Midsommar Most Heat Moon
Yesterday was hot. Hit 91 I think and the heat lasted through the night. At Marilyn’s birthday party we spoke with her son, Kevin. Kevin lives in Las Vegas and said, “105 is a relief. People say it’s over a hundred degrees, doesn’t matter. No. When it’s 117, that’s worse. 105 is better. 90 is really good.” Well, if he says so. Not a subtlety I want to become accustomed to.
The party was at the home of two of Marilyn’s friends, Jan and Claude. Their home, like the Bernstein’s, is up a long private road, but unlike the Bernsteins, their house sits near the end of a wide valley situated between two shorter mountains. The valley itself is open at the east, looking toward North Turkey Creek road and well beyond that, to Denver. In the distance were mountains, the furthest still carrying some snow, the closer ones, mountains that enclose Evergreen, green with their lodgepole pine contrasted against buff colored rock.
The sun in the mountains is brutal. There is less atmosphere to block out the UV rays and it was a clear, blue morning. Forgot my hat so this bald head needed shade. Jan and Claude’s house has a huge wrap around deck and yesterday it had maybe 20 folding tables setup end to end, the sort used in churches and synagogues across America, with paper tablecloths and silverware wrapped in cloth napkins. A small tent welcomed guests in the driveway with mimosas and orange juice. Nametags, too.
Marilyn turns 70 on July 12th. She and Irv have lived in Conifer for 45 years, all that time in the same house up King’s Valley road. Over that time she and Irv have made a large mass of friends, many of whom testified to the many mitzvahs she’s done over the years. Marilyn is energetic, “This year I’m doing a 7 mile hike each weekend just to show myself I still can.” She chairs the Adult Education Committee at Beth Evergreen and has done so for many years.
Many of the folks at the party were from Beth Evergreen, but there were also many who used to work with Marilyn in the Jeffco School District where she was the public relations director. One, Jennifer, was with Marilyn in that office at the time of the Columbine shootings. Marilyn handled public relations for the school district during and after the shooting. Columbine still has a big footprint on the Colorado psyche, the nation’s, too.
Danced the hora last night, mixing up my feet as I normally do while dancing, but enjoying myself anyway. Joy, it turns out, is a character trait in mussar. “It’s a mitzvah to be happy.” Rabbi Nachman. Judaism constantly challenges my Midwestern protestant ethos, not primarily intellectually, but emotionally. Last night was a good example.
We ate our meal together outside, all at one picnic table. Tara’s Hebrew school students had decorated it and it was colorful underneath our paper plates and plastic bowls. The evening was a perfect combination of cool warmth and low humidity. The grandmother ponderosa stood tall, lightning scarred against the blue black sky. Bergen mountain had already obscured the sun which still lit up the clouds from its hiding place.
We all laughed when Rabbi Jamie asked if I hoped (another middot, character trait, clustered with joy) to be able to greet strangers the same way. “Well, not by kissing them on the lips or licking them.” I was thinking, but yes, I hope I can add that level of uncalculated joy to my meetings with others.
Looking for light in prison. An assignment for the kabbalah class tonight. Rabbi Jamie suggested watching a movie like Hurricane, about Rubin Carter. I thought of MLK and Letters from the Birmingham Jail and Nelson Mandela, too. Then I remembered a portion of the 
Finally, nine years later, Devaki is pregnant again, this time with the eighth son Kansa dreaded. This son is Krishna, an avatar of Vishnu.
Kabbalah. Reread Genesis 1-2:3. Now, ask yourself a question that occurred to a long ago kabbalist. What is the light created on the first day of creation? We know it’s not the sun or the moon or the stars because they don’t blink on until the 4th day, 1:14-19. So what is the ohr (light) of verse 3. “And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.”?
It’s a very bright group around the table: a historian, a Berkeley trained lawyer, an organizational consultant, a Hebrew scholar, a rabbi in training, a second lawyer, a teenager with a good grasp of theoretical physics, two retired hospital administrators. This makes the conversation sparky, inspirational.
Kate continues to struggle with dry mouth, a very sore throat and other symptoms of Sjogren’s syndrome. She’s lost weight as a result. Lab tests don’t suggest anything terminal going on, but her distress is significant. If you know Kate, you know she has an energizer bunny mode, but she’s been on the battery depleted side of that equation for a while now.
A new seasonal reality for us: pine pollen. All these lodgepole pines insist on involving on us in their reproductive orgy that happens this time of year. A fine yellow dust settles on everything. Coming in easily even through screens, it’s especially apt to settle on things electrical, so the computers and the tv and the microwave all have a coating. It also coats our solar panels, reducing their efficiency. If it rains, a yellow scrim settles over the driveway, pooling where the water does. I wish these pines could figure out a more direct way to make more pines.
While hiking and thinking about Reimagining, I realized I’m taking an atelier approach to it. Ateliers train would be artists in the classical mode, using lots of drawing, life models and work with perspective. They’re considered conservative in today’s art world, a sort of throwback to the artist/apprentice studio that dominated art education for so many centuries.
Yet what I really want to do is rethink what faith is, why we go to the places that we go to for spiritual nourishment and whether there might be a real faith, an approach to the religious life, that emerges naturally from the world in which we live and carry on our daily lives. That is, one without a charismatic founder or an ethnic base, a faith which would help us see the holy ordinary, that would expose the ligatures that bind us to this planet, to the plants and animals and minerals and atmosphere, expose them and help us see them as the loving embrace that they are, not only as limits to our lives.
While the world burns, at least the Trump world, kabbalah suggests a bigger world, more worlds, right next to this one. There is, as Rabbi Jamie said, a bigger picture. I learned a similar lesson from Deer Creek Canyon during my cancer season two years ago. These Rocky Mountains, still toddlers as mountains go, were and will be present when we are not. In their lifetime humanity will likely have come and gone.
Yet. We do not live either in the deep geological past nor in the distant geological future, we live now. Our lives, our mayfly lives from the vantage point of geological time, come into existence and blink out, so we necessarily look at the moment, the brief seventy to one hundred year moment into which, as Heidegger said, we are thrown.
Somehow we have to realize that though our lives are small compared to the immensity of the universe and the imponderable nature of time, they are everything while we have them. As for me, I find all this comforting. Putting my efforts in the larger perspective gives me peace, putting them in the immediacy of my life gives me energy. We will not complete the task, no, we will not. But we are not free to give it up either.