Welcome to the Commune podcast. My name is Jeff Krasno.

Many of you may receive my weekly Sunday commusing article, where I address a breadth of issues from the spiritual to the physiological, 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 features two distinct musings both

semi autobiographical here's my first musing titled precious scars titled, Precious Scars.

In 1983, when I was 13 years old, I was admitted to the pediatric ward at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

I had a malignant tumor on my left knee.

I was among the fortunate.

Let's just say the entrance of the pediatric ward at Sloan is wider than the exit.

While my surgical oncologist excised my tumor with a plum,

he cared little for aesthetics and left me with a gruesome eight-inch scar across the top of my patella.

40 years later, as I trace it lightly with my index finger, it remains numb. I added another battle wound further up my thigh when I received a total hip replacement. Isn't this the course of life?

Across the years, we accrue scars, both literal and emotional. My experience at Sloan was my confirmation, my vision quest, my bar mitzvah.

I arrived a boy and left a man.

There is a concept in the Kabbalah, a form of Jewish mysticism called the emanations.

The emanations refer to the ten sephirot, the platonic forms of

wisdom, understanding, mercy, beauty, strength, and other creative life forces. These qualities

leave the realm of the divine and come to earth in imperfect form. In attempting to deeply understand concepts like love, we

reassemble the shattered mind of God. It's as if platonic capital L love is a pristine,

crystalline vase hovering somewhere high above the clouds. As it tumbles down through the atmosphere, it refracts and reflects love's light, only to smack

into the world's hard clay and splinter into a million shards.

We earth creatures are then left to pick up the pieces.

...