Category Archives: Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Health, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

death cannot defeat life, only end it

Leave a comment

Beltane                                                                            Beltane Moon

The hits just keep on comin’. Now, in addition to the biopsy this Thursday I have lowering oxygen saturation. This is not good. It can and does destroy brain cells and my brain is my favorite organ. So, I have an appointment with Lisa Gidday sometime in the next three weeks. Geez. This all converges with long standing, but well-managed issues (right now) like high blood pressure, cholesterol levels too high or too low, stage 3 kidney disease and others like left ventricular hypertrophy.

Now, I choose to see this all in a positive light. I have some chronic conditions that are common to many people and the dietary and pharmaceutical solutions to them have been successful so far. The kidney disease and left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) are not good, but they both seem stable.

Unless. The LVH ends up reinforcing the lowering oxygen saturation. That’s for the follow-up to my appointment with Lisa.

My sense of myself, in spite of all this, is that I’m healthy and strong. Doesn’t feel like denial. I know about each item here and its implications. My choice is to take positive and aggressive action where I can and to accept the limitations or ultimate consequences in those instance where no action can be taken.

Two different streams of thought have lead me to a calm place. The first, experienced immediately after the beginning of the prostate journey, involved facing my actual mortality. We maintain throughout most of our life a subtle innocence about the probability and even the possibility of our own death. In my opinion this attitude is the reverse of unrealistic. In fact it is protective of our need to get on with living in the face of an inevitability about which we can do nothing.

The prostate findings lifted that protective innocence from me. There was death peeking over my shoulder, the agency of its coming perhaps revealed. This shook me. Hard. Finding my way into it, not running away, took the better part of a week and a half. Then, I realized that, if not this, something. If not now, sometime. With that frame and the palliative effect of taking the actions I could take, I became peaceful again.

The second thought involves living until I die. This has always been intention, not to run away from life or problems but to embrace them. Make choices. Take action. If I see a problem that affects me deeply, my tendency is to move toward it, see if I can do something. The realization here is that no disease, no condition can stop me from living until I die. I will, in other words, continue doing those things that matter to me. As I have done. Death cannot defeat my life, just end it.

So far these two thoughts: something, sometime will kill me and death cannot defeat my life, have helped me see that I am in no different situation now that at any other time in my life. Nor will I ever be.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., The West

Pulse Flow

Leave a comment

Spring                                                                       Beltane Moon

Building on the Colorado River session reported below, I also wanted to comment on a happenstance that seems significant. When things show up in disparate parts of my life, surprising me by their shared connections, I try to pay attention. That happened on Wednesday night. In the post below I mention the pulse flow that allowed, for 8 weeks, river water to fill the Rio Colorado and reconnect that river with its delta in the Gulf of California.

Last year in April I drove to Tucson for an Intensive Journal Workshop. It so happens that was when the pulse flow was underway. It was a news story the entire time I was in Tucson and it intrigued me, though I had forgotten about it until the presentation Wednesday.

It was the psychic pot stirring that happened for me in the Workshop that led to a conversation with Kate. We decided to move out here. Perhaps an analogy could be made between the pulse flow that revitalized the Rio Colorado basin and the tilling of my inner garden in the Intensive Journal.

So I put it together this way: intra-psychic journey in the Southwest, during an important riverine experiment, which landed me here on Shadow Mountain. Now I’m learning more about the Colorado River, source of the pulse flow, and water usage in the arid West, a topic that has interested me for some time.

Not sure yet what to make of this connection, but there is one, and something may, well, flow from it.

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

Spirit in the Sky

Leave a comment

Spring                                                                 Beltane Moon

On Monday (yesterday) my spirits lifted. The beginning of the work week moves my needle in a positive direction. Kate came up with some distractions. Yesterday we finally liberated all the art with the exception of our really big paintings from their containers and stored them in the guest room. This meant another slice and compress hour or so with the discarded cardboard, then stuffing it into the recycle bin. Mostly though I think I’ve integrated the possible futures and can live with any of them. (well, maybe not live with one really bad one.)

My distraction level is down. I’ve given myself (contraindicated over time) a break from exercising. An occasional vacation is good for the bones and blood vessels. I’m being gentle and compassionate with myself.

I got back my lab test results for other parts of my body. I am more than my prostate! An odd finding was that my total cholesterol at 127 is too low. Those atorvastatin pills go under the knife, cut in half to slim them down to the 10 mg dose. It’s weird considering the need to raise my cholesterol.

My kidney disease is stable and may well remain so for the rest of my life. The numbers were good for the most part with the exception of that damned PSA and the cholesterol.

Under any future I plan to live and live well until I die. That has always been my plan, my intention and I refuse to let anything, anything, interfere with it.

 

Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Mountains, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., The West

A Western Way

Leave a comment

Spring                                          Beltane Moon

Discovered two places that may shape my long term presence here in the West. The first I found in, of all places, the NYT. The article recounts the new mission of the former owners of Denver’s most treasured book store: Tattered Covers.

They gave up the book trade to create the Rocky Mountain Land Library. Here’s a brief explanation from their website:

“IMAGINE a network of land-study centers stretching from the Headwaters of South Park to the metro-Denver plains. Each site will be united by the common purpose of connecting people to nature and the land, but each site will have something unique to share:

—South Park’s Buffalo Peaks Ranch will offer a 32,000+ natural history library, along with residential living quarters for anyone who would like to experience the quiet and inspiration of a book-lined historic ranch, set on the banks of the South Platte River, and surrounded on all sides by a high mountain landscape, with some peaks rising to over 14,000 feet.”

As it happens South Park (of television fame) is about an hour from here going west and over the Kenosha Pass in the South Park Heritage Area. It is, oddly, 66.6 miles from here according to Google Maps.

I plan to volunteer here as soon as my medical condition becomes clearer. This will point my life more towards the west, away from Denver. A good thing for me and it will root my life more in the Rockies and the idea of the West.

The second I discovered just today, The Shumei Natural Agriculture Institute in Crestone. Here is a brief explanation:

“Doing nothing, being nothing, becoming nothing is the goal of Fukuoka’s farming method, an approach to agriculture which he has pursued for over forty years with resounding success. With no tillage, no fertilizer, no weeding and no pesticides he consistently produces rice, barley, fruit and vegetable crops that equal or exceed the yield per acre of neighboring farmers who embrace modern scientific agriculture. The basis of his philosophy is that nature grows plants just fine without our interference so that the most practical approach is to get out of the way. In the course of explaining his reasoning and methods, this do-nothing farmer delivers a scorching indictment of chemical agriculture and the human assumption that we can improve on nature. He explains the beneficial role of insects and plants usually characterized as pests, the fallacy of artificially boosting fertility with petrochemical concoctions, the logical error implicit in the use of farm machinery or draft animals, and why pollution is an inevitable result of misguided attempts to improve on nature.” This from an Amazon review of his book: Natural Way of Farming: The Theory and Practice of Green Philosophy.

This is exciting, a form of gardening that appeals to my soul. Crestone is about three hours from here just off 285. I’ll get down there sometime soon and start reading about Natural Agriculture.

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

Lucky We Live the Mountains

Leave a comment

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

Leave a comment

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

1 Comment

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

Leave a comment

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

Leave a comment

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

Leave a comment

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.