Samain and the Summer’s End Moon
Tuesday gratefuls: Morgan at Evergreen Orthotics. Neck braces. Abby Price, P.A., at Panorama Orthopedics. Steroid injection. Today. Looking forward to both. Cartoons. Anime. Manga. Horror. Fantasy. Science fiction. Mystery. Drama. Literary fiction. Albrecht Dürer. Arcimboldo. Breughel. Rembrandt. Poussin. Goya. Velasquez. Turner. Holbein.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: World Art
Life Kavannah: Wu Wei
Week Kavannah: Hakarat Hakov Gratitude. “Who is rich? Those who rejoice in their portion.” Perkei Avot 4:1
Tarot: Being a metaPhysician
One brief shining: Once again under the beam of a radiation device remember radiation poisoning from atomic bombs yet here I go exposing myself to even more high energy particles for their harmful effect on human tissue, yes, their harmful effect aimed not at enemy cities, but at enemy cells, rogue multipliers who want to consume every bit of my body.
If you went into the crawlspace under my house, you would see black plastic sheeting covering the floor and tight against the short walls. Outside a vented flying saucer like device with a whirling fan sucks air from beneath the sheeting and disposes of radon, a naturally occurring radiation contained in soil and rock and water. Many homes here in the Rockies have radon mitigation devices.
When I traveled through southern Utah, several years ago, I stopped at the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. When I got out of the Tundra pulling Merton’s last possessions (Kate’s Dad), I hiked around the area.
Small wooden signs in National Park style had yellow painted letters that read: Uranium Mine, stay out. Chains across the entrances reinforced the signs. These were modest as mines go, more like human sized burrows reaching back into the rock of the Kaiparowits Plateau.
When Kate and I began to look for housing after we decided to move to Colorado, a good deal caught our eye, the Candelas Development. Cheap land, good prices on interesting homes, and midway between Boulder and Denver with unobstructed views of the Front Range.
What’s not to like? Its proximity to the long closed Rocky Flats nuclear production facility for one. Rocky Flats, now a Superfund site, blocked off by chain link and razorwire, made nuclear triggers for the military. An ongoing controversy focuses on plutonium found in the unmitigated land surrounding the Superfund site, the Rocky Flats Wildlife Refuge, and the land under the Candelas Development.
It’s been declared safe over and over again by regulators, but critics say that no amount of plutonium exposure is healthy. We did not choose to buy there.
Radiation occurs in so many places, some of human artifice, most part of Mother Nature’s collection of elements distributed over the Planet’s surface and within her mass.
I’m glad some clever scientists figured out how to harness radiation for peaceful uses like nuclear power plants (looking at you, Bill Schmidt), smaller reactors that power submarines and aircraft carriers, and fighting cancer.
Starting on Monday of next week, I’ll have the first of ten doses of lower energy radiation to kill a lesion in the bone marrow of my T4 vertebrae. I will wear my red t-shirt with the radiation hazard logo in yellow.