Beltane Closing Moon
When attention defocuses and my mind heads toward default, it no longer picks up a stray red flag: What about the $%*&$NG house in Andover? This creates space for other thoughts to arise, of course, like: what about my prostate? But that’s fine because action on it is ahead and noticing it does not create anxiety, just resolve. This means I now have some free space, some room to expand my horizons. That makes me feel good.
Beltane Closing Moon
The closing moon has presided over the sale of 3122 153rd Ave. Northwest, Andover, Minnesota, 55304. We only needed one buyer and, in fact, had only one offer. But, it was a good one, from a couple that will continue our work with the land and with bees. That they want the raised beds, the orchards, the hydroponics, the bee woodenware and will use them all feels like a legacy. And a profound one.
Feels so good to have this behind us. A settled feeling, residing somewhere below the heart, has begun to permeate me. There is no longer that agitated sense that we do not quite belong on Shadow Mountain, that a tie from yesterday makes us not fully present in our new home.
Over the weekend I entertained, briefly, what would happen if the deal with the Vorhee’s fell through. The house would have to go back on the market. We’d continue with two mortgages and utilities. The uncertainty would continue, perhaps through the summer. And, we would have to drop the price again. That felt dismal, like sinking in the great swamp of that name.
Now I can concentrate on dealing with prostate cancer with a single focus, not one divided by financial concerns. I’m confident that the prostate cancer journey will have a good outcome, too, but the path forward still has some unknowns, mostly what sort of treatment we’ll choose. That unknown should disappear on June 11th, after then only the execution and recovery.
Beltane Closing Moon
Three things of significance today. Picked up Mary for her first visit to Black Mountain Drive. I’m wired up with leads and a belt holster, ekgs available at the push of a button. This is for thirty days or until I have 3 episodes or events.
And. The Andover house closed, almost all of the money is in our bank account. We are no longer cash poor and paying two mortgages. Yippee, Yi, Ya as we say out here in the West. It hasn’t quite sunk in yet, but we’ve looked up our bank balance and it’s pretty damned healthy. Great to have that uncertainty behind us.
Now the entire circus tent has been struck, all three rings, loaded on the train and the train’s left town, heading west. Our last physical and fiscal ties to Minnesota ended today around 3pm. The friendships, the cultural and political ties, those will remain.
But today we are wholly here from a business perspective. Black Mountain Drive already feels like home, as does the Front Range. How long it takes for our souls to take root in the mountains is an unknown, but a pleasant one, a process of taking the mid out of the midwesterner. It’s already begun. Gotta go now and hitch my hoss to a post.
Beltane Closing Moon
Beltane Closing Moon
Word on Real Estate Street is that our closing may, if the gods of the under(writer)world are appeased, happen today at 2 pm. May it be so.
Holter monitor gets strapped on at 11:45 this morning and then it’s out to DIA (Denver International) to pick up Mary. She’s flying here from Minneapolis where she goes to see her financial advisor. Mary gets around. She’s been in Greece, Indonesia and I don’t know where else already this year. Her home is still in Singapore.
Which brings up Mark. Brother Mark. Who reports that Riyadh is hot. He also sends me news of bombings and shootings in Saudi Arabia, many of them claimed by the Islamic State. He says he feels safe, especially since he lives near the King’s palace.
Steadier internal seas, less distraction. Even cancer can recede when it becomes ordinary, a part of the inner furniture. That’s not to say it’s out of mind, just relegated to the we’re doing something about this and have to wait pile. This will, I’m sure, go through changes, but right now, a good place.
(How I will feel after the closing actually happens.)
Beltane Closing Moon
And so I was able to translate verses in Ovid, 4 of them, enough because this was one long sentence and difficult for me.
Felt good to have the concentration necessary.
Beltane Closing Moon
Reading Karl Ove Knausgaard’s, My Struggle: Volume I. This book hits me as his memories call up my memories. His father memories call to mind my own, distant father, somehow unknown and unknowable. As he sat at the kitchen table, ruler and fat pencil in hand, mocking up an ad for the Times-Tribune’s Thursday edition, the big one which made us paperboys groan as they weighted down our green canvas bags, I would watch him, wonder why a man of his intelligence would spend time doing this.
His mind (Knausgaard’s) roves around ideas and art and writing in ways I recognize, having traveled many of the paths on which he walks. He wonders about his visceral reaction to art, why one painting moves him and another doesn’t, why so many of the ones that do come from a time before the 20th century. He plays with epistemology, speculating on how confident we can be about knowing the world; it is there, as David Hume said when he kicked the rock and said, “I refute it thus,” referring to Bishop Berkeley’s world of perceptions only, yet the world is not so easily known, forming itself from colors, for example, that represent not what color something is, but exactly the color it isn’t.
And, too, he is Norwegian. So he describes the inner workings of a Scandinavian mind and a culture that references lutefisk, fjords, cold and snow in the way a Hawai’ian might mention taro, palm trees and the hula.
My Struggle is not for everyone. It is personal, microscopic, intimate, plotless, meandering. If you need a narrative that hangs together in the usual way, this is not it though there is a continuity, a sort of modest stream of consciousness, more like blocks of consciousness, that do connect one with the other.
Recommended.
Beltane Closing Moon
Neighbor Jude, after describing in detail his woes with his $400 Ford Bronco, “I’m now $6,000 to $8,000 into it.” said, “Here in Colorado we have 330 sunny days a year. And we just used up 28 of the not sunny days in May.” Which is true since 28 of May’s days had precipitation and clouds. A very unusual May. (as to our sunshiny days, see this: Colorado sunshine more myth than reality.)
Kate’s home. Over dinner last night at Chandeliers, the fine dining room at Brook Forest Inn, just a couple of miles down Black Mountain Drive, we both agreed that life was better when we’re together. I got distinctly out of balance over the last week, gradually worn down by the tests and the still unknown.
My O2 saturation dilemma just got some good news. When Kate did hers yesterday, it was 87. And this morning 88. That seems to mean there’s some reacclimatization process after visiting sea level. I had come back the week before from Minnesota when I started measuring mine. I’d like to take this whole question out of consideration.
Forgot to mention that the results of my echocardiogram came back in 1 day, rather than the 7-10 Noah said they would take. My heart is structurally normal. That’s good news. In fact it’s better than good news because it means I have resolved, over the intervening years, a diagnosis of left ventricular hypertrophy, presumably through exercise. I still have to get the holter monitor on though. That’s Tuesday, the same day sister Mary is coming.
Beltane Closing Moon
Realized after talking to Kate yesterday that I have a tightrope I’m walking. I need to recognize my prostate cancer as potentially fatal, because of that I need to find the best treatment possible. Yet. I also need to find ways to be with that possibility and not sink into the slough of despond. There’s a tension created by the act of staying focused on the medical issues and trying to maintain calm. I’m sure this is not novel to me. Anyone with a lethal agent inside them must face the same dilemma.
One solution is denial. Nope, nothing’s going on. I’m ok. Another is wallowing in the terrible fate. Poor me, why me, oh my. In between these two extremes is a path that sees things as they are, but does not give up living. Of course I swing between the two poles. At certain points I think oh this is no big problem. It’ll get fixed (how is not part of this thought pattern) and I’ll be better and life will return to normal. At other points the disease has already won and I’m planning my last good-byes, writing my obituary, planning my funeral.
Most of the time I’m aware of the disease, know I’m taking the steps that can be taken, and am at peace. Life is not normal. Concentrating for Latin or writing has not returned. Daydreaming seems to have a foreshortened horizon. I no longer imagine long projects like Superior Wolf or translating Ovid, finding a way to go on another cruise or start researching certain facets of Western history. Now my daydreams stop at tomorrow or next week, do not extend into the next decade. This is, I suppose, my subconscious reminding me of the predicament.
I do not feel anxious. I sleep well and, for the most part, am level and engaged, not wandering off to thoughts of doom or what might be. In my opinion I’m handling the situation, if not always well, at least honestly. Not sure what else I could ask of myself right now.
Beltane Closing Moon
A mile or so from our driveway is the trailhead for Upper Maxwell Falls trail. I went once in the winter and didn’t take my yak-traks with me. It was too icy to navigate the altitude gain.
Today, as the gloom began to settle in late afternoon, and as my own mood began to mimic the gray overhead, I set out for Maxwell Falls.
The trail is not long, about a mile and a third round trip, but it does climb, then decline through ponderosa forest. Piles of large boulders, weathered and jumbled together, cling to the side of Shadow Mountain above and the trail, while Maxwell Creek flows with equal parts power and grace, going white over rocks in its way, curling around them, too, in gentle embrace.
The falls themselves are modest in height, but there are several, one after another, giving more speed to the already rapid water. This is the way it’s been here for millions of years after the snow melt and when rains come. The water starts up high and finds these channels that allow it to collect and be the chisel. Later, it will grow calm after having taken a fast ride, perhaps pooling behind a beaver dam or a spillway or flowing into a lake or pond.
It is a privilege to live so close to this magic. It dispelled the gathering gloom in my Self, allowed me entrance to the Otherworld, the place where humans are still one among many and not more important than any other.