Beltane Rushing Waters Moon
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Mountain Weather May
Category Archives: Weather +Climate
Memorial Day
Beltane Rushing Waters Moon
To any Hoosier boy Memorial Day announces the Indy 500. Likewise, as a Hoosier student it meant, summertime! But up here on Shadow Mountain? We’re not quite ready for the parades and “Gentlemen, start your engines!”
The Calm
Beltane Rushing Waters Moon
White and gray. The 18 inches or so of snow lies thick on our roof, solar panels hidden from our star. That unusual characteristic of snow to move upwards with the shape of an obstacle like a fence post, a statue, mailbox, or birdbath has created several objects in our yard with white caps reaching skyward, simulacrums in snow of the surface beneath them.
The lodgepole pines have puffy sticky snow that conforms to their branches, weighing them down, pointing them towards Shadow Mountain. One by one the weight will become too much and the whole pile on one branch slides off with an oof and a powdery white trail following it to the ground followed by another, then another until the branches spring back up, ready to receive sunlight. Until then, the trees, like our solar panels, are cut off from the source of their power.
A member of Beth Evergreen sent an e-mail from Boston yesterday, “It’s a hot, sticky 95 here.” This reminded me that the legendary speaker of the house from Boston, Tip O’Niell said, “All politics are local.” So to with weather.
The storm seems to have quieted overnight. No snow falls now. The sun, already well up over Denver, has begun to light the clouds over Black Mountain, accentuating the blue sky. The whiteness of the scene from my loft window seems to impose a silence borne of the color itself, soundlessness corresponding to the fresh, but otherwise colorless, snow. Along with the silence comes a profound stillness, as if for the moment nothing moves. Perhaps the mountain lion has retreated to its den, the bear to its former place of hibernation, the mule deer and elk bedded down among the willows and dogwood out of the wind.
As for this mammal, I’m sitting here, quiet and thoughtful, happy to have a meditative scene out my window. Black Mountain is my writing companion, often my muse. In fact, just now I watched the sun’s light slowly descend from Black Mountain’s peak toward the shelf of rock well below it. The peak itself shines as the sun reflects back off the high albedo of its snow cover. The sun itself, our own star among the heaven’s billions or trillions, seems to have picked out Black Mountain saying, “Behold this wonder so near to you, yet so different.” The sun, God’s spotlight.
OMG
Beltane Rushing Waters Moon
May 18th. May 18th. This is the merry, merry month of May. Its 18th day. 18 days after Beltane, the start of the growing season. Obviously, somewhere other than Shadow Mountain.
This, That
Beltane Rushing Waters Moon
So. Because physics. No black tea up here, at least not at a proper temperature. Thanks Tom and Bill for your help. When you relieve the pressure, the water reverts to the pressure of the air and the temp goes down as it does. Sigh.
Black Mountain is covered in cloud, hidden behind an opaque scrim of greyish white. Bishop Berkeley would suggest it’s not there at all, but I think it is. We’ll find out sometime today.
Went into Kate’s hairstylist with her yesterday and got my ears waxed. Jackie put hot wax on my ears, then pulled it off, removing those hairs that seemed to follow receipt of my Medicare card. This is my second time. She says if we do this often enough, the follicles will not push up hair. I mean, hair on the ears is so last iteration of our species.
Kate spent the rest of the day at Bailey Patchworkers. This is a sewing group that meets at the Bailey Library. Kate joined in our first year here. Another group with some of the same members, a needleworkers group, invited her to join them. As a result, she’s had two circles of friends here for almost the duration of our time in Colorado. This is a woman who listens to lectures and does counted cross-stitch or needlepoint. She’s sew into it.
Planted a tomato plant yesterday in a five-gallon plastic bucket. When I opened the bag of garden soil (we don’t have anything a Midwesterner would recognize as soil), the smell of the earth almost made me cry. I miss working in soil, growing plants and my body told me so. A greenhouse went up higher on the priority list.
I love living at altitude, among the Rockies and all their flora and fauna. See the post below. I also loved living in Andover where horticulture, in retrospect, was so easy. It is possible to recreate that experience in miniature, inside four walls and a roof. I want to do that.
A Clashing of Spiritual Longings
Beltane Rushing Waters Moon
Irv Saltzman invited us to a performance by his singing group, the Renaissance Singers. It was held in a wooden Episcopal Church, St. Laurence’s, which is near our home. Directed by a Chinese national, Hannah Woo, who is finishing her Ph.D. in musicology, they were 8, four men and four women. As a group, they matched each other well. April, a soprano, had a lovely clear voice and a large range. Irv, formerly a tenor, has now transitioned into a bass/baritone role. Their performance was wonderful. At a meal afterwards we discovered April is our neighbor.
Renaissance choral music and instrumental renaissance music has always captivated me. It’s easy to see courtiers in colorful costumes listening to this music in a palace, brown robed and cowled monks hearing it in a morning prayer service, or small groups performing at home for their own amusement. It’s also the music most often heard at Renaissance festivals. Sorta makes sense, eh?
The sanctuary had a vaulted ceiling with exposed beams and two large, clear windows that looked out to the east, toward Shadow, Evergreen and Bear mountains. It rained while we were there and the mountains were in mist, the windows covered with raindrops slowly moving from top to bottom. There were individual chairs, padded with kneelers, arranged in a three sided configuration, making the sanctuary a sort of thrust proscenium stage, an ideal arrangement for a small group of singers.
A church artist had painted the stations of the cross and they were around the sanctuary, set off by bent sheet metal frames. A copper baptistry, large, sat over a cinerarium where the congregation deposits cremation remains and memorializes the dead with small plaques.
Between the two windows hung a large crucifix, a cross made of bare, light wood and a bronze Jesus hung by two nails. I had an odd sensation while listening to this music I’ve often heard in monastic settings on retreat. It carried me back into the spiritual space of an ascetic Christianity that often comforted me. This time though I came into the space as a peri-Jew, identifying more with Marilyn and Irv and Kate, with the still new to me spiritual space of Beth Evergreen, than the theological world represented by this spare, but beautiful sanctuary.
The crucifix stimulated the strongest, strangest and most unexpected feeling. I saw, instead of the Jesus of Christianity, a hung Jew, a member of the tribe. More than that, I felt the vast apparatus and historical punch created by his followers, followers of a man who shared much of the new faith world in which I now find myself. It was an odd feeling, as if this whole religion was an offshoot, a historical by-blow that somehow got way out of hand.
These feelings signaled to me how far I’d moved into the cultural world of reconstructionist Judaism. I see now with eyes and a heart shaped by the Torah and mussar and interaction with a rabbi and the congregants of Beth Evergreen.
This was an afternoon filled with the metaphysical whiplash I’ve experienced often over the last year, a clashing of deep thought currents, spiritual longings. This process is a challenge to my more recent flat-earth humanism, a pagan faith grounded not in the next world, but in this one. Literally grounded.
What’s pushing me now is not a desire to change religious traditions, but to again look toward the unseen, the powerful forces just outside of the electromagnetic spectrum and incorporate them again into my ancientrail of faith. This makes me feel odd, as if I’m abandoning convictions hard won, but I don’t think that’s actually what’s going on. There is now an opening to press further into my paganism, to probe further into the mystery of life, of our place in the unfoldingness of the universe, to feel and know what lies beyond reason and the senses.
Ichi-go ichi-e Once in a lifetime
Beltane Rushing Waters Moon
Fog this morning over Black Mountain. It comes in and out of view as the mist moves toward us. Now it’s gone altogether. There’s a thin scrim of icy snow on the solar panels. Colder last night.
My Japanese informed aesthetic often finds resonance here in the mountains. The ponderosa pines that surround Beth Evergreen’s synagogue present heavily crenulated bark, twisted branches and a sturdy calm. From the sanctuary, looking south and east, one window pane has an especially crooked branch that reaches up like a hand. When the snow comes, it looks like a portion of a Kano school gold screen. Ravens and crows land on these branches, too, also emulating the scenery that inspired so many Japanese painters and printers.
Moon watching, a Japanese pastime, has its analogue here as well. The moon rising and setting among the mountain peaks, clouds placing a thin gauze in front of it, the stars as its context, emphasize the moon’s romance. I can stand on my deck here off the loft and watch clouds cross the moon’s face. Its silvered light makes beautiful shadows of the lodgepole pine.
Big eared mule deer and thick, tall elk come down to Maxwell and Cub creeks, lapping up the cold fresh melted snow. Mountain lions slip noiselessly through the undergrowth, lie prone on rock cliffs waiting for them to pass nearby. Bears root up tubers. Minx, bobcats, pine martens, smaller predators, hunt for prey. Rabbits and squirrels and mice feed, look over their shoulder. The web of life is vibrant.
Ichi-go ichi-e is a Japanese phrase often associated with the tea ceremony. The tea master arranges art in the tokinama, chooses teas and sweets, decides which tea bowls and tea pots and tea utensils to use, then greets their guests as they arrive, often no more than one or two. He does this to create an ichi-go ichi-e, a once in a lifetime moment or for this moment only. It connotes the treasure of each meeting between or among people.
Each moment of the day Black Mountain offers ichi-go ichi-e to those of us who live near it, if only we stop and look. To appreciate ichi-go ichi-e though we need to pause, or as mussar teaches us, put a space between the match and the flame. If we slow down our glance, our gaze, let it come to rest, if we take a breath and consider what is right there in front of us, then we find once in a lifetime moments happening throughout our day.
These do not, as you might think, cheapen or dilute over time, rather they enhance our experience of the world. We recognize the fleeting nature of life, of this moment and that moment, of the unique and precious and irreplaceable flavor to each encounter. Nothing is old, all is new, always.
In fact, to the extent that we can gain an appreciation of ichi-go ichi-e, then we never age.
Beltane, 2017
Beltane Rushing Waters Moon
Cue the couples out in the fields doing their sympathetic magic for the fertility of the crops. Light the bonfires for leaping over and the bonfires for driving the cattle between. Gather the naked Scots outside of Edinburgh for the great fire festival. Dance in the streets because the growing season has finally come round again, the Great Wheel has turned and food will begin to appear from mother earth.
The greenman is dead, long live the greenman. Let the lady and the god Cernunnos mate again and again and again. Watch as the seeds break open and pierce the soil, spreading leaves, gathering in sunlight and drinking in rain. See the birds, gone for the season, return to sing and fly and swoop and delight us.
As winter has made us fold our arms and shiver, put on coats and boots, Beltane says, open them, embrace the sky, kick off the boots, shed the coat. Go out into the forest and walk, slowly. Listen to the streams falling down the mountainside. Feel the wind come over the continental divide, still cool from the snow covered peaks beyond it.
This is Beltane. Mayday. Collect women and men, girls and boys, give them streamers and ribbons, connect them to the tall pole and have everyone swirl, under and in and out and back again. Pick flowers for the table, for a basket, for your lover.
May the power in each plant, in each rock, in each deer and fox and moose and elk and badger, in every person you meet, each bit of food you eat illuminate your heart and may your heart illuminate theirs. This is a time for coming out. Hug. Kiss. Smile. Appreciate.
Show gratitude for the snows of winter, the transition of spring, and the promise of nourishment spreading among us now. We have come again to the season of plant growth. The time when animal babies slowly mature. Celebrate, celebrate, dance to the music of the earth herself and her consort the sun.
Becoming Native to This Place
Spring (last day) Rushing Waters Moon
The last day of spring. Solar panels covered. Roof covered. Driveway plowed. 16-24 inches of new snow Friday night through yesterday. Delightful, but hardly springlike. In our spring fantasies, that is. The ones that have tulips and iris and crocus and lilacs and wisteria in them. For a mountain spring though, welcome and not unexpected.
Kate and I are still recovering from our three days of cooking and helping out at Beth Evergreen. Geez. Still, we have the time and the dogs have the patience. This pack anyhow. Vega would not have let us sleep in like Kep, Gertie and Rigel do. She had very clear ideas about when to go to sleep and when to wake up.
We spent most of yesterday admiring the falling snow. A snow globe day, refreshing and beautiful.
Still learning the mountains, how they change. Snow. Light. Rain. Fall. Flowers. Rapidly flowing streams. Clouds. Freeze and thaw. Fire. The animals they nurture move in and around and on them. Night and day. The stars and the moon. The sun as it arcs across the sky. All wonderful, all different.
In one of the sessions with Rabbi Jaffe a member of the board referred to the Beth Evergreen folk as mountain Jews. I liked that. I’m a mountain pagan, a mountain docent, an old man of the mountain. And a fellow traveler with the mountain Jews. Welcome to the journey.
Two Busy Days
Spring Rushing Waters Moon
Missed yesterday. A very busy two days for both Kate and me. A visiting scholar at Beth Evergreen, Rabbi David Jaffe, came into town on Thursday morning. His first event was a potluck, then a mussar (Jewish ethics) session. Kate and I went early to set up.
Then, that evening Rabbi Jaffe walked the board and other leaders of the synagogue through what he called a soul curriculum for the organization as a whole. I resonated most with this presentation. Kate and I were there because I’m a member of the Adult Education committee. Both of us contributed soups to the soup and salad meal. I made chicken noodle soup and Kate made Vietnamese Pho.
After getting home around 9:30 (our bedtime is 8pm) we got up the next morning and drove into the Denver Performing Arts Center to see grandson Gabe perform in the Denver Public Schools Shakespeare Festival. This ended up taking longer than intended, but we got home in time for a nap before returning to Beth Evergreen yesterday at 4:30. This time we helped set up for Rabbi Jaffe’s lecture, preceded by a congregational meal.
After helping set up tables, arrange flowers, distribute utensils to each place, we attended the James Taylor shabbat. Rabbi Jamie Arnold, Beth Evergreen’s rabbi, is a talented musician who does covers and writes his own music. He often modifies familiar songs with Jewish prayer book language and writes Hebrew verses for them, too.
The meal, catered by Ali Baba, a Golden Lebanese restaurant, and paid for by a generous congregant, fed about 80 people. The tables filled the social hall plus a table set up in the entry way. It was exciting to have that many people together, eating and sharing stories.
Afterward Rabbi Jaffe gave a lecture on mussar. It was more sparsely attended than it might have been due to the heavily falling snow and the predictions-now fulfilled-of around a foot of accumulation.
We again got home around 9:30pm. Late to bed twice in a row. Harder and harder these days.
Today was the People’s Climate March in Denver, which I intended to attend, but the roads going down the hill are icy and snow covered. Climate change is, as I said in an earlier post, once again the focus of my political energy so I’ll only miss the gathering, not the action.
This late spring snow challenged our Rav4 on the way home last night. Hwy. 78, aka Brook Forest Drive/Black Mountain Drive/Shadow Mountain Drive winds up the mountains from Evergreen. It was snowing hard, the roads were not plowed and the shoulders are narrow. No sudden plummets, but sufficient curves and changing elevations to make the drive interesting. Plus, I was ready to be asleep an hour before we left Beth Evergreen.
Today, though, and the next week, too, we have a quieter time. No grandkids this weekend and only one scheduled event in the next week.