Beltane Moon of the Summer Solstice
A welcome headline in the Denver Post yesterday: Cool spring dampens fire risk. It looked bad back in February and March when we were dry and unseasonably warm, then it began to snow. And snow. Then rain. The temperatures have been seasonal or below for the most part since late April. May it continue.
Beltane Moon of the Summer Solstice
Drove the fifteen or so minutes to Staunton State Park yesterday. Since we moved here I’ve wanted to include regular hiking as part of my fitness routine, but I let first one thing and then another get in the way. No longer. Bought an annual state park pass. “Sir, could I ask you if you are over 65?” Saved me ten bucks. Sure. Ask away.
Debbie, the personal trainer who put together my new workout plan has suggested I alternate cardio days with resistance work. Since I’m paying her for her expertise, I’m going to go follow her suggestion. She also said hiking would be good for abductor/adductor strengthening, uneven terrain. “The Davis Pond trail at Staunton would be a place to start.”
Here are a few pictures from that very trail. I used to exercise outside a lot: Crosby Park in St. Paul, Lake George Regional Park and Rum River Regional Park in Anoka County, but the ease of the treadmill and inertia moved me away from it. Glad to be getting back. And the scenery here is amazing.
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.
Beltane Rushing Waters Moon
Today
Beltane Rushing Waters Moon
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 Mesillat Yesharim, Path of the Upright, is a complex, subtle and often difficult to parse text. With a guide like Rabbi Jamie Arnold its complexity and subtlety becomes an advantage, encouraging a range of views, sparking discussion. But with me, lacking sufficient knowledge, it could become a bramble thicket instead.
Secondly, I do have some depth in other fields, especially those related to the environment, and I find myself drawn to them with the content of chapters 18 and 19 in this central mussar text. Those two chapters recount movement toward hasidut or piety and chesed or loving kindness. Since these are action outward categories-hasidut can also be translated as loving deeds-ecological thinking fits well with them. But. I realize if I go in this direction I risk making my own agenda the centerpiece rather than learning about these middah.
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.
Last. As is usual for me, I have way more information than can possibly fit. At this stage, roughly a week away, that’s not a problem. Except it is. I don’t know how to edit the material because I’m not really sure what my focus is. Is it hasidut, chesed, kedusha (holiness) or is it the manifestation of those ideas in the world? In this case it’s a question of am I moving too quickly beyond the new concepts to their application?
I’ve enlisted the help of a rabbi in training, Bonnie Houghton, to help me sort out what will be useful and what won’t. Mussar and Torah study both emphasize the value of a study partner. A sound idea.
Oh. And. I’m not a Jew.
Beltane Rushing Waters Moon
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 lodgepole pines have puffy sticky snow that conforms to their branches, weighing them down, pointing them towards Shadow Mountain. One by one the weight will become too much and the whole pile on one branch slides off with an oof and a powdery white trail following it to the ground followed by another, then another until the branches spring back up, ready to receive sunlight. Until then, the trees, like our solar panels, are cut off from the source of their power.
A member of Beth Evergreen sent an e-mail from Boston yesterday, “It’s a hot, sticky 95 here.” This reminded me that the legendary speaker of the house from Boston, Tip O’Niell said, “All politics are local.” So to with weather.
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.
As for this mammal, I’m sitting here, quiet and thoughtful, happy to have a meditative scene out my window. Black Mountain is my writing companion, often my muse. In fact, just now I watched the sun’s light slowly descend from Black Mountain’s peak toward the shelf of rock well below it. The peak itself shines as the sun reflects back off the high albedo of its snow cover. The sun itself, our own star among the heaven’s billions or trillions, seems to have picked out Black Mountain saying, “Behold this wonder so near to you, yet so different.” The sun, God’s spotlight.
Beltane Rushing Waters Moon
This family gives their dogs regular rides in a convertible and, according to their housekeeper, has a horse who comes in the house to eat out of the fruit bowl. Life in the mountains.
Beltane Rushing Waters Moon
May 18th. May 18th. This is the merry, merry month of May. Its 18th day. 18 days after Beltane, the start of the growing season. Obviously, somewhere other than Shadow Mountain.
Beltane Rushing Waters Moon
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.*
The work is good, necessary. It is even, as Thomas Berry said, the great work of our generation, but it often feels mechanical to me. Pull this lever. Have this meeting. Create this sign. Monitor Polymet. Call the governor. Write your Senator. Hike this trail. In its mechanistic form this does not feel like my love for our home, this earth, this planet, third rock from the sun.
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.
The hike I took at Flying J Ranch (see posts below) was shinrin-yoku, forest bathing. Perhaps that’s a way to combine the inner work with the outer work. Or, perhaps I could follow the mussar notion of outer work affecting the inner work. Not sure. But, there is a need for me to more closely match my spiritual journey with this work. Maybe the mountain art notion will fit here, too. More to come.
*
Beltane Rushing Waters Moon
David believes we protect what we care about. I agree with him. He uses photography as a way of engendering support for some of our more charismatic megafauna. Mountain lions and bears are under attack in certain sections of Colorado. The government is killing them to supposedly increase mule deer herds.
This is a still of the same mountain lion in the video.
