Cabin Journal

Here, There and Everywhere

It’s what the Buddhists call monkey mind, because it’s all over the place. One minute, the monkey is jumping into the tree, the next it’s hurtling itself to the ground. One minute it’s eating a banana, and next the banana has been thrown down. The monkey is everywhere, unable to settle down.

That’s my mind, leaping from one thing to another. With no work coming in right now, I agonize over how best to use my time. I start one project, then decide I should work on something else. I go on the Internet and then change my mind and start going through the stacks of papers on my desk. Or maybe I should check my email, always a dependable distraction.

I’ve been coming to the cabin for the past two weeks with no editing projects that need to be done. That should be a welcome endeavor, leaving me with more time to enjoy the beautiful fall weather, the last of the aspens changing. Ideally, my mind should be as placid as the pond near the cabin, with the golden aspen reflected (above) in its calm surface. But my monkey mind won’t let me relax. It’s full of “shoulds.” I should be writing, changing the sheets, washing the dishes, reading, walking, visiting the neighbors, not visiting the neighbors.

Finally, my monkey mind settled on a project. Every year, I need to re-stain the back (right) and front decks at the cabin. I have the same argument with the man at the paint store: isn’t there some way to prolong the duration between paintings? “Not unless you paint all five sides,” he says enigmatically. My neighbors blame the high-altitude sun for the decks’ early deterioration.

For all my complaining, once I settle down into the job, I enjoy it. There’s a meditative quality to painting, where I can legally empty my mind of extraneous thoughts, get caught in the back and forth swipe of the paint brush on the deck. Soon I start noticing the rush of the wind through the tall pine trees above my head, the crunchiness of the pine needless underfoot as I walk around the deck and the strong smell of pine mixed with decaying plants.

For some reason, a colony of small ants is constantly criss-crossing the deck, and so I have to work hard to brush them off so they don’t get caught in the paint and die. It’s a constant effort, and sometimes I fail. I also have to be alert to things falling from the sky. In the ponderosas above me, the chickarees are busily tearing off the pine cones and needles, so I’m constantly being dive-bombed by pine missiles. In our own ways, we’re both preparing for winter.

Somehow, the painting process works. I feel my monkey mind slowing down, concentrating on the task at hand, as well as this fine, unnaturally warm fall day. And when my mind starts to wander again, there’s the sure-fire wake-up call: a pine cone crashing down inches from my head and the chickaree’s loud angry call to tell me I’m in the way of its urgent endeavors.

When the Clouds Parted

I’ve been complaining a lot lately about summer ending, but driving up to the cabin last week, I had a change of heart. I forgot how exciting this change of seasons can be, how the landscape can change dramatically from week to week, always promising something new. On the plains last week, the clouds were piled up in layers of grays, blacks and whites, moving swiftly across the sky, as if they had someplace to be. It was a welcome change from the endlessly hot and sunny skies we‘ve all had summer.

On Thursday, it rained on and off at the cabin, but in the evening the skies started to clear, and when the clouds parted, there was the first snow on Mount Meeker, just a light dusting (above). The next morning, everything was covered in frost (left).

At Wild Basin, the undergrowth of plants in the mostly pine forest are turning different shades of red, golden, yellow, orange and purple. On this gray and wet day, it’s as if someone turned on a light on the forest floor. Glowing almost as brightly are the white trunks of the aspens and the wet boulders, mottled blue and gray.

  And yet, at Lake Isabelle, in Brainard Lake, nature is playing tricks, toying with the illusion that summer is still here while winter descends on the high peaks. With a heavy winter snow not completely melting until August, most of the flowers are still flourishing: bluebells along the stream, Indian paintbrush on the hillsides, even a columbine blooming in mid-September, when most years the grasses have turned to brown and the only flower still blooming is the blue gentian. It looks like the middle of July until you glance up at the higher peaks, dusted with snow, and the hillsides below them, the grasses turned russet (above).

If I can’t stop the seasons from changing, I’ll have to enjoy every last blooming flower, each new promise of snow, every leaf that turns golden and falls from the tree. And wait to see what tomorrow brings.

A Touch of Fall

 

At the cabin this week, the weather suddenly turned cool—in the 50s rather than in the high 70s. Mount Meeker was hidden in clouds, and I could sense fall and winter, the days getting shorter. The aspen are starting to turn, and the chickarees seem almost frantic to start storing the pine cones for winter.

In front of my deck, one of the gray squirrels was ripping off pine branches and tugging furiously at the pine cone that wanted to stay attached to the tree. The chickaree won.  In the back of the cabin, a squirrel was making constant trips carrying cones in its mouth to a pile of rotting logs, where it was caching its food for winter days. On the road later I saw one chickaree tearing at the outer shell of a cone to get at the inner softer meat (below), oblivious of me or any possible traffic.

Life has been feeling fragile lately, and when I took my walk around Meeker Park, I felt I needed to go as slowly as possible, as if I went too fast something would break.  I want to hold onto these days as much as I can, even as they disappear, like water through my fingers. I can’t stop them, can’t stop winter from approaching, as hard as I try.

On the hillside above the pond, even though I couldn’t see Mount Meeker, the view was still impressive: the sun hitting patches of the forested hillsides and distant mountains, the clouds and light constantly moving and changing (above).

Down in the meadow bottom, the grasses were thick, red mixed with the gold.  I wished I were one of the horses in the meadow so that I could step into the sea of grasses, be enfolded by it, feel the stalks against my legs, and be part of this moving, rushing stream.

As the World Turns

 

When I came up to the cabin last week, something felt different. The season had turned, and with it, something was missing, some liveliness. It’s still summer, but the lushness and abundance of June and July are gone. Everything feels a bit dissipated and sad.

From what I see in my rain barrel, it’s hardly rained at all here in the past week. Wednesday, clouds massed, the skies darkened, and a few raindrops fell, but then it passed and the sun would come out. A couple of hours later another attempt would be made, promising rain, but always reneging.

It feels as if everything is struggling. Some of the needles on the small pine in the front yard have died and turned red, the leaves on the plants have curled inward, and the thistles have already gone to seed. The patch of tall green grass that I love to watch blow in the wind has shrunk to a small area. And the flowers are long gone.

Even the animals are fewer. A few weeks ago, they seemed underfoot. I couldn’t sit on the deck without having a chipmunk or ground squirrel practically run over my feet.  But last week I saw one rabbit, one chipmunk, one ground squirrel, one hummingbird. Have they succumbed to predators?

And yet, I’ve been reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, one of the bleakest books I’ve read in a long time. It depicts a post-apocalyptic world where a man and his son wander through a landscape that is mostly grey, composed of ash, after some unnamed devastation has killed all the vegetation and animals and most of the humans.

I have to keep putting it down every few pages and listen to the crickets outside the window. At the cabin I look up at the tops of the pine trees and the blue sky and piles of white clouds, or the ground squirrel stuffing its cheeks with grasses.

And I feel comforted. Yes, it’s dry here and not as lush as I’d like, but life is still rich. The world is precious, and I can’t lose sight of that.