Crestone #4: Discipline

We have been at Nada for just over two days, and already so much seems important enough to write about. Just watching sun and clouds play off rocky Challenger Peak and the adjacent conifer fields can take all afternoon and is worth the meditation. The birds have been lovely. I think we have a piñon jay so far, but a little gray job with mottled breast and a very distinctive brown crown defies identification.

And reading. Cindy has finished The Pact by Jodi Picoult already, while I have waded into Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods yesterday and just now finished reading Mary Oliver’s newest collection of poems, Evidence, cover to cover. Trust me. You’ll be seeing some Oliver quotes in blog entries for the next little while.

But I suppose the most important thing I’ve read so far came in the Nada guest handbook provided in our hermitage. It appears on the second page -- just after the all-important schedule of weekly events -- so it’s safe to assume this idea is pretty important in the Nadan’s daily lives. The section is entitled ‘The Value of Discipline.’

I don’t know about you, but discipline is a real issue for me. I know how important it is to get things done. As a teacher, I had the discipline to get up every day and make it into school and provide kids something of value. I approached grading papers the same way.

And being a grandfather. I love to schedule time for the grandkids and just go do cool stuff. Dig a pond. Go on a picnic. Take a bike hike. Visit the National Museum of the United States Air force. A quote from the handbook spells out that desire factor pretty well: ‘Freedom is not doing whatever we want, but really wanting to do whatever we must.’ Being Grandpa Tom works like that for me.

But in other aspects of my life discipline is wanting. Too much other stuff distracts. The grocery. Reds’ games. Email. Surfing news and political websites. Taking Mom to the doctor. iTunes. All of this takes me away from the writing I’d like to think I’m supposed to be doing.

So one thing I’d like to think I’ve learned so far on this break from my real world, again from the Nada handbook, is this: The antidote to external rules is not sloppiness but internal rhythm.

I would like to get better at finding my internal rhythm. And that has a lot to do with paying attention. Mindfully. I’ve been reading some Zen stuff, too.

Today’s elder idea: If we skip discipline, an unfruitful looseness and lethargy result. If we leave ourselves wide open, we will never find our way to genuine freedom.

from the Nada handbook

Crestone #3: Arrival at Nada

We are now into our second afternoon in Crestone at the Nada Hermitage. We were welcomed yesterday and went about the task of moving our two weeks of stuff into our place, making it a little bit more our own. We now reside in the morning shadow of the Sangre de Cristo range. It is certainly a site to behold.

Though this place is considered a desert and languishes through a long drought, we had a lovely hard fifteen minute rain just a couple hours after our arrival. Clouds thickened over the late, hot, post-noon hours, then blew in the short driving storm from the west. Air temperature cooled immediately. We had a great view of everything from our south window wall -- after we rushed to close the western windows.

Earlier today we had an orientation with Suzy, a member of the community here. She explained how the library check-out procedure worked and showed us where to put compost, recycling, and trash. We ended our session with a brief visit to Nada’s chapel. While there she explained the symbolism in the two windows and the significance of the black granite altar. We told her a little of our story, especially the recent parts involving the burial of Cindy’s dad just a month or so ago. The discussion then turned to issues of darkness and light that we experience in our lives. Back when I was in graduate school, I was energized by the idea of living at peak experience. Since that time, I have had more than a few heart-to-hearts about how such wasn’t possible. Life is composed of both light and dark, good and bad. Cindy observed how so many people want to see life as an ‘either/or’ thing, when it makes more sense to accept it as ‘both/and.’ We have much to learn from such a varied pallet of life experiences.

Yesterday afternoon in our hermitage was almost magical. We had completed our long 1,500+ mile pilgrimage successfully and were embarking on a ‘quiet’ fourteen day ‘retreat.‘ We shared a bottle of wine while Cindy knitted and sat at our window watching the mountains change with the cloud patterns. I took a couple of brief walks, taking pictures and fighting off a well armed mosquito population. Still, we both felt great and were glad we were finally here. We made reservations back in January!

Waking this morning found us with a bit of an unexpected let-down, but here we were in a secluded cabin with life’s essentials -- and each other. I expected to nap often, write this blog entry, and just be still in this space with the wind audible in the grasses and piñon pines.

Only the library on the Nada campus has wi-fi connection, so after our orientation, Cindy fired up her computer to check email. I was already heading out the door on my way back to our hermitage to write this when she called across the room, shock in her voice, relaying the message that one of our retired colleagues from Wayne High School, Bob Sterling, had died yesterday. We were both stopped in our tracks.

Light and dark, indeed, even in this place of beautiful retreat.

Today’s elder idea: It wasn’t ‘either/or’ for Ansel Adams. He printed images from his photographic negatives with the full range of tones from complete black to absolute white in every exposure. He became a master of embracing the extremes.

Crestone #2: Pilgrimage

I know it would have been quicker to take a plane, rent a car, then get about the pleasure of making our way into the mountains. Denver’s Frontier Airlines, in fact, has a direct flight from Dayton International, and with a rental car, the cost would have been about the same as our gas and motel expenses. I checked. And I’ve heard lots of people say how much they hate to drive across Kansas. It is over 400 miles of monotony, they say, and takes about forever. I understand. It is a long and often painful drive. Still, we welcomed it for reasons I’ll get to in a minute.

Today we took on Kansas from a starting point new to us: the southeast corner. We had spent the night prior in Springfield, Missouri, having dinner with Cindy’s aunt and uncle. An hour southwest to Joplin this morning put us on the Kansas line. From there we noodled our way across on red highways (two-laners) all the way west into the high plains, stopping tonight in the little burg of Las Animas, Colorado. It was a hot day, too. A bank sign in Dodge City reported the temp had reached 104.

Aside from the summer heat and the time it takes to traverse, Kansas is downright beautiful. Coming up from the southeast, we watched countless harvesting crews take out mile after mile of winter wheat while others gathered hay and alfalfa into huge rolls and bales. We saw countless western meadowlarks singing their hearts out on fenceposts and marveled at scissor-tail flycatchers working the air. The Gypsum Hills were downright stunning, as well: arroyos and the occasional water hole accenting rolling grassy hills with only a few scrub trees -- as far as the eye could see.

It is important to say, too, that we both saw the trip’s difficult-on-the-butt drive as element of pilgrimage. We signed on for two weeks at the Nada Hermitage because of the silence it offers. Such a promise of silence, we both thought, needed some preparation. We both commented that in the days we spent at home selecting and packing things we might use in our cabin, we were deliberately disconnecting from the world. We had work to do -- stopping the mail and newspaper and lining up family and neighbors to water plants, tend the tomatoes and cucumbers, and cut the grass. But we also felt ourselves slowing down in anticipation of Crestone and the Sangre de Cristos. The long drive is part of that preparation.

The silence Nada and the San Luis valley offers will be important to, as the folks there say, re-humanize us. Essential to that renewal, then, is Nature’s remarkable beauty. Our pilgrimage across the Midwest into the mountains reinforces, again, the wonder and power of this Earth and the amazing geography and geology we know as the United States of America.

Today’s elder idea: Take time to get ready for the really good stuff. Slow down. Immerse yourself in time and place.

PS: I apologize for a few spelling errors published lately. I mistyped earthspeaks.org in a recent email and some of you were directed to earthspeak.org. Sorry about that. If you have a few extra minutes, though, give earthspeak.org a look. Brother Will reports it is a 2002 piece on California toxics and bears a closer look.

Crestone #1

If you are reading this, you more than likely came through the earthspeaks.org website to get here. And if you’re here, you’ve probably heard me say something somewhere about Crestone, Colorado sometime since last winter solstice. If you haven’t yet, I would suggest you read the Crestone essay at earthspeaks. It sets this trip in important context.

First off, let me say that I have a thing for Colorado. Like John Denver, I felt like I was born in the summer of my twenty-seventh year when I first traveled cross-country to Colorado with my four year-old daughter and wife in tow. I had been teaching junior high English for five years and found some truth in the old saw that the three best reasons to teach were June, July, and August. A bit cynical perhaps, but such did allow me to indulge in a growing love for travel that my year-round working buddies could only dream of. To this day I am grateful.

Lots of lovely memories from that first trip remain fresh in my mind, like when daughter Jennifer, on our first backpack trip up the Roaring River trail at Rocky Mountain National Park, made her favorite new toy a found detergent bottle. She was glad she had Raggedy Ann when it was time to crawl into her sleeping bag, but she really had fun with the bottle, squirting everything in camp, including mom and dad.

The drive across Kansas was pretty hard. It was a nasty hot day and I kept getting a temperature light on the dash -- unless I kept the speed under 50. Right about that time I was painfully aware that I had a four year-old on board, and thought how horrible the day would be if we broke down. We did have some trouble with the carburetor, as mentioned, but other than that, we made it into the high plains of eastern Colorado with dad having the worst part of the day worrying.

And tomorrow, Cindy Lou and I set out on the next pilgrimage to the Centennial State. Destination: Crestone, a little town with only a few hundred residents year round, tucked on the western slope of the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the arid San Luis valley, just a bit north of Great Sand Dunes National Park. Again, if you haven’t read the Crestone piece at earthspeaks, I’d recommend it. It will set up what’s about to happen nicely.

And just what that is, I’m not sure. All I know is we’re heading out tomorrow in a quest for a quiet two weeks during which the folks at the Nada Hermitage, our hosts, aspire to create a vital environment characterized by solitude, simplicity and beauty, where community thrives, love is nurtured, prayer flourishes, and the whole person can be transformed.

Oh, boy. Does that sound good to us. We are ready. I hope you’ll stick with me as I blog through this trip, trying to explain what it is about mountains, Mother Nature, and solitude that moves me. More later.

Back porch hummers

When I first decided to try blogging a month or so ago, I thought my first entry would be about birds. They certainly are my most constant companions on the back porch when I sit. But other stuff came up and here I am writing about birds, finally, five entries in.

So much can be said about birds. They have been characterized as the ‘canaries in the coal mine’ regarding habitat health. When populations drop, you can bet there’s a problem with the environment. Audubon, Bird Watcher’s Digest, and other publications have cited plenty of those examples. Most neo-tropical bird populations are dropping, while some others, like year-round Canada geese, are doing better. That’s some good news, I suppose.

I find bird behavior downright intriguing. Years ago I was out birding with Aullwood’s Tom Hissong at Tar Hollow State Park in southern Ohio. In that pre-iPod era, Tom played the song of the summer tanager on his cassette tape recorder -- and lo, and behold, my first summer tanager -- all decked out in deep scarlet with those formal black wings -- lighted in a tree just in front of our group of Wayne High School biology students. We were amazed. And very impressed.

But back yard birds are my best avian buddies. I hear barred owls now and then and just last week a Cooper’s hawk snagged a chipmunk one door away on our cul-de-sac right in front of grandson Noah and me. Talk about cool!

But it’s the guys and gals who come by the bird bath and feeders in the back yard that I see most. Tufted titmouse. Northern cardinal. Carolina chickadee. Red bellied woodpecker. White breasted nuthatch. Beautiful little bodies that swim through the air and navigate minute branches in my porch-bordering hedge that amaze day after day.

It was in Lake City, Colorado a few years back where I witnessed the greatest concentration of hummingbirds I had ever seen. I was amazed at how aggressively they protected their sweet water source. I had been feeding ruby throateds here at home for a few summers, but never saw that behavior. When I got home, I paid better attention.

Sure enough, lots of fire in the belly here, too. I have witnessed one little creature sitting sentry in the hedge, just waiting for another little guy to fly in. Off she’d go, hustling the interloper off her food source. I was most amazed at the sound of their wings touching: kind of a quick buzzing sound. Youch! That has to cause damage to those miniature little bodies!

Here’s a back porch poem from last summer:

Hummer 1

The challenger approaches from

below and east -- the dark side of evening

sweetwater -- moving up,

then

lateral,

jerking incrementally,

analyzing

acquisition of target

while stalking avoidance of the

current dominant female

posting sentry somewhere

near.

Then a slaking deeply in shadow,

ingesting as quickly as systems

allow:

one --

two --

three --

drafts of surrogate flower

before the proprietor chatters in,

reestablishing the current order

of things.

4 July 2008

rainy, under canopy

Today’s elder idea: A paraphrase from American hero John Glenn, speaking in Dayton during the centennial celebration of first flight in 2003:

We have much to learn yet about flight by studying hummingbirds. We know how they do it, but their durability and agility still hold secrets that human flight can’t duplicate.

Gaylord golf

I’m no athlete.  My favorite activity is walking, though I haven’t made a habit of it lately.  I should, I know.  When I golf, I prefer to play 9 holes and pull my clubs in a cart.  Course time, and therefore the walk, is usually a couple of hours.  I get to use a variety of clubs in a variety of situations.  Now and then I drop a long putt.  I find that pretty satisfying.  I don’t mind playing 18 holes -- from a cart -- but I have to admit that by the back 9, I can’t remember much about what was played where.  I have a heck of time remembering how many strokes I’ve taken.  Count on it being at least a bogey, often a double or a triple.  One par per round if I’m lucky.

This past weekend I was part of a group of seven golfers, all the rest from the Detroit metro area, who headed up to Gaylord, Michigan, heralded as “America’s summer golf mecca.”  Northern Michigan courses are famous for their beauty, but that beauty comes at the cost of hills and dales with fairways lined with trees.  Beautiful, indeed, but chock full of places to lose a golf ball.   

So here’s the thing today:  I didn’t play very well.  (Technically I was hitting about 5 strokes over my 9-hole average.  Considering course difficulty, that wasn’t so bad.)  But after you play a game for a few years, like golf, you just expect you can do it better.  Much of my game has improved since I picked up clubs over ten years ago, but there are many days I still can’t hit two drives in a row straight down the fairway.  

Sure, I could take some lessons.  I have opted, instead, to subscribe to Golf Digest, watch Gary McCord’s Golf for Dummies, and listen to other golfers who have suggestions to make.  And at age 59, I’m not sure just how much better I’ll ever get anyway.

I watch the best of the best on the Golf Channel and on CBS on weekend afternoons.  In the process, I see how well the game can be played.  Then I think about stance and swing, and give it a try.   And after years of trying, I’m still not very darned good.  Frustrating, you know? 

I suspect I should be more zen about golf and just be present.  Focus on one hit at a time.  Enjoy the scenery.  Look for birds.  And the truth is when you ask a golfer what he likes best about the game, more often than not you’ll hear it’s the company kept on the course.  You actually get to spend time with friends.  Not bad.  

I feel that way, too.  But finding the balance between success and being present is tough for this hombre to find.  

Today’s elder idea:  Golf can best be defined as an endless series of tragedies obscured by the occasional miracle, followed by a bottle of beer.    not an original thought

For more on Gaylord golf, see http://www.gaylordgolfmecca.com/

Working with wood

Something good there is about working with wood.  My dad built wooden toys in his retirement, another guy I knew built custom furniture, and a neighbor moved to a bigger place just so he’d have a shop to work his wood in.  My Virginia brother has a workshop, too, and relishes refinishes when time permits.  A high school classmate of mine has his very own planer in his basement.  They all seem to get something special back from the element -- wood in this case -- in the process.

The last couple of days was one of those rare times when I took the opportunity to work with wood.  For me, creativity usually is connected with my Mac.  This time, though, wood made the act of creation, or re-creation, much more physical.  In the real world.  First it was sanding down a forty year-old pocket door, ridding it of finish and some pet scratches left by some long-gone house critter.  The six-panel pocket was then anointed with a new coat of stain, deepening prominent red while highlighting some dark tones, and finished off with a new coat of polyurethane.  

Working with the old door put me in touch with the tactile acts of caressing and tending, sanding and rubbing, brushing and smoothing, along with studying and assessing the condition of a crafted relic from a tree that once stood and knew nourishment from the earth.  The job seemed particularly real compared to how I usually entertain myself.

And maybe that’s at the heart of having a tactile hobby, like wood working.  Unlike computer stuff, you really get your hands on it.  Computer stuff is all pretty mental.  Not so with wood.  Or the earth.  Another friend, a studied organic gardener, tells me that when her hands touch soil, something clicks on inside her.  Manipulating dirt is just what she needs to stay in touch with things true, good, and beautiful. 

The point of this entry is to appreciate the value of elemental therapy.  In our busy world where almost everything is bottom line connected to pixels and fast downloads, working with wood and soil grounds us to the physical world.  Slowing down to appreciate elements that visit our personal space, zen-like, if you will, is a practice worthy of effort.  I recommend it. 

Today’s elder idea:  Work with the earth.  Know her.  It’s natural.