• Category Archives Family

  • Surrender

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring and the Purim Moon

    Tuesday gratefuls: Ruth and Gabe here for spring break. Blood pressure. This laptop. Ancientrails. Black Mountain and Great Sol. A Mountain morning. Herme. The Monsoons in K.L. The Desert and the white Camel Bull in Hafar. That Mule Deer Doe back again yesterday. Hunting for Grass beneath the Snow. Simple Pinto Beans. Pretty good.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Grandkids

    One brief shining: Soaked the Pintos for six hours, drained them, covered them with Water, added a Bay Leaf, slab bacon, and half an Onion, hit P for the power setting on the stove, brought the Water to a boil, then backed it off to 3, a gentle simmer, one hour later added Salt, Cayenne, and Paprika, waited another hour, stirring occasionally, the beans softened, chopped the bacon into bits, returned it to the Beans. Tasty.

     

    Cooking more and more with Beans. Easy. Freezable. Lower on the food chain. Fire up my Zojirushi Rice cooker at the same time. Rice and beans. Filling and nutritious.

    I make most of my meals, some as easy as lox and cream cheese on English muffins, some more difficult, but not much. The freezer lets me extend a batch of Beans, some Greens, even hamburger into many meals.

    Rarely eat out by myself anymore. Breakfasts and lunch with friends maybe two, three times a week at most. Once in a while I’ll get a Subway or food from Fountain Barbecue or the Evergreen Market. But not often. The way life has evolved. I enjoy either reading or watching TV while I eat and both are easier at home.

     

    Suppose this goes back to the bechira points question of yesterday. Am I hiding out or living comfortably? Feels like the latter. But is it?

    Also relates to the broader implications of surrender. Not resignation. Not submission. More wu wei, the Taoist notion of going with the flow, not trying to control events but to discover their patterns and to move with them.

    Perhaps, too, it relates to thoughts about chi, love, the sacred consciousness, becoming as the underlayment of the universe. If I am surrendering to the flow of chi in my life, to the patterns of becoming, leaning into love of self and others as my prime directive, then how I’m living is fine. That is, it matches the movement of essential energies intersecting and shaping my day to day existence.

     

    You know, as I’ve been writing here, as often happens a crystallization of thought, of learning has precipitated out onto the page and in my heart. My current life of friends, family, Judaism, and a rich home life does feel right and good.

    Even when I decide to stay home rather than go to an event. Those events are not the key moments. Not anymore. Probably never were. No, the key moments find me in a booth at Aspen Perks or Primos, or the Bread Lounge, or the Parkside, or Thai 202. With Ruth and Gabe, Ginny and Janice, Marilyn and Irv, Tara, Rebecca, Alan. Or on zoom with Tom, Diane, the Ancient Brothers. Or talking with my son and Seoah. Going to mussar, not the event so much as the time with the people there.

    Other key moments find me painting, writing, reading, cooking by myself. This is me. Now. Walking myself, my friends, and family home.


    Family Feelings Fourth Phase Friends Shadow Mountain

  • I sense you’re slipping…

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring and the Purim Moon

    Wednesday gratefuls: Marilyn and Irv. Bill and Carol. Lea?, Lila? and Rider. Covid booster. The Morning blessings. The Shema. Snow. Slowly sublimating. (Which, I just learned, takes 7 times the amount of energy that boiling water does!) Knife handling at Evergreen Market. Rebecca. Safeway. John Connolly. Books. Still arriving. Breakfast. Waking up.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Dogs

    One brief shining: Wandered in to the Safeway, past the Ugli fruit and the Dragon fruit, past the eggs and the dairy case, walked up to the counter, I have a 10:30, all we have is Moderna, that’s fine, off to the small waiting area with chairs, ten minutes later a quick oddly painful jab, thank you.

     

    Still wrassling a sense of diminishment, a sullen colored mood that feels like a slight weight on my shoulders. Thrashes my self, my soul leaving them tired, exhausted even at the start of the day. Dawn does not come up rosy fingered, but scratching against the darkness, bleeding into the Forest, silhouetting Black Mountain rather than revealing. Makes me want to sit down, lie down. Go back to sleep.

    Might be my long exercise drought. Two weeks ago I stopped because I didn’t want to irritate my bowels while they healed. Then the snow came and I can’t get up to the loft. Sleep is not as good. Not bad, but not good either. Or anemia. Or some mysterious dark haired revenant from my shadow. Could be cabin fever, too. Lot of staying in over the last couple of months. Might need a vacation. Probably do. Almost certainly do. So what’s stopping me?

    Inertia. My back. Winter’s tenacious though now tentative grasp. In other words, nothing.

    Whatever it is, I feel like that guy in the old Pogo cartoons who walked around with a rain cloud over his head. Not. Much. Fun.

    I also know this will not last. If Kate were here, she might be telling me, “I can sense you’re slipping into melancholy.” Guess she is here in my heart, telling me that, isn’t she?

     

    Just a Moment: Could also be the steady fall of disappointing rain from America’s election 2024. Friends are going to Costa Rica to check out land. In case 45 turns into 47. Intelligent, rooted friends. Don’t want to live out their sunset years under an autocrat. Not hard to understand though I feel no pull in that direction.

    Or, maybe the politics of Israel, the U.S., Palestinians. When was the last time a majority leader of the Senate spoke for regime change in a country that has been and is our ally? I agreed with Schumer, btw. Netanyahu bought and paid, literally, for this disaster and sustains his time in office only through the cheapest of political maneuvers.

    Might it also be articles titled like this: Why we shouldn’t give in to climate despair.

    Sure these everyday on the frontpage news items are not Zoloft for my mood.

     

    And yet. I’m not my reactions to the news. I’m not my fatigue. I can choose a different path. So. I will.

     

     


    Family Feelings Fourth Phase Politics US History World History

  • Makes me sad

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring and the Purim Moon

    Tuesday gratefuls: Vince and his helpers. Jill the needler. Acupuncture. Safeway and pickup. Furball Cleaning. Mailing taxes. The Equinox. Spring. A good Winter. Ruby in the deep Snow. The occasional frozen dinner. TV. Young Sheldon. True Detective with Jodie Foster. Deadly Tropics. Bull. The Furies. Alexandria First Methodist. Hometown memories.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: The calm after the Storm

    One brief shining: Take off all my clothes, get up on the table with the clean sheet, stick my face in the round bit built for it, wait for Jill, soon needles go in on my feet, along my legs, clustered on the right side of my back, this time some of them connected to an electrical device that sends current into my body, twitching and tapping my muscles greet it.

     

     

    The church I grew up in. Sold as a venue for events and making art and whatever else occurs to the new owners. Makes me sad I wrote to Mary and Mark. Sister and brother. Don’t expect the video will interest too many of you, but the very first part does show the church as it was before this woman and her husband bought it. The sanctuary is still mostly intact. My family sat in the third pew about halfway in under the large stained glass window of Jesus at Gethsemane.

    Another mid-America tale this one not so much the rust belt apres the foreign cars story as an older one of faith and sexuality gone toxic. Used to be the big church in town. The woman in the video says it has 24,000 square feet. I believe it. Alexandria First Methodist had the largest church building in town and probably the largest membership while I was growing up in the 50’s and 60’s.

    It survived Rev. Clayton Steele’s oh so stereotypical fleeing to California with the organist or choir director. It survived the tumult of the late 1960’s and early 70’s. But it did not survive the question of ordaining queer folk. Ironically one of the key supporters of LBGTQ+ ordination was the son of Clayton Steele, a local dentist. The entire Methodist church, once the biggest denomination in the U.S., fractured, too. So not odd that Alexandria’s franchise went as well.

    As a result, the church was on the market.

    I had Boy Scouts, Sunday School, Sunday worship in this building for the years I lived in Alexandria. Which were all but the one and a half I lived in Oklahoma as an infant. Through 1965. When I left for college. My mother had her stroke in that building. While helping serve a funeral dinner. Confirmation. Communion. Tenebrae services. Christmas Eve and Easter. Regular, weekly attendance. As significant a part of life as school.

    Once a month we had a church supper in the basement. To this day I remember Mrs. Stafford’s grapes. Green grapes coated first, I think, with egg white then rolled in sugar. Of course, fried chicken and mashed potatoes and peas. Jello, too, with a variety of foodstuffs embedded. My least favorite? Olives.

    Now that I see this video I understand for the first time desacrilizing a church building. The building is not the church. No, it’s the people. However. Over time, like the Velveteen Rabbit, if enough people love a building, worship and pray in it, experience weddings and funerals there. the building becomes real, too. And when discarded, as Alexandria First now is, its reality continues adhering to that pew, those lights, those night time immersions in darkness during the Tenebrae services.

    Protestants, with the exception of the Episcopalians, don’t desacrilize, but I wish they did. It would make this easier on my heart.

     

     

     


    Commentary on Religion Family Feelings Fourth Phase Memories US History

  • Kate

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc and the Purim Moon

    Monday gratefuls: This damned cold. Heat pumps. Morning dark on Shadow Mountain. The lives of my Wild Neighbors. Ruby and her snowshoes. Taxes. Preparing and paying. Election 2024. Joe Biden. 45. 45 entertaining Orban in Florida. Gaza. Israel. Hamas. Judaism. Two state solution. Mussar. Kabbalah. Tree of life. Ed Walsh. Sheepshead. Games.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Chesed

    One brief shining: Formula One has begun its 2024 season with Max Verstappen winning the first two races; this sport so expensive, so fast, so global fires the dreams of go-kart drivers and a 77 year old on Snow tires in his SUV.

     

    My isolation here on Shadow Mountain keeps me mostly away from Covid, RSV, but not from the common cold. Achoo! Not sure how I caught it (shouldn’t it be the cold caught me?), maybe at Aspen Perks on Saturday or Mussar on Thursday. Anyhow interrupted sleep, lots of kleenex. Push fluids, Kate says. And rest. Yes, ma’am.

    As you know, even colds are nothing to sneeze at in your late 70’s. Another Kate saying from medicine of yesteryear: Pneumonia is the friend of the elderly. Meaning it can end suffering. Cheery thought.

    Kate. So smart. So knowledgeable. So sweet. Handy with a kitchen and a sewing room. Yesterday marked the 34th anniversary of our 1990 wedding in St. Paul. Joseph played the piano. BJ, Sarah, and a couple of hired musicians performed our wedding composition. Diane stood up with me. A lovely and meaningful start to our thirty-one years together.

    How can I say the depth of my feeling for her? Kate came into my life at just the right moment. I’d lost my faith in the Christian God, needed to get out of the ministry, but how would I pay the bills? Raise Joseph? Kate saw and understood my predicament, said yes when I asked her if I could quit. Said yes to my writing and cooking, caring for the dogs and the boys as my contribution to our marriage. She took a chance on me as I did on her.

    After our move to Andover, a Twin Cities exurb, well into what Kate and I called the pickup zone (where the bulk of the vehicles on the roads were pickups), our life together blossomed. Literally and figuratively. Flowers and Vegetables and a small Orchard. Bees. Dogs, so many Dogs. The firepit. We lived a life of horticulture, apiculture, and, as Jon called it, dog ranching.

    A mutual life. Kate extracting honey. Kate the Ninja weeder with her bandana. Charlie the Soil and planting worker. The beekeeper. The Dog feeder. Kate quilting. Me writing. Both of us hanging out with the Dogs. Prepping meals with our own heirloom Tomatoes, our own Leeks and Onions, Carrots, Green Beans. Honeycrisp Apples. Cherries and Plums.

    A complete and grounded life.

    Kate’s last years were spent on Shadow Mountain. Where, she often said, everyday was a vacation day. We loved living here, loving here. Our marriage continues. Ruth and Gabe. This house. The substantial IRA Kate left to me. Joe and Seoah, who loved Kate and was loved back by her. She is gone from this vale but not forgotten. Never forgotten.


    Family Feelings Fourth Phase Health

  • Ontario

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc and the Purim Moon

    Sunday gratefuls: DST. MST. Songtan time. Hello, darkness. Stratford Festival. Mark’s reprieve until April 16th. Seoah and Murdoch and my son. Zoom. Janice and Ginny. Scott. Shabbat. Adar II. Leap years Gregorian and Jewish. Aspen Perks. Kat and Travis. Reading. My great joy. Computer glitches. Ancient Brothers. Mario and Babette on the road.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Stratford, Ontario

    One brief shining: Those trips to the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario involved camping on the shores of Lake Huron, listening to the long trumpets with banners blare out a fanfare for the start of each play, Shakespeare on the stage, the lovely Avon wandering near by and the Black Swan Coffee House where I first encountered criticism of the U.S. role in Vietnam.

     

    When having breakfast with my friends Ginny and Janice, both theater folk, we discovered our mutual affection for the festival in Stratford, Ontario. I haven’t been back since my honeymoon with Judy, my first wife. 1969. A long time. But in talking with Ginny and Janice I reignited my interest. Much as I did last week with my passion for creating a sustainable presence for humans on our only Planet. Guess I should start paying attention. The psyche is a changin’.

    Those were highlights for me with our family. Driving into Canada, a foreign country! Crowns on top of the speed signs. Familiar cars with unfamiliar grills and looks. Colorful money. Crowns again. It all felt very exotic to me. The farm houses in distinctive shades of blue and yellow. Kincardine. A Scottish town. Ipperswich Provincial Park. Provincial. Not state. Provinces. When our time in Stratford finished, we would drive on north to Tobermory on the Bruce Peninsula.

    There we would motor on to the Chi-cheemaun, a car ferry run by the Owen Sound Transportation Company, and cross the Georgian Bay. The Flowerpot Islands in the distance. No car ferries in Alexandria, Indiana. It was all wonderful. Strange. Not in the U.S. We traveled to a foreign country. I didn’t know anybody else at home who’d done that.

    Until the War. The Vietnam War. That bastard child of anti-communist fever dreams. Classmates began to disappear overseas. Dennis killed. Richard Lawson wounded. The Native American guy whose name I don’t recall right now killed. A few of us. Very few went to college. Exempted. The rest. Fodder for the meat grinder of an unnecessary war.

    This was the early 1960’s. They all blended together. Shakespeare. Coriolanus. The Black Swan. Lake Huron. The cranking sound of the Chi-cheemaun’s open maw closing. The quiet vanishing of young men my age. The end of high school. Mom’s death. The start of college. So long ago. So far away in time as to be of another century. Even another millennia.

    Which all segued into the movement. The anti-war movement. The days of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Which describes my experience well. As the Grateful Dead said, “What a long strange trip it’s been.”


    Cinema and Television Family Feelings Fourth Phase Friends Humanities Memories Politics Travel US History World History

  • The Cave of Fear

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc and the Ancient Moon

    Wednesday gratefuls: Great Sol. Illumination. Energy. A distant nuclear Fire. Space. Mercury. Venus. Earth. Mars. The Moon. Near Earth Asteroids. SpaceX. NASA. ISS. James Webb. Pioneer. Humanity. Curiosity. Planets. Exoplanets. Astrophysics. My son. Kepler, of blessed memory. Kate, always. Rigel. Shadow Mountain. Conifer and Evergreen.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: My son

    One brief shining: Used to be I’d walk out on the asphalt, see the early morning Sky, pick up the Denver Post, and return it to Kate who waited at the breakfast table to start the crossword.

     

    So many used to be’s in any life at any point. Living in Indiana. Going to Wabash. Going to Elementary School. Going to Wisconsin, Minnesota. Married to Judy. Married to Raeone. Married to Kate. Able to Garden, take care of big Dogs, organize a movement. Able to believe in Jesus. Living on flat land. Used to be. Though. The experiences of those used to be’s remain. Not only remain. They shape. Me. My current experience even 70 years removed. From, say, first grade. Or my paper routes. Or having a living mother. Father.

    Faulkner, so true: The past is never dead. It’s not even past. Only the future has a blankness, an unshapedness. Even in the Zen so treasured moment we are never only in the moment. We are vessels and agents of memory, unable to escape our past, unable to know our future, yet always moored to the moment.

    Another quote that fits in here:  Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for.   Joseph Campbell.   On the Zen Calendar for March 6.

    When Kate died, BJ came to get me and we drove through midnight down highway 285. I pushed the elevator buttons for my last time to see Kate. Walked in the room. Her corpse lay in the distance. My heart seized. I could not go to her. I was afraid. This is the past, the used to be that surfaced when I read the Campbell quote this morning.

    Oh. My precious. My sweet. I feared. When I thought I would not. I was ashamed, struck down by fear. I could not, would not, go to her. Surely the very cave I was afraid to enter lay open then. And. I. Did. Not. Go. In.

    This morning, this March 6th, 2024 morning, almost three years after that moment, I’m ready to go into that cave. Dark in here. So dark. The dark of oblivion. The dark of will never find my way back. The dark of she will never find her way back. The darkness of being alone. For both of us. Separated now by that ultimate mystery. The dark of oh my god I do not know what to do next. The dark of life without. Her. My Rock. My partner. My love. My one true love. Oh.

    Human. Only human. Both of us. Her now dead. Me a frightened old man of 74. So fucking hard.

     


    Family Feelings Fourth Phase

  • Not Taco Tuesday but Peopled Thursdays

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc and the Ancient Moon

    Friday gratefuls: Quiet in my body. Beauty out my window. Calmness in my soul. Great Sol brightening a Shadow Mountain Morning. A day filled with friends and family. First, Diane and all the news from San Francisco. Then Tara and her happiness in Costa Rica. Mussar. Then, Luke and Leo. Finally, Joanne. Home as Great Sol disappeared behind this spinning World.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Conversation and its power to heal, inspire, deepen

    One brief shining: Drove past the Alpine Rescue Team and its museum, over I-70 and past the County garage until the hand made sign warning of a hidden driveway, turned right onto a one lane dirt road with shoulders eroded from its steep incline, went on to a left turn, drove a bit more but not all the way up the driveway to avoid having to back down any further than I had to, got out, walked up to Joanne’s door and knocked.

     

    Thursdays have morphed into my busiest day of the week. I start the day with one of my longest relationships, Diane, my first cousin, who lives on Lucky Street. Always a good way to start the day. She’s well informed about the world and our family. A good source of practical information, too. I learned a couple of weeks ago that she makes a mean lasagna.

    For lunch I met my Hebrew teacher and friend, Tara, at the Marshdale Burger joint. We had lunch and discovered that my audiologist, Amy, has been her friend since she and Arjean moved up here over 25 years ago. Tara and Arjean came back a week or so ago from Costa Rica. She had pictures. Riding horses on the beach. Sunsets. A gated ex-pat community.

    From Marshdale I drove to CBE for mussar. We’re beginning to wrassle with the strange, yet obvious to me idea that nothing is static, everything always becomes something new. The book we’re reading challenged us with Alfred North Whitehead’s idea of God as the creative advance into novelty. Not omnipotent. Not omnipresent. Not even necessarily sentient. Rather God as the impulse toward novelty in all things, always making all things new, always and everywhere. A God who must by definition change as the creation changes, becoming new, different in each moment with each “drop of experience.” His phrase.

    Yet. Still a God in whom we can place our faith. We can hold in our lev confidence that this, too, will change and that if we work with it, we can help guide that change, maybe call it the moral arc of the universe, leading us toward justice, love, and, yes, Downtown Council of Minneapolis, compassion.

    Think of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt. Before they could leave Egypt, they had to have faith that their situation could change. If they did not have that faith, Pharaoh did not need to use power to keep them to stay. They were unable to imagine, to dream, to feel a possible future free of Egypt’s oppression.

    When this conversation finished up, Luke and Leo and I sat for an hour and caught up. Luke had planned to come up last Sunday but I had to say no after my lousy Saturday night. Luke was on his way up to Granby for a weekend at Rabbi Jamie’s place there. He had all of his art materials with him. Gonna be creative.

    At 4 I went to Joanne’s and we had the usual far-ranging, deep conversation about the world and Judaism and liberalism and the slave trade and molluscs that spit out purple in the Aegean Sea, blue in Israel, and green in South America. She’s making me a tallit, a prayer shawl, and its fringes, called tzitzit, will be of blue yarn dyed with the recently rediscovered haustellum, a species of snail (actually a different species than the Indo-Pacific murex. New data.) that created the Tyrian purple of Roman and Greek fame and tehkelet in the waters off Israel, a sky blue. The murex of South America produces a green dye. It takes 120 pounds of snails to produce one gram of dye. So, precious.

    As the sun disappeared and the always present night returned to visibility, I drove home, back up Brook Forest to Shadow Mountain.

     

     


    Family Feelings Fourth Phase Friends Judaism Mountains Mussar Shadow Mountain

  • Loneliness

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc and the Ancient Moon

    Tuesday gratefuls: Dan. Alan. Joanne. Snow. My companion Lodgepole greeting the Snow. Much as they greet Great Sol. Home. Sue Bradshaw. Josh. Proctitis. Feeling vulnerable. Alone. A white Snow Cloud filling the Sky. Electricity. Fitbit. My desktop and laptop. The internet. What a joy. A.I. Senate Navy Bean Soup. Corn bread muffins. Health

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Waking up

    One brief shining: We need the windows in our homes like we need our eyes, so we can see outside, right now my eyes turn to this computer screen, but every so often they turn up and look toward Black Mountain, see only the Clouds bringing the Snow, of course, too, my hands typing and the file cabinet and the wall, like the window view we see only a portion of the World around us, yet it is enough for the moment.

     

    With my visceral world calmed down, as it has been since Sunday morning after that no good, horrible night, I want to revisit my feelings of loneliness. They stemmed not from the bleed itself, but from the feeling of vulnerability it sent cascading through my soul. Looked at from today’s perspective that makes sense to me. What else is loneliness than a feeling of vulnerability in a world populated by over ten billion other humans? And none available when life gets scary, hard.

    I feel fortunate that for me the feeling was temporary, exacerbated by the depth of the night and the severity of my situation. Several folks have reached out since then, confirming what I knew-once that shock passed: there are many who would take my call, even come. I’ve returned, strengthened by those responses, to my usual alone, but not lonely. Visiting loneliness for an hour or so was a brusque shock; however, it gave me a window, see one brief shining today, into that narrowed and insecure experience.

    I’ll see Sue Bradshaw on March 12th and I’ve sent a note to Kristie, my oncology P.A. I want to be aware and ready if this happens again.

    Mentioning Kristie reminds me I’ve not remarked about my latest lab results. My PSA rose slightly, as did my testosterone. That may mean my cancer has begun to wake up from its chemically induced slumber. May not. Another round of labs-I’m a phlebotomy regular!-in six weeks rather than three months. If it’s rising again, we’ll wait until it hits .3 and then I’ll have another PET scan. That will determine a new course of treatment.

    Kristie tells me that even since I went on the Erleada and Orgovyx, now some two and a half years ago, other treatment protocols have been found. The ever pushing forward of prostate cancer research produces results helpful to me in real time. As a result, I’m not worried, more curious about what happens next.

     

    Just a moment: A friend from CBE recently returned from her months long stay in a Buddhist nunnery in India sent me a note. Since I was officially a Jew now, she said when I replied to her I had to kvetch about at least one thing. Kvetch=complain in Yiddish. I sent her a note with this.  My kvetch: Election year 2024. That one should be good for some months.


    Family Feelings Fourth Phase Friends Health Politics

  • Travel, Dreams

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc and the full Ancient Moon

    Shabbat gratefuls: Bereshit. Tetzaveh. Rashi. Creation stories. Becoming not being. Seeing things as they are. Finite. Decaying. Impermanent. Loosely tethered. Entropic. Dreams. Dreamers. Irene. CBE. The Socrates Club. Tom, feeling better. PSA. Testosterone. The truly ancientrail of cancer. Shabbat. Relaxing. No agenda. Reading, always reading.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Dreams

    One brief shining: Buddy Mark as Mario and Elizabeth as Babette in Nice for Carnival, a bawdy parade with barbed floats critiquing world leaders, later a trip to a Picasso pottery museum, and an archaeology museum with a generous estimate of human habitation in Provence, taking Mark says calculated risks, for instance, a portrait class next week. Go, Mario and Babette!

     

    I admire my friend Mark’s travel jones. Every once a while he has to get up and get outta here. Road trips. Trips to Asia. Mexico. The Caribbean. Nice. I have some of the same urges, yet I mostly let them rise and fall away. Hoping once the possibility of snow passes that I’ll get on my pony and ride, ride, ride. Guess that’s up to me, eh?

    My son may make a short visit to Arizona in the next month. If he does, I’ll get down there to see him. I can motivate myself for family. I’ve driven from Arizona to Colorado before. Doable.

     

    Yesterday got back into the dream group that Irene has run for years. She’s a member of CBE and coordinates an online dream group and an in person dream group at CBE. Often has dreamers (as Irene call us) from far away. Yesterday Jane in England and Scott in Harlem. Marilyn and Irv are in the group, too. They introduced me to it.

    A session runs two hours. Irene puts the names of those who have dreams in a hat and pulls one out. One dream per hour so two folks get a chance. The dreamer reads or tells their dream then we discuss it using the conceit of saying “In my dream I…” This means we’re not interpreting the dream for the dreamer, but offering insights as if the dream were our own. Sometimes someone will say, “My projection is…” Jungian influenced. As you might expect.

    I find it both fun and psychologically intense. A chance to go deep into yourself and into another person’s dream world.

     

    Two other stories I’m following. The Alabama supreme court’s designation of all embryo’s as children. Wowzer. Trump and the Senate Republicans all of a sudden all over IVF. As a good thing! This underlines my observation yesterday that Roe v. Wade’s demise will play a significant role in the Presidential election. GOP bad. Democrats good. C’mon. Nobody’s fooled by those attaboys for IVF.

    Odysseus. The moonlander. On its side, antennaes not pointed toward home, but still broadcasting. Alive, but injured in the landing. We can all relate, right? Reminded me of Bella the sushi delivering robot at Sushi Win. Endearing to think of a compromised machine struggling valiantly to complete its work.

    We’re entering a new phase in our relationship with machines. Uncharted. Strange. Not to mention, A.I.

     

     

     

     

     


    Dreams Family Feelings Fourth Phase Friends Politics Science Travel US History

  • Shtetl Life

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc and the Ancient Moon

    Shabbat gratefuls: The Ark of the Covenant. The Tabernacle. The very detailed instructions from Hashem for it. Hoarfrost on the Lodgepoles. Thousands of flocked Trees within my field of vision. My companion Lodgepole glistens as Great Sol reappears on this cold Mountain Morning. Kai, Seoah’s nephew. His writing. Asia. Fan Kuan. Taiwan.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Hoarfrost

    One brief shining: Family reaches across oceans, over national boundaries and time zones, does not diminish with distance: Mark writes from Hafar in the desert of the Arabian Peninsula, Mary from Kuala Lumpur, I see Seoah and my son, their dog Murdoch, in their 12th floor apartment in Songtan, Korea, I talk to Diane once a week from San Francisco, all these precious people so, so far away.

     

    Breakfast yesterday with Alan and Joanne. Always a treat. I handed over Lamb to Joanne. She’s also reading, she says carefully, my copy of Emily Wilson’s Odyssey. We discussed Joanne’s upcoming warts and all early history of CBE which she presents next Wednesday night. She’s well known in the congregation for her wit and rightly so. Should be an entertaining experience.

    Alan’s daughter, Francesca, who lives and works in Manhattan, returns to Denver Monday. She’ll be doing some work here, schmoozing donors for the Jewish charity she works for. I can’t remember its name. Something to do with organs and organ transplants, I think. Then on Sunday she will perform with a trio in the second of Alan and Cheri’s Inspire concerts held in their penthouse apartment on the 38th floor of Inspire Towers. All of the condos from the 38th floor to the 42nd received the appellation, penthouse. Marketing, eh?

    Joanne and I will head down to what she calls the pandemonium for a second time to hear Francesca. Joanne tutored Francesca for her bat mitzvah and loved working with her. These are the sort of intricate and intimate ties that make synagogues so personal, more like a village. Or, a shtetl.

    That may be, come to think of it, what appeals to me so much about CBE. It has characteristics familiar to me from growing up in a small town. I know some of the people very well. I know a larger number casually, some on sight only, yet there are times when see each other, acknowledge each other. The total number is not so big that I feel distance, at least not much.

    Very similar to walking downtown in 1950’s/60’s Alexandria. I’d see folks I knew well. I’d wave at the parents of kids I knew. Some store owners, clerks. We were important to each other whether we knew it or not. Our faces, our bodies, even our repeated locations added stability and confidence to our day-to-day lives. We lived embedded lives, lives where we were seen and known. Sure, this has its downsides, too. Folks gettin all up in your business. Having to interact with folks you despised or, worse, that despised you for some reason. Perhaps forgotten. Never feeling off stage. Yet I’ve found over the years that I gravitate back to contexts that provide this sort of experience.

     


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