Category Archives: Myth and Story

Art and Culture, Colorado, Humanities, Literature, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Music, Myth and Story, Shadow Mountain

Art Years. Mountain Years.

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Mabon and the Harvest Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Luke at 34. Bella Colibri. Rabbi Jamie’s Rosh Hashanah sermons. Shadow, the morning kisser. Artemis’ Cucumbers. Pizza and Burger plants in my son’s garden. Seoah’s half marathon. Mary’s political neighborhood. Mark and West Texas. From afar in Hafar. Ruth and Gabe, students. The Never Ending Story. Fourth Wing. Iron Flame.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: The Harvest

Year Kavannah: Wu Wei

Week Kavannah:  Malchut. Wonder.    “Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.”  Socrates.

Tarot: Five of Pentacles. (Druid Craft)

  • Focus on internal resources: For a querent, this version is a powerful reminder that sometimes the help we need is within us, but our focus on the problem prevents us from seeing the solution. It is a prompt to shift perspective, recognize internal resources, and understand that our perceived limitations may be an internal block rather than an external lack. 
Festival Theater, Stratford

One brief shining: Trumpets blaring we would file into our seats at the three-quarter round thrust stage of the Guthrie Theater when it stood attached to the wonderful Walker Art Center, find our seats, and wait as the Gospel of Colonus, or the Bacchae, or the Christmas Carol came to life, poor players strutting and fretting upon the stage until they were heard no more. Applause!

 

Minnesota: Though now a Coloradan, a Rocky Mountain guy, a Jew, a widower, I once was a Minnesotan and happily so. Especially when it came to the arts. Those trumpets I mentioned? Oddly, when my family vacationed in Stratford, Ontario I had encountered them years before. Why? Because Michael Langham, the director of the Guthrie when I first attended on a student discount, had been the director of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival during those long ago family vacations.

The Walker allowed all of us tucked into the rarely visited Upper Midwest of the Heartland access to the latest and the greatest of modern and contemporary art. What a gift. The MIA, an encyclopedic museum, covered art from ancient Chinese ceramics and bronzes through impressionists and abstract expressionists and had its own contemporary art exhibitions.

I spent twelve happy years guiding tour groups through the Asian galleries discussing the Jade Mountain(s), the Japanese Tea Ceremony, Song dynasty ceramics, and Korea’s amazing celadon glazed pottery. Yes I also led tours that included Goya and Rembrandt and Kandinsky, Chuck Close and Egon Schiele, but my heart remained always in the Asian collection.

It was a distinct privilege to immerse myself in the thousands of years of art in the MIA’s collection, to have my understandings of the modern world upended at the Walker, to have the Western world’s best playwright’s effort brought to life while I attended the Guthrie.

Too, there was and will always be for me: The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Decades of attendance acquainted me with Mozart, Teleman, Bach, Ives, Copeland, Fauré. And, ta dah! Kate.

Today my chamber music is the golden swathes of Aspen Leaves on Black Mountain. My Guthrie is the rain swollen Maxwell Creek while the Arapaho National Forest recapitulates the MIA and the Walker. So be it.

Beyond the Boundaries, Commentary on Religion, Great Wheel, Health, Holidays, Myth and Story, Paganism, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Paganism lies just beneath the surface

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Lughnasa and the Cheshbon Nefesh Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Shadow, her sweet self. Dr. Bupathi. Another blood draw. Soon another P.E.T. scan. Oh, joy. Cancer. Driving down the hill. Rides for my nerve ablation procedures. All our organ recitals. Mark’s journey of return to Hafar. Darkness. Welcome it. Vikings. JJ McCarthy.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Dr. Bupathi

Year Kavannah: Wu Wei

Week Kavannah: Ometz Lev   Strength of the heart

Tarot: Nine of Wands. (Druid Craft)

  • Inner fortitude: Past struggles have made you wiser and tougher. The card encourages you to trust the wisdom of your experiences and to have faith in your ability to handle whatever comes next.

One brief shining: I dropped into Noodles and Company, bought a large bowl of mac and cheese, a side salad, rewarding myself with comfort food for driving down the hill, hearing the news I expected to hear, taking care of bidness, thinking I might have to start being even more kind to myself if I’m in new territory.

 

Health: Saw Bupathi. As expected, he ordered a new blood draw. And, another PET scan. I’ll see him again when that’s been done. Short version. This rise in my PSA, by itself, is not concerning. If it jumps again? New drug protocols.

Here’s an oddity. The Rocky Mountain Cancer Care Offices had Halloween decorations up. Not just a few. Witch’s conical hats. Bats. Black Cat. Plastic Pumpkins. Strands of purple and black crepe paper. More. In every hall and hung with a decorator’s eye.

This celebration seems both early to me and yet so apt. If there is any place where the veil between the worlds thins out everyday, all year it’s at an oncology practice. Many, perhaps most of us who visit here, have seen the possibility of death move closer, some so close her breath is hot on the back of their neck.

Sure Halloween doesn’t hold the same punch that it did during early Celtic times, but it retains the spirit of it actually pretty well. Trick or treaters costumed in the night do represent, though most don’t realize it, the back and forth between this world and the Other World so pronounced during this holiday of Summer’s End, Samain.

I mentioned all the decorations to the phlebotomist who had just slid a needle painlessly into a vein on my left arm. “Like Christmas,” she said. “Yes,” I replied, “Only scary.” She laughed.

Do you ever wonder about Halloween? How much effort some folks put into it? Their yards decorated with ten-foot skeletons, witches standing around a boiling cauldron, maybe a devil, or a vampire? Pumpkin lights. Elaborately carved real pumpkins.

Paganism always lies just below the surface. In the holidays of most world religions. In the resurgence here and in Europe of diverse pagan “traditions.” It’s there to receive those whose faces turn toward the greensward, to the soil, to seasonal change. When the miracle of photosynthesis goes from science to awe.

Halloween speaks to our need to recognize death, to know the fallow time will come for us all.

Commentary on Religion, Dogs, Health, Humanities, Judaism, Kabbalah, Literature, Myth and Story, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science, Torah

This Is Not the Way

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Beltane and the Greenhouse Moon

Sunday gratefuls: A day of no-things. Shadow and I outside, drop, walk, stop, drop, turn, walk, drop. Her eagerness. Her five o’clock licking. Sciatica. Morning darkness. The morning service. The Shema. Tara. Ruth, home two days ago, leaving for Alaska today. Gabe, now a senior. Whoa. Mary in Seoul. Seoah, Murdoch. My son. Mark walks to downtown Al Kharj. Shadow Mountain.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: MRI

Week Kavannah: Wholeness and Peacefulness. Shleimut. Integrating pain into my daily life.

One brief shining: Sorry, Marines, pain is not weakness leaving the body, no; but, it is a constant reminder of being alive, of still having a body that can identify itself through the jolt that starts in the hip, gathers intensity around the knee, and on occasion flashes to the foot.

 

Back and cancer: Get MRI results tomorrow. Buphati at 3 pm. On Friday I see Kylie my Army officer retired P.A. for preparation. I have a SPRINT device in my future. The bogo MRI. Checking for cancer and readying me for a pain reduction, elimination procedure. Rare confluence of medical care.

Ouch, ouch, ouch. ouch. Sciatica is a son of a bitch. Above 10. A crescendo, then a falling away. I. Do. Not. Like. It.

If the SPRINT device works, I will send up hallelujahs in the name of its inventor, Kylie, and the doctor who installs it. If it doesn’t? I’m no worse off than before. Probably nerve ablation.

If there’s cancer in my hip? Don’t know. But Buphati will have things to recommend, I know.

 

Reading: I’m on a run of science fiction and magic. John Scalzi’s Starter Villain and Kaiju Preservation Society. Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files. The Gray Man and Daniel Silva set aside for the moment.

My serious reading of late has been for my two Kabbalah Experience classes. A New Story for Human Consciousness and the Radical Roots of Religion. The first, learning to retell, reimagine the story of Adam and Eve. And, in so doing, realizing we can reframe, reconstruct any story, including the one we tell ourselves about who we are in this world.

The second investigating moments when Judaism received a radical refit. Focused on Mordecai Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Reb Zalman, and Art Green, but looking backward to Maimonides, the Bal Shem Tov, the destruction of the second Temple and the rise of Rabbinic Judaism.

I’m excited about these classes. I want to retell the story of Adam and Eve. Maybe my own story, too. Most of all I’m excited about considering what the next revolution might be in Judaism, imagining it, perhaps helping to build it.

 

Just a moment: Whoo, boy. We’ve crossed over and I didn’t really get it until I read this paragraph in an article titled: “Why Trump’s push for ‘gold-standard science’ has researchers alarmed.”*

Crossed over to what? An age of ideology, a time when political thought, doled out by political commissars, trumps (see what I did there?) decision making for any other reason.

This is a direct route to a Stalinesque, Mao Tse Tungesque form of governance. It is, as George Will observed in his strange opinion piece about Trump as a progressive, a form of Statism.

I admit I’m an Enlightenment, scientific method guy. But. I know that science does not occur in a political vacuum. Its funding, its direction, even its focus often has political influence. Look, for example, to the Agricultural and Mechanical universities dotted around the U.S. and delivering junk methods to farmers that kill the soil and enrich Big Ag.

Even so. I support science and the scientific endeavor to understand, to grasp the world around us as it is, not as we either imagine or wish it to be. No political commissar will know scientific facts better than scientists themselves.

I do agree with one facet of this critique of science, however. Many Americans have lost faith in science and we need, as a country, to help restore it. This is not the way.

 

 

 

” “And in a “Gold Standard Science” executive order last week, President Donald Trump outlined a new level of oversight over what counts as quality evidence and what does not, (emphasis mine) putting “a senior appointee designated by the agency head” in charge of overseeing “alleged violations.” Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in a briefing that the goal of the executive order is to “rebuild the American people’s confidence in the national science enterprise … the status quo of our research enterprise has brought diminishing returns, wasted resources and public distrust.”” Washington Post, June 1, 2025.

Asia, Judaism, Myth and Story, Paganism, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Reimaging revelation, Science, Torah, Wild Neighbors, Writing

A New Credo

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      Hercules wrestling Thanatos

Driving to Lone Tree this morning. Spine injections. Struck by the notion of Israel Harari. The Mountain man who struggles with God. Of Jacob/Israel as an archetype. The trickster transformed into wounded man of faith. Peniel-where I saw God face to face.

I’ve focused on Israel, on the struggle, but not considered or not fully considered the after moment, when Israel, newly named, limps away having seen God. Who names this ford on the Jabbok river after his realization.

So I decided to do that. I’ve struggled with God since I was young. Too small. Too violent. Too obscure and ineffable. Dead. I don’t experience God. What good can God be? And this stupid, stupid idea of a seventy year life as a test for residing in Heaven or Hell for eternity? No.

Then, the last 30 years or so, pass. Focused on the Soil, the Seed, the growing miracle of Plants, Dogs, grandchildren, love. No need for God. I feel the sacred when I amend the Earth. Pluck Onions and Carrots from their hidden places and spray them off with a hose nozzle. Food. The true transubstantiation.

What if I felt my way into the Goddess? Her Earth. Me as part, yet not part. Unique, but not unique. A Wave above her Ocean, ready at all times to return. What if I admitted to myself that my  feeling of separateness is the original sin. The hubris of independence. Of individuality.

What if. The yetzer hara, the selfish inclination, speaks to us of separateness. Of our needs. Of our unique demands. While the yetzer hatov speaks to our interdependence, our awareness of the needs of others, of the World around us.

Could I find the sense of support, of sustenance, of forgiveness, of grace, of embeddedness in the whole, the One? Could I pray? I drove on, watching the Trees, the Hogback, remnants of the orogeny that preceded the rise of the Rocky Mountains. Striated. Weathered. Shrunken. But still there, millions upon millions of years after its emergence.

Was I really, truly part of it? Was all the artifice of highways and cars part of it? The houses and stores. Doctor Vu, the kind and careful man who inserted needles into the narrow spaces of my bulging spine. And all his tech? The rotating bed. The living x-ray. Michal, his variously adorned assistant. Even the steroids shot toward my nerves? All of it?

What difference might it make if I leaned into this most pushed away notion. Or, is it the embrace I’ve already made of the chi, of wu wei, of the mystical revealing the ordinary as the sacred? Do those feelings find me already in her arms?

You know, it does. I’m a man of this short moment, a Wave cresting on the Ocean of the whole, going only from emergence to absorption, not needing to understand how. Yet as that man I’m also in and of the Ocean, of the Goddess, her instrument in this troubled part of her cosmos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Commentary on Religion, Kabbalah, Mountains, Myth and Story, Plants, Torah, Wild Neighbors

Wildness in the Garden

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Spring and the Wu Wei Moon

Friday gratefuls: Select P.T. Rick. Ginny. Luke. Jamie. Marilyn. Ratzon. Mussar. Shadow, the eater of bones. Kate, always Kate. Breakfast for Shadow. Cookunity. Vegetables home grown. Nathan. Marilyn and Irv. Steroid injections. Anavah. Diane’s healing. Mark and his ESL students in Al Kharj. Snow, a lot. Easter and resurrection.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Snow

Week Kavannah: Joy. Simcha.

One brief shining: A Mountain Spring includes 70 degree weather yesterday and 19 this morning; Sunshine and greening grass yesterday and Snow coming straight down, already covering my backyard this morning; at some point a sudden shift will occur and a Mountain Summer will have begun.

 

My Wild Neighbors like to eat Garden produce. My new Greenhouse will have net covering to foil them. Besides I let my Dandelions go to seed and multiply offering dainty treats for the Mule Deer and Elk who love this briefly available food. I also offer plenty of Grass and other Plants desired by my Ungulate friends over the course of the growing season.

Shadow’s amusement will include this year Voles, Mice, Rabbits, Chipmunks, and the occasional Squirrel, either Red or Aberts. My guess is that she’s not the predator Rigel and Vega were, but she’ll still have fun chasing these Mountain Mammals for whom speed is safety.

I’m not fully in the Wild, but I am fully in the Wildlands Urban Interface and the Arapaho National Forest. No Grassy yard expected or desired. Only what grows on its own. My happy place.

 

chatgpt

Third new human story class. Holding the Genesis accounts of creating humans to closer account. For example. You can’t eat of the Tree of Good and Bad. How would either Eve or Adam know what that meant? They have no experience, no prior knowledge of those words. Good and Bad are empty vessels.

The voice, as Twain calls God, may as well have said don’t eat of the Tree of Rocks and Scissors.

And that Snake that gets all the blame? Well, guess who made him. Why make a sneaky Snake in the first place. Then to blame and punish him for acting as the Snake God created him to be? Doesn’t really seem fair, does it?

I wonder, too, about God’s observation about the human (adam). It’s not good for the human to be alone. Hmmm. From a Kabbalistic perspective that sounds like God’s contraction in the ayn sof, the emptiness that preceded everything. God pulled back to leave room for the universe. Was God lonely, too?

There are more, many more questions about this old, old story. All of them echoing down the millennia since it’s inclusion in the Torah. Original sin, for example.

Here’s a new take on original sin (in which I have never believed) that came to me yesterday. When Adam and Eve eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Bad they become self-conscious. They need clothes. Might the original human sin have been self-consciousness?

That is, could the awareness of themselves as beings separate from each other and the rest of the Garden’s plants and animals, be the fall. The illusion that our separateness is real and total. That we are somehow wholly independent from the natural world and other humans, too?

I could easily draw a line through all of human history that would link this fallacy with all the major sins our flesh is heir to.

Health, Myth and Story, Politics, Seed Keepers, US History

The Daily Miraculous

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Imbolc and the Snow Moon

Shabbat gratefuls: Talmud Torah. Shadow, her jaws, her claws, her intensity. A cold night. Good sleeping. Studying Zornberg. The Golden Calf. Cookunity. Shrimp and cheesy grits. American Idols. MAGA. Cousin Donald. $$$$. Matt Desmond. Jon Stewart. Working out. Finishing taxes and 529.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: AGI

Week Kavannah: Social Responsibility. Achrayut.

“Being human means being conscious and being responsible. By becoming responsible agents for social change we actualize not only our humanity but also our mission as Jews.” Viktor Frankl

One brief shining: When I turn my coffee grinder on and it begins its whirring chomping way through the dark roast espresso Beans, my ear knows, just knows when enough has been ground to fill the coffee maker. How?

 

The human body. Talk about awe. It knows so much more than we realize in consciousness. Like the length of time it takes to grind enough coffee beans. Or, where we are in a room and what’s behind us. Or, how fast we have to go to avoid a car merging into our lane. How to move and twist for a layup. When we’re in love.

How to get enough oxygen to your brain. Blood to your organs and extremities. How to make hormones that regulate blood sugar. How to clean toxins from your blood.

Or your brain. Which makes a navigable world each time you open your eyes. Taking in the right amount of data. Not too much, not too little.

The new field of sociogenomics recapitulates Heidegger and his dasein. We affect the world and the world affects us. Through genomics. How the body’s genetic material adapts and gets adapted to by its social environment.

The wonder, the awe of it all. Kate and I often observed that the wonder is not that the body fails sometimes, but that it works so well almost all of the time.

Breathing. Moving us through space. Reminding us to rest. To sleep. Perchance to dream. To wake. To eat. Making use of the fuel we provide it through metabolism. Parceling out nutrients to each and every cell. Speaking of miracles. Of magic. Of life.

 

Just a moment: I’m imagining a new Whole Earth catalogue. Or, better, a Seed Saver’s Catalogue. With colorful pictures, descriptions of Seeds like organizing, working the political process, current facts about poverty and its many solutions, success stories from around the country and the world, resources.

What Seeds might you include? I would want information on the American Renaissance. Poetry. Slavery. Stonewall. How to grow a garden. Raise Chickens. Wild Neighbors. Climate Change. How to repair a leaky faucet. How government works. The constitution.

Perhaps some sort of AI way of generating new and more information, connections. A link, maybe, to the Wikipedia project.

Liberty and freedom. Communal responsibility.

How to train a dog, raise cattle. Do wildfire mitigation. What are the responsibilities of a citizen?

Engaging, short articles. Lots of images. Lots of resources. If possible, free to all. A labor of love of country and Mother Earth.

Humanities, Myth and Story

What defines you?

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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?

 

 

Family, Fourth Phase, Great Wheel, Holidays, Judaism, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Crossing the Veil

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Samain and the 1% Sukkot Moon

Thursday gratefuls: 17 degrees. Snow. Hard Freeze. 1991 Halloween Blizzard in the Twin Cities. My son and Zack White. Trick or treating, but home early. The soft capture of the Celtic Faery Faith. Mom’s yahrzeit. Wild Neighbors. Elephants. Persons, too.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Snow

Kavannah:  CLARITY   Tohar  Clarity, lucidity

One brief shining: Mom, I remember, always smelled good, wore red lipstick, smiled a lot and hugged me, took me to the ice cream parlor when I got good grades, explained what she thought Dad meant, then in October of 1964 while volunteering at a funeral dinner, had a stroke, lingered for seven days and died.

Mom, Dad, Me. Maybe 1951

Life can change oh so fast and in unexpected, totally unexpected ways. Mom was 47. In good, even robust health. But she had unknown aneurysms at her temples and in the forehead region of her brain. One burst and leaked blood down through her brain and began to clot around her medulla oblongata. The part of the brain that connects it to the spinal column. Survivable today with clot busting drugs. Not then.

Her yahrzeit falls today because this is a leap year on the Jewish lunar calendar, pushing everything almost a month ahead on the Gregorian calendar. And, as it happens, right onto Samain. The time in the Celtic Faery Faith when the veil between the worlds thins and access to the Otherworld and from it is most possible. Dia de los Muertos, same idea. Also. All Souls day comes soon on the Christian liturgical calendar, November 2nd this year.

About twenty years ago I took a class on ritual and the teacher, whose name I don’t recall, said she thought these beliefs about the veil thinning came from the falling of the leaves on deciduous trees. Opening forests up, making those things hidden by leaves during the growing season suddenly visible. Maybe.

Or, maybe she had it backward and the veil is a mental construct, a knowing about the truth of the sacred, the holy always present, always visible to us, about which the falling of the leaves jolts us each year into a temporary state of mystical union with the world as we already know it. But have trouble realizing without a big reminder.

I’m partial to the second idea. Reading an interesting book, just started, All Things are Full of Gods: the Mysteries of Mind and Life. David Bentley Hart. He’s a neo-Platonist*. Both Judaism and neo-Platonism believe reality is one.

In both systems of thought nothing is ever lost. It may transform, but all is all becoming. Changing, moving forward and backwards, up and down, changing, changing, yet the stuff of reality remains constant, never destroyed. Like E=Mc squared.

You might believe, and I do on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays that this creates an opening for continued existence of a soul, a person’s essence, after death. Since today is a Thursday and Samain, I’m going to visit with mom, light her candle, look at the photographs I have of her. One of us will cross the veil, remember that oh yes you’re always with me. Hug each other. Smile. Maybe I’ll see Kate, today, too.

*Neoplatonists following Plotinus believed that the individual soul, considered as intellect, is divine. However, the soul is outwardly expressed in terms of a personality that is particular and thus less divine. There is a risk, then, that a soul endowed with an intellect can lose sight of its own divine nature.

Neoplatonism is based on the principles that: 

“Mind precedes matter” 
Reality depends on a highest principle, often called “the One” or “God” 
The One
The One is a supreme principle that is absolutely simple and undetermined. It is beyond being, and cannot be named or described. 

Art and Culture, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Letters, Literature, Myth and Story, Painting, Shadow Mountain, Wild Neighbors, Writing

Wish me joy and persistence

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Mabon and the Harvest Moon

Monday gratefuls: The Ancient Brothers on Ode’s art. Art. Painting. Water color. Cut paper. Paper marbling. Computer aided. Charcoal and pastels. Oils. Acrylic. Sculpture. Furniture design. Architecture. Music. Chamber music. Jazz. Writing. Novels. Short stories. Poems. Poets. Writers. Painters. Sculptors. Musicians. Movies and television. Story and image.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: The Uffizi

Kavannah: Teshuvah

One brief shining: Today I’m pulling out the 3/4’s finished first draft of Jennie’s Dead, plan to read it, red pencil in hand, waiting to reinsert myself into its flow, the story as I started it so many years ago, wanting to reclaim my life as a creator of worlds, of characters, of ideas expressed in things that would never have been and never could be without the mysterious work of creation. And, it is work.

 

Probably time, too, to print out Ancientrails from the point where I stopped the last time. Not sure how long ago it was, but it was awhile. Easy to check since I have the plastic tubs filled with the first printing, some two million words, stored on wire racks in the loft. I want, so badly, to get my mojo back. My writing mojo. I let it slide as I let myself get overwhelmed by the world of illness, hers and mine. The long, slow process of Kate’s dying. Didn’t have to let it go, but I did and I’ve sunk a bit since then, a light in my heart dimmed.

Going through the outer world of friends and family, Mountains and Streams and Wild Neighbors, of Judaism and the pandemic, of wrestling with back pain, often with little success. None of this bad or shallow or wrong. No. Necessary, kind, fulfilling. Yet the stream from which I had drunk so giddily for 20 years, the Andover years, dried up. The aquifer that fed it drained and not renewed.

Writing and my current worst ailment, a back preventing me from walking more than short distances, making work around the house often more than I can do, fit well together. I can do it like I’m writing this. And, I can keep at it, like Ode, until I reach the end. Why would I do that? For the same reason my brother-in-law, Jerry the painter and maker, is in a spasm of creativity knowing his heart could give out at any time. For the same reason Ode believes his best art is ahead of him. And now, ta da, a sports metaphor! To leave it all on the field. To have held nothing back. To have gone as far as I can. Not sure I know why beyond that. Please wish me joy and persistence.

This is then, a matter for teshuvah, for a return to the land of my soul. Yes, there’s that word again. Soul. Where is it? Don’t know. Is it a metaphor for the whole of me, an ensouled body and lev? Yes, but more, I believe. The something more is that which links my ensouled body and lev to the other ensouled entities like my friends, family, my Lodgepole Companion, Great Sol, Elk and Mule Deer, Shadow Mountain. We are together, moving forward in constant creation, unique and separate, yet whole and infinitely connected. Perhaps that which is there to bond with all does not die, but rolls on, moving with the rest toward an unknown future, probably one bound tightly to a known past.

Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Health, Judaism, Myth and Story, Politics

An Unserious Man

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The Off to College Moon

Friday gratefuls: Mussar. Rabbi Jamie. Laurie and her Chicago stories. And her chili cheese hotdogs. The Pearl. Ruby. Ruth on campus. Kepler, my sweet boy. Kate, always Kate. The blue Sky above, Shadow Mountain Home beneath. Kamala. Her tagging of 45 as an unserious man. Joanne and Alan at the Parkside. Labcorps. Marilyn and Irv.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Kamala and Coach Walz

Kavanah: Serenity  Menucha

One brief shining: A lesson in patience has come my way, the comparatively (to Quest) slow pace of getting my still not available PSA and testosterone numbers sent me down on Wednesday, forced to adjust my attitude, to open my heart to waiting, which has taught me to consider my desire for knowing, for knowing now, for knowing what comes next, for knowing estimates of my life span, that desire changes neither my PSA, what comes next, or my life span. Oh.

 

The story of the Pearl resonates with all who hear it. Though. Realized after recounting this at mussar yesterday Oysters are not kosher. No fins or scales. I’m not observing kosher, perhaps obviously, yet I did have to stop and consider this. If I were to observe kosher, and I have no plan to right now, it would be along the lines of ethical eating. Which is the function of kosher observance in traditional Jewish life. I do eat far less red meat than in the past, partly health and partly to eat lower on the food chain. Use less resources.

Still working on finding a jeweler or silversmith. Harder than I thought it would be. Evergreen Goldsmiths could have done what I wanted, but they closed. Going to the Silver Arrow gallery to see if they have recommendations.

 

No results from Labcorp. Not sure what’s going on. Practicing the midot of serenity. Does it make me serene to get agitated about not having these numbers? No. Will asking my docs to look into it help with my serenity? Yes. So I did that just now. Inner calm. Yes.

 

Just a moment: Listened to the opening twenty minutes or so of Kamala’s speech. Trump as an unserious man. Oh, yes. An epithet so true and so weakening. I hope it gains viral currency. I found her speech fine, but not exceptional. Not a barn burner as we might say in our suddenly spotlighted Midwest. So I stopped listening. Don’t need a barn burner. Need steady, stable, democratic small d. A return to normalcy. Never thought I’d write or believe those words.

She seems to have captured the zeitgeist perfectly. Hyperbolic promises and overheated rhetoric play into the bombast and chest-thumping of the MAGA style. We do not need more of that. We need to take this narrow window Kamala recognizes and keep the orange one in his billionaire fantasy world, his tasteless Trump Tower and gauche Mar-a-Lago. There to await the consequences of his criminal activity as his various trials come to fruition and his debts to his victims come due.