Category Archives: Jefferson County

Bees, Family, Friends, GeekWorld, Jefferson County, Judaism, Mountains, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Beezzy

May 26, 2018 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Sumi-e Moon

Snowtires off and away. Oil changed. A/C an issue that took all day yesterday with no joy on finding a leak. Frustrating. Rear brakes had to be replaced, too. That’s fine. Tires and brakes in good operating order are a must for mountain driving. The A/C is also a must with my Nordic Goddess always eager to have the temperature regime of her genetic homeland. Hopefully all will be finished by noon or so today.

20180522_174843 — Ruth and Kate made this. Kate’s from yesterday looks as good.

Kate continues to gain stamina and increase range of motion for her right shoulder. She made challah yesterday, and challah rolls. With some tweaking thanks to a high altitude info sheet from King Arthur Flour she’s really got it going on. This is beautiful challah and rolls. She gave one to Tara yesterday and we’ll give the rolls to Sally today when we visit her in Golden.

Yesterday late afternoon we went over Tara and Arjan’s home for a session with their bees. Like Rabbi Jamie and Dan, they’re first year beekeepers. They’ve got the derigeur, for the Front Range, electric fence. Bear strength. Bears really like honey. And we’ve got bears.It was fun seeing their enthusiasm and a healthy hive.

Their Italians are much more docile than my Minnesota Hygienics. The four built out frames I gave them were filling up with pollen, honey and brood. They’re queen right and the colony is growing. They moved slowly, did a hive check looking at each frame while I stood off to the side and examined them, too.

Their home is on Kilimanjaro Drive. You’ll get the naming convention when you know we passed Jungfrau, Annapurna and Zugspitz drives as well. Kilimanjaro is long and winds way back into the mountains east of Evergreen. The views are wonderful with the continental divide just visible to the northeast. Still snowpacked. It was a clement mountain evening with blue sky, lots of rock and pine trees. And friends.

Bees, Family, GeekWorld, Health, Holidays, Jefferson County

Life in the Big Mountains

May 25, 2018 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Sumi-e Moon

Yesterday at 8 am Kate went to P.T. and I went to On the Move Fitness. They’re next door to each other. While Kate continued rehabbing her shoulder, I went through my new workout for the second time. The previous session had ouched my lower back some, so Deb modified some of the exercises.

I felt so righteous about having my workout done at 8 am, I relaxed until time for mussar at 1 pm. Anyhow new workout under my belt.

Over to C.J.’s Chicago Dogs to pick up a couple of Italian Beefs for supper. Tasty and nostalgic. Good Chicago memories. I’ve always liked Chicago and spent a good bit of time there earlier in my life.

Then, a little t.v., Midsomer Murders and reading a new book, The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, a post-modern feminist riff on the story of Jekyll and Hyde. It includes Dr. Moreau and Sherlock Holmes as characters. Fun. Been doing a lot of heavy lifting with books like the Order of Time, qabbalah and the Dead Sea Scrolls, so something just for entertainment.

Today our first Blizzaks go off and away, three and a half winters of service, time to buy a new set for the upcoming winter. Oil change. Air conditioning rejuvenation. Lot of driving today. Going over to Tara Saltzman for tea and bees. She and Arjan want to talk about their bees, maybe I’ll do a hive inspection.

Memorial day weekend. Feels holidayish already. Camper races have started, 285 will be a parking lot later today. Lots of preliminary complaining by locals. Fortunately we don’t have to drive 285 unless we choose to, so we can work around holiday traffic.

Commentary on the news, General, Jefferson County, Judaism, Our Land and Home, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, US History

Say It Ain’t So, Bob

May 18, 2018 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Sumi-e Moon

Probably won’t be going back to Chainsaw Bob’s. Went yesterday to get my chain sharpened. They have a new deal, smart, where you leave your old chain and they put an already sharpened one on your saw. Supposed to save time. And it would if the guy putting the chain back on wasn’t trying to sell another guy a saw.

Gave me plenty of opportunity to peruse the new signs hung over the desk between the shop and the front. A picture of Hillary Clinton had these remarks. Hillary Chicken. 2 fat legs, 2 small breasts and lots of left wings. Next to it was a sign that read. Startling news! 25% of women in the U.S. are being treated for mental illness. You know what means? 75% are untreated! Under these signs a woman whom I assumed was Chainsaw Bob’s wife met customers, organized service and took money.

first-they-came-for-the-mexicans-and-i-did-not-10234171 Sexism is still raw and unvarnished in many places, like racism on public display in Charlottesville, Virginia. Murica.

We live in our bubbles. The Big Sort, published in 2009, had the subtitle, Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart. Yesterday the Denver Post reported that the population of downtown Denver had increased by 3 times since 2000 to twenty-six thousand with 81% single, white and with an average age of 34. This is just a single instance of folks choosing to live among those similar to themselves in race, wealth and educational level.

This from Richard Florida and his excellent website, Citylab: “Americans have not only grown more ideologically polarized over the past couple of decades, Republicans and Democrats are drawn to very different kind of places. Back in 2004, Bill Bishop dubbed the self-segregation of Americans into like-minded communities, “The Big Sort.”” Oct. 25, 2016

When I grew up in Alexandria, Indiana, during the 1950’s it was segregated by race, one black family in the town of 5,000, yet there were college educated folks living next door to factory workers who had, at best, graduated from high school. As a result, I have a blue collar sensibility that sets as deep in my character as the college-educated one I gained at home. Even this modest class diversity is rarer and rarer as suburbs and city neighborhoods, cities and rural areas grow more and more homogeneous.

With a pussy-grabber in chief who sees good folks on both sides in Charlottesville, this sorted and ideological reinforcing America is ripe for a wave of extremism even more shocking than we’ve already seen. Trump’s approval rating is growing, still dismal, but moving up. The 30% or so of the U.S. who are his base may not seem like much, 70% are not his base, but Mao noted that only 3% of a country needed to be active revolutionaries for a rebellion to succeed. And he proved it.

What does this augur for our future as a nation? At a minimum it means a large percentage of the population will be unhappy with the government. At its maximum it could mean a white male populist revolt favoring Chainsaw Bob’s tilt to American politics. That’s close to where we are right now.

Dogs, Jefferson County, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, Sport, Travel

Mountain Sounds

May 17, 2018 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Sumi-e Moon

20151022_101834 You might expect the cough of a mountain lion, the cries of magpies, mule deer and elk rustling through undergrowth, bugling in the fall, the sounds of the pines soughing as winds sweep down from Mt. Evans, perhaps even the violent poundings of the thunder storm the other night. And those sounds do exist up here.

But the one I here most often, aside from light traffic noise on Black Mountain Drive and dogs barking, is a chainsaw. Lots of fire mitigation work. Lots of tree felling for wood heat. Lots of people, I think, who just like their chainsaws. Me, included.

Neighbor Holly displaying t-shirt sold on the Han Motogear website

Then there are the motorcycles. Our neighbors, Eduardo and Holly, run a business selling steampunk gear to women riders. They have two Harleys. Motorcyclists come up here more often than bicyclists, riding in packs or alone, enjoying the mountain scenery and the fresh air. There are other motorheads up here including Jude our welder neighbor and the family two doors down that never got over the whole Volkswagen thing from the 60’s.

These folks, I think, and many of our other neighbors live up here as a base camp for canoeing, riding, climbing, 4×4 adventures off road, skiing. If you’re already in the mountains, it’s easier to explore them.

20180115_153644 In the winter there is the scrape and drag of Jefferson County snowplows and the intermittent pushing and engine revving of private snowplowers, the whine of snowblowers.

Oddly, much of the time our home in Andover was quieter than it is here. And I value quiet. This noise does not, however, upset me. As an older adult, I’m happy to have neighbors close by and having neighbors means living with their habits and passions. Even the noises I’ve described are intermittent and when a heavy snow falls, or mid-day, like right now, or late at night, the silence here is profound.

GeekWorld, Great Wheel, Jefferson County, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science, Shadow Mountain

The local

May 17, 2018 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Sumi-e Moon

Forgot how exhausting real studying can be. My goal was to finish Rovell’s book, The Order of Time, before qabbalah last night. I did it. But I had to read and ponder for several hours over the last two days. Much of the work is clear, even if challenging to understand. Some of it, especially about the quantum world, was damned difficult. Some of it I didn’t get. That’s o.k. Confusion is the sweat of the intellect. A lot of sweat in that small text.

My reward? At kabbalah last night I found the discussion needed the insights Rovelli offers. But I didn’t understand them well enough to add them to the discussion. Result? Cognitive dissonance. The question last night was, does the future exist? Rovelli answer: at the quantum level, no. No past, no present, no future. No time. Just events occurring in no particular order. Kabbalists answer, no. The past and the future only exist in the present. Sounds similar, but it’s not. No time is no time.

And, Rovelli established to my satisfaction that there is no present, even at the Newtonian level. The easiest example is a moment, A, happening on earth. Is it in the same present, a universal present we assume exists for the whole universe, as an event on Proxima, three light years away? No. It is in the same moment as an action on Proxima three years from now. In this example, thanks to distance we can see that our present does not match up to Proxima’s.

present_moment_wonderful_moment-300x224 Here’s the real trick in Rovelli’s book though. The present is highly local. The present is a construct meaningful only within the part of the universe with which we are in direct relation. So my present here on Shadow Mountain is different than the one down the hill in Aspen Park or down the hill even further in Denver.

We can only know the present through direct relationship. Why? Well, consider this. Let’s say I want to know what’s happening right now in Aspen Park. How can I do that? I’m not there. I could call, but dialing takes time, so by the time I’ve connected with Aspen Park, the moment I’m reaching is no longer the present about which I wondered a moment ago. Even a reply takes time to reach me from Aspen Park over the phone. It’s the same problem as Proxima, just on a different scale.

local Picky? I don’t think so. The present is just that. Now. But I can discover no other present without encountering it after mine has already disappeared. This highly local nature of the present unhinges our assumption of time as a constant, the same everywhere. No, in fact it’s exactly not the same everywhere. You have to let that trickle in, at least I did.

And, there’s more! But I need to re-read the book to get it. Not right now. Not enough energy.

Jefferson County, Mountains, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Weather +Climate

Good-Bye Mountain Moon

May 14, 2018 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Mountain Moon

The mountain moon will disappear over the next few days; but, its impact, like that of the new shoulder moon, will continue. I’m now picking up mountain facts, art, poetry, science, including a lot of vulcanology. The mountains that I see everyday speak to me in new ways. See what you’re looking at.

Here’s an example. While on our way to Evergreen the other day, Kate said, “Oh, look. Leaves on the aspens!” This was near the entrance to the Cub Creek trailhead. Sure enough, a grove of aspen (clones of each other) had small bright green leaves. But. As we went further down Brook Forest Drive, the aspens were not leafed out. Their leaves were still furled, mostly colorless. Why? What about the soil, water, location with other trees made that one batch of aspen leaf out earlier than almost all the others we saw further down? Still don’t know.

Another. The last few days have been rainy and foggy. As we passed rock faces bare of trees, the fog and mist on them gave a perfect simulacrum of the Song dynasty paintings that I love, mountains seeming to emerge from and disappear into the clouds.

Another and ongoing aspect of becoming native to this place.

Beyond the Boundaries, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, General, Jefferson County, Judaism, Mountains, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Tennessee Rebbe

May 12, 2018 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Mountain Moon

Rami Rabbi Rami Shapiro is here from middle Tennessee. He’s a prolific author, 36 books, and funny. Kate and I heard him at mussar on Thursday. He offered a paradigm from somebody whose name I didn’t catch, but it represents the human as living on five levels simultaneously. If you imagine a spiral spun out at least five whorls, he puts the body at the center, then the heart, the mind, the soul and spirit.

The first two operate below the level of consciousness. He referred mostly to the autonomic functions of the body: breathing, heart beating, all those things the body does on its own, that we couldn’t control even if we decided we wanted to. The heart in this model is two emotions love and fear, both of which arise unbidden and with which we then have to contend at the level of mind.

The mind, the ego, focuses on survival, on navigating the body and the heart through the visible world. The mind, in this paradigm, wears masks (but not in a pejorative sense) as it expresses itself to the world. Soul and spirit are, like body and heart, operating out of the realm of usual consciousness, but they can be accessed. In meditation we can reach soul as we are living it right now.

As soul we become aware of our direct links to other people, to the world we live in and we understand them as part of us and ourselves as part of them. Shapiro says that such dictums as love thy neighbor as thyself become axiomatic at the soul level. When we know the true face of the other, which we can do at soul level, then we have to treat them with loving kindness. This includes the earth.

Spirit is inaccessible through our actions, but in meditation we can come right up to it. Grace has to pull us over the boundary. Once in the realm of spirit our sense of connection becomes total. We know, without effort, the interconnection and interdependence of all things, from the tiniest fly to the furthest galaxy and beyond.

It’s an interesting paradigm in its insistence that we live on all five of these levels all the time. We are always, then, in the realm of the spirit, accessing universal bonds, and the level of soul where we know the true faces of all around us.

Something about it seems a little hinky to me though and I can’t quite identify it. As a heuristic, I believe it has a great deal of value since I do believe we live on several levels all the time. At a minimum it reminds us of that.

Rami holy rascals He refers to himself as a perennialist. Here’s what that means:

“I am a Jewish practitioner of Perennial Wisdom, the fourfold teaching at the mystic heart of the world’s religions:

1. all life is a manifesting of a single Reality called by many names: God, Tao. Mother, Allah, Nature, YHVH, Dharmakaya, Brahman, and Great Spirit among others;

2. human beings have an innate capacity to know the One in, with, and as all life;

3. knowing the One carries a universal ethic of compassion and justice toward all beings; and

4. knowing the one and living this ethic is the highest human calling.”

Jefferson County, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain

The Arid West

May 11, 2018 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Mountain Moon

A blue sky day again yesterday. As the wxgeek implies below, we will pay a price for the beauty of these days. May it only be anxiety. This will be our fourth summer here and we’ve yet to have an evacuation. Lucky.

(We’re in the upper right hand corner of the red in Colorado. These same maps look much better for July and August.)

We’ve done the fire prep things we can do; but, after reading Megafires by a UofC Boulder based investigative journalist who specializes in wildfires, I realized if we get a fire coming up Brook Forest Drive, we’ll lose our house unless firefighters stop the fire or protect our house. We’re in a lodgepole pine forest with scattered aspen groves. Fire behavior for lodgepoles, a pioneer species, is to crown, burning everything down so the forest can start over. These forests burn less often than the ponderosa dominated ecosystem at lower elevations; but, when they do, they take out everything in their path.

Big fun. Oddly, it’s not a source of anxiety for me because we’ve done what we can and the rest is statistical. Too, we decided a while back that we’ll just replace what we lose since stuff isn’t what’s important to us. Kate, the dogs, me, a few important papers. We’ve saved those last in a safety deposit box down the hill and all my writing is stored in the cloud or on flashdrives.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Jefferson County, Judaism, Mountains, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Technical Problems

May 8, 2018 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Mountain Moon

The Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition runs from March 16 to Sept. 3, 2018 at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. The exhibition showcases ancient artifacts predominantly from Israel. Photo courtesy of Denver Museum of Nature & Science. — Photo courtesy of Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

On Sunday I reached some sort of odd apotheosis, presenting a series of video lectures on the Dead Sea Scrolls at Beth Evergreen. In the audience of 20, larger than I had expected, were 4 people from Idaho Springs and Georgetown, Christians invited by a biblical scholar who is a member of Beth Evergreen. That meant that in answering some of their questions, even haltingly because I don’t know the field very well, I, still an ordained Presbyterian clergy, represented a Jewish perspective to Christians on subject matter that altered both faith traditions. Weird.

It could have been better. Two weeks ago I checked out the A/V setup I would use. Though I had a DVD, my laptop, a Lenovo has no DVD player. Not a problem because I could stream the lectures off the Great Courses’ website. The link to the synagogue’s wifi was fine, as was the hdmi link to the projector set in the ceiling. Rabbi Jamie and I fussed around with the sound board, unfamiliar to me, linking the computer to it. We did get the sound to work and I thought I had it down.Turns out I missed a key move on powering up the sound board.

Kate and I got to Beth Evergreen at 1:15 since she had agreed to handle the food (which she did in typical splendid fashion) and I wanted to have time for tables and for making sure my setup would deliver. With some satisfaction I soon had the lecture displayed on the screen. But. No sound. Hmmm. I have plenty of time, that’s why I came early.

After looking carefully at the soundboard, being sure it connected to the hdmi feed, a few people began to show up. Uh oh. I really had to get this to work. Finding the power buttons, I got the sound board to light up, but still no sound at the screen. It’s been a long time since I got sweaty palms, but I did on Sunday. Folks kept coming. I kept having no sound. It was ten till 2, the start time, and being an unreconstructed Northern European the thought of starting late literally made me sweat.

GreatCoursesLogo I had to call Alan Rubin, a new Beth Evergreen friend, who is the A/V sage. He said he was sitting by his pool enjoying the weather. It was a blue sky, white cloud, warm but not hot, Colorado day. After some false starts, Alan isolated the problem, I poked a button and, right at 2, the sound. Whew.

However. All this meant I had not had time to arrange the tables for folks to take notes, so they sat in chairs looking up at the screen. I also had not given sufficient thought to the pedagogy of the afternoon. How would we interact? What questions might prompt discussion? The fact that everyone faced front rather than seeing each other across a table made getting a conversation started difficult. Though I don’t think the audience cared, I’d hoped for a more interactive event and I didn’t facilitate that.

This was the first of what we hope to be many more online type offerings by the adult education committee, so I’ll get a chance to get better at it.

Sunday’s session anticipated a May 20th trip to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science for a tour of the Dead Sea Scroll exhibit currently there. Russ Arnold, Rabbi Jamie’s brother and professor of religion at Regis University, Denver, will lead the tour.

Art and Culture, Asia, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Jefferson County, Mountains, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain

The Tao

May 6, 2018 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Mountain Moon

Black Mountain sits, stoic and massive. No Pele here on Shadow Mountain either though not far away, less than 600 miles, is the supervolcano at Yellowstone. Does Pele feel these others, all these others? Stromboli? Mt. Etna? Montserrat’s Soufrière Hills volcano? Mt. Pinatubo? All those seamounts like Lo’ihi? Are there other Pele’s around the world or is She the one goddess of fire beneath the earth’s surface?

The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak. Albert Bierstadt 1863 — The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak. Albert Bierstadt 1863

And what of the Rocky Mountains? Is there a Vishnu-like deity here, noted for His calm, stolid presence, a stable and stabilizing force? To be on and among these mountains does not call out terror, does not reveal the raw fierce power of an erupting volcano. The wildfires that can scour their flanks are not of them, but of the soil, of the world of plants and lightning, of drought and human folly. Their orogeny was, of course, violent, a brutal tearing of the earth itself, forcing rock up, up, up, a tectonic plate pushing hard against another. But that was long ago, ended long ago.

The tao here is quiet, steady whereas the tao of Kilauea creates in ropy pahoehoe and ragged aa, in blasts from the magma chambers meeting underground water, by rips in her surface. Yet they are both the tao. No less generative, no less powerful for their difference. The tao here relies on cohesion, aggregation, altitude, the flow of the atmosphere. The tao on the Big Island relies on explosion, heat, creative destruction, movement.

Both are outward expressions of absence, the unceasing, unrelenting power of pure creation. The tao comes into this reality from the ein sof, making the ten thousand things. The same source that births you or me or the ocean or the sun or the Sombrero Galaxy.

A Mountain Path in Spring, Ma Yuan, Song Dynasty

(Emperor Ningzong’s poem inscribed in the upper right corner reads, “The wild flowers dance when brushed by my sleeves. Reclusive birds make no sound as they shun the presence of people.”)

Yes, I am one with the calm of Black Mountain, with the hottest lava erupting now on Kilauea’s eastern rift zone, with the gathered strength of the Yellowstone magma, with the flow of the Colorado, the Rio Grande, the Platte with the globe straddling fluidity of the world ocean. So are you. We bring our own uniqueness, self-consciousness, to the tao. We know ourselves as part of the tao. I am stolid, explosive, fluid, distant, near. We are of the tao now, as we were before being thrown into this time, these places, and we will be of the tao after this life we have dissipates, falls away.