Category Archives: Great Work

Great Work, Jefferson County, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain, Weather +Climate

Red Flag Warning

July 11, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Park County Fair Moon

A red flag warning means that critical fire weather conditions
are either occurring now... .or will shortly. A combination of
strong winds... low relative humidity... and warm temperatures can
contribute to extreme fire behavior.

All that fire mitigation work makes sense when the weather services throw up a red flag warning as they have yesterday and today. Those of us who live up here know this is a price for living in the mountains, but that fact doesn’t mean we want to pay it. The dilemma is that we live in a desirable area, so folks from all over come up here to play, to be in the mountain wildernesses, to do research, to hang out, camp. The visitors are not as attuned to the dangers here, so that s’more or that can of beans or heating the water for coffee seems innocent. And it is, until it isn’t. One spark.

Jefferson County fire fighters closed westbound I-70 and Colorado 470 east (which connects to our nearest highway, 285) due to a grass fire on Hogback Ridge. Yesterday a truck lost some trash which flew in the air, contacted power lines, burst into flames and fell to the ground. So freak accidents, careless tourists or locals ignoring reality put us at risk.

A person reported a neighbor yesterday for burning stumps. He puts charcoal on them, lights it up, then covers the stump with a metal can. He was indignant when asked to put them out. What could possibly go wrong? In another instance folks moved into a new development near Bailey and spent the 4th and this last weekend setting off fireworks in their driveways. Geez, guys.

And, as friend Tom Crane knows, there’s always the possibility of a propane explosion. Cheery thought.

Anyhow our weather is like a femme fatale: gorgeous, sensuous, potentially murderous.

Garden, Great Work, Jefferson County, Latin, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Plants, Science, Shadow Mountain, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Getting Back To Work

July 10, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Park County Fair Moon

Summer has come in full glory and I’m still not back to work. Getting frustrated with myself, need to get a discipline underway. Back to the work in the morning pattern that has seen me through several novels and lots of Ovid.

It is now a year and a day since my cancer surgery, a real spade turner in the soil of my psyche. Are my old goals still appropriate? Does the divorce and the engagement with Jon and the grandkids override them? Doesn’t feel that way. My ability to give correlates with the care I take of myself. Taking care of myself means continuing creative and scholarly tasks. That work plus exercise are central to my life and cannot be avoided without damaging my Self.

Right now the days float by. This meeting with Jon. That power washing of the solar array. Mow the fuel. Reorganize the loft. Work in the garage. Read the NYT. Keep up with the presidential campaign. All of these things are important, even necessary, but I’m doing them and not creating the daily discipline that longer projects require. I know how to do it. I have done it. But not now.

This morning I have my first class in a Native Plant class that focuses on the montane ecosystem, the one in which we live. It’s a start in the discipline. What I need is to protect my mornings again. Get up here in the loft, write a thousand words a day, translate at 5 verses of Ovid.

I need encouragement to get this routine started again.

Great Work, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain, The West

Weeding

May 23, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Running Creeks Moon

Topped all the felled trees, finished the limbing on them, too. Began the hauling to the front. Wore myself out. Tomorrow I’ll start cutting them up.

Rain today. Cloudy. Our solar production is far behind what was predicted, due in large part to the heavy snowfall, but also to cloud cover. Payout may take more time than we have here, but the intimate connection between the sun and our electrical use is worth it anyhow; as is severing, to the maximum extent we can, the link between our electrical use and coal generated power.

Chain saws whir all over the neighborhood here on Shadow Mountain. Fire mitigation is the mountain spring equivalent of planting a garden. Weeding, really, on a large scale. A weed is a plant out of place. Of course, you could argue that those of us who live up here are the weeds. Perhaps the trees should be plucking us out. Which is, of course, exactly what a wildfire does. Complex, man.

Great Work, Jefferson County, Shadow Mountain

Big Fun on Shadow Mountain

May 14, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Running Creeks Moon

Wildfire mitigation. Still at it, today by proxy. Always Chipper, a small company run by Kevin Breeden, husband of our former housecleaner, came over today. I had asked him last fall to come and chip the slash from my fire mitigation work then. But. The day he was to come we got two feet of snow. And the piles remained covered all winter. As I blew the snow off our 200 inches or so of snow (one of the five biggest since the 1990’s), I covered the slash. Over and over again. It wasn’t until this last Sunday that the snow melted and Kevin could come.

As Kevin said, he widened our driveway. He and his partner Mike also took down several trees I felt surpassed my skill level, either too close to the house, the fence or the powerline. I only had him fell them. I’ll limb them and cut them up along with the remaining blue ribbon trees, then have Always Chipper come back and eliminate that slash, too.

My goal is to have all this done before Memorial Day, before the El Nino inspired precipitation leaves us and we’re barenaked again to a normal wildfire season.

At the same time our neighbors, Holly and Eduardo, decided to move a shed from one side of their property to the other. This is the Han Motogear shed, the one that contains their side business making women’s apparel for motorcyclists. It took a lot of jacking up, positioning on cement blocks, then setting it down on a trailer, moving the shed about a hundred feet and reversing the process. By late this afternoon our properties looked significantly different than they had in the morning. Big fun on Shadow Mountain.

Asia, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Myth and Story, Plants, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Travel

A Taxi to Nirvana rather than a Stairway to Heaven

April 14, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Wedding Moon

Off to Nirvana with Hameed this morning. Nirvana is a huge columbarium that has intrigued ever since my sister sent me the link. And, besides, if I can get to Nirvana for the price of a taxi drive, why not?

We’ll go on about 10 minutes further to Skygreens, a vertical farm. Some evolution of this idea may well be the farm of the urban future and both Kate and I find it an interesting idea.

We’ve hired Hameed by the hour, $30 Singapore, about $22 U.S. I’ll let you know how Nirvana was when we get back. I think that’s what bodhisattvas do, so both Kate and I will accept the honorific when we return to the mountains.

Somewhat cooler today. But, only relative to 92 feels 102. So…

Have I mentioned that it’s hot here?

Colorado, Dogs, Great Work, Mountains, Science, The West

Beast

March 27, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Maiden Moon

Finished a 2010 book, The Beast in the Garden, today. By David Baron, an NPR reporter, Beast examines the changing nature of the wildlife/human interface especially through an examination of mountain lion activity in and around Boulder, Colorado in the late 1980’s into the mid-1990’s.

Baron did an exhaustive amount of work. He recreates the time period in which Boulder’s love for nature and its actions to both create and preserve a natural setting resulted in tragedy and conflict. After several years of encouraging wildlife into the city through tolerance, rings of urban parks and conservation of land outside its limits but contiguous, Boulder had an irruption of deer. An irruption is, as Baron says, very similar in meaning to its volcanic homonym.

There’s a saying here on Shadow Mountain, “If you have deer, you have mountain lions.” That proved true in Boulder. The problem was, that since the elimination of the wolf, mountain lions no longer had any predator of their own and had become desensitized to their ancient foe: the canid. No longer did just any dog barking drive away mountain lions. That meant the lions could follow their main food source, deer, into human inhabited areas where they could encounter dogs.

Some cougars began to hunt dogs. The combination of hunting deer, their ancient and still most frequent prey, and dogs, kept as pets and therefore nearby human’s daily life, led to certain cougars becoming habituated to humans. Habituation involves suppression of the once instinctive fear of humans engendered by early farmers and ranchers near extermination of the species. Once that fear is suppressed humans are bipedal potential sources of dinner. Dogs were eaten. Cougars lounged in people’s backyards. A few attacks occurred. Then, a couple of deaths. This book tells that story.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

something’s happening here

March 15, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Maiden Moon

Diana Bass has written a book, Grounded, about what she believes is a revolution in religious thought. God’s no longer in the Holy Elevator business, press 2 for heaven, B for hell. No, God’s moved out of the three story universe and climbed into the world around you. Immanence, not transcendence. Bass finds God at the sea shore, in the clouds (no, not up there, the real clouds), in movements for social justice, in human relationships.

She seems very excited about all this, certain that a major inflection in Christian history has begun to unfold on her watch.

Here’s the problem I have with it. What does adding the word God to an experience of natural sublimity add? If God is found in human relationships, as Henry Nelson Wieman famously thought, again, what does adding the word GOD to a human relationship contribute?

I agree with Bass about the direction of what she and others call religious thought and practice. But I don’t believe an immanent God makes more sense, probably less in some ways, than the old boy with the beard in the sky where you go when you die. If you’re lucky.

Instead of moving the entirety of Christian history out of the heavenly and into the soil and peoples of this very mundane earth, why not imagine that a reenchantment of the world is well under way. That giant sucking sound you heard for the last 2,000 years or so was the Christian faith draining the spirit from nature, from human interactions and locating it in a transcendent realm. Sort of vampiric, taking the life force from the earth and its living beings and storing it far away in the care of one despotic ruler.

Well, it’s time to give it back. That’s what’s going on right now and the movement is not aided by reinterpreting the very theological systems that created the problem in the first place.

Asia, GeekWorld, Great Work, Health, Third Phase, Weather +Climate

Saturday

February 20, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Valentine Moon

Not used to being the slow one, but in our tai chi class, now in its 6th week of 8, I am. It’s ok though. I need repetition and once I get it, I’ll have it, so speed of learning is not so important here as quality over time. Physically co-ordinated things have never been my shining moment.

The weather has been warm and in mid-winter on the eastern slopes that means chinooks. Warm = windy at this time of year. Still learning the weather patterns. It has made for outstanding electricity production. Yesterday’s output is below.

Dogs, Family, GeekWorld, Great Work, Latin

What’s Happening Now

January 28, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Yule Stock Show Moon

My UPS just kicked in and saved my current work. But, now I have to go reset the modem. Sigh. (Well, I’ll be damned. The modem fixed itself.)

We’ve had good production out of our solar arrays this last week, not so much the first three weeks of January. We’ll see how generation averages out in this first year. A learning curve.

Kate’s been organizing, an Iowegian dervish of the kitchen. She’s been much lighter since she started. Glad.

Vega goes in tomorrow for a bandage check and biopsy results. Hoping for good news, aware it’s unlikely.

Tomorrow, too, another session with Greg.

Asia, Colorado, Great Work

Draft Horses

January 25, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Yule Stock Show Moon

More Tai Chi for arthritis. Second class yesterday. Our group of 5 shrank to 3 Kate, me, and another woman about our age, maybe a bit younger. But all of us with arthritis of one sort or another. In other words, people of a certain age.

This is a chi gong style, different from the work I did with Great River Tai Chi in Minneapolis. Arthritis makes tai chi more difficult so the creator of this style modified the moves and the attitude. Both are important. The moves are less crisp, more fluid, less dramatic. The attitude is not perfection but persistence. Keeping people moving is the prime goal of this style, so adjusting the moves to what your body allows is the key.

After tai chi, we went back the National Western Stock Show, this time just Kate and me for one of the draft horse events. Our interest in basic agriculture/horticulture and our interest in Irish Wolfhounds, plus our Midwest rural roots, made seeing these giants of the horse world interesting.

It was a long show, almost four hours. These horses, though, whether pulling buckboards or traps, in two hitch or four hitch combinations, were a pleasure to watch. True horsepower in its original form. Their muscles rippled. Their eyes were intense and their individuality was on full display for those who could see it.

Mules were part of this show, too, though I found them much less interesting, at least visually, than the draft horses. While making sure what a mule was, horse + donkey, I discovered that male donkey, a jack, almost always covers a mare. The result of that union is a mule, usually sterile. On occasion a stallion will cover a female donkey and the result of that union is called a hinny.

The last, and best, part of this four hour show was the weight pull. These horses, in two horse pairs, were attached to a metal sled (no wheels) filled with sand bags. They started at seven thousand pounds or so and ended at fourteen thousand, gradually increasing the load until none of the pairs could pull it beyond twenty feet. (my video)

The heart of these pairs was on display as they dug, pulled easily on the lighter loads, or put shoulders and haunches to bulging as the loads got heavier. With the exception of one pair all the rest put all they had into each pull. It was clear they enjoyed the challenge.

Getting a team connected to the sled, accomplished by putting the sled’s hook ended chain through a metal coupler on the horse’s pole and bar, was often the most interesting part of the pull. Why? Because the horses pull when they think they’re attached to the load, often dragging those trying to hitch them up away from the hook.

Always interested in draft horses. Now even more so.