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  • 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


  • 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.


  • A Busy Thursday

    Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

    Friday gratefuls: Alan. Snow. Ruby’s all season shoes. On Monday. Plus many fluids. Back pain. PSA blood draw. Cancer. And other fancy stuff. Shadow and the marrow bones. Tom’s portrait of Shadow. Lake Superior. The Boreal Forest. The Arrowhead. Grand Marais. Thunder Bay. Up North. Parashat Tazria-Metzora

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Being a student

    Week Kavannah: Persistence. Grit. Netzach.

    One brief shining: The Mountains rise up and slope down into Valleys, our roads here in the Rockies thin slices of asphalt or gravel following the rising up and the sloping down, the changes in direction commanded by rocky prominences and Snow melt filled Streams carrying the Mountains themselves downstream ever so slowly, slowly.

     

    Yesterday. Seems so far away. So far away. Diane reminded me to ask for help. To set up ways to get to appointments-not only when I’m being sedated. I know this transition has to occur. Yet I’ve gone so long now on my own. I need, yes need, to let others do for me what I would do for them.

    Irv and Paul and I discussed the nature of evil, whether it exists at all or is just a human construct.

    At the Kabbalah Experience we continued our exploration of the story of Adam and Eve. This time wondering about our ability to live outside the givenness of our lives, to see what we cannot know exists.

    Dave Sanders offered the Truman Show as an example. A simulacrum. Where is the edge of our learned world? Do we need a stage light to crash through the set for a big reveal?

    His point? The Garden of Eden as Seahaven, the village in Truman’s life. A small paradise filled with every needful thing. The stage light, the Snake and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Bad. The expulsion as Truman’s daring escape on the sail boat.

    Later Rabbi Jamie and our Thursday afternoon mussar group discussing the middah of bushah, most often translated as shame. Not in Jamie’s translation of the Orchot Tzaddikim. He uses self-consciousness or conscientiousness.

    Bushah arises when we realize we have been less than who we see ourselves to be. Shame comes when we see ourselves not as less than we see ourselves to be, but when we see ourselves as less than intrinsically. Shame, in other words, is an extreme, even perverted instance of bushah. Guilt, embarrassment, chagrin may represent the mid-point of this continuum from shyness to shame, the healthy feelings that encourage us to investigate our behaviors, then act to change them.

    After all that I drove over to Evergreen Medical for a blood draw, another PSA. My every three month peek into the status of my cancer. Waiting for the hormone resistant shoe to drop. Wish I could allay that feeling, expunge it. Just wait and see.

    But I know that’s the next phase of this journey, that it marks a more treacherous road ahead. A part of me wishes we’d just get on with it. Go down the chemotherapy path or other treatments for hormone resistant Stage 4 prostate cancer.

    I don’t want that, not really. I want to stay where I am as long as I can. Androgen deprivation therapy, my current protocol, always fails. Not whether, but when. The waiting though carries its own cost. Will this blood draw be the one?

    Living with this uncertainty and the insidious effects of back pain can create moments of intense darkness.


  • Wildness in the Garden

    Spring and the Wu Wei Moon

    Friday gratefuls: Select P.T. Rick. Ginny. Luke. Jamie. Marilyn. Ratzon. Mussar. Shadow, the eater of bones. Kate, always Kate. Breakfast for Shadow. Cookunity. Vegetables home grown. Nathan. Marilyn and Irv. Steroid injections. Anavah. Diane’s healing. Mark and his ESL students in Al Kharj. Snow, a lot. Easter and resurrection.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Snow

    Week Kavannah: Joy. Simcha.

    One brief shining: A Mountain Spring includes 70 degree weather yesterday and 19 this morning; Sunshine and greening grass yesterday and Snow coming straight down, already covering my backyard this morning; at some point a sudden shift will occur and a Mountain Summer will have begun.

     

    My Wild Neighbors like to eat Garden produce. My new Greenhouse will have net covering to foil them. Besides I let my Dandelions go to seed and multiply offering dainty treats for the Mule Deer and Elk who love this briefly available food. I also offer plenty of Grass and other Plants desired by my Ungulate friends over the course of the growing season.

    Shadow’s amusement will include this year Voles, Mice, Rabbits, Chipmunks, and the occasional Squirrel, either Red or Aberts. My guess is that she’s not the predator Rigel and Vega were, but she’ll still have fun chasing these Mountain Mammals for whom speed is safety.

    I’m not fully in the Wild, but I am fully in the Wildlands Urban Interface and the Arapaho National Forest. No Grassy yard expected or desired. Only what grows on its own. My happy place.

     

    chatgpt

    Third new human story class. Holding the Genesis accounts of creating humans to closer account. For example. You can’t eat of the Tree of Good and Bad. How would either Eve or Adam know what that meant? They have no experience, no prior knowledge of those words. Good and Bad are empty vessels.

    The voice, as Twain calls God, may as well have said don’t eat of the Tree of Rocks and Scissors.

    And that Snake that gets all the blame? Well, guess who made him. Why make a sneaky Snake in the first place. Then to blame and punish him for acting as the Snake God created him to be? Doesn’t really seem fair, does it?

    I wonder, too, about God’s observation about the human (adam). It’s not good for the human to be alone. Hmmm. From a Kabbalistic perspective that sounds like God’s contraction in the ayn sof, the emptiness that preceded everything. God pulled back to leave room for the universe. Was God lonely, too?

    There are more, many more questions about this old, old story. All of them echoing down the millennia since it’s inclusion in the Torah. Original sin, for example.

    Here’s a new take on original sin (in which I have never believed) that came to me yesterday. When Adam and Eve eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Bad they become self-conscious. They need clothes. Might the original human sin have been self-consciousness?

    That is, could the awareness of themselves as beings separate from each other and the rest of the Garden’s plants and animals, be the fall. The illusion that our separateness is real and total. That we are somehow wholly independent from the natural world and other humans, too?

    I could easily draw a line through all of human history that would link this fallacy with all the major sins our flesh is heir to.


  • Growing My Soul

    Imbolc and the Birthday Moon

    Tuesday gratefuls: Tupelo Honey. Birthday lunch. Alan. Downtown Denver. Challenging myself. Adopting Shadow. Good CT scan. CT. With contrast. The wide world of medical imaging. Waiting rooms. Hospital parking lots. Good sleep. Great Sol. Lodgepole shadows.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: I.V.’s

    Week kavannah:  Netzach with zerizut and simcha

    One brief shining: Shadow curls her small head up toward my chair arm, her dark eyes with black pupils looking into mine, asking for food which I have placed behind the chair-where she usually eats, perhaps she’s forgotten and I’ll have to show her. I’ll give it a bit, better she finds it for herself.

     

    Never thought I’d be talking about growing my soul. Yet. As I’ve come to understand the term, I do. What is my soul? Multi-layered. The first and core level is the nefesh. What is the nefesh? The nefesh is that which identifies me as human.

    I say it’s DNA. Why? Because DNA links me to all living things and identifies me as part of Mother Earth’s evolutionary experiment while giving me a unique location in that experiment and a uniqueness, too, within my species. Being part of the grand evolutionary experiment also connects me to the organic and inorganic building blocks which allow that experiment to flourish, including the boundless fusion energy of Great Sol which passes its vitality from the solar furnace to leafy, green plants.

    The neshama soul grows in the space between the DNA created unique me and the outer world in which it moves and lives. Heidegger called this the dasein. There can be no neshama without the nefesh, but likewise there can be no nefesh without being-in-the-world, dasien, as a shaper of that world and as a being shaped by that world.

    As my nefesh encounters the world as it is, that encounter flows dialectically, into my dasein and out to the dasien of the other. In that tension comes the vitality, the livingness of being alive. Note that in this view there is no clean, clear distinction between me and thee. Or, me and my Shadow. Or, my favorite Lodgepole. Lodgepoleness flows into me and Charlieness flows into the Lodgepole. We are both changed during the encounter. Think of the Japanese idea of forest-bathing.

    We can come to notice that our actions have influence on others and theirs on ours. How do we live into those encounters, how can we be there with the other fully? That’s where disciplines like mussar come in. There are ways of becoming that enhance our encounters and ways that diminish them.

    Say my dasein includes Shadow. How I approach her affects her dasein so that we either grow closer to mutuality or further away from it. If I move suddenly, I notice, she retreats, moving away from the boundary of my dasein. That tells me, in my Shadow inflected dasein, to move more slowly in her presence. We can call that realization an expression of chesed, of loving kindness, which allows our dasein’s to come closer, to increase our intimacy.

    Just where my head went this morning. From my dasein to yours. Good day.


  • Zohar

    Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

    Shabbat gratefuls: Ruth. New Snow. Cold. Full night’s sleep. Dreams. Alan. Acting. Directing. Singing. Dandelion. Evergreen. Ruby. Gas. Alan’s BMW. Electrons. Joanne. Taxes. Death and taxes. Diane, healing. Social media. Staying off social media. Gabe. Interviewing Rabbi Jamie. Breakfast. Peskyfowlatarian. Shrimp last night. Smoothie for lunch with protein powder.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Learning

    Kavannah 2025: Creativity

    Kavannah this new week: Chesed (this week, especially toward myself)

    Practice for rachamim (compassion): Listening for the melody of the other (& self)

    One brief shining: Opened the “very good” copy of Art Green’s Guide to the Zohar and fell further into a world of monsters, demons, divinity, and hints for seeing the sacred, following an ancientrail with trailheads in ancient Greece, in the Tanakh, merging Athens and Jerusalem, painting a picture that only the lev can see, eyes blinded by scientism and crude materialism, a cracking whacking inner smacking of old ways of thought confronting my deep desire to see what I’m looking at.

     

    I now have all 12 volumes of the Pritzker Zohar, translation from an original Aramaic text compiled by Stanford professor Daniel Matt. He and other scholars translate the text and provide detailed commentary. This is as close to the original as I’ll ever get since I have scant Aramaic and only a bit more Hebrew.

    It’s an odd experience, studying Kabbalah. At least for me. Its way of thinking and expanding and heading down unexpected paths often obscures more than it enlightens. At first. Though as I’ve gone on from the classes I’ve taken with Rabbi Jamie and David Sanders, especially with the Zohar, I find resonance with the wild speculation, leaps of thought, fantastic imagery.

    Accused, I discovered in recent reading, of pantheism, the writers of the Zohar have felt and pressed their way toward insights consonant with my own. I’m discovering in this study why a systematic ge-ology, which I tried to write some years ago, couldn’t come from my lev. I experience the world as a mystic, a world ready to offer revelation at every turn, from a study of the Joseph story in Genesis to a Bull Elk watching me from the Forest’s edge as rain pelted down. Or the knowledge that in Emet, truth in Hebrew, are the three mother letters, aleph-the beginning, mem-the middle, and tav-the end, so that truth has to have a holistic context, is never a single statement or claim. Or the death of my beloved. Or the appreciation of sound as a creative force. In other words revelation of the One, the oneness, the unity and yet the creatively ever advancing all never stops coming to us, is available in every instance of every day.

    I keep coming back to Rami Shapiro’s wonderful metaphor of each of us as waves created by the ocean, pushed up and moving for a time, then collapsing back into the ocean. Always part of the One, yet also distinct and remarkable, unique. Our distinctiveness never lost, yet also absorbed into the whole.


  • Meh in the rearview. For now.

    Yule and the Full Quarter Century Moon

    Monday gratefuls: Marilyn and Irv. Alan. The Full Moon. Cold night. 4 degrees. Good sleeping. Celebrex twice daily now. Chronic pain. Snow. Moving stuff around. Brings George Carlin to mind. Carlin and Monty Python. Douglas Adams. The trinity of comedy for me. Exodus parshas begin this week. Zohar, all 12 volumes. Clearing space for study. My son. Murdoch. Seoah. Korea. Mary in Brisbane. Mark in Al Kharj. Diane, healing.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Grocery pickup

    Kavannah 2025: Creativity

    Year Tarot: The Archer

    Kavannah for this week: Wholeness and peacefulness  shleimut

    One brief shining: A new Dell desktop sits nearby, still in its substantial box, waiting to get lifted out, placed next to my old Dell desktop so the transfer of files can begin, underwriting in its newness the sense within me, reinforced by my Tarot year card, the Archer, that this will be an important year for me: “This Wildwood Tarot card makes meaning: the dawn of new life is beginning and a bumper season is coming.”

     

    Yes, the period of meh has receded. Encouraged by learning that my aorta won’t bother me. By writing stories in the Storyworth app. By leaning into my mobility limitations. By deciding to go for an ortho consult: right shoulder, left forearm and hand, lower back and hip, neck. By focusing on kabbalah and Torah study. By the new CBE men’s group. By my pescatarian (plus chicken, if nothing else is available) turn. No, not a hard decision, a decision to lower the number of choice points when it comes to food.

    Also by recognizing, even more, the value of my mornings. And further, by the decision to move my home gym down to Kate’s old sewing room. Concentrating my workouts downstairs.

    Glad for all this.

     

    Only a week away from MLK holiday. And, on the very same oh so ironic day, the inauguration of our 47th felon, no. Wait. President. No. Felon President. That’s it. If the long arc of history bends toward justice, the sag created on the 20th will have to be repaired.

    MLK. Malcolm X. I’m more a Malcolm X sorta guy. Sure, non-violence. Yes. As a way of bringing change. When it works. Where it can work. Not much good against despots, Proud Boys, 3 Percenters, Christian Nationalists. Violence. Often counter-productive. Yet look at the Day of Love, as felonious cousin Donald has renamed it. That was violent, not extreme, yet that was the overall look and feel. No Velveteen Rabbit stuff. More like where the wild things are.

    Din, or justice in Hebrew, insists on right and wrong, demands restitution and retribution when a wrong is committed. (from Tara’s work sheet on rachamim).

    This image puts the Wanderer’s Journey overlaid on the ten sefirot of Kabbalah’s Tree of Life. Though interesting for that reason I want to focus on the line between Chesed, #4, and Gevurah, #5. Chesed is loving kindness and Gevurah is strength, boundaries, the law. If rachamim, compassion, were placed on here it would be on the midline between Chesed and Gevurah, blending the attributes of strength and boundaries with loving kindness.

    Realized in reading Tara’s notes that I’m a left side of the tree guy. More severe and punishing in my approach to injustices. Which I think is appropriate for public and systemic wrongs. Rabbi Jamie, I think, is more of a right side of the tree guy. Loving kindness and compassion as first approaches. Which I think are more appropriate for individual and small group situations.


  • Merrily we roll along, roll along, roll along

    Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

    Tuesday gratefuls: This too is for the good. 2024 and 2025. And this December 31st 2024 life. 8 degrees this morning. Good sleeping. Von Bek. The War Hound and the World’s Pain. The Psalms. Bob Dylan. The Band. Ain’t No Grave. The Blues. Jazz. Jefferson Airplane. The Doors. Led Zeppelin. Ginger Baker. John Coltrane. Thelonious Monk. Slipping quietly into the next year.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Tara

    Kavannah: Persistence and Joy

    prompt: A vintage father time with sickle and an infant new year

    One brief shining: How to encapsulate a year in one sentence, a challenge, perhaps remembering a Bar Mitzvah with friends and family present, a changed arc for cancer, a couple of months of low feeling, many breakfasts and lunches and zoom calls, visiting Ruth in Boulder, Gabe solving puzzles, many visits from my Mule Deer friends, the Mountains remaining-steady, solid, reliable-Great Sol and Good Night, Orion’s return, all while turning 77. Whee!

     

    As the Zen calendar from Tom says:

    This year,

    yes, even this year,

    has drawn to its close.   Buson

     

    Here is the illustration inspired by Japan’s Kano school, visually interpreting your evocative paragraph.

    Though age and wrinkles compared to that slender hipped 28 year old in his silly multi-colored suspenders and shorts would suggest definite linear time, no, I say no to that. I say live by the Great Wheel. By the telling and retelling of the story in the five books of Moses. By Sukkot and Mabon, Samain and Shavuot, the Winter Solstice and Passover. All repeating in a yearly cycle, spiraling through the heavens of time’s confusing paradoxes. Always ready to leave behind the hell of human insistence on seeing the profane where only the sacred-ONLY THE SACRED-exists.

    I confess I don’t understand how time can seem so linear yet reside all the while in an ever repeating, glorious parade of seasons and holidays, all of which may in some future Samain-see the problem, all of which may in some future Samain, be harvested for a final time as our universe slips into its own Winter Solstice. Only, if I have an understanding of it, to experience its own rebirth as a cosmic Great Sol, a Phoenix, rising again, still?, from the depths of a cold forever.

    All this to say happy new year! Let’s hear it for the calendar, for aging, for yesterday and tomorrow, all the while knowing we can never live anywhere but today. And not even today, but in this ichi-go ichi-e moment. Which will never repeat yet is eternal, never gone from the roiling, boiling mix of creation in which we live and move and have our becoming.

    God. I sound like a bad fortune cookie. Nevertheless. Yes. To all this. To however we are, whomever we are, whenever we are. Bouncing along jostling each other, holding each others hands, walking each other home, living with the thereafter, somehow, even if it’s only in molecular hand me downs.

    You out there. To a less abstruse post next year. Tomorrow.

     

     

     

     


  • Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ

    Yule and the Yule Moon

    Christmukkah gratefuls: Many happy Christmases. The complete severance of Christmas from Christ’s Mass. All of the childhood induced fantasies drifting up and out of bedrooms all over the world. All of the Jewish memories of resistance triggered now for 8 days. Holiseason peaking with Christmas, Hanukkah, and Yule all resonating, vibrating with each other. It is indeed the most wonderful time of the year.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Holiseason

    Kavannah: AWE Yira יִרְאָה  Awe, reverence, fear (פְּלִיאָה Plia: Wonder, amazement)

    One brief shining: I hear the rattling of old Marley’s chains this morning, looking at a world about to devolve into a Christmas Carol with a different ending, where the Scrooge’s of our country like Trump, Bezos, Musk, and Gates join oligarchs from around the world to ignore even the Ghost of Christmas future and forge for themselves heavy chains and money boxes that will haunt them into their unredeemed future.

    Here is the image representing “Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ” in the style of socialist realism, emphasizing interconnectedness and harmony.

    And even so, let me say a word for yirah. For wonder, amazement, awe, reverence. Paul reminded me of the Lakota phrase, all my relations. I asked chatbotgpt to give it to me in Lakota and what it means in the Lakota worldview.

    The answer* made me realize that I’ve spent decades deconstructing theological and philosophical and even scientific ideas, trying to swim down and through them to the core of what matters. Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ matches my current conclusions though I had to get through years of seminary, meditation, horticulture, dogs, loving Kate, to find the final ingredient I needed, the unitary metaphysic of Judaism. The Tree of Life in Kabbalah maps on to this native worldview, too.

    Wish it was as easy as reading this years ago and being able to integrate it, but that wouldn’t have worked. I needed to live the struggle. Judaism with Kabbalah contains this wisdom and expresses it without dogma. Makes me feel even more like a member of the tribe. Or, a tribe.

    When I talked to the Mule Deer Doe last week, when I spent time with the three Mule Deer Bucks on my first day here on Shadow Mountain ten years ago, when I planted tulips and iris and crocus and garlic and heirloom tomatoes, when I removed honey supers to carry to Kate for our honey harvest, when I sat with a Wolfhound’s head in my lap and another’s in Kate’s, I engaged the embodied learning of Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ.

    Yes, mitákuye Oyás’iŋ comes most vividly into our whole life through direct experience. Yet for me the life of the mind is important, too, and I wanted always to be able to clarify, to say in words the truth my body already know.

    In a way I sense my life is now complete. I made the swim all the way to the bottom and down there was the Holy Well of the collective unconscious, linking me to all my relations through the world of Judaism.

    Reincarnation? Could be. Death a transformation? Without a doubt. Life a continuous amazement and wonder. For sure. May as well celebrate.

    BTW: I like this image from Chatbot’s Dalle, too.

    Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah!

     

    *”Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ” reflects the interconnectedness of all beings and entities in the universe. It embodies the belief that everything—humans, animals, plants, stones, water, air, the earth, and the stars—is interrelated and part of a sacred whole. This worldview emphasizes:

    1. Unity and Kinship: All beings are regarded as relatives, forming a vast web of relationships that must be honored and respected.
    2. Reciprocity: The phrase underscores the importance of balance and mutual care among all entities, fostering a sense of responsibility toward the natural world and its cycles.
    3. Sacred Connection: Life is seen as a continuous, sacred circle in which every part has its place and purpose, contributing to the harmony of the whole.
    4. Humility and Gratitude: By acknowledging “All My Relations,” individuals express gratitude for the interconnectedness of life and humility in recognizing their place within it.

    In ceremonies and prayers, “Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ” is often used to close statements or invocations, serving as a reminder of this profound interconnectedness and the sacred responsibility it entails.

                                                    Herme Harari Israel


  • Guard your own soul

    Samain and the Yule Moon

    Here is the vertical depiction of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, inspired by the style of Leonardo da Vinci with intricate, classical details. Let me know your thoughts or if you’d like any refinements!

    Wednesday gratefuls: Edwardian Advent Calendar. Shirley Waste. Sprinkling of Snow. Holly and Berries. Ivy. Yule logs. Oak. Pinôn. The Fireplace. On a cold Winter’s evening. Great Sol spreading a pink glow over my Lodgepole Companion. Christmas Music. Dreidels. Menorahs. The Shamash. Hanukah candles. Season of lights. Ohr. Ein sof.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: the Nefesh.

    Kavannah: BEAUTY  Tiferet  תִפאֶרֶת  Beauty, harmony, balance  Sixth Sefirah: Reconciliation, synthesis, integration; the Heart (between Chesed & Gevurah)

    One brief shining: Gazing through a kabbalistic lens I can see sacred energy, chi, life force, consciousness, ohr whatever fits your understanding, flowing up and down, in and out, over and under as Water transvaporizes, as Great Sol’s Light feeds my Lodgepole Companion, as Raven’s feed on the carcass of a dead Mule Deer, as I breathe Oxygen from the Plant world and eat food created by Light-Eaters.

     

    Just the teasers thrown out by red tie guy-Cousin Donald as Joanne Greenberg calls him-may rattle you. Force you out of the day in which we live, the only day in which you will ever live, this day. Today this December 18th, 2024 life. When you allow his provocations, his mindless choices, his venal understanding of the world to pull you into a miserable 2025, dreading its January 20th reading of the Presidential oath, the terrorist has won. Don’t let him occupy your mind and heart. Live rent free.

    I hesitate, but not too much, to use this metaphor. That’s the Great Satan at work. Trying to make us angry and fearful, focused on the appetites of a man we might otherwise feel sorry for. A stunted soul with a blinkered and greed and attention-demanding nefesh.

    Guard your own soul today. Seek out the beautiful. The loving. The wonderful. The sacred. Husband your power, your strength for whatever may lay ahead. Put off becoming anxious about matters not yet in play.

     

    The Storyworth folks. I wrote about this a few days ago. Rabbi Jamie mentioned it to me. I’ve written answers to five questions so far, getting myself into writing mode by writing. The best way. I light my candle and respond to the question, writing as long as I can, at least 500 words, sometimes more. Which makes a thousand words plus a day with Ancientrails. That’s enough to satisfy the writerly need in me.

     

    Just a moment: School shooters. Troubled teens. I know a few myself. Not troubled in that way, that is, a violence prone way, but I can see how it would not have been a long step for them. What if their parents had owned guns? Been the sort of folks who feared the world, saw it as a dangerous, dark place. If that weren’t true, what if their friends had been such people? Something has broken adolescence in America. And I don’t know what it is.