. Printing presses. Newspapers. The much maligned, but oh so important news media. Diane’s willingness to get up early to talk. Mark and Mary in month long lock downs (of varying strictures). Gov. Polis and Mayor Hancock (Denver) for stepping up. Jeffco, too.

What’s the idiot up to now? That’s how I think of my first look at the news when I get up. These days though I find the question moot. He already did it by screwing up the testing, playing keep away with the national stockpile of medical equipment, and blaming, blaming, blaming rather than acting.

John Prine died. One of my favorite musicians. Hello in There. Angel from Montgomery. Ballad of Sam Stone. An American original like Bob Dylan, who was a fan of John’s. Covid-19.

Passover starts tonight. Easter is on Sunday. Zaidy’s Deli in Denver, performing a mitzvah, offered takeaway Seder boxes with matzo, Manischewitz blackberry wine, brisket, haroset and other sides, items for the seder plate. Rigel and I drove over to CBE yesterday to pick up our order. Eve, the executive director at CBE, had put haggadahs in there.

Like many synagogues, most, I imagine, CBE will hold a virtual Passover meal on Thursday night. We’ll use the Jewcy Haggadah, the ritual for the service. It has the famous four questions including how is this night different from all other nights?

The primary purpose of Passover is to recount to children the foundational story of the Hebrew slaves and their liberation from Egypt. Kids hunt for the hidden afikoman, a piece of matzah, and get a reward if they find it. They also hear about all the plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, sing songs, and generally have a good time.

Passover brings many friends and family, including a Gentile or two or more, into a bubbe’s home. Not this year. The story with the plagues has been changed by a plague. The irony has not been missed. Many of our friends are sad because this is a joyous occasion, a time to celebrate, and not having folks in the house will seem very strange.

At passover we move from a narrow place, a narrow pharoah mind, to an expansive place, the Promised Land. Rabbi Jamie in last week’s morning prayers, Maladies and Melodies.

Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Coronavirus, Judaism, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Weather +Climate, World History

We’ll See

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Spring and the Corona Luna

Monday gratefuls: Ruby, the red Rav4. Filled up. Wearing a masque in public. This time an obvious one. The clerk at the liquor store. The clerk at the Safeway. The guy from the Pho place, bringing our order outside. I gave you some extra! A trip to Evergreen with Seoah and Kate. Sunday zoom. Woolly friends, old friends. Deep story.

If god lived on earth, all his windows would be broken. Yiddish saying.

You can see why. Pogroms in Russia. The holocaust. Virulent anti-semitism throughout European history. But not just Jews. The plague. Earthquakes. Wild fire. Volcanoes erupting. Hurricanes and tornadoes. Pedophiles even among God’s supposed ambassadors. Wealth and status inequalities all over the globe. Racism and sexism.

This is the old, old problem of theodicy. If god is omnipotent, omniscient, how can he (yes, this is the he-god.) let bad things happen? Good question, as it turns out. Some of the most convoluted theological thinking of many bright theologians have never found a satisfactory answer. IMO that’s because there is no satisfactory answer.

Does this mean that god is an intentional doofus when it comes to ruling the universe? No, it simply means that those of us who invented him and his ways, all of the hims and hers of the religious over history, have projected ourselves or our monarchs onto the sky. Turns out we’d be no good if we were omniscient or omnipotent. That’s a relief, at least to me.

There is a more radical approach to the conundrum, one that at first makes no sense. Monism. The universe is one. You can call the one god, if you want. Or, you can call it the one. The implication of monism for the question of theodicy is, well, hard to grasp.

Let’s say you choose to call the one, god. That is, the unique entity that is all stuff together is god. Some do this. Spinoza, for example. Art Green for another. There are flavors to this monism idea, but right now we’ll let those be. If the one is god, then all things, bad and good, are of the one. Volcanoes. Plagues. Hurricanes. Tsunamis. Murders. Rapists. The coronavirus. as well as, of course, love, justice, compassion, warriors, mothers, fathers, nurses and doctors.

I know. It seems like a violation of common sense. How do we get away with attributing the worst and the best to this god, this one? Short answer: we have no choice. This is the god who’s windows would all be broken, isn’t it? I mean, what sorta god…?

We start by recognizing that all of our judgments are just that, our judgments. It’s the human mind that separates events and people and their actions into good and bad. I’m not suggesting that there is no difference between good and bad. I’m just identifying them as artifacts of our minds trying to assess our world in terms of helpful and unhelpful.

Monism requires us to pause a moment and see that goods can become bad and bad things can have good results. Monism forces us to look beyond our blinkered vision, to turn around as we see, to take in the full 360 degree view.

Here’s an ancient parable, told in many cultures, that illustrates this point:

“Once upon a time, there was a farmer in the central region of China. He didn’t have a lot of money and, instead of a tractor, he used an old horse to plow his field.

One afternoon, while working in the field, the horse dropped dead. Everyone in the village said, “Oh, what a horrible thing to happen.” The farmer said simply, “We’ll see.” He was so at peace and so calm, that everyone in the village got together and, admiring his attitude, gave him a new horse as a gift.

Everyone’s reaction now was, “What a lucky man.” And the farmer said, “We’ll see.”

A couple days later, the new horse jumped a fence and ran away. Everyone in the village shook their heads and said, “What a poor fellow!”

The farmer smiled and said, “We’ll see.”

Eventually, the horse found his way home, and everyone again said, “What a fortunate man.”

The farmer said, “We’ll see.”

Later in the year, the farmer’s young boy went out riding on the horse and fell and broke his leg. Everyone in the village said, “What a shame for the poor boy.”

The farmer said, “We’ll see.”

Two days later, the army came into the village to draft new recruits. When they saw that the farmer’s son had a broken leg, they decided not to recruit him.

Everyone said, “What a fortunate young man.”

The farmer smiled again – and said “We’ll see.”

Moral of the story: There’s no use in overreacting to the events and circumstances of our everyday lives. Many times what looks like a setback, may actually be a gift in disguise. And when our hearts are in the right place, all events and circumstances are gifts that we can learn valuable lessons from.

As Fra Giovanni once said:

“Everything we call a trial, a sorrow, or a duty, believe me… the gift is there and the wonder of an overshadowing presence.””

This is a monistic perspective. And, in its vein, I’d ask you to take the rock out of your hand for a moment, quite breaking god’s windows over the coronavirus, and say to yourself, “We’ll see.”

Coronavirus, Dogs, Family, Friends, Health, Jefferson County, Judaism, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, US History, Woolly Mammoths

Seeing

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Spring and the Corona Luna

Monday gratefuls: Corn dogs. State Fair corn dogs. The Minnesota State Fair. The Great Minnesota Get Together. The Great U.S. stay apart. The bailout. I think. Being alone with Kate and Seoah. Those pictures of Murdoch from Brenton. Life in a world historical event. Life. Death. The power of Monday.

Here’s what I’ve seen. A black SUV, a Lexus, next to me at a stoplight. Latex gloved hands on the steering wheel. On the road to Loveland Saturday all the LED road signs read: Avoid Non-Essential Travel. A cascade of it’s gonna be later messages from Instacart. So many maps and graphs and charts. Fewer cars on Black Mountain Drive, especially when I go out for the newspaper around 5:30 am. Empty parking lots. A closed outlet mall. So many e-mails starting with we care about you and that’s why our business is doing X. Friends and family on zoom. The rabbi on zoom, singing about breath. A sign at Bergen Bark Inn. We’re taking care of the dogs of essential workers like doctors, nurses, firefighters, police, grocery store workers. The worker at Starbucks extending a credit card reader so I could insert the card, then remove it on my own. My own gloved hand on the hose nozzle at the Phillips 66. That bottle of hand sanitizer in my cup holder. Seoah with her lysol spray hitting each package that gets delivered.

When will it ever end? When will it ever end?

And, yet. A moment in time like no other. Yes, the Spanish Flu. Yes. But, no. Not in this millennia. Not in my lifetime. Not in this century.

The first quarter of 2020 has not gone so well. What with all the dog bites, then Gertie’s death, then the plague. Yes, the Moronic plague. And, the virus. True.

However, I find it exciting, too. What will happen next? How bad can this get? Wow. Really? The ways people are coping. The empty streets of big cities around the world. The bravery. The stupidity and the cupidity.

Like one facebook meme said: This is the first time we could save the world by watching television.

Commentary on Religion, Family, Friends, Health, Judaism, Politics, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, US History, Woolly Mammoths

Let It Be

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Spring and the Corona Luna

Sunday gratefuls: Technology, not our savior, but a friend. Brenton and his 3,500 steps. Bob Dylan and his new song, Murder Most Foul. The Weight, by the Band. Pictures of Murdoch coming from Loveland. Zoom. Over the wires, over the air, over the ocean and across the desert. Wow. Each one of you, readers. Whoever you are. I love you.

Zoomed. Again. The new hang out, like the ol’ Kid Canteen on Harrison Street. Mark in Riyadh. Mary in Singapore. Diane in San Francisco. Kate. Me. On Shadow Mountain. Bombs over Riyadh, Mark said. Have you heard? Singapore’s like normal, almost, Mary said.

Diane was cold, doing a Mark Twain version of the coldest night he ever spent. We talked, decades of back story, going back even into the 19th century. All of us linked by genetics, by fate, by Indiana. Kate looked good.

Paul in Maine. Tom, Bill, Mark in the cold place. On Shadow Mountain. Cranes flying up, up, weighted and buoyed. The mystery of flight. Caretaking, its weight. Wondering how we can survive. Can we keep it up?

All of us gone viral. Lives infected. The future uncertain. How can we survive?

We’re all monastics, huddled in our apartments, our camps, our homes. Rattlin round in them like ol dry bones. Is it life without others? I would say yes. I would say no. I would say, well, I just don’t know.

Fear the moronic plague the most. He and his will kill us all if it might lift the Dow. Plenty of money for some, for most, none at all.

Hear, oh, world. The one is the lord god, the lord. Can you follow an ancientrail created by slaves, crossing seas, and wandering? I thought so for a moment last week. Put Kate in a prayer, held her there. Tears came to my eyes, I wanted it.

But, no. No longer me. No way back into Easter, either. Following the bird, the rock, the sky, the lake, the trout, the love of one for another, all the spirit in all the things all the one. Must be enough.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Cooking, Family, Feelings, Health, Judaism, Kabbalah, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Breathe in, Breathe out

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Spring and the Corona Luna

Saturday gratefuls: Murdoch jail break. Seoah’s spring rolls. Kate’s good day. Her referral to an ostomy nurse (for her feeding tube). The white, confectioner’s sugar look on Black Mountain, our lodgepoles, the solar panels. Rabbi Jamie’s Maladies and Melodies zoom session yesterday. These days of our lives. Learning new things about society, about ourselves, about our globalist reality.

Some miscellaneous things.

Cousin Diane sent out this message about how to care for groceries. Then I read that those of us over 60 should not be going to the grocery store at all. Will keep on using pickup when I can (not delivery), but Seoah may end doing up most of our in-store shopping. Anyhow, here’s the video. I found it helpful.

On the subject of resilience here’s a link to a Harvard Business Review article, “That discomfort you’re feeling is grief .” It helped me name a complex of feelings that come and go, stimulated by the virus, yes, but not exclusively about it. The more we can grasp the emotional, the psychological impacts of the pandemic, the less they will cause us unwanted and unexpected trouble.

In a soothing and, at the same time, provocative hour on Zoom Rabbi Jamie took us through a modification of Jewish morning prayers. Maladies and Melodies. Songs he’d written, psalms he’d translated. His thoughts along the way.

Two things stood out for me. He began with the idea of moving from a narrow mind, like the narrow, confined space of Egypt for the Hebrew slaves, (Passover is two weeks away.), to a broad, expansive space. From a narrow, pharaoh mind to wide vistas and open hearts. How do we move, I wondered, and I imagine he intended this, from a lock down state of mind to a broad mind even though fear and actual confinement are the norm for people around the world?

In a meditation (He’s a Buddhist, too, and spent time in Nepal on pilgrimage.) he had us focus on our breath. Breathe in, breathe out. Don’t force it. Follow it. He mentioned breath as neshama, that part of our soul most directly connected to the one. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. It’s a respiratory virus. It affects the lungs, our ability to breath. Breathe in, breath out. I thought this. I imagine others did, too.

Can anything separate us from the one? No. Not even something that blocks our breath, because our neshama remains linked to the one even if our breathing ceases. So what is there to fear? A death? Still one with the one. Breathe in, breathe out.

Cooking, Coronavirus, Family, Jefferson County, Talmud

Thanks for coming to work

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Spring and the 1% sliver of the Leap Year Moon

Monday gratefuls: A chicken! King Sooper had a chicken! I got the second to last one. Drug makers. Pharmacists. Nurses, especially nurses. All health care workers, all around the world. Politicians, in particular U.S. governors and mayors, actually confronting the crisis. Democrat senators holding the line for working people. Fear. Keeps people inside.

Grateful for Brother Mark, confronting a difficult time in Saudi Arabia, doing well. Staying in touch with his colleagues, learning new tech. So many of us have to make dramatic changes in our working lives. Those who can. Hurray!

I think about all those folks like waiters and chefs and busboys and retail store workers whose jobs have disappeared. A good time to be retired. A good time to have sold your company. Though there is that falling market thing.

I’m on daf 8b, the second side of page 8, of Shabbat, the second tractate of the Talmud, a collection of commentary on the mishnah, written legal theory from the older oral tradition. I just got daf 17 of Shabbat today, so I’m closing in on being current. I’ll get back to one a day this week for sure.

Went to the grocery store, King Sooper, yesterday. Found, 9 days after I started looking, a whole chicken. That means I can make the chicken noodle soup that Kate likes so well. After my workout this morning. No more than 3 chicken products, no more than 3 ground beef. Signs. King Sooper looked somewhat less devastated than Safeway did last week. Perhaps the panicked ones have begun to calm down, realizing this is a marathon, not a sprint.

Pharmaceuticals. I went to King Sooper because I needed to pick up an albuterol inhaler that I use for exercise. Oh, the clerk said, I have two for you. Of the same thing? Yes, I’ll take the $10 one. She laughed. The other, brand name inhaler, was $94. Same drug, same amount, same delivery method. Which one would you choose? Everybody got a good laugh.

I tell each clerk thank you for coming to work. We need you and you’re here. At the liquor store I asked the guy how business was. Slow today, but really busy last week. Well. You might have to help out the other small businesses. You’re right, he said. I might.

King Sooper was not crowded unlike my Safeway trip. In Safeway the aisles were full, people looked dazed. At King Sooper yesterday folks looked like purposeful shoppers, finding what they needed, not in OMG I gotta get to the toilet paper aisle mode. The tables were gone, but the in-story Starbucks was open.

Tried to get some takeout from Rocky Mountain Wraps, but they had closed. Sunday hours. We’re encouraged here to get takeout from restaurants and tip well, try to help the small business folks. I plan to over the next weeks. It’s nice to have some variety. Seoah made a shrimp and pasta meal last night that was very good.

Saw today that restrictions need to get tighter if we’re to control the viruses spread. OK with us.

Commentary on the news, Family, Friends, Health, Talmud

Cut Precious Stones

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Spring and the Leap Year Moon

Sunday gratefuls: the long shabbat. the damage being done to Trump’s presidency. By himself. The solar snow shovel. Scott Simpson’s note about his journey back from Colorado. Ode’s crane stories. Crane. Again, still, the truckers, shelvers, nurses, clerks, doctors, cleaners, gas station attendants. Hope we remember their service afterward. The loft.

Shelter in place. Not yet an order here in Colorado. But. I looked at its parameters in California. Only essential visits: medical facilities, groceries, outdoor activities with others 6 feet away, caring for others who need in home assistance. Then I thought. Huh. Kate and I have been doing shelter in place for more than a year and a half. CBE events being the only major deviation. Odd, but the case.

Reading the news is like watching a slow motion car wreck. Can’t watch. Can’t look away. A mathematics professor from the U.ofCo.’s Biofrontiers Institute compared our current situation to those in Florida awaiting a predicted hurricane. Everything looks normal, feels the same. But 8 days away is a powerful disrupter. It’s not a question of whether, but when.

Got way behind on reading the Talmud, but the stay-at-home mode has allowed me to begin catching up. Maybe today. Wondered the other day about why I was doing this. It’s a huge commitment and it isn’t my tradition. If I found it uninteresting, I would quit. And, some of it is pretty boring. Berkahot, the first tractate which I finished yesterday, had many entries about the times for prayer, about where to pray, how many folks it took to pray. It ended strong though with many entries on modesty and where to defecate. Yes, really. The Talmud finds all of life worthy of commentary.

It’s like travel for me. Immersing myself in a strange world, one complete unto itself. Not mine, but human. Therefore interesting. There’s another aspect of it that’s like travel. I can say I’ve been there. Outside the world of Judaism nobody would care, but within Beth Evergreen, in other Jewish places, having done the Daf Yomi is like having gone on the Haj. It’s a mark of honor.

Perhaps the most salient reason is that the Talmud provides context for my life on the ancientrail of former slaves from Egypt, a people whose wandering is not over.

Here’s an example from near the end of Tractate Berkahot: “Bar Kappara taught: A person should always teach his child a clean and simple craft. The Gemara asks: What craft is considered clean and simple? Rav Ḥisda said: Cutting precious stones.”

Family, Friends, Health, Kabbalah, Mussar, Weather +Climate

World. Changed.

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Spring and the Leap Year Moon

Friday gratefuls: Ted of All Trades for two pushes yesterday. A beautiful snowday. Mussar on Zoom. Kate on camera. Rigel, hip deep in the snow. Leftover cabbage and corned beef. Each of you. Isolation. A changing world. Internet. DSL. Black Mountain, Shadow Mountain.

And on we go together, separate. Sister Mary had planned to come for a conference this weekend. Canceled. Brother Mark has had two hours of instruction on Blackboard, an online instructional tool, and will start teaching with it soon. Good luck, Marko. We had over 10 inches of snow yesterday, snow all day. I cleaned the back deck seven times. Ted came and plowed us out twice.

Our Thursday mussar class was on Zoom. A good medium, fourteen signed on. Some technical glitches, to be expected. We were able to do our class, an hour and a half, read Rabbi Jamie’s clear, new translation of the Orchot Tzaddikim, and do our usual back and forth. I’m not sure this would have worked as well if I didn’t already know the others online. Or, maybe it would have been a different, but also rich experience. A self-quarantine positive note was Debra Cope’s presence from her new home in Maryland. Online the distance was not a barrier. Good to see her and hear her.

I have a new class with Rabbi Jamie starting in April, but this time I imagine we’ll all be on Zoom. Friend Tom Crane poked those of us who gather by zoom once a month. We’ll be meeting on Sunday morning to talk about what we’ll do during the present crisis. All of us are well past the at-risk age of 60. Leaning on this generation of online conferencing tools will help at least some of us.

The world has changed. But we don’t yet know how, or how much. I remember men on the moon. Yes, I’m that old. Even the first off-earth landing for a human doesn’t compare. We don’t where we’re headed. We’re not even sure where we’ve been. Ride it out. Wu wei for all.