• Tag Archives snow
  • Mindfulness

    Imbolc                                                      Waxing Bloodroot Moon

    We’ve begun the slippery, muddy slide into the growing season, though I understand some of the parking lot snow piles, many well over 8 feet high and some much higher than that, will take a long time to melt.  Maybe months, into the summer.  The snow always pleases me as it falls and as it covers our world, now over 120 days straight with snow cover, but there is a time when it becomes a nuisance.  The snow went beyond nuisance this year and became a definite hazard as it has become impossible around the piled snow at many city intersections.  When driving the Celica out of the garage here, I’ve not been able to see traffic on 153rd since late December.  In that regard I will be not sorry to see the snow melt away.  On balance, though, I get far more pleasure from the snow than I do hassle, so when it’s time again, I’ll be ready.

    Leslie’s mindfulness presentation this morning was wonderful.  We drew mandalas, did a guided meditation and ate a strawberry, a grape, a piece of cheese and a hunk of bread with intention and attention.  We washed it down with water and tea.  Each bite was an adventure.  Made me aware of how unmindful I am when I eat.  Also brought me into the present.  It was a Be. Here. Now. time.  Gotta get back to the meditation, discovered I missed it.

    South America.  A lot to learn in the next six months plus.  In addition to scoping out the ports, already somewhat begun, I’ll read at least one comprehensive history of the continent, an ecological history and a natural history.  I want to find a reasonably priced geography, too.  The ones I have found so far are damned expensive.  One of the values of traveling is its ability to make the distant, close and the abstract, real.  There’s a definite gestalt to lengthy travel in a part of the world unknown.  At some point, a point uncertain, an understanding snaps into place, a combination of prior experience, preparation and that small market in Manta, Ecuador, the smells of Santa Marta, Colombia, the sight of glaciers around Punta Arenas.  Then, like the Velveteen Rabbit, South America will become real for me.

    Often, I take along some literature, too, perhaps some Allenda, Losa, maybe I’ll just take take a Hundred Years of Solitude and read it again.  The phrase book, too.

    Grocery store now.


  • Nix Still Comes Down…Geesh

    Imbolc                                                       Waning Bridgit Moon

    This has been a nix two-day event.  The Woolly’s, for the first time I recall, canceled.  Too little parking around Charlie Haislet’s condo.

    The days events scattered around me, I never quite got traction, feel a little down.  Nothing bad, just wheels spinning.  Don’t like it.

    The snow-blower, which needs a tune-up, chugged, coughed and sputtered, but worked long enough to blow the snow off the sidewalk.  I was glad.  This was too heavy for a shoveling session.

    Kate and I do plan to join the Y here after I get back from Blue Cloud.  I’m after a personal trainer to get a resistance work out going again, plus I’m going to do my first Pilates and attend a bodyflow class that uses a combination of Tai-Chi, yoga and Pilates.  Sounds fun to me.  I’m deconditioned right now when it comes to muscle mass, so shoveling the walk would have hurt.  My aerobic conditioning is fine, no heart attack likely, but a lot of back and shoulder ache.  Looking forward to getting back to resistance work.

    So, I’m gonna workout then roast a chicken with garlic cloves under its skin and onions on the inside.  These are our garlic and onions, still useful this far into the season.  I’m also going to use some canned beans from 2007.  A little bulgur and we’ll have a meal.


  • Nix Still Comes Down

    Imbolc                                                                      Waning Bridgit Moon

    Boy did we get the snow.  Don’t know how much, but it sure piled up in the driveway.  Up to the top of my Sorels when I retrieved the paper.

    Business meeting this morning.  Still reconnoitering retirement finances.  They look good right now, real good in fact.  The recent market up tick has made our IRA look strong and has helped our savings fund, too.  Even so, we need to get comfortable with the income, outgo realities of this new reality.  We will.

    Need to go out and do some digging, find our sidewalk.  I’m sure it’s still there.  Somewhere.


  • The Holly King Still Reigns

    Imbolc                                                            Waning Bridgit Moon

    The snow has well begun and the winds howl outside, evidence that the Holly King has not yet been defeated by the Hawthorn Giant.  Even so, the snows of this time of year do not last long, even when they come in depth.  The sun vaults higher and higher in the sky each day, already 11 degrees higher at 33 than it was on January 1st at 22.  This elevation concentrates the sun’s rays, warming the days faster and faster until finally the Holly King will retire to his growing season abode far away in the ice of the northern regions.  I don’t know what he does there, but when he returns after the crops have been harvested and the land left fallow, he will be rested and ready to reassert his dominion.  Today he shows that his reign has not yet ended for this year.

    Translating Ovid has been slow, as it always is, looking up individual words in the Latin dictionary, investigating verb forms and the declensions of nouns and adjectives.  The trickiest part, for me anyhow, remains holding the various words and their possible conjugated and declined meanings in my mind, assembling and reassembling them until, like the keystone into the arch, the sentence or phrase hangs together.

    I like being in my lower floor study, half below ground, windows opening at ground level show the wind and the snow.  In here I have created a library set up for my needs:  art history references, philosophical texts, books on the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Sierra Club and environmental politics, travel guides from Greece, Cambodia, Turkey, Rome, Great Britain, Cambodia and Thailand among others,  texts, little read, on neuro and cognitive science.  Files for objects at the MIA, old presentations, short stories, novels and research material on the Great Wheel, the ancient Celts.

    This is a peaceful place where concentration comes easily and hours can pass without leaving.  I suppose it’s also a meditation room.  Now the snow and the work of the morning have me leaning toward a nap.  Kate’s at work this Sunday, so I’ll sleep alone.  Unusual these days.


  • Ante Nixem

    Imbolc                                              Waning Bridgit Moon

    The bubble of calm before the winds begin to blow and the snow to fall.  Predictions have increased the amount from 8-10 to 12-18.  I’ve never outgrown my joy at a snowfall, so I’m looking forward to this one.

    My plan for the snow is this:  Ovid and some reading.  I’m translating the story of Diana and Actaeon right now since Titian painted a large canvas on this theme, a painting now in the MIA for three months.

    The reading right now is Empire, a s0-so novel of imperial Rome.  I’m sure the idea seemed like a winner when the guy started.  Take one non-imperial family and follow them through the years of changing emperors.  If the through in were stronger, it might have been strong, but it’s more like a pastiche.  He throws in well known stories of this emperor or that, trying to palm them off on the reader as if they were imaginative leaps, but I know too much of the history.  The saving grace to the book is that it is a decent survey of the changing fortunes of Rome under emperors from Augustus to Hadrian.  So far.  I’m almost done and look forward to a new novel written with more narrative flair.

    Can you tell I’m sort of caught up in Rome right now?  That’s the way it goes for me.  Ancient China.  Ancient Egypt.  Ancient Celts.  Ancient Greece.  Ancient Rome.


  • This Shooting

    Winter                              Waxing Moon of the Cold Month

    A decent snowfall here last night but not a lot.  The sun shines bright on the old Front Range.  Colder though.

    This shooting.  It seems apparent to me that the general atmosphere of current political debate can give permission to some marginal folks to take action.  Reference to Second Amendment remedies leaves little room for the imagination.  So, I wish the tea party folks would tone down their rhetoric.  It seems to me the decent thing to do.

    Here, though, I am hoisted on my petard since I will defend the right of even dimbulbs to say what they will and I count the tea party among them.  That same principle though allows me to say what I think of their analysis.

    We were radicals once, and young.  The movement of the 60’s had its violent fringe, restricted to bombs, yes, but nonetheless.  I have some sympathy for folks who feel aggrieved and inclined to say the most inflammatory that floats to the surface.  I also have sympathy for those who say their language should not be seen as per se violent.

    Still, I look back on those days, the anti-war, anti-establishment, anti-racist days, and remember that we did feel a certain joint responsibility for what others of us did.  We knew we were connected by our analysis and our perceived common enemy.

    A common enemy shared, at least in part, with the tea party folks:  the Federal Government.  We thought they over reached with the draft and the war.

    Here’s the big lesson from those times that I would pass on to my ideological mirror images.  We were wrong about the government being the enemy.  The government is only what we allow it to be.  The government is the sin-eater for the nation.  It collects the hurts and hopes and problems of us all and attempts to sort them out, improve things when it can.

    Do they often get it wrong?  Yes.  Do we in our own lives?  Yes?  Our governmental process is sloppy, takes too long to come to a decision and, like generals, seems bent on fighting the last war rather than the next one.

    Still, it is our form of resolving disputes and it is, I agree with Churchill here, the worst form of government save all the rest.

    I would hope the tea party folks would back away from defensiveness, difficult, I know, and examine their message to see if it says what they want, check to see if gives succor to those fringe folks who would move beyond the pale of political discourse, no matter how heated, into the realm of violent action.  If they do this, they will gain some admiration for restraint, if  they do not, they risk losing it all.


  • Happy Grandpa

    Winter                                             Waxing Moon of the ColdMonth

    When Kate and I arrived down south here in Denver, we got a 40 degree temperature swing.  At 8 am this morning, my weatherstation recorded -14.  When we got to Denver, it was 26.  If we’d left Minnesota at 50 degrees amd gotten a similar bump, it would be 90 here.

    Now, there are school closings here with a snow that would only bring out the sanding trucks in Minnesota.  Strange.

    After a nap, the grumpy traveler became a happy grandpa, taken upstairs by granddaughter Ruth to see her princess walkie talkies and her changeable Cinderalla doll.  Back downstairs grandson Gabe carried his toy train, Thomas, and came to me, “Up.”  So we did.

    Gabe and I looked at the Dreidel lights Jen had strung over the window sill.

    After a Mexican meal at the restaurant next to our hotel, the kids went home and the grandparents walked through the snow a short way to the hotel.  This snow is finer than most of them we get in Minnesota, light, but not fluffy.

    Bedtime here in the Mile High City.  With snow.


  • Snow in LA. Earthquake in Indiana. Ice Here. End Times?

    Winter                                                                         Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

    Headlines you never expected to see:

    Wind gusts topping 90 mph topple trees in L.A. area, blocking roads; snow closes I-15

    Magnitude 3.8 Earthquake Rattles Indiana

    Whoa.  Earthquake.  Indiana?  What the…   Here’s an example of today’s news coverage.  My old buddy Ed Schmidt made a joke on his facebook page about an earthquake.  Just to be sure I checked google.  Sure enough:

    “Officials from the U.S. Geological Survey said an earthquake with a magnitude of 4.2 has been registered in Indiana, just north of Indianapolis near the small (hmmm. where are their fact checkers?) town of Kokomo (46,000+).

    (USGS earthquake epicenter map)

    No damages or injuries were reported as a result of the quake that hit at 6:55 a.m. central time, officials said.

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    Some people in the Chicago area said they felt shaking from the earthquake, though it’s unclear if a 4.2 magnitude quake in Central Indiana could be felt as far west as Cook County…

    The earthquake’s epicenter was about three miles beneath a farm field a short distance south of Pingree Grove, near Route 20 and Switzer Road in western Kane County.

    That quake was caused by a previously unknown fault line that has not generated any shocks since geologists started keeping track 150 years ago.

    In Indiana, Howard County Chief Sheriff’s Deputy Steve Rogers says the department was bombarded by phone calls after the quake from people wondering what had happened. He says some people reported hearing a loud boom.

    Indiana University geologist Michael Hamburger told Indianapolis television station WTHR the quake was felt across Central Indiana and into western Ohio. He said the temblor occurred in an area “that’s seismically very quiet.”

    The Indianapolis Star is reporting the quake was felt as far west as New Castle, Indiana, and that items shook off the shelf in Martinsville, located in northeast Indiana.”

    Meanwhile, here there be ice.  Out, out damned ice.  Be gone.  Snow we can deal with, but ice?  Four-wheel drive’s no good, just slipping and sliding out of control.  Skidding into the New Year may be some people’s idea of a good time, but not mine.

    Kate and I had plans to go to the Spectacle shop today and spend year end money left over in our pre-tax medical account.  Will have to wait till tomorrow.  When we go, I plan to get some up to date reading glasses and a new pair of driving glasses with the graduated lens.  Gonna stick with round lenses, not sure why but I’ve come to identify myself with them.  My correction is sort of odd in that I can read without glasses since I have offsetting problems, but now when my eyes get tired or I read a lot of small type, blurring occurs.  In the past, when that happened, I could put on my reading glasses to sharpen things up, but now they’re just enough off that they make things worse.  An aging body is such fun.

    We have a grand-dog in surgery today.  Solly, Jon and Jen’s youngest dog, has some kind of digestive tract problem.  He doesn’t eat and has become thinner and thinner.  Hope he comes out of that ok.


  • Snow

    Samhain                                                  Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

    The Winter Solstice comes in a week.  The longest night.  I’ll be there, remembering the triple Goddess, Bridgit, burning a candle and honoring the deep inside of us all.

    Yesterday I used the Himalaya’s as a metaphor for parking lot snow.  According to the newspaper this morning I shot too low.  We have all new mountain ranges going up in parking lots and city streets throughout the metro and they’ll be there a long, long time.  This is not a good thing for city budgets.  Snow plowing is expensive.

    Looking at snow mountains and threading my way through snowy city streets I have to take this body to its test.  Bye.


  • Ukraine to open Chernobyl area to tourists in 2011. No. Really.

    Samhain                                                  Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

    Kate woke me up, wiggling my ankle.  There’s no dog food.  Oh.  I’m not at my best just after I get up, but in this case I had to throw on some clothes and step outside, to the back of the truck and hoist a bag of dog food, 40#, carry it back inside, slit it open and pour the next week and a half’s worth of food for Vega and Rigel into the bin.  It was a sharp surprise, the difference between the bed and the outdoors.  It was -12 out there.  Geez.

    The headline on the sports page this morning was great:  Roof Da!  I’ve not seen anyone take up my many worlds hypothesis as an explanation, but it might be that the cosmologists and theoretical physicists haven’t seen my facebook post yet.

    These are the times that try men’s snowblowers (Women’s, too, for that matter.)

    OK.  Here’s a headline I never expected to see:

    Ukraine to open Chernobyl area to tourists in 2011

    This takes adventure tourism to a new place.  You’ll glow.  You’ll shine.  You’ll see your inner self.