Yule and the Moon of Deep Friendship

Shabbat gratefuls: Shadow, chewer of bones. Ruth and phlebotomy. Gabe beginning to grasp leaving home. Rabbi Jamie, grieving his dad. Tom and Jessie. Roxann. Star Trek: Discovery. Joe and Seoah. Afar Hafar. Down Under Melbourne. Up high Shadow Mountain. Minnesota. Its culture.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Science Fiction

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei    Shadow, my Wu Wei mistress

Year Kavannah: Creativity.   Yetziratiut.   “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” ― Pablo Picasso

Week Kavannah: Rachamim. Compassion.

While chesed (lovingkindness) often refers to a choice of action, rachamim is deeply tied to visceral emotion and empathy—feeling the pain of another. 

• Spirituality: It represents a free spirit, a prodigy, and the realm of dreams and visions.
• Connection to Nature: The Stoat serves as a guide to help you reconnect with the sacredness of the ground beneath your feet

One brief shining: Waiting outside while a loved one is in a surgical suite, a shiva minyan, a young man looking into the future, a young woman educating herself with joy, people close to me at inflection points, moments when life can feel the wind shear of change, perhaps moments after which the journey alters in a significant way. Bless them all.

 

First. Minnesota. Land of 10,000 protesters. A general strike! From the yesteryear of the labor movement. Wonderful. Chesed, loving kindness in concrete action. Solidarity. Across racial, class, and sexual preference lines. Our America live now on the streets of my former, yet forever home.

100 clergy arrested at the airport. Those who know justice will roll down like a Spring Mountain Stream. Those who feel the oneness, who pray for peace and acts of compassion. Those who risk themselves to say NO to this Stephen Miller fever dream, this Trumped up version of law enforcement. My peeps.

I could not be more proud of this out of the way state, on nobody’s well traveled path, up north, bordering Canada. Yes. That Canada. Who also stood up to our naked would be autocrat.

Minnesota, the only state in the lower 48 which never lost its Wolves. Landed sister to the great Gitchee Gummi. Where the Boreal Forest sweeps around crystalline Lakes carved out by receding glaciers. Where the Anishinaabe and the Lakota  have lived for centuries. A beautiful, proud state with a long history of radical politics, of caring for the other, of owning the past and its failures. Of looking for solutions that include, not divide.

These cruel, cold weeks we are all Minnesotans. Melting ICE. Showing love for our neighbors. Standing tall against injustice.

 

Second, is the universe a friendly, unfriendly, or neutral place? A question Einstein saw as the most important of all as humanity advanced into an increasingly technological future.

Perhaps since late high school, certainly since my first philosophy class, I’ve been in the neutral camp. I never believed in a god that reached into human lives and changed them. Or, one that changed history. My gods were abstract expressions of human projection. Merciful, demanding, angry, loving, just. As we are.

Once I disabused myself of gods altogether, I saw the universe as awesome, wondrous, and indifferent. How could it be otherwise? An infinite game of pool with one atom striking another, repeat, form something new, repeat, until without a guiding hand, on this Rocky, Watery world evolution took hold. As wondrous and awesome as the creation of the universe, but still random. Mutations, extinctions. until, in a rare geological epoch, a goldilock moment favored a bipedal life form with a big brain. Could have been otherwise, eh?

Well, yes. It could have been. But it wasn’t. This last week I’ve considered all the same data and have come to a different answer to Einstein’s question.

Friendly, I now see. The universe is friendly. How could it be otherwise. Random its working may have been, yet can I deny that those random acts of Star creation, solar furnaces in which the elemental structures of the universe were brought into being, did not seed the Galaxies and Solar Systems with the needed material to create Water, Mountains, Land, life?

And, can I deny that over the 4 billion year history of this single Planet-one of trillions captive to those solar furnaces-the interactions of gravity, erosion, freezing and thawing, lightning strikes, volcanic explosions made it possible for the vagabond continent of Africa to become home to the hominid evolutionary path that led to Homo Sapiens.

Further, can I deny that that evolutionary path led some early humans out of Africa and into what is now Europe, India, China and that further travels of my/our ancestors eventually found what is now the Americas.

Lastly, can I deny that if the long, amazing chain of atoms striking atoms, the kindling of Stars, the subsequent creation of Planets and solar systems, the emergence of life on Earth, and the long, long, long path leading to Mom and Dad, which led to my birth proves the universe to be friendly? I cannot. Neither, however, do I believe that the universe qua universe works as a somehow god, finding our everyday actions a place to intervene.

Yet, we are all part of this marvel, this miracle and in that connectedness find our mutuality, not only with other humans but with the Bear, the Lion, and the Platypus, the Ocean and the Desert, the fertile Land and the frozen poles. And even the most distant Stars and Galaxies.