Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Jefferson County, Mountains, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase
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Been trying to feel the mountain. Beneath our house Shadow Mountain extends at least 8,800 feet to sea level and just where a mountain begins and ends after sea level is a mystery to me. That’s a mile and 2/3rds of rock. A lot of rock.

14 years ago I came out to Colorado and camped above Georgetown in the National Forest. Right next to me was a sugarloaf mountain. As darkness fell, the mountain disappeared into the gloom. All that massiveness just disappeared. But I could feel it looming over me. Since then I’ve wondered what the mountain equivalent is to the Shedd Aquarium’s freshwater exhibition tag: The essence of a stream is to flow. What is the essence of a mountain?

Mass seems to be the answer. It is the distinctive feature that draws our eyes when we come in on Interstate 76 from the plains of Nebraska. Suddenly, the plains stop. The essence of the plains is flatness? No more flatness, verticality created by mass intervenes with sight lines. The volume of rock pressed upwards by colliding tectonic plates changes the topography.

So these last couple of mornings, before I got out of bed, I’ve been trying to feel the mass of Shadow Mountain. Trying to extend my Self into the mountain, to feel the mountain as it lies there. Not so successful so far. It occurred to me this morning that this is the opposite of conquering the mountain, of summiting, of climbing. This is diving, deepening, merging. Part of the difficulty is the claustrophobic feeling of having the mountain all round me even in my imagination.

This is not all. I noticed the other day in the east, just above the lodgepoles on our property, Orion. In Minnesota I was a late riser so I don’t know where Orion was at 5 am in August, but his presence here surprised me. I have, until now, counted Orion as a winter companion, first becoming visible in November. He may have risen much earlier even in Minnesota, but I missed him. Orion is a special friend, a constellation with which I’ve had a long relationship and one I view as a companion in the night.

Then, there are the bucks. Mule deer bucks. On Sunday as we drove to Evergreen there were four mule deer bucks with still velveted antlers quietly munching grass along the side of the road. They looked at us; we looked at them. The velvet has a prospective nature, auguring the rut when not yet released. On this morning they were friends, not competitors for breeding rights. And they were in harmony.

Then, yesterday, Kate said, “Look at that!” I turned and over my left shoulder looked down into the grassy valley that extends between Shadow Mountain and Conifer Mountain. In the field of mown alfalfa stood a huge bull elk. His rack was enormous and already cleared of its velvet. It arced out away from his head on both sides, tines extending its reach even further. This was a bull of legend. Seeing him took us into the wild, the world that goes on alongside us here on Shadow Mountain, the lives of our fellow inhabitants of this mountain.

All of this, the essence of the mountain, Orion rising, velveted mule deer, the bull elk, hiking on the Upper Maxwell Falls trail, all of this accelerates becoming native to this place. The Rockies. Our home.

Third Phase

Markets End a Wild Day Down About 4%

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Third phase folk pay attention to the stock market, at least those of us lucky enough to have investments. I spent a bit of time 15 years or so ago trying to get up to speed on investing. Bio-tech stocks seemed real attractive to me. After a year or so I realized investing was not my thing. A real stunner, that, since I had only a few years before resigned as the development minister for Unity Church in St. Paul, one of the dumber career moves I’d ever made.

Kate and I have learned to manage money, not easily, not without pain, but we’ve got it now. What buddy Scott Simpson does, manage money for others, is a high-dive act, a constant immersion in a chaotic realm. Being able to do it consistently and for others means he’s mastered a very complex and often cruel domain.

On days like today, when markets shake like the San Andreas getting ready for the big one, those of us retired and depending on our investments for a certain portion of our monthly living expenses can over react. Markets correct when they go down at least 10%, and they enter bear market territory when they hit 20%, off a previous high.

Market corrections, on average, last about two months. In other words, sell now and you sell low. If you go into cash, you then have to decide when to buy back in. Most people wait till the market ticks up again, often resulting in buying high after having just sold low. Some people’s portfolios never recover. That happened to many, including friends of mine, in 2008.

So. Take a deep breath. Do nothing. Wait. Often difficult, but the wisest course of action now.

 

Family, Our Land and Home

The Eyrie

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Shadow Mountain homestead still under construction. Jon added the shelving unit on Saturday that will hold my tea, teaware, coffee and water heating appliances. That will make the winter a more civilized moment up here in what Kate calls Charlie’s Eyrie. A second story loft at 8,800 feet. An eyrie.

 

We added a new gas stove to our kitchen yesterday. Kate’s adventure with thumb surgery will find me happily back at the grocery store and cooking. But, I really don’t like electric stoves. The kitchen will get a complete makeover, but the stove we needed now.

That generator, the project that will not die, will get leveled and stabilized and wired on September 1st. Alpha Electric will install a ceiling fan in our bedroom on the same day. The gas will get attached, an inspector will come, then we’ll be ready for what happened a couple of weeks ago. In the same process we’ll get an estimate on redoing Kate’s bathroom with a walk-in shower. Safer over time. Skylights need repair, too.

The house, even after all this, will still be missing its soul, our art. The walls are bare, waiting a good feel for where we want paintings, sculpture, travel mementos, photographs. Until the art is hung, the house will not feel fully like home.

 

That will leave the external sprinkler system, probably next spring, whatever kind of cover Jon can create for the gap between the house and the garage (too much snow and uneven icy, ground in winter) and garden/bee works. Jon has an idea for the house/garage gap that may include a greenhouse, which would solve the garden works.

My original vision was fully moved in in two years. I still think that’s about the right length of time. We may make 18 months.

This process is, by turns, frustrating and exhilarating. The frustration is dealing with trades people and their shifting schedules, plus the difficulty of accurately assessing their work, both what needs doing and how well it’s been done. The exhilaration is finishing projects, bringing the whole closer to our vision of home. Time and money.

Politics, US History

It Can Happen Again

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And now, news that Donald Trump has staying power. Oh, my. A few days back I wrote about the possibility of a four-party presidential election with Trump on the right fringe and Sanders on the left fringe. If this should happen, it raises the possibility of a Jesse Ventura outcome on a national level, a minority candidate sliding into office. I’m not sure how plausible such an outcome is, but the thought of Jesse the Mouth being followed by Donald the Hair gives me shivers.

Presidential elections, the silly season, have extended themselves back in time. We’re still over a year from the election and yet news of candidates and candidacies are everywhere. There is no incumbent. The first viable woman candidate is making her case, trying to make doubled history by following the first black president. Bernie Sanders has quite literally come out of left field, giving voice to many of us who’ve felt disenfranchised by the center right politics of the Reagan era. And Trump. The mean side of the American dream, only white dreamers need apply.

Politics since the mid-1970’s have lurched from outright criminal to benign neglect, from the right’s right wing to the horrific posturing of the neocons. Obama has been better, Obamacare a good start on national health care, but his use of drones, failure to close Gitmo and his defense of the industrial/governmental security state have made his years since then look status quo.

There was this bright moment, from about 1965 to 1975, when politics had the will of the people behind it, pushing, keeping up pressure, not letting old fissures of race, gender, militarism, class go unchallenged. It was an anomaly, I see that now, but it was my youth and my young adulthood, so it became what I hoped for, what I continue to hope for. Politics enacted at the grassroots level. Politics done for the needs of the many, not the interests of the few. Politics that listen to the voiceless: the tree, the river, the mountain, the land, the elk, the pika, the wolf.

Yes, the 60’s were an anomaly, but they don’t have to be. That spirit can come back, the realization that we are, all of us, responsible for each other and that a primary executor of that responsibility is government at all levels. That spirit can lift us out of the corporate state and back into a citizen state. It has happened before and can happen again.

Family

Immersion

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Grandparent immersion finished up yesterday with a trip to the Colorado History Center. This two week time got us all the way here with the grandkid experience, something we had lagged on a bit with finishing up the move, then the prostate cancer. We ate meals together, rode a train, saw Buffalo Bill’s grave, hiked in the mountains, put our hands on the active exhibits at Robot’s Rising and played with toys at the Colorado History Museum.

There was quiet time with dogs, wandering around in the backyard, playing with legos, reading, sewing. We had to learn each others idiosyncrasies and adapt. There were kerfuffles, too, of course. All of this led us to a deeper appreciation of each other.

Mountain living combined with family, that was the goal. We wanted our home to be our home, separate from Jon and Jen’s not only by distance, but by geography. Buying the house on Shadow Mountain accomplished half of our goal.

The other half has had more complications. There was initial resistance to the distance we were from Pontiac Street. And our refrain in that instance is, “We’re 900 miles closer.” I’m not sure how much of that resistance remains, but this past two weeks demonstrated our resolve. There is, too, the change from occasional visitors to full-time residents. This requires fine-tuning our relationships in ways not previously necessary.

We’ve begun this process, but are far from finished with it. I imagine it will take months, if not years and even then the fine-tuning will change as the kids grow older. Us, too, for that matter.

Dogs, Family, Great Work, Jefferson County, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

On the Path

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gabeuppermaxwell300Two hours in the dentist’s chair yesterday. Cleaning, followed by a crown prep and filling two cavities. When Kate came back from the dentist on Wednesday talking about the sticky fluoride treatment she’d received, it made me realize we’ve had no fluoride in our water for over 20 years. Living with our own well.

Took Gabe and Ruth to the Upper Maxwell Falls trail yesterday afternoon. We didn’t make it to the falls, instead wandering off on an alternate trail that climbed through jumbles of boulders and large, rocky cliffs. The regular trail is very popular in spite of its out of the way location. Over the summer there have been no fewer than six cars and often twenty parked at the trailhead.

We examined plants. Ruth found a snake (she wants one for a pet.), but it slithered away Upper Maxwell Falls Trail1350beneath the rocks. We climbed on the rocks and looked out. Nature provides something new, something noteworthy every foot or so. It was a slow hike. Here were lichen, familiar forms from Minnesota. There was a very late blooming Indian Paint Brush, its fiery bloom resting on the ground. The trees, some of them, were huge, trunks so big that Gabe, Ruth and I couldn’t get our arms around them holding hands.

Maxwell Creek exerted the magnetic attraction that water has for humans. We went down twice to be closer to it, the first time we crossed over to the alternative trail that we followed. The second time we crossed back to the Falls trail. Ruth talked about some camp counselors who followed a mountain stream to its source, an artesian spring, drinking from it, since “water is never fresher.”

Being in the Arapaho National Forest has its own version of mindfulness, one in which attention leaves the world of the day-to-day and focuses on an interesting rock, a blooming flower, the sound of water rushing over rocks, the view from a boulder. The eye scans for what is new or unfamiliar, being delighted constantly by a patch of cowslip, a bit of lichen on a lodgepole pine, a small squirrel playing peek-a-book around a thin aspen trunk.

Ruth and I are going back this morning, taking Kepler along in his harness.

Humor

Asking the Big Questions

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So why did the chicken cross the road?

SARAH PALIN: The chicken crossed the road because, gosh-darn it, he’s a maverick!

BARACK OBAMA: Let me be perfectly clear, if the chickens like their eggs they can keep their eggs. No chicken will be required to cross the road to surrender her eggs. Period.

JOHN McCAIN: My friends, the chicken crossed the road because he recognized the need to engage in cooperation and dialogue with all the chickens on the other side of the road.

HILLARY CLINTON: What difference at this point does it make why the chicken crossed the road?

GEORGE W. BUSH: We don’t really care why the chicken crossed the road. We just want to know if the chicken is on our side of the road or not. The chicken is either with us or against us. There is no middle ground here.

DICK CHENEY: Where’s my gun?

BILL CLINTON: I did not cross the road with that chicken.

AL GORE: I invented the chicken.

JOHN KERRY: Although I voted to let the chicken cross the road, I am now against it! It was the wrong road to cross, and I was misled about the chicken’s intentions. I am not for it now, and will remain against it.

AL SHARPTON: Why are all the chickens white?

DR. PHIL: The problem we have here is that this chicken won’t realize that he must first deal with the problem on this side of the road before it goes after the problem on the other side of the road. What we need to do is help him realize how stupid he is acting by not taking on his current problems before adding any new problems.

OPRAH: Well, I understand that the chicken is having problems, which is why he wants to cross the road so badly. So instead of having the chicken learn from his mistakes and take falls, which is a part of life, I’m going to give this chicken a NEW CAR so that he can just drive across the road and not live his life like the rest of the chickens.

ANDERSON COOPER: We have reason to believe there is a chicken, but we have not yet been allowed to have access to the other side of the road.

NANCY GRACE: That chicken crossed the road because he’s guilty! You can see it in his eyes and the way he walks.

PAT BUCHANAN: To steal the job of a decent, hardworking American.

MARTHA STEWART: No one called me to warn me which way the chicken was going. I had a standing order at the Farmer’s Market to sell my eggs when the price dropped to a certain level. No little bird gave me any insider information.

DR SEUSS: Did the chicken cross the road? Did he cross it with a toad? Yes, the chicken crossed the road, but why it crossed I’ve not been told.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY: To die in the rain, alone.

GRANDPA: In my day we didn’t ask why the chicken crossed the road. Somebody told us the chicken crossed the road, and that was good enough for us.

BARBARA WALTERS: Isn’t that interesting? In a few moments, we will be listening to the chicken tell, for the first time, the heartwarming story of how it experienced a serious case of molting, and went on to accomplish its lifelong dream of crossing the road.

ARISTOTLE: It is the nature of chickens to cross the road.

BILL GATES: I have just released eChicken2014, which will not only cross roads, but will lay eggs, file your important documents and balance your checkbook. Internet Explorer is an integral part of eChicken2014. This new platform is much more stable and will never reboot.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: Did the chicken really cross the road, or did the road move beneath the chicken?

COLONEL SANDERS: Did I miss one?