General

Sometimes Dreams Devolve

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Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Rabbi Jamie. Laurie. Tara. Eleanor the dog. Rich. Joanne. Marilyn and driving in the dark. Irv. Nate. Cold. Snow. Dr. Whited. CT scans. Aortic artery. The heart. The lev. Mussar. This too is for the good. Doctors, Nurse Practitioners. Physician’s Assistants. Medicine.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Cancer

Kavannah for 2025: Creativity

Kavannah for this January 9th life: Chesed – loving kindness

One brief shining: This computer, the one recording my fingerstrokes in bits and bytes, I bought in a slight morphine haze after having had my left knee replaced in 2016, eight years ago this last December; I will receive its replacement, another Dell tower and new curved 32 inch monitor today, which means that awkward phase moving from one computer to another will begin soon after.

 

I have two addictions these days. One is buying books. And keeping them. The other is buying a new computer every now and then. I don’t need to. In either case. But both of them trip a little trigger that delivers the equivalent of sugar water for rats in a cage. Given that my previous addiction, alcohol, was both destructive and over time cost more than these two combined, I have come out about even I reckon. Can you say rationalization?

Anyhow my shiny new platinum Dell tower will arrive along with a bigger, curved, 4K screen. That means I can take this 27 inch screen downstairs and watch Criterion Channel movies on it. Or something. I’m just grateful that my thing is not new cars, or houses.

 

Mussar last night. The stories we tell, this group of confidants, soul replenishers. The seeing and being seen. Intellectual stimulation. Gentle challenges. Digging into the inner world with each other, sometimes guts and all. Hugs and smiles each time we meet. Lunches and breakfasts, texts and phone calls in between. A sphere of intimacy as close as BFF’s, approaching family without quite the same level of obligate love.

Kate and I came to this group together until she died. I went as her spouse. She was on the board at the time. Eight years, or nine. Long enough for the Velveteen Rabbit effect to have worked on each one of us.

 

Just a moment: Conflagration. Crown Fires. Santa Ana Winds. Movie stars. Canceled premieres. Canceled houses. Armageddon. Hard not to wax apocalyptic. We’ve all seen L.A. burn, get swallowed by earthquakes, invaded by aliens, wrecked by rampaging gangs. This time though the disaster is not on the lot, the lot is the disaster. Life imitating, well, art. Sort of art that is.

And add the compassion of a past, yet future President, who says: the fires are Gavin Newsome’s fault. Just makes it all the more surreal.

California is a repository of the American Dream, one forged by those who kept going west until they got stopped by the waters of the wide Pacific. And sometimes Dreams devolve into nightmares. Right now in LA.

Selfishly, I hope we’re not the next fire prone area to make national news.

 

 

Great Work, Health, Politics, US History

Blunted Dagger Rattling

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Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: Rich Levine. Marilyn. Dr. Whited. Tom. Paul. Alan. Cold, single digits. Vince, plowed driveway. Rabbi Jamie. Writing. Kavannahs. Ukraine. Iran. Iraq. Turkey. Israel. Palestinians. Syria. Jordan. Egypt. Yemen. Saudi Arabia. Lebanon. China. Russia. South and North Korea. Japan. Taiwan.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Aortic Artery

Kavannah for 2025:  Creativity

Kavannah for this January 8th life: Foresight   (roeh et hanalod)

One brief shining: Aortic artery aneurysm they say, spreading, mom’s brain aneurysm, a visit today to a cardiac surgeon, the past coming forward to haunt me, not as a synaptic engraved memory, but as a body recapitulating my mother’s, weakened arterial walls threatening to let my blood run free.

 

Yeah. Keeping the world of doctors, nurses, technicians, phlebotomists, and billing departments in a steady flow of the green blood which runs through their veins. That’s me. Today’s contribution will go to Dr. William Whited, a cardiac surgeon, who will reveal to me the amount of danger I’m in from a slowly thinning aortic artery. A new issue for a new year. Yay.

 

After about a five hour break from that last paragraph I can write off my aorta as an issue. At my age, Dr. Whited said, most likely will never be a problem. I liked him a lot though I admit I’ll like not seeing him again even better. I’ll need a CT scan in the next few weeks, just to make sure measurements are up to his standards, but he expects no trouble. Would that cancer and my back held such casual futures for me.

 

From a geopolitical point of view I can see a certain logic in Trump’s desire for Greenland. Warming of the Arctic. The great northern passage opening up. Rare Earth elements. Sure, as a parlor game. Like, say imagining Canada as our 51st state. When we consider a rules base global order, maybe our NATO treaty for example, it’s not only flat out bonkers but a reflection of the Trump doctrine: keep your friends at arms length and your enemies close to the Oval office. Do favors for your enemies and take what you want from your friends.

Of course, as one commentator noted, this blunted dagger rattling has a bread and  circuses appeal to his followers. Watch me stand up to Denmark and Canada. What a strong guy am I. All the while his real work will be cutting taxes for billionaires, expanding his family’s net wealth, and punishing all who dared to stand against him.

Gonna be a long four years. And they haven’t even started yet.

 

Just a moment: Apocalypse Now. I love the smell of wildfires in the morning. I feel for all those whose lives, whose homes, whose work places may have to yield to the fury of a Mother Earth grieving for her finely tuned climate.

One way to reach the Great Work, a sustainable presence for humans on this Earth, lies in disaster after disaster until a more reasonable population size is left.

Aging, Feelings, Fourth Phase

Aging and its cultured despisers

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Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Phonak. Amy. Mile High Hearing. All body workout today. The Outpost. Emunah. Snow. Cold. A Mountain Winter. Still light on Snow. The Churning of the Sea of Milk. Angkor Wat. Siem Reap. Cambodia. The Mekong. Brother Mark on his way to Saudi. Eleanor, the Dog. Tara. Friendship. Men. CBE.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Eleanor, fluffy kind energy

Kavannah for 2025: Creativity

Kavannah for this January 7th life: Understanding. Bina

One brief shining: How many moments of wind carrying cold air over my bald head have to happen for me to have a good night’s sleep; or, how high do I have turn up the electric blanket which pleases me for reasons I cannot define; or, how much peace in my stomach and in my heart leads my mind into slowing down and slipping away into human sleep mode.

 

Here is the illustration inspired by Hokusai, depicting the essence of aging and Elderhood in a serene, nature-filled setting.

OK. Here’s a new pet peeve. Super agers. No, I’m not dissing them, whomever they are, for having won a genetic or geographic (blue zones) or good luck lottery. Good for them. Banners and candles and whatever else goes with it. Huzzah! Might we learn something valuable from their lives? I suppose so.

No. The peeve I have lies in the way we valorize certain individuals, lift them up as exemplars for what aging can be. That can have the effect, like all the hoohah about diet and exercise, of diminishing the perfectly normal aging most of us will experience.

The vast, vast bulk of us, somewhere north of 99.9% I imagine, live our lives doing the best we can, making decisions that impact our overall health in many ways, some good some not so good and often living out the consequences of a genetic heritage in which we had no choice.

Super agers. Centenarians. The tail of the bell curve, the one sloping to the right. Are they our role models? What about the poor bastards on the other end of the curve with disabilities of all kinds. With limited resources to realize the dreams of the American Immortal.

I do not consider myself poor because I have less money than Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. And more importantly I don’t want to have that money. It’s not a perfect analogy of course.

Would l want to have the supple brain and over-70 Olympian’s body of these wunderkind of the Sun City set? Yes. I would. Didn’t happen for me. Am I a less good person, is my aging somehow less than? No. I’m at 77 and-here’s the comparison I like-above ground and taking nourishment.

What I’m pleading for here is a way to accept and celebrate aging in all its varieties, all its super and non-super manifestations. There’s no one way to do aging right. There’s your way and my way and, yes, the way of the .001%. Everybody who manages to slip past, say 65, deserves the honor and recognition of Elderhood, something our society, our individualistic, youth oriented, success infested society has drained away from us. To its peril.

End of rant.

Humanities, Myth and Story

What defines you?

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Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

Monday gratefuls: Friends. Family. Medical Guardian. Tech help for living alone. Tom who recommended them. Cold week upcoming. Snow. Living in the Rockies. Being a Westerner. Having been a Midwesterner. Being a Jew; having been a Christian. Meeting new men. Kate, always Kate. Lunar calendars. Gregorian calendars. Maintaining the illusion of time.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: the Tanakh

Kavannah for 2025: Creativity  Yetziratiut

Kavannah for this January 6th life: Patience Savlanut

One brief shining: The phases of the moon play out against a backdrop of stars, galaxies, the cosmic void which changes as we race through our orbit around Great Sol; Mother Earth tilted, so the weather changes from hot to cold and back again, and all of these repeat like life and death and birth among living things, nothing lost, all cycling in the great spiral of the Milky Way as it too races on its way, yet somehow also all becoming new, changing. A miracle.

Here is the illustration in the style of a medieval illuminated manuscript, focusing on the concept of a personal core story. It combines rich colors, detailed motifs, and symbolic elements to evoke a timeless sense of life’s journey.

Your core story. Rabbi Jamie wrote an interesting article focused on the notion of a core story for religious communities. The Christian core story focused on the life, death, and resurrection of Reb Jesus. The Jewish story focused on liberation from oppression and the journey afterward. Got me to thinking about each of us. You. Me. Even our Dogs and the Trees near you. Last night’s Sky. What is your core story?

Let me see if I can tease one out for me as an example. May not find this one on the first go round. A core story functions as a touch stone, a marker of identity, something so central to our sense of self that we cannot be who we are without it.

Polio. Experienced before most of my memories had begun to form. Known mostly through family stories and its bodily sequalae with which I still live. A central part of this story lies in my needing to learn to walk a second time after six months of paralysis on my left side. Rug burns on my forehead as I drug my body along Aunt Virginia and Uncle Riley’s couch, encouraged by my mom and Aunt Virginia. Uncle Riley wrote in concrete, 1949 Charles Paul. Polio.

To this day I live with a paralyzed left diaphragm and dead muscles on the left of my neck. Others lived and live with much worse. Not complaining. Observing that this core story remains with me in a tactile, never to be forgotten way.

In later thoughts about polio I decided Standing Upright in the World would be my way of honoring that young me and my parents and all who cared for me over the time of my illness. My personal motto.

Are there other key stories in my life? Yes. My mother’s early death. Searching for a sacred reality. Getting sober. Finding and losing love. Kate. Yet none rest at the very core of my ancientrail like polio does.

What’s your core story?

 

 

Feelings, Fourth Phase, Health, Holidays, Judaism, Woolly Mammoths

Men. In their awkwardness. Beautiful.

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Yule and a beautiful crescent of the Quarter Century Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Torah study. Men’s group at CBE. Flat bread with lox and onion. Pescatarians. Ruth skiing. Such joy. Gabe and his puzzles. 9 degrees. New Snow. Driving in the dark. A boost. Diet. Changing. Matt. Rob. Bill. Jamie.  The mesh bag. Neck weakness. January 20th.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Men, struggling with their hearts

Kavannah for 2025: Creativity

Kavannah for this January 5th life: Persistence

One brief shining: Drove back last night from the men’s group at CBE graced by the waxing crescent of the Quarter Century Moon; its soft light radiated by a Mountain Fog illuminating the Arapaho National Forest and the curves of Brook Forest Drive, then Black Mountain Drive until Shadow Mountain Home appeared out of the mist, welcoming me.

 

Got a boost yesterday. Community working its magic. During Torah study in the morning I still felt pressed down, disengaged. Distant. But Luke came up and gave me a big hug. Ginny smiled to see me. I felt seen. Though. Still coasting at a slow low place when I left.

Came back and did nothing until 5:30 when I left to go back to CBE for the first meeting of the men’s group. Buzzed the door. Got let in by a guy I didn’t know. Then I let in a  couple of other guys, neither of whom I knew. One of them, Matt, turned to get his nametag. Oh, good idea, I said. I’m usually good for one a day he said.

Steve brought flat bread with lox and onions. Made by his wife. I brought my go to mandarin Oranges in my new mesh bag. Joe brought miniature rugalach and date bars. Jamie tossed a handful of leftover Hanukkah gelt on the table. Chips and dip appeared. Finger food. Manly interpretations.

The conversation had that awkward I don’t know you tone, things held back, laughing. I only knew Jamie and Steve. Steve just a little. As we navigated telling bits and pieces of our stories, wondering who resided behind the careful words, I felt myself easing onto familiar ground.

When it came my turn, the Woolly Mammoths came out naturally. 40 years of learning how to get behind the careful words, the fear of vulnerability, with other men. Men trained by American culture and in this case reinforced by Jewish culture that feelings were at best anti-competitive. At worst they could…well, you know, don’t you?

Sensing the journey ahead and enjoying the tender feelers put out, an occasional smile, a sad look, a story that told more than intended, my downward emotional Dog began to shift to a Sun Salutation. I didn’t expect that to happen, but it did. Not all the way back to normal, no, not at all, but buoyed up all the same.

 

Just a moment: Tomorrow some Christians celebrate the Magi’s visit to the lowly manger in which the Son of God was born. And Trump will trumpet the day of love which the bulk of us call insurrection. MAGA or Magi? Even as a Jew I’m going with the Magi.

Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase

I sense you’re slipping

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Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

Shabbat gratefuls: Candles. Snow. Torah study. CBE Men’s group. Feeling low. Workouts going well. 2025. Brother Mark. Mary. Seoah. My son. Murdoch. How do I feel? Acting. Erleada. Orgovyx. Medicare drug policy. Orcas. Sadness. Mountain dark Morning. Black Mountain.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: AI

Kavannah for 2025: Creativity

Kavannah for the January 4th life: Yirah. Awe, amazement, wonder.

One brief shining: Had a strange moment at breakfast with Alan, my tone and demeanor was soft, repressed, as if I were muted emotionally; nothing to do with Alan, whom I delighted to see after he had been gone a month, the strangeness coming in my lack of awareness that I felt this way, as if I had to have an old friend as a mirror to see myself.

 

Here is the image you requested, capturing a melancholic atmosphere inspired by Breughel’s style, blending positive and negative emotions with a surreal touch

Depressive genes run in our family. And, for Mary, Mark, and me the epigenetics after mom’s early death  pushed us each in different directions, yet pushed we were in unwelcome and unexpected ways. The Myth of Normal, an interesting if difficult read, says we all grow into adulthood with trauma overlaying our development, no matter our family of origin. There is, in its conceit anyway, no normal developmental path, only paths damaged in ways unique to each human.

Kate had a task set her by John Desteian, my former Jungian analyst. When she felt it, she was to tell me, “I sense you’re slipping into melancholy.” That she needed to do that helps explain the strangeness I felt at breakfast with Alan. That was me channeling Kate back to my self.

This might explain, too, my veering toward the past of late, and veering not toward its joyous times, rather those instances of loss, of failing to achieve the goal. Why this happens, much like my brother Mark’s much more intense struggles, is not clear. I can  find no particular precipitating event in my recent past.

Challenges, I just realized, my practice for this month in which I say to events I first valence as negative or bad: This too is for the good. This mussar practice forces me to pull the lens back, see an event in a broader or deeper context. How does melancholy fit into my life as a whole? Into what I need, really need, right now? Can it serve a purpose not evident in the way it makes me feel? What might that purpose be?

I’m not sure. The start of a New Year, even if you eschew resolutions as I have, can bring introspection if only by looking back on the year just past. Or, maybe I have it backwards and the fact that the past has come to visit me is the cause rather than the effect.

Perhaps I need, for some deeper psychic reason, to explore this ancientrail I have walked since February 14th, 1947 when I first saw the light of day. Melancholy pauses life, slows it down, turns it inward. Is it something I need to find a way to change or is it something I need to listen to, understand its role in my life right now? I don’t know.

These turns of heart can run toward danger if they get too far into the realm of regret or shame, but that’s not what I feel. I feel as if my heart has had a dark molasses poured over it, obscuring the present, making the now less immediate. Privileging then the look inward.

 

Great Work, Plants, Politics, US History, World History

Noble? failures

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Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

Friday gratefuls: Mini-splits. Elements and Elementals. The abyss. Sisyphus’ rock. Nietzsche. Whitehead. Plato. Socrates. Democritus. Diogenes. Thales. Xeno. Even Descartes. Kant. Maimonides. The Talmud. The Mishnah. The Torah. Coleridge. Wordsworth. Keats. Lao Tze. Chuang-tzu. Moses. Israel. Joseph. Miriam.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Our core story

Kavannah for 2025: Creativity

Kavannah for this January 3rd life: Joy

One brief shining: Went to Stinker’s Sinclair yesterday to buy some milk, but there were no quart containers available, so I took four of the 16 ounce plastic bottles to the checkout where the clerk offered to make sure there were not any quarts in the back; while he did that, I looked across the counter to the other clerk, a thin guy with slightly long dark hair, maybe early twenties, and noticed that he carried an empty holster on his hip, tied to his right leg with a carefully knotted strand of leather.

 

I’ve had a quiet week. Spoken to a few friends. Breakfast with Tara and with Alan this morning. Otherwise getting well back into a new workout routine, this time ensuring I do two full body resistance sessions a week and still aiming for the 150 minutes of moderate cardio. Not all the way there yet, but I can feel it coming.

Reading. Finished the Tao of Pooh and ready to start the Te of Piglet, Hanukkah gifts from Ruth and Gabe. Von Bek, stalled in the story of the second Von Bek, The City in the Autumn Stars. Parsha in Bereshit (Genesis). Commentaries. The NYT. The Washington Post.

Watching The Outpost, Seal Team, and Archer. Hawai’i 5-0 when I workout.

Listening to Mozart quartets.

Exchanging e-mails here and there.

 

Listening to the voices of my past as they continue to bubble up. Wondering why I tend to focus on the noble failures more than the successes. At least I see them as noble.

An example. We (odd, but I don’t who recall who “we” were.) heard one of the last remaining local seed companies, Northrup King, had entered into negotiations with Sandoz, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant. This purchase followed a trend of Big Pharma and Big Ag Chemical companies buying the smaller companies who sold seeds to farmers for each year’s new crop.

Why? The smaller companies owned patents on the seeds. When there were many local seed companies, the hybridization processes were sensitive to regional and even local variations in soil, weather, pests, and other variables important to good crop production.

The companies buying up the patents wanted two things (at least): control over the seed patents for crucial crops like corn, wheat, soy beans, and rice. Corn, wheat, and rice provide about 50% of the world’s calories according to chabotgpt. That control was step one. After they gathered (harvested?) these patents, these companies could centralize hybridization and begin the process of working on their genomes. This was in the mid-1980’s, when genetic manipulation was still in its infancy.

We organized. Tried to form a local co-op to purchase Northrup-King and keep them out of Sandoz’s hands. We protested at the Northrup-King building which is now a wonderful space for artists. I met a person from the General Accounting Office of the Federal Government and tried to get her interested. We looked for a local buyer.

This was prior to the internet so I subscribed to a company, a clipping service, that would provide relevant information published in magazines and newspapers throughout the U.S. We developed crude information packets for local media.

All this over the course of 9 months to a year, as I recall. We were way out of our league. Barely had an effect on a process more critically handled in the world of finance than of local radical politics.

In my mind a noble failure. We did, for a while, raise consciousness of the issue. We discovered novel ways to fight big corporations and their capitalist driven desire to dominate markets by any means necessary. Still, in the end, Northrup-King disappeared into the world of chemists and genetic engineers, their seed patents with them.

 

Commentary on the news, Holidays, Memories, Minnesota, Politics, US History, World History

Yesterday’s Lives

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Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Reconstructionist Judaism. Judaism as jazz. My White Pine companion at Boot Lake Scientific and Nature Area-Minnesota. Those elms I had to cut down and debark in Andover. Emma’s fallen cottonwood. The Seven Oaks out my study window. The dead Ash Tree where the Morel’s grew. The Ironwood that was so tough to cut. Honeycrisp. McIntosh. Plum. Pear. Cherry. Trees in our Orchard.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Mountain Winds

Kavannah for 2025: Yetziratiut  Creativity

For this January 2nd life: Netzach  Perseverance and grit

One brief shining: A hand on her back, a flinch, you scared me, oh wondering what could have made her flinch since she knew I was there, right behind her, sad that touch took her into flight mode, the snow blew busily across my driveway.

 

We’re almost done with Holiseason. I count January 6th, Epiphany as the end of this wonderful time of year that began on Samain, October 31st. Here’s a connection I’d not made before. January 6th, day of the insurrection, when MAGA stormed the Capitol building carrying weapons and looting like vandals. January 6th, day of the Epiphany, which celebrates the visit of the three Magi bearing gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Sorta different, eh? Now wedded by history.

 

Not sure why, but yesterday’s lives have begun seeping into my present. Not in a regret or shame or guilt way, but as a remembrance of time’s past. Could be the stories I’m writing in the Storyworth application. Maybe not though. At breakfast with Tara I told Ball State movement stories that I rarely tell. Today in my gratefuls Trees I had known in Minnesota kept coming to mind. A few days ago I took the Artemis Honey jar out of the cabinet and went into a combination of grief and joy, of remembering life with Kate and the persistent joy then which brought grief about its loss and about Kate’s death.

Most lives, like mine, are ordinary. Most lives, like mine, are extraordinary. Ordinary because they will sink under the burden of history, little known and less remembered. Extraordinary because only I could live my life which makes it, like yours, wonderful, another full-on, head down, legs moving experiment in what it means to be human.

May as well lean into it, the onrush of old lives. Seems to be what’s happening in my psyche.

 

Just a moment: That truck. Near Cafe du Monde. Jackson Square. ISIS? Geez, guys. Read the room. So yesterday. And the irony, the maybe intended irony, of an ugly Tesla cybertruck blowing up in front of a long red tie guy hotel in Las Vegas. Why can’t China or Russia be the great Satan? Or at least share the honor.

I can already feel the aggrievement wheels turning in cousin Donald’s meanness machine. What if he decides to turn the full weight of the U.S. military against Muslim terrorists? He’s capable of that. And trust me someone in his sphere of malevolence has probably recommended it already. What if?

 

 

Commentary on the news, Friends, Great Wheel, Health, Judaism, Mussar, Politics, US History

Toxic. What else can you say?

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Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

New Year’s Day gratefuls: Tara. Ron. Ruth and Gabe. Veronica. 5 degrees this morning. Good sleeping. Snow. A new year. Kinda. The Realm. Von Bek. The Grail. Snowplows. Another Mountain Day, another Mountain life. Ruby in her winter shoes. MVP tonight. Family. Love. A new Zen calendar. Enlightenment. Not hard. Not easy. See what you’re looking at.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: The feel of a fresh slate

Kavannah for 2025: Yetziratiut  Creativity

For January 1 life: Wonder, Malchut

One brief shining: Sitting with Tara over sausage patties, home fries, eggs over easy, and sourdough toast, coffee steaming, the noise almost too much, I felt yet again love, again chesed, again the presence of one who sees me as I am and accepts me, as I see her and accept her.

 

I promised something less abstruse today. Here it is.

Carried the three largest split Oak logs in with the intention of burning them last night, starting a new tradition, burning Yule logs on New Year’s Eve since I missed the Winter Solstice. As in love with the night as I am, I no longer experience as much of it. I go to bed early, too early I felt for burning the Oak. Or, maybe I’m just too set in my ways. Whatever. I didn’t do it. Again. That’s twice.

On a related note: I was gonna go upstairs and hit 30 minutes on the treadmill. Thought about it right after I got back from breakfast with Tara. Almost. Knew it was my yetzer hara, my selfish inclination saying nah. You worked out yesterday. You can work out tomorrow. Take a rest already.

I read instead.

We make these sort of decisions at bechira points, choice points, and whichever way we decide we reinforce the likelihood of making that same choice again. I had two bechira points yesterday and chose the easy way. The good news here is that the yetzer hatov, the generous inclination, the possibility directed yetzer, will always have a chance to change that decision at the next bechira point, reinforcing the way that nurtures becoming.

Mussar expresses a medieval psychology, yes. But. Clyde Steckler, professor of pastoral care at United Theological Seminary, said you can explain the workings of the mind using any system of thought you want and still come up with useful, meaningful ways to understand it. Mussar exemplifies this idea.

I no longer live in a world of bad and good, right and wrong, but in a world of possibilities and potentials reinforced or thwarted. Maybe it’s that field that Rumi talks about. The one out beyond right and wrong. Where we can meet. My practice this month helps reveal this reality: this too is for the good.

 

Just a moment: Driving a pickup truck into a crowd of revelers on Bourbon Street. These newer pickups look like weapons to me. Their massive grills. Cabs high above the rest  of us tooling along in our SUV’s and sedans. And aggressive driving? Speeding. Impatience. Road rage. Seems baked into the I’m bigger and stronger than you are toxic masculinity cast in steel and named Ram. About to get stroked by the red tie guy. Who will attempt to make normative an unthinking, insensitive, domineering version of maleness.

 

Asia, Fourth Phase, Great Wheel, Holidays, Kabbalah, Paganism, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Reimaging revelation

Merrily we roll along, roll along, roll along

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Yule and the Quarter Century Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: This too is for the good. 2024 and 2025. And this December 31st 2024 life. 8 degrees this morning. Good sleeping. Von Bek. The War Hound and the World’s Pain. The Psalms. Bob Dylan. The Band. Ain’t No Grave. The Blues. Jazz. Jefferson Airplane. The Doors. Led Zeppelin. Ginger Baker. John Coltrane. Thelonious Monk. Slipping quietly into the next year.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Tara

Kavannah: Persistence and Joy

prompt: A vintage father time with sickle and an infant new year

One brief shining: How to encapsulate a year in one sentence, a challenge, perhaps remembering a Bar Mitzvah with friends and family present, a changed arc for cancer, a couple of months of low feeling, many breakfasts and lunches and zoom calls, visiting Ruth in Boulder, Gabe solving puzzles, many visits from my Mule Deer friends, the Mountains remaining-steady, solid, reliable-Great Sol and Good Night, Orion’s return, all while turning 77. Whee!

 

As the Zen calendar from Tom says:

This year,

yes, even this year,

has drawn to its close.   Buson

 

Here is the illustration inspired by Japan’s Kano school, visually interpreting your evocative paragraph.

Though age and wrinkles compared to that slender hipped 28 year old in his silly multi-colored suspenders and shorts would suggest definite linear time, no, I say no to that. I say live by the Great Wheel. By the telling and retelling of the story in the five books of Moses. By Sukkot and Mabon, Samain and Shavuot, the Winter Solstice and Passover. All repeating in a yearly cycle, spiraling through the heavens of time’s confusing paradoxes. Always ready to leave behind the hell of human insistence on seeing the profane where only the sacred-ONLY THE SACRED-exists.

I confess I don’t understand how time can seem so linear yet reside all the while in an ever repeating, glorious parade of seasons and holidays, all of which may in some future Samain-see the problem, all of which may in some future Samain, be harvested for a final time as our universe slips into its own Winter Solstice. Only, if I have an understanding of it, to experience its own rebirth as a cosmic Great Sol, a Phoenix, rising again, still?, from the depths of a cold forever.

All this to say happy new year! Let’s hear it for the calendar, for aging, for yesterday and tomorrow, all the while knowing we can never live anywhere but today. And not even today, but in this ichi-go ichi-e moment. Which will never repeat yet is eternal, never gone from the roiling, boiling mix of creation in which we live and move and have our becoming.

God. I sound like a bad fortune cookie. Nevertheless. Yes. To all this. To however we are, whomever we are, whenever we are. Bouncing along jostling each other, holding each others hands, walking each other home, living with the thereafter, somehow, even if it’s only in molecular hand me downs.

You out there. To a less abstruse post next year. Tomorrow.