I keep hearing that in order to help local businesses it is important for us to continue purchasing things from them during this time of the pandemic. I agree with that idea. However, but I began to worry about those businesses (and their employees) that don’t sell products, but instead provide services. Many of those businesses are in an even greater problem than those that provide products (such as restaurants). In many cases the services can’t be provided because they require violation of “social distancing” requirements, or aren’t requested because they are easy to avoid for the time being. How are those businesses going to survive? As I looked around I found that there are some people (such as my wife) that have searched out the people providing these services and are paying them as if they were getting the service. This is not a financial transaction, and it isn’t exactly “charity” – it is acting on the realization that maintaining these local businesses is critical to our well being and the health of the community. If they don’t make enough money to stay in business, they will go elsewhere and that will be a loss for everyone.

We had hoped that the federal and state governments would step up and provide enough assistance to keep them afloat, and to allow them to keep their employees on the payroll – even though there is no job to do during the pandemic. However, while some efforts along those lines have been made – they are generally too little and too late. Our governments don’t seem to have the ability (or desire) to help with this kind of “safety bridge”. So what do we do to help? Many people are donating and assisting with things for the out-of-work folks in terms of food closets, temporary shelters, and emergency support. However, there is almost no support for those small businesses that are going broke and being put out of business because insufficient, or no, customer income. I know I could look up the people I normally do business with – but that would be very awkward, and since it is likely just me, ineffective. They need more than my normal $10 a week (or whatever) business, they need a lot of people like me.

Is there some way that we can pool our assistance for these kinds of businesses? Is it feasible to have a central fund that I could send a contribution similar to my normal “donations” (things that I purchase locally rather than on Amazon)? This doesn’t have to be forever, just until we get through this period of great need. If we do it, those folks can maintain their businesses and lifestyles (food, mortgages, gas money, utilities, etc) – and will be here when we need them after the storm passes. If not, then they will lose their homes, their livelihoods, their investments, and we will lose their businesses that are so important to all of us in our communities. If we don’t somehow find a way to help them in big ways it is going to be a lose, lose, lose, lose situation. If we can find ways to help them get through it, then it is as many (or more) wins.

I think the need is clear and obvious. Now we just need to find a way to get it done – as a community helping our community.

Last weekend my wife and I went to our cabin near Mount Lassen in the California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. We purchased a Christmas tree permit allowing us to catch one tree in the Lassen National Park, in the middle of the trees shown in the accompanying photo. We were at about the 5,500 foot (1675 meters) elevation, at a time of year that should have had a couple of feet of snow on the ground, but we only found traces in the shady locations. We were successful in finding a very pretty little tree.

Now that we have it home and set up in our living room the question of decorations has come up. So far we have decided leave it nude, no lights, no decorations. It was a difficult decision, but we finally decided that what we really like is the tradition of a tree, and the smell of the tree – maybe the decorations aren’t important. I am finding that the presence of a nude tree is a little unsettling. It is causing me to wonder about the meaning of the tradition. It seems to be related to the comfort of our family sharing each other. This year covid-19 has changed things so that we won’t have family to our house, so that we aren’t doing it for the children. Then there is a question of what do the decorations mean, are they important in some way beyond them being pretty? It does feel odd, and somehow incomplete, to have a pretty little naked tree sharing our living room – a dead pretty little naked tree. When I was a child my mother put up a bare manzanita limb. No leaves, just a jagged limb that was perhaps 3 feet tall. I didn’t like it at all, it just wasn’t a “Christmas Tree”. Our new little tree feels a little like that, it is a tree – but perhaps not a “Christmas Tree.” I am interested in seeing how this experiment works out as we get closer to Christmas. Will we learn to come to experience the same thing? Will we break down and put decorations on it? Will we do it again next year? It is an interesting opportunity to watch myself.

For those that like to watch slow moving shows like meteor showers, this Sunday might be interesting. The shower starts in North America at around 10:00 pm, peaks at midnight, and slows after that. This is an interesting meteor shower in part because it is not coming from a comet, but rather from an asteroid, so it is burning up pieces of rock rather than chunks of ice. That gives the meteors a different color, a lot more yellows, along with “normal” white. Because of the direction of impact, they will be slower and more graceful paths than most meteors. The prediction is about 100 per hour, which sounds like a lot – and it is, but it is also only about one a minute, giving lots of time between events. It is not quite like you see in the spectacular photos you see in magazines and such. Those are real, but time lapse taking over many minutes thus “adding” many meteors to the photo. Apparently there have been times in the historical past where the sky was full of meteors all at once, but don’t expect that. “A lot” is not all that exciting. One of the unusually good things this year is that the moon won’t be in the sky, making the sky much darker and meteors easier to notice. The meteors will come from all parts of the sky, not just from Gemini (although Gemini will be coming up over the eastern horizon at about mid-night). You need to plan for about 20 minutes for your eyes to change to “night vision” mode (it is a chemical change and takes awhile).

Astronomers aren’t sure what caused the particles to get separated from the parent asteroid (Phaethon). Phaethon is on an orbit that takes it far outside of the asteroid belt, indicting that it probably got knocked out by a collision of some sort. Perhaps that created a lot of dust and stuff that travel along with it. Apparently that is unlikely. Phaethon gets very close to the sun and therefore get HOT (around 1400 F), and spins meaning it is alternating hot and very cold. Perhaps that is causing stuff to get ejected – also not likely because of various reasons. Or it got smacked somewhere along the way, which seems to be the current pet theory. In any case, the meteors are small chucks of rocks entering our atmosphere at only about about 80,000 mph (instead of 160,000 mph for the Leonids for example).

I hope to drag myself out to look at it, but have a history of not wanting to get up for such as slow moving show. Perhaps I’ll see the tail end of the shower in my early morning star gazing from my hot tub at 5:00 am or so. I won’t see so many meteors, but it will be much more pleasant watching for them.

I have been having a little Facebook chat with a friend from UC Davis. He is deep into the middle of the covid vaccine development so I have trust in what he has to say. It took a few back and fourths to get to the nut of the issue, but we finally did – and I want to share it.

The answer is that I am correct about what efficacy means (as discussed in the media it means “preventing sickness”, not “preventing transmission”). They are being careful about what they claim, and he agrees that it is being misunderstood by most people that read and hear what they are saying.

He said the problem is that they haven’t had time to do the human tests necessary to make a claim about preventing transmission. However, they have done enough tests to be confident that it will prevent transmission by about 99%. But that is based upon assumptions and some science that point in that direction.

His educated opinion is that it will work, and work at an effectiveness for preventing transmission of about 99% . That is very good news. It means if they can manage to vaccinate about 50% to 60% of the population it will be over with because of the creation of sufficient herd immunity. So maybe there is actually a light at the end of the tunnel.

This morning I got a phone call from a Native American spiritual man who happens to be a good friend of mine. He learned that his brother is now in the ICU with covid-19 and almost certain to die from it. My friend wants almost more than anything to visit him in the hospital in Texas, but knows that they won’t let him do that – and in order to get there requires a long, and very dangerous trip from California for him, being an old man. This is his second lose, earlier this year a nephew died from the disease. I feel so sad for him. He is suffering that part of losing a dearly loved one where you go from totally balled up with tears and grief, then a short and welcome “smooth” time to get take a breath and get your feet under you, only to them be taken away with another bout of devastating grief. It is such a hard time, and he being a spiritual man is supposed to be there to help others through their troubled times. Now he can’t, and both he and his brother are all along. So sad. I love you bro – wish I could do more to help!

A question concerning “how to mediate” that comes up often is whether or not concentrating on a manual project strongly enough to “enter the zone” is the same as sitting meditation. Examples of activities that result in “entering the zoom” are numerous. My personal favorite is hand planning wood. I can do that for a very long time, not actually wanting to get it finished because the effort is so pleasant. The repetition, movement, and smell of fresh cut wood has an hypnotic effect on me. Other people have reported this kind of experience while doing things such as knitting, chanting, rowing a boat on a calm lake, perhaps long distance running and other similar activities. Often when I talk to these folks about the experience of doing sitting meditation (sometimes referred to as Shamatha or “mind-calmness” or “calm abiding”) they say they “don’t need” to sit like that because their meditation practice is through one, or more, of those hypnotic inducing “in the zone” practices.

My feeling is that neither are “correct” or “the right way” – both work for some things, it might all depend upon the goal. It is a difficult topic to discuss with someone who has experienced only one approach because we really don’t have a good way to describe much of any of the experience. As a practitioner of both approaches I might be in a position of understanding the similarities and differences, but still find it very difficult to describe.

I think the first point is that “calm abiding” does not mean “without thought” – there are always thoughts. It is about noticing them, maybe even thinking about them – but not “attaching” to them. My experience with entering “the zoom” activities is that thoughts pretty much stop, it is a very different experience. Not a bad one, just a different one. If the goal is to “relax” maybe it doesn’t matter much which one you choose.

In general, the practice is to gently focus on an object of attention (the breath is a handy thing since it is always there, some people silently repeat a mantra such as “om”). Inevitably thoughts come up and the mind wanders. Eventually you notice that there are thoughts instead of the object of attention, at which point you go back to the object of attention. Around, and around, and around. Calmly watching thoughts arise without judgment or interpretation, drift on by, noticing, returning … The most important part of this whole cycle seems to be the part of “noticing” that you are thinking. This is what is being “practiced” – it is the part that we practice so that during our off-cushion time we learn to be calm and notice our thoughts rather than jump on them, get caught by them, and do things that we didn’t want to do. This might be a very different thing than what happens when doing something repetitively “in the zoom.”

There have been some interesting studies with brain scans of experienced practitioners during sitting meditation that show the mind is very active, but in specific locations. The parts of the brain that “light up” while going around this three-sided cycle of focusing, “thinking”, noticing and returning are in distinct locations, separate from each other. It seems that different parts of the brain are used to achieve these three activities. I am not sure what the importance of this might be, but I find it interesting that we seem to be “exercising” specific parts of our brains as we “practice” these practices.

I have been complaining to my friends, or anyone that would listen, about Trump’s insistence upon “proving” election fraud. However, somewhere in the middle of the night it dawned on me just how important that gift is to us all. We have been having a lot of concerns about election security over the past few elections; what with hanging chads, stories of bags of ballots thrown in rivers, Russian interference and voting machines difficult (or impossible) to audit. That worry resulted in a LOT of changes about how we do elections; then Covid came along which added in a lot of last minute work-arounds involving mail-in ballots, social distancing and all sorts of large and small changes. While these changes were being made, we sort of had to just trust that the election officers were doing the right thing and that it was all working properly. We really needed a big audit of the system, and Trump was kind enough to make that happen – he even let the Republicans pay for it! Amazing. Not only that, but he pressed hard against the judicial system to see if it might not be possible to break it in ways that could result in election fraud through intimidation and court packing (by him of course). This test isn’t finished yet, but it appears that the system is pretty darn secure and upset proof. The counting has been spot on, and almost all of the court challenges were thrown out. The one big test still coming along is whether or not he can get something before the Supreme Court, and if he does whether his hand picked far-right republican choices support him over the words and intent of the constitution.

We really and truly needed this kind of high intensity, dig as deep as you can test and audit. Once this is all finished, and it is firmly established that there was no election fraud by the Democrats, Biden and the Democrats will be in a much stronger position by eliminating concerns of the election not being fair, or tampering with the process like the last time it ended up in the Supreme Court and they decided to choose the winner instead of allowing the counting process to continue to the end. That sort of thing is not good for the incoming President. As an incoming President you want to win the popular vote as well as the electoral votes, want all fears of fraud or corruption put to bed, and want the votes to make the decision, not a hand full of justices to decide for the nation. So this is perfect for the Democrats and for Biden. Some day, a long time from today, we might offer President Trump and hearty “thank you. (Not that you intended to be giving a gift).”

Who knows, perhaps this will result in finally tossing out the archaic and fraught electoral system of voting.

I found a new word, and a new field of study, in a Facebook article today. Epistemology is basically the study of how we know what we know. It is concerned with how we separate “truth” from everything else. This is a topic very much in my mind these days, as I am sure it is most everyone’s else’s mind. A common question that comes up in conversation is “how could they possibly believe that?” It doesn’t matter much who “they” are, we are all scratching our heads wondering how you can take obvious “facts” and end up with “that” belief. We are all turning into philosophers of epistemology, trying to make sense of what is happening to so deeply divide us.

We are now officially in the “holiday” season – which is always a difficult time for many reasons such as the pressures to get the “perfect” gift for those that we really love, knowing full well that in most cases if they really wanted it they already have it. We are somehow expected to know them better than they do, picking out “the thing” that they don’t even know they want. What could possibly go wrong with that?

And then we are hoping once again for the magical, special, dancing in our hearts feeling that always comes with Thanksgiving and Christmas (at least we hope it will happen like that) – except that it doesn’t seem to quite work out that way. Our missed expectations and hopes, and the darker and colder days, are the perfect formula for depression and loneliness to creep in. And this year!! Oh my, it is going to really be a mind twister, it already has – and the crazy, scary, lonely and exhausting things are likely to continue for awhile.

I am trying to brace myself for all of this – I know it is coming, and I know it will tend to be overwhelming. Right now – today- I KNOW that it is not my fault, or the fault of those that I love – I am just hoping I can remember to remember this truth. It is just how it is, and it is just one of those things to notice, watch and not add guilt for not making the magic happen perfectly. It is definitely the year to quietly enjoy each other, to be warmly thankful for whatever good things we have, to not get too excited by roadblocks, and to just kind of sit back and “go with the flow.” Hopefully we will figure out how to reach the “reset” button for 2021. Be careful out there, and try to avoid accusing anyone of not fulfilling what you want them to do – especially yourself.

I get up in the pre-dawn hours to sit in my hot tub, staring at the stars overhead. This morning was a clear, moon-less, sky. Because I am in California, in the northern hemisphere this morning’s sky featured some of my best “friends” including Orion, Gemini, Canis Major, Leo and of course the big bear Ursa Major steadily pointing to the north star, Polaris. I laid my head back on the edge of the hot tub so I could take in the entire sky and realized that I COULD see the entire sky, from horizon to horizon (plus a little) in all directions. That got me to thinking about how amazing our eyes, and ability to see, actually are. Our perception, including our eyes and our brain, work much different than a camera or a telescope. Looking straight up it like a “fisheye” lens where the entire doom of the sky (and a little ground all around) is visible and clear, but what we “see” is not uniform. The edges are there, and clear, but very hard to concentrate on. My concentration is almost all in the very center, surrounded by slowly decreasing levels of attention, not decreasing levels of clarity so much as what I can attend to with my mind. But let anything move, such as a satellite or a “shooting star” enter the edges of my attention and I “notice” it instantly. Then I shift my center of attention and see it clearly. I don’t have to focus on things to notice movement or change. How odd — telescopes don’t do that (or at least they didn’t use to – perhaps they do with artificial intelligence scanning the entire image looking for things such as movement – just like my brain is obviously doing). I found it amazing, and rather awe inspiring to notice what I CAN notice – and all of it built up over millions of years of evolution one little step at a time.