Welcome to the Commune podcast.

This is Jeff Krasno.

How many of you may receive my weekly Sunday commusing article, where I address a breadth of issues from the spiritual to the sociopolitical.

And on occasion, I will also record an audio version of these articles and release

it here as a bonus episode. So today's missive addresses a concept in Japanese aesthetics known as

Yu-Gen. There's no real translation for this notion, but we've all felt it. In the Chinese

philosophical text from which the term was taken,

Yu-Gen meant deep or mysterious. But really, it points to a sensation of sadness, not grief, per se,

but rather a delightful kind of wistfulness akin to the feeling that arises when listening

to Sati or Debussy.

In essence, it's a sadness that we choose, and it is strongly related to the acceptance

of transience that is often associated with wabi-sabi.

Today's musing attempts to poke at this feeling.

Now, for those of you familiar with the work of Alan Watts, you will likely hear echoes of his incomparable brilliance in this episode and many others. I am deeply influenced by his poetic waxing

and am thrilled to have begun a partnership

with his son Mark to feature content

from the Watts Archives on Commune in the coming months.

So without further delay,

here's today's commusing titled Moving On.

One summer, I went up early to open the small family cabin on the lake.

Skyler and the girls would tutel up a few days later once I had evicted the spiders, expelled winter's must, and stocked the shelves.

Soon, the lake would be teeming with kayaks, dinghies, and pale-skinned

...