Category Archives: Memories

Anoka County, Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Jefferson County, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Original Relation, Our Land and Home, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, The West, Weather +Climate

Becoming Native

May 23, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Running Creeks Moon

“…I am at home in the West. The hills of the coastal ranges look “right” to me, the particular flat expanse of the Central Valley comforts my eye. The place names have the ring of real places to me. I can pronounce the names of the rivers, and recognize the common trees and snakes. I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places.” Joan Didion, California Notes, NYRB, 5/26/2016

Becoming native to a place implies the opposite of what Joan Didion recalls in this fine article taken from notes she made in 1976 while attending the Patty Hearst trial for Rolling Stone. The becoming process implies not being easy where you are, not knowing the place names as real, not knowing the common trees and snakes.

The Black Canyon of the Gunnison is not a real place to me. Neither is Four Corners nor Durango nor the summit of Mt. Evans, only 14 miles away. The owls that hoot at night, the small mammals that live here on Shadow Mountain. No. The oak savannah and the Great Anoka Sand Plain. Familiar. Easy. The Big Woods. Yes. Lake Superior. Yes. The sycamores of the Wabash. Yes. Fields defined by mile square gravel roads. Pork tenderloin sandwiches. Long, flat stretches of land. Lots of small towns and the memories of speed traps. Yes.

A local photographed yesterday near here. from pinecam.com by serendipity888

With the fire mitigation this property here on Shadow Mountain is becoming known. It has three, maybe four very fine lodgepole pines, tall and thick. A slight downward slope toward the north. Snow, lots of snow.* Rocky ground, ground cover and scrubby grass.

Denver. Slowly coming into focus. The front range, at least its portion pierced by Highway 285, too. The west is still blurry, its aridity, mountains, deep scars in the earth, sparse population. The midwest clear, will always be clear.

Becoming native to a place is the ur spiritual work of a reimagined faith. First, we must be here. Where we are.

*”Snowfall for the season on Conifer Mountain now stands at 224 inches (132% of average).” weathergeek, pinecam.com

Aging, Family, Feelings, Health, Memories, Science

I heart heart

May 12, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Running Creeks Moon

The things life splices together. Yesterday Kate had an appointment with her cardiologist. I went with her. She showed me the report of her echocardiogram, we discussed the cardiologist’s finding. All very clinical. Yes, the heart is a muscle and one which can be graded and observed at many levels. It has ejection fractions. leaflets, diffusions and profusions, valves and chambers. The fine tuning of the heart’s care is a substantial branch of medicine.

The heart is also, and perhaps more importantly, a metaphor. For love. For feeling. For courage and persistence. For essence. For intimacy. The metaphor can, too, be graded and observed at many levels. Heartless bastard. In my heart. I heart NYC, you, my dog, my honor school student, my rifle, my concealed carry handgun. That gets right to the heart of things. My heart is heavy. You have heart. My heart belongs to you.

Why might the metaphor be more important than the muscle? Because love lives on past the stilling of the muscle. Kate and I spliced together the cardiologist appointment with a visit to DazzleJazz, hearing the Keith Oxman quartet and Dr. Diva, a singing professor from Nebraska. We sat next to each other, she rested her head on my shoulder. We whispered and touched. My heart belongs to her. And that muscle so closely examined a few hours before? No match for her true heart, the one that belongs to me.

BTW: usual aging heart stuff for Kate. Blood pressure meds now. Attention to diet, keep up with the tai chi. Some upper body resistance work. We can push back against the dying of the light, but it goes out anyhow. Something, sometime. Yet love remains.

Aging, Beyond the Boundaries, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, Memories, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Mystic Chords

May 6, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane New (Running Creeks) Moon

The mood here. Still subdued, still gathering the reality of Vega’s death around us. When Mom died, now 52 years ago, the ongoingness of life surprised me. Cars still rattled down Canal Street. Lights went off and on in houses. School was open, teachers teaching and kids squirming at their desks. The sun rose and set. Dogs barked. We needed sleep and ate breakfast.

This no longer amazes me. The feelings of absence, of missing, of longing do not disappear however, though they can get submerged in the running creek of life. I still miss my mom, not in that acute, gut twisting way of 52 years ago, but longing for her, for her presence remains.

Abraham Lincoln called these threads of feeling and remembrance, their resonance, the mystic chords of memory. Yes. Part of their function, a paradox, lies in the quickening of our daily life, jimmying us out of the cracks and ruts we fall into. We realize a life time has bounds.

As the writers of the Hebrew scriptures often said, this background music is a blessing and a curse. It can become a cacophony, a dirge we cannot shut off. A mental tinnitus. Yet, it is the dead, as much as the living, often more, who shape us, create us-sometimes to our exasperation, other times to our joy.

With Vega the only source of pain is her sudden absence. The rest, the memory of her, the mystic chords she sets off, are joyful and loving. And those will persist.

Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, Friends, Memories, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Why grief?

April 29, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Wedding Moon

As you might expect, I’ve been thinking about death, about grief in the wake of Vega’s sudden death. In particular I’ve been wondering how I can have a grasp on my own death, no fear, but be so distressed at Vega’s.

Then, it occurred to me. In movie thrillers the torturers often open their usually neated packet of tools: knives, pliers, dental picks, pieces of bamboo with a flourish. Or, as in the Marathon Man, the dentist goes to work on you without anesthetic. In many cases the torturee summons up inhuman courage or an anti-heroic defiance.

When the usual infliction of pain or disorientation fails, or when the torturer is portrayed as unusually sadistic, friends or colleagues or family members of the torturee are led into the room. Then the torturer goes to work on them. Seems effective in the movies I’ve seen.

Grief, at least in part, is because the universe is such a torturer. Not with malice, of course, but certainly with a sort of intention. Life has an endpoint and entropy sees that it arrives. So, it’s possible to have the notion of your own death sorted out while responding with agony to the grim torture of having your friends removed from the room .

Dogs, Feelings, Memories, Shadow Mountain, Weather +Climate, Writing

Foggy

April 28, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Wedding Moon

Clouds at 8,800 feet. Or, as some say, fog. Cold and clammy outside this am.

I’ve gotten back to work on Jennie’s Dead and Superior Wolf, not a lot of new content yet, but it will come.

Spent some time yesterday, too, in the what now seems eternal rearranging of the loft. Finding an optimal way to encourage my work with the tools I have: books, files, images, maps and brochures, workout equipment, lamps, chairs, is the goal. Still waiting on a couple of pieces from Jon, walnut shelves and a top for my art cart.

While I worked on rearranging the loft, I put on Pandora, the music streaming service. I have a Pandora station devoted to The Band, a sixties rock group who collaborated with Bob Dylan. As it played their music and music of similar contemporaries, an overwhelming sadness hit me.

It began with a memory of Vega, feeling her presence in my life, feeling her absence. But, it morphed into a more general sadness, possibly a melancholy nostalgia for the times the Band evokes, those days of the 60’s. It tapped, too, into old neurotic loops. What have I done with my life? Has it mattered? Does mattering matter? You know, those inner paths which have a Mobius strip nature, going nowhere in particular yet taking a very long time to get there, only to find out you’ve gotten back where you started.

As these moods do these days, these third phase days, they passed. Grieving Vega, grieving a time gone by, grieving unreasonable expectations. All part of life, not to be inhabited forever, but acknowledged. A hat tipped to them as they go by.

A less melancholy day today, I hope.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Health, Memories, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science, Third Phase

One Year Ago

March 30, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Maiden Moon

Had blood drawn yesterday for my third post surgery PSA. Right now they come every quarter, routine surveillance. The first two have showed .015 which is the clinical equivalent of none. Since the results have followed the best hoped for pattern, I’m experiencing no anxiety about them.

Today is my second annual physical with Dr. Lisa Gidday. This physical revisits a key moment from cancer season. The start of the season. It was last year at my first physical in Colorado when Dr. Gidday found a suspicious hardness in my prostate. I count cancer season as having begun with that physical on April 14th and ending in late September with my first follow up PSA.

It was a short time compared to my image of what cancer is typically like. It went: initial suspicion, see urologist who confirmed Gidday’s finding, biopsy, diagnosis, decision on treatment, surgery, recovery, first PSA after surgery. All this in six months.

There is the question of a cure. Does this mean I have no more prostate cancer? Did the end of cancer season mean the end of the cancer threat? No, it does not. Things look good, very good, but the clinical reality is that a few cancerous prostate cells could have escaped and are dormant right now. My gut says no, that is not the case. I feel rid of the traitorous bastards.

In fact, I feel very healthy right now. Yes, I have this damned knee, lower back and shoulder, but they’re nuisance level. Yes, I have chronic kidney disease, but it seems stable. In fact the numbers that gauge its severity actually improved in my last blood work done in October. Yes, I have insomnia, but it’s just one of those damned things.

My point here is that aging means an accumulation (for most of us) of chronic conditions. We can choose to focus on those as ongoing problems, become obsessive about them and drown ourselves in anxiety or we can recognize their inevitability and, if not embrace them, at least accept them with grace. Most of the time.

The anxiety is unnecessary. That is the point of Yama, the Tibetan deity. To worship Yama we envision our own death, see it coming, embrace its part in our story. When we can truly accept the reality of our own death, anxiety about what may deliver it to us becomes redundant. We may not know the particulars, but we do know the outcome of our life. It’s the same for all of us.

Art and Culture, Memories, Third Phase

Bananas!

March 7, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Valentine Moon

Going to sleep. Staying asleep. The first is easier than the second for me. Kate, a survivor of medical school residency, has some ideas that she’s shared with me. Paying attention to my breathing was one. This meshes, of course, with meditation and a gestalt psychology approach, experiencing all the sensations of your body. I’d never applied it trying to sleep and it does help.

The monkey mind is strong though. After a while my mind grabs onto the words I’m using to pay attention to my breathing, begins to run somewhere with them. Look. A banana! Even so, breathing helps even if not all the time.

A second idea involves counting. You know, sheep. Backwards from a thousand. That sort of thing. My own take on this is to repeat 1,2,3,4 and 5,6,7,8 over and over. Now, by the time I get to 4, I get a yawn. But the monkey is still active, still hunting for the banana that sneaks around this dulling.

So, the third idea. Go to your happy place. Oddly, this was harder than I imagined it would be. Where was my happy place? As I’ve written before, happiness is not my goal, rather flourishing (eudaimonia). So that idyllic spot where trees and sunlight and grass come together to create a place of rest and contentment? Doesn’t work for me.

Took a while but eventually I hit on the Minneapolis Institute of Art (not Mia). At the MIA there was a sweet spot of intellectual and emotional and social stimulation. I felt good there. Stimulated and stimulating. Giving and receiving. So during my counting I now go on regular journeys to the MIA. I was there so long as a volunteer, 12 years, that I remember the building and its contents, as they were four years ago anyhow, very well.

It’s taken me a while to get the monkey to let go of art history-lots of bananas!-and allow me to just be in the presence of the art qua art. That’s not to say that art history doesn’t inform me even in this attempt to go to sleep; it does, but I don’t follow those thoughts anymore, at least not while trying to sleep. Next post: a tour from these trips.

Jefferson County, Memories, Music, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Oh, Lord

February 12, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Valentine Moon

Went down the hill last night to Grow Your Own, a hydroponics shop and wine bar that features local musicians. It’s just at the base of Conifer and Shadow Mountains so very close to our house. Tom McNeill sang. “I’m an old guy,” he said, “and I know old songs.”

He sang the songs of our youth: Oh, Lord Won’t You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz, Little Red Riding Hood, Something’s Happenin’ Here, Mamas and Papas, John Denver, Pete Seeger those kind of songs. A reminder of the person who inhabited those days, the me who was out there “singing songs and carryin’ signs.”

Latin today. The Myrmidons from Book VII of the Metamorphoses

Family, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Park County

Seafood Paella and Spanish Music

January 30, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Yule Stock Show Moon

Kate and I went to the Aspen Peak Winery in Bailey last night for seafood paella and Spanish music. I love local events and this one had a good combination of homemade ambiance and terrific food.

On the drive to Bailey, about 20 minutes under normal circumstances, we experienced rush hour on Highway 285. The event was at 6 pm and Bailey is west of us in Park County. Rush hour is rush hour, even in the mountains, and I would not want to make this commute every day, especially after a big snow storm.

Saw a pick-up with a funny, but biting bumper sticker: Save an elk, shoot a land developer. Sort of the flip-side to a 1970’s bumper sticker that has remained in my memory: Sierra Club, kiss my axe. That was in Ely, Minnesota during the debate over the creation of the Boundary Waters Wilderness Area.

Kate’s had a good, but long week organizing the kitchen. She’s ready to get back to sewing. Golden Solar is coming to finish the critter guards on our micro-inverters today. Tai Chi later this morning. Probably chainsaw work later today. The weekend.

Colorado, Dogs, Family, Holidays, Memories, The West, Third Phase

Super Dogs

January 19, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Yule Stock Show Moon

Took Gabe and Ruth to Superdogs at the National Western Stock Show yesterday. We started attending back in 2010. That year I took Ruth on the shuttle. We got about two miles from home. She turned to me with a slightly scared, sad look, she was 3 I think, and said, “I miss my mommy.” I called Jen, she talked to Ruth and we went on.

Since then we’ve seen rodeos, dancing horses, many superdogs, lots of cattle, some pigs, sheep, alpaca. The exhibit halls are full of large metal pincers to hold cattle and other large animals while branding and medicating, fencing, horse stalls, lots of pick-ups and other motorized things like Bobcats, Kubota tractors and John Deere machinery. Trailers of all kinds and lengths. Rope. The big Cinch booth with all things denim and boot.

That first year Jen and Ruth were watching a sheep competition and a reporter from the Denver Post caught them in a picture that went on the front page. It’s become a family tradition although this year it was just Grandma, Grandpop and the kids.

We ate lunch at the Cattleman’s Grill, a large open air restaurant with oilcloth covered 8 foot tables put together in long rows. Like a big family reunion. Lots of cowboy hats and boots, kids.

After that we wandered the exhibit halls. Gabe and Grandma went to the petting zoo where they got their hands on sheep, goats, pigs while Ruth and I examined the Western Art Show and Sale. Ruth and I liked the show. It had some wonderful sculpture, especially a small stone owl, landscapes done in non-traditional (that is not sentimental) manners, and some excellent paintings of animals, in particular one Brahman bull. He was a distinct individual in this full head portrait.

The Superdogs show either has gotten better since we first saw it or I’ve lowered my standards. This year was fun. These canine athletes, most of them rescue dogs, catch frisbees, do the high jump, run through plastic tunnels at speed, race along raised platforms and have a helluva good time. They are high energy, eager animals.

We’ll be back next year. Who knows what wonders we’ll see?