• Category Archives Fourth Phase

  • Ancientrails. Almost twenty years old.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

    Sunday gratefuls: -8 degrees. Yet more Snow. Winter. Introspection. Diane, healing. Mark, all dressed up and ready to teach. Mary in the Florida of Oz. My son and Seoah, coming for my birthday. Talmud Torah. Exodus’ strong women. Moses. Yod Hey Vav Hey. Hashem. Adonai. I am. I will be who I will be. The burning bush.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Writing Ancientrails

    Kavannah 2025: Creativity

    Kavannah for the week: Appreciation of Opposition   Haarecha shel machloket

    One brief shining: All through the nation MAGA folks will go to sleep tonight ready for their big day on Monday, Martin Luther King’s day of service, and cousin Donald’s hand on the bible, John Roberts presiding; I’ll give them their moment, but not my country.

     

    Here is the image inspired by Caspar David Friedrich, capturing the nighttime scene in Bangkok’s Chinatown as described.

    Want to lift a glass to Ancientrails. Early in February it will end its 20th year of daily existence. Started, oddly, in Bangkok. On a nighttime visit to a 7/11 I rushed across a side street and in the dark missed a gutter in the street. My right leg stayed still while my body kept moving. Thought I sprained my ankle. Hobbled on to the ATM, took out $100 in bahts, and limped across Yaowarat, Chinatown’s main drag, to my modest hotel. 2004.

    Had about a week left before my flight home. Not wanting to miss the city, I drug my leg around, not worried because, hey, it was just a sprain. The nice lady at the physical therapist felt my leg and said, “Oh, that’s not a sprain. You’ve ruptured your Achilles tendon.” Well. Shoot.

    Surgery. January 2005. Two months no weight on the right leg. What the hell am I gonna do? Cybermage William Schmidt set me up with Frontpage, a Microsoft app, and I began to write. I shifted, again with Bill’s help, to WordPress in 2007. Somehow the first three years got lost in the old bits and bytes shuffle.

    I write every morning, no matter where I am, with few exceptions. Kate had her crossword puzzles and I have Ancientrails. Over 2 million words a few years ago. Probably closer to three now.

    What I had decided to do was to take my journaling online. A blog. An anachronism now. Who writes blogs? Who reads them? Always had a thin hope that Ancientrails might take off, but frankly it never has. Oh, yes. There’s you, faithful reader, and I appreciate you more than you know. But a mass audience? Nope.

    I get it, too. There’s no through line here except my life and opinions. Occasional theologizing, political opining, even art criticism though that’s fallen away for the most part. No telling what I’m going to be up to because I rarely know until I start typing.

    Once in a while something fills my attention, like Ancientrails’ approaching double decade anniversary, and I remember to write about it. Most often, it’s a riff.

    While I know it’s no masterpiece, I have added a codicil in my will to continue paying my cloud based service, Ionos, and its predecessors to keep Ancientrails on line after my death.

    It is, at least, a piece of Americana. My peculiar America.

     

     


    Fourth Phase Memories Travel Writing

  • Ways of Healing

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

    Friday gratefuls: Alan. Charlie’s dying, too. This disease will run its course. Phrases offered as billboards in my mind. Ruby on Mountain curves. Polar vortex slumping. Arriving soon. Snow first. Cancellations. Gunflint Trail coffee mug, over 35 years old. Ancientrails approaching its twentieth anniversary. The value of conversation. My interlocutors, all of you. Including readers of this blog.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Being heard and seen

    Kavannah 2025: Creativity

    Kavannah this week: Wholeness and peacefulness

    Here is the image inspired by your paragraph, created in the style of Minoan art. It reflects the vibrant colors, flowing lines, and intricate details characteristic of this ancient artistic tradition, capturing the warmth and connection of the moment. 2nd try, still not quite what I wanted. Anyhow.

    One brief shining: Ears offered in gentle wholeness, eyes turned toward me, body relaxed, yet engaged, an occasional smile, grimace, nod across my coffee cup and his red plastic keep the coffee warm thermos, as I did what the mussar practice for this week (from the Thursday group), suggested and told my friend Alan, in response to his how you doing, how I was doing.

     

    Normal, or rather, traditional Minnesota winter weather coming to the Mountains. Snow and below zero cold. Cancellations. I’m glad. My Coloradification has been complete for a while now. Cold starts in the mid-20’s. Below zero? Head for the thermostat. Snow and ice on Mountain roads, especially at night? Nope. Not anymore. Even with my Minnesota skills I know too big a risk when I see one. For me.

     

    Breakfast with Alan this morning. The Parkside. Next to the Evergreen Arts Center where Alan’s Rotary meets early on Friday mornings. This week, I said, had challenges. Mostly in the ever changing world of cancer. As I wrote a few posts back in Overburden, I have strategies for these moments. And they work. To varying degrees. This week I’d say they worked reasonably well since the challenge level was high.

    Kristie said, as I wrote, this disease will run its course. Recognition, yet again, that my cancer is incurable. And, if something else doesn’t take me out, it will be happy to step up. When? No one knows. I’m in as good a place as a stage 4 cancer guy can be according to Kristie. That’s welcome news. Yet it has a grim underlayment.

    So I told Alan the whole current context for my feelings this week. He listened. I listened, too, to myself. As I spoke, I grew lighter. Brighter. Remember that bit about the healing power of conversation? No, it cannot cure my cancer. But. It can cure my soul.

     

    Just a moment: Wanted to issue a sort of correction. I wrote cousin Donald did not have his hand over his heart at Jimmy Carter’s funeral. And he didn’t. But. I did notice later where his hand was. It was over his stomach.

    3 days and counting. Still no glimmer about whether I’ll engage, ignore, or run wildly about my house, hands in the air, screaming for no apparent reason.


    Fourth Phase Friends Politics Weather +Climate

  • Solitude in the Public Square

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

    Thursday gratefuls: Great Sol. Finishing the Warhound and the Pain of the World. The Outpost. Weakness. Exercise. The Move. Good night’s sleep. Diane, healing. Mark, teaching. Mary, waiting. My son. Working. Conversation. Chatbotgpt. My Lodgepole Companion. Nature Journaling. John Muir Laws. The privatization of Space. Blue Origin. New Glenn. Falcon Heavy. Starship. NASA.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Letting matters become as they will

    Kavannah 2025: Creativity

    Kavannah this week: Wholeness and Peace

    Here is the revised WWII patriotic poster-style illustration emphasizing regionalization and the rise of different global powers, with a diminished focus on the United States. This was a second try. Chatbot has trouble with words in illustrations. Maps, too, apparently

     

    One brief shining: Our divided and war worn World, regional powers rising, taking advantage of the retreat of the American Titan back to its homeshores, invading Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, threatening to enclose and absorb Taiwan, claiming the South China Sea, while we, the once world hegemon want Greenland, the Panama Canal, and, for gods sakes, the Gulf of America.

     

    No. Not starting a political rant. Just making an observation about the volatile and dangerous turn the World has taken. How in two generations, my parents and their children, us, the US has gone from savior to policeman to super hegemon to coming isolationism. With, of course, those weird exceptions. Maybe First Friend Elon will buy Greenland and the Panama Canal and gift them to us? Could happen, right?

    Still pondering how or whether to engage with the new post-January 20th America. That Seed-Keepers idea. Retreating into the world of the American Renaissance. I am going to study the Zohar, get up close and intimate with Kabbalah again. That’s for sure. Put this odd inflection of humanity’s history in a wider and deeper context.

     

    An interesting article in this month’s issue of the Atlantic. The Anti-Social Century by staff writer Derek Thompson. Here’s a link to the February issue. In some ways Thompson’s argument is an extension of Robert Putnam’s famous monograph: Bowling Alone. In that Putnam found increasing social isolation a definite problem Thompson’s essay seems to part ways in his acknowledgment that many people prefer solitude and now have a home environment that nurtures it. Challenges the notion of a lonlieness epidemic. Thompson though, like Putnam, finds this diminution of the public space a disturbing trend and pushes for changes that might result in a social century.

    Here is the WPA poster-style illustration based on your paragraph. It emphasizes new social dynamics while nodding to traditional third places.

    Without going study to study, graph to graph in the article I want to raise another possible perspective. Perhaps, like the recent acknowledgment of neuro-typicals and neuro-divergents, what Thompson has really done is limn the rise of a new way of being social, a different way that honors the individual over the community. Perhaps we can find a way to be responsible citizens without as many third places like churches, bowling alleys, cafes, sports fields.

    I know this may sound like, may even be, an oxymoron, solitude in the public square, but I know my life is as rich now as it has ever been and I spend the bulk of my life alone. Many older people, especially women, find living alone freeing. A space in which they can grow and develop in their own peculiar ways.

    The evolution of solitude could also be a revolt against the too many press of urbanization, perhaps even a desire to return to the more solitary ways of the early American rural life. Without having to leave the convenience economy behind.

    It could be that the whole Trump/MAGA/ascendance of the id represents the last gasp of an older American culture that wanted to dominate and control the public square. Make it toxic enough that only they could stand to be in it. For now.

     

     

     


    Commentary on the news Fourth Phase Friends Hermitage Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. US History World History

  • Meh in the rearview. For now.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    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.


    Fourth Phase Judaism Kabbalah Tarot

  • Rachamim

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Yule and the almost full Quarter Century Moon

    Sunday gratefuls: Vince and his friends. Their muscles. Moving day for my home gym. A couple of chairs. My new computer. The complete Pritzker Zohar. My classroom for the next few years. Year Tarot: The Archer, #7. Life Tarot: The Wheel, #10, and a shadow card, The Wanderer, #1. Wildwood Tarot. Going deeper, yet staying on the surface. Ruby and her Mountain ways. Talmud Torah

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Leaning in to mobility limitations

    Kavannah for 2025: Creativity

    Year card: The Archer, #7  “The Archer is located on the spring equinox, March 21. The time this card represents is sunrise. The Archer belongs to the Air element, bringing creative energy and inspiration. This Wildwood Tarot card makes meaning: the dawn of new life is beginning and a bumper season is coming.”  TarotX.net

    Kavannah for this week: Wholeness and peacefulness  shleimut

    One brief shining: Seeing my son over the thousands of miles, listening to him describe his life and work, hearing his melody loud and clear, a strong man, dedicated, caring, loving, thoughtful, a tune marked by doggedness and intelligence, commitment, warrior energy.

     

    Here is the illustration in the style of an ukiyo-e print, visually interpreting the nurturing and generative qualities of compassion.

    This new practice for the month, listening for the melody of the other, has proved challenging to recall. Its purpose is to train my rachamim muscle, my compassion, over against my din muscle, my justice muscle. Justice somehow got wired into my soul from a young age. Always ready to judge and enter the fight on behalf of others. Compassion came later, or at least in much smaller emergences than my desire to stop the war, further women’s rights, block capitalist greed, build affordable housing.

    As I’ve aged, compassion (rachamim) has pushed its way forward. Perhaps because I have needed more compassion. Perhaps because aging can induce, and has for me, vulnerability. Life contains fewer and fewer chances, contains more and more tragedy and chaos. Reduced energy, at least for me, plays a role here, too. I don’t have the get up and struggle sort of vitality, physically, that I used to have. Also friendships and acquaintances have risen to top priority in my life. Following only family. To retain and sustain relationships compassion must show up first.

    Did that shoulder slump? Is her head slightly tilted down? Is there a tightness in his voice? That foot tapping. Clock watching. Smiling without sarcasm. She leaned her head suddenly on to my shoulder. What do I know of the composer? What’s likely influencing this melody? Is it one I’ve heard before? Is it new? Is it shrill? Or is it like morning Bird song? My eye can be, must be my ear.

    Both rachamim and the Hebrew word for womb share the same root. What can we imagine from this? Does compassion have a generative quality, creating a womb-like space for another’s soul to grow? Does compassion nurture over time, making it a necessary element of every interaction with another? Frequent exposure to your compassion may be the fertile Soil another’s soul needs to flourish.

    Sometime I’ll write about din. Which sets aside compassion in the interests of equity, fairness, fighting oppression. Not today.


    Feelings Fourth Phase Judaism Mussar

  • Aging and its cultured despisers

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

    Tuesday gratefuls: Phonak. Amy. Mile High Hearing. All body workout today. The Outpost. Emunah. Snow. Cold. A Mountain Winter. Still light on Snow. The Churning of the Sea of Milk. Angkor Wat. Siem Reap. Cambodia. The Mekong. Brother Mark on his way to Saudi. Eleanor, the Dog. Tara. Friendship. Men. CBE.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Eleanor, fluffy kind energy

    Kavannah for 2025: Creativity

    Kavannah for this January 7th life: Understanding. Bina

    One brief shining: How many moments of wind carrying cold air over my bald head have to happen for me to have a good night’s sleep; or, how high do I have turn up the electric blanket which pleases me for reasons I cannot define; or, how much peace in my stomach and in my heart leads my mind into slowing down and slipping away into human sleep mode.

     

    Here is the illustration inspired by Hokusai, depicting the essence of aging and Elderhood in a serene, nature-filled setting.

    OK. Here’s a new pet peeve. Super agers. No, I’m not dissing them, whomever they are, for having won a genetic or geographic (blue zones) or good luck lottery. Good for them. Banners and candles and whatever else goes with it. Huzzah! Might we learn something valuable from their lives? I suppose so.

    No. The peeve I have lies in the way we valorize certain individuals, lift them up as exemplars for what aging can be. That can have the effect, like all the hoohah about diet and exercise, of diminishing the perfectly normal aging most of us will experience.

    The vast, vast bulk of us, somewhere north of 99.9% I imagine, live our lives doing the best we can, making decisions that impact our overall health in many ways, some good some not so good and often living out the consequences of a genetic heritage in which we had no choice.

    Super agers. Centenarians. The tail of the bell curve, the one sloping to the right. Are they our role models? What about the poor bastards on the other end of the curve with disabilities of all kinds. With limited resources to realize the dreams of the American Immortal.

    I do not consider myself poor because I have less money than Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. And more importantly I don’t want to have that money. It’s not a perfect analogy of course.

    Would l want to have the supple brain and over-70 Olympian’s body of these wunderkind of the Sun City set? Yes. I would. Didn’t happen for me. Am I a less good person, is my aging somehow less than? No. I’m at 77 and-here’s the comparison I like-above ground and taking nourishment.

    What I’m pleading for here is a way to accept and celebrate aging in all its varieties, all its super and non-super manifestations. There’s no one way to do aging right. There’s your way and my way and, yes, the way of the .001%. Everybody who manages to slip past, say 65, deserves the honor and recognition of Elderhood, something our society, our individualistic, youth oriented, success infested society has drained away from us. To its peril.

    End of rant.


    Aging Feelings Fourth Phase

  • Men. In their awkwardness. Beautiful.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Yule and a beautiful crescent of the Quarter Century Moon

    Sunday gratefuls: Torah study. Men’s group at CBE. Flat bread with lox and onion. Pescatarians. Ruth skiing. Such joy. Gabe and his puzzles. 9 degrees. New Snow. Driving in the dark. A boost. Diet. Changing. Matt. Rob. Bill. Jamie.  The mesh bag. Neck weakness. January 20th.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Men, struggling with their hearts

    Kavannah for 2025: Creativity

    Kavannah for this January 5th life: Persistence

    One brief shining: Drove back last night from the men’s group at CBE graced by the waxing crescent of the Quarter Century Moon; its soft light radiated by a Mountain Fog illuminating the Arapaho National Forest and the curves of Brook Forest Drive, then Black Mountain Drive until Shadow Mountain Home appeared out of the mist, welcoming me.

     

    Got a boost yesterday. Community working its magic. During Torah study in the morning I still felt pressed down, disengaged. Distant. But Luke came up and gave me a big hug. Ginny smiled to see me. I felt seen. Though. Still coasting at a slow low place when I left.

    Came back and did nothing until 5:30 when I left to go back to CBE for the first meeting of the men’s group. Buzzed the door. Got let in by a guy I didn’t know. Then I let in a  couple of other guys, neither of whom I knew. One of them, Matt, turned to get his nametag. Oh, good idea, I said. I’m usually good for one a day he said.

    Steve brought flat bread with lox and onions. Made by his wife. I brought my go to mandarin Oranges in my new mesh bag. Joe brought miniature rugalach and date bars. Jamie tossed a handful of leftover Hanukkah gelt on the table. Chips and dip appeared. Finger food. Manly interpretations.

    The conversation had that awkward I don’t know you tone, things held back, laughing. I only knew Jamie and Steve. Steve just a little. As we navigated telling bits and pieces of our stories, wondering who resided behind the careful words, I felt myself easing onto familiar ground.

    When it came my turn, the Woolly Mammoths came out naturally. 40 years of learning how to get behind the careful words, the fear of vulnerability, with other men. Men trained by American culture and in this case reinforced by Jewish culture that feelings were at best anti-competitive. At worst they could…well, you know, don’t you?

    Sensing the journey ahead and enjoying the tender feelers put out, an occasional smile, a sad look, a story that told more than intended, my downward emotional Dog began to shift to a Sun Salutation. I didn’t expect that to happen, but it did. Not all the way back to normal, no, not at all, but buoyed up all the same.

     

    Just a moment: Tomorrow some Christians celebrate the Magi’s visit to the lowly manger in which the Son of God was born. And Trump will trumpet the day of love which the bulk of us call insurrection. MAGA or Magi? Even as a Jew I’m going with the Magi.


    Feelings Fourth Phase Health Holidays Judaism Woolly Mammoths

  • I sense you’re slipping

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

    Shabbat gratefuls: Candles. Snow. Torah study. CBE Men’s group. Feeling low. Workouts going well. 2025. Brother Mark. Mary. Seoah. My son. Murdoch. How do I feel? Acting. Erleada. Orgovyx. Medicare drug policy. Orcas. Sadness. Mountain dark Morning. Black Mountain.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: AI

    Kavannah for 2025: Creativity

    Kavannah for the January 4th life: Yirah. Awe, amazement, wonder.

    One brief shining: Had a strange moment at breakfast with Alan, my tone and demeanor was soft, repressed, as if I were muted emotionally; nothing to do with Alan, whom I delighted to see after he had been gone a month, the strangeness coming in my lack of awareness that I felt this way, as if I had to have an old friend as a mirror to see myself.

     

    Here is the image you requested, capturing a melancholic atmosphere inspired by Breughel’s style, blending positive and negative emotions with a surreal touch

    Depressive genes run in our family. And, for Mary, Mark, and me the epigenetics after mom’s early death  pushed us each in different directions, yet pushed we were in unwelcome and unexpected ways. The Myth of Normal, an interesting if difficult read, says we all grow into adulthood with trauma overlaying our development, no matter our family of origin. There is, in its conceit anyway, no normal developmental path, only paths damaged in ways unique to each human.

    Kate had a task set her by John Desteian, my former Jungian analyst. When she felt it, she was to tell me, “I sense you’re slipping into melancholy.” That she needed to do that helps explain the strangeness I felt at breakfast with Alan. That was me channeling Kate back to my self.

    This might explain, too, my veering toward the past of late, and veering not toward its joyous times, rather those instances of loss, of failing to achieve the goal. Why this happens, much like my brother Mark’s much more intense struggles, is not clear. I can  find no particular precipitating event in my recent past.

    Challenges, I just realized, my practice for this month in which I say to events I first valence as negative or bad: This too is for the good. This mussar practice forces me to pull the lens back, see an event in a broader or deeper context. How does melancholy fit into my life as a whole? Into what I need, really need, right now? Can it serve a purpose not evident in the way it makes me feel? What might that purpose be?

    I’m not sure. The start of a New Year, even if you eschew resolutions as I have, can bring introspection if only by looking back on the year just past. Or, maybe I have it backwards and the fact that the past has come to visit me is the cause rather than the effect.

    Perhaps I need, for some deeper psychic reason, to explore this ancientrail I have walked since February 14th, 1947 when I first saw the light of day. Melancholy pauses life, slows it down, turns it inward. Is it something I need to find a way to change or is it something I need to listen to, understand its role in my life right now? I don’t know.

    These turns of heart can run toward danger if they get too far into the realm of regret or shame, but that’s not what I feel. I feel as if my heart has had a dark molasses poured over it, obscuring the present, making the now less immediate. Privileging then the look inward.

     


    Family Feelings Fourth Phase

  • Merrily we roll along, roll along, roll along

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    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.

     

     

     

     


    Asia Fourth Phase Great Wheel Holidays Kabbalah Paganism Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. Reimaging revelation

  • The Skein of our Lives

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Yule and the 2% crescent of the Yule Moon

    Sunday gratefuls: Honesty. To others and self. Yule darkness. The days between the Winter Solstice and the New Year. 5th day of Hanukkah. The Maccabees. The oil in the Temple Menorah. Good workout yesterday. Chatbotgpt. Ruth and Gabe. Mark and Mary. My son and Seoah. Murdoch. Rich. Ron. Alan. Diane back home. That long dive into the deep end of my mind.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: The Lev

    Kavannah: Love (ahavah) and Persistence

    One brief shining: Reading Michael Moorcock’s The War Hound and the World’s Pain I followed von Bek through Hell, through Mittlemarch, or Middle Earth, out to the world as we know it always hunting for the cure for the world’s pain until finally at the edge of the forest near heaven he receives a clay cup that signals his oh, so ordinary enlightenment while representing the culmination of human striving.

     

    I have these threads weaving through my life and my heart as we head toward the quarter century mark of the first century of the third millennium. In no particular order: kabbalah, mussar, friendships, family, writing, the nature rights legal movement, Mountains and Shadow Mountain, Wild Neighbors, reading for Herme’s Journey, exercise, cancer, back pain, books of all sorts, travel, Seed-Keepers, telling my story, Ancientrails. AI. Judaism. Paganism.

    And, of course, there is the wider context for all these: Kate, politics, organizing, Christianity, paganism, alcoholism, Jungian therapy, the Wooly Mammoths, Minnesota, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Raeone and Judy, Tina, seminary, Alexandria, the Andover years, the Peaceable Kingdom, all those dogs.

    There is the third place of the lev, as well. Or, perhaps better, the lev as a third place in which all these coexist, influence each other, reaching over and shaking hands, embracing. Pushing away. Denying. Erasing. Recreating. Nothing is static. All effects All. Moving not necessarily forward or backward, up or down, but in and out, releasing new energy with each penetration, impregnating the moment so something novel can grow, reach out for something else and keep the whole underway.

     

    Yes. We loved each other.

    Let me give you a modest example. Last night I decided to have an English muffin with peanut butter plus the last bit of the unfrozen Senate navy bean soup. As the English muffin toasted and the soup warmed in the microwave, I got out the peanut butter and thought. Hmm. Honey.

    Reached into the cabinet, moved a box of sugar, and there sat a small canning jar with a handwritten label: Artemis Honey. In Kate’s beautiful cursive. She came. Standing there with the uncapping knife, honey super in hand, looking beautiful and engaged. The Andover years where we worked as one. Dogs. Vegetables. Flowers. Bees. And the chamber quartet we commissioned for our wedding. The honeymoon. Living in the move as we prepared to come to Colorado.

    For a long moment I stood there. Before I reached in. Should I eat this? As if it were the last piece of her, of our life together. The honey harvest. Of course I can eat this now, a holy communion, a eucharist. Her body and mine together again if only for a moment.

    I spread a bit of the wonderful thick amber colored honey over my peanut butter. And ate it.


    Family Feelings Fourth Phase Literature Memories Minnesota