Dogs, Fourth Phase, Friends, Judaism, Politics, Shadow Mountain, US History, World History

Jewish Men Together

Leave a comment

Imbolc and the Snow Moon

Sunday gratefuls: CBE Men’s group. Orion. The Night Sky. The 1% waxing sliver of the Snow Moon. Ritalin. Ruth and the Flatirons. Gabe and college. And guitar. Tara and Eleanor. A Shadow playdate. Safeway Pickup. Silver Bistro. Cook Unity. Conquering the experience of pain. Back to working out.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Shadow and Eleanor zooming

Week Kavannah: Patience.  Savlanut. When I rush, slow down. When I want to speak, wait. When my inner agonizer arises, calm him, move on.

One brief shining: Tara brought Eleanor over, leggy curly haired and full of puppy energy Eleanor, who sniffed Shadow, Shadow sniffed back and the playdate was on as the two circled each other, smelling for information, then running full tilt in the back through Snow drifts, chasing, quarreling a bit, Shadow rolled over bared her teeth after saying I submitted now stay the hell away from me, a long conversation with my heart friend Tara as they played.

 

Dog journal: Shadow had her first playdate here. Not her last. I have a large fenced yard, almost an acre with Lodgepoles and an Aspen. Snow drifts that last throughout warmups because it faces north. In the Spring there will be Rabbits and Mice and Voles and Squirrels to chase. The occasional Mule Deer and Elk for Shadow to herd. A good place for Dogs. No Rocky ledges for Mountain Lions. Fence keeps out Coyotes. Safe enough during the day.

Like nanny’s at a Central Park Playground Tara and I let our Dogs run while we talked. Tara, like Marilyn, is part of MVP. She said yesterday that she and Arjan would take Shadow whenever I had to go somewhere. Limited prospects on that, but still, like the offer from my son and Seoah, appreciated.

 

CBE men’s group last night. We began to get down to it. We told some of our stories. Moving from Chicago. L.A. Florida. Minnesota. Buffalo. Dallas. To find our true home. Both in the Mountains and as Mountain Jews at CBE. Fleeing in-laws, a broken life, New York City. Looking for Mountains and trails. Quieter. Simpler. Often finding and not finding what we sought.

A question unique to this sort of group. How long can we stay here? Where will we go if things get bad? The question of 1930’s Germany. Of Babylon. Of Russia under the Tzars. Of the Inquisition era in Spain. As evil Donald continues to extend his poison from sea to shining sea and well beyond.

I felt for the first time that there may be a more important question than maleness, the nature of the masculine role in society for a men’s group. At least this men’s group.

Another factor. As Jamie observed, there aren’t that many Jewish men. In the world. What unique role might we have in a world bent on rushing headlong into a dangerous yesterday?

If these men commit, stay the course, this will be a fourth anchor point for me at CBE. Mussar/MVP. Torah study. Men’s group. Friends.

 

Feelings, Fourth Phase, Health, Politics

Inner Gyroscope

Leave a comment

Imbolc and the Snow Moon

Shabbat gratefuls: Snow. March. Shadow. Not quite potty trained. Great Sol. Toys for Shadow. Her food. Her wiggly happy greeting. Not allowing pain to rule. MVP. Seder. Venom’s Last Dance. Parsha Terumah. The Mishkan. Talmud Torah. Hanna Matsuri. Luau. My son. Seoah. Murdoch. Physical therapy. Amazon.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Doggy playdates

Week Kavannah: Patience.  Savlanut. When I rush, slow down. When I want to speak, wait. When my inner agonizer arises, calm him, move on.

One brief shining: After my nap, my body ached, I didn’t want to get up to move to do this anymore this weakness this doldrum of the daily life; then it was right then I began to throw my covers off saying to this too old too soon guy that no this weakness this sapping of the life force did not represent my nefesh it was my fear and my doubt so get back to your workouts your smiles your Shadow. And I did.

 

A Da Vinci-style blueprint sketch of your inner gyroscope, complete with intricate mechanical details, rotating rings, and Renaissance-style annotations.

Another tough week at times. Mostly coincident with back pain. When tired and in pain, I find my inner strength weakens and the yetzer hara begins to take hold, dragging me back toward the slough of despond. Dredging up the what are you doings? The what sort of life is thises? The inner castigator. You should act politically. Write another novel. Stop watching so much TV. Be a man, not a patient. You know. That sorta thing.

Eventually my strong inner gyroscope rights from being pushed over by reactivity and shadowed understandings of reality. Puts these thoughts in context of my life, of my strong purposes now: Being a friend. Being a family guy. Loving Shadow. And myself. Learning and sharing about the New Apostolic Reformation. Writing Ancientrails. Learning Mussar. Studying Torah and other ancient texts. Sitting in the Mountain world, feeling its changes as Snow and Cold, Mule Deer and Elk gather round in their most ancient of all ways.

Life without a solution to pain challenges the soul. So does each day of our lives. It’s our task, and ours alone, to find the footholds on this technical climb and scale the rock face, as always with no rope.

 

Just a moment: How bout that live TV roast of former ally, Zelensky? The United States has become, in the scorching hot winds since January 20th, a thug nation. Extorting a nation when it’s down for its natural resources. Demanding them as vig for all the money spent on their defense.

If this government were an ordinary mobster on the streets of New York City or Philly, there would be a task force out to put them in jail. Instead they control the world’s most powerful military, led a hostile philistine take over of the Kennedy Center, and seem more focused on destroying governance than governing.

Note that here in the Rockies, not too from the Gulf of America, I’m writing this in the official language of our country, English, with no help from immigrant labor and a safe distance from those war-mongers in the Ukraine.

 

 

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Politics

Morality Plays

Leave a comment

Imbolc and the Snow Moon

Friday gratefuls: Alan. Marilyn and Irv. Snow. March, our big Snow month. Shadow. Difficult nights sleep. Ramadan. Elon Musk, a real Bond villain. Mussar. Hana Matsuri. Torah study. Men’s group. Smart phones. The internet. The cloud. Clouds. NOAA. National Weather Service. Critical government services.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: The sound of Shadow eating

Week kavannah: Netzach with zerizut and simcha

One brief shining: Driving up the hill Tuesday after lunch with Alan, Denver temperature 66 degrees, climbing on 285 past the Hogbacks, past Indian Hills, past Windy point, temperature in the low 50’s, by the time I reached Shadow Mountain Home the air was 47 degrees, 19 degrees cooler than Denver.

 

60 years ago I was a freshman at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana. In my first semester I joined the Scarlet Masque, a group of actors who put on plays for the town of Crawfordsville. Guerilla theatre had a moment in the mid-1960’s and we decided to perform medieval morality plays on the main commercial street of Crawfordsville.

Medieval morality plays convey straightforward messages about good and bad, sin and redemption. They present difficulties for actors because the lines rhyme. Here’s an example from the Castle of Perservance:

MANKIND:
What need I toil, or sweat, or strive?
Why should I labor, while I am alive?
Gold and silver will serve my will,
And I shall do what I like still!

BACKBITER:
Well spoken, my jovial lad!
Hold fast to pleasure, be never sad!
Why fret and fast, why should you care?
Eat, drink, and make good cheer,
For life is short, and death is near!

MANKIND:
Ha! By my soul, thy words are sweet,
And thus my heart shall take its seat.
A lordly life shall I pursue,
And bid those beggarly monks adieu!

This is, I admit, a long winded introduction to my real point. Over the last six months or so, I notice I’ve drifted in my reading and in my television watching to contemporary morality plays. I’ve read mysteries and thrillers. I’ve watched police procedurals, movies about assassins, the FBI, science fiction movies about alien invasions.

What do they share in common with the medieval morality plays? They present clear messages. Good Bond. Bad villain. Good police, bad criminals. Bad arms dealers, good assassins. Over the course of 45 minutes to an hour and a half, though the battle goes back and forth with the outcome often in doubt, in the end good triumphs. The vanquished bad actors get what’s coming to them.

Ah.

It took me until last week to realize why I felt soothed by these works. So much in the world and in the U.S. seems an inversion of values I hold close. US friends with Russia. Extorting Ukraine for precious metals. Gutting NOAA and the National Weather Service. Finding money for deficit increasing tax breaks in programs like Medicaid and food stamps. Not only are the bad guys not getting punished, they’re making front page news daily.

Not so in NCIS: New Orleans. That wife who poisoned her husband and brother with polonium. Behind bars. Or, FBI. The three terrorists who tried to bomb a baseball game in Central Park? Foiled and arrested.

BTW: Whose name could I have replaced Mankind’s with in the excerpt from Castle Perserveance?

General

Makes my heart sing

Leave a comment

Imbolc and the sliver of the Birthday Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Wiggly, happy Shadow. Amy. Sit, Shadow. Down, Shadow. Touch, Shadow. Shadow work. Ivan Illich. Bringing liberation theology to North America. Cornel West. Mary Radford Reuther. The Iroquois medicine man. Planting the peace tree. Detroit. Spring Ephemerals. Crocus. Grape Hyacinth. Snowdrops. Waiting for Aspen Catkins and Lodgepole Anthers. Black Bears. Big March Snows still on the way.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Adopting Shadow

Week Kavannah: Netzach with a dash of zerizut and simcha

One brief shining: A Mountain Spring follows heavy Snow like the 4 feet Kate and I came home to in 2016 after my son and Seoah’s wedding and our trip to Singapore; the melting Snow feeds the Colorado River on the western side of the Continental Divide and the Platte River on our eastern side which then carries Shadow Mountain water from Cub, Blue, North Turkey, and Maxwell Creeks, all flowing into Bear Creek, to the Gulf, not of America, but of Mexico.

 

Dog journal: Amy came again yesterday. We worked again on sit, down, and now touch with an outstretched palm. Touch leads to the command, come. We both agreed that Shadow’s making real progress. Less skittish. More exploring. Learning commands.

Shadow now moves through her space with no fear, checking things out. She came out of the laundry room a moment ago, then went over to smell the bag of her food. Telling me in dog language that eating anytime now would be welcome. Almost 7 am so it’s the right time. Gonna pause writing for a moment and fill her food bowl.

Crunching sounds. A sip of water. Shadow’s breakfast. Soon it will be outside again.

Learning how to teach her, how to let her make her way through trauma and puppyhood makes my heart sing.

 

Getting ready, with reluctance, to work on my taxes. It’s not hard once I get into it, filling the organizer for Phil, my accountant. Mailing it. Same with the final push for Ruth’s 529. This week. Stuff that is hard for me. Why? Don’t know. Something about patience for details. For which I have little. Maybe numbers?

Went through a period where I didn’t claim my charitable contributions because I don’t believe charity should get a tax right off. It should be done, I reasoned, for its own sake, not for the sake of saving taxes. A purist at heart. Gave that up. Though I still believe it would be a more honest world if the rich didn’t get tax benefits for what they perceive as charity.

 

Just a moment: Fitness and I have had a struggle over the last six months. I quit. Then went back. Quit again. Moved all my stuff downstairs to make working out easier. Did a few turns on the treadmill, some resistance. Stopped again. Did 68 minutes of cardio while trying to find Tupelo Honey. A testimony to neither my discipline nor my common sense.

Right now I’m waiting again. Don’t have to, but I am. Pain doc ordering up home-based physical therapy. Want to work that as part of my  routine. What routine, he says? I know I need this. But self-care fatigue has me in its grip.

Denver, Fourth Phase, Friends, Health, Politics

My Aching Back

Leave a comment

Imbolc and the Birthday Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: Shirley Waste. Shadow. More out and about. Alan. Tupelo Honey. Ritalin. My aching back. Limiting. Good sleeping. 23 degrees. Some wind. Great Sol. Sunlight on the Lodgepoles. Taking out the trash. Vince. Marina. Ana. Sunny days.  The Mountains.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Shadow’s wiggly energy

Week Kavannah: Netzach with a dash of zerizut and simcha

One brief shining: Each night before I go to bed, my baby, I say the shema: Hear oh Israel, yod hey vav hey is (God), yod hey vav hey is One, touch my menorah and say I am content with what I have and I’m content with who I am, and immerse myself in this ancient faith made new by Reconstruction, by my own journey, by Kate’s, by its insights into the nature of this strange efflorescence of the universe knowing itself, humanity

 

Aversive conditioning. Wanted to try Tupelo Honey, a Southern restaurant in downtown Denver, a downtown I do not know well, having had few occasions to drive into it or park; I suggested it to Alan for my birthday lunch, he agreed; he could walk from his condo.

About noon yesterday my back ached. I didn’t know where I was. Mostly I wondered why the hell l had suggested a downtown location. Turns out I parked not too faraway from the restaurant, but my lack of familiarity with downtown Denver, and my silly attempt to use Google’s walking directions led me far away from my goal. Lunch with Alan.

I arrived after a tortuous route, twenty minutes late, my back screaming. No celebrex, remember? Turns out that part of downtown is known for its complexity. So, now I know, eh? Pain does not encourage a thoughtful or rational approach to problem solving. The body wants it to stop. That distracts the mental work necessary to, say, follow a confusing map in a no through streets part of the city.

Food was good. Not great. I expected the kind of fried Chicken my Aunt Mame used to make at the Copper Kettle in Morristown, my mom’s hometown. Nope. A thin skin with some sweetness in it. The rosemary and thyme crispy potatoes were good.

Walking back to the garage Alan went with me. I had already tumbled to the fact that it was much closer than my original route. My back had already gotten agitated and didn’t calm down until I was back home. If I go into Denver again, I may park, as Alan suggested, at a strip mall outside of downtown and Uber in.

Not gonna be anytime soon.

 

Just a moment: Talked to buddy Paul Strickland yesterday. He and his wife, Sarah, attended a conference in Camden, a Maine seaside town. Conference title: Democracy Under Threat. His thoughts after the conference have not yet congealed, but he did report some interesting facts.

One especially chilling number. Counting Russia, China, and India as authoritarian governments plus smaller countries like Belarus, Hungary and many others, some 71% of the people on earth live under authoritarian regimes. 71%. That means democracy serves less that 29% since some of those are monarchies, but not necessarily authoritarian. A sad day for our planet.

Dogs, Kabbalah, Mussar, Plants, Science

Growing My Soul

Leave a comment

Imbolc and the Birthday Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Tupelo Honey. Birthday lunch. Alan. Downtown Denver. Challenging myself. Adopting Shadow. Good CT scan. CT. With contrast. The wide world of medical imaging. Waiting rooms. Hospital parking lots. Good sleep. Great Sol. Lodgepole shadows.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: I.V.’s

Week kavannah:  Netzach with zerizut and simcha

One brief shining: Shadow curls her small head up toward my chair arm, her dark eyes with black pupils looking into mine, asking for food which I have placed behind the chair-where she usually eats, perhaps she’s forgotten and I’ll have to show her. I’ll give it a bit, better she finds it for herself.

 

Never thought I’d be talking about growing my soul. Yet. As I’ve come to understand the term, I do. What is my soul? Multi-layered. The first and core level is the nefesh. What is the nefesh? The nefesh is that which identifies me as human.

I say it’s DNA. Why? Because DNA links me to all living things and identifies me as part of Mother Earth’s evolutionary experiment while giving me a unique location in that experiment and a uniqueness, too, within my species. Being part of the grand evolutionary experiment also connects me to the organic and inorganic building blocks which allow that experiment to flourish, including the boundless fusion energy of Great Sol which passes its vitality from the solar furnace to leafy, green plants.

The neshama soul grows in the space between the DNA created unique me and the outer world in which it moves and lives. Heidegger called this the dasein. There can be no neshama without the nefesh, but likewise there can be no nefesh without being-in-the-world, dasien, as a shaper of that world and as a being shaped by that world.

As my nefesh encounters the world as it is, that encounter flows dialectically, into my dasein and out to the dasien of the other. In that tension comes the vitality, the livingness of being alive. Note that in this view there is no clean, clear distinction between me and thee. Or, me and my Shadow. Or, my favorite Lodgepole. Lodgepoleness flows into me and Charlieness flows into the Lodgepole. We are both changed during the encounter. Think of the Japanese idea of forest-bathing.

We can come to notice that our actions have influence on others and theirs on ours. How do we live into those encounters, how can we be there with the other fully? That’s where disciplines like mussar come in. There are ways of becoming that enhance our encounters and ways that diminish them.

Say my dasein includes Shadow. How I approach her affects her dasein so that we either grow closer to mutuality or further away from it. If I move suddenly, I notice, she retreats, moving away from the boundary of my dasein. That tells me, in my Shadow inflected dasein, to move more slowly in her presence. We can call that realization an expression of chesed, of loving kindness, which allows our dasein’s to come closer, to increase our intimacy.

Just where my head went this morning. From my dasein to yours. Good day.

US History, World History

Time Travel

Leave a comment

Imbolc and the Birthday Moon

Monday gratefuls: Marilyn and Irv. Shadow. Not quite potty trained. Protein. 24″ of Snow on Saturday. CT Scan today. Ancient Brothers. Dog toys. Dog bed. Settling in with Shadow. Ratzon. Will. Desire. Zerizut. Enthusiasm. Simcha. Joy. Feeling rested. Safeway pickup. Living in the Mountains. Yesterday’s world brought to you by Don and the MAGAs.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Shadow

Week kavannah: Netzach with a dash of zerizut and simcha

One brief shining: As the policy of he who shall remain shameless becomes clearer, a strong whiff of steam engines and ocean liners, La Belle Epoque when might still meant right for the Tsars, for the Prussians, for colonial militaries dividing up Africa, as an isolated America sat it out save for brief adventures to Cuba, later to the Philippines while satisfying its Manifest Destiny by pushing slowly westward and killing nations indigenous to this continent. Ah, the days of yesteryear.

Never thought I’d have a chance to relive the days of robber barons. We’ve moved into the world of Theodor Drieser’s  The Financier, the Titan, the Stoic, His trilogy about Frank Cowperwood. Of Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street, Babbit. Back when the U.S. made its bones on the backs of Native Americans and Chinese coolies, rather than foreign adventures like the Europeans.

Sure, the moves of a strongman are redolent of many eras, but none so much in the U.S. as when men like Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, James J. Hill, J.D. Rockefeller had their way with our young country. Did you watch the coronation? In the most prominent rows, behind the King’s family were Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, and Sundar Pichai.

What’s next? Bring back vaudeville, silent movies, Ziegfeld’s Follies.

All I’m saying here is that Trump is less of an anomaly than he seems. Pushed up  against the recent past, yes, but as a historical type? No. What is different is that he’s combining robber baron domestic policies and the expansionist, naked self interest foreign policies of that same era, too.

We’ve allowed him to shuck off the progressive policies that began to take hold after Teddy Roosevelt’s trust busting and drag us back to a time not long after we had to fight a war to end slavery. This is the reactionary way, a turning back to old ways of oppression and wealth concentrating.

Where or how can this end? I’m not sure. By the time 2028 rolls around, we’ll be firmly lodged in 1928. You know what happened in ’29.

 

Just a moment: CT scan today. Aortic artery aneurysm. Someday soon an MRI for my hip and lower spine. Perhaps a PET scan later in the year to check on my metastases. I’m taking a tour of imaging devices. Isn’t medicine fun? Oh, and I had full dental x-rays last week. See inside of me. Now.

Yes, life at the most personal continues even while our nation twists and turns on its allegiance to a sad man, a bad man, behind blue eyes.

 

 

 

GeekWorld, Politics, US History

Reactionaries and Electronic Communication

Leave a comment

Imbolc and the Birthday Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Shadow. Potty trained. To the outdoors! Sit and down, making progress. Shadow Mountain under 18 inches of white Snow. Vince. Salaam. Dog watcher. Democracy under Threat. Paul, in Camden. Mark and the desert. Mary and Oz. My son and Seoah, in the former Joseon Dynasty. Lodgepoles with unloaded Branches. Aspen’s gray-green against the Snow. My right hip and back.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: No poop in the house this morning

Week Kavannah: Netzach

One brief shining: Snow once more high on the Trees, soft, undulating, imitating the Rub al’Kahli, the empty quarter on the Saudi peninsula, where Bedouins rode camels, eating dates off Palms at an Oasis, while here the tall monarchs of the Forest, the Moose, use their long legs to find food even in a white desert

 

Got up this morning, picked up my hearing aid from the night stand. I’d left it there, forgetting to take it out to its charger. After letting Shadow outside, I looked for it. Where did I leave it. It needs to charge for the Ancient Brothers conversation at 8.

Imagine my surprise after searching upstairs and down, high and low, to find it where I automatically put it, behind my ear. Routine. Who says aging isn’t funny?

 

Firing the Joint Chiefs, military advisors to the President. Now the three-star Generals who run the Judge Advocates in the Navy, Army, and Air Force. Because they tie the hands of soldiers trying to win wars, Hegsteth says. Calling them jagoffs. Oh. And 8% cuts to the military over each of the next five years. Do the math. Using military bases and gitmo for detaining immigrants. This administration wants to bend the military, make it serve partisan politics. And to act in this country.

Add that to Trump’s coziness with Putin and J.D.’s embrace of the German Far Right. Whaaa. There may be an overall playbook at work here, but it looks like  something simpler, whatever they used to do, we’ll do the opposite.

This must feel revolutionary to the MAGA base. It’s not. It’s reactionary in both a literal and figurative way. It’s not making America great again, it’s making America a different country, yet not a better one, just one defined by greed, naked self-interest, and diminution of the other.

 

Just a moment: Conversation. Communication. Interaction. Topic of an Ancient Brothers’ morning. Is the screen captivity of Millenials, Gen Z, Gen alpha a plague on human interaction? Or, is it a new form of being human on a crowded planet. Let’s bracket the insidious software of Tik Tok, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Not because their manipulation of the human mind isn’t real, effective, and pervasive, but because I want to find the communication possibilities wherever they are.

Conversation in 3-D most would consider the gold standard. Neuroatypicals may be an exception. Conversation on the phone or on a service like zoom might come next. Then, e-mail. Texts. These are mediums where your message has no software filtering, magnification, or distortion.

After these more transparent communications come what I would define as social media. Especially the four mentioned earlier. Even these can be used for communication, especially for wide dispersal of a message. The difference is in the software that encourages liking, uppolling, changes of who sees and receives your messages and whose messages you receive and see.

There is in them a capitalist hand that wants profit, not better communication. What matters is the stickiness of the platform. Eyeballs. Length of time on the site. It seems obvious to me that serious and deep interpersonal communication in such an environment has more challenges, invisible levers, and problematics.

How does all this effect culture? The ability to form deep and meaningful friendships, find love? I just don’t know. Much more to learn here.

Dreams, Fourth Phase, Health

On Transition Road

Leave a comment

Imbolc and the Birthday Moon

Shabbat grateful: Torah study. Rabbi Jamie. Bev. Luke. Exodus. Manna. Palestinians. Gaza. West Bank. Israel. Amalek. The sins of the fathers. Whose fathers? Trump and Putin. Shadow. Sit. Shadow. Down. Shadow Mountain. The Shadow. Psyche’s Shadow. Great Sol. Conversation. Zoom. Connection. Democracy. Autocracy. Oligarchy. Gerontocracy. Kakocracy. Kleptocracy. Choose.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: A Puppy’s Eyes

Week Kavannah: Netzach

One brief shining: Wind pushes into the room behind my chair, the outside door open awaiting a small Shadow to come in from the cold, to trust that the inside has as much safety for her as the outside, her hesitation mirrors her mind, caught between risk and certainty, fear and trust, the past and the future. Savlanut.

 

Dream group yesterday. On my dream. Sort of a dry hole at first. Then, climbing up from the car with an empty fuel tank, up from the rich brown of a dirt road leading away, trusting that the cliff I climbed would lead…somewhere. Somewhere with more fuel for the road. Gabe was there. Gabe the grandson and Gabriel the angel. Quietly accompanying me in my new home, hunting for fuel after finding a gas can.

I came away with the sense of an after life. After the fuel runs out for me on this lower level, driving even then toward the unknown. My sense of curiosity carrying me up over the rocks of doubt waiting for a message from Gabriel about where to find my next fuel source. Trusting that it’s there in this new place.

 

Had to break off from dream group for a call from my palliative care nurse practitioner. A new woman on Zoom. Ele. I liked her. We talked about my, to me, puzzling and disconcerting level of fatigue. Each task I choose to do is a one-off. As much as I can handle. Unloading and loading the dishwasher. Rest. Go pickup groceries, put them away. Rest. Stand while prepping a meal. Rest while eating the meal. You get the idea.

I asked her about this and for the first time someone explained this fatigue to my satisfaction. Even though my PSA is stable, she said, the cancer is not gone. My body has to do all of its usual work plus absorb/resist the work load the cancer places on it, too. Add in a still uncontrolled hyperthyroid condition, low testosterone, and harsh anti-androgen drugs. Tired. Always.

 

No wonder I’m cycling through thoughts of dying, of places after death. No wonder at all. Even so. I’m alive and alert though perhaps not vivacious. My sacred community of friends and family, Shadow, Wild Neighbors and Mountains, Lodgepoles and Aspens keep me in this day, this February 22nd life, pull me back from a doom scrolling view of my future.

 

Like the Hebrew slaves who found themselves in a desert wilderness far from their Egyptian homes, without the minimal comforts they enjoyed there, it’s easy to want to go back to a latter day. A day when I could do home chores with ease. Yet I have been released from the bondage of performance and achievement. And, I don’t want to go back.

I want to learn the lessons of this time, this time before dying, no matter how long or how short that might be. Why? Because that’s all we can ever do. Learn today’s lesson. Celebrate these moments.

 

Dogs, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Health, Judaism, Mussar

Dream Time

Leave a comment

Imbolc and the Birthday Moon

Friday gratefuls: Big Snow. Shadow, the good Dog. Murdoch. My son. Seoah. Vince and Snow plowing. Feeling well rested. Pain doc. Chocolate. Hawai’ian dark chocolate with Macadamia Nuts. Chocolate coffee beans. Mary in Oz. Diane, healing. The rise of autocracies. King Donald. A third term. Prostate cancer.

BTW: If you are new to Ancientrails or have forgotten, we Jews are grateful for everything that happens since it is all part of the One. Doesn’t mean we like all of it or don’t want/need to change it. But even King Donald is part of our wonderful, amazing, grace filled World.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: My sacred community of family and friends

Week Kavannah:  Persistence and grit.  Netzach.

One brief shining: I looked up and noticed Shadow returning to her food bowl, first licking up crumbs, then trying to eat the yellow and purple Crocuses off the Portmerion pattern, digging her puppy teeth into the porcelain with a grinding sound, going after those flowers, puzzled by their intransigence. I will get her a raised set of stainless bowls, but not right now, so she’ll have to deal.

 

Here is your illuminated manuscript-style illustration, capturing the essence of the Stable Rock of Shadow Mountain, Maxwell Creek, and the sacred wildlife in a medieval bestiary aesthetic with golden detailing.

Dream last night: I had moved to a new city and decided to follow a long dirt road that wound far away from town, visible for a long way until it turned right around a low hill. Didn’t get very far because I hadn’t checked the gas gauge. E. I pulled to the side, got out and walked over to a rocky cliff.

Began to climb. I got the top after some effort and found a place that looked like it would have a gas can. When I went in, grandson Gabe was with me. Together we looked through a lot of different shelves, finally locating a gas can which I bought.

We walked back outside to fill it up and where I thought there would be gas pumps, there were none. Oh, well. We began walking, asking people if they knew where we could get gas. That’s all I remember.

 

Saw the pain doc on Wednesday. Rode up in the elevator with a guy saying he was heading in for the pain and torture spot. Turned out we were both going to Mountain View Pain Medicine. He to p.t., me to an initial consult.

When I explained my lower back pain, how it drastically limited my mobility and gave me excruciating pain after my drives to Boulder and back, the P.A. went into a dialogue that confused me at first.

I’m a rule follower, she said. If we’re going to work with you, you’ll have to do conservative therapy and come in here once a month. Then, I tumbled to it. Can my primary care doc manage my tramadol? Oh, yes. All the hesitation dropped away. This was a continuing, and welcome, echo of the oxycodone addiction crisis. No pain doc will risk their practice by giving away narcotics.

She suggested an MRI which I agreed to. Sometime in the next two weeks. Get to the root cause of my pain. Yes. What I’ve wanted for a while now. Admit to a little anxiety about incidental findings with this so careful an imaging tool since the source of my pain and the areas of my metastases coexist. Might find more cancer. Hope not.

 

Just a moment: Got into a funk yesterday. Ached. Pain less well controlled after no more Celebrex. Maybe a little tired. Fatigued by whatever: uncontrolled hyperthyroidism, very low testosterone, the effects of my cancer drugs. Wondering if the shortness of breath, weakness meant (against current evidence) my cancer was advancing. Thought about not going to mussar, too tired. Too much effort.

Nope. My kavannah, netzach, said, get up and go anyhow. What a good choice. I’d only missed two sessions, but I got some glad you’re backs. Geez. Also, my funk disappeared in the solvent of friendship, study, seeing and being seen.

Had a time afterward with Rabbi Jamie looking for a text to use for MVP in two weeks. We laughed a lot together. A good friend.

On the way home I remembered, as I sometimes have to do, that I am alive and loved today, in this February 21st life, no matter what the future holds. Be gone, funky thoughts!