Seeing the forest for the trees

Imbolc and the Leap Year Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Sliver Leap Year Moon last night. Awakening to the forest around me. The beauty and warmth at CBE. Kate’s healing fingers, her growing stamina. Her mood. Wiggly Murdoch at Bergen Bark. Time with Seoah. All those dinosaurs and trees and shrubs that died so we might have oil. Keep it in the ground. Yes. For the Great Work.

How things work in my mind. About a year ago my buddy Alan Rubin came up here. His first comment was, “You live way back in the forest.” Huh. Well, yeah. The Arapaho National Forest. Those words tucked themselves away only to emerge a couple of weeks ago while I drove back up Shadow Mountain from a turn down the hill. Lot of trees. More than the drive up. Oh. Alan was right. We live way back in the forest.

We live in a forest. Oh. I see. Yes. All those trees. A forest. For five years I’ve been focused on the mountains. Their bulk. Their altitude. Their visual presence as I drive to Evergreen, to Aspen Park. We live in the mountains we tell ourselves and count ourselves so lucky. The Rocky Mountains. Guess what I’ve just realized. We live in the mountains, in a forest. It’s all around me now, this forest. I feel it, too.

In Minnesota we lived on the Great Anoka Sand Plain, groves of oak trees, iron wood, elm, black locust, cottonwood, but, no forest. Had to drive up north for the Boreal Forest or over to Carlos Avery Wildlife Preserve. We had a small woods on our property. Which I loved. But it was not a forest.

Here the lodgepole and aspen climb the mountains, show up in the valleys, surround our house and our neighbor’s houses. Here elk and mule deer and fox and mountain lions and bears and rabbits and pine martens and moose live in the forest, too. All us mammals in a place that feels like home, the forest. On mountains.

Makes me wonder what else I’m missing. Probably a lot.