Category Archives: Fourth Phase

Asia, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Health, Poetry

A comma, not a period

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Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: Jon Bailey. Detailing my car. Seoah is coming. Casa Bonita. Valentine’s Day. #78. Fitbit. Charlie H. Ruby clean inside. Avocado Toast. Lox and English Muffins. Ruth’s excitement about her new Astronomy class. Gabe. Coming up Saturday to interview Rabbi Jamie. Sue Bradshaw. Josh. Kai. Evergreen Family Medicine.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Marilyn and Irv

Kavannah 2025: Creativity

Kavannah this week: Rachamim, compassion.  Practice-listening for the melody of the other.

One brief shining: Looking about the same except for a moon face, wondered if it was prednisone, my fellow traveler on the ancientrail of cancer sat in his chair, bookcases behind him, his lake out the window, and exhibited compassion, his melody a bit jagged after a year of death and illness, yet still poetic.

 

First iteration. A recruiting poster syle illustration of Mary Oliver’s quote

When Charlie H. said he was in remission, his surveillance pushed out to four months from the usual three, a sign of dramatic improvement, I felt an uncharitable son of a bitch why him and not me? I didn’t begrudge him at all the good news. No. Happy for him, but wondering why my cancer has proved so damned intractable.

Especially wondering today because yesterday I had four vials of blood drawn, one of which goes for testosterone and PSA lab work.

 

Reminded in that conversation of Paul’s online session with poet Jane Hirschfield. He reported two arresting sentences: Death is not a period, it’s a comma. And. Attention is your life.

second iteration after asking Chabot to correct the spelling of precious

A comma. “…a punctuation mark (,) indicating a pause between parts of a sentence.” Oxford Languages. Interesting to wonder about that sentence, the one in which your life this time might be an object or a subject, a life acted upon or a life acting on its own. What is the verb in the sentence? Verbs? Was there an adjective for this life of yours? Strong, passionate, weakened, vulnerable, clever, unusual? What is the cosmic sentence which the universe, in its polyvalent, multivalent way, has written that is yours and yours alone? It may be the work of a hundred lifetimes, learning how to read your own sentence.

One more thought on the comma. Learning to read each other’s sentence would allow us to glimpse the narrative line running through your time. A series of short stories, linked by the main character of your Self which, when combined, would be a novel in many volumes. Can you imagine the shelves in that Library of Alexandria?

What does that work require? Attention. To your own melody. To the melody of the other. To the moment, yes, of course. But also to the century, the year, the day, the hour. The millennium. Not different from the work of seeing. And hearing.

“What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day”

 

Just a moment: Welcome to the Year of the Snake. Although the Chinese zodiac correlates the snake as “simultaneously associated with harvest, procreation, spirituality, and good fortune, as well as cunning, evil, threat, and terror”, I can only see the last four in the American year of the snake.

 

 

 

 

Art and Culture, Fourth Phase

Mondays at the Museum

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Yule and the Quarter Century 4% crescent Moon

Monday gratefuls: Blackbird. Ginny. Janice. Annie. Vince. Diane, healing. Mark, teaching. Mary, waiting. My son, traveling. Cold night. Another full night’s sleep. Shrimp po’boy. Breaded catfish fillets. Chinese AI. Oh, my. Deepseek. Cousin Donald, America firsting. New computer. Ready to engage. Chiefs-Bills. Quite a game.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Hawai’i

Kavannah 2025: Creativity

Kavannah this week: Chesed (loving kindness)

One brief shining: The Blackbird in Kittredge has an outside host, even in the winter, though yesterday I was glad to see she’d been given a tent in which she could work in her shirt-sleeved Blackbird t-shirt, a tent where those of us waiting for seats could rest on white metal chairs or wooden crates.

 

Got a little way laid yesterday on seeing. Important, yes. But I really intended to write about art, the Docent years. So.

A person alone in an art museum looking at an earthenware coil built pot from China. In the style of Durer

Those Mondays at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Every Monday for a long time, years, I would drive in from Andover, listening to a Great Courses lecture while coming south past the ring road, crossing the Mississippi, eventually leaving the freeway. Parking in the parking lot near the museum.

Maybe the lecture would be on Chinese Silks. Or, the new Pre-Raphaelite exhibition. Could be Song Dynasty ceramics or the Armory Show. Whatever it was I filled a thick blue notebook with careful notes, soaking up the information, storing it away like a squirrel with acorns.

The Museum excited me, so many cultures, so many artistic disciplines, so many artists. From the early Mediterranean carvers of Venus Figurines to Van Gogh’s Olive Trees. The Chinese Jade Mountain to the Doryphoros. Three floors. Two buildings, connected.

No wonder that after the lecture many of us took full advantage of the museum on a day no outsiders were let in. Mondays were days when the registration department moved art from one gallery to another. Hung new art. Cleaned the art. I liked the scissor-jack platform in the lobby which carried a cleaner to the yellow horn like pieces of the Chihuly glass chandelier. They used small vacuums and feather dusters.

Mostly I wandered. I had my favorites. Goya’s Dr. Arrieta. The smooth, ancient Chinese pot, unglazed earthenware of perfect proportions. One Corner Ma’s painting of a Taoist scholar standing under a pine tree, admiring a waterfall. To have as I long as I wanted with a piece, no pressure to move a group along, no one to intrude on my, yes, I’ll call it reverie.

Each work that spoke to me was direct revelation from the artist’s inner world to mine. It was not like a spiritual experience. It was one.

Delicate works that had survived thousands of years after their creation. Some Chinese ceramicist built that beautiful earthenware pot over two thousand years ago.

The gratitude of the ailing Goya to his Doctor exposed in his vulnerable pose in the Doctor’s care. Kandinsky playing with color and form, moving away from representation.

I loved those Mondays and they remain precious in the memories of my life.

 

 

Art and Culture, Fourth Phase, Memories, Mountains, Tea, Wild Neighbors

Seeing, not looking

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Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Ruth. Snow. More. Another full night’s sleep. In a row. Art Green’s Guide to the Zohar. Mysticism. Art. Lascaux. Venus figurines. Minoan. Grecian. Phoenician. Early Christian. Egyptian. Hittite. Babylonian. Roman. Celtic. Norse. Anglo-Saxon. Qin, Han, Tang, Song dynasties. Goryeon. Kang school in Japan. Ukiyo-e. Nayarit. Jalisco. Benin. Early Hindu. Nepalese. Tibetan. Nahuatl. Mayan.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Art

Kavannah 2025: Creativity

Kavannah this week: Chesed (loving-kindness)

Rachamim practice: Listening for the melody of others

One brief shining: Love that kid, my now 43 year old son, seeing him across 9,000 miles, his hair a bit longer on top, a fade on the sides, talking about Seoah at the gym, Murdoch staying on base for their trip, Hawai’i-a mutual dream, his transition to command, the nod to the Vikings living up to expectations, a visit to Minnesota to see his mom, old friends, skiing and his racing turns, sore legs.

 

No. Got that out of my system yesterday. Mystical me. Today, let’s talk literature. Nah. How about art? Haven’t gone on that ancientrail for quite awhile. Chatbotgpt and I have had fun over the last few weeks co-operating on image making. I provide the idea, 4o provides the image. With wildly varying results, as you’ve already seen.

Here is the depiction of a 60-year-old version of you in a room filled with traditional Japanese teaware, capturing a serene and tranquil moment.

A bit of nostalgia. Trafficking in the past these days as I continue to write stories in the Storyworth app. 14 so far. Story is too grand a word for these 500 words or so excursions on roadways back into the last millennium. The last century. More like lightning flashbacks, brief illuminations of moments of a life.

Thinking this morning about those Monday mornings as a guide, a docent in training, then a docent when I could go in for a lecture in art history by an expert in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts lecture hall. After. I loved the in depth, detailed way of looking that art historians and curators brought to specific objects.

Never thought of it this way before but a lot of my life has been about seeing, really seeing, what was in front of me. Yesterday I discussed the revelation I find in each and every instance I encounter. Sometimes I see clearly, sometimes, most often, through a glass darkly. Perception clouded by bias, distraction, assumption, all those ills to which the human sensorium is heir to.

Anthropology offers a sort of x-ray vision into human behavior, how culture shapes us, defines us, supports and limits us. Philosophy sees questions where others see answers.

Here is the portrait inspired by our conversations, rendered in the dramatic and textured style of Francisco Goya, reflecting your life and connection to the Rocky Mountains.

Radical politics means looking into the truth of our economic and political relationships with one another and seeing the patterns, the flaws that create distortion, inequity. Gardening opened my eyes to the language of plants, how they express themselves, tell us what they need. Our long interrelationship with them. Having so many Dogs over the years opened my eyes to their distinctiveness, their majesty as fellow creatures, my deep love for them.

Living in the Mountains has turned me toward Wild Neighbors, toward Rock. Pines. Aspens. Fox and Moose. Beaver and Marmoset. Toward Mountain Streams in their dramatic seasonality.

Judaism has given me new lenses for viewing friendship, metaphysics, history, tradition, and myself.

Kate. In a true love affair which helped her understand herself in new ways, to see herself, not just her profession as she helped me see and be my whole self.

 

Fourth Phase, Memories, Travel, Writing

Ancientrails. Almost twenty years old.

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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, Friends, Politics, Weather +Climate

Ways of Healing

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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.

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

Solitude in the Public Square

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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.

 

 

 

Fourth Phase, Judaism, Kabbalah, Tarot

Meh in the rearview. For now.

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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.

Feelings, Fourth Phase, Judaism, Mussar

Rachamim

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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.

Aging, Feelings, Fourth Phase

Aging and its cultured despisers

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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.

Feelings, Fourth Phase, Health, Holidays, Judaism, Woolly Mammoths

Men. In their awkwardness. Beautiful.

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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.