Confronting my fear(S)

Hog Back Ridge. The trailhead begins 3 blocks from my house, traces the edge of the open space for a bit, and then turns up, quickly Y-ing into a loop along the eastern slope, and then the top, of the foothills. Both sides climb, one more gradually than the other, but both in full sun. After trying repeatedly this summer, turned back by my own weak legs, my lungs inadequate to the 5300', and the intolerable heat, I conquered the hill early on a cloudy morning.
Today I did it again--same conditions but for the heat. Aided by the cool Fall air, I managed my climb-generated heat by stopping to catch the cool breeze frequently as my pounding heart calmed.
These were my fears: rattlesnakes, mountain lines, coyotes. Once we moved into the neighborhood, I began to read about the trail: http://www.protrails.com/trail.php?trailID=154
Catch the bit about the rattlesnakes lounging about on the top? So, I keep my eyes on the path and rocks ahead, noisily planting my hiking poles with every step, wondering about the survival rate of snakebites.
Except when I'm looking over my shoulder for the mountain lion that might be bearing down on me. With every gurgle of my water bottles, with every swish of my thighs, I'm sure something is coming from behind. Mike has seen cougar scat on the trail, and signs announce their possibility, and I recall all too clearly the reports of joggers attacked from behind. So what if no one in Boulder has seen one here? There are abundant rock ledges and, near the top, brush and trees where one, no doubt, languorously waits.
Then the coyotes: Mike tells me about a team of coyotes who closed in on a woman hiker, nipping at her jeans, until her dog came charging back along the trail to scatter them. But not here. I peer at the tall grasses and the bushes, looking for them. No dogs allowed on this trail.
I overthink. I worry worry worry with every step, wondering if the steps in fear are worth whatever the reward will be. But they are. Once the crest is breached, the slope turns down, and my heart lightens. Not with the joy the view might instill, but with the satisfaction of hitting my stride, overcoming a struggle, both physical and within my very core.

Bliss

As I drove through a meadow, gold and red with late season grasses, sun shining with mountain intensity, sky a stunning Colorado blue, U2 on the radio, windows down to invite caressing breezes in, beginning the ascent to the treeline and the tundra beyond, with Bill by my side--breath held--I felt bliss. Much rarer than happiness or even joy, my bliss transcends. Time stopped that moment, held us gently, before a soft exhale.

Lucy's chutney

Lucy lived to be nearly 100. She was a woman of intense reserved passion--for her long-departed husband, art, the Adirondacks, Shakespeare's sonnets, learning, work (she retired at 82). Brightly intelligent, she had a photographic memory, and I learned early in our relationship that it was futile to argue history, or dates, or events--I was always wrong. In her 90's, her memory evaporated along with her mobility, and it must have been a very lonely existence for her.
I like to remember her making this chutney, stretching her full 4'10" to see over the lip of the large pot she used in order to check on its progress. This is the recipe she used the day I documented it; I'm sure there were variations over time. It tastes delicious, complex, great on sandwiches and everything else.

6-8 pounds of hard green pears, peeled and diced
1 quart of cider vinegar (add 1/2 quart more as it cooks down)
2 pounds of brown sugar
1 pound of white raisins
1 T mustard seeds
1 tsp salt
1 head garlic, chopped fine
6-8 chili peppers
ginger (candied, dried, or fresh)

Throw together and cook forever, stirring frequently, until it's a thick rich brown.

art--pushing the boundaries

"Life can seem mundane or even boring as we trudge through our daily routines. To me, art provides a way to push beyond the boundaries of the ordinary and find new ways to view life as the grand, unlikely spectacle that it is." Ben Tolman, in a statement accompanying his ink portrait of his wife, Jana, in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2009.

wonder

Here's a loooong quotation from Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire. It captures something of the value of escaping the mundane. While Pollan's focus is marijuana, I seek the same sense of wonder in simple show-stopping moments like this weekend's snowstorm
"I'm not prepared to concede that these epiphanies [being high] are as empy or false as they usually appear in the cold light of the next day....We simply don't have the words to convey the force of these perceptions to our straight selves, perhaps because they are the kinds of perceptions that precede words. They many be banal, but that doesn't mean they aren't also at the same time profound.
Marijuana dissolves this apparent contradiction, and it does so by making us temporarily forget most of the baggage we usually bring to our perception..., our acquired sense of its familiarity and banality. For what is a sense of the banality of something if not a defense against the overwhelming (or at least whelming) power of that thing experienced freshly? Banality depends on memory, as do irony and abstraction and boredom, three other defenses the educated mind deploys against experience so that it can get through the day without being continually, exhaustingly astonished.
It is by temporarily mislaying much of what we already know (or think we know) that cannabis restores a kind of innocence to our perceptions of the world, and innocence in adults will always flirt with embarrassment....By the grace of this forgetting, we temporarily shelve our inheritied ways of looking and see things as if for the first time....
There is another word for this extremist noticing--this sense of first sight unencumbered by knowingness, by the already-been-theres and seen-thats of the adult mind--and that word, of course, is wonder.

Aramis, in buddha pose.
How could I not smile?

foxy marauders

Our niece and family live across the street from an iris farm in Boulder, CO, where we recently visited. We wandered through the fields, with the glorious Flatirons in the background, to catch the last blooms. I noticed: a child's pink Croc in a furrow; a fencepost with a runningshoe; another; a clothesline with a row of gloves dangling from it; more fenceposts with assorted shoes and gloves. What gives?
Amanda explained a family of foxes had denned under one of the outbuildings, and each night roamed through north Boulder gathering these human artifacts from yards and porches; as folks walked through the gardens, they put them wherever they could off the ground--fence posts, shelves, tree branches.
I retraced my steps a few mornings later and found a pile of fresh bounty--shoes of every color and size--in front of the den's entrance; as I watched, a fox trotted out, but turned tail when he saw me. I retreated and watched from a distance as he came out, grabbed a Nike, and carried it back to the den.
Are they running a thrift store? playing dressup? insulating the den for winter?