Beltane Mountain Moon
A blue sky day again yesterday. As the wxgeek implies below, we will pay a price for the beauty of these days. May it only be anxiety. This will be our fourth summer here and we’ve yet to have an evacuation. Lucky.
(We’re in the upper right hand corner of the red in Colorado. These same maps look much better for July and August.)
We’ve done the fire prep things we can do; but, after reading Megafires by a UofC Boulder based investigative journalist who specializes in wildfires, I realized if we get a fire coming up Brook Forest Drive, we’ll lose our house unless firefighters stop the fire or protect our house. We’re in a lodgepole pine forest with scattered aspen groves. Fire behavior for lodgepoles, a pioneer species, is to crown, burning everything down so the forest can start over. These forests burn less often than the ponderosa dominated ecosystem at lower elevations; but, when they do, they take out everything in their path.
Big fun. Oddly, it’s not a source of anxiety for me because we’ve done what we can and the rest is statistical. Too, we decided a while back that we’ll just replace what we lose since stuff isn’t what’s important to us. Kate, the dogs, me, a few important papers. We’ve saved those last in a safety deposit box down the hill and all my writing is stored in the cloud or on flashdrives.
In the present, which has never existed before and will recede as if it were never there, all things can be made new. This is a subtle idea, at once obvious and at the same time almost impossible to grasp. Yet it is true that the 71 years of my life have passed in moments, always in the now. Even in 1947 my life passed moment to moment in increments, the very same as the increments I experience today in 2018.
Kate made dog treats for the first time since her surgery. She’s gradually gaining back use of her right arm. PT today for her at 8 am.
I’ve been reading a book by 
It reminded me, the reason I liked it, of Paul Ricoeur’s notion of second naiveté in which a scholar of religion first distances him or her self from his faith as a result of academic work, then returns to the texts after that distancing with a second naiveté, an embrace of the former belief now informed by reasoned analysis. The result, in both cases, is something new, neither level 1 nor level 2, but an amalgam.
Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR and LBJ would be my top five Presidents, no particular order. Yes, Teddy Roosevelt and maybe Eisenhower are in a close second tier. I disagree with historians who rank Truman and Reagan above LBJ. And JFK is overblown. LBJ gave a damn about those in the U.S. who had less. In a commencement speech at the University of Michigan on May 22nd, 1964, he “… called on the nation to move not only toward “the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society,” which he defined as one that would “end poverty and racial injustice.” 
Turns out I missed a key move on powering up the sound board.
I had to call Alan Rubin, a new Beth Evergreen friend, who is the A/V sage. He said he was sitting by his pool enjoying the weather. It was a blue sky, white cloud, warm but not hot, Colorado day. After some false starts, Alan isolated the problem, I poked a button and, right at 2, the sound. Whew.
However. All this meant I had not had time to arrange the tables for folks to take notes, so they sat in chairs looking up at the screen. I also had not given sufficient thought to the pedagogy of the afternoon. How would we interact? What questions might prompt discussion? The fact that everyone faced front rather than seeing each other across a table made getting a conversation started difficult. Though I don’t think the audience cared, I’d hoped for a more interactive event and I didn’t facilitate that.