Yearly Archives: 2016

Commentary on the news, Politics, The West, US History, Weather +Climate, World History

The Madhatter Zone and Kairos

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Beltane                                                                             Running Creeks Moon

This is no longer a silly season. We’ve passed over silly into the Madhatter zone. How did the richest and most powerful country in the world, renowned for its democratic experiment, manage to nominate for the presidency two its most reviled citizens? This is a question that will puzzle the world, this country, political scientists, pundits and historians for decades. Not, to make it all that much worse, that there were any really better options. A crazed Texan whom nobody liked? A sneaky far right winger with a Cuban pedigree? An Ohio governor who masked a cruel streak? An aging and not very presidential democratic socialist from the Green Mountain State? This is the best we can do?

Feeling the Bern, for those us of a leftist persuasion, has been great fun, but he was no more presidential in his way that triumph of skyscraper buffoonery, Donald Trump. Hillary does have the chops, the gravitas for the job, I’ll give her that. And, it may have to be enough this year. As a country, we simply cannot afford to put an idiot in the Whitehouse. Hillary is a centrist, a hawk and definitely uninspiring.

The people who raise her negatives are not all boiling over tea party crackpots. She’s wonky and sort of anti-charismatic. Her inability to reach younger women has put a bright line down in the lane markers of contemporary feminism. Older women who want a woman, a competent, dues paid up woman like Hillary are in a slow lane to the right of the millennials who want what the feminist revolution promised, to choose a candidate based on her politics, not her gender. This may be one of the larger ironies of our time. The very success of mid to late 20th century feminism has made breaking the ceiling with the toughest glass difficult for one its champions.

I wish I could view this as a phenomenon, a circus act, a sideshow moment in our political history. This way to see the most incredible hair in all of American politics. See the amazing slippery Hillary explain it all. It’s not, though.

It’s a time Christian theologians of the crisis school would call kairotic. A time of kairos, a time that requires action, definitive action that will dramatically affect the future. Climate change has a deadline and that deadline is 2050. If we don’t reduce the use of fossil fuels by 80% by 2050, a huge amount, then the degree of climate change that will be baked in will alter our grandchildren’s world beyond our recognition.

This single issue has many political inflection points: fracking, tar sands, the whole Middle East mess, the funding of terrorism, how to support renewable fuels, funding new modes of transportation, shifting the world’s manufacturing and home heating energy sources and perhaps most importantly the economic impacts of all these.

Climate change and its hydra headed nature is not, however, the only critical issue. The continued rise of Asia, China and India foremost there, will change the geopolitical nature of our world, already has changed it. The tensions in the South China Sea are a leading indicator. India, within the next decade, will pass China as the world’s most populous country. How these two Asian giants manage their economies, their militaries, their internal politics will demand creative responses in U.S. foreign policy.

Internally, we have an economy that has thrust a demagogue and a left-wing populist into national prominence. This is a gilded age more patinaed than that other Gilded Age which Mark Twain satirized. The fault lines in our economy are many. The un or undereducated young have an unemployment rate of 17.8% according to today’s New York Times. The radical union busting of the post-Reagan era, all too successful, has diminished the clout of those in working class jobs like hotel cleaners, janitors, minimum wage factory workers, convenience store clerks, fast food workers.

Meanwhile, the gutting of Glass-Steagall led to the very catastrophe it was enacted to prevent, runaway banks and cunning, rather than sensible, financial instruments and markets. This had the perverse effect of giving the already muscular top 1% of our economic elite a sustained regime of fiscal steroids leading directly to the dangerously top heavy accumulation of wealth in our distributional pyramid. It’s more of an inverted pin really, a pinhead of unimaginably concentrated power and a thin column of those who barely count economically. This is a recipe for revolution, a recipe which has already led to Trump and Sanders, the mildest menu items on the list.

The Black Lives Matter movement continues a history of our nation long struggle to open our society to descendants of the enslaved. Changing demographics will alter the relative power of Latinos, African-Americans, Asians, Native Americans and Whites. The surge of angry white men wanting to make America Great Again is an attempted stiff arm to the increasingly powerful rush of these forces.

Finally, although not at all really the end, we have in the West, where I know live, a movement, the SageBrush Rebellion, which wants to take public lands and turn them over to state control, eventually for sale to private parties. This movement is a quixotic but potent mix of NRA supporters, libertarians, would be right-wing revolutionaries, ranchers, constitutional wingnuts. All of them find the economic and demographic changes going on now threatening in the extreme. The economies of the West are often fragile, subject to market forces beyond their control and now water issues made more difficult by a changing climate.

None of these are trivial matters, none of them will be blustered away or easily solved, even with the best of intentions. The world, our planet, needs, deserves leadership that will address these problems, not avoid them. Given the choices in this madhatter political season here in the U.S., I say Hillary. She’s the best still standing.

 

Family, Health, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Weather +Climate, Writing

This, that

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Beltane                                                                       Running Creeks Moon

Front, May 6th
Front, May 6th

The snow is mostly gone in the front, south facing yard. In the back though there are still long drifts of snow punctuated by even larger patches of soil, rock and the tufty grass we have up here on Shadow Mountain. The days are warmer but the nights remain cool. They will remain relatively cool and dry even during the summer.

I’ve had a time consuming blog related project that has eaten up days of time and is not done yet. It has given me an opportunity to go back over all the wordpress entries: 2016-2007, which has been fascinating. Some 8,000+ now.

Back, May 9
Back, May 9

Kate has Bailey Patchworkers, a sewing/quilting group, today and will make a run to the Happy Camper for cbds. My elliptical comes this morning. I’ll be able to get back to working out at a high intensity with the elliptical’s knee joint friendly motion. The treadmill will stay for walking at a moderate pace.

Once this blog project is over I plan to start regular hikes in the woods and a return to the fire mitigation work I began last fall. Kate is currently doing cross stitch for a very cute baby blanket. The baby blanket comes, naturally, after the wedding quilt.

Much to my chagrin, since I stopped adding salt to my meals, my weight has dropped, my blood pressure has dropped and I’m sleeping much better. Of course, I’m happy with the improvements. Still. Imagine me slapping my forehead with my hand.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Jefferson County, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, Weather +Climate

Water. Psyche.

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Beltane                                                                     Running Creeks Moon

maxwell 2015Went into Evergreen yesterday hunting for truffles-no, not nose to the ground, nose to the display case-and a bottle of Chardonnay. On the way down Shadow Mountain and whatever other mountains I descend on highway 78 (Shadow Mountain Drive, Black Forest Drive and Brook Forest Drive) Maxwell Creek tumbled down its narrow bed toward the rocks of Upper, then Lower Maxwell Falls. Further down Cub Creek came crashing down the mountain, headed toward a rendezvous with Maxwell. This time I realized that the creek going over the concrete spillway further on down 78 was neither Maxwell nor Cub, but a third creek coming down and out of Shadow Mountain like Maxwell. This one hits either Cub Creek or Maxwell somewhere, I couldn’t find the spot, but in any case all three join below Lower Maxwell Falls parking lot and speed toward Evergreen.

IMAG1503Not so long ago, I think it was 2012, these same three creeks overwhelmed Evergreen, causing considerable flooding. That was the same year that Golden and Manitou Springs and Boulder had flood problems, too. This is not that kind of year, but the amount of energy in these creeks impresses me.

The stolid, deeply moored mountain shows its power to create movement, the opposite of its apparent nature. Which might say something about us, about what we perceive as permanent and unchanging in our Selves.  Look for what movement it creates, perhaps unknown to us until we look.

Aging, Beyond the Boundaries, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, Memories, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Mystic Chords

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Beltane                                                                               New (Running Creeks) Moon

The mood here. Still subdued, still gathering the reality of Vega’s death around us. When Mom died, now 52 years ago, the ongoingness of life surprised me. Cars still rattled down Canal Street. Lights went off and on in houses. School was open, teachers teaching and kids squirming at their desks. The sun rose and set. Dogs barked. We needed sleep and ate breakfast.

This no longer amazes me. The feelings of absence, of missing, of longing do not disappear however, though they can get submerged in the running creek of life. I still miss my mom, not in that acute, gut twisting way of 52 years ago, but longing for her, for her presence remains.

Abraham Lincoln called these threads of feeling and remembrance, their resonance, the mystic chords of memory. Yes. Part of their function, a paradox, lies in the quickening of our daily life, jimmying us out of the cracks and ruts we fall into. We realize a life time has bounds.

As the writers of the Hebrew scriptures often said, this background music is a blessing and a curse. It can become a cacophony, a dirge we cannot shut off. A mental tinnitus. Yet, it is the dead, as much as the living, often more, who shape us, create us-sometimes to our exasperation, other times to our joy.

With Vega the only source of pain is her sudden absence. The rest, the memory of her, the mystic chords she sets off, are joyful and loving. And those will persist.

 

Great Wheel, Jefferson County, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, The West, Weather +Climate

Running Creeks Moon

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Beltane                                                                         New (Running Creeks) Moon

Upper Maxwell Falls May, 2015
Upper Maxwell Falls May, 2015

Shadow Brook, Forest Brook, Maxwell Creek, Deer Creek, the mountains streams I see regularly, are full. The snow melt obeys the law of gravity, following the twists in spacetime toward lower points. They boil at rock beds and turns, often muddy water capped with white foam.

With all the recent snow fields have begun to green and our aspens have leaf buds. The lodgepoles look healthy. That 10 inch snow last weekend has already melted and the snow drifts even in our north facing back yard have begun to diminish. Time to get back to I’m a lumberjack, yes I am.

Wildlife is more in evidence, too. On the day of Vega’s death Kate saw a red fox on the roadside, as if Vega’s spirit were saying the good-bye we didn’t get in person. We’ve several small herds of mule deer and Kate saw four elk does yesterday. Pinecam.com, source for all things local, has had mountain lion photos and reports of hungry bears causing mischief. The Denver Post reported a bear rummaging through a man’s refrigerator in his second floor apartment.

The bicyclists also return with the clearing roads, joggers, too. Crankshafts of motorcyclists also begin to appear. And that seasonal bird, the tourist, begins to clog highway 285, racing around curves and down the 7% inclines. There are grumbles on Pinecam.com. Here in Conifer 285 is still four lane, but south (really west) of us about seven or eight miles it goes down to two lanes. That’s the direction the tourists head and it makes for dangerous driving in the summer months.

So a seasonal change is upon us, though a very different one from the flowering, leafing, sprouting spring of Andover.

 

Dogs

Vega.

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Beltane                                                  Wedding Moon

dogfamilyVega’s ashes have come in. The sadness returned with this news. Thinking last night about death. Death is long, permanent, invisible, dark. Life is short, transient, all too visible, filled with light. Life is the flutter of one dragonfly wing, snow slipping from a pine branch, a meteor. Death is ordinary; life is extraordinary.

(Vega, on the left, still at the breeders. Her father, Guinness, is the gray wolfhound. All of her sibs.)

Grief, Proust said, gives power to the mind. Not sure what he meant by that, but there is a definite sense of emotional and intellectual heavy lifting around a death. We have no choice but to make sense of a world now less populated. One we loved has slipped beyond the reach of our senses.

How will we live now? That question confronts every individual, every family, every dog pack visited by death. Here we see Rigel’s tail beginning to thump more often and more loudly. We see her taking over the couch. Her bark is deeper, more considered.

Vega does, as Seoah said, live on in our hearts. Funny, opinionated, dominant without ruling, loving, sweet. That was Vega. From the very beginning. Still.

Beyond the Boundaries, Family, GeekWorld, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science

Out There

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Beltane                                                     Wedding Moon

Ruth and I went to the Fiske Planetarium in Boulder on Saturday night for a program on black holes. Ruth had never been to a planetarium. The lights went down and the night sky appeared on the dome above us. The southern night sky. So, right away the wonder of the star machine. Then, the night sky over Boulder with the constellations. The astronomer talked about their correlation to the ancients who relied on them for agricultural purposes. It is reportedly spring. Somewhere.

Ruth watched and listened carefully. The short film on black holes was not easy, covering the birth of black holes, their peculiar physics and their role in the cosmos. After it was over, the astronomer walked us through some of the recent findings related to black holes, the most notable being the discovery of gravity waves at the LIGO observatory. The relation to black holes is that the gravity pulse detected at LIGO began in a black hole.

sloan image

It’s been a while since I immersed myself in matters astronomical. My fine grained understanding of the evening was not great. The hey now moment came at the end when the astronomer pulled the dome’s display further and further out until the entire Sloan Survey covered only the center of the dome.

The rest of the dome then represented the edge of the knowable universe. Out there the astronomer showed what he called the light wall, a here cooler, there warmer barrier of early light, earliest light, really. This light wall, a new idea to me, represented, he said, the exterior wall of the black hole within which our whole universe lives! Wow. Immediately sped past my understanding. Just did a little quick research on this and found nothing. Could be my hearing. Yet another sensory limitation when it comes to learning about the universe.

On the way out Ruth said she was expecting something like that at the end. Why? Because in the film they had presented black holes as violent, destructive forces, so in the end they’d need to show their good side. Not a scientific conclusion, but still a damned good one. I missed the setup and it was there. Ruth is 10.

Great Wheel, Holidays

Beltane, 2016

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Beltane                                                 Wedding Moon

This is the first day of the growing season, the time when the old Celtic calendar turned over from Samhain, or Summer’s End, to Beltane, the day that marks the end of the fallow time. At some point, too, the Celts began to observe the solar holidays, solstices and equinoxes. Their distinctive holidays fall between these 4 solar events and hence are known as cross quarter days. It was only later in the evolution of the Celtic calendar that two other cross quarter holidays, Imbolc on February 1st and Lughnasa on August 1st were added.

That we’re not living in Ireland is apparent today since we’ve just received around 10 inches or so of new snow. No start of the growing season on Shadow Mountain. We’re both far away from the oceans, Ireland has a maritime climate, and high above it’s mostly sea level altitude.

But, close enough. Soon the weather here will slip out of the fallow season’s cold and snow into the growing season’s warmth. Sort of. At altitude the nights are never as warm and the temperature averages not as high as they are at sea level. Too, here in the West the precipitation comes largely in the fallow time. That means the growing season here on Shadow mountain is both shorter and cooler as well as drier. That defines the montane ecosystem in which we live.

The market week and celebrations of Beltane included the Maypole, fire jumping (for fertility), driving cattle between two bonfires for health, and those who wanted making love in the fields to draw the fertility of the fields into themselves and add their own to the fields in return. It was known then that human life and the life of the fields and forests were one. This knowledge remains essential to the health of our species and is one reason a pagan outlook continues to nourish me.

The fallow time is a long time of inwardness, six months or so. If they’re perennials, plants die back above ground and focus on storage of energy in their root system. They also interact vigorously with the soil around them. The human spirit goes inward, too, evidenced in the felt need for the holidays of light that fill up the two months plus of holiseason. In that time we humans interact with our roots, family and friends and tradition, nourishing them and being nourished by them.

So, when the lambs are in the belly at Imbolc (in the belly), the ewes freshen and milk becomes available. Memories of lambs frolicing in the spring return. By Beltane the lambs have strengthened and the fields are ready for planting. In old Ireland, that is. Those in the farther northern and southern latitudes and in high altitudes can appreciate the sunburst of life without snow and cold, of life with the promise of fresh vegetables, grain crops, fattened animals, of relaxing outside on a warm evening.

This is a time to celebrate. Dig deep into your fallow time ruminations, seek out what needs the sun to flourish. Make sure it’s planted in the right soil and gets the nourishment it needs, then grab your loved ones and dance, dance, dance. (or, if you’re more Celtic and less northern European, reverse the order.)

 

 

Aging, Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Health, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Too Much Salt?

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Spring                                                  Wedding Moon

Ruthandgabeuppermax300The snow has been less than predicted, a good thing. Still, it’s the wet, heavy, slushy stuff that makes snowblowers clog up.

Jon, Ruth and Gabe are coming up tonight. Jon and Ruth will go skiing tomorrow and Gabe will stay with us. Ruth and I plan to take in a Fiske Planetarium (Boulder) show on black holes this evening. Kate’s making Mississippi Pot Roast. This is the sort of thing that, no matter how much we might have wanted to do it, was impossible when we lived in Minnesota.

Got rid of 4 bookcases bought long ago at Dayton’s warehouse in Minneapolis. They’d seen me through the house on Edgcumbe and in Andover. Most of these got sold off in Minnesota, but the remaining four held some books while the built-ins were under construction. That opens up space in the garage. It’s a priority as soon as the weather warms up. Would’ve been last year if it hadn’t been cancer season over the summer.

saltOK. I have a confession to make. I’ve been putting too much salt on my food for years. Big surprise, I’m sure, to all of you who have witnessed it. In fact, I was following an approach suggested by my internist, Charlie Petersen. His opinion was that once you passed a point where a problem, blood pressure in this instance, required treatment, you didn’t need to modify your behavior if the treatment worked. And it did. For many years. But, not now.

Over the course of the trip to Asia I stopped adding salt to my food. My blood pressure, which had been labile before the trip, suddenly fell into line. Damn it. Empiricism is such a bitch. And, not so small side benefit. It’s easier to sleep through the night since my fluid retention has significantly decreased.

Yamantaka 13 Deitykat1

There is no doubt that I have a self-destructive homunculus in residence. Smoking and drinking took me several unpleasant years to put into the past. Just why this little guy is so interested in my demise, I don’t know. Maybe he’s the death wish that Freud believed we all have. He doesn’t give up. If I start one of these activities again, I quickly go back to the maximum use. I learned this while quitting smoking, several times.

It’s tough getting him to just sit still. You would think that, having visited Yamantaka (the slayer of death) many times over the years, he would calm down. Yamantaka is the Tibetan God of death itself. To worship him one thing you can do is look your own death straight in the face, imagine yourself dead, meditate on your own corpse. In this way Yamantaka helps us to accept death for what it is, a natural and not to be feared part of human existence.

Seems like that would get this homunculus to quiet down. Oh, it’s going to happen anyway and it’s ok, so why do I have to speed things up? But, no. Doesn’t appear to work that way.

Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, Friends, Memories, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Why grief?

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Spring                                                         Wedding Moon

As you might expect, I’ve been thinking about death, about grief in the wake of Vega’s sudden death. In particular I’ve been wondering how I can have a grasp on my own death, no fear, but be so distressed at Vega’s.

Then, it occurred to me. In movie thrillers the torturers often open their usually neated packet of tools: knives, pliers, dental picks, pieces of bamboo with a flourish. Or, as in the Marathon Man, the dentist goes to work on you without anesthetic.  In many cases the torturee summons up inhuman courage or an anti-heroic defiance.

When the usual infliction of pain or disorientation fails, or when the torturer is portrayed as unusually sadistic, friends or colleagues or family members of the torturee are led into the room. Then the torturer goes to work on them. Seems effective in the movies I’ve seen.

Grief, at least in part, is because the universe is such a torturer. Not with malice, of course, but certainly with a sort of intention. Life has an endpoint and entropy sees that it arrives. So, it’s possible to have the notion of your own death sorted out while responding with agony to the grim torture of having your friends removed from the room .