Category Archives: Great Work

GeekWorld, Great Work, Our Land and Home, Science

Power to the People

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Mabon                                                                          Elk Rut Moon

We sat down with Kaleb Waite of Golden Solar yesterday afternoon. He impressed us both. He had a clearer plan for our panels, which ones we needed. Smart panels. He had a nifty gadget that can project shadowing throughout the year from any tall object near the roof, like trees or chimneys. He did not dumb down his presentation and walked us through the particular advantages and challenges of our roof. When he finished, we’d made up our minds. Golden Solar will get our business.

With the eventual development of capable storage batteries, we may be able to go off the grid entirely, though for the time being we will still be connected to the Intermountain Rural Electric Association (IREA). The concept of radically distributed power generation, a form of disaggregation, is a small piece of the path leading to a sustainable future. Our choice, by itself, means almost nothing; gathered with others though and through that putting real change forward, an individual choice is not a small piece.

 

 

Great Work, Jefferson County, Mountains, The West

We Share the Mountains

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Mabon                                                                Elk Rut Moon

One of the joys of living in the mountains is the unexpected appearance of wildlife. The Lakeshore Cafe, where we go for our business meetings on Sunday morning, sits across Upper Bearcreek Drive from Evergreen Lake. This morning there was a harem of elk with two bulls drinking, swimming in the lake and wandering the marshy area. At our initial pass a multi-point buck was striding across a pedestrian bridge, a picture I wish I could have taken, but traffic behind me prevented it.

When we turned into the Lakeshore’s parking lot, Kate suggested I park and go take some photos. Here are a few:

Bull with water lilyBull and doesBull with water lily2 Bull Elk after swim

Colorado, GeekWorld, Great Work, Science, Travel

Martian Meteorites, Dinosaur Skeletons and Peyote

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Lughnasa                                                      Elk Rut Moon

The Denver Gem and Mineral Show. “Largest in the nation.” I believe it. Vendor upon vendor occupying all the audience circulation area around the seating in the Denver Coliseum (where the hot dogs and beer get sold. And big on its own.) The coliseum floor and the circulation area around it, plus tents in the rear parking lot. We ran low on energy before we could get outside.

Spoke with three vendors, each unique. One wore a t-shirt that said Save Our Sacrament. He’s part of a church in Arizona that considers peyote its sacramental substance. His church welcomes all races, so they’re not covered like the native americans though he claims using peyote as a sacrament is legal in five states (actually 6 according to the churches website): Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, Nevada and, drumroll please, Minnesota.

Second guy was a Colorado rockhound who clearly loves rocks. He told us about geodes with water inside (think how old that water is), how to tell jade from other rocks that look similar (put your hands on it. if it’s heavier and cooler than its neighbors, probably jade) and showed us his personal pendant, a space owl, a piece of agate (I think.).

Meteorites were the domain of the third guy. eegooblago meteorites. I asked him what an ungrouped meteorite was since a row of small pieces were labeled that way. He started slow, but got excited as he moved into his explanation. It involves an organization that is the only official meteorite naming authority. They have lists of meteorites by type, a sort of “canonical taxonomy”, great phrase. If, after a lot of checking a chunk doesn’t fall with the canonical taxonomy, then it’s ungrouped.

He went on to show us the Martian meteorite, the only one certified and named by the authority. (see picture) Not cheap. But, to own a piece of Mars? Wow.

I learned from him that deserts are great places to find meteorites and the Maghreb is one of the best. “Morocco,” he said, “has a very sophisticated meteorite market. The Maghreb itself not so much.” He and his partner do occasionally hunt on their own, but mostly they go to rooms in which many collected rocks have been gathered.

In the Maghreb they rely on the folks who travel the desert regularly. They pick up various rocks and bring them back to a collecting spot. Then, using a handheld device that can “read” elements, he and his partner decide which ones to buy.

There were things I wanted to buy. The Dinosaur Brokers had a very nice fossilized skeleton of a small meat eating dinosaur for only $4,200. Another outfit had a huge Woolly Mammoth tusk, gorgeous. $14,000 plus but they were willing to wheel and deal. Their words. Fossilized fish, Woolly Mammoth teeth and vertebrae. Dinosaur tracks. Most well out of my price range. Didn’t buy anything though Kate got a number of things for grandchildren gifts, including some coprolite, fossilized poop. For Gabe, of course.

 

 

Colorado, Great Work, Jefferson County, Shadow Mountain

Dining Out

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Lughnasa                                                                     Labor Day Moon

Driving down to Big R for some chain I saw a small herd of elk does, maybe 10, in the meadow at the bottom of Shadow Mountain Drive. I watched one, then the others, come slowly out of the woods and begin eating the recently cut grass.

Then, coming home, there in our yard was this fellow and a companion. I pulled into the driveway, opened the garage door and they both kept eating. Just dining out in the neighborhood. Our neighborhood, theirs and ours.

muledeer600muledeer2600

 

Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Memories, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science, Third Phase

The Now and the Not Yet

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Lughnasa                                                                    Labor Day Moon

A curious bifurcation. Friends comment on how well my life’s going. I’m not feeling it. Kate says look at the big picture. That’s what they’re seeing. Time with grandkids. Settling into the mountains. Healthy dogs. Cancer season mostly over. Loft getting put together.

When Kate suggested I look at the big picture, I replied, “It’s not in my nature.” My comment surprised me. What did that mean? “It’s not in my nature.”

In the moment I meant the larger trajectory of my life always gets swamped by the quotidian. The generator, damn thing. Rigel’s cast. Aimlessness. Sleep. That’s what gets my attention, my focus. It’s the way of generalized anxiety. Yes, I can back off from the day-to-day, know that these things are transient and the bigger things more lasting, but I get dragged right back in. Gotta change our home insurance before October 31st. Like that.

But more to my question, what is my nature? What does that mean? I mentioned a while back I’m reading a book called How Forests Think. In it Eduardo Kohn makes a strong, a remarkable case for animism, identifying animism with the Selfhood of living things. Self, if I understand Kohn right, is the gathered experience of not only an individual tree, dog, human, but of the evolutionary and genetic inheritance each individual bears. In this sense my Self is the culmination of human adaptation over millions of years, specific adaptation in the instance of my particular genetic family and the moments since my birth that have shaped who I have become in dynamic interaction with those genetics.

I’ve always had a strong view of Self, that emergent being/becoming we each are. (BTW: we, in Kohn’s vocabulary, includes all living things) Thanks to many years of Jungian analysis I have tended to articulate Self in relation to Jungian thought as an entity rooted in the collective unconscious, born of the struggle between persona and our genetic tendencies, or, said another way, between our adaptative responses to the world and our animal inheritance.

It is in this sense that I meant it is not in my nature. Over time, thanks to events subtle and gross, I have learned to focus on the thing not finished, the matter with something left to do. That moves attention away from the completed, the resolved. Things like settling into the mountains, presumptively cancer free, time with the grandkids recede, get placed in the room marked o.k. for now.

So my nature is the sum of me, the skin-bound memories (another Kohn term) and the adaptative ancestry from which I descend. Here’s an interesting point about genetics and adaptation that Kohn makes, they are future oriented. That is, the adaptations that stick are, in essence, bets on a future that will require them. So, though they come from the past and manifest in the present, each adaptation represents a subtle reorientation of the species to a time imagined, in the most physical of senses, to have similarity with the near past.

Colorado, Great Work, Jefferson County, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, The West

Clash

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Lughnasa                                                            Labor Day Moon

 

Part of the transition to fall here in the mountains is the elk rut. My dental hygienist told me about her first experience. She and her husband came home from work in late September. They heard a sound like two men clashing 2×4’s together, went to the window and saw two bull elks in the backyard, charging each other. This went on through supper, and as night fell, they both used night vision goggles that her mother had left behind after a visit. They went to bed to the sound of the elks battling for reproductive rights.

When she got up, the second elk was gone and the winner basked in the comfort of a large harem of does. Also, she said, the bugling sounds just like bugles. Looking forward to this fall.

 

Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Jefferson County, Mountains, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase
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Lughnasa                                                                 Labor Day Moon

 

Been trying to feel the mountain. Beneath our house Shadow Mountain extends at least 8,800 feet to sea level and just where a mountain begins and ends after sea level is a mystery to me. That’s a mile and 2/3rds of rock. A lot of rock.

14 years ago I came out to Colorado and camped above Georgetown in the National Forest. Right next to me was a sugarloaf mountain. As darkness fell, the mountain disappeared into the gloom. All that massiveness just disappeared. But I could feel it looming over me. Since then I’ve wondered what the mountain equivalent is to the Shedd Aquarium’s freshwater exhibition tag: The essence of a stream is to flow. What is the essence of a mountain?

Mass seems to be the answer. It is the distinctive feature that draws our eyes when we come in on Interstate 76 from the plains of Nebraska. Suddenly, the plains stop. The essence of the plains is flatness? No more flatness, verticality created by mass intervenes with sight lines. The volume of rock pressed upwards by colliding tectonic plates changes the topography.

So these last couple of mornings, before I got out of bed, I’ve been trying to feel the mass of Shadow Mountain. Trying to extend my Self into the mountain, to feel the mountain as it lies there. Not so successful so far. It occurred to me this morning that this is the opposite of conquering the mountain, of summiting, of climbing. This is diving, deepening, merging. Part of the difficulty is the claustrophobic feeling of having the mountain all round me even in my imagination.

This is not all. I noticed the other day in the east, just above the lodgepoles on our property, Orion. In Minnesota I was a late riser so I don’t know where Orion was at 5 am in August, but his presence here surprised me. I have, until now, counted Orion as a winter companion, first becoming visible in November. He may have risen much earlier even in Minnesota, but I missed him. Orion is a special friend, a constellation with which I’ve had a long relationship and one I view as a companion in the night.

Then, there are the bucks. Mule deer bucks. On Sunday as we drove to Evergreen there were four mule deer bucks with still velveted antlers quietly munching grass along the side of the road. They looked at us; we looked at them. The velvet has a prospective nature, auguring the rut when not yet released. On this morning they were friends, not competitors for breeding rights. And they were in harmony.

Then, yesterday, Kate said, “Look at that!” I turned and over my left shoulder looked down into the grassy valley that extends between Shadow Mountain and Conifer Mountain. In the field of mown alfalfa stood a huge bull elk. His rack was enormous and already cleared of its velvet. It arced out away from his head on both sides, tines extending its reach even further. This was a bull of legend. Seeing him took us into the wild, the world that goes on alongside us here on Shadow Mountain, the lives of our fellow inhabitants of this mountain.

All of this, the essence of the mountain, Orion rising, velveted mule deer, the bull elk, hiking on the Upper Maxwell Falls trail, all of this accelerates becoming native to this place. The Rockies. Our home.

Dogs, Family, Great Work, Jefferson County, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

On the Path

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Lughnasa                                                               Labor Day Moon

gabeuppermaxwell300Two hours in the dentist’s chair yesterday. Cleaning, followed by a crown prep and filling two cavities. When Kate came back from the dentist on Wednesday talking about the sticky fluoride treatment she’d received, it made me realize we’ve had no fluoride in our water for over 20 years. Living with our own well.

Took Gabe and Ruth to the Upper Maxwell Falls trail yesterday afternoon. We didn’t make it to the falls, instead wandering off on an alternate trail that climbed through jumbles of boulders and large, rocky cliffs. The regular trail is very popular in spite of its out of the way location. Over the summer there have been no fewer than six cars and often twenty parked at the trailhead.

We examined plants. Ruth found a snake (she wants one for a pet.), but it slithered away Upper Maxwell Falls Trail1350beneath the rocks. We climbed on the rocks and looked out. Nature provides something new, something noteworthy every foot or so. It was a slow hike. Here were lichen, familiar forms from Minnesota. There was a very late blooming Indian Paint Brush, its fiery bloom resting on the ground. The trees, some of them, were huge, trunks so big that Gabe, Ruth and I couldn’t get our arms around them holding hands.

Maxwell Creek exerted the magnetic attraction that water has for humans. We went down twice to be closer to it, the first time we crossed over to the alternative trail that we followed. The second time we crossed back to the Falls trail. Ruth talked about some camp counselors who followed a mountain stream to its source, an artesian spring, drinking from it, since “water is never fresher.”

Being in the Arapaho National Forest has its own version of mindfulness, one in which attention leaves the world of the day-to-day and focuses on an interesting rock, a blooming flower, the sound of water rushing over rocks, the view from a boulder. The eye scans for what is new or unfamiliar, being delighted constantly by a patch of cowslip, a bit of lichen on a lodgepole pine, a small squirrel playing peek-a-book around a thin aspen trunk.

Ruth and I are going back this morning, taking Kepler along in his harness.

Beyond the Boundaries, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Humanities, Mountains, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Writing

Having a Moment

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Lughnasa                                                            Labor Day Moon

I’m having a moment. It’s immediate stimulus has been reading How Forests Think, by Eduardo Kohn. Kohn is an anthropologist who has done significant field work in el Oriente, the east of Ecuador where the Andes go down into the tropical rain forests of the Amazon drainage. But this book is something else. Though it draws on his field work with the Runa, its focus is the nature of anthropology as a discipline and, more broadly, how humans fit into the larger world of plants and animals.

Thomas Berry’s little book, The Great Work, influenced a change in my political work from economic justice to environmental politics. Berry said that the great work for our time is creating a sustainable human presence on the earth. In 2008 I began working on the political committee of the Sierra Club with an intent to do my part in an arena I know well. I continued at the Sierra Club until January of 2014 until I resigned, mostly to avoid winter driving into the Twin Cities.

Since then, I’ve been struggling with how I can contribute to the great work. Our garden and the bees were effective, furthering the idea of becoming native to this place. The move to Colorado though has xed them out.

Kohn’s book has helped me see a different contribution I can make. Political work is mostly tactical, dealing in change in the here and now or the near future. In the instance of climate change, tactical work is critical for not only the near future but for the distant future as well. I’ve kept my head down and feet moving forward on the tactical front for a long, long time.

There are though other elements to creating a sustainable human presence on the earth. A key one is imagining what that human presence might be like. Not imagining a world of Teslas and Volts, renewable energy, local farming, water conservation, reduced carbon emissions, though all those are important tactical steps toward that presence; but, reimagining what it means to be human in a sustainable relationship with the earth.

Kohn is reimagining what being human is. His reimagining is a brilliant attempt to reframe who thinks, how they think and how all sentience fits together. He’s not the only one attempting to do this. The movement is loosely called post-humanist, removing humans from the center of the conceptual universe.  A posthuman world would be analogous to the solar system after Galileo and Copernicus removed the earth from the center. Humans, like the earth, would still exist, but their location within the larger order will have shifted significantly.

This fits in so well with my reimagining faith project. It also fits with some economic reimagining I’ve been reading about focused on eudaimonia, human flourishing. It also reminds me of a moment I’ve recounted before, the Iroquois medicine man, a man in a 700 year lineage of medicine men, speaking at the end of a conference on liberation theology. The time was 1974. He prayed over the planting of a small pine tree, a symbol of peace among the tribes of the Iroquois confederacy because those tribes put their weapons in a hole, then planted a pine tree over them.

His prayer was first to the winged ones, then the four-leggeds and those who swim and those who go on water and land, the prayer went on asking for the health and well-being of every living thing. Except the two-leggeds. I noticed this and went up to him after the ceremony and asked him why he hadn’t mention the two-leggeds. “Because,” he said, “we two-leggeds are so fragile. Our lives depend on the health of all the others, so we pray for them. If the rest are healthy, then we will be, too.”

Reimagine faith in a manner consistent with that vision. Reimagine faith in a post-humanist world. Reimagine faith from within and among rather than without and above. This is work I can do. Work my library is already fitted to do. Work I’ve felt in my gut since an evening on Lake Huron, long ago, when the sun set so magnificently that I felt pulled into the world around me, became part of it for a moment. Work that moment I’ve mentioned before when I felt aligned with everything in the universe, that mystical moment, has prepared me for. Yes, work I can do. Here on Shadow Mountain.

 

 

 

Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Great Wheel, Great Work, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Feel the Rain On Our Face

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Lughnasa                                                                    Recovery Moon

There are many ways of becoming native to this place. The one that worked for me involved a combination of following an ancient liturgical calendar based on seasonal changes in temperate latitudes: the Great Wheel and gardening. There are many other paths. Chado: the Way of Tea integrates the tea ceremony with a finely divided sensibility to Japanese seasons, some only two weeks long. Hunter/gatherers have to be native to the place where they are or they will not survive. Followers of the Tao, the way, lean into the rhythms of the natural world rather than away from them, flowing through the world as water does in a stream. Hiking and camping and canoeing. Forestry with an emphasis on forest health. Conservation biology.

Oddly though practitioners of modern agriculture are often as estranged from their place as residents of vast urban enclaves. And I recently read, in Foreign Policy magazine’s July/August edition, an intriguing explanation as to what lead current, often corporate, agriculture astray. When the population explosion gained prominence in the mid-1960’s, think Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb,” a concentrated focus on methods of improving agricultural productivity resulted. And it worked. More acres went under the plow, more chemicals went into the soil and onto crops, antibiotics filled food animals, food production became more sophisticated though not more nutritious, fast cheap restaurants bought and sold fast cheap food. There are real dangers in letting ourselves become strangers to our home world.

Becoming native to this place is analogous to being born again, revivified for the act of belonging to, being part of this planet. Second naiveté, Paul Ricoeur’s wonderful notion, can follow a state of critical distance:

“According to Ricoeur, the rational forces brought to our civilization through modernity have made it difficult to accept religion or scripture in the “first naïveté” sense. Once subjected to rational inspection, the literal meanings of religion really do not hold up…”  exploring spiritual development

Modernity has put the fruits of enlightenment reason and modern technology forward as more significant, more important than the growth of a tomato, than the beauty of a wilderness lake. It has substituted the grace of a soaring condor with the stiff, hard brilliance of an airplane. That tomato, grown soft and juicy on the plant, got replaced by a hard-skinned, pre-ripe picked fruit designed for machine harvesting and long distance transport. Distances that used to require human feet and legs, or the same of horses, now demand only that we sit and wait.

Before you resist this. This is not a screed against airplanes, cars, computers, telephones or grocery stores. It is a recognition of the rupture, the critical distance, modernity has created between our lives and the world that sustains them. Food comes from soil and plants and the animals that eat the plants. Oxygen from the plants at work. Water used to be purified by the very wetlands we fill in or drain to build subdivisions or to plant more acreage of chemically injected crops.

Life, in other words, exists in a delicate balance with the inanimate; that balance is literally billions of years old and one we cannot afford to ignore. Yet we do. And so we must make an effort to again become native to this place, this place which in its wonder gave life a chance.

Following the seasons as they change and following within those changes emergence, growth, life and death became easier for me when I overlaid on spring/summer/fall/winter the four big solar events of equinoxes and solstices, then put between those the cross-quarter holidays of my Celtic ancestors:  Samhain (summer’s end), Imbolc (in the belly), Beltane (the beginning of the growing season) and Lughnasa (the first harvest holiday). When I write the season at the top of this blog, I remember, for example, that we are now in the season of first harvests. And sure enough Kate brought home some wonderful heirloom tomatoes today.

The extensive gardens, both flower and vegetable, plus the orchard that Kate and I installed and nurtured in Andover reinforced the lessons of the Great Wheel. At Halloween, Samhain’s paler descendant, our garden would be finished, the beds covered, foods in jars in the basement, garlic hanging from rafters, onions and apples spread out. We were part of the turning wheel and the turning wheel shaped what we could and could not do. We lived then with the rhythms of the temperate latitudes, in some harmony with them.

Now we are in a new place, a more arid, less fertile place and the way of becoming native to it is still in process. But it will come.

We cannot all go back to the land. Cities dominate the living patterns for most of the world. But we must find ways, whether through community supported agriculture or urban hydroponics or organized trips to the countryside, to help us all feel the rain on our face. We all need to wonder at the slender green shoots that brave their way through the late snows of winter. Or, at the tropical lushness of equatorial jungles. Or the marvel of lives lived fully in the world ocean. Our lives and the lives of our grandchildren depend on our becoming, again, native to this place. To know our spot with a second naiveté so that we will care for, love this rocky, watery wonderful earth.