Daily Archives: January 27, 2015

Colorado, Mountains, The West

Weathering

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Winter                                                                             Settling Moon II

Another 68 degree day. This has moved past a January thaw into a January spring time. I walked around in the back, on the completely thawed out areas and did find some green leaves, especially a thick velvety leaf. There was also bright green moss growing on the ground and a dull green lichen spreading over a rock. The ice melts and flows around the tiny rocks, flakes, large flakes of a tannish-pink rock, then seeps into the soil at least part way.

This kind of thawing, followed by freezing, is a soil-making process. It is the slow, very slow process of eroding away Shadow Mountain. First the rock becomes soil, then rain and streams carry the soil down the mountain. Eventually, there are soft foot-hills or aged peaks like the Appalachians.

Shadow Mountain is even more basic an environment than Anoka County in Minnesota. Northern Anoka County has a high water table that has resisted development and retained the rural, northwoods atmosphere that has made it special. Yet here on Shadow Mountain even development is not as much of an active force as snow and rain, cold and heat. To transform northern Anoka County all that would be required would be an increased drainage of wetlands. Unlikely to happen now, yes, due to stringent requirements on the conservation of wetlands, but possible. Here it would require explosives, massive earth and rock moving equipment and years of time. Even then there would still be the bulk of Shadow Mountain left. It’s just not economically viable, thank god.

Colorado, Humanities, Third Phase

A Library Out of Chaos

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Winter                                                                                 Settling Moon II

One bookcase almost filled with its new content: Latin texts, texts about Latin and Greek authors, ancient history. That may fill it up. I had wanted to fit mythology and religious studies on that shelf, too, but that’s part of the fun of organizing. Bunching books together in new ways, ways that might spark new thinking.

Another example is the United States section where I’m putting everything I have that touches on any aspect, from the geological to the theological, of the U.S. experience. American identity, the American landscape, regionalism and American literature are especially interesting to me.

Art books will fill up many shelving units but that’s a category that already had its own section of my library. In addition to the Latin and my own work, I hope to spend much more time with this broad subject, focusing initially on aesthetics. Aesthetics, or the philosophy of art, was not a part of the MIA docent program education. One question in particular fascinates me: what is art? Said another way, how do you know art when you see it?

Right now I’m carving out a bookshelf for poetry. When I unboxed the books, I put them up with little regard for their content. Now I’m moving books from the bookcases and the floor into intellectual families according to my own interests. That means taking books off of bookcases, leaving some them there, then carrying others to the bookcase. Sounds like a lot of shuffling around and it is, but the process gets easier the more I do it because I recognize where small caches of, say, poetry are.

Of course there are, too, all those file boxes. Then, the art.