Samain Thanksgiving Moon
Up and on the road around 5:30 am. Out to Park Adventist Hospital in Littleton for two more imaging studies. The first one, an ultrasound, looked for narrowing of arteries feeding blood to the bowels. If they are narrowed, food passing through the intestines can put pressure on them and cause nausea and pain. The second, a barium contrast study, combined fluoroscopy, which follows movement in internal organs, with still x-rays. This study was to determine how food moves through the digestive system from top to bottom.
The techs let me stay with Kate for the second study. I sat on her rollator, think walker with a seat, wheels, and a brake. To not expose me to the x-rays I had to sit back in the little booth the technicians use. I got to see the barium she swallowed go down her throat and into her stomach. This was fluoroscopy. Very strange. I’ve gotten to know the inner you, I told Kate.
Afterward we went to Krispy Kreme and got a couple of original glazed to blot out the chalky taste of the barium.
Gabe’s concert is tonight. Big fun.
Last night, as the kids and I were making pizza over at CBE, I got a call from Kate. Cell service is dicey in the mountains, but I finally understood. The door blew open, again, and all three dogs escaped. Uh-oh. That meant I put on my hat and left, telling Tara on the way out, “Our dogs escaped. It’s more important.” Drove home. Kate tried to call me three times but for some reason I didn’t hear the calls. The neighbor had brought the dogs home while I was on my way. Since it’s 30 minutes each way by the time I got home and found this out, it was too late to return. I’ve not been a reliable teacher this first semester.
As we’ve noticed other times our dogs have escaped, they were pretty damned pleased with themselves. Rigel’s smile would have lit up Broadway. Kate said they came home prancing. Oh, what a good time we had.
Life on the mountain. Never dull.
Happy to have some good news to report about Jon. Went to his court date yesterday. His inner attitude seems to be shifting away from anger about the divorce (understandable, but not helpful) toward getting on with his life, accepting the constraints of the restraining order (unreasonable, but legally enforceable, as he just discovered). He wants to get his art in a gallery or up for sale. This is big because it’s a key part of his identity that lay fallow during the twelve years of his marriage. He needs positive reinforcement and he’s had more than his share of negatives over the last few years.
He’s a very talented, smart guy who can handle all the work necessary to remodel his home, replace an axle in his car, ski a great line down an A-basin bowl, teach elementary age kids how to express themselves. I hope he can organize his life so these thing line up, move him forward, and make him feel good about himself.
I’m feeling a bit stressed, a lot going on. Religious school tonight. I’m taking pizza makings and teaching a unit on holidays, especially winter holidays. The kids will reimagine, reconstruct a new winter holiday. Tomorrow morning Kate has two imaging studies, looking for zebras. Tomorrow evening is Gabe’s winter concert in Stapleton. A sequelae of the hearing yesterday is that Jon can’t, for the moment, attend. The old protection order carved out an exception to the 100 yards rule for events with the kids, things like parent-teacher conferences, concerts, doctor visits, but the law is a blunt instrument. Yesterday by default it eliminated those exceptions. Jon wants me to go to represent our side of the family. Important for Gabe. I’ll go.
Got reinforced shortly after the move out here when I had to deal with prostate cancer. That shook me. I worked hard to keep myself upright and maybe, in the process, began to consolidate a lot of learning. A major part of that consolidation came from the support I got from family and friends. Oh. Life can be good, even when it’s bad. Weird. Since the move, it’s been one damned thing after another, or it feels that way right now. Those things forced a going deep, being honest, being grateful a lot. Now, four years later, our move anniversary is the Winter Solstice, my Colorado Self, the one born in the alembic of all those insults, has asserted itself.
Interesting. First, on Dec. 6th I will join all teachers in the religious school, board members, and staff for an emergency response training evening. Stimulated, as you might expect, by Pittsburgh, but always an active consideration.
retrograde, 9th House.
Like the study of kabbalah with Rabbi Jamie it’s easy to get overwhelmed with all the new information since astrology and kabbalah are centuries, millennia old. Both have multiple competing schools and a good deal of learning necessary to fairly evaluate them. That is, they both require a certain suspension of disbelief in order to get traction. Kabbalah has enriched my understanding of Judaism in many ways, none more important than its insistence that all the Torah is metaphor, but it took me a good ways in to the study to learn this. By undermining a literal interpretation of the Torah, kabbalah gave me a way to appreciate and use the biblical material without having to contort my own thinking. In my world that reopened those old stories that we know so well, made them available for my own growth.
To give you a taste of the possibilities here are a few lines from an analysis of mercury retrograding into my 9th house: “Re-examine what you believe as Mercury backs up into the 9th house. Your beliefs create what you experience. It’s time to consider the future. What you do now effects the outcome. What’s your overall philosophy of life? Are your really living it?…During this transit you may be called upon to re-assess what the truth really means.”
One more turn to Tarnas before my consultation with Elisa tomorrow. He made his move toward a synthesis of the modern mind and the Romantic–equivalent to the distinction between the self shaped by the Copernican disenchanted cosmos and the primal, ensouled (enchanted) universe that went before. His initial step came through depth psychology, tapping the collective unconscious and the idea of synchronicity to suggest a permeable self influenced by the cosmos and influencing it. Having opened the door between Self and cosmos with depth psychology, he turned toward astrology.
His argument about skepticism as a tool, not an end, was a wakin’ up moment for me. Oh, duh! Of course. Only I hadn’t seen it that way. Skepticism was a way of life for me and I treated the world of ideas as you might expect. I embraced almost nothing, held every philosophical and religious claim at a skeptical arms length. Yes. And no. I had let the tool use me, rather me using the tool.
My only point here is that astrology, especially one linked as Tarnas does to the concept of archetypes, may provide us with aids to self-knowledge, aids that light up an enchanted universe, help it become visible. And if it does, I want to use it, include it in my tool kit. Right there alongside skepticism. But I don’t see it as the only, or even the most important, clue to an ensouled universe.
SeoAh left. CBE, neighbors, and Kate’s sewing friends stepped in. We have food from Marilyn and Irv, Jamie, Holly and Eduardo, and Tara. Joan and Lauri will bring dinner on Wednesday and Friday. Helps a lot, easing back to full time cooking. Helps a lot, too, feeling the caring and love of folks from various walks of our lives.
7 degrees this morning on Shadow Mountain. About 10 inches of fluffy powder since Saturday night. Fell yesterday clearing snow off our temporary decking, the palettes and stall mats I’ve shown before. Not hurt. Reminded, again, pay attention.
But, as the human mind, using its sharpest tools, reason and skepticism, saw through this primitive perspective, and, as monotheistic religions posited a creator who made a special creature, humankind, in their God’s own image, a gap grew between the human and the universe. Now, in the modern era, we look out from within to a morally neutral cosmos, devoid of soul or spirit, moving with randomness according to physical laws that, since we have discerned them, reveal the trapped, the determined nature of, well, nature.
I’m at Dino’s on far west Colfax, near Kipling. This is an Italian place that my friend Alan Rubin used to visit when he grew up on west Colfax, further east, into Denver. The old orthodox neighborhood. Much like, I guess, the northside of Minneapolis at about the same time. His dad was a brilliant immigrant who ended up running a string of dry cleaners, doing very well. Dino’s, founded in 1963, hasn’t changed its decor since then, we both guessed. Great pizza.
The weather gods have chosen an apt offering for the last day of fall, 8 inches of snow. In true Colorado fashion it will probably be here tonight and tomorrow, gone by Thursday if not late Wednesday. Looking forward to it. A difference between Colorado and Minnesota exists in forecasting snow. Here in Colorado people pant for the snow, welcome it, do celebratory dances. In Minnesota, not so much. It means work and slick roads in the Gopher State; here snow means beauty, tourist dollars, and will be gone conveniently.