Mabon and the Sukkot Moon
Shabbat gratefuls: Ruth and Gabe here. The darkness before dawn. Using the Lenovo. Family. My son. Seoah. Murdoch. Mary. Mark. Diane. The Good Fight. Jon. Kate, always Kate. Electric blanket and a down comforter. Plus a cool night. Winter storms next week.
Sparks of joy and awe: Time with the grandkids
Kavannah: UNDERSTANDING Bina Understanding, differentiation, deep insight; from בּוּן to split, pierce/penetrate; also בֵּין between Third Sefirah = Left brain (opposite Chochmah/Wisdom) (Tevunah, Comprehension, analytical thought, reason & intellect)
One brief shining: After a good day at Boulder on Thursday, good day=not in pain or overly exhausted, began to rethink my life, yeah, I know, again, maybe getting out even more, or maybe moving around more, not exercise, but going places, doing something for fun, spontaneity and joy mixed in with seriousness and focus.
Right now, late October, when I turn off the light as I go to bed, I can look up at a tall Lodgepole in my backyard and placed as if by an angel is a star that crowns it. Twas the Night Before Christmas comes to mind. More though. I see how crowning a “Christmas” tree with a star probably came to be. Christmas is in quotes because the Evergreen Tree in mid-Winter is part of the Yule tradition, symbolizing eternal life.
I plan to have a Yule log this Winter. Still haven’t gotten down to Variety Firewood to look for sizable hardwood logs and pinõn, but I will. Maybe Sunday after lunch with Alan.
Hanukah, the Jewish festival of fire and light for the darkness, comes very late this year starting on Christmas day and ending on January 2nd, in the new year 2025.
Long ago and far away from the Rocky Mountains in the bustling small town of Alexandria, Indiana, I carried newspapers for the Alexandria Times-Tribune where my dad worked. I had two routes. The first one I thought of as the Monroe Street route. It started on Monroe Street a block or so west of the Nickleplate railroad tracks. It wound through neighborhoods near Thurston Elementary School, the new one where I attended 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades.
The second route, the Harrison route, had more customers, started north of Monroe Street and ran to the town limits out near the ruins of the Kelly Ax Factory.
On both of them I enjoyed the time alone, folding newspapers into small squares and deftly curling them onto my customers porches. All except the big edition on Thursdays that carried all the grocery store ads my dad had sold the previous week. That one we rolled up and put a rubber band around. They flew through the air pretty well, but not as accurately as the smaller squares.
Point of this? Saw a brief story about Freddie Freeman’s walkoff home-run in the bottom of the 10th against the Yankees in the World Series. I used some of my paper route money to buy a transistor radio I could clip on my belt while I carried papers. I often used it to listen to baseball games. I was a Dodger fan.
