Lughnasa Labor Day Moon
Driving down to Big R for some chain I saw a small herd of elk does, maybe 10, in the meadow at the bottom of Shadow Mountain Drive. I watched one, then the others, come slowly out of the woods and begin eating the recently cut grass.
Then, coming home, there in our yard was this fellow and a companion. I pulled into the driveway, opened the garage door and they both kept eating. Just dining out in the neighborhood. Our neighborhood, theirs and ours.
Lughnasa Labor Day Moon
An establishment in Bailey, further west from here on Hwy. 285.
Lughnasa Labor Day Moon
Kate leaves tomorrow for Driggs, Idaho. Her sister, BJ, and her long time s.o., Schecky, have bought a house outside Driggs. BJ’s living there this summer while she plays violin at the Grand Tetons Classical Music Festival in Jackson Hole, a short drive away in Wyoming. She’s played this festival for several years. Schecky and BJ currently live in the Beacon Hotel on Broadway in NYC, not far from Juilliard and Lincoln Center where they met. They’ve lived in the Beacon their entire professional lives. Rent control.
Driggs, then, will be quite a downshift in terms of people and energy. Schecky is originally from the west and they’ve both done extensive backpacking. He plays the cello and has a solo career in Europe and Japan. In the U.S. he plays for the New York City Ballet and the New York Symphony.
BJ turns 60 on the 8th, so this is a birthday trip, but a quick one, since I’m leaving Wednesday for Indiana. With the dogs it’s difficult for Kate and me to travel together on these shorter journeys. Since we bought the Rav4, we’ve only had one car, so we rent from Enterprise and leave the Rav4 for whoever’s at home.
Kate’s taking her featherweight sewing machine and will help BJ with window treatments. She made her chili and cornbread for me yesterday, as well as a peach pie from Colorado Palisade peaches which are now in season.
Lughnasa Labor Day Moon
Next week, on Tuesday, I’m leaving Shadow Mountain for the familiar plains and fields of the Midwest. My 50th high school reunion. Not so long ago it seemed unlikely that anyone could be old enough for a 50th high school reunion. Now. Well.
A friend on whom I had a long schoolboy crush, Tony Fox, has been posting a countdown on Facebook. She came up with some photographs from the Spectrum, our yearbook. These are from our freshman year, 1961. That’s me on the left.
This photograph caused a shock of recognition when I saw it the other day. 54 years later I still find myself in this pose from time to time. The look. Also very familiar. Still.
And yet there is the question of my relationship with this 1961 version. My cells have changed over completely at least 7 times. The narrative that I have or that I am includes this young man, yes, but how? Am I his literal descendant as we tend to think, or am I only a thought, a continuously updating Self that is really brand new from moment to moment?
This photograph raises in me a lot of compassion for this young guy, knowing as I do now what the future, especially through his teens and twenties, holds for him. He will be tested in ways the innocence captured here cannot comprehend.
High school. A complicated time. As were the teen years themselves. Soon to come roaring back for a couple of days in mid-September.
Lughnasa Labor Day Moon
Yesterday, driving on 285 west through the Platte Canyon toward Kenosha Pass, I could feel summer beginning to transition toward fall. The sky was a bit gray, the air brisk, a definite browning in the grasses and small shrubs along the North Fork of the South Platte. The sweet melancholy of autumn passed through me with a quiet shudder. This will be our first fall in Colorado.
These moments of awareness as seasons change carry with them the autumns of yesterday. The smell of leaves burning on the streets in my childhood Alexandria. The homecoming parade. The brilliant blaze that catches fire in Minnesota as oaks, maples, elms, ash, ironwood turn from their productive summer chlorophyll green to the color of the leaf itself. People heading north after Labor Day to close up their cabins. Kicking piles of leaves raked up in the yard. Jumping into them.
What will fall be like in the mountains? I know it will have splashes of gold as the aspens change. There will be brown, the desiccation of grasses and shrubs. But the view from my loft window to the west, which contains lodgepole pines on our property and the massif of Black Mountain in the distance, also covered with lodgepole, will still be green. I imagine the green might become duller, but I don’t know for sure. The angle of the sun will change, has changed already, but the basic green and blue, the sky above Black Mountain, will remain.
The temperatures, especially the nights, will cool down. The mule deer and elk rut are important to fall here, as is the hunger of black bears feeding themselves toward hibernation. A young mule deer buck was in Eduardo and Holly’s yard yesterday, velvet still on his antlers. We’ve seen no does for some time and wonder where they are. Perhaps waiting out the violence of the rut in secluded mountain meadows? They are, after all, its object.
Summer is always a paradox in the temperate zone. It brings warmth and growth, a loose freedom to wander outside with no coat. In that way it opens up the space around us, gives us more room. But the heat can become oppressive, driving people back indoors toward air conditioning. Humidity goes up; weather hazards like tornadoes, torrential rains, thunderstorms, derechoes increase. Here in the mountains, most years, the threat of wildfire spikes. As for me, I am usually happy to see summer slip away.
Lughnasa Labor Day Moon
From NASA. the formal beauty of this machine, this spacecraft made photograph. wonder-full
Lughnasa Labor Day Moon
A curious bifurcation. Friends comment on how well my life’s going. I’m not feeling it. Kate says look at the big picture. That’s what they’re seeing. Time with grandkids. Settling into the mountains. Healthy dogs. Cancer season mostly over. Loft getting put together.
When Kate suggested I look at the big picture, I replied, “It’s not in my nature.” My comment surprised me. What did that mean? “It’s not in my nature.”
In the moment I meant the larger trajectory of my life always gets swamped by the quotidian. The generator, damn thing. Rigel’s cast. Aimlessness. Sleep. That’s what gets my attention, my focus. It’s the way of generalized anxiety. Yes, I can back off from the day-to-day, know that these things are transient and the bigger things more lasting, but I get dragged right back in. Gotta change our home insurance before October 31st. Like that.
But more to my question, what is my nature? What does that mean? I mentioned a while back I’m reading a book called How Forests Think. In it Eduardo Kohn makes a strong, a remarkable case for animism, identifying animism with the Selfhood of living things. Self, if I understand Kohn right, is the gathered experience of not only an individual tree, dog, human, but of the evolutionary and genetic inheritance each individual bears. In this sense my Self is the culmination of human adaptation over millions of years, specific adaptation in the instance of my particular genetic family and the moments since my birth that have shaped who I have become in dynamic interaction with those genetics.
I’ve always had a strong view of Self, that emergent being/becoming we each are. (BTW: we, in Kohn’s vocabulary, includes all living things) Thanks to many years of Jungian analysis I have tended to articulate Self in relation to Jungian thought as an entity rooted in the collective unconscious, born of the struggle between persona and our genetic tendencies, or, said another way, between our adaptative responses to the world and our animal inheritance.
It is in this sense that I meant it is not in my nature. Over time, thanks to events subtle and gross, I have learned to focus on the thing not finished, the matter with something left to do. That moves attention away from the completed, the resolved. Things like settling into the mountains, presumptively cancer free, time with the grandkids recede, get placed in the room marked o.k. for now.
So my nature is the sum of me, the skin-bound memories (another Kohn term) and the adaptative ancestry from which I descend. Here’s an interesting point about genetics and adaptation that Kohn makes, they are future oriented. That is, the adaptations that stick are, in essence, bets on a future that will require them. So, though they come from the past and manifest in the present, each adaptation represents a subtle reorientation of the species to a time imagined, in the most physical of senses, to have similarity with the near past.
Lughnasa Labor Day Moon
The Labor Day moon has been full the last couple of nights. From our north facing bedroom window we see its light amongst the lodgepole pines, soft on the intermittently grassy and rocky surface that is our backyard. In Andover our south facing bedroom found the full moon shining, lighting up our bed and the room itself. This mountain experience is more subtle, we see the moon by moonshine only while the moon itself floats across the southern sky toward Black Mountain.
My mood has not lifted. I feel my Self as I see the moon shine. The Self, though hidden for now in my psychic south, still sends out rays of thought and feeling. Its presence is known only by these hints. An inclination toward horror fiction. A surge of interest in images from Rome. Imagining my books spread out on my art cart or me sitting in the now covered with books chair, reading. Looking through notes written on art works remembered. Feeling my way through the mountain, into the mountain. Wandering the trails, climbing on the rocks of Shadow Mountain.
After what I wrote yesterday, I realized this is not an unusual transition for me, though it’s not one I’ve made in a while. Something, perhaps the Self’s phases as it passes through the sky of a new place, perhaps the false winter of the cancer season, perhaps the ongoing adjustment to family and the absence of friends, something, probably a mix of all these, has put my Self in the southern sky, out of my range of vision for now.
The ancientrail through this place must be walked slowly. I’ve been trying to push, to run, to shorten the journey with speed. My inner ear becomes deaf as I hurry. My mind narrows to the dangers of the trail, watching for roots and projecting rocks. Imagination has no role. Yet, on this ancientrail of Self re-discovery listening, imagining, expanding the mind are what is necessary.
Waiting now to see the moonrise.
Lughnasa Labor Day Moon
Part of the transition to fall here in the mountains is the elk rut. My dental hygienist told me about her first experience. She and her husband came home from work in late September. They heard a sound like two men clashing 2×4’s together, went to the window and saw two bull elks in the backyard, charging each other. This went on through supper, and as night fell, they both used night vision goggles that her mother had left behind after a visit. They went to bed to the sound of the elks battling for reproductive rights.
When she got up, the second elk was gone and the winner basked in the comfort of a large harem of does. Also, she said, the bugling sounds just like bugles. Looking forward to this fall.
Lughnasa Labor Day Moon
Rigel broke her thumb and dislocated the digit next to it on her left paw. She has a cast and a medi-paw over the cast to protect it. She stumps around like a one-eyed pirate captain, whacking the floor as she goes. How did she do it? No idea. Kep has furred out again, looking like an Akita about twice his real size. Over to Award-Winning Pet Grooming in Bailey on Monday. No kidding. That’s the name. Vet recommended it.
That generator I’ve written about so often? Still not installed and this time it’s the electrician who pulled out. He claimed his crew’s work on El Rancho, an Evergreen remodel, had overwhelmed him. Feeling a bit snakebit on this one. So, sigh. Find another electrician. The amount of work for the trades up here in the mountains is so high that smaller jobs get pushed off the calendar.
On Monday Ikea delivered the last of the bookshelves, five more of the tall ones. This time I took out the tape measure and measured the remaining piles of books, divided the total inches by the length of a bookshelf. Needed five to cover what’s on the floor. With the black walnut shelving on the shorter bookcases these birch veneer units will snap to attention. Jon’s also producing a custom top for what he calls my art cart, resin over a basin filled with various smaller pieces of wood. Not gonna make Labor Day for the finish up here, but the result will be worth the wait.