Fall Hunter Moon
Pain. Can make you tired. Can make it difficult to focus. Just plain hurts. My left knee has gone from bad to very bad. Trying various meds as a way to make it from now until January. Some success. Pain is a peculiar phenomenon, so assertive, so real; yet totally individual. Inaccessible to another. A message that, once sent, it would be nice to be able to turn off.
Superior Wolf continues to grow. 50,000 words. Writing is so much damned fun. Interesting to see a story unfold from the tips of my fingers, words and ideas following one another, no idea where they’re coming from. Doesn’t seem probable, but it happens. Everyday. Odd.
The aspens stand unclothed, their skirts dropped by the big winds we had last week. I’m glad they’re here. Realized yesterday that bare deciduous trees are a marker of fall for me, being a Midwest boy. We’re in that time between the falling of the leaves and the coming of the snow, a time with a skeletal aesthetic, when a senescence aesthetic with browns, tans, ochres in various shades colors the mountain meadows, an arid aesthetic with little rain, little snow, mountain streams at their low ebb. Samain, next Monday, is the holiday of this transition time, a holiday of the veil between this world and the Other World thinned. The growing season is well over, the season of harvest is ending. The fallow time comes next.
Kate went to Simchat Torah at Beth Evergreen last night. This holiday marks both the end of Sukkot and the annual end of reading through the Torah. I chose not to go because it involves dancing and lots of standing. The congregation holds the Torah scroll at various points, symbolizing the year’s readings and the Torah’s ability to link the congregation together.
The rabbi, in this case Jamie, goes around and tells each person which portion of the Torah they hold. Kate had the story of Jacob and the angel at the Jabbok Ford. Probably my current favorite Biblical passage. I like the notion of struggle, of wrestling through the night, with the sacred. I like the suggestion that such a struggle can change your identity, give you a new name and a new purpose.
