Category Archives: Shadow Mountain

Coronavirus, Dogs, Family, Health, Mountains, Plants, Shadow Mountain, Talmud, Third Phase

To Rigel

Leave a comment

Beltane and the Corona Lunacy II

Tuesday gratefuls: Rigel, our amazing 11 year old. “She could pass for five,” said the vet at her physical yesterday. Cool mountain nights. Blue Colorado sky. Being home, having a home. Rocks piled up high, high, high. Streams racing to the leave the Mountain top, to carry its message to the sea.

Busy Tuesday morning. 7 am meeting of the Clan. Clan Keaton. We celebrate and continue my mom’s family. Right after I took Rigel back to the vet for another tooth removal. Cracked. She comes home in about an hour. High intensity workout. Read Talmud. Nap. The morning.

Kate goes in tomorrow morning to see the reconstructive surgeon who worked on her fingertips. The scars have mostly healed, but they hurt at the tips and her sensitivity there has not returned. She can sew, but with less dexterity.

A Mountain spring is here. The forest service moved our wildfire danger from low to moderate. There have already been two smaller fires in Conifer. Covid will impact fire response crews. Those fighting difficult fires are often bunked close together, share equipment, and dining space. Not to mention exhaustion, dehydration. Whatever the impact it will not be positive.

Another clue about spring. The fine yellow mist shaken from new Lodgepole pine cones has begun to spread on Mountain Winds. There’s a faint layer on my computer keyboard. Animacy is in the air.

Mark and Mary have finished their terms, but there’s a two week grade challenge window which keeps them at work. Grade challenge window? Geez. Education has changed, eh? Diane’s choral music class from San Francisco’s Community Education program has moved online. She seems resigned to eventually getting Covid. She tested negative in a community testing program last week. The clan wends its international way through this international pandemic.

Beyond the Boundaries, Coronavirus, Friends, Great Wheel, Great Work, Mountains, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Our Land and Home, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, The Move, The West, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

Shansin. Again.

Leave a comment

Beltane and the Corona Lunacy II

Monday gratefuls: Shansin. Four Mule Deer Does in the yard this morning. Romertopf. The Chicken that gave its life for our meal. Potatoes. Onions. Carrots. Garlic. Sesame oil. Old friends: Tom, Bill, Mark, Paul. Poetry. Wine for Kate. Those who wear masks. Those who don’t. These Mountains. Their Trees. Their Water. Our Wild Neighbors.

At a time of frustration and anxiety Shansin, our home which honors the Korean Mountain Spirit, and Shansin Himself, have gifted me a token of peace. At 5:30 this morning I went out for the newspaper, as I have hundreds of times since we moved here in 2014. A Mule Deer Doe looked up at me from the yard. Good morning, I said. She looked at me, her huge ears standing out from her beautiful face, alert.

Somewhat further away three of her Sisters ate, too. Good morning. Good morning. They each looked at me and continued eating. As I walked along the driveway to the mailbox, they continued eating, occasionally looking up as I moved by them. I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad you’re enjoying the grass.

Paper in hand, the latest coronavirus news buzzing off its front page, I walked back to the house, to Shansin with Shansin. They all grazed, content. I was part of their morning, They were part of mine. Neighbors on Shadow Mountain.

Yes, we belong here. Together. Whatever might be elsewhere, we belong here. Our lives continue in mutuality with those others who live among us. Fox. Cougar. Bear. Elk. Moose. Pine Marten. Canada Jay. Magpie. Raven. Crow. Spider. Mouse. Vole. We are all under the protection of Shansin.

At crucial moments in our Mountain time Shansin has sent his angels, his messengers. That first day here on Samain of 2014 when the three Mule Deer Bucks and I met in the back. The first day of radiation therapy when two Elk Bucks jumped our fence and stayed a day and a night eating dandelions. This morning, when my patience and emotional reserve had frayed, left me feeling beleaguered.

It may be the apocalypse(s). It may be. But here on Shadow Mountain I am part of something that will survive. That will flourish in spite of and in part because of them.

This is what the end times look like up here. A newspaper in its tube. Four Mule Deer grazing on our land. A cool Mountain morning underway.

Colorado, Coronavirus, Family, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Shaken, Not Stirred

Leave a comment

Beltane and the Corona Lunacy II

Saturday gratefuls: The Fog. Dr. Gustave. Christine, optical technician. Good pressures. Cataracts and Cataract surgery. Getting gas. Freddie’s delicious Steak burgers. Air conditioning in ruby. Hungarian goulash by Seoah. Friends at CBE. Home. Shadow Mountain. The Mountains. Down the Hill.

Not sure how to talk about this. It’s unpleasant, but I need to put out there the profound dis-ease I felt yesterday. A twice canceled appointment with my ophthalmologist, Dr. Gustave, found me the only car in the Corneal Consultants parking lot. Check-in was by cell phone as was word that they were ready to see me. After locking ruby I walked into the building to find myself the only patient there. Most of the spaces inside, including the waiting area, were dark. It felt like exploring an abandoned structure.

Christine and I greeted each other through our masks, mine a ks94 mailed to us from Korea by Seoah’s Sister and Brother-in-law. We walked past empty exam rooms, the retina camera and visual field equipment room.

We’ll be in here. Any issues with your vision? Yes. My hearing is affecting my vision. When I watch television, I use closed captions, but they’re getting blurry. Also, why are my eyes turning blue?

Dr. Gustave a bit later. We’ll be taking those cataracts out as soon as elective surgeries are authorized again. It wasn’t my glasses? No. Morgan Freeman has the same condition with his eye color. Is it pathological? No. A part of aging for you.

The whole experience there was unsettling. Christine told me they would wipe down the exam room with clorox after I left. That made me feel strange. It was wise, yes, but still.

There were further errands to run. I needed to get some cash, so I went to a Wells Fargo branch that I know has a drive-through. This drive through is closed. Huh? O.K. I put the Korean mask back on, slipped a glove on my right hand, and went into the lobby prepared to face actual people. But from a safe distance. Closed. This branch has been closed for a month said guy coming downstairs from his office above the bank. Well. Damn.

At Freddy’s Steak Burger I waited in a very long line, maybe 15 cars, to get a double bacon cheeseburger, fries, and a chocolate shake. A treat I’d looked forward to when I knew I would be visiting this bank. They’re close by each other. A Chick Fil’a up the street had employees outside, helping drive-up customers. Freddy’s did not.

Unease had begun to set in when I walked through the darkened halls of Corneal Consultants. It got amplified by the absence of other patients, by the clorox comment, by the face shield worn by Dr. Gustave. The closed bank. The very long line at Freddy’s. The also closed car wash where I got gas. The dysfunctional car wash I tried next further down Hwy 470. I wanted to get home.

Getting into the mountains usually calms me, but this time unwelcome anxiety had seeped in, jangled my nerves. I felt better on 285, headed toward Conifer, but not ok. I mailed some bills in Aspen Park.

At home I recounted this trip to Kate. I felt unsafe, I told her. People weren’t wearing masks. The step back from stay at home orders meant there were a lot more people out, cars on the road. All the signals of the contagion. Dark exam rooms. A closed bank. Where, btw, our safety deposit box is. The car washes. The long line at Freddy’s.

It left me, I said, a bit shaken. Dis-eased. I’m so glad to be home. It’s safe here. I don’t want to go out again.

When I heard myself say that, and when I realized I meant it, I felt old and frail. Which of course jacked everything else up a little higher.

It’s the next morning now. I’ve had some sleep. I’m aware how much my home means to me. How important it is to have this shelter right now. Yet, I still feel the dark penumbra of the virus corona. It has changed my world and I don’t like the feeling of threat that has come with it.

Kabbalah, Letters, Literature, Myth and Story, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Not a vice

Leave a comment

Spring and the Corona Lunacy II

Thursday gratefuls: Overcast early morning. Kate, progress. Seoah and I at the grocery store. The clan that gathers on Tuesday mornings. That cool night. The howls. The coronavirus. Reshaping our lives, our history. Other plagues that teach us how to live with this one. History. Eduardo and Holly. Jude. Zeus and Boo. Even the new pine cones, still green on the Lodgepole branches. Pine pollen, tree sex about to get underway.

Gathering information. It eats up my time. Right now I have 30 tabs open in Firefox. Each tab is either an article or a video or an image I want to both read and collect. Most of them are from this morning.

Evernote is my enabler since it will save whatever I want. There are thousands of articles, youtube videos awaiting me there. And, I go back to them. I can find that article I remember from a couple of years ago. Or, all the notes on translating Ovid I took in 2013.

Now that I’m writing about it I look around my bookshelves and see the same inclination. Then, there’s that horizontal file cabinet and all the file-tubs on metal shelves. Travel souvenirs, small sculpture, a collection of snowglobes, art on the walls, stacked against the bookshelves. Some made by me.

Kate found this perfect space where my collections and I can be together with a view of Black Mountain and the Lodgepole Pines. I can sit inside my own mind, both its external and internal manifestations.

Started out writing this as a negative, a confessional piece about this vice I have for collecting. As I wrote, I thought, no, not a vice, just my way of being in the world.

On the Kabbalah zoom yesterday Jamie changed his name to I Am cloaked in a Jamie. When I saw that, I changed mine to Student masque. These are both instances of the Kabbalistic understanding of masks. We put on and take off masks all day, all life, perhaps all eternity long. Life is a mask for the elements held together in the shape of you. Your body is a mask for your neshama, your soul.

The student is a mask I wear, one I love. I put it on often, when I climb the stairs to this loft, it’s most often the student whose feet carry me. Other masks? Husband. Father. Friend. Nature lover. Pagan. Leftist. Advocate. Grandpop. Museum goer. Traveler. Abandoned boy. Dog companion. Fearful boy. Writer. Reviser. Gardener. Bee keeper. Scholar. Futurist.

The student loves to learn, to know. He is open, taking in new things, organizing them, saving them for future reference. He’s critical, too, as he has been taught, weighing evidence, comparing sources, looking for holes in the argument or how to shore up the argument.

Not a vice, just a mask.

Cooking, Dogs, Family, Kabbalah, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Weather +Climate

Soul

Leave a comment

Spring and the Corona Lunacy II

Wednesday gratefuls: Garbage men and women. King Sooper pick up today. Tony’s meat bundles that I collect on May 4th. Kate’s problem solving with her sewing machine. Rigel climbing up on the bed and plopping down right between us. Her head on my pillow. The cool night. Balmy days. The pine pollen to come. The coronavirus. What has it revealed today?

In dog news. Rigel tried for a daily record, scoring three loft treats in one day. Last night I brought Mark’s stimulus check up to the loft for safe keeping. I rarely go upstairs after supper, but Rigel was there, going for a third treat, a triple dip she rarely accomplishes. As house meany, I didn’t let her in the loft. She doesn’t know how expensive those treats are. All rabbit dog treats are not cheap.

Seoah gave us a reprise of her wonderful Swedish meatballs. Not even Ikea or the Swedish Institute in Minneapolis does a better meatball. These are really, really good. May have eaten a couple too many.

We still have snow in the backyard. Less and less everyday, but a yard cleanup is getting necessary. Like Minnesota, when the snow melts, detritus slowly sinks toward the ground. When I looked out the back window this morning, I saw an orange leg with green feet. Part of a dismembered dog toy. We see now what the dogs managed to smuggle outside during our winter snows.

Today in Kabbalah we’ll discuss soul. A tough topic. Bound up with centuries, even millennia of freight. I’ve begun using the word again in the last year after decades of setting it aside as too gnostic, too three-story universe, too weird. In the moment I believe soul refers to the whole of you, the best you, your buddha nature. With Art Green I believe soul represents the link between what seems to be the individual and the one. How all that works, I still don’t know.

Art has a nice piece on it. He shares my misgivings and also puts the afterlife aside as an unknown. The soul is God’s breath which gives us life. The last breath before we die returns to the one and afterward we offer up our elements to the elements. My paraphrase.

Commentary on the news, Dreams, Health, Our Land and Home, Politics, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, US History

Slow to Wake

Leave a comment

Spring and Corona Lunacy II

Monday gratefuls: Sweet potato pizza. No, really. Seoah found it on a Korean youtube cooking channel. Kate’s good days. Sleep. Lots of it. Bernard Cornwall and the TV adaptation of his Saxon novels: The Last Kingdom. The blue sky. The sun. Black Mountain. Cogency.

Sleep. Until 6:45. Usually up at 5:30 (or, 4:30 in the true time). Dreaming, unwilling to rise. Even though Kep jumped on me. Rigel barked. Kate poked me. Couldn’t. Get. Up. Finally. Still not awake. Writing anyhow.

Don’t know what to say next.

Check on the idiot. Who spent seven hours tweeting, retweeting. On Sunday. A nod to his evangelical sycophants? Not sure about that, but I am sure, after having read a Washington Post article that this guy is decompensating. He seems scared, isolated, unsure of what to do next. Imagine the prison a high profile, powerful job like President could be if you no longer felt you could do it. Instead of anger I’m beginning to feel sorry for DJT. Out of his depth, no tools. Months more in office with a crisis like no other roiling the waters.

If you love him, let him go. How his followers, his base base, should act toward him now.

Got further on reorganizing the loft. A periodic task which, when complete, energizes me. Will finish this week if the banker boxes come.

Of course, I have to wake up first. Soon. I hope. Things to do, but no places to go.

Coronavirus, Dogs, Family, Feelings, Health, Judaism, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

So Lucky

Leave a comment

Spring and Corona Lunacy II

Friday gratefuls: New tricks for an old dog. Appreciative inquiry. Kate on the board, planning for the next five years. Kate sewing. Kate smiling. Kate. Seoah and her sadness. The coronavirus, what has it done for you today? My life’s quieter, less strained. Got me into spring organizing for the loft. Has laid bare the true fault lines in our country: economic and racial inequity, the emissions which poison us and are overheating our planet, yet another wave of know nothingism. The virus is only a medical crisis and it will pass.

This morning about 5 am I came awake as I usually do around that time. The electric blanket warmed me, the cold night air streamed from my open window. Rigel was asleep, her head between mine and Kate’s, her long body stretched out. Kep curled up at the end of the bend. Kate was asleep, too. I laid there for about a half hour, feeling so lucky. So lucky.

About 5:30 Kep jumped on me, as he does every morning, eager and happy, pressing down, saying hello, good morning, let’s get up! Rigel, a very heavy sleeper, lifted her head. Oh, no. Not now. Let me sleep a little longer. Come on, Rigel, time for breakfast, let’s get up, big girl! Her head sinks back to the bed. Nope. Not right now.

Rigel! Get up. Time for breakfast. She slowly rises and shakes herself, standing on Kate’s legs. All right, all right. I’m coming. I let the two of them out by the downstairs door. They run off, their bladders full, like mine. We’re all just mammals, doing what us warm blooded animals do after waking.

The early morning goes on. Let them back inside. The clink of food in dog bowls. Treats. Kep goes back down to sleep with Kate. Rigel stays in the sewing room. I get the paper, put it at Kate’s place. Pour some cold coffee into the big Santa Claus mug, grab my phone. On the way out of the house and up to the loft I turn on Kate’s upstairs oxygen, make sure the canula is around the newel post nearest the downstairs.

There’s a light coating of snow. I felt it during the night on my head. That open window. A bit of ice on the stairs up to the loft. Careful with my feet, that hard-earned Minnesota knowledge of how to walk on slippery surfaces.

It’s around 6 when I open the door, switch on the lights. Things are in a bit of disarray, more so than usual that is, because I’m rearranging furniture. Yesterday and the day before I moved my computer to a different spot. It had been in the same one for almost five years. Books related to Judaism going on a freshly cleaned off bookshelf. Reading chairs now with their backs to the window overlooking Black Mountain and Black Mountain Drive.

When my order of five banker’s boxes get here, I’m going to store all my object files from my docent days in them, take the boxes downstairs to the garage. Never used them. The plastic bins they’re in now will receive the two million words of Ancientrails printed out last fall. The pages will have cardboard year separators like a comic book store. That will free up the desk which Kate used for study during medical school. It will go parallel to the art cart and on the rug. On it will go my painting and sumi-e supplies, freeing up the whole surface of the art cart for painting, working with ink.

The manuscript of Jennie’s Dead is on the round table next to the computer, partially edited, awaiting more work. It’s only now, in retrospect, that I can see through the cloud that settled over me, a fog hiding the creative impulse, the simple joys.

So lucky.

Coronavirus, Jefferson County, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, The West, Third Phase, US History

HOWL

Leave a comment

Spring and the Corona Lunacy

Tuesday gratefuls: All those protesters, Corona Lunacy in full bloom. Seoah shopping at Safeway. The vast amounts of creative energy flowing into peak TV. Game of Thrones. The earlier rising of the sun. Kep and Rigel, still on the 4:30 am clock. Now 5:30. Cool air. Books. Books. The coronavirus, cutting right through the veneer of civilization in the U.S. Friends. You know who you are.

Howling. 8:00 p.m. Go outside. Howl. Continue until it fades. Since early in the lock down neighbors throughout Conifer: Kings Valley, Aspen Park, Evergreen Meadows, up here on Shadow, Conifer, and Black Mountains, we go out at 8 and howl. Doesn’t last long, two minutes, three minutes, but the sound is authentic enough to get Rigel’s attention.

Started out in support of the medical personnel. Now, though. I’m here. I’m here. Still alive. Still ok. This is us. Like the old ladies in the Italian city who threw open their windows and sang into the plague. But this is the mountains, not the land of opera. So, we howl.

Reminded me. A night several years ago in January, north of Ely, on a lonely road leading into the forest. I stood with the eight other students and howled into the night. The wolves answered us. This was a week long educational program put on by the International Wolf Center.

Howling is about solidarity, about personal presence, about territory. It’s also a bit silly up here, and fun.

Commentary on the news, Coronavirus, Family, Friends, Politics, Shadow Mountain, The West, Writing

Give Me Liberty or Give Me Covid

Leave a comment

Spring and the Corona Lunacy

Monday gratefuls: Kate in her sewing room. Making cloth masks. With pockets for coffee filters. So good. Oh Death by Ralph Stanley. Talking about death with my old friends on Zoom. Mario, it’s still too abstract. More real in our 80’s or 90’s. Glad he thinks so. The Riyadh, Singapore, San Francisco, Rocky Mountain connection. Got out Jennie’s Dead, started reading. Will start writing when I’m caught up. Feeling better overall.

Might be the imminence of spring. Might be the space between bloody January and today. Might be Kate’s incremental improvements with her fingers and her leaking problems. It certainly is not the current state of Covid-19 testing. Whatever it is, maybe just my cyclical psyche ready for a new era, I’m feeling strong.

Organizing my loft. Again. A periodic task necessitated either by a long down period like this last one or a time of full on work like I’m entering now. Another facet of this change might be an inverse response to cabin fever. I can’t go out, so I may as well go in.

Brother Mark sent me a picture from a rally, a sign that said, Give me Liberty or Give me Covid. These folks understand liberty and freedom in their most restrictive meaning. Liberty means you can’t tell me what to do and freedom means only freedom from, not freedom for, too.

Both have more expansive connotations. Liberty is also the ability to choose for others, to use your power, your resources on behalf of your neighbors. Freedom is not only freedom from the unreasonable intrusion of the state or the opportunity to follow your own dreams wherever they may lead. It’s also freedom to choose community responsibility. Freedom to vote, to organize, to lift up your nation. To stay in your home not only on your own behalf, but also in service to your elders, to the vulnerable.

Give me liberty or give me Covid illustrates too well the blinkered version of Lady Liberty, the one proclaimed by those yellow flags with the snake. That liberty means stay the fuck outta my way. Or, else. Misunderstanding the nature of liberty can be fatal. That sign proves it. Not sure how, or even if, this truncated view of two basic American values gets remedied. Especially if the false choice between liberty and illness gains traction.

What do you when the treasonous bastard encouraging these already misguided folks is the President? Save your sacred Second Amendment, he says. And the connection to all of this is what? Shoot the sick ones? As a New York Times story title says: Head of Government Encourages Anti-Government Protesters. This is where Kristallnacht came from. We’re way past the turn off for a reasonable resolution to this stand off.

What comes next? No idea.

Coronavirus, Family, Friends, GeekWorld, Mountains, Shadow Mountain

High Tech, High Touch

Leave a comment

Spring and the Corona Luna

Friday gratefuls: Kate on coming to bed last night, “I’m super tired.” She stayed for the whole virtual board meeting and long range planning session. The snow. About a foot of new whiteness. Black Mountain white against blue. Cold weather. Good sleeping. Unorthodox on Netflix. Good high intensity workout yesterday.

The Third Wave. Alvin Toffler. 1980. He said in it, high tech, high touch. That stuck with me. What he meant was, the more we use high technology, and it’s gotten higher and higher since 1980, the more we will want in the flesh interactions with others. We’re living through dramatic proof of his prescience.

Zoom. Went from 10 million users to 200 million over the first weeks of stay at home orders. Virtual seder. Online mussar class. The clan gathering: Mary, Mark, Diane. Old friends: Mark, Tom, Paul, Bill. About to arrange a gathering for the Johnson sisters. Kabbalah class. All zoom. Woollies, too.

The sessions with fewer folks work better for me than the larger ones. The seder was meaningful and Rabbi Jamie used breakout rooms to help, but it still felt distant. Although, the same number of people at round tables at Mt. Vernon Country Club would have been distant, too. Yet not. Bodies are important. Just their presence is reassuring. 53 people

Mussar has fifteen. It works well, but I wonder how well it would work if we didn’t already know each other. The Kabbalah class works, but I preferred the one day I drove into the Kabbalah Experience space. Since I didn’t know these folks at the beginning, I rarely knew the context for their remarks.

The best are the Clan gathering and the Old Friends. But, again. These are folks I know well, over periods of many years. The Woolly sessions lie somewhere between these two and the others.

They are way better than nothing. I will stipulate that. I can see facial expressions, some body language, and it keeps us in touch with each others lives. All good.

But. I miss the actual flesh. Don’t want it to sound weird, but the embodied person is different from the virtual one. If we ever get holograms in wide use, I imagine it will be the same. We’re pack animals, like dogs, and an important part of the pack experience is physical presence.

As a temporary measure, the chance to interact even on screen is wonderful. It alleviates the worst part of physical distancing, staying at home: feeling shut in. Over time though I would miss the chance for casual moments off from the group, for hugs, for shaking hands.

Even though only yesterday I wrote about a personal stay at home order for a year, I find regular time with other folks, especially those I know and love, important. Like most introverts I find interaction with others draining, so I have limits. Not getting close to them these days.