Imbolc Anniversary Moon
Monthly Archives: March 2017
Stuff Going On Here
Imbolc Anniversary Moon
It was 68 here yesterday. And dry. So little snow left, just in the northern shadow of our home, here and there in shaded parts of the forest. This is a typical La Nina year, according to weathergeek, our pinecam.com meteorologist. The result? A long, potentially too hot, summer and fall.
Working on the last of the cardboard to plastic transfer process. Yesterday I found complete drafts of Phantom Queen, The Sacrifice, The Wild Pair, Missing, Hunting Gods, Only To Be Born and the Last Druid. They’re now resting in file folders in one box. Even the God’s Must Die will go in there today. I don’t have a printed out copy of Superior Wolf yet, not done, but close. Jennie’s Dead, a partially finished novel, and work on Loki’s Children, the second in the Tailte trilogy, will have files here, too, because they are ones I will finish eventually. Feels good to see these drafts all in one place, in the physical world of paper, not just bytes. I have another file box full of short story drafts, some edited.
The research and writing group/beta reader comments for each novel and story will go into the banker’s boxes and get moved downstairs to the shelving in the garage.
The dogs are all healthy right now. I’ve stopped letting them out after breakfast in the morning (at 4:45/5:00 am) due to the mountain lion problem. They’ll go out after the sun comes up. It’s strange, but part of mountain life, to have to consider predators killing them. When I was a kid in Indiana, the worry was your dog getting run over by a car.
Imbolc Anniversary Moon
Underground Family
Imbolc Anniversary Moon
Dream last night. Once again in Oklahoma or its inner equivalent, a home place for the Ellises. This time Dad was there, having moved to a house in a city (Oklahoma City?). It was an old house, but well-maintained, with lots of wood detailing, cool even in the summer. It had older, abandoned houses around it though they were undergoing renovation. Dad was cool to me, tolerated me being there, but not much else.
He wanted to move, abandon this house, which I thought was wonderful and would increase greatly in value once the housing around was updated. I expressed my feelings, but he was determined to move.
I cleaned up the downstairs of the house, hoping he would stay.
Before finding Dad in this house, I had discovered a vast underground series of rooms, all devoted to the Ellis clan in Oklahoma. There were lots of people in them, moving around, conducting business (ranching type business), hanging out. I felt uncomfortable down there, though I was also impressed with the size and scope of these various rooms. My discomfort was minimal, but there. I wandered among the rooms for a long time.
The Masque
Imbolc Anniversary Moon
Masks. The sample session about kabbalah has had me focused on masks I wear. Here are a few: grieving son, angry son, abandoned son, skeptic, philosophical analyst, anxious son, anxious man, friend (I think each friendship might prompt a different mask), loving husband, anxious husband, devoted and loyal husband, protective husband, father, proud father, step-father, grandfather, cousin, brother (again, a different mask for Mary and Mark), dog lover, grieving dog lover, gardener, beekeeper, greenman, mountain man, 60’s radical, weary 60’s radical, writer, anxious writer, fearful writer, reader, blogger, Celt, German, Minnesotan, Hoosier, Coloradan, member of Beth Evergreen, anxious member of Beth Evergreen, hiker, traveler, traveler for fun, traveler for self-knowledge, meditator, translator, Latin student, mussar student, fellow traveler of Judaism, driver, angry driver, meditative driver, commuter man, docent, art lover, art critic, poet, exerciser, reluctant exerciser, healthy man, dying man, sick man, indulgent man, poor eater man, healthy eater man, home maintenance scanning man, home maintenance securer, worker supervisor (home maintenance), father-in-law, theater and movie goer, chamber music lover, jazz lover, politically dutiful man. Well, it’s a start.
The idea here is to know your own masks without judgment, then order them from core masks to peripheral. What masks can you not take off without removing some skin? Those are core (actually near core) and the most resistant to change. The core itself, the I am, is pure awareness and has no mask. I have an issue here with the kabbalah, not sure how a soul, a self, the core of me, can put on a mask. The donning of a mask seems contradictory to pure awareness, how would the motivation to mask up occur? How could it be actuated? This is important to my philosophical analyst mask though, as Jamie pointed out, the practical application of these ideas doesn’t require an answer.
The ultimate goal is to be able to take off and don masks appropriate to each moment. To do this, of course, we have to be self-aware, we have to know what mask we have on. This will take practice.
Kabbalah
Imbolc Anniversary Moon
Kabbalah. Last night at Beth Evergreen we dipped our toes in an ancient lake, one so esoteric that information about it was not written down until the time of the Spanish Inquisition. The kabbalah, it was felt, needed nuanced interpretation and written down it could be read by those who might misunderstand its teachings.
But during the Inquisition so many scholars were killed that many were concerned the teachings might be lost, so books began to be written. The Zohar is the famous Kabbalah text, a central work on Jewish mysticism.
Isaac Luria, a rabbi of 16th century Safed, a town in Galilee, at that time in Syria, is a key figure in contemporary Kabbalah.
Years ago Kate wanted me to go to Hawai’i with her for a continuing medical education event. I said, no thanks. She insisted. I went. My expectations were completely wrong. I had a cheesy hula dancer dashboard ornament, loud shirt, noisy American tourist understanding of Hawai’i. We went to Maui and the Big Island that year. I wanted to stay.
My sense of kabbalah comes from a teeny understanding of it as mysticism and the fact that Madonna got into it some time back. Its popularity among celebrities at that point made me avoid it then and colored my anticipation of what Jamie would have to offer. Last night I wanted to stay.
In kabbalah parlance in both instances I donned a mask of cultured (actually ignorant in these cases) sophistication. This mask has its advantages as it helps me avoid wasting time on matters I don’t consider important. But the instance of Hawai’i and kabbalah teaches me that this mask also excludes rich experiences if I know too little about them.
A key point of kabbalah is awareness of the masks (personas) we use and being able, eventually, to take them off and put them on when appropriate. Sounds like a long ride.
A Quiet Day
Imbolc Anniversary Moon
A quiet day. Kate had the Bailey Patchworkers, a sewing group that meets once a month, and I stayed home with the dogs. Still transferring files from cardboard to translucent plastic. Slow process. As I touch files I’ve had for years but not revisited in a long while, I stop to read, wonder why the hell I kept this?
These are still remnants of the move from Minnesota, tasks partially done, enough to start functioning, but needing more careful organization for things to really hum. Our two very large paintings done by brother-in-law Jerry remain in their crates, built especially for them. Lots of other art hangs out with its brothers and sisters leaning against walls, shelving, in closets. Slowly. Slowly.
Kate and I have been studying mussar for nine months or so. Tonight Rabbi Jamie has an introductory class in Kabbalah. I know very little about this Jewish mystical tradition (I knew nothing about mussar.), but I’m going to go, find out a bit more.
The lenticular clouds over Black Mountain have mini-rainbows as the sun sets behind them in the west, delicate pinks and blues. It gets cool fast up here when the sun goes down, summer and winter. Part of the joy of living here. For us.
Tweety
Imbolc Anniversary Moon
So, wiretapping doesn’t mean wiretapping. It means, well, whatever D.T. might have meant if he’d put down the phone, stopped tweeting (D.T.-tweety bird) and thought. Accusing a fellow president of spying on you is just another thing, something done for the hell of it, with no evidence other than a right wing nutjobs rants? God, how long do we have to put up with this guy?
He has allies like Congressman Steve King from Iowa’s 4th district, which includes Kate’s hometown of Nevada:
““We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies”
While many politicians, including Mr. Trump, often try to back away from statements that offend, Mr. King amiably doubles down. On Monday, confronted about his tweet, he told CNN, “I meant exactly what I said,” adding that he would “like to see an America that’s just so homogeneous that we look a lot the same, from that.”
Mr. King, 67, represents the most conservative corner of Iowa…” NYT, March 14, 2017
We’ve gone pretty far down the rabbit hole, my fellow Americans. D.T. has made it safe for racist ideologues, smash and grab xenophobic thugs and robber barons. He’s leading the charge for a recision of the very modest health care program instituted by Obama. The current plan would leave up to 24 million, that’s 24 MILLION, souls without health care. This is not politics, this is warfare against the most vulnerable in our society.
Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey had this to say:
“It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.” Hubert H. Humphrey
D.T. and his band of deplorable Congressfolk fail this test. An F. Cruelty is not only a bomb dropped from the sky; it’s a conscious decision to deprive fellow human beings of what they need to live and to thrive.
One Convenient Button
Imbolc Anniversary Moon
A Flat Out Lie
Imbolc Anniversary Moon
Fire danger continues high. If we don’t get some moisture, it’s gonna be a long summer. Weather5280 says some changes may be ahead in the latter part of March. Go moisture. Bring on some cold. Let it snow.
Still moving files from banker’s boxes to translucent plastic bins. Finished all my art files yesterday, today I plan to begin on my writing files which make up most of the rest. When I finish this work, I’ll have left only reorganizing and hanging art plus a final pass at organizing the books within categories. It’s funny, but I can feel a growing excitement about having the loft as I envisioned it two plus years ago, a sort of liberation and consolidation of potential. Ready to move forward with writing and Latin and other work facilitated by this amazing space Kate found for me.
Had Sky Country Pump come out on Friday to replace the water pressure tank that had, according to Geowater, gone bad. I called Sky Country because Geowater tried to install things I hadn’t ordered, then ordered a pressure tank replacement, $1,000 plus. I stopped all of it, having them only install the acid-buffering system I wanted. Our water has a ph of 5.2. They were unhappy; I was mad.
So, I wasn’t surprised when the Sky Country Pump folks said, “No problem with the water pressure tank. We’d love to sell you a tank, but you don’t need one.” Ah.
Now that means that either Geowater is incompetent or flat out lied. I’m thinking the latter. In effect it would have been theft had I said yes, go ahead with the tank. It would have appeared to be my decision, but it would have been based on alternative facts, as KellyAnne might say.