Beyond the Boundaries, Colorado, Mountains, Science, The West

The Rio Grande Rift

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Imbolc                                                Black Mountain Moon

Into the Colorado School of Mines last night, its Museum of Colorado Geology, for a second lecture to the Friends of the Museum. This one: Whither the Rio Grande Rift?

The significance of the title escaped me until Vince Matthews, former Colorado State Geologist, explained that the rift was a spreading of the earth’s crust, a spreading that thins the mantle and increases volcanism and creates faults. Then it hit me. Oh, a rift. Like the Olduvai Gorge in the horn of Africa.

There are three faults within the Colorado portion of the Rio Grande Rift that made it onto the USGS hazards map, one believed capable of producing a 7.5 magnitude quake and another of producing a 7.0 quake. Logarithmic scale. Those would be powerful and they would come in the middle of Colorado, toward the New Mexico border.

He used two terms in this dense, finely argued lecture that were completely new to me: graben and lineament.

Graben: In geology, a graben is a depressed block of land bordered by parallel faults. Graben is German for ditch or trench.

 

Lineament: A lineament is a linear feature in a landscape which is an expression of an underlying geological structure such as a fault. Typically a lineament will comprise a fault-aligned valley, a series of fault or fold-aligned hills, a straight coastline or indeed a combination of these features.

The focus of his presentation was the true northern extent of the Rio Grande Rift. Here’s a map that shows its extension in the consensus view (more or less). In this map you can see the Rio Grande rising in southwestern Colorado, then flowing through the San Luis basin into New Mexico and then onto its more familiar location as a major boundary feature between the US and Mexico.

Vince said that current thinking took the Rio Grande Rift as far as Leadville.

 

Leadville in this map is the first black lettered city above the C in Colorado. I use this map to show you the San Luis Basin (the light tan opening to the left of Highway 25 and starting at the New Mexico border. The San Luis Basin is a major feature of the Rio Grande Rift as it comes north out of New Mexico.

Matthew’s argument extended the Rio Grande Rift considerably further north and then hypothesized a turn from its primarily north/south axis to an east/west one. This map of the Colorado Plateau can be used to illustrate his argument:

 

Matthews extended the boundary of the Colorado Plateau east to include the Rio Grande Rift, then proposed that the rift extended east/west toward the area here marked as the White River Plateau. He based his argument on indicators of a rift zone (which I won’t go into here) and on an experiment on a clay model of the Colorado Plateau.

In essence he argues that the Colorado Plateau is a tectonic feature that has been rotated clockwise. When asked how that could have happened, he said, “I don’t know.” But, if you imagine the Plateau as a piece of the earth’s crust that has physical integrity, then a motion pushing up on its southwestern edge would turn it clockwise. One of the other geologists in the room proposed the San Andreas Fault as it developed. (I got lost right here, but I followed the argument up to this point.)

Very interesting. These lectures are helping me orient myself to the unusual topography of Colorado and some of forces that shaped it.

BTW: I loved Matthew’s description of two cinder cones as “very young.” They were only 640,000 years old. Puts 68 in a very satisfying context.

Beyond the Boundaries, Health, Latin, MOOCS, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase, US History

It’s All Real Stuff

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Imbolc                              Black Mountain Moon

Prep days. Yesterday reorienting my workouts, today moving back into Ovid with the Latin. Prep is important but I find I want to hurry through it, press on, get to the real stuff. But, it’s all real stuff, isn’t it?

When doing the Latin, for example, I want to work fast, translate easily, get it. But, most often I have to work slowly, translate with difficulty, struggle to understand.

In the MOOC I’m taking from McGill University the current section is on physical literacy. An amazing insight for me. Literacy in the alphabetic, language based world, yes. Numeracy in the numbers based, mathematical world, yes. But physical literacy? That is, learning basic moves and physical actions that can later be strung together to play a sport, keep one fit, teach us how to fall, no. The idea never occurred to me.

It apparently surfaced in the 1930’s in America whereas numeracy only emerged as an idea in the 1960’s. It’s not surprising, I guess, since the move from the farm to the town and city was weighted against the old, physical ways that had existed since hunting and gathering gave way to the neolithic revolution.

Perhaps, come to think of it, becoming native to this place is a component of physical literacy, a tactile spirituality. As we move less and less, we interact with the natural less affectively, less often, less well. Perhaps play is a big component of becoming native to this place, wandering aimlessly in the woods or by a pond, in the mountains, on lakes.

Anyhow, I’m excited about this idea, a human trilogy necessary for a satisfying life: literacy, numeracy and physicality.

Art and Culture, Mountains

Aurora

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Imbolc                                                          Black Mountain Moon

At 6:00 a.m. now the sky has gone from black to a whitish blue, a few stars still visible. When I go to bed, usually around 9:00-9:30 p.m. these days, night has fallen sometime ago, but on the nights around the full moon, the land in our back is a wonder. The moon shine comes in from the south-south east and lights up the snow with its silver glow. It also creates dark, soft shadows around the lodgepole pines. If I follow the pines to the sky toward which they point, I see stars: Cassiopeia and others in her vicinity.

Now, in the morning, Black Mountain slowly emerges from indistinct mass to large, pine-covered height, 10,000+. Sometimes, like today, it has a streak of cloud behind it. Not often, but sometimes, too, it has a lenticular cloud giving it an atmospheric halo.

Shadow Mountain, where we live, only reaches 9,600 feet and we’re about 800 feet below that, so we look up to our taller neighbors. Beyond Black Mountain, but not too far, is Mt. Evans, a fourteener.

Mt. Bierstadt is another fourteener. Those of you interested in art may recognize it since it was named after the Hudson River School painter, Albert Bierstadt. He painted this of another Colorado fourteener, Long’s Peak.

Health

Moving Experiences

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Imbolc                                       Black Mountain Moon

IMAG0948Spent the morning tweaking my exercise regime. I’m taking a MOOC, Body Matters, from McGill University and it got me thinking about stuff I’d left out of my current routines. Then, I read a book (sampled) by Gretchen Reynolds, the excellent health and fitness columnist for the NYT. Plyometrics. I’d left them out this round. I change my routine up every once in a while, just to keep things interesting.

Plyometrics used to be called jump training. It involves explosive moves like jumping, doing an obstacle course of low hurdles, jump-rope. It adds bone strengthening, agility and balance to endurance, cardio-for which I do high intensity intervals, and resistance work for which I do a mix of exercises from outfits like Core Performance and P90X and old trainers.

Just ordered a wooden plyo box, 12x14x16, that will give me three different heights for squat jumps.

I didn’t start exercising until I was about 40, but I’ve kept at it pretty much since then, varying levels of intensity, at gyms and at home, with trainers and without trainers. Sometimes I’ve had healthy diets, sometimes not so much. But staying with it has been such a mantra for me that it is now easier to continue than it is to stop. After two months of no workouts due to the move, I was eager to get back to regular physical exercise.

That’s not to say, as Kate points out, that I did no physical activity during that time. I packed and unpacked, moved boxes from here to there, broke down cardboard and removed it from the house, set up all manner of things and did all this, once here in Colorado, while acclimatizing to 8,800 feet.

Even so, I like my workouts. In my new gym space. And I’m glad to be back at them.

BTW: I’ve also started using a nutritional supplement highly recommended by exercise physiologists, and I’m not kidding: chocolate milk!

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Latin, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Translating De Bello Gallico, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Back At It

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Imbolc                                  Black Mountain Moon

I’ve found my rhythms. Back at Latin, going to turn today back to Ovid from Caesar. Writing. I’m 4,000 words plus into Superior Wolf and my brain is buzzing, following trails here and there with characters, research, narrative structure. Working out is back, too, 6 days a week right now. I’m not where I was in terms of fitness, not sure how the altitude has affected me, but I’m improving and that’s the key. The whole fitness area is still in flux, but I have a pattern I’m using.

A new element, too. I’m going to make some art. Not sure what quite yet, though I’ve got some ideas and lots of material. When my center room work space gets finished, I plan to get at it. There’s also, with art, the research and work with art history, theory. Not there yet in that work, but it will come.

Even, if you managed to get through my long posts under Beyond the Boundaries, Original Relation and Reimagining Faith, you’ll know, my reimagining project has finally begun to take off. Why now I’m not sure, but there you go.

This blog, of course, has remained a constant.

Now, if we could just sell that house.

Memories, Minnesota, Politics, US History

Peek-A-Boo

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Imbolc                             Black Mountain Moon

Reading in the New York Review of Books about FBI surveillance of the anti-war movement. There was paranoia about the Feds all the time, with new folks coming under suspicion. The times were rich with focus, focus that made sense and focus that did not. The two were sometimes hard to separate.

Anyhow, the article reminded me of the funniest instance of FBI surveillance in which I personally participated. Back in ’72 or ’73 a bunch of us conceived the idea of a human chain around the Federal Building in St. Paul. There may have been a court case then, I don’t recall, but we showed up bright and early, joined hands and made a circle around the building. OK, almost the whole building. We didn’t have enough to close off the loading docks.

Anyhow, the Kellog Square apartments were under construction across the street from the Federal Building. They were mostly complete, several stories of apartments with glass windows facing the street. All of the apartments, up, I don’t know 20 floors, were empty. No curtains on the windows. No furniture. No renters yet.

Except. About six stories up, one unit had curtains. And, peeking between the curtains were cameras. The lenses were visible to the naked eye. Once we noticed them we waved, of course.

Very subtle of the FBI to hide behind curtains. In the only apartment that had them.

Oh, those were the days.

Latin, Third Phase, Translating De Bello Gallico

Plateaus

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Imbolc                                  Black Mountain Moon

Struggling with Caesar. Two things keep me at it. This quote: confusion is the sweat of the intellect. And, struggle is the first and painful step toward flow. There is, too, that stubborn insistence that I can learn this.

I’ve not discussed learning plateaus in the Latin for some time, but I passed one last week, when I began to be able to read the Latin without referencing vocabulary or grammars. This lasted only for a couple of sentences, but I did it. This capacity has resurfaced since then, but the ease I experienced last week is gone. For now. What I mean here is that I’m struggling on a much different plateau than in the past.

This process has been excruciatingly slow. It’s very similar to working out though. You keep at it, do a certain amount regularly and the benefits slowly accumulate. Right now I’m doing an hour to an hour and a half of Latin a day. That’s about all my mind can tolerate without becoming resistant to further work.

I’m midway through today’s work in the Gallic War, book 4, section 26. Caesar’s troops have landed near the White Cliffs of Dover and are fighting their way ashore. It’s tough going for them right now.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Mountains, Myth and Story, Poetry, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Spring

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Imbolc                                      Black Mountain Moon

“Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly–and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.”
–  Omar Khayyám

March 1st is the beginning of meteorological spring. The three coldest months of the year are over and the next three are a transition between the cold of winter and the heat of the growing season, the three warmest months of June, July, August. Meteorological spring, though, is a creature of averages, a soulless thing with no music. I prefer the emergence of the bloodroot (in Minnesota) as the true first sign of spring.

On March 20th Imbolc will give way to Ostara, the Great Wheel’s spring season, on the day of the vernal equinox.

I do not yet know the traditional first signs of spring for the montane ecosystem, but I will. Nor do I know the tenor, the rhythms of the seasonal change here in the mountains. I look forward to learning them.

I’m reading the Thousand and One Nights again, a new translation, so right now Arabic and Persian stories, poetry fill my head. Khayyam’s Rubaiyat was my earliest introduction to Persian culture and one I found magical from the beginning.

There is, today, the slightest touch of spring longing in me. And so I wrote this.

Beyond the Boundaries

Beyond the Boundaries

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Imbolc                                                Black Mountain Moon

“Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Introduction to his essay, Nature

Two new categories appear today on Ancientrails: Beyond the Boundaries and Original Relation. They come from this paragraph, the first of Emerson’s introduction to his essay, Nature. When I first read this paragraph, I was just beginning to grasp the radical nature of Emerson’s thought and the liberal religious movement which claimed him. Since that first reading, it has become a steady source of inspiration and more. It has become a sharp knife for my own thinking, my own willingness to walk out to the boundary of what I have learned, what I believe, what I know, to walk out to the boundary then step over it and walk in the meadows beyond.

Now I want to try and give systematic attention to that work, to collect the thoughts I’ve had, the experiences I’ve had out beyond the boundaries. In a way you could call this an attempt to create a personal testament, a summing up, but by the nature of the work those categories are too limiting. Instead this is more in the way of an adventure, following ancientrails out to their terminus, then investigating the terrain beyond them.

What happens after religion, for example? I do not share the current negative assessment of religion, in any of its forms, not even Emerson’s. Religion is the great poetry of our species, the language in which the common person can give voice to wonder, to awe. It is, too, and at the same time, a way to congeal values and create a code of behavior, a way to define who we are and what we do.

Most religions I have studied, or at least become familiar with, have great learnings that all of us can use though we may not be so enamored of the codes of behavior that come along with them. No, I’m not trying to reduce all religions to some universal value like love your neighbor, or love, such work denies the particularity, the native genius in each of them.

I have found in my own searching certain key ideas, even revelations perhaps (if we are careful about what we mean) in various religious traditions that I have incorporated into my own thought. Let me give you an instance: incarnation and how it manifests in the Christian tradition, especially the birth narratives for Jesus. This is a god, in the Christian tradition—the God, becoming human. It’s a mind rattling idea, an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent being funneling Itself down into the frailty and limitations of a human body. What are we to make of that? What if we walked up to the notion of a god coming in from the outside, looked around the edges of that idea, and stepped over the fence line? You might get a result like the one below.

Here’s three paragraphs from a Christmas time post:

Three wise men, shepherds, angels and gospel writers of all kinds should take note each time a new human is born. Each of us is the universe looking on and through itself. That is god-like, making the universe a true polytheist.

Each of us has the full potential of a new Self, a Self that may be the next Madam Curie, Ghandi, or Doris Lessing. Or, that Self might be the next loving mother or father, the next hero or heroine, the kind big sister or the thoughtful big brother.

Whatever he or she becomes, each birth could be greeted with: Hallelujah, this day, a new divinity is born.

Beyond the Boundaries and Original Relation are part of a trinity of ideas with Reimagining Faith. In posts to these categories I hope over the next year or so to lay down enough material for a book, not a new religion, not at all, not even a new philosophy, hardly, but an idiosyncratic vision, seen from within the life and mind of one man, as he walks up to various boundaries and crosses over them.

 

Colorado, Great Work

Mother of Rivers

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Imbolc                                      Black Mountain Moon

Just spent a half an hour tracing the Rio Grande from its source in Colorado to the Gulf of Mexico. Then, the Colorado. The Platte River rises here, too, as does the Arkansas. Colorado may in the national memory be mountains, but in the national and international geography it is the mother of rivers, much like the Himalaya are the mother to India’s famous rivers.

It’s interesting to think of the snow hanging right now on the lodgepole pines in our yard melting, then later in the spring finding its way down the mountain into the South Platte and then on to the Mississippi and the Gulf. A mountains seems isolated, feels isolated but gravity and density make what happens on it run down hill.