• Category Archives Plants

  • Belonging, holy

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    The Mountain Summer Moon

    Wednesday Gratefuls: A bright golden haze on the Meadow. A blue, smoky Sky above. Kamala Harris. 45, a man of chaos and hate. Election 2024. A political clown car. Labs. Middle Earth. Hobbits. Ruby. Cool nights. Good sleeping. A big workout yesterday. 160 minutes done for the week already. Lunch at Tara’s. Stories. Books. TV. Movies. Theater. Ovid. The new translation.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Ovid

    One brief shining: Still glad, all these years later, I bought a Landice treadmill, lifetime guarantee, brought it here from Minnesota with my dumb bells, balance boards, and yoga mats to create a small home gym outfitted now with stall mats, a wall mirror, a TRX mounted to the ceiling, and the TV which accompanies my workouts with stories as I do cardio, stretch, lift weights.

     

    Whimsy. Eudaimonia. Life of July 24, 2024. A response to the Ancient Brother’s question of the week: “All things considered are you happy? Why? Why not? What makes you happy? What makes you unhappy?” From Maine’s own man from away, Paul Strickland.

    I’m sometimes happy. Sometimes not. In my world happiness is more a mood, a transient state induced by, say, a chili-cheese hot dog, seeing a toddler, finding myself lost in a book. Maybe the afterglow of a lunch or breakfast, a good workout. I don’t seek happiness, it happens to me in this moment or that. Always glad when it does. A bath of endorphins is good for the soul.

    What I do seek is eudaimonia. Flourishing. Seeking satisfaction rather than achievement. As I consider it, not an ideology, but a way of integrating my sense of Self, my I am becoming, with life as it flows in and around me. Except in the academic world, and then without much true ambition, I’ve sought results that stem from my values. Those results, and/or the effort to realize them, matter to me. Success and failure are temporary states, neither definitive, neither more than a collective opinion.

    I want to emphasize integration. Though I find Maslow’s later hierarchy profound since it added a stage beyond self-actualization, I’ve been anti-transcendence for a long, long time. It implies leaving my Self, my I am, my neshamah behind for a purer, bigger place or experience. Nope. This body. This history. This mind. Damaged and flawed it has suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and the dizzying heights of accolades, sublime moments of intimacy, and the joy of being alive.

    Integration says nope I’m where I belong, among that and whom to which I belong and among whom I am a vital, unique presence. Valuable for my uniqueness, not for my capacity to leave my uniqueness behind for some spiritual space. My journey beyond self-actualization then lies in friendships, intimacy. In understanding how my Lodgepole companion and I share home ground. How the Mule Deer and the Elk, the Black Bears and the Mountain Lions are my neighbors. As in, Love thy neighbor as thyself. How as a human animal I am not only part of Mother Earth’s family, I have evolved from long ago kin whom I share with the Lodgepole and the Elk. I do belong here. Right here. Not out there or up there or behind that veil. Right. Here.

     

     


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  • Mountain Time

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    The Mountain Summer Moon

    Sunday gratefuls: The Ancient Brothers. Sleep. That nightmare with the undefeatable monster who kills everyone, enjoys it, and disappears at times. The Rockies. Gabe. Walking. RTD. My son and Seoah. Murdoch the languid. Bagel table yesterday. All Dogs. Everywhere. This benighted nation. The finished line. Blue Sky. Gentle Black Mountain.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: My Son

    One brief shining: We got here, let Rigel, Vega, and Kep out of the SUV after Tom’s marathon driving session from Andover to Shadow Mountain, the three Dogs ran around in the yard, peed, drank some Water, then ran right back to the SUV, jumped inside, and settled down for the ride home.

     

    Colorado has had many moments. The first one for me was that Samhain when I took possession of the house after closing. Walked out in the backyard. Three Mule Deer Bucks grazed quietly. I got closer to them than I would now, looked in their eyes. They looked back. By the time they turned and bounded away, I had the feeling that the Mountains had welcomed me, saying I belonged here.

    Acclimating to the altitude. While unpacking. Left Kate and me huffing and puffing. That one day in May the next year when I learned I had prostate cancer. The consolation of Deer Creek Canyon that followed. Prostatectomy in July of the same year. First time meeting Seoah.

    Finding CBE through the class on King David taught by Bonnie. Meeting Marilyn and Tara there.

    Doing the Fire mitigation, felling Lodgepoles with blue plastic ribbon tied to their trunk. The Durango/Mesa Verde trip with Paul, Tom, Ode.

    My son and Seoah getting married in Gwangu. Kate and mine’s last big trip together. Including Singapore and Mary’s kind gift of a stay in a hotel suite. The magic of Umar. Vega dying when we got home. Jon’s divorce. His decline starting.

    Cancer returning. Radiation. Buying Ruby for the A.C. while I drove to Lone Tree. Kate’s slow decline starting.

    Seoah coming in January to help out, having to stay until June. The pandemic. Gertie dying.

    Kate’s many hospitalizations. Her joyful time at CBE, living her Jewish life. Her death.

    Mourning and grief. Jon’s death.

    Somewhere in this time the start of the Ancient Brothers.

    Three years of visits to my son and Seoah in Hawai’i, then Korea after Kate died.

    Rigel’s death and Kepler’s death.

    The Elk Bull looked at me from within the Forest. In the rain. And the Mule Deer looking in my bedroom window late at night.

    My conversion and time overall at CBE.

    Trip to San Francisco.

    Now three years plus after Kate’s death, prostate cancer becoming more serious.

    Through all of this. The Rockies. Black Mountain. Shadow Mountain. Conifer Mountain. Bergen Mountain. Kate’s Creek and Valley. The Wild Neighbors. Black Bears. Elk. Mule Deer. Mountain Lions. Squirrels, Red and Abert’s. Marmosets. Chipmunks. Voles. Fox. Bobcat. Lynx. Rabbits. Rattle Snakes. Bull Snakes. Black Widow Spiders. Wolf Spiders. Maxwell Creek. Cub Creek. Upper Bear Creek. Bear Creek. Lake Evergreen. Evergreen, a Mountain town.


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  • Killer Robots

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    The Mountain Summer Moon

    Tuesday gratefuls: Kristie. Orgovyx. National Geographic, October 2009. Learning basic botany. Harder than I thought. Resilience. Zen. Chan. Tibetan. Vedanta. Avatars. Shiva. Brahma. Vishnu. Ganesha. Lakshmi. Zoroaster. Lao Tze. The old man. Zhuangzi. Exoplanets. Exudates. Exdates. Today’s date. This July 5th, 2024 life. Great Sol. All planets.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: The Periodic Table

    One brief shining: Cancer has the same flavor as the tale of the Scorpion and Frog, your own cells growing growing growing until they sink along with the rest of you.

     

    PSA cell

    N.B.: Yesterday I referenced castration resistant prostate cancer. Castration resistant is a metric, no longer part of the treatment. That is, the standard of androgen deprivation therapy-a very, very low amount of androgens, male hormones, in the body-is the amount equivalent to that of a castrated man. In fact, even for sex offenders chemical castration, which is androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) used off book, is the norm. If prostate cancer grows in spite of ADT, then you are said to have castration resistant prostate cancer. It requires new treatment.

    Wanted to make that clear. And, I do not have it.

     

     

    Taking a basic botany class on Coursera, as I mentioned. Only the second class session and I’m in over my head. This session focuses on how plants see. Turns out plants see more than we do, more of the electromagnetic spectrum. How a plant grows, when it germinates from a seed, when it stops growing, when it folds up for the night or opens up for the day, all controlled by phytochromes in the photochromic receptor system.

    I’m used to taking a class, then a test, and doing better than well. In this case I took the test right after the session. I did not do close to well. Thought I understood when I obviously did not. So today I plan to study before I retake the test. You have multiple tries to better your score.

    Not a big surprise, really. This is science and it has right and wrong answers. I’m more of a big picture, relativistic, let’s consider the opposing perspective guy. In case you just said, wait a minute, science insists on the opposing perspective through the experimental process. Well, ok. Not quite the same, but similar.

    Madras Courier

    Just a moment: Here’s how we end ourselves. The Era of Killer Robots is Here. NYT, The Daily, July 9, 2024. Guess a dystopian writer got this part first. Imagine a technologically advanced but smaller nation confronting a brutal, much larger rival who is fine with using its citizens as cannon fodder. Imagine that smaller nation loses access to sophisticated weaponry already designed and under manufacture. What does it do?

    Yes. The Ukraine has tapped its significant technology sector to automate its weaponry and create new weapons using drones and other high tech, easily available machines. That, in and of itself, is not the problem since a lot of weapons have high tech components.

    So, what is the problem? Ukraine has lost many of its fighting age citizens and faces a shortage of soldiers. In that situation and willing to do whatever it takes to fend off the Russian Bear, it was inevitable that they would produce weapons that not only have high tech killing potential, but weapons that can make the decision to fire on their own.

    That’s SkyNet territory. Without a human mediator it’s all about the algorithm and the sensors. The deeper ethical concerns get set aside when survival is at stake. Understandable, but very dangerous. For us all.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     


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  • The Jurupa Oak

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    The Mountain Summer Moon

    Sunday gratefuls: Churros and xocolate. Ham and creamed cheese. Mandarin oranges. The Mediterranean diet. Aspirational. Coffee. Bunn High Altitude Coffee Maker. Espresso roast beans. Veronica’s bat mitzvah party. Rabbi Jamie. Parsha Korach. Numbers. Aviva Zornberg’s Bewilderment. Reading. Plant hormones: cytokinin, auxin, gibberellin.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Evolution

    One brief shining: Pulled back the blue wrapper on the bar of xocolate from La Tienda, put chunks from it in a small pan with some milk after I placed the churros in my toaster oven, hit the induction button and pressed it up to six slowly stirring with a fork as the milk turned first light brown, then a deep chocolate as it thickened, the churros finished with an appliance ding, I poured the xocalate in a wide coffee cup and began dipping the churros.

     

    One thing tasted like I hoped. Churros and melted chocolate. Definitely an only on rare occasions treat. But yum. The Spanish serve it at breakfast and as a dessert. This is something that will stay on my broad menu. Though I admit it doesn’t bring me closer to the fruits, vegetables, whole grains and fish my inner dietitian recommends.

     

    Spent shabbat reading and watching TV. Napping. Relaxing after a rigorous workout week. Eating good food. At least good tasting food. Tarot cards. Working the subconscious through Woodland Guardians and the Wildwood deck. Reading parsha Korach and Aviva Zornberg’s commentary. Which also works the subconscious.

    The inner world equivalent of those deep submersibles. Scrunching myself up in the five of vessels, diving with the archetype of a dancing anima holding a Baccahanalian thysrus, twirling among candles. How low can I go? Or following the lost generation of Jews and their trust/distrust of the power that led them out of Egypt only to wander in the desert. The bee and the pomegranate taking me back to the Andover bee hives, the evenings with seeds encased in red. Thinking of Persephone.

    Shabbat. Friends. Food. Learning. Relaxing. Reinforcing my Jewish identity.

     

    iNature page on the Jurupa Oak

    Just a moment: the Jurupa Oak*. I’d never heard of it until cousin Diane sent me an article about it. This tree has lived for 13,000 years. California’s housing crisis could doom it. WP, July 5, Shannon Osaka.

    It is a clonal colony like the more well known Pando, a colony of Aspen in Utah, estimated to be 14,000 years old.

    Trees and their lives. Bristlecones and Sequoias and Coastal Redwoods and Lodgepoles and Aspen. Maples. Oaks. Wollemi Pines. Dogwood. Ash. Elm. Ironwood. Willows. Ponderosa. Douglas Fir. Colorado Blue Spruce.

    We live such short lives though we may travel far. The Tree stays rooted, lets the world travel around it, dancing and reaching for the Sky.

     

    *The Jurupa Oak, or Hurungna Oak,[1][2] is a clonal colony of Quercus palmeri (Palmer’s oak) trees in the Jurupa Mountains in Crestmore Heights, Riverside County, California. The colony has survived an estimated 13,000 years through clonal reproduction,[3][4][5] making it one of the world’s oldest living trees.[5] Wiki

     


    Cooking Plants Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

  • Tree Time

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer and the Bar Mitzvah Moon

    Monday gratefuls: Flonase. Tree sex. Grass sex. Make me sneezy. Leo the gentle. Luke. With family in Florida. Mark dealing with loss in Hua Hin, Thailand. Seoah turning 46 this July 4th. Murdoch. My son, who cares for those who work for him. The unconscious. The collective unconscious. Archetypes. Dreams. Depth Psychology. Rollo May. Marie von Franz. James Hillman. Robert Johnson.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Sleep

    One brief shining: A mystery this slipping into the unprotected, vulnerable hours, extinguishing the busy scanning of the everyday for a nighttime swim in the inky waters of just our Self, a time for only you, only me, rummaging through the storehouse hunting matters that need healing or celebration or acceptance, speaking the language of symbol and emotion, of the deep you, attending to your Self in the inner cathedral.

    On my Lodgepole Companion the yellow male Flowers, catkins, have disappeared. The female ovulate Cones, red and swollen, fertilized, now dot the Branch ends, beginning the transition from female Flower to Pine Cone. These serotinous cones require fire to open them, a hot fire like one produced when the Crowns burn. Crown Fires burn fast, destroying acres of Trees at once. Stopping them tests the mettle of current Fire suppression techniques. Often the Crown Fires burn until they burn themselves out. As once they did always.

    Fire does not destroy the Lodgepole; rather, it opens their seeds to newly fertile soil. One Forest dies that another may be born. Not a lot different from the way death burns through a generation of humans, one generation dying, the other growing up in its stead.

    Annie Novak, the instructor in my Tree Communication class, cautioned us to notice our anthropocentric tendencies when talking about Trees, Plants. An example. We consider seconds, hours, months, years, decades, as important measures of time. How does a Tree experience time? Or, does a Tree experience time?

    Dendrochronologists may use Tree growth rings to accurately place an individual’s life span in our human history. The Tree growth rings themselves? Dead. The heartwood of a Tree functions as a Tree’s columnar support essential to support the Crown as it grows up and up. A key Tree strategy for access to Great Sol’s Light.

    Trees do move, up from their Seed toward the Sky, out toward the space around them, and down into the soil beneath them. But they do not move from their chosen location. They also grow in girth, expanding as the cambium produces xylem cells which push the width of the Trunk out as they die and form the heartwood.

    (NB for the Ancient Brothers. I misspoke about xylem cells. They die and become the strong support for the trunk. In the center of the heartwood xylem cells transport water from the roots to the leaves through capillary action.) The phloem cells, between the bark and the cambium (growing part of the tree), take sugars down from the Leaves and Branches to other parts of the Tree. It is the phloem and cambium that measure only a few human hairs in width.

    Since the heartwood and bark are dead (bark not always, see Aspens for example, but mostly), and the living part of the tree-phloem and cambium-have only a few hairs width presence in the huge structure of the Tree, what of the Tree might experience time? Do we consider the whole organism, which consists of mostly dead tissue, or do we consider the living cambium and phloem only? Perhaps the whole Tree and its growth rings simply are time itself measured in a Treecentric way?

    Lots to think about and I’m only one or two strides into Herme’s Pilgrimage. Where will Herme go?

     


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  • Herme’s Pilgrimage

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer and the Bar Mitzvah Moon

    Shabbat gratefuls: Ginny and Janice. Irene. The Dreamers. Yud Heh Vav Heh. Chai. Aleph. The Shield (Star) of David. Tarot. Woodland Oracle Deck. Orange one. Older one. Our country. Right and wrong. Love it, don’t leave it. The 1960’s. The Peaceable Kingdom. Judy. The Goat. The Aurora in the Lake. Steppenwolf. Cooking and heating with wood.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: Dreams

    One brief shining: The thickly polyurethaned round table had a jigsaw cutout of a house and a Mountain, outside Bear Creek ran full and strong; as I drove to the Blackbird for breakfast with Ginny and Janice, I’d noticed the sign, In Case of Flash Flood Climb to Safety; as a result, I looked again at Bear Creek, saw its strength contained for the time within its banks and was glad.

     

    This new, integrative journey, Herme’s Pilgrimage I think I’ll call it now, has me reaching back into closets stored with varied kinds of knowledge. The story of Zeus, Hermes, and Lycaon. Of Baucis and Philemon. The South Node on my astrological chart. The Wildwood Tarot. The Tree of Life. Kavanah. Teshuvah and Tikkun. Resurrection. Reincarnation. The Tea Ceremony and the way of Chado. The Great Wheel.

    As I wander on this pilgrimage, knowing how to read a Tarot spread will come up alongside quantum mechanics. Sun sign next to the sephirot on the Tree of Life. A roku Tea cup and a tallit. How these will resonate, reverberate. What fun, eh?

    Today the Tarot and Oracle cards have my attention as does the parsha Shelach, Numbers 13:1-15:41.

    Beaver and Birch, Woodland Oracle Deck

    The Woodland Oracle suggests drawing a card a day to become familiar with the deck. Seemed like a good plan. So I did. The Beaver and the Birch.

    Upright the Beaver and Birch suggests a focus on home, doing the decorating, maintenance that create a home. This felt propitious because Herme’s Pilgrimage focuses on activity I can do at home. Also, the Beaver works hard, creating not only a home and a dam with their hard work, but a Pond as well.

    The pond can represent the work of Herme’s Pilgrimage. A layer that reflects the Sky, the rational world of appearance, and a depth below where matters of myth and legend, religious practice, and poetry lie.

    The dam suggests the barrier, the boundary I need to construct so I can focus on letting the Pond fill up and surround my home. I will leave my home by swimming through the Pond and return the same way.

    The Woodland Wardens represented in the 52 cards of the deck combine Animals and Plants. Jessica Roux, the creator of the deck, says she was inspired by the Victorian language of Plants as well as the Creatures themselves.

    Whatever focuses my attention, sends it down unimagined paths, has value to me. Tarot and oracle decks have that capacity for me. Music, too.

    Wanting to go as far down the Rabbit hole, into the Pond, and through the Looking Glass as I can.

     

     


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  • The Tree the Realtor said to cut down, Tree #7

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer and the Bar Mitzvah Moon

     

    Too close to the house, she said. And, not growing straight. That was nine and a half years ago. I cut down forty or fifty Lodgepoles for fire mitigation. Another few for the solar panels. Shading them in the crucial hours of the day. But I cut down no Aspens. “Trees like aspen naturally have a higher water content and do not usually contain the volatile chemical compounds that can make trees like pine so flammable.” International Association of Fire and Rescue. The title of the article refers to Aspen stands as natural firebreaks.

    Not why I left it alone. I felt sorry for him/her. Looked like it had had a tough life.

    Aspen Trees are dioecious, meaning male and female reproductive organs grow on separate Trees. Not educated enough yet to know which is which. Though. If it has no catkins, it’s a male. We’ll see. I think he’s a guy. Don’t recall catkins.

    Pando Aspen Clone 2017 photo by Lance Oditt

    Whichever is not too important because reproduction by seed does not drive Aspen increase. Aspen Seedlings do not do well in shade and since Aspen grow in clonal Groves, usually within and around Coniferous Forests, they rarely grow very well. Populus tremuloides, the quaking Aspen, and other species of Populus like big-toothed Aspen (Populus grandidentata) common in the Eastern U.S., reproduce mainly through their root system. It throws up suckers around a Mother Tree and produces clones of Her. You may have heard of Pando, the Utah Aspen Colony cited often as the world’s largest Tree.

    The more closely I examined him my affection for him grew. I wondered why he had this big scar, dead heartwood exposed. Looked like burn scar with all the black Bark around it, but that same coloration existed in many spots on the Trunk. Then I moved around the tree and found this pattern of discoloration on the side opposite the scar. What was that?

    Oh. I see. An Elk, maybe a larger Mule Deer, scratched themselves here. Wait. Yes, the probable explanation for the big scar and maybe for his angled growth. An Elk or Mule Deer dining on his tender and nutritious Bark when he was young. Makes sense to me.

    That’s not all of the insults. Two years ago his Leader cracked off and fell during high Winds. This in spite of the adaptive advantage of quaking Leaves which reduces the force of Wind gusts. I worried it might kill him, but no. He continues to grow. Sadly, I may have to cut him down sooner rather than later. He’s leaning too close to the house in the same direction from which the Winds come.

    I admire Trees, Animals that take injury and accident and disease yet do not give up. Three legged Dogs, for example. Vega. And this crippled Aspen. I hope that when I do cut him down that suckers will grow further from the house. I’d be happy to see him live again in a different spot.

     


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  • Herme’s Journey

    Posted on by Charles 1 Comment

    Summer and the waning Bar Mitzvah Moon

    Monday gratefuls: The Ancient Brothers. Great Sol. Shadow Mountain. TV. Books. CD’s. Jazz. Mozart. Telemann. Bach. Coltrane. Monk. Parker. Gregorian Chants. Rock and roll. CD player. K-dramas. Netflix. Amazon Prime. Mhz. Starlink. Conversation. Listening. Seeing. Really listening. Really seeing. The Aspen out my bedroom window. The dead Lodgepole.

    Sparks of Joy and Awe: The lesser light-the Moon

    One brief shining: When I go now to an airport, when I even imagine going to an airport, I recoil, seeing the old Native American punishment, running between rows of TSA employees, airline boarding agents, and crabby fellow sufferers all diminished by the experience, yet needing to pass along, like some fraternity hazing ritual, the same misery to the pledges not yet seated in their too narrow and too jammed together seats. And paying often thousands of dollars to do it.

     

    Still enjoying a post bar mitzvah push sense of opening, of new possibilities. Herme’s Journey, which I imagined after the dream workshop last month, got sidelined a bit by the week of the ritual, guests, celebration, and the week of physical recovery that followed that one. Though. Kavod for the Trees (Honoring the Tree) has kept it alive.

    Herme’s Journey followed thoughts and feelings triggered by my Wabash dream. That dream encouraged me to reenter the life vision I had when I started college almost 60 years ago. To embrace that dream of a long period, lifelong in my hopes of those years, as a student, then a scholar. With libraries and writing instruments my primary tools. With ideas and their expression as my life work.

    Herme, you may recall, is the name I gave to the neon sign I had made of the Hooded Man Card* from the Wildwood Tarot Deck. The name I gave to myself in the wake of Kate’s death, of a mourner then a griever, then… I wasn’t sure what.

    Herme’s Journey blends the Hooded Man Card with the first card of the Tarot Deck: The Fool. The major arcana of a tarot deck tells a story of the Fool’s journey, begun blithely, a bindlestaff over one shoulder, a dog alongside, stepping off into the unknown. In the Wildwood deck** the Wanderer’s journey is through the Wildwood. Yes. My journey, too.

    The Wanderer is a beginner, the beginner’s mind at play in the fields of the psyche. Herme’s Journey is my Wanderer’s path, a beginner’s path, but one begun with the age and experience of an old man. So, Herme’s Journey.

    What lies along this path? Still unclear though Trees play a central role. As does the Great Wheel of the Year and the Jewish Lunar Calendar. As the pilgrimage unfolds, I plan to explore Kabbalah, my long period of work with Ovid’s Metamorphosis, poetry and literature, myth and legend, fairy and folk tales, religion, and the arts: music, painting, sculpture, theater, dance, opera.

    What will come? Again, unknown. It will be the path, not the destination. What I will do is read a lot, write, travel, think, listen, see, taste. Talk.

     

    *The Hooded Man stood at the winter solstice point on December 21, along with the earth and the sun in the night. This is the time to be alone and contemplate life. This card describes the gates of death and rebirth, deep inside the Earth.  Hooded Man

    **A central theme of the Wildwood Tarot is the interconnection of humans with the wild, with animals, and with the calendar cycle.


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  • A Doubled Trunk, Grown Over Tree #6

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer and the Bar Mitzvah

    Tree number 6 grows near the dead Lodgepole. Like the Lodgepole Companion it lacks Branches at certain points on its trunk. The most notable feature of this tree though is what appears to be two Trunks grown together, fused now, and joined as one.

    Around the Trunk opposite to this photo another, less obvious obtrusion suggested to me that my hunch was correct. When Splintered Forest came through and marked Lodgepoles for Fire mitigation, they always marked those Trees with two Trunks. They have a tendency to split apart under the pressure of high winds.

    I also found several instances of what looked like Fungus, maybe Lichen. I didn’t see this on other Trees nearby and it made wonder what about this Tree attracted them.

    Tree number 6 grows in a small cluster of other Lodgepoles though at some distance from its neighbors. While it is similar to the other Lodgepoles it, too, has distinctive features-Fungus, double trunk grown together, its location.

    As I’ve worked on this project, somewhat episodically, a strange thing has begun to happen to me. As I drive down the hill toward Evergreen, I don’t always see the Forest. Now I see its individual Trees. Not always, but often.

    I love photographs of Animals that show their distinctive personality, their uniqueness. Yes there are Dogs. But only one Kepler, Gertie, Rigel, Vega. Cattle, Horses, Sheep, Mule Deer, Elk, yes, but each one has their own history, their own unique way of being in the world.

    There is an interesting foreground and background awareness going on related to this. Individual Lodgepoles. Individual Aspens. Individual Willows and White Pine and Ponderosa. That Mule Deer, curious about me, who looked in my bedroom window. I find identifying and appreciating unique individuals a good balance to the tendency to lump members of a species together.

    Yet. There is a deeper oneness in which all individual, unique beings participate. We are constitutive of that oneness even as we are unique and identifiable. Our change and growth is the change and growth of the one. We are, at a deeper level, part of each other in a profound, yet too often invisible way. Somewhat like the Root system of the Trees I’ve met.

    Honoring ourselves can lead us to honor what appears to our limited senses to be an other.

     

     


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  • Honoring the Dead, Tree #5

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer and the Bar Mitzvah Moon

     

    Tree #5 is a dead Lodgepole in the back yard. Its Bark has faded in color to a dull brown and become brittle. Where the Bark has peeled off dead Wood shows traces of Critters that left small trails along its surface. Looking up toward the Crown and the Lead ghost Branches project out, no Needles, no flexibility, like fingers stretched out in pleading. Remember me as I once was.

    A long, deep crevice runs up and down the Trunk allowing a glimpse inside. Reminds me of the necropsy on the dead collared Timber Wolf during my Wolf intensive in Ely, Minnesota. Several Januaries ago. The crevice and the biologist’s opening of the Wolf’s thorax and abdomen provided a sight not available in life except under rare circumstances. In both cases the Lodgepole crevice and the Wolf laid open I could imagine galaxies and local clusters whirling in this not meant to be seen space. Inner space, not outer space, the one suggesting the other, by the wonder of life gone from its home on the one hand and the vastness of the universe on the other.

    The dead Tree stands where it grew, a corpse remaining in place. Made me wonder about the idea of death itself. We imagine death as a clear and distinct state from life. In terms of agency I suppose it is. But consider the dead tree. Birds rest on it. Woodpeckers eat from it. Squirrels may build a home there. Its roots have begun decomposing, feeding already the living Trees, Grasses, Soil microbes. When it falls, were it to remain in the yard, it would decay slowly while offering homes for Voles, Chipmunks, Rabbits and other Animals.

    So death in nature has many phases, all of them useful in some way to other Creatures and Plants. Perhaps death is not so clear and distinct. In Muir Woods there were fallen Coastal Redwoods that will take decades, maybe centuries to complete their death. And throughout those Woods as in the yard here death actively supports life. Is not its enemy but instead its friend.

    Does that help us, frail mammals that we are? We can certainly formaldehyde a body, put it in a box and surround that box with cement or even steel vaults. But why? To defeat the natural processes which Elk, Mountain Lion, Aspen, Willow, and Meadows filled with lush Grass not only go through themselves, but need so that others of their kind can survive? We have set ourselves apart from our Mother, rejected her ways, and visited upon her insult after insult. Perhaps the dead Lodgepole can teach us a different, better way.


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