Imbolc New Life Moon
One thing I’ve been up to over the last month. This is a brief article for the Shofar, Beth Evergreen’s congregational newsletter.
The digital world. A blessing and a curse. We’ll go with blessing in the Adult Education Committee’s work to consolidate access to online learning. This work is still nascent and you can see its first fruits on the Beth Evergreen website soon.
We hope you can help us make this resource as vibrant and useful as possible. When the online learning webpage launches, please take a look and give us feedback. Is the webpage user friendly? Are the categories the ones you would like to have? Do the course offerings and other online sites for Jewish learning stimulate you? Make you want to learn? Should there be other types of sites? We believe this webpage will take a while to become as rich a resource as possible and it won’t get there without your help.
In addition to offering easy access to online educational opportunities, we also will sponsor group learning at the synagogue. We’ll pick a MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses), or you can suggest one. Using the screens and projector in the sanctuary we’ll show the lectures and leave time for discussion, something not usually available when taking a MOOC at home.
A course at the Center for Online Judaic Studies on the Dead Sea Scrolls is an example of how we might use these resources communally. The Adult Education committee is sponsoring a guided tour of the Dead Sea Scrolls on May 20th. Dr. Russel Arnold will lead us through the exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. We could use this course as a way to prep ourselves for the tour.
Here are some other current examples of course offerings: History of Modern Israel, pt. I and II. The Holocaust, an introduction: pt. I and II. Judaism Through Its Scriptures. The Talmud: a Methodological Introduction. Israel State and Society. What would you like to learn?
Wow. Weather station says the humidity outside is 66%. Inside 2%. Aridity is the norm, humidity a rare phenomenon here. Like most rarities it’s welcome. Most welcome.
Came back from a short trip to the post office and the doggy drug store. While driving, I realized I had sunk further into melancholy, the gremlins now over the wall of my subconscious. Perhaps that’s what this feeling of new life trying to break through is, a sadness about the immediate past, or perhaps it’s part of a deeper thread carrying those moments of doubt one accumulates in a life time. The overcast to my inner sky is real, whatever it is.
It’s been awhile, I think, since old man melancholy came to visit, set up residence as a guest, in Rumi’s characterization. But he’s moved in for the duration. Still don’t know what to do. Hunker down? Act better to feel better? The mussar way. Doesn’t feel right to me, at least not now. Go down the holy well from which this manifestation arose? If we do meet the gods in our pathologies, then who is this tromping around my psyche?
It is axiomatic that each person is unique, a particular example of the human, of life, of the creative process that began at tzimtzum or the big bang, thrown into a particular time and a particular place. It is that particularity that Emerson elevates. It is that particularity which formulates within us, as instantiations of the whole, our own work. When we tap into the sacred, the shard of ohr (divine light) lodged within us, we come to know our work. And, the world needs it because you are the only one with this spark of the divine and the only one in the whole history of the universe who has it. If you don’t express your ancientrail, it will die with you and the world will be poorer.
Worlds collided last night and I found it unpleasant. Rabbi Jamie, the Evergreen Chorale, and choir director Val Robinson combined for an evening of Jospel music. That’s gospel music done in a Jewish idiom. Val was a spectacular director. She had the choir energized, crisp in its delivery, and used all of its members as if she were playing an organ. A Beth Evergreen member, Cheri Rubin and her husband Alan, helped make this happen.
I didn’t realize the distance I’d come from Alexandria and the gospel music style of 
Life still trickling by. A bit of snow over the last few days, colder now, in the Colorado measure of that term. So relative. Saw a facebook meme with Texans in parkas at 70 degrees. Could have countered that with a Minnesotan in shorts at ten below. Meanwhile 11, last night, felt pretty cold after three years here. These gross physical acclimatizations are easy to spot, but what about the more subtle mental adjustments?
This is all by way of becoming native to this place, a key element in my pagan creed borrowed from Wes Jackson at the 
Kate and I did it on the Great Anoka Sand Plain. Over the Andover years we listened to the soil, to the rhythms of the growing season. We stuck our hands in the soil, partnered with it. We planted trees and fruit bearing shrubs. There was the open prairie we cultivated on either sides of the more traditional suburban lawn carpet. Bees, with whom we partnered, for honey. Dogs who used the woods as their home and hunting ground. By the time we left we were native to that place. Its rhythms shaped our own and together we created a place to live.
71 times Valentine’s Day and I have shared a moment. This was a quiet one, a good one. Decided I would cook Kate a special meal. In all our years together I’d never done that. It felt great. Went to Tony’s Market (upscale groceries, great meat). Bought a ribeye and some model thin asparagus. Kate found some tiny potatoes. Candles and jazz from Kate’s Pandora Satchmo and Ella channel. Just right. Later, a dusting of snow.
At one point concentrating on Colorado and the west. At another, more Taoism. Stop writing novels. Read more. A lot more. A year of the Tao or a year of the West. Travel. In our immediate region. As much as possible. Continue with the sumi-e. Take classes? Go to a Progoff workshop?
No matter our birthday, 19 or 99, our past selves come along to the party. I’m unclear about the reality of self or soul though I believe in them both. Whatever the self is, it’s a composite, a melange of key moments and the reactions to those moments. And, as time goes on, the reactions to those reactions.
“Valentine’s Day began in commemoration of St. Valentine. It seems that in the third century A.D., Emperor Claudius II of Rome issued a ban on marriages and engagements, to encourage young men to join the army instead. But Valentine went ahead and continued marrying couples in secret. When the emperor discovered this, Valentine was condemned to death and beheaded. The year was 278.”