Just a shout out to the Crawford Volunteer Fire Department: There was a spine jolting lightning strike in the neighborhood this evening. The ‘brave fire laddies’ (as the Colonel used to say) (and lassies, which he never said) were out in several vehicles in no time. I don’t know if there was a fire they put out, but they apparently patrolled the area for the duration of the dry lightning storm.
Our What’s App fire watch group responded to the strike over the next hour with observations from various perspectives. Some could track the patrol vehicles from their vantage points, at least one scouted the woods, one smelled smoke briefly, and I climbed the tower with binoculars. I know at least one person will sleep easier tonight for our community’s vigilance. I’m very grateful.
Sunset beyond the Grand Mesa last week, as smoke began to decrease here.
I’m grateful today that wildfire smoke in my little corner of the world has diminished, but watch with compassion and horror as Canada’s boreal forests burn out of control again this summer in climate chaos exacerbated wildfires, and thick smoke blankets southeastern Canada and the northeastern and mid-Atlantic US. There’s a great graphic in this Guardian article. The good news is that it’s likely to improve by Sunday in time for the World Cup final in New Jersey. Even better, the president told Canada it has to stop!
Sunrise through wildfire smoke beyond the Iwo Jima memorial outside Washington, D.C. That bird!from The Atlantic, Finn Gomez / Getty
“A 2024 study published in Science found that carbon emissions from wildfires had increased by 60 percent in the prior two decades. Fires in boreal forests such as Canada’s were the main reason. Another study, published in Nature, found that Canadian wildfires in 2023, when more than 43 million acres burned, generated more emissions than the burning of fossil fuels in all but the three most-polluting countries.”
I could do tonglen all day long for just the wildlife alone killed and displaced by these mega-fires. And how do we cope with the grief of losing so much of the natural, wild world to greed-induced climate chaos? Not well, it turns out. In modern western culture, we don’t even know how to mourn the deaths of beloved individuals very well, but even so we do it better than we grieve the death of nature. Our nervous systems weren’t designed (read, ‘evolved’) for the constant stress, duress, and distress that persistent grief over the degradation of our planet stirs in many of us. One Buddhist offers the model of palliative care to help us be with our planetary grief.
A friend shared this creative, low-impact alternative to July 4th fireworks: the photographer and friends used bubble blasters to celebrate–or is this AI? credit@luckyclover.5280
… Some Say in Ice
Meanwhile, the Colorado Sun sheds light on the true consequences across the state of last April’s catastrophic freeze in the North Fork Valley. After some reports recanted original estimates, it turns out the initial impression of 100% fruit loss was accurate. Fruitgrowers and related businesses that rely on harvests and fruit tourism have had to get creative this summer to stay afloat and support just some of their employees. Vendors and distributors across the state who rely on North Fork fruit, roughly 10% of Colorado’s harvest and most of its organic fruit, have also been hard hit.
Most of the fruit trees in the North Fork Valley, like my apricot, survived the freeze and have leafed out beautifully this summer without producing any fruit.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Fire and Ice, Robert Frost
Some people’s worlds have already ended in ICE. Congress failed Americans again by authorizing another $70B last month for DHA, apparently giving ICE license to kill again. Speaking of corruption and perversion, Penzeys is having a great sale right now on all spices beginning with the letters E,P,S,T,E,I,N: the sale code for checkout is FILES. Whatever happened to those files, anyway? As always, action is the antidote to anxiety. If ICE horrifies you, or the Epstein Files upset you, find your local grassroots activists and join them in peaceful protests, get out the vote efforts, and the camaraderie of shared purpose.
I’m grateful for leftovers for lunch all this week, after a delightful fly-by visit last weekend from old dear friends Ed and Gabrielle, globe-trotting, super-computing astrophysicists from Wyoming. They picked up some fresh vegetables from the smoky Ridgway farmers’ market on their way here from New Mexico, and I made big batches of potato salad and three-bean salad. Smoke was light, and Wren gave them each kisses of approval.
Keeping cooking and baking to a minimum this week with continuing temperatures in the mid- to high nineties, I did use the skillet to cook up a mess of garden greens decorated with the second and final green pea harvest–what am I doing wrong? This morning I baked a loaf of sourdough early because I’ve missed having bread. I’m grateful for doing something right.
I’m grateful I can do some little things for some little people to make this hard life in a world in upheaval a little easier. This white-breasted nuthatch figured out a few weeks ago to drink from the ant moat above the hummingbird feeder. Soon I noticed other birds drinking from them as well, scrub jays, house finches, a Bullock’s oriole. Now I fill the ant guards with water more often than I fill the feeders with nectar.
All the grey flames on the map are a gratifying indication that many of the fires of the past weeks are essentially out. Colorado remains the epicenter, and some are horrifically huge. A couple of friends have asked me, “Why don’t you move?” I told that to Garden Buddy, and she replied, “No—-! Where would we go????”My thoughts exactly. Fortunately, after dense smoke for days, the winds shifted late this afternoon and I was able spend a little time in the yarden, and to harvest my blueberry crop.
The yield was a satisfying 200% larger than last year’s. The half that I enjoyed was very sweet and perfectly ripe. Though reluctant at first because it was so tiny she didn’t recognize it as a blueberry, Wren ultimately enjoyed her half.
Kathleen shared this amazing photo she took while cleaning her outside windowsills in Florida. It’s a mama scorpion carrying its live-birthed babies with the adorable name of scorplings. I’ve bookmarked the word to use in Scrabble.
Speaking of adorable, this grebe family is a photo Audubon Society shared on Instagram, and I still can’t get over the faces of those little piggy-backed chicks. Their Pa is feeding one of them a feather, which helps with their digestion.
My digestion was helped over the holiday with a red, white, and blue French toast bowl, using up the heel of the latest sourdough boule.
Some flowers I’ve tried and failed to cultivate several times are enjoying some semblance of success, including these sweetpeas that the Bad Dog boss started from seed and shared with me. May they survive the summer, overwinter well, and climb the fence next year.
Zoom Cooking With Amy on the 4th resulted in one of the most delicious meals ever, a simple caramelized onion pasta. We both used thin spaghetti, and Vidalia onions, which were more teary than I expected, but also sweeter after half an hour simmering on medium heat in olive oil and butter. Once the onions were done, we tossed in chopped garlic for a minute, then the cooked pasta, and alternately stirred in pasta water and grated Parmesan until a glossy sauce came together. The flavor was amazing with an unexpected quality of juiciness. The last of the leftovers held this quality through lunch today.
Even after intense mindfulness practice for more than five years (or maybe because of it) I feel like I’m just now learning to really listen.
A week ago wildfires started in Colorado. Off and on, the mountains to the east are entirely obscured by smoke from the convergence of wind currents blowing through the Gold Mountain fire to the south the Snyder fire northwest on the border with Utah. Grand Mesa to the north is also occasionally invisible, and the sun is a red disk setting.
At times the smoke is mild, reminiscent of a campfire at a site across the campground, only pervasive and persistent, not wafting and shifting. Other times it’s an acrid stench that stuns my lungs. I’m grateful the fires aren’t closer, grateful I’m still safe at home, still breathing.
The Air Quality Index has been fluctuating between the 50s on the best nights to as high as 185. During the day it’s been hovering around 90 give or take a dozen, depending on how the winds have been blowing the previous hour. I wear a dampened mask to go outside and fill bird feeders, shift hoses in the yarden. The poor little birds! Especially the hummingbirds with their tiny lungs and extravagant heartrates.
Unretouched photo of a sagebrush glowing at sunset.Smoke billows a few days ago from the Gold Mountain fire roughly 60 crow miles south of us.
This evening the West Elk mountains are under deep chiarascuro. It changes hour by hour, more or less dense, wind dependent. The good news is that the Snyder fire seems to have stalled at 30,000 acres and is now 95% contained per Watch Duty.
Last night’s moonrise
The bad news is, the Gold Mountain fire just north of Ouray has grown to 25,000 acres in six days. The 2500-acre Willow fire in the mountains above Aspen forced evacuation of an Outward Bound base camp where a friend’s son lives. He remains up in the mountains on an extended backpack with a group of teens and may not even know of the fire. Friends of a friend lost everything the other day in the explosive Aspen Acres fire southwest of Pueblo including their pets, and barely escaped alive. More than 11,000 humans have been displaced from that fire alone as of tonight. Hundreds of structures have burned. Fairgrounds around the state are open to house large animals evacuated from the paths of various wildfires.
Current Watch Duty map, at 9:21 pm MT July 3.
And there are a few more wildfires in Colorado. A week ago, there were none. Multiply every human that’s affected by these fires by pick-a-number, and guess how many other sentient beings have been killed or displaced. Most of these fires will be found to have been started by human activity, whether accidental or malicious. All of them are raging as wildly as they are because of human-caused climate chaos. Tomorrow will likely bring more fires across the region from idiots shooting off fireworks despite fire bans. Climate ignorance pervading the political sphere has only and will only exacerbate the threats to all beings.
And even in the midst of smoke and rage I’m doing my best to calm down and eat well. Here’s a creamy potato-cheddar soup I had for lunch the other day.
I’m furious about human stupidity. I’m grateful for the courageous individuals and teams who do their best to mitigate these disastrous consequences, from the local, state, and federal firefighters on the ground to the fired federal employees who got together to resurrect the Strump-shuttered climate.gov with a new website, climate.us, and everyone in between.
I’m gratified to see the desert willow in full gorgeous bloom just a few years after a freeze so hard I thought it was dead.
I’m grateful once again for Alexandra Petri, who writes about MAHA day at the Great American State Fair, an event which I’ve been only peripherally aware of with my limited intake of current events and what passes for news. I giggled all the way through, from her description of the Screamin’ Freedom energy drink to her interaction with a featured ‘legacy’ speaker who urged her to go topless. If you don’t laugh sometimes you’ll just cry.
Even though Amy and I swore off Instagram recipes, we both can’t stop. The other day I tried the rice-waffle with some leftover rice, mixed with a little rice vinegar and sesame oil. I used too much liquid since I fudged the recipe with only enough rice for one cake. It took forever to crisp up and didn’t hold together well, but it was tasty and fun enough that I’ll try it again with proper proportions. They topped theirs with sushi elements, but I just made an Asian tunafish salad based on this recipe with what I had on hand.
Also doing my best to savor the moments I’m able to be outside. The temperature this fiery week has been lovely, it’s just been too smoky to enjoy it except in small sweet snatches.
And when we can’t be outside, we make the most of being inside.
Things I’ve been grateful for recently include discovering that the ‘new’ lens for the husband camera has been the wrong lens all along. It’s just never provided the same quality closeups (or any distance, really) that the original husband camera did with his original equivalent lens. (Imagine sufficient technical jargon here to explain why it was not the right tool for the job and move on.)
After shooting these images the other day, inspired and excited to bring my husband out to play for the first time in a long time, I ended the day feeling the same disillusionment that I have every time I’ve used this lens since I bought it. There was a cascade of reasons I didn’t investigate this sooner, among them the possibility that it was just me, unable to hold the camera quite as steady as I used to.
So I’m grateful to learn that it wasn’t me! And I’m grateful that I can return the whole setup. While this results in a financial hit, at least I’m able to trade in the lens, the camera body, and the other lens I bought six years ago and get back about 25% of what they cost me.
I may or may not get another camera. Except for photographing my favorite things, bugs and birds, the iPhone camera does well enough for what I foresee needing going into this next phase of my life. I’m no longer showing or selling large prints, I’m simply sharing online or creating small-scale projects like books or slideshows that don’t require the fancy components of a husband camera.
I’m grateful that I’m finally feeling motivated to simplify and downsize in a profound way; enough that I can contemplate relinquishing this pleasure and many more elements of this full and busy life. It’s time to release my grasp on things, conditions, relationships, drives, commitments, etc., that have added so much to my life but have become overwhelming.
Buddhism is often distilled into one simple phrase. The exact phrase varies from teacher to elder to practitioner, of course, but the gist is this: “From beginning to end, the path of dharma is about letting go.”
I don’t know if there is such a thing as the simple art of being, but I might be close to discovering it. It’s been a restful couple of weeks spent turning inward, spinning a cocoon, resting into my life as it is moment by moment, making deep inward contact with myself.
I’m grateful to those of you who read this blog regularly and encourage me to continue posting with your supportive comments. I’m grateful for the connections I’ve made and those I’ve deepened through this platform. I’m not walking away from Morning Rounds, but for now I won’t be posting as regularly as I have over the past five years.
Caterpillar of an owlet moth species photographed in the garden some years ago.
I attended an online retreat last weekend in which a dharma talk included a description of the life cycle of the monarch butterfly. It’s a great metaphor for many aspects of the Buddhist path, from faith and resilience and patience to impermanence and transformation.
The monarch butterfly by Joel Sartore, creator of the Photo Ark.
What resonated the most with me in that talk was the idea of imaginal cells. Once any caterpillar spins its chrysalis, it dissolves itself into goo inside the cocoon. It unmakes the caterpillar it was and with the provocation of imaginal cells it creates the butterfly it was destined to become. Right now, I’m the goo. It could be awhile before I know what I’m turning into, but for now I’m content and grateful to rest inside myself and let the imaginal cells determine the course of my transformation. Let me remember to be grateful every living moment of every day.
I’m grateful that the California poppies self-sowed this year and bloom with more vigor than those I bought last year. I’m savoring their remarkably velvet-looking petals, and how much the pollinators love them.
These are the pink snapdragons mentioned in the previous post. Just look at those colors!
I baked the sourdough a little differently yesterday after watching Paul Hollywood demonstrate plaiting dough. I started with the simplest variant, just twisting two strands together. This meant that the loaf wouldn’t fit the round dutch oven, so I baked it on parchment paper on a cookie sheet, and covered with another parchment paper. This allowed the dough to dry out a bit much making a thick dark crust, just a little overdone. Next time I’ll find a lid that fits, or use foil, for the first half of baking.
These two screenshots are from the app Watch Duty, which now covers flood conditions as well as fires. This is a great app! The image above is from yesterday morning around 8 am; below is from this afternoon around 2:30. The pink areas denote Red Flag warnings: high fire danger. The fire icons indicate various sizes and stages of wildfires. The lower house with the blue dot is mine; the one above is my friend Barb’s, and the one in northern Utah is my cousin Robin’s.
The Bee Hive fire southwest of Montrose, roughly 75 miles from here, started yesterday and was holding steady at around 180 acres this afternoon, with lots of air support. See the little purple planes? But note the difference in the maps in just over 24 hours. So many more active fires! I’m grateful for the folks who invented this app, and for the many people who provide information and reports to keep it up to date. I’m grateful to anyone who is willing to call out the drivers of climate chaos, like the fossil fuel industry and the banks that finance these greedy, immoral corporations. Check out this graph from Rainforest Action Network, and this article in The Guardian about the ‘unfathomable’ increase in banks’ support for the industry last year.
Where’s Wren? And, how many pollinators? I was grateful to catch this western tiger swallowtail on the native thistle right outside the front gate, and didn’t notice the native bees until I looked at the pictures tonight. It’s amazing they all came out so clear given how windy it was at the time.
The wind got stronger through the afternoon. I spent as much time as possible outside today, until it was just too hot and windy. Then I came in for a meditation, some work time, and wrapped up the day with our monthly Grateful Gathering. Keeping with the month’s theme, Live Fully Alive, we talked about connections with nature, with people we love, meaningful interactions with strangers (or friends we hadn’t met yet); we heard about a nonagenarian who said life is a blink in cosmic time and a grandmother who said it’s a glance out the window. We held the truth of the phrase “Death is certain, time of death uncertain” as we shared gratitude that one of us had survived surgery after a life-threatening emergency; and we savored Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day.”
Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean — the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down — who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
~ Mary Oliver
Biko, Wren and I hung out together in the shade under the deck for awhile this afternoon. Later, after the gathering, when it was cool enough, Wren and Topaz and I strolled the Sunset Loop and the Breakfast Loop. The wind was so strong I had to strap my hat, and the atmosphere was hazy. Before we returned home the smoke rolled in. I hurried the last hundred yards, gathered the sheets off the line, closed up the house, and turned the air purifier on high. At bedtime, it’s still smoky out, and I’m grateful it’s cool enough inside to leave the house closed.
By the time we got home from the walk, most of the California poppy petals had blown off, but I got this shot earlier just as they started to fall. The penstemon blossoms are starting to fall also, and were blowing like cherry blossoms as we came inside. Life is a single bloom.
Penstemon palmerieverywhere you look… Another quiet day in the garden, catching up with householder tasks like laundry, dishes, cooking, in between watering, savoring, tending the plants.
How many pollinators? I’m grateful to see such diversity and numbers of pollinators making the most of the abundant garden. Coreopsis is also flourishing this year.
The first ripe strawberry surprised me this evening. I got another surprise last night right before bed. When I turned off the TV I heard rustling in the mud room, big rustling in some packing paper. Wren and I tiptoed over and I shined a flashlight in the corner. In a fraction of the time it will take you to read this, a large furry shape emerged from the paper sending my heart into my mouth as I thought squirrel! but it was only Topaz. Whew! A little on edge, are we? Back to the garden, I finally got the little tomato starts into their permanent beds. I’m grateful they grew so well from seeds Chris n’ Dave sent me, so I’m trying their Florida ‘Mickey maters’ again now that climate chaos has warmed up our growing zone from a low 4 to a solid 5.
I got the carrots thinned just in time, and handed the thicker of the thinnings to Little Wren to munch. But I did save the nearly true carrot one for myself. In the background, a thriving yellow snapdragon that overwintered: First time every any of them have made it through, and a lovely pink one also regrew.
I’m grateful for a restful, nourishing weekend with lots of meditations in nature; an extraordinary dharma talk from Roshi Joan based on her recent essay, Mutual Belonging: Compassion and Social Responsibility; and plenty of time to catch up with myself. I’ve been moving too fast. One health challenge after another, the simple fact of aging, the cascading polycrisis, the ephemeral beauty of this precious place, all coalesce in this urgent sense that my days here are numbered. It felt good to just breathe, a lot, and slowly.
We were overdue for a sunset loop walk, and as we sat on our usual log, our usual curious neighbors made their way over to visit. After a brief hello, they all turned as one and filed away. Shortly after we turned toward home a big cold wind blew in and sent the horses into a gleeful gallop. Let me remember to be grateful every living moment of every day.
A female oriole showed up at the hummingbird feeder so I quickly pulled out the oriole feeder and hung it.
Apologies for the cryptic post the other day! Thanks to those who were paying attention and inquired about it. It took awhile to figure out what happened. The day before my most recent post, I had tried to post some photos from the WordPress app on my phone, with the title ‘Attention.’ No text, just some pictures. The next day I saw that it had not gone through, so I added a few more pictures and posted ‘Surrounded by Life.’ Somehow, a few days later, the empty ‘Attention’ post showed up out of the ethers.
The sad finale to the robin nest, found on the patio later the very day I reached into the nest to find it empty.
The oriole came to its special feeder after a couple of days, and the male flew by, but then they were gone.
Where’s Wren?
The little dog alerted me to a mouse in the pantry the other night. I couldn’t bear to kill it, so I brought in and baited the live-trap with a pinch of havarti stuck on with a peanut butter smear. In the morning an adorable big-eyed deer mouse fluttered around when Wren woke it. I was pretty sure where it came from and how it got in the house, so I released it back home. Then I made sure the screen door was latched or the glass door closed so it couldn’t sneak back in through the gap that occasionally opens with a breeze. Old doors.
The Palmer’s penstemon is wild this year. I was happy to hear from a friend to whom I’d given seeds a few years ago: “THANK YOU SO MUCH for the Palmer’s penstemon seeds! They’ve exploded this year!! And the pollinators love them.”
The next night the mouse was back. This time I released it up at the woodshed, hoping it would find enough distraction there. The next night it was back again. Again I released it up the hill, and then watched all doors like a cat all day. Wren fixated in the pantry again, so I guessed it was back. I have no qualms about killing mice but it’s getting harder to do it.
I don’t even mind the mice themselves, it’s their… residue. Especially in light of recent hantavirus news. (And, shades of the nightmare I went through after the Housesitter from Hell.) One little mouse doesn’t pose much risk of the virus, but does leave unfortunate traces, everywhere. So I set the snap trap.
That night when I went up to bed, Wren pointed to the curtain rod over the French door onto the deck. There was a mouse on top of the drape! I opened the door and tried to shoo it out, but it escaped into the stairs.
The next morning, there was our little mouse friend, dead in the trap, his bright big eyes wide open. I set him atop a fence post for a bird to carry off. Apologies.
I’m grateful for so many bumblebees, all over the penstemon. This is the biggest one I’ve ever seen.
Imagine my surprise the next night when once again there was a mouse atop the upstairs drape! Where are they coming from? How many more?
This morning at the pond was rich with wild life. A garter snake cruised the edge, an ash-throated flycatcher hunted from above.
The pond floor is covered with tiny tadpoles, and last year’s frogs are growing. I spotted this one before Wren did. I’m not sure she even saw it until it jumped while she drank.
May all beings be well, and happy. May all beings be safe and free from harm. May all beings awaken and be free.
Thanks to my friend Ted Leach for sharing this quote. See his blog for what Wilson meant by these three observations.
Today in the garden. I was unable to tear myself away from my safe place this morning to brunch with friends. I hope they can understand and forgive me some need that I don’t fully understand myself. But I made the most of a quiet day at home — I almost wrote ‘alone’ except that I’m not alone here. Just look. Surrounded by Life.
Same tree above and below, different times of day, different angles. We spent a good hour yesterday morning wandering the woods with our infrared phone camera. I’m grateful for technology and terrified of it at the same time. I heard today from a reliable source that bots sicced on Reddit users were six times more persuasive in changing humans’ minds as other humans. This is how it is right now. So I turn back to what’s real. The forest. The garden.
Meet the Trees, the second in a series of Meditations with Nature, will be a half-day retreat here on Saturday, June 13 from 9 am through noon. Some meditation experience is helpful but not necessary. If you’re in the vicinity and the weather holds, come enjoy the garden and the forest with me. Registration closes June 9.
After that thought-provoking soul-nourishing walk communing with ancient junipers in the morning, I baked margarita cupcakes in the afternoon. In the latest installment of the Birthday Cake Challenge, I took these treats to some margarita-loving friends, an amazing couple who share the same birthday. We sat on their deck enjoying gin-and-tonics looking out across the West Elk Mountains. I didn’t tell them what flavor the cupcakes were, intending for them to guess. I was tickled pink when I saw him take the tiny lime slice and squeeze it over the frosting as though it were a cocktail, before he even knew it was one!
There was tequila in the buttercream frosting as well as lime juice, and a lot of lime zest and juice in the cakes, which I brushed with tequila as soon as they came out of the oven. Highly recommend. And lots of leftover frosting! What to put it on next?
