Spring and the Leap Year Moon
Friday gratefuls: Ted of All Trades for two pushes yesterday. A beautiful snowday. Mussar on Zoom. Kate on camera. Rigel, hip deep in the snow. Leftover cabbage and corned beef. Each of you. Isolation. A changing world. Internet. DSL. Black Mountain, Shadow Mountain.
And on we go together, separate. Sister Mary had planned to come for a conference this weekend. Canceled. Brother Mark has had two hours of instruction on Blackboard, an online instructional tool, and will start teaching with it soon. Good luck, Marko. We had over 10 inches of snow yesterday, snow all day. I cleaned the back deck seven times. Ted came and plowed us out twice.
Our Thursday mussar class was on Zoom. A good medium, fourteen signed on. Some technical glitches, to be expected. We were able to do our class, an hour and a half, read Rabbi Jamie’s clear, new translation of the Orchot Tzaddikim, and do our usual back and forth. I’m not sure this would have worked as well if I didn’t already know the others online. Or, maybe it would have been a different, but also rich experience. A self-quarantine positive note was Debra Cope’s presence from her new home in Maryland. Online the distance was not a barrier. Good to see her and hear her.
I have a new class with Rabbi Jamie starting in April, but this time I imagine we’ll all be on Zoom. Friend Tom Crane poked those of us who gather by zoom once a month. We’ll be meeting on Sunday morning to talk about what we’ll do during the present crisis. All of us are well past the at-risk age of 60. Leaning on this generation of online conferencing tools will help at least some of us.
The world has changed. But we don’t yet know how, or how much. I remember men on the moon. Yes, I’m that old. Even the first off-earth landing for a human doesn’t compare. We don’t where we’re headed. We’re not even sure where we’ve been. Ride it out. Wu wei for all.
