Yearly Archives: 2025

AI, Friends, GeekWorld, Health

Ablated. And happy about it

Leave a comment

Samain and the Radiation Moon

Shabbat gratefuls: Brace. Steroids. Ablation. A medical trifecta. Possible surcease from pain of long standing. Long call with Ruth. Alan, the sherpa. All my close friends. Joanne. Marilyn and Irv. Luke and Leo. Tara and Eleanor. Ginny and Janice. Annie and Luna. Joe. Tom. Paul. Mark. Bill. A bit of Snow, now gone thanks to the solar snow shovel. Trending cold. Valium and Lyrica.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Radio frequency heat

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei    Shadow, my Wu Wei mistress

Week Kavannah:  Hakarat Hakov   Gratitude.    “Who is rich? Those who rejoice in their portion.” Perkei Avot 4:1

Tarot: Being a metaPhysician

One brief shining: The med tech with blond hair, a Grateful Dead fan, positioned me on the table, belly button in the center of the pillow, said this will be cold, he was right, then Dr. Gabriel said 1,2,3 before the needle with lidocaine went in for numbing, can you feel this thumping, no, the needles went in deep next to my spine delivering a radio frequency in the 350–500 kHz range which then, like a microwave oven, generated heat in the tissue around the nearby nerve thus cooking the proteins that facilitate transmission of pain from the nerve to the brain. As best I understand it.

 

That happened. Alan showed up in a puffy down vest for the cold weather, I grabbed one of my LLBean vests, my wallet, washed down two valiums and a Lyrica, and got in his intense blue BMV with leather seats, electric because that’s Alan. We were headed for Lonetree. Yet again for me.

As we drove, the drugs began to circulate, playing their necessary havoc with certain speech and motor functions. Valium boy, Alan called me.

Once I’d gotten off the table and into recovery, the CMA brought me water and soda crackers. I didn’t hurt, but the drugs had hit hard, making me unsteady on my feet and foggy.

Alan took me home, saw me open the door, and said, “I’ve gotta scoot.” He had a performance at Parkside Assisted Living in Aurora.

Once inside I took off my vest, put my wallet in its spot, went downstairs to let Shadow out. A little tricky, those stairs. Back upstairs for some food.

After letting Shadow back in, I thought, nap time. Shadow and I went into the bedroom around 1:30 pm. When I woke up, Shadow lay curled beside my pillow and the clock read, 8:30 pm. Well. That was the day, I guess.

A good day. Right now I’m feeling no pain at all but that could be the lidocaine. I won’t know the true results for a week or two.

So the week that was: I got braced, injected, and ablated. But wait! There’s more! Monday begins my ten sessions of radiation. A very, very medical holiseason for me. With life improving results I hope.

 

Just a moment: An AI bubble? So, so hard to say. Here’s a sentence that explains why some people think so: “By one measure, investments in computer equipment and software accounted for more than 90 percent of growth in gross domestic product in the first half of the year.” NYT, 11/22/25

My gut tells me this is not a bubble, rather an instance of tech thinkers outstripping the understanding of folks like me. I’m trusting greed and adventure to produce a happy, safe landing for us all. Time, as we say, will tell.

Friends, Health, Politics

L’etat est moi.

Leave a comment

Samain and the Radiation Moon

Friday grateful: Joanne looking well. Snow! Alan, my chauffeur. Rock. The Rocky Mountains. Joanne’s turn around. That driveway. Rainbow Hill Road. El Rancho. Stroke. Rehab. Ablation. Dr. Vu, whom I trust. Lonetree. Thanksgiving. Holiseason. Morgan of Evergreen Orthotics. Evergreen dressed for the Holidays. Christmas lights, well before Thanksgiving. The Chart House. Ruth and her A-Basin ski pass. Jon, of recent memory. Kate, always Kate.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Recovery

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei    Shadow, my Wu Wei mistress

Week Kavannah:  Hakarat Hakov   Gratitude.    “Who is rich? Those who rejoice in their portion.” Perkei Avot 4:1

Tarot: Being a metaPhysician

One brief shining: Joanne’s driveway, the stuff of CBE legend with its narrow road, curves, and its lack of a space to turnaround even at the top often necessitating a difficult backing up maneuver, has a modification, a car depth cutout, about 40 feet wide, exposing a rock face that the excavator said  could have been dealt with only by bomb. Much better.

 

But. It did expose an interesting geological phenomenon. At least to me. One large upthrust of granite leans in a southerly direction while next to it a companion upthrust of layered rock leans in a northerly direction. What, I wonder, could produce uplift of two massive chunks of rock, so close together, in two opposite directions? A curiosity. At least to me.

Joanne I’m happy to report has little apparent physical harm from her stroke. And, she is still her well-spoken, quick, and funny self. However. She has, she says, lost forty years of Hebrew. The psalms and the Torah, both of which she has translated, no longer unlock themselves. Her French and Latin have gone, too. She may, she says the doctor’s tell her, get them back. Even reading English requires some effort for her. Joanne, among the most literate persons I’ve ever met, had to spell out the words on the book I took her. The Hour of the Predator. As she said, sad.

We live in the age of gratitude for parts that still work, not surprise at parts that don’t. An age that requires, no demands adaptation to circumstances unthinkable, unimaginable to even our seventy-year old selves. Without that willingness to adapt, to accept things as they are and to become yourself in a new configuration, old age can kill the heart.

 

Just a moment: Can you say decompensation? You, said he who should be named horrible himself, told a woman reporter, are a horrible person, a horrible reporter. Her error? Asking MBS, the once and future king of the burning sands, about his involvement in the murder and dissection of the Washington Post columnist, Jamal Khashoggi. Trump the Horrible went on in the same interchange to say of Khashoggi, things happen.

In another moment of misogyny on Air Force One he turned to another female reporter and said, Quiet. Quiet, piggy.

These do not even come close to his reaction yesterday to a video made by six congressmen, former members of the military and intelligence communities. (see MSNOW clip below)

He called the video and its makers seditious, then later, seditious behavior punishable by death! He also reposted a suggestion to hang them.

Lèse-majesté. Off with their heads! These are the reactions of an unhinged, delusional mind, the mind of a man who sees himself in the famous quote attributed to Louis XIV, king of France, “L’etat c’est moi.” He’s a President, elected and impeachable, one of three parts of a system of government defined by a constitution that explicitly has no room for the divine right of kings.

This is behavior so distant from reasonable that you might expect to hear it shouted from a locked room in Bellevue.

How can we hold him to account?

Aging, Cancer, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Hermitage, Memories, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain

Alchemical work

Leave a comment

Samain and the Radiation Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Joanne. Diane. The Alembic. Jung. Freud. Rogers. May. Frankl. Maslow. Satir. Fromm. Adler. Horney. Erikson. Paul Goodman. Adorno. Marcuse. Benjamin. Habermas. Unamuno. The hermeneutics of suspicion. Ricoeur. Guides from my student days. The theology of liberation. Cornel West. Shadow Work. Ivan Illich.

Sparks of joy and awe: A day of rest

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei    Shadow, my Wu Wei mistress

Week Kavannah:  Hakarat Hakov   Gratitude.    “Who is rich? Those who rejoice in their portion.” Perkei Avot 4:1

Tarot: Being a metaPhysician

One brief shining: Shadow, shadow work, the work done but unrecognized, unpaid, unappreciated housework, child rearing, transporting yourself to work, self checkout, pumping your own gas, making your own travel arrangements, assembling products that come in pieces, maintaining a yard and a vehicle noticed and named by radical thinker, Ivan Illich, in his book, Shadow Work. How much shadow work do you do?

Alembics. “…historically used by alchemists and for producing medicines, perfumes, and alcohol, the word can also be used metaphorically to mean something that refines or transmutes.” Gemini

I’ve begun to think of my life in terms of alembics. When was I thrown into a life situation, either by my own choice or by outside circumstance that resisted logic, yet compelled me to respond in unexpected, unusual, new ways?

A major early almebic? The death of my mother. No way to reason my way through that. A moment of dark transformation, carried without thought into the dark recesses of my heart, clashing with a changed world, and not well. In spite of being in a family, I sat in this alembic alone, feeling the fires of fear, doubt, grief lick up and around my stunned self.

This transmutation produced no gold. No, it produced a broken soul, one ready for abandonment, for sudden shifts from light to dark, from innocence to intoxication. Yes, the second alembic, which contained the first, grew from days at Phi Kappa Psi and Wabash where I learned to smoke and to drink.

An alembic that would not shatter until March of 1976 when I began treatment at a Hazelden outpatient clinic in Minneapolis. Getting sober allowed me to gather in pieces of the dark time and begin to transform them into psychic gold. To understand that the grief, the agony, the isolation (self-imposed) had forced me to mine my inner resources in ways and at a time most people went to prom and figured out what to do with their lives.

Other alembics. The Peaceable Kingdom. Seminary. Adopting Joseph. Vietnam era protests. Studying philosophy and anthropology. Marrying Kate. Andover with its gardens, dogs, bees. Writing. Shadow Mountain. Kate’s illness and death. Cancer. CBE. Converting to Judaism. Old age with a terminal illness, the fourth phase.

I like the use of alembic to describe these times because it recognizes that the pressures and fractures and falls and emergence shape us in ways unpredictable, unknown, yet in which we have no choice but to participate as best we can.

Are you in an alembic right now? Or, have you emerged from one recently? Or, long ago. How did it transform you? How is it transforming you?

Back Pain, Denver, Health, Post Polio

Belay Glasses

Leave a comment

Samain and the Summer’s End Moon (a very faint waning crescent)

Wednesday gratefuls: Tom. His path. Shirley Waste. Joanne. Working out. Great Sol illuminates us all. Shadow, who goes outside when I’m done talking on Zoom. This strange trip we’re on. Ripple. Sugaree. The Weight. Ain’t No Grave. The Night They Drove Ol’ Dixie Down. Tambourin Man. Don’t You Need Somebody to Love. That teeny Mule Deer not quite a fawn anymore.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Morgan, rock climber and orthotist

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei    Shadow, my Wu Wei mistress

Week Kavannah:  Hakarat Hakov   Gratitude.    “Who is rich? Those who rejoice in their portion.” Perkei Avot 4:1

Tarot: Being a metaPhysician

One brief shining: Still in the dark, I picked up the white plastic trash bags filled with two weeks of refuse, some garbage, some recyclable, opened my kitchen window which begins about a foot and a half off the floor, tossed the bags in their respective bins, opened the front door, and went out to pull them with a sound like muffled thunder to the edge of my driveway where Seoah and I went as the last ritual of Kate’s shiva.

 

Tuesday, Tuesday. Drove down the hill into Denver near Denver Health to the Evergreen Orthotics office where I once again discussed braces for my wobbly, sagging head. Morgan, my orthotist, a fit young woman in her late twenties, early thirties with an engaging smile and warm persona showed me the possible braces. Both soft, one identical to one I purchased on Amazon, another larger.

I told her about my problem standing and talking with people taller than I am. At 5’5″ that’s a lot of people. She said, “This is sort of a joke, but you could get belay glasses.” She’s a climber and explained the principle. Belay glasses have a prism that lets you see your climbing partner without straining your neck back.

So I could have my soft neck brace on, then in a social setting I could flip my belay glasses on my readers when encountering a taller human. That wouldn’t be weird at all.

There’s a transition here, similar to getting my handicap placard, where I have to publicly acknowledge my troubles with assistive devices. I don’t like it. Yet most old folks wear both glasses and hearing aids…assistive devices. So. Transist me up, Scotty.

Inadequate solutions at best, yet better than having the charming medically described head drop.

 

Turned around and drove back toward Golden. Panorama Orthopedics. Saw Abby who numbed my hip and jabbed a needle through my skin. Steroids again.

“So,” I asked, “if the injections don’t work and you can’t do surgery, where does that leave me?”

She shrugged a bit, a slight tilt to her head, “Well, then we’re between a rock and a hard place.” Which made me think of Morgan.

Oh, I also thought. Whaddya’ mean we whiteman? It’s me that’s stuck. That bridge we all agree we’ll encounter later. You know, when we come to it.

Left there and drove forty-five minutes back home. A lot of pain setting in as I headed up into the Mountains, willing myself back home, driving sometimes with gritted teeth. Too much for one day.

Cancer, Colorado, Health, Mountains, Science, Shadow Mountain

An Inner Glow

Leave a comment

Samain and the Summer’s End Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Morgan at Evergreen Orthotics. Neck braces. Abby Price, P.A., at Panorama Orthopedics. Steroid injection. Today. Looking forward to both. Cartoons. Anime. Manga. Horror. Fantasy. Science fiction. Mystery. Drama. Literary fiction. Albrecht Dürer. Arcimboldo. Breughel. Rembrandt. Poussin. Goya. Velasquez. Turner. Holbein.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: World Art

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei

Week Kavannah:  Hakarat Hakov   Gratitude.    “Who is rich? Those who rejoice in their portion.” Perkei Avot 4:1

Tarot: Being a metaPhysician

One brief shining: Once again under the beam of a radiation  device remember radiation poisoning from atomic bombs yet here I go exposing myself to even more high energy particles for their harmful effect on human tissue, yes, their harmful effect aimed not at enemy cities, but at enemy cells, rogue multipliers who want to consume every bit of my body.

If you went into the crawlspace under my house, you would see black plastic sheeting covering the floor and tight against the short walls. Outside a vented flying saucer like device with a whirling fan sucks air from beneath the sheeting and disposes of radon, a naturally occurring radiation contained in soil and rock and water. Many homes here in the Rockies have radon mitigation devices.

When I traveled through southern Utah, several years ago, I stopped at the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. When I got out of the Tundra pulling Merton’s last possessions (Kate’s Dad), I hiked around the area.

Small wooden signs in National Park style had yellow painted letters that read: Uranium Mine, stay out.  Chains across the entrances reinforced the signs. These were modest as mines go, more like human sized burrows reaching back into the rock of the Kaiparowits Plateau.

When Kate and I began to look for housing after we decided to move to Colorado, a good deal caught our eye, the Candelas Development. Cheap land, good prices on interesting homes, and midway between Boulder and Denver with unobstructed views of the Front Range.

What’s not to like? Its proximity to the long closed Rocky Flats nuclear production facility for one. Rocky Flats, now a Superfund site, blocked off by chain link and razorwire, made nuclear triggers for the military.  An ongoing controversy focuses on plutonium found in the unmitigated land surrounding the Superfund site, the Rocky Flats Wildlife Refuge, and the land under the Candelas Development.

It’s been declared safe over and over again by regulators, but critics say that no amount of plutonium exposure is healthy. We did not choose to buy there.

Radiation occurs in so many places, some of human artifice, most part of Mother Nature’s collection of elements distributed over the Planet’s surface and within her mass.

I’m glad some clever scientists figured out how to harness radiation for peaceful uses like nuclear power plants (looking at you, Bill Schmidt), smaller reactors that power submarines and aircraft carriers, and fighting cancer.

Starting on Monday of next week, I’ll have the first of ten doses of lower energy radiation to kill a lesion in the bone marrow of my T4 vertebrae. I will wear my red t-shirt with the radiation hazard logo in yellow.

 

 

Cooking, Politics, Writing

Now You Know My Biases

Leave a comment

Samain and the Summer’s End Moon

Monday gratefuls: Snow in the forecast. Rain, too. Joanne’s recovery. Joe Greenberg. Shadow Mountain Home. Shadow Mountain. Evergreen. Pine. Conifer. Black Mountain Drive. Shadow Mountain Drive. Brook Forest Road. Blue Creek Road. Dr. Carter. Radiation. Abby, hip injection. Dr. Matthews, nerve ablation. Morgan, neck brace

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Bubble gum and baling wire

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei

Week Kavannah:  Hakarat Hakov   Gratitude.    “Who is rich? Those who rejoice in their portion.” Perkei Avot 4:1

Tarot: Being a metaPhysician

One brief shining: Got out the Nordic Ware aluminum sheet pan, shiny, but no longer new, and opened the refrigerator to retrieve the brown paper wrapped tail on Shrimp, the minced Garlic both of which I placed next to the Kosher Salt, Red Pepper flakes, and the 1/4 cup measure; the big mixing bowl contained the two dry English muffins which I sliced in half, putting them next to the cutting board.

 

Cooking: Yes, I’m doing it. I canceled CookUnity, ok, but uneven meals. Too often had to throw one out.

I’m going full sheet pan on this cooking thing. They’re easy(ier) to put together and much easier to cook. They also produce four servings at least which means I can store them in meal sized aliquots (a Kate word) to have later. Two sheet pan recipes produce supper for a full week. And, they have vegetables.

The New York Times Cooking section has dozens of sheet pan recipes. Working my way through the ones that sound good and already repeating one I really liked.

It’s not easy. Standing that long hurts. It might be this week reduces the pain. I certainly hope so. Still, it’s worth it. I had to understand my schedule to do it though. I cook them in the morning after my workout. Mornings are my best times bodywise. I can handle the self-imposed abuse plus get something tasty out of it.

 

Just a moment: I don’t do original reporting, but I do read the Silver Bulletin, Vox, Ground News, the Atlantic, the Guardian, the NYT, the WP, the LA Times, Heather Cox Richardson, Wired, and the Bulwark. Can’t help it it seems. I’m a political junkie. Hi, Charlie!

I do also read books by right wingers and lefties alike, focusing on key texts that inform right wing folks like MAGA, the New Apostolic Reformation, and conservative think tanks, while reading left and center books on political ideas.

I’m writing to let you know how I source my opinions, my take on the news, both of the day and the future.

I’m a left of center left democratic socialist, an advocate for racial and gender and ethnic justice, as well as the legal rights of nature and understand the changes necessary to develop a sustainable way for humans to live on Mother Earth.

As a resident of the American West with the heart of a long time Midwesterner, and one who lives both on and in the Rocky Mountains, I have an interior U.S. (not coastal) perspective as well.

As a gardener, a dog lover and companion, a Jew, and a pagan I take all of this: politics, climate change, and social justice work personally.

Meaning: my contribution to the day to day absurdity of the current administration will consist of my own analysis of the news, of matters that matter. Now you know my biases.

 

Memories, Minnesota, Plants

Wood Heats You Five Ways

Leave a comment

Samain and the Summer’s End Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Joanne. Ginny and Janice. Annie and Luna. Annie and Shadow wrasslin’ outside. Derek cutting down dead Lodgepoles. Ginny and Janice’s expansion project. Janice as the general contractor. Her Apple Crisp. Garlicky Shrimp sheet pan meal. Torah study with Luke. Chayei Sarah. American History.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Good Friends

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei

Week Kavannah:  Hakarat Hakov   Gratitude.    “Who is rich? Those who rejoice in their portion.” Perkei Avot 4:1

Tarot: Being a metaPhysician

One brief shining: Derek fells my dead Lodgepoles with his electric chainsaw, bucking them, then moving lengths of the downed Tree on his shoulder or on a dolly to the side of the house he rents; where he cuts them into lengths suitable for splitting, carries them inside, and uses the wood to heat the house, smoke often wafting in through my bedroom window.

Wood heats you five times. When you cut it. When you buck it. When you carry it. When you split it. When you use it in your stove.

Carries me back to the Peaceable Kingdom outside Nevis, Minnesota. 80 acres of less than sterling Soil, a house, a couple of outbuildings. A woodstove for cooking and airtight for heating. And a woodlot.

My old International Harvester pick-up and I would bounce down the lane to the Woodlot with my Jonsered chain saw in the back, a can of fuel and a smaller one of chain oil rattling as we bounced up and down the swells and potholes.

In the Woodlot I would either fell a Tree, often a Burr Oak or a Maple, which would have to season, or a Birch that could be used green. Most days I would buck Trees that I’d felled the previous season, toss the logs in the bed of the truck and bounce back to the farmyard where I’d find my splitting maul, place the logs on the stump of an old Oak, and split until I had enough wood for the stove and the air tight. I was so much younger then, I’m older than that now.

A quarter of a log fit in the air tight so I’d load it full with three or four, close the door, and watch the embers of the previous Fire start a new one. If I had seasoned Oak or Maple, a loaded air-tight would burn six to eight hours after I choked down the air flow. This meant I could usually get a full night’s sleep and not wake up to a cold house.

The woodstove was a different thing altogether. It had to be fired up each time you used it. You got temperature variation by increasing or decreasing air flow, moving a pot around on the stove top or putting, say bread, in a warming compartment.

The smell of percolating Coffee often combined with the scent of burning Oak or Maple, maybe Bacon cooking in a cast iron skillet, a couple of eggs. I enjoyed those days and have no idea what I would do in that situation in this 78 year old body. That Charlie? A different guy in so many ways.

Friends, Health, Judaism, Politics

I Know Which Cup the Coin Is Under

Leave a comment

Samain and the Summer’s End Moon

Shabbat gratefuls: Luke and Leo. Luke leading the Bagel Table. Shadow and her pleading eyes. I’m hungry, Dad. Rachel, my social worker from Birmingham, Alabama. Alan. The Humming Bird. Challah French Toast. Latkes. Beignets. Having a Creole restaurant in Evergreen. Josh and Sarah. Next week’s pain reduction: hip injection and nerve ablation. Ruth and Gabe, the Friday after Thanksgiving.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Chayei Sarah

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei

Week Kavannah:  Hakarat Hakov   Gratitude.    “Who is rich? Those who rejoice in their portion.” Perkei Avot 4:1

Tarot: Being a metaPhysician

One brief shining: That place that was the Parkside, then for a minute a Mexican Cantina, has become the Hummingbird, a Creole restaurant owned by Josh and Sarah Hess, members of Beth Evergreen, New Orleans natives, where Alan and I had breakfast, his Eggs Benedict on layered biscuits with a side of latke, mine Challah French Toast with a side of bacon, Chicory Coffee French Press with milk, while we discussed his gracious offer to chaffeur (his word) me to my nerve ablations next Friday, for which I will take, forty minutes in advance, two valiums, one Lyrica and a partridge in a pear tree.

I promised to be an amusing ride. Alan took me to my first PET scan in far away Aurora, where Jon lived. Since I’d never had a PET scan, I worried about claustrophobia. I took a single valium. According to Alan, I was an amusing passenger on the way home. Loose lips.

Turns out I don’t need anything for CT scans or PET scans, as I’ve learned over the years since then. MRI’s of the kind I had recently require anesthesia. The Lyrica and valium for the ablations though is anesthesia for this forty minute procedure and I have to take them forty minutes in advance. Which means the ride to the procedure should be amusing this trip. Looking forward to it.

My medical October will climax this month with a neck brace, a steroid injection in my hip, nerve ablations on my lumbar spine, and 10 sessions of radiation on my T4 vertebrae. I will be glad to put all of these in the finished category. For now. All of them, including the neck brace may require further attention in the future.

 

Just a moment: Red Tie Guy reminds me of those street hustlers with three card monte or the coin under the cup. Follow my hands. Democrats in Epstein’s files. Liberating Venezuela. Solving rising food prices by reducing tariffs he imposed, then claiming credit. Shooting cigarette boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific as though they were an arcade game.

Perhaps we could discuss those blue tinted election results, especially the surge of young women voting Democrat. Or, the Latino vote shifting blue as well. Even in precincts that had gone heavily red tie guy just last year.

Sorry, dude. But I know which cup the coin is under.

 

Closing note: I know. It’s bad. It really is. And, three more long years. Even so. Love. Action. Home. Friends. Family. Dogs. A good book. A good movie. A good meal. The Arapaho National Forest. Lake Superior. Grizzlies and Wolves. Wildlands and Wild Neighbors. The Night Sky. Great Sol each morning.

 

Memories, US History

My Inner Kid Chose to Speak.

Leave a comment

Samain and the Summer’s End Moon

Friday gratefuls: Alan. The Hummingbird, Josh and Sarah’s new restaurant. The gathering darkness of late Fall. The journey of all men with prostate cancer. Dr. Carter and the medical physicist, developing a plan. The MRI. The PET scan. Tom, his journey. Walking each other home. Bishop Berkley. Leibniz. Hume. All who wonder.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Science Fiction

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei

Week Kavannah:  Chesed.  Loving Kindness.        “Kindness is the language the deaf can hear and the blind see.”  Mark Twain

Tarot: Being a metaPhysician

One brief shining: The Stars above, the Samain Moon, constellations created in the mind, Galaxies, local clusters, the Cosmic vastness, a void filled with the stuff of dreams and wishes, stuff of very stuff, no less part of the one than your big toe or mine. And, no more.

 

When Dad became the editor of the Times-Tribune, Alexandria’s daily newspaper (in a town of 5,000. Can you imagine?), Bob Feemster, who bought the paper and hired Dad, believed he needed a television to keep up with national news, especially elections.

That meant our family was among the first in Alexandria to have a staticky, rabbit-eared box of vacuum tubes and a black and white cathode ray tube that somehow captured something out of the sky, turning it into pictures, moving and talking pictures. Wow.

And so. Saturday morning television. The children’s time with cartoons like Woody the Woodpecker, Donald Duck, Yosemite Sam, and Tom and Jerry. Also, dramas. Roy Rogers, Captain Midnight, Sky King. Captain Renfrew of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and his dog, Lightening, Tarzan, and the Cisco Kid.

That all seems quaint today with streaming services that have pushed broadcast TV into near extinction. No Saturday morning kid’s time because cartoons can be found all day and night, every day of the week. As well, of course, so many dramas, comedies, movies. Just head over to the Disney Channel. Or, if the fare there smacks too much of patronizing adulthood, go to Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu.

I know it’s naive to say that my 1950’s childhood was innocent. Those TV shows I listed above were often explicitly racist and certainly sexist, reinforcing the worst of what kids learned in the home and from their friends. Me Tarzan, you Jane. Hey, Cisco. Hey Pancho.

Yet it was simpler, at least in the amount of information we had regular access to. No internet or smartphones or Google, their equivalent in my hometown was the Carnegie Library. Even that had a children’s collection and an adult collection.

Most kids did not have a mother who had been to Europe and Africa though many fathers had fought in France, Italy, Germany, some in northern Africa. So there were those connections, in all their horrifying reality, to somewhere far away.

Then, too, the Cold War. Sputnik. Nuclear weapons and mushroom clouds. No, hardly innocent.

And here I sit, on Shadow Mountain, over seventy years later from the time Bob Feemster brought that little black box into our home. Those days seem so far away, both in time and in the content of daily life. Yet. They shaped much of what I believed was true, much of which I’ve had to unlearn.

We all carry those young kids with us. For life. Mine chose to speak to me this morning.

 

Family, Judaism, Mountains, Paganism, Plants, Reimaging revelation, Wild Neighbors

All Sacred, All One, For All Time

Leave a comment

Samain and the Summer’s End Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Alan. Ablations scheduled. Radiation approved, but not scheduled. Hip injection scheduled. Soft collar orthotics in. My medical October has bled far into November. Tom and his telehealth today. Shadow. Her vitality. Sheet pan meals. Cooking again. Canceling Cook Unity. Tara. Aurora Borealis in Colorado. The Edmund Fitzgerald. Lake Superior. Wolf 21.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: a day of rest

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei

Week Kavannah:  Chesed.  Loving Kindness.        “Kindness is the language the deaf can hear and the blind see.”  Mark Twain

Tarot: Being a metaPhysician

One brief shining: The Aurora, shining shimmering curtains of green and red that dance, flow, shift, grow and fade, took them for granted in Andover where for most of the twenty years, I could go out on our front porch and watch them, that placed against the wonder of Coloradans seeing them, many for the first time after these latest, massive coronal ejections.

 

Mother Earth, Great Sol. Yin and yang. Visible when the protective magnetic field of our Mother receives bursts of highly charged particles released during a coronal mass ejection.

Awe. Wonder. Desire. That is, desire to remain here, by this Pond, clothed in the majesty of existence by all that’s holy and sacred.

Another moment, in looking back, when the sacred oneness revealed itself, said look here, can you not understand that the Largemouth Bass, the Goats on the farm, the Trees in the wood lot, Judy, yourself also dance, whirling like dervishes endowed with the holy, connected and interdependent for all time?

Each time I drive home from Evergreen, I drive by Kate’s Valley and her Stream, and further on, past the Upper Maxwell Falls trailhead, the spot where the Elk Bull appeared to me drenched in the Rainy Night, standing on the Forest’s edge. In both places I nod, see them in their apparently mundane clothing, the light of Day suggesting nothing special to see here. A small Mountain Valley, a stand of Aspens along Black Mountain Drive.

Yet. I know. These places revealed their sacred nature to me when I turned over the Bresnahan urn with its flame signatures glazed in earthy, russet colors and spilled into the clear Mountain Stream the final remains of my love, my wife, my soulmate. As that Bull Elk did on a Rainy May night.

They have taught me, in their every day appearance, that no the sacred is not only there in moments of heightened emotion or sudden clarity. Rather, her Stream runs sacred in the light of a November morning, no more and no less sacred than the White Pines and Lodgepoles that line its banks along with the holy Wild Strawberries, the sacred Raspberry. The Water. The Rocks. And the Sky above them. All sacred, all one, for all time.