THE WAY WE MARK TIME … There was a time when I was a young seminary student, studying Latin, Greek and the classics. A time when I too believed in the stories that I’d been told since childhood: Santa Claus, the Holy Trinity, the Immaculate Conception. When I too marched out of my chapel pew to the soaring exhilaration of bellowing organ pipes, transfixed in the toccata ecstasy of Widor’s 5th Symphony … But entering my 8th decade on this blue earthship, I’m flabbergasted by my society of fellow shipmates measuring the days and months anno domini “in the year of the lord,” as though we were still medieval peasants in fealty to the nearest castle’s king. Still cataloguing our time on earth and even our biology by “orders” and “species” and “kingdoms.”
Enough of kingdoms
Let there be
kindoms
CALENDARS … Like those I admire most, I walk to the beat of my own drum. I measure the years not from the symbolic birth of the Christians’ “anointed one” but from the earliest continuously occupied habitation site in Colorado, on the Gunnison River near the Western Slope’s town of Austin – Dr. Glade Hadden’s archaeological dig, Eagle Rock Shelter, carbon dated from 12,750 years ago … Of course, I recognize that even this settler colonialist dating schematics belies the antiquity of Indigenous Wisdom’s true dating system – what B. “Toastie” Oaster identifies in the most recent issue of High County News as “time immemorial” … Like the climate, our understanding of human habitation on the continental plate that we ride is in flux. So, what I’m calling my Western Slope Calendar is provisional. As most names are … Which is why, in my 80th year, I’m welcoming in a new start for a new calendar.
Not 2025 A.D.
but the Western Slope Calendar’s
13025
WINTER SOLSTICE … This past earthship holy day I was drumming up the Sun at Sleeping Buffalo Rock in Paradox Valley, in the West End of Montrose County, at the moment when a Sun shadow pierced the spiral petroglyph etched into stone. Along with my archaeologist buddy Glade Hadden and retired C.U. professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Dr. Bob Grossman … Here’s an excerpt from this year’s winter solstice poem by my dear East Coast friend Amy Hannan (aka Amalia Sabatini):
May blessings abound on the sacred Earth
Northern hemisphere and south
As the planet continues its wobbly dance
And we welcome Winter with merry chants
Hoping beyond hope for wisdom, courage, peace and joy.
-Ah Clinton, nj
¡PRESENTE! KYRA KOPENTONSKY … Gypsy soul, flitting from flower to forest, living life on her own terms, her cello part of the traveling kit that she used to enchant us all – Kyra didn’t just dream of crossing the Sahara camelback on her poetry and coming upon a utopian oasis of palm trees in the shimmering heat, she made her own date wine. Mixing a batch of medjools and some “frozen jujubes” from a friend’s fruit trees, she sipped the intoxicating reveries of her wild imaginings … And adventures. From her famous mountain lion encounter to playing keyboard requests on demand at Telluride’s top-of-the-world lounge at the Peaks Hotel, her life brimmed with risk, exploration and unique experiences … Ever the natural healer/chef/wise woman open to awe and surprise– rather than composting the glass jar of brown sludge and gray water sourdough starter she found forgotten for a month at the back of the fridge, she unscrewed the lid and gasped in surprise, inhaling not moldy ochre but, amazingly, the scent of roses … Adding fresh rye flour and water, she stirred and set the admixture close to the heater. Soon, voilà, she watched it come alive: “bubbling, foaming, chattering away in an effervescent language” all its own … Not unlike what I’m doing now, invoking her ghost in the machine of my mind, listening to the chatter of my heart in mourning for her leaving us and at the same time savoring the sweet vigor of her memories.
Susurrous
This Whispering Pines Fire District pen in my hand
was left in my car in a ponderosa forest
six years ago, a bad drought year,
with the list of fire restrictions nearly tucked
beneath my windshield wiper.
Now, another dry year, the same pen
still whispers to me that fire is inevitable,
dark orange blaze slashes through my home –
what little security I had wrapped around myself
like a gossamer shawl is burning to ash.
But I also feel the stirring of seeds that have evolved
with fire, learning to open wide after the heat –
I hear them softly murmuring that I can rise
from the ashes of my own drought,
I can be the rain that soaks my parched soil,
I can be witness to my own re-growth.
-KAK, 9jul13018
