• Category Archives Myth and Story
  • What defines you?

    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?

     

     


  • Crossing the Veil

    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. 


  • Wish me joy and persistence

    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.


  • An Unserious Man

    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.

     

     


  • Lugnasa

    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


  • The Great White Whale

    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?

     


  • Liberal Arts, their necessity

    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.


  • Herme’s Journey

    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.


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

    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.

    *


  • Cabin Fever Trip

    Spring and the Moon of Liberation

    Tuesday gratefuls: Great Sol. Brightening our day. Counting the Omer. Begins tonight. Traveling readiness day. Delayed, but happening today. Diane’s great work on setting up an itinerary. Museums, as Ode says, temples of creativity. The Artist’s Way. My Jewish immersion. The Three Body Problem trilogy. Fall Out on Prime Video. High quality television. Kindle.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Artists-painters, writers, playwrights, musicians, poets, actors, sculptors, architects, composers

    One brief shining: With awakening I’m in a new life, a multiverse reality based on the day before yet new as the dew on a spring ephemeral, in that day my many breaths each constitute life breathed out and back in, new lives each breath, how can I keep from singing?

     

    Feeling the welcoming breath of a travel day exhaling from the end of the week toward me. Inspiring my activities today. Finalize packing. Stop mail. Get a pedicure. Collect myself for a journey.

    This is mostly a cabin fever trip. A way of escaping a place I love because the snow and the cold stayed a bit too long. And for most folks I’ve talked to. A way to refresh the joys of home by vacating its presence for a bit. Enjoy the graces and beauties of San Francisco, see Diane. Live in a hotel for 7 nights, 2 nights in a sleeping car there and back. Write. Read. See the Rockies, the intermountain West, the Sierra Nevadas, canyons and deserts.

    I’ve missed seeing good art on a regular basis. I’ve not found the Denver art scene at all comparable to the Twin Cities and I’ve let that attitude, plus the drive, keep me from seeing much at all. That’s on me. This trip will allow me to visit at least three of the country’s great collections: The Legion of Honor, the De Young, and the Asian Art museum. I plan to see them slowly. Taking as much time as I need. Reenter the world of Zhou and Han, Song and Tang, Picasso and Hokusai, Rodin and Giacometti.

    Yes. You could say of me. Religion, politics, and art. The subjective, the debatable, the aesthetic, the aspects of culture not manageable by STEM. Sure I like a good scientific discovery as much as the next nerd, but to examine an ancient text for the message it carries down the millennia to this day, to stand in the street and face down an oppressive economy, to join the conversation of those for whom shape, color, and language create whole worlds and dizzying perspectives, yes. That’s my journey.

    That and one other thing. The wild spots outside my door, up the flank of Black Mountain. Here on Shadow Mountain I can integrate the seeker, the advocate, and the artist with the world around me. My Lodgepole Companion and I see each other each morning. I said hello yesterday to those Mule Deer Does munching grass along Black Mountain Drive. Within them lie the same message as the Torah portion I will read on June 12th, the same spirit of over against oppressive structures, and an equivalent beauty to the best of Monet.