Recycled Art by the River...
 Whenever I leave the Woods for the City, I reflect on Emerson & Thoreau (& especially Thoreau's scorn for the habits & behaviours of the City); & I cannot help but feel that they were not speaking of Breckenridge. Here, the City marries Nature around her. Here, brilliant little Foxes use pedestrian-crossings, & slow (fat) Robins in the little streets are given right-of-way. Here, the High Rocky's Sun bathes us all; "man & beast" alike. We are all equal beneath this Sun; Creatures born of Nature, into Nature, & who shall return to her again in Death. #thank-you-Joseph-Campbell 
"Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.” -
Rumi  What dare we take from heaven's cup
With fire brushing Mountain tops, With Sunlight burnished on her tops; Where from her peaks, the snow-melt plops, Where from her bluffs the awed heart drops, And from her cliffs the bold heart stops. What dare we dream when from the vial Of Skye & Stone, pure liquid pours? From deep recesses in her core, Whence River maidens swiftly bore; Their Springly task, a frigid chore, Along the Forest's verdant floor. What dare we learn from Wood & Leaf; Alemebic pair that shade our heads; And bid us bow with sacred dread, Beneath the tow'ring Pines outspread; Our also-tow'ring souls be fed, When Spirit with the Woods be wed.  "What am I? & What is? asks the human spirit with a curiosity new-kindled, but never to be quenched..." - Emerson I've been reading Emerson at night, of late. He puts forth, in his essay "Nature," a fantastic blueprint for understanding our relationship with Nature & the Universe at large. He says of our age, that it "is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes." Then he asks a pertinent question to (early American) Transcendentalism: "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?" I began to ask myself what it was that disappointed me most, from the futile religious groups & "spiritual" movements I've examined. The answer appeared to be, for each, that I could never get an original, relevant, & therefore viable relationship from them. There is no relationship with the Buddha, long-dead (or reincarnated); Only a set of decent principles. Christ never answered my pleas; (Though he promised the door would open if I knocked). & Muhammad...perhaps well-intentioned; But I distrust anyone who "restores" a faith with violence. & so on, the list goes... Faith in personhood seems misplaced. Nature is everywhere, Universal. {"Historical Christianity has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion. It has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus. The soul knows no persons. It invites every man to expand to the full circle of the Universe, and will have no preferences but those of spontaneous love..."} Emerson points out that we are "embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature..." "Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines today also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship." I think this is ultimately the ground I am approaching. I will (after a Lewisonian fashion) trust the "perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy." Rather than trust the static corpus of some past event(s), I will look to my own condition; my own dynamic interaction/relationship with Nature & the Universe at large. Is not my condition (life-process) a coded answer to my own questions? As Emerson says of man, "He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth." "In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?"  I build my fires the same way every time, Because it's the quickest, most sure-fire (pun intended) method. I clump a pile of tinder (dry, highly flammable material such as twigs & leaves) in my fire-pit.  I then build a little teepee of branches over the tinder. Once the tinder is lit, the teepee will follow with a longer blaze.  More tinder...  Bigger teepee on top.  Reach inside the teepee with a match, & voila! Leaving space at the base to feed air to the tinder gets it going instantaneously.  Within minutes, she's roaring away, & will burn steadily for some time. Seriously, the teepee method is failproof. "The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution."
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