• Category Archives Woolly Mammoths
  • Tajikistani Comfort

    Winter                                                                Waxing Moon

    20190118_104419Quick geopolitical quiz. Where is Tajikistan? No googling, no globe, no world map. Where is it? If you know, you get the sister city of Boulder appellation, Friend of Dushanbe. Friend of what? Oh, you didn’t know that Dushanbe is the capital of Tajikistan? No, we’re not revoking your nametag. Not only are we not revoking your nametag, we’re inviting you over to tea at a traditional Tajikistan Tea House donated to Boulder by the citizens of Dushanbe. And, it’s a stunner.

    The Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse was fabricated in Tajikistan and then reassembled in Boulder, much like the Teahouse exhibited in the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s Japanese galleries. The result puts you in another place. The intricate, colorful glazed tiles and the carefully hand carved wooden pillars lit by floor to ceiling windows makes the dining room seem both familiar and exotic, intimate, yet expansive. 20190118_123043Though we didn’t sit on one of them, there were also raised platforms with cushions and short tables. Looked like fun to me.

    The menu has an assortment of dishes ranging from Lapsang Souchong Bulgogi to a Russian Beet Salad. We spent a leisurely hour and a half eating hummus, samosas, and the Russian Beet Salad. The deserts were wonderful, too.

    I picked up an ounce of white tea, Silver Needle. My disappointment with the physics of boiling water at 8,800 feet sorta knocked me out of the tea making habit I’d developed in Andover. The Teahouse inspired me to suck it up and get back to it. Starting today, I plan to add tea-making back into my daily routine.

    Fellow Travelers
    Fellow Travelers

    While we ate a gentle snow fell, visible through the large windows. Could have been a morning in Dushanbe. After our meal, we drove over to McGuckin’s. It’s a hardware store, but so much more. First, it’s the size of a big box retailer. It’s aisles have that distinctive hardware shelving and signage, but they include furniture, fly fishing equipment, art supplies, humidifiers, a dizzying range of power tools, garden tools. The atmosphere was laid back, many folks meandering around, like us, taking in its immensity. I found a large brush to paint backgrounds and some tape to use for outlining. A few sponges, too.

    Dark Lane, Southowram, England
    Dark Lane, Southowram, England

    The drive back home, about an hour in normal conditions, took almost two. Tom did his usual masterful, calm job as helmsman. Unfortunately the timing meant that he and Mark dropped me off, then headed back down the mountain to make their 7:00 pm flight. DIA is far from our house and you have to traverse the whole of the Denver metro to get there. Not a fun drive.

    Ram Dass sums it up: We’re all just walking each other home. Tom and Mark came out and we hiked another few miles toward that final destination, the most ancientrail of all. The precious value of knowing we’re not walking alone turns us into fellow pilgrims. Life without travel companions is a burden; with fellow pilgrims it’s a rich, exciting journey toward the unknown.

     


  • Thursday

    Winter                                                                             Waxing Moon

    The Cutthroat
    The Cutthroat

    The support team arrived. We went to three Baily landmarks. The Rustic didn’t open until 11:00, so we wandered back across 285 to the Cutthroat Trout Cafe. Which Mark observed, “Doesn’t serve any fish.”

    The food was good, straight breakfast, no fancy names or ingredients. Eggs, pancakes, hash browns, coffee, toast, jelly. Our waitress had been there since 5 am. “Yes, mostly coffee drinkers before six, but there are two gentlemen who come in and eat pretty regularly.” She had on an I love Goonies t-shirt.

    Since the Sasquatch Outpost was right next door, we walked in there. I bought Kate a Sasquatch doesn’t believe in you either t-shirt from among the many, many Sasquatch themed items on offer: a bar of soap shaped like a Bigfoot foot, a Bigfoot riding a motorcycle, signs: Caution Big Foot Breeding Area, avoid eye contact, Warning Big Foot Area Stay on Marked Trails, hats, sweatshirts, books, scarves.

    Shoppin' for weed
    Shoppin’ for weed

    Next stop. The Happy Camper. These old enough to remember dial phones and black and white tv guys stepped into the brave new world of cannabis with a cash register to take your money. Mark had a bit of culture shock. So many options, so little hassle. He chose some thc capsules. That night both he and Tom enjoyed a better sleep. A big deal for both of them.

    After Bailey we came back to the loft and hung out. Talking. Then it was nap time so we rolled out our mats, oops, no, kindergarten. Tom and Mark went back to the unusually decorated B&B, Arrowhead Manor, and I went downstairs.

    We reconvened at 5 pm for a trip to Sushi Win. Sushi Wins’ owner no longer accepts credit cards or checks, just cash. Mark had an unusual roll that came in a seaweed cone wrapped in black and white checkerboard paper and presented in an ice cream cone stand. Very mod. Tom and I had the sashimi bowl. As usual Sushi Win had few customers, quiet.

     

     

     

     


  • The Flame Narrative

    Samain                                                                                Stent Moon

    20181211_115152Bought this ceramic container a few years back, probably during a Woolly Mammoth retreat at Valhelga, the Helgeson’s family retreat on a lake close to Collegeville, home of St. John’s Monastery. It reminds me of the modest clay cylinders that held the Dead Sea Scrolls and I loved the brown to black glaze, the whoosh.

    On the St. John’s campus, Richard Bresnahan fires up the huge Johanna Kiln every fall with the help of students and volunteers who come to feed it wood 24 hours a day while the firing continues. Richard, who hosted us Mammoths several times at his pottery studio on the north side of the large St. John’s campus, introduced me to the idea of flame narrative.

    In a kiln like the Johanna, wood-fired, the flame and the heat travel from the firebox at the front up through the dragon like body, hence the name dragon kilns. As the heat and the flame move through and up the various chambers, they pass over the bisque shapes of hundreds of tea-pots, tea cups, storage containers, plates, anything that can be made from clay.

    Burned into this container is the narrative of the flame’s passage on that fall day when it sat inside the Johanna Kiln and the dragon’s breath made its way past the wooden platform on which it sat. Literally baked in to the surface of this beautiful pot.

    Johanna Kiln Steve Basile photo
    Johanna Kiln Steve Basile photo

    It’s my choice of a final resting place. I hope whoever cares for my cremains will put them in it and either keep them somewhere, bury them, put them in a mausoleum, or seal the top with wax and cast the whole into the nearest moving water like the Tibetan monks do to their mandalas. I’m fine with any decision.

    Not sure why but over the last couple of days the flame narrative idea and my death have been on my mind. They merged. After our deaths, the memory of our life, whatever it is, is like the flame narrative on the ceramics that come out of the Johanna Kiln. The fiery tongue of the dragon breathes life into us, gives us motive energy for our brief sojourn as organized, sentient star dust. As that fire moves through the gigantic kiln of our years, it burns the story of our journey into the universe, never to be gone, never to be repeated. Then, as Beowulf says, “Heaven swallows the smoke.”

     

     


  • I like this guy

    Samain                                                               Thanksgiving Moon

    5002011 09 10_1164Happy to have some good news to report about Jon. Went to his court date yesterday. His inner attitude seems to be shifting away from anger about the divorce (understandable, but not helpful) toward getting on with his life, accepting the constraints of the restraining order (unreasonable, but legally enforceable, as he just discovered). He wants to get his art in a gallery or up for sale. This is big because it’s a key part of his identity that lay fallow during the twelve years of his marriage. He needs positive reinforcement and he’s had more than his share of negatives over the last few years.

    artistHe’s a very talented, smart guy who can handle all the work necessary to remodel his home, replace an axle in his car, ski a great line down an A-basin bowl, teach elementary age kids how to express themselves. I hope he can organize his life so these thing line up, move him forward, and make him feel good about himself.

    Kate had a nausea free day yesterday. She took the ativan and that seemed to help. A day without nausea is like a day with sunshine. It makes her feel good and makes me feel good. May it continue.

    breathe thich-nhat-hanh-calligraphyI’m feeling a bit stressed, a lot going on. Religious school tonight. I’m taking pizza makings and teaching a unit on holidays, especially winter holidays. The kids will reimagine, reconstruct a new winter holiday. Tomorrow morning Kate has two imaging studies, looking for zebras. Tomorrow evening is Gabe’s winter concert in Stapleton. A sequelae of the hearing yesterday is that Jon can’t, for the moment, attend. The old protection order carved out an exception to the 100 yards rule for events with the kids, things like parent-teacher conferences, concerts, doctor visits, but the law is a blunt instrument.  Yesterday by default it eliminated those exceptions. Jon wants me to go to represent our side of the family. Important for Gabe. I’ll go.

    Stressed, yes, but not anxious. Still. Amazing myself right now. Following the water course way, going with the many changes, leveraging their energy, keeping my feet while wading in a fast flowing river. Not trying to dam it up, divert it, slow it. Finding the chi, aligning mine, taking each day on its own. Most of the time, and this is the part that amazes me, little of this is conscious. Means I’ve integrated something at a soul level, some amalgam of mindfulness, wu wei, and love of life.

    tao laoGot reinforced shortly after the move out here when I had to deal with prostate cancer. That shook me. I worked hard to keep myself upright and maybe, in the process, began to consolidate a lot of learning. A major part of that consolidation came from the support I got from family and friends. Oh. Life can be good, even when it’s bad. Weird. Since the move, it’s been one damned thing after another, or it feels that way right now. Those things forced a going deep, being honest, being grateful a lot. Now, four years later, our move anniversary is the Winter Solstice, my Colorado Self, the one born in the alembic of all those insults, has asserted itself.

    And I like this guy. This mountain man, man of the West, embedded in family and friends and Congregation Beth Evergreen. Doing ok. Thanks to all of you and some random acts of life.

     


  • Zoom. Zoom.

    Samain                                                                       Thanksgiving Moon

    offy 1/3 model, rodauthority.com
    offy 1/3 model, rodauthority.com

    Zoom. I remember balsa wood airplanes and matchbook cars. Both earned zoom, zoom, zoom. Later, listening to the Indy 500 on the radio, as I did for years the zoom, zoom, zoom of the Offenhauser engine that dominated that track, 27 wins, was background to the sportscaster’s calling of the race.

    Now Zoom has moved on, gone into the cyberworld. No longer a sound it’s a brand, a type of online video conferencing (videophones! Dick Tracy!) that captures participants in tv-like rectangles filled with one actor, you. It also moves from screen to screen, following the conversation. It has the feel of an IRL gathering with the ability to span distance with ease. It’s a technology I’ve been eager to see for some time. Would loved to have had it when I chaired the North Star Sierra Club’s legislative committee. Statewide participation would have been easy.

    While cranking up the Moving Tradition’s curriculum for Beth Evergreen, I zoomed with their staff and other teachers from synagogues across the U.S. When on the Durango trip last summer with Mark, Paul, and Tom, Paul suggested using it to get together when we returned to our respective homes in Maine, Minnesota, and the Front Range. And so we have.

    zoom employeesYesterday Paul, Mark, Tom and I moved into cyberspace. Zoom. Zoom. It was 9 am here in the Rocky Mountain West, 10 in the Midwest, and 11 in the land of the first light. The conversation went deep, over 30 years together makes that easy. We had body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, and shared laughter.

    Though. No hugs at the end, no elevation of the trunk as we used to do in our silly, but bonding, post-meeting ritual as Woolly Mammoths. No shared food. Not sure whether profound relationships could be started and nurtured without these, but in the instance of men who’ve known each other long and well, it’s a miracle. (If you were raised, as I was, in the time of the Offenhauser engine.)

    “We’re all just walking each other home.” Ram Dass. The ancientrail of human companionship, of friendship now has another path, a virtual one without mountain passes, hostels, gatherings at the Nicollet Island Inn. Zoom. Zoom.

     


  • Merging Strengths

    Samain                                                                      Healing Moon

    Friend Mark Odegard sent this to me, something he found in an old journal from his hippy days traveling the earth, searching, finding, losing.

    In the way of art, even to its creators, he saw something new when he came upon it this time: “Yesterday I saw in the drawing you and Kate, holding on, merging strengths, hoping to make it. Hard work, tough times,  pain and love.”

    Ode journal, nov 4, 2018 kate and me


  • A True North

    Lughnasa                                                                Waning Summer Moon

    Still thinking about the north. In 1969 Judy and I left Connersville, Indiana, headed toward Appleton, Wisconsin. In my mind the landscape would be pine trees, glistening lakes, deer, lots of people in plaid shirts. Maybe still a lumberjack or two. Jack London’s White Fang, Call of the Wild, Sea-Wolf, Burning Daylight had made me a distant fan of a place closer to the Arctic, one where the wildness of our planet had not been consumed by factories and roads.

    Burning DaylightTurns out the Fox River Valley was not that place. The Fox River which runs from the Green Bay through Appleton and finally into Lake Winnebago had no available oxygen for aquatic life thanks to years of dairies and paper mills, two of the worst polluters, dumping effluent. But you could see this north from there. In the Fox River Valley it manifested itself in a tortured way through snowmobile culture and the annual ritual of the deer hunt. Both were violent and dangerous. On winter nights the lights of snowmobiles rake the roadways and countrysides as riders drive their vehicles alongside the roads from bar to bar for a shot and a beer. It was often said that grudges got settled during deer season.

    White Fang’s north also announced itself in the weather. That winter we had two feet of snow in one storm, an amazement to this long time Hoosier, resident of an agricultural and industrial belt that had confused seasons often with slush and ice storms in place of winter, northern winter. I learned about engine block heaters. Temperatures dropped to way, way below zero. And stayed there.

    LondonWisconsin was a bad experience for me. Judy and I had married at 21 and 17. I had graduated from college that spring and had no idea what to do next. So. Get married. By Appleton neither one of us were sure why we’d said yes to the other. The long winter nights found us drinking beer by the case and playing sheepshead with Judy’s family. Her father, a convinced alcoholic, and I, just getting started in my addiction, didn’t really get along. He was a snowmobile racer, a deer hunter, an ink salesman and a Packer fan. I had little interest in any of those things. Our only common ground was his daughter.

    By 1970 I’d found myself withering in Appleton. Too much alcohol. Judy and I had agreed on an open marriage, it was the sixties after all, but when she acted on it, I discovered I hadn’t meant it. I had three jobs in Appleton: life insurance salesman (never sold a policy, lasted three months), a baker making bread and pound cakes, but getting to work at 4 a.m for $1.50 an hour lost its charm quickly, and, finally, as a rag cutter at the Fox River Valley Paper Company. This was a distinct change from studying anthropology and philosophy, fighting the establishment. And not a good one.

    Seminary took me to Minnesota, where I did find my true north, not in New Brighton, of course, but up north in the boreal forest, among the 10,000 glaciated lakes and on the shores of Lake Superior. This was Burning Daylight territory. I stayed for forty-five years.

    Burntside Lake, Ely
    Burntside Lake, Ely

    While up north, from 1969 to 2014, I discovered the insular nature of this land. The long blue ellipse of Lake Michigan made Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, the Upper Midwest, lack a through route to the West. We were not on the way to anywhere. You had to want to go up there for some reason and most folks in the U.S. chose not to. Nothing there unless you fished or hunted or had business or family. Cold, too. Brutal winters. As far north as most folks got was Detroit or Chicago.

    Especially distant, especially unknown were the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, northern Wisconsin and northern Minnesota with the Iron Range, the Arrowhead region, Lake Superior, Voyageurs National Park, the BWCA, Warroad. It is a culture that has some common ground, snowmobiles, snowshoes, ice fishing, hiking, mineral extraction, cross-country skiing, but little integration even with the states in which they lie. What integration there is tends to be that of tourist destination and tourist though of course the Iron Range and the copper mines of the Keweenaw, the laker supported transport of the Great Lakes, and such cities as Duluth, Superior, Sault St. Marie, and Marquette attract citizens as well as visitors.

    Now living in a region dominated by the story of the vanishing frontier, the Indian wars, the cowboy, mountains, and the false allure of unbridled freedom, the north country has receded from view again. It is far away, not on the way to anywhere most choose to go, and largely unknown. Yet it still feeds my imagination and my memories there are warm and many. No, I never mushed a dogsled to take medicine to a plague ridden village isolated by a blizzard (Sergeant Renfrew of the Canadian Mounted Police), but I did mush a dogsled. I never caught a muskie or a lake trout, but I did spend many happy hours picking blueberries in the late August sun. It was the north of my Jack London induced fantasy and I loved it. As I now do the Rockies.

     

     


  • North

    Lughnasa                                                                      Waning Summer Moon

    strangerReading two books right now, The Stranger in the Woods and Northland. They are oddly complementary. Northland recounts a three-year long journey by the author following the northern border across the U.S. It starts in Maine. This early part of his journey is through land very familiar to friends Paul and Sarah Strickland who live near the St. Croix River separating the U.S. and Canada. Stranger in the Woods tells the story of Christopher Knight, who grew up in central/northern Maine, graduated from high school, became a burglar alarm installer, then, at age 20 decided to disappear into the woods. He was found 27 years later after having spent the intervening time in silence, living alone in a rocky clearing and subsisting off of raiding cabins near his well-concealed home.

    Porter Knox, author of Northland, says that land in the U.S. along the northern border is a land apart, distant from the rest of the country both for its inhabitants and visitors. Having lived in Minnesota for forty years, I know the Northland border there and in Michigan, too. It’s severe country in Minnesota with temperatures the rest of the country read about during the winter, lakes carved by the retreating glaciers of the last ice age and boreal forests. It’s also poor country with soil too rocky and thin for agriculture and too distant from cities for most commercial purposes. Tourism is the main economic driver there and that’s seasonal.

    an album
    an album

    Knight’s family had developed a way of living in the Northland. They had a large garden, hunted, were clever with their hands and spent time with books, not media. It was a subsistence existence that reminded me of the movie Captain Fantastic. Christopher took the northland life style to a logical extreme, becoming isolated not only from the rest of the country, but from human community itself. In Minnesota and Wisconsin his family would probably have been called Jackpine Savages, which refers to folks who live off the land there, often taking multiple jobs while living mostly off game, fish and gardens.

    As I write this from the top of Shadow Mountain, I can see how different and faraway this border and these lifestyles must seem to the rest of the U.S. In fact, it strikes me as odd how little known these northern lifeways are. Redneck culture, not the same, but also rural in origin, has a lot of visibility. So does the older Appalachian Scotch-Irish culture from which Redneck culture emerged. Cowboys were similarly isolated from mainstream U.S. culture, but their presence is large in U.S. history, too. Not so for the folks who live in the colder regions along the border with Canada.

     


  • Hoaxer

    Lughnasa                                                    Monsoon Moon

    Another interesting day. Wrote in the morning, then out to Lake Minnetonka for a few hours on the lake riding Falcor, Tom’s lucky dragon. It’s a Sundancer 280, capable of giving Tom a reminder of his youthful boat building days. He built his first boat at 10. He and Bill and I went from his slip over to Lord Fletcher’s, a restaurant that caters to the boating crowd. We all had walleye.

    A truly Minnesota experience. A boat. Friends. A lake. And, walleye.

    Coming back to the hotel, I took a nap, then went to the club lounge for appetizers. Enough for dinner.

    Later, Jazz Central where I heard docent friend Grace Goggin’s son, Peter, play the sax in his band, Hoaxer. He’s good, really good, and Hoaxer is the real deal. They play a hard driving, innovative, energetic, even funny brand of jazz. They were, by turns, raw and sweet and passionate. If you get a chance, listen to them.

    I stayed there until 10:30, way past my bedtime, then, for some reason, went back to my hotel and watched tv. Vacation mind, I guess. A little sleepy this morning. In an hour I leave for St. Paul, for the Groveland celebration, inside now due to thunderstorms.