Winter Stent Moon
Here we are in another year. Took second son to the airport at 7 am. Big traffic jam about 10 minutes from the airport on Pena Road. Took 20 minutes to clear. Lot of pissed off people.
Went out to get gourmet food for New Year’s Eve. The whole family was here. KFC Littleton. I was the only customer. Drove down the hill, cussing at the Colorado drivers who don’t understand snow. Still seems weird to me, but there you are. Snowing, some snow on roads, a normal winter evening for Minnesota. Of course, add in altitude and it does change the equation some. But not down to 30 mph. Sigh.
Cold here. -9 last night. Some snow. Maybe 3 inches or so. Better than none.
On the drive last night I thought about year themes and resolutions. Not a big resolution maker anymore. Nonetheless, I made some anyhow. In short form they are eat, write, paint, exercise, read, teach, cook.
Long form. Eat no processed meats. Write new novel. (primal ensouled universe/enlightenment disenchanted universe. Next?) Keep painting, learning more techniques. Back to 3 days resistance, 3 days cardio. Learn how to read birth charts. Become a better teacher. Cook Korean and salt/fat/heat/acid. Continue kabbalah and mussar. Hike. Not resolutions so much as continuing, ramping up activities from 2018.
Having the whole family here for New Year’s Eve and morning made the house feel like a launching pad for the future. Us two old folks, our two kids, SeoAh and the grandkids. This family, these memories will live on into the hot future. Though Kate and I won’t be there; we will.
Ruth has paint brush in hand working on a black and white version of a SeoAh and Murdoch photo. It’s so much fun to have her up here painting while I write this. Creativity bonds us. She’s using my oil paints, a medium with which she has little experience. She does have a lot of experience in acrylics, watercolors, photography. Her training has helped me a lot, too.
Ruth, SeoAh, and I have a trip planned tomorrow to Red Herring Art, then over to Stanley Marketplace for sushi. We all love sushi. I’m going to buy Ruth some paint and maybe a brush or two. Red Herring is the Denver art supply store that has the most sumi-e materials. This time though I’m going for its oil painting brushes and paint.
Ruth chatters on about her painting process. She’s a perfectionist, not necessarily a bad thing in an artist, but demanding. She did help me with one of my favorite tool paintings. This is the chef’s knife I use a lot. Top is mine before I finished filling it in, bottom is after I filled it in and Ruth helped me with blending on the knife.
2019. The Blade Runner year. Dystopian time? Match. Authoritarian regime? Match. Police killing those marginalized to society? Match. The cinematography of our era may look different-though Hong Kong, Shanghai, Dubai-but the underlying premise of a dark future catching up with all of us was prescient, if not exactly surprising.
Dystopian futures, even ours from the perspective of 1982, have this seeming anomaly: Life goes on. Most folks make some accommodation, some compromise, and go on with their daily routines. Short of mass suicide, what other option is there? It is those very accommodations and compromises that are fertile soil for the demagogue and the populist. See Trump, Erdogan, Germany’s alt-right, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Brazil’s Michel Temer. Movies have to convey dystopian troubles cinematically, so we think if the visuals don’t correlate with ours that the movie doesn’t apply. Wrong. It’s the core cultural themes that are important.
SeoAh and I went to H-Mart yesterday. Not sure if I’ve written about it before or not. H-Mart is a New Jersey based, Korean owned Asian grocery chain. It has two stores in the Denver metro. An obligatory part of a SeoAh visit is at least one visit to H-Mart. These are huge stores, set up like a cross between a grocery store and a suk with many small shops set inside a standard mall large box. On any visit there are folks from India, China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam scrutinizing the produce, buying live lobster or clams or fish, Asian cookware and dishes, choosing from so many brands of soy sauce. There are, too, the occasional Caucasians, some in families with Asian kids, presumably adopted, a few just shopping for themselves.
My goal in going with her was to learn how she shops, what she looks for. I want to learn at least a few Korean dishes; but, I really want to learn how a Korean cook thinks. That way I can make my own Korean meals. Kate likes the food and so do I.
10 degrees on Shadow Mountain. A couple of inches of fluffy powder fell over night, a minor storm compared to what had been predicted earlier. The lodgepoles have white flocking. Black Mountain hides behind a gray blue cloud. The neighbor’s Christmas lights, now past their expiry date, still glitter.
The learning curve in both astrology and oil painting slopes almost straight up for me. My mind gets short of breath at times. I remember this from Latin. Slog. Slog. Slog. Oh! “Confusion,” I read, “is the sweat of the intellect.”
At almost 72 I’m no longer naive enough to think I can master anything, but I’ve proved to myself over and over that with patience (difficult for me at times) and either a good teacher or a lot of autodidactic effort, I can learn new things. Even new things that might seem unusual for me. Organic gardening. Beekeeping. Raising perennial flowers. Writing novels. Teaching Jewish religious school. Living at altitude. Cooking. The downside of this valedictory life, that’s a thing, is that I’ve not become Tolstoy or a commercial beekeeper or Top Chef, certainly no Latin scholar. But I have had the chance to peek behind the curtain of numerous activities I might have once thought, like German, beyond me.
Not long after my December 1st, 2016, knee surgery, I had an odd moment. It was Hanukkah. Gabe and Ruth were plowing through their presents, and I sat on the couch, my leg up and some combination of pain meds circulating, morphine and oxycontin, I think. Ruth lit the menorah. A sudden, overwhelming (undoubtedly drug accelerated) sense of dislocation came over me. Sadness, too. What was I doing in this house? No Christmas tree. No decorations. This exotic holiday had pushed all that away and left me on the outside.
The stent went in easily. No pain for Kate, only a local anesthetic at the insertion site in her groin. Whether the procedure solved the problem only time and many meals will tell.
In ancient Uruk residents opened all city gates, lit bonfires and sang hymns timed to the rising and the setting of certain stars in the sky. This all night vigil honored many Sumerian deities, but most of all Anu, king of the gods, and special protector of the city. In the Congo the Mbuti hunters clap, sing, and dance around a fire at night, the Molimo Ceremony. This is not only a solstice observation, but for significant events. If there has been a death, they sing to the forest: “If darkness is, and the darkness is of the forest, then the darkness must be good.” from the Lapham Quarterly, Winter 2019
Then Kate can heal over the longest night of the year. Fecund darkness, calm and quiet night, holy night, sacred night. A 98% full moon. With all the energy of a still waxing moon, one very near fullness, she will receive the best energy this long night can offer. If you have a moment once the darkness falls, feel your way into it, perhaps in the moonlight, and remember Kate.
Finally. The stent goes in tomorrow. God, I hope it does what we want. The guy, Dr. Mulden, is the senior guy in the metro on this particular kind of work. Lucky to have him. She’ll be in the hospital tonight, maybe tomorrow night if they feel observation is necessary after the stent placement. Home by Saturday lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise.
Tomorrow is the winter solstice. I haven’t gotten yet to the six new rituals I found in Lapham’s, but I will either later today or tomorrow. The dark, the long night, to me symbolizes healing, fecundity, a depth experience for the Self, a soulful journey. It’s what I need right now, a time out of time, time with the ancientrail that winds in and down, following the shamans toward the center of the earth, the center of the soul.