Category Archives: Science

Feelings, Fourth Phase, Mussar, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Reimaging revelation, Science

Expectations

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Winter and the Cold Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Alan and Cheri. Joanne. Denver. Downtown living. Down the hill living. Shadow Mountain home. Domo. Buckhorn. Sushi Den. Jerusalem. Ali Baba. The Bistro. The Fort. Bread Lounge. Angry Chicken. Katsu Ramen. Fountain Barbecue. Restaurants. Meals out with family and friends. Chamber music. Charlie Parker. Thelonius Monk. Herbie Mann. Dave Clark Five. Dazzle.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Shabbat

One brief shining: Bought a weighted blanket last summer and in these now cold winter nights it’s part of the layered system that keeps me warm; some mornings of late I’ve taken to enjoying not sleeping in but lying in, wrapped in those layers and happy with my head in the cold, just right, wondering why it all felt so good and I realized the other day it was the embrace of that weighted blanket.

 

One of the reasons I’ve taken to these occasional surrender moments, to being awake but staying in bed, is the time it gives me to think. To ponder without distraction. I can follow a thought down an ancientrail and back again. This morning the notion of expectations had me going.

Over the last couple of weeks in mussar we’ve been discussing an example given by Rabbi Toba Spitzer in her book, God is Here. Which I highly recommend, btw. Her example comes from a silent retreat, an annual event for her. She sits down to lunch, imagining the taste of the food, enjoying the view, settling in for a pleasant lunch. A man sits down near her and begins to eat an Apple. Each bite explodes in her ear. She’s completely thrown off the wonderful lunch she’d imagined. She ends up with a ruined lunch. The obvious culprit here is her expectation of how her lunch would go. As long as she held onto the quiet, contemplative meal, she experienced torment from the Apple eater.

Taking the learning here. Expectations can sabotage our experience. Bad expectations. Bad. Down expectations.

Then I began to wonder. What are expectations? The shorthand we use so we can navigate our day. Cars will stop at stop signs. Eating two eggs, bacon, and home fries will not only taste good, but satisfy my hunger. Leo will make me happy when he comes to stay. The stove will turn on. Expectations help us by routinizing parts of our lives. So we’re not always thinking through what’s going to happen next.

Then it hit me. Expectations are the mental habit behind curiosity. Not obvious, right? Why? Because when something happens that defies or upsets our expectations, we have two choices. Choice one. Do our best to return our experience to its anticipated path. Which makes sense if the stove won’t turn on or we decide to wait out the guy who just ran the stop sign.

But even in those mundane instances we have to stop and consider the second choice. Why? Why won’t the stove turn on? Why did that guy run the stop sign? In these cases the answers will probably not rock our world.

However. Imagine that you assumed the earth was the center of the universe and you expected the data from your telescope would confirm that. Or on a less exalted plain. Traffic had caused me to stop beside three large Willow Trees. I looked at them, all gnarly and twisted, thick, old. Then I thought. Wait a minute. These are Willows. There’s no creek here. What’s going on? I’ve never seen Willows up here except by a stream. I don’t know the answer. But I’d like to.

Here’s the aha. Curiosity arises when something breaches our expectations. Why did she say that? What’s going on with my dog? Why is she limping? Why has the climate begun to change? What would happen if I put this and this together rather than that and that? Does the Apple eater have to ruin my lunch?

What this suggests to me. Greet breaches of your expectations with wonder. With awe. Because the world and your experience has given you a chance to learn something new.

Feelings, Fourth Phase, Fungi, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Health, Hydroponics, Mountains, Our Land and Home, permaculture, Plants, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science, Sierra Club, Weather +Climate

A Bold Return to Giving a Damn

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Winter and the Winter Solstice Moon

Friday gratefuls: Tara. Her new puppy. Cold. Snow. Sleep. Gabriella. A Bold Return to Giving a Damn: One Farm. Amazon. New Phone. Wallet. 2024 on the way. Poetry. Road Less Taken. Lines Written at Tintern Abbey. Kubla Kahn. Notes on a Supreme Fiction. Circles. Leaves of Grass. Ozymandias. The Raven. Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. The Wasteland. Song of Myself. The Second Coming. And so much else.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Poetry

One brief shining: The end of another year approaches, our penchant for deciding calendar dates as the always orbiting Earth’s journey around Great Sol continues, brings us to Pope Gregory XIII who chose in October of 1582 in his well known Papal bull: Inter gravissimas to change the rules for leap years to prevent the Julian calendar’s drift away from the solar holidays, oh you didn’t know, well neither did I but Wikipedia did.

 

 

Gabriella. My adopted Axolotl. She’s swimming in the chinampas canals along with other wild Axolotls who will repopulate the ancient waterways of Xochimilco. I get excited about this project because it’s both the reintroduction of a wild species into its former habitat (see the five Timber Wolves released a week ago in western Colorado) and a project that supports indigenous farming methods healthy for the chinampas themselves. This kind of work will enable our grandchildren to have their best chance to adapt to a warming World.

A Bold Return to Giving a Damn: One Farm, Six Generations, and the Future of Food relates the story of Will Harris and his disillusionment with Big Ag 30 years ago. The successful transition of his family’s farm to regenerative farming makes compelling reading if you care about the source of your food. This farm is in southwestern Georgia, but it’s an example, not singular.

The USA Regenerative Agriculture Allliance, Inc trains farmers in regenerative practices. Yes, it’s about good food, food raised without pesticides, fertilizers and other “inputs” that defy the natural cycle and deplete the soil. But, it’s also about how to live in a warming World. Someday regenerative agriculture will use the perennial grains and other crops under development at the Land Institute.

Want to volunteer in the work of Ecosystem restoration? Look at the Ecosystems Restoration Communities website. They do restoration projects all over the world. The expertise and practical knowledge developed as these organization go about their own individual missions will become the Seedstock for a World that can no longer afford any depletion of natural capital.

What’s natural capital? An accounting method. That’s right. Accounting. The Natural Capital Project at Stanford University develops accounting methods that define the value of Ecosystems, Oceans, the Water cycle, Forests. Why is this important? Regenerative agriculture is a good example. Corporate farming, by far the dominant model in the U.S. and in most of the World, treats Soil, Crops, and Animals as so many widgets to be manipulated for increased profits. Their accounting methods do not have to take into account the value of the Soil, the Rain, the need for dna diversity in both food Crops and Animals. They don’t have to reckon with the future costs of ruined Soil, the dangers of monocultures in such critical crops as Corn, Wheat, Rice. Maybe they’re not as profitable as they think.

OK. I’ll stop. For now. But I will return to these adaptive approaches that will help Ruth and Gabe survive in a much changed world.

 

Dogs, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, GeekWorld, Judaism, Politics, Science

A Philosophical Day

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Samain and the Summer’s End Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Kippur, Rich’s new Dog. Leo. Kepler, my sweet boy. Kate, my sweetheart. Rich, a good friend. Joan. Ron. Marilyn. Tara. Jamie. Alan. Ruth. The solar Snow shovel. Dry needling. Mary. Spinal stenosis. Ruby. Dry roads. Mostly. Safeway. Ice cream. Shadow Mountain. Shadow Mountain Home. Starlink. Sushi. Crackers. Salmon. Sleep.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: My CBE family

One brief shining: Went to Rich’s office yesterday to sign Powers of Attorney and met Kippur, the five-month old black and tan puppy Rich got as a foster and who bounced back as a rehome, Kippur came up as I sat on the couch, pawed me, licked my hand, looked me in the eyes, jumped up on the couch, put his head in my lap, then settled with his body snug against my left leg.

 

First off. Buddy Tom and I got to talking yesterday. About weirdness. Quantum mechanics and agreeable electrons and photons. The lack of solidity in all things.   And how about that spooky action at a distance. The narrow sensory spectrum of human senses. Multiverses. Multiple dimensions. We didn’t wander over into time. But we did mention death. And the sacred. And how limited our grasp of things really is. How much we don’t know. How much is hidden from us. Could the sacred be the occasional glimpse into  quantum reality? Or, another dimension? Or, a multiverse? Sensory data beyond our capacity?

And these are matters that have solid scientific data and theories behind them. Not some guy reading gold tablets on one side of a curtain. Or Mohammed listening to the angel. Yet they are all also as strange as salvation, heaven, a God. As strange as the Quran or the Tanakh or the New Testament. That was the morning.

In the afternoon I went over to Rich Levine’s office to sign durable powers of attorney naming Joseph overall and Rich for Colorado. That’s when I met Kippur, the wonderful puppy. All puppies are wonderful, I should also say. Anyhow Rich and I got to talking about whether humans are hard wired for symbol making. A woman philosopher he learned about Tuesday night thinks so. She convinced Rich. Not sure at this remove what the implications of that were but Rich thought it was important.

Rich teaches constitutional law at the Colorado School of Mines in, he said, “A country that no longer honors the constitution. We’re living in a post-constitutional time.” We also discussed Israel and Hamas. The sadness and dismay at being Jews given the way Israel is acting in Gaza. And yet…

Also had a p.t. session with Mary in which she said, alarmed, “What’s that around your neck!” I thought I had a creature somewhere on me. Turns out she’d seen the flashing of my Medalert pendant. I usually turn it so the light flashes toward my chest, but apparently I hadn’t that time.

Finished the day with MVP discussing the character trait, or middot, of silence. My practice for this month is to ask myself when am I? More on that at a later time.

 

 

Great Wheel, Health, Judaism, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Reimaging revelation, Science, US History, Wild Neighbors, World History

Consider Oneness

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Fall and the Harvest Moon

Monday gratefuls: Fat Bear Week. See this link. Rebecca in India. Mary in K.L. Mark in Hafir, Saudi Arabia. Me on Shadow Mountain. My son and Seoah and Murdoch in Songtan. Israel. Gaza. West Bank. Korea. Divided nations. Night Sky. Stars above and around the Lodgepoles. The coming darkness. A Mountain Morning. Aspen Torches, Trees of Ohr. The Tree of Life. Malkut to Keter. The Wildwood Tarot. Luke. Ginny. Jimmy. Murdoch, the silly. My son, the silly. Kate, who was also silly. Jon, who was not. Ruth. Gabe.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Fat Bear Week

One brief shining: A bear stands on a rock facing downstream, salmon climb the ladder of flowing water headed to their clan home to spawn, one tight powerful snap and the journey ends.

 

War. A son whose life lies in preparation and readiness for war. A nation, Korea, divided and still at war. Israel, my coreligionists fighting a war of their own creation. Oppression has a heavy price, paid too often, most often, in blood. Consider the violence of a nation that still relegates its native peoples to lands not wanted, depriving them of the lands that once sustained them. Consider the violence of a nation that systematically denies the vote, a decent education, good housing, well-paying jobs to persons descended from the enslaved. Consider a nation that denies an entire people, the Uighurs, even the crumbs of citizenship. Consider a nation, any nation, that allows its majority to wreck havoc on its minorities without conscience or care. Most nations.

Consider all these things. We are human after all, all too human. Jealous of what we already have, greedy for what we might get. Israel did not invent oppression. Nor did China. Neither did the U.S.A., even when slavery was legal. No. We humans find love, justice, and compassion often beyond our grasp even if in our individual hearts we might feel it. Collectively we protect our families, our clans, our regions, our skin color fellows, our nations. And in protecting, a noble and worthy action, deny others what they need, a base and evil result. This is the original sin of our species. To love those we prefer and exclude those who fall outside of our love’s sphere. A sad, pitiful narrowness to our vision.

Then consider the human body. Consider what the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The often unfortunate result of a reductionist science that separates the heart as a consideration of medical care from the liver, from the gut, from grief and joy and stress and despair. That separates the teeth from the pancreas. The blood from the lungs. The thyroid from the feet. Treats each one as a thing sui generis when no. Cortisol bathes each organ, blood moves through and into and out of the lungs, the gut, the feet, the brain and into the kidneys. We are one.

Of course we can learn and know about the heart when we dissect it, image it, palpitate it, treat its actions with chemicals of our own devising. Of course. But how did the heart come to have that blocked vessel? That flapping valve? That enlarged chamber? How does the heart function as part of the oneness that is homeostasis? How is that homeostasis affected by the smile of a child? The sound of a jackhammer? The death of a loved one? The denial at every turn of opportunity?

More. Yes. My body is one. Yes, it is. But. It is one within a community, within an atmosphere. My body so individual and precious to me can last no more than a few breaths without the oxygen exhaled by plants nearby and faraway. My body so individual and precious to me cannot live more than a few days without food grown by farmers, caught by fisherman, sustained by healthy soil and oceans and skies. My body so individual and precious to me cannot last without the touch, the warmth, the smile, the greeting of others.

Our original sin. To misplace the apparent concreteness of our skin color, our tribe, our class, our nation as worthy of dominance over others. No. We are one. The Eternal One only knows unity. Only sees togetherness. Insists in its nature on love, justice, and compassion. It has ever been so, and has ever been denied. Our fault, our most grievous fault.

Politics, Science, Weather +Climate

Under the Mushroom Cloud

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Lughnasa and the Herme Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Oppenheimer, the movie. Gabe. The last revision of The Trail to Cold Mountain. Acting. Cool night. Closed caption contraption. In and Out. Euphemisms. Driving. In rush hour. On I-70. With the express lanes functioning. God is Here, the book. Metaphors. For the sacred. Mussar. Leading mussar today. Getting back into the Mountains after having been in the city.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Movies

One brief shining: Trinity on the White Sands of New Mexico, a tower alone, an old fashioned motor and chain lifted a ball with electrical wires coming off of it, like a head connected to a neural mapping device, only this was no head, rather it was the first atomic bomb moving slowly link by link to its moment of explosive truth.

 

Baby boomer? Yes. They’re talking about my generation. A massive number of births following a long and bloody war. Which, at its end, changed the world forever. The movie Oppenheimer gives us a glimpse into the work, the pragmatic scientific bloody-minded work, that made that change. It shows us, yes, the story of the Chief Executive Scientist behind the bomb’s completion, Robert Oppenheimer. A complex man filled with paradox and living a life always on the knife edge of tragedy. Yes, an American Prometheus chained ever after to the rock of fame and infamy, governmental vultures stopping by to pick at his liver, healing up and then starting over again.

What it does not show is the mushroom cloud hovering over us baby boomers, the first generation to grow up with the knowledge that humanity held the awful power to eliminate itself. An anti-evolutionary device, the A-bomb. Too easy but I’ll say it anyway. Our sword of Damocles. Mutually Assured Destruction. MAD. ness. What else can it be?

Under the mushroom cloud spies snuck here and there, covertly hunting for nuclear secrets. The US and the Soviet Union locked in a standoff made Velveteen Rabbit by the missile silos in Siberia and in the fields of Wyoming and South Dakota. That same mushroom cloud hovers still. Only now the so-called nuclear club has many members: China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Israel, the U.S, North Korea, France, the United Kingdom.

Ironic that in the early winter of the baby boomer generation the great threat to the world is no longer that mushroom cloud but an early industrial age blanket made of carbon. Not to say the nuclear threat does not remain. It does. Yet so far the MAD notion of self-destruction in an instant has held fingers away from the buttons.

All the while we drove our cars, buses, trucks and turned on our air-conditioners, joined the electric revolution.

Apocalypse now is not a movie anymore.

Acting, Art and Culture, Beyond the Boundaries, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Reimaging revelation, Science, Wild Neighbors, Writing

Joy

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Summer and the Herme Moon

Monday gratefuls: Herme. The Seeker. Gaius Ovidius. Han Shan. Writing a very short play. Acting. Distractions. Procrastination. Writing again. Working on revelation. Sacred. Divine. Holy. Spiritual. Religious. Worship. Inspiration. What do these words mean? Are they still important? Judaism. Sarah. BJ. Family. Ruth and Gabe. Marina Harris. My son and Seoah. Murdoch. Korea. Adapters. Travel. Love. Burning it all away but love. Life’s purpose.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: the religious life

One brief shining: Here it is the Lodgepole out my window I look at it and see all its Branches arranged towards the East where Great Sol becomes seen each morning no need for western facing Branches due to the shade of others those Branches toward Great Sol right now hold Needles and Cone, survival and reproduction of the species, unseen but known to me is that most magical and necessary of all transformations/transubstantiations photosynthesis gathering in the nuclear fusion power of Great Sol, combining it with carbon dioxide and water, then stepping it down into sugars and oxygen and fixed carbon. A miracle of the ordinary. The ordinary as miracle.

 

Oh. Speeding into my mind since last Tuesday night Herme and the nature of revelation. Prompting a creative torrent can’t keep up with it. Have to slow down. Stop. Read. Watch television. Burning through my photosynthetically captured energy reserves. Glad my thyroid stimulating hormone has given me the ability to use the energy as long as I can. More than glad. Joyful.

 

This is so much fun. Considering how to lace lines from Han Shan into my own written dialogue, stage directions, settings. Imagining how to advance the plot, how to have a smash bang ending. Yippee! Having to figure out how to represent each character distinctively. When I have trouble having to do that for one character. Gotta thank Alan for suggesting acting classes. I’ve learned so much about myself. About talents and skills long buried. Not gone. Which makes me happy.

Acting combines the intellect and the emotions, the lev heart/mind, into a sharpened tool with the whole body. The voice. Movement. Posture. Cadence. Emphasis. Volume. All important. Plus memory. Putting it all into the mind and retrieving it as necessary, remembering per Meisner how to live truthfully in an imaginary situation.

 

Also going to sleep thinking about revelation. What does it reveal? How? When? How do we know it when it’s happening? Waking up with revelation still on my mind. Seeing revelation through my window.

The book of Nature, of super nature, always open to one page or another. Great Sol in the Sky. The Lodgepole out my window. The first six inches of Top Soil. Feeling the Oxygen breathed out by the Lodgepoles going into my lungs. Another miracle. The transfer of Oxygen into my blood stream so the energy gained from Plants and Animals can transubstantiate into my organs, flesh, bones, lev. How marvelous! How wonderful.

These are the ordinary encounters, yes, but still inspirational. Perhaps they don’t rise to the level of revelation. The line between revelation and an ordinary miracle is still not clear to me. Perhaps an ordinary miracle involves the intellect more. I can look up photosynthesis, read about it, yet its role in our life of very life is so intimate, so critical, and so ignored that seeing where it is happening, right now, opens my heart in wonder.

Yet it does not have the jolt, the jitterbugging of the Rainy Night Watcher. That was a hairs on the skin rising up goosebumps moment. I take from those indicators that my body/lev responded holistically. No mental processing. No slotting of the experience or wondering about Elks. Rather an oh this is happening to me right now! Wow. What? Gosh. A frisson of fear. I can still see him dimly lit at the side of the road, watching, his Antlers spread wider than the space of the two Lodgepoles just behind them.

Loving this, too. Reimagining revelation. Yes. That’s the key.

 

 

Acting, Asia, Commentary on the news, Poetry, Politics, Science, Travel, US History

Summer, the American Season

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Summer and the Summer Moon Above

Friday gratefuls: Mini-splits cooling. A cool night. Good sleeping. July 4th. Seoah’s birthday. Sending her a Jacquie Lawson card. Mary in Eau Claire. The most recent CJ Box book. K-dramas. Stranger. Sky Castle. Itaewon Class. Cod. Potatoes. Collard greens. Herme.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Our Earth

One brief shining: Geez Tom passed on an image from JPL that showed all the asteroids that could strike the Earth and they wove in and out of the Solar system creating a web of white that looked like doom doom doom for the Planet but no JPL says not this century.

 

Learned another one:

 

I traveled to Cold Mountain,

Stayed here for thirty years.

Yesterday looked for friend and family

More than half had gone to the Yellow Springs

Slow burning, life dies like a flame,

Never resting, passing like a river.

I stand in my lone shadow,

Suddenly, the tears flow down.

 

Summer feels like the American season to me. The 4th of July. The Indianapolis 500. NASCAR. Baseball. Family reunions in city parks and on family farms.

For many years I would take the summer to read American history, political philosophy, political analysis. Haven’t done it for a while but recent reading about the far right was the sort of thing I would do.

I also have a modest Civil War jones. I love to visit battlefields. Again, like the summer reading, it’s been a while since I’ve set out on a road trip to visit Civil War sites. Thinking I might do it next year. Visit Sarah and Jerry, Paul and Sarah. This year’s occupied with Korea and Israel.

Let me see. I’ve been to Manassas, Antietam, Shiloh, Ft. Sumter, Stones River, Vicksburg, Ft. Donelson, and Andersonville. Still missing Gettysburg and several others. Enough for a long trip.

 

Guess I could also visit Trump era proto-Civil War sites like the Capitol Building and Richmond, Virginia.

With the Extremes dismantling  years of liberal policy and law trying to take us back to their own future, a dismal and cruel place, learning what the far right wants has become more and more important.

They want no special treatment for African Americans. Even if the special treatment of slavery skewed not only the politics of our constitution but embedded racism in the very interstices of our law and governance. Even if the special treatment of slavery ginned up the falsest of lies, white supremacy. Even if we know all of this for sure.

They want all life held sacred. Except the children born to poor parents or the children of immigrants. Or the victims of mass incarceration who end up dying needless deaths in prisons across the U.S. I mean not only, not even primarily, capital punishment, but deaths of despair, of under treated illness, deaths of families living without fathers.

They want to be left alone in their enclaves of Christian Nationalism or survivalist paranoia or anti-globalist, America first isolation. They want to treat all Federal lands as personal property and suffer no accountability for their actions.

They want guns to protect their liberty from the fascist Federal government while supporting the actual fascists who will certainly take their liberty and impoverish them even more.

They want the libtards to stop trying. We cannot, must not. Ever. Stop.

 

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Entheos

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Beltane and the Mesa View Moon

Monday gratefuls: Curiosity. The Ancient Brothers. Mark and Dennis. Coming May 23rd. Yet more Rain. Even more swollen Streams. Ancientrails as a life project. Tom and his time with Charlie H. Bill and his time with Bella. Mark and his time at the gym. Anytime Fitness. My treadmill. Marilyn. Ginnie. Josh. Jane. Kat. A banker. Vulcan Centaur.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Rocket Scientists

One brief shining: A beautiful woman with a long braid dangling over her t-shirt down to her space themed spandex had, on the back of the blue t-shirt an outline of the Vulcan Centaur rocket, on the front ULA and I asked, I’m too ignorant to know but is that a real rocket ship?

 

Yes. She answered. And I was working on it until I quit my job a year and a half ago. What was your area of expertise? Vibration and acoustics. Oh. I see. Not sure why I keep running into engineers. But I do.

CBE is amazing. All these smart people. This was at the Dismantling Racism class yesterday afternoon. Looked up the Vulcan Centaur and it’s been under development since 2014. Supposed to fly for the first time in July. Had a setback a month ago though with a second stage explosion during preparation for a launch.

The class has gotten better. Taking a mussar approach to the work. I like it for the inner work though I chose an opponent for my practice this week. Four areas of possible practice each week: with HaShem (God), with Self, with a fellow, especially a victim of anti-black racism, or with an opponent.

My practice involved an e-mail to a person with whom I’ve had long standing differences. Sent it last night and got a reply this morning. A sweet one. Maybe there’s something to this approach. The middah this week is kavod, or honor. Honoring self and other. The theological idea is the all made in God’s image trope. Said another way, we’re all human, all riding this blue spaceship our only home together with all the other critters and plants. Honor it all.

 

During the Ancient Brothers session on curiosity I identified curiosity as my defining characteristic. And naming what I call the valedictory lifestyle. As a valedictorian myself I’ve occasionally become curious (see!) about what happens to others who graduate first in their class academically. Turns out usually nothing spectacular. Sure a lot go into academics. Some have successful careers in business or the sciences.

But usually no stars. No one off achievements. No amazing inventions. Why? Because we’re generalists. We easily get sidetracked by something new and shiny. If purity of heart is to will one thing, we’re not at all pure.

I call them enthusiasms. My enthusiasms can last a long time. Religion has turned out to be the longest lasting, but inside that broad category I’ve been all over the place. From existentialist atheist to Christian to Unitarian-Universalist to Pagan and wanderer with the tribe. There’s a piece of each of these, often substantial pieces that remain intact within me. All somehow glued together with Taoism.

There’ve been many others. Art, my twelve years at the MIA. Politics, lasting almost as long as religion, but again all over the place in terms of action. Islam which I studied after 9/11. Horticulture. Cooking. Heating with wood. Beekeeping. Dogs. World travel. F1. Science. Tarot and Astrology. Cinema. Acting. Writing. Getting degrees. Tea. Korean and now Spanish. Oh, and one that actually has been lifelong, reading. Not sure when I learned but I’ve never ever stopped. Buying books, too. To feed the habit. I’ve dabbled in painting and sum-e.

Enthusiasms in my life are more than dabbling but less than enough to gain full mastery. But I must admit it’s been, is being, a hell of lot of fun.

 

 

 

 

Mountains, Science, Shadow Mountain, The West

Colorado Plateau. Rotates!

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Imbolc and the Valentine Moon

Friday gratefuls: Kristie. Kep. Sunseen. On the Lodgepoles. Through the Lodgepoles. Fresh Snow. Cold temps. A search for emet. Cancer. Diane. Her political astuteness. Our long connection. Family. Biden. Ukraine. The Democratic compromise. State of the Union, steadier. Luke. Rabbi Jamie. Tara. Our Land, this Land. The Rockies. Mind blown. The Deep. Love everlasting.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Science

 

The Laramide orogeny. Mountain building seventy-five million years ago. A tectonic plate crashing into another right at a line followed by Hwy. 470 here in the Denver metro. The Plains crunched up at the Front Range. What I’ve read and believed since moving to Colorado. Those Hogbacks the remains of an ancient Mountain Range, the Laramides.

Turns out. No. Not the case. The Colorado Rockies are around ten million years old! Wait. There’s more! The whole Colorado Plateau rotates clockwise! The Colorado Rockies still being pushed up higher! That’s right. The Rockies are a young Mountain Range created by a dynamic I’ve not fully grasped.

I understand this much. The orogeny (Mountain building) pressure comes not from the east as in the old Laramide theory, but from the west. And that pressure, exerted by the same Faults that create Earthquakes in California, are dynamic, still at work. There may be some Vulcanology implicated too.

As you can tell by the exclamation marks, I’m excited about this! Taking a new class on Colorado Glaciations. Glaciation is why the Rockies look so rugged. Also, according to Vince Matthews, another former director of the Colorado Geological Survey who’s teaching this course, none of the current Glaciers in Colorado are over 400 years old. Stopping with the exclamation marks. That’ed get silly.

Not sure how to reconcile Vince Matthew’s comments about the Rockies being ten million years old and what you’ll see below, but it’s evident that this is work no one understands very well. Even geologists.

Supposed to get a link to a video that shows how this works. I’ll post it when it arrives. The whole Colorado Plateau. Rotating. Wow. Here’s a bullet point list about what one author believes:

▪ The Colorado Plateau’s iconic landscapes were shaped during its 70-million-year, still-enigmatic, tectonic evolution characterized by uplift and erosion.
▪ Uplift of the Colorado Plateau from sea level took place in three episodes, the youngest of which has been ongoing for the past 20 million years.
▪ Tectonism across the Colorado Plateau’s nearest plate margin (the base of the plate!) is driving uplift and volcanism and enhancing its rugged landscapes.
▪ The bowl-shaped Colorado Plateau province is defined by ongoing uplift and an inboard sweep of magmatism around its margins.
▪ The keel of the Colorado Plateau is being thinned as the North American plate moves southwest through the underlying asthenosphere.
Dogs, General, Mountains, Science, Shadow Mountain

Wild

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Samain and the Holimonth Moon

Sunday gratefuls. Erev Hanukah. Gabe. Deciding which presents to open first. Avatar: Water. Pakeha. Cold weather coming. Kep. His blind life. Beau Jo’s pizza. Gabe’s teenage boy appetite. Rabbi Jamie’s adult class on Hanukah. The death of P-22. Vince and Frank Zappa. Kep on the grippy rug. That red alert call at 2 am. For the wrong city. Wellington Paranormal. Next to last episode.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: A grandson’s love

 

The death of P-22. This article in the LA Times tells the story of P-22. In case you didn’t know it. A Mountain Lion that wandered into Griffith Park after crossing several freeways ten years ago P-22 became, as LA seems to require, a celebrity. Here’s another article about P-22 in the Washington Post.

Beth Pratt, regional executive director of the National Wildlife Federation said:

“I sat near him, looking into his eyes for a few minutes, and told him he was a good boy,” wrote Pratt, who said goodbye to P-22 before he was euthanized. “I told him how much I loved him. How much the world loved him.”

And, quoted later in the article: “He changed the way we look at L.A. And his influencer status extended around the world, as he inspired millions of people to see wildlife as their neighbors…”

I understand. Here in the Mountains our wild Neighbors continue to evoke awe and wonder no matter how long your residency. Driving yesterday Gabe and I saw more than fifteen Mule Deer at various points along the road. The rule in the Mountains is this. Where there are Deer there are Mountain Lions. I’ve never seen one though Kate did.

Coming home from MVP Wednesday night I saw a flash of light, slowed and saw a healthy Red Fox gazing at me from the hillside. As I drove home, I thought about him slipping into the night Forest on the hunt. We humans are diurnal, sleeping at night and active in the daytime (most of us anyhow. though the electric light has altered our behavior a lot.) The nighttime Forest is difficult for us navigate. Dr. Astrov from Uncle Vanya, “You know how, when walking in the Forest at night, when you see a light you forget the darkness and your fatigue, the thorny branches hitting you in the face…” Many fairy tales have their story set in the dark Woods.

Mountain Lions are crepuscular hunters, dawn and twilight. Ambush predators they lie in wait on rocky outcropping or on a tree branch. As P-22 did, Mountain Lions will eat pets. A Dog run up here without a top? Box lunch.

Our wild Neighbors throughout the World remind us of the thin veneer we have created with civilization. The Arctic cold slumping south this next week may highlight this again in south Texas. Remember the sudden crisis in the Texas electrical grid in February of 2021? Bet it’s not fixed.

We fantasize ourselves as separate from the lives of our wild Neighbors, but that’s all it is. Fantasy. Without the roof and walls of our homes, the heating or cooling they provide, the provisions available in grocery stores, without electricity or gas or fuel oil. Back to nature. Without my motorized chair or a pedal powered bicycle Denver is as far away for me as it is for that Black Bear I saw this summer.

Dystopian movies and novels, of which there have been many as we head toward a possible Climate apocalypse, foreshadow the survivalists nightmare come true. And that nightmare is. A return to the Wild.