Baca County Beltane

In the photo, the Beltane Sun (astronomical Beltane--May 5) has recently risen. When it appeared on the horizon, it fit right into the little notch in the rock just below its current position--an alignment that happens only on Beltane and Lammas.

The site, on private land, is known to the students of archaeological sites as "the Sun Temple." I went there last weekend with filmmaker Scott Monahan, researcher Phil Leonard, and Martin Brennan, author of several books on Irish megalithic alignments, including The Boyne Valley Vision and The Stones of Time.

Some people prepare for ritual with baths and meditation, but maybe a 150-mile drive into the gradually darkening prairie works as well. A little synchronicity: on the way to La Junta, I heard the NPR report on the Neolithic temple unearthed in Ireland.

We camped at the site. A wall of lightning flickered silently to the north. Some 200 miles to the east, Greensburg, Kan., was being obliterated, but we did not know it. Our part of Colorado, which had been smashed by blizzards last winter, was warm and quiet. A great horned owl and a screech owl called from the cliffs.

Left: Martin Brennan viewing the sunrise.

On of the cliffs, someone centuries ago scraped the rock smooth and pecked a circle a little bigger than a human head. If you sit precariously so that your head is in the circle, then you see the alignment. A couple of alleged ogham inscriptions are nearby.

I am not qualified to judge the ogham, but I know that more and more (although still few) people visit such sites at the appropriate days. They watch as the old drama of sky, Sun, and rock plays out for a few seconds on a quarter or cross-quarter days. Afterwards, I suspect, they feel a little different about their place on this planet and on the southern High Plains.

Cremation, public lands, and commerce

Ladies in White, three women in Missoula, Montana, tried to start a business scattering human ashes--what the funeral industry calls "cremains"--on national forest land.

The U.S. Forest Service doesn't like the idea, because they see a "slippery slope" towards permanent monuments:

But the Forest Service has long had a firm policy against commercial scattering, said Gordon Schofield, the group leader for land use here in Region I. If ashes are scattered “the land takes on a sacredness, and people want to put up a marker or a plaque.”

The Ladies in White say their practice is environmentally benign, although they do accept that like other public-lands commercial users (guide services, for instance), they need a permit.

Currently, the official position on private scattering is "don't ask, don't tell." (Some of us writers do tell, however.)

What a wonderful tangle of American religious issues: "nature religion" in the broadest sense, the change in funerary practices, representatives of some Indian tribe sticking their oar in, the organized environmentalists, and the bureaucrats in the middle of it all.

Take a look at Catherine Goodman, the woman on the left. What is that on her head--antlers? a crescent crown?

Via Ann Althouse's blog, where there are lots of comments.

Dolores LaChapelle

Dolores LaChapelle of Silverton, Colorado, died January 22 at an advanced age. (She was still skiing deep powder in her seventies.)

She begins the preface to her 1992 deep ecology book Sacred Land, Sacred Sex: Rapture of the Deep: Concerning Deep Ecology and Celebrating Life by stating that it does not fit into any categories:

it's neither psychology nor philosophy, neither history nor anthropology--not even social anthropology. It's most certainly not "eco-feminist," "new age," or "futurist." Yet it takes in all this and much more.

So did she.

The University of Utah has an online collection of her skiing photographs. She was a pioneer of ski mountaineering, among other things.

The Durango Herald ran this feature article about her in 2002.

LaChapelle became renowned in skiing circles for her powder skiing prowess. [While at Alta] she even earned the nickname “Witch of the Wasatch” for her uncanny ability to predict storms.

Look at her article "Ritual is Essential" for an understanding of how she connected human ritual with living "in place"

Ritual is essential because it is truly the pattern that connects. It provides communication at all levels - communication among all the systems within the individual human organism; between people within groups; between one group and another in a city and throughout all these levels between the human and the non-human in the natural environment. Ritual provides us with a tool for learning to think logically, analogically and ecologically as we move toward a sustainable culture. Most important of all, perhaps, during rituals we have the experience, unique in our culture, of neither opposing nature or trying to be in communion with nature; but of finding ourselves within nature, and that is the key to sustainable culture.

More: M. says that Dolores LaChapelle always reminded her a little of Felicitas Goodman. Part of that was physical: both when we met them were no-nonsense elderly women who wore their hair in a single long braid. I wonder if they would have respected each other as rival shamans, or hated each other.

Cross-posted to Nature Blog.