Elizabeth, before I go any further I want to wish you a very Happy Birthday! I'm writing this shortly after midnight, so it's officially the 27th, and I hope you have a wonderful day tomorrow. Even though the circumstances make it difficult to celebrate in the ways you normally would, I hope you will do something fun for yourself, maybe go on an awesome hike or road trip, in addition to sharing your day with your family. It's been one heck of a tough year, but things are gonna get better, so just keep that in mind. You are an awesome lady, an Artist with a Capital A, and an exceptionally nice person, and I am always thinking of you. :):)
I hope you had a nice Thanksgiving, once again considering all the current factors. For me, this is the first Thanksgiving that I haven't spent at Pearl's since 2005, which is five years before I became her caregiver. As I'm sure I've mentioned, the family friendship goes back to 1953, when my parents moved to Reseda from Cincinnati in 1951. Almost simultaneously, Pearl and her late husband Roy were moving west from Minnesota. The Valley was founded, in large part, by Midwesterners! And in our case, my family and Pearl's family ended up just around the corner from one another in Reseda, a cool suburban town that still looks, in some respects, just as it did 70 years ago. We moved to Northridge in 1968, but always kept in touch, and the family Thanksgiving tradition at Pearl's house began sometime in the mid-to-late 80s. I didn't go in those days, because as a twentysomething I was doing my own thing, but many years later, in 2004 I accompanied my Mom to Pearl's on Thanksgiving Day. For me it was a reintroduction to friends I hadn't seen since I was seven years old! But my parents and sister Vickie had maintained contact all that time. Mom passed away just after Thanksgiving in 2005, so I didn't go to Pearl's that year, but I did go back with my sister and my Dad in 2006, and I've been part of the tradition ever since. Until tonight of course.
But we'll be back next year, and I'm confident the whole world will be back. Covid will probably still be with us, but will be weakened by then. Even the terrible Spanish Flu of 1918, which killed 50 million, only lasted two years.
I didn't do much today. We had Gale Force Winds which made a trip to Aliso unappealing. So I just camped out in my apartment, watched some football and finished my book : "Denisovan Origins" by Andrew Collins and Gregory Little. It's a mindboggling work, featuring extensive research into North American Mound Culture, and the history of it's cosmology. The observance and monitoring of the night sky was all-important to people of the post Ice Age, particularly those whose ancestors had lived through the Younger Dryas Impact Event. Very interesting to me was the revelation of The Path of Souls, based on the folklore of American Indian tribes in the Great Lakes area. It has to to with their belief in the spiritual journey, after death, to the next life, which is attained by following a specific path through the Milky Way, and finally up through the polar axis at the top of the night sky dome, around which the constellations turn.
I can't see any of this. I've never been able to, as I live in a major city that blots it out with electric light.
But that was their world, the world of the Denisovan ancestors, which also produced a race of giants, who stood between 7 and 8 feet tall, and sometimes 9. The "Tall Ones" became the elite of the American Adena Culture, and the Hopewell Culture, that lasted until somewhat recently, 500 AD.
The importance of The Path of Souls was their idea of progress, to "progress" successfully into the next world. We in the modern era, having discovered the electron, have our own notion of progress, which has enabled us to travel into outer space and to blow things up. I won't go on a tirade about progress (and who could?), but it's worth asking the questions : "what exactly is progress"? and "what is it supposed to lead to"? Such are the vexations of the Human Condition, but in the case of the paleoancient Americans, they were looking to the sky as The Universe. Right now, we're staring at our gadgets. I know that's totally cliche to say so, but it's true, and so it's up to us who have the historical perspective to revert to at least some of the old ways.
Who is to say that the Denisovans of old saw nothing in the night sky of value? Not me. I wish I could see it myself. //////
That's all I know for tonight. Happy Thanksgiving! Happy Birthday, Elizabeth! Tomorrow I will be back at Pearl's until mid-December. See you in the morning.
Tons and tons of love. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxoxo :):)
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