Beltane Rushing Waters Moon
I put myself in a corner with my workouts. In an effort to get to 10,000 steps a day I began to place more and more emphasis on cardio, increasing my time on the treadmill and on the elliptical for high intensity. Problem. I got too tired to do my resistance work. I prioritize cardio since a heart attack or stroke is a real risk for a white male in his 70’s and cardio can help lower the risk. Even so, balance and a certain amount of functional muscle strength is important to daily life so I don’t want to ignore those either.
Full recovery from the total knee replacement also requires resistance work, strengthening muscles that support the knee as it works. The good news is that the increased cardio does strengthen the quads, very important for the knee, but moving always in that straight line way does little for the abductors and adductors which stabilize the knee. What to do?
Hire a personal trainer. I went to a small fitness center situated next to Select Physical Therapy where I did my post-op p.t. Both are in store front settings in a small mall with a raised boardwalk and other businesses like a hairdresser and Altitude Martial Arts.
I met with Debbie yesterday for about an hour and a half. She’s good. She listened to what I’ve done in the past, what I’m doing now. She took my blood pressure and reviewed my medical history. After that we did some warm up and a few exercises, some new to me, some the ones I’ve carried over from the end of physical therapy.
Though she’s developing a complete body workout for me that I’ll learn on Thursday, she made two suggestions yesterday that I think will prove important over time. First, she noted that I had little in my routine to work the abductors and adductors. Exercising them will require working in different planes of motion than straight ahead. Second, hike outside. This one, while obvious to someone in the mountains, was important to me because I’ve allowed inertia to keep me at home. I needed a push to get out, to hike regularly and she gave it to me. Already worth the price of admission.
Still working on how I will lead our mussar class next week. It’s been hard for me, mildly anxiety producing. First, I don’t have the depth, any really, in Jewish thought. The 
Thirdly, the whole Jewish immersion experience I’m having at Beth Evergreen is like learning a new language. I have some words and a very limited amount of grammar. I don’t want my naivete getting in the way of other’s learning.
White and gray. The 18 inches or so of snow lies thick on our roof, solar panels hidden from our star. That unusual characteristic of snow to move upwards with the shape of an obstacle like a fence post, a statue, mailbox, or birdbath has created several objects in our yard with white caps reaching skyward, simulacrums in snow of the surface beneath them.
The storm seems to have quieted overnight. No snow falls now. The sun, already well up over Denver, has begun to light the clouds over Black Mountain, accentuating the blue sky. The whiteness of the scene from my loft window seems to impose a silence borne of the color itself, soundlessness corresponding to the fresh, but otherwise colorless, snow. Along with the silence comes a profound stillness, as if for the moment nothing moves. Perhaps the mountain lion has retreated to its den, the bear to its former place of hibernation, the mule deer and elk bedded down among the willows and dogwood out of the wind.
Our next Sierra Club meeting will be on June 19th, one day before the summer solstice. Sierra Club work is paganism stripped bare of its mythic content. There is passion for sure, but not the poetry, no ritual, no inner work. It’s all outer work: hike, lobby, analyze, network, persuade. We may, for example, show the next Al Gore movie, Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. See trailer below.*
Somehow I need to find a way for my inner work to imbue my outer work. Todd, a long-time member of the Mt. Evan’s local group to which I belong, talked about a hike he took yesterday in Reynold’s Park. He named a particular orchid that he found and his face lit up. “A bullsnake, too.” It may be that these folks, tied to the very local region encompassed by our borders, find their inner work in being on the trail, hiking Mt. Bierstadt, taking the Mt. Evan’s road, helping clear trail.
