A Sense of Proportion

Every year Cedar, my wife, and I tend to celebrate the changes of the seasons at Tinaja Ridge, a piece of wild nature 7,200 feet above sea level in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies. Solstice 2025 was no exception. Tinaja by the way is the Spanish word for a large pitcher. It’s not a Spanish 101 word. I had to look it up in my Spanish-English dictionary. And I have no idea why the ridge is so named. One of these visits I’ll ask. Anyway, this eight-acre lot is owned by Gene and Lauren, a married couple with degrees in nature education. They use the land and the adjoining national forest to give one-day and multi-week programs to us over-civilized creatures to reacquaint us with our more-than-human relatives and to help us learn from them.
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On this particular one-day session, as I was hiking up the hill to where we circle up to start our 10-to-4 day, I felt more exhausted than usual. I wasn’t out of breath but clearly felt the stain of this fifty-yard walk more than usual, even more, it seems, than a few months earlier for our Tinaja Ridge spring-equinox experience...

​On all these outings our leaders always encourage us to write our impressions down. Today, however, we had a special guest, April Tierney, a young mother and a poet who lives in the nearby town of Lyons. Youthful as she was, especially in comparison with most of the rest of us, she already had a half dozen published books of verse and a more than local reputation. So this day we were encouraged by her example to record our impressions poetically. Here then is what my hard opening climb inspired me to write. 
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A Sense of Proportion
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On arriving I felt my age,
The full weight of my eighty-five-and-a-half years.
Yes, friends,
I use half years again now,
Just as I did when I was four.
It’s safer that way.
Compare when we give our spine-contracted height
Another half inch by stretching.
But when I arrived clearly strained at our meeting circle
For Solstice today,
The boulders reminded me of my arrogance.
They were the real deal; I the impostor,
Someone still doing time, They said,
In this bodily lock-up we two-leggeds call Life.

It’s the wrong season, but this image could have been me.