Category Archives: Shadow Mountain

Jefferson County, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, Weather +Climate

Weather Forecast Mountain Style

October 8, 2017 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Harvest Moon

Jefferson and West Douglas Counties Above 6000 Feet/Gilpin/Clear Creek/Northeast Park Counties Below 9000 Feet Severe Watches & Warnings

Winter Storm Warning

Issued: 4:14 AM MDT Oct. 8, 2017 – National Weather Service

... Winter Storm Warning in effect from 9 PM this evening to 3 PM
MDT Monday... 

* what... heavy snow expected. Plan on difficult travel conditions,
  including during the morning commute on Monday. Total snow
  accumulations of 6 to 10 inches, with localized amounts up to 14 
  inches, are expected.

* Where... Rocky Mountain National Park and the Medicine Bow 
  range, the mountains of Summit County, the Mosquito Range, and 
  the Indian Peaks, the northern Front Range foothills and the 
  southern Front Range foothills

Great Work, Jefferson County, Mountains, Original Relation, Plants, Shadow Mountain, The West, Weather +Climate

Gasthaus

October 6, 2017 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Harvest Moon

Coming out of Beth Evergreen last night the full harvest moon hung over the town, silver and wonderful. It limned the mountains, highlighted the blue in the spruce tips on the drive back up Shadow Mountain. Earlier in the evening we saw several mule deer on the way down the mountain, does and bucks, then five or six of the much larger elk wandering around, ironically, right below a flashing Elk Crossing sign.

The Arapaho National Forest wraps around Black Mountain Drive/Brook Forest Drive so as we make our way up and down the mountains into Evergreen we’re surrounded not by residential development, though there is some, but mostly by forest, lodgepole pines, aspen higher up, Colorado blue spruce and ponderosa pine lower down that come right up to the road, as does the slope of the various mountains we pass.

At night this drive activates my fantasy life. I imagine the mountain lions and bears, the mule deer and the elk, the skunks, pine martens, pikas, Abert and red squirrels, an occasional bull snake all living there, either in hiding or bedded down or up and stealthily pursuing their next meal. Though the portion of the Arapaho National Forest where we are is not wilderness, it does abut the Mt. Evans Wilderness Area and Staunton State Park. Once in awhile moose come through our area, too, though they’re mostly toward the west, in Staunton and toward Bailey. This is the WUI, pronounced wooee, the wildlife/urban interface.

You could say we don’t belong here, we humans, that this mountainous land belongs to the mountain lion and the bear, the magpies and the Great Horned Owls. And you would be right, of course. Yet the truth is we humans do not have a place uniquely ours. We’re an adaptable species, able to live on islands, on the coasts of great oceans, lakes and rivers, on deserts and vast fertile plains. We’ve spread from Africa, where we roamed the veldt, hunting and gathering over vast stretches of land, to colder climates in the north and to all the continents of the planet.

I say we do belong here, but only as guests, as itinerant cousins of the wild animals, the sturdy pines. But, then, we are guests, too, on the Great Plains stretching north and south in the center of North America. Guests, too, on Iceland, Greenland, Britain. Guests as well in the Himalayas, in the jungles of the Congo and on the Sahara. Guests in the high Andes and on the distant lands of Tierra del Fuego.

As guests we have to realize we share our living space with species not as adaptable as we are. As guests we owe it to our neighbors to make our presence as unintrusive as possible, as honoring as possible. One manifestation of this honor is driving with care, going more slowly than perhaps we might want because our neighbors could need to cross the road. Another part of it is to see that the land we own (ha. that we temporarily inhabit) is as friendly to the locals as it can be. That we don’t poison the land, that we don’t build more than we need.

I tend to think of it as living in a vast apartment building. Our noise level, our lights, our motors, our driveways all impact the folks living in the next place. So we need to be considerate. When we leave our apartment, when our time as guests of Shadow Mountain and the Arapaho Forest is over, the neighbors remain. They own the condos and they can’t move. Leaving the place better than we found it is the least we can do.

Great Wheel, Jefferson County, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, Weather +Climate

Out With The Old Season

October 2, 2017 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Harvest Moon

Snow this morning. Coming down in fat flakes, wet, the small deck outside the backdoor slick. I let the dogs out briefly before their breakfast and they slipped a little. They have to relearn to drive on snow and ice just like us humans. We took an abrupt right turn last week away from a fading summer and toward late fall. This was Black Mountain on Wednesday of last week.

20170928_081848

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

On the Road with the Fellow Traveler

October 1, 2017 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Harvest Moon

Arthur Szyk (1894-1951). The holiday Series, Rosh Hashanah (1948), New Canaan,CT — Arthur Szyk (1894-1951). The holiday Series, Rosh Hashanah (1948), New Canaan, CT

This year I attended the first Rosh Hashanah service and both Yom Kippur services. More of the Hebrew has become familiar, at least the transliterations. More of the melodies and songs, too. There are still times when I feel awkward, out of place. At certain points, in certain prayers, for example, the congregation turns to face the east, takes a slight dip at the knee and bows. Not sure exactly what’s going on there. Not all men wear kippahs, a smattering of women do. Same with prayer shawls. Not wearing either one does not make me uncomfortable as it first did, but I’m still aware of it.

Especially at the High Holiday services there were many I did not know, since some Jews attend the High Holidays in a fashion like the Christmas and Easter alumi in Christian churches. 70% of Jews in the U.S. do not attend synagogues, but many come for certain liturgical high points, including Pesach and Purim.

Tree of Life. Painted by Beth Evergreen religious school

Even so, there are now more people whom I know and in turn know me or Kate. That makes going to the synagogue a place to be seen, seen in the same way the Woolly Mammoths saw each other. We’re still new to most of the relationships, a year plus for the people we’ve come to know best like Marilyn and Irv, Tara, Rabbi Jamie, Leah, Elizabeth, Sally, Fran, Lisa, Anshel, Rich, Allan, Ron, Jamie and Steve, but they’re developing. I’ve learned to be patient with the evolution of friendships and close acquaintances, letting them grow in a natural way.

In the mussar vaad practice group, MVP, Marilyn asked me to present on kavod, or the midot (character or soul trait) of honor, dignity and respect. This is even more intimidating than presenting to the Thursday mussar group because this group includes Tara, Marilyn, Rabbi Jamie and Ron, a former script writer in Hollywood, very bright, but, at the same time, more fun because it’s a challenge. I’ve found an important component of staying vigorous emotionally, intellectually and physically at 70 is taking on challenges, much like a decision some years ago to test my self-perception as a bad language learner with Latin.

Showing up to the MVP, the Thursday mussar group, taking kabbalah and Hebrew, going to some services, attending holiday events, and working on the adult education committee are all moments when relationships can grow and I really enjoy working with these folks. Beth Evergreen was a great find for us.

Dogs, Family, Jefferson County, Mountains, Shadow Mountain

Oh, No

September 30, 2017 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Harvest Moon

Gabe yesterday hunting for bones on Black Mountain

Gabe came in yesterday afternoon (He’s with us due to no school on Friday.) and said, “Grandpop, there’s birds in the sewing room.” Huh? Kate’s sewing room, the old garage remodeled by the last owner, opens to the outside and due to the bug free environment here–at least relative to Minnesota–we often keep the door open so the dogs can go in and out. Easier on all of us.

Sure enough, there were two small sparrow sized birds in the sewing room, fluttering and searching for places where they could see light, unfortunately mostly through windows. I opened windows, left the door open and began to talk to them gently, encouraging them to find their way outside. Gabe, unbeknownst to me at the time, had named them Jerry and Billy.

Jerry and Billy somehow found the window above Kate’s sewing machine a possible escape portal. Nope. Closed. Billy fluttered up by the top of the moveable bottom half of the window; Jerry chose the window sill, trying to push through the unexpected and unseen barrier with no luck.

Then. Rigel, who had come in the open door, looked over, saw the poor fluttering bird, ran over there and grabbed Jerry in her mouth.

Gabe, “Oh, no.”

Jerry seemed lifeless after Rigel took him in her mouth, not gently at all, and bit down. She took Jerry outside, finished him, then ate him, most of him. Gabe later buried the one wing and mostly empty body cavity in the front yard. He said, “I had fun burying Jerry.”

Hobbes said, “Life is mean, nasty, brutish and short.” I’m sure Jerry would agree.

Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Writing

On Daily Rhythms

September 28, 2017 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Harvest Moon

A peculiar sequelae of my new schedule, afternoons remain inchoate. After the nap and before supper. Not sure yet what to do with that. Might be good for games and puzzles? I want to read then, too, and do Latin (or, Hebrew). Perhaps once kabbalah and Hebrew classes get cooking I’ll find this the natural time for that work. The issue is peculiar because once I’ve fed the dogs, gotten my writing done, finished items off my to do list and completed my workout, I’ve already had 7 plus active hours.

So after the nap there’s this, ok, you’ve done enough, kick back, relax feeling, yet it feels off since it’s still the middle of the day. Weird. These matters do have a way of resolving themselves over time, so we’ll see.

Kate was in fine fettle yesterday. [fettle, what is that? state or condition of health says the online dictionary. Makes sense. Also, oddly, as a verb: trim or clean the rough edges of (a metal casting or a piece of pottery) before firing]. Anyhow she felt good and I felt good seeing her feel good. She’s done a great job of adjusting to Sjogren’s, not easy at all, and days like yesterday are the reward. May she string many of them together.

Mountains, News of the Strange, Science, Shadow Mountain, The West, Travel

Painted Ladies on Shadow Mountain

September 20, 2017 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Harvest (new) Moon

Belle-dame_(Vanessa_cardui)_-_Echinacea_purpurea_-_Havré_(3) Under the category of awe. In passing I noted a reference to butterflies being around in some numbers. One commenter on pinecam.com referred to them as painted ladies migrating.

This might have passed in and out of my attention, but I noticed a butterfly on Black Mountain Drive. Curious, I walked up the driveway to the road.

Sure enough, spread out sort of like the cross country runners in Ruth’s meet last night, there were butterflies going toward Evergreen, all of the ones I saw using the open space created by the road as a flight corridor.

I watched for a bit and they kept coming, isolated individuals, groups of two or three, sometimes more, flapping their apparently fragile wings, moving, just in my observation, great distances for their body size.

In Europe they migrate from Africa to Britain, as far as 9,000 miles. In our case they’re headed for New Mexico, Arizona and northern Mexico, just like the snowbirds who leave temperate climes for those warmer stretches of mother earth during the winter.

That such tiny creatures can travel so far, flying the whole way, then turn around and do it again, made me pause for a moment of awe. In retrospect it would have been appropriate to have crowds along Black Mountain Drive, cheering, applauding, “you can do it!”, “all the way to Mexico.”, maybe little sugar stands set out.

Those were the painted ladies on Shadow Mountain.

Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, The West, Weather +Climate

Falling

September 15, 2017 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Eclipse Moon

- Nancy Drew, “Morris Louis, 1959″, (96 x 92) acrylic, flock and glitter on canvas, 2002 (This piece was created as an homage to Morris Louis, influenced by his work from 1959) Dana McClure — – Nancy Drew, “Morris Louis, 1959″, (96 x 92) acrylic, flock and glitter on canvas, 2002 (This piece was created as an homage to Morris Louis, influenced by his work from 1959) Dana McClure

The eclipse moon, still in the sky, now three weeks after blotting out the sun at midday, has become a crescent. I just looked up the moon calendar and noticed that the new moon falls on the two days prior to the fall equinox. The beginning of fall on the Great Wheel comes, this year, with the new energy of a rising and waxing moon.

Golden spears have begun to show up among the lodgepole pines on Black Mountain. Fall here announces itself with a subtle show of a single color, gold amongst green. As fall progresses, the subtlety disappears in wide swaths of yellow gold splashed across the mountains as a colorfield artist (Morris Louis, for example) might. Mountains become three dimensional canvases, temporary installations, a visual treat announcing the coming of the white season.

The angle of the sun has changed, it’s lower in the sky now, spreading its considerable energy over wider and wider areas, lowering the amount of warmth we receive over the course of a day. The trees and the birds and the bears and the elk and the mountain lions know this. The elk rut has begun and there are reports of bugling elk with large harems of twenty five cows coming in from many locations. A photograph and video collection on a local facebook group showed two bull moose with their velvet recently scraped off, clacking their wide racks against each other in a marshy area about twenty miles from here.

The Mt. Evans’ road has been closed for two weeks now, not to open again until after Memorial Day, 2018. OpenSnow, a website for skiers, announced the first snow of the season in the Cascades, noting that it should help fight the wildfires burning now in the northwest.

This turning of the Great Wheel brings with it, at least for me, renewed energy, an eagerness to engage the world fully. Heat saps me, makes me want to put on one of those funny hats that has room for two beer cans fitted to plastic hoses for constant cooling sips, sit down, and wait until, well, now.

I’m grateful for this seasonal change, though the growing season has its definite charms, too. It’s just that the temperatures important for plant growth are not so pleasing to me. And, BTW, Kate has pulled off a mountain gardening trick. She has several tomatoes ripening in our single 5 gallon plastic bucket container garden. My Demeter.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Friends, Mountains, Mussar, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain

Embarrassed

September 14, 2017 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Eclipse Moon

mussar chart The mind and heart, so wonderful, so necessary, so amazing, but also so fragile. Take mine for instance. Yesterday was a full day, beginning, as my days do, around 4:45 am. I got the dogs fed, ancientrails written, Jennie’s 750 words written and went downstairs to eat breakfast and make two sugar cream pies.

I met Rabbi Jamie for lunch in Evergreen, drove back to Shadow Mountain and took Kate to Bailey for her Patchworker’s gathering. Stopped by Happy Camper on the way back home. A 30 minute rest, then back to Evergreen for a meeting about the first ever Evergreen Forum.

Here’s the tricky part for me, the tricky part for moving more fully into the space of Beth Evergreen. My responsibility for the meeting was to get the four panelists there. I reminded them all in an e-mail a week plus ago, but only Rabbi Jamie and Rev. Dr. Judy Morley of the Science of Mind church showed up. I was embarrassed. Of course, they’re adults and had plenty of prior notice; still, I felt I failed at part of my task. Not a great feeling. The planning went fine though and we got the work done.

However. This meeting preceded a second meeting, Mussar Vaad Practice leadership, of which I am also a part. (MVP, get it?) At this one I’m part of a group of six taking responsibility for continuing the integration of mussar’s character development work into congregational life. This was the meeting for which I baked the pie.

During this meeting, I fell into a dispirited place. Dispirited is such an interesting and evocative word. Exactly right here. My spirit, my ability to engage as me, waned during the course of the time. Why? Well, MVP intends to lead by deepening our own personal practice of mussar. Part of that practice involves focusing for a month on a particular character trait, last month’s was self-awareness, this month’s is awe.

The practice involves using a focus phrase, mine was be aware, to keep our attention focused on how we are with that particular trait over the month. I said I’d journal my awareness. Others made lists twice a day of how they made choices, another put a note on their car dashboard asking, Where I am going, why, Where I am going, how, and another turned off the radio in their car and used that time to focus, while yet another checked in on how they were eclipsing themselves, hiding their true feelings behind socially expected behavior.

At check in we said how it had gone over the month. Most of the folks had very fruitful months with some behavior changes I would describe as significant. When it came my turn to check in, I couldn’t remember any of the things about which I’d journaled and I admitted that the journaling didn’t last long. As my Woolly friends who read this will know, I love assignments and am diligent about fulfilling them. Comes from all those years as a student. Except I hadn’t this time. Again, I felt embarrassed.

Too, this meeting went until 8:30 p.m. I’m in bed at 8:00 p.m. since I get up at 4:45 or 5:00 to feed the dogs and start my day. I’m not sure, but I think as my mind begins to move toward sleep, at least at this age, my emotional resilience goes down, especially when I’m out.

The end result of this was that I came home feeling like a failure. Too big a word? Not really. The good news here is that I recognize the context for this feeling, why it came over me and that it was contextual, not core. I told Kate I’d feel better after some rest. And I did.

Being older means having gone through this cycle before and being self-aware (hah, ironic, eh, in light of last month’s character trait?) enough to know the feeling will pass. This is so important, though it may not be obvious. If I allow my embarrassment to mutate into shame, then it could well weaken the bonds I’ve begun to develop at Beth Evergreen.

Shame at not being able to fulfill my obligations could make me much more reticent in future meetings and in general with the people involved. It could push me away from Beth Evergreen. But that only happens if I see the embarrassment (my reaction) as being produced by the other’s shaming me. If I understand and own the reaction as my own, and as a reaction to circumstance, not as a character flaw, then I can continue in community.

A tough but good learning.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Health, Judaism, Mussar, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Writing

Engaged

September 12, 2017 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Eclipse Moon

The waning Eclipse Moon stands high in the southern sky this morning above Orion’s head and shoulders. The brightness of even a half moon obscures many stars, a good reminder that light does not always reveal. It can hide things, too.

Today is a busy one. Once I’ve finished my writing, ancientrails and Jennie’s Dead’s 750 words, I’m going to make two sugar cream pies. One is for home, the other for the mussar leadership group that meets tonight. Sugar cream pies are a distinct cultural marker for the Hoosier state, but more than that, they’re really delicious. Why I don’t make them often.

At noon Rabbi Jamie and I are going to eat at Sushi Win, a sushi joint, excellent, in Evergreen. We’re going to discuss the Evergreen Forum, in particular the meeting with the four participants at 4:00 p.m. this afternoon. We have to decide on format, setup, a questionnaire. The topic, prayer and worship in each person’s tradition, is already chosen.

kaddish the first line from Bleichrode prayer book 1923

Judaism, evangelical Christianity, science of mind and Islam will present this coming Saturday night. This will be the first of what we plan to be quarterly events. I’m excited about it, a little nervous, since it’s my idea, but Beth Evergreen is a collaborative place and many others have helped move the concept to this point. Next up will be a Buddhist, a Sikh, a Hindu and a Native American. That will be December 5th. A visiting scholar will present in the first quarter of 2017 on Reconstructionist Judaism’s thinking on these topics.

After lunch with Rabbi Jamie I’m going back to Shadow Mountain. Kate needs to get to the library in Bailey for her patchworkers group which meets there. I’ll take the opportunity to to go over to The Happy Camper and pick up some edibles.

Back home for a nap, then over to Beth Evergreen for the meeting at 4:00. Following this is the mussar leadership group at 6:30. Home around 8:30 or 9:00 p.m. A very full day.