• Loneliness

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc and the Ancient Moon

    Tuesday gratefuls: Dan. Alan. Joanne. Snow. My companion Lodgepole greeting the Snow. Much as they greet Great Sol. Home. Sue Bradshaw. Josh. Proctitis. Feeling vulnerable. Alone. A white Snow Cloud filling the Sky. Electricity. Fitbit. My desktop and laptop. The internet. What a joy. A.I. Senate Navy Bean Soup. Corn bread muffins. Health

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Waking up

    One brief shining: We need the windows in our homes like we need our eyes, so we can see outside, right now my eyes turn to this computer screen, but every so often they turn up and look toward Black Mountain, see only the Clouds bringing the Snow, of course, too, my hands typing and the file cabinet and the wall, like the window view we see only a portion of the World around us, yet it is enough for the moment.

     

    With my visceral world calmed down, as it has been since Sunday morning after that no good, horrible night, I want to revisit my feelings of loneliness. They stemmed not from the bleed itself, but from the feeling of vulnerability it sent cascading through my soul. Looked at from today’s perspective that makes sense to me. What else is loneliness than a feeling of vulnerability in a world populated by over ten billion other humans? And none available when life gets scary, hard.

    I feel fortunate that for me the feeling was temporary, exacerbated by the depth of the night and the severity of my situation. Several folks have reached out since then, confirming what I knew-once that shock passed: there are many who would take my call, even come. I’ve returned, strengthened by those responses, to my usual alone, but not lonely. Visiting loneliness for an hour or so was a brusque shock; however, it gave me a window, see one brief shining today, into that narrowed and insecure experience.

    I’ll see Sue Bradshaw on March 12th and I’ve sent a note to Kristie, my oncology P.A. I want to be aware and ready if this happens again.

    Mentioning Kristie reminds me I’ve not remarked about my latest lab results. My PSA rose slightly, as did my testosterone. That may mean my cancer has begun to wake up from its chemically induced slumber. May not. Another round of labs-I’m a phlebotomy regular!-in six weeks rather than three months. If it’s rising again, we’ll wait until it hits .3 and then I’ll have another PET scan. That will determine a new course of treatment.

    Kristie tells me that even since I went on the Erleada and Orgovyx, now some two and a half years ago, other treatment protocols have been found. The ever pushing forward of prostate cancer research produces results helpful to me in real time. As a result, I’m not worried, more curious about what happens next.

     

    Just a moment: A friend from CBE recently returned from her months long stay in a Buddhist nunnery in India sent me a note. Since I was officially a Jew now, she said when I replied to her I had to kvetch about at least one thing. Kvetch=complain in Yiddish. I sent her a note with this.  My kvetch: Election year 2024. That one should be good for some months.


    📂This entry was posted in Family Feelings Fourth Phase Friends Health Politics

  • Life

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc and the Ancient Moon, now waning

    Monday gratefuls: Life. Familiar sounds as Shadow Mountain folks go off to work. The Sky like a polished katana. My buzzy body. Taking in our insults, regathering. My lev healed. For now. Rest days. Bereshit. Television. Soothing. Taking care. Of myself. Annie. BJ. Sarah. Phone call from Ruth. Gabe and his learner’s permit test. Taxes. Tis the season.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Steroids

    One brief shining: Our body carries the after effects of our lousy night, a bit shaky, thrown off, yet also eager to move on, get fed, go back to the usual diet and exercise routine, yet not yet, for the lingering sense, a drained out, hollowed feeling, goes back and forth, up our back and gut, into the shoulders, and thence directly to the mind where memory traces its account in blood.

     

    Blessed cessation. Oh, yes. When something not happening takes on an outsized significance. A quasi-normal day after a horrible night. Quasi because not confident in the not happening. Will this start up again? God, I hope not. Likelihood seeming less and less as the day wore on. Confidence increasing. This flare has ended. Still some laundry to do, but yes. Moving past this to healthy life again. Oh, thank you to the miraculous body who is me, who is our physical presence in the world. Who in spite of our troubles finds our center again, rushes to healing. Our journey together, my lev and my body, is the most ancientrail of all.

    As I learned, again, after Kate’s death, Great Sol appears anyway, throwing the bright light of fusion driven energy on the peak of Black Mountain. The Lodgepoles still reach toward Great Sol, eager for their daily nutrition. Maxwell Creek flows on down the Mountain, Kate’s Creek feeding into it not far from from Hwy 73. Neighbors get up and brush their teeth, eat breakfast, go to work. Our journey is brief, our significance most likely little. We sink quickly from sight and memory.

    Why then do we live? Why do we greet a return from illness or problems as a resurrection? A return to normalcy. Why? Because life is all we know. These cells of our humanness, so few compared to the others-just checked this out and turns out it’s not true. The best estimate, cited in this article: 1.3 microbiome cells to 1 human cell. Even with this estimate the reality is that our human cells are less than half of our body’s constituent cells. And, BTW: there are also viruses, fungi and archaea in addition to the microbiome’s bacteria. What even is “our” life? We have had no say in creating this astounding organism, this host-self, that wants most of all to continue to live. That is the existential imperative. We gasp for Air. We find Water. We eat each day. We do these things not out of choice, but habit, instinct. The lungs must have oxygen. Our cells must have Water and nutrition. So we organize ourselves around those needs. We live.

    Of course we can fancy this up with philosophy and religion. We can come to an awareness of living that raises our continued existence to the level of choice. Yes. But even then the biological imperatives must be met while considering this. What we do with this strange and momentary glance at reality depends on our learning, our choices, our dreams, of course. But deprive the body of air or water or food and no dream, even one of justice, will come first.

     

     

     


    📂This entry was posted in Feelings Fourth Phase Health

  • A lousy night

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc and the Ancient Moon

    Sunday gratefuls: Blood. Radiation. Prostate cancer. Great Sol. Joan. Alan. Cheri. Francesca. Shabbat. Conifer Medical. Movies. Returning to Seoul. 2:22. Going nova. Odysseus on his side. After having passed through the Scylla and Charybdis of Lunar landing. Space above and the Moon below. Scientists. Engineers. Space travel of all kinds.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Bleeding stopped

    One brief shining: In June of 2019 I spent thirty-five sessions under the mechanical dinosaur shape of the Cyberknife, lying quietly as it jerked and twisted its away around my abdomen, sometimes to jazz sometimes the blues sometimes Mozart all my choice; the trips to Lone Tree stopped in August but some of the side effects might come even years later Dr. Gilroy said. How right he was.

     

    A lonely night last night. One of those side effects, radiation induced proctitis, an inflammation of the lining of the rectum, kept me up last night. A lot of blood. I mean, a lot. My first thought was: this is where Kate’s decline began. And she had less bleeding than I had. Didn’t help. After the first session I called Conifer Medical. What should I do?

    Wait it out, use the suppositories. If you go to the emergency room, they can’t do anything for it, so they’ll put you in the hospital. Yep, that’s what happened with Kate. Don’t want to do that if I don’t have to. I didn’t. The oncall doc said I might have two or three more episodes but that it should quiet down after that. If not, call again.

    And so it did. Nothing since 2 am.

    If that’s TMI, sorry, but I wanted to give you the context for the real difficulty I had last night. I handled the bleeding and talking to the doc just fine. Didn’t want to, but I had to. I was calm.

    The real problem was this. I felt alone. Because I was alone and having a real crisis. When Kate had her bleed, I was there to talk to her, take her to the emergency room, stay there, wait. No Kate. The burden felt very heavy. Handling the crisis and handling the emotional weight of it. Having to make the decisions alone.

    I did go back to bed and got a good night’s sleep. That has helped this morning. I had to contact Alan and Joan to tell them I couldn’t make the concert this morning. Didn’t like that. I keep my commitments. And I couldn’t.

    This morning those feeling are gone, replaced by my usual alone but not lonely. Still. They happened, opened a hole in my life situation. Made me consider the downsides of living alone. At 77.

    Doubt anything will change. Don’t know what kind of change I could make short of living in a senior care setting and I don’t want that. Maybe consider who to call if such a thing happens again. Maybe talk to a couple of people.

    BTW: the radiation accomplished nothing positive.


    📂This entry was posted in Feelings Fourth Phase Health

  • Travel, Dreams

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc and the full Ancient Moon

    Shabbat gratefuls: Bereshit. Tetzaveh. Rashi. Creation stories. Becoming not being. Seeing things as they are. Finite. Decaying. Impermanent. Loosely tethered. Entropic. Dreams. Dreamers. Irene. CBE. The Socrates Club. Tom, feeling better. PSA. Testosterone. The truly ancientrail of cancer. Shabbat. Relaxing. No agenda. Reading, always reading.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Dreams

    One brief shining: Buddy Mark as Mario and Elizabeth as Babette in Nice for Carnival, a bawdy parade with barbed floats critiquing world leaders, later a trip to a Picasso pottery museum, and an archaeology museum with a generous estimate of human habitation in Provence, taking Mark says calculated risks, for instance, a portrait class next week. Go, Mario and Babette!

     

    I admire my friend Mark’s travel jones. Every once a while he has to get up and get outta here. Road trips. Trips to Asia. Mexico. The Caribbean. Nice. I have some of the same urges, yet I mostly let them rise and fall away. Hoping once the possibility of snow passes that I’ll get on my pony and ride, ride, ride. Guess that’s up to me, eh?

    My son may make a short visit to Arizona in the next month. If he does, I’ll get down there to see him. I can motivate myself for family. I’ve driven from Arizona to Colorado before. Doable.

     

    Yesterday got back into the dream group that Irene has run for years. She’s a member of CBE and coordinates an online dream group and an in person dream group at CBE. Often has dreamers (as Irene call us) from far away. Yesterday Jane in England and Scott in Harlem. Marilyn and Irv are in the group, too. They introduced me to it.

    A session runs two hours. Irene puts the names of those who have dreams in a hat and pulls one out. One dream per hour so two folks get a chance. The dreamer reads or tells their dream then we discuss it using the conceit of saying “In my dream I…” This means we’re not interpreting the dream for the dreamer, but offering insights as if the dream were our own. Sometimes someone will say, “My projection is…” Jungian influenced. As you might expect.

    I find it both fun and psychologically intense. A chance to go deep into yourself and into another person’s dream world.

     

    Two other stories I’m following. The Alabama supreme court’s designation of all embryo’s as children. Wowzer. Trump and the Senate Republicans all of a sudden all over IVF. As a good thing! This underlines my observation yesterday that Roe v. Wade’s demise will play a significant role in the Presidential election. GOP bad. Democrats good. C’mon. Nobody’s fooled by those attaboys for IVF.

    Odysseus. The moonlander. On its side, antennaes not pointed toward home, but still broadcasting. Alive, but injured in the landing. We can all relate, right? Reminded me of Bella the sushi delivering robot at Sushi Win. Endearing to think of a compromised machine struggling valiantly to complete its work.

    We’re entering a new phase in our relationship with machines. Uncharted. Strange. Not to mention, A.I.

     

     

     

     

     


    📂This entry was posted in Dreams Family Feelings Fourth Phase Friends Politics Science Travel US History

  • Shabbat and Political Optimism

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc and the Ancient Moon

    Friday gratefuls: Tom. Alan. Diane. Marilyn and Irv. Ginny and Janice. Janet. Luke and Leo. Rabbi Jamie. Jewish prayer and liturgy. Wild Neighbors. Shadow Mountain. Black Mountain. My Lodgepole companion. Great Sol. Odysseus gone to the Moon. Living alone. 77. Blood pressure. Prostate cancer. Riley. Ginny. The next generation. Mark and Saudi. The MIA and its troubles.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: The MIA (Minneapolis Institute of Arts)

    One brief shining: Sat there in my serious reading chair, my long time buddy Tom on the newly reupholstered couch, both of us with a can of seltzer water, both engaged in that mutual investigation of our inner lives that typifies our relationship, enjoying seeing and being seen.

     

    Already looking forward to shabbat. Interesting. It beckons me, the sabbath bride waving, coming closer. She is the Shekinah, a feminine metaphor for the godliness of becoming. She represents malchut, the manifestation of becoming that we experience each day, the destination sought by all the sefirot on the tree of life. Once reached the destination changes to teshuvah, return, return to the crown of creation, the keter. That cycling of sacred energy, of thought becoming plan, plan becoming actions, actions flowing into this world, making it and keeping it vital, is the One. The one is becoming. The becoming is one.

    Once again those words from a post earlier this week: prana, chi, life force, breath, soul, love, the sacred, the divine. That buzzing, blooming mix in which we all live and move and have our becoming. No wonder ancient healing technologies want to find and direct that energy, turn it toward wholeness rather than destruction. Whether it can be found through the instrumentalities of scientific inquiry does not matter. Empiricism has its limits. And one very clear one is its understanding of life itself.

    Whew. Well. That took a dive into the deep end. Let’s swim back toward the middle depths.

     

    My inner pollster/pundit/analyst has begun to smile. I know, we’ve all been there before and gotten burned. However, hear me out. Listened to an Ezra Klein podcast, “The Strongest Democratic Party that any of us have ever seen.” Came away from that feeling hopeful.

    Been considering these several things: First and foremost, the vacating of Roe v. Wade. A decision against precedent, against stare decisis*. This will mobilize women in red and blue states, their allies, too. It will be a mobilization against not just Trump, but against the Republican party because red states have pushed quickly into the no abortion ever under any circumstances zone. And, of course, the most recent and perhaps the most egregious post-vacating instance (though there are many from which to choose) in the discovery of the Alabama Supreme Court that all embryos are children. Because God said so.

    Second, the evidence in the Ezra Klein show of a solid and working political party ready to dive into the most consequential election of our history. A good organization is the sine qua non of electoral victory.

    Third, the orange one who in addition to ironically selling clown shoes has gone further into the weeds of his fever swamped mind than ever before. A dictator for a day? Really? Punish enemies using the Justice Department? Sic the Russians on NATO countries that don’t meet his criteria? Not to mention all those criminal and civil actions against him. I know all this only makes his base love him more, but it will not play the same way in the hearts and minds of independents and Republicans who have not lost their sanity.

    Fourth, the evidence in Heather Cox Richardson’s book, Democracy Awakening, about the many times we’ve faced authoritarian threats and overcome them. She shows that though we cannot be complacent, the historical view finds we can rally and defeat the enemies of democracy. May it be so.

     

    *”Stare decisis is a legal doctrine that obligates courts to follow historical cases when making a ruling on a similar case.” Stare decisis


    📂This entry was posted in Feelings Fourth Phase Friends Judaism Politics Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. Reimaging revelation US History

  • The Future is, again, Now.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc and the Ancient Moon

    Thursday gratefuls: Old friends and newer friends. CBE’s beginning and its flounders. Sushi Win and Bella, that cute robot waitress. Tom. Happy Camper. Conifer Cafe, 80 decibels. Yikes. Naps. New Mexico. Arizona. Utah. Colorado. Short trips. Israel. Hamas. Gaza. Two-state solution. The Moon in the Sky like a big pizza pie. Amore! Love.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Jews

    One brief shining: Hold your phone up to the bar code, press the link, up pops the menu, consider it while using the physical menu, order, then enter credit card data, press send, and a bit later Bella comes trundling out from her charging station with plates, Water, and glasses, wait a while longer and here comes spring rolls, tempura shrimp, and a pot of green tea, followed after another short wait by Bella’s return with a sushi roll, my hamachi carpaccio, press finish on Bella for the third time and she rolls away, her fetching backside complete with an LED sign reading Sushi Win that flashes across her darling metal shoulders.

     

    The future rolled up on Tom and me not in Silicon Valley or the tech wise Denver suburb called Tech Center, but in a sushi place trying to continue surviving. I met Bella last week on Valentine’s Day when I ate at Sushi Win with Luke. Tom and I share a fascination with scientific and technological breakthroughs, so we had fun meeting Bella, considering her potential future impact. We both took videos.

    As I wrote a week ago, many restaurants have experimented with new ways post-pandemic. Covid was hard on people, yes, but on restaurants, too. Fountain Barbecue has computer screens where you order and pay, wait until your order is done, then pick it up yourself. So last millennium.

    Each of the three times Bella came to our table, I found myself wanting to say hello, thank you, and good-by at the appropriate times. And, I did. This cued me in to a robotic future where our responses to the new machines in our lives vary by context. I responded to Bella as I was familiar to responding with a waiter. But a robot in my living room serving tea or cleaning floors would probably elicit a different response. Oh, excuse me. Could you be sure to get that area where the dog hair is? Thanks. Could you get me a beer and a hot dog? Yes, you can clear this up now. Different yet again. Could you hand me a 3/16th? Hold the car up here while I work on the tire. Sweep out the garage and return to your charging port. We’ll cut the grass tomorrow.

    Oh, the wonders we’ll see. The future rushing, leaping into our lives, coming soon to a restaurant table near you.

    Of course, A.I. Shifting the workplace yet again. Hitting some knowledge workers this time. Maybe covering school board meetings, reporting on last night’s football game, making travel plans and reservations, polishing or even writing that essay or think piece for work.

    Not to mention our machines headed to the moon, to low earth orbits and high. DNA editing. Zoom. Smart phones. Dumb users. Electric and self-driving vehicles. Gee whiz, Buck Rogers.

     


    📂This entry was posted in Feelings Fourth Phase Friends GeekWorld Science US History

  • This. That.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc and the Ancient Moon (92% Waxing)

    Wednesday gratefuls: Mario and Babette go to France. Tom goes to Evergreen. Mark (brother) may leave Hafar. New Mexico. 5 hours away. Marilyn and Irv. Primo’s. The Cutthroat in Bailey. Happy Camper. Jamie the phlebotomist. Blood draws. PSA and testosterone. Murdoch. Kep of blessed memory. Rigel, too. Gertie and Vega. Kate, always Kate.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Mario and Babette at the airport, ready to travel

    One brief shining: Unbutton my sleeve, roll it up above the elbow, set the elbow on the front rest of the phlebotomy chair, I’ll use a smaller needle she says to preserve that vein, little pinch, the needle is in and blood spurts out into tube number one, then tube number two, there you’re a tablespoon and a half less of a man.

     

    Yeah. Three months are up again. And this blood draw is significant. My testosterone should be up and as it goes up the likelihood that my PSA goes up rises along with it. Dr. Simpson told me, when we finished the second round of radiation, that there was a small chance I was cured. This is the test that might cancel that idea. Or, support the possibility if I get another undetectable PSA while my testosterone goes up. Not counting on either one. Results should be back this morning.

    On Friday I telehealth with Kristie. Assume I’ll have a new urologist/oncologist. As you may recall, my old one, Dr. Eigner, retired in December. Kristie and I will discuss what happens next in light of the results of the surveillance labs. Another step along this path.

    A bit of anxiety, peering into the unknown again. Between here and there.

     

    Breakfast with Marilyn and Irv yesterday. Always good to see them, get caught up. Primo’s. We were going to try the new Conifer bakery, Wicked Whisk, but it’s closed on Tuesdays. Driving to Primo’s on 285 there is a grand display of snow-capped Mountains in the distance, beyond the Platte River Valley.

     

    Going to be some folks here for my bar mitzvah. Some Ancient Brothers. Probably Pamela and BJ. I hope Gabe and Ruth can come. No real plans for an after party yet. The service is at 10 am so it would be way early for anything but a lunch or an enhanced oneg. The four of us haven’t gotten together yet and discussed what we might do. Whatever it is, it will involve food.

     

    I seem to have misplaced or outright lost a book. You might think this would not be unusual at my house, but you would be wrong. I have an excellent memory of where I last had a book. This one though, the Rights of Nature, which I’m reading for a Rocky Mountain Land Library book club has vanished from my sight. Frustrating because the book club meets on March 3rd.

    I’ve exhausted the possible places it could be and still not found it. I like to complete my assignments. Hard if I can’t find the book. Oh. Looked it up on Amazon. Bought it on Kindle. No hard copy to find. Guess that explains it.

     


    📂This entry was posted in Feelings Fourth Phase Friends Health Judaism

  • The Alexandrian’s Library

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc and the almost full Ancient Moon

    Tuesday gratefuls: Tom. My Lodgepole companion waving their branches with an early Morning Breeze. That faint blush of Great Sol on the peak of Black Mountain. Senate Navy Bean soup. Pretty good. Famous Dave’s cornbread. My kitchen. Dr. Jill and her needles. Acupuncture. Mourning and grief. Evening and Morning, the first day. Safeway pickup.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: My Lodgepole companion

    One brief shining: Stripped down to my underwear I crawled up on the massage table, stuck my face in the small ring jutting out from it, and lay there as Dr. Jill placed needle after needle after needle after needle, most with barely a prick, some though a bit more, as Dr. Ma says, she must have forgotten to sharpen those.

     

    Yes, another round of needling with no laughter. No Whale noises, thirty/forty minutes of lying down being one with the Chinese way. Dr. Jill felt up and down my spine, pushing here and there, then inserting a needle, a few in my leg. Sounds like something I will do every two weeks for a while, then maybe once a month. Stenosis doesn’t get better, the only treatment for it outside of surgery is symptomatic relief: physical therapy, acupuncture, NSAID’s, Lidocaine patches, steroid injections. Though I’ve ruled out that last one.

     

    Ana came yesterday, spiffed up the house. Having my house cleaned helps me in ways beyond sanitation and hygiene. Self-care. A clean house concentrates the mind, removes a distraction. An anxiety prophylactic. Same thing with organizing, re-organizing. Going to have Ana and Lita do my loft next time. I’m ready to get back up there for more than workouts.

    Had an interesting experience up there yesterday morning. I decided to look at my library as an outsider, what did it say to me about me? I started on the shelves devoted to Minnesota, the Great Lakes, natural history, glanced at my Civil War collection. Onto Hawai’i and the U.S.A. Biographies of Tesla. Oppenheimer. Einstein. Atomic era history. American history, the West. A shelf of books about the Enlightenment, natural theology, emergence, the American Renaissance. A few on Astrology. So many books. Plays. Emerson’s complete works. A few Russian novels. Reference books including the OED and the Grove Dictionary of Art.

    Of course there’s poetry, religions, especially Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and philosophy. Roman and Greek works. Latin texts. A shelf of Ovid related books. Celtic history, mythology. Magic. Great Britain. Novels, a whole bookshelf. Travel guides, military history, gardening and horticulture. Meteorology. And, of course, Art.

    As I walked slowly around the perimeter of the loft, I began to feel my self emerging, the one knit together over all these years, all those interests. Yes. This is me, or the tapestry of selves that through memory constitute my ever changing identity. A koan. If all these are my self, who now am I?

    This felt good, warm, self-acknowledging. Whether they have any practical benefit, my books, my passions have enriched my life, taking me to places I would not have been able to go alone. They have nourished my soul.


    📂This entry was posted in Feelings Fourth Phase Health

  • A Vital Reality

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc and the Ancient Moon

    Monday gratefuls: Early to bed, early to rise. Sacharit, the morning service. The Shema. Waking up. New life. Hello Darkness, my old friend. Shadow Mountain Home. February. Family. Murdoch. Kepler, of blessed memory. Kate, always Kate. Ruby, who needs a shower. Workout yesterday. Cardio. Labs this week. Snow. Warm weather. Books. Words.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Words

    One brief shining: My son came on the screen and we talked across nine thousand miles as if he were in the room or I was in his, Seoah bounced in smiling, Murdoch came over and put a paw on the table, now a dog of some years, gray showing on his muzzle.

     

    Prana. Love. Ruach. Neshamah. Chi. The Sacred. The Divine. Consciousness. Life Force. Psyche. Soul. Other words to add? Please. No syncretism or leveling here. No these do not mean the same thing. It is not the case, for example, that all religions have love as their main principle. We’d be better off as a species if they did, but no they don’t. I offered these words yesterday during the Ancient Brothers conversation about pan-psychism*.

    My point in this list lies not in their particular definitions but what, in my opinion, they point to. That is, many cultures, probably all though I don’t know how to know that, have an intimation of a reality somehow charged with vitality. Some have explicit views. The Celts, for example, had the Other World which sits alongside this one, permeable both ways. Jews see the world as one, interconnected and vibrating with energy. Some in Judaism call that vibration, God. Not me, but some. In Taoism chi animates and flows through everything. Chardin sees love as the essential oil of the universe.

    We live in a peculiar moment of history. Yes, in all those ways, too, but not my point here. In this instance I mean a world leveled by the forces of empiricistic and scientistic distortions. No God. No chi. No soul. No prana. Just what we can experience either through our senses or scientific apparatuses. In the Unitarian-Universalist movement this position had a nickname, flat-earth humanism. A world drained of color, meaning lost in a random number generator of a universe. Often with the added sea anchor of determinism, no free will. Automatons coming to life, then leaving it.

    John Dewey in his book Reconstruction points to this unresolved dichotomy between science and religious views that arose say before Francis Bacon. Dewey wants to reconstruct philosophy by using it to introduce scientific method to the consideration of ethics and morals. In the wrong hands this project could end up in the flat-earth camp. On the other hand if we admit to our conversation the wild world of quantum mechanics, the possibilities of string theory’s multi-verses, and as Tom mentioned yesterday, the dominant stuff of the universe, dark matter, dark energy, too, I imagine, we might find a way forward.

    A final point here. All of this requires a turn from the static ontology of being to the vital ontology of process.

     

    *Panpsychism is the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy


    📂This entry was posted in Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. Reimaging revelation

  • Prepping

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc and the Ancient Moon

    Sunday gratefuls: Pan-psychism. The Sacred. The Divine. Consciousness. Chi. Prana. Ruach. Neshama. Soul. Life force. A Mountain Night. The Moon casting light on the Snow, shadows of Lodgepoles. The neighbor’s security light. Cassiopeia. The Great Bear. Pleiades. Orion. My friend. The Mule Deer and the Magpie. Love.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Shadow Mountain Night Sky

    One brief shining: Each night I arrange my cache of blankets just so, switch on the electric one, wiggle in and wait for everything to warm up, while doing that I look up out my window to the northern sky and see Cassiopeia peek out from behind the same Lodgepole and find that comforting, some stability, predictability before entering sleep when, the rabbi’s say, your soul is taken from you which is why we Jews pray a prayer of gratefulness when we wake up, thanks for returning my soul. Resurrection.

     

    Preparations for the B’nai Mitzvah service began yesterday. The four of us studying the morning service together, the liturgy we will use on Shavuot. I attended by Zoom, wish I’d gone in person. Everybody was there but me: Rabbi Jamie, Kat, Laura, Veronica, and Laura Berman. Kat, Laura, Veronica, and I will celebrate our b’nai mitzvahs together. B’nai mitzvah = children of the commandments. Reflecting of course its more usual occurrence at puberty.

    At 77 I’m the oldest of the group by a good 10 years I’d guess. We’ve not exchanged ages. Initially, each of us would have had our ceremonies in Jerusalem, Veronica and me our conversions, Kat and Laura their bat mitzvahs. Now Veronica and I have been through the beit din and mikveh so we can proceed with our b’nai mitzvah.

    My torah portion is coming along. I’ve gotten reading it down. With vowels. On the day of though the torah has no vowels, so there’s more learning yet to do. How to read the same text without the pronunciation aid of vowel markings.

    Part of the preparation will involve choosing parts of the service we each will do in addition to our torah portions. I’m more than a bit nervous I might have to chant, or god forbid, sing. Not. My. Thing. I hope we can find a work around for me.

    This preparation fit well into my shabbat practice which includes torah study and reading for my conversion classes with Jamie. Last night I lit the candles at 5:16 pm, five minutes later than the week before. I’ll have the blessing memorized by this week or next.

    It may seem surprising that I’m as focused on ritual observance as I am, which is not very compared to what it could be. I find ritual does what it’s designed to do. Establishes a mood, separates a time or an event out from the mundane. After I light the candles, shabbat has begun for me. I settle into a quieter, more relaxed space. Immediately after I light the candles I go to my chair and read the week’s parsha. Perhaps some commentary. My shabbat has begun.

     

     

     


    📂This entry was posted in Judaism Shabbat Shadow Mountain