• Category Archives Humanities

  • What defines you?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

    Monday gratefuls: Friends. Family. Medical Guardian. Tech help for living alone. Tom who recommended them. Cold week upcoming. Snow. Living in the Rockies. Being a Westerner. Having been a Midwesterner. Being a Jew; having been a Christian. Meeting new men. Kate, always Kate. Lunar calendars. Gregorian calendars. Maintaining the illusion of time.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: the Tanakh

    Kavannah for 2025: Creativity  Yetziratiut

    Kavannah for this January 6th life: Patience Savlanut

    One brief shining: The phases of the moon play out against a backdrop of stars, galaxies, the cosmic void which changes as we race through our orbit around Great Sol; Mother Earth tilted, so the weather changes from hot to cold and back again, and all of these repeat like life and death and birth among living things, nothing lost, all cycling in the great spiral of the Milky Way as it too races on its way, yet somehow also all becoming new, changing. A miracle.

    Here is the illustration in the style of a medieval illuminated manuscript, focusing on the concept of a personal core story. It combines rich colors, detailed motifs, and symbolic elements to evoke a timeless sense of life’s journey.

    Your core story. Rabbi Jamie wrote an interesting article focused on the notion of a core story for religious communities. The Christian core story focused on the life, death, and resurrection of Reb Jesus. The Jewish story focused on liberation from oppression and the journey afterward. Got me to thinking about each of us. You. Me. Even our Dogs and the Trees near you. Last night’s Sky. What is your core story?

    Let me see if I can tease one out for me as an example. May not find this one on the first go round. A core story functions as a touch stone, a marker of identity, something so central to our sense of self that we cannot be who we are without it.

    Polio. Experienced before most of my memories had begun to form. Known mostly through family stories and its bodily sequalae with which I still live. A central part of this story lies in my needing to learn to walk a second time after six months of paralysis on my left side. Rug burns on my forehead as I drug my body along Aunt Virginia and Uncle Riley’s couch, encouraged by my mom and Aunt Virginia. Uncle Riley wrote in concrete, 1949 Charles Paul. Polio.

    To this day I live with a paralyzed left diaphragm and dead muscles on the left of my neck. Others lived and live with much worse. Not complaining. Observing that this core story remains with me in a tactile, never to be forgotten way.

    In later thoughts about polio I decided Standing Upright in the World would be my way of honoring that young me and my parents and all who cared for me over the time of my illness. My personal motto.

    Are there other key stories in my life? Yes. My mother’s early death. Searching for a sacred reality. Getting sober. Finding and losing love. Kate. Yet none rest at the very core of my ancientrail like polio does.

    What’s your core story?

     

     


    Humanities Myth and Story

  • An Ontological Oncologist

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samain and the Moon of Growing Darkness

    Tuesday gratefuls: Marilyn and Irv. Paul. Mark in K.L. Gettin’ stuff done. Snow. Cold. Back to working out. Aches to prove it. My Lodgepole Companion. That young Buck with the spike Antlers. Visiting again. Mary getting ready for Summer. My son, Seoah, and Murdoch. Thanksgiving in Songtan. His generosity. The Water Grill. 2:15. Ruth, Gabe, Jen, and me.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Thanksgiving

    Kavannah: Perseverance and chesed

    One brief shining: Opening a book and beginning to read starts a journey into the unknown, what if this paragraph changes my life, oh no, he didn’t, picked up one yesterday recommended by NYT conservative columnist, Ross Douthat, a dialogue between Olympian Gods favoring an idealistic, almost Bishop Berkeleyan, metaphysic in which all is mind or forms as mind pushes itself into forms. Or something like that.

     

    Got my house cleaned yesterday. Ana wielding her dust cloth, vacuum, and other tools of her trade to give me that spiffy home feeling. Not cheap but Furball Cleaning, owned by my friend Marina Harris, shows up and on time, and does better than average work. Hard to calculate how much psychic difference a clean house makes, but it’s a lot.

     

    That book I opened yesterday is All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life. Haven’t read a philosophy text in a while. This one is thick, thick, thick. As near as I can tell David Bentley Hart wants to make the case for something like Bishop Berkeley’s: Esse est percipi. To be is to be perceived. A solution, Hart believes, that could solve the four hundred old mistake in Western culture most often blamed on Descartes: The mind-body split.

    I agree with Hart’s definition of the problem. And, how you define is how you solve so we’re halfway to agreement from the start. I might even agree with a version of his solution, but not one that ends up providing a comfortable berth for old fashioned Thomistic theology. Which is where I suspect he is headed.

    My agreement with Hart lies in his insistence on a unitary metaphysic, it’s all one, and a rejection, because of this, with dualisms as final expressions of the nature of reality. My difference with him so far? I suspect him of having a static ontology. I may be wrong about that though. I’m a Whiteheadian, Jewish fan of the notion of all becoming new, every moment, in every instant.

    BTW: This might be the place for Paul’s addition to my stable of oncologists: urological, radiation, and medical. Paul thought I should add an ontological oncologist. Perfect. Static ontologies are the cancers of a process metaphysic.

    I know. I’m sorry. But it’s what I’m thinking about today.

     

    Just a moment: So. 25% on Mexico and Canada. 10% on China. Tariffs. First day in office. Dictator day if I recall. Whatever. As the teenagers say. Or, said. Probably a while ago.

    As a seed-keeper, I’ll continue reading Thoreau and Emerson, Dickinson and Melville. Madison and Monroe. Throw in a little Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

     


    Humanities Politics Shadow Mountain US History

  • Too much with us

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    The Mountain Summer Moon

    Tuesday gratefuls: Lab orders. Cancer. Ruby. Blackbird Cafe in Kittredge. Potato cakes. The fantasy homes along Bear Creek between Evergreen and Kittredge. All Stone exterior. All Log exterior. That one with the Waterfall. Bear Creek full yesterday after heavy Rains on Sunday. Coffee. Milk. Seltzer Water. The Shema. Unitary metaphysics. This spinning Planet.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Homes. Of all sorts.

    One brief shining: The kind phlebotomist wanted to help me; but, I’d forgotten my lab orders and she couldn’t find any in her computer system, after I’d driven a half an hour to get to her since my doctor’s office happens to be between lab companies this week; she flipped up the soft arm of the phlebotomy chair and I squeezed out, shaking my head at my own error, not bringing my copy of the orders.

     

    Been musing for a while about certain things that cannot be done via computer. Any medical visit that requires puncturing the skin. A physical exam in a doctor’s office. The delivery of physical objects purchased online. A kiss. A handshake. A hug. Driving down the hill and back up again. Flying in an airplane. Travel that involves dining and sleeping. The list could go on.

    Too often these days we give the lie to Wordsworth, “The world is too much with us, late and soon…” Instead we settle for the faux experience. Remember Alvin Toffler in his book, The Third Wave? High tech, high touch. Yes. The more we use technology, the more we need in person, face to face, skin to skin. We feel, often without knowing it consciously, with Wordsworth again: “Little we see in Nature that is ours. We have given our hearts away.” With A.I. advancing as it is, we may also find ourselves paraphrasing him: We have given our minds away.

    I’m no technoLuddite. Hardly. I have three computers. I’m writing this blog on my computer, expecting you to read it on yours. I spend at least three plus hours every week on Zoom, more some weeks. I no longer read a physical newspaper, relying instead on the digital versions of the NYT and the WP plus other news outlets. My shopping, like most of us who live in the Mountains or in rural America, happens online. My front door, your front door has become a receiving dock.

    Asher B. Durand (1796-1886)
    Kindred Spirits  1849
    Thomas Cole and William Cullen Bryant

    Yet. The interplay between the online world and the world of physical objects, especially humans and other Animals, Forests and Oceans, Mountains and Lakes has made revisiting the Romantic artists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries a useful corrective.

    In the United States Romanticism coincided with pre-Civil War and post-Revolution thought, the period often known as the American Renaissance. The Romantic turn toward the individual, the irrational, the natural produced works like Emerson’s essay, Nature, and Thoreau’s Walden Pond. Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter.

    This period of American intellectual and artistic life wanted to discover a non-European, American style in literature, poetry, painting. Melville’s Moby Dick. Painters like Church, Durand, Cropsey, Cole. A fruitful period to rediscover for our current ailment.


    Art and Culture Humanities Letters Literature Poetry US History

  • The Great White Whale

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    The Mountain Summer Moon

    Wednesday gratefuls: Brakes. Stevinson Toyota. CBE annual meeting. CBE history. Rocky Mountain Cancer Care. Tomorrow. Shirley Waste. Rolling, Rolling, Rolling. The trash containers. Sounds like Thunder. Rain yesterday. Great workout. Faster. 2X resistance. Farmer’s carry added. A short trip to the hallucination store. Great Sol, steady friend.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: New front brake pads for Ruby

    One brief shining: Knife cutting through tape, flattening cardboard, cleaning out the trash compactor, that ritual of this American life-trash day-requires plastic bins, plastic bags, throwaway plastic, lots of cardboard since we’ve disaggregated receiving docks, turning our front porches into the truck bays of used to be stores, dispersing the burden from corporate trash bins to local residences and local landfills.

     

    Got in 105 minutes of exercise yesterday. With 40 minutes on Sunday that means I only need another 5 to hit my weekly goal of 150 minutes of moderate exercise. Beginning to move faster these days so I’m up in the cardio zone more and more. Started doing a farmer’s carry to improve my grip strength. If Anthony Hopkins can stay fit at 86, why can’t I?

    Cousin Diane has an every other day jog from her home on Lucky Street to Folsom and onto Bernal Heights Park. Buddy Mark and his wife Elizabeth have memberships at Lifetime Fitness, same as my old gym in Coon Rapids, Minnesota. Alan hits the elliptical and the weights every morning at the Spire Condominiums where he lives in downtown Denver. Marilyn does jazzercise at 77. Exercise moves the needle on health span. Worth the effort.

     

    American Renaissance II:

    Been thinking about this more and more. Realized last night that the gang who put I heart the constitution stickers on their cars, who fly American flags from the beds of pickup trucks, who venerate the “founders”, who focus on the second amendment as God’s gift to domestic terrorism have a truncated version of American history. Stuck they are (thanks, Yoda) on a faux legalistic path from the first colonies right down to the streets of Washington, D.C. and January 6th. The history that matters to them is rebellion, not revolution. The golden tablets handed down to Wynken, Blynken, and Nod guide them towards. What? Amurica? A land of guns, liberty, and Christian white folks handed back the reins.

    Where in their journey is Rip Van Winkle? The Knickerbockers? The Scarlet Letter. Thanatopsis. Thoreau. Emerson. Mary Fuller. Emily Dickinson. Herman Melville.

    Perhaps we can see our time as a hunt for the great White whale. Will it bind us as a nation to its watery flanks, entangling us in harpoons and ropes, sending us all on a Nantucket sleigh ride? Will the great White whale then dive and take us, like Ahab, to a deep ocean grave? Seems possible to me.

    We need a fuller, richer understanding of the time when this country came to be. Not only about systems of governance. No. There was poetry. Literature. Broad discourse on the rights of human beings. Benjamin Franklin. How can we lift up the complex, messy, beautiful reality of pre and post revolution early America?

     


    Health Humanities Literature Myth and Story US History

  • American Renaissance II

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    The Mountain Summer Moon

    Phnom Penh Park Hornbills

    Tuesday gratefuls: The steady string of twists and other plot surprises. Poor Milwaukee. Joanne and I. All these years we’ve worked. Both shake head. Sushi. Evergreen. Yesterday’s afternoon rain. United Healthcare. A James Bond villain in American corporate clothing. Life with cancer. Flonase. An allergy season from heaven. So far. The Hornbills of Phnom Penh. Thanks, Mark.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Wild neighbors everywhere

    One brief shining: Went into Nana Sushi in Evergreen right across from the main fire station in the same spot where Thai 101 was a few years back; saw Joanne and she asked would I rather go back to the booths, yes I would because I could put my hearing aid to the wall well when we got back there she told me she’d been sitting in the front because it was easier for her to get up. Dueling infirmities.

     

    Beginning to feel reality slipping away. The shots in Pennsylvania. His fist raised in the oh so ironic Fight, Fight, Fight. Him entering the convention in profile with a large bandage on his right ear. The polls. That documents case for now disappeared. Presidential immunity. Project 2025. As if a thumb has been pressed on the flow of events in my (our) United States of America, tilting them toward putting this guy and his gang of anti-law, anti-constitution, anti-immigration, anti people of color, anti gay and lesbian, anti climate change in power. That’s the reality slipping away. As if a long string of no that can’t be rights has direction and purpose.

    As the wags say though. It isn’t over until it’s over. We still don’t know what the next chapters of the political thriller we’re living in have to offer. Things could change. Couldn’t they?

     

    Let’s talk instead about Ruth’s frog. A tattoo on her right upper arm. She asked for ideas for names. I suggested Twain. You know, Calaveras County. Which BTW is an event that continues to this day. I found this cute picture on the Calaveras County Website.

    Perhaps there is a route through the potential dismal and painful years. An American literary and artistic renaissance. American Renaissance II. A celebration of American art and artists, locally and nationally. Organized readings, classes in person and on zoom, museum exhibitions. Poetry contests. Prizes for new art and artists. A way to remind ourselves of the history of our national spirit. And of our national spirit itself. An oh so important task right now.

    When the Ancient Brothers discussed what they’d do with a quarter of a billion dollar windfall, the last thing I offered involved creating a think tank for the advancement of the liberal arts outside the academy. This could be a big idea. A way to counterpunch. With Emerson and Whitman. Twain and Bierce. Dickinson and Sontag. Oates and Morrison. Copland and Gershwin. Bierstadt and Hopper. Cage and Davis. Monk and Coltrane. Piercy and Hughes.

    I like this idea. Come at them from the side rather than head on. Perhaps defuse defensiveness? This one stays in the hopper. Soft power.


    Art and Culture Commentary on the news Feelings Humanities Letters Literature Politics US History

  • Liberal Arts, their necessity

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    The Mountain Summer Moon

    Thursday gratefuls: Gabe and Ruth. Beau Jo’s. Pizza. Cool nights. 22 degree difference: Lakewood to Shadow Mountain, 92-70. Abert’s Squirrel and Red Squirrels running. Chipmunks. Rabbits. Marmots. Fishers. Pikas. Prairie Dogs. Mice. Ravens. Crows. Magpies. Corvids.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Family

    One brief shining: Outside along the fence, there, peripheral vision alerted me, found it, a hopping form, bushy tail, then another, Red Squirrels, smaller all black pointy ears, running between the Lodgepoles, an Abert’s Squirrel, a very squirrely morning.

     

    Excited. I got a new translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Plan to read it through as part of Herme’s Pilgrimage. Stephanie McCarter from the University of the South. Not as ground breaking as the new Iliad and Odyssey by Emily Wilson, but fresh eyes and a woman’s perspective. Looking forward to grounding myself again in Ovid’s world of epic poetry, shapes changed into bodies, metamorphosis.

    You could call me a classicist. Not in the academic sense, I don’t have the languages, but religious and ancient classical texts do have a gravitational pull for me. In translation I’ve read and returned to the Bible, Homer, Chinese literary classics like Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Greek philosophy, the Talmud, Roman and Greek playwrights and poets like Ovid, Beowulf, the Norse sagas, Dante.

    When I say I’ve returned to them, I mean I will read them more than once. Which I don’t tend to do with more modern works. Say after the Renaissance.

    You could call me, too, conservative. I also keep returning to religious institutions and religious life. There’s a strong part of my inner journey that’s fed by books like the Torah, the New Testament, Tao Te Ching, Chado: the Way of Tea. Even the Great Wheel emerges from the long ago past.

    The vast deposit of human literature allows us to hop into a Jules Verne’s contraption of the mind, find long ago cultures like the Zhou Dynasty, Renaissance Florence, the Shogunate in Japan, village life in the old Celtic world, and for a time live in them, seeing the sights, considering the patterns of thought, the imaginative creations of other ways for being human.

    The wonder and magic of reading.

    Our era has begun to focus education away from the liberal arts which introduce us to philosophy, history, literature ancient and modern, languages, music and theater, poetry. We have a science and business tropism, a tendency to bend our institutions toward technology, toward business, toward matters concerning the practical arts like engineering, medicine, corporate agriculture.

    Of course those practical paths undergird our day to day lives. Necessary to us all. Yes. But, and here’s where the classical world, the conservative nature of the liberal arts and religion comes into play, to what end do we sustain human life? For what purpose do we earn profits? What is a humane approach to political economy?

    Without poetry and chamber music, without the voyage of Odysseus, without the journey of Dante, without the often ancient debates over the purpose of community, of nationhood, of war, of humanity itself, without Lao Tze and Confucius, without Zen and animist faiths like Shintoism and Western paganism we have no compass points to guide our white coated brethren, our C-suite compatriots, our decisions between a Trump and a Biden.

    Aimlessness leads to corruption, mendacity, and general rot. We are, right now, reaping the whirlwind of this shift in basic education.


    Feelings Fourth Phase Great Wheel Humanities Judaism Latin Letters Literature Myth and Story Science Torah Translating Metamorphoses World History

  • Herme’s Journey

    Posted on by Charles 1 Comment

    Summer and the waning Bar Mitzvah Moon

    Monday gratefuls: The Ancient Brothers. Great Sol. Shadow Mountain. TV. Books. CD’s. Jazz. Mozart. Telemann. Bach. Coltrane. Monk. Parker. Gregorian Chants. Rock and roll. CD player. K-dramas. Netflix. Amazon Prime. Mhz. Starlink. Conversation. Listening. Seeing. Really listening. Really seeing. The Aspen out my bedroom window. The dead Lodgepole.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: The lesser light-the Moon

    One brief shining: When I go now to an airport, when I even imagine going to an airport, I recoil, seeing the old Native American punishment, running between rows of TSA employees, airline boarding agents, and crabby fellow sufferers all diminished by the experience, yet needing to pass along, like some fraternity hazing ritual, the same misery to the pledges not yet seated in their too narrow and too jammed together seats. And paying often thousands of dollars to do it.

     

    Still enjoying a post bar mitzvah push sense of opening, of new possibilities. Herme’s Journey, which I imagined after the dream workshop last month, got sidelined a bit by the week of the ritual, guests, celebration, and the week of physical recovery that followed that one. Though. Kavod for the Trees (Honoring the Tree) has kept it alive.

    Herme’s Journey followed thoughts and feelings triggered by my Wabash dream. That dream encouraged me to reenter the life vision I had when I started college almost 60 years ago. To embrace that dream of a long period, lifelong in my hopes of those years, as a student, then a scholar. With libraries and writing instruments my primary tools. With ideas and their expression as my life work.

    Herme, you may recall, is the name I gave to the neon sign I had made of the Hooded Man Card* from the Wildwood Tarot Deck. The name I gave to myself in the wake of Kate’s death, of a mourner then a griever, then… I wasn’t sure what.

    Herme’s Journey blends the Hooded Man Card with the first card of the Tarot Deck: The Fool. The major arcana of a tarot deck tells a story of the Fool’s journey, begun blithely, a bindlestaff over one shoulder, a dog alongside, stepping off into the unknown. In the Wildwood deck** the Wanderer’s journey is through the Wildwood. Yes. My journey, too.

    The Wanderer is a beginner, the beginner’s mind at play in the fields of the psyche. Herme’s Journey is my Wanderer’s path, a beginner’s path, but one begun with the age and experience of an old man. So, Herme’s Journey.

    What lies along this path? Still unclear though Trees play a central role. As does the Great Wheel of the Year and the Jewish Lunar Calendar. As the pilgrimage unfolds, I plan to explore Kabbalah, my long period of work with Ovid’s Metamorphosis, poetry and literature, myth and legend, fairy and folk tales, religion, and the arts: music, painting, sculpture, theater, dance, opera.

    What will come? Again, unknown. It will be the path, not the destination. What I will do is read a lot, write, travel, think, listen, see, taste. Talk.

     

    *The Hooded Man stood at the winter solstice point on December 21, along with the earth and the sun in the night. This is the time to be alone and contemplate life. This card describes the gates of death and rebirth, deep inside the Earth.  Hooded Man

    **A central theme of the Wildwood Tarot is the interconnection of humans with the wild, with animals, and with the calendar cycle.


    Feelings Fourth Phase Great Wheel Hermitage Holidays Humanities Kabbalah Latin Letters Mountains Myth and Story Plants Poetry Tarot Travel Weather +Climate Wild Neighbors Writing

  • Tsundoku

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer and the Bar Mitzvah Moon

    Sunday gratefuls: Workout. Bechira point. Good choice. Herme’s Journey. Each Tree. Each Rock. Each Stream. Each Valley. Each Meadow. Each Ocean. Each Volcano. Each Dog. Each Person. Great Sol. The Great Wheel. Sukkot. Pesach. Shavuot. Tu B’shvat. Lunar months. Lunar calendar. Cyclical time. The phases of the Moon. Cognitive effort.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Accepting

    One brief shining: Check out the stack, pick up a current favorite like Storm Before the Calm (thanks, Tom), sink into that Stickley chair, find the dust jacket flap marking where reading left off, open the book, and proceed to learn, in this case that there are cycles in our national life, that Friedman’s way of parsing two of the big ones may offer hope for the grandkids. Smile quietly.

    Reading. What a revolution in my life when I learned how. Of course, Dad read. And wrote. Being a newspaperman. Mom I can’t recall though I imagine she read, too. Exemplars of a sort. Enough anyhow. All three of us: Mary, Mark, and I read.

    Interesting word, read. It can mean something as simple as understanding a Stop sign or an effort as complicated as following the story of War and Peace. When I say we read, I don’t mean we can read, I mean we actively use the skill to learn. As Mark Twain said, There is no difference between a man who can’t read and one who doesn’t read.

    Yes, if you know me, you know I have a book thing. Kate said to me once, “Most people go to a library. You buy the book.” Well, yeah. A habit formed first at Guilkey’s Newstand with comic books and then all of Ian Fleming, then whatever looked good. When I had a little money, I bought books. When I had enough money, I bought more books.

    Do I read them all? No. Tsundoku is the Japanese word for the stack(s) of books you’ve purchased but haven’t read. These articles in Big Think: “I own too many books” and in Maria Popova’s Marginalia: “Umberto Eco, Why unread books in our library are more valuable to our lives than read ones.” explain.

    My favorite rationale from these articles? Tsundoku is an antidote to the Dunning-Kruger effect, the tendency of ignorant people-Twain’s those who don’t read-to believe they know and understand vastly more than they do. Orange 45, I’m looking at you.

    Those unread books apply a force field to any upwelling of know-it-allness. Why, right here, I don’t know much about Herodotus, or the life of Edward Hopper, or the American Prometheus. My ignorance extends to Clausewitz, Severe Weather, and the plays of Plautus. Perhaps I’ll get to them, some day. But even if I do there will still be the volume on the journeys of Captain Cook, or that other one about the geology of the Plains. Or… You get the idea.

    I love the content of books and not the books themselves so my library contains no first editions, few signed books. It does contain the complete works of Emerson, more than one translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy and Ovid’s Metamorphosis, and lots of science fiction along with, well, many many others.

     


    Feelings Fourth Phase Humanities Latin Letters Literature Writing

  • I’m Into Something Good. Oh, yeah…

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane and the Shadow Mountain Moon

    Sunday gratefuls: Cool night. Elk. Mule Deer. Fox. Great Sol. The Great Wheel. The Great Work. The Jewish Year. Wild Trees. Ancient Forests. Sequoias. Coastal Redwoods. Bristlecone Pines. Kabbalah. Shekinah. The Sabbath Bride. Emergence. Lodgepoles. Aspens. Jewitches. Love. Justice. Compassion. A direction, a purpose. A way to live.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Emergence

    One brief shining: Before the closing of the door and before I even open it, I stand hand over my eyes repeating the shema, declaring that I, god-wrestler, find the one to be all and the all to be one, which we might call god or not, but we can call it for sure the interdependent web of all things, all becoming things, everywhere there is a where, stretching from me in front of my bedroom door to the other reaches of this universe, passing by the Crab Nebula and the Horse Head Nebula on its way to a boundary where there can be no boundary.

     

    I’m into something good.* Said this this morning during the Ancient Brothers. An exciting burst of serendipity, synchronicity, plain old enthusiasm. Heading toward eudaimonia. Wow. Sounds manic as I write it. Has some of that flavor. The shovel that uncovered this new path? A dream. And the Dreamers’ response to it.

    And… Here we go. I’m going back to Wabash College. At least that place I was when I was there. Serendipity note: the Herman’s Hermits song below was released in 1964, the summer before my last year of high school, and before my mother’s death in October. Another serendipity note: Herman’s Hermits.

    When I went to Wabash, I had competing emotions, both so very strong. The first. Grief. Unresolved, not understood, in no way dealt with. Mom was dead. I left home to go to this school, at the time highly competitive, and bare my small town intellect to so many others so much smarter than me. Grief and uncertainty. Toxic at best.

    The second. Finally! A liberal arts education. A chance to get into the cultural deposit of the West. (It would be many, many years before Asia showed up in my life.) Philosophy. History. English Literature. Languages. A chance to grow beyond my autodidact years, guided by professors and stimulated by fellow students. Hard to convey the excitement, even relief, I felt at starting college.

    Then German happened. I wanted to read Hegel, Nietzsche, Kant in the original. So I signed up. And floundered. Bad. Got c’s and d’s on quizzes and tests. Where this headed was clear. Abject failure. I did not do the brave and movie worthy thing. Face up to it and overcome. No. I dropped German like a hot potato masher hand grenade.

    At the end of the year summer jobs were hard to find and Wabash was expensive. I decided to go further. Leave Wabash altogether. I’m not big on regret, but this is one of them for me.

    The dream. Said. Go back. Be who you intended to be. The one that got lost along the way. So who was I going to be, the 18 year old version of this 77 year old. I wasn’t sure of anything but my desire to dive headlong into the deep waters of the liberal arts. Where would I come out? No idea. Didn’t want to know. I only wanted the journey. No destination.

    I’ve made a journey, but got off the path of liberal arts, shunted aside by politics and religion. By alcohol and women. By travel and jobs. All ok, all good. Yet not where I wanted to be.

    Now. The tarot card, the Hermit, hangs rendered in neon over my breakfast table. Herman’s Hermits remind me of the year before college, feelings accelerating, ground speed increasing. I’m also reminded of my first response to Kate’s death. I’m going to be a hermit. Hence, the neon. Last year I wrote a one-act play introducing Herme, the Hermit, and Cold Mountain’s poetry. And the dream says, go. Teshuvah. Return to the highest and best you.

    A semi-hermit, a sometime recluse, a happy loner. But one with the permission to study, to write. To go back into the liberal arts and see if, as Israel: God-Wrestler, I can add to the world my own learnings.  About the Great Wheel, the Jewish liturgical year, trees and plants, about process metaphysics, about religion, about poetry and literature, about transformation and metamorphosis. These are the lenses through which I have learned to see the world.

    Next. Organizing my days, weeks, months, years around this Fool’s Journey. After that. On to the diving board, spring up and down. Out into thin air.

    *


    Feelings Fourth Phase Friends Great Wheel Great Work Holidays Humanities Judaism Letters Literature Myth and Story Plants Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. Reimaging revelation Tarot

  • The Day After

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring and the Purim Moon

    Monday gratefuls: And yet more Snow today. Sigh. Yay! The day after Easter. Incarnation. Another big religious idea. April Fool’s day. The Fool in the Tarot deck. April. The cruelest month. Dawn. Spring. Choice points. Choice points that build community. Talking Story. Clan Keaton. San Francisco. Amtrak. Defeating inertia. Lucille’s New Orleans cafe. Alan.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Ruth turning 18

    One brief shining: The day after Easter has a dawn, too, can you imagine that day when the disciples and others gathered around the resurrected Jesus, wanting to touch him, to deny, to embrace, to wonder, to laugh, you’re back, and we thought, well, we thought…

     

    No. Again. Does not have to be a historical event anymore than the story of Persephone and Hades, or the Bremen Town Musicians, or Hansel and Gretel. We can still lean into the story, imagine what it might have been like. Use that imagining to flesh out our own response to the idea, in this case, of resurrection.

    Wouldn’t you want to test resurrection? Kick a tire? Look under the hood? See if the idea could unwrap dead selves, dead gifts, dead hopes? I would. I did. Many years of Jungian analysis found me sifting through dreams, through active moments of my imagination, reexperiencing the traumas of Mom’s death. Of the strained and then withered relationship with Dad. Of that moment when I dropped German for fear of a low grade. Of fear itself trapping me in its silk web, bound and trussed, waiting only for the spider to finish its work.

    Then there came that dream, a big dream, as Jung called them. In front of a large crowd I held a sword, lifted it with both hands above my head. He has the power they whispered. He has the power. And I knew I did.

    Yet this use of resurrection is not one and done. No. Throughout our lives we continue to let fear or regret or guilt or shame wrap key moments in a soft protective shell, imagining it’s better that way. There, there. You don’t have to worry about that. We’ll just put a bow on it and place on the shelf here.

    The Easter story says, hey! Unwrap that box. Roll that stone. Take your shears and cut that web, let it drop away. Though your fear sought to protect you it’s time now to say its work is over.

    This is the work of the day after Easter. Work that can only be done in the light of a day when resurrection has become a settled reality for us.

     

    Just a moment: My Midwestern heart loves basketball of all sorts including the reigning NBA champs the Denver Nuggets and the plucky women of Iowa, especially Caitlin Clark, and it beats strong today as Iowa faces LSU, replaying the NCAAW championship game from last year. Go, Hawkeyes!

    My American heart grieves for the people of Baltimore, an already difficult urban area hit with a one hundred thousand ton body blow.

     


    Dreams Feelings Fourth Phase Holidays Humanities Myth and Story Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. Reimaging revelation Sport