Category Archives: Colorado

Colorado, Family, Feelings, The Move

You Have Entered. The Deadline Zone.

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Samain                                                                        Moving Moon

We have transitioned to a new zone. The deadline for finishing our packing is Sunday because the packers come on Monday. I don’t like deadlines. I clutch (as I would have said in the 1960s). This means gears grind and my ability to make good decisions declines. That’s why I wanted to have two years to make the move. That way, I could manage a shorter time frame as we made it possible.

Fortunately, Kate’s gears engage just when mine begin to slip. She’s got lists and her purposeful walk and good humor. I feel pressure and would  prefer not to. She’s great in a crisis. I like planning. We are yin and yang though sometimes she’s yang and I’m yin, other times the opposite. We bring different parts of our psyche to bear at different times. An altogether good thing.

Colorado, Feelings, Friends, The Move, Woolly Mammoths

Sadness. A Measure of Value.

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Samain                                                                      Moving Moon

Breakfast at Key’s with Woolly Frank Broderick. He gave us a bowl by Robert Big Elk with smudge in it for purifying the new house. There were also six prayer ties for protection on our journey a week from Friday.

My first introduction to Frank was his shamanic drumming, 20+ years ago. I’ve gone on many shamanic voyages to his drums over the years. He walks with the Lakota people as a friend and ally.

Frank’s a Celtic guy, as am I, he more purely than me. My Germanic heritage is probably stronger genetically and reinforced by upbringing, but it was not the heritage I embraced when I began writing over 25 years ago. It was the Celtic.

Not sure why I made that choice at this late point, but I know that the Celtic world felt and feels very close to my soul’s journey, especially in its intimate linkage to the natural world. Of course, if I’m honest, the Germanic scholarly mind has made an equally strong imprint. I’m a combination of the two: wildly passionate and captive of a need for scholarly precision. An uneasy mix.

Sadness, I’ve learned, is a measure of value. As we love, so are we sad. I’m sad to leave Frank behind, as soul brother and as political fellow traveler.

Colorado, The Move

I’m Hoping For A Mild Christmas

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Samain                                                                                 Moving Moon

Weather station and a computer monitor went in a plastic tub. The final items have begun to disappear leaving only the bare minimum. This computer, this printer, the two televisions. Dishes, pots and pans. Even those will go on Monday.

Though there’s some question about Conifer, it’s beginning to look like the weather is going to cooperate with a thaw headed toward us and a mild week next week, the packing, loading and leaving week. Though I’m a guy who likes a consistently cold winter and lots of snow, I’m happy if it holds off this next couple of weeks.

Colorado, The Move

Eschaton Now

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Samain                                                                              Moving Moon

Kate’s off at the Third Bird, a Minneapolis restaurant, with the ladies who lunch, a last meal together. I’ll have my last presentation at Groveland on Sunday, then the last Woolly meeting as a Minnesota resident on Monday night at the Nicollet Island Inn.

These moments are no longer a ways in the future. They are now. This house is a temporary skin, one we’re ready to molt. Someone else will harvest the garlic crop in the ground. Someone else will plant the raised beds next year and harvest the apples, cherries, plums, blueberries.

Meanwhile we’ll be considering how to keep the bears out of the honey and how to grow vegetables at all at 8,800 feet. And opening boxes.

Colorado, The Move

Shift

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Samain                                                                            Moving Moon

Can you feel the shift? The wind has started blowing from the east, giving us lift. No matter now the final bits of packing, the papers, the plans. The momentum has begun to take us, all the work past or almost past and nothing but future lies ahead.

It’s heady. Creates a swooning sensation, a bit giddy. When Brian, our window washer, loaded up the Simplicity Landlord lawn tractor into his trailer, he said, “I’ll bet you guys are ready to go?” Oh. Yeah. Replying to him carried me into the future for a moment, desire collapsing the days. “Yep. We are.”

The liminal field in which we have lived for the last seven months has begun to fade away. We are living the move. No longer living in the move.

The circus tent has two main tents collapsed, one folded up and headed for the truck, another ready. The third won’t go down until this house sells, but the roustabouts have their instructions. They will know when to strike it and get it loaded. The circus will have to do with only two rings for a short time. It will manage.

Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Holidays, The Move

Seed Planted

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Samain                                                                                  Moving Moon

The Great Wheel congruence I mentioned a few posts back, the one between closing on Samain (Oct. 31st) and having our first full day and night together in Colorado on the 21st of December, the Winter Solstice, are not the only ones.

When I went back over posts related to this decision, I discovered Kate and I discussed the possibility and then decided to move on April 30. That day we planted a small seed that began to germinate on May 1st.  That’s Beltane, the Celtic holiday that marks the opening of the growing season.

That means the idea of moving to Colorado took root that day and began to flourish over the growing season. We tilled the ground around it over the summer and into the fall, finally harvesting the fruit of a new home on the day marking the end of the growing season.

There is natural magic here. Yes, these dates are coincidences, but the congruity between our dreams and their realization in parallel with the Great Wheel’s turning demonstrates, profoundly I believe, the interdependent nature of our lives as human animals (see the TED talk below) and the life of plants and other animals. We reflect in our lives the patterns to be found in the world around us. I find this deeply comforting.

Colorado, The Move

Like Water Circling a Drain

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Samain                                                                            Moving Moon

Finding emotions cycling faster as the time here gets shorter. As Frank Broderick put it in a phone call yesterday, time here circles like water down a drain, getting smaller and smaller as the days disappear.Yesterday I felt delight, this morning, early, a nascent panic. God, do we have time to get everything done?

Last evening the treadmill mysteriously quit working. This is a Landice and I have a lifetime warranty on it; the parts cost is not an issue though there can be a substantial labor charge. The question is, can it get fixed before the movers load it on the truck? I’ll find out today.

Filling out papers for the sale of the house. Stuff we could have done a while back but didn’t realize we had. Disclosure forms, things like that.

Based on my anxiety over the last few months and the number of dire events that have not happened you might think I would be calmer now, use experience to tamp down the nervous tics. But no. Not the way this ornery critter of the psyche works. It just wipes off its forehead, says whew, escaped that one, then moves on. The future has enough branches that plenty of things might happen.

Kate had an emotional last quilting session yesterday. Her sewing group made clear how much they would miss her. Not to mention that today the grand piano moves on to a new home. We were surprised to learn, quite some time ago now, that it was worth less than nothing. It would not fit in the new house and it’s too big for Jon and Jen’s.

Kate gifted it to a senior citizen we know well. She plays, but got rid of her piano when they moved into their town house. Now she’ll have a piano on which to practice again. The changes have begun to come faster now. The piano movers, for example, are here right now at 7:15.

 

 

Colorado, Great Wheel, Holidays, The Move

We’ll Be Home For the Solstice

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Samain                                                                             Moving Moon

Closed on Samain and at home for the first full day and night on the Winter Solstice. On my sacred calendar the days and nights could not have lined up better. The Winter Solstice this year is on a new moon, an excellent time for beginnings. The new moon will make even darker that deepest night of the year.

We purchased our new home at the beginning of the Celtic New Year, the time when the fallow season begins. Our first full day and night together in the new house will come at the moment when the night is longest, when dark has triumphed over light as completely as it can. Then, as we become more and more settled on Shadow Mountain, the light will gradually increase.

The new moon, the Winter Moon, will grow and become full in the first weeks of our moving in. Blessed be.

Colorado, Family, Feelings, Friends, The Move, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

The 25th Is the New 50th

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Samain                                                                               Moving Moon

The electrician comes today to remove the automatic transfer switch for our generator. Eric at Alpha Electric in Evergreen said they can cost as much as $1,000 to $1,200. Probably saved us the cost of the electrician today and the cost of installing the generator in Colorado.

While we decided to leave the Viking in place (so we can install an induction cooking surface in Colorado), we did decide to take the freezer with us. One less thing to buy out there.

At the Woolly restaurant meeting on Monday Stefan said, “I know you’re focused on logistics right now, but this is a big life change.” He’s right, in a way. The logistics have absorbed, helpfully, a lot of the angst. We could put our worry hats on about things we could resolve like choosing a mover, what to take and what to unload, when to buy a new home.

The larger question of whether this is a good decision or not, oddly, doesn’t really matter. We made the choice to go and accepted the consequences, positive and negative, of that choice. There’s little we can do now to effect that. As a result, the time between deciding for Colorado and now has been filled with making that choice a reality.

We gave ourselves long enough to say our good-byes and that has been a very nurturing, even healing process. It means that when we start our new life in Colorado it will not be with regrets about Minnesota, but with warm memories.

The new life will depend on us and our choices, too. We’re going open to a new place, to new friends, to stronger family relationships.  And, we’re looking forward to being with each other in a different environment. Our first anniversary in Colorado will be our 25th and for those of us of the divorce generation, the 25th is the new 50th.

 

Colorado, Holidays, Mountains, The Move

What We’re Getting For Christmas

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Samain                                                                                Moving Moon

It’s quiet. Thankfully. Some guys are running cable along the utility easement on our property and the dogs don’t like that. At all. Lots of warning, warning, warning barks. Lots.

Kate got yet another load of boxes. How many she’s gotten over the course of the last few months I don’t know. A large number. Gives me hope for the AA chapters up here. She also got a barrier for the front seats to prevent the dogs from climbing up for a better view. There’s definitely something better about sitting where the humans are sitting.

It’s like Christmas is coming only in the form of an A1 moving van. If the driver’s a rotund guy in red with ermine trim, I’ll know holiseason has come on full strength.

We’re getting a new life for the holidays. Just what we wanted!