Category Archives: Myth and Story

Ancient Brothers, Cooking, Memories, Men, Minnesota, Myth and Story

Santas

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Yule and the Moon of New Beginnings

Monday gratefuls: Cold Hafar. Mark invigilating. Cold night, good sleeping. Your favorite place. Mine is right here on Shadow Mountain. Ruth, skiing A-Basin. Gabe sorting through Jon’s art. Shadow’s last week in boarding school. Sue Bradshaw. Ana. Sheetpan meals. One of my own. Working out again. The Hummingbird.

Sparks of Joy and Awe:

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei    Shadow, my Wu Wei mistress

Week Kavannah:  Gevurah   strength, discipline

Creating Space: “Gevurah is the strength to create space and to hold space… it’s what helps us nurture our passions.” — Renee Fishman

Becoming a metaPhysician

One brief shining: Cutup the Spring Onions, added brightly colored strips of Bell Peppers, some Garlic, Olive Oil, Salt, Pepper, stirred them together to coat everything, all spaced evenly in one of my Nordicware quarter sheetpans, baked at 425 for ten minutes, then put Andouille and Italian sausages on top of them and baked 30 minutes more and soon I had at least five meals ready.

 

Cooking: Beginning to understand how to build my own sheetpan meals. Their virtue lies in their short prep, ability to accommodate diverse ingredients, ease of cooking, and limited cleanup. Just the sheetpan and whatever prep left over.

Once finished, I eat one meal right away, then portion out the rest in containers, pop them in the fridge, and I have my own meal service. Today I’m making Salmon fillets with baby potatoes and perhaps broccoli florets.

The nerve ablation has removed my back pain on my left side, so I can stand longer while prepping and cooking.

Still weak though, stamina sucks. I wanted to add sauerkraut to the sausage meal, but I’m too weak to open the f*!#&ing jar. Same with the Sour Cherry preserves I wanted to put on my toast. Geez. My modest goal is to get back enough grip strength to manage these simple tasks. I’m working on it.

Glad to be back in the kitchen, cooking for myself. I prefer my own food and the nerve ablation plus my new resistance work regimen enables me to get back at it.

 

Santa: Ancient Brother Mark told a great Santa story yesterday morning. Worth sharing.

When he lived in Marine on St Croix, Mark contacted a Santa to come for a pre-Christmas gathering at his house. Christopher was young, 3 or 4, and Mark invited a few other families with young kids. It was a Christmas party and the children had not been told Santa was coming.

After the party was underway, a pickup truck pulled up in the driveway and a man with a real great white beard got out, came around to the backdoor, and walked in, saying nothing. The kids stared.

Still saying nothing he went over to the fireplace and shined a flashlight up the fireplace chimney, checked the damper by opening and closing it.

“I’m one of the Santa’s.” he told the by now confused and wondering kids. “We have to go out and check chimneys to be sure Santa can get down them.” He went on to explain that there were many, many Santa’s. “Making Christmas happen is a big, big job.”

Mark and his friends tried to pay him, but he refused the money. “Don’t blow it for me, man. It’s for the kids.”

Humanities, Literature, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Our Land and Home

Riders on the Storm

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Yule and the Moon of New Beginnings

Boxing day gratefuls: Shadow, my sweet girl. Feeling no pain. Global warming. Climate change. Chatgpt. Snow in the forecast. Sorta. Football. How bout those Broncos? And, those Vikings. Joe. Seoah. Murdoch. Ruth and Gabe at Christmas dinner with Jon’s friends. Gabe looking through his dad’s art. Joanne and Alan today at the Hummingbird. Garlic in winter. Yule. Shema. Chesed. Yirah.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Resistance work

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei    Shadow, my Wu Wei mistress

Week Kavannah:  Yirah.    Radical amazement, awe.

Becoming a metaPhysician

One brief shining: On Christmas day I heard the heralds sing, Vikings in yet another takeaway from the Lions, that Viking’s running back leaped and got the ball over the pylon, touchdown, Bo Nix scrambles for another first down, and Bronco’s keep the ball moving downfield, proving that Christmas day did send good cheer to me, and to all Viking’s and Bronco’s fans, a happy New Year!

 

Riders on the storm. Into this world we’re thrown. Jim Morrison, who died too young, knew his Heidegger. Thrownness is a Heideggerian idea that seems obvious once you understand it, yet has profound implications for understanding anyone’s life purpose.

Thrownness means birth locates you not only in a family and a place, significant enough, but also in an era, a moment in time neither in the past nor in the future, but in what becomes for you, as long as you live, your time. Sorta obvious, right?

Its profundity comes from this: Even though I may want very much to be a Druid in the peak era of Celtic civilization, I can’t. The past. Even though I may want to live in an era without Trump, I can’t. We share this time. Damn it. Even though I may want to live in a time long after this one. I can’t. The future.

Thrownness positions us where we are, with this body and its gifts, its flaws, these relatives and friends with their gifts and flaws. With the joys and possibilities available through computers, electric cars, zoom calls, good medicine, a prosperous nation. But also within a time straining to solve civilizational problems through old, time cursed solutions like oligarchy, fascism, and bigotry.

We cannot be anywhere else, with any other world around us. We must, therefore, act within this one. And, we must act as the person we are, not one we wish we might magically become.

In case this is all too abstruse, and it probably is, let me anchor the idea in my life. I was thrown into post-WW II America with two veterans of that war as parents. It was a time when polio still raged among the young. It caught up with me. I grew up in a small Indiana town with displaced hillbillie’s kids as my classmates and friends. My mother died when I was 17, almost out of high school.

Let’s stop there. I had no choice about any of these things. They were the realities of my life in the same way being raised as a  Masai warrior’s child of the same era was theirs. My development physically, emotionally, intellectually, had to have these influences.

In other words who I am today at 78, sitting on Shadow Mountain, remains anchored in how I chose to respond to those realities. Could not have been otherwise. Though my choices could have, potentially, been different, they were the ones I made and I cannot go back and remake them.

As this 21st century year comes to a close, give some thought to the world into which you were thrown. It is your only world, for this lifetime, and only you can offer yourself to it as healer, servant, bringer of justice and compassion, artist or engineer.

Memories, Minnesota, Myth and Story

By the Shores of Gitche Gumee

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Samain and the Radiation Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Cold. A bit of Snow. Shadow, the mystery dog. Rabbi Jamie. CBE. Joanne. Marilyn and Irv. Prostate cancer. Mayo. RMCC. Football. Vikings. Bears. Lions. Packers. Wu Wei. Taoism. Chuang Tzu. Lao Tzu. Mencius. Confucius. Emerson. Thoreau. Mary Fuller. Emily Dickinson. Hawthorne. Melville.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: College Football

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei    Shadow, my Wu Wei mistress

Week Kavannah:  SERENITY   Menucha     Serene, carefree, literally “at rest/comfortable”                         “In Jewish tradition, ‘menucha’ (מְנוּחָה) signifies a profound state of spiritual and physical rest, tranquility, peace, and fulfillment, going far beyond merely ceasing work. It is a core concept tied to the Sabbath (Shabbat) and the ultimate spiritual destiny of the soul.” Gemini

Tarot: Being a metaPhysician

One brief shining: Look up to Ursa Major, the Great Bear, and follow the arc of his tail to Arcturus or the pointer Stars to Polaris, the North Star, cradling in your mind, if you can, the distances, so so far apart, and the backward clock those bright diamonds of light represent, your eye deceiving you telling you what you see is there, right there, when it might have been gone, dispersed, for a million years, leaving behind only its light still traveling because it must through the void of space and time. Like you, after death.

When Kate was alive, she did the crosswords. Two of them every morning. On paper, first in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, then the Denver Post. Because I got up early, I went out to the mailbox and collected the newspaper for her. That meant I saw the seasonal change of the Stars. Each late Fall I looked forward with anticipation to the return of Orion whom I consider a friend.

In Andover, Minnesota I would, too, often see the Northern Lights dancing over the Perlich’s house across from us. When Orion or the Northern Lights were in the sky, I would stop and watch, no matter how bitter the cold. We live in a world of wonder and sometimes it reaches out and grabs you.

Up here on Shadow Mountain Orion rises over Conifer and Black Mountain, trailing Starry memories of early Minnesota mornings and tales of the ancient Greeks, whose imagination informs, even now, what we see.

My friend Tom Crane and his wife Roxann went up to Duluth last Friday to celebrate Roxann’s birthday by the big Lake. I remember how many times Kate and I went up there, too. How every time, if the sky was clear, I would wander down from our rented town house to the rocky Shore and look out across the dark stillness of Lake Superior, a mirror to the night sky, catching the Stars.

By the shores of Gitche Gumee, by the shining big sea waters, all its ancient Glacial past reverberates. And not only its ancient past but also it would whisper in its somber voice a well-known folk song, the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

“The legend lives on from the Chippewa on downOf the big lake, they called Gitche GumeeThe lake, it is said, never gives up her deadWhen the skies of November turn gloomy…”

 

 

Aging, Cancer, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Hermitage, Memories, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain

Alchemical work

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Samain and the Radiation Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Joanne. Diane. The Alembic. Jung. Freud. Rogers. May. Frankl. Maslow. Satir. Fromm. Adler. Horney. Erikson. Paul Goodman. Adorno. Marcuse. Benjamin. Habermas. Unamuno. The hermeneutics of suspicion. Ricoeur. Guides from my student days. The theology of liberation. Cornel West. Shadow Work. Ivan Illich.

Sparks of joy and awe: A day of rest

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei    Shadow, my Wu Wei mistress

Week Kavannah:  Hakarat Hakov   Gratitude.    “Who is rich? Those who rejoice in their portion.” Perkei Avot 4:1

Tarot: Being a metaPhysician

One brief shining: Shadow, shadow work, the work done but unrecognized, unpaid, unappreciated housework, child rearing, transporting yourself to work, self checkout, pumping your own gas, making your own travel arrangements, assembling products that come in pieces, maintaining a yard and a vehicle noticed and named by radical thinker, Ivan Illich, in his book, Shadow Work. How much shadow work do you do?

Alembics. “…historically used by alchemists and for producing medicines, perfumes, and alcohol, the word can also be used metaphorically to mean something that refines or transmutes.” Gemini

I’ve begun to think of my life in terms of alembics. When was I thrown into a life situation, either by my own choice or by outside circumstance that resisted logic, yet compelled me to respond in unexpected, unusual, new ways?

A major early almebic? The death of my mother. No way to reason my way through that. A moment of dark transformation, carried without thought into the dark recesses of my heart, clashing with a changed world, and not well. In spite of being in a family, I sat in this alembic alone, feeling the fires of fear, doubt, grief lick up and around my stunned self.

This transmutation produced no gold. No, it produced a broken soul, one ready for abandonment, for sudden shifts from light to dark, from innocence to intoxication. Yes, the second alembic, which contained the first, grew from days at Phi Kappa Psi and Wabash where I learned to smoke and to drink.

An alembic that would not shatter until March of 1976 when I began treatment at a Hazelden outpatient clinic in Minneapolis. Getting sober allowed me to gather in pieces of the dark time and begin to transform them into psychic gold. To understand that the grief, the agony, the isolation (self-imposed) had forced me to mine my inner resources in ways and at a time most people went to prom and figured out what to do with their lives.

Other alembics. The Peaceable Kingdom. Seminary. Adopting Joseph. Vietnam era protests. Studying philosophy and anthropology. Marrying Kate. Andover with its gardens, dogs, bees. Writing. Shadow Mountain. Kate’s illness and death. Cancer. CBE. Converting to Judaism. Old age with a terminal illness, the fourth phase.

I like the use of alembic to describe these times because it recognizes that the pressures and fractures and falls and emergence shape us in ways unpredictable, unknown, yet in which we have no choice but to participate as best we can.

Are you in an alembic right now? Or, have you emerged from one recently? Or, long ago. How did it transform you? How is it transforming you?

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.