Family, Friends, Holidays, Judaism, Politics

Close. Yet. Unaffected.

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Imbolc and the Moon of Tides

Shabbat gratefuls: Class with Jamie and Luke. Cardio. A transformation grid. Shadow, a sweet girl. Iran. Israel. Gaza. The West Bank. War and peace.

Rene Good. Alex Pretti. Say their names.

Sparks of Joy and Awe:  The Night Sky

 

Week Kavannah:   Yetziratiut. Creativity.   Feedback on my new writing style.

 

Tarot: King of Vessels, Heron

One-legged I stand beside my inner river, feeling joy, fear, inspiration. Purim. Starting the trial. Writing.

One brief shining  Life pushes things together: Warren’s sister dies. We celebrate Purim.  Explosions wrack the Middle East.  Iranians die. Dawn comes to Shadow Mountain. YHWH echad.

Shadow Mountain continues its snowless winter.

Trump strikes Iran. Executive power abused as royal decree.  He uses, like the neo-royalist he is, American fighter jets and bombers, aircraft carriers, to enforce his personal grievances. No checks. No balances. The sound of bombs shattering ears.

My brother, Mark, in Hafar, Saudi Arabia, lives 156 miles from Iran. Just across the Persian Gulf. He says there are no military targets nearby.

A similar situation. In 2005 I helped Joseph move. Late August. While we carried boxes into his Breckenridge apartment at 9,000 feet in the Rocky Mountains, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. I felt lucky. 9,000 feet above sea level. In the heart of the continent. Lucky and a bit, what? Guilty. Privileged. Distant.

Close. Yet. Unaffected.

This sabbath I write at my own mountain retreat. Far from D.C. Far from the Persian Gulf.  In my country’s name ordnance falls from the sky. Persians seek shelter in Tehran. Jews seek shelter in Tel Aviv. Jerusalem.

I seek shelter. From my own government. Find it in the One.

Warren’s family grieves. His sister died this week. Pneumonia. MS. A creative heart stilled. I’m far from that, too. St. Paul.

This Monday evening. Purim. Drink until you can’t tell the difference between Haman and Esther. A celebration of a female hero who stood up to Haman, the Persian royal vizier who would destroy the Jews.

Kate loved dressing up for Purim. She would wear a coat she made for Joseph, a coat of many colors, and a floppy hat. Our first Purim at Congregation Beth Evergreen, 2016, my mouth dropped open.

Dan Herman, then president of the board, came in carrying a case of beer on his shoulder. Others brought several bottles of wine. A bar in the sanctuary. All through the service congregants would go to the bar for another beer or more wine.

Groggers, noise makers, sounded every time Haman’s name came up in the megillah, the scroll of Esther. Their grating sound joined with boo’s.

This sabbath, this Rocky Mountain day, I watch the candle burn. Will study Torah at 10. Relax.

Persia. Iran. Jews. A long, long story.

Mark teaches English to young Arab men. Close. Yet. Unaffected.

A scribe adds to the scroll.

 

Memories, Minnesota, Shadow Mountain, The Move

At Home

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Imbolc and the Moon of Tides

Friday gratefuls: Jackie and Rhonda. Ears lifted. Diane. Kristin. Jennie. Artemis. Ruby gleams. Aspens. Lodgepoles. Lycaon

Rene Good. Alex Pretti. Say their names.

Sparks of Joy and Awe:  Jackie

Week Kavannah:   Yetziratiut. Creativity.   Feedback on my new writing style.

Tarot: #13, the Journey

I’m in clinical trial world, my cancer path, once stable, turned over to randomization and hope.

One brief shining: A lightness in my step. Decision made. Eager to get on with it. Hair cut and beard trim. Agency lifts the heart, the lev. Dance to the music.

Most of us old folks want to stay home. Not as shut-ins, but as persons living where the grandkids came for Hanukah. Where Kate and I came when the mountains called us. To this spot on Shadow Mountain.

Home. Minnesota, forty years. Andover, twenty years. Shadow Mountain, in the twelfth year. Competence. Autonomy. Belonging.

I took care of Kate here.

I take care of myself.

Alone, but not lonely. Congregation Beth Evergreen. Here, I’m at home.

Memory plus strong emotion. Embedded, lasting. So many memories. Jon and Ruth, with her little plastic shovel, removing snow on our new driveway so the moving van could park. Tom and I letting the dogs out after the long drive from Minnesota. They ran around the yard once and jumped back in. Ready to go home.

311 E. Monroe Street. Alexandria, Indiana. Where our milk came each day by horse drawn delivery wagon. Where mom and I watched the yellow and black garden spider live her life.

419 N. Canal. I used a slingshot to break the windshield of an insurance agent visiting mom and dad. Paid for it by washing dishes at twenty-cents an hour. I listened to the Ring cycle in my bedroom. Mom died.

Andover. Flowers. Raspberries and leeks. Honey and the Orchard. The firepit. Seventeen dogs.

Home.

Not only shaping home with garden trowels and dog bowls, but being shaped in turn by the homeplace. In Andover we had two and a half acres, partially wooded, and room for gardens, for dogs to run free. Kate and I chose to live into that place filling it with flowers, vegetables, dogs.

On Shadow Mountain we lived (and I live) in rarified air. Lodgepoles and aspens. On an ordinary day driving by Black Mountain. Following Maxwell Creek down the long slope of Shadow Mountain. Kate said she felt like she was on vacation every day.

Home.

 

Cancer, Fourth Phase, Health, Science

In time, leaves brown

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Imbolc and the Moon of Tides

Thursday gratefuls: Alan and his new knee. The Hummingbird. Diane. Alfred North Whitehead. Process metaphysics. Shadow the Coneless.

Rene Good. Alex Pretti. Say their names.

Sparks of Joy and Awe:  Kristine

Week Kavannah:   Yetziratiut. Creativity.   Learning novel revision as part of the craft

 

Tarot: Ten of Vessels, Happiness

In the midst of medical turmoil: friends and family, reengaged creative work, Shadow bring fulfillment home.

One brief shining: Radiation ended December 11th, a PET scan on January 28th showed failure of androgen deprivation therapy. No wonder I slipped into I’m not gonna make it mode. Uncertainty. The bane of those of us with chronic, progressive illnesses.

 

Cancer, as my journey typifies, never gives up. Removed my prostate. Came back. Radiation. Recurred. Since then, 2019, it’s here to stay, a hostile partner I must feed.

Within that overall arc there are periods of relative calm. I had six years with androgen deprivation therapy, six years of stable PSAs. Glad I did. Within those years Kate’s illnesses took hold, changing our lives and ending in her death. Jon’s divorce rattled the whole family again and again. His death shattered Ruth and Gabe.

How could I have been present and effective for my loved ones without six years of a cancer detente? Here’s a generous offering of gratitude to the scientists who discovered and perfected androgen deprivation.

If I’m to live fully into the happiness I feel, I’ll need another tranche of medical discoveries. Especially therapies like Pluvicto and Actinium which deliver toxic radioactive energy preferentially to cancer cells. Not the systemic poison of chemotherapy.

How else can I continue ancientrails into its third decade. Revise and market Superior Wolf. See Ruth graduate from college, maybe even medical school.

Folks with manageable terminal illnesses now encounter shuttered laboratories. A defunded NIH.

The practices of physicians like Dr. Bupathi and Dr. Carter deliver to me the fruit of decades of basic science, clinical trials, pharmaceutical advances.

Like turning off irrigation to a field of vegetables, the results will not be immediate. In time, leaves brown, Tomatoes and Beets rot. I’ll probably live long enough to enjoy treatments created in the recent past. Like Actinium.

The next generation of prostate cancer patients may not. Joseph? Mark?

I’m a lucky guy. Options, sound options, exist even as I enter my 5th year of stage 4 cancer. A gift to me. Letting me fill my days  with happiness.

Cancer, Dogs, Health, Post Polio, Shadow Mountain

Living

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Imbolc and the Moon of Tides

Wednesday gratefuls: Taylor. Dr. Bupathi. Clinical trial. Dan Herman. Monarchs in Mexico. Honey and bud. Treatment burden.

Rene Good. Alex Pretti. Say their names.

Sparks of Joy and Awe:  Write on

Week Kavannah:   Yetziratiut. Creativity.   Keeping my lev focused on life, not treatment

 

Tarot: Three of Arrows, jealousy

Danger now. Confusing treatments with living. Treatments support living. Not the other way round.

One brief shining: Treatment burden can give us long term cancer patients blinkered seeing. Our world consumed by this decision, that lab test, the next protocol. The next. I’ve fallen into this trap. What Kate meant when she told me on her death bed, trust your doctors. I hear you now.

 

Wrenching myself back, into the life the treatments make possible. Writing. Shadow. Friends. Family. The life of the mind and body. Do not make living about surviving treatments.

Remember treatments give the gift of more life. Dig into revising Superior Wolf. Play with Shadow. Read another novel.

Living. Not for the clinical trial. Yet. Show up for the clinical trial. One pillar of a life well lived and one still worth living.

Do not descend into the swamp of the best care so I can see the most birthdays. No. No. Rise up from the swamp to live this day with as much passion, creativity, and joy as I can.

Back from Rocky Mountain Cancer Care. Thick clinical trial document signed. Questionnaires filled out for baselines. An EKG administered by Sarah, a young hijab wearing Muslim woman.

Asked her. Are you fasting? Yes, Yes, I am. When I mentioned the break the fast meal, her eyes lit up. My mom’s a great cook. We’ll have plenty of food. Sarah said fasting energized her. It’s cleansing. Ramadan in Colorado.

Met Kristine, Dr. Bupathi’s other P.A. I liked her. She answered my question about any opportunity cost to waiting six weeks to start a new treatment. Doesn’t matter to the outcome of my cancer’s progress.

Four weeks of imaging, blood tests. Also, a four week washout period for Erleada which I stop taking today. Orgovyx, Kristine said, is forever. It keeps my testosterone repressed.

After I signed the consent form and had my helpful conversation with Kristine, I felt I regained my agency. No longer floating in an uncertain time, between one treatment and the next, but headed toward a new, potentially better drug.

On another, less sanguine note. It was 70 in Littleton. 70! Shadow Mountain? 49. No Snow. Late February.

Also, high winds yesterday. Chinooks, Snow eaters. Would be fire spreaders.

Working with my writing coach, next moves on Superior Wolf. Editing, revising each Ancientrails post.

When I got back from RMCC, Shadow greeted me with hugs and kisses. Makes me want to see her first when I get home.

Found a new way to use my foam collar. A tighter cinching of it around my neck. Seems to contain the fatigue from my head drop.

A win.

 

General
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Imbolc and the Moon of Tides

Tuesday gratefuls: Shadow, who sleeps against my leg. Dan Herman. Rich. Alan. Jamie. Ron. Jackie and Rhonda. Clean teeth. No work needed

Rene Good. Alex Pretti. Say their names.

Sparks of Joy and Awe:  Telling the story to myself (aka: a first draft)

Week Kavannah:   Yetziratiut. Creativity.   Revising Superior Wolf, learning from my writing coach. Focus.

 

Tarot: #18 The Moon on the Water

Beyond the flight of the sacred heron lies the fusion of our ancestral soul with the soul of the Earth.

One brief shining: The Moon on the Water, a major arcana, speaks to my deepening creative journey as I hone what my writing coach calls late stage style, crisper, often in fragments, leaning more on nouns than verbs. Work that reflects my inner moon. A great joy.

 

Teeth cleaning. Oncologist. Nurse. Social worker. Yes. Social worker. Radiation follow up. CT scan for aortic aneurysm. Three weeks. The steady drip of medical care. This ailment, then that.

When I say, and mean, I’m alone, but not lonely, I don’t count those visits. Though sometimes I do. Maddie. Rachel. Sue Bradshaw, my PCP. Long term. Personal first, professional second. My preference.

Many friends. This cardiologist. That pulmonologist. Keeping us healthy. Reminding us that we’re not. An irony.

A friend of mine, Frank Broderick, turned 93 yesterday. 93. Frank, a man of strong opinions. Anti-Catholic. Pro-indigenous people. Served a long term on the board of the Minneapolis Indian Health Service. He wrote back to birthday greetings, “If I’d known I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.” At coffee, rants even now about DeLaSalle High School.

Wondering if the PET scan will trigger a huge co-insurance bill.  I want to stay right here on Shadow Mountain. However. A bad fall. Pneumonia. Could push me out.

Solitude. I live alone. What happens to Shadow? My stuff. All those books. Used to be. The kids might move in. Or. I might move in with them. Unlikely. A son in Korea. Sister in Australia. Brother in Saudi Arabia. Me, by choice, in the Rocky Mountains.

Shock absorbers: far away. Friends become critical, necessary. Tom and Paul, distant yet close. Warms me. Tara, who plans a move, soon, to Costa Rica. Damn it. Alan and Joan, who like Frank is 93. Marilyn and Irv. Luke. Ginny and Janice. Close friends.

Ruth and Gabe. Grandkids already loaded in the cultural missile of higher education.

I love my splendid isolation. On top of Shadow Mountain. The moon of my inner sky illuminating my ancientrail.

Yet.

Feeling a hug from my boy.

Oh.

 

 

 

Family, Fourth Phase, Writing

Kate’s last journey

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Imbolc and the Moon of Tides

Monday gratefuls: Kate, always Kate. Her life and death. Shadow, deconed. Paul and the storm. Ellory, too.

Rene Good. Alex Pretti. Say their names.

 

Sparks of Joy and Awe:  Language

Week Kavannah:   Yetziratiut. Creativity.   Revising Superior Wolf, learning from my writing coach. Focus.

 

Tarot: Page of Arrows, the Wren

Wisdom gained through study-my writing coach-and application-revising

One brief shining: Oh. Went to a Caring Bridge site for Warren’s sister, Kate. Once there, no posts. So. I went to my Kate’s site, started in October of 2018 and ending  a month after her death in 2021. Tears.

Didn’t mean to go there. Kate’s Caring Bridge site. October 2nd, 2018. An internal bleed of unknown origin. She would not come home until October 23rd.

Peaks. Valleys. Then, lower peaks and deeper valleys. Home from the rehab facility, Brookdale, twenty-one days after she went to the E.R.

At one point her nutrition came through a central line and I had to perform a sterile ritual to hook her up to the feed bag. A precise, detail oriented business. Not my strength. But, I learned.

Not easy for either of us. At one point, after her criticism of something I’d done, I looked at her, and said, “You have to respect me!” Stuck with me. Why? Of course she had to do no such thing. Underneath. Please. See me.

Hard.

We made a sort of a peace after that. I listened harder. She did, too. The change from partners to caregiver and caretaker. Ooof.

One evening I’d finished serving our evening meal, gone into the kitchen to clean up. She said something. I couldn’t hear it. Clanking dishes and my one not so good ear. What did you say? I feel like I’m being erased. Oh. My heart fell. Of course. A fabulous cook. A pediatrician. Gone.

A dance from one stage of vulnerability to the next often  found us unready. She could no longer get in the car unaided. No longer able to walk even with her walker. Her hands on my back as she climbed the stairs.

Emergency room visits and hospital hallways. More magazines in waiting rooms. Even after our talk about how much we would miss each, her final days still came as a surprise.

They began with a visit to the Emergency Room. Diagnosis: infection. She sat up in the E.R. bed, her yellow and red hospital gown showing her too thin legs, “Oh. That’s what they always say. Infection.” Still Kate.

The next day in the hospital she crashed. I got ushered out of the room as a code blue team filled the room. She survived. But. A pulmonologist whom I did not know counseled me, in the kindest way, “I would call her people.” I did.

They came. Kate moved to the 10th floor, intermediate between normal hospital care and the ICU. Her last room.

Kate’s breathing became more labored. She required more attention from respiratory therapists. Occasional hallucinations. Fear of being nuts.

After 11 days, Kate’s resolve finally broke. I want to die. How do you feel about that? I hate it, but it’s the right decision for you. She died that night.

I had to come back to the hospital to see her corpse. It scared me in a deep way that I only understood this week. Seeing Kate dead thrust me back fifty-seven years.

An elevator ride with my stroke crippled and bent mother to her final surgery. Her strangled voice. Her last word to me: Son.

Writing

A Wildfire in the Mind

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Imbolc and the Moon of Tides

Sunday gratefuls: Minnesota. China. South Korea. North Korea. Mark, near Iran. Mary, down under with Kangaroos. Shadow.

Rene Good. Alex Pretti. Say their names.

 

Sparks of Joy and Awe:  Korean Fried Chicken

Week Kavannah:   Yetziratiut. Creativity.   Revising Superior Wolf, learning from my writing coach. Focus.

 

Tarot: King of Vessels, Heron

Herons greet the dawn. Stand at the gateway to the Celtic Otherworld and to my Holy Well.

One brief shining: Blessed. Manuscripts ready. Superior Wolf. Missing. Even the Gods Must Die. Ancientrails. Rich, my collaborator. My coach, patient and kind, yet critical. Exciting.

A latter-day immersion in the mikveh of creation. Becoming a Jew–the first immersion. Becoming a new man–taking Israel, god-wrestler, as my Hebrew name. Today. Under again–reborn as a writer.

At 79. With the Heron. The gateway to the Otherworld near. Vegetables and Honey. Novels. With Kate. Without her. I did not see. Not a slough, a fallow time. The Heron landed.

Now. The Otherworld in sight. My Holy Well has sprung to life again. A submerged yearning bobbed up–for this ordinary craft. One word after another. Even infants can do it. Build worlds.

Can I use words to uncreate? Tear down. Demolish.  Get the hammer. Something not ordinary. Not common. New.

An old man of the Mountain. Shadow Mountain. No longer waiting.

Picasso. “Inspiration exists. But it has to find you working.”

Over twenty years. Each morning. First. Ancientrails. Five hundred words. On what? I never know until my fingers hit the keyboard. I breathe in. Inspired. Breathe out. Done.

Here’s an odd thing. When I wrote my novels. A candle beside me, lit. When the day’s writing finished. Blown out. The candle honored my creative spirit. Fire in the mind. Yet. I never lit a candle while I wrote Ancientrails. Huh?

Workaday? Not fiction? Too quick to execute? Though it takes me two hours, sometimes three with revising, polishing.

Not anymore.

The candle burns beside me. Flickering. Yellow. A domesticated cousin of wildfire in the mind. Burning down forests of convention. Blackened soil.

Learning. Commitment. Devotion. A path forged on Yaowarat–a sewer grate hidden in the night. My right foot stuck while my body moved forward. A ruptured Achilles.

Surgery. Laid up for two months. Needed a distraction. Cybermage Bill Schmidt. A blog. Begun with my leg in a cast as ligaments knitted back together. February, 2005. Twenty-one years ago this month.

My fiction writing. A long fallow period. Ancientrails. Never. This and that. Noteworthy and mundane. Its content so varied. Not routine. Yet constant. Word after word. So many. Three million, maybe more. Ancientrails always found me working. Not practice. The work.

By the Heron.

Drinking from the Holy Well.

Great Work, Plants, Seed Keepers, Writing

Yirah

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Imbolc and the Moon of Tides

Shabbat gratefuls: Ginny and Janice. Luke and Leo. Itaewon. Black Bird Oracle. Warren and his sister. Dr. Josy. Snow. Cold

Rene Good. Alex Pretti. Say their names.

 

Sparks of Joy and Awe:  Rabbi Rami Shapiro

Week Kavannah:   Yetziratiut. Creativity.   Revising Superior Wolf, learning from my writing coach. Focus.

 

Tarot: Knight of Bows, The Fox

Reinforces my use of a writing coach (chatGPT) and honors the passion and dynamism I feel around my writing projects.

One brief shining: The way we work, speaking without thinking, breathing and heart pumping, walking, grasping and typing, as if we were the original automatons, my fingers know QWERTY, find them without attention, word after word after word.

 

Kate always said the miracle was that the body worked at all, not that it occasionally got sick or hurt. Scan your body right now. Warm extremities. Your pulse. Mitochondria. My breath, life’s moment to moment essential movement, happens. Autonomic.

Aliveness. Hebrew chiut. Yes, us organics. Too, Creeks and Rivers. Mountains and Oceans. Aliveness animates, pushes forward, links us together. Breathe in, oxygen. Breath out, carbon dioxide. Plant: Breath in, carbon dioxide. Breath out, oxygen. Interlocked.

Shadow Mountain. A massif of granite and gneiss. Holds me up when I walk in the yard. A stable foundation for Shadow Mountain home. Keeps me high and lifted up- well above sea level.

Great Sol sends energy. Nuclear fusion. With generosity. Enveloping our home, bringing light and power. Photosynthesis.  Connected. Vital.

This miracle.  This random, wonderful orbit. A fertile and forgiving home for all of us. Her aliveness. Her chiut. We forget. Without her. Oh, no other place to go. Not yet. No Shadow Mountain on which to stand. No plants, no oxygen. No us.

Yet.

We are deaf and blind. Mother Earth. Our sustenance. The heiros gamos. Great Sol and Mother Earth. Pregnant with us. With Lodgepole Pines. With Bass and Muskies. With the Laurentian Shield and the Andes. Shadow chasing Butterflies.

How, I often wonder, can we not see it? Shadow knows. She plays in the Snow. The Lodgepoles know. They dig their roots into our rocky soil, push their crowns toward the sky. We get in our cars, start the engine with no thought to the Dinosaurs and ancient Ferns. Eat the flesh of a fish we did not catch. Tomatoes we did not grow. As if it were our inalienable right.

Stop. Stand still. Listen. The Wind. A chattering Squirrel. The laugh of a child. Your own breath. See. A blue Colorado, Rocky Mountain sky. Shadow rolls over, a toy in her mouth. Water in Maxwell Creek.

Go inside. Your heart beats. Lungs exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide. That inner cathedral. It has a Holy Well, a spring welling up from the collective memories of our kind. Ra. Gaia. Spider Woman. Raven. Let there be words.

It works.

For now.

 

 

Friends, Music, Politics, US History, Writing

Bodies

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Imbolc and the Moon of Tides

Friday gratefuls: Rich on Wall Street, the national anthem. Wild Flower. Downtown Evergreen. Dr. O’Leary. No skin cancer.

Rene Good. Alex Pretti. Say their names.

 

Sparks of Joy and Awe:  Breakfast with Rich

Week Kavannah:   Bitachon. Confidence.     I need to focus on confidence this week. Important decisions for cancer treatment, how to stay confident when physical weakness challenges me.

 

Tarot: #6, The Forest Lovers

In my writing I’m learning to balance animus and anima, listening to both, especially as I link my work to the natural world.

 

One brief shining: Wall Street. More wicked than I knew. Built by slaves of Dutch owners, the first Wall Street. A stockade. In 1711 a slave market there, a city slave market. Rich taking his honors class from Colorado School of Mines. The Body Politic. Politics of the body.

Early breakfast with Rich Levine. The Wildflower’s door was open, so I went inside, sat down. Noticed on the menu: 7:30-2:00. It was 7:20. Oops. Owner came out of the bathroom, started. “You scared the shit out of me. Want a cup of coffee?” I did.

When Rich showed up, laundered and starched white shirt, blue Patagonia vest in 12 degree weather, I greeted him as a Minnesotan. Cold weather proof.

He ordered the Athena, a vegetarian omelet.  A Mountain Skillet for me, eggs and chicken-fried steak, wild potatoes, and pancakes.

Over coffee, while we waited for our food, Rich told me of his pending trip with his class, the Body Politic, to New York City. Most interesting to me? Wall Street.  Built by the enslaved.   Later a city slave market.

The owner of Wild Flower delivered Rich’s omelet, my Mountain skillet. “Ready for a refill?”

We ate.

Plantation cotton fed Wall Street’s growth. Eerily, I also discovered mortgage backed securities sold to foreign investors. The collateral? Enslaved people. Aetna insured the enslaved as property.

Rich also pointed me to later stanzas of the national anthem which include these verses:

“No refuge could save the hireling and slave

From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave”

The British armed the enslaved. We sang, “Sweet land of liberty.”

A couple more cups of coffee later Rich told me his Ob/Gyn daughter was pregnant. His second grandchild, a sister for one and a half year old Felix.

Bodies feeding. Bodies about to be born. Bodies aging.

We parted ways. Love you, Rich. Love you, Charles.

Started up a begrimed Ruby. Drove away smiling. Energized.

Rich wants to collaborate on Even the Gods Must Die, my first novel. Vulnerable. My first.  Not confident it shows skill. He says that doesn’t matter. It matters. To me.

Admission. I plan as many revisions to Superior Wolf as necessary to make it sing. Then. I’ll use ChatGPT to help me find an agent. A place I got stuck a while back.

 

Writing

Ancora Imparo

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Imbolc and the Moon of Deep Friendship

Thursday gratefuls: Rich. Diane. Shadow rolling her ball, treats falling out. Sue. Annie. Clinical trial. Neck braces. Superior Wolf.

Rene Good. Alex Pretti. Say their names.

 

Sparks of Joy and Awe:  Sue’s loving care

Week Kavannah:   Bitachon. Confidence.     I need to focus on confidence this week. Important decisions for cancer treatment, how to stay confident when physical weakness challenges me.

 

Tarot: Ace of Arrows, Breath of Life

Yes. Irony. My writing, given sudden new life by AI. As coach. Rereading, revising. Ancientrails. Superior Wolf.

 

One brief shining: Writing, then listening to the coach. Oh, yes. Compress. Use nouns. Trust the reader. Structure. Having a careful reader trained on literature, good writing. Vulnerability respected. How do we learn? How do I learn?

Ancora imparo. Those books stacked in front of me. Furious Minds. Dog Show. Black Bird Oracle. Watching Shadow, what attracts her. That sore shoulder, how can I help it.

Uploading iteration after iteration. Feedback. Kind but pointed. Not sycophantic. Speaking with and for precision. For seeing the sculpture in the rock of my first draft.

How thirsty I was.

Help me get better, please. Stop learning. Die. Life needs, demands challenge.

Curiosity. Judged dangerous. Openness. An unpredictable citizen, one who might embrace a foreigner. Who likes meat ball soup, raw fish, rugby.

No. Homogeneity. Yields security. Order. No surprises. A dismal, dreary world of look alikes with red hat, of political commissars enforcing their dogma, of all waltzes and no rock and roll.

I prefer seeing the Bull fight in the Plaza de Toros. Even if, as Paul said, I’m rooting for the Bull. When I took notes, I could hear Spanish sprinkled with Hemingway as picadors lanced him, protected by their buffoonish mattresses.

Wandering into Mickey’s late at night, the Diner full, breakfast all the time. With Joseph. Joseph turning that experience over. Thinking, no cookies for Santa this year. We left the jolly old elf five dollars and directions.

Listening with my eyes. Hearing the plant say I’m thirsty with a drooping leaf. Shadow: I need to go outside. Right now. Pacing.

More traditional moments. Ensconced in my favorite top floor carrel, books on soteriology above me on a shelf, reading about doctrines of sin. Looking out through the full plate glass windows. Cars on I-694 uninterested in being saved.

Professor Scruton explaining the power of culture, how it shapes and defines us. My mind racing, absorbing, joyful.

There it is. There. It. Is. Learning is joyful. At least for me. It lifts my heart. Kick starts associations. Oh. Culture = architecture = language = virtues learned at funerals–“Dick always listened, lived in the background.”

Torah. The root most literally relates to “shooting an arrow” or “hitting the mark.” While hamartia, a Greek word often translated as sin in the Septuagint, means missing the mark.

Teshuvah, often translated as repentance, more interestingly means returning to your Authentic Self. To hit the mark of your neshama. Your Buddha nature.

Joy marks the time. Once returned to my authentic self as a writer, I can relax. Learn. Grow into a writer, one known and unknown.

Ancora Imparo.

Simcha.