Monthly Archives: July 2020

Coronavirus, Jefferson County, Mountains, Original Relation, Our Land and Home, Science, Shadow Mountain, US History, Weather +Climate

The Mountains skipped like rams

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Summer and the (new moon), the Lughnasa Moon (moon of the first harvest)

Monday gratefuls: Clean floors and toilets. Chex Mix. Cinnamon rolls. Shrimp. Claussen’s picked up the pallets. Neowise. Samwise. Tolkien. Robert Penn Warren. The harem of Elk in the lower meadow. The confused Mule Deer Buck on Shadow Mountain Drive. All of our wild neighbors. And, our human ones, too.

When Kate and I went to see Amber last week, the meadow at the bottom of Shadow Mountain Drive had a harem of 20 Elk Cows, several Calves, and one proud Buck, strutting, head high. It’s a large meadow that lies between Conifer Mountain and Shadow Mountain, at the base of both. It has a Marsh that attracts Moose sometimes and an expanse filled with Grass that gets baled for hay later on in the year, this Meadow also attracts Mule Deer and Elk.

Seeing wild Animals living their lives is thrilling. Makes life in the Mountains awe-full. Delight, joy jumps right into your chest. The Mule Deer Buck that couldn’t figure out what to do with the metal barrier on a curve closer to home evoked concern. I flashed my lights for oncoming cars to warn them. The courteous dirt bike rider behind me was cautious. The Buck was unpredictable. In the five and a half years we’ve lived here I’ve seen only one dead Deer along the road, so these situations work themselves out.

As I reached in to pull out the Denver Post, I looked up at Black Mountain. A few small cumulus Clouds crowned its peak. The ski runs are dry, jagged brown scars down its face.

Unbidden, as happens often, we live in the Mountains wrote itself on my inner screen. A muted sense of wonder followed and I stood there, the latest doom-scrolling in my hand, captivated by the Mountain summer.

When Israel went out from Egypt…The mountains skipped like rams,
    the hills like lambs. Psalm 114, NRSV

The Mountains are calling and I must go. John Muir

These are not ancient Rocks caught in the stupor of inanimacy. These are not piles of Stone pushed up from the Earth’s Crust and left alone. These are Mountains. Tall, steady, confident. Like Vishnu they are stability, order, toughness made real. Shadow Mountain allows us to live on its peak and on its sides, but it could take away that permission. One massive burn through its forest of Aspens and Lodgepole Pines and our houses would be gone. Shadow Mountain would remain. The forests would grow back.

We are so Mayfly like to these sturdy beings. Our kind may not last as long Shadow Mountain. Surely won’t if we don’t change our behaviors. Yet it gives us a home, like it gives a home to our wild neighbors. A Mountain forgives those who tread its flanks. Except, perhaps, for those who shave off its peaks, ruin it with strip mines. Or, hard Metal mines that pollute Streams, kill Wildlife.

Time though. Time is the Mountain’s friend. It waits as its colleagues Rain, Snow, Ice, Lightning, running Water scour what human’s leave. Tumble it down through Creeks and Streams. Dilute it, spread it out. A million years on Shadow Mountain will look much the same, perhaps a bit shorter, perhaps a bit narrower, but still substantial. 9358 Black Mountain Drive will have long ago become a forgotten pimple.

We can learn from the Mountains. Even our Mayfly lives can gain from patience, from being slow to react, from purification in the waters of the heavens. We need these lessons now, in these Covid 19 times.

Commentary on Religion, Coronavirus, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Politics, US History

A Hard Place to Be

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Summer and the Moon of Justice

Sunday gratefuls: My partner, Kate. Our sweet girl, Rigel. And, our good boy, Kepler. Kate’s stoma site looking better. The front yard, looking clean and foresty with the stumps gone. The backyard looking good, will look better before Labor Day. Window cleaners, gutter cleaners in August. Yeah. Rethinking our Covid life. Republican, Trumpian angst.

Every limbo boy and girl
All around the limbo world
Gonna do the limborock
All around the limbo clock
Jack be limbo, Jack be quick Chubby Checker, 1962

Remember the limbo? Wonder how we’d all do now? Those of us in the Boomer brigade. Would not be pretty, I imagine. Kate and I used this word today to name a source of sadness. Covid has put our lives in a limbo between then, PC, and, whenever, post-C dominance of life. Her illness puts our lives in limbo between our old life together and whatever happens next. In some ways the third phase is a limbo phase between the younger, active days of education, family, career, and that old scythe wielder in the black hoodie, death.

Limbo was an abode near hell, a permanent eternal home for the just who died before the birth of Jesus and those who died unbaptized. Limbo is the ablative form of limbus, or border. Reminded me of liminal. Comes from a Latin word that means threshold. On the threshold of hell lies a well-bordered realm for those who couldn’t fit into a medieval Roman Catholic understanding of theodicy.

Yes, that’ll do. We are, through no fault of our own, needing to stay at home, in limbo, our homes being the border between us and the hell of Covid. And the threshold, the liminal space, is a place now filled with danger and possibility.

The ancient Celts believed the liminal times of dawn and twilight were magical, the optimal time to work spells, to conduct rituals. Many religious traditions have waking up and going to bed prayers, rituals. Jews, for example pray in the morning to open the literal eye and the metaphorical one. Episcopalians pray at night: “Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith.”

Limbo is a tough place to be. Liminal spaces like dawn and twilight, or liminal places like an ocean beach or a lake’s shoreline, offer entrance to another world, one unlike the one we are currently in. At night, sleep. In day, wakefulness. On the beach land underneath us and oxygen in the air, in the water, water beneath us and oxygen trapped, for us, in its molecules.

What’s beyond the threshold of limbo? A Biden presidency? A world made safer with vaccines, good testing, and contact tracing? A healthier Kate, able to get around more the world? We just don’t know. We are not, however, unbaptized souls trapped in a metaphysical realm, but flesh and blood trapped in a disastrous political situation compounded with a pall created by plague.

We are souls in waiting. A hard, hard place to be.

Politics, US History

Dumb Ups

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Summer and the Moon of Justice (saw the crescent Moon of Justice with Venus on Thursday morning. One of the most beautiful sights in the sky. To my eye.)

Saturday gratefuls: Downtime. Vacation. Finishing the reorganization of the loft. Finally. Well, mostly. Kate’s weight up. Scott Levin, regional director of the ADL. His seminar on racism yesterday. Kate energized by the gospel service at CBE. (on zoom) Ribs from the Smokehouse. The quiet. Leaning into managing prostate cancer as a chronic disease.

Taking a break. Wondering why I didn’t do it sooner. Going head down, staying in it. Sometimes necessary to get through a rough patch, but tiring, even exhausting if it becomes a permanent response to daily life. That would be me over the last few months to two years. I need to reset my day-to-day attitude. Doing it.

Looking forward to regular writing hours, picking up the paint brush, the sumi-e brushes. Needing to create, not only respond. Hikes. Gotta those going. Gonna try albuterol before going out. That plus my camel pack will at least let me get some distance into the forest, up the mountain.

CBE sponsored a seminar by Scott Levin of the regional Anti-Defamation League. I’ve been involved, as I think I’ve mentioned here, with civil rights since early college. Led a couple of marches in Muncie, Indiana, a very racially divided city. Got death threats. I was 19.

The Tillman anti-racism seminars in seminary. Twice, once with class mates in Minnesota, once with students from Morehouse College in Atlanta. Robert Terry workshops. Dumb ups, smart downs. Prepared a video based training curriculum for anti-racism training for clergy and congregations.

Worked on several initiatives with both Latino and African-American clergy and communities. Sin Fronteras, without borders, was an organization created with Latino activists to pay for the application fees for green card hopefuls. Helped create a “grandmother” ministry in the Powderhorn Neighborhood, led by a Lakota grandmother, Bea Swanson. Went out to Wounded Knee with food during the occupation by A.I.M.

Not any work here in Colorado. Yet. CBE plans to engage more. Maybe I’ll get involved. Harder with not being a reliable attender to meetings.

The Scott Levin seminar was dispiriting in some ways. A lot of liberal nonsense, at least one conservative ostrich, no problem, not here. Scott himself has a good understanding of systemic racism though he didn’t go very far into it. A few folks who understand the linkage between bigotry and power that produces and reinforces systemic racism. That was heartening. More such folks than I’ve encountered in a religious community before. (a white religious community)

Racism was, and remains, our original sin, starting with Columbus, continued by the English settlers, enshrined in our constitution with the 3/5th’s compromise, continuing even after the civil war with Jim Crow, segregation, barriers to voting, employment and housing discrimination. And, yes, police violence. Violence has, since the days of slavery, been used to keep people of color down. Look at the ICE holding centers right now.

This is the time to support the movement. There is a chance for real change with racist Donald in charge and making sure the nation stays riled up. That’s good for the prospects of deep and lasting change. Especially since it’s an election year. Marrying street activism with a Democratic sweep of Congress and the Presidency could set the stage for a new day in race relations. May it be so.

Politics, Shadow Mountain, US History

When is dawn?

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Summer and the Moon of Justice

Thursday gratefuls: The loft. Amber, a smart nurse. Anti-fungal powder. Curative foam. Ruby. Her air conditioning. Freeways: Hwy 285, 470, 70. Wadsworth Blvd. Wheatridge. Kate, her equanimity. Kep. Rigel. All my zoom connections. Books. The internet.

Doom-scrolling. Just did a bit, trying to read the tea leaves. No flying cars. No neon-washed nightscapes. No replicants, no replicant bounty hunters. Blade-Runner days and nights. The reality of 2020, a year after the 1982 movie’s dystopian version of Los Angeles, is so much grimmer. So much darker. So much worse.

The President of this version of 2020 chose the midst of a pandemic to push a case to the Supreme Court that would take health care away from millions. He’s also chosen this time to unfreeze executions in the Federal Prison system. His administration has children in cages, supports white supremacy and white supremacists, thinks Black Lives Matter is a hate group. The chaotic White House response to the worst pandemic of this millennia has killed thousands of Americans and led us to the number one position in the world for new cases, now over 65,000 a day. With no Federal activity to slow it down, let alone stop it.

The election in November. He’s way behind, that orange festooned buffoon. Or, so say the polls. But we all have poll shock, having been gulled once. Gulled once, shame on us… Just read a Politico article that said one problem with polling potential Trump voters is that they don’t usually vote. They come out for him only, and hang up on pollsters.

Doom-scrolling is not necessary. The headlines of each day’s newspapers scream the dysfunction of this once confident, world-leading nation. George Will had a column yesterday in the Washington Post titled, The nation is in a downward spiral. Worse is still to come. WP. It’s last line is, “This is what national decline looks like.”

Let’s call it red hat irony. The man who campaigned on making America great has gutted us. Stripped away our credibility with foreign allies. Defended our Cold War enemy against election meddling charges and ignored its pay for slay reinsertion of itself in Afghanistan. He has let a pandemic run wild among our people while stiff arming the poor, the needy, the teeming masses yearning to be free. His pandemic policy might accomplish his goal of reducing immigration down to almost zero.

This country. My home. Probably your home. Its flag, my flag. Its military, my military. Its people, my people. Its beautiful, majestic land, my land. Why wouldn’t we all have tears streaming down our faces as we see it now, in retreat, many of us in self-imposed exile in the nation of our own home?

This is not the American Century, nor the American Millennia. Hell, we couldn’t achieve an American Week or Day. Let’s hope that the old cliche holds, that things are darkest before the dawn. We can’t see ahead right now and that’s pretty damned dark.

Cooking, Coronavirus, Dogs, Family, Health, Jefferson County, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Travel

Needed

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Summer and the Moon of Justice

Wednesday gratefuls: Mary’s recovery. Nasal polyp removal. Anitha, her bestie caring for her at home. Meeting with our financial advisor, RJ. Zoom. The health of our corpus. The three Earth countries sending visitors to Red Mars. Tianwen, Perseverance, Hope. China, USA, UAE. The night sky. Our stumpless front yard. Needing a break.

Want to set this burden down. For a bit. Need a vacation. A staycation. Something. Always on. Dogs. Kate. Cooking. House maintenance. Cleaning. Mail. Groceries. (Kate pays the bills.) Cars. Insurance. You know, all that domestic stuff. Work outs. Organizing stuff. Laundry. (Kate folds. Thank god.) My own health. Doctor visits. Imaging, hospitals, emergency rooms.

A bit whiny, maybe, but I do need a break. Of some kind. Not gonna happen either. No place to go, for one. Thanks, Covid. So even if putting the dogs at Bergen Bark Inn and Kate in respite care weren’t expensive and a hassle in itself (something more to organize), the virus makes travel unfun.

Having Seoah here was wonderful, of course. And, she did relieve the cooking and house cleaning. But not the overburden of responsibility.

Trying to figure out what I can do here on Shadow Mountain. Just crossed off workouts for a week and a half. I always go back, so that’s no danger. Problem with them is I moved them to mornings so I wouldn’t miss them so often. I used to work out around 4 pm. Too hot now. Plus cooking the evening meal. Other things. The move to mornings has worked well. I’m very regular with the exception of morning appointments out of the house.

But. Not getting any writing done, painting. Reading has shrunk to news and serious material like Art Green’s Human Narrative. Some pleasure reading in the evenings.

I want to finally finish, I’m oh so close, the loft. Then get back to writing and painting. I’ll take early morning hikes. Read some more fiction. Watch movies. I’ll buy takeout for the next week and a half, too. That should help. Ah, hell. I could take two weeks off from exercise. I might. Jump start a renewed Covid, stay-at-home life.

Yes. This sounds good. A respite. Needed.

Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Coronavirus, Friends, Great Work, Health, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Plants, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Torah, US History, Woolly Mammoths

A New Covenant

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Summer and the Moon of Justice

Wednesday gratefuls: Mountain Waste. The Claussens, coming for my pallets. The much improved back. Mowed. Most of the detritus picked up and moved. Photographs from Scott of the Woollies at George Floyd’s death site. Sjogren’s, not Covid. Pork ribeye. Napa Cabbage. The heat. The coolness of the morning. Garbage bags.

And then the world came crashing back into my consciousness. Been following the coronavirus spikes, unable to shed the schadenfreude that accompanies the horror. All those people sick and dying because of Trump, Fox News, sychophancy. The Master Race putting its own head on the guillotine. Fixated on this, like looking at a fire in the fireplace or a gently moving fan.

Opened up the email from Woolly Scott. Pictures of my long time friends at the site of George Floyds’ death. Long arcs of dead and withering flowers freshened up by new bouquets. A line of soft toys, teddy bears and rabbits, looking both sad and sweet. Mark Odegard in an orange shirt, a mask, looking at the George Floyd mural. These are friends who lived through the sixties, who understand this holy site in the context of MLK, Malcolm X, the Civil Rights Act, The Voter Registration Act. All that.

Statues falling. Folks going after not only the Confederate memorials, but Founding Fathers like Washington and Jefferson. Or, later, Woodrow Wilson. The screeches of foul play coming from the dotard in chief. His allies revving up their motorcycles, donning their leathers, taking their automatic weapons off their racks and out of gun safes. Heading out to protect the constitution and their way of life. Their white privilege. A complicated time.

Here I am on the mountain top. Moved, but unmoved. A latter day Noah on his ark, Ararat below me. Can this earth flooded with hate and hope create a new world? Maybe I need a dove.

What might be the sign of a new covenant? A bonding among all humans agreeing to live sustainably on our only home, in peace with each other. I can still see the double helix as the trunk of a tree of life, its crown, its keter, in the heavens, its roots dug deep below the soil. This covenant I can feel.

Let’s all cut our fingers, slash our palms, swear a blood oath that we will live as if all of it, you and me, the Lodgepole, the Whale, the Mountain, the Ocean are holy. Worthy. Precious. Loved. That should do it.

Feelings, Health

Blood test addendum

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Summer and the Moon of Justice

Anxiety. I’m fine. Not worried. Oh? Kate asked. Yep. I’m ok.

Got all the way down Shadow Mountain and part way to Aspen Park when I realized. Uh oh. No lab order. Had to turn around, drive back home, fish the order of its yellow file folder and message Quest Labs that I would not make the appointment on time.

Realized I was leaning forward into the steering wheel, trying to will myself there, eliminate the drive. Just be there. Get it over with. Jaws clenched a little.

When I got into my I witness and I wait mode, I calmed down. Drove peacefully. Until. When I exited Hwy 470 at Bowles, I stopped with the other cars at the light, waiting to get onto Bowles. The light turned green, the other cars left. My engine wouldn’t turn over. What? I fussed, wondering WTF?

Then. Oh, I see. I’d turned the car off when I stopped. Well, hell. More at stake here than my consciousness owned.

An irregular funnel shaped cloud, gray, with thick feathers of white shooting out from it to the north and a cumulus cloud, white like Ivory snow behind it, hung in front of me as I drove down Bowles. It had rain coming down out of the funnel’s spout though it was all alone in that sector of the sky. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Made it with no other intimations of my own anxiety or unusual natural occurrences.

Family, Feelings, Friends, Health, Third Phase

Blood test

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Summer and the Moon of Justice

Tuesday gratefuls: PSA. PSA test. Prostate cancer. Life’s precious days. The Shofar. Pride. Sorrow. Will James. His proposal for the Trees too close to the house. Rick Standler who’s coming by this week to grind the stumps. Cleaning the garage. Finally. Gusting Wind. Clear, blue Sky over Black Mountain. Tree pollen. Sneezing. The fans here in the loft. Low humidity.

OK. Draw blood. Send it to the lab. Write down numbers. Post them. Send them to the oncologist. Weird to think that this process talks about cancer. About its presence or its likely absence. Quest labs. Makes it sound downright Arthurian, eh?

Each case of cancer has its quest. There is a dragon to slay. Trials to go through. Setbacks. Those who hinder and those who help. Obstacles. It is a test of will, too. Can you stay on your quest in spite of fear, pain, misery? Can you defeat the illusions, delusions, ghosts?

I suppose this is why so many obituaries start with he fought cancer. She was brave. Survivors writing what they hope will be their own virtues. The warfare analogy so common in the death notices is understandable, but far from adequate.

The medical care for cancer infantilizes as often as it ennobles. Toxic chemicals introduced into our whole body do their indiscriminate work. Get weak. Have hot flashes. No sex drive. Suffer bone loss. And that’s just me. Others. Our immune systems suppressed. Nauseated. Lose our hair.

Not victims. Humans who have a disease. Not victims. The knight on the quest can never be a victim. Cancer is, as doctors often say, bad luck. It’s deadly. Scary. As bad a dragon as you’re likely to face. Yes. All that.

But. To be a victim is to give cancer a victory it doesn’t deserve. We all die of something. I’ve come to think of that something as a friend as important as my mother. My mother gave me life. This life. Cancer or heart disease or old age will give me death. The most important punctuations for all of us: Life. Death.

Before death however, no matter how diseased or distracted, we are alive, here and now. I’ll die tomorrow. Yes, perhaps. Until then though we wake up, we cook, eat, wash dishes, hold hands. Look life in the face. Smile.

Family, Feelings, Friends, Health, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Ordinary Time

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Summer and the full Moon of Justice peaking over Black Mountain

Monday gratefuls: Seeing Jon, Ruth, Gabe. Rain. Cooling a hot day. Beau Jo’s pizza. Folks in masks in Evergreen. Simple Green. A good mop. Lysol and Tough wipes. Clean toilets and floors. The whole yard looking neater. Seoah closer to finishing quarantine. Old friends. Bringing joy. Being joyful. The moon this morning, full and half set behind Black Mountain when I got the paper. Our mountain life.

“All that is gold does not glitter; not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither; deep roots are not reached by the frost.” J. R. R. TOLKIEN quoted in the INFP profile on 16personalities

On Sunday morning now I mop the floors and clean the toilets. Takes about an hour and a half. Feels good. More would not feel good. Kate dusts. Some stuff, like windows and the stainless appliances, get missed. We’re working on how to deal with that.

Seoah just did it. She’d mop, clean, hustle. I’m trying to continue the spirit in which she did these necessary chores. Working so far. I clean the kitchen each day. Load, unload the dishwasher, cook. With Seoah’s good energy as the backdrop.

Told the story yesterday to my old friends Bill, Tom, Mario, Paul about putting Kate’s feeding tube back in. First couple of times it popped out we went to the E.R. Once to the surgeon, Ed Smith. Now, I’ve done it twice. I care for her feeding tube site once a day or once every couple of days. Nurse Charlie.

Doing these things, plus getting all the pallets ready for collection and the lawn mowed have buoyed me. These are the chop wood, carry water equivalents for me right now. And doing them induces a meditative, here and now state.

Let’s hear it for ordinary time, not extraordinary time. These wild and precious days in which we spend the life gifted to us.

Friends, Humanities, News of the Strange, Third Phase

Neurotic

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Summer and the Moon of Justice

Sunday gratefuls: A mowed and less cluttered backyard. Jon and the grandkids coming tonight. Pick-up groceries. Safeway. Even though. Kate’s feeding tube. Her appointment with an ostomy nurse. House cleaning. The dishwasher. The final days of our freezer. This pulse of energy I have for domestic work. May it last. Cool mountain mornings. Trump and his racist ways.

Not all who wander are lost. This Tolkien quote could be my family crest. Mary and Mark living the expat life. Kate and I finally come to rest, like Noah, on a mountain top in the Rockies. And that’s the external reality.

A few days back I surfaced the wandering going on in my inner life. Last night, as my plugged up nose kept me awake, an old shard of psychiatric shrapnel worked its way up again. Philosophical neurosis. Diagnosed with this in 1969. After, I think, the MMPI and one or two visits with a doc. Neurosis got ejected from the DSM in 1980, but not before it struck me with the force of a hidden mindmine.

Nowhere in searches on Google or in any book on psychology have I found the term. The psychiatrist who diagnosed me is lost to memory, as well as any explanatory information from him. Those two words, philosophical neurosis, have many synaptic threads attached to them and they tug out of the basement every once in a while.

Philosophical neurosis. It had the unusual impact of pathologizing a key aspect of my personality. I take nothing for granted. Discovering there was an entire, storied academic tradition of people who did the same transformed me over the course of a semester. Even though I came to love anthropology as much as philosophy, philosophy shaped me, made me a critic and theorist at heart.

When I was a young boy, my bedroom adjoined my parents. My father and I would “talk about tractors” for a while before going to sleep. As I recall, this meant talking about a diverse range of topics. Early on though it exposed me to critique. Even at age 7 or 8, I would pursue the logic of a topic to its fullest extent. Dad never had dad authority. He could tell me something, but I would as often say, I wonder about that, as I would nod my head.

He called me tech. As in, technical. I always argued about the mechanics, the structure of an observation. Wish I could give you an example from that time, but my main memories around being “tech” was Dad’s growing frustration with me. He had been raised by his German physician grandfather, Jonas Spitler. My impression is that Jonas had dad authority. Always.

It came to me from the womb. I had, and have, an instantaneous realization of a contradiction or a flaw in an argument. It was no surprise to me when I took the Meyers-Briggs personality inventory and discovered my letters: INTP, an introverted intuitive thinking perceiving type.

“Logicians are known for their brilliant theories and unrelenting logic – in fact, they are considered the most logically precise of all the personality types.” on the INTP personality, 16personalities. Poor dad. I came with this mental equipment, discovered philosophy and politics. Our relationship was over right about then. He had strong, definite opinions. With which, unfortunately for us, I often disagreed.

Then, that psychiatrist nailed me with what I now believe was a made-up diagnosis. Maybe he was an incarnation of my father’s persona. I do remember he told me I had to find values that I could embrace or my life would be, well, shit.

Embracing or conforming to a belief system defines blasphemy and anathema for me. If it makes sense to me, sure. I can go there. But if it doesn’t, now or later, then I’m on another path, another ancientrail.

This explains why I’ve always felt like an outsider in any job I’ve ever had. Even the ministry. In the end, it has to make sense, the assumptions, the framework of the job. And the world does not divide logically. So, Charlie out. Sorry.

Philosophical neurosis. As much as I hate to admit it. Fair enough. I have to approach the world as I am and that does seem, at least at 73, to be who I am, one who can’t turn off the analytical part of his mind. Doesn’t I mean I’m not loving, caring. I am. But don’t expect me to buy the shiny new religious or political system you’ve discovered. I probably won’t.