Monthly Archives: March 2015

Colorado, Original Relation

Them Bones

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Imbolc                                        Black Mountain Moon

These bones, these bones, these weary bones. Took Ruth (granddaughter Ruth) to the Colorado Museum of Geology today. We drove in to Denver and picked up after Sunday School, in the Jewish instance this is school on Sunday. She’s on the long road to the Bat Mitzvah, learning Hebrew, Torah, tradition. Over the last few weeks she’s been learning the 4 questions for the Pesach meal, the first of which is the famous, Why is this night different from all other nights? She recited it in Hebrew.

When Kate told Ruth she’d studied Hebrew long ago, Ruth replied, “Well, if you learn the alphabet and the vowel marks that’s all you really need.” And, of course, in a sense she’s right.

We ate lunch in downtown Golden at the Blue Canyon Grill, then went to the museum. We were late getting in because (only at an academic institution situation) a sign there said, “Between March 7th and March 15th we might be open. Call to confirm.” Several people gathered with us in the lobby and one efficient looking mom whipped out her cell phone and called. “Answering machine,” she said.

Just when we’d decided on the Science Museum a slightly padded guy in a black t-shirt, ear plugs and a stubbly beard wandered up. Yes, he said, I’m here to open up.

The museum has display case after display case of beautiful rocks and minerals from all over the world (and out of this world, too, since it has the largest moon rock brought back with one exception, plus several meteorites), but with an emphasis of course on Colorado minerals, notably gold and silver, but copper, molybdenum, pyrite, too.

There was, too, a significant collection of fossils and petrified plants. Dinosaur bones, too. When I asked the guy who opened the museum to explain petrification, he did so, and afterward added, “The same process works with organic matter like bones, too. In the instance of dinosaur bones found in Colorado a major element that precipitated out of the water solution and into the bone was uranium. Colorado’s dinosaur bones are hot. Really hot.”

The Colorado School of Mines is an interesting place, full of people who know a lot about rocks and geological history. Much more to learn from there.

To get back to these weary bones. Didn’t seem like much of a day activity-wise, but when we left the museum grandpop felt completely tuckered out.

Beyond the Boundaries, Myth and Story, Original Relation

From the Slumber of the Everyday

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Imbolc                                             Black Mountain Moon

From the dog to the human. Seeing the dogs yesterday, 100% clicked in to their genetic heritage and feeling great about it, made me wonder what circumstances create the same integration of body, mind and spirit in humans? Two ideas occur to me right away: sex and flow, yet those don’t seem quite right. Sex is instinctive and common among mammals, for the purpose of reproduction. Lions and tigers and bears and humans, dogs, too, all engage in sex, so it’s not distinctive, it’s instinctive. Flow is closer, but in its case it’s too distinctive, too idiosyncratic, too much a marker of an individual’s uniqueness and only rarely achieved.

Perhaps the trigger is hunting. After all, we share with lions, tigers, bears and dogs a predatory nature. We are not rabbits, squirrels, mice, voles. In this case I wouldn’t know since I’ve never hunted. But I can imagine. A true hunt, one where finding food is a necessity, would concentrate the mind, require attention to even the smallest physical movement, both on the part of hunter and hunted.

Or, perhaps, defending loved ones. This could explain the attraction of the warrior ethos. Though these are both traditionally male roles. What would be the female equivalent? Or, is there one trigger that unites men and women? Women hunt and fight, too.

Of course, there can be more than one trigger, I’m sure. Or, maybe we’ve evolved ourselves past a distinct trigger, become too socialized, too far distant from our veldt past. Still, watching Rigel yesterday afternoon come up to her purpose from the slumber of the everyday, I wonder.

Dogs, Mountains, Original Relation, Our Land and Home

Oh, Yeah. Fox!

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Imbolc                              Black Mountain Moon

We have fox here and some use Black Mountain Drive as a route from here to there. Late this afternoon Rigel was at the window, looking out toward the road when a fox ran by. Rigel, who is feral herself, gave a prey bark and the others responded. Soon the house filled with barking and yipping, running for the front door, the back door, anyway to get at the fox.

Rigel and Vega have coyote hound and wolf hound blood. This animal was in the prey category. Smack in it. And they felt the need. You could see it activating their attention, their ruffs, their dogness. This was the moment they were made for.

Much as I would have liked to let them run the fox down, or give it a try, the danger to them would have been too great. (cars, angry neighbors, getting lost) So they had to forgo the hunt.

Even a half an hour later though they were still smiling, prancing, looking 100% dog qua dog. Not pet. Not domesticated, just animals cued for what their life purpose is.

 

Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Mountains, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., The West, Third Phase, Writing

Learning Colorado

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Imbolc                                         Black Mountain Moon

Signed up for 4 Colorado Native Plant Master programs: one in the foothills, one in the montane eco-system (ours) and one in the high plains. 3 of these are 3 session 8:30-12:30 classes. The fourth is a two session, 9-3, course on plant sketching. Don’t really want to qualify for the Native Plant Master program since it has requirements for volunteering that I don’t want to fulfill, but I want the content and the chance to meet some people involved in botany here.

All part of becoming native to this place. Starting this week I plan to keep a nature journal, hand-written, a record of our yard, hikes, these courses, geology lectures and field trips, meteorology notes. I’m not much of an artist, but I think with some practice I can draw plants and animals, maybe sketch geological features, at least well enough to call them to mind when I review the entries.

We drove into Evergreen for our business meeting at the Wildflower Cafe. It was good to see those folks again. Afterward we drove around Evergreen a bit, going out to the I-70 entrances and seeing in the distance snow covered peaks. Our mountains around here have snow, but are not snow covered.

 

 

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Wheel, Holidays, Mountains

Happy Purim!

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Imbolc                                         Black Mountain Moon

A sunny, 55 degree Friday here on Shadow Mountain. It has knocked on that door behind which hides spring longing. One thing I look forward to is a mountain spring, but I know it will come when it comes. Still, these day make me imagine what our neighborhood, our drive, our mountain will look like without snow cover, with the aspens leafed out.

Today I went back into Ovid for the time in several months, delighted to see that my skill level has picked up considerably. I’m still far from facile, but I can see the plateau before it from where I stand now.

Then this afternoon I wrote another 1,500 words on Superior Wolf. This version, this is my fourth or fifth restart, going back to 2002, seems to have the push necessary to get to the end.

Kate’s gone into Denver to celebrate Purim* at Temple Micah. She made hamentashen, the triangular goodies associated with this holiday.

 

*The festival of Purim is celebrated every year on the 14th of the Hebrew month of Adar (late winter/early spring). It commemorates the salvation of the Jewish people in ancient Persia from Haman’s plot “to destroy, kill and annihilate all the Jews, young and old, infants and women, in a single day.”

 

 

Beyond the Boundaries, Colorado, Mountains, Science, The West

The Rio Grande Rift

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Imbolc                                                Black Mountain Moon

Into the Colorado School of Mines last night, its Museum of Colorado Geology, for a second lecture to the Friends of the Museum. This one: Whither the Rio Grande Rift?

The significance of the title escaped me until Vince Matthews, former Colorado State Geologist, explained that the rift was a spreading of the earth’s crust, a spreading that thins the mantle and increases volcanism and creates faults. Then it hit me. Oh, a rift. Like the Olduvai Gorge in the horn of Africa.

There are three faults within the Colorado portion of the Rio Grande Rift that made it onto the USGS hazards map, one believed capable of producing a 7.5 magnitude quake and another of producing a 7.0 quake. Logarithmic scale. Those would be powerful and they would come in the middle of Colorado, toward the New Mexico border.

He used two terms in this dense, finely argued lecture that were completely new to me: graben and lineament.

Graben: In geology, a graben is a depressed block of land bordered by parallel faults. Graben is German for ditch or trench.

 

Lineament: A lineament is a linear feature in a landscape which is an expression of an underlying geological structure such as a fault. Typically a lineament will comprise a fault-aligned valley, a series of fault or fold-aligned hills, a straight coastline or indeed a combination of these features.

The focus of his presentation was the true northern extent of the Rio Grande Rift. Here’s a map that shows its extension in the consensus view (more or less). In this map you can see the Rio Grande rising in southwestern Colorado, then flowing through the San Luis basin into New Mexico and then onto its more familiar location as a major boundary feature between the US and Mexico.

Vince said that current thinking took the Rio Grande Rift as far as Leadville.

 

Leadville in this map is the first black lettered city above the C in Colorado. I use this map to show you the San Luis Basin (the light tan opening to the left of Highway 25 and starting at the New Mexico border. The San Luis Basin is a major feature of the Rio Grande Rift as it comes north out of New Mexico.

Matthew’s argument extended the Rio Grande Rift considerably further north and then hypothesized a turn from its primarily north/south axis to an east/west one. This map of the Colorado Plateau can be used to illustrate his argument:

 

Matthews extended the boundary of the Colorado Plateau east to include the Rio Grande Rift, then proposed that the rift extended east/west toward the area here marked as the White River Plateau. He based his argument on indicators of a rift zone (which I won’t go into here) and on an experiment on a clay model of the Colorado Plateau.

In essence he argues that the Colorado Plateau is a tectonic feature that has been rotated clockwise. When asked how that could have happened, he said, “I don’t know.” But, if you imagine the Plateau as a piece of the earth’s crust that has physical integrity, then a motion pushing up on its southwestern edge would turn it clockwise. One of the other geologists in the room proposed the San Andreas Fault as it developed. (I got lost right here, but I followed the argument up to this point.)

Very interesting. These lectures are helping me orient myself to the unusual topography of Colorado and some of forces that shaped it.

BTW: I loved Matthew’s description of two cinder cones as “very young.” They were only 640,000 years old. Puts 68 in a very satisfying context.

Beyond the Boundaries, Health, Latin, MOOCS, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase, US History

It’s All Real Stuff

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Imbolc                              Black Mountain Moon

Prep days. Yesterday reorienting my workouts, today moving back into Ovid with the Latin. Prep is important but I find I want to hurry through it, press on, get to the real stuff. But, it’s all real stuff, isn’t it?

When doing the Latin, for example, I want to work fast, translate easily, get it. But, most often I have to work slowly, translate with difficulty, struggle to understand.

In the MOOC I’m taking from McGill University the current section is on physical literacy. An amazing insight for me. Literacy in the alphabetic, language based world, yes. Numeracy in the numbers based, mathematical world, yes. But physical literacy? That is, learning basic moves and physical actions that can later be strung together to play a sport, keep one fit, teach us how to fall, no. The idea never occurred to me.

It apparently surfaced in the 1930’s in America whereas numeracy only emerged as an idea in the 1960’s. It’s not surprising, I guess, since the move from the farm to the town and city was weighted against the old, physical ways that had existed since hunting and gathering gave way to the neolithic revolution.

Perhaps, come to think of it, becoming native to this place is a component of physical literacy, a tactile spirituality. As we move less and less, we interact with the natural less affectively, less often, less well. Perhaps play is a big component of becoming native to this place, wandering aimlessly in the woods or by a pond, in the mountains, on lakes.

Anyhow, I’m excited about this idea, a human trilogy necessary for a satisfying life: literacy, numeracy and physicality.

Art and Culture, Mountains

Aurora

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Imbolc                                                          Black Mountain Moon

At 6:00 a.m. now the sky has gone from black to a whitish blue, a few stars still visible. When I go to bed, usually around 9:00-9:30 p.m. these days, night has fallen sometime ago, but on the nights around the full moon, the land in our back is a wonder. The moon shine comes in from the south-south east and lights up the snow with its silver glow. It also creates dark, soft shadows around the lodgepole pines. If I follow the pines to the sky toward which they point, I see stars: Cassiopeia and others in her vicinity.

Now, in the morning, Black Mountain slowly emerges from indistinct mass to large, pine-covered height, 10,000+. Sometimes, like today, it has a streak of cloud behind it. Not often, but sometimes, too, it has a lenticular cloud giving it an atmospheric halo.

Shadow Mountain, where we live, only reaches 9,600 feet and we’re about 800 feet below that, so we look up to our taller neighbors. Beyond Black Mountain, but not too far, is Mt. Evans, a fourteener.

Mt. Bierstadt is another fourteener. Those of you interested in art may recognize it since it was named after the Hudson River School painter, Albert Bierstadt. He painted this of another Colorado fourteener, Long’s Peak.

Health

Moving Experiences

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Imbolc                                       Black Mountain Moon

IMAG0948Spent the morning tweaking my exercise regime. I’m taking a MOOC, Body Matters, from McGill University and it got me thinking about stuff I’d left out of my current routines. Then, I read a book (sampled) by Gretchen Reynolds, the excellent health and fitness columnist for the NYT. Plyometrics. I’d left them out this round. I change my routine up every once in a while, just to keep things interesting.

Plyometrics used to be called jump training. It involves explosive moves like jumping, doing an obstacle course of low hurdles, jump-rope. It adds bone strengthening, agility and balance to endurance, cardio-for which I do high intensity intervals, and resistance work for which I do a mix of exercises from outfits like Core Performance and P90X and old trainers.

Just ordered a wooden plyo box, 12x14x16, that will give me three different heights for squat jumps.

I didn’t start exercising until I was about 40, but I’ve kept at it pretty much since then, varying levels of intensity, at gyms and at home, with trainers and without trainers. Sometimes I’ve had healthy diets, sometimes not so much. But staying with it has been such a mantra for me that it is now easier to continue than it is to stop. After two months of no workouts due to the move, I was eager to get back to regular physical exercise.

That’s not to say, as Kate points out, that I did no physical activity during that time. I packed and unpacked, moved boxes from here to there, broke down cardboard and removed it from the house, set up all manner of things and did all this, once here in Colorado, while acclimatizing to 8,800 feet.

Even so, I like my workouts. In my new gym space. And I’m glad to be back at them.

BTW: I’ve also started using a nutritional supplement highly recommended by exercise physiologists, and I’m not kidding: chocolate milk!

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Latin, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Translating De Bello Gallico, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Back At It

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Imbolc                                  Black Mountain Moon

I’ve found my rhythms. Back at Latin, going to turn today back to Ovid from Caesar. Writing. I’m 4,000 words plus into Superior Wolf and my brain is buzzing, following trails here and there with characters, research, narrative structure. Working out is back, too, 6 days a week right now. I’m not where I was in terms of fitness, not sure how the altitude has affected me, but I’m improving and that’s the key. The whole fitness area is still in flux, but I have a pattern I’m using.

A new element, too. I’m going to make some art. Not sure what quite yet, though I’ve got some ideas and lots of material. When my center room work space gets finished, I plan to get at it. There’s also, with art, the research and work with art history, theory. Not there yet in that work, but it will come.

Even, if you managed to get through my long posts under Beyond the Boundaries, Original Relation and Reimagining Faith, you’ll know, my reimagining project has finally begun to take off. Why now I’m not sure, but there you go.

This blog, of course, has remained a constant.

Now, if we could just sell that house.