Winter New (Valentine) Moon
I turn 70 next month. Not a particularly notable achievement since the silver tsunami includes millions doing the same thing this year, but, hey; it’s my only chance to hit three score and ten. Kate’s been there ahead of me and knows the territory, so have many friends. Thus, the Valentine moon.
The old man on Shadow Mountain, that’ll be me after Valentine’s Day. One piece of gathered wisdom from the time so far: life is still precious, love is still its heart.
Winter Cold Moon
The end of the day here on Shadow Mountain. The sun, disappearing behind Black Mountain, lights up a few narrow cumulus clouds while light leaves the land around our home.
My energy has begun to return to normal. It has taken this long, 8 weeks; but, I’m finally back to writing Superior Wolf and plan to get to the Latin soon. Those two plus writing this blog are my work right now.
The Beth Evergreen community has begun to feel like home, more so for Kate, I think, but somewhat for me, too. I imagine that feeling will deepen over time.
Tomorrow night I’m going to the Conifer Community Church for a meeting of Organizing for Action-Conifer. This will be my first meeting, perhaps their fourth or fifth. I’m looking forward to meeting like minded folk, allies in what will be a long pull.
Winter Cold Moon
A knee note. The last few visits of physical therapy are near. They’re working with me now on post p.t. workouts. Specifically, how I can avoid damaging my knee while strengthening my legs. Pretty much common sense. No deep squats, no torquing the knee, no exercises that weaken the back in anyway. Core work.
I felt silly asking about this today, but I did. How do I build back my cardio? I asked because I’d begun to get back to it, then pushed myself too fast and began to resist doing it at all. Slowly. That’s the ticket. First, 3 days a week. Then, either add a day at the same pace or increase by 10/20%. Oh. I was going for six days a week and kicking the time up five minutes at a whack. No wonder I was resisting.
Overall, the knee is great. Hardly any pain. I often forget now that I had the work done. Well, often might be a stretch, but I do have times when I forget. And that’s a good thing.
Winter Cold Moon
Winter Cold Moon
Winter Cold Moon
Imagine a long train, 130 hopper cars filled with Wyoming’s Powder Basin coal, moving at 50 mph with roughly 19,000 tons total weight. Imagine Washington DC as its terminus. We’re in the observation room of the Washington Monument, watching this train come into town. In slow motion it hits the Capital, plowing right through and heading on down Pennsylvania Avenue taking out other government office buildings and finally spending the last of its considerable energy demolishing the White House and the Executive Office Building.
This is, I’m sure, a conservative fantasy, one being enacted now in the Oval Office. The orange old man with the wondrous toupee has, with Executive Orders, supported the Keystone and DAPL pipelines, begun the rending of the ACA, will soon appropriate money for the great wall of fear and has eroded abortion protections. He has also gagged several government agencies and his nominee for Secretary of State has effectively threatened war with China. He’s not even been in office a week. That train will get a chance to leave town, pick up speed and return to get other cabinet buildings and pick off a few journalists and protesters.
Winter Cold Moon
My Latin teacher, Greg Membrez, found this hilarious video from the Netherlands.
Winter Cold Moon
In the Nix (see post below) the author Nathan Hill takes a side excursion into the difficult, thorny problem of the self. The idea he presents helped me, gave me a middle ground beyond the no-self notions of the Buddha and several contemporary psychologists and philosophers and the Western view of one true self.
The dialectic between no-self and one true self has always found me much closer to the one true self pole. It’s the one that I accept intuitively. In fact, it was the unquestioned truth until mid-college, so unquestioned that any other idea seemed literally absurd.
“Oh, that’s her true self.” We might say this when we see someone angry, apparently peeling back the onion, layers of false selves, to reveal the enduring self located, well, somewhere; or, when some other extreme behavior allows us, or so we think, to peer into the interior of another. This is the radical western reductionist view of the self, perhaps linked to the notion of soul, the essence of a person.
The Buddhist notion, which I don’t pretend to understand well, posits no I, no we, only a consciousness that responds to whatever shows up in the present moment, our self a narrative, a story we tell ourselves, but having no “real” existence.
In Hill’s notion there is a third, perhaps a middle way, between these two poles. A character says, oh, her true self has been hidden by false selves. No, Hill’s other character says, not by a false self but by another of her true selves. Ah. Not split personality or multiple personality, not that idea, rather the idea that we each have more than one “true” self.
This makes so much sense to me. The self that writes this blog is the writing me, the self that wants somehow to turn my inside out so others can see in. I have a husband self who acts in relation to Kate and to the history of relationships I’ve had. There is a grandparent self brought into existence by Ruth and Gabe. A Woolly self. A friend self, perhaps as many friend selves as I have friends. There is an art lover self, a physical self focused on the body, a reading self, too, who willingly opens all these selves to influence by another. Each of these true selves, and many others, have their own history, their own agenda. You might call these selves the specific wanderer on each of my several ancientrails.
Given the quote above from Whitman, I’ll call this the Whitman theory of self. It is, for now, the one to which I adhere.
Winter Cold Moon
“For this meeting, please bring a magazine, journal, newspaper article, book, or something written, that you have read within the last month and that brought a great deal of passion, inspiration, focus, energy, or meaning for you personally.” Scott Simpson, for the Woolly meeting a week ago today
I’ve read three books recently that have stayed with me: Zero K by Don Delillo, Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead and The Nix by Nathan Hill. These are all fiction, all by contemporary authors.
Zero K examines, in a minimalist world, our obsessions with death, immortality and technology while recounting a strained father-son relationship. It’s stark and strange, featuring, for example, a compound somewhere in the ‘stans. At this compound, mostly underground, is the center for a cryogenics movement funded by wealthy folk hoping to live forever, or at least until there’s a cure for whatever they have right now.
Underground Railroad imagines a real railroad, with tunnels and station masters, which carries escaped slaves. It is not so much the railroad though that commends this novel, but the story of the slaves who escape. This novel puts you inside the minds of slaves on the plantation and as they decide to flee and the ambiguous world that faces them even in relative freedom. Claustrophobic, scary, uncertain life on the run sometimes contrasted favorably with enslavement, sometimes furnished prisons and punishments that did not. I appreciated the chance to live in this world for the time it took to read this novel.
The Nix uses massive online video gaming, the Chicago protests of 1968, and the life of a disappointed assistant professor of English and his estranged mother to reflect on what it means to be human.
The nix is a Norwegian legend, according to the characters in the book, which involves a horse. The horse finds children, plays with them, then invites them, by lowering his head, to climb aboard. At first, the children are delighted. They love the horse. Then, the horse begins to gallop, faster and faster. The child becomes frightened. Finally the horse wades into a lake, throw off the child and kills them. The theme of the Nix is just this: that the thing you love can kill you.
Well worth the read.
Winter Cold Moon
Of course, the irony of the women’s marches, successful though they were, is profound. With the same organizing effort and the same passionate devotion it would have been possible to defeat Trump. One interesting study I saw said Hillary lost due to Democrats who stayed home.
Now, this does not detract from the present moment and forward looking significance of these amazing gatherings not only in the U.S., but in other countries of the world, too. The power of the images alone is wonderful. They make me feel hopeful.
But. This Guardian article does tell the truth: “Without a path from protest to power, the Women’s March will end up like Occupy.” Protest, per se, feels good, but does not move the balance of power on its own. It gives pause to enemies, succor to supporters and creates at least a temporary feeling of solidarity. These are not small things.
A pause in the Trump Whitehouse is a good thing. And, yes, I use the word enemy. What else would you call Donald the Trump? Enemy: “a person who is actively opposed or hostile to someone or something.” Someone=women, persons of color, the disabled, immigrants, other nations, political opponents. Something=the planet.
So here is one conclusion from the wild embrace of public opposition by millions of women and their allies. We need to find the pressure points of this new regime and attack them relentlessly. For the next four years. This means organizing. Phone calls. Letters. Street protests. Letters to the editor. Interaction with state legislators and federal legislators. Often. We need, in other words, to take the momentum from yesterday and use it. Right now. Before it fades.