Monthly Archives: February 2021

Family, Health

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Imbolc and the Megillah Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Chili. Chex mix. Rigel’s head on my pillow. Kate. 80 pounds. Vaccines. Covid. 46 at work. AOC. Ilhan Omar. CBE Purim spiel.

Sparks of Joy: The almost full Megillah Moon shining over Black Mountain this morning. The cold. Getting things done downstairs.

 

Kate after election day 2016

 

Kate has had a tough, tough week. Her weight is down. 80 pounds. She’s a bit wobbly. Which is more of a concern than that might convey. She had severe neck pain yesterday and last night. Eating is hard.

We did see Dr. Thompson on Friday. She’s a keeper. Kate’s situation, which has complications along with the complications, has her concerned and hard at work. She’s found a nurse case manager for Kate and a dietician who handles feeding tubes.

She also feels Kate may do better in a University health care system where all the docs are in one place and get together to consider her needs, form a unified plan. This would involve a switch in insurance plans. Don’t know whether that’s even possible at this point in the year.

Dr. Thompson plans to consult with the head of New West Physicians to see if exceptions can be made, either in the way New West cares for Kate or in our insurance so she can move to the University of Colorado health care system.

Dr. Thompson believes malnutrition is the chief problem right now. Again, I agree. It’s not possible for other things to calm down if the body doesn’t have enough nutrition.

A lot.

Friends, Judaism, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Boo. It’s Haman. Boo.

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Imbolc and the Megillah Moon

Saturday gratefuls: Dr. Thompson. Kate. Always Kate. The Karma, her wheelchair. Psalm’s class. Kabbalah Experience. Earth. Animacy. Flying through space, yet with friends. Perseverance. Mars. The asteroid belt. Rockets. Satellites. Math.

Sparks of Joy: Odin. Ecstasy. The Moon.

 

 

What’s a megillah? A scroll. The third division of the Tanakh, the ketuvim, the Writings, has five books: Lamentations, Esther, Ruth, Song of Solomon, and Ecclesiastes, that are read from scrolls during certain Jewish holidays.

The scroll of Esther is read aloud on the holiday of Purim, which ended yesterday. Purim celebrates the story of Esther. Esther has risen to Queen of Persia through the advice of her guardian, Mordecai. The King, though, does not know she is of the Jewish minority in his kingdom.

Haman, the grand vizier, announces a campaign to rid Persia of Jews. Mordecai encourages Esther to reveal her ethnicity and foil Haman. She does this. Haman and his compatriots pay for their hubris and the Jewish community in Persia survives.

The first Purim I attended at Congregation Beth Evergreen the President of the congregation carried cases of beer and bottles of wine into the sanctuary. What?

Purim shares elements of medieval Christmas revelries, especially its Lord of Misrule. Conventions get upended. Drinking more than usual and during a worship service, for example. Folks dress in costume and often laughter, even derisive laughter accompanies the worship.

The whole megillah means reading the entire scroll out loud. On Purim that means Esther and it is read from a handwritten scroll, though often truncated. Whenever the evil grand vizier’s name, Haman, occurs, the congregation shouts, laughs, cranks on groggers, mechanical noisemakers. It’s fun.

Another part of Purim is the Purim spiel. A member of the congregation writes an entire play, always a musical at Beth Evergreen. In it is a retelling of the Purim story, but also moments that make fun of synagogue leadership. The Lord of Misrule idea.

I’m including a link to this year’s Purim spiel at Congregation Beth Evergreen. My buddy, Alan Rubin, his daughter Francesca, and his wife, Cheri play prominent roles.

The megillah of Esther is the only book in the Tanakh which doesn’t mention God. And, it’s a story of Jewish liberation from persecution. As such, over the centuries it has given hope to Jewish communities, almost always a minority of the nations within which they found themselves.

Judaism, Poetry, Torah, Writing

Psalm for a Wednesday

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Imbolc and the Megillah Moon

Friday gratefuls: No lupron. Good PSA’s. Dog warmth, cold night. Kate and her sisters. Pickup at Safeway. Bright Snow. Lodgepoles. Black Mountain. Bunch Grass. Wild Rugosa. Mushrooms. Friends, old and new. Covid. Purim today.

Sparks of Joy: Vaccines. Purim shpiels. Dr. Thompson.

 

 

The Days Are Gods.

(attr. Ralph Waldo Emerson)

 

A Psalm for Mittwoch

 

Woden. Odin. Ooinn, Master of Ecstasy. How do you fill our mittwoch?

Ecstasy. Fill our poetry with heat, intensify our lives.

Days swelling with your power. Ours, too. Our days. Oh. Ooinn.

Never quit us. Never again hang from the great tree, never again die for knowing.

Ecstasy. Learning flames within our hearts in your honor.

Shaman, seer. Poet, warrior. See with the empty socket. Let me.

Dance with Mimir who slaked your thirst. And took your eye.

And water the great tree Yggdrasil with your blood

You, Odin. One-eye. Trickster. Seeker of knowledge. On this, your day, we let you in to quicken our lives.

 

yggdrasil

 

This was gonna be my megillah post, but I’m going to have to do that tomorrow. I needed the time this morning for my assignment for Psalm’s class. We had to write a psalm for a day of the week.

Makes me want to go through all the days, seek out their divine names and powers, honor them as they seep into us, over and over and over again. Not sure I will, but the idea’s there.

 

 

Cooking, Coronavirus, Family, Health, Holidays, Judaism, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Yesterday

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Imbolc and the Megillah Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: Trash. Covid. Vaccines. Kate’s wakeful, but good night. Sleep. Me. Sushi Win. Their Special roll. Spring rolls. Purim box from CBE. And, one from the Kabbalah Experience. Memories of Covid. Early ones. Seoah among them. Cold. Blue Sky.

Sparks of Joy: Rigel prancing. Kep lying on my legs. Kate excited. Vaccines.

 

Kate, costumed for Purim

 

Spent yesterday, some of it anyhow, moving and rearranging and tossing. Stuff that has needed doing but I’ve not felt the energy for. Found that energy. Felt good. Not done, but will finish this week.

Drove over to Congregation Beth Evergreen to pick up a Purim box. Each member has one. A mask, groggers, and I don’t know what else. Got another box from the Kabbalah Experience with masks and paints for Purim. Will explain all in the Friday megillah post.

In the same direction as Sushi Win so I got takeout. Sushi Win is an above average sushi joint. A special treat that it’s up here at all, so we order takeout every once in a while. Big tips, too. We want to see them survive the pandemic. Us, too.

Couple of Sheriff’s vehicles at Derek’s yesterday. No idea why.

Kate woke up with an idea about how her terrible bout of herpes might be involved with her current condition. She’s going to get her medical records from Abbott-Northwestern, see if they can help. I sure hope so.

A meme from Facebook: Mars is the only planet we know inhabited entirely by robots.

News of the strange: Saw an article in the Washington Post about an Oklahoma man who killed a neighbor, cut out her heart, cooked it with potatoes, and served it to his uncle and his family to get the demons out. Apparently didn’t work because he then killed the uncle, the uncle’s four year old grand-daughter, and stabbed his aunt in both eyes. WP, 2/24/2021

 

Family, Health, Shadow Mountain

Transactions

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Imbolc and the Megillah Moon

Monday gratefuls: Talking with Kate. Kep in the morning. More Snow. Chili. Making. A dawn red Sky over Black Mountain with blue sky behind. The Ancient Ones. Going deep. Life pivot points. Alcoholism. Covid. Vaccines.

Sparks of Joy: Red in the Sky. Bill’s love story. Purim.

20th Anniversary, 2010

Realized yesterday that one of the issues with caregiving is that so many interactions are transactional. Change a bandage. Free oxygen tubing from the door. Take down the feed bag. Get coffee. Food. Talk about how to deal with illness. Money meetings. Getting the newspaper. And so on.

Nothing wrong with these. Nothing at all. In fact they define caregiving. But. They are not the casual back and forth of a couple meeting in the kitchen while making a sandwich. Talking on the way to a restaurant. Over a meal. While working together in the garden or listening to music at a concert.

Transactions are typically one way in caregiving. Who wants that? No one, but it is a fact of life with someone who is chronically ill. I know this is obvious, but it has just occurred to me.

Why is it important? Because it’s the casual interactions when the relationship grows, learns about itself, nurtures both ways. This can happen during transactional moments; but, then the emphasis, the attention, is on completing a task, making sure it was done well. Not the same, not the same at all.

Working on how to introduce more casual time into our day. Kate wants to play games. OK, that’s one way. I want to sit down and talk. Her fatigue and lack of stamina make even these simple ideas difficult. Often she’s in bed. Disappeared.

Any ideas from out there in Ancientrails world? Happy to hear them.

Cinema and Television, Commentary on the news, Coronavirus, Dogs, Family, Great Wheel, Health, Holidays, Judaism, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, US History, Weather +Climate

The Frozen Rose of Texas

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Imbolc and the Megillah Moon

Sunday gratefuls: All the Megillah’s. More snow. More cold. A good sleep. Cold chicken. Red Lobster biscuits. My Ecuador alpaca coat. My new LLBean insulated plaid shirt. My duckies. Love the cold, don’t love being cold.  Vaccines. Covid. 45 gone. 46 in. Judah and the Black Messiah.

Sparks of Joy: Fresh, white Snow. Rigel jumping up on the deck like a 5 year old. Life.

 

 

Those vaccines. Hard to come by up here in the mountains. Not yet. We’ll get them though. Sooner, I imagine. Haven’t gone the obsessive click now, click again, click now, click again route. We’ve survived Covid so far doing what we’re doing. Gonna keep at no visits, grocery pickups, only essential medical visits. Probably for a while after the vaccine, too.

Love that they’re out there. That we’re eligible. That others are getting them. That more will get them. Might be Happy Hanukah and Merry Christmas. Ho, Ho, Ho. or Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel. If that happens, I’ll still enjoy the darkness of the Winter Solstice, but I’ll be right there with the light worshipers, too. Can you imagine how festive a season that will be?

Meanwhile a hyper clean, car sized robot will roam Mars punching holes in its surface and storing soil in special containers for the second part of a three stage project. The second stage is a lander that picks up those containers and the third stage returns them to Earth for NASA and European Space Agency labs. 2025-2027. Far away from the virus infected planet it left last July. Smart Perseverance.

And, maybe, just maybe, our nation will have made progress on sorting out its painful contradictions. I watched Judas and the Black Messiah yesterday on HBO Max. Fred Hampton was 21 when J. Edgar conspired with the Chicago P.D. to eliminate him. 21. When I watched, I kept saying yes, Fred, yes. Power is people. Capitalists, no matter their color, exploit the people. A Rainbow Coalition. Yes, Fred. Then he died in his bed, never waking up, his pregnant Deborah arched over his body.

Of course, the move reminded me of the damning curse of racism, but it went further, much further. Fred brought together Puertoricans and poor whites. He saw the thread that wove together the oppressed and was able to speak to it, to help others see it. No wonder they killed him.

What if the Proud Boys and the Black Panthers saw common cause? They could. It’s corporate capitalism that keeps them both down. What if those of us on the far left joined, too. And Chicanos. And Asians. And Native Americans. There would need be no violence. That sort of self-awareness would win at the ballot box.

I know. Texas. How would you like a $16,000 bill for keeping the heat on? See the paragraph above.

Asia, Beyond the Boundaries, Commentary on the news, Dreams, GeekWorld, Letters, Memories, Mountains, Myth and Story, The Move, Third Phase, Travel, US History, World History

Go, young one, Go

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Imbolc and the Megillah Moon

Saturday gratefuls: Simple roast chicken. So good. Red Lobster dinner rolls. Likewise. Shadow Mountain Israeli Salad. Cooking. Kate’s feeling better this morning. Rigel prancing in the snow. At 12+. Kep and his serious life. Perseverance. For all those at JPL. Yeah! For all those from Colorado who participated (a lot). Yeah! For the part of our soul that is curious, that wants to see, that wants to know.

Sparks of Joy: That roasted chicken when it came out of the oven. Vaccines. The love of and by dogs.

We live in an age of exploration. I know it got started even earlier, but we have good evidence of humanity leaving Africa and spreading out over the Earth. A long period of exploration that once begun, we have not been able to stop.

Yes, it’s had its bad moments. Many of them. Colonialism its worst, I think. But a lot of glorious ones, too. Rounding Cape Horn. Summiting Everest. Walking the land bridge from Asia to North America. LANDING ON THE MOON. Voyager. Curiosity. Perseverance. Down to the Mariana’s Trench. Into the microscopic, the sub-microscopic.

And there are the psychonauts who explore the mind on hallucinogens. The mystics, who do their exploration without technology. Scholars who roam libraries, tells, caves for evidence of our long pilgrimage, how we have handled it. Children who go down the block, turn right into the field, and leave this planet by means of their imagination.

We are explorers. Pilgrims. Wanderers. Always hunting for some new place to live our lives, or to visit to expand our life at home.

I celebrate each explorer. Each pilgrim. Each wanderer. In you, in us, we grow beyond this species and into the future. May it always be so.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beyond the Boundaries, Commentary on the news, Dogs, Science, US History

Space Boy

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Imbolc and the Megillah Moon

Friday gratefuls: Grilled cheese. Chicken. Snow Plows. Ted of All Trades. Snow. Cold. Like back in Minnesota. Holding Kate’s hand. Her feeding tube. 45 gone. 46 in office. Friends, ancient and new.

Sparks of Joy: NASA. NASA employees at JPL. Perseverance on Mars. Perseverance landing on Mars.

 

 

I watched it. Or, rather I watched as the scientists at JPL watched their instruments. One man’s leg jiggled the whole time. Up and down. Others went from screen, looking for information. A slight grimace there. What did that mean? All the more difficult to read because of the ubiquitous   masks.

News about the parachute deploying brought cheers. Then, back to business. The heat shield disappeared. Perseverance was, according to a dial on the screen, 19 kilometers from the surface. Then, the dial read in meters.

“Perseverance has landed!” Arms went up in the usual touchdown, goal post signal. A clenched fist or two. Smile wrinkles at the eyes. Cheering. Backslapping.

How could they stand it? These folks work for years, in this case at least 8 years, to build a one-off machine, delicate and sturdy. A tough combination. Then they strap it to a tank of explosives and shoot it away from Earth. For a long, long journey. All of that can go perfectly. Did.

But. There’s that final mile. Oh, yeah. Atmosphere. Gravity. The potential for 8 years of work and billions of dollars to crumple in on itself, a wrecked car on a distant planet. Parachute. Heat shield. Navigation. Sky crane. All points at which things could go wrong.

As one NASA employee said, “Thousands of things have to go right. Only one thing going wrong could destroy all this work.”

That same employee said, right after the landing, “This is what NASA does! This is what we can do when we put our brains together. This is what this country can do!”

I was with them during the 7 minutes of terror as the lander went offline due to the extreme heat of entry into the Martian (get that, Martian!) atmosphere. Holding my breath, biting my lip.

Yes! I teared up. All that complexity. All that work. All those things that could have gone wrong. All those things that went right! Captain Midnight. Buck Rogers. Sputnik. The Eagle has landed. We are a space faring nation. My 10 year old heart filled up with dreams, impossible dreams, and spilled over into a 74 year old’s reality.

When we grew up, rockets were, well, not much in evidence. Sure there was Goddard. And, Von Braun. The V2. The winged bombs over London. John Carter was our Mars hero. But the thought of landing a machine on Mars. Any machine? Nope. Not in the mind of even the most space-crazed child of the ’50’s.

To live through the Russian space program. Sputnik. Then, Laika, the one way space dog. Yuri Gagarin. Mercury. Apollo. That wonderful Apollo 11. One small step for Man, one giant step for Mankind. A footprint. A flag.

My space eyes all along have been boy’s eyes. Eyes filled with wonder. Eyes filled with tears. Eyes that have seen things happen that were beyond even that boy’s hopes. It was his heart that leaped into the bodies of the NASA folks yesterday. His heart that felt the emotion. The success. The joy.

 

 

 

 

Health, Politics, US History, Weather +Climate

A Cold South

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Imbolc and the Megillah Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Dr. Thompson. House cleaners. Vaccine. Covid. Carl Hiaasen. Screen writers for The Alienist. Oximeter. Blood pressure monitor. Prostate cancer. PSA’s so far. COPD.

Sparks of joy: Dr. Thompson. Snow coming. Poetry. Perseverance getting closer to Mars.

 

Cooked Steak Diane and saffron rice for a birthday supper. Easy Entrees. Steak was wonderful. Thick and the sauce a great complement. Plenty for more meals. The rice. Meh. But, if it was gonna be meh on one, the rice every time.

Saw Dr. Leigh Thompson today, replacing Dr. Gidday. I like Dr. Thompson. She’s humble and knowledgeable. A good combination in my opinion.

Cold in the south. When I saw the forecast map, I thought, They’re all gonna die. Not all, but a lot. And suffering.

Power grids down. I learned on NPR that Texas is an island, power grid wise. That means it won’t go down along with other nearby states, but it also means that they can’t import power from the grid outside their borders. A tough reality right now.

I like the idea of a 1/6 commission. The more we learn about the web of propaganda, organizing, and negligence that helped create this insurrection, the safer we will all be. Oh, and it might cement even further 45’s culpability. That would be ok.

What a time! We’re about to dump 1.9 trillion dollars into the economy. The weather is crazy. Covid has new variants up its sleeve. Kids are out of school. Millions are out of work. The next few years will define interesting times for the United States. Looking forward to being part of that.