Summer Park County Fair Moon
Up here on Mt. Ararat, aka Shadow Mountain, our small ark has come to rest. Or at least so it seems at times. The rising waters of hate, fear, violence, guns, neglect lap, muddy and turgid, not far below. We keep sending the dove of peace out from the ship. It quickly returns, finding nowhere to rest in a world rent by pain. Doves can read the headlines.
Under the headlines a friend faces death from lung cancer. Jon and Jen fight. The wildfire season is underway on the Front Range, a Russian roulette moment until the rains return. The Trumpet blasts ignorance and xenophobia.
Yet. The lodgepoles blanketed us with their yellow pollen. I watched bees, native and honey, crawl in and out of pale blue Penstemon. Stacked and neatly trimmed lenticular clouds form over Black Mountain, Mt. Evans. Cub Creek and Bear Creek and Deer Creek carry water stored higher in the mountains by late winter snows, feeding trout and willows along the way to the Gulf of Mexico. The mule deer and elk come to our yard for grass and other small plants, show up on Black Mountain Drive as we drive home from dinner. A great horned owl flies above the pines, hunting for prey.
All this human turmoil happens as the Great Wheel turns, as it turned long before humans emerged from the evolutionary struggle and as it will turn long after our mean spirit has scrubbed us from the planet. We may live on beyond this wonder, this earth, but our fate here seems one of mutual homicide. Could we only take the lesson of the Great Wheel and learn to live with our kind as part of rather than against each other and the natural world.
