Health, Politics, US History

What Have We Got To Lose?

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Samain and the Yule Moon

Friday gratefuls: Rabbi Jamie. Making art. Friends. Ichi-go, Ichi-e. Health insurance. The failure of capitalism. Failing institutions in the U.S. 45/47 already tripping over his long red tie. Plants. Plant intelligence. Consciousness. Materialism. How shall the twain meet? Scrabbling off a 2-D life. With a little help from my friends.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Making art

Kavannah: Joy (simcha)

One brief shining: Sitting at the end of the long table between Gordon and Ellen, I reinforced for myself, yet again, the over the top value of my Phonak hearing aid, having forgotten it in its charging cradle back home, voices from mere feet away arrived muffled, testing my puzzle solving skills and reminding me, too, of how socially distancing bad hearing can be.

 

 

The murder of Brian Thompson of Maple Grove, Minnesota. Yes, United Health Care, formerly known as Group Health, a colossus in American health insurance, has its roots and headquarters in my former home state of Minnesota. My AARP Advantage health plan is a United Health Care product. I have experience with it as a user, an insured, and as a source of news from time to time when I was in Minnesota, often about how much the executives made in salary and bonuses.

Dr. William McGuire, former CEO of UHC, donated $10 million for Gold Medal Park near the Guthrie Theater. He also owns, in retirement, the Minnesota soccer club, the Minnesota United. A billionaire.

How much of that money is literal blood money? Money “earned” as “profits” by holding back coverage to plump up the quarterly P&L. In 2016 I was denied an axumin scan that would have accurately targeted the location of my resurgent cancer. Experimental, UHC said. That meant I entered 35 sessions of radiation with the powerful beam aimed at the area, the prostate fossa, or bed, statistically most likely to harbor active cancer cells. That wasn’t where they were.

After a prostatectomy and 35 sessions of radiation, if prostate cancer returns, it is incurable. Where I am now. Since 2019. Would a more targeted bout of radiation cured mine? I don’t know, of course, but I was not given the chance to find out. And, it was my last hope for a cure. Yes, I do carry some anger about that.

With what the NYT described as a Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry exploding across social media, it occurred to me that we might see in that vitriol a clue to Trump’s victory. A toxic stew of anger about health care, inflation at the grocery store checkout and the gas pump stirred into a broth of white supremacy, anti-semitism, homophobia and misogyny. A generalized and deep upset with the way things are.

Institutional distrust sweeps in there, too, not just for the health care “system.” The church. Higher education. C suite salaries compared to those in their employee.

I can imagine a person saying, this is too much. Harris sounds like the old boss; Trump sounds like a different boss. What have we got to lose?

Friends, Health

Some (like me) might call it murder

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Samain and the Yule Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Rich Levine. Irv and Paul. Zoom. Dandelion. Ruth. Gabe. My Lodgepole Companion. Tom’s note. Paul’s 78th. Life. This December 5th, 2024 life. Dilating Aorta. Living high. Happy Camper. Evergreen. Beth Evergreen. Mussar. Rabbi Jamie.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Kippur

Kavannah: Perseverance and love (ahavah)

One brief shining: Old friends can remind us of who we are when we forget-as we all do from time to time-as two friends recently did for me; “…your greatest teaching is your deeply personal sense of wonder and curiosity.”; and, when asking to go to my next oncology appointment with me: “You don’t have to go alone.” Oh.

 

If you were given the job of decorating the sitting room for Cardiology Now, where I went for my echocardiogram on Monday, would you choose this? Somebody did. It’s the only art there, a heart made by skeletal fingers. I mean, come on guys. A little respect.

Got news back from my echo already. Aortic artery dilation has apparently increased. My doc has made an appointment for me at a cardiac/thoracic surgeon to consult. Guess this is a test of my personal GPS after writing about the feeling of enough only yesterday. Who needs all this?

A worry? I don’t want to go into the hospital, have surgery at 77, possibly need rehab. Kate’s journey informs my own in this case. Each time she went into the hospital she took a step or two further down the stairs leading to death. Don’t want to start that journey.

Unless, of course, I have to. The question is how much dilation is actually dangerous? Am I at that point? Or, is watching and waiting the best strategy. TBD. This I know is true. Aortic dissection=bad. A situation as Kate used to say: “incompatible with life.”

If it needs doing, I suppose I’ll do it. Stay tuned.

 

Breakfast this morning with Rich. A good friend. A sweet man with a big heart. Mostly catching up, but I did hand off to him transferring Ruth and Gabe’s 529 money. And I asked him about another pot of money that could be available for them. Business.

We also discussed, as you might expect, the hard problem of materialism v. idealism. Rich is a philosophophile. As am I. Not too many folks you can go down that particular rabbit hole with.

A privilege and an honor to know him and count him as a friend.

 

Just a moment: The murder of the United Health Care executive. Caveat: I say no to murder no matter the instigation.

However the two bullet casings with deny and delay reminded me of a long ago lesson in seminary about forms of violence. A decision to deny and delay treatment can be the bureaucratic equivalent of murder. Please note: I’m not saying it’s like murder; I’m saying it’s exactly murder. That is, if an insurer denies or delays treatment for a member of its plan and that denial or delay results in their death, that’s murder.

Perhaps beginning to investigate and prosecute insurance malpractice with criminal charges as the goal might push matters in a, shall we say, healthy direction?

 

 

Feelings, Fourth Phase, Health, Judaism

Blah. Bah.

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Samain and the Yule Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: Rich Levine. Small Estate Affidavit. The arcane lore of the law. The law itself. Making and enforcing laws. Judges. Lawyers. Police. Detectives. Canon law. Bishops. Diocese. Bishop Joe Strickland. Life in spite of. A good life in spite of. Seed-Keeping. Soil. Roots and Rhizomes. The Light-Eaters. Zöe.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Boulder

Kavannah: Perseverance and love (ahavah)

One brief shining: As I drive down the hill, and everything is down the hill from my home on Shadow Mountain, the lights have gone up, pushing that holiseason instinct to brave the advancing darkness by illuminating it, brilliant tiny bulbs of all colors strung along eaves, up a forty-foot Colorado Spruce, on wires from a tall pole to form a tree of lights, we are still here they say, look at what we can do.

 

I have only one thing that carries a weight for me. You might think prostate cancer, but no. That’s not it. It’s transferring the money from Kate’s 529 accounts for Ruth and Gabe to my own. I want to start giving Ruth money. Since last August. My formophobia notwithstanding I have dutifully sent off three packets of declarations, forms, and certificates. Still no joy.

Dealing with it makes me tense, jaw tightens. Teeth clench. My emotional resilience plummets. Not good for problem solving. Especially over the phone, to call center employees. Some who can do this, but not that. Those who can do that are not available and will call me back. Right.

Reached out to Bond and Devick, my financial planners, since they’re in Minnesota and it’s a Minnesota program. They helped me. Sort of. Going to see Rich tomorrow. If I can, I’m going to hand it to him and ask him to finish this for me. I want it off my back.

 

Going to see Rabbi Jamie tomorrow after mussar. Twice in the past month I’ve encountered a barrier within that I didn’t know existed. I believe my flat affect stems from its grip on me. The barrier is enough.

My first encounter with it was on my second visit to my medical oncologist, Dr. Buphati. I’d gone to that meeting expecting clarity about the status of my advanced prostate cancer. When I discovered they did not have my PSA results, drawn in their office three weeks before, I hit the barrier.

As if a train of cars, each one carrying a different emotional cost levied over the whole of my nine year plus cancer experience piled up, each one pushing against the other with the force of inertia gained over time and distance.

Over most of those nine plus years I’ve tried to deal straight up with the news about this change or that, move on to the next step, treading that fine line between being informed and responsible as a patient and trusting my doctors as Kate asked me to do. Sure, I’ve had times when fear overcame me, uncertainty pushed me to my knees, but each time I got back up. In this moment, at that visit I could not get back up.

Though I left after that visit with a feeling of doom and sadness overwhelming me, I drove home without incident and did right myself later in the day.

For some reason I cannot recall the second time right now. Not the trigger that is. But the feeling? Oh, yes. Here’s a different metaphor. Have you ever worked in or been in a factory where they had heavy doors attached to a counterweight with a chunk of lead in the cable holding the door open? If there’s a fire, the lead melts and the counterweights engage pulling the door closed to protect whatever lies beyond it.

That sort of feeling. As if what has gone before has been so much, that my feelings slammed my inner world shut. Trapping those feelings that threatened to engulf me.

It doesn’t surprise me that these moments have come to visit. The last ten years have held more tough times than I can recall. Yet I feel I’ve learned how to navigate the grief and the fear neither ignoring nor denying it, while not being captive to it either. In spite of that I have had death, divorce, and disease as my constant companions over the last ten years. I have not forgotten that. I don’t dwell on it, but the memories and the feelings remain stored within me.

When I stepped into this new period of uncertainty about my prostate cancer, right after my bar mitzvah ironically, I’ve gone up and down. Sometimes steady. Sometimes not. The most current manifestation of these feelings has been a flat affect, not down, not up. Blah. Unmotivated. Slow. Tired. Very much like acedia.

The door to my inner world slammed shut. Bottling up my exuberance and joy.

I don’t like living blah. My life means more to me.

 

Family, Health, Politics, Writing

Heartseen

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Samain and the Yule Moon

Shadow Mountain by my buddy 4o

Tuesday gratefuls: My son and Seoah. Skiing. Here and in Korea. Shadow Mountain in the style of Hokusai. Chatbotgpt4o. Handy. Memories of my son. Of him and Jon. Kate, always Kate. Ruth. Gabe. NYT. Washington Post. Ground News. Hamas. Hezbollah. Iran. Israel. Ukraine. North Korea. China.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: My son and Seoah here for my birthday

Kavannah: Perseverance and love

One brief shining: My body on the gurney, lying on my left side facing Lynne who held a sonar wand which she glopped up with lubricant, cold as it hit my bare chest, and suddenly there, right there on the screen, a peek inside my beating heart, valves, vessels, blood flowing shown by red and blue pixel clouds that looked like a weather map. Oh. Amazing.

 

Another echocardiogram. Primary purpose? Check out my aorta. Which has a slight problem, so slight that I can’t remember what it is. An enlarged aorta. Looked it up. Dr. Rubenstein wanted this echo a year after my visit to him. If the mild enlargement has not changed, we’ll cross it off my problem list. Glad to do that.

Still comes with the full echo though. So I get one more look at my heart as it works. If you’ve never had one, I find them amazing. There on the sonar screen my heart valves opened and closed. Lynne took various measurements with the click of a mouse while I watched.

Before echocardiograms? Not sure. Asked chatbot. Stethoscopes. Thumping the chest. Pulse checks. EKG’s. Chest X-Rays. Those sort of things. But nothing that could see the heart at work, measure the chambers and the blood flow. Much less accurate. Thank you, technology.

Went to Noodles on the way home and picked up some Korean noodles for dinner.

 

Today I’m going to try one more time to finish the transfer of Ruth’s 529 from Kate’s account to a new one in my name. This process has had several iterations and involves starting over again with each new phone call to adjust to their needs. So frustrating.

 

My new rhythm works for me. Getting more writing done. Regular exercise and reading. What I needed to lift me out of the flats.

 

Just a moment: Hadn’t considered Trump’s vindictive streak and his nominee to run the FBI, Kash Patel. After reading Heather Richardson’s commentary on the exposure Hunter faced given both of those, I not only understand Joe’s decision, I would have made it myself.

Interesting point about RFK and his appointment to run HHS. People don’t trust our medical care system, so they’re ok with anyone who promises to shake things up. I understand this. It’s a confusing, messy, expensive bureaucracy that often doesn’t seem to have health or the patient as its top priority.

RFK would not be my choice to lead the charge, but that someone should? Oh, yeah.

 

 

Colorado, Commentary on the news, Family, GeekWorld, Literature, Science, Sport

Fun with our AI future overlords

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Samain and the Yule Moon

Monday gratefuls: Google calendar. Computers. NVidia. AI. Catastrophizing. Equalizing. Leveling. Great Britain. Scotland. England. Wales. Ireland. Brittany. Galicia. The Gaeltach. The Celtic Faery Faith. Wassailing. Yule logs. Evergreen Boughs and Trees. Singing and Feasting.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Echocardiograms

Kavannah: Perseverance and Love

One Brief Shining: The bigger and harder and more important project, supporting the liberal democratic vision of Lincoln, Teddy and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which, as Heather Richardson said, means having a government big enough and strong enough to fight off not only foreign foes, but especially domestic ones: the haters, the oligarchs, religious extremists like the Christian nationalists.

Another chatbot image

Having fun with chatbot and image creation. It often doesn’t spell too well and can approach the cartoonish rather than the beautiful. Still. I can get an image I know I have the right to post and that’s original. I’ll get better with my prompts and chatbotgpt will improve over time, too. I’m also using chatbot as a resource for the work I’m doing on the Great Wheel holidays.

Working with the idea from a couple of days ago. Write Ancientrails. Eat breakfast. Write five hundred to a thousand words on the Great Wheel. Workout. I like this rhythm and it gets my candle lit. A key reinforcer.

 

Brother Mark has flown back to Bangkok, awaiting January 1 and a flight to his old stomping grounds in Hafar, Saudi Arabia. He’s also figuring out what he needs to do to retire. A task all of us have faced or will face.

I admire his ability to live what he himself calls his unconventional lifestyle. Not many have seen as much of the world as he has. Not many Americans know Saudi Arabia and its citizens as well as he does. Mark shows  what it is to be an American by traveling to spots where our kind is not common. An important role and one he does well.

 

Just a moment: My heart goes out to Colorado skier Mikaela Shiffrin. Puncture wound from the gate at the top of her run. Having had Kate with a feeding tube I know how troublesome these kind of wounds can be. Often requiring expert management. She’s a phenom not only while skiing at speed, but in her mental toughness, yet her public vulnerability, too. This last noticeable after her father’s untimely death a couple of years ago. She’ll come back and snag that 100th victory. I’ll be skiing with her when she does.

As long I’m writing about young women I admire, let me add, again, Zöe Schlanger. Her sensitivity to the Plant world, her depth of research, and her own inquisitive intellect. You go, Zöe.

 

I understand Joe. You had the power. You love your son. 45/47 will do the same for so many, too. Not sure what I’d do. An ethical/emotional vice I hope never to encounter. My take? It’s holiseason. With an emphasis on light and family and the warmth of human community. In the spirit of the season, I’ll say.

Family, Great Work, Literature, Paganism, Plants, Politics, Science

Blindness

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Samain and the Yule Moon

Sunday gratefuls: For all the ways we learn and express ourselves. The Ancient Brothers on Gardener’s 8 intelligences. My son, Seoah, and Murdoch. Coming in January. Going to Korea in May. Maybe with Ruth. Snow. Mary. Mark. My family spread along an Asian crescent from Korea to K.L. to Brisbane. Far from Rocky Mountain high.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Learning

Kavannah: Enthusiasm (Zerizut) and Joy (Simcha)

One brief shining: Lit the candle yesterday, wrote 500 words on a why/how to celebrate Yule essay, starting with my personal journey this year, intending to produce 8 essays, one for each of the Great Wheel’s holidays, using stuff I’ve written and collected over the years.

 

Spent yesterday in conversation over zoom with my son and Seoah in Songtan, Korea and Mary in Brisbane. Separate calls. Wrote to brother Mark in K.L. A bit weird. Sitting here on top of Shadow Mountain, in the Colorado Rockies, speaking directly to Korea and Australia. No latency. Clear pictures. Sound good. Pandemic tech and habits, a changed reality. Amazing to this small town Hoosier boy.

Shadow Mountain Home as imagined by chatbotgpt

Want to give a big shout out to Zöe Schlanger. An amazing intellect. Intrepid and careful reporting. The Light-Eaters. So many good quotes. Here’s an example. “I think of plants as primary and humans as secondary. Plants can do without us. We can’t do without plants.” Thank you, photosynthesis.

Reminded me of the Iroquois medicine man I’ve often talked about. He delivered a prayer for the Soil and the Rocks, the Trees and the Mountains and the Oceans, those who swim in the Water and fly in the Sky but never mentioned humans. Why? Because, he said, humans are the most fragile and vulnerable of all creation. Without all the Plants and Animals and Water and Soil, humans can’t exist.

In so many ways, so many obvious ways, we receive this message every day. Did you eat breakfast? Where did it come from? What was it? It was either a Plant or an Animal fed by a Plant. Did Night and Great Sol emerge this morning where you are? Imagine if Mother Earth decided to stop turning. How about the Water to fill up your Water bottle, the Water you used for that shower, or to wash your clothes and your dishes?

We humans consider ourselves agents nonpareil, yet we could not accomplish basic tasks without an assist from Mother Earth. Thankfully, she is on our side. Even when we are not on hers. Nor could we continue above ground and taking nourishment without her and her gifts. Why are we blind to this?

 

Just a moment: 45/47 continues to play tiddly winks with appointments to powerful positions. Now Patel, a man committed to gutting the FBI, nominated to head it. This is a revolution of the ill informed, driven by intentional ignorance and malevolence. Will the Senate do its job? Its advice and most critically consent role has never been more important.

Have any good will left over from Thanksgiving? Time to access it now.

Asia, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Great Wheel, Holidays, Judaism, Paganism

A Way Back

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Samain and the Yule Moon

Bush_turkey Jim Bendon from Karratha, Australia

Shabbat gratefuls: Body weight workouts. Brush Turkeys in Queensland. Lizards in K.L. Asia. Korea. Songtan. Beijing. Kate, my son, and I traveled there. 1999. Japan. Ichi-go, ichi-e. Ruth and Gabe. Mary and Mark. Oz and Malaysia. Black Friday. Advent. AI prompts. Yule. The 12 days of Christmas. Feeling flat.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: The Light-Eaters, Zöe Schlanger

Kavannah: Perseverance and chesed. Love.

One brief shining: Ever have that pit of your stomach feeling that something marvelous lay just out of reach, if only you could get yourself organized, find the time, open yourself fully to the possibility; I do each time I look at the green candle made by Vance Kitire, never lit since I bought it with the lovely throw rug years ago; and why you might ask, because whenever I begin and sustain a writing project I always light a candle before I begin writing for the day.

A Pagan Yule. Chatbotgpt

 

That candle contains the promise of an immersion in another world, a world of fantasy, one created by me in which I find life emerging in its own peculiar way, no less real than IRL. An embrace of another personality. Both within me and within the work itself. Yet the candle remains in its as created state. Untouched by flame. The flame that signals to me work has begun.

This does not, most of the time, feel like a burden. Most of the time it reminds me that I have another version of myself that I love. One committed to the daily work of writing a novel. I await his emergence again, his claim on my time, on my mind and heart, on my imagination. No, not waiting on inspiration, but on an inner consolidation of intention, idea, and joy.

How do I lift myself up? Find that small lever that elevates my mood? Not from the abyss, not from melancholy, but from, perhaps oh archaic sin, acedia*. I’m not a sin oriented guy anymore. Hamartia, missing the mark of my values, yes. Sin, no. But I do recognize the flat affect of acedia and when it dominates, as it does right now, I search for teshuvah. A way to return to the land of my soul. A way I’ve wandered off and for the moment have forgotten.

Mussar offers a way to adjust our inner life by acting as if. Acting as if we persevere, as if we have compassion, as if we experience joy. I’ve used mussar to get back to working out by working out. At first a bit at a time, then back to a full diet as my neshama “remembers” who I am, one who cares for his body.

Perhaps a writing schedule, as I have for Ancientrails. I long ago ritualized the writing of Ancientrails. It is the first thing I do after waking up, saying the shema, and taking my pills. I write until finished. Only then do I eat breakfast. BTW: Ancientrails will finish its twentieth year next February.

I could do Ancientrails, breakfast, write 500 to a 1,000 words on a project, then exercise. After that read. Commit to exercise during the day rather than a half-hour after breakfast. That could work. Think I’ll try it.

 

*The word acedia comes from the Greek word akēdeia, which means “an inert state without pain or care”.
Acedia is considered one of the seven deadly sins, or capital vices. It’s often described as a “noonday demon”. Some say that acedia can arise from the social and spatial restrictions of a solitary monastic life.

 

 
Denver, Family, Fourth Phase, Shadow Mountain

Thanksgiving Down the Hill

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Samain and the 2% crescent of the Moon of Growing Darkness

Friday gratefuls: Water Grill. The Spiny Lobsters. Fresh Oysters. Thanksgiving with Ruth and Gabe. Jen. Gus. LoDo. Denver. Down the Hill. Shadow Mountain Home. Ruby. With her Snow shoes on. Cold night. Living alone. Kate, always Kate. Talking to her. Ruth potentially on the Dean’s List. Her next semester classes. A history minor.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Gabe’s hug

Kavannah: Perseverance and chesed

One brief shining: Only a brief while before it swam in a large aquarium with many other Spiny Lobsters, then it boiled in a pot, got cleaved in half, plated with liquid butter and coleslaw, given to a server, and delivered to my bibbed presence where I took the small fork and deftly lifted most of its meat out of one half, dipped a chunk in butter, and the great circle of life went on.

Straight outta the waters of Southern California.

 

The Water Grill. A fancy, and by that I mean expensive, Sea food restaurant. It has a Seahorse sculpture over its door, but no signage visible from the street. My second Thanksgiving in a row eating a Thanksgiving meal down the Hill in Denver.

With two downtown Thanksgiving’s literally under my belt (ha) I’m curious about the number of people who no longer cook a meal for friends and/or family. The reason? Both times all street parking has been full and the restaurants I saw had packed tables.

The Bib

The Water Grill has many tables and booths, a big place with glass buoys made into chandeliers, old boat propellers and coral behind the booths. Full. And stayed full over the two hours Ruth, Gabe, Jen, and I ate there.

Don’t know about the others but my excuse is I no longer have the stamina, the standing in one place capacity to cook a full meal. When the bill came, I paid it, thinking about what I had really purchased. Sure, a meal. But that was secondary. What I really paid for was the two hours spent eating by Ruth’s side, talking to her about college, talking to Gabe. Jen.

Remember that Thanksgiving we ate at the Water Grill? When I was a freshman at UC-Boulder? We had Oysters and Spiny Lobsters! Oh, right. I remember.

I’ll remember the sudden and unexpected Bear hug I got from Gabe, from behind, as I got up to put my coat on. Heartfelt. And, from Ruth after that. A brief hug with Jen.

Brought to mind the Ira Progoff seminar in Tucson, April of 2014, when I realized we needed to move to Colorado to support the kids. The fruits of that decision as well as my decision to stay here, not move to Hawai’i. Which I could easily do now if I wanted.

Love is a verb and it becomes real, Velveteen Rabbit real, in moments like these.

Drove home into the Mountains as Mother Earth turned her other face toward Great Sol, the early Night fully fallen when I pressed the garage door opener and drove Ruby into her stall.

 

 

 

Holidays

Holidays

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Samain and the Moon of Growing Darkness

Thanksgiving: Aunt Marjorie. Uncle Ike. Many Thanksgivings at their house. All my relations. A Lakota phrase referring to Mother Earth, Great Sol, and all the other parts of creation on which humans depend. The Rocky Mountains. The Weather. Water in the Aquifer. Wild Neighbors. Arapaho National Forest. All Forests. The Atmosphere. Shadow Mountain Home.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Ruth and Gabe

Kavannah: Perseverance and chesed

One brief shining: Remembering Thanksgiving’s past and those who will be missed at the table today: Kate and Jon, my Son and Seoah, dogs circling the table hoping for a dropped piece of, well, anything, a happy babble of conversation rising and falling, the clink of serving spoons lifting mashed potatoes, stuffing, another slice of a tenderloin roast, the room smelling rich with the perfume of meat, Potatoes, Cranberries, Coffee and Wine.

 

And here we go. With Thanksgiving the pace of Holiseason picks up. December hoards the richest trove: Advent, Posada, Hanukah, Christmas, the Winter Solstice, Yule, Kwanza, and the transition to a new year.

Kate and I used to cook Thanksgiving dinners, then I did. For three years we bought Thanksgiving sides from Tony’s Market in Littleton and I made a tenderloin roast. Now I prefer to go to a restaurant. Last year at the Urban Farmer a stranger bought my meal for me. And not a cheap meal at that.

Today Ruth, Gabe, Jen, and I will eat at the Water Grill. They have a traditional Thanksgiving menu and their usual menu. Think I’m going to have Spiny Lobster with at least a half dozen Oysters, a salad. Perhaps crispy polenta. Maybe a Bluefin Toro Tartare. As well as the bill, of course. Grandpop’s treat.

We’re headed there because Ruth is a pescatarian. Think I will be, too, this Thanksgiving only.

Buddy Tom will share Thanksgiving with Roxann and Jessica at the Trillium in Mendocino, a favorite R&R spot for them. Roxann celebrates her 75th tomorrow at another of their favorites, Café Beaujolais.

Wherever and whoever you are: a Jesuit nun who was my first spiritual director told that me that gratitude was enough. Just enough. A thought for Thanksgiving.

 

Just a moment: Record Snow fall in Seoul, Songtan. Seoah ran in the Turkey Trot, fashionably attired in the best running wear. My son bought two Turkeys and will roast them for his squadron, also inviting their Korean counterparts to this American holiday meal. I wish they were here or I was there.

I’m thankful for our divided nation. From Sea to shining Sea. Alaska and Hawai’i, too. For all those who serve it in uniform and all those who would, in spite of our troubles, yearn to live here. Immigration is NOT a bug. It’s a feature. Ask farmers in Texas and the Central Valley.

Been watching a few episodes of Hawai’i 5-0. Kicks up the Hawai’i motivation I had a couple of years ago. Maybe Seoah and my son will retire there and I’ll finally end up there. Though I love the Rockies, I love Hawai’i, too.

 

 

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General

You’re Alive

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Samain and the Moon of Growing Darkness

Wednesday gratefuls: Ley Septic. Living Waters. Snow and cold. Great sleeping. Sue Bradshaw. Synthroid. Celebrex. Erleada. Orgovyx. The bubble gum and baling wire keeping me alive. Laurie’s Chi-Town Food Truck. Laurie’s dog. Joy and Kaitlan. Rich and Rick. Mary in Oz. (Aus). The Pacific. The Southern Ocean. The Atlantic. The Sea of Japan. The Yellow Sea. The South China Sea.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Mark’s new job

Kavannah: Perseverance and chesed

One brief shining: Snow came in through the screen of my opened bedroom window, sprinkling my head with a Mountain Winter baptism, Waters evaporated into the Sky, perhaps from the Pacific Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico, falling on my head, including me in the great cycle of Water, a most holy act of Mother Earth and her sacred Atmosphere, necessary for sustaining life, and preparing me for the life I lead today, this November 27th, 2024 life.

 

Thanksgiving is tomorrow. Disputed cultural territory, yet a beloved holiday, too. Now followed by Native American Heritage Day. Better known right now as Black Friday. Whenever potential customers go idle thanks to holidays, ads and special promotions announce its coming and try to wrest a few bitcoins from the collective purse. The curse of the holiday times.

Oh, part of that, too. Sporting events get scheduled. Plenty of seat time. On this point, see the aforementioned ads and special promotions times 2. Thanksgiving football. The Detroit Lions and the Chicago Bears. For example. In some instances the sporting event is the holiday: Superbowl, World Series.

I choose to let the curse be a mild one, granting the capitalists their pound of financial flesh. I can enjoy a meal with Ruth, Gabe, and Jen without participating too much. As our time at the Water Grill tomorrow will allow.

Family. Friends. Loved ones. Together, seeing, being seen. Hugs. Smiles. Reawakening old relationships, reinforcing new ones, sustaining active ones. Humans connecting around important themes: Gratitude, Light, Darkness, Sacred Nature and her progeny. Love.

As we all pass through this Holiseason, well underway, I hope you can take every opportunity that presents itself to pinch yourself, you’re alive! You have friends and family! And if not, my wish for this Holiseason is that you find one or the other or both.

 

Just a moment: Saw Sue Bradshaw, my PCP, a nurse practitioner and a sweet woman. Each time she sees me she takes my hand and smiles. I smile back, squeeze her hand. Healing before any talk or probing and prodding.

We discussed my multiple medications and conditions. I told her she was taking good care of me. Well, I’m trying, she said. Then added, look at you, you walked in here. I replied, Yeah, as we might say back home, above ground and taking nourishment.

 

How bout that cease fire in Lebanon? You go, Joe. Underappreciated, yet still putting in the hours and the big effort. A sad end to a good Presidency, perhaps now lifted a bit by a diplomatic holiday miracle. A late November surprise.