Beltane and the Corona Lunacy II
Thursday gratefuls: Kate, sewing. Seoah, laughing. Rigel, sleeping hard. Kep, eager to get up, get breakfast. 34 degrees this morning. High Winds, low humidity, lots of sunshine=red flag warning. Masks. The Lodgepole blown over yesterday. Equanimity. Mussar. Kabbalah class yesterday. Missed opportunities for exercise. Dave and Deb.
High Winds yesterday. Up to 40 mph, gusting lasted most of the day yesterday and Tuesday. Both were red flag days. Occurred to me that these are the original red flags. When they show up, those of us surrounded by the Arapaho National Forest pay attention. Not a metaphor.
A Lodgepole pine blew over in our backyard. Pines tend to have shallow roots. Fortunately it blew over away from our house. It could have hit the upstairs balcony had it gone south instead of north. An unintended consequence of fire mitigation, I think. Lodgepoles grow close together up here, an area clear cut for Denver early last century. I removed this Individual’s companions, left it to deal with the gusts of Wind all on its own.
Gotta get out the limbing ax. There’s other limbing work to be done on Trees felled last fall. And, there are still Trees to remove. Shallow roots are a good adaptation to thin Soil, rocky Soil, but they do have their risks. Wondering about other reasons for shallow roots.
In people shallow roots can lead to problems, too. The strong winds of the coronavirus can lead to a fall. The middah of equanimity, the topic for MVP mussar next week, is the psychic equivalent of deep roots. When life pushes us hard, say isolation or lockdown for an indeterminate number of weeks, equanimity can keep us upright. We will feel neither the need to run out and fill up the car with toilet paper, nor will we hunker down, go still, bury our fears.
Judaism has a clear view of the human experience: “Your spiritual experience will give you many gifts, but don’t expect it to relieve you of your human nature.” (Everyday Holiness, Alan Morinis, p. 99) Yes, practice equanimity, but don’t be surprised when life sends you a fire, or a virus, or a serious illness and you lose it. Notice that, congratulate yourself perhaps on a less severe reaction than you might have had in the past, and learn what you can from it. Mussar is an incremental practice that does not have an endpoint.
