Daily Archives: January 4, 2015

Colorado

Snow and Wind

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Winter                                                                      Settling Moon

Fourth snow removal this morning. My neighbor, Eduardo, with a mattock, was hacking away at snow plow deposit blocking his driveway. It slopes up from below grade. Holly was out with a snow rake removing snow from their roof. I’ve never done that. Wonder if it’s necessary?

The winds have begun, heading toward 90 mph gusts tomorrow. The pines sway with them, readied by millions of years of evolution. The lodgepoles are one of the pine species, like jackpine, whose cones only open in the heat of fire. Fire is natural here, so natural that it aids in the dispersal of the very trees it destroys. Houses aren’t like that.

Even though we’ve become  much more acclimatized a morning’s labor can still do us in. And it did today. We both took long naps. No more work for today.

Colorado, Family, Health

Little Boxes, In a Pile

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Winter                                                                   Settling Moon

All the kitchen boxes are empty. The cupboards have begun to fill up. A milestone. Ridding the living room of boxes was another. Getting the Swedish shelving  up (all Kate) another. The washer and dryer, one more.

Also, our acclimatization has continued. We can both work longer now without fatigue setting in. No light-headedness on exertion. Sleep’s much better. There still remains a good distance to go before we’re fully here physically, but we’re both here emotionally. In a short time this spot on Black Mountain Drive has become home.

Monday afternoon we’re going to take the grandkids while Jon and Jen are in meetings. This will be the first time we’ve seen them together since we got here. Illness and some lingering disagreement about where we should have lived have dulled the joy on this aspect of our move.

Colorado, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Desire, Emotion, Asceticism A Critical Look

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Winter                                                                     Settling Moon

Opened the last kitchen box this morning. Kate’s busily creating spaces to put the treasures I dig out. At one point this morning she said, “We’ve got so much stuff!” with an exasperated sigh. She’s right, I suppose, though we’ve gathered this stuff over 25 years together. A third purge, which Sarah Strickland predicted, will occur. Goodwill Denver, here we come.

The Stoics want us to be free from emotional entanglement. The Buddhists want us to be free from desire. Western spiritual thought wants us to be free from things. Think George Carlin’s famous rant about stuff. None of these blanket proscriptions satisfy me. In fact, they seem to pointedly ignore the human condition.

Our emotions guide us, warn us, help us make decisions. Desire defines our pursuits through this life. Following our bliss, finding our passion mark desire as an important element in living a full and authentic life. And then there’s our stuff.

Like emotion and desire, stuff can overwhelm us, cripple us, even, in some cases, defeat us. But, like emotion and desire, the physical things with which we surround ourselves support us and give us the tools we need to live our lives. Raising our emotional life to consciousness, raising our desires to consciousness and raising our stuff to consciousness so we can make choices about them seems the critical piece to me.

In other words the life controlled by repressed emotion, or ridden by desire, or the live lived for accumulation of things is an inauthentic life. An unconscious life. A life lived in thrall, no matter to what, is a life shorn of its potential and shrunken in its worth. In this way I take the extreme positions of Stoicism, Buddhism and anti-materialism as signposts warning us, danger ahead. Useful, but not if taken as absolutes.