Monthly Archives: May 2025

Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Judaism, Men, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Torah

Freedom. Often painful. Always difficult.

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Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

Sunday gratefuls: Joe. Bill. Rob. Seth. Matt. Jim. Allan. Jamie. CBE men’s group. The Cow Elks and Bull dining while we talked. Berrigan Mountain and Elk Meadow behind us. Sanctuary outdoor porch. The wonderful Ponderosa with its twisted limbs. A breeze. My son. Donyce. Rich. Shadow, greeter of the dark Morning.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Men, talking

Week Kavannah:  Enthusiasm. Zerizut.

One brief shining: As Mother Earth kept turning toward the east, Berrigan Mountain slid across the horizon and Great Sol seemed to move lower in the Sky, the Air around us grew chilly while we talked on of 8 year old sons, narcissistic ex-husbands, mothers who shamed us, the isolation of Covid, getting caught driving while drinking, hoping that somehow our story would intersect with another’s lev, allow us to be seen and heard.

 

A young Bull Elk with only two points had a harem of ten Cows, unlike Marlon Brando in Waterfront, he was already a contender. His virility displayed itself as I turned past the Life Care Center of Evergreen and drove up the asphalt road leading to the synagogue. Men’s group.

We’ve begun to open ourselves, still easy to move into the head, Jewish men after all,  acculturated to hide vulnerability, paper over feelings with work and vain glory. American men.

Some lonely. Some afraid. Some eager. All glad for the presence of other men, a rarity for most. Like Shadow trust will not come without time, without bravery, without tears and laughter. Well begun.

 

Torah study in the morning. Ten tests of the freed Hebrew slaves as they move through the desert wastes of the Sinai. Taking the slaves out of Egypt. Yes. Taking Egypt out of the freed Hebrews. Hard. Liberation begins in the lev. Backsliding, fear, regression. Part of the package.

Why bring us all the way out here? So far from the familiar life. This cannot be what freedom is. Or, if this is freedom, I prefer the certainty of servitude. Let me go back. I’m scared. What if I’m not strong enough, good enough. Enough.

To move away from oppression to liberation requires sacred awareness, awareness of the power and resilience beneath the beaten down heart, the overworked, over stressed body. Realizing, yes, that fear of liberation, of gaining personal freedom and responsibility can cripple us, too. As much, early on maybe more, than the dull routines of our personal Egypt.

Not different from the confinement of maleness in America.

 

Just a moment: Men showing off their brute strength by deporting the weak, the outcast, the poor yearning to be free. Mocking the great Lady of New York Harbor, inverting the American promise, slashing the preamble of the Constitution into shredded parchment. If it’s aesthetic or academic or kind. No. If it’s crude, cheap, destructive, dogmatic, malicious. Yes.

Can you hear the slaves wandering in the desert where capitalist shrouds constrain all the loving-kindness, all the justice, all the mercy, all the rational and life-saving thinking? If it’s not good for the bottom line, what good is it? The Egypt of an extractive, idolatrous economy. Killing all of us while making some very comfortable in the funeral procession.

No. He will not be the Pope. But. He’s already Pharaoh.

General

Stage 4, a Dead End

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Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

 

Got my PSA numbers back again. .19 by Quest labs vs. .20 by Lab Corps 3 months ago. After consulting chatgpt about the likely significance of two different assay methodologies, I’m comfortable that I’m in as good or better shape than I was last time. Means for 3 months I can coast, happy I’m still in hormone sensitive territory. Where I wanna be.

Even so. Stage 4. Watch a television drama. If the writers want to ratchet up tension for a character or those who care about them, you’ll hear a sentence like this one from I, James Wright on Britbox: “I have stage 4. There’s no stage 5.” Effective. However. For those of us with real Stage 4 cancer. Damn.

If I were an engineer or mathematician, I might create a graph. Identify feelings on one axis and dates of blood draws on another. Pretty sure the feelings would anticipate the quarterly surveillance, showing spikes up as a quarter’s end nears, then a flattening.

Unless. Say back pain cranks up loud. Demanding attention. A thought about cancer crosses my frontal lobe. They link up, twirl around an empty syringe or full pill bottle. Spikes in between the quarter’s ends.

Point. Stage 4 cancer acts like chronic pain, always draining resources, sometimes more, sometimes less. Never absent. How can it be? There’s no stage 5.

Right now I’m feeling pretty good. These numbers did not rock my world. A slight thrill. A breath held, loosed.

Again the always oddity. No matter what the result. Not today. Not tomorrow. Lesson? Live today, here and now. Not because some self help moron suggests it, but because, fortunately, I don’t have a choice.

I don’t have to leap ahead to the end game. To hospice care. Long term care insurance. Family coming for last visits. Will that be the denouement to my story? Likely. But not yet.

 

 

Friends, Jefferson County, Mountains, Weather +Climate, Wild Neighbors

On the Way to Breakfast

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Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

Shabbat gratefuls: Talmud Torah. Shadow. So early. Morning, early early Morning. Back and leg pain. Exquisite. Teeth gritting. PSA. OK. Medical care moving closer. Subway. Cookunity. Dandelion. Alan. Driving down the hill to Evergreen. Green green Grass. Trees waking from their Winter slumber. The Bears are out. A sure sign of a Mountain Spring. Snow overnight yesterday. Melted and gone.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Knee replacement

Week Kavannah: Enthusiasm. Zeal. Zerizut

One brief shining: Opening Sefaria means stepping into the long, disputative history of Jewish thought where a thousand flowers of interpretation and commentary and imaginative flourishes thrive, feeding off each other, sparking new insights, all in the service of living today.

 

Out with a right turn toward Evergreen. Ruby’s snowshoes hissing a bit on dry pavement even though 2 inches of Snow lay in my backyard and the temperature hovered in the mid-twenties. Downshifting, brake preserving. These curves as well known as my own body’s, when to brake, when to accelerate learned over ten years. Concentration focused on the roadside for Mule Deer, Elk. Respect for the Wild Neighbors.

Great Sol had driven off the Snow on south facing Lodgepoles, but on the right, the north side of Black Mountain Drive, Winter Trees stood with white, drooping branches. Higher up on Black Mountain its now distinctive ski runs held on to the Snow even though facing south.

Maxwell Creek ran free of Ice, its rushing waters from earlier Snow melt now calm. Full. Eager. When I passed the Upper Maxwell Creek trailhead, I began talking to Kate. Telling her about Ruth’s decision to go to medical school. About Gabe waking up. Shadow waking me up. How much I missed her knowledge and wisdom, her love. About my back pain and how I now understand from the inside her own struggles with it.

Passing Kate’s Valley and Kate’s Creek, my attention turned to the clock. Oh. I was a half hour early. Hmm. Get a car wash? Why not.

Lake Evergreen and its views of Bear Mountain, Great Sol glinting off light Wind raised ripples, blue as the Colorado Sky. The gray Rock of the roadside a somber contrast. No Elk grazing this morning.

The car wash’s robotic voice said: the car wash is closed. Oh. Decided to take a look at Elk Run assisted living. I need to look at a couple of these places in case circumstances change. Still haven’t done it.

This place sits walking distance (for most people) from CBE. After passing the Life Center of Evergreen, Bergen Bark Inn, Mt. Evan’s Hospice,  and the section 8 housing where Anne lives, I realized this was a social service neighborhood.

Past it was the Tanoa Way residential area with dead ends and no outlets and mansions with the Mountain equivalent of Widow’s Watches, high windows facing a view of nearby Mountains.

After I had visited spots I’d wanted to see, but had never driven to, I turned toward the Dandelion and a breakfast with my friend Alan.

 

Fourth Phase, Friends, Health, Judaism, Kabbalah, Mussar

A Busy Thursday

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Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

Friday gratefuls: Alan. Snow. Ruby’s all season shoes. On Monday. Plus many fluids. Back pain. PSA blood draw. Cancer. And other fancy stuff. Shadow and the marrow bones. Tom’s portrait of Shadow. Lake Superior. The Boreal Forest. The Arrowhead. Grand Marais. Thunder Bay. Up North. Parashat Tazria-Metzora

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Being a student

Week Kavannah: Persistence. Grit. Netzach.

One brief shining: The Mountains rise up and slope down into Valleys, our roads here in the Rockies thin slices of asphalt or gravel following the rising up and the sloping down, the changes in direction commanded by rocky prominences and Snow melt filled Streams carrying the Mountains themselves downstream ever so slowly, slowly.

 

Yesterday. Seems so far away. So far away. Diane reminded me to ask for help. To set up ways to get to appointments-not only when I’m being sedated. I know this transition has to occur. Yet I’ve gone so long now on my own. I need, yes need, to let others do for me what I would do for them.

Irv and Paul and I discussed the nature of evil, whether it exists at all or is just a human construct.

At the Kabbalah Experience we continued our exploration of the story of Adam and Eve. This time wondering about our ability to live outside the givenness of our lives, to see what we cannot know exists.

Dave Sanders offered the Truman Show as an example. A simulacrum. Where is the edge of our learned world? Do we need a stage light to crash through the set for a big reveal?

His point? The Garden of Eden as Seahaven, the village in Truman’s life. A small paradise filled with every needful thing. The stage light, the Snake and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Bad. The expulsion as Truman’s daring escape on the sail boat.

Later Rabbi Jamie and our Thursday afternoon mussar group discussing the middah of bushah, most often translated as shame. Not in Jamie’s translation of the Orchot Tzaddikim. He uses self-consciousness or conscientiousness.

Bushah arises when we realize we have been less than who we see ourselves to be. Shame comes when we see ourselves not as less than we see ourselves to be, but when we see ourselves as less than intrinsically. Shame, in other words, is an extreme, even perverted instance of bushah. Guilt, embarrassment, chagrin may represent the mid-point of this continuum from shyness to shame, the healthy feelings that encourage us to investigate our behaviors, then act to change them.

After all that I drove over to Evergreen Medical for a blood draw, another PSA. My every three month peek into the status of my cancer. Waiting for the hormone resistant shoe to drop. Wish I could allay that feeling, expunge it. Just wait and see.

But I know that’s the next phase of this journey, that it marks a more treacherous road ahead. A part of me wishes we’d just get on with it. Go down the chemotherapy path or other treatments for hormone resistant Stage 4 prostate cancer.

I don’t want that, not really. I want to stay where I am as long as I can. Androgen deprivation therapy, my current protocol, always fails. Not whether, but when. The waiting though carries its own cost. Will this blood draw be the one?

Living with this uncertainty and the insidious effects of back pain can create moments of intense darkness.

Great Wheel, Mountains, Paganism, Plants, Weather +Climate, Wild Neighbors

It’s the Merry, Merry Month of May

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Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

Thursday gratefuls: Mary coming to visit. Beltane. Snow. 32 degrees. Gnawer of Bones. Slow to trust. Shadow. Roxann who knows. Tom. Tramadol and two acetaminophens. Helps. Fantastic Four. Adam and Eve. Mordecai Kaplan. Abraham Joshua Heschel. Learning. Staying mentally sharp.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Amy

Week Kavannah: Persistence and grit. Netzach.

One brief shining: We float sometimes above our life, hovering over it like some household God, hoping to change directions or circumstances with a twist of the divine hand, a twirl of the sacred finger but we know all along that only our body bound to the earth can achieve miracles.

 

Beltane. When those crazy Scots and those blue-eyed Swedes take off their clothes and dance naked around a bonfire. Enacting the magic of sympathy for Mother Earth as she takes in seeds, embraces them in her fertile womb, and kisses them into growth. Why not? She provides for us. Sustains us. Gives us water to drink and gravity to keep us grounded.

I’ve not written many Great Wheel posts in the last few years. Like Taoism and now Judaism though, the pagan in me never sleeps. I stay alive to these seasonal changes, to their meaning for our daily lives. Even if we get Snow and freezing temperatures here on Shadow Mountain. I know the Lodgepole catkins, the Aspen leaflets, fawns, calves, kits, bunnies will emerge, small flags of life’s own Great Wheel waving the colors of renewal.

Beltane honors the marriage of the Lord and the Lady. A maiden no more the Earth takes a lover who warms and quickens her. On Beltane ancient Celts would make love in the fields. Leap over small fires. Drive their cattle between bonfires. All to advance fertility.

Love realizes its biological imperative. Souls join as bodies dance together in the rites of Spring. Are we ever more than then? When our hearts fill with passion and our senses brighten to the other. The one who shares our oneness. As the One shares with us all. What an orgasm. Can you imagine how it feels to be Mother Earth in the Spring?

We cannot stay sad about death. Not when green shoots up from black Soil. As the Spring Ephemerals throw up their colorful flowers. As the Cherry and Plum offer their delicate blooms only to shed them in Snow like Storms so Fruit can grow. As the Honeybees leave their Winter Hives seeking Nectar and spreading Pollen, these matchmakers of the Sky. When Cutthroat and Rainbow Trout push out their Roe for the milky Semen’s discovery in cold Mountain Streams.

Death does not mark a finish, rather a continuation howsomever it might be. And Beltane marks Nature’s covenant that this is so.

We know not how it is. We mortal creatures. Beltane celebrates mortality with its promise of living abundantly. If only we care for ourselves and the land.

Get outside and visit the marks of this glorious, this wondrous, this most yes of seasons. You deserve the lift.