Family, Health, Music

The Fall

Leave a comment

Summer                                                      Park County Fair Moon

Rebekah Johnson
Rebekah Johnson

Kate’s sister BJ is a classical violinist who bows with her right arm. She has, for many years, played the Teton Music Festival in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Schecky, her significant other, a cellist, called Kate yesterday to say that BJ had suffered a bad fall trying to climb down from the deck of their new home in Driggs, Idaho. They live in the Beacon Hotel on Broadway in NYC and spend a lot of time apart due to their career, so Schecky being in NY while she’s in Idaho and Wyoming is not unusual.

Apparently the door to the deck slammed behind her and locked. When she couldn’t get back inside, she decided to climb down. She fell, experiencing a bilateral fracture of her pelvis, a dislocated shoulder and a humerus broken at the ball that inserts into the shoulder. On her right arm.

So this summer of interesting times for the Buckman-Ellis/Olson family has gotten more interesting. Kate’s driving up on Thursday to Driggs and will stay a while, maybe a week or so. I’ll remind behind with the dogs, the Timberline painters and Jon. Family is forever.

 

Commentary on the news, Politics, US History, World History

The Cause

Leave a comment

Summer                                                                     Park County Fair Moon

My brother asked, “What do you think is the cause for the recent turmoil in the U.S.?”

We used a promissory note to build our early republic. Its collateral was the freedom of African men and women captured and brought to the New World as forced labor. Slavery. The transaction made economic sense. The winding together of these two, slavery and economic advantage, created a long rope of unearned privilege, unearned wealth. This rope supported, and, to our everlasting shame, continues to support a bridge, a suspension bridge, whose terminus is Edina, the Upper East Side, Nantucket, Orange County, Cherry Hill, Jackson Hole, Vail, Aspen, the Gold Coast, Hyde Park.

As in the Monty Python movie the Holy Grail, there is a bridge keeper, one who lets only certain people cross from the realm of the ordinary to the realm of the moneyed, the elite, the one percent. The first question he asks is, “What color is your skin?” The second, “Where did you go to school?” The third, “Who is your family?” If you answer, give the wrong answer, you immediately fly away from the bridge back to the ordinary place from you which you came. Read the recent novel Sport of Kings if you want a literary explanation.

The turmoil so painfully evident right now is but one instance of an attempt to collect on the promissory note, but the debt collectors have little power and those who cross the bridge are far away from them. Affirmative action, reparations, integration, voting rights, model cities, all of them attempts to change the bridge keeper’s questions, have altered, to a modest extent, the foot traffic on the bridge. But only for a very, very few.

 

Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Politics, Science, US History, World History

Not Quite Yet

Leave a comment

Summer                                                                   Park County Fair Moon

“We’re in grave danger”

“The lineup of speakers presented a United States in danger, threatened from abroad and from within, a once-proud nation on the very brink of chaos and dystopia.” NYT, GOP Convention, Day 1

rain over black mountain
rain over black mountain

My post about Mutual Homicide might give you the impression that I agree with this analysis of the immediate future. Nope. Standard and Poor’s and the DOW have both reached record highs in the last couple of days. There are signs that the climate change movement has begun to get traction. The Cubs are winning. Von Miller finally signed with the Broncos. US demographics portend an increasingly diverse nation, with contributions from many cultures strengthening our common life. We’ve just had two full terms of an African-American president and are probably near our first woman president. LGBT rights have increased as has an understanding of transgender individuals. Women have entered more and more careers, have more real power. We are not spiraling into the earth. Not yet.

My mutual homicide conclusion, a dark one, possibly too dark, comes not from the near term, but from a very long term view of the way we humans are acting. We have in place an economic system that does not account for externals, the costs to the public good of private profit seeking. This fact, by itself, is enough to explain the dire distant future I imagine. When the engines of our ingenuity (to borrow the title of an NPR feature) rely on diminishing natural resources and cost-free toxification of the air, the land and our water, then economic advance (like the records for the DOW and Standard and Poor’s) is really a blinking red light. A stop sign. But together we choose, over and over again, to run the light imagining that there is no truck marked CO2 concentration barreling through the intersection.

Can we agree to change course? In theory, yes. In practice, with the state of anarchy that exists among nation-states, it will be very difficult. We need not just one but many statesmen and stateswomen to move into leadership. And unfortunately this is not the trend around the world. No, the world has begun to move toward more and more nativist politics. The Han chinese. The Hindu nationalists. Brexit. The increasing strength of far-right parties in Europe, especially Austria, France and Germany. Donald Trump.

I know, after writing this and the mutual homicide post, that I owe you all a strategy, a path to a future where we do learn to live sustainably on our planet. I’m thinking. I’m thinking.

Family, Jefferson County, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain, Weather +Climate

A Collective Sigh

Leave a comment

Summer                                                                    Park County Fair Moon

staing begun

Staining the wood is an involved process. First, there’s power washing, cleaning and laying bare the wood, followed by extensive masking. These tasks took a week. The application of the stain is, itself, labor intensive. Though it can be applied with a power spray, it has to be back brushed to force the stain into the wood. Since the process requires two coats, that means each inch of the garage, shed and two decks will get stained and brushed twice. Longer lasting siding and much increased aesthetics will result. Nathan, Chris, Dean and Matthew have been working steadily.

fire-danger-high

While they were finishing up yesterday, we had a thunderstorm. As in Minnesota, a thunderstorm breaks the heat, but here it comes with a collective sigh. The rain has a salvific effect, much like the rain in movies after a long drought or the coming of the monsoons in India.

We’ve had several red flag warnings over the last week plus and the forest service signs, common along roads here in the mountains, have all had Smokey’s finger pointed at High. Jefferson County, our county, instituted a level 2 fire ban. No fires at all. The rains give us some respite from the risk of wildfire and that’s most welcome.

Jon is in Denver for the next five days working on finishing a deck railing, remodeling a bathroom and moving his stuff out of the house. Jen and the grandkids are in Orlando for a hemophilia conference. Today is a phone conference between Jon and Jen’s lawyers trying to hammer out some differences without the principles involved. May it be fruitful.

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Family, Humanities, Literature, Our Land and Home

Indolence in Horse Country

Leave a comment

Summer                                                               Park County Fair Moon

An indolent day yesterday. Kate, Jon and the grandkids left for Fairplay, about an hour west of here in South Park, headed to the Park County Fair. Neither Jon nor us has a vehicle that comfortably seats 5, so somebody had to stay behind. Me.

Did a little binge watching, read the Sport of Kings. This book, Sport of Kings, is a major American novel. It catches American aristocracy (that strange self-inflected club), slavery, westward expansion, effectively compares the breeding of blue-blood humans and blue-blood horses-thoroughbreds, the respective dynamics of working class, upper class and poor black families, all seen through the prism of Kentucky bluegrass horse culture. It’s one I may read twice.

Jon’s into Denver today to work on his and Jen’s house, getting it ready for sale in the red-hot Denver market. I’m following in just a bit to pick up some portion of his stuff: tools, clothes, walnut boards for the loft, machines for ski-making. This whole process has been icky so far, but I’m entertaining a hope (maybe, really, a fantasy) that this week marks a modest turning point in the acrimony.

Ladders rattle over the roof of the garage as the final masking is underway. The staining will commence on the whole very soon, perhaps today. The preparation for a good painting/staining job is painstaking, time-consuming.

Cinema and Television, Family, Great Work, Jefferson County, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Plants, Shadow Mountain

Weekend Stuff

Leave a comment

Summer                                                                      Park County Fair Moon

columbine Black Mtn DrWent to a delightful children’s movie, BFG, with the grandkids. A Spielberg film, it uses CGI as seamlessly as anything I’ve seen. This is a big-hearted movie with childish wonder spilling out all over the place. A Roald Dahl book. The story of an orphan who inadvertently sees a giant deploying dreams. He kidnaps her because she’s seen him. They develop a relationship, one threatened by other giants. Sweet and sad.

Ruth and Gabe were here overnight. Ruth and Jon worked on printmaking in the garage. He’s developing a body of work focused on found objects, metal objects crushed by traffic. He inks them up, then uses a press to transfer the ink to paper. Gabe and I talk because he likes to come up here in the loft and play.

penstemon
penstemon

The staining of the garage is underway. It will look good and last longer when this whole project finishes. The shed and decks, too.

Wandering the back yard now, looking at flowers that grow here with no help. I’m going to gather seeds, then reseed with them in the fall. We have two varieties of penstemon, wild flax, columbine, sulfur flower, indian paintbrush, daisies, shrub roses and a few I haven’t identified. Work with what already likes this soil and this microclimate. Encourage them.

Later in the fall we’ll plant lilacs and more shrub roses in the far back, perhaps some aspen. I want to plant some aspen out front, too.

 

 

Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Jefferson County, Mountains, Politics, Shadow Mountain, US History

Mutual Homicide

Leave a comment

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.

 

 

 

Politics, US History, World History

#InterestingTimes

Leave a comment

Summer                                                                        Park County Fair Moon

Nice. Phillip Castile. Dallas. And that’s just the last couple of weeks.

Russ Douthat, a NYT conservative columnist, and a co-author have an article in today’s paper about curing Trumpism. It identifies a core problem in the Republican party. The party has, for several decades now, been a party of two parts: the establishment elite and working class whites. Trump has limned that division and created an internal revolution between these two very different constituencies.

“Some of these concerns (of the white working class) are rooted in racial anxiety, and an older generation’s inevitable fear of change. But many of them are rooted in basic human vulnerability — a very personal exposure to stagnant wages, family breakdown, military quagmires (America’s wars are disproportionately fought by volunteers from downscale Red America) and a social crisis of opioid abuse and suicide that hardly anyone in Washington or New York noticed until recently.” Douthat, NYT, 7/15/2016

Brexit. Greece. Refugees and immigrants. The impossible dilemma that the bloody marriage of oil and Islam has bequeathed on the world. And that’s just Europe and the Middle East. Consider, too, the rise of China and the recent decision of the UN panel against China’s claims about the South China Sea. Of course there is, too, the region of the Great Game, that mysterious hidden world (to the West) of the ‘stans, armed conflict going back hundreds of years.

People who feel history no longer listens to their voice become dangerous. Most people do not want power or great wealth or globe spanning influence, most people want food for themselves and their families, a roof, water, gainful work and some time to enjoy life. In each of the trouble areas of the world whole groups, classes of people, cry out. They are not fed, clothed, housed, watered, working. And joy is difficult to find. Imagine the family gathered for a meager meal, the kids running around as children do. As grandparents, you look at the children and see their future. Bleak.

Think of China, Vietnam, India, Nigeria, Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, México. Whole populations want to matter, feel as if current history has promise, yet are uncertain of its arrival. The world is a dynamic place, shifting and changing always. Even the great civilizations like Egypt, China, Greece, Rome, Persia rose and fell. Our times are not different in kind, only in the details.

Politics is the way humans sort out their communal conflicts. U.S. politics are in a fundamental reordering right now, but the primary point, here, as elsewhere on mother earth, is to treat each other well. When we don’t, murders and wars and the collapse of nations can follow.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, Friends, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Fraught

Leave a comment

Summer                                                        Park County Fair Moon

rudbeckia ReynoldsFeeling the pressure of the divorce. So many tensors pulling this way and that. Jon and his understandable anxiety about his immediate and near term future. Kate’s tough position as mother, mother-in-law and grandma. Court hearings with deep consequences. The fate of Ruth and Gabe as their mother and father fight over them. The friable nature of our extended family as it goes through a wrenching alteration, one with permanent implications. Trying to stay centered and available. All difficult.

This is life at its most fraught, perhaps the only analogue being serious illness or an unexpected financial crisis. All of us become frayed, our best persons fighting to remain present, but often submerged in our collective anxiety. A good time for Mussar, the Jewish spiritual practice Kate and I have taken up through Congregation Beth Evergreen.

If there were a red flag warning for families, we’d have one on our flagpole right now.

Yet. The immersion in each others lives at increased intensity also has positive implications. We get to know each other better, perhaps most possible when the day-to-day gets set aside and we become more vulnerable, more accessible. If we listen to our inner life, we have a chance, too, to learn more about ourselves.

A friend going through a difficult period refers to it as graduate school for self-awareness, for learning what truly matters. Yes.

Health
Aside Leave a comment

Summer                                                               Park County Fair Moon

PSA test today. The first one after my one year surgery anniversary. This has become routine, though not without its still high stakes character. As Kate often says, the more tests that are done, the more likely irregularities are to show up.