Beltane                                                                        New (Closing) Moon

Hard to get into a rhythm. All this health stuff. Narrows my world, makes it seem focused on what’s wrong, not what’s right. And a lot is right.

Take the mountains. Everchanging. You’d think they’d stay the same, these massive intrusions from beneath the earth’s crust. So solid. So there. But it’s not so. This month the precipitation has put fog all around us, Black Mountains lies obscured not far away. The Rockies look more like the Smokies.

As I have driven them this month, the Blue Ridge Parkway, civil war battles, the early days of the American revolution have stirred in my memory. But this is not the east. This is the arid west and its imprints are from the first nations, from the Spanish and the Mexicans. Here the early years of human habitation stretch back over 11,000 years. Here the lands had no fixed borders, but were fluid, changing as first nations grew and waned, moved.

Here the incursions came not from the east across the broad Atlantic, but from the south, up from Mexico. European contact here brought bull-fights and Spain, a colonial power, yes, but one inflected by the Mediterranean and the Romans rather than the Atlantic and the Celts, the Britons.

This is what I want to engage. But to do it, I have also have to deal with my health. The third phase.