Category Archives: Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Aging, Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, Jefferson County, Mountains, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Lucky We Live the Mountains

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Spring                                                        Mountain Spring Moon

Lucky we live the mountains. Yes, Minnesota is a beautiful state, but the exurban chunk of it in which we lived and the areas in which I usually traveled, south toward Minneapolis, only occasionally reflected the wonder of the northern part of the state. There was the Mississippi, the lakes in the city, the green belt of parks. There was little Round Lake on Round Lake Blvd. That was about it. The rest of it, the beautiful part, including northern Anoka County with its high water table, marshy and wooded terrain, had to be sought out by driving.

Here the 3 mile drive home from highway 73 up Black Mountain Drive winds past a valley filled with grass and pine on the south side of which rises Conifer Mountain. To the north Shadow Mountain gradually pulls the road higher and higher, rocks jutting out, ponderosa and aspen dot the slopes and mule deer sometimes browse. Each morning when I go to the mailbox to retrieve the Denver Post Black Mountain is on my right, guarding the west and the eventual sunset.

Anytime we leave home, whether to go into Evergreen for our business meeting or into Denver to see the grandkids or south toward Littleton for medical care mountains and valleys, canyons and gulches grace the roadways. Small mountain streams run next to the roadways, swift and right now, often violent. Walls of sheer rock alternate with wooded mountainsides. Always the journey is up or down until we get past the foothills onto the beginning of the great plains where the Denver metroplex takes over.

This was my thought while driving home from the doctor yesterday. How short is a human life span. Not even a tick of the second hand to this rock. These mountains have been here for millions of years longer than the human species itself has existed. They will probably be here millions of years after we’re gone. What is one lifetime? What is a few years here or there? Compared to these. This was a comforting thought.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Jefferson County, Mountains, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain

Pulses

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Spring                                               Mountain Spring Moon

Under the mountain spring moon various shades of green have slowly, slowly begun to appear. The ponderosa pines have been green all winter but they’ve greened up some. The first ground cover green to appear was the bearberry when the snow melted back. This evergreen ground cover was green all along, just hidden. A shaded patch of moss has gone from a muted pale green to emerald over the last couple of weeks. There are, too, even here at 8,800 feet, dandelions. Some grass, too. Crab grass for sure, another hardy perennial. Tufts of grass that look like prairie drop seed, but are not, I’m sure, remain their winter tan.

Too, the dogs have begun to sniff through the deck, smelling, I suppose, new rodents of some kind. Along with that has come Rigel digging. With the advent of warmer soil Rigel and Vega may begin creating holes in the rest of the yard as well. Another harbinger of spring.

Birds chirp happily around 5:30-5:45 am as the sun begins to rise.

Driving along Highway 78 (Shadow Mountain Drive, Black Mountain Drive (our segment) and Brook Forest Road) the only snow that remains is on the north side of the road or in shaded spots. A pond not far from our house still has ice, but the ice has a shallow layer of water over it. The mountain streams run, burble, ice now long melted and turned into stream. Willows along the streams look fire tipped as their branches turn a green gold. “Like dusted with gold,” Kate said.

The mountain spring is a slow arriver, coming in pulses, alternated with sometimes heavy snows. We have the potential, for example, for a huge snow storm Wednesday through Friday.

While on a drive Sunday, not far from our home, on top of a large outcropping of rock where the sun penetrated the trees, lay a fox, curled up and enjoying a quiet Sunday nap. The fox was a tan spot against the gray of the rock. Mule deer have begun to return as well, we see them at various places along the slopes and valleys. Kate just called and said, for example, that we have four deer in our front yard and “the dogs are levitating.” Sure enough, there they are, finding the green just as I have been.

Asia, Family, Latin, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Habitual

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Spring                                          Mountain Spring Moon

New morning habit in process of forming. I’m going to protect the time from 5:45-11:00 am for work with timeout for breakfast. After long experience, I know that I don’t do well if my work times get interrupted. This means I’ll need to make appointments for the afternoons in the future. Yes, this potentially interferes with my workout regimen, which begins at 4:00 pm each day. And, yes, it could disrupt my nap, but I think the advantages outweigh the hassles.

It also means I’ll not be posting here until mid-day, nor will I check e-mails, do other kinds of work on the computer until the afternoon or evening.

What will I be doing in those morning hours? Latin. Moving forward with my translation of Book VII which I plan to be my first complete book translated. There are 15. Writing. I’ll be working on Superior Wolf, writing and researching.

It’s odd, but the sunny disposition of Colorado really leans toward the outdoors, not like the cold and gloomy winters and early springs in Minnesota, where staying inside just made sense. This focus on mornings spent with the mind will have outside interference. I’ll have to focus harder on getting in hikes, plant identification, exploration in the time I have available.

I’ve been taken over the last few weeks with an idea from the Baghavad Gita, action with out attachment to the results. In the Gita this notion prunes karma, since it is the entrapment of desire that bends karma one way or the other. With no focus on the result the action cannot produce bad karma. This is not the way I see it though I understand this more orthodox approach.

Instead I find the idea of action without attachment to the result as a way to cut the final cord tying me to the bourgeois desire for achievement. It was this strain of thinking that cut across my cerebral cortex when living large popped up. In other words I learn Latin with no final end in mind. Being an amateur classicist is what I will do, defining the realm in which I will act. Just so the writing. Writing novels, being a writer is what I will do, what I have done. But the results of that action? Not important. Grandparenting. Gardening. Bee keeping. All the same.

So creating the atmosphere in which I can act is critical. Creating an atmosphere in which I succeed, not so much so.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Vulnerable & OK

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Spring                           Mountain Spring Moon

Quick note to say I’ve moved past the mood of the last post. Business meeting this morning with Kate at the Wildflower. We shared some of our mutual vulnerabilities: mortality, worthiness, relationships with kids and grandkids. In that unusual alchemy of love vulnerabilities shared become a source of strength and self-forgiveness. 25 years now of letting each other in, hearing and the seeing each other, loving each other. A gift beyond measure.

Art and Culture, Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, Mountains, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., The West

Born To Be Wild

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Spring                                 Mountain Spring Moon

In late April, early May I will attend my 27th retreat with the Woolly Mammoths, this year in Ely at the YMCA’s Camp du Nord. Often we have a theme and I suggested the following:

Been thinking about topic and theme. Seems like Ely area cries out for considering the wilderness, the wild within and without. What does it mean to be wild? In your life? In your heart? In and with your passions? Does wildness have anything to say to the third phase? How does wilderness feed us, heal us? Why? Another aspect of the same idea. What is to be human and wild? How do humans fit into the wild? Do we? Can we? It seems to me this is much of what Will Steger has dealt with.

As I’ve begun to consider these questions, take them into my heart, my civilized and my wild heart, they’ve begun to pull information out of the surrounding atmosphere. As often happens once we focus on something.

One source that has been prodding me over the last week is a book, The Great Divide: A Biography of the Rocky Mountains, by Gary Ferguson. In the first chapter on Mountain Men comes this observation. Richard Slotkin, an American studies professor at Wesleyan University suggests that a main theme of early America was the shredding of conventional European mythology and getting to a more primary source, the “blood knowledge” of the wilderness. Since was the time of Emerson and Thoreau, too, both of whom were instrumental in the turn away from European influence and toward development of American letters, American thought, American literature and who were, again both, focused on the natural world as a source of inspiration, it seems this tendency to turn our back on “civilization,” whether European then, or decadent American late-stage capitalism now, and look to the wilderness for guidance is an integral aspect of the American character.

It may be less so now than then, but nonetheless, it endures. Look at the heritage of John Muir, Aldo Leopold, the outdoors ethos of Minnesota, Colorado and Alaska (to name state cultures I know), the idea of the West.

In this same chapter Ferguson counterpoises the Easterners romanticization of the mountain men as true individuals living with unfettered freedom with the civilized and European inflected culture of the East Coast. This was true, he says, throughout the 19th century. In fact, many of the mountain men worked in companies of 20-30, with some trapping, some hunting, some cooking, some taking care of supplies and pelts. They also tended to travel with their families and were surprisingly well-educated. About 1/5 of the mountain men left memoirs and many were fluent in both Latin and Greek.

I mention this because when our gaze turns toward the Boundary Waters Wilderness, the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada range or the expanses of wilderness in Alaska, to mention only a few of the wild areas in the U.S. alone, we often look toward them as places of healing, zones where civilization can be shed, as mystical bounded lands within which magic of a sort is still possible.

In fact though these are simply places where the hand of civilization has been light-though not absent. Witness acid rain, the extinction or near extinction of apex predators, and now the slow creep of climate change. And the need for a word like wilderness, the notion of wild occurs only when its dialectical opponent, civilization, has become ascendant.

So, to consider the wild in our hearts, in our lives, in our country we need also look at how civilized we are. What being civilized means. What needs civilization meets that wilderness does not and the reverse. We must also consider that the dynamics of these questions are bound up, in a particular way, with the American experience, with our sense of who we are as a people and a nation. It is not enough, in other words, to imagine the wild heart, but we must also attend to its gilded cage. It is not enough to seek the blood knowledge of the wilderness, but we must also attend to the context, our everyday home, where that knowledge has been lost.

Art and Culture, Asia, Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Spring, 2015

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Spring                                   Mountain Spring Moon

The sun hits the celestial equator today at 4:45 pm. It also rises due East and sets due West. This is the day the serpent crawls up Chichen Itza. Though meteorological spring, the three months between the coldest and warmest months, began on March 1st, today is the old holiday, one celebrated in cultures across many lands.

Here, for example, is an interesting paragraph about spring from the perspective of wu xing: “In Chinese thought, spring is associated with the color green, the sound of shouting, the wood element, the climate of wind, things sprouting, your eyes, your liver, your anger, patience and altruism– and a green dragon. Not surprisingly, spring is also associated with the direction east, the sunrise direction as Earth spins us toward the beginning of each new day.”  earth and sky

Spring sees the early evidence of winter’s end, celebrated at Imbolc, when the lambs are in the belly, brought forward. The lambs are born. The grass is plentiful so the ewes can give milk and nourish their babies. The gradual loosening of winter’s cold and snow and ice continues, accelerates until the days have warmth as their usual state.

The warmth and the sun climbing toward the north signal plants and animals both. Hibernation ends so the visible population of critters increases rapidly, coming out for the food the new season promises. Spring ephemerals burst out of the snow: snowdrops, crocus, aconites. Later, the daffodils will come, too. The strategy of the spring ephemerals is an interesting one. They emerge, bloom and die back before whatever is in the surrounding vicinity can leaf out, thus capturing all the available sunlight before shade covers their spot.

If Michaelmas is the springtime of the soul, then the vernal equinox is the springtime of the body, of the material and animate world. No surprise then that it serves as the proximate marker for the Christian easter, focused as it is on the resurrection, the new life of the body. Both Christmas and the Easter, the two key Christian holidays, one marking the incarnation and the other the death and regained life of Jesus, focus on the body and its possibilities. In the first instance the body is seen as a vessel for the divine and in the second the body is seen as no longer bound by the strict laws of the animal world. Death is no longer the end.

The Great Wheel suggests a similar, but profoundly different way of viewing these two most profound mysteries: birth and death. The Great Wheel focuses on the rhythms of the natural world and on their sequence, their repetitiveness. Taken most literally it adds nothing to these rhythms, nor does it subtract from them. Birth and death occur as the great wheel turns, as the earth revolves around the sun, source of the vital energy that maintains life between these antipodes.

This intricate interdependence between animals and plants in their life cycles, the sun and the earth’s orbit around it, is common, literally mundane. Profane, too, I suppose. Yet the miraculous is here, too and we need no sacred text to see it. Out of the stuff born in the birth of the stars themselves, stuff borne later on the solar wind and in the cataclysmic explosions at the deaths of these same stars, came the material that created our sun and our home, this planet, this earth.

Then, consider what happens next. That same stuff, now reordered and shaped into this planet, somehow reconfigured itself so that it could move, so that develop intention and instinct, so that it could replicate itself rather than having to wait for the violent processes more usual for the distribution of matter. And that that stuff, the same from the heart of the stars, so reconfigured, grew in complexity and capability until human babies began to born. Babies that could, probably for the first time here on earth, perhaps for the first time in the whole of the universe, see that which gave them the potential for life, the universe in its particularity here on earth and its dizzying universality in the cosmos.

The birth of the universe’s own eyes and ears and poets and composers and painters and dancers came and as miracles. And still do. In the same way the death of these same poets and artists does not end the births. No, the births keep coming and the deaths do not end them. In my mind this is the true resurrection, the actual reincarnation, the exact moment of rebirth. Death does not end us. We continue. And Spring is just the season to bless and hold this true miracle close to our hearts.

Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Mountains, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., The West, Third Phase, Writing

Learning Colorado

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Imbolc                                         Black Mountain Moon

Signed up for 4 Colorado Native Plant Master programs: one in the foothills, one in the montane eco-system (ours) and one in the high plains. 3 of these are 3 session 8:30-12:30 classes. The fourth is a two session, 9-3, course on plant sketching. Don’t really want to qualify for the Native Plant Master program since it has requirements for volunteering that I don’t want to fulfill, but I want the content and the chance to meet some people involved in botany here.

All part of becoming native to this place. Starting this week I plan to keep a nature journal, hand-written, a record of our yard, hikes, these courses, geology lectures and field trips, meteorology notes. I’m not much of an artist, but I think with some practice I can draw plants and animals, maybe sketch geological features, at least well enough to call them to mind when I review the entries.

We drove into Evergreen for our business meeting at the Wildflower Cafe. It was good to see those folks again. Afterward we drove around Evergreen a bit, going out to the I-70 entrances and seeing in the distance snow covered peaks. Our mountains around here have snow, but are not snow covered.

 

 

Beyond the Boundaries, Health, Latin, MOOCS, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase, US History

It’s All Real Stuff

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Imbolc                              Black Mountain Moon

Prep days. Yesterday reorienting my workouts, today moving back into Ovid with the Latin. Prep is important but I find I want to hurry through it, press on, get to the real stuff. But, it’s all real stuff, isn’t it?

When doing the Latin, for example, I want to work fast, translate easily, get it. But, most often I have to work slowly, translate with difficulty, struggle to understand.

In the MOOC I’m taking from McGill University the current section is on physical literacy. An amazing insight for me. Literacy in the alphabetic, language based world, yes. Numeracy in the numbers based, mathematical world, yes. But physical literacy? That is, learning basic moves and physical actions that can later be strung together to play a sport, keep one fit, teach us how to fall, no. The idea never occurred to me.

It apparently surfaced in the 1930’s in America whereas numeracy only emerged as an idea in the 1960’s. It’s not surprising, I guess, since the move from the farm to the town and city was weighted against the old, physical ways that had existed since hunting and gathering gave way to the neolithic revolution.

Perhaps, come to think of it, becoming native to this place is a component of physical literacy, a tactile spirituality. As we move less and less, we interact with the natural less affectively, less often, less well. Perhaps play is a big component of becoming native to this place, wandering aimlessly in the woods or by a pond, in the mountains, on lakes.

Anyhow, I’m excited about this idea, a human trilogy necessary for a satisfying life: literacy, numeracy and physicality.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Latin, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Translating De Bello Gallico, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Back At It

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Imbolc                                  Black Mountain Moon

I’ve found my rhythms. Back at Latin, going to turn today back to Ovid from Caesar. Writing. I’m 4,000 words plus into Superior Wolf and my brain is buzzing, following trails here and there with characters, research, narrative structure. Working out is back, too, 6 days a week right now. I’m not where I was in terms of fitness, not sure how the altitude has affected me, but I’m improving and that’s the key. The whole fitness area is still in flux, but I have a pattern I’m using.

A new element, too. I’m going to make some art. Not sure what quite yet, though I’ve got some ideas and lots of material. When my center room work space gets finished, I plan to get at it. There’s also, with art, the research and work with art history, theory. Not there yet in that work, but it will come.

Even, if you managed to get through my long posts under Beyond the Boundaries, Original Relation and Reimagining Faith, you’ll know, my reimagining project has finally begun to take off. Why now I’m not sure, but there you go.

This blog, of course, has remained a constant.

Now, if we could just sell that house.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Mountains, Myth and Story, Poetry, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Spring

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Imbolc                                      Black Mountain Moon

“Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly–and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.”
–  Omar Khayyám

March 1st is the beginning of meteorological spring. The three coldest months of the year are over and the next three are a transition between the cold of winter and the heat of the growing season, the three warmest months of June, July, August. Meteorological spring, though, is a creature of averages, a soulless thing with no music. I prefer the emergence of the bloodroot (in Minnesota) as the true first sign of spring.

On March 20th Imbolc will give way to Ostara, the Great Wheel’s spring season, on the day of the vernal equinox.

I do not yet know the traditional first signs of spring for the montane ecosystem, but I will. Nor do I know the tenor, the rhythms of the seasonal change here in the mountains. I look forward to learning them.

I’m reading the Thousand and One Nights again, a new translation, so right now Arabic and Persian stories, poetry fill my head. Khayyam’s Rubaiyat was my earliest introduction to Persian culture and one I found magical from the beginning.

There is, today, the slightest touch of spring longing in me. And so I wrote this.