It looks like the last time I posted I was dealing with a tight chest and shit in my throat. I feel like there was a time in between where I wasn’t feeling sick, but here I am again. My wife is out of town and I am trying to stay occupied and creative, this is a kind of light week responsibility wise, so I’ve got a lot of time to create if I can spend it well.

I’ve been doing a lot of work on my 40k models. I played my first real game of Kill Team and found it mostly uninteresting, so I’m exploring Necromunda. I’m converting some of my models into members of a shadowy bounty hunter group called the Azure Kindred. I’m working on backstory for the gang and it’s members, but for now, I’m having fun putting them together.

I finished Kate Sekules’ mending book, it was fantastic and I am now using it in my classes. I taught last Friday; it went very well. I’ve repaired a couple of treasured garments and made a pair of shoes on a whim. I was in a fit of creativity over the weekend that I’m hoping to ride through this week. I’ve got a couple very exciting ideas I’m tossing around with friends and I am excited to find the focus to develop them.

I need to buy a white paint marker so I can keep working on A Diary of Symbols and Lines. I am very close to finishing up this series. I don’t know why I think that, it just feels right. I’m moving into more 3D, textile work and dipping my toe into land and the built environment as mediums. I’ll keep you posted if any of my fever dreams become reality.

I think when someone is dying, you are tending to them for yourself more than for them. I don’t mean that in a cynical way, rather, I think that comforting those who are dying is a way for us to reconcile our feeling of coming up short that often accompanies this event. We usually feel like we could have said or did more, or shouldn’t have said or did what we did. This act of witnessing the end of someone’s life, I think, can be a place of finding comfort with the fact that this line of thinking is so unbearably futile in the face of our inevitable passing. Of course we could have done more, or different, this is not untrue. But it’s pointless to recognize because it can’t be undone in any way. This is a moment of teshuva, of returning, where we can try to come back into alignment with a reality where there is nothing we can do but we absolutely must do all we can to do it. A non-dual place that exists in a few sacred moments.

In the Avinu Malkeinu prayer we recite the phrase כִּי אֵין בָּֽנוּ מַעֲשִׂים, transliterated as kee ayn bah-noo mah-ahh-seem, and translated by Rabbi Alan Lew as “…for we have no more good deeds.” He explains that this is a central concept of teshuva, that inevitably, we will find that we have come up short. This is not a fact to despair, but a fact that does need to be accepted. When we are seeking forgiveness from God, from our fellow mortals, whoever, we are ultimately in need of a pathway to forgive ourselves, so we can move on and grow and become the people we need to be. I think that bearing witness to someone’s dying is a moment like those final days before Yom Kippur, where there is no time left and so much to do, and this is what we must find a way to live with. I’ve been lucky enough to not watch many people do the work of dying, these thoughts are mostly formed from watching people watching people dying.

Pain gives us a visceral chance to deny or accept, perhaps the only real opportunity of substance. It is easy to appreciate a pleasant experience, it is immensely difficult to feel the same when your world is splitting in two. But this is what I mean when I talk about being close to God; to be unable to discern between Mordechai and Haman, or rather, to not divide what is good and bad but really just witness what is all around us.

Good night.

A dramatic non-sequitur into thoughts about death, but good ones, i guess

I think this is called journaling. it’s saying I spelled that wrong, I’m not interested in confirming that.