• Category Archives The West
  • Kindred Spirits

    Last day of Summer and the Lughnasa Moon

    Saturday gratefuls: Mini-split air con units. Thanks, Tom. Mark’s suggestion for a topic on Sunday. Lotta sleep last night and this morning. Feeling good. An excellent meal with Jon yesterday evening. Rain. Cooler weather. Smoky on High. Lush mountain meadows, filled with waving stalks of pollen.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Sashimi. Japan.

    Tarot card: Ace of Wands, Druid Craft Deck

     

    Good news. At dinner with Jon we talked about our new relationship, one with Kate no longer physically present. Though she remains a psychic presence for us both in powerful ways. We agreed we wanted to continue, be family. Over sushi, sashimi, and crab wontons. Uplifting.

    I spent yesterday handling various matters. Groceries. Bills. Emails. Workout. The dinner with Jon. Must have worn me out because I slept 9 hours +. Also, rain and a cool night helped.

    Tom helped me find the mini-split air conditioning system. It will work for my downstairs. Just have to find a contractor and get it installed. Too late, unfortunately, for Kate.

    Taking this Saturday as a rest day, a travel day as Kate and I called it. We always took a rest day after long travel.

    It was a big week. Ruth and Gabe here Sunday night through Tuesday evening. A lot  of pruning work with Ruth. House cleaners on Tuesday. Kep into VRCC for his allergy shot. P.T. on Monday and Wednesday. Tarot and Kabbalah on Wednesday. Alan for breakfast, Jackie for a haircut, and mussar on Thursday. Donating the wheelchair and the rollator. Errands yesterday and the time with Jon and the evening. Not to mention laundry, folding clothes, cooking, feeding the dogs. You know, all that ordinary homestuff.

    Pruning goes well. I’m on a hiatus from it until Ruth makes up her mind about all the sewing related things. Still hoping to have it complete, or almost, before the 18th. Get furniture moved around over that time period. Try to get a new feel for the house sorted out by Thanksgiving.

    Have had to modify the 18th because we learned this week that Ruth and Gabe’s first day of school is the 18th. Shifted activities to late afternoon and evening. Only possible wrinkle? The Delta variant. If it continues to rage, as it has of late, it may interfere with travel. If that happens, we’ll push this out to 2022. See this from this mornings Washington Post:

    “The newly resurgent coronavirus could spark 140,000 to 300,000 cases a day in the United States come August, fueled by the highly transmissible delta variant and the widespread resumption of normal activities, disease trackers predict.”

    Thomas Cole and William Cullen Bryant, Kindred Spirits Painting by Asher Brown Durand

    Ace of wands. Rather than go to the Rider-Waite interpretations, I’m going to read this one on my own. The Druid Craft deck speaks to me as one grounded in Celtic lore and myth.

    A bull elk with an 8 or 10 point rack stands on a rock that reminds me of the Pulpit Rock in Strand, Norway. It also reminds me of a painting by Asher Durand.

    A steep cleft in the mountains separates the bull from another precipice, one shaded by an autumnal aspen grove.

    Above the mountains the blazing sun sends fire to the tree, the elk, the mountains, the sky while a full moon hangs, almost invisible in the fiery presence, above a small spire of rock behind the elk.

    Bull with water lily, 2015, Lake Evergreen

    The wand lays itself over the sun, perhaps having summoned its energy. Or, in the process of summoning it? The wand has reddish bark that seems still living, as if the wand had only recently been cut from a tree, or somehow remains alive anyhow. Perhaps a rowan? The wand as alive seems confirmed by the green leaves, eight in all, mysteriously falling away from it.

    The whole scene is peaceful. Some key words that come to mind: majestic. natural. communal. creativity. fire. determination. mountainous. lone elk. aspen grove. single wand.

    Black Mountain, 2015

    Perhaps the wand has become a conduit between the sun and the natural world at its fall change. The push of the sun’s fire has caused the wand to send its green leaves, which it needs to continue living, on a mission, as angels, messengers of the sun’s creative power.

    The elk and the aspen grove, animal and plants, both salute the sun. A bull elk with a rack like that is ready for the rut, the annual fertility rite for all elks. The aspen grove, with its just turning toward gold leaves, has begun to prepare for winter, a time when it will have to live off foods stored in and around its interlocked root system.

    The positive session with Jon last night, the on pace pruning, Tom’s visit a week ago, the Tarot and Kabbalah class have me feeling grounded, yet still transforming. Moving toward the creative energy of the sun, soaking it in with the Bull and the Aspen Grove. In the mountains. On my Pulpit Rock, where I stand with my kindred spirits, the river and mountain poets of Chinese history.

    Life on a different, yet familiar ancientrail.

     

     

     

     


  • June 17 addenda

    Beltane and the Shadow Mountain Moon

    The basilica, Minneapolis. From my hotel room.

    The growing season turning red hot. Dry. Minnesota, that state of lakes and the Superior Lake, of -30 nights in January, of down coats and cabins, all red. And not a drop of rain to share. How can this be? It’s not Minnesota’s color. Brown is the color of the West, of the Mountains. Not 45 degrees latitude, half way to the Northpole.

    We know these insults in the Rockies. Past that line where we all get less than 20 inches of Rain. For the whole  year. Yes, we know. We suffer it, fold up a few tents, turn off the lawn sprinklers, run the AC. Fight Wildfires, hope they don’t burn our home. But. Minnesota? The world is out of joint.

    On Oahu where I sit writing this we’re in the warmish dryish season where the temps tend to be in the 80’s and Rain still falls. Twice in the last two days. Then, there’s all that Ocean. The Mountains squeeze out purified Ocean drops, fling them at the already green, always green slopes.

    Here it’s pretty much as usual. Or, maybe I think that because I know this world much less well. I recall reading that the tropics will be affected least by global warming. Sea level rise though. Vanuatu has advertised its extinction. Do not want to go the way of Atlantis. I understand.

    As the world literally burns, Republican and capitalist violinists play on, from the pent house to the mountain retreat to the air chilled vaults of Swiss banks.


  • Considerations

    Ostara and the Ovid Moon of Metamorphoses

    Saturday gratefuls: Tough towels. Morning lucidity. Vaccines. Kate’s appointment today. Georgia GOP. No doubt now about their racist, oligarchic ideology. The Voting Law. Ditching the filibuster.

    Sparks of Joy: Vaccine #2 on April Fool’s Day.

    Gabe’s bris

    Miracles in my world. The greening of the Lodgepoles. The leafing out of the Aspen. (both of these I’m anticipating) A Black Mountain decked in white. Iris rhizomes throwing up stalks for another year. (this, too, anticipated) Fawns. Calves. Colts. Life. Abundant and rich. Puppies. Dogs. Love. Mountains. Justice. Memories. So many, everywhere. Hallelujah.

    Oh. Terrible night. Kate talking throughout the night, explaining her dreams to herself, she said. Lotsa lost sleep for both of us. Makes everything more difficult.

    Contacted Jewish Family Service in Denver. They’re sending a social worker out who specializes in gerontology. With her we’ll develop a plan, perhaps, plans, that we can use to define our next year, few years. Housing options. In-home health care options. That sort of thing.

    There are lots of services available but knowing which ones exist, which might come to the mountains, costs, is difficult. At best. Same with housing options including, but not limited to, buying another home.

    Kate’s healthspan, lifespan are critical, but unknown. I imagine this will include some more time with Dr. Thompson, consulting. Mine are, too, but I’m the more functional at the moment. Dogs are a crucial element. Our stuff is less of an issue. We can sell or keep. My library can be sold in whole or in part. In that sense we’re portable. Except for the Dogs.

    I suppose you could say, why didn’t they consider all this before they moved to the Mountains? Fair enough. We did give it cursory attention, but we both felt good, were planning for a healthier time than we got. Didn’t happen.

    Shadow Mtn. Drive, down the hill a mile from home. Black Mtn ahead

    Living in the Mountains is a big adventure for us, something we wanted long before we decided to move. I don’t regret it, not for a minute. Even if it seems foolish. Even if it was foolish. To lose a sense of adventure, of new possibilities, is to die before the grave.

    We’ve had six years so far. A really long vacation in a place people come to from all over the world. Would I make the move knowing what I know now? Maybe not, so I’m glad we did it without knowing.

    Rigel and a bull Elk in our back a day before my first radiation treatment.

    My hope is that we will find a combination of home health care services that allow us to remain here. Moving the Dogs would be very difficult. They’re both older, Rigel beyond the expected life span of large breed Dogs at 12, and Kep turning 10 this year.

    I’m still alive, healthy for 74. Love Kate, the dogs, our house, family, extended and birth, our CBE friends, my Ancient friends. I love reading, learning, writing, creating. Colorado and the West. The humid East. The Midwest. The Mountains and all of our wild Neighbors. Neither resigned to life, nor resigning from it.

    Ready for this moment and the next. Here I come.


  • Post Interrupted

    Imbolc and the Megillah Moon

    Saturday gratefuls: Kate. Her doggedness. Rigel’s, too. That stimulus bill. Biden at work. Spring and Winter playing with each other. Now it’s my turn! Spring this weekend. Winter next week. Writing poetry again. Going with life as it streams through 9358 Black Mountain Drive. Elk Creek Fire paramedics. Swedish E.R. Dylan.

    Sparks of Joy: Vaccines. Ode’s prints. Ruth.

    This post got interrupted yesterday:

    Elk Creek Paramedics came to our house yesterday. Kate was in extreme distress, trouble breathing, pain, nose bleed that wouldn’t stop. They took her out of the house and down the hill to Swedish E.R.

    She’s still in the hospital this morning (Sunday, March 7) though I expect she’ll be released today. No obvious reason for the incident in x-rays or blood work. Scary, but looks like it will resolve.  Kate’s Caring Bridge site

    It started here.

    Colorado on my mind. There’s a fascinating thread on Pinecam.com about whether it makes sense to live up here. Here’s the key section from the post that started it:

    “My wife and I own property in an unnamed Foothills community served by a community well system. I’ve got reason to believe there are issues with water supply, long term, and so we may be looking at selling soon. We’ve also experienced difficulty finding property insurers willing to write policies in our area due to wildfire risk – it’s not impossible, just expensive.”

    I finished reading it all, and the responses reflect concerns in the minds of most who live in the mountains, especially in the more developed areas like Conifer and Evergreen.

    When I lived at sea level in the Midwest, I often wondered how people could live in flood plains. I mean, they’re flood plains, right? Well, I understand now. Many of us live where the land calls us. Kate and I do.

    This is the WUI, wooee! Wildland/Urban Interface. Sociologically we’re an extension of the Denver Metro area, an exurb, much like Andover is in Minnesota. About the same distance out, too. Different geology though.

    In Andover we lived on the Great Anoka Sand Plain, a shore line area of the ancient glacial river Warren. Lots of rain, a deciduous forest, oak savanna, and fields that grew whatever crops folks wanted. We grew perennial flowers, vegetables, fruits and nuts, kept bees.

    In Conifer we live on a mountain top at 8,800 feet. This is the arid West. Drought often, as it is now. Folks grow what they can and some do well, but it’s tough with the more intense sun, elk and mule deer, rocky infertile soil. Unlike Andover, we live here on the sufferance of the wild fire cycle.

    On our property water availability depends on precipitation and older water stored in cracks in the bedrock. Our well has been refractured, meaning the rock got opened up some by water under pressure or drilling.


  • Rough Seas Ahead

    Imbolc and the Megillah Moon

    Sunday gratefuls: -19. Here! Valentine’s Day. 74 round trips, ticket punched. Easy Entree’s. Gifts and good eating. Rigel, who woke me up with a birthday kiss this morning. Kate’s somewhat better day. Snow. We need it. 57 yes. The cowardly 43 lions. Better get to Oz and get some courage. Vaccines. Covid. Third Phase life, it’s sweetness and its bitters.

    Sparks of Joy: The heart shaped tin from Easy Entree’s. Rigel’s kiss. George Will. No, really. The loft. Being alive.

     

     

    Well digger’s belt buckle? Oh, something to warm up with here this morning. -19 when I got up. My weather station so that’s as local as it gets. The weather gods brought me a reminder of my 40+ years in Minnesota. Which hit -50 and lots of other -‘s. Would that it could last longer. We’re still cold lovers, Kate and me, though we have become fans of the solar snow shovel, too. Cold, then warm enough to melt what fell.

    In Minnesota my birthday was almost always very cold. Here not as much. So, a nice present. Namaste, divine weather beings.

    The Senate vote? Yes, sure. It’s embarrassing to our country, to our democracy, to our civility, to the rule of law, to human decency, but why do you ask? Oh. You thought as, one columnist said, they might not lick his boots? Perhaps you thought that sending an angry mob to fight like hell against their constitutional duty to recognize the votes of our nation would make them change? Now you know what politics are like when fear rules.

    The only thing they had to fear, as FDR said, was fear itself. And, unlike our entire nation during WWII, they let it overcome them, those 43 cowardly lions. I agree with George Will, again, “Although not nearly as tragic as 9/11 in lives lost and radiating policy consequences, 1/6 should become, as its implications percolate into the national consciousness, even more unsettling.” Washington Post, 2/13/2021

    The Senate vote, while not surprising, suggests something  sinister. That those divisions  on display on 1/6, and this is Will’s point, I believe, reduced 43 members of the “world’s most prominent deliberative body” to 90 pound weaklings. They fear sand being kicked in their face by the fascist-no-longer-thank-god-in-chief. Who will stand up, agree to be their Jack LaLanne?

    Or, their Dorothy? Who might lead them to meet the Wizard? In this analogy Trump would be the man behind the green curtain, turning wheels, pushing levers while looking meek and ashamed when discovered. Yeah, you’re right, this analogy stays firmly in fantasy.

    Another point of agreement with George Will from the same column: “An essential conservative insight about everything is that nothing necessarily endures. Care must be taken.” This is a lesson of the Trump years. And, I have learned it.

    There is a fruitful, necessary tension between protest and the fabric of democracy. Without it protest would never, could never, succeed. Now though, thanks to the right-wing troops, the real sheeple, I know there is a line beyond which even protest must not go.

    In former days I had a thirst for revolution, a dramatic and overall change in our body politic. Back then I refused to believe in human imperfection. If only we could get policies and the economy right. If only we could change the structure of political life. Now, though, I know.

    This imperfect institution, our democracy, is exactly as Churchill said, the worst form of government, except for all others. It is fragile and wonderful. When it works, it allows us to fight and makeup. To consider change in our common lives and take action. Yet a man as coarse and stupid and venal as 45 can bring it close to extinction. As Will says, care must be taken.


  • Evergreen, Pine, and Conifer

    Winter and the Moon of the New Year

    Christmastide, Day 9: Evergreen Day

    Sunday gratefuls: Coffee. Cold coffee. The Denver Post. All print newspapers still at it. An informed citizenry. Trump, for exposing our weakness. 17 days. Buh, bye orange one. 2021. 2020 in the rear view.  Tara. Marilyn. Rabbi Jamie. Lobster and ribeye.

    Vega in the snow

    Once again. Pine, Conifer, Evergreen. This is our day in Christmastide. This day and the Snow day have no festivals associated with them, so we celebrate aspects of midwinter that bring us joy.

    Matthews cites an interesting Cherokee story about the origin of the evergreen. The Great Spirit created plants and wanted to give them each a special gift, but could not decide which gift would go to which plants.

    Second and third year cones. Cones have a lot of resin.

    Among the trees, the Great Spirit decided on a contest. He asked all of the trees to keep watch over creation for seven days. After the first night, all the trees remained awake, excited at the opportunity. On the second night some fell asleep, but woke right back up.

    As the nights went on, most of the trees began to fall asleep, unable to stay alert for so long. By the seventh day, all but the pine, the cedar, the spruce, the holly, and the laurel had fallen asleep.

    “To you,” the Great Spirit said, “I shall give the gift of remaining green forever. You shall guard the forest even in the winter when all your brothers and sisters are sleeping.” And so they do to this day.

    At our elevation the Lodgepole guard the Aspen whose golden leaves in the fall proceed their winter sleep. At lower elevations the Ponderosa, the Spruce stand guard. At the treeline ancient Bristlecone Pines patrol. In other parts of Colorado the Douglas Fir, the Engleman Spruce, the Pinon Pine, the Rocky Mountain Juniper, and the White Fir watch. The Great Spirit reminds us each Winter of the Evergreens special gift.

    Here is a special Solstice salutation from Italy’s sixteenth century:

     

    I salute you!

    There is nothing I can give you which

    You have not.

    But there is much, that while I cannot give,

    You can take.

    No heaven can come to us, unless our hearts find

    Rest in it today.

    Take Heaven!

    No peace lies in the future which is not

    Hidden in this present instant.

    Take Peace!

    The gloom of the world is but a shadow.

    Behind it, within our reach, is joy.

    Take joy!

    And so at this Christmastime, I greet you,

    With the prayer that for you, now and forever,

    The day breaks, and the shadows flee away!

    Matthews, p. 200


  • Let It Snow

    Winter and the Moon of the New Year

    Christmastide Day 8: Snow Day

    Saturday gratefuls: Rigel’s sleeping habits. Keps. Mine. Kate’s. All different. Dogs to feed. Humans to feed. The night Sky. The International Space Station speeding past Ursa Major this morning. The waning full moon. Sleeping through the night. Amazing. Writing, back to Jennie’s Dead. A new schedule. Working. Ribeye and Lobster, today. Held over.

     

    April 2016 Shadow Mountain

    Remember Frau Hulda, aka Mother Christmas, from Day 2? Also called Frau Holle in Germany. Midwinter Snows are the feathers shaken from her bedspread. We’ve still got a few feathers on the ground here.

    Today we celebrate Snow.

    Got into Jack London as a boy. Read Call of the Wild and fell hard for his descriptions of the North. Remember Buck? I fantasized about Pine Trees, Lakes, Dog sledding, and, Snow. Snow that lasted. Snow that did not turn into the slushy melt of Indiana Januaries. Winter as a real season, not a sometimes cold, sometimes chilly, sometimes wet, sometimes icy season.

    We had family vacations that took us to Stratford, Ontario for the Shakespeare Festival on the banks of the Avon. Our journey often took us to the MS Norgoma ferry from Tober Mory, Ontario, across the Georgian Bay of Lake Huron and onto Manitoulin Island.

    In Stratford we camped in the Ipperswich Provincial Park, also on Lake Huron. Those travels plus Jack London’s novels put living among Pine Trees and Lakes as a stronger desire than I realized while the impressions formed.

    2012, Andover

    As an adult, when I got the chance, I moved to Wisconsin, Appleton, and from there on to Minneapolis/St. Paul. I lived in the north for over 40 years, a place Jack London and Lake Huron had taught me to love.

    The Winters were real. That first Winter in Appleton the temperature dropped to well below zero for a full week and we got a foot of Snow over one weekend. I discovered engine block heaters and knew folks that took their batteries out at night and brought them inside. This was 1969.

    Minnesota is cold. It Snows, yes, but the big difference there is that the snow sticks around. The temperatures remain well below freezing for weeks, months. And the Sun hangs low in the Sky. When the Winds howl and the Snow blows, it can, as friend Tom Crane observed, blot out all the boundaries: fences disappear, roads, roofs, front yards and back yards.

    January, 2015. Shadow Mountain

    After our move to Colorado, we’ve experienced a different Winter. On Shadow Mountain, the second Winter we were here, 2016, 220 inches of Snow fell, four feet in one storm. Minnesota typically gets between 40 and 50 inches.

    But. After the Snow in the Mountains, we get warmer weather. Often, a Snow fall, no matter how big, disappears in less than a week. The Solar Snow Shovel. The Sun’s angle is a bit higher than Minnesota and we’re a good bit higher at 8,800 feet. Colorado’s blue Skies mean we get a lot of Sun shine even in the deepest midwinter. This is the arid West. Humidity outside today is 19.

    What’s your Snow story? Today’s a good day to go out and play in the Snow if you have some. Perhaps a Snowball fight. A Snowman. Skiing. Snowshoes. A hike.

    Tomorrow: Evergreen Day.


  • The New West

    Samain and the Moon of Thanksgiving

    Wednesday gratefuls: Mountain Waste. Doctors. The one here and the ones out there. Roads. The builders of Colorado Mountain roads. His Dark Materials. Phillip Pullman. Friends. Caregiving. Tsundoku. Collecting books you have not read. William Schmidt. Bill. As he goes through the next 14 days. Tom on December 1st. Carne asada unthawing. Carnitas and beans for supper.

    Red Sky in the morning through the Lodgepoles. A western greeting. When it’s red like this, I always think of Louis L’Amour. I’ve only read one of his. It surprised me. The prose was more like Dashiel Hammet. I think it was Riders of the Purple Sage.

    When we moved out here, I expected cowboy hats, western shirts, cowboy boots, maybe guns on the hip. Bars with half-doors on spring pivots. Lotta chaw. I have been disappointed. There is the occasional Stetson. Cowboy boots are the most common of the things I mentioned. Very few western shirts, though attending the Great Western National Stockshow saw many of them. It’s the rodeo guys, the paid cowboy entertainers, who dress western.

    Although. Yesterday when we got our hair done, Jackie showed me pictures of her son’s wedding. The minister, her son and his bride stood on a large boulder. Her proud father, all dressed in black with a black Stetson and belt with silver stood off to the side below as did the small number of wedding guests. The chairs were hay bales with Diné blankets. This western culture lives on among ranchers. It’s more of a rural thing.

    Denver and its metro area, including the Front Range where Kate and I live, is the New West. Skiers, hikers, back country campers, and many millennials have added themselves to the state. In spite of the many bumper stickers like Native, Colorado: We’re full. This change irritates the hell out of “native” Coloradans. Who are, in my opinion, feeling a slight taste of the angst their ancestors gave the Utes, the Apaches, and the Comanches who lived here first. They’re not native here. No one is, in the longview. It took those wandering tribes from Asia a while to populate North America, but even the earliest of them weren’t here 50,000 years ago. But, as we used to say in the first grade, those early nations did have dibs on the land.

    This change in the human population has changed both the physical and political landscapes. The number of hard rock mines here, hard rock mines with toxic runoff and piles of toxic tailings literally dot the mountainous part of the state. After the Indian wars, the settlement of Colorado got a big push from Eastern mining and railroad interests, plus one pulse of gold diggers. Pikes Peak or bust. Most, almost all, busted. There was gold here. And silver. And magnesium. So many minerals that a college, The Colorado School of Mines, has taken a storied place in both the states recent past and mining around the world. The mines, the railroads, even the stockyards that grew up around the ranches and the confluence of north/south rail lines, were not locally owned, nor locally controlled. Colorado was, back then, a vassal state of financiers, industrialists, and railroad owners like James J. Hill.

    That’s the second big lie behind the nativist bumper stickers. These faux natives of Colorado did not “own” it. Those who saw the West, the Rockies in particular, as a source of resources for their own plans, did. They controlled the politics and the wealth. Those so-called natives descended from peasants who worked the land and mountains for Wall Street feudal lords. The New West, the new Colorado, has its own Fortune 500 companies. The space, technology and military presence here makes Colorado a unique blend of highly educated workers and outdoors enthusiasts. It also means that the state has gone from red to purple to blue over the last few decades. Again, a process highly irritating to those who want to close our borders to new residents.

    Kate and I are part of the New West, the new Colorado. So are many of our neighbors. We have moved West as Horace Greeley once urged young men to do. Sort of. Many of us came from the humid east, but many come from Texas and California. Colorado, by a slim majority, became the first state to mandate by popular vote, the reintroduction of wolves. The natives were the chief opposition. The rancher crowd and the hunting oriented outdoors folks. This will not be their first defeat along environmental lines. We also elected a gay Governor, Jared Polis, two years ago, after having been called the Hate State not twenty years ago.

    When I consider all this, I’m not surprised any more at the low relevance of old west motifs. My fleece and plaid shirt, denim and hiking shoes, are the dress of the New West. At least for me.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     


  • Colorado

    Fall and the Moon of Radical Change

    Thursday gratefuls: Kate’s stoma site looking good. Rigel off antibiotics. Her gut can relax. Rigel early in the morning, barking as loud as she can. Why? Oh, why. No idea. Mac and cheese with ham. Comfort food. The East Troublesome Fire. The Cameron Fire. The Calwood Fire. Reminding us that climate change is real and not tomorrow.

    Wildfires are us. The West is burning. Precipitation blocked by warming oceans. Trees dried by low humidity, killed by pine bark Beetles. Grasses squeezed dry, lying ready for ignition. Rabbi Jamie’s home in Granby. The East Troublesome Fire. Evacuated. He posted pictures on Facebook. Scary.

    Clouds this morning red from the Wildfire refracted Sun. We have moisture on the way. Hope it comes in time to wet down our Very High fire hazards. The National Forest Service closed the Arapho National Forest, the one in which we live, citing dry Trees and strained fire-fighting resources. This means no Denverites, no other out-of-towners at Lower and Upper Maxwell Falls. Well, it means there should be none.

    Speaking of Colorado. Here’s a video from near Telluride.

    Could have been worse. Think if the Jeep with the camera was a tiny bit further along on the trail. The woman who drove the falling Jeep is in a Grand Junction hospital with serious injuries. She bailed just before it went over.

    Then, too. An election is coming. Like Winter. Did I say vote? Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote.


  • Springtime of the Soul

    Fall and the RBG Moon

    Wednesday gratefuls: Thoracentesis. Valet who got our car from a distant garage. The imaging employee who found an unused machine for Kate’s catscan. Phase two of the three stage plan done. Remembering to take out the blue foam. Clear vision. Michaelmas yesterday. Cool morning.

    Michaelmas. The Saint’s Day of the Archangel Michael, he of Lucifer ejecting mythic fame. God’s great warrior. Also the name of the first term in British colleges and universities.

    But best of all, the springtime of the soul. Rudolf Steiner. The growing season has finished. The external world had its glorious moment at the Fall Equinox, the celebration of the harvest. The body will be fed.

    We turn our attention inward after Michaelmas. The nights grow longer, the angle of the sun shortens, and the days grow cold. Courage and sadness. A touch of melancholy encouraged.

    When we drove down the hill yesterday, golden leaved Aspens had burst out among the Lodgepole Pine green. Framed by a typical clear blue Colorado sky the beauty made me gasp.

    The beauty, the chill in the air. We know its brevity, like the beauty of the young. Those Aspen speak from the sides of Black Mountain, Conifer Mountain, Shadow Mountain. We are done now. Good bye. See you on the flip side. Their golden glamor a farewell to summer.

    We know it. Many falls. The outrageous, over the top color of a Midwestern fall. The remnant of the Big Forest, the one that stretched from the east Coast to the Plains. Before the modern era a squirrel could travel tree to tree from the Atlantic to the Great Plains without ever touching the ground. So much melancholy in those colors, the abstract landscapes of a vivisectioned ecosystem.

    Piles of Leaves in the yard, on the Forest floor. Running, jumping, landing in the piles. Dogs racing into them, through them. Do you remember, as I do, burning Leaves in the street? An acrid smell combining with earthy wetness. A strong seasonal memory.

    One day soon Winds driven by the Cold slumping down from the Arctic will strip them all, Maple, Oak, Ironwood, Elm, Ash, Locust, Hickory, Sycamore, dislodge their Leaves and the tree naked against the coming winter. The Aspen gold rush will disappear and only the ghostly gray-white of their Trunks and Branches will remain.

    A woman I learned ritual craft from thought this denuding of the deciduous Trees might explain Samain and the Celtic belief that the veil thinned between this world and the next during the transition.

    Kate’s sister Sarah married Jeremiah Miller. A painter. Before I met her, Kate bought two of his very large paintings. One hangs in our bedroom. In it the Sky is a gunmetal blue and its complement of cumulus Clouds show as reflections in a Pond. Both Sky and Pond show through a Forest of bare Trunks and Branches, a before Winter comes scene we see all year.

    This turn of the Great Wheel follows the gradual waning of the Light until the longest Night, the Winter Solstice. What better time for introspection, for the Soul to rise?

    May this season of the Soul’s Springtime give you what you need for the next months and years of your journey, your ancientrail.