From Up On Frederick's Stone

I’m sorry for how I made you feel. The shame you took on, the constant improvement. I was trying to mould you, I meant well, I wanted what was good for you, but we got into a rut, and you absorbed the feelings of not being good enough from me. I loved you, and you were frustrating me, and that made my affection contorting to you. You wanted to feel okay, you deserved to feel affection, but you also had real challenges to face, and got caught between wanting to feel okay as you are, needing to feel better, and craving to feel loved. I’m glad you’re more well now. It wasn’t fair to you to feel like you were under scrutiny often. It was also not good for me to be with someone who felt erratic to me. It was not a you thing, it was not a me thing, it was an us thing. We loved each other, and our love broke down. I’m grateful for what we shared. I’m sorry I hurt you. I remember you said I helped you, and I imagine that even though it made you angry and hurt, part of you remembers that I tried hard to love you, give feedback, be supportive, even if it was hard and imperfecf. I understand how it feels to be criticized; even if it’s rational and empathetic, it’s still criticism. You shouldnt feel under the knife all the time from a lover. I hope you are happy and have a happy life. You made a real positive difference in my life, you were my closest friend for a while, it was a blessing to share what we did. We learned a lot from each other, through each other. I know that we needed different things from a lover. I wish you peace and life all the days of your life. May the greengold jetstream carry you.

You thought I was nothing.
You said I was nothing,
That I did nothing,
Accomplished nothing.
An ivory tower swirling with conceit.
What you did not see was
Yourself in a mirror.
I wanted to create with you
A garden of alpine flowers
For whom bloom no one need see them.
I didn’t really want to write, to publish:
I wanted to create a world of words, a relationship
A spiritual union of two souls.
We were the book I wanted to write.
I expected your equal participation,
But you were fluid and shaped yourself around mine,
Then froze.
Your own self-deprecation and my resentment
Got in the way of seeing that.
Hate me all you wish,
As you did all the others.
It’s done anyway.
There are higher causes, deeper reasons
Than productivity.
It’s what keeps the sick alive
And gives art to the world.
It’s what produces us in the first place,
Before there ever was a “usefulness.”
So don’t smear me with your delusion.
But it’s done anyway.
Just don’t smear what is with your delusion,
Lest you forget what you are:
A soul.



March 31, 2024
Easter

This restaurant is the first I’ve visited that is essentially indistinguishable from mexican restaurants in San Diego, notwithstanding the young white manager who walked in with his laptop and started chatting up with the chicano girls running the cashier, and the plaid red/white plastic table coverings.

The carne asada rule is as follows: if a restaurant can succeed in making a good carne asada taco, they can do all other things well. With the exception of the pollo taco, which I assume was an old and soggy batch of chicken, they did all things well. Rice and beans tasted like home. Great tacos. Good double shelled yellow corn street tortillas heated on meat fat con cilantro y cebolla. Carne asada, mucho gusto. Carnitas, mucho gusto. Lengua, mucho gusto. Salsa, great. Horchata, ordinary. Fútbol en las televisiones y música hispañola en la cocina. Mexicanos y mexicanas comen a las mesas distribuido distanciada. Me recuerde como estoy en casa, en Escondido, solamente media milla.

5 de Marzo, 2024

Longmont, Colorado

That might be the phrase, the quality in the high Sierra that called me, in the soul, the pure water of existence. Undetracted, undiminished, undissipated, undeclined, etc. etc. In this book I’m reading, A Naturalist’s Guide to the Southern Rockies, the section on montane weather and solar radiation, it talks about sunlight passing through the atmosphere, and the various gases scattering different wavelengths in different directions, and that the blue color of the sky is a result of water vapor deflecting blue wavelengths more than other wavelengths. Red light, invisible to our eye, is undeflected. “Most people have noticed how much bluer the clear sky looks in the mountains than at lower elevations. This intensity of color results from a decrease in molecular scattering, which primarily affects wavelengths in the short-wave, or blue, end of the spectrum, and the greater availability of short wavelengths at higher elevations because of this decreased scattering” (pg 157). Thus, to ascend into the high mountains is to approach the undeflected radiance of the light, the shining elemental insight Ansel Adams talked about epiphanically, the vision of an archetypal Sierra glacial lake basin near treeline that caught my imagination and stirred me to go to Thousand Island Lake, and I happened to go on the waning gibbous moon, the same as the vision. “All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation… My approach to photography is based upon my belief in the vigor and values of the world of nature, in aspects of grandeur and minutiae all about us.”

“I was climbing the long ridge west of Mount Clark. It was one of those mornings where the sunlight is burnished with a keen wind and long feathers of cloud move in a lofty sky. The silver light turned every blade of grass and every particle of sand into a luminous metallic splendor; there was nothing, however small, that did not clash in the bright wind, that did not send arrows of light through the glassy air. I was suddenly arrested in the long crunching path up the ridge by an exceedingly pointed awareness of the light. The moment I paused, the full impact of the mood was upon me; I saw more clearly than I have ever seen before or since the minute detail of the grasses… the small flotsam of the forest, the motion of the high clouds streaming above the peaks… I dreamed that for a moment time stood quietly, and the vision became but the shadow of an infinitely greater world—and I had within the grasp of consciousness a transcendental experience.”
~Ansel Adams

Mystical, lovely, profound—what we know in our minds is also in the high mountains. We see something in common. The pure abstraction of mind is especially present, prescient in the high mountains. Minds are mountains; mountains, minds.

“O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.”
~GM Hopkins

The deep, abstracted blue in the mountain’s elevation, the sky is pure as the water and the knowledge thereof. Dzogpa chenpo, natural perfection, dzogchen. It is divine, the glory of the Lord, the face of God that cannot be brought down into the valley, the sacred pneumos that is stirring over the mirror-face of the deep. The black inside iridescence is undeflected radiance.


March 4, 2024
Longmont, Colorado

Oh my God this is so good. Tastes like my neighbor friend Jose’s mama’s cooking. Yellow masa tortillas. The carnitas gordita was euphorically good. Unbelievably good. Probably one of the best pieces of mexican food I’ve ever had. The street tacos were damn good too, but not orgasmic. Meat was a little squishy. Carne asada, carnitas, barbacoa. Onion, cilantro, lime, delicious rojo y verde salsas. Cheap too.

I tried going to a place next door which was very busy, was teeming with white people, the menu was impossibly small font, none of the employees acknowledged my presence when I came up to the counter and waited there right in front of them for a minute (they were at the cash register). So I walked out.

February 27, 2024
Longmont, Colorado

So although my location is a thousand miles from where I was living for the last ten years, some things are constant. The prominence of the twin peaks of Longs Peak, the steep cline of the easternmost Rockies, the vast sedimentary plains mirror the prominence of the twin peaks of Cone Peak, the steep cline of the westernmost Santa Lucia mountains, the vast oceanic plain of the Pacific. I have gone from one bookened of mountains to the other, in a sage rainbow. Big Sur to the Front Range. The local tribe that lived here were the Arapahoe, though I’m reading that sometime in the not too distant past they were pushed west by either white settlers or another tribe. They were a warlike tribe, it seems. And I am unsurprised that they too have a flood myth involving thunderbird and a water monster. Tsowem and Neniisotoyu’u.

For the next x number of weeks, on each Tuesday I will be trying tacos from each of the various taco restaurants in Longmont, scrutinizing and likely enjoying each of them. Taco Tuesday. This week I went to Blue Corn Tacos.

So I’m starting to see that I want some organization in my blog. I’m getting to that point in my life where I have so many directions I want to go, so many topics I want to dive into and divulge, and since the topics are different, it’s ineffective to approach them from a position of broadscanning. When I was in grad school etc., the topics I was interested in were rather universal and centralized—spirituality, creativity psychology, engineering, mystic poetry. I could be in a broad scanning state, divergently thinking, accessing feelings in many directions to accrue valuable words and filter them into a central idea. This still works for my attitudes and opinions, for my philosophy, but for various topics I want to refine, it seems that I should blaze a trail for myself. I would like to use the written form like a trail. Plowing in with intuition and working memory is alright, but I’m at a level where I’m wanting to produce and work with high-caliber scientific research. I know I’m just a freelance scholar, so I don’t have as many resources at my disposal, but what I do have is freedom and enthusiasm. I can study the topics I want to. Reflection can be through reading and writing and filing.

About a week ago, I was up hiking in the San Bernardino Mountains, and the rocks there happen to be very old. The Baldwin Gneiss formation, which comprises the central block of the San Bernardinos, is dated to older than 1.7 billion years old, in the Proterozoic Period. For perspective, animals evolved closer to 500 million years ago, and the Earth is about 4.6 billion years old. And yet the same pile of ancient stone is also very young, being thrust up along the San Andreas Fault as we speak, perhaps as recently as within the last 2 million years. Mount San Gorgonio is thus at once extremely ancient and very young. In human terms, if the Baldwin Gneiss were 80 years old, the uplift of the San Bernardinos would be a 1-month-old infant. The views from atop Mt San Gorgonio at 11,503-ft were incredible. The day before was a Santa Ana wind event, so all the smog had been lifted from the LA Basin, uncovering a panorama that swept over Southern California. I could see up to Olancha Peak in the southern Sierras, Telescope Peak over Death Valley, Charleston Peak by Las Vegas, the Kelso dunes of Mojave National Preserve, almost into Arizona at the Chocolate Mountains, almost into Mexico at the Salton Sea, down into San Diego at Point Loma, past the Channel Islands into the vast Pacific. I was lucky to be able to slip in the hike in December, before the serious snows and icy weather come. There were already small patches of snow and ice.

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