Category Archives: Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Jefferson County, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain

Clouds Will Form and Rain Will Fall, Even on That Day

June 4, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Running Creeks Moon

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness. ”
– John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, (1938), page 313.

Though nothing in our immediate vicinity would count as wilderness, Mt. Evans, the fourteener that lies directly west of us and is our weathermaker, has a designated wilderness area all around it. I can access the Mt. Evans’ Wilderness Area on the Cub Creek Trail, about two miles from home.

The mountains are our everyday, rising, rising, rising yet still. Steady. Tall. We have our life on and among them, enjoying the air cooled by Shadow Mountain, a mile and a half above sea level. The lodgepole pines, interspersed with the occasional aspen grove, are the mountains’ hair, growing longer and longer. Sometimes the odd bald spot appears, usually with craggy rock visible.

Black and red fox, mule deer and elk, black bears and mountain lions, squirrels and chipmunks are our neighbors. We’re just two legged mammals in our dens up here. With the millions of years of age the mountains represent, in very physical form, our few thousand years as a species is unnoticeable. When we’ve run our course and the homes here on Shadow Mountain are fit only for archaeology, Shadow Mountain will still exist. It will not wonder where we’ve gone, nor feel a pang of loss.

I like the feeling of our impermanence set in contrast to the mountains. They too will erode away, yes, their immovability moved by water following the demands of gravity, but it will take so long. Cannot be imagined, how long it will take. Our visit to the heights will be long over when Shadow Mountain is of Appalachian size. And even on that day the sky will be blue, clouds will form and rain will fall.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Writing

Reimagining Gods and other matters

May 30, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Running Creeks Moon

Two odd ideas passing through, perhaps they’ll stay:

thinking about the notion of the after-life and what a miracle it would be if one exists. that led me to the thought that the real miracle is after-inanimancy. That is, life itself emerging from an inanimate stew. Which, for some reason, further lead, with the idea of emergence in play, to the meta-animate, that which exists beyond life, but in dialectical tension with it. This idea could explain gods, the particularity of them, perhaps even their existence. They would be limited, defined by the process that made them possible, life and further consciousness, yet analogous to life in the way that life is analogous to inanimancy.
thinking more about the idea of becoming native to a place in light of a post I wrote about Minnesota. I had, I said, become native there. This got mixed in with the idea of homecoming and from homecoming, reunion. So the final step of becoming native to a place is a homecoming. And when we visit other places to which we have become native, it’s a reunion.

Just my process at work and I wanted to hold onto these. Put them up on the whiteboard and look at them later.

Anoka County, Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Health, Jefferson County, Latin, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Weather +Climate, Writing

Write It Out

May 25, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Running Creek Moon

freshman year — Freshman Year, Alexandria H.S.

Ever since the great iconoclasm, my voice has been muted. Not sure why. Topics don’t seem to occur to me. I’ve never had a theme, a particular ax, though felling and limbing the occasional political issue shows up once in awhile. Philosophical, quasi-theological pondering. That, too. Lots of did this, did that. The online continuation of a journal keeping way I’ve had for decades. Art. Yes, but not as much as I want.

Maybe there was a more intimate link between the images and the vitality of this blog than I realized. Apres le mitigation the whole copyright issue, the fate of images in an age of digital reproduction, will occupy some of my time.

Work on both Superior Wolf and Jennie’s Dead have been ongoing, though not yet much writing. Reimagining Faith occupies a lot of my free thinking time, wondering about mountains, about urbanization, about clouds that curve and mound above Mt. Evan’s, our weather maker. No Latin yet. Not until I can have regular time up here in the loft. Not yet.

Could be that underneath all this lies a reshuffling of priorities or a confirmation of old ones. It’s not yet a year since my prostate surgery and a friend of mine said it took her a year to feel right again. This year has felt in some ways like my first year here, a year when I can take in the mountain spring, the running creeks, the willows and their blaze of yellow green that lights up the creek beds, the mule deer and elk following the greening of the mountain meadows.

My 40 year fondness for Minnesota has also begun to reemerge, not in a nostalgic, wish I was still there way, but as a place I know well, a place to which I did become native, a place which shaped me with its lakes, the Mississippi, Lake Superior, wolves and moose and ravens and loons. Where Kate and I became as close as we could with the land we held temporarily as our own. Friends. Art. Theatre. Music. Family. Perhaps a bit like the old country, an emigre’s memories which help shape life in the new land. An anchor, a source of known stability amidst a whirl of difference. The West. Mountains. Family life.

So. There was something in there anyhow. Now, back to fire mitigation.

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, 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.

Beyond the Boundaries, Family, GeekWorld, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science

Out There

May 2, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Wedding Moon

Ruth and I went to the Fiske Planetarium in Boulder on Saturday night for a program on black holes. Ruth had never been to a planetarium. The lights went down and the night sky appeared on the dome above us. The southern night sky. So, right away the wonder of the star machine. Then, the night sky over Boulder with the constellations. The astronomer talked about their correlation to the ancients who relied on them for agricultural purposes. It is reportedly spring. Somewhere.

Ruth watched and listened carefully. The short film on black holes was not easy, covering the birth of black holes, their peculiar physics and their role in the cosmos. After it was over, the astronomer walked us through some of the recent findings related to black holes, the most notable being the discovery of gravity waves at the LIGO observatory. The relation to black holes is that the gravity pulse detected at LIGO began in a black hole.

It’s been a while since I immersed myself in matters astronomical. My fine grained understanding of the evening was not great. The hey now moment came at the end when the astronomer pulled the dome’s display further and further out until the entire Sloan Survey covered only the center of the dome.

The rest of the dome then represented the edge of the knowable universe. Out there the astronomer showed what he called the light wall, a here cooler, there warmer barrier of early light, earliest light, really. This light wall, a new idea to me, represented, he said, the exterior wall of the black hole within which our whole universe lives! Wow. Immediately sped past my understanding. Just did a little quick research on this and found nothing. Could be my hearing. Yet another sensory limitation when it comes to learning about the universe.

On the way out Ruth said she was expecting something like that at the end. Why? Because in the film they had presented black holes as violent, destructive forces, so in the end they’d need to show their good side. Not a scientific conclusion, but still a damned good one. I missed the setup and it was there. Ruth is 10.

Aging, Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Health, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Too Much Salt?

April 30, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Wedding Moon

The snow has been less than predicted, a good thing. Still, it’s the wet, heavy, slushy stuff that makes snowblowers clog up.

Jon, Ruth and Gabe are coming up tonight. Jon and Ruth will go skiing tomorrow and Gabe will stay with us. Ruth and I plan to take in a Fiske Planetarium (Boulder) show on black holes this evening. Kate’s making Mississippi Pot Roast. This is the sort of thing that, no matter how much we might have wanted to do it, was impossible when we lived in Minnesota.

Got rid of 4 bookcases bought long ago at Dayton’s warehouse in Minneapolis. They’d seen me through the house on Edgcumbe and in Andover. Most of these got sold off in Minnesota, but the remaining four held some books while the built-ins were under construction. That opens up space in the garage. It’s a priority as soon as the weather warms up. Would’ve been last year if it hadn’t been cancer season over the summer.

OK. I have a confession to make. I’ve been putting too much salt on my food for years. Big surprise, I’m sure, to all of you who have witnessed it. In fact, I was following an approach suggested by my internist, Charlie Petersen. His opinion was that once you passed a point where a problem, blood pressure in this instance, required treatment, you didn’t need to modify your behavior if the treatment worked. And it did. For many years. But, not now.

Over the course of the trip to Asia I stopped adding salt to my food. My blood pressure, which had been labile before the trip, suddenly fell into line. Damn it. Empiricism is such a bitch. And, not so small side benefit. It’s easier to sleep through the night since my fluid retention has significantly decreased.

There is no doubt that I have a self-destructive homunculus in residence. Smoking and drinking took me several unpleasant years to put into the past. Just why this little guy is so interested in my demise, I don’t know. Maybe he’s the death wish that Freud believed we all have. He doesn’t give up. If I start one of these activities again, I quickly go back to the maximum use. I learned this while quitting smoking, several times.

It’s tough getting him to just sit still. You would think that, having visited Yamantaka (the slayer of death) many times over the years, he would calm down. Yamantaka is the Tibetan God of death itself. To worship him one thing you can do is look your own death straight in the face, imagine yourself dead, meditate on your own corpse. In this way Yamantaka helps us to accept death for what it is, a natural and not to be feared part of human existence.

Seems like that would get this homunculus to quiet down. Oh, it’s going to happen anyway and it’s ok, so why do I have to speed things up? But, no. Doesn’t appear to work that way.

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 .

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

But You Can Never Leave

April 15, 2016 Charles 2 Comments

Spring Wedding Moon

Kate and I have been to Nirvana. And even had lunch there. Hameed, our taxi driver, when asked whether it was a popular tourist attraction, shook his head. No, he had never taken anybody there. He seemed a bit bemused.

Nirvana has a website. And site duty agents who gave us an extended tour, explaining the entire concept, taking us through one of the three towers. Each one is five stories high like a pagoda with a circular ramp winding from top to bottom, a Guggenheim for the afterlife. Along the ramp, from top to bottom are rooms filled with niches and decorated according to the beliefs of those who choose to reside there.

When the young Chinese man who gave us our tour referred more than once to “checking in”, the song Hotel California came immediately:

“Relax, ” said the night man,
“We are programmed to receive.
You can check-out any time you like,
But you can never leave! ” The Eagles

When you check in you can also place replicas of, say, your living room, in front of the urn(s) for your cremains.

The folks at Nirvana are pragmatic. We Chinese, the site duty agent said, take three joss sticks (incense) in when we pray with our ancestors. But, he went on, if three or four or eight or ten come in the room, then… So, we invite one person to go in and invite their ancestors outside. Problem solved.

There are, in a similarly pragmatic fashion, rooms for free-thinkers. In these rooms no statuary, no sounds of chanting, just sedate jade decorated niches. In this way the site agent said, if you’re a Buddhist and your child is a Christian, who might say, if you’re in the Buddhist room, I won’t come, the family can still be together.

Both Kate and I found the place oddly appealing. It’s quiet, respectful, out of the weather, air-conditioned. Instead of creepy it has a comforting feel. Not your usual tourist stop, but a fascinating one nonetheless.

Skygreens, the vertical farm, however, was not so welcoming. When we got there, we drove in to see the place no one was around. I had e-mailed them yesterday to see if we could visit, but received no reply. We took some pictures and I called the office. “We’re not open to the general public.” OK, then. Not quite the future of urban farming I’d expected. It looked run down and somewhat sad.

Asia, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Myth and Story, Plants, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Travel

A Taxi to Nirvana rather than a Stairway to Heaven

April 14, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Wedding Moon

Off to Nirvana with Hameed this morning. Nirvana is a huge columbarium that has intrigued ever since my sister sent me the link. And, besides, if I can get to Nirvana for the price of a taxi drive, why not?

We’ll go on about 10 minutes further to Skygreens, a vertical farm. Some evolution of this idea may well be the farm of the urban future and both Kate and I find it an interesting idea.

We’ve hired Hameed by the hour, $30 Singapore, about $22 U.S. I’ll let you know how Nirvana was when we get back. I think that’s what bodhisattvas do, so both Kate and I will accept the honorific when we return to the mountains.

Somewhat cooler today. But, only relative to 92 feels 102. So…

Have I mentioned that it’s hot here?