AncienTrails

Lughnasa and the Lughnasa Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Shortness of breath. Prostate cancer. Vascular disease. Post-polio syndrome. As long as I have them, I’m alive. Kate, always Kate. Rigel. The slows this morning. Kep, snuggled last night. That steak and Romaine salad I made. Cooking. HVAC appt. next week.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Tarot

Tarot card drawn: Queen of Pentacles*

Excited about my call with Social Security today. Shows you what my life is like now, I guess. No, really. I want to get this one finished and those SS checks fatter and getting deposited. They want me to prove my marriage to Kate. Fair enough. Ordered a copy of the marriage license two weeks ago from Ramsey County. No joy yet.

Eye exam yesterday. Every six months for glaucoma. Dr. Repine, who is quick, but solid, said: “Stable. Everything’s stable. Your pressures are good. The retina photograph shows the same status as 2019. Stable.” They always look for those holes Jane West drilled in my eye. “Patent.” Considering the previous fate of cataract and glaucoma sufferers, I’m glad to have good ophthalmological care.

Tarot and Kabbalah class yesterday. 52 cards. 52 weeks in a year. 4 suits of 13 cards each. A quarter of a year, a season. Rabbi Jamie’s correlation of pips and royals with the Tree of Life.

This class. Surprisingly good. Digging deeper into the archetypal, the daily introspection offered. Finding the tarot and the kabbalistic inflection of it provocative, evocative.

Beginning to peel back the layers. The cards, the Tree of Life, the Torah, poetry are all mirrors in which the subconscious and the unconscious can, occasionally, be seen.** Dreams, too, of course. All symbols, numbers, art can serve the same mirroring function, pushing us to access matters we’ve hidden, suppressed or repressed, or matters that exist in the pool of symbols Jung calls the collective unconscious.

Not all serve us equally. Some might find the Bible essential when held lightly, not as a rule book, but as a mythic text about humanity’s inner journey. Others, astrology. Others, Mary Oliver or Rainer Marie Rilke or William Yeats. Jungian analysis.

Right now I’m discovering that the Tarot cards work for me. Don’t know whether I could ever read for others. Maybe. Could be fun to try. I do know that when I pull the cards, consider them, check possible interpretations I find myself enlightened, an unseen portion of my psyche made visible to me. Not unlike the Johari window.

The Queen of Pentacles: Pentacles correlate to Earth, to the Body, to action, and to nefesh, the soul that we are, as a whole person. The Queen represents the anima of those correlations. She is mother Earth. She is the body. Her actions bring us close to mother Earth, reassure and nurture us.

This morning my mirror showed me independent Charlie, living within family and community, but on my own. A calm and balanced life can come from the underworld experience of grief. Grief plows through the subconscious and the unconscious, turning up furrows. Oh, love hurts. Yes, indeed. Love sustains. yes. Kate sustained me, nurtured me, loved me. Now I have to incorporate that Kate into my own psyche so she can still sustain, nurture, and love me.

Death, where is thy sting? In loss. In silence. In absence. Kate’s no longer at the table doing her crossword, writing checks to pay bills, laughing with me, kissing me. God, I miss her. Yes. She was my Queen of Pentacles, a grounding, nurturing force.

Now I have to consider that any subconscious or unconscious doubts I have about my own worth, my love worthiness, my creativity must dissolve under the Queen’s reign in the court of my soul. Why? Because Kate saw me as worthy, creative, lovable.  And that challenges any doubts early illness, parental conflicts, relational slights, alcoholism raised.

So for now, I’m a follower of the way of the Tarot. A western I-Ching. Still gotta learn to throw the yarrow sticks. Maybe next year.

*”…the Queen of Pentacles suggests that it is important to you to live independently, with a stable income and with enough time and space to also nurture your loved ones. You may be trying to strike a better balance between your home and work lives, giving it your all in both domains. At the same time, you find time for yourself and prioritise ‘me’ time in between all of your other commitments.

This Queen asks you to maintain a compassionate, nurturing, practical and down-to-earth attitude when dealing with others and your present circumstances. Focus on creating a calm and balanced life for yourself. Be resourceful and practical, dealing with issues as they arise using straightforward solutions that fix the problem with minimal fuss.”  biddy tarot

**”If you’re to better understand and accept yourself, as well as the concealed motivations governing maladaptive behaviors, it’s critical that you access the internal forces dictating them. There’s no way that you can reach your full potential until you gain entry into much of what exists below your awareness—that is, make both the unconscious and subconscious conscious—and, at last, come to positive terms with what, unknowingly, has been sabotaging you.” Psychology Today

Imbolc and the Megillah Moon

Friday gratefuls: Vaccines. Stable lung disease. Purim. Esther. Psalms. Easy Entrees. Valentine’s Day. Duncan, Oklahoma. Watonga. Alexandria. Connersville. Muncie. Crawfordsville. Appleton. Nevis. Center City. Minneapolis. St. Paul. Andover. Conifer.

Sparks of joy: Birthday coming. Inogen on Mark’s big sketch book page. Gratitude. Waxing crescent Moon. Cold and snow on the way. The possibility of vaccines.

Rabbi Jamie asked us to take six words out of Psalm 23 then write 6 verses using them. I took words from his translation: Death’s door, solitude, fear, harmonies, valleys, and grace. Here is my psalm/poem using them:

Death’s door opens both ways

Into my solitude and back out

Erasing my fear

From its threshold cosmic harmonies spill out

Filling the valleys of our lives

With the grace of eternity.

I’ve been thinking about radical aloneness coupled with necessary linkages. As humans, our skin bounds us, binds us. Only we know the inner life of our Self, our soul, our unique journey through this random gift of sentience. Yet. We have no language to know the journey without the necessary linkage to another, to others. We have no food to eat without the necessary linkage to the products of the soil. We have no learning without the quickening of our senses by necessary linkages to reality. (whatever that is.)

It’s a peculiar and often devastating truth, our radical aloneness. It’s both ironic and salvific that we cannot be radically alone without necessary linkages to others, to food, to the world beyond us. Covid has made the global scope of our linkages evident in spite of our radical aloneness.

I would say each one of us IS an island surrounded by an ocean of others. On our island are the structures we’ve built, the colors we’ve used to paint them, the roads that lead forward and backward through the story of our life. It is a mobile island. We have to take it with us wherever and whenever we go.

It has rickety bridges, poorly maintained causeways for the transport of food and air. There are several viewing platforms and from our island we can see other viewing platforms. Are they on other islands? A quirk of perception makes it impossible to know.

Even so we are often at our platforms, looking out, using flags to send signals. The others use flags too but we cannot be sure their flags mean the same as ours. They often look similar, but it’s impossible to know for sure.

I’m signaling right now. Arms flashing, plucking flags from their stanchions, returning others. Thinking of you, imagining you and your island. I hope things are ok there.

Imbolc and the waning Wolf Moon

Monday gratefuls: Kate speaks her heart. Rigel starts eating again. The Monk Manual. Wind. And the weather it carries. Black Mountain. Maxwell Creek. Upper Bear Creek. Cub Creek. Shadow Brook. Waning crescent Moon. The stars of early morning. The heart that beats in my chest.

Points of joy: Kep eager for breakfast. Being with the Ancient Ones. Imagining more of Jennie’s Dead. Exhaustion after the new workout. Using the Monk Manual.

When I started on the post yesterday, it focused on art, religion, legend, mythology, fairy tales, folklore. Got distracted while writing and shifted away from my main idea. Back at it this morning.

My library has three full shelves of mythology and folklore, its historical context. Another two full shelves of books on art. Another two of religion and philosophy and poetry. The bookshelf immediately to my right has texts about the intersection of religion, philosophy, and the natural world. That represents an ongoing investigation for me, how to reconcile humanity to a sustainable presence on this earth.

Just to be complete my library also includes shelves of fiction, a full shelf of works on Lake Superior and its context, travel, gardening, the military, American and Western history, including a good deal on the American Civil War.

I used to think religion and folklore and legend and mythology and fairy tales occupied different terrain. Art, too. But the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve stripped dogma from my approach to religion, the more the boundaries disappear. Of course religion is this generation’s mythology. To be studied later in the classics department of a long away in the future university. Fairy tales and folklore and legend were the work of scientists, humans seeking patterns in nature, explanations for the forces that influence, shape, and sometimes take our lives.

Perhaps my immersion, my lifelong immersion, in these fields means that I reject the Enlightenment, at least in its empiricist modality. It might. The question. How can I find knowledge and truth in physics, biology, astronomy, geology yet retain a naive faith in the possibility of something all those disciplines cannot explain?

The new atheists like Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett have a flat earth attitude toward wonder, mystery, delight, whimsy. In their mean and stolid world only that which can be seen, measured, replicated has meaning. They are descendants of the logical positivists and the language philosophers. Perhaps the best expression of this attitude is Wittgenstein’s famous quote: “Whereof we cannot speak, we must be silent.”

Whether or not he meant it that way, most thinkers who want to discard the mantel of dogma and its many obfuscations believe he meant, if it’s not empirical, we can know nothing and say nothing about it. This follows from Kant’s understanding of the ding an sich, the thing in itself. Kant believed there was a reality, he was no idealist, but he also believed that since we could only know what our senses brought us we could never know that reality itself, just the effects it had on our eyes, our hands, our ears, our nose, our taste.

There is a bald truth here. Our sensorium equips us to navigate a world delivered to us through our bodies. We can learn a lot about this world by being very careful about what we perceive. Yet at the end of theoretical physics, at the end of cosmology, at the end of life’s study of itself, at the end of consciousness, we have only an elaborate construction based on empirical data. As we know, any specific instance of that construction is often wrong, because science itself proceeds through revolutions in thought paradigms as much as it does through the empirical method.

In Celtic mythology the world of Faery, the world of pixies, faeries, goblins, the dead, and the divine is The Other World. What a world it is. I’ve recently imagined it, in my underway novel Jennie’s Dead, as a vast and open land where old gods go after their followers abandon them. Where characters of myth and legend still have adventures. Where travel between lands may take thousands of years or be finished in an instant.

What an impoverished, skinny world the new atheists and their philosophical forbearers inhabit. I prefer the company of Aladdin, of Shiva, of Lao Tze, of Herman Hesse, of Zeus and Lycaon, even of Jesus and Moses.

My sense of wonder awakens daily as I do. The Lodgepole pines out the bedroom window sway in the Wind. The Stars twinkle and shine above them in a black early morning Sky. A Mountain Lion coughs far away. In the fall the strangled call of a bugling Elk might make its way here. I’ve just come from the land of dreams, another non-empirical realm, and my Other World senses are on high alert, having spent a nighttime tuned to the flashes of neurons, the pulsing of brain cells switching on and off.

Poetry sweeps away the cobways of linear thought, carrying the reader into the realm of aha. Of, oh, I see. Of distant caverns unimaginable to man. The room of the Raven exists first in Poe’s mind, then on the page, then in ours. But how does it exist, ontologically? If you say only in ink on paper, my how little you know.

I’ve traveled Russian cart tracks holding hands with the staret of the Pilgrim. I swam the waters deeper than the Mariani’s Trench with the Megladon. I’ve walked on foreign worlds and spoken with aliens. Harry Seldon and I together pondered psychohistory. I’ve played the glass bead game, gotten into a Louisiana bar with a bottle of Trublood in my hand. The Caliph and I entertained Jinn. Huck Finn and I tossed a line in the waters of the Great Muddy.

These eternal inhabitants of the Other World are our guides. They know the ancientrails on which we humans travel and want us to use them to our utmost benefit.

You and I were a speck of ohr during the obliteration of the ayn sof. We’ve traveled together and apart for billions of years, been part of so many things, witnessed so many others. When God is repaired, we may join up again and sit with Rumi, a jug of wine at hand, blessed to be in that far off land beyond right and wrong.

Fall and the RBG Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Cat scan today. A quiet day yesterday. Safeway grocery pickup. Salmon and Asparagus. A butter and brown sugar plus soy sauce topping. Yahrzeit candles for mom. Covid. Trump. Alt-Right. Climate change. Black Lives Matter. A shaken nation, forced to reconsider its purpose and future.

In the year of the rat Magawa lifts up rats and smashes our prejudices. A feel good story for a difficult time.

Had a quiet day yesterday. The only trip was to Safeway to get a pickup order. Read some more in Rage, almost done. Painted again for the first time in three or four months. Not my best nor my worst. Needed to pick up the brush again.

A while back I ordered an internet course on growing Sacred Mushrooms. The course emphasizes Mushroom culture. It seemed odd to the folks at Visa security. They put a hold on my credit card and gave me a call. Yes, I ordered that. Oh, ok, sir. Thank you.

Got started on it yesterday. Growing Mushrooms is something we can do without a greenhouse. We both like them, so I’ll give it a go. I’ve always been fascinated with decomposition, how necessary it is and how elegant the living things that make it happen. Took a UofM course on Lichens years ago.

Kate’s had a bad couple of weeks. Mostly in bed, though she does get up each day. The shortness of breath has made moving a challenge. We look forward to the cat scan today and the thoracentesis tomorrow, hoping together they will provide relief and better knowledge.

Got some feedback about Sunday that helped a lot. Thanks, Ancient Ones. My men.

Hard to know what’s affecting me these days. Stress from Kate’s struggles. Eye drops and adjustments in vision from the cataract surgery. Lingering Lupron. Two years of thc at night. Need for a vacation with no possibility of one. I do feel slower, tired. My mindset is strong though.

I’m healthy in my own way. Good heart rate, blood pressure. COPD controlled. Exercise, now aerobics only for a month, continuing. A PSA next month. Not depressed. A bit dysthymic at times. Referented, I believe.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…

Lughnasa and the Labor Day Moon

Friday gratefuls: Vampire Kate. Four new teeth for her. Rigel’s good appetite this morning. 2020, year of tragedy and transformation. Cooling down of our days. The blood red sun. Again. The zombie GOP, haunting itself. Annie. That very cute chocolate lab pup that Brenton White gets in 9 days.

The Pine Gulch Fire on the Western Slope has become the largest fire Colorado’s ever had. It surpassed the 2002 Hayman fire last night. A long drought, climate change, reduced snow pack = bad times for the Rockies and the rest of the West.

Wrapping himself in flags, multiple flags, Trump stood at the White House, the White House!, and spoke to the Republican virtual convention. Uncle Sam wept. Lady Liberty, too. Blind Justice. His carnival show of an administration has barkers, thrill rides, and rigged games, but only one ringmaster, a clown.

This is a dangerous moment. Between now and November 3rd the United States is in as much peril, more, than even war time. We may see more teenagers, or adults with teenage executive function, “deciding to keep order.” as Tucker Carlson said of Kyle Rittenhouse, the Kenosha shooter. We will see attacks on Kamala Harris, on BLM, on the very notion of national responsibility for the poor, the elderly, the immigrant.

Trump is right on this score. The nature of this country is in play. If you want to ignore climate change, eliminate any form of national health insurance, sanction racism, empower police to be even more violent, seal our borders, and go even further down the path of pariah nationhood, he’s your man.

Just say no.

Lughnasa and the Labor Day Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Kate and her 76th. Veterinarians. Their love of dogs. Rigel in their care. Still. Kate’s teeth. Emergency fund. Ruby. A fine car. Window cleaners coming today. Angelique. New house cleaner. Kep. Tears. Again. Sweet Corn. Cool morning. Cooling nights.

Getting this out before the meeting of the clan. Rigel has endocarditis, an infection of a heart valve. She’s being treated with IV antibiotics and fluids, still at VRCC. The cardiologist there says guarded prognosis. Hard to treat and it can slough off detritus that leads to a stroke. Wait and see as SeoAh says.

Meanwhile the birthday girl, Kate, discovered yesterday that she’s going to lose four teeth on the bottom of her jaw, the ones between the bicuspids. Sjogren’s. Old age. Impressive bill. This happens next Thursday. Happy birthday, Kate!

My beloved females. Please hold them in your hearts.