Relinquishment
On Loss, Recalibration and Moving Forward
May Day, or Beltane, marks another shift in the seasonal calendar. Beltane is a hand-off, a mid-season tipping point when spring topples toward summer. From Spring into summer - or, on more “normal” years in the high-country - from winter into spring. But this is not normal.
2026, the Year of the Firehorse, arrived with a disruptive force. War, fire, heat. There seemed to be no winter, and barely a spring. The seasons jumped from fall into sudden summer. And “normal” no longer carries meaning as it did before.
The heat came early. Everything seemed to bloom at once - not in the usual order. Apricots, peaches, plums, cherries, apples all opened and fruit setting by mid-April. Then the freeze. Because we always get a freeze in April, even into May. But it’s not normal. It is snowing on top of summer growth.
High up in the Gunnison Basin, maybe 30 miles from my house (although there is no such route) and not so far from where Anthracite Creek starts to gather up before joining the Muddy and becoming the North Fork. But on the other side, in the headwaters of the Gunnison’s main fork – lies the townsite of Gothic. It will be a while, a winding, wild canyon route, and many miles before the Gunnison and its North Fork join.
The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) has been at Gothic since 1928. Here scientists have been conducting an experiment since the 1990s looking at the impact of warming high-elevation soils on mountain plants. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in March 2026 found that 29 years of experimental warming at Gothic shifted ecosystems from alpine grassland to desert shrubland and significantly altered soil fungal communities.
Fewer wildflowers, more shrubs. Forests disappearing and changing. Loss of “normal.” When you live near the spine of the continent, the impact of what happens here also cascades.
RMBL sits high in the watershed, tracking change in tangible and real ways. Mapping what we are losing. What we have already lost. With climate disruption Gothic’s subalpine setting has proven it to be an important site to better understand how a heating globe is impacting our mountains, and everyone who depends on them downstream.
Lower down, near where the Gunnison joins the Colorado River at Grand Junction, the Grand Valley Water Users Association is telling its members not to put in new landscaping, to keep trees alive, but not to water lawns. Hold onto what you can. Let go of what you cannot.
Relinquishment. This is the letting go of what we cannot keep. It is usually not easy, and it is often hard. Sometimes we choose because we must, and sometimes it is taken from us.
Below-ground, up at Gothic, the mycorrhizal network breaking down under warming is also relinquishment — not chosen, even gradual in our frame. Underground connections that sustained the visible world are quietly failing. Do not water lawns. Try to keep your trees alive.
Consider the I Ching, the ancient Chinese “oracle” that maps patterns of change, and challenges to overcome or opportunities to seize. Guài is one hexagram often associated with this time in the season.
Beltane is a tipping point. It is the moment counterpoised to Samhain in the Celtic seasons, when the veil is again thin. Only now it is inviting us back into life. But we are not there yet. Thinness is an opportunity. But it is also dangerous. We have not yet arrived and we can still lose everything.
So, here we are again, the wanderer winding our way like water down canyons toward some resolve. Yes, we must be resilient, carrying forward what we need, but we cannot bring it all.
And the hexagram, Guài, also shows something that might either emerge or that might collapse. We are at this moment: what can we choose now to put down, to relinquish, before even more is taken away? This is now about what we can hold on to, what we can let go, and what just collapses. Is there still a container that can hold this all together?
In Guài the lines tell two tales, one where things are taken, sunk into an abyss; or, one in which we choose to put down what cannot be maintained, is no longer needed, no longer useful, or is harmful. On that path we continue on, a vessel still intact. No promises, but avoiding the abyss for now. That second path narrows, while the first path will not be refused.
A friend who is an anthropologist, Maya Daurio, and who once lived here in the North Fork Valley for a while, wrote their dissertation on the temporal disruption and reset that often occurs as people process events that erase a familiar landscape and reveal what was always there. A thinness.
They interviewed people who had gone through Colorado’s largest wildfire in state history, the 2020 Cameron Peak Fire that burned through Poudre Canyon, which is also a landscape from their own family and past. The area was devasted by both the fire and then by flood and debris flow.
In a blog Maya writes:
“One of my neighbors stopped by one morning for a cup of coffee mid-summer. He was here to view the ruins of his family’s house for the first time which also burned in the wildfire. I described how I had been experiencing the landscape as something both deeply familiar and also strange and new in the way it looks and acts, almost like occupying an alternate reality. ‘Like a thin spot,’ he responded, referring to the thin places of Celtic mythology representing the liminal border between two worlds. In the months and years following wildfire, human and other than human agencies, relations, and materialities exist in a kind of in betweenness. Making sense of the enormity of changes and ongoing processes of transformation requires constant recalibration.”
In the choice it asks us to make Guài demands honesty. That is its test. To see the situation as it is revealed, and then to act accordingly. In their blog they write: “Learning to see alluvial fans reveals that in a narrow, steep-walled canyon like the Poudre, many homes are either built on these relatively flat depositional mounds or in the river’s historical floodplain when it operated under its own agency, meandering from one side of the canyon to the other.”
The choice before us is to accept the choice before us. To live within a new reality being revealed or to face an erasure, fire, flood, freeze.
In Grand Junction recently, Colorado’s U.S. Senator Michael Bennet spoke at the Club 20 Spring Conference. “We are in a new reality on this,” Bennet said. “Support from the federal government is dwindling.”
At its root Guài asks a question. The old order has ended. What comes now?
Below Black Canyon National Park the river roars through Gunnison Gorge. At its mouth the muddy waters of the North Fork finally meet the more blue waters of its river, the Gunnison. Near here one of the oldest archaeological sites in North America stands testament to that margin, to the landscape’s limits, to the reality that we live within.
And a few hundred feet above, on Roger’s Mesa they’ve been growing orchard fruit for more than 100 years. Keeping careful records. Marking what used to be. Here, today, some orchards are reporting a near total loss from that April freeze. Which should be normal in a season that is anything but.