Aging, Anoka County, Dogs, Family, Friends, Health, Memories, Minnesota, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Other Nations

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Imbolc and the Leap Year Moon

Thursday gratefuls: That we haven’t switched to DST yet. Love me that standard time. Dr. Gidday, whom I see today. Corinne in Boulder. Murdoch, who’s getting a bath for his time with her. Kate, my Kate. The Democratic primary, calming down. Hope for the fall. My class with Rabbi Jamie, the way it’s provoking me. That I feel in excellent health on the day of my annual physical. (I know. Prostate cancer. COPD. Kidney disease. Even so, that’s how I feel.)

As the years grow greater in number, now 73 for me, the annual physical has a certain hold your breath feel. Will she find anything new, anything unwanted? It’s already happened to me a couple of times, so I know I can absorb the hits. Yet, I’d prefer not to. Life is still engaging, fun, demanding, exciting. I’m ready for a better year.

Kate’s had a recent setback with some bleeding. Not at the September, 2018 level, thank God, but there nonetheless. She’s going with me to my physical this morning, will talk to Dr. Gidday. Her recovery has been like this, a step ahead, a step back. She’s in so much better shape now that each problem now feels like a betrayal of those gains. Give her a break.

After my physical at nine-thirty, Kate and I will take care of a couple of errands, pick up Seaoh, and drive to Bergen Bark Inn. Murdoch will have had a bath and be ready for a visit to Boulder. We’re pretty damned lucky to have two potential foster parents and to be able to visit them both this week. Loveland, tomorrow, will be the second visit.

Kep got his teeth cleaned yesterday. Not our best part of doggy world. Gonna get better at this. Ordered some dog dental supplies. Will keep up with them now. He was a bit loopy from the anesthesia, his rear paws turning out at odd angles, his butt hanging lower when he walked. Took him until late in the evening to shake it off.

A friend wondered about our dogs, said he didn’t understand that part of my life. He wasn’t being critical, just a bit bewildered. “The dogs are a huge part of your life, I don’t understand all of that, three big dogs was overwhelming when…I visited you, there must be some ancient canine story flowing through your blood.” 

Dogs make it harder to travel. Pricey to board them. Dogs are expensive with food and vet bills. Dogs make messes, chew up stuff you’d rather have intact. Vega, for example, loved to eat shoes. Dogs get into fights, injure each other and us. They crowd into bed and won’t move, so we adjust. They sneak up under your arm at the table, seeking food or comfort. So, yes, hard to understand.

However. Gertie, in her last days, licked my face at 3 a.m. Emma stood on the downed cottonwood, a lioness looking over her domain. Hilo snuggled in under my armpit for a nap. Celt accepted all attention graciously, like a monarch. Sorsha took down a deer, tried to get two squirrels at once. Tor was one-hundred and ninety pounds of pure love. Orion, too. I pulled Tira, bleeding and in shock, off a gate in our garage. Morgana and Scot, siblings, were sweet, kind. Buck and Iris. Bridgit. Tully.

They are memories for us, like travel, I suppose. Moments Kate and I shared, often years of moments.

Mostly though, it’s about love. Given and received. Unreserved, unconditional. Greetings at the door. A friend for a nap. Their quirks. Their distinct and different personalities. Their willingness to share themselves completely.

They also offer a strange and privileged opportunity; they grant us a chance to live with and know what Henry Beston identified as: “…other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.” Here’s the full, important quote.*

* “We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”
― Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod

Beyond the Boundaries, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Judaism, Memories, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., World History

Ancientrails

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Imbolc and the Leap Year Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Alan, recovering from pneumonia. Brenton and Corrine who have both contacted us through DogsonDeployment. We see Corrine on Thursday in Boulder. The gentle aches in my body, the sleeping in this morning that mean I had a good workout yesterday. The steer that gave its life for our ribeyes. Rocky Mountain Land Library.

Art Green’s book has done what he intended. I’m looking backwards, now even to Christianity, for a religious language that can express the deep moments, open up the inner world of the one. Hear oh, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Over the next months, years I imagine this work will become easier.

Paganism and Christianity have many crossover points. Why? Because Christianity absorbed and integrated many pagan religious ideas. I’m sure you know about the Christmas tree (eternal life to Teutonic auld faith), the Easter bunny and Easter eggs (signs of fertility, again Teutonic). You might know about Lammas, the feast of loaves, which follows the Celtic Lughnasa, a first fruits harvest festival. Or, All Saint’s Day which recapitulates the Celtic Samain, the end of summer, and the time when the veil between the worlds thins. The Saturnalia, a Roman festival, “…was celebrated with a sacrifice at the Temple of Saturn, in the Roman Forum, and a public banquet, followed by private gift-giving, continual partying…” wiki. It ended on December 23rd and became the precursor of Christmas.

Ancientrails of the human condition all: the mystery of life and death, the wonder of pregnancy and birth, of seeds quickening, the relief at the first harvest, the longing for loved ones who have died, the need to brave the darkening over mid-winter with light and friends and food and gifts. We die. We make love and we plant. We hope for food sufficient to cover the long fallow time. We grieve, mourn, yearn. We wonder whether spring will ever come, whether the sun will return this time.

Green says each religion is a language, a language that speaks in the varied tongues of the one. Yes. I agree with him, though I can’t do what he did, that is, remain in the religious culture of his childhood. What I can do, though, is go back to Christianity’s pathways, its way of speaking the language of oneness, as I did yesterday with Jesus at the Mount of Olives and his resurrection. What I can do is stay in what I call paganism, perhaps a form of panentheism, and speak from within it about these ancient human trails. I say perhaps a form of panentheism because I do not share with Green the easy use/reuse of the God word. That word carries, again for me, way too much baggage: violent, misogynist, patriarchal, xenophobic. Maybe a panenpneuma? Panenpan? Panenohr? We’ll talk about these options tomorrow.

Beyond the Boundaries, Colorado, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Jefferson County, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Park County, permaculture, Plants, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, The West, Third Phase, US History, Weather +Climate

Deep Guidance

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Imbolc and the Leap Year Moon

Sunday gratefuls: An extra day in my birthday month. DogsonDeployment and the three folks who responded right away. Seoah’s careful scrutiny of the profiles. Kate’s help with Corrine, who called from DoD. Blue skies and warm temps. Atlas Obscura. The Rocky Mountain Land Library. Jon’s offer to stay with Kate while I take the kids on a road trip.

Just signed up for a Food and Land Bookclub. My real interest in it is its association with the Rocky Mountain Land Library in next county over Park County. When I bought the books for the book club, four in all, I found my powers returning. Oh, this is what I’ve got energy for my body said. Book titles: Mayordomo: chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico, Braiding Sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants, One Size Fits None: a farm girls search for the promise of regenerative agriculture, and, The Seed Underground: a growing revolution to save food.

When we first moved here, over five years ago now, I wanted to garden, to learn the native plants, to hike the mountains, learn the land and streams and wildlife. Prostate cancer, bum knee then knee replacement, COPD. Kate’s various medical dilemmas later. Distracted. Accomplished little of these. Some hiking, not much thanks to the COPD and the bad knee. Gardening here required more physical energy than I have available. My first native plants class got interrupted by my prostatectomy. Life. Stuff.

I first discovered the Rocky Mountain Land Library in 2015, our first year here. It was only a dream then, an idea concocted by the former owners of Denver’s most loved book store, Tattered Covers. It now has a ranch in Park County, south of Fairplay, a bit over an hour from here. Buildings and projects have begun to come together. It wasn’t ready when I found it and, as it turned out, neither was I.

During Gertie’s last days I reflected again on my instinctual opposition to euthanasia for dogs. It’s no longer absolute because I saw its necessity as Gertie suffered, but it’s still strong. Were there any other instances in my life where I made choices from an instinctual level?

Instinct? Intuition? Deep inner guidance? Link to a source of knowledge I can’t access consciously? Instinct in any formal sense is probably wrong, but the feeling involved, a strong compulsion, a certainty that this path was mine, had that flavor anyhow.

Turns out there were other such choices. When I turned 32, I knew I had to be a parent. Got a vasectomy reversal. Didn’t work. OK. Adopt. First child, a girl, died in a salmonella outbreak at the orphanage. Raeone didn’t want to go forward. She’d just gotten a new job. My deep push made me agree to take care of the new baby myself, no matter what it took. I took him to work with me until he was 18 months old.

After an Ira Progoff workshop in Tuscon, an intentional stirring of my inner life, I stopped by Denver to see Ruth and Gabe. By the time I left I knew Kate and I needed to move to Colorado. She agreed and so we did. We wanted to live in the mountains and to be in our kids and grandkids lives.

Other less dramatic instances. Saw a movie while in college that featured Manhattan. Put my thumb out and spent the summer of 1968, the summer of love, not in San Francisco, but in Manhattan. Curator of Asian art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Bob Jacobson, gave a lecture on Angkor. Specifically he showed the amazing stone bas relief sculpture that runs for a quarter mile around Angkor Wat’s great Hindu temple. And in particular the churning of the sea of milk where gods and demons struggle for a magical elixir. Had to see it. When my dad died and left me enough money to do some travel, I went.

A related but less pressured decision came when I realized I was no longer Christian, that I had to leave the ministry. Had I not met Kate, this feeling would have been tested, but I met her and she allowed me a graceful exit.

Right now I’m feeling a similar push, perhaps not only to the Rocky Mountain Land Library, but to reawaken the me who woke up for twenty springs, twenty summers, and twenty falls glad for the chance to plant lilies, weed onions, harvest garlic, trim the raspberry canes. The me who woke up for several years and knew tending the bees was in the day’s labor. The me who came here excited about the West, about the mountains, about being in a brand new place. We’ll see where this goes.

Denver, Friends, Great Work, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain

Seeing the forest for the trees

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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.

Denver, Dogs, Family, Great Wheel, Health, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Family Time

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Imbolc and the new Leap Year Moon

Monday gratefuls: Gabe, who wants to be an actor. Seoah leafing through a furniture catalog. Lunch with Ruth, Gabe, Jon, and Seoah at the Yak and Yeti. Seeing the Highlands neighborhood in Denver. Discovering University Ave. in Denver. Coffee. Coffee growers. The coffee plant. Laborers who grow, roast, and grind coffee.

Took Seoah and Gabe into Denver yesterday. Seoah wanted to exercise her military discount at Lululemon, a chic athleisure clothier. And, she did. Seoah is in great shape. She regularly runs 20 minutes at 6.5 or 7.0 mph, does 300 squats, yoga. Her fashion sense is also highly developed from 20 years in the upscale Gangnam neighborhood of Seoul. Lululemon is a natural for her.

Three things that make Seoah happy: a discount, pho, and Indian food. After the visit to Lululemon, we drove south through Denver. I’ve gotten my sea legs in the Denver street system now, I can navigate. Chose University Avenue to take us south to Hampden. Had not driven on it before. It runs by the University of Denver, Iliff Seminary (Methodist, as is UD), and past blocks of college type retail. Around UD the streets have names like Harvard, Yale, Bates, Cornell.

Hampden is the main east-west street for the southern part of Denver, which has no ring road that makes it easy to traverse the city. Hampden is also Hwy. 285, a Federal highway that runs out of Denver to the west, into the mountains, then south all the way to Santa Fe. It’s also the primary road we take when we need to go down the hill. I know it very well since it runs close to Swedish Hospital and is on the route to Jon’s house much further east in Aurora.

We met Jon and Ruth at the Yak and Yeti, an Indian, Nepalese, Tibetan restaurant. Wanted to eat at India’s Restaurant, the oldest Indian restaurant in Denver, on Hampden like Yak and Yeti, but on Sundays they don’t open until 5:30 pm. Yak and Yeti’s food is undistinguished, but plentiful. Attracts folks who want to eat cheap, the buffet is $12.95, and who want to eat a lot. A lot of family time this weekend.

Today Kep goes in for his physical and his rabies shot. His vaccination, good for three years, expires on the 27th of this month. Given our recent history we don’t want a dog with an out of date rabies vaccination. We’ll also pick up Gertie’s ashes.

No new word on Murdoch. We’ll visit him a couple of times this week. He’s having a great time there so far. Always happy and wiggly to see us. No idea he’s in exile.

Family, Health, Politics, Third Phase, US History, World History

Changing World

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Imbolc and the waning sliver Shadow Mountain Moon

Saturday gratefuls: Kate’s stitches out. Her toughness. Seoah cleaning. Rigel, grieving. Chinooks (snow eater winds). Gabe, who comes at 10. Jon and Ruth skiing at A-basin today. My Aeron chair. The split key-board I use. This Dell computer. The engineers and laborers who designed and built all three. The pretzel factory. Lodgepole evolution that allows them to withstand heavy snow and high winds.

Took Kate in for hand therapy. It’s a burn and reconstruction clinic, directed by Benson Pulikkottil. I thought at first he might be Finnish, given the last name. When I saw his burnt umber skin, however, I was pretty sure that was a wrong guess. Looked him up. Kerala. A state in India with 100% literacy.

He looked at Kate’s fingers, said they were doing well. Take the stitches out. A nurse came in and removed them. Kate winced and teared up. Unusual. She’s stoic, so the pain must have been exquisite. Made me wince, too.

Quieter here on Shadow Mountain. A good thing, but also strange. Both of us have the sense that we have too few dogs. Two. Just not enough. Unsure whether we’ll do anything about that, though a puppy or two would enliven the house.

Rigel has been subdued since Gertie died. When we’re not around, she’s also regressed to grabbing things off the table and moving them to her spot near the fire place. Kep’s tail is down more than up. The pack has changed and they don’t know why. Murdoch disappeared, too. Dogs don’t like change.

Speaking of change. The Munich security conference, a gathering of world diplomats had as its theme, Westlessness. A play, I suppose, on restlessness since organizers meant attendees to consider a world without the West as a dominant force. China’s rise spurred the conversation though Trump’s abdication of global leadership made it bite. The concern lies in diffuse centers of influence both in Asia and in the Middle East. The article points to Russia, Iran, and Turkey as core figures in Middle East politics now.

Wow. If dispersed centers of power become the norm, the post-WWII world will vanish like human space travel did. A wondrous achievement winking out. Not sure how I feel about this.

The US led West has dominated world politics since the end of World War II. Over 70 years. My entire lifetime. History though is the record of these tectonic changes, some taking hundreds of years, think the rise and fall of Rome or the changing dynasties of China, India, some taking much shorter times. The end of the cold war. The invasion of Turtle Island. Indian independence.

A world shaped by the U.S. and its odd brand of imperialism: We’re invading you to make you free. Oh, and here’s a ticket to an American capitalist economy, too.

My fellow leftists and I have been and are critical of these policies. Election interference, for example. Take a ride down south to Latin America. We’ve been engaged there for years. Meddling in the politics of others has been a hallmark of our “soft” control.

In that sense I’m happy to see other centers of power emerge, grow strong. We will have neither the responsibility nor the burden of global hegemony. It would, however, be a dramatic and drastic change. It is though a direct result of an America First policy, a policy wedded to xenophobia and white supremacy.

A world in which we are a valued member, one among many, not America First, but America With, would be my preference. Perhaps we need to go through Westlessness to reach this place. But. It can’t happen as a denial of a world already connected in so many ways. It needs to happen as a result of our humility, not our arrogance.

Commentary on Religion, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Judaism, Mountains, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

A Task

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Imbolc and the waning crescent of the Shadow Mountain Moon

When I first began reading Art Green’s Radical Judaism, I thought maybe my job would be to think Christianity through from his truly radical, non-supernatural perspective. Look at Christian civilization in the manner of Mordecai Kaplan with Green’s theology as a pathway, a halakha. The way to walk. Couldn’t get any energy up to start. Why?

Ah. I left Christianity behind long ago now. Of course, it still informs me and my life as the Torah informs the life of a Jew whether secular or religious. But, I don’t feel shaped by it in the distinctive manner my friends at CBE exhibit. Even if G-d no longer requires the hyphen, they still bow during the Amidah, wear the kippa, show up for High Holidays. I have no interest in Christmas or Easter services, that old life.

Huh, I thought. That’s weird. I spent all that time in sem, 15 years in the ministry, and I’m a product of Western civilization, profoundly shaped by Christian belief and thought. I like big projects. Why wouldn’t I want to go back and rethink all that?

It came to me slowly. Somewhere in Green’s book, I can’t find it right now and that frustrates me, he casually dismisses neo-paganism. It’s not clear what he meant, whether he’s taking a substantive jab at pantheists from his panentheistic position, or knows the shallow roots of Wiccan’s, witches, and druids. If it’s the latter, I agree with him. Silliness abounds in contemporary pagan practice and what passes for thought.

If it’s the former, he and I are in conversation with each other. In either case though it triggered a realization. I’m a pagan. Maybe not the best word with all its freight, but one I use intentionally. The pagans of the middle ages, rural folk (classical Latin paganus: rustic, villager, rural folk, peasant, unlearned, countryman, bumpkin), held onto their older religious practices and beliefs because the church had a more tenuous connection with them, less power over their daily lives.

In contemporary usage pagan is a very broad umbrella: Wiccans, latter day Druids, Asatru, Dianists, polytheists of many shades all fall under it. There are also pagans, see this page, who use the term much as I do, as a placeholder for a religious position outside the usual suspects of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam as well as outside other traditions, in particular Buddhism, Hinduism, and most shamanisms.

That’s it, I realized. My task is to use the theological tools of Art Green and the civilization leaning thought of Mordecai Kaplan to reconstruct paganism for a contemporary audience. That I have energy for. Stay tuned.



Commentary on Religion, Judaism, Kabbalah, Mountains, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Torah

Midrash of Ordinary Things

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Imbolc and the waning crescent of the Shadow Mountain Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Colors. White snow. Green lodgepole pines. Black sky. Blue sky. Pink skin. Pale coffee skin. Fur. Kep’s. Rigel’s. Hats for us bald guys. Gloves. Coats. My Chilean fjord scarf knit with love. Coffee. That first bitter taste in the morning. Eggs. Bacon. Rice cakes. Pho. The gas heater in the loft.

Continuing to study Art Green’s Radical Judaism. Read the final section of the Torah chapter yesterday morning. The power was out, our generator on, but the internet was down so I couldn’t write.

Last week Rabbi Jamie talked about midrash, a playful method of reading the Pentateuch, Its chief characteristic is finding relationships among seemingly unrelated verses, etymology of similar words, looking at individual Hebrew letters, considering their gematria (numerological significance). Green, for example, explores an Hasidic midrash that connects the ten utterances of God in the creation narrative and the ten dibrot, or ten words, that constitute what Christian’s call the Ten Commandments.

The underlying assumption of midrash is its critical feature. Everything connects, everything relates to everything else. We have to pay attention, be aware. Since, according to Green, paying attention is the ur religious task, occasioned by our nature as sentient creatures, midrash is an important tool for uncovering the occulted sacred.

Paying attention = Carey Ream’s, “See what you’re looking at.”

Midrash as a neo-pagan’s tool is my current fascination. Stars and fish. Mountains and apartment buildings. Cars and amoeba. Self and other. What is the underlying connective tissue? How are they related to each other, how do they critique each other? What can we learn from the frisson between two apparently disconnected, unrelated things?

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. A midrash on space and time. Thanks for all the fish. 42. A depressed robot. The restaurant at the end of the universe. Douglas Adam gives us dialectical shock after dialectical shock. Dolphins and whales in space? Building a freeway, through the solar system? The hyper drive. A mechanical person with feelings.

The cloud slowly falling down Black Mountain. When the cloud covers the mountain is the mountain still there? How can small droplets of water obscure (or, delete) 10,000 feet of granite and basalt? What does the gradual disappearance of the mountain suggest about what the mountain itself hides? We live in and amongst mystery.

Gratitude can open us to the midrash of ordinary things. What a wonder, a matter of sacred beauty, is color, which reveals as it hides. That piece of bread, toasted, eaten, is no longer toast, no longer wheat, but is now you. Breathe. We cannot live without the second by second inspiration of a gas we cannot see, yet need desperately. Hold your breath. Know the intimacy of our connection to the world around us.

Think, too, of the intimate connection Green proposes as our new sacred narrative, our link to that first squiggly cell coughed up by inorganic matter around a sea vent or in a tidal pool. Or, press even that idea back to the formation of stars and the creation in them of elements. Extend the link with the flow of change that is our universe. Where does it go? Nobody knows.

I’m leaning into monism right now. Seeing the midrash in the everyday. We’ll see where that takes me.

Aging, Astrology, Colorado, Dogs, Family, Memories, Minnesota, Mountains, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, The West, Third Phase, Weather +Climate

Living

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Imbolc and the waning crescent of the Shadow Mountain Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Jen. Who called my attention to a lapse in judgement. King Sooper. Who will load my groceries this morning. Tony’s where I’ll get the pork schnitzel. The crescent moon above Black Mountain. The Storm Glass Ruth got me for Hanukah. Jon home from the hospital.

I reported something here said to someone else about yet another person. That was a lapse in judgement and I apologize to Jen for that.

Past the seventy-three marker and heading into another Aquarian year. Might be a good time to get my chart read again. Sorta put all that away after an initial burst of interest. Maybe an annual thing? Like an oil change and vehicle inspection? Time has slipped by, following the trails of Maxwell Creek, Upper Bear Creek, Cub Creek. Running toward the sea of souls.

In another liminal space, a large one this time. After Gertie. After Murdoch. As the wounds heal. Quieter, solemn. Rigel and Kep both subdued, following us, I suppose. No plans. One day in front of the other.

Even Trump seems far away, perhaps only an orange smudge floating out over the Atlantic. Our little family so dispersed. Atomic. Held together by the weak nuclear force. Yet, held together.

The two feet of snow melted in the warm days. Our roof not as layered. Our driveway almost clear. Another round coming, maybe today and tomorrow. Colorado.

This space between, a sacred place, a holy place. Happening on our mountain top. In the Rockies, in the West, in Colorado. The Midwest a humid memory. We’ll see what comes. Living. That’s it right now. Living.

Dogs, Friends

Never fully understanding

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Imbolc and the waning Shadow Mountain Moon

My friend Grace sent this note. Sad, sweet, and true.

Charlie, so sorry to hear your Gert is gone. Makes me think of this again- “we who choose to surround ourselves with lives even more temporary than our own, live within a fragile circle, easily breached. Unable to accept it’s awful gaps, we still would live no other way. We cherish memory as the only certain immortality, never fully understanding the necessary plan “ – Irving Townsend . Peace to you and Kate. Grace