Bill's Views on Most Everything

Estes Park

People living on Front Range Colorado are so fortunate to live here.  The big attractions, of course, are the mountains, right up the road.  I am just back from a retreat held at the YMCA of the Rockies in Estes Park.  No matter the weather or time of year, that hole in the mountains is a spectacular place, the T-shirt shops notwithstanding.

The retreat was an Insight Meditation retreat held from Thursday afternoon to Sunday morning.  Friday and Saturday were silent, something of a challenge for an extrovert.  It is normally hard to get me to shut up.  I had a good experience.

It snowed on the way up Thursday, and I helped several people get their cars up the hill to our cabins.  By Friday morning, there were six or eight inches of white stuff.  Estes Park is a Ponderosa Pine forest, and the trees had a thick frosting of show.  Beautiful.  Then the wind blew.  It really blew, as it often does on the east side of the Rockies.  The wind comes from the west, hits the mountains, shoots up, cools off, then descends, blasting across Estes Park.

The wind from the west blew the snow off the ground and trees and shot up the ridge on the east side of the park.  It snowed uphill.  Now that is something I had never seen before.  One of the themes of the retreat was impermanence.  The reality is change.  It snows, it blows, and it stops.  You are changing, different than you were ten minutes ago.  The mountains offer a powerful illustration of change.  They rise, wear away and are gone.  The snow and rain come, and then there is drought.  It floods, carving the canyons a bit deeper.  The glaciers arise, grind their way downhill, and change the landscape.From the window of the cabin I could see four climate zones.  Ponderosa in the park, then spruce on the slopes with lodgepole a bit higher, then timberline.  Timberline: tundra and pikas.

Those zones are not static, they’re on the move, responding to the changing climate.  The ponderosa are climbing the slopes, and timberline is heading downhill.

Lodgepole Beetle Kill

The lodgepole pine zone is changing the fastest.  Winter is less cold, not killing the Mountain Beetle larvae as usually happened fifty years ago.  The beetles kill the trees, millions of acres of trees.  All those dead trees are fuel.  The fires clear the land, opening it up for aspen to move in.  We think of change in the mountains being a slow process, but this has happened in the space of fifteen years or so.

The bare ground means much more runoff, making the floods Colorado sees roughly every twenty years or so larger and more violent.  Erosion is increasing, sending more mud to Mississippi.  The bare ground blows, and the dust and sand deepen the soils east of the mountains.  Next, the aspen move into the bare ground in the mountains, making fall even more spectacular.

Change is more rapid these days.  I am changing too.  This Insight Meditation is accelerating a process of inner change I began years ago.  I have dealt with lots of personal issues in the past, and am now cycling back through some of them.  Fear arises during the meditations, moving to anger.  My response is addiction.  Food.  Alcohol.  My personal climate zones change, the midsection growing as I eat to dull the feelings.

During my meditations, those old feelings arise, I note them, and watch as they fade away.  The past is gone, I have no need to hold on, and I see it passing away, replaced (slowly) by more time living in the moment.  After all the present is all we really have, the rest being a construct the ego brings up to have something to do.  I am working on training my ego to be OK with emptiness.  That also means giving up trying to live in the future.  The future isn’t there.  It never is.  We need to look ahead enough to make conditions favorable to staying alive a bit longer, but that’s all.  The rest is just ego busywork.  That busywork occupies most of my consciousness.

I want to stay in now, the present moment, but then I look up and see the pastries in the case here in the coffee shop.  I thrust myself into the future, eating them, even though I am not hungry.  There just might be more fat in the future.  I still have a lot of work to do.