Cooking, Coronavirus, Dogs, Family, Health, Jefferson County, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Travel

Needed

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Summer and the Moon of Justice

Wednesday gratefuls: Mary’s recovery. Nasal polyp removal. Anitha, her bestie caring for her at home. Meeting with our financial advisor, RJ. Zoom. The health of our corpus. The three Earth countries sending visitors to Red Mars. Tianwen, Perseverance, Hope. China, USA, UAE. The night sky. Our stumpless front yard. Needing a break.

Want to set this burden down. For a bit. Need a vacation. A staycation. Something. Always on. Dogs. Kate. Cooking. House maintenance. Cleaning. Mail. Groceries. (Kate pays the bills.) Cars. Insurance. You know, all that domestic stuff. Work outs. Organizing stuff. Laundry. (Kate folds. Thank god.) My own health. Doctor visits. Imaging, hospitals, emergency rooms.

A bit whiny, maybe, but I do need a break. Of some kind. Not gonna happen either. No place to go, for one. Thanks, Covid. So even if putting the dogs at Bergen Bark Inn and Kate in respite care weren’t expensive and a hassle in itself (something more to organize), the virus makes travel unfun.

Having Seoah here was wonderful, of course. And, she did relieve the cooking and house cleaning. But not the overburden of responsibility.

Trying to figure out what I can do here on Shadow Mountain. Just crossed off workouts for a week and a half. I always go back, so that’s no danger. Problem with them is I moved them to mornings so I wouldn’t miss them so often. I used to work out around 4 pm. Too hot now. Plus cooking the evening meal. Other things. The move to mornings has worked well. I’m very regular with the exception of morning appointments out of the house.

But. Not getting any writing done, painting. Reading has shrunk to news and serious material like Art Green’s Human Narrative. Some pleasure reading in the evenings.

I want to finally finish, I’m oh so close, the loft. Then get back to writing and painting. I’ll take early morning hikes. Read some more fiction. Watch movies. I’ll buy takeout for the next week and a half, too. That should help. Ah, hell. I could take two weeks off from exercise. I might. Jump start a renewed Covid, stay-at-home life.

Yes. This sounds good. A respite. Needed.

Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Coronavirus, Friends, Great Work, Health, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Plants, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Torah, US History, Woolly Mammoths

A New Covenant

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Summer and the Moon of Justice

Wednesday gratefuls: Mountain Waste. The Claussens, coming for my pallets. The much improved back. Mowed. Most of the detritus picked up and moved. Photographs from Scott of the Woollies at George Floyd’s death site. Sjogren’s, not Covid. Pork ribeye. Napa Cabbage. The heat. The coolness of the morning. Garbage bags.

And then the world came crashing back into my consciousness. Been following the coronavirus spikes, unable to shed the schadenfreude that accompanies the horror. All those people sick and dying because of Trump, Fox News, sychophancy. The Master Race putting its own head on the guillotine. Fixated on this, like looking at a fire in the fireplace or a gently moving fan.

Opened up the email from Woolly Scott. Pictures of my long time friends at the site of George Floyds’ death. Long arcs of dead and withering flowers freshened up by new bouquets. A line of soft toys, teddy bears and rabbits, looking both sad and sweet. Mark Odegard in an orange shirt, a mask, looking at the George Floyd mural. These are friends who lived through the sixties, who understand this holy site in the context of MLK, Malcolm X, the Civil Rights Act, The Voter Registration Act. All that.

Statues falling. Folks going after not only the Confederate memorials, but Founding Fathers like Washington and Jefferson. Or, later, Woodrow Wilson. The screeches of foul play coming from the dotard in chief. His allies revving up their motorcycles, donning their leathers, taking their automatic weapons off their racks and out of gun safes. Heading out to protect the constitution and their way of life. Their white privilege. A complicated time.

Here I am on the mountain top. Moved, but unmoved. A latter day Noah on his ark, Ararat below me. Can this earth flooded with hate and hope create a new world? Maybe I need a dove.

What might be the sign of a new covenant? A bonding among all humans agreeing to live sustainably on our only home, in peace with each other. I can still see the double helix as the trunk of a tree of life, its crown, its keter, in the heavens, its roots dug deep below the soil. This covenant I can feel.

Let’s all cut our fingers, slash our palms, swear a blood oath that we will live as if all of it, you and me, the Lodgepole, the Whale, the Mountain, the Ocean are holy. Worthy. Precious. Loved. That should do it.

Feelings, Health

Blood test addendum

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Summer and the Moon of Justice

Anxiety. I’m fine. Not worried. Oh? Kate asked. Yep. I’m ok.

Got all the way down Shadow Mountain and part way to Aspen Park when I realized. Uh oh. No lab order. Had to turn around, drive back home, fish the order of its yellow file folder and message Quest Labs that I would not make the appointment on time.

Realized I was leaning forward into the steering wheel, trying to will myself there, eliminate the drive. Just be there. Get it over with. Jaws clenched a little.

When I got into my I witness and I wait mode, I calmed down. Drove peacefully. Until. When I exited Hwy 470 at Bowles, I stopped with the other cars at the light, waiting to get onto Bowles. The light turned green, the other cars left. My engine wouldn’t turn over. What? I fussed, wondering WTF?

Then. Oh, I see. I’d turned the car off when I stopped. Well, hell. More at stake here than my consciousness owned.

An irregular funnel shaped cloud, gray, with thick feathers of white shooting out from it to the north and a cumulus cloud, white like Ivory snow behind it, hung in front of me as I drove down Bowles. It had rain coming down out of the funnel’s spout though it was all alone in that sector of the sky. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Made it with no other intimations of my own anxiety or unusual natural occurrences.

Family, Feelings, Friends, Health, Third Phase

Blood test

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Summer and the Moon of Justice

Tuesday gratefuls: PSA. PSA test. Prostate cancer. Life’s precious days. The Shofar. Pride. Sorrow. Will James. His proposal for the Trees too close to the house. Rick Standler who’s coming by this week to grind the stumps. Cleaning the garage. Finally. Gusting Wind. Clear, blue Sky over Black Mountain. Tree pollen. Sneezing. The fans here in the loft. Low humidity.

OK. Draw blood. Send it to the lab. Write down numbers. Post them. Send them to the oncologist. Weird to think that this process talks about cancer. About its presence or its likely absence. Quest labs. Makes it sound downright Arthurian, eh?

Each case of cancer has its quest. There is a dragon to slay. Trials to go through. Setbacks. Those who hinder and those who help. Obstacles. It is a test of will, too. Can you stay on your quest in spite of fear, pain, misery? Can you defeat the illusions, delusions, ghosts?

I suppose this is why so many obituaries start with he fought cancer. She was brave. Survivors writing what they hope will be their own virtues. The warfare analogy so common in the death notices is understandable, but far from adequate.

The medical care for cancer infantilizes as often as it ennobles. Toxic chemicals introduced into our whole body do their indiscriminate work. Get weak. Have hot flashes. No sex drive. Suffer bone loss. And that’s just me. Others. Our immune systems suppressed. Nauseated. Lose our hair.

Not victims. Humans who have a disease. Not victims. The knight on the quest can never be a victim. Cancer is, as doctors often say, bad luck. It’s deadly. Scary. As bad a dragon as you’re likely to face. Yes. All that.

But. To be a victim is to give cancer a victory it doesn’t deserve. We all die of something. I’ve come to think of that something as a friend as important as my mother. My mother gave me life. This life. Cancer or heart disease or old age will give me death. The most important punctuations for all of us: Life. Death.

Before death however, no matter how diseased or distracted, we are alive, here and now. I’ll die tomorrow. Yes, perhaps. Until then though we wake up, we cook, eat, wash dishes, hold hands. Look life in the face. Smile.

Family, Feelings, Friends, Health, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Ordinary Time

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Summer and the full Moon of Justice peaking over Black Mountain

Monday gratefuls: Seeing Jon, Ruth, Gabe. Rain. Cooling a hot day. Beau Jo’s pizza. Folks in masks in Evergreen. Simple Green. A good mop. Lysol and Tough wipes. Clean toilets and floors. The whole yard looking neater. Seoah closer to finishing quarantine. Old friends. Bringing joy. Being joyful. The moon this morning, full and half set behind Black Mountain when I got the paper. Our mountain life.

“All that is gold does not glitter; not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither; deep roots are not reached by the frost.” J. R. R. TOLKIEN quoted in the INFP profile on 16personalities

On Sunday morning now I mop the floors and clean the toilets. Takes about an hour and a half. Feels good. More would not feel good. Kate dusts. Some stuff, like windows and the stainless appliances, get missed. We’re working on how to deal with that.

Seoah just did it. She’d mop, clean, hustle. I’m trying to continue the spirit in which she did these necessary chores. Working so far. I clean the kitchen each day. Load, unload the dishwasher, cook. With Seoah’s good energy as the backdrop.

Told the story yesterday to my old friends Bill, Tom, Mario, Paul about putting Kate’s feeding tube back in. First couple of times it popped out we went to the E.R. Once to the surgeon, Ed Smith. Now, I’ve done it twice. I care for her feeding tube site once a day or once every couple of days. Nurse Charlie.

Doing these things, plus getting all the pallets ready for collection and the lawn mowed have buoyed me. These are the chop wood, carry water equivalents for me right now. And doing them induces a meditative, here and now state.

Let’s hear it for ordinary time, not extraordinary time. These wild and precious days in which we spend the life gifted to us.

Friends, Humanities, News of the Strange, Third Phase

Neurotic

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Summer and the Moon of Justice

Sunday gratefuls: A mowed and less cluttered backyard. Jon and the grandkids coming tonight. Pick-up groceries. Safeway. Even though. Kate’s feeding tube. Her appointment with an ostomy nurse. House cleaning. The dishwasher. The final days of our freezer. This pulse of energy I have for domestic work. May it last. Cool mountain mornings. Trump and his racist ways.

Not all who wander are lost. This Tolkien quote could be my family crest. Mary and Mark living the expat life. Kate and I finally come to rest, like Noah, on a mountain top in the Rockies. And that’s the external reality.

A few days back I surfaced the wandering going on in my inner life. Last night, as my plugged up nose kept me awake, an old shard of psychiatric shrapnel worked its way up again. Philosophical neurosis. Diagnosed with this in 1969. After, I think, the MMPI and one or two visits with a doc. Neurosis got ejected from the DSM in 1980, but not before it struck me with the force of a hidden mindmine.

Nowhere in searches on Google or in any book on psychology have I found the term. The psychiatrist who diagnosed me is lost to memory, as well as any explanatory information from him. Those two words, philosophical neurosis, have many synaptic threads attached to them and they tug out of the basement every once in a while.

Philosophical neurosis. It had the unusual impact of pathologizing a key aspect of my personality. I take nothing for granted. Discovering there was an entire, storied academic tradition of people who did the same transformed me over the course of a semester. Even though I came to love anthropology as much as philosophy, philosophy shaped me, made me a critic and theorist at heart.

When I was a young boy, my bedroom adjoined my parents. My father and I would “talk about tractors” for a while before going to sleep. As I recall, this meant talking about a diverse range of topics. Early on though it exposed me to critique. Even at age 7 or 8, I would pursue the logic of a topic to its fullest extent. Dad never had dad authority. He could tell me something, but I would as often say, I wonder about that, as I would nod my head.

He called me tech. As in, technical. I always argued about the mechanics, the structure of an observation. Wish I could give you an example from that time, but my main memories around being “tech” was Dad’s growing frustration with me. He had been raised by his German physician grandfather, Jonas Spitler. My impression is that Jonas had dad authority. Always.

It came to me from the womb. I had, and have, an instantaneous realization of a contradiction or a flaw in an argument. It was no surprise to me when I took the Meyers-Briggs personality inventory and discovered my letters: INTP, an introverted intuitive thinking perceiving type.

“Logicians are known for their brilliant theories and unrelenting logic – in fact, they are considered the most logically precise of all the personality types.” on the INTP personality, 16personalities. Poor dad. I came with this mental equipment, discovered philosophy and politics. Our relationship was over right about then. He had strong, definite opinions. With which, unfortunately for us, I often disagreed.

Then, that psychiatrist nailed me with what I now believe was a made-up diagnosis. Maybe he was an incarnation of my father’s persona. I do remember he told me I had to find values that I could embrace or my life would be, well, shit.

Embracing or conforming to a belief system defines blasphemy and anathema for me. If it makes sense to me, sure. I can go there. But if it doesn’t, now or later, then I’m on another path, another ancientrail.

This explains why I’ve always felt like an outsider in any job I’ve ever had. Even the ministry. In the end, it has to make sense, the assumptions, the framework of the job. And the world does not divide logically. So, Charlie out. Sorry.

Philosophical neurosis. As much as I hate to admit it. Fair enough. I have to approach the world as I am and that does seem, at least at 73, to be who I am, one who can’t turn off the analytical part of his mind. Doesn’t I mean I’m not loving, caring. I am. But don’t expect me to buy the shiny new religious or political system you’ve discovered. I probably won’t.

Anoka County, Colorado, Denver, Family, Friends, Holidays, Jefferson County, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Myth and Story, Our Land and Home, Park County, Politics, Shadow Mountain, The West, Third Phase, Travel, US History

#244

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Summer and the Moon of Justice

Saturday gratefuls: This country. These purple mountain majesties. The lakes of Minnesota. Lake Superior. Evergreen. Conifer. Shadow Mountain. The great plains, rippling wheat. Corn fields of Iowa. Lady Liberty. New York City. San Francisco. Puget Sound. The Colorado River. The Mississippi. The South. New England. The first lighters up there in Maine. Jambalaya. Gumbo. Devil’s Tower. El Capitan. Crater Lake. The Mackinac Bridge. Protests. Alexandria. Muncie. The Big Medicine Wheel. The sacred Black Hills. Cahokia. Carlsbad Caverns. Marfa. West Texas. From sea to shining sea. Haleakala. Waipio Valley. Waimea Canyon. Da Fish House. Denali. Kodiak. Salmon. Grizzly. Wolves. Lynx. Wolverines. An amazing country still.

244 years old. Lot of candles for that red white and blue cake. Hard times. Like the Civil War. The First World War. The Spanish Flu. The Depression. WWII. Yes, it’s been hard before. Will be again. We navigated the churning, stormy waters of all those. We can get through this one, too.

A canard? Maybe. Yet, I believe it’s so. Rising out of this fire may come a nation truer to its ideals. No more Trumps. Ever. No more easy white privilege. No more easy oppression of people of color, women, lbgt. A more just economic and medical system. If we do, the pain will have been worth it.

I love this country. From Route 66 to the hot dog shaped hot dog stand in Bailey. From Coney Island to Puget Sound. From the Minnesota angle to the bayous. It’s my home, my place, the spot on this earth to which I am native. It can be tarnished by the political class, but not erased.

Here are my friends, some of my family, the graves of my ancestors. Here are the roads I traveled as a young man, the streets and fields I played in as a child, houses in which I’ve lived, the cities I’ve loved and fought for. This is the land of memory.

Let’s celebrate #245 with a 46th President. And with 45 in jail or disgraced. Make it so.

Art and Culture, Letters, Literature, Music, Painting, Photography, World History

All ye need to know

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Summer and the Moon of Justice

Friday gratefuls: Getting a start on cleaning up the garage. Buying dope. The continental divide yesterday, hazy with wildfire smoke. Kate. Our sad birthday tomorrow. Grocery pick-up order in. The vasty deeps. The airless heights. The Rub Al Kahli. Longing. Water. Beauty. What does it mean? Simplicity. Joy.

Is this a beautiful idea? Does this idea bring me joy? My mussar practices right now. And, interesting ones. What makes an idea beautiful? According to one perspective, all things are beautiful, if we bring beauty to them, look for it until we find it. Not all ideas are beautiful. Of this, I am sure. But, some are.

A recent example for me comes from Braiding Sweetgrass and its chapter title: A Grammar of Animacy. The idea here is the Potawatomi language’s division between animacy and artifice. All things not built or made by humans are animate to the Potawatomi. This is a beautiful idea. It’s surprising. Rocks and mountains. Grass and water. Fire and wind. All part of the spirited world, the ensouled world. It’s novel. It takes me to Shinto, to Western mythology, to the Faery Faith of the Celts. It challenges my received understanding.

Beauty is a contested idea. Just ask Picasso, DuChamp, Kandinsky, DeKoonig, Rothko. Are only representational paintings beautiful? If so, what makes them so? Space, color, line. At least. No color, no pleasing line, no well-defined space, no beauty.

But. What if the primary subject of a painting was color? Think the Rothko chapel. Or, the color blooms of Morris Louis. What if it were line? Like Cy Wombly. Or, imagine a sculpture of wire, dangling from a ceiling, defining and redefining the space in which it hangs? Calder. Or, what if the primary subject of a painting deconstructed a face, a table, a tableau? Picasso. Braque.

Each of these artist’s works would have been shunned as unintelligible for most of the history of Western art. That accusation still gets thrown at them, even in this, the third millennium. Why, my kid could do THAT!

The next few weeks of mussar will focus on beauty as a middot, a character trait. Perhaps this will be the kick in the ass I’ve needed to get back into the world of art. I hope so.

General
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Summer and the Moon of Justice

Not sure, but I think the security guard at the Happy Camper (marijuana dispensary) said, as I left, “Have a nice flight!” If he didn’t, I wish he had.

Cinema and Television, Commentary on the news, Coronavirus, Family, Friends, Mountains, Politics, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, US History

Good News

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Summer and the Moon of Justice

Thursday gratefuls: Chuck roast fork tender in the Instapot. Yum. The stillness. Only the occasional car on Black Mountain Drive. Just us and the critters. Wild and domesticated. PSA next week. Kate’s ostomy nurse referral. Kep and the bone from the chuck roast. Rigel and the bone from the chuck roast. Kate’s voracious reading. Robertson Davies.

Doomscrolling. Covidiot. (thanks, Tom) Mask maker, mask maker, make me a mask. At home with the virus raging outside. Like a wild snowstorm blowing across Shadow Mountain. So quiet here.

Generation hide. They told us it would be bunkers, radiation hazards. They prepared us with duck and cover drills. (though, to be honest, I don’t remember any.) Pamphlets. Civil defense sirens. Those yellow and black icons of danger. Nope.

The biohazard sign, triplet open crescents over a circle. Duck and cover = masks. Bunkers = self-quarantine, but, at least above ground. No sirens, just daily updated charts of the infection curve. Never flattened here. Here, in the United States of America. Maybe we should duck and cover. In shame.

Mutually assured destruction now means all those freedumb loving libertytards who refuse to wear masks. Who refuse to believe the virus is real. Or, if it is real, they believe it’s germ warfare. God, our fellow citizens as intentional disease vectors. What….?

Our generation sits behind closed doors. Those books on the nightstand now read. Newspapers, for those ancient of days who still receive them. TV tuned to Netflix. As the bleeding edge of the Baby Boom, we’ve been in a high risk category for over 10 years. Now it counts.

Those who like good news can find a lot of it on television. Though I long ago stopped watching infotainment, the protests get covered. What a joy they are in this otherwise bleak time. Young people speaking their minds. Yes, something’s happening here. And this time, it’s very clear.