Tag Archives: Colorado

Green Halloween?

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First of all, I took this photo on August 26th. Is this what the new Pagan future will look like? Everyone complaining that it is not even the equinox, but the stores are full of Halloween merchandise?

This building used to be a Toys “R” Us store in Pueblo, Colo., until that chain suddenly contracted. It has been empty ever since, except that the Spirit Halloween party company rents it some years for the weeks leading up to Halloween.

Months ago it got the “Green Store” sign, supposedly for a thrift store, but that business still has not opened. (There were management problems, for one thing.)

But plastic skulls and sexy-witch costumes still sell well, at least for two months of the year!

In other news, my absence from blogging was due to a trip to Yellowstone, M.’s and my first real vacation of more than a long-weekend’s length since last November.  I am posting about our trip at Southern Rockies Nature Blog.

Home Country: Remembering Gia-Fu Feng

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The South Hardscrabble Creek area. Click image to see it full size with labels.

There really is a Hardscrabble Creek, and this is part of its watershed. (View is to the southeast.)

The label “Stillpoint” marks the site of a therapeutic community started in 1977 by Gia-Fu Feng, who taught a sort of Taoist (Daoist) philosophy mixed with Gestalt-style encounter groups in North America and Europe through the 1970s and early 1980s. (He died in June 1985.)

His translations of the Tao Te Ching and of Chuang Tsu remain popular, in both sense of the term.

Earlier incarnations of Stillpoint had been in Los Gatos, California, and Manitou Springs, Colorado, where M. and I first knew Gia-Fu and his followers as one of several large, communal living experiments. We had no desire to live in a therapeutic commune and do encounter groups, however!

This last incarnation of Stillpoint never became the “new Taoist village” that Gia-Fu envisioned, although the remodeled barn/community building and various cabins and hermitages are still there.  Ownership has passed through a chain of people connected to Gia-Fu.

One of them, Carol Ann Wilson, wrote a good biography, Still Point of the Turning World, but as so often happens with “crazy wisdom” teachers, I think that you had to have been there to really “get” Gia-Fu.

My last sight of him came in the spring of 1985 when I drove past Stillpoint, bound for Boulder after turkey-hunting up South Hardscrabble Creek. He was strolling up the side of the gravel road in billowing, bright-yellow trousers and his padded jacket—probably the one in the Wikipedia photo. When I came back permanently, only his memory remained.

Talking about Tlaloc, 2

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A turkey feather and a candle for Tlaloc. This culvert carries Hardscrabble Creek under a road—what is left of it.

In her comment on my first Tlaloc post, Hecate Demetersdatter asks,  “What was/is it about Tlaloc that called/calls to you?”

It was my reading and re-reading of Craig Childs’ House of Rain that made me conscious of how important a deity Tlaloc (under various names) had been from antiquity to the present day in the American Southwest and on south into Mesoamerica. (Childs, no avowed polytheist, tends to regard him simply as the personification of the hydrological cycle.)

If we might regard deities as connected with place, then I am in that place and subject to that hydrological cycle—a cycle that seems to have stalled a bit this year.

And as Tlaloc has been addressed in many tongues already, why not add English to them?

Also, looking forward to the American Academy of Religion meeting in San Francisco, I obviously need to eat here.

 

Talking about Tlaloc

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Feather offering for Tlaloc

Bundle of turkey, Steller’s jay, and flicker feathers placed in a dry spring basin.

On Friday morning, April 29, back from a early morning fire call (shed + trash + grasses at the edge of the prairie), I climbed the ridge behind the house and made an offering to Tlaloc, the god of rain.

(I think I need to make a lot more of them, given that it has not rained for a month.)

Later that day the Sand Gulch Fire exploded, forcing us to evacuate our house and spend the night in our pop-up camping trailer parked next to the fire station. But the next day it snowed four inches, helping to bring the fire under control.

The desert ecologist and nature writer Craig Childs got me thinking about Tlaloc a while ago with some evocative passages in his book House of Rain, which I reviewed on the other blog here (also referenced in this post).

At high, prominent springs or caves in Guatemala or the Yucatán,  one is likely to find the head of a decapitated rooster (replacing the turkey, which was commonly used in the past) along with pools of melted wax from votive candles (365).

This post kicks off my discussion about being an American Eclectic Witch reviving the cult of Tlaloc on a household basis—no stepped pyramids here, just real mountains.

Tlaloc

Both Aztec depictions of Tlaloc and Mayan depictions of the equivalent deity, Chaac (if you follow a sort of interpretatio azteca), leave me cold aesthetically, for all that they are richly symbolic. But one thing at a time—perhaps I can find one done in the style of pop-Mexican calendar art.

The worship of the gods can change over time—consider this “feast of St. Tlaloc.” We could do that!

More to come.

Why I Have Not Been Blogging

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Everything in my normal life stopped last Friday, and it is just starting to get back to normal. A 560-acre forest fire is not like all the tornadoes down South—for one thing, you can fight a forest fire to some extent—but it is a big disruption when it is close to your house—within half a mile, in our case.

After our evacuation order was canceled, and M. and I were back home, we started feeling the desire to clean everything. Not that it was smoked up, the house just felt grubby and messy after a long winter.

When I made my quick trip home on Saturday morning, the power was off, the house cool and dark,  shaded from the early morning sun by the ridge to the east. The previous morning’s dirty dishes were still on the counter, stuff was tossed around from our quick evacuation packing.

And so I though, “As soon as I get back here permanently, assuming that I do, it’s time to start paying attention to the house, the garden, and the physical plane in general.”

Of course, when we came home, it was snowing, but we’ll take all the moisture that we can get.

I do have some blog posts stored in my head and will be getting to them over the next three days. Then it’s festival time.

An Old-Fashioned Funeral

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In the southern Colorado town of Crestone, a woman gets an old-fashioned funeral.

Belinda Ellis’ farewell went as she wanted. One by one, her family placed juniper boughs and logs about her body, covered in red cloth atop a rectangular steel grate inside a brick-lined hearth. With a torch, her husband lit the fire that consumed her, sending billows of smoke into the blue-gray sky of dawn.

People do still occasionally light funeral pyres. The Pagan Book of Living and Dying (1997) describes one such in Texas. When I read that chapter, I suddenly understood references in Classical texts to “funeral games.”

It takes hours for the pyre to burn down, so what do you do in the meantime? Race your horses? Play volleyball?

But disregard the next-to-last paragraph in the Yahoo article—the legendary stuff.  Crestone is a quirky place—and people work to keep it that way—but overall there  is more “fakelore” generated about the San Luis Valley than about anywhere else in Colorado. People even say that I was born there.

How I Spent My Summer Solstice

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Some people just cannot handle the solstice. (The Telegraph, UK)

It wasn’t this bad. On Sunday M. and I went up to Salida, Colorado, to catch the last day of FIBArk, the whitewater boating festival, watching competitors come down the frothing Arkansas River as we drove upstream.

Our main interest was in the Crazy River Dogs event, which we have managed to attend for three of the last four years.

In this photo, the brown dog will be pursuing the aspen pole at upper left as it bobs through a rapid in the downtown Salida kayakers’ water park.

A "river dog" leaps into the Arkansas River after a flying aspen stick.

FIBArk, like the solsticial doings at Stonehenge—I found the first picture in this slide show—marks our beginning of high summer.

To me the quarter days of solstices and equinoxes are “outer” festivals. They should be celebrated with public festivities, whether those festivities are capital-P Pagan or not. Food booths in the park, paddle-flailing kayakers, swimming dogs, the Sun beating down—it’s all good.

The cross-quarter days are for magic.

Time Is Flowing By

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Canada geese and goslings on the Arkansas River, Fremont County, Colorado

Canada geese and goslings on the Arkansas River

I have new blog posts in the works, but I had to take off Tuesday and go fishing in the Arkansas River above Cañon City, where these Canada geese were parading up and down the bank, the parents seeming to ponder whether the goslings could handle the current yet. (Of course they could—in the slacker water.)

Apollo, God of Coffeehouses

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Solar Roast Coffee, 226 N. Main St., Pueblo, ColoradoBack when Enchanté was a zine rather than a blog, Brightshadow did a series of articles on “gods of the city.”

These were representations of the Old Gods in statuary, architecture, etc., primarily in New York City, where he lives.

New York has no monopoly on them, of course. I like riding a morning train into Chicago from the east and seeing the rising Sun light up the statue of Ceres on the Chicago Board of Trade building, for example.

Pueblo, Colorado, has a coffeehouse dedicated to Phoebus Apollo. You can see him in his Sun-chariot over the door.

No, it’s not across from a hospital and full of doctors. City Hall types are more prevalent.

The owners have put the Sun to work, however. All of their coffee is solar-roasted in a variety of home-built roasters, which you can see on their Web site.

I would tend to associate coffeehouses with Hermes—all the brain buzz, the clicking laptop keyboards, the newspapers and books.

But this one’s Apollo’s.

UPDATE: Still learning my way around WordPress—I hit a little glitch and lost the comments on this post. Sorry.

The City Dionysia in Colorado Springs.

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“Just when you thought you knew what Colorado Springs was all about,” commented a poster on one of the Colorado Pagan email lists.

It was the City Dionysia festival, complete with a performance of Euripides’ The Bacchae.

There is, of course, a Facebook page, where you can see some photos.

I missed it by going camping, an homage to a different god. Maybe next year.

You have to admit that this event nicely counters the usual “Fort God” image that is commonly encountered.