Category Archives: Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Jefferson County, Mountains, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

August 25, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Labor Day Moon

Been trying to feel the mountain. Beneath our house Shadow Mountain extends at least 8,800 feet to sea level and just where a mountain begins and ends after sea level is a mystery to me. That’s a mile and 2/3rds of rock. A lot of rock.

14 years ago I came out to Colorado and camped above Georgetown in the National Forest. Right next to me was a sugarloaf mountain. As darkness fell, the mountain disappeared into the gloom. All that massiveness just disappeared. But I could feel it looming over me. Since then I’ve wondered what the mountain equivalent is to the Shedd Aquarium’s freshwater exhibition tag: The essence of a stream is to flow. What is the essence of a mountain?

Mass seems to be the answer. It is the distinctive feature that draws our eyes when we come in on Interstate 76 from the plains of Nebraska. Suddenly, the plains stop. The essence of the plains is flatness? No more flatness, verticality created by mass intervenes with sight lines. The volume of rock pressed upwards by colliding tectonic plates changes the topography.

So these last couple of mornings, before I got out of bed, I’ve been trying to feel the mass of Shadow Mountain. Trying to extend my Self into the mountain, to feel the mountain as it lies there. Not so successful so far. It occurred to me this morning that this is the opposite of conquering the mountain, of summiting, of climbing. This is diving, deepening, merging. Part of the difficulty is the claustrophobic feeling of having the mountain all round me even in my imagination.

This is not all. I noticed the other day in the east, just above the lodgepoles on our property, Orion. In Minnesota I was a late riser so I don’t know where Orion was at 5 am in August, but his presence here surprised me. I have, until now, counted Orion as a winter companion, first becoming visible in November. He may have risen much earlier even in Minnesota, but I missed him. Orion is a special friend, a constellation with which I’ve had a long relationship and one I view as a companion in the night.

Then, there are the bucks. Mule deer bucks. On Sunday as we drove to Evergreen there were four mule deer bucks with still velveted antlers quietly munching grass along the side of the road. They looked at us; we looked at them. The velvet has a prospective nature, auguring the rut when not yet released. On this morning they were friends, not competitors for breeding rights. And they were in harmony.

Then, yesterday, Kate said, “Look at that!” I turned and over my left shoulder looked down into the grassy valley that extends between Shadow Mountain and Conifer Mountain. In the field of mown alfalfa stood a huge bull elk. His rack was enormous and already cleared of its velvet. It arced out away from his head on both sides, tines extending its reach even further. This was a bull of legend. Seeing him took us into the wild, the world that goes on alongside us here on Shadow Mountain, the lives of our fellow inhabitants of this mountain.

All of this, the essence of the mountain, Orion rising, velveted mule deer, the bull elk, hiking on the Upper Maxwell Falls trail, all of this accelerates becoming native to this place. The Rockies. Our home.

Family, GeekWorld, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Memory Imperfect

August 16, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Labor Day Moon

Today the grandkids again. Tomorrow with them the Georgetown Loop Railroad. I took them and their parents on it in 2012. Here’s a couple of photographs to show you how they liked it then. Now, they want to go back. Memory is an imperfect thing.

Yesterday we got Kate her birthday present. At 71 Grandma got a smart phone. The grandkids made fun of her old-fashioned phone, a flip top cell. They have no idea what an old-fashioned phone really looks like. Lots of bakelite.

I know I’ve been waxing philosophical over the last few days, maybe even the last few weeks. I think it’s a response to renewed life, getting serious about work again and the gradual, but steady finishing of the loft. This latter gives me a space where I can be serious and I need a certain quantum of seriousness in my day to feel balanced.

Beyond the Boundaries, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Humanities, Mountains, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Writing

Having a Moment

August 15, 2015 Charles 1 Comment

Lughnasa Labor Day Moon

I’m having a moment. It’s immediate stimulus has been reading How Forests Think, by Eduardo Kohn. Kohn is an anthropologist who has done significant field work in el Oriente, the east of Ecuador where the Andes go down into the tropical rain forests of the Amazon drainage. But this book is something else. Though it draws on his field work with the Runa, its focus is the nature of anthropology as a discipline and, more broadly, how humans fit into the larger world of plants and animals.

Thomas Berry’s little book, The Great Work, influenced a change in my political work from economic justice to environmental politics. Berry said that the great work for our time is creating a sustainable human presence on the earth. In 2008 I began working on the political committee of the Sierra Club with an intent to do my part in an arena I know well. I continued at the Sierra Club until January of 2014 until I resigned, mostly to avoid winter driving into the Twin Cities.

Since then, I’ve been struggling with how I can contribute to the great work. Our garden and the bees were effective, furthering the idea of becoming native to this place. The move to Colorado though has xed them out.

Kohn’s book has helped me see a different contribution I can make. Political work is mostly tactical, dealing in change in the here and now or the near future. In the instance of climate change, tactical work is critical for not only the near future but for the distant future as well. I’ve kept my head down and feet moving forward on the tactical front for a long, long time.

There are though other elements to creating a sustainable human presence on the earth. A key one is imagining what that human presence might be like. Not imagining a world of Teslas and Volts, renewable energy, local farming, water conservation, reduced carbon emissions, though all those are important tactical steps toward that presence; but, reimagining what it means to be human in a sustainable relationship with the earth.

Kohn is reimagining what being human is. His reimagining is a brilliant attempt to reframe who thinks, how they think and how all sentience fits together. He’s not the only one attempting to do this. The movement is loosely called post-humanist, removing humans from the center of the conceptual universe. A posthuman world would be analogous to the solar system after Galileo and Copernicus removed the earth from the center. Humans, like the earth, would still exist, but their location within the larger order will have shifted significantly.

This fits in so well with my reimagining faith project. It also fits with some economic reimagining I’ve been reading about focused on eudaimonia, human flourishing. It also reminds me of a moment I’ve recounted before, the Iroquois medicine man, a man in a 700 year lineage of medicine men, speaking at the end of a conference on liberation theology. The time was 1974. He prayed over the planting of a small pine tree, a symbol of peace among the tribes of the Iroquois confederacy because those tribes put their weapons in a hole, then planted a pine tree over them.

His prayer was first to the winged ones, then the four-leggeds and those who swim and those who go on water and land, the prayer went on asking for the health and well-being of every living thing. Except the two-leggeds. I noticed this and went up to him after the ceremony and asked him why he hadn’t mention the two-leggeds. “Because,” he said, “we two-leggeds are so fragile. Our lives depend on the health of all the others, so we pray for them. If the rest are healthy, then we will be, too.”

Reimagine faith in a manner consistent with that vision. Reimagine faith in a post-humanist world. Reimagine faith from within and among rather than without and above. This is work I can do. Work my library is already fitted to do. Work I’ve felt in my gut since an evening on Lake Huron, long ago, when the sun set so magnificently that I felt pulled into the world around me, became part of it for a moment. Work that moment I’ve mentioned before when I felt aligned with everything in the universe, that mystical moment, has prepared me for. Yes, work I can do. Here on Shadow Mountain.

Health, Our Land and Home, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

One Month Out

August 8, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Recovery Moon

Now a full month out from surgery. Cancer made less threatening with clear margins, no cancer cells in the tissue around the prostate after its removal. Now kegels, those exercises vaunted in Cosmo in the 70’s, an upcoming PSA in September and healing wounds where the robot arms reached inside me are the physical remnants. The kegels strengthen muscles necessary for continence. And they’ve worked.

I thought I’d be back at it now: translating Ovid, writing Superior Wolf, investigating the mountains and the west, but I’m not. The catheter came out only three weeks ago. That required the kegels and a brief use of adult diapers, maybe a week and a half all told. Jon’s been putting the bookshelves together and shelving books has taken time.

There was, too, the steady flow of Ken of Boiler Medic and the boiler installation, Herb and John the plumbers running line for the new stove and the generator. Arranging with Eric for the generator move, then Herb back for the gas connection, then Eric back to install the automatic transfer switch and connect the generator, test it.

There is, as well, a niggling feeling that post-cancer me and pre-cancer me are no longer quite the same person. I’ve not had that sudden revelation of life’s purpose found, or a mission uncovered; but, I feel somehow different. It might be that my day-to-day won’t return to the old pattern, that some new mix will emerge.

One specific instance is a more co-ordinated reading program, using Nina Killham’s bibliotherapy recommendations, certain projects like re-imaging faith and neglected areas of reading like poetry and classical novels as guides. Then, too, there is the type of writing I’ve avoided, long form, essay like pieces on matters like reimagining faith, politics in our time, water, identity and self-hood.

I’m waiting for sign along the ancientrail of recovery from a dread disease. There is planning, goal setting and then there’s discovery. Right now I’m more focused on discovery.

Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Great Wheel, Great Work, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Feel the Rain On Our Face

August 7, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Recovery Moon

There are many ways of becoming native to this place. The one that worked for me involved a combination of following an ancient liturgical calendar based on seasonal changes in temperate latitudes: the Great Wheel and gardening. There are many other paths. Chado: the Way of Tea integrates the tea ceremony with a finely divided sensibility to Japanese seasons, some only two weeks long. Hunter/gatherers have to be native to the place where they are or they will not survive. Followers of the Tao, the way, lean into the rhythms of the natural world rather than away from them, flowing through the world as water does in a stream. Hiking and camping and canoeing. Forestry with an emphasis on forest health. Conservation biology.

Oddly though practitioners of modern agriculture are often as estranged from their place as residents of vast urban enclaves. And I recently read, in Foreign Policy magazine’s July/August edition, an intriguing explanation as to what lead current, often corporate, agriculture astray. When the population explosion gained prominence in the mid-1960’s, think Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb,” a concentrated focus on methods of improving agricultural productivity resulted. And it worked. More acres went under the plow, more chemicals went into the soil and onto crops, antibiotics filled food animals, food production became more sophisticated though not more nutritious, fast cheap restaurants bought and sold fast cheap food. There are real dangers in letting ourselves become strangers to our home world.

Becoming native to this place is analogous to being born again, revivified for the act of belonging to, being part of this planet. Second naiveté, Paul Ricoeur’s wonderful notion, can follow a state of critical distance:

“According to Ricoeur, the rational forces brought to our civilization through modernity have made it difficult to accept religion or scripture in the “first naïveté” sense. Once subjected to rational inspection, the literal meanings of religion really do not hold up…” exploring spiritual development

Modernity has put the fruits of enlightenment reason and modern technology forward as more significant, more important than the growth of a tomato, than the beauty of a wilderness lake. It has substituted the grace of a soaring condor with the stiff, hard brilliance of an airplane. That tomato, grown soft and juicy on the plant, got replaced by a hard-skinned, pre-ripe picked fruit designed for machine harvesting and long distance transport. Distances that used to require human feet and legs, or the same of horses, now demand only that we sit and wait.

Before you resist this. This is not a screed against airplanes, cars, computers, telephones or grocery stores. It is a recognition of the rupture, the critical distance, modernity has created between our lives and the world that sustains them. Food comes from soil and plants and the animals that eat the plants. Oxygen from the plants at work. Water used to be purified by the very wetlands we fill in or drain to build subdivisions or to plant more acreage of chemically injected crops.

Life, in other words, exists in a delicate balance with the inanimate; that balance is literally billions of years old and one we cannot afford to ignore. Yet we do. And so we must make an effort to again become native to this place, this place which in its wonder gave life a chance.

Following the seasons as they change and following within those changes emergence, growth, life and death became easier for me when I overlaid on spring/summer/fall/winter the four big solar events of equinoxes and solstices, then put between those the cross-quarter holidays of my Celtic ancestors: Samhain (summer’s end), Imbolc (in the belly), Beltane (the beginning of the growing season) and Lughnasa (the first harvest holiday). When I write the season at the top of this blog, I remember, for example, that we are now in the season of first harvests. And sure enough Kate brought home some wonderful heirloom tomatoes today.

The extensive gardens, both flower and vegetable, plus the orchard that Kate and I installed and nurtured in Andover reinforced the lessons of the Great Wheel. At Halloween, Samhain’s paler descendant, our garden would be finished, the beds covered, foods in jars in the basement, garlic hanging from rafters, onions and apples spread out. We were part of the turning wheel and the turning wheel shaped what we could and could not do. We lived then with the rhythms of the temperate latitudes, in some harmony with them.

Now we are in a new place, a more arid, less fertile place and the way of becoming native to it is still in process. But it will come.

We cannot all go back to the land. Cities dominate the living patterns for most of the world. But we must find ways, whether through community supported agriculture or urban hydroponics or organized trips to the countryside, to help us all feel the rain on our face. We all need to wonder at the slender green shoots that brave their way through the late snows of winter. Or, at the tropical lushness of equatorial jungles. Or the marvel of lives lived fully in the world ocean. Our lives and the lives of our grandchildren depend on our becoming, again, native to this place. To know our spot with a second naiveté so that we will care for, love this rocky, watery wonderful earth.

Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Great Wheel, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Becoming Native to This Place

August 7, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Recovery Moon

The most ancientrail of all is becoming native to this place.

But, why must we become native to mother Earth? Aren’t we native simply because we are thrown onto the planet’s surface at birth? Yes and no. Yes, in that we are an organism designed to live in this gravity, breathe this concentration of oxygen, use plant matter and other animals as food. No, in that those of us thrown into a complex industrial/technology culture are native not to the planet itself, but to adaptations made over centuries by economies and governments. This includes the U.S., Europe, most of Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, as well as residents of urban areas on every continent.

In the U.S.A. we are native to electricity as Kate and I learned just this Monday. Our typical life ground to a halt along with 4600 others when the power went out. We are native to a night lit not by fire, but by bulbs. We are native to warm houses in winter, cool ones in summer. Our hunting and gathering takes place at King Sooper, Safeway, Lunds, Byerlys. We are native to antibiotics, surgery, dental care.

When we climb the additional 3,600 feet in altitude from Denver to our home on Black Mountain Drive, we sit comfortably in a moving chair powered by the ancient remains of dinosaurs and forests. We are native to telephones, computers, text messages. We are native to machines and carpenters and plumbers. We are, in short, native to almost anything but this planet where we live.

You could reasonably ask whether this matters. Our future lies in the stars anyhow, doesn’t it? Maybe so. Especially if we render the earth uninhabitable for humans. Which, with climate changing drivers still dominant in our world economies, we’re working hard to accomplish.

I believe it matters. Why? The short answer is that becoming native to this planet, again, is our best hope for throttling back those climate change drivers. We can escape to the stars while having a beautiful homeworld as our base of exploration.

The longer answer has to do with the nature of our humanity. Technological and industrial estrangement from the rhythms of the natural world is almost a canard, a cliche. We expect tomatoes in winter. We expect access to any part of the planet within hours. Even the colors of our sunrises and sunsets often have chemical pollutants to thank for their vibrancy.

We need to awaken ourselves to the essential, everyday miracles: photosynthetic conversion of sunlight into food, the transpiration of that same process, oxygen, being a gas we need to survive. And this consciousness that we have. How about that. Or the intricate and interdependent web of living things. The changing of seasons in the temperate zones. Water’s strange characteristics.

In the next post I’ll suggest one way of becoming native to this place.

Beyond the Boundaries, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Travel

The Lure of Yesterday

July 24, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Recovery Moon

NYT had a video and an article, 36 hours in Siem Reap. This type of article is a regular feature and one that gives a wonderful, quick entré to a particular locale. My visit in 2004 is now 11 years ago and the Siem Reap of this video has many upscale tourist options that didn’t exist when I was there. The Siem Reap of 2004 was a sleepy village though studded with many smaller hotels and one big one, the Hotel D’Angkor. Hostels were as evident as tourist hotels. But the building boom had already begun and the Siem Reap of 2015 had its roots in 2004.

As such articles do, it featured a wide array of things to do from shadow puppetry performed in front of a fire and screen to dining in upscale restaurants, tours on tuk-tuks and shops featuring Cambodian village crafts. I suppose the article does its job as a teaser, a what if I were there, even briefly fantasy, but it glossed over, very lightly, the primary reason Siem Reap has become an international destination. Quite a feat, really, in a country ravaged by years of the Khmer Rouge and corrupt politicians.

Angkor. Angkor is a site containing over 70 temples, each built by a different ruler of the Khmer, and extending over many square miles. It is much more than Angkor wat, the supposedly eponymous temple. In reality Angkor wat just means Angkor temple. That direct translation does not differentiate the best preserved and fascinating temple closest to Siem Reap from all the others. Ta Prohm. Bayon. Banteay Serai. And many, many others.

Angkor is a built space that has carried the Hindu culture of the Khmer deva-rajas, god-kings, who ruled between 802 a.d. and 1351 a.d., into our time and will carry it far into the future. The intricate bas reliefs, the monumental four-faced sculptures with the classical Bayon smile, the elephants carved in stone, the florid decor of Banteay Serai require time and reading to appreciate. Ta Prohm, an often photographed temple, has been left as the forest has reclaimed it, with kapok trees growing through doorways and over roof tops.

Outside many of the temples small bands of Cambodian musicians play traditional music. My first reaction was oh how wonderful, authentic music played among the temples of this ancient culture. Then I began to look closely at the band. Most were missing a foot or an arm or a leg or carried other scars from the many landmines that continue to plague the Cambodian people.

One of my most memorable travel evenings was spent on the outer stone wall of Bayon, watching the living temple across the way as monks clad in saffron and maroon hit gongs, lit incense Bayon and prayed along with passers by who came to worship. The sun set and the shadows changed the expressions of the four-faced sculptures said to be the likeness of Jayavarman VII, the last deva-raja, who converted to Buddhism. The monkeys howled, insects chirped and the deep bass of the temple gong reverberated. Incense scented the air.

Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, Health, Memories, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Travel, US History

Week II Post-Surgery

July 22, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Recovery Moon

Week II post surgery. My energy improves daily though I’m not back to full stamina. The surgical stigmata, six wounds where the robot’s arms pierced my skin, are healing nicely. It no longer hurts to lie down on them. An unpleasant, but anticipated side effect of the surgery, temporary incontinence, seems to be clearing up much more rapidly than I’d imagined it would. And, most importantly, I’m presumptively cancer free, the only question being possible microscopic metastases. I test for that in early September.

The tomorrow wall has crumbled. I can now see into the future again. Yesterday I made Amtrak reservations for my 50th high school reunion in September. The overnight California Zephyr runs from Denver to Chicago and then a short ride on the Cardinal to Lafayette, Indiana where I’ll pick up a rental car and drive the rest of the way. I do it this way because the Cardinal gets into Indianapolis after midnight and this allows me a good night’s sleep, plus I can gradually re-enter Hoosier space driving familiar highways back to Alexandria.

camp chesterfield2 — The Trail of Religion

Again this time, as I did for the 45th, I plan to stay at Camp Chesterfield, a Christian Spiritualist center. It’s a quirky, old, interesting place. And, it’s cheap.

The loft is ready for its second round of construction, more shelves, then more shelving. I’ve abandoned my attempt to get the books properly organized as I shelve them because I need to clear space for more shelves. I can sort and organize as much as I want come fall.

My psyche has not caught up to my body’s healing pace. Though the tomorrow wall has fallen, I still find my days somewhat chaotic, not sure what to do, then what to do next. We’ve had a continuing drip, drip, drip of other matters: cracked tooth, dying boiler, Kate’s very painful back that contribute. All those seem to be moving toward resolution. I’ve even found a plumber for the generator install, a niggling thing still hanging on.

I’ll find my psyche back to its usual eagerness over the next week or two. I look forward to it.

Again, gratitude to all of you who sent notes over the cancer season. It matters.

Faith and Spirituality, Health, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Oh, You Were Lucky

July 19, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Recovery Moon

Been thinking about luck and fortune. The meanings are slippery and often adjust themselves to rationalization. For instance. I was lucky to find my cancer early enough for successful treatment. Well, yes. But. I was unlucky to find cancer at all. It was my good fortune to find, with Kate’s help, competent and caring medical professionals in Colorado. Again, sure. But. It was my bad fortune to need as much of their competence and caring as I did.

Over the last few days since the catheter came out I’ve had this thought, “Boy, was I lucky. I had cancer, but it was treatable. And, I found it and treated it quickly.” The facts are true. I had cancer. It was treatable. It was found and treated quickly. But lucky seems askew. Lucky would have been to have never had cancer at all. Lucky described my state prior to diagnosis, not after. After, it was data, decisions, actions.

I write this because I’ve been tempted to another line of thought, too. I was lucky; I had prostate cancer, not lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, any cancer that most often defies treatment. There is a tendency to diminish the severity of our own situation and compare it to the dire circumstances of others. This helps psychologically, but it changes neither the fact of my situation nor theirs.

Each situation is as it is. Cancer is bad, no matter what type, no matter its response or lack of response to treatments. This disease is not one, but many; it is polymorphous and diverse. I’ve had friends with terrible cancers that eventually caused death. I’ve heard the stories of many men who’ve had the same arc with prostate cancer that I have. And others who have died.

Lucky and fortune play no part, save as soothing conceptual anodynes. Facts. They are what matter. Love and friendship can give aid in real time and I’ve experienced it. But that was not luck. That was kindness, compassion.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Retirement, Third Phase

Third Phase Summary

July 17, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Recovery Moon

The third phase. First phase: childhood/education through at least high school, maybe undergraduate college. Second Phase: career/family formation. Third phase: Post career with adult children. This last phase has become an extended and to some extent new part of normal life. In the recent past the third phase was often short, interrupted by illness and often marred by poverty and ended not long after it began, especially for men.

Advances in medical science, improved social security and medicare and the maturation of the baby boom generation have combined to push the third phase into greater and greater prominence. We live longer, with better health and improved economic conditions. Too, the large population bulge of the baby boom is forcing society to see the third phase. In the past it may have been possible to consign the aging third phaser to the margins of society, but with the huge numbers of those born between 1946 and 1964 third phase citizens will be a larger and larger percentage of the population.

This is exciting. It allows our culture as a whole to reconsider the third phase and its implications for both individuals and society. Since the third phase is post career/work and usually represented by a couple with no children at home, it places an inflection point on the question of individual worth. The normal external markers affecting self-worth are employment and children. Both of these are in the past for most third phasers. Or, at least the time when they dominated an individual’s life is in the past.

Though it may be frightening to some this means that we each get the opportunity to reshape our lives, often around activities more closely aligned to our own interests. Kate, for example, always a hand-worker and seamstress, now focuses on quilting. I was able, earlier than most third-phasers, to focus on writing, political work and the arts, interests which sustain me now in my late 60’s. Family is still important, of course, with grand children and the lives of adult children, but those interactions happen occasionally rather than daily. This allows a pleasant mix of intimate, family contact while ensuring enough time for independent activities.

The third phase continues to fascinate me as I see friends headed into it and experience it myself with Kate. Friendships matter even more, with the hard work of friendship done while family and career dominated, and become increasingly precious as those factors reduce in importance. In my case the Woolly Mammoths and the docent corps continue to enrich the third phase.