Category Archives: Reimaging revelation

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An Unsystematic Theology for the non-Supernatural

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Mabon and the waning Sukkot Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Ginny. Janice. Alan and the Piggin’ Out Barbecue in Lakewood. The Evergreen Chorale. Ovation West. Community Theater. Gabe. Ruth. Studio Arts. UC Boulder. Go, Buffs. Coach Prime. Great Sol. Maxwell Creek to Bear Creek to the South Platte to the Missouri to the Mississippi to the World Ocean.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Watersheds

Kavannah: Serenity  Menucha

One brief shining: At the Piggin’ Out Barbecue you enter behind their food truck, WhattheTruck, and find yourself in a room only big enough for 8 people, six if they’re large sized, and a smiling woman with silver eyeliner, at a tiny counter, the menu on the wall to her left, a glass covered drinks cooler on the other side of a doorway leading back to the kitchen, out of which a staff person comes carrying finished orders outside to one of three seating areas, one in an enclosed tent, another under what looks like a large carport, and the third tables on a concrete slab.

 

Met Alan at Piggin’ Out last night. Tasty. I had a slab of ribs with spicy sauce, macaroni and cheese, baked beans, and a honey glazed chunk of corned bread. Obviously a joint and a local favorite. People came and went while we ate, most picking up to go orders.

Had breakfast with Marilyn and Irv, too. A day of friends and minor key domestic tasks.

 

Ann, my palliative care nurse, called just as I’d hit the garage door button on my way to Piggin’ Out. She had to reschedule. A funeral on Friday. We set up a zoom for Thursday in place of our 1 pm Friday appointment. Looking forward to talking to her. This regular conversation with a medical person feels supportive, kind. We all need support and kindness.

 

As you can tell from my title, I’ve chosen a path that works for me. I tried, more than once, to write a Ge-ology. A Pagan Halakah. A Great Work focused website. Systematic. With chapters and subheadings and thoughtful transitions between big ideas. A Mother Earth focused imitatio of, oh what the hell, Aquinas, Tillich, Barth. Discovered my mind doesn’t work that way. I work in smaller, sermon or ancientrails sized pieces. And, thoughtful transitions, building toward a comprehensive conclusion about matters holy, sacred, and divine? Not so much.

However. I have written, over the course of many sermons and postings, in hand-written journals, and spoken in numerous conversations, occasionally insightful remarks about the nature and accessibility of the sacred world. I want to begin gathering those, seeing if I can place them somehow together without giving up their ad hoc, highly contextualized origins. A Hermes’ Journey task.

 

Just a moment: Well. A week from now. 7 days.  Do you feel a big nuclear bomb with a cowboy dressed Orange One astride it, one hand on the fuse and the other waving a Stetson dropped toward our nation? Or, do you hear high heels clacking on the floors of their new home in that big Whitehouse on Pennsylvania Avenue?

I have no idea what will happen. Maybe like you?

 

Boulder, Colorado, Great Wheel, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Reimaging revelation, Science, Wild Neighbors, World History

The WHI: the Wildlife Human Interface

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Mabon and the Sukkot Moon

Friday gratefuls: Ruth. Rich. The Colorado Supreme Court. UC Boulder. Wolf Hall. Elephants. All of our Wild Neighbors around the world. Doug’s Diner. Being a student. Jamie. Luke. Woolly Mammoths. Driving to Boulder in the early morning as Great Sol gradually lit the Hogbacks, the Meadows in their russets and greengolds, the lower down deciduous Trees aflame with reds and oranges and yellow. Getting out and about.

Sparks of joy and awe: Non-Human Rights

Kavannah: Kavod  Honor

One brief shining: Sitting next to Ruth, I watched the mock courtroom of Wolf Hall fill up with law students dressed in their student variety from jeans and backpacks to a black dress and pearls, the conversation subdued since the presence of black robed Colorado Supreme Court Justices would soon transform the mock courtroom into a real court, one about to hear a pleading that Elephants fit the definition of person for the purpose of a writ of habeas corpus*.

 

I want to back into this topic. A story I’ve told and retold. Almost exactly ten years. October 31, 2014 I stood in what would soon be my back yard staring into the soft black eyes of three Mule Deer Bucks. Seemed like a long time though probably no more than a minute. When they decided we were done, I felt as if I’d been granted permission to live here among them, a message delivered by these spirit beings of the Mountains. Yes, you can say I overlaid on those three Bucks my own interpretation. Finding in that encounter a blessing I hadn’t known I’d sought.

In 2019. June. The day I began 35 sessions of radiation for my unhappily returned prostate cancer three Bull Elks jumped over our five foot fence with great ease and proceeded to eat the blooming Dandelions. One of them had only one antler. They would come again and again.

A year ago on a rainy July night I drove up Black Mountain Drive not far past the Upper Maxwell Fall’s trail head and encountered a Bull Elk staring at me as I passed by, his bulk hidden by the Aspen stand, but his antlers and face clear in the momentary flash of my headlights.

Yesterday morning I got up at 6 am, got dressed, drank some coffee, gathered the items I needed, put on my black Grateful Dead hat with the colorful dancing Bears and began the hour long drive down the hill, then north to Boulder. Along Hwy 285, still well into the foothills I saw a black shape along the side of the road. Since many people have metal cutouts of various Wild Neighbors as lawn decor, I imagined at first that this object was one of those. Until it looked at my oncoming car, turned quickly around, and scuttled in that soft clumsy-appearing Black Bear amble back into the Forest.

I don’t see many Bears. This is the third one I’ve seen since I’ve lived up here though they live all around us. A few years ago walking not far from my house a large Black Bear crossed the road not thirty feet from me. Last year I saw a Bear near the intersection of Brook Forest Drive and Hwy 73. That’s all of them.

In each of these three instances the Bears turned away from me, hurrying into the shelter of their wild home, the Forests and Mountains.

All this means I live in the WUI. The Wildlife Urban Interface. Again, yes, you can argue we shouldn’t be here. Maybe not. But we are. Even the cities outside which the WUI exists were once encroachments on Wild habitats, too. Like the Animals of the Mountains we too have to live somewhere.

Not an apologetic. A statement of fact.

My friend Marilyn Saltzman told of a safari she was on a few years back. Their guides took them to a Watering hole somewhere in the Bush. A herd of Elephants drank from it while a number of other Animals waited. Some Elephants left, then came back, others left. Not until the last Elephant had gone did the other Animals come to drink. As she told this story, I thought, who is the true monarch of the Jungle?

Finally, you might say. Seated in the mock courtroom made real, like the Velveteen Rabbit, Ruth and I listened to two lawyers make oral arguments that the five elephants: Missy, Kimba, Lucky, LouLou, and Jambo deserved release from their confinement in the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo. Yes, that Cheyenne Mountain.

The Non-Human Rights Project had entered a writ of habeas corpus claiming they did have that right under a writ. The Cheyenne Zoo had counsel as did the five Elephants. This article in Colorado Politics is an excellent summary of the proceedings.

It was like watching yesterday and tomorrow. The gray haired, dismissive and at times arrogant attorney for the Zoo, represented the status quo. Basically: We’re a really, really good zoo. The younger, much younger lawyer for the Elephants represented the growing awareness of the blurry, blurry line separating us from our Wild Neighbors. Sure, Elephants. Big brain. Social. Emotional. Sensitive. Like Primates and Whales and Dolphins and other clearly intelligent animals, even Corvids, to mention another class of Animals, Elephants in zoos represent an obvious case of anthropocentrism used as a rationale to dominate, entrap, and enslave other Animals.

Through the Rights of Nature movement, see my March 4 of this year post, not only Animals but Rivers and Forests have been granted legal rights and protections. Zoos and those defending them are on the wrong side of history. It will take years and many more legal proceedings but somewhere, sometime the thin edge of the wedge will hold open the door to a world where humans live as part of the Interdependent Web of all beings (defined as widely as you wish) on Mother Earth. When this happens, it will have Earth shattering, no let me amend that, Earth healing consequences.

This Mabon morning in Colorado, yesterday, I saw one more track being laid down toward this too far off day.

 

 

*Although there have been and are many varieties of the writ, the most important is that used to correct violations of personal liberty by directing judicial inquiry into the legality of a detention.  Britannica

Feelings, Fourth Phase, Mussar, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Reimaging revelation

As I went to bed. The Holy, The Sacred. Clear sight

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Lugnasa and the 99% Full Harvest Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Ninja blender. Figuring out the veggie paradox. Celecoxib. Allows me to stand long enough for short cooking. Pain lessened. Over my dislocation created by possibly shorter life span. Feeling grounded in my life again. In part thanks to the pain treatment. A beautiful photograph. Taken by me. Header. Serious thinking. Tarot. Jessica Roux.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: The Sky at dusk on Shadow Mountain

Kavannah: Yirah

One brief shining: Each night after the lights go dark, the window’s cranked full open, the fan turned on, and I’ve taken my last look at the Stars through the Lodgepoles, I fall into a revery of thought, never knowing where my mind will carry me but always happy for the ride, this idea bouncing off that one, triggering another turn of ideas or images, pure and unguided inner joy. Today’s post is about last night’s journey.

 

Thinking about the day as my head lay on the pillow, body stretched out and at peace. As I try to do each night, I consider the middah I chose. Did it come to mind? Did I experience its manifestation? What were the specific moments when that happened? How did I feel? Then, and immediately afterward. What did I learn?

Yirah. Awe. Wonder. Amazement. [(fear)] Yirah, the Hebrew for this sudden feeling of openness, of seeing clearly, often got translated, by Jews and Christians alike, as fear. As in the phrase “Fear of the Lord.” Bad translation. Bad. Down boy. And I say boy advisedly, because Fear of the Lord has a decided patriarchal connotation. Bow down to the King, the one who rules you, makes you obey, has the power of life and death over you.

Rudolf Otto defined the Holy as containing an element beyond the ethical sphere, which he named the numinous.* Stripped of what Otto defines as its element of moral perfection, which he has to assume because he’s writing within a Christian context, the holy, the numinous, is in my opinion what we mean by the word sacred.

Yirah opens a neural pathway for experiencing of the numinous. Which, again Otto, can be both terrifying and fascinating. In Yirah, in awe, wonder, and amazement we find the gateway to revelation. And what is revelation? An experiencing, however brief or long, of the numinous, the holy. The sacred.

I reclaim a possible connection to Kant here in his use of the word noumenon. Below the author of the Wikipedia article says the numinous is unrelated to Kant’s idea of the noumenon which refers to: “…an unknowable reality underlying sensations of the thing.” Kant also called this the ding an sich, the thing in itself, whatever an object of perception is without the observer.

What I believe Yirah opens us to is just that: the ding an sich, the thing itself. Reality as it is, not as we confuse it with our preconceived ideas, our biases, our values. I think you could also call it the field out beyond good and bad where Rumi invites us to meet.

What is that reality, for which I now claim the word sacred? A place where the mystic bonds of each to each and all to all become, however briefly for us, accessible. So in cultivating the middah of yirah we strengthen the inner muscle that allows us to see beyond the surface to the ligaments and tendons that link us to the Tree, the Friend, the Lodgepole Pine, the Mountain, the Ocean, to our Lover, to our Inner World and in it to the Collective Unconscious. Those connections which tie us inextricably together, a roiling, boiling mass of creativity, of newness that we try, hard, to ignore because experiencing it directly is to experience, perhaps, the terror of dissolution, yet also a deep fascination. Oh, so this is what the World is really, really like?

An important observation here is that this is not a logical nor a conceptual process. It is a sensory process, in other words, a process stimulated by seeing something, hearing something, touching something, tasting something. It is in no way faith. You might call the experience of yirah a mystical moment, whether long or short.

So when I took in whole cloth the bulk of Black Mountain and realized a moment of wonder, what happened was a brief, bodily experience of all the links and bonds that tie me to Black Mountain and Black Mountain to me. When I watched Great Sol’s light fade into night and the colors entranced me, I saw into the mystic bonds that tie me to Great Sol, to the dusk, to the coming night, to the vast distances between Shadow Mountain and our Star. When I experienced, for a moment, myself as part of the Arapaho National Forest, a human among Trees, I felt one with each Lodgepole, Rock, Stream, Mule Deer, and Elk.

And one more bit. Yirah, then, is a sensory event which peels back the gauze of day-to-day illusion in which we see and treat everything as separate from our body, ourselves. The midot, all the character traits we study in mussar, I think, are ways we can open ourselves to the world, ways we can become a moment for the other to experience yirah and us as bonded to them. A give and take, a push and pull, a way perhaps of becoming holy, sacred.

Yirah is the gateway for revelation. revelation the gateway to the sacred. The sacred is seeing the links that bind us to the all and the all to us.

*”…while the concept of “the holy” is often used to convey moral perfection, which it does entail, it contains another distinct element, beyond the ethical sphere, for which he coined the term numinous based on the Latin word numen (“divine power”).[2]: 5–7  (The term is etymologically unrelated to Immanuel Kant’s noumenon, a Greek term which Kant used to refer to an unknowable reality underlying sensations of the thing).” He explains the numinous as an experience or feeling which is not based on reason or sensory stimulation and represents the “wholly other”

“The Holy, according to Otto, is a mystery (Latin: mysterium) that is at once terrifying (tremendum) and fascinating (fascinans).   Wiki

Beyond the Boundaries, Great Wheel, Holidays, Judaism, Memories, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Reimaging revelation, Torah

More things, Horatio

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Lugnasa and the Harvest Moon

Monday gratefuls: The Ancient Brothers. Visa. Stolen number. Gold on the Mountains. Coming. Crisp nights. Herme’s Journey. Candles. Cernunnos. Paul, splitting wood. Ode and Elizabeth. Tom on his bike. Bill and Marietta. Full Harvest Moon on the 18th. September in the Rockies. Elk Cows grazing along the roadside. The Rut. Green and its many shades.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Aspens in the Fall

Kavannah: AWE   יִרְאָה Yira   Awe, reverence, fear (פְּלִיאָה Plia: Wonder, amazement) (כּוֹבֶד רֹאשׁ Koved Rosh: Seriousness, solemnity, gravitas) [קַלוּת רֹאשׁ Kalut Rosh: Disregard, levity, flippancy; literally “light-headedness”]

One brief shining: Mabon, the fall harvest holiday, begins on the Fall Equinox, September 22nd this year, but the full harvest moon arrives sooner, both raising memories of nights driving on gravel roads past fields of Corn stubble, across Nebraska as the combines cut their wide swaths through gold fields of Wheat, Pumpkin patches filled with orange globes ready for front porches and pies, of Grain trucks lined up to unload at train side granaries, of Shine on Shine on Harvest Moon for me and my gal.

 

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a long time. Religion and its cultured despisers. Friedrich Schleiermacher. Why, I’m asking here, in a time of rapid secularization, do I keep choosing a religious lens through which to view the world? I don’t believe in God, not in any way that would resonate with folks in Alexandria First Methodist or probably anybody at United Theological Seminary. I’ve left two traditions behind, Christianity and Unitarian-Universalism, only to convert to Judaism at age 76. Paganism, finding the sacred in the ordinary, especially for me in the turning of the Great Wheel and the world of Wild Neighbors, Mountains, Streams, and Plants remains core for me as it has since about age 40.

Part of the answer lies in the middah of Yirah. Awe, reverence, wonder, amazement. Maybe the whole answer. Like a Plant, heliocentric, turns towards Great Sol, I’m Yirahcentric, turning my face, my lev toward Awe. Can’t help it. I see beauty in the eyes of a toddler searching for the next target as they dash around a playground. In the Dog hanging out the window of a car, letting the breeze bring scents. In the Moon as it changes. In the smile of a friend. In the songs of the Morning Service. In the shema. In studying ancient scriptures to learn what those in past found yirah worthy.

Awe grounds me, grabs me, says to me, hey, pay attention. Here. Right here. At the memory of Kate. Rigel snuffling my hands as I tried to tie my shoe laces. Perhaps you, perhaps most people, can experience awe without a religious frame for it. I want the constant reminder that the Jewish liturgical year, the cycle of the parshas, Jewish friends bring to me. Oh, my sacred community. It’s right here in Alan, Joanne, Ginny, Janice, Tara, Ariaan, Jamie, Rebecca, Sally. Sharing with me a sense that the world has more, far more, to offer than even the white coats and their laboratories, their microscopes and telescopes and centrifuges can grasp.

Which no way denigrates what science has made known. I’m in awe of the CERN collider, the deep underground searches for neutrinos, the close readings of the double helix. The images of the Hubble, the James Webb? Awesome. Wonderful. Amazing.

Yet I remain aware of how shallow an understanding even these majestic human endeavors bring us. Consider the red dots in a James Webb image. What are they? Galaxies. Is it amazing that the Webb can see these galaxies far away in distance and time? Oh, yes. But consider. They are Galaxies. Billions of Stars, Planets that we can experience only as tiny red dots. Or the neuroscientists searching for consciousness. Where is it?

Perhaps the easiest example of what I’m trying to say: love, justice, compassion. Feelings and abstract thoughts. Find those Sam Harris.

As Hamlet famously observed: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” Perhaps I gravitate toward religion because it openly acknowledges this. Religion is, in this sense, more humble than scientistic reverence. More humble than any certainty blathered on by politicians or even psychologists.

I bracket those who seek refuge in religion against a chaotic and uncertain world. I understand that impulse, the desire to know for sure. Yet it is a trap, a leghold trap, that keeps its prey away from the very thing they seek: freedom.

Two Jews, three opinions. Yes.

Asia, Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Holidays, Judaism, Korea, Memories, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Reimaging revelation, Shabbat, Travel

Chuseok and Teshuvah. Double post. see below as well.

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Lugnasa and the Harvest Moon

Shabbat gratefuls: Torah. Jamie. Mussar. Ruth and Gabe. Lighting the candles. The shema. CBE. Mary and Guru. Mark in Bangkok. My son and Seoah in Okgwa for the Chuseok Festival.* Alan and his busy weekend. Good sleeping. Kristie. Second opinions. Cancer. Spinal stenosis. Sally. Aging. Its joys and its struggles. Scott and Yin. Men. Women. UC Boulder.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Friendship

Kavannah: Teshuvah-“…the journey of teshuvah is not about “turning over a new leaf” or being “born again”; rather, it is simply finding our way back to the land of our soul…Every person possesses a core of inherent goodness whose integrity cannot be compromised. While outwardly, one’s actions may not always reflect this inner goodness…people always have the ability to shed their superficial facade and do teshuvah—returning to their truest, deepest selves.” chabad.org

One brief shining: Chuseok draws families together in North and South Korea, often back to the places of their birth or raising, like little Okgwa for Seoah, back for thanksgiving for family, for the harvest, for love between a brother and a sister, all over that land, a return to the place of your formation; we might say finding a way back to the land of your soul, which has an individual component, of course, but also and strongly a community, familial component, though, yes, the land of your soul and your homeland may be also be widely divergent.

Chuseok card

 

 

Sept 2023. Seoahs family

The key move here, from a Jewish perspective, lies in the neshamah, that essence of you, that buddha nature, that stainless and unstainable core to which one can always return, no matter how hamartia-missing the mark-has confused your nefesh, the outward facing portion of you that changes, grows, shrinks, expands depending on which of the many wolves you feed.

The month of Elul, our current month in the Lunar Calendar for 5784, encourages all Jews to chasbon nefesh, accounting of the soul. Look back over the last year and see if you got lost in moments of despair over an illness. Like I did. See if you judged others harshly, rather than judging them on their merits. Like I did. See if you neglected opportunities to act with loving-kindness. Like I did. See if you failed to discern again the purpose of your life. Like I did. See if you failed again to act on that purpose. Like I did. Take steps to amend those personal lapses that you can. Like I have. Take steps to open your lev to your true path. As I have.

Teshuvah is not about guilt, however. It is about sweeping away the barriers in your life to being who you most truly are: a sacred becoming, a moment in the ever expanding tapestry of novelty that is the universe and everything. A unique and irreplaceable soul, a unique, never to be repeated, ishi-go ishi-e self awaits your joyous return.

No stains that lead to damnation. No sins even God could not forgive. Only you and the land of your soul. To which, at any time, you can, with exuberance and calm, return.

 

 

 

*”It’s the other time of the year in Korea besides Lunar New Year’s Day, aka Seollal (설날), when family members gather together.  Usually, this means traveling to the home of the head of the family, often one’s grandparents.

According to legend, an ancient king of the kingdom, Silla, started a month-long weaving contest between two teams.   The team who had woven the most cloth won, and they were treated by the losing team with food, drinks, and other gifts.  Thus starting the tradition of Thanksgiving almost 2000 years ago.

Some scholars also tie Chuseok to Korea’s history, wherein agriculture was a big part of daily life.  Koreans commonly offered rituals to ancestors to give thanks and celebrate the harvest moon.

Traditionally, the purpose of Chuseok was for family members to gather together during the full harvest moon. This usually appeared in the sky on the 15th day of the 8th month of the lunar calendar. Families wanted to celebrate and show gratitude to their ancestors for the fruitful harvest.

Chuseok is very much a traditional holiday where many of the customs from the old days still stand.”

Chuseok in Korea

 

 

 

Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Mountains, Reimaging revelation, Weather +Climate

The Pearl

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The Off to College Moon

Monday gratefuls: Kate, always Kate. Sarah, BJ, Pamela. The Ancient Brothers. The Bistro. Oysters. Filet mignon. A Pearl. The Otherworld. Another dimension. Rain, Rain, please stay and come again another day. Shadow Mountain Drive, Shadow and Conifer Mountains, the Evergreen Meadow in the Rain. Mist and shades of green. My Otherworld.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: The Pearl

Kavanah: Serenity   Menucha

One brief shining: Drove over to Marshdale, a burb of Evergreen, as Rain pelted the Lodgepoles and the Aspens, rendering Shadow Mountain and Conifer Mountain green misty hulks of risen Rocks, to the Bistro, a small fine dining restaurant that Kate I and went to for special occasions, her 80th counted, walked in with my hood up as the Rain came down, got my usual table against the wall; Stacy came around and I ordered a 6 Oyster appetizer, both Kate and I loved fresh Oysters, proceeding from left to right I used the little fork to pry loose the meat, tipped the shell, and slurped them down, except at the sixth and last one, I bit down, what?, and pulled out of my mouth a tiny pearl.

 

 

I looked at it with my unaided eyes, having left readers behind as I often do, and held it up to Stacy. Is this what I think it is? I’ll take it to the chefs. Yes, the chefs considered opinion, a pearl. She returned it in a small clear plastic cup that might contain sauce in another situation.

Texted Ruth with a picture. What’s that? A tiny pearl I found during my birthday celebration for your grandma. Oh, she joined you. Dad does that sometimes with me.

A sense of the uncanny settled over the meal. Thunder roared outside, Rain hit the windows of this charming restaurant with its low wooden beamed ceiling. Did Kate reach across the table and take my hand? Did I tell her happy 80th and see her smile? I had intended to order the house salad but instead ordered a caprese salad by mistake. A salad Kate and I first had in a small cafeteria in the Vatican on our honeymoon. We loved it and made it often with our own heirloom tomatoes. We called it Popeteria salad.

At the table with me I had my Kindle on which I’m reading Lev Grossman’s latest, The Bright Sword, his retelling of the Arthurian legend, and in it a main character had just stumbled into the Otherworld. So had I.

The Pearl from Kate, what else could it be, I’ll have set in a ring to wear on my ring finger or as a pendant for a necklace.

On her 80th birthday. Kate. Reached out and gave me a gift. A Pearl of great price.*

Raffles Town House. 2016.

*Luke 13: 45“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking beautiful pearls, 46 who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it.

 

Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Reimaging revelation, Shadow Mountain, US History

Earth Waves

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The Off to College Moon

Wednesday: Tom. Zoom. Ruth. Money for college. Inspire concerts. 110 minute workout yesterday. Work out days. 2. Focus on Herme’s journey. 5 days. Mayfly life. Earth Waves. Mountains. Mountain Day in Japan coming August 11. Shadow Mountain. Black Mountain. Conifer Mountain. Berrian and Legault Mountains. Evergreen Mountain. Berrigan Mountain. Mt. Blue Sky. My local cluster of Mountains. 82% containment of the Quarry Fire. Evacuations over.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Shadow Mountain

One brief shining: Rabbi Rami Shapiro’s metaphor of our lives as Ocean Waves, above the surface of the Ocean yet still the Ocean, then returning to the Ocean from which we came made me consider Mountains, Earth Waves, lasting much longer than the Ocean Wave, yet also destined to return to the Earth from which they rose. both metaphors for human life and I choose the Mountain, the Earth Wave, to emulate.

 

Continuing on the theme from the last few days. My cobbled together worldview. This is the life of August 7, 2024, risen through the orogeny of waking, strong and tall, durable. From its peak you can see Denver and Minnesota and Thailand and the Outback and Orion and Draco and the Milky Way. Yet also only a day, one of the infinite Mayfly lives, none longer than a day. We surf the Earth Wave of our day, our life, embracing its heights and its valleys.

My Lodgepole Companion greets this August 7th life with their usual stoicism yet expresses joy as its Needles, oriented by Great Sol toward the southeast, soak up life giving Light. The life of August 6th saw Rain for their Roots, may it be so in this life, too.

My day, my only day in which to live, this day, August 7th, 2024, includes greeting Great Sol. Saying the shema. Groaning a bit as my back exacts its price for movement. Excited for Ruth’s visit to work on Kate’s Minnesota Saves account. Free the money. Free the money. Free the money! A nap in this life, I imagine. Near the end of this life, as Great Sol disappears thanks to Mother Earth’s stately spin, I’ll buy some cutup fruit at at the Evergreen Safeway and go to the Mussar Vad Practice group at CBE.

After the day’s light disappears and night falls, I’ll drive home away from Berrigan Mountain and Evergreen Mountain, up the Valley drained by Cub Creek, Blue Creek, Maxwell Creek. Swimming through the Earth Waves in which I live, climbing from Evergreen to the peak of Shadow Mountain where I will rest at the crest of its wave.

One day.

 

Just a moment: The Midwest. My home for over 65 years. 40 of those in Minnesota. Not Coastal. Not a center of power in the political sense. Its politics far more opaque than those who live outside it know. Especially the Upper Midwest states of Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. More communal with the German and Scandinavian roots. More rooted in Land and Lakes. Distant from the rest of the U.S. Less concerned with the opinions of others, more determined to make its own way. Sometimes populist. Sometimes progressive. Sometimes conservative in the old fashioned sense. Sometimes crazy right. McCarthy is buried outside Appleton, Wisconsin. Not sure what it will look like to the nation as Walz’s turn on the hamster wheel of fame drives close inspection.

Art and Culture, Asia, Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Hermitage, Holidays, Judaism, Mountains, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Reimaging revelation, Shadow Mountain

My ancientrail

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The Off to College Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Ruth. Willville. August 20th. On her own. With a net. Returning to the Solar System. Gaia. Great Sol. Space. Vastness. Galaxies. Huge. Galaxy Clusters. Huger. The Universe its ownself. Our home. Our tiny, tiny presence in our galaxy, our local cluster, the whole of everything. And thanks for all the fish.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Shabbat

One brief shining: Reading the parsha, the end of Numbers, then the book on Reconstructionism for class and for the CBE bookclub, lighting the candles, and saying the berakhot, the blessing over them, settling in to my Shabbat, sleeping, then rising, resurrected, granted another life, the life of August 3rd, 2024, lived with friends Marilyn and Irv, with more books and some TV until the day fled, the life was over, and I went down into the 1/60th of death again.

Kavanah: PERSEVERANCE  Netzach (NETS-ach)  נֵצַ

 

I cobble things together. Not exactly syncretism. I have no larger design in mind. Discovering useful ways of understanding, framing, defining. I’m finding the life of August 4th, 2024 a contemplative one. Coming as it does after Shabbat and graced by the presence of my Ancient Brothers. Better for me than living in the moment. Living a full life, one day at a time. AA resonance. Jewish inflection. Expansion of the be here now idea to a waking day. Carpe diem fits. Though it might be a bit aggressive. How about cradle the day, or enjoy the day, or embrace the day?

This all fits well with the lesson of Yamantaka. Meditating on my corpse. Seeing death for what it will be. For me. Not a time to fear but to include in the ongoingness of life. Whether darkness or reincarnation or sudden awakening in a different form. As significant as birth. As love. As justice. As compassion.

Eudamonia comes from the Greeks. Aristotle. A cleaner, more as I experience the flow life way of approaching life’s purpose. Especially considering the longue dureé, how very important and mostly insignificant I am and will be. How I was before I was. If I was. The Mexica idea. Life is a dream between a sleep and a sleep.

Being a Jew. Bathing in the waters of the mikveh. And in the community I find at CBE. And in the long, rich tradition of Jewish thought and ritual. Saying the shema in the morning and in the evening. Studying mussar. Friends.

Hanging with the Ancient Brothers. With Diane. Friends and family over the years. Mary and Mark. My son and Seoah. Dogs.

The Great Wheel and the pagan eye that finds the sacred, the divine right here on the surface of things where Tomatoes grow and Iris bloom and Rain falls and Wildfire burns.

Following the Jewish liturgical year and the Great Wheel. Cyclical time. Not linear. More important to me. Though aging matters, too. I’m fond of the years I’ve lived. And the many, many lives known one day by one day.

Of course, Taoism. Another way of understanding the unitary, yet always evolving one in which we move and live and have our becoming.

With these ideas, these notions, this framing I find each day, each new life, a miracle. A time to savor. To not waste. To know as ichi-e ichi-go, once in a lifetime. And all beautiful. Wabi-sabi.

My tao. My ancientrail. Herme’s journey.

Great Wheel, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Reimaging revelation

Lugnasa

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The Mountain Summer Moon (its 1% crescent)

Shabbat gratefuls: Special Shabbat candles. A day of rest, friends, reading. The Quarry Fire. Life in the W.U.I, the wildlands urban interface. Its anxieties and its joys. Poetry. Literature. Torah. Talmud. Mussar. Midrash. Music. Ives. Copeland. Cage. Mozart. Coltrane. Parker. Monk. Bach. Telemann. Gregorian chant. Kate, always Kate. Her violinist sisters: B.J. and Sarah.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Shabbat

One brief shining: This August 3rd life in the year 2024, a hot dry life with Wildfire not far away, with the contentment of Shabbat on offer, with those fancy Shabbat candles burned down, later Irv and Marilyn on their way to Aspen Perks for a breakfast with me, while I use ever changing neuronic activity to control my fingers, spit out black words while waiting to see what I’m saying. Oh.

Kavanah: Presence   Metinut (mitt-ee-NOOT)   מְתִינוּת

Mindfulness, presence, intentionality (literally to “move slowly”)   [חִפָּזוֹן Chipazon, chee-pah-ZONE: Hurry, rush, haste]

 

Lughnasa*. A first fruits holiday. A cross-quarter day on the Great Wheel lying between the Summer Solstice and the Autumnal Equinox. August 1st. Catholicism celebrates the day as Lammas or Loaf Mass when parishioners in Great Britain and Ireland would bring freshly baked bread from the season’s first Corn (Wheat in the U.S.) harvest. As their campaign of suppression and repression of native religions gathered force, Roman Catholics swept up many Jewish and pagan holidays. Lughnasa among them.

 

 

While the Roman Catholic church built churches and cathedrals over Celtic holy wells, hoovered up holidays, declared Celtic gods and goddesses heretical or chose to adopt them, St Bridgit being a notable example, Brigid being the powerful triple goddess of hearth, smithy, and healing, the Celtic Faery Faith never fully died out as W. Evans-Wentz proved by visiting late 19th century Celtic lands for his doctorate from Oxford. His dissertation, the Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, shows that it survived then in the pagan (rural) areas of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall, and the Isle of Man.

The week long market fair still held in rural Celtic lands had a religious as well as an agricultural purpose. Dancing and bonfires, sneaking off into the fields to spread fertility with the sympathetic magic of love-making, honoring the sun-god of many talents, Lugh.**

Lughnasa, remembered by Celtic immigrants to the U.S. like the Scots-Irish, spawned county and state fairs here. The Great Minnesota Get Together is a for instance. If you go, look in the bushes. There might be a few stray pagans celebrating in the old way.

*

*“To this day, there is a town in Kerry that holds a fertility festival each August, where a magnificent he-goat precides like Cernunnos for three days and nights, and bacchanalian drinking, wild dancing, and varieties of sexual indescretion are the principal entertainments. It is this characteristically Irish mélange of pagan and Christian that forms the theme of Brian Friel’s magnificent play Dancing at Lughnasa—Lughnasa being the harvest feast of the god Lug, still celebrated on August 1 in parts of Ulster.”  source: How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995)

**“Lugh was able to do all things well. He could forge at a smithy and ride a great horse, hold his breath under water for hours, fight without ever becoming exhausted, and throw his spear with perfect precision. He was also a harper, poet, wheelwright, headler, and genealogist, and that’s not all! Lugh managed to defeat the giant Balor of the One Eye, who could kill everyone in his range of vision simply by opening his eyelid and looking at them. Lugh whirled his sling over his head and put out Balor’s eye.”source: The Story We Carry in our Bones (2015)      Irish Myths

Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Reimaging revelation, Science, US History

Election 2024: the Novel. Another Twist.

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The Mountain Summer Moon

Sunday gratefuls: The novelist has thrown yet another Big Twist into this election year. Trump’s ear. Oh, my. Red Flag warning today. Red Flag in the day, attention must pay. Numbers. Zornberg’s Bewilderment. Reading. Mitch Rapp. Another week of 150 plus minutes exercise. Radiation consult this Thursday. My son. Seoah. Murdoch. Hawai’i.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: My son

One brief shining: Handed in my Powerball ticket, a big winner, over a quarter of a billion dollars, Tom’s challenge, what are those first moments like, how do I feel, what do I do, the Ancient Brothers topic for this morning, an American, so American, fantasy, yet one with a Rorschach template for our real values.

 

Gotta admit. I didn’t see a registered Republican recent high school student using his no doubt legally obtained AR-15 assault rifle to fire eight shots at 45. That one photograph with blood around his mouth. I thought to myself, no way this can get any weirder. Wrong, so wrong. Gobsmacked. Forehead slapped. Mind scrambled.

No thriller writer would have this much chutzpah. The irony way too obvious. The twist, after the debate and the Supreme Court ruling on immunity, and the felony convictions, and the money damages in the cover up trial and the E. Jean Carroll verdict. Too much. I mean, come on. Is that believable?

It is a page turner though. What will happen next? Russian interference? Chinese interference? Maybe a black hole selectively absorbing only those citizens with way more red than necessary in their fashion statements? Each day a different aspect of the democratic process comes under attack from those seemingly interested in a quasi-king instead of a head of the third equal branch of our Federal Government.

At 77 this is almost more excitement than I can handle. Normally a bit breathless here at 8,800 feet, now I’m attached to an oxygen concentrator.

There are as well all those polls showing the orange one ahead in the swing states, the battleground states, while kind Old Joe dithers. And Kamala Harris runs without running. Democrats dither along with Joe. Somebody has to show decisiveness. Let’s turn this damned election upside down and inside out. Elect a Democrat.

 

Just a moment: Here’s the thing. Revelation. A musty old idea. Communication from the other side, eh? Or, maybe from this or that multiverse? Could be God? Always, and I want to lean on this hard, Always, human mediated. Even miracles only become miraculous when reported and confirmed by some human who experienced them. The implication? All of our religious reveries, our sacred writings, our tales of Jesus and Moses and Zoroaster and Shiva and Lao Tze, all within the human experience. What is resurrection but a tale told by a human?

No, this is not a definitive argument against revelation per se. All I can confidently say is that we don’t know it unless someone told us or we experienced it and are the ones doing the telling. Same thing could be said, I suppose, for science. Only the results of experiments by humans, evaluated and reported by humans.