Beltane New (Closing) Moon
Got to feeling like I was a victim, not of any person, but of the insults to/from my body. I hunkered down, quit working out, quit Latin, quit writing. Almost a month now. Tired of feeling like a victim and I know the only way around the feeling is to stop acting like one.
So, back on the treadmill. Back to Latin and Superior Wolf, let the health matters develop as they need to.
Beltane Beltane Moon
It’s a wonderful day in the neighborhood. For a biopsy. Slept well. Think I sussed out on my own the culprit in my lower oxygen readings. Trazodone. I stopped taking it a couple of days ago and I slept well (ironic, since it’s a sleep aid.) plus my breathing has returned to normal.
I have no fear, not even of the procedure itself, nor its possible information. Doesn’t feel like denial. (But, would I know if it was?) The details of the procedure and its possible results are clear to me. Though death does seem to hang around these intersections like a prostitute looking for a trick, I’m in no way tempted. Life, as long it runs, is good.
Whatever transpires, this whole month (it was april 14 when i saw lisa for my physical) has been an intrapsychic marathon, 26 miles of self-examination, staying with the feelings, considering worst outcomes. It has also been a month in which friends (especially the Woollies) and family have helped me stay strong and clear.
It could have been otherwise. One of the things that worried me when we moved out here was the loss of my friends. But I’ve found that those relationships, docents and Woolly Mammoths alike, transcend distance. The warmth and support I’ve felt from all of you is no less, perhaps even a bit more, for traveling 900 miles.
So, thanks to you all. I’ll get back to you with the results.
Spring Beltane Moon
When I woke up this morning, I felt terrific. The haze, the gloom had lifted. Why? Have no idea except time and honesty. Honesty made sure the feelings were not trapped in a poisonous cluster reinforcing themselves; and, time has let the shock factor diminish.
Here’s a for instance. I looked up ghost towns in Colorado this morning. There are a lot of them and many not too far from here in South Park. The desire to get up, get out and go see things has begun to kick in, to put the Andover house and the prostate in the rearview for a day or so.
And I’m glad for it. I don’t like the down, distracted, glum feeling even though I know in this instance it’s referented and therapeutic.
So, I’m going to dig out the camera, the tripod, the binoculars and go on a road trip after the Woolly Retreat.
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.
Spring Mountain Spring Moon
Wondering about retirement, about the third phase, not from an abstract notion of this journey now, but from within it, on the path. I notice things like this. A weather blog I follow talks about the decadal oscillations (Atlantic and Pacific) that have a determining effect on drought patterns in the U.S. When the author says these may not change their influence until 2035, I quickly calculate. 92. That means I may live in the forest fire red zone knowing only drought conditions.
Work. I commented here about work, about Latin and writing, gardening and beekeeping as work. And it’s true that I experience them that way. When I call them work though, I sometimes find myself confused. Am I retired or am I working? Yes seems to be the answer. Perhaps I need a new paradigm.
What came to me as I wrote that last sentence was the Hindu notion I mentioned a while back, action without attachment to results. From within that idea it doesn’t matter, working or retired. Both. The doing, the acting carries the meaning, not the end. Related I think to the idea of the journey as the destination.
Yet, I admit that the culture comes up inside me, makes me wonder about the wasted years, all that time since leaving the church, now 25 years. What have I done? Which really means, of course, besides being alive how have you contributed to the world? I was taught, in that it’s obvious, it’s the way it is manner that culture defines for us, that work means results. A man is his attachment to results and the results make the man.
Results mean new law, building affordable housing, organizing citizen based power to balance philanthropic concentrations of wealth and to alleviate the pains of vast unemployment in Minnesota. Those were results a man could claim and in claiming lay down evidence as to his worth.
But. What if the novel doesn’t sell? What if the effort to market work is so weak that it never really has a chance? Does that invalidate the writing, the patience, the persistence necessary to conceive, execute, revise? Then, if the action does not have the expected result, does it come crashing down on the man, rendering him less a man?
Some days it feels like the answer is yes. If there is no book on the shelf with my name on the cover, then I am less of a man. If in writing, I have taken energy away from the political work which gave me tangible results, then I have contributed less than I could have. Have I allowed fear to dominate my marketing work over the last 25 years? Fear that I would be rejected time and again. Possibly. Does that erase the novels and short stories I have written? Or, to put it in the most blunt way possible, has it called into question all the “work” I’ve done in the past two decades and a half?
Some days it feels like the obvious answer is no. What is the result of loving a woman? What is the outcome of raising a child? Where is the success in a flower bed or a dog? All these most important actions rely not on the actions of the man, or at least not solely. Loving a woman does not make her a better woman, does not create an achievement. Raising a child, though important, does not make the child. Children make themselves, influenced no doubt by the parent, but still, the responsibility is theirs. The same with grandchildren. Flowers and vegetables grow, too, again perhaps aided by the gardener, but it is their task to produce a bloom or a fruit or vegetable. Dogs live their lives in the orbit of the humans who love them, but their life is the result and who can claim ownership of life itself?
Another angle. The taking in of knowledge, developing understanding, all the reading and attending to cultural artifacts like art, theater, chamber music, movies, what does that amount to? What is the result, the thing that matters? Is there any point to it all?
Not to mention that I have made almost no money for the last 25 years. Not none, but not enough to count.
As I write this, see it laid out on the page, though, I’m inclined toward compassion, toward acceptance of the man who has done what he has done with as much energy and passion as he has, a man who has stayed faithful to his wife, his son, his stepson and his family, dogs, gardens, bees, who has remained constant in following his inner path regardless of the outcomes.
Bill Schmidt’s find of this poem says what I feel better than I express it myself:
Love after Love
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life…
Spring Mountain Spring Moon
Apparently the dropout rate for language instruction is incredibly high. I believe it. There were several drop out points along the way in my Latin learning, moments when the thickness of my resistance seemed impenetrable.
Read the other day that it takes 600 hours of practice to become fluent in a foreign language. The same article said that learning a language was just hard, not impossible. Now it’s beginning to appear that this article had it right.
Thing is, it seems like I have way over 600 hours of practice translating. Now this article referred to learning, say, French, and admitted that other languages like Mandarin could take much longer. Maybe fluency and accuracy in translation are different, I don’t know, but it’s taken me a long time to get where I am and that’s still far from 100%.
Like most pilgrims, the journey was key to the adventure, but the destination has proved worthy of the path. Rationales for learning Latin developed over time. One was the third phase desire to keep the brain active, creating new neural pathways. The second, or was it the original one, involved making the stories of the Metamorphoses a deep and accessible resource for writing. The third was to challenge my self-perception as one who could not learn a language.
The first I don’t know how to measure. The second has been happening all along the way and, happily, the third was a successful challenge. Challenging self-perceived limitations is an important facet of life at any age, perhaps more so as we move well into our third phase.
Spring Mountain Spring Moon
Snow last night, not much but enough to coat rooftops and give the moonshine a reflective surface in the back. The moon hung directly over Black Mountain for a couple of mornings. Here’s a fuzzy (phone) photo taken from the deck off my loft.
An odd phenomenon with shifting my workouts to the morning. I get more work done in the morning. Then, though, the afternoon, late afternoon, seems to drag.
This will become my reading time for work related material. Right now I’m studying germline gene therapy for Superior Wolf. I’m also reading an older historical fiction piece called The Teutonic Knights by Henryk Sienkiewicz. Written in 1900 it is a great read. Sienkiewicz was prolific, author of many other works of historical fiction, including Quo Vadis. The Teutonic Knights have a role to play in Superior Wolf,so that book is work related, too.
I count Latin, writing and reading to support them as work, as I do gardening and beekeeping. Some people would count these as hobbies, especially the gardening and the beekeeping, but for me they represent the non-domestic parts of my day and have done for many years now.
At least for me a day filled only with meals, leisure reading, volunteer activities, shopping would be lacking a contrast, the contrast provided by labor with a forward progression, aimed toward an end of some kind. As I wrote before, I’m learning to detach myself from the results of this work, but that doesn’t deflate its value. Hardly. Work remains key to a sense of agency, a sense that does not come from merely sustaining life. For me.
Mentioning work, Kate made me a spectacular wall-hanging with vintage Colorado postcards.
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.
Spring Mountain Spring Moon
Gabe and I had an adventure yesterday. We went to the Agro Mine Tour, ate lunch at Beau Jo’s Pizza in Idaho Springs and finished off the day with a soporific soak at the Indian Hot Springs, also in Idaho Springs.
The mine tour itself is a cheesy, tourist-trappy thing with a clunky video, corny presentations and a self-guided tour after that. Still, the Double Eagle Mine, Gage is at its face (end) in this photo is remarkable in that it was dug by hand, by two men over the course of one year. About three hundred feet long, maybe five and a half feet tall and about 4 feet or so in width, it’s a monument to persistence, if nothing else.
The rest of the tour focuses not on a mine, but on the Agro mill, which in its prime, produced $100,000,000 worth of gold when gold was at $18-35 an ounce. It was fed by the Agro tunnel, a 4.5 mile tunnel dug through solid rock to remove waste water from various mines and to create a small railroad to deliver ore buckets to the Agro mill.
The Agro mill closed in 1943 when, on the last blast of the day, four unlucky miners 
dynamited a wall holding back water filling up an abandoned silver mine. The resulting flood geysered water from the tunnel for 9 hours. In addition to killing the miners the flood weakened walls and caused cave-ins along the tunnels length making the railroad tracks no longer usable.
The mill itself went down in stairstep like levels since most of the work proceeded through the aid of gravity. The Agro tunnel fed ore in from the top of the mill and the processing went in stages toward the bottom. A structure made of wood it looked like an unsafe place to have worked.
Idaho Springs is about 30 minutes outside of Denver to the west and well into the mountains. The Colorado Mineral Belt, which begins in the San Juan Mountains in the far southern part of the state, makes an arc up through Leadville and finds its terminus just a bit further north from Idaho Springs. Along this arc lie most of the mines in Colorado, many of them producing, like the mines the Agro Mill serviced gold, silver, copper, lead and zinc. Some have molybdenum and other metals. There’s a big, working molybdenum mine outside of Leadville.
Idaho Springs is a tourist town, primarily, located on either side of a long main street paralleling I-70. It has some residential housing, but not much. Service stations, inexpensive motels, restaurants, curio shops, a knife shop, a hardware store which sells gold panning supplies, that sort of thing.
And the Indian Hot Springs. The facilities, both the main building and the adjoining motel, saw their better days many years ago. The springs, though, deliver. Gabe and I swam in a large pool of water, 100 degrees +. There are, too, hot springs caves, a men’s and a women’s cave where clothing is optional. Kids under 16 are not allowed in the caves.
After all that, it was back to Denver and a quick exit so Grandpop could beat the rush hour traffic on the way home.
Spring Mountain Spring Moon
Wild. Wilderness. These ideas have established themselves as a filter in my mind, a sort of osmotic membrane that pulls notions out of books, magazines, my own thoughts.
Last night, as I went to sleep, wild and civilized kept pushing through various permutations. I recall best the idea that life itself is a wild adventure, a biological arc, for us mammals it extends from conception through birth to death. This idea sets to the side the notion of civilization as counterpoint to the wild and focuses on inanimate material animated. And not only animated in the human instance, but aware. And not only aware, but self-aware, knowing the biological arc, knowing our location in that arc at any one point in our life.
This is a radical, wild variation on the cold vast wilderness that seems to be our solar system, perhaps our whole universe. If we conceive, we humans on earth, of wilderness as a spot where nature can proceed according to its rhythms, ruled and influenced only by its own law-as it does in the vasty reaches of space, then we might consider the role within it, of an individual tree or wolf or rabbit or stream or mountain.
In a wilderness that really represents an unbroken continuity with the deep biological and geological past a particular tree is still, just like each living instance of the human, the inanimate animated. The tree reaches down with its root system-let’s imagine this tree is a bristlecone pine-into the soil beneath its trunk and develops an intimate relation with the minerals, the biome beneath the surface and available water. It transforms the riches found there into more bristlecone pine. This individual tree, this bristlecone pine, in this pristine wilderness is an agent of literal metamorphosis, taking the inanimate and making it animate.
No less would an individual human in a pristine wilderness or one in the heart of its polar opposite, a contemporary megacity, accomplish the same magic. With one crucial exception, of course. Photosynthesis. The bristlecone pine not only reaches into the soil beneath, but into the air above and pulls out gases, incorporating them through its leaves into its whole body, mixing those gases with material drawn up from the soil. And one more. It takes the furious wild energy spawned in the nuclear fusion reactions of our sun and uses it to drive this process of animation.
In this sense then the individual bristlecone pine in the wilderness and the human on the streets of Shanghai are both radicals. That is, they both animate the inanimate, take up the elemental shards of the primeval universe and reshape them into patterns not native to their physics.
Within the biosphere, the realm of the living, most of its constituents live, then die. The magic drains out of the individual fish, the domestic cat, the high flying condor, the deep swimming whale. They release the elements they have animated back to cycles linked directly to the act of cosmic creation.
In humans this biological arc goes from conception through live birth to death. Both ends of this continuum, this biological dialectic, are, relative to human civilization, moments deeply wild. They participate only lightly and then inconsequentially in the world of ideas, technology, skill, labor, culture. They both represent key inflections of our wild nature: coming to individual life and leaving it. These moments are not mediated by culture, rather they rip into its fabric and insert or remove individuals from its complex ministrations.
So each of us is wild and free at the moment of our birth and our death. The question then is how much civilization constrains our inherently wild nature. I’ll consider this in another post.