Daily Archives: May 25, 2025

Dogs, Fourth Phase, Garden, Great Wheel, Greenhouse, Health, Paganism, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Reimaging revelation, Writing

Shou Sugi Ban Treated Wood for Artemis Greenhouse

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Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II (3% crescent)

Sunday gratefuls: Shadow jumping onto my legs this morning for a hug. So sweet. Fun with old socks. Our new, changing relationship. Back pain. Zerizut for p.t. and resistance work. Tara. Alan. Rich. Luke. Mussar. Shabbat. Morning prayers. Enveloped by Rain and Fog. Mom and Dad, both veterans. My son, a future veteran. All those who defend us with their lives.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Rain

Week Kavannah: Zerizut. Enthusiasm. for p.t. and resistance.

One brief shining: As Great Sol began to disappear behind Black Mountain yesterday, a rainy Fog rolled in and gave my backyard a ghostly appearance, Lodgepoles coming in and out of sight, Shadow rushing inside all wet from running through a Cloud.

 

On Ancientrails: You may notice some extra posts here and there. I’ll signal them with something in the future, probably an image. You will find my regular as usual posts with the format of long standing.

These new posts are me trying to write out, work out my sense of where I am in my thought process about certain matters like spirituality, theology, politics. I’ve had this urge to write down things I’ve thought about for a long time. They’re incomplete sentences, non-systematic because I’ve admitted to myself that I’m not a system builder or even an always logical thinker. There is this strain of mysticism, a poetry of the inner world that means more to me than a syllogism. Though I love syllogisms, too.

You will know these entries by their lack of gratefuls, sparks, kavannah, one brief shining. Please feel free to ignore them. They’re me scratching my name in the wet Sand. I want a record of those ideas before the King Tide rolls in.

 

Dog journal: Shadow bounded into my arms this morning before I got out of bed, her paws on my outstretched legs. As if overnight, she’d forgotten to be shy, to be scared. I hugged her and she wriggled happy, licking my face. Yes, I said to her, this is what I want. What I need. An oh so special moment.

 

Back pain/cancer: Tara will take me to my open-sided MRI. I’ll have taken an Ativan for my claustrophobia so I’ll be talkative with little executive function for a filter. Glad I trust her.

Here’s an oddity with this MRI. Both my oncologist and my pain doc want images of my hips. Both have sent orders. I hope that doesn’t screw things up.

Oncologist checking for metastatic growth in my hips. Pain doc getting information for a possible insertion of a SPRINT device later. Two diagnoses for the price of one! BOGO.

 

Just a moment: We will move into the Artemis Greenhouse Moon tomorrow. Nathan comes tomorrow to begin building. He thinks it will take about a week. I’m excited. I want/need to grow things again.

It will be done in shou sogi ban treated wood. This is an ancient Japanese wood treatment that involves charring the surface of a board, then sealing it. Nathan has taught himself how to do this.

Since I’m starting a little late in the gardening year, I’ll have to be careful with what I plant, but I’ll get crops this year. Plus there will be flowers.

 

 

 

 

Garden, Great Wheel, Mountains, Plants, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Talmud, Torah, Wild Neighbors

Artemis: A Riff on Tactile Spirituality

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Beltane and the Wu Wei Moon II

A Tactile Spirituality

“I live at 8,800 feet in zip code 80433. I’m having a greenhouse built in my backyard. What vegetables will grow well in it. Look for heirloom varieties. Include recommended planting dates. Mostly I want salad ingredients and greens. Tomatoes.”

This is the prompt I gave chatgpt for a quick assist in knowing what to plant. I got back 21 pages of detailed recommendations, including specific heirloom varieties of Tomatoes, Lettuce, Radishes, Carrots, Beets, Onions, and Herbs.

Spirituality has the curse of the three-story universe, René Descartes, and destructive deconstruction. That is, Abrahamic prayer and devotional practice has historically “aimed” its prayers up toward the heavens and away from the corruptions of the flesh. Descartes’s dramatic division of the mind from the body reinforced a religious path focused on the immaterial mind, released from the body. And, in turn, Mother Earth. While deconstruction did unveil the power dynamics involved in how our agriculture works, how choice of books for a syllabus reflected white privilege, and the patriarchal symbolism of the three-story universe, it also made demythologizing a knee jerk way of removing mystery and grace.

As a result a tactile spirituality seems, at first look, an oxymoron. The mind. The heavens. Transcendence. Those are the domain of spirit. Not the soil. Not the forests. Not the feet or the hands. Not the world of this reality, this busy, noisy, fussy, often bloody and violent reality. How can we gain the peace, the calm, the centeredness where spiders crawl, illness ravages, and death dominates?

That’s where Artemis Greenhouses comes in. About as down and dirty a human activity, or I should say, human aided activity as I can imagine. Soil (no, not dirt) under the fingernails. Nurturing small plants. Beets. Spinach. Lettuce. Radishes. Plucking off predating insects. Blocking out Deer and Elk. Harvesting the red and white Radish. The red Beet. Rainbow colored Chard. Green Kale and Spinach. Eating them.

Fuel for the body. That most inelegant of spiritual residences, the body. Full of blood and waste, nutrients and foreign matter. Under some understandings only a vessel for the soul, a way to keep the mind alive.

No. Souls are us. Our living flesh ensouled. Sacred. Hardly ordinary unless you call, as I do, the ordinary sacred. What we touch feels the hand of a god, the god. What we embrace knows the warmth of a god, the god. The soil in which we plant seeds quickens when we work it.

The Mule Deer Doe who feeds her newborn fawn feeds a divine presence, a unique and precious never to be repeated instance of god made flesh. Maxwell Creek filled with Spring Rain pulls bits of Rock and Earth from its bank as the god-in-water, returning the Rocky Mountains to the World Ocean.

Sure. The Torah. Yes. Talmud Torah. The hands of living gods have written it and the minds of living Jews finds god within, upon its pages, in its stories. It teaches us. Yet, it teaches the same message as Maxwell Creek. That god rushes to the Sea. That god fills every molecule of Water.

I read the scripture written in the bark of my Lodgepole companion. I see the yellow Flame of the Aspen Catkin against the blue Flame of a Colorado Sky and read of life’s elegant and graceful re-emergence in this, the wet season.

In my world all spirituality is tactile. In Shadow jumping on my legs. In turning the pages of a Torah commentary. In hearing the voice of Luke or Ginny or Janice. In tasting a bit of Lettuce, an Onion, a fresh heirloom Tomato. All of the tactile is spiritual.