Category Archives: Myth and Story

Commentary on Religion, Family, Friends, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

We are the people of Holiseason!

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Samain and the Full, Blue Moon of Radical Change

Saturday gratefuls: Dr. Eigner. Undetectable PSA. The Great Wheel. Taoism. All us pagans. Samain. The fallow season. Holiseason. Darkness. A return, however brief, to time sanity. The big snow that tamped down the Cameron and East Troublesome fires. The American Way. The American Dream.

Samain. Again. The Celtic New Year. The Great Wheel turned now for a full orbit around the sun since last Samain. Though I embraced the Jewish New Year in September, 5781, as a way out of 2020, it never seemed to stick. That is, 2020 kept crashing back over the dike of even as ancient a tradition as that one. Gonna try again.

The Celtic New Year puts the beginning of a new year at the beginning of the fallow time. Samain in ancient Gaelic means Summer’s End. In the most ancient Celtic calendar that we have, the Celts recognized two seasons. Beltane, now on May 1st, marked the season of fertility, growth, harvest. Samain, now on October 31st, is the final harvest holiday. The growing season finished villages prepared for the difficult time of year to come, a cold time when people lived off their stores. Interesting to me that the Celts chose such a time for their New Year.

The veil thins during this time, the veil between this world and the Other World. The Other World is the land of Faery, the land of the Gods, the land of the dead. The thinned veil meant ancestors could cross back into this world, as could the Faery folk. Since the Faery folks sometimes kidnapped children and ancestors could be ornery, it was a scary transition from growing season to the fallow time.

Contracts ended or began during the Samain market week as they did for each of the Celtic holidays: Beltane, Lughnasa, Samain, and Imbolc. Always a festive time of year Samain like the others, saw trading and feasting, late night dancing around bonfires, visiting family. The Celts also celebrated the two equinoxes and the two solstices: Ostara, Midsommar, Mabon, and Yule with market weeks.

Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophist, and radical thinker of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, says Michaelmas, the Saint Day for the Archangel Michael, September 29th, is the “springtime of the soul.” Along with the Jewish New Year which always falls near the same time, we’re encouraged to go deep into our selves. I marry this idea to the increasing darkness, the gradual lengthening of the night that began at Midsommar and reaches its maximum at Yule, on the Winter Solstice. Samain invites us to not only go inside, but to also open ourselves to that Other World, the Unseen One, that lies just out of sight. Might be a multiverse, might be a dimension not understood by science or reason.

The Great Wheel teaches us about the link between our inner journey and the seasonal changes. The seasonal changes themselves can teach us about the world beyond our lived reality. We can avert our attention from the screens and pages and indoor rooms of our lives and take our attention out of doors. We can wonder what lies beyond that mountain, beneath that lake.

It teaches us Covid too shall end. And, makes us aware as well, that it will both end and return again. Though I hope we don’t have to have another Trump. Please. Don’t make authoritarianism and rampant stupidity laced into cupidity a renewing moment. Please.

Holiseason begins now. The term is not mine-I found it in the Oxford English Dictionary-but I apply it to the time between today, Samain, and January 6th, the Epiphany, the day after the Twelve Days of Christmas.  Holiseason includes so many, many holidays: Samain, Thanksgiving, Divali, Hanukah, Advent, Posada, Winter Solstice, Yule, New Years Day, Boxing Day, Kwanza. Add ones that you know.

We bathe ourselves in light and darkness, spend time with family, often giving them gifts. Holiseason is a time to sing songs, make the tables groan with food, decorate the house, the city, the nation, hug friends and family, acknowledge all the ancient spiritual trails we follow,  cue ourselves in to the soul’s journey, move deep into the caverns of our own inner life.

If you open yourself to its richness, holiseason will alert you to the fullest potential in yourself and those you love. It will remind you that the whole globe seeks for wisdom, for love, for light. Traditions come alive in song, in movies, in books. Poetry. We need not despair, even with Trump, even with Covid, even with hurricanes and wildfires. We are the people of the Holiseason. Joyous. Alert. Loving. Singing. Diving deep into our own souls to turn them inside out and know others through them. Blessed be.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Family, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Weather +Climate

Oh, I See

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Fall and the Moon of Radical Change

Sunday gratefuls: Snow. 8 degrees. More Snow, more Cold drooping down from the north, screaming in later from the west. Rigel and Kep. Kate. Our dialogue about doing things together. A warmer day yesterday. Happy Camper. Safeway. Ruby.

A light Snow, crystalline, falls outside. The temperature has dropped to 6 degrees. We are in a belt, once again, that could get up to 12-14 inches. Any amount of Snow and cold comes as a relief, not only here on Shadow Mountain, but also for those affected by the East Troublesome Fire and the Cameron Fire, well north of us, up in the Rocky Mountain National Park part of the state. I hope it’s enough to douse them, or at least bring them under control.

My favorite coffee mug has the Polar Express on it. I got it when Kate and I took then 7 year old grandson Gabe to an evening on board a Christmas train. He remarked, “We don’t celebrate this!” and huffed at the whole production. I got mad. Couldn’t he back off and enjoy the elves coming through with hot chocolate? Nope.

Gabe is not an observant Jew, even now several years later at the age of 12. But, he held fast that night. I admire it. I can say that now, but then, I thought, you ungrateful little killjoy!

You see this coming, right? What was really going on there? I loved Christmas. I loved the Polar Express. I did not associate it with Christianity by that point, but Gabe certainly did. Christmas is the great temptation for Hanukkah kids. Partly why Jewish children do so well at Hanukkah these days in terms of presents. Look! We have 8 days, they only have one night.

Not Christmas. Nope, Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel. Not Silent Night. No Christmas Tree. No Santa Claus. No The Night Before Christmas. A clear demarcation line between them and us. Kate and I that night were them. Gabe defended his faith and his culture. Again, good for him.

Fast forward to a Hanukkah at our house a year or so later. My knee replacement had just happened. I was home but medicated, morphine. Big pain.

As Ruth and Gabe went through the stack of presents on the coffee table, I was hit with a sudden wave of despair. What was I doing here? Why was I celebrating Hanukkah? I’m a Christmas guy. How did I let myself get into this?

The same kind of holiday dysphoria, I think, that Gabe experienced on the Polar Express. Huh. What goes around, comes around.

Since that moment, which passed as the morphine went away and the knee healed, I’ve realized the exasperated finger needed to point back at myself. Both incidents indicated a deep longing, a childhood longing, for a holiday I knew as mine.

I love Santa Claus, twinkling lights, hot chocolate, candy canes. And, yes, the Christmas Tree. I don’t love the hassle of the Christmas Tree or the materialistic orgy. No. That was easy to leave behind. What are the presents for anyhow? Proof of love? What kid needs that? Or, at least, what kid should need that?

The whole mishmash of mistaking parental love for the giving of gifts let me walk away from Christmas. Kate helped of course because she got tired of decorating MY Christmas Tree. Can’t blame her for that.

I don’t need the whole crass side of Christmas. Neither do you, I imagine. Maybe nobody does.

But. Boy, do I need the songs and the lights and all that stuff about Santa and the North Pole. And, the Tree. This year I’m going to pick a Lodgepole in our yard as my Christmas Tree. No, I’ll not cut it down. Maybe I’ll find a living Evergreen Tree to have inside, a small one.

Its that Evergreen connection that makes religious sense. Evergreen, a resurrected God. See? I’ll continue this, but I want to post now, so I can get breakfast before my time with the ancient ones.

Music, Myth and Story, Politics, Science, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, US History

The Plastic Hour

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Fall: RBG Moon, Mars, Orion, and Venus in the morning sky

Friday gratefuls: Savannah, nurse at Cherry Hills. Dr. Gustave. Sandy, the nurse anesthetist. Right eye cut and healing. Zeiss. Alan. The intraocular lens. Those who invented, designed, and made it. Annie and Sarah. Kate, her wrist calming down. Carne asada from Tony’s.

Right eye patched. I see Dr. Gustave today at 10:30. A familiar routine. Even with the right eye still dilated, I can see the words I type with clarity. Not before, not without glasses. And, even then, fuzzy,

I feel younger. Silly? Yeah, but I feel it anyhow. I’m ready for a bonus round with life.

Wondered what it meant to have Johnny Nash, the singer of “I Can See Clearly Now”, die in between the surgery on my left eye and the right one.

Checking on the idiot. Give me a sec. OMG. He’s worse. Prosecute Biden and Obama. A rally in Florida on Sunday. Won’t debate virtually. Going out in public when he should still be in quarantine. No boundaries. No sense. Aarrggh.

George Packer writes for the Atlantic. In the Plastic Hour, he wrote himself into hope after dispirited articles: “We are living in a failed state”, “Failure is a Contagion”. and, “The President is winning his war on American institutions.” He’s brilliant and has a feel for this time we’re in. Recommended. And, if you read it, what do you think?

Aging, Dreams, Family, Feelings, Garden, Great Wheel, Health, Jefferson County, Mountains, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Our Land and Home, Plants, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, The West, Third Phase, US History, Weather +Climate

Springtime of the Soul

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Fall and the RBG Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: Thoracentesis. Valet who got our car from a distant garage. The imaging employee who found an unused machine for Kate’s catscan. Phase two of the three stage plan done. Remembering to take out the blue foam. Clear vision. Michaelmas yesterday. Cool morning.

Michaelmas. The Saint’s Day of the Archangel Michael, he of Lucifer ejecting mythic fame. God’s great warrior. Also the name of the first term in British colleges and universities.

But best of all, the springtime of the soul. Rudolf Steiner. The growing season has finished. The external world had its glorious moment at the Fall Equinox, the celebration of the harvest. The body will be fed.

We turn our attention inward after Michaelmas. The nights grow longer, the angle of the sun shortens, and the days grow cold. Courage and sadness. A touch of melancholy encouraged.

When we drove down the hill yesterday, golden leaved Aspens had burst out among the Lodgepole Pine green. Framed by a typical clear blue Colorado sky the beauty made me gasp.

The beauty, the chill in the air. We know its brevity, like the beauty of the young. Those Aspen speak from the sides of Black Mountain, Conifer Mountain, Shadow Mountain. We are done now. Good bye. See you on the flip side. Their golden glamor a farewell to summer.

We know it. Many falls. The outrageous, over the top color of a Midwestern fall. The remnant of the Big Forest, the one that stretched from the east Coast to the Plains. Before the modern era a squirrel could travel tree to tree from the Atlantic to the Great Plains without ever touching the ground. So much melancholy in those colors, the abstract landscapes of a vivisectioned ecosystem.

Piles of Leaves in the yard, on the Forest floor. Running, jumping, landing in the piles. Dogs racing into them, through them. Do you remember, as I do, burning Leaves in the street? An acrid smell combining with earthy wetness. A strong seasonal memory.

One day soon Winds driven by the Cold slumping down from the Arctic will strip them all, Maple, Oak, Ironwood, Elm, Ash, Locust, Hickory, Sycamore, dislodge their Leaves and the tree naked against the coming winter. The Aspen gold rush will disappear and only the ghostly gray-white of their Trunks and Branches will remain.

A woman I learned ritual craft from thought this denuding of the deciduous Trees might explain Samain and the Celtic belief that the veil thinned between this world and the next during the transition.

Kate’s sister Sarah married Jeremiah Miller. A painter. Before I met her, Kate bought two of his very large paintings. One hangs in our bedroom. In it the Sky is a gunmetal blue and its complement of cumulus Clouds show as reflections in a Pond. Both Sky and Pond show through a Forest of bare Trunks and Branches, a before Winter comes scene we see all year.

This turn of the Great Wheel follows the gradual waning of the Light until the longest Night, the Winter Solstice. What better time for introspection, for the Soul to rise?

May this season of the Soul’s Springtime give you what you need for the next months and years of your journey, your ancientrail.

Aging, Coronavirus, Family, Feelings, Friends, GeekWorld, Health, Jefferson County, Judaism, Minnesota, Mussar, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Paying the Price

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Fall and the RBG Moon

Monday gratefuls: Groveland. The Ancient Ones. The ancientrails of wondering and friendship. The Darkness. The Stars, now steady. Kate’s stoma site. Getting clear and healthy. Kate. Just Kate, always Kate. Exposure. Fear. 28 degrees this a.m. The Gold in them thar Hills: Aspen. Magwa, the hero Rat. The clan.

So what happens to me. I over prepare. I go deep but the subject has only so much time. I’m disappointed. Did I give them anything? Did I intervene too little? Was I defensive? Will they want me back? Especially yesterday with It’s Beyond Me.

Zoom of course. Perhaps my choice of style, a discussion rather than a straight presentation. The inherent ambiguity of the topic. Felt off when it finished.

Also, I need this. I need to try something new. Learn something new. Be in this zoom moment as an actor, not only a passive observer.

Watched Social Dilemma on Netflix. The second of three documentary recommendations from the ancient ones. Again, not much new. Still, disturbing. I’m writing this in Firefox, using duckduckgo as my search engine. I practice good hygiene on Facebook and still love the old friends and Irish Wolfhounds. I heard the young, bright manipulators, but did not hear the path forward. Unless it’s regulation. Which is a duh unless you hate regulation as evil government intervention. I’m for it.

As I changed Kate’s bandage yesterday, we talked. I’m wondering how we can lift ourselves out of, or away from, this medicalization? I mean, I don’t want to see you as a patient all the time, but with all these appointments and treatments, it’s hard. Our life is not that. Yet, it is.

Right then, Rabbi Jamie called, wondering how Kate was? She mentioned this thought I’d just had. He listened. He had some time before Yom Kippur and wanted to connect with some folks. They miss us. We’ve been absent even from zoom mussar for over a month.

Covid. Makes all this hard. Kate can’t go to Patchworkers or Needleworkers. We don’t go to mussar at CBE. Or, services. Or the occasional program. It will soon be Sukkot and the booth is up, but we’re not there to participate. Yes, this is life now. Yes, it has its price.

God, this is cheery.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Health, Humanities, Minnesota, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science, Torah, Writing

Unanswerable Questions.

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Fall and the RBG Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Orion, clear and distinct, like Descartes wanted his ideas. The night sky, visible again! Meatloaf from Easy Entrees. Learning to sleep all night on my side. The lens in my left eye. Kate, waiting for relief. Ruth will watch Kiss the Ground. Groveland wanting to hear me again after all these years. It’s Beyond Me.

Three days post-op now. Biggest surprise so far was Orion, there. No longer several bursting flares, but his own, distinct self. Rigel there, too, his left foot, bright and clear. Ah. It’s good to see an old friend looking well.

I no longer need glasses for television. But, I did order three pair of 2.5 cheaters off Amazon. I can still read now with my right eye, but that goes away on the 8th of October. With the artificial lens I can’t focus anymore.

This surgery is such a good metaphor I wonder why it’s not deployed more often. Our vision gradually becomes clouded, the world becomes less and less easy to see. What do we need to remove our political cataracts and gain a humane vision? Those cataracts that have developed over years of lesser evils and disappointing politicians. Do we all come with the cataracts of racism and classism or do we develop them over time? Who will be our surgeons?

Shifting. It’s Beyond Me. I’ve had fun gathering answers to Groveland UU’s question: What are the origins of religious beliefs?

Finding an anthropologist, Harvey Whitehouse, has worked on the subject pleased me. He’s a cognitive anthropologist, a specialty that had little footing when I studied anthropology back in the late 1960’s. They study the way our mind shapes our understanding, rather than the understandings themselves. Whitehouse’s work is bloodless, but it has high points.

This presentation has to be a discussion. It asks an unanswerable question, my favorite kind. Each of us has an intuition about the answer. It will be interesting to learn what others have concluded. I have several notions to throw into the pot, but the answer is lost in the long ago, far away.

Doing presentations is a delight. I get to do research. I get to think about a topic. My ideas and conclusions get an airing. Feedback comes. On occasion cash, too.

It’s also unsettling. The research has to stop. The thinking must end. No matter how tentative, the ideas must be articulated. Exposed. Naked. And, in person.

My work doesn’t include the realm of the certain. I cannot say what the origin of religion is. No one can. Then I here Wittgenstein, of that about which we cannot speak, we must be silent. I only speak about such matters. A challenge, for sure.

So right now I’m anxious, teeth a bit clenched. Zoom adds another layer of uncertainty. Also a layer of experiment, of trying something new.

Aging, Asia, Beyond the Boundaries, Commentary on Religion, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities, Mountains, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Plants, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Weather +Climate

Courage and Sadness

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Mabon (Vernal Equinox) and the RBG Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Kate resolving the missing $5,500.Rigel eager to get up this morning. Orion in the south. Mars in the west. Venus in the east. Sirius in the southeast. Small bursts of color. The Great Wheel, turning.

The vernal equinox. When the night hours increase. Daylight shortens. Crops come to fruit. The Earth begins to gather back to itself the plants that grew in fields and meadows.

The Elk rut. That strange strangled cry of the bugling bull Elk. The cough of the mountain lion as they hunt in the dawn and twilight. Bears in their hyperphagia phase (a new word for me), 20,000 calories a day. Preparation for hibernation. Upturned trash cans, detritus on the roads.

Orion returns to the night sky. Getting the paper while feeding the dogs. In the dark now. Seeing the stars. Or, rather, their cataract driven explosions of light.

Earth/Sky, a favorite website, has a fascinating short article about the Chinese sense of autumn. This observation I found significant: “…it’s part of Chinese culture to maintain and add to ancient wisdom. In contrast, we in the Western world tend to replace old ideas with new ideas. So – although our Western way of thinking encourages advances in things like technology and economics – the Chinese understanding of natural cycles remains far deeper than ours.”

The emotions associated with autumn for the Chinese, courage and sadness, rise in full measure this 2020 harvest season. Sad. The feeling of Leaves falling, Grasses withering, light diminishing, the Sun’s angle shortening. RBG’s tzaddik death. The pandemic. Our beleaguered and chaotic nation. Isolation and its discontents. Courage. Facing the election, doing what’s necessary. Mourning, then fighting. Going on as the Vegetative world dies, changes. Living with the pandemic instead of in spite of it. Leaning into the third phase for those of us old hippies and radicals still here.

The Great Wheel is ancient Western knowledge. I have chosen to maintain it and, I hope, add to it. As the Earth/Sky article notes: “To the Chinese, nature means more than just the cycling of the seasons. Nature is within and around us…” It used to meant that in the West, too, but our emphasis on reason, on results, on arriving at destinations, on a monotheistic creator who controls nature, have become mature cataracts for us, occluding our vision.

We see what we believe useful. We find the laws of nature, then proceed to own them, use them. This gives us the impression that, like magic or miracles, we can control nature. The rapid warming of our planet gives the lie to that.

I’m neither a Luddite nor anti-reason, anti-science. I am sad about what we’ve lost in our rush to understand and after having understood, manipulate.

I find comfort in knowing as autumn comes to the Rockies, it has also come to me. My life has matured, has headed for the fallow season, the long season in which I return those borrowed elements, become again one with the universe. Though of course I’m one with it now, too.

Which makes me feel the turning of the wheel, it tugs on me, pulls me toward not only death, but also spring. The cyclical renewal. Who knows? Maybe autumn prepares us not for annihilation, but transformation and renewal. It does for Mother Earth. Why not us?

Aging, Cooking, Dogs, Family, Health, Holidays, Judaism, Myth and Story, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Getting to 5781

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Lughnasa and the Labor Day Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: Kate. Always Kate. The night sky. Venus. Life on Venus? Rigel. Kep. Deb from on the move fitness. Her grief. The new workout. Cool morning. Mountain Waste. Rage, by Woodward. The internet. DSL. The Gift on Netflix. Borgen, too. Dark sky spots in Colorado: Dinosaur National Monument. Great Sand Dunes. Westcliffe. Black Canyon of the Gunnison. More.

Up early for the Clan call, forgot to post yesterday. Forgetting is rare, but it happened. Mary, Mark, Diane. Singapore, Riyadh, San Francisco. The wonders of our age. In real time, no lag other than the one I understand Zoom introduces to create smooth conversation.

Kate didn’t feel up to it. The pleura effusion continues to create problems for her. She now has some pain in her right chest, the side of the effusion. No imaging study scheduled yet, but she’s going to call today. It makes her shortness of breath worse, restricting her movement.

Some sleeplessness for me Sunday night. Wondering where things were headed with Kate. Rumination. Not my usual fare at night. Not for a long time.

We decided not to see Amber this week at Advanced Wound Care. We needed a quiet week. No medical appointments. With my upcoming cataract surgery I’ll have a few of my own.

As the Labor Day Moon wanes, it moves us toward the High Holidays. The Jewish lunar calendar starts each new month on a new moon, Rosh Chodesh. The head of the month. Rosh Hashanah, head of the year. Each new year celebrates the creation of Adam and Eve according to legend.

Since 2020, based on the Gregorian Calendar, has sucked, I recommend choosing 5781. No more of that 2020.

Got a new workout yesterday from Deb Brown. She lost her husband, Dave, to glioblastoma in the midst of early lockdown. I hear Dave’s voice often, I told her. I love to teach deadlift technique. Hold that band out from your chest as long as you can. She hears it, too, she said. Only louder and a lot.

We met on Zoom. A little clunky for this purpose, but it worked. The exercises: goblet squat, flat bench press, dipper, staggered stance row on stability ball, bicep curl, skullcrusher, stability ball prone back extension, plank, 1 leg balance with transverse step.

I like switching up my workout every six to eight weeks. It helps keep me interested, but more important, it changes up muscle use. Muscles don’t become acclimated to the routine.

Easy Entree tonight. Cod in a white wine and tomato sauce.

And, a trip to Happy Camper this morning.

Art and Culture, Beyond the Boundaries, Memories, Minnesota, Myth and Story, Shadow Mountain, Travel, US History, World History

Still alive in my heart

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Lughnasa and the Labor Day Moon

Sunday gratefuls: The Ancient friends. Health. Healthspan. Working out. Cool weather. Low humidity and dewpoint. Extreme fire weather. Rain yesterday and Friday. Stress.

Drifting to sleep, roaming places that reached into my heart. In no particular order:

Delos, the small Greek island where Apollo and Artemis were born

Delphi, home to the Delphic Oracle in the Temple of Apollo

Ephesus, the most complete Roman city I’ve seen. Near Patmos. The grave of John the Evangelist is there. Maybe.

The Chilean Fjords. 120 miles of islands, ocean, and glaciers.

Ushuaia. The furthest south city in the Americas.

Angkor Wat, temples of the Khmer devi-rajas, God-Kings.

The Maglev train in Korea

The Forbidden City and the Great Wall

Pompeii

The Uffizi

The Sistine Chapel

Inverness, Scotland

St. Deniol’s Residential library

Winifred’s Holy Well

Cahokia

Chaco

Lake Superior

Northern Minnesota

Shadow Mountain and its neighbors

Manhattan

The Cloisters

Bangkok’s China Town and its night restaurants on the sidewalks

Minneapolis and St. Paul

The Panama Canal

Oaxaca

Mexico City: the zocalo and Garibaldi Square and Xochimilco and the Anthropology Museum

Merida

Commentary on the news, Great Work, Myth and Story, Politics, Third Phase, US History

A Second Act

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Lughnasa and the Labor Day Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Kate. Amber. Rigel. Kep. Cool morning. The Pandemic. Trump. BLM. Prostate cancer. Lung disease. Sjogren’s. CBE. Mussar. Tara. Electric cars. The dying of the extractive fossil fuel industries. Climate change. The Book of Revelation.

Predicting the end of the world is a parlor game played by intellectuals and cranks. It never fails to terrify, alarm, or make someone laugh. Think of all the cartoons with the bearded man and the sign: The End is Near.

Apocalypse. It’s hard to put the word aside these days: Murder Hornets, Covid, Trump, Climate Change (remember climate change?), that asteroid, Hurricane Laura. It has me checking the clouds for a guy in a flowing robe and an angry tilt to his eyebrows.

Remember 2012? Y2K? The first models of what the Coronavirus might do? Evangelicals support Israel because they think it will encourage the second coming. No, really.

Instead, I hear T.S. Eliot, “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.” Our sense of drama wants, needs a bang, but I’d say the most likely scenario for the end of humanity comes after centuries of an Earth made too hot for us by our own actions. A self-destructive species, us Humans.

You’ll probably not guess where I’m going with this. It means to me that our nation will survive the Donald, will take him, the pandemic, even the Asteroid and murder Hornets, and recreate ourselves.

There may be no second acts in America, but I believe there will be a second act for America. The last four years, colored even darker by the “if it were fiction, it wouldn’t be believable.” nature of the last few months, have had certain oddly positive effects.

The racist (and, classcist) strands in our history have been written clearly in blood and anger. Black Lives Matter and its counter protesters in the alt-right have put on a medieval morality play in cities across the country. See Kenosha. Portland. Minneapolis. The reactions of police and the denizens of the right-wing demimonde have clarified what’s at stake for our nations future. I believe we will see positive policy changes in cities and in our nation, especially after the election.

The orange excrescence has performed a similar service for the small d democrats here. Who are, I believe, most of us on the left and right. We now know how important not only the constitutional nature of our government is, but the norms and traditions it has developed over 200 years of history as well.

That’s why I’m seeing a sign on a Brookforest yard that reads: I’m a Republican, but I’m no Fool: Vote Biden. That’s why all those national security folks have gone on record as supporting Trump. Even George Bush. George Will. Many other prominent members of what used to be the GOP.

We will have an opportunity, if we choose to take it, to reimagine this nation. Our founding documents and our founders will play a strange role in this reimagining.

That 3/5th’s “compromise.” Sally Hemmings. All those George Washington owned slaves. The white, male, property owner requirement for voting. Not who we want or need to be anymore. Let them now live on as the sins of the fathers that were visited on our generation, but finally expiated.

I’ve taken mild liberties with the text, but this should serve as a template for the next four years:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men of us are created equal, that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men all men and women, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

We gray beards and gray heads have a role to play in this exciting time. Just what it is, I’m not sure, but it has something to do with insisting on our better natures. Will you join me as we search for Rumi’s field out beyond right and wrong?