• Category Archives Original Relation

  • Pulses

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                               Mountain Spring Moon

    Under the mountain spring moon various shades of green have slowly, slowly begun to appear. The ponderosa pines have been green all winter but they’ve greened up some. The first ground cover green to appear was the bearberry when the snow melted back. This evergreen ground cover was green all along, just hidden. A shaded patch of moss has gone from a muted pale green to emerald over the last couple of weeks. There are, too, even here at 8,800 feet, dandelions. Some grass, too. Crab grass for sure, another hardy perennial. Tufts of grass that look like prairie drop seed, but are not, I’m sure, remain their winter tan.

    Too, the dogs have begun to sniff through the deck, smelling, I suppose, new rodents of some kind. Along with that has come Rigel digging. With the advent of warmer soil Rigel and Vega may begin creating holes in the rest of the yard as well. Another harbinger of spring.

    Birds chirp happily around 5:30-5:45 am as the sun begins to rise.

    Driving along Highway 78 (Shadow Mountain Drive, Black Mountain Drive (our segment) and Brook Forest Road) the only snow that remains is on the north side of the road or in shaded spots. A pond not far from our house still has ice, but the ice has a shallow layer of water over it. The mountain streams run, burble, ice now long melted and turned into stream. Willows along the streams look fire tipped as their branches turn a green gold. “Like dusted with gold,” Kate said.

    The mountain spring is a slow arriver, coming in pulses, alternated with sometimes heavy snows. We have the potential, for example, for a huge snow storm Wednesday through Friday.

    While on a drive Sunday, not far from our home, on top of a large outcropping of rock where the sun penetrated the trees, lay a fox, curled up and enjoying a quiet Sunday nap. The fox was a tan spot against the gray of the rock. Mule deer have begun to return as well, we see them at various places along the slopes and valleys. Kate just called and said, for example, that we have four deer in our front yard and “the dogs are levitating.” Sure enough, there they are, finding the green just as I have been.


    Faith and Spirituality Great Wheel Jefferson County Mountains Original Relation Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. Shadow Mountain 📎and tagged

  • Wasted Years?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                Mountain Spring Moon

    Wondering about retirement, about the third phase, not from an abstract notion of this journey now, but from within it, on the path. I notice things like this. A weather blog I follow talks about the decadal oscillations (Atlantic and Pacific) that have a determining effect on drought patterns in the U.S. When the author says these may not change their influence until 2035, I quickly calculate. 92. That means I may live in the forest fire red zone knowing only drought conditions.

    Work. I commented here about work, about Latin and writing, gardening and beekeeping as work. And it’s true that I experience them that way. When I call them work though, I sometimes find myself confused. Am I retired or am I working? Yes seems to be the answer. Perhaps I need a new paradigm.

    What came to me as I wrote that last sentence was the Hindu notion I mentioned a while back, action without attachment to results. From within that idea it doesn’t matter, working or retired. Both. The doing, the acting carries the meaning, not the end. Related I think to the idea of the journey as the destination.

    Yet, I admit that the culture comes up inside me, makes me wonder about the wasted years, all that time since leaving the church, now 25 years. What have I done? Which really means, of course, besides being alive how have you contributed to the world? I was taught, in that it’s obvious, it’s the way it is manner that culture defines for us, that work means results. A man is his attachment to results and the results make the man.

    Results mean new law, building affordable housing, organizing citizen based power to balance philanthropic concentrations of wealth and to alleviate the pains of vast unemployment in Minnesota. Those were results a man could claim and in claiming lay down evidence as to his worth.

    But. What if the novel doesn’t sell? What if the effort to market work is so weak that it never really has a chance? Does that invalidate the writing, the patience, the persistence necessary to conceive, execute, revise? Then, if the action does not have the expected result, does it come crashing down on the man, rendering him less a man?

    Some days it feels like the answer is yes. If there is no book on the shelf with my name on the cover, then I am less of a man. If in writing, I have taken energy away from the political work which gave me tangible results, then I have contributed less than I could have. Have I allowed fear to dominate my marketing work over the last 25 years? Fear that I would be rejected time and again. Possibly. Does that erase the novels and short stories I have written? Or, to put it in the most blunt way possible, has it called into question all the “work” I’ve done in the past two decades and a half?

    Some days it feels like the obvious answer is no. What is the result of loving a woman? What is the outcome of raising a child? Where is the success in a flower bed or a dog? All these most important actions rely not on the actions of the man, or at least not solely. Loving a woman does not make her a better woman, does not create an achievement. Raising a child, though important, does not make the child. Children make themselves, influenced no doubt by the parent, but still, the responsibility is theirs. The same with grandchildren. Flowers and vegetables grow, too, again perhaps aided by the gardener, but it is their task to produce a bloom or a fruit or vegetable. Dogs live their lives in the orbit of the humans who love them, but their life is the result and who can claim ownership of life itself?

    Another angle. The taking in of knowledge, developing understanding, all the reading and attending to cultural artifacts like art, theater, chamber music, movies, what does that amount to? What is the result, the thing that matters? Is there any point to it all?

    Not to mention that I have made almost no money for the last 25 years. Not none, but not enough to count.

    As I write this, see it laid out on the page, though, I’m inclined toward compassion, toward acceptance of the man who has done what he has done with as much energy and passion as he has, a man who has stayed faithful to his wife, his son, his stepson and his family, dogs, gardens, bees, who has remained constant in following his inner path regardless of the outcomes.

    Bill Schmidt’s find of this poem says what I feel better than I express it myself:

    Love after Love

     

    The time will come

    when, with elation,

    you will greet yourself arriving

    at your own door, in your own mirror,

    and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

     

    and say, sit here.  Eat.

    You will love again the stranger who was your self.

    Give wine.  Give bread.  Give back your heart

    to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

     

    all your life…

     


    Aging Beyond the Boundaries Faith and Spirituality Original Relation Third Phase

  • Habits Changing

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                       Mountain Spring Moon

    That new habit? Already changing. Figured out that drinking lots of water during my afternoon workouts made my night’s sleep get interrupted. Often enough to be annoying. So, I moved my workouts to mornings, starting this morning. Several positives came into focus in addition to having the whole day to get rid of excess water: cooler, a good thing for summer days. Leaves afternoons and early evenings free. An endorphin boost in the am is good. No sun coming in through the loft door makes the TV easier to see.

    So, I have to rejigger my schedule again, accounting for the first hour of the day as exercise, then breakfast. Thinking about that now.

    Tonight Kate and I will go into Denver to Dazzle Jazz for an evening of jazz in classical music. A good mix for us since we’re classical music and jazz fans, about 5% of the musical audience according to a DJ from KBEM in Minneapolis

    I just reviewed the first pass at the light and shade study. We may not have many options for vegetables. I’m going to repeat the study in a month with better defined areas and more systematic spots for taking the pictures, make them uniform from hour to hour.


    Garden Health Music Original Relation Our Land and Home 📎and tagged

  • Born To Be Wild

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                 Mountain Spring Moon

    In late April, early May I will attend my 27th retreat with the Woolly Mammoths, this year in Ely at the YMCA’s Camp du Nord. Often we have a theme and I suggested the following:

    Been thinking about topic and theme. Seems like Ely area cries out for considering the wilderness, the wild within and without. What does it mean to be wild? In your life? In your heart? In and with your passions? Does wildness have anything to say to the third phase? How does wilderness feed us, heal us? Why? Another aspect of the same idea. What is to be human and wild? How do humans fit into the wild? Do we? Can we? It seems to me this is much of what Will Steger has dealt with.

    As I’ve begun to consider these questions, take them into my heart, my civilized and my wild heart, they’ve begun to pull information out of the surrounding atmosphere. As often happens once we focus on something.

    One source that has been prodding me over the last week is a book, The Great Divide: A Biography of the Rocky Mountains, by Gary Ferguson. In the first chapter on Mountain Men comes this observation. Richard Slotkin, an American studies professor at Wesleyan University suggests that a main theme of early America was the shredding of conventional European mythology and getting to a more primary source, the “blood knowledge” of the wilderness. Since was the time of Emerson and Thoreau, too, both of whom were instrumental in the turn away from European influence and toward development of American letters, American thought, American literature and who were, again both, focused on the natural world as a source of inspiration, it seems this tendency to turn our back on “civilization,” whether European then, or decadent American late-stage capitalism now, and look to the wilderness for guidance is an integral aspect of the American character.

    It may be less so now than then, but nonetheless, it endures. Look at the heritage of John Muir, Aldo Leopold, the outdoors ethos of Minnesota, Colorado and Alaska (to name state cultures I know), the idea of the West.

    In this same chapter Ferguson counterpoises the Easterners romanticization of the mountain men as true individuals living with unfettered freedom with the civilized and European inflected culture of the East Coast. This was true, he says, throughout the 19th century. In fact, many of the mountain men worked in companies of 20-30, with some trapping, some hunting, some cooking, some taking care of supplies and pelts. They also tended to travel with their families and were surprisingly well-educated. About 1/5 of the mountain men left memoirs and many were fluent in both Latin and Greek.

    I mention this because when our gaze turns toward the Boundary Waters Wilderness, the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada range or the expanses of wilderness in Alaska, to mention only a few of the wild areas in the U.S. alone, we often look toward them as places of healing, zones where civilization can be shed, as mystical bounded lands within which magic of a sort is still possible.

    In fact though these are simply places where the hand of civilization has been light-though not absent. Witness acid rain, the extinction or near extinction of apex predators, and now the slow creep of climate change. And the need for a word like wilderness, the notion of wild occurs only when its dialectical opponent, civilization, has become ascendant.

    So, to consider the wild in our hearts, in our lives, in our country we need also look at how civilized we are. What being civilized means. What needs civilization meets that wilderness does not and the reverse. We must also consider that the dynamics of these questions are bound up, in a particular way, with the American experience, with our sense of who we are as a people and a nation. It is not enough, in other words, to imagine the wild heart, but we must also attend to its gilded cage. It is not enough to seek the blood knowledge of the wilderness, but we must also attend to the context, our everyday home, where that knowledge has been lost.


    Art and Culture Beyond the Boundaries Faith and Spirituality Great Work Humanities Mountains Original Relation Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. The West

  • Close to Home

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                                 Black Mountain Moon

    This night, a heavy wet snow. Woke up to three inches of thick white covering the deck. As I do each time it snows, I clear the deck first thing, even before getting the dogs. This is important because the snow compacts in front of the door and the dogs  track in the snow from the deck. The stone floor can become slippery beyond our long entrance rug. Clearing the deck fixes most of that.

    There was, this time, less snow on the driveway than on the deck. It doesn’t matter out there much at all since today will be 47, Saturday 57 and Sunday 65. The snow will be gone, probably by later today, certainly by Saturday.

    I went for my first mountain hike yesterday, following the Upper Maxwell Falls trail into the Arapaho National Forest. Even though intuition told me I would need my Kahtoola spikes, the day was sunny, almost 50 so I put on my Keens, grabbed my backpack with water, compass, map and journal and drove the mile or so to the trailhead.

    Where I promptly fell, slipping onto my butt. Sigh. Pay attention to yourself, I said. To myself. Hiking poles, which I had also considered, but left hanging in the garage right next to the truck, would have helped, too.

    IMAG0977This is a popular trail and the love it had seen over the last few weeks had created stretches of the trail that were solid ice almost the width of the trail. Fortunately there was crunchy snow just off the trail so that walking on it I could make it some ways back into the woods. About 3/8’s of a mile in, though, the trail turned steeply up and narrowed. This section was not ice, but solidly packed snow that had melted then refrozen. May as well have been ice. In the gear I had for the day that was not passable, so I turned back.

    Maxwell Creek burbled under its lacy ice and snow covering. There was an off trail path across the creek and up to a mostly snowless outcropping of rock, a small cliff and several lodge lodgepole pines (above). I wandered over there and began my nature journal sitting back against the large pine.

    This is, I think, still on Shadow Mountain though my USGS topographical maps have not yet come in the mail.

    Also near the Upper Maxwell Falls trail
    Also near the Upper Maxwell Falls trail

    This was an exploratory hike, one to assess what I would need when I begin making this a regular habit and for that purpose it worked just fine. Lessons: snowshoes would have worked. To hike in these conditions spikes on the boots plus hiking poles make sense. I’ll need a good pair of winter hiking boots. Learn more about the compass and its use with maps. I need a better back pack and a small camera to take along would be good, too. The nature journal will be another pathway into becoming native to this place.

    As I wrote the other day, the combination of spring weather, settling in to the house and acclimatization have made me eager to get out in the woods. And so I have started. This coming winter I’ll be out there with snowshoes and spikes, poles and pack. Now that spring and summer press against the remnants of winter it will be hiking boots, poles and pack. Couldn’t be happier. Like a long running vacation in the Rocky Mountains.

     


    Colorado Health Mountains Original Relation

  • Them Bones

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                        Black Mountain Moon

    These bones, these bones, these weary bones. Took Ruth (granddaughter Ruth) to the Colorado Museum of Geology today. We drove in to Denver and picked up after Sunday School, in the Jewish instance this is school on Sunday. She’s on the long road to the Bat Mitzvah, learning Hebrew, Torah, tradition. Over the last few weeks she’s been learning the 4 questions for the Pesach meal, the first of which is the famous, Why is this night different from all other nights? She recited it in Hebrew.

    When Kate told Ruth she’d studied Hebrew long ago, Ruth replied, “Well, if you learn the alphabet and the vowel marks that’s all you really need.” And, of course, in a sense she’s right.

    We ate lunch in downtown Golden at the Blue Canyon Grill, then went to the museum. We were late getting in because (only at an academic institution situation) a sign there said, “Between March 7th and March 15th we might be open. Call to confirm.” Several people gathered with us in the lobby and one efficient looking mom whipped out her cell phone and called. “Answering machine,” she said.

    Just when we’d decided on the Science Museum a slightly padded guy in a black t-shirt, ear plugs and a stubbly beard wandered up. Yes, he said, I’m here to open up.

    The museum has display case after display case of beautiful rocks and minerals from all over the world (and out of this world, too, since it has the largest moon rock brought back with one exception, plus several meteorites), but with an emphasis of course on Colorado minerals, notably gold and silver, but copper, molybdenum, pyrite, too.

    There was, too, a significant collection of fossils and petrified plants. Dinosaur bones, too. When I asked the guy who opened the museum to explain petrification, he did so, and afterward added, “The same process works with organic matter like bones, too. In the instance of dinosaur bones found in Colorado a major element that precipitated out of the water solution and into the bone was uranium. Colorado’s dinosaur bones are hot. Really hot.”

    The Colorado School of Mines is an interesting place, full of people who know a lot about rocks and geological history. Much more to learn from there.

    To get back to these weary bones. Didn’t seem like much of a day activity-wise, but when we left the museum grandpop felt completely tuckered out.


    Colorado Original Relation

  • From the Slumber of the Everyday

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                             Black Mountain Moon

    From the dog to the human. Seeing the dogs yesterday, 100% clicked in to their genetic heritage and feeling great about it, made me wonder what circumstances create the same integration of body, mind and spirit in humans? Two ideas occur to me right away: sex and flow, yet those don’t seem quite right. Sex is instinctive and common among mammals, for the purpose of reproduction. Lions and tigers and bears and humans, dogs, too, all engage in sex, so it’s not distinctive, it’s instinctive. Flow is closer, but in its case it’s too distinctive, too idiosyncratic, too much a marker of an individual’s uniqueness and only rarely achieved.

    Perhaps the trigger is hunting. After all, we share with lions, tigers, bears and dogs a predatory nature. We are not rabbits, squirrels, mice, voles. In this case I wouldn’t know since I’ve never hunted. But I can imagine. A true hunt, one where finding food is a necessity, would concentrate the mind, require attention to even the smallest physical movement, both on the part of hunter and hunted.

    Or, perhaps, defending loved ones. This could explain the attraction of the warrior ethos. Though these are both traditionally male roles. What would be the female equivalent? Or, is there one trigger that unites men and women? Women hunt and fight, too.

    Of course, there can be more than one trigger, I’m sure. Or, maybe we’ve evolved ourselves past a distinct trigger, become too socialized, too far distant from our veldt past. Still, watching Rigel yesterday afternoon come up to her purpose from the slumber of the everyday, I wonder.


    Beyond the Boundaries Myth and Story Original Relation

  • Oh, Yeah. Fox!

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                              Black Mountain Moon

    We have fox here and some use Black Mountain Drive as a route from here to there. Late this afternoon Rigel was at the window, looking out toward the road when a fox ran by. Rigel, who is feral herself, gave a prey bark and the others responded. Soon the house filled with barking and yipping, running for the front door, the back door, anyway to get at the fox.

    Rigel and Vega have coyote hound and wolf hound blood. This animal was in the prey category. Smack in it. And they felt the need. You could see it activating their attention, their ruffs, their dogness. This was the moment they were made for.

    Much as I would have liked to let them run the fox down, or give it a try, the danger to them would have been too great. (cars, angry neighbors, getting lost) So they had to forgo the hunt.

    Even a half an hour later though they were still smiling, prancing, looking 100% dog qua dog. Not pet. Not domesticated, just animals cued for what their life purpose is.

     


    Dogs Mountains Original Relation Our Land and Home

  • Learning Colorado

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                         Black Mountain Moon

    Signed up for 4 Colorado Native Plant Master programs: one in the foothills, one in the montane eco-system (ours) and one in the high plains. 3 of these are 3 session 8:30-12:30 classes. The fourth is a two session, 9-3, course on plant sketching. Don’t really want to qualify for the Native Plant Master program since it has requirements for volunteering that I don’t want to fulfill, but I want the content and the chance to meet some people involved in botany here.

    All part of becoming native to this place. Starting this week I plan to keep a nature journal, hand-written, a record of our yard, hikes, these courses, geology lectures and field trips, meteorology notes. I’m not much of an artist, but I think with some practice I can draw plants and animals, maybe sketch geological features, at least well enough to call them to mind when I review the entries.

    We drove into Evergreen for our business meeting at the Wildflower Cafe. It was good to see those folks again. Afterward we drove around Evergreen a bit, going out to the I-70 entrances and seeing in the distance snow covered peaks. Our mountains around here have snow, but are not snow covered.

     

     


    Colorado Faith and Spirituality Great Work Mountains Original Relation Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. The West Third Phase Writing

  • It’s All Real Stuff

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                              Black Mountain Moon

    Prep days. Yesterday reorienting my workouts, today moving back into Ovid with the Latin. Prep is important but I find I want to hurry through it, press on, get to the real stuff. But, it’s all real stuff, isn’t it?

    When doing the Latin, for example, I want to work fast, translate easily, get it. But, most often I have to work slowly, translate with difficulty, struggle to understand.

    In the MOOC I’m taking from McGill University the current section is on physical literacy. An amazing insight for me. Literacy in the alphabetic, language based world, yes. Numeracy in the numbers based, mathematical world, yes. But physical literacy? That is, learning basic moves and physical actions that can later be strung together to play a sport, keep one fit, teach us how to fall, no. The idea never occurred to me.

    It apparently surfaced in the 1930’s in America whereas numeracy only emerged as an idea in the 1960’s. It’s not surprising, I guess, since the move from the farm to the town and city was weighted against the old, physical ways that had existed since hunting and gathering gave way to the neolithic revolution.

    Perhaps, come to think of it, becoming native to this place is a component of physical literacy, a tactile spirituality. As we move less and less, we interact with the natural less affectively, less often, less well. Perhaps play is a big component of becoming native to this place, wandering aimlessly in the woods or by a pond, in the mountains, on lakes.

    Anyhow, I’m excited about this idea, a human trilogy necessary for a satisfying life: literacy, numeracy and physicality.


    Beyond the Boundaries Health Latin MOOCS Original Relation Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. Third Phase US History