Fall New (Thanksgiving) Moon
A wild cousin on nearby Marauder Avenue. Yesterday morning, early.
Category Archives: Shadow Mountain
Shadow Mountain Journal
Fall Hunter Moon
Pain. Can make you tired. Can make it difficult to focus. Just plain hurts. My left knee has gone from bad to very bad. Trying various meds as a way to make it from now until January. Some success. Pain is a peculiar phenomenon, so assertive, so real; yet totally individual. Inaccessible to another. A message that, once sent, it would be nice to be able to turn off.
Superior Wolf continues to grow. 50,000 words. Writing is so much damned fun. Interesting to see a story unfold from the tips of my fingers, words and ideas following one another, no idea where they’re coming from. Doesn’t seem probable, but it happens. Everyday. Odd.
The aspens stand unclothed, their skirts dropped by the big winds we had last week. I’m glad they’re here. Realized yesterday that bare deciduous trees are a marker of fall for me, being a Midwest boy. We’re in that time between the falling of the leaves and the coming of the snow, a time with a skeletal aesthetic, when a senescence aesthetic with browns, tans, ochres in various shades colors the mountain meadows, an arid aesthetic with little rain, little snow, mountain streams at their low ebb. Samain, next Monday, is the holiday of this transition time, a holiday of the veil between this world and the Other World thinned. The growing season is well over, the season of harvest is ending. The fallow time comes next.
Kate went to Simchat Torah at Beth Evergreen last night. This holiday marks both the end of Sukkot and the annual end of reading through the Torah. I chose not to go because it involves dancing and lots of standing. The congregation holds the Torah scroll at various points, symbolizing the year’s readings and the Torah’s ability to link the congregation together.
The rabbi, in this case Jamie, goes around and tells each person which portion of the Torah they hold. Kate had the story of Jacob and the angel at the Jabbok Ford. Probably my current favorite Biblical passage. I like the notion of struggle, of wrestling through the night, with the sacred. I like the suggestion that such a struggle can change your identity, give you a new name and a new purpose.
The Unexpected. Snow.
Fall Hunter Moon
Didn’t expect snow this morning, but there it was, white in the yard. The season is trying to push toward winter, but has a bad case of reticence.
I’ve been working on the second chapter of Superior Wolf. It got plenty of critiques, valid ones, in my writing group, so I decided to rewrite it. I believe version 2.0 will be better.
Kathleen Donahue. Died. I met Kathleen, really, on facebook, though she was from Alexandria, my hometown. She was seven years younger than me, meaning she was in 6th grade when I graduated from high school. She moved to California long ago, got involved in the music business writing lyrics, suffered through two violent attacks and had an iconoclastic personality.
About six months ago she posted that an unexpected finding during a visit to the doctor had uncovered stage 4 lung cancer. They gave her about six months to live. I’m surprised how much her death affected me. Social media has its rightful critics, but for the purpose of staying in touch with old friends and faraway family, for the opportunity to renew or begin acquaintances with people with whom there is some connection already, they offer a possibility unavailable when I was younger.
And with that opportunity comes the chance for grief.
Kate and I did the drive into Denver yesterday. A long way for nosepads for a pair of glasses and to have some Mac repair guys wave their hand over her Ipad. They made it all better. There are things you can’t accomplish in the mountains, these are two of them.
Jon’s in a much better place. If things remain as they are, he will get most of what he wants in the divorce’s final orders, due November 28th. It’s gratifying to see that his strategy of taking responsibility, being open to negotiation and trying to avoid stirring things up in this delicate pre-final orders stage is working.
Eating Sunshine
Fall Hunter Moon
We had two ribeye steaks last night. After Kate and Ruth lit the shabbos candles, I said my piece about the cattle we knew from the meadow. The primary point was to say thank you to the animal who gave his or her life. The words felt clumsy and anachronistic in my mouth, but right. It was a simple moment, not long, but placing us, as brother Mark pointed out, among others from Jain to Native Americans who stop to honor their food.
It particularly felt right juxtaposed against the familiar Midwestern grace, Bless this food to the use of our bodies. The food is all about us. We can safely ignore the real animals, the real vegetables because God made them for us to eat. This is another way in which traditional Christian values deflect believers from the world around them to the world beyond or at least to a source beyond.
This was a pagan ceremony, one that directs us toward the vital and necessary web of interdependence that sustains us all. This particular cow was not a sacrifice to an abstract principle. In fact there was nothing abstract about it at all. This meat came from an animal that lived this year, ate grass that grew this year, nourished by rain that fell this year, breathed oxygen this year. And her essence did not reach the gods through an altar fire, rather it entered into the truest and most significant transubstantiation, the same transubstantiation that occurred when the grass entered her four stomachs, a transubstantiation facilitated by water falling from the mountain skies of Colorado and the true and astounding miracle of photosynthesis. 
Ultimately our meal, not only the beef, but the green beans, the baked potatoes, the pasta and pineapple, the bacon bits and sour cream, was on the table, hecatombs for humans, by the power of nuclear fusion. The sun projects light and warmth into the solar system it holds in its gravitational thrall. On this earth the also miracle of evolution, began among the deep sea vents billowing out sulfur and heat from earth’s own interior, has found a way to embrace Sol, our sacred source of life and light.
(eatsunshine) We eat sunshine. Reimagining faith then must embrace astronomy, evolution, plant biology, animal science, human culture. This embrace occurs most intimately each time we sit down to eat, no matter the culture or religious beliefs represented. We live and move and have our being thanks to the elemental forces driving our local star and the astonishing fact that our planet has shaped its own elements into hands and leaves and hearts and minds able to receive those forces into our own bodies. Quite amazing.
A Kol Nidre Night
Fall Hunter Moon
When Kate and I drove home from the kol nidre service at Beth Evergreen last night, the Hunter Moon lit up a sky covering labyrinth of white fluffy clouds. Occasionally, a few clouds would become very bright, then a hole would open, briefly, and the three quarter moon would not only backlight the cloud cover, but provide a luminous presence, too. It was a magical sky, a sort that seems particular to the onrushing fall. Aspens still blaze bright gold in some places, in others the leaves have turned brown and blown away leaving stands of naked branches as harbingers of the winter months.
The kol nidre service starts Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, and has many elements, most elements, new to me. Even so, I could tell that this service with roots in the middle ages as well as the ancient past, spoke of a people, a tribe, with a nuanced understanding of what it means to be human. We are neither angels nor devils, rather we do good one minute and bad the next. Knowing this, placing it at the heart of the most sacred day of the year, makes Judaism a powerful poem. It teases out the curious mix of pride and shame that inhabits us all, says, yes, ok, but now let’s focus on next year. Let’s seek pardon and forgiveness for where we failed and reinforcement for what was good.
I feel odd at Beth Evergreen. My physiognomy is out of place. The language of many of the prayers and songs is foreign to me. I don’t feel, and don’t expect to feel, part of the tribe. Yet, Kate feels, is, part of the tribe. Also, much of the content resonates with my own faith reimagining project.
I’m learning, at 69, that analytical thought is not the best tool for religious insight. Rather, the heart and its contradictions, its powerful pushes and pulls, can create a warm and joyous place where even the most egregious of errors can be contained without problem.
Yesterday
Fall Hunter Moon
Superior Wolf has reached a rough half way point. Maybe. I’ve written about 45,000 words toward a goal of 90,000. I say maybe because my ambitious goal for it may require a longer novel, perhaps as much as 150,000 words. Not sure yet, not sure right now how I’ll know if I need to go longer. My goal is to write a novel of a sort I admire, long and bending of genre, deeply researched, typified by two books: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke and The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. Superior Wolf feels like my best effort toward this goal of anything I’ve written.
750 words a day seems like a sweet spot for me. Sometimes it takes 30 minutes. Other days four or five hours. But writing 750 words every day produces a steady accumulation of text, enough to make it seem both adequate and effective. Self reinforcing.
Working on homeowners insurance right now, a fraught topic in the red zone. The red zone, which I have mentioned before, is the area in Colorado most likely to experience wildfire. Jefferson County, our home county is the long, narrow county which abuts the southwest side of the Denver metro (gray blob, high center right). We are smack in the middle of Jeffco’s redzone.
There are many things to consider, but the most important is the replacement value of the home. Since replacement for a structure will be undertaken in a contemporary environment (at the time of the fire), the home’s initial construction value is irrelevant. What matters is what it will take to rebuild an equivalent structure when a fire occurs. This is, of course, affected by any upgrades. We’ve added solar panels, refreshed the kitchen and redone the downstairs bathroom. You don’t want to pay for too much replacement value, but you for sure don’t want to have too little. A tough balance to strike.
Also called the guy who installed our boiler for an inspection before winter gets ornery.
Final activity for yesterday was changing the oil in the snowblower. If you have any mechanical aptitude, this is probably not worth mentioning. In my case the material world and I struggle every time we come in contact. I did get the job done, but it took much more thinking and jiggering than it might have. Example: to drain the oil the snowblower has to be tipped over on its side, but not fall over. That meant balancing the snowblowers unwieldy bulk with my legs while my arms prevented it from tipping over all the way. The result was dependence on my knees for backward stability. And that left one isn’t working so well right now. Gave me a couple of interesting moments.
A sort of gett’er done day.
White
Fall Hunter Moon
I didn’t post these when it happened, on Wednesday of this week, but we’ve had our first exposure to the upcoming winter. We still have snow in our backyard which faces north and the ski runs cut into the face of Black Mountain also have snow. It’s higher and the runs have trees for shade. You can see them in the first picture.
Do You Know Any Stars?
Fall Hunter Moon
Looked at Orion on the way up here this morning. He warms my heart like a familiar friend, a friend who comes for the season. I have greeted his return each autumn for 48 years. We first became acquainted during the 11-7 shift at Magnetic Cookware in Muncie, Indiana. I worked there as a security guard. When I see him in the southern sky, I smile.
Hokusai, the great Japanese ukiyo-e printmaker, followed the Northstar sect of Buddhism. In one sense we obviously project our sensibilities on these celestial objects. That’s clear when we look at the different names various cultures have given to the same identifiable stars or constellations.
In another sense, and more important to me, we see the Drinking Gourd, or the Big Dipper, or the Great Bear, or Orion as distant reminders of the changing seasons here on earth and we use them as sailors and caravans in the Rub al Khali, as farmers and hunters have used them, as guides. They are not, therefore, far away from us in the collaborative sense. The vast distances that separate us from these solar engines are irrelevant to their purpose as way finders and markers of seasonal transitions.
No wonder, in a world lit only by fire, that the stars were the work of gods. We might think we know them better now, now that we can identify their chemistry, understand their age and locate them in a 3-D universe, but that’s only a material, physical way of knowing. Important in its way, yes. Perhaps even key to the future of human existence. Still, very different from that night beacon lighting the way to freedom for escaping slaves. And, very different from Orion as my friend and companion for 48 autumns and winters.
In these latter uses the stars are important parts of our life right here on this planet, giving us direction and even emotional sustenance, clueing us to the coming of spring or the dog days of summer or the fall harvest.
As the squat Welshman asked me at St. Winifred’s Holy Well in Holywell, “Do you know any stars?”
photo credit: Orion Head to Toe, by Rogelio Bernal Andreo, creative commons license at Orion
Middot
Fall Hunter Moon
Snow. An inch or two falling right now. Wet, heavy. A reminder that the season has changed, is changing. Warm days ahead yet, so the solar snow shovel should take care of this round.
Speaking of seasons, this is not the silly season; it’s the Insane Clown Posse season. When a reactionary like Mike Pence gets kudos for a stable debate performance, the world has gone seriously out of whack. This is a guy who tried to abrogate the first amendment, destroy unions, and denigrates women. The only reason he looked less than totally unappealing is the comparison to his running mate, Donald the Hair Trump. OK, Kaine wasn’t much better, but, hey, these guys were picked as Vice-Presidential candidates for a reason. Whatever it was.
The bathroom is now complete. Yowza.
Yesterday was a reading day, getting up to speed on the middot (character trait) of watchfulness. The notion of Mussar is to take character traits like watchfulness, explicate them, then practice them. Literally. Mussar encourages taking a character trait like watchfulness, then working over the period of a month to manifest it in your life or raise your observance of it to a higher level. Watchfulness entails what a Jesuit might call examen. Paying attention to your behavior, becoming conscious of it rather than letting it flow by out of habit unnoticed, that’s the first part.
The second part is evaluating that behavior as either of an outward oriented nature, yetzer tov, or of a self-ish nature, yetzer hara, inclination. This is a continuous process, a scrutiny that critiques actions. In fact, Mussar encourages this kind of self-examination at a regular time each day, too, partly, I think, to consolidate learning.
Watchfulness does not quite equate to mindfulness thought they’re definitely related ideas. Mindfulness has less of an orientation toward self-knowledge. So the middot for this month is watchfulness.
A Busy Few Days
Fall (High Holy Days) Hunter Moon
Yesterday included three separate trips into Evergreen. First, I took Kate in for the morning Rosh Hashanah service at Beth Evergreen. Then, I came back to answer questions, be available for the electrician and the painter. At noon I went back to pick up Kate and eat the after service lunch with her. All these trips included waits in two spots on Brook Forest Road for culvert repair. Stop. Slow. Stop. Slow.
It was a glorious Colorado day with brilliant blue punctuated by puffy white, a soft wind, then a brisk wind blowing and temperatures in the mid to high sixties. Low humidity.
The service, as services often do, ran 20 minutes over so I sat on a concrete patio outside of Beth Evergreen’s event hall. The brisk wind stripped pine needles from the huge ponderosa’s on the hillside sending flotillas of the connected two needle bunches at me. Round top tables set outside on the patio had rocks on their table cloths. A table near where I sat blew over; the tablecloth, I think, acting as a sail.
There were kugels in aluminum pans, bagels with lox and cream cheese or chopped egg, fresh cut vegetables, fruit. Paper plates and plastic forks. Lots of eating and greeting. Some very short skirts. Some men carried small cloth pouches containing prayer shawls and yarmulkes. Kids ran around,
teenagers laughed knowingly to each other. The wind continued to blow.
Back home we napped while Caesar finished painting. The big thing unfinished is installation of the shower door. That will probably happen today. The result is even more pleasing than I imagined it would be.
The third trip into Evergreen was for the Evergreen Writer’s Group at Where the Books Go. Writing groups are fragile things, easy to get wrong. They focus on critiquing work, the very work you’ve been laboring over in private for hours, days, sometimes weeks and years. The internal stakes are high, no matter the outward stance individuals take.
If one of Kate’s sewing groups was similar, the women would bring in their current project and ask others what they thought. How are the seams? What about color choice? The fabric. Their intention for the work and whether they seemed to be achieving it. Most important, the event would not be collaborative as these groups are, but critical.
There might be something to learn here. Perhaps the writing group could be more collaborative, be more a place where we could write together, work on current projects or doing writing exercises together.
Anyhow this trip to Evergreen was without the stop. slow. stop. slow bit because the Jeffco work crews had shut down the skip-loaders, dump trucks and road graders and gone home.
Kate went with me, dropping me off at the meeting and going on to the Lariat Lodge where we ate a couple of weeks ago. She managed to get most of the reading done for our Mussar group, four chapters worth! She also bought supper for me.
With the grandkids coming last Friday night and leaving at 2 pm on Sunday, then erev Rosh Hashanah that night, and the three trips into Evergreen yesterday, it’s been a very busy few days for us. And, we’re not done yet.
This morning I’m seeing Lisa Gidday, our internist, to discuss knee replacement. We’ll also get our flu shots. The week calms down some after this.