Monthly Archives: October 2015

Great Work, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain

A Tiny Rant About Gas

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Samhain                                                                           Moon of the First Snow

The moon hung right between Orion’s shoulder blades when I got up this morning, a quiet wonder. Now it sits, a daytime moon, above the peak of Black Mountain, a ghost of its luminous night time presence.

Filled up with gas today and with our King Sooper discount bought gas for $1.69 a gallon. $1.69. A long time ago when I saw those numbers flash by on the gas pump. People are joyous about this, economists say it portends well for the Christmas shopping season.

I say bah, humbug. Cheap gas is something we don’t need. Dearer gas, gas the price of which includes the externalities of its destructive extractors and processors, pricey gas, that’s what we need. Just like we need costly coal and kerosene. Even natural gas should cost more. The methane leaks from shale oil fields are contributing a distressing amount to global warming, making natural gas a less friendly transition fuel.

Word from our solar folks that the panels may go on as soon as the week before Thanksgiving. That’s good news because it means we’ll have less chance of not getting our net meter installed before January 1st, the cutoff for the onerous demand charges about to be instituted by our friendly mountain electric company.

Today, like Saturdays across this land, has been and continues to be one of errands and small projects. Groceries gotten. Light bulbs replaced. Boxes moved.

Kate’s painting the pony wall in her sewing space because it’s something she can do one handed. Not being able annoys her, makes her mad at her green casted hand. Only three more weeks.

Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Our Land and Home, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, The Move

Happy New Year!

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Samhain                                                                   Moon of the First Snow

The Celts began the New Year at the end of the harvest season celebrated on October 31st. In the old Celtic calendar there were only two seasons: summer and winter and today marked summer’s end or Samhain, the end of the growing season. So for the ancient Celts the year began in the fallow season, the season of senescence and death.

As I’ve watched the run up to Halloween this year, I’ve been struck by its emphasis on horror, scares and fear. As a direct, but altered version of Samhain, Halloween emphasizes certain aspects of the original holiday, for example the thinning of the veil between this world and the Otherworld, the land of faery and the dead.

This year Kate and I celebrate the thinning of the veil between Minnesota and Colorado. Exactly a year ago today we closed on Black Mountain Drive. That closing brought Minnesota and Colorado so close to each other they could touch. For us.

Three mule deer bucks were in the back that morning, eating grass. I approached them slowly and they let me get very close, watching me with round brown eyes, attentive but not nervous. They were the spirit of Shadow Mountain welcoming us home, a trinity of mountain dwellers.

Black Mountain Drive is a Great Wheel home. We closed on October 31st, Samhain, and moved in on December 20th, the Winter Solstice, the day that Samhain ends. The holiday of the longest night, Winter’s Solstice, is my favorite holiday of the year, so to close on Samhain, the New Year, and to move in on my favorite  holiday gives our home a special frisson. It occupies a space not only on the physical Shadow Mountain but on spirit Shadow Mountain, too.

IMAG0773Our home participates not only in the massive rockness of the mountain, but in the essence of the Rocky Mountains, their wild majesty, their sudden emergence from the Great Plains, their uncivilized character. These mountains are home to elk, mule deer, fox, bear, squirrels, pika, mountain lions, human beings, dogs, cats, lodgepole and ponderosa pines, Colorado blue spruce, fast running streams, waterfalls, quiet ponds and small lakes.

It is a Samhain home and a Solstice home, forever for us, infused with the old energies of these two seasons. Our years within it begin on the Celtic new year and grow deep with the long night, the two poles of our start here.

So this year we celebrate both home and holiday. Blessed be.

Aging, Health, Our Land and Home, Third Phase

Aches and Pains Week

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Mabon                                                                        Moon of the First Snow

This has been an aches and pains week. Pain, chronic pain, with which Kate is too familiar, can sap drive, make life difficult. This week we’ve both been hit by pains and accompanying disruption in our sleep. The combination of sleep deprivation and pain makes it very difficult for me to focus on anything that requires attention, thought.

Chainsaws vibrate. A lot. And, they’re noisy and dangerous. In addition the fast movement of the chain has a gyroscopic effect that makes the saw want to move in its own way, so part of using one is occasionally working against that force. Trees weigh a lot and the larger the branches, the more they weigh, too. Using the chainsaw results in heavy labor immediately afterward. All of which I like, for some reason.

There’s plenty more work ahead, moving as I will today into the southwest portion of our front woods. My goal is to get the front done and have someone come move all that slash.

Last week I punctuated my chainsaw work with a two hour up and down hike with Ruth. It was a wonderful time for the two of us, not so wonderful for my back. These are the constant third phase trade-offs. This I can do, but it will make my arm sing hot music. This I can do, but my back will claim its prize at the end. This I can do, but I’ll have to sacrifice sleep as a result.

The paradox, the contradictory part of all this is that if I don’t do something, I’ll soon be able to do nothing. So rest or desisting from exercise, manual labor is not really an option, not for long. The physical therapy aims to get me back to a spot where these trade-offs are not as acute, not as persistent and frequent. But, it too, has its price. Time.

This is not complaint, just observation. It’s all as much a part of the third phase as all-nighters were of the second, both with tests and later with babies. This reality defines a certain part of what it means to be older, at least for most of us; but, it does not define all of aging, nor does it define the most important parts.

Dogs, Health, Weather +Climate

Futility

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Mabon                                                                               Moon of the First Snow

P.T. this morning. Dana did some rotator cuff work that hurt like a summabit. Then it felt better. Learning more new exercises. Soon I will achieve that fated day when the things I do for self-care like working out, teeth, p.t. exercises, showering consume all my waking moments. Then the capacity to stay alive will meet futility.  Nah. Not really. But it feels like it right now.

Gray days. Snow predicted tomorrow. More trees to cut down, but this old body isn’t up to it today. Tomorrow. In the snow. Like a real Minnesotan.

Vega, Gertie and Kepler all come up to the loft. Vega stands outside the door and gives a soft but insistent bark. Let me in. Gertie paws at the door, already scarring the metal door, scraping off the green paint. Kepler comes up and stands outside the door. If I see him, I let him in. Otherwise he waits as long as it makes sense to him, then he goes back downstairs. All three of them are up here now, snoring. Rigel will not climb the stairs.

 

Friends, Minnesota, Third Phase, Travel, Woolly Mammoths

Where They Know My Name

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Mabon                                                                           Moon of the First Snow

Lonnie and Stefan came to Shadow Mountain yesterday. We had a nice visit, showed them around the homestead and had a deli lunch Kate gathered at King Sooper. In correspondence with Stefan later I gave a voice to a recent recognition about friends:

“I’ve been thinking about making new friends out here. At first, it was a high level need. I jumped into a sheepshead group, tried to connect with the Sierra Club and a group called Friends of the Mt. Evans Wilderness. Then I realized that the friends I made in Minnesota like you and Lonnie have a depth, a history that I will never replicate here. Not enough time.

So, a high priority for me is to maintain face-to-face contact with as many of you as I can. The Woolly retreat is one way and I hope to make it back for the Nicollet Island Inn dinner in December. That way, combined with trips like yours and Lonnie’s, I can stay in relationship with those I love in Minnesota.

I’ll make new friends here, too, eventually, but these will be third phase friends. They can’t share the second phase time I spent with all of you in Minnesota.”

This might sound dismal. But it simply recognizes the truth of the friendships I found in political work with the Sierra Club, among the docent corps at the MIA and in the Woolly Mammoths. These are not to be left behind, but nurtured still. The times of being with many of these friends was episodic even while in Minnesota. So the duration between face-to-face moments may increase, but it also may not.

 

Colorado, Mountains, The West

Foxy

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Mabon                                                                       Moon of the First Snow

 

After some ice cream, we left Georgetown and, since Ruth wanted to go back a different way, we drove the Guanella Pass south out of Georgetown. It comes out in the very small town of Grant on Highway 285 about 25 miles from Shadow Mountain. The pass reaches 11,669 feet at its highest point and includes several overlooks, national forest campgrounds and a large Xcel energy hydroelectric station.

As we climbed, the snow cover got heavier and heavier until we reached an area where the snow was thick on the ground somewhere close to the treeline. 24 miles long the Guanella Pass takes a while to drive because it’s both narrow and twisty.

20151024_163702Along the way we saw this guy sunning himself on the road. He never moved when I stopped the car, rolled down the window and took several pictures. A healthy looking red fox.

This is wild, forlorn country reachable, for now, by car. One socko storm though and the Guanella Pass will close for the season. The Mt. Evan’s road, which traverses a similar route further east, climbs one of Colorado’s fourteeners.