Category Archives: US History

Commentary on the news, Coronavirus, Family, Jefferson County, Mountains, Politics, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, US History

We Are At Home

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Spring and the full Corona Luna

Tuesday gratefuls: A good workout. All the delivery people: USPS, UPS, Fedex. Again, and still, all the service workers, warehouse workers, truck drivers, doctors, nurses, governors and mayors who’ve chosen to confront life under the pandemic. And, again, the coronavirus for unveiling the lies we tell ourselves to preserve our status, our pollution, our failed economic systems. Seoah, who cleans and cooks and smiles and laughs and orders from Lululemon.

The snow is melting. We’ve had bright sun shiny days. Jeffco put the entire county on stage 1 fire restrictions indefinitely. It’s unusual for that restriction to come this early, with much snow still to come. Not good news.

What would happen right now if we had a major disaster, like a wildfire? It would up end our life here and create a turmoil wherever we had to go. Or, an earthquake in California. A hurricane hitting Florida or New Orleans. Tornadoes in the south. Disasters during an ongoing disaster. Are we ready for these? They will happen.

We’ve flagged off our housecleaner for the second time. We’ve continued to pay her though, as we will pay our hair stylist. These are one woman businesses. They are our contract employees so we’re supporting them. How long? Don’t know.

Seoah cleans so we’re ok. And the hair? Somebody said a couple of weeks ago that we were only three weeks from knowing everybody’s true hair color. Shaggy’s been my look most of my life. Another couple of months is NBD.

Another zoom time this morning with Clan Keaton. Linking the far flung Ellises and our first cousin, Diane. Mark sent me a clip from the Arab News announcing a 24 hour curfew in Riyadh. Residents can only go out between 6am and 3pm for food and medicine. Today begins a month long lockdown in Singapore with somewhat looser restrictions. San Francisco’s been shelter in place for longer than most.

All this physical distancing and social distancing has begun to work. How much it will flatten the curve and what happens when it ends are still uncertain. Like our lives.

Coronavirus, Dogs, Family, Friends, Health, Jefferson County, Judaism, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, US History, Woolly Mammoths

Seeing

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Spring and the Corona Luna

Monday gratefuls: Corn dogs. State Fair corn dogs. The Minnesota State Fair. The Great Minnesota Get Together. The Great U.S. stay apart. The bailout. I think. Being alone with Kate and Seoah. Those pictures of Murdoch from Brenton. Life in a world historical event. Life. Death. The power of Monday.

Here’s what I’ve seen. A black SUV, a Lexus, next to me at a stoplight. Latex gloved hands on the steering wheel. On the road to Loveland Saturday all the LED road signs read: Avoid Non-Essential Travel. A cascade of it’s gonna be later messages from Instacart. So many maps and graphs and charts. Fewer cars on Black Mountain Drive, especially when I go out for the newspaper around 5:30 am. Empty parking lots. A closed outlet mall. So many e-mails starting with we care about you and that’s why our business is doing X. Friends and family on zoom. The rabbi on zoom, singing about breath. A sign at Bergen Bark Inn. We’re taking care of the dogs of essential workers like doctors, nurses, firefighters, police, grocery store workers. The worker at Starbucks extending a credit card reader so I could insert the card, then remove it on my own. My own gloved hand on the hose nozzle at the Phillips 66. That bottle of hand sanitizer in my cup holder. Seoah with her lysol spray hitting each package that gets delivered.

When will it ever end? When will it ever end?

And, yet. A moment in time like no other. Yes, the Spanish Flu. Yes. But, no. Not in this millennia. Not in my lifetime. Not in this century.

The first quarter of 2020 has not gone so well. What with all the dog bites, then Gertie’s death, then the plague. Yes, the Moronic plague. And, the virus. True.

However, I find it exciting, too. What will happen next? How bad can this get? Wow. Really? The ways people are coping. The empty streets of big cities around the world. The bravery. The stupidity and the cupidity.

Like one facebook meme said: This is the first time we could save the world by watching television.

Commentary on Religion, Family, Friends, Health, Judaism, Politics, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, US History, Woolly Mammoths

Let It Be

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Spring and the Corona Luna

Sunday gratefuls: Technology, not our savior, but a friend. Brenton and his 3,500 steps. Bob Dylan and his new song, Murder Most Foul. The Weight, by the Band. Pictures of Murdoch coming from Loveland. Zoom. Over the wires, over the air, over the ocean and across the desert. Wow. Each one of you, readers. Whoever you are. I love you.

Zoomed. Again. The new hang out, like the ol’ Kid Canteen on Harrison Street. Mark in Riyadh. Mary in Singapore. Diane in San Francisco. Kate. Me. On Shadow Mountain. Bombs over Riyadh, Mark said. Have you heard? Singapore’s like normal, almost, Mary said.

Diane was cold, doing a Mark Twain version of the coldest night he ever spent. We talked, decades of back story, going back even into the 19th century. All of us linked by genetics, by fate, by Indiana. Kate looked good.

Paul in Maine. Tom, Bill, Mark in the cold place. On Shadow Mountain. Cranes flying up, up, weighted and buoyed. The mystery of flight. Caretaking, its weight. Wondering how we can survive. Can we keep it up?

All of us gone viral. Lives infected. The future uncertain. How can we survive?

We’re all monastics, huddled in our apartments, our camps, our homes. Rattlin round in them like ol dry bones. Is it life without others? I would say yes. I would say no. I would say, well, I just don’t know.

Fear the moronic plague the most. He and his will kill us all if it might lift the Dow. Plenty of money for some, for most, none at all.

Hear, oh, world. The one is the lord god, the lord. Can you follow an ancientrail created by slaves, crossing seas, and wandering? I thought so for a moment last week. Put Kate in a prayer, held her there. Tears came to my eyes, I wanted it.

But, no. No longer me. No way back into Easter, either. Following the bird, the rock, the sky, the lake, the trout, the love of one for another, all the spirit in all the things all the one. Must be enough.

Coronavirus, Family, Friends, Health, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, US History

Resilience Strategies

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Spring and the Corona Luna

Thursday gratefuls: Kate’s fingers healing, slowly. (due to her Reynaud’s disease) Zoom. The wire that brings in the internet. The internet, making this whole situation more bearable. Books. Authors like Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling, Isaac Asimov, Neal Stephens, William Gibson. Emotions like sadness, grief. The notion and practice of resilience.

Here’s an excellent written out Tedtalk on resilience by Lucy Hone*. Three strategies are the focus of the piece: 1. Know that suffering is part of life. 2. Carefully choose where you’re directing your attention. 3. Ask yourself: “Is what I’m doing helping me or harming me?”

1. Know that suffering is part of life. At seventy plus number one is a lesson most of us have learned. Parental deaths. Serious illness. Depression. Failure. Divorce. Life has difficult, damned difficult moments. The book of Job is an object lesson in recognizing suffering as part of life, not as something happening only to you. That’s the main point here: you’re not being picked on, Covid19 is not the first, nor will it be the last instance of suffering.

2. Carefully choose where you’re directing your attention. Number two may not be so obvious. I’m going to quote the first paragraph from Ms. Hone’s talk:

“I’ve found that resilient people have a habit of realistically appraising situations, and typically they manage to focus on the things they can change and learn to accept the things they can’t. This is a vital and learnable skill. “

And, she says further on: “Whatever you do, make an intentional, deliberate, ongoing effort to tune in to what’s good in your world.” If your media choices right now focus on the next coronavirus news, you might want to consider a diet. Say, reading the newspaper or watching the news or listening to the podcast at a certain time, for a particular length of time.

I have, for years, kept a good news file. I toss in there certain birthday cards, notes from friends, anniversary cards and notes. Notices from things I’ve helped make happen. Pictures of kids and grandkids, dogs. Anything that’s personal and positive. If I start to turn down the blues trail, I take it out. This could be done on a computer, too. Just open a file, cut and paste into it.

3. Ask yourself: “Is what I’m doing helping me or harming me?” I read this article several months ago, then slipped it into my resilience notebook on Evernote. I’d forgotten the first two strategies, but this one stayed with me.

It’s so easy to slip into patterns, habits, routines that are unproductive or down right harmful. With this question though you can challenge yourself, ask yourself, is this worth it?

I know, for example, that if the melancholy I felt yesterday were to continue, it would be harming me. It’s very instructive to have this question to pose. If it’s not helping me, what can I do to alter it? How can I choose to focus myself differently?

Once in a while I get stuck in an anger loop with Kate. A perceived slight, an argument, just the frustrations of being together most of the time. I’m imagining this is an issue right across the country now. This doesn’t help resolve whatever is bothering me, or help her. It hinders me, hinders us.

This question helps me remember that I can choose a different path. We can talk it out, decide to handle things in a different manner. We’re not destined to stay in a negative place.

Resilience is a key to staying afloat at any time. In this, the time of the virus, it is a necessary skill, one which, if you don’t have it now, it behooves you to learn. More on this later.

*Lucy Hone is a codirector at the New Zealand Institute of Wellbeing & Resilience and a research associate at AUT University in Auckland. She is also the author of the book Resilient Grieving.

Commentary on the news, Great Wheel, Health, Politics, US History, World History

AC/DC

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Spring and the Leap Year Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Snow pellets hitting me as I walked out for the newspaper. Blue gray sky as the sun rises behind clouds. Corned beef and cabbage. The equinox, today. Brother Mark, learning new skills. Seoah taking Murdoch for a walk. Kate, a strong woman as friend Debra said. Our world, changing.

First. Welcome Spring! Welcome. We have never needed your message of renewal, growth, emergence more. Even after fallow times, even after the cold and the dark of winter, even after the longest night, you come. You come in the midst of what will be a long darkness, perhaps a long fallow time. You mean, you are, the direct, the tactile hand of mother nature reaching out to each one of us sheltered at home. You will bring us flowers and green leaves and birds singing and fields being planted. Thank you.

More crucial. You will demonstrate for the us the cycle of life. Again. Still. Always. We are uncertain. We don’t know what this afternoon will bring. Tomorrow? Even murkier. But we do know that light follows the dark. That even the longest of winters give way to the gentle spring. So it will be with this virus.

Renewal can take many forms, however, and what the renewal after the coronavirus will look like may surprise us all. Here are two articles that I found useful. Our New Historical Divide B.C. and A.C. by Thomas Friedman in the NYT, and, We’re Not Going Back to Normal by Gordon Lichfield of MIT’s Technology Review.

Friedman, of the St. Louis Park Friedmans, places some hope in advanced biotechnology, but admits it’s not yet ready for a rapid enough response to make a big difference. He quotes a friend, University of Maryland professor, Michele Gelfand on the difference between tight and loose cultures. Tight cultures, with many rules and punishments already in place, think Singapore, Austria, Korea, China, can lock in a broad response quickly and expect that it will be heeded. (She does not mention the bureaucratic paralysis of China.) No parties in the Asian equivalent of Bourbon Street. Loose cultures like the U.S., Italy, Brazil have a tougher time putting responses together and a tougher time enforcing them. She and Friedman believe our political culture may have to change.

Lichfield is clearer on the dilemma. Even though mitigation can help, it’s severe restrictions on movement that will do the most. There are problems. Severe measures are hard to enforce and get harder over time. ICU admissions, a rough metric, can give us a sense of the effectiveness of mitigation or restriction. As admissions trend downward, some loosening of the restrictions can happen. But. New cases will emerge and the spike in hospital admissions will start up again. Until it starts to go down again thanks to reimposed restrictions. According to the study he cites from London’s Imperial College response team, this will happen again and again in waves for 18 months!

It is both the length of time to resolve this, as much as 18 months, and the economic shocks inevitable over that time (and already red light flashing visible now) that will forge a new way of being together. Will you choose to help guide that new world order or resist it?

Colorado, Commentary on the news, Health, Politics, Shadow Mountain, The West, US History

The Cowboy Way

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Imbolc and the Leap Year Moon

When we moved here, I imagined a lot more cowboy boots, stetsons, and cowboy themed places. There are cowboy boots, our hair stylist Jackie says she wears nothing else, and in any restaurant (back when we could go to restaurants) a certain percentage of folks will have on a pair. Same with Stetsons and western shirts with the pleat in the back and pearl faced buttons. The Buckhorn, Denver’s restaurant holding the first liquor license the city issued, has a definite cowboy feel. Buffalo Bill and Wyatt Earp ate there. So they say.

Rather than clothing and decor, the cowboy way is evident here in a love affair with guns, the second amendment, and libertarianism. Let me alone so my cattle can roam. Out where you can’t hear nothing all day. Unless it’s me, a good guy with a gun, taking out a varmint tryin’ to steal ma stuff. Then you might hear me exercising my second amendment rights. (No, not me, as in me, but, you know.)

A gun shop owner, the Denver Post reports, said he’s seen a huge uptick in business. Part of, he said, is because “folks went to King Sooper, trying to track down some toilet paper and saw grown men and women fist fighting to see who gets the last pack of tissues.” Later in the article he tagged panic as the reason for the sales, not the virus. “You can’t shoot a virus,” he said.

Another guy, owner of Devils Head Choppers in Castle Rock, a joint gun and motorcycle shop, ran out of ammo. He said such a run responds to unusual events or even elections, particularly ones that favor Democrats. sbradbury@denverpost.com 3/18/2020

Up here in the mountains a lot of folks say their security company is Smith and Wesson. Isolated property, long driveways, uncertain response times from the Jeffco sheriff’s office reinforce these attitudes. These postures ride along with government can’t do it right, ever, thinking.

Darwin is having a partisan political moment. Look at this from Slate: “…in the United States, poll after poll shows the virus has found a population that’s particularly likely, through nonchalance and neglect, to help it spread. That population is Republicans.” Slate The whole article is interesting if you have time.

If a number of the red state folks, Trump fans, go out to scoot boots, bowl, eat chili, then there might be fewer of’em to line up in the voting booth. Damn science.

Fun times the good ol’ U.S. of A.

Health, Politics, US History, World History

Why are we so vulnerable?

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“When this current pandemic subsides, and we can catch our breath, we need to ask: Why are we so vulnerable?’’ said Michael T. Osterholm, who is director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. wapo

Osterholm was the state epidemiologist in Minnesota for a long time, now he’s quoted often on the pandemic. He’s a trustworthy guide in this time of frustration and mild panic. We must answer his question since one facet of climate change involves new disease vectors and new diseases.



Beyond the Boundaries, Colorado, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Jefferson County, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Park County, permaculture, Plants, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, The West, Third Phase, US History, Weather +Climate

Deep Guidance

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Imbolc and the Leap Year Moon

Sunday gratefuls: An extra day in my birthday month. DogsonDeployment and the three folks who responded right away. Seoah’s careful scrutiny of the profiles. Kate’s help with Corrine, who called from DoD. Blue skies and warm temps. Atlas Obscura. The Rocky Mountain Land Library. Jon’s offer to stay with Kate while I take the kids on a road trip.

Just signed up for a Food and Land Bookclub. My real interest in it is its association with the Rocky Mountain Land Library in next county over Park County. When I bought the books for the book club, four in all, I found my powers returning. Oh, this is what I’ve got energy for my body said. Book titles: Mayordomo: chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico, Braiding Sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants, One Size Fits None: a farm girls search for the promise of regenerative agriculture, and, The Seed Underground: a growing revolution to save food.

When we first moved here, over five years ago now, I wanted to garden, to learn the native plants, to hike the mountains, learn the land and streams and wildlife. Prostate cancer, bum knee then knee replacement, COPD. Kate’s various medical dilemmas later. Distracted. Accomplished little of these. Some hiking, not much thanks to the COPD and the bad knee. Gardening here required more physical energy than I have available. My first native plants class got interrupted by my prostatectomy. Life. Stuff.

I first discovered the Rocky Mountain Land Library in 2015, our first year here. It was only a dream then, an idea concocted by the former owners of Denver’s most loved book store, Tattered Covers. It now has a ranch in Park County, south of Fairplay, a bit over an hour from here. Buildings and projects have begun to come together. It wasn’t ready when I found it and, as it turned out, neither was I.

During Gertie’s last days I reflected again on my instinctual opposition to euthanasia for dogs. It’s no longer absolute because I saw its necessity as Gertie suffered, but it’s still strong. Were there any other instances in my life where I made choices from an instinctual level?

Instinct? Intuition? Deep inner guidance? Link to a source of knowledge I can’t access consciously? Instinct in any formal sense is probably wrong, but the feeling involved, a strong compulsion, a certainty that this path was mine, had that flavor anyhow.

Turns out there were other such choices. When I turned 32, I knew I had to be a parent. Got a vasectomy reversal. Didn’t work. OK. Adopt. First child, a girl, died in a salmonella outbreak at the orphanage. Raeone didn’t want to go forward. She’d just gotten a new job. My deep push made me agree to take care of the new baby myself, no matter what it took. I took him to work with me until he was 18 months old.

After an Ira Progoff workshop in Tuscon, an intentional stirring of my inner life, I stopped by Denver to see Ruth and Gabe. By the time I left I knew Kate and I needed to move to Colorado. She agreed and so we did. We wanted to live in the mountains and to be in our kids and grandkids lives.

Other less dramatic instances. Saw a movie while in college that featured Manhattan. Put my thumb out and spent the summer of 1968, the summer of love, not in San Francisco, but in Manhattan. Curator of Asian art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Bob Jacobson, gave a lecture on Angkor. Specifically he showed the amazing stone bas relief sculpture that runs for a quarter mile around Angkor Wat’s great Hindu temple. And in particular the churning of the sea of milk where gods and demons struggle for a magical elixir. Had to see it. When my dad died and left me enough money to do some travel, I went.

A related but less pressured decision came when I realized I was no longer Christian, that I had to leave the ministry. Had I not met Kate, this feeling would have been tested, but I met her and she allowed me a graceful exit.

Right now I’m feeling a similar push, perhaps not only to the Rocky Mountain Land Library, but to reawaken the me who woke up for twenty springs, twenty summers, and twenty falls glad for the chance to plant lilies, weed onions, harvest garlic, trim the raspberry canes. The me who woke up for several years and knew tending the bees was in the day’s labor. The me who came here excited about the West, about the mountains, about being in a brand new place. We’ll see where this goes.

Family, Health, Politics, Third Phase, US History, World History

Changing World

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Imbolc and the waning sliver Shadow Mountain Moon

Saturday gratefuls: Kate’s stitches out. Her toughness. Seoah cleaning. Rigel, grieving. Chinooks (snow eater winds). Gabe, who comes at 10. Jon and Ruth skiing at A-basin today. My Aeron chair. The split key-board I use. This Dell computer. The engineers and laborers who designed and built all three. The pretzel factory. Lodgepole evolution that allows them to withstand heavy snow and high winds.

Took Kate in for hand therapy. It’s a burn and reconstruction clinic, directed by Benson Pulikkottil. I thought at first he might be Finnish, given the last name. When I saw his burnt umber skin, however, I was pretty sure that was a wrong guess. Looked him up. Kerala. A state in India with 100% literacy.

He looked at Kate’s fingers, said they were doing well. Take the stitches out. A nurse came in and removed them. Kate winced and teared up. Unusual. She’s stoic, so the pain must have been exquisite. Made me wince, too.

Quieter here on Shadow Mountain. A good thing, but also strange. Both of us have the sense that we have too few dogs. Two. Just not enough. Unsure whether we’ll do anything about that, though a puppy or two would enliven the house.

Rigel has been subdued since Gertie died. When we’re not around, she’s also regressed to grabbing things off the table and moving them to her spot near the fire place. Kep’s tail is down more than up. The pack has changed and they don’t know why. Murdoch disappeared, too. Dogs don’t like change.

Speaking of change. The Munich security conference, a gathering of world diplomats had as its theme, Westlessness. A play, I suppose, on restlessness since organizers meant attendees to consider a world without the West as a dominant force. China’s rise spurred the conversation though Trump’s abdication of global leadership made it bite. The concern lies in diffuse centers of influence both in Asia and in the Middle East. The article points to Russia, Iran, and Turkey as core figures in Middle East politics now.

Wow. If dispersed centers of power become the norm, the post-WWII world will vanish like human space travel did. A wondrous achievement winking out. Not sure how I feel about this.

The US led West has dominated world politics since the end of World War II. Over 70 years. My entire lifetime. History though is the record of these tectonic changes, some taking hundreds of years, think the rise and fall of Rome or the changing dynasties of China, India, some taking much shorter times. The end of the cold war. The invasion of Turtle Island. Indian independence.

A world shaped by the U.S. and its odd brand of imperialism: We’re invading you to make you free. Oh, and here’s a ticket to an American capitalist economy, too.

My fellow leftists and I have been and are critical of these policies. Election interference, for example. Take a ride down south to Latin America. We’ve been engaged there for years. Meddling in the politics of others has been a hallmark of our “soft” control.

In that sense I’m happy to see other centers of power emerge, grow strong. We will have neither the responsibility nor the burden of global hegemony. It would, however, be a dramatic and drastic change. It is though a direct result of an America First policy, a policy wedded to xenophobia and white supremacy.

A world in which we are a valued member, one among many, not America First, but America With, would be my preference. Perhaps we need to go through Westlessness to reach this place. But. It can’t happen as a denial of a world already connected in so many ways. It needs to happen as a result of our humility, not our arrogance.

Aging, Art and Culture, Family, Friends, Health, Holidays, Politics, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Travel, US History, Woolly Mammoths

WWMD?

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Winter and the Future Moon

Monday gratefuls: Kate’s feeling better. Stefan and Lonnie on zoom. Tom’s gift of cartoons by Sack. Beau Jo’s pizza, novel and tasty. Driving in the mountains. The three deer I saw on the way to Evergreen, especially the tiny one. The bare rock, the cold streams, the lodgepole and aspen. Steep slopes. Florence and its art.

After a somewhat comical series of no-goes, I gave up on going to Vail to see Lonnie and Stefan. Stefan had a new hip done at the Steadman Clinic. Snow came to Vail on the first two days I offered. Not unusual, but enough to not make me want to do a two hour drive in it. Yesterday, my third choice, was MLK weekend. The second busiest of the entire year for ski traffic. And, Sunday, the Denver Post said, would be the busiest of the four day holiday. So, zoom.

Good to talk to them. Four years ago they decided to learn painting in an atelier in Florence. They’ve become patrons of the school as well as students, spending much of each year in Italy. Now they face an existential choice between remaining most of the year in Florence, where they’ve become part of an international crowd of artists and art students, or returning to the Twin Cities where their family lives. Would be a tough call for me.

The mood here is lighter. After a tough period of dog bites and exhaustion, I’m rested again. Kate’s had some issues, but eliminating tramadol from her daily meds has given her easier breathing. It’s nice to have a respite from angst.

Today’s MLK. I wonder what he’d do right now? Would he organize mass marches in the face of the rising right wing threat? Would he stay away from such events as the pro-gun rally in Richmond, Virginia today?

Will the MLK holiday become a neo-nazi, white supremacist rally day? A day to show “racial solidarity” and protest for the right to gun ownership. IDNK.

His dream, MLK’s, is mine and probably yours. I’ve always been soothed by his quote from Theodore Parker, Unitarian clergy and anti-slavery activist, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Still am though this seems to be a time when it’s not bending very much in the direction of justice.