Mountains, Shadow Mountain

We live here

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Lughnasa and the Lughnasa Moon

Saturday gratefuls: Beef stroganoff and egg noodles from Easy Entrees. Waking early. Rigel sleeping, wouldn’t get up. Safeway open at 6 a.m. Nobody there. The Mountains at dawn. Muted behind the tree cover, with the sun coming up as glory, rays leading the way over the peaks to the east. We live here. I kept thinking as I drove. We live here. Then, I realized, we live here.

A word for the dawn. I don’t drive much in the early a.m., but I did this morning. Off to Safeway. Which was clear of unmasked people and almost all shoppers. I felt safe, able to wander a bit. Like B.C. Mostly though I luxuriated in the drive there and back. The Sun sent its emissaries, angels of Light appearing as a crown, streaming high and proud over the eastern foothills. The few Angus Cattle being fed out on the grassy Meadow about a mile down the hill from us. Shadows and darkness still in the Lodgepole and Aspen Forest on the slopes of Black Mountain and Conifer Mountain. Few cars.

We live here, I kept saying to myself. Which changed. We live our life here, we are alive here. Even with Covid. Even with illness and infirmity. Even with Trump in the Whitehouse. Even with the climate changing, moving swiftly toward tragedy. We are alive here.

Forgot to post this

Family, Health, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Hard Stuff

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Lughnasa and the Lughnasa Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Amber. Lisa and the humming bird feeder. Dr. Pullikottli. Kate’s fingers healing. Ruby and her a.c. Mule Deer Buck. The intimacy of difficulty. All those carboniferous trees and plants that gave their lives so I can drive my car. Electric Cars. Go, Tesla. Echocardiograms. Chicken breasts. Read to eat meals.

Two weeks of no workouts. Marking a slow down or at least different focus for daily life. Dug down into my psyche. Like a retreat. Still surfacing. Yesterday I found myself up against it. I can’t keep cleaning the house, I said. I can’t manage the cooking in the way I have been. More tears.

I felt like I was letting Kate down. No, she said. You have been my pillar, my strength. I don’t say it often enough. Oh.

This, she said, is why people downsize. Yes. There’s a moment when you realize, no, I can’t take care of all this anymore.

Is this that time for us? No. We can afford a house cleaner. Kate will find one. I can buy meal kits, ready to eat food. Cook much less. Occasional take-out. Relief.

Derek has done a fabulous job in clearing up our downed trees. The pallets are gone. The front stumps have been ground. The place looks so much better. Will James will take down the remaining fire mitigation marked trees. Next week the gutters get cleaned and the week after the windows.

Ordered beef stroganoff with egg noodles from a chef run ready to eat meal business with an unlikely location. It’s at the base of Conifer Mountain, about 5 minutes away. Ezentrees.com. Looks pretty good.

We both love mountain living, even with its obvious drawbacks for our mutual lung issues. This house suits us. Large enough to house family on occasion, small enough to feel homey for us. The loft for me. These decisions are so fraught, so wrapped up in the past, in our expectations, in cultural values around home. And, independence.

We’ll keep jiggering with paid work, family help, and our own efforts. Hard stuff though.

Commentary on the news, Judaism, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., US History

Not One Thing

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Lughnasa and the Lughnasa Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: Amber. Stat locks. Kate’s healing stoma site. Rigel, whose love buoys me up. Kep and his steadfastness. Kate’s reading. Invisible Man right now. Ellison’s classic. The almost full Lughnasa Moon, red over Black Mountain this morning. Our more organized upstairs. Needing more blankets. The kindness of CBE.

Cancel culture. from Merriam-Webster: “To cancel someone (usually a celebrity or other well-known figure) means to stop giving support to that person.” I’m giving the definition because I’ve been reading this term for a while now and didn’t know what it meant. Once I found the definition I immediately thought of a recent change I’d made in my e-mail signature:

“There is a love of wild Nature in everybody, an ancient mother-love ever showing itself whether recognized or no, and however covered by cares and duties.” ― John Muir btw: Yes. I know about his racism. And, I deplore it. But, I also know about his love of the natural world and I love it. None of us are all one thing.

Other items I read pointed to the #metoo movement as a starting point as well as the more recent protests around George Floyd. It goes deeper and further back than that, though. Sinners don’t get into heaven. How much sin denies you entrance through the Pearly Gates? Never real clear. I’m speaking as a theologian here. Martin Luther famously said, “Hate the sin and love the sinner.” I’ve always found that an important idea.

Taboo. Kapu. Karma. Sin. Religious ideas that get social traction. In the Christian tradition the idea of sin, hamartia, missing the mark, plays an outsized role. IMHO. So outsized that it can cancel your heavenly bliss.

But who decides if your sins are too much? Or, just this side of the line?

In Christianity, God decides. But who knows how God views a particular person? Especially yourself? This question has dogged Christian apologetics for centuries. How can we know whether or not we stand in God’s favor? Clearly an important question if the afterlife is in play. Eternity.

The Protestant Ethic* is a good example of how this question can lead to corruption and blasphemy. Calvinists especially felt a need to know where they stood since predeterminism, in some cases double predestination, was a cornerstone of Reform theology. Double predestination says that God not only predetermines all actions in the universe, but also (the double part) determines who goes to hell and who gets salvation.

Since the race was all over at the starting line, the finishing places of everyone already known, it became critical to see if there were signs in this life that could identify which direction you were headed after death.

The Protestant Ethic came to identify hard work and success, financial success in particular, as evidence of God’s favor. A golden ticket.

What was not to be known was God’s judgment. Among believers in the Protestant Ethic who bought pews and clergy, a surety of salvation arrogated to themselves the power of God. That is blasphemy. You could even call it a form of witchcraft, using spells and incantations to bind divinity. For that was surely the expectation. I lived right, I did well. Reward me.

Cancel culture uses similar logic to discover who is damned. Commit a sex crime. Cancel them! Woody Allen. Harvey Weinstein. Bill Cosby. Commit an act of racist hatred. Cancel them. Lindsey Graham. DJT. Derek Chauvin. George Wallace. Bull Connor. And so many unnamed yet. The perpetrators of police murder. Cancel them! The reinforcers of systemic racism. The apologists for wealth and power. Their insurers.

Let me be clear. These are heinous crimes, sins against humanity, and deserve punishment. Prison. Public diminishment. The ignominy of seeing yourself in history books as bad examples.

But. All of these people, like John Muir, are not one thing. Not only sexual predator, not only racist cops or politicians or creepy entertainers. I don’t know any of them well, but there might be a good father there. A devoted son.

Cancel culture condemns the whole person for one aspect of their personality. I understand the impulse. That wrong is, in my eyes, so awful, so often neglected, that those who get caught must be pilloried in the square forever.

But we can’t do that. If so, we’ll need to get someone to make each of us stocks and lock ourselves in them. These bad impulses, the yetzer hara as Judaism names it, are attempts to gratify the ego. And that’s all they are.

Each person also contains a yetzer hatov, an impulse to bear the burden of the other, to love the neighbor as the self. We all let our yetzer hara out to play. Perhaps not as egregiously as the canceled, the left behind of our culture, but perhaps so, too.

We need, no, must, see each human, including ourselves, as working our way through this life, this one wild and precious life, as well as we can. Some choose a slack hold on their impulses, hoping gratification will lift them up. Some choose to struggle, to work with the selfish impulse as a means for motivating change, achievement.

We all, always, have this choice. Even Cosby. Even Chauvin. Even Wallace.

Let’s not have any more left behinds in this damaged and broken nation. We’ll need all our resources to come back from Covid and Trump.

*”Protestant ethic, in sociological theory, the value attached to hard work, thrift, and efficiency in one’s worldly calling, which, especially in the Calvinist view, were deemed signs of an individual’s election, or eternal salvation.” Encyclopedia Britannica

Anoka County, Bees, Dogs, Family, Garden, Great Wheel, Hydroponics, Memories, Minnesota, Our Land and Home, permaculture, Plants, The Move, Third Phase

Greenman

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Lughnasa and the Lughnasa Moon

Tuesday grateful: The Lughnasa moon just setting below Black Mountain. That one violet volunteering near our front steps. The daisies. The faint whoosh of folks going to work. Ruth. Her eagerness to see us. Their garden and her joy in it. Seeing Patty yesterday. Banking. Socrates, the teller.

Gardening. At the end of my time on the Ancient Ones zoom, I surprised myself by summing up my life as having one regret. Gardening. That we hadn’t pursued it here on Shadow Mountain. I miss, I said, growing our own food. Working with soil and plants. I do. Miss it.

Once Kate and I moved to Andover a transition began for me from city boy to horticulturalist. I wouldn’t have predicted that necessarily. We’d done some perennials at our home on Edgcumbe road. Starting with the small bed I planted in the front yard, finishing during the great Halloween blizzard of October 31st, 1991. Daffodils and Iris, if I recall correctly.

It’s true I had a big garden back in 1974 on the Peaceable Kingdom, my failed attempt, with Judy, to develop a spot for the movement to have respite care. My only Psilocybin journey happened there. I watched our Potato plants growing. But the Peaceable Kingdom did not last and neither did gardening.

A bit of gardening at the first house, the one on 41st Avenue, but Slugs took over. There was no gardening at home in Alexandria. A few Flowers maybe, but nothing to remember.

Andover, though. When we got there, the front yard was bare, as was a sloped area behind the house in the back. About an acre of Woods were doing fine, as undisturbed Woods will do. In between was a large patch of weedy, scrubby Grass with a large grove of Black Locust. They didn’t look good, some of them were dead. BTW: many of the Weeds were actually Hemp plants seeded during a World War II field planted in it.

We hired a landscape architect who helped us with the bare Land. I wanted to sow a Prairie on all of it. Kate said no, we could never sell it. We settled on two large areas of Prairie with sod and some new Trees in between them, directly in front of the house. On the sloping area behind the house we decided to do a terraced garden. Irrigation went in with all of it.

In the beginning I wanted to do only perennials. I imagined our house overflowing with fresh cut flowers throughout the growing season. I had a lot to learn. Having flowers blooming from spring into fall requires so many skills.

I did not want to do annuals. And, I didn’t. Along the way I learned about soil amendments, spading forks and gardening spades, trowels, and hori-hori. Killed a lot of plants. Cussed at Rose Chafers, Japanese Beetles, Colorado Beetles. Along the way I fell in love with the families Lily and Iris and crocus. Learned the amazing recovery powers of Hosta.

The Black Locust and their small swords taught me caution and how to use a chain saw, a commercial grade chipper, a Peavey, a Swede saw. Hired stump grinders. I cleared, with Jon’s help, enough area that we could imagine a vegetable garden. Jon built us raised beds from the start, anticipating the day when bending over would not be easy. He made some in whimsical shapes, others square, some rectangular. I filled them with top soil and compost.

We had various compost piles, none of which worked very well. We built one that used split rail fencing and a large metal gate to keep the dogs out. Tully, one of our Wolfhounds, kept finding her way in. But she couldn’t get back out. Strange.

Speaking of Wolfhounds. Jon built a fence around the raised beds to keep them out. They loved to dig in soft garden soil.

More on this later. This has gotten long.

Health

A Blue, Sun Shiny Day

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Lughnasa and the Lughnasa Moon

Monday gratefuls: Radiation. Dr. Gilroy. The sabbatical. Too short. Gardening. Bill. Tom. Paul. Yesterday. Exposing their self-understandings. Tender. Still cool. Kate’s sisters and their bi-Sunday zooms. Sarah. Anne. B.J. Oil checks. Weird. The land in Texas. Mary and Mark, as Mary said, my nomadic family. Rigel and Kep on the bed last night. For a while. The working of Claritine.

Got in Ruby. Turned on the a.c. Pegged 55 on the cruise control and wound my down the hill, then south 470 to Lonetree. It will have been a year on August 9th that I had my last radiation treatment. Today I saw Patty, the kind head radiology tech who oversaw my treatments. She remembered me. Is that you, Charlie?\

Yes, it was. I had on my red Los Alamos split the atom t-shirt. We went through the formalities. Co-pay. Urinary and bowel function and symptoms checklist. A nurse took my vitals. 96 O2, 100/65 B.P. Dr. Gilroy came in.

He hadn’t changed. Still slightly tubby, expensive tattersall shirt. Close cropped gray hair. Jovial. Anything bothering you?

An existential question to start with. Thought about mentioning Kierkegaard, but I didn’t. Nope. Not really. Given my Gleason score, staging, my prostatectomy and the recurrence, the radiation and the Lupron, what are my odds of a cure. About 2/3rds, 1/3rd, he said. 1/3rd have a recurrence. We don’t know why. The odds are good, but 1/3rd is a lot of people.

I see. It didn’t rock me this time like it did when Eigner said 60/40 in July. Getting used to the fact that cancer is always going to be a part of my life. Every 3 month psa’s. On and on and on.

Like walking along on a plank bridge over a deep ravine. Every fourth step might break and you’ll fall through. But most don’t. Just keep walking. Oh. Well. O.K.

We got up, didn’t shake hands. Covid. Masks on. I left. In the lobby I hit the hand sanitizer, opened the door, and walked into a bright blue Colorado day.

Commentary on Religion, Family, Friends, Garden, Great Wheel, Health, Holidays, Memories, US History

Head, Heart, Hands and Health

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Lughnasa and the Lughnasa Moon

Sunday gratefuls: The framers. Jon’s print. Ode’s. Ruth’s painting. Kate’s heirloom needlepoint: Love is Enough. All beautiful. Art by friend and family. Pho. Singapore noodles. That woman and her kid who needed money. Ruby and her air conditioning. Driving through Evergreen with the window down and the AC on. Allergies. Sympathy for my father. Blue skies, cool nights. No wildfire so far. Lughnasa

Lughnasa in the mountains. Lughnasa is a first fruits harvest festival. In ancient Celtic life it would have meant, like all the major holidays do, a market week. Games, trading, drinking and feasting, contests. State fairs and county fairs are Lughnasa influenced. They tend to fall between August 1st, Lughnasa and the autumnal equinox, or Mabon.

The Madison County 4-H Fair, which was held in Alexandria, my hometown, rather than the county seat of Anderson, Indiana, is a good example. I don’t recall, or maybe just don’t know, the reason Alexandria’s Beulah Park got the honor, but it was great for us as kids.

A carny setup strings of lights, cotton candy machines and hot dog stands, rides, and games. We would go early, watch them setup. Mom holding me on her shoulder, a blue blanket wrapped around me, a string of lights above my head is my first memory. A faint chill shuddered through me. I’ve always believed that was the first sign of my polio.

Local men erected tents with thick stakes and strong rope. Vendors of all sorts came to the fair. My favorite one was the dairy that passed out dixie cups of chilled buttermilk. I’d sprinkle mine with salt and pepper, going back as often as they’d allow it.

Car dealers brought out new model cars. I saw my first 1957 Chevy at the Madison County Fair. Farm equipment dealers brought tractors, hay balers, wagons. Those big yellow and green John Deeres. The red Massey-Fergusons. Tires taller than all of us kids with deep tread.

There were entertainers: magicians, singers, choirs, local celebrities. A queen contest. But the most important part of the fair, the Madison County 4-H fair, were the 4-H exhibits and shows. Some of you city folks may not know about 4-H: Head, Heart, Hands and Health.

4‑H Pledge

I pledge my head to clearer thinking,
My heart to greater loyalty,
My hands to larger service,
and my health to better living,
for my club, my community, my country, and my world.

This was small town America, rural America at its best. That pledge works. Can you imagine djt taking the pledge, for example?

4-H, the county extension office, and the cooperative extension offices from public land grant universities made room for kids with sheep, pigs, cows, rabbits, chickens, ducks, geese, horses. The kids came with their animals, often slept in their stalls during the fair. They made room for kids who cooked, baked, painted, did seed art, crafts like crocheting. County extension offices sponsored contests for wood-working, pie baking, honey making, quilting. County 4-H’ers could win blue ribbons, go on to the State Fair in Indianapolis.

Walking through the stalls with Holsteins, Guernseys, Jerseys, Angus, Hereford, and smelling farm smells, the ordure mixed with hay and urine. Seeing the biggest Boar lounging in his pen, his testicles usually visible and the scene of much laughing and pointing. The fancy Pigeons and high-strung Banty roosters. Rabbits with their long ears and velvety fur.

The buildings held jars of pickles, honey, jam. There were live Bees, honeycomb, and jars of amber honey ready to be judged. Decorated cakes. Plates of cookies. Bird houses and hobby horses, hand made. Quilts. And much more.

We knew where food comes from. Our friends and family grew it in their fields, raised it in their barns and pens. This was, and is, a celebration of Mother Earth.

The 2020 Madison County 4-H Fair was canceled due to the pandemic. But it will be back, spreading the country gospel of head, hearts, hands, and health. What we need right now.

Beyond the Boundaries, Cinema and Television, Commentary on the news, Coronavirus, Family, Health, Science, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Travel, US History, Weather +Climate

America’s Id

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Summer and the Lughnasa Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Amber and Lisa. Hummingbirds. Simple joys. Lisa. Her obvious concern and help. Derek, who offered to complete our fire mitigation work. A day of sunshine yesterday. Drove 150 miles yesterday to medical appointments. In air conditioned comfort. Tisha B’av. A day of mourning for the loss of the first and second temples. And, later, for all the trials of the Jews, including pogroms and the holocaust. A somber day. Yesterday.

A video maker held his Black Lives Matter sign in what he called the “most racist town in the U.S.,” Harrison, Arkansas. Here’s an edited version of that experience.

This video could be titled, America’s Id.

Also in America’s south, NASA successfully launched its Perseverance spacecraft. Headed to Mars with a helicopter and water seeking instruments, Perseverance continues the human fascination with life not of Earth. It will land in the middle of February, 2021 in Jezero Crater. An excellent explainer about why NASA chose Jezero is this July 28th article in the NYT.

Though Earthbound and isolated on Shadow Mountain Perseverance gives me a thrill. And, not just a thrill, but a scientific extension of my own interests. It pleases me in a deep way that we’ve not abandoned space exploration. Humans need to know, to explore, to test ideas and equipment. And, Mars! Speculations abound. I’m glad we Americans can still pull together for such an event. Looking forward to next February.

America’s Id and its shiniest example of hope. We are both, all. This time calls for Perseverance.

Family, Health, Politics, Shadow Mountain, Writing

Let The World Be New

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Summer and the Lughnasa Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: Mountain Waste. Garbage truck drivers. Mail folk. Snow plow drivers. All risk their lives on curvy mountain roads with limited sight lines. Summer and winter. Everyday bravery. Kate’s better day. Lisa, seeing Lisa today. Get some next steps with Kate’s shortness of breath and nausea.

I named the Lughnasa Moon as a reminder that the Great Wheel underlies most of what I believe these days, as a way to get back to the Celtic, the mythic, as a way to remind myself of the wonders floating in my imagination. Easy to lose sight of in Covid days and feeding tube nights.

George Will. An honest man. Writes superbly. His column today in the Washington Post, Biden’s election will end national nightmare 2.0, references Gerald Ford’s comment at his inauguration that “our long, national nightmare is at an end.” In conclusion Will writes: “Forty-six years later, an exhausted nation is again eager for manifestations of presidential normality.” I hadn’t considered this, but it would take one huge source of angst off the domestic table.

I’m looking for brightness, for the upbeat, for the comforting. Will provided some. Grateful for it.

I’m also looking for fairies, for Gods and Goddesses. Ready to get back to Jennie’s Dead. A place of refuge. A place where the world can become new with my fingers on the keyboard.

Aging, Coronavirus, Family, Health, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Weather +Climate

Dealing With A Rough Patch

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Summer and the Lughnasa Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Almost reorganized living room. Kate’s hands. Dreams. Rains. Cool. The life we live. Nyquil. Pollen. Tramadol. THC. End of the staycation tomorrow. Perry Mason on HBO. Wet earth. Petichor. The tragedies and joys of our days.

Dreams. Trying to find third gear in a GTO going up a snowy hill. A new phone, different design, metal plate beside the screen. Meeting folks in a coffee shop. Choppy memories.

Kate’s going through a rough (rougher) patch. Breathing more difficult. Feeling weak. Not eating much. Scares me. Good thing we see the doc tomorrow. Hard to know how to be. Honest? This scares me. Me, too, she says. Or, should I try to remain upbeat, better tomorrow, some new drug?

Not wanting to send her down, but not wanting to be dishonest either. I find it hard since my default is to go with the clearest, most real. Not sure what helps her. Me.

It’s been a cool week plus here, nice sleeping. That’s helped both of us. On the other hand the cooler, cloudier weather also dampens the inner weather.

Derek works hard, moving logs first on a dolly, then with his jeep over to his house and his wood pile.

Good seeing Mary and Mark this morning. Things are still in between for them both. He’s awaiting the late August, early September startup of his school in Riyadh. She’s waiting for Malaysia’s borders to open so she can go there into 14 days of quarantine. After she’ll be with Guru until the next academic year in Kobe, Japan. Retired. Sorta.

Family, Garden, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Weather +Climate

Mop floors, Clean bathrooms

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Summer and the Lughnasa Moon

Monday gratefuls: Clean floors, bathrooms. Good wonton soup. A Kate good day. Rigel’s eating well. Kep’s eagerness in the morning. Brother Mark in his old haunt, Hail, Saudi Arabia. Ragweed misery. Rain, more rain. Keep it coming. Bacon. Eggs. Covid. The revelations about us it is revealing. The USA, humbled. The vasty deeps and the airy heights.

Ruth sent us a video of the garden at her Dad’s. It’s growing. Lots of rain recently has helped. Jon’s got so many skills to share with Ruth and Gabe. He’s an artist, first. And, a good one. He has remodeling skills which he’s using to renovate his house. Ruth and Gabe are learning along the way. He’s a good cook. A maker of skis. A skier. A teacher. A gardener. A man filled with love, too. They both need it.

Kate had a better day yesterday. Her stoma site looks good, healing. She sees Lisa this week for a cortisone injection-bursitis-and a DEXA scan for osteoporosis. They’ll also discuss a focus on nausea. If we can get the nausea under control, then she can gain more weight. She’s hanging on to what she has, but to gain weight she needs to be able to eat at least some during the day. Tough for her with this recurrent nausea.

She’s moving through my fiction library. Her goal, she says, is to read it all. She just might at the rate she’s going. Yesterday, she read Recursion, a sci fi novel. Yesterday! Science nerd turns liberal arts major.

The weather has turned monsoonal. Although Weather 5280, my best source for weather in the mountains, says we’ve not made into the monsoons. The monsoons, typically July and August, feature a flow of moisture north from the Baja that gives Colorado afternoon rains. That flow is not set up. The monsoons used to mark an end to the high stress part of the wildfire season. Not so much now, though they help when they come.

Considering what to do with my mini-sabbatical, as Paul called it. I may extend it another week. I’ve gotten a lot of different sorts of things done. Finished the final touches on the loft, cleaned out the living room, coordinated several trades people for electrical work, tree felling, mowing, window washing, got rid of the pallets, supported Derek.

Chop wood, carry water. The Zen adage. Realized that first comes the fireplace, the pots for the water. The house is my fireplace, my pots for water. Mop floors, clean bathrooms. Daily life, as the Zen masters knew, is daily life. We are in it and of it. If we treat it as a burden, then it burdens us. If we treat it as a spiritual exercise, then we receive nurture.

Choosing nurture.