Beltane Rushing Waters Moon
To any Hoosier boy Memorial Day announces the Indy 500. Likewise, as a Hoosier student it meant, summertime! But up here on Shadow Mountain? We’re not quite ready for the parades and “Gentlemen, start your engines!”
Beltane Rushing Waters Moon
Kate and I sponsored the oneg last night at Beth Evergreen. Oneg means delight and in this use it’s a modest event after the sabbath service. It involves the kiddush prayer over wine, the passing of challah (a ceremony not coincidentally similar to the Christian eucharist) and having some sweets or other snacks. It’s similar to coffee after a Christian or U.U. service, but different in one significant regard. The Jewish sabbath, as a day of rest and renewal has a focus on good food and general delight, so the oneg both is that ideal and reinforces the larger sabbath ethos.
Kate did her usual excellent job of providing a variety of tasty food and adult beverages, in this case white wine. We bought the challah at a small bakery, Alpine Bakery, in Evergreen. I picked out cookies: bunnies, unicorns and trains. The oneg was in honor of Ruth and Gabe so they seemed apropos.
In the service, sparsely attended, due I imagine to the snowfall over the last three days, the Beth Evergreen choir sang. The Reconstructionist book for the sabbath service is an impressive piece of liturgical accompaniment. It contains both Hebrew and English versions of the various portions as well as commentary that suggests the reconstructionist take on traditional elements of Jewish worship.
In a section focused on the Exodus, the parting of the Reed (Red) Sea the commentary says an early Reconstructionist prayer book did not include the parting of the sea because of its supernatural element. This version of the prayer book has it because “As myth, however, the ancient tale of wonder underscores the sense of daily miracle in our lives.” This gives you a good feel for the Reconstructionist approach to both theology and the Torah. It’s one I find myself nodding to a lot.
Though I retain my empiricist, flat-earth metaphysics I’m finding it under spiritual and intellectual siege. This ancient tradition, radically reconsidered from within, pushes me to open myself to a deeper, more mystical place. The mystical has always been a significant part of my spiritual journey, but I’ve let it lie fallow for the most part in recent years. Not sure where this is headed, stirrings of old feelings mixed with reimagining faith. An interesting moment.
Beltane Rushing Waters Moon
White and gray. The 18 inches or so of snow lies thick on our roof, solar panels hidden from our star. That unusual characteristic of snow to move upwards with the shape of an obstacle like a fence post, a statue, mailbox, or birdbath has created several objects in our yard with white caps reaching skyward, simulacrums in snow of the surface beneath them.
The lodgepole pines have puffy sticky snow that conforms to their branches, weighing them down, pointing them towards Shadow Mountain. One by one the weight will become too much and the whole pile on one branch slides off with an oof and a powdery white trail following it to the ground followed by another, then another until the branches spring back up, ready to receive sunlight. Until then, the trees, like our solar panels, are cut off from the source of their power.
A member of Beth Evergreen sent an e-mail from Boston yesterday, “It’s a hot, sticky 95 here.” This reminded me that the legendary speaker of the house from Boston, Tip O’Niell said, “All politics are local.” So to with weather.
The storm seems to have quieted overnight. No snow falls now. The sun, already well up over Denver, has begun to light the clouds over Black Mountain, accentuating the blue sky. The whiteness of the scene from my loft window seems to impose a silence borne of the color itself, soundlessness corresponding to the fresh, but otherwise colorless, snow. Along with the silence comes a profound stillness, as if for the moment nothing moves. Perhaps the mountain lion has retreated to its den, the bear to its former place of hibernation, the mule deer and elk bedded down among the willows and dogwood out of the wind.
As for this mammal, I’m sitting here, quiet and thoughtful, happy to have a meditative scene out my window. Black Mountain is my writing companion, often my muse. In fact, just now I watched the sun’s light slowly descend from Black Mountain’s peak toward the shelf of rock well below it. The peak itself shines as the sun reflects back off the high albedo of its snow cover. The sun itself, our own star among the heaven’s billions or trillions, seems to have picked out Black Mountain saying, “Behold this wonder so near to you, yet so different.” The sun, God’s spotlight.
Beltane Rushing Waters Moon
This family gives their dogs regular rides in a convertible and, according to their housekeeper, has a horse who comes in the house to eat out of the fruit bowl. Life in the mountains.
Beltane Rushing Waters Moon
This is a record breaking snow already and it’s barely gotten started. Good news for us up here on Shadow Mountain. Hard to burn when everything’s covered in fluffy white moisture. This is a flour sifter snow, coming down straight, no wind, and fast.
Trump. He says with “surety” that no politician in history has ever been treated worse. Not sure Charles II would agree. Or JFK, MLK, RFK, Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela, Salvador Allende, Archduke Ferdinand. To mention a few off the top of my head.
His first hundred days might be his last hundred days. Even Pence looks better. Sort of.
Over the last couple of days I’ve been reading the Divergent trilogy by Veronica Roth. Granddaughter Ruth is reading it and I try to keep up with at least some of her favorites. The first book is very good. The second one’s not quite as good, but ok. The third shows it’s difficult to sustain a creative push. Makes me wonder how George Martin’s done it with the Game of Thrones series. Not easy.
Still dealing with the difficulties of making tea at altitude. Just wrote my favorite tea company, Verdant Tea, a Minnesota company that works directly with tea growers in China. Maybe they’ll have some ideas.
Kate spent another sewing day yesterday, this time with the needleworkers. These are most of the day events where the women come together to work on their own projects, see what the others are up to and share ideas, techniques. Friendships, too. She also had her third injection of Remicade, an anti-rheumatoid arthritis biological drug. Her color and energy has improved. Seems to be working.
Well. Breakfast time in the Rockies. With snow.
Beltane Rushing Waters Moon
May 18th. May 18th. This is the merry, merry month of May. Its 18th day. 18 days after Beltane, the start of the growing season. Obviously, somewhere other than Shadow Mountain.
Beltane Rushing Waters Moon
Working on a presentation for our mussar class at Beth Evergreen. Want to include Berry’s idea of the great work for our generation: creating a sustainable human presence on earth.
Also want to include Aldo Leopold’s land ethic:
“All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively the land.” The Land Ethic, A Sand County Almanac.
The date of the presentation happens to be Emerson’s birthday. So, from Nature: “The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.” introduction to his essay, Nature.
Linking up with the parsha* (Torah portion read in Shabbat services) I found Leviticus 25 filled with interesting ideas about the land. Here are a couple that fit well with these ideas.
Lev. 25:18 “…you shall live on the land securely.”
Lev. 25:23 “…the land shall not be sold permanently for the land belongs to Me, for you are all strangers and temporary residents with me.”
Of course, this is a mussar class so all of this has to connect with the Mesillat Yesharim, Path of the Upright, that we’re reading. To do that I think kedusha, holiness, hasidut, piety, and chesed, loving-kindness are key. These last two come from the same root.
Here are some ideas about holiness from the parsha of a couple of weeks ago, Kedoshim. Leviticus 19:2b: “You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy.” In commentary on Kedoshim the Conservative text* that I have quotes many famous Jewish scholars.
Martin Buber: Holiness is not found in rising above one’s neighbors but in relationships, in human beings recognizing the latent divinity of other people, even as God recognizes the divinity in each of us. The commentary adds, “As human beings we can be Godlike by exercising our powers to sanctify moments and objects in our lives.” Namaste.
I can also link this idea to the Japanese ichi-go ichi-e, once in a lifetime, attitude gleaned from the work of Japanese tea masters, especially the renowned Sen no Rikyū. He learned ichi-go ichi-e from his master, Takeno Jōō. “Jōō believed that each meeting should be treasured because it can never be reproduced.” wikipedia
Another of my favorite Japanese ideas is shinrin-yoku or forest-bathing. Here’s a one-line summary from the website linked to here. “The idea is simple: if a person simply visits a natural area and walks in a relaxed way there are calming, rejuvenating and restorative benefits to be achieved.”
More from the commentary on Kedoshim: “The modern distinction between “religious” and “secular” is unknown to the Torah. Everything we do has the potential of being holy.”
Again, from Buber, “Judaism does not divide life into the holy and the profane, but into the holy and the not-yet holy.” Another scholar, a man named Finklestein, adds, “Judaism is a way of life that endeavors to transform virtually every human action into a means of communion with God.” or, perhaps with a pagan sensibility, ichi-go ichi-e.
I say perhaps intentionally because my reimagined faith could intersect with these ideas in a positive way, especially so if the locus of the divine is the individual soul, that part of us that connects with collective unconscious, Brahma, the three Sephirot: kether, the crown, chochmah, wisdom and binah, understanding, that part of the other to which we bow when we say Namaste. Or, as I quoted Buber earlier, “Holiness is not found in rising above one’s neighbors but in relationships, in human beings recognizing the latent divinity of other people…”
This, too, is in the commentary: “…(find) ways of sanctifying every moment of your life. We can be as holy as we allow ourselves to be.” again, the Japanese ichi-go ichi-e and shinrin-yoku.
I’m also trying to pick up some ideas about Hebrew roots but that, so far, has eluded me.
Somewhere in this stew is enough material for a session. Just gotta sort it out.
*Etz Hayim, Torah and Commentary, The Rabbinical Assembly, The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. 2001. New York, N.Y. 10027
Beltane Rushing Waters Moon
Beltane Rushing Waters Moon
Our next Sierra Club meeting will be on June 19th, one day before the summer solstice. Sierra Club work is paganism stripped bare of its mythic content. There is passion for sure, but not the poetry, no ritual, no inner work. It’s all outer work: hike, lobby, analyze, network, persuade. We may, for example, show the next Al Gore movie, Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. See trailer below.*
The work is good, necessary. It is even, as Thomas Berry said, the great work of our generation, but it often feels mechanical to me. Pull this lever. Have this meeting. Create this sign. Monitor Polymet. Call the governor. Write your Senator. Hike this trail. In its mechanistic form this does not feel like my love for our home, this earth, this planet, third rock from the sun.
Somehow I need to find a way for my inner work to imbue my outer work. Todd, a long-time member of the Mt. Evan’s local group to which I belong, talked about a hike he took yesterday in Reynold’s Park. He named a particular orchid that he found and his face lit up. “A bullsnake, too.” It may be that these folks, tied to the very local region encompassed by our borders, find their inner work in being on the trail, hiking Mt. Bierstadt, taking the Mt. Evan’s road, helping clear trail.
The hike I took at Flying J Ranch (see posts below) was shinrin-yoku, forest bathing. Perhaps that’s a way to combine the inner work with the outer work. Or, perhaps I could follow the mussar notion of outer work affecting the inner work. Not sure. But, there is a need for me to more closely match my spiritual journey with this work. Maybe the mountain art notion will fit here, too. More to come.
*
Beltane Rushing Waters Moon
David believes we protect what we care about. I agree with him. He uses photography as a way of engendering support for some of our more charismatic megafauna. Mountain lions and bears are under attack in certain sections of Colorado. The government is killing them to supposedly increase mule deer herds.
This is a still of the same mountain lion in the video.
