Beach

Next to last day of my vacation and I’m still less than relaxed. There is a stupid tune playing as background of my thoughts and, no, I do not know the words, and all I can think about is that the guy on the sand to my right has muttonchops. Muttonchops! He looks like a victorian military man just returning from a stint in India. I haven’t met a beard I could relate to since the 70’s but why is this one so annoying to me?

I took myself for a very long walk on the ebb tide beach. I hoped to walk off the chatter and judgment in my brain. I padded through beery foam, cross-scored sand and clean sparkle. My feet pressed evidence of the moment in the sand. I followed an intermittent, crinkling sand-sun and on and on I talked in my head above the incessant tune.

A gull pirated some bait in a Ziploc. He looked determined to swallow it whole. I tried to make him drop it, but failed. Later a large Black Backed Gull made off with a guy’s cell phone in a Ziploc and many people converged to make him drop it.

I walked for two and a half miles before I turned into the steps of my shadow and started back. The darker, undulating me moved like a very relaxed woman. I knew better. I could have screamed in frustration at not being able to quiet myself amid so much magic. I remember being a young girl at the beach, awake and mellow and blissfully empty inside after a beach day. That’s what I was looking for on this vacation. Emotional agendas always fail but I can’t seem to remember that. My youthful self clearly had fewer goals for the beach. I'd have been better off if I'd had none.

I saw something wonderful last Saturday. All along the beach and out to sea I could discern flecks of bright yellow. Butterflies, it seemed, all fluttering north along the coast. They winked between the bathers and further out to sea. No one appeared to notice them. They were loosely aligned, not in any way close to each other, but always, all day, I could see a dozen or so delicately working their way north. Eventually one of our party found a knowledgeable park ranger who told us they were Cloud and Cloudless Sulphurs migrating to Argentina. Apparently they preferred an eccentric route, north by northwest and into the wind. I get it.

Later, my umbrella blew completely inside out and Mr. Muttonchops, whose name I will never know, was the only one to come immediately and help me get it down. I am so sick of myself.

Though I didn’t get any photos from my beach walk, and though I felt I was ranting and humming the whole time, a part of me must have been present because my mental images of that day are clearer than my photographs.

Regarding the lost money and the good will I hope is following in its wake, (see prior post 'Supply') I was notified this week that my proposal for a large job has been accepted and I have an inquiry for another one of some substance. So money goes, money comes, Money will surely go and come again. My faith and my capacity to rest, like the Sulphur Moths, flicker in heavy wind and often seem to be going in the wrong direction.

beardcriticandbutterflyobserver@chincoteague

Supply

I am not in a funk. I am not. I arrived on vacation to discover that the $500 cash I’d brought to cover expenses had vanished from my pocket book. Certainly it plagued me into a measured and careful search but, having come up empty, I am attempting to let it go. Thank God, I have a little savings account with $700 in it. My emergency fund is covering.

The shock of finding the money gone, however, was something to contend with. It sat in my chest, the sense of loss, of fear, of intrusion, but I didn’t want to let those feelings get their claws into me. It’s vacation time and I wish to float. Courting relaxation and peering beneath the water with my goggles when I feel myself bumped by these feelings, I’m satisfied to let them go if I can.

Money has never mattered to me anyway unless I just happened to need some at the moment. Over the years money worries have been a recurrent and unsettling emotional issue. Having a well-honed sense of financial responsibility and also an inability to be motivated by money I have spent my artist’s life in a financial boundary water between the continent of fiscal solidity and the land of making things for the joy of the making. Rarely do those shores come close to each other. The tension created by these apparently irreconcilable differences has given me a lot to be curious about.

I am certain that in my whole life the loss of $500 will have no real impact. What has been impacted is the sense of security I felt believing I was financially prepared for this vacation. What has been aroused is my need to assign a cause to the loss, feel injured knowing how hard I worked for that particular $500 and, in other words, believing things I think of as mine are mine and should remain mine unless I give them away. I want to feel I have edges and surfaces and territory. I want to feel I am managing my life well. Still, I know the whole concept of ownership will not sustain scrutiny.

Where does supply come from? Logic tells me it comes from hard and smart work. But when I am working on commission, which is how I make my money, I am in the world of intuition and inspiration and trust. I am working solely to make a vision come to life, no matter how much money is in the contract. The same me that trusts itself to the flow of the work has to pay the bills. Over the years I’ve come to believe in the operation of some 'force,' I won’t try to label it, that supports me in the midst of complete uncertainty. It is a gifting watery force of some kind that always comes through eventually to keep me supplied even though there are a lot of boulders in the stream.


Relaxing in the sand on a mat behind the beach chairs, drying shirt flapping above me, the ocean thrum and hiss, I was sinking just beneath the surface of my thoughts and floating there, feeling marginally peaceful when suddenly I ‘knew’ what had happened to the money. Someone I was fond of had taken it and there was absolutely nothing to be done about it. Anything said or done would make a ‘thing’ ugly and destructive and no good likely to come of it. If I’m going to make a thing, I prefer it be interesting, evocative of spirit or beautiful. It should at least be pretty. Opening up the question of someone’s morality is none of that and I won’t do it.

Well then, that’s okay. Emotionally I will pry my fingers off the cash. I’m almost to the place where I can wish a blessing upon it and everyone who comes in contact with it. My hope is to forget about it completely. So when I catch my brain running the satisfying fantasy of throttling the culprit until their sneaky, thieving impulses are truly arrested, until they are shocked, until they suffer a feeling of violation, I feel a bit exasperated with myself, and that doesn’t make anything good either. It seems I need a bit of help forgiving. I invoke the river of abundance that has supplied me always and ask it for help.

Now I will nap. Let my onboard computer update while I give the old worn synapses of automatic reaction a time to rest. Let the invisible flow of Gift carry me to a better place.

Secretly Shopping

Looking down I see the tent made in the soft, ratty quilt by my curly toes. The quilt is fourteen years old. I once wrapped my infant grandson in it. I meditate in its folds; roll up in it on the beach. It is in shreds and will not survive many more washings. If I were the mother of me, I’d start cutting it down in size and giving it back to me smaller each time by half, weaning me from its comfort so as to avoid the grief of losing it when it is no longer patchable. Idly, obliquely, almost surreptitiously from myself, I am shopping for its replacement. I will need time to break in the new one before this one is gone for good. The good mother in me tries to prepare me for change.

My sister weaned herself from solitude into a second marriage. The nuptials were just last week and were thoroughly ratified by the celebrants and the bride and groom are very happy. They waited a long time for this and they were thoroughly prepared. Still the bride finds herself fantasizing the disappearance of an unwanted cat that may be part of the package of coupledom. There are many ways to lose a cat, or a marriage, or a familiar old comfort; so many ways the current moment can feel unacceptably aligned with the unwanted .

My sisters and I are trying to make ‘home’ our sense of gratitude. As often as they appear we are cutting up our sorrows and disappointments and throwing the bits to the wind; remembering, and then indulging, thankfulness for this moment, the particular patch of the quilt we are living, this gossamer now.

Maybe the bride will embrace the groom’s ratty old cat, its trail of hairs, its distinctive smells, its habit of never ever going outside. Surely it has value if only as counter point to the perfection of her home. Then again, she could be secretly shopping for the cat’s ‘next’ home?

How do we stay present when ‘now’ requires so much acceptance of loss and annoyance, such prescient recognition of the value of unwanted gifts. Practice, I guess.

Why mourn in advance the loss of a favorite quilt when at this moment I am thankfully protected by its droopy old folds? It's
not gone yet.

The baby I wrapped in it yesterday, my heart expanding with love, is today a quixotic 13 year old boy, his expression of himself as impossible to hold onto as mercury. Every moment is both the first and last time for the opportunity it presents. Salinger said the only thing in the world of value is a dead cat because no one can put a price on it. Salinger aside, I think a dead cat might have a price to the right person but a live one, unwanted, might be worth more.

Daydreaming Of The Next House

Both my young niece and a middle aged friend were diagnosed with colon cancer a year ago and now they are both out of options, so say their doctors. I want to say something helpful or comforting. I want to help them find joy from where they are to where they are going, though maybe they have that already. I’m speechless and impotent with good intentions. All I have is the truth that unfettered malignant growth terrifies me; that I admire their courage. I want to say you are beautiful and unique and unforgettable. I want to say that being here and then not being here is inconceivable. There is no one like you, I want to say.

I am daydreaming again of my next house; how it will have three rooms and a bath: how it will be simple and small with odd room combinations.

Not my idea of heaven, but throw in friends and family and it’s the closest thing I can imagine to it on this earth. No one is interested in hearing about that, I think.

A fish could swim in today’s air (Friday) and all my intentions of weeding flew into a revised plan of napping in the air-conditioned house.

My sole achievement so far this weekend (Saturday) is to have fabricated a hummingbird feeder from a leaf shaped bottle of maple syrup, a red plastic CD cover and a thin plastic tube. Many of my solitary moments of fun involve a hot glue gun and an idea. Again, I can’t imagine anyone caring about that. Even the Hummingbirds don’t care so far; only the ants.

What we care about is joy in the moment and how to find it and how to find our way back to it because everything changes all the time. The hope of happiness in this life, in spite of suffering, brought me to faith and the practice of faith-from-the-heart. It brings me there again thousands of times a year. So how does that help anybody else? My mind can't even stay on the subject.

It’s been such a lush summer that I can’t keep up with the brush cutting and weeding so I’ve moved my attention from large impossible pursuits to small attainable ones. I decided to work with the growth, focus on the positive and make an edible and entertaining front porch; hence the hummingbird feeder. . .and the cherry tomatoes and summer squash growing out the bottom of hanging pots.

Someone gave me the gourd plant. I thought the gourds would be small red and decorative. Instead they are big watermelon-like gourds, kind of snaky-colored, impending, heavy. Not what I ever imagined or wanted. But I know the path to joy leads from where we are and what we’ve got, through the heart, to a gift. Joy is the gift. So I tie up the gourds and water them faithfully, as if I liked them.

I don’t know, when I confront death, if I will be able to sink into my heart with the pain that it brings, offer that pain up to God, wait expectantly to see it transformed into something better. I hope the experiences of a life time of faith will allow me to see another miracle and receive the gift of a few more moments of joy. But we don't know how we will be in the face death. And I don't know how to be with anyone else facing death.

What will the next house be? Will this nap, this rain, this summer, be my last? Can't I make just one more thing with the hands I am so used to using, to seeing before me.

What I have to give is just my bumbling lostness, my impotence and sometimes, when it is given to me, a joy-filled love flailing around in the circumstance of the day; an irrational, potent hope. The dying remind us of our need for it. That is their exquisite, fragile, virulent gift to us.

Small

Someone told me once that small may not be good but big is always bad. I don't know who originally said it but I’ve never forgotten it.

You all may deserve these soulless barns of commerce like Wal-Mart but I don’t. I have not abandoned Millers Grocery Store in order to save 10 cents on four rolls of paper towels. The best small grocery store in the world, they even carry organic and gluten free products now. I was faithful to Manchester Pharmacy, local, independent, where if prescriptions were a little higher, it was worth it. I could sit at the counter while waiting for pills, and for the price of medication and lunch, I could get a dose of mothering thrown in for free. It made my pills work better. Emma would talk to you while she made your grilled cheese, tomato and mustard sandwich just the way you liked it. I’m talking real milkshakes too. CVS took out the counter so there would be more room to sell cheap plastic stuff. Then they moved too. The building is now unoccupied.
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Red with exertion and frustration I used to trail into the local hardware store, dragging my weed whacker behind me, and announce that the **^!*##! thing wouldn’t start again and they would address the issue. With that long and pitying look I loved so well, Pat would hoist it into the back room, slap on a 59 cent part, start it, show me how to start it and add $.59 to my bill. Gone, rolled over by Wal-Mart. Oh, how I miss you Manchester Supply! There’s a Curves there now, if you’re interested.

The alcoholics in town used to be able to monitor their addiction gracefully with a stop at the drugstore for a ‘miniature’ several times a day. Now they have to go into the liquor store on the corner to do that and there’s just no dissembling possible. Don’t get me wrong. I love the local liquor store too. The East Indians who run it are on top of things and always keep a few bottles of Freixenet Extra Dry cold for me. But when Doc had liquor at the Manchester Pharmacy even members of the Worship Team at the Assembly of God could buy alcohol in town. They can't take a chance being seen in the local liquor store. I’m sure some of them are using a lot more gas these days.

The Manchester Auto Parts still sells full serve gas although now there’s a Sheetz as well. So you have a choice. You can pull next to the pumps at MAP, get full serve, tell the attendant to put it on your bill and sail off again, paying, as of today, $3.85.99 per gallon, or you can go to Sheetz, pump your own smelly gas, deal with the machines that are incomprehensible, truck yourself inside through rain, snow or hot melting asphalt, and pay 2 cents more per gallon for the privilege.

Of course those of us who love MAP realize that Doug takes Saturday night and Sunday off and they get their gas on Friday. If you’re cruising through town on Sunday and want gas, it’s Sheetz for you. Maybe while you’re inside you’ll feel like standing in line to slide your finger over the greasy public touch screen and order a sandwich. You can eat it in the car if you're still hungry after that.

I heard last week that Kopps Lumber has just closed. Why, God? Why do bad things happen to great small businesses? I was sick. They were just 3 miles away down a country road from me and they delivered for free. They had been there forever. Where will those talented cabinet makers go to find work? Where will I go when I need a board cut in an odd shape that won't fit in the back of my Legacy? Where will I get a new board made for my dining room table? Nowhere good. Nowhere close. Nowhere I want to shop

You would think when more people move into an area it would follow that soon there would be more places to shop and more variety to choose from. But instead, what a larger population does is make prey for big business. When they move in, the commercial soul of the area dies.

The only good change we've had lately is the opening of a small Mexican Food Shop, Tienda La Jarochita. Not middle class, tarted up 'quaint' but true quaint, as you can see. I am delighted to be able to buy South American food from South Americans. This lovely seniorita behind the counter was happy to help me.

I had my most recent meltdown in Wal-Mart on Friday. It was my daughter’s birthday and I was compiling a book of photos of her life for her. I spent over an hour at a machine waiting to make copies and then making copies. When I went to pay, the clerk confiscated all but about a half dozen of them. Fear of lawsuits over copyright laws, I deduced . You can’t get a copy of your kid’s 1st grade school picture even when your kid is 39 years old. Big stores, big lawsuits, big fears and the quest for ‘big’ savings have given us a life of walking where we don’t want to walk, dealing with people who do not want to deal with us and vistas that have been obstructed by ugliness. Why can't we have the self-control to ignore them to death as they do us?

Shop on-line if you’re strapped for cash. Do without the junk. Support real businesses where real people are earning their living, not corporations. Big is not your friend. Big is not even really cheap when you consider what constant anonymity does to your psyche, what obfuscation of issues and waiting in lines does to your guts, what buying from people who have absolutely no interest in your consumer satisfaction does to your quality of life. Big is bad.

In Manchester, we still have the Vac and Sew repair shop. They fix vacuum cleaners and sewing machines. Can you believe it? We still have Gino’s barber shop. He has a real barber pole. You can find a jeweler and clockmaker. We still have beautiful Manchester Bank (now BBT) where the personnel have been there a long time and will cheerfully help you figure out your bank balance if you are mathematically challenged. We still have the Dutch Corner Restaurant. Come back Family Pharmacy. Come back Manchester Supply. Come back Kopps. The four-way clock on top of the firehouse has just been repaired. But time for sane living is running out.

Trying On Wealth

The word ‘July’ makes jewels in my mind. There is the green, gold and red of first vegetables. There is the deep glow of roadside berries catching shafts of sun. The big pearl moon floats in the kindest air and you can be comfortable lying around looking at it for hours. You can make music or listen to music by starlight. Hundreds of fireflies spark up the dark valley.

There for the taking are a few moments as good as the best moments of childhood if we want to snatch them for ourselves.

Friday evening, end of the week, Ray and I were so tired we thought we couldn’t move. If we hadn’t been really really hungry and too tired to cook we would probably have fallen asleep on the sofa watching Coneheads for the fifth time. Instead we threw ourselves in the car, opened the sunroof and all the windows and went in search of nourishment. The end-of-day sun trickled gold through the car and the green bosomy fields rolled by with glimpses from time to time of blue mountains in the distance. The radio was playing old rock and roll and the car hugged the curves like water in a spinning bucket.

Coming home there was a sheer red moon floating up in a haze. We drove just a little fast through the reservoir and kept time to the music. He smoked a Swisher Sweet and my hair was flying in my face, both expressions of the sudden and surprising joy we were feeling. The words to a song were floating through my head. ‘Whatever happened to Saturday night. Finding a sweetheart and holding her tight. She said tell me, tell me, was I all right. What ever happened to Saturday night.’

Saturday night I hosted the monthly ‘Sing.’ At one point I slipped away from the music and sought the quiet of the porch swing. Will and Daphne were there. Is there anything more delicious than the sound of a creaking porch swing, the laconic intermittent remarks of old friends? Terrance brought a drum out and quietly drummed up the moon.

Ray told me once he thinks we are swimming in miracles all the time. How could you not love a man capable of a remark like that? But I think it’s more like we’re flying through miracles focused on all the wrong things most of our time.

I have a headache, a stiff neck and a painful cut thumb. I have $1.47 bank balance. Arthritis is making me walk funny. I need to spray for bugs and the car needs rear shocks. The roof leaks in five places but I think I’m having the summer of my life. I’m pretty sure we can’t always tell when we are in the middle of the best of our own times. So for the rest of July I’m looking for the edge of beauty in the ordinary and I am trying on wealth. I’m sucking it up with the butter on sweet corn. I’m letting it dazzle me from the reflecting wings of bugs.

Spirit Storehouse: water element

I sank into my recliner this Sunday evening properly tired from two days of mowing, weeding and cleaning, like the good granddaughter of a farmer that I am.

I don’t attend church these days but I wandered for an hour this morning in prayer and meditation. I don’t know how my Banka would have viewed that. I do know his favorite hymn was Sweet Hour of Prayer. As a teenager I would sing it, examining the words, searching for clues about Banka’s relationship with God. I could identify with a lot of it; ‘Sweet hour of prayer that calls me from a world of care. . .’ I solemnly empathized with every image until I came to the phrase ‘and shout while passing through the air, farewell, farewell sweet hour of prayer.’ The picture it evoked of my wrinkled, skinny grandfather with his huge ears that stuck out from the sides of his head like side view mirrors, flying through the air, like maybe on a rope swing, shouting a regretful good bye to his prayer time, always undid my better self.

Images from the weekend come to mind and I realize I’m visualizing them with unusual clarity; two evenings of sitting with friends on darkening patios, watching stars and the half moon and fire flies. A train goes by. The engineer returns our wave as he glides past and beyond our view. Dan’s profile is tall and elegant as he describes a new kind of insulating cinder block. I’m intrigued. Charlie describes his art of poured paint, his arms gesturing. John beams in his ‘other #1 Uncle’ tee shirt, Judy and Garey met on line. He visualized her and met her the next day. Tiny Lisa is expansive with her friends. Chuck, a world traveler, dreads flying to Indiana the next day.

Paul dreams of creating a new musical instrument. Ray thinks we should start production of Alaskan oil. He’s in love with his new series S 1994 BMW. Laura has her long hair up out of the heat. She knows the lyrics to all the songs we can remember and her laugh is music too.

Jenny, my daughter, called to say she’d seen a real dust bunny. A little rabbit had gotten into the house and taken shelter behind the sofa. Rescued, he had cobwebs between his ears, and tufts of hair and dust festooning him. He was released no worse for wear.

It’s going to storm. I welcome the water in a way that people with a leak in the roof usually do not.

On Thursday my acupuncturist needled the points for Spirit Storehouse on my chest. That point, say the professionals, helps balance the water element within us. I don’t know. I walked in there like an old car to a dealer who has promised $1000 trade-in for any car you can drive to the lot. I walked out of there a well-tuned Mercedes. Or think of a muddled and raging sea after being calmed by Christ or the lifting of a friend who was sinking beneath the waves because his terror overcame his faith. Think of reservoirs filling up with clean rain water.

I had been anxious and numb as I lay down on the treatment table. Now look. I am filled up with gratitude for friends. My kitchen sparkles. My wood stove is polished up for the fall season. I have vacuumed, weeded, laundered and mowed. I have smiled with friends and remembered my dear grandfather. My daughter, that good girl, called me and made me laugh. I feel supported. I feel rich and aware and full of hope.

I gathered this bounty from the road side during my walking meditation. I’m passing it on to you.

I Keep Looking

I keep looking, trying to see exactly where the teeth go in. It’s somewhere around the spine but not exactly in the middle. You can tell because the little furry body hangs lop-sided out of the cat’s mouth, more weight toward the tail end.

The question of where on the chipmunk’s spine Floyd clamps down has come to mind because of how his victims move when he releases them. It is always the same; a series of small awkward arcing hops. Are their spines broken? I don’t think so, at least not until he’s ready to kill them, else how could they hop at all? Maybe sprained, I think, bruised, fluids rushing to the area, pain, adrenalin, heart pounding, then miraculous release and another tiny shot at freedom, while the cat lies in the grass, careless, almost bored, letting the chipmunk arc again in broken little hops toward cover. Don’t tell me animals only kill to eat.

This chipmunk made it to a large flower pot on wheels and crawled into the space underneath. Floyd, alert now, crouches, embracing the area beneath it, batting with his right paw, then left and right, swift as a boxer working out, until he’s rousted the critter and caught it again.

I see this chipmunk’s eye scanning for options even as he is carried again to the center of the yard for possible execution. Another stay, another desperate break for cover, flattening under grass borders, resting a second or two behind a car tire and then, against all odds, the wood pile and safety.

I may find him there in a couple of days, dead of heart failure or injuries. He may crawl off to his borough and die there. But maybe not. Maybe he’ll live and produce legions of cat-defying offspring.

There is a reign of terror on my front porch that leaves body parts daily. I’ve learned to live with it. I no longer intervene. Watch a cat eat a fresh kill. His pupils are dilated to the outer edge of his irises in pleasure and receptivity. The high, like a heroin fix, like someone who’s been starving. But I feed my cats every morning. They are far from starved.

Once in awhile they leave a gift for me, the alpha cat, who loves them and loves the creatures they kill and who is looking for the bright shining heart at the center of things in this life. I can almost see that edge. But it is not in the pain, or pleasure. It is not in the fact that reality is layered or deep. I do not know if the love is anywhere, except in me. I don't even really know that.

Between Time

The grandfather clock is sounding ten 2-note bongs. My ear plucks the sound through my general mental chatter and I note the time. I wouldn’t have to. When I don’t want to hear it, I don’t. That’s one of the beauteous developments that come from living with wind-up clocks.

It is speculated by mathematicians and physicists that time is the fourth dimension of what could conceivably be as many as eleven aspects or permutations of reality. I have no trouble imagining time as a stretchy toy in one metaphoric hand of God. God’s imagined hands, however many there are, may play with time but God’s heart is always personal love now, an incomprehensible aspect of reality more real than real to me though often mysteriously invisible in time, or for a time.

Now the second clock, the one that really was my grandfather’s, the clock where Dad over-painted the gold because Mom thought it looked trashy, is striking 10. I note that too. I have a sense now of what time it is. It’s tenish.

It is quite possible to keep both clocks accurate but you’d have to fine tune them often, making minute adjustments to the pendulum, lengthening or shortening it in it’s arc thus slowing or speeding up the bites of time eaten by that particular clock. I tired of this fussiness many years ago and have settled for lining both clocks up with Eastern Standard once a week or whenever I really need accuracy, like New Year’s Eve, when I’m trying to coral my rowdy friends into a unified display that will at least marginally accompany the shotgun blasts and fireworks of my neighbors. When you want co-ordination, accurate timing is mandatory. When you just want to be at work on time the fast clock will let you know you might want to think about getting in the car. No hurry. The second one hasn’t even bonged yet.

If you are vacuuming or daydreaming during the first one, chances are you’ll catch the second. If you’re napping and don’t want to sleep past the hour, the first one will awaken you and the second one will inform you while you lie there remembering your dreams. Or you can take a cat nap between the first and second one and feel you’ve lost nothing.

I like that my time is independent of batteries, cables, radio waves, computer chips and electricity. My clocks need only me, their winder, to notice when they’re sounding tired and give them an invigorating rewind. I like the relationship.

In this house you always know about what time it is regardless of power outages. And I appreciate the fact that neither clock is absolutely accurate, reminding me always that I’m on my time, for better or worse.

Contrast that with the $9.99 digital wrist watch I bought last year from Wal-Mart. The directions were microscopic, complex and inaccurate. I spent a year of my life trying to form a relationship with that watch and ended up murdering it when my part of the world shifted to daylight savings time this spring. I gave two hours of my life that I will never get back again, plus the one we all lost to ‘springing forward,’ attempting to make the appropriate adjustment to my timepiece. I put it on the work bench and smashed it repeatedly with a hammer. Damn its unlabeled button one, button two, button three. I hammered it into primordial dust, into cosmic soup, and with any luck at all, into another dimension where I will never never never have to go. I was very far away from love in my heart at that time.

Mary / Martha

I’ve got an empty plate today; a bite or two of leftovers but nothing that adds up to a meal. I’m awaiting divine magnification of my supply. I’m looking through the scraps for meaning. I’m avoiding personal industry. It’s Sunday, after all.

The lushest year with all the rain, the longest day, yesterday, so much need for accomplishment, so little interest I feel in moving my body. I keep finding myself staring into the layers of clouds. If I gaze into them deeply enough, a switch will be flipped inside me and all the bits will come together with meaning. The tension in my chest will subside, or so it feels.

On the Mary/Martha scale of how we attend to life, I’ve always tipped a bit toward the Mary side. As I’ve grown older, in spite of all the obvious need for activity, I place increased weight on the Mary way. What I wish I could do is hire a flotilla of Martha’s. Then all would be perfect. My plate would be full in every way.

The raccoon stole my heavy glass pie plate from the front porch. It’s the cat’s dish and the raccoon checks it twice a day for leftovers. Yesterday morning I discovered it all the way across the lawn by the edge of the hill and I perceived her intention. Bemused, but not forward thinking, I simply brought it back to its accustomed station. I should have siliconed it to the concrete. Today it’s gone.

I picture her sly, intrepid, mothering little body dragging that dish home to her babies, putting it in place, staring at it expectantly from time to time, waiting for the magic. I imagine her disgust and disappointment when it remained stolidly empty. She was set to have a dreamy risk-free summer playing with the kids, getting out of the business of nursing, everybody snacking when they felt like it. It was a stellar plan but she was operating on a flawed premise.

I may well be also. I gather flowers from the overgrown garden where they’ve burst magnificently above the pigweed in spite of my total neglect. I place them on the kitchen table where I can feast on them tomorrow when it will be Monday; a long solstice Monday where I’ll have to get back to the business of business and content my Maryish heart, my raccoon heart, with brief glimpses of beauty while I forage for food.

How Do You Know When It’s Time To Quit?

It took me 12 years to make this quilt. The plan for it clarified before me like road in a fog, just enough vision for the next moment or two. The embroidered grid flowed stitch at time from light to dark, intensity to pallor. The plan I was setting up for myself seemed overwhelming but I just kept going. I wanted to see the finished product.

Last year, I realized the quilt was complete. I still have border squares which can take some quilting and I’ve done a few, but I consider them optional. If a symbol becomes meaningful to me, I add it, but I do not assume I’ll finish every last square. The next owner may want to do that.

It is the quilt that reminds me that I’ve never been afraid of long term projects. I take comfort in that when I’m tempted to quit on my 8 acres before I’ve been able to finish creating my vision for it.

Overwhelmed. It is easy for me to sink in June beneath the tidal wave of green arching over me. Multiflora Rose, Oriental Bittersweet and Ailanthus want to conquer all other species of plant life on this hill, or so it would appear. Vines spread up, roots writhe both down and laterally under the soil. From above and below, the invasive exotics strike and smother the native plants and altogether with the oak and sassafras, dogwood and cedar, they rise up to block the view from the top.

The quilt was art by addition. Sculpting the view from my porch is a project in subtraction where nature keeps coming in and adding back in what I have purposely deleted. Nothing opposed me in quilting. To my sorrow and confusion, my home project, has put me at loggerheads with nature. No one wins that war. Money and man-power can create an uneasy truce.

I’ve employed guys with chain saws, guys with industrial strength brush killer, guys with hand tools. I’ve gotten estimates from guys with back hoes and bulldozers. I’ve consulted burn specialists. But in the end, it pretty much boils down to what I can do with a pair of loppers and a small battery powered chain saw. My will, moving my tendinitis ridden elbows, my arthritic spine, inspired by a vision.

Is there any virtue in taking on the impossible in service of maintaining one’s home view? If my passion were to feed the hungry or alleviate the pain of advanced illness or if I had some way to offer hope to the economically disenfranchised then yes. But spending oneself for a love affair with one’s home is a more questionable life use of personal resources, to my way of thinking. Yet I can not let go; can not envision myself anywhere else, can not imagine abandoning this project before I can glimpse its completion.

At the top of this blog is a picture taken from the front porch in 1993. At the bottom is the same view today. In the photo to the side is a typical view of the insurgent forces.

From experience I’ve learned that Ailanthus stumps must be painted with full strength brush killer if you want to avoid cutting down the same tree forever. Even so, it can produce whole communities of relatives.

I was warned by a farmer friend of mine to cut down the female Ailanthus that bloomed beside the house 30 years ago. I was young and stupid and I thought its blooms were pretty. He warned me it would take over the property. I think of him as I pluck baby Ailanthus trees from the hedge, the driveway and the ice cube trays.

I was delighted with the Bittersweet when I saw the first berries one long ago autumn. I had no idea I was not looking at American Bittersweet but a species from abroad which could turn a hillside into a wasteland, bringing down oaks. I got distracted for 10 years or so with other concerns and when I next gave Bittersweet my attention, it had formed a killing shroud over every sumac, maple, oak, birch, cedar and sycamore.

A hopeless war insidiously becomes a way of life. After hope of winning has been exhausted there are only acts of principle, small forays against tyranny. The complicity of those with compatible agendas. I wield my nippers because it's the right thing to do. I subtly favor the native species to even the balance of power. I consider the possibility of a companion goat. And I wait to know the moment when it is time for me to surrender the battle to another.

Receptivity Versus Aggression

The perfumes of June on this hillside are staggering, arresting, compelling. Rose and honey are layered in the air and there’s a base note of something very spicy that keeps the mix from cloying. It’s surround-smell. It’s a presence I anticipate and revel in every year. Luca Turin himself could not have created a better perfume than this.

Last night the heat wave broke with a thunder storm. It blew out the electricity so Ray and I dragged the two new 0-gravity lawn chairs onto the covered porch and let our environment embrace us. It was his idea. We sipped champagne, made peace over our last political debate and tried to guess at the content of the air. It was a theatre of the sensual. Lightning illuminated cloud formations. Thunder kept us alert. The temperature dropped.

When hail started jumping in the lawn, he found a nice one and placed it in my hand. Squashed and round it looked like beach glass, flattened and smoothed by the forces through which it had traveled to reach us; it looked like we both feel when we try to talk politics. I ate it. It tasted clean and good.

Adjusting to the lack of light and electricity we heated lasagna on the top of the gas stove and watched The Bucket List on my new laptop. After he left I went back out to the porch wrapped in my old quilt and followed the light show of the receding storm.

From the darkness a raccoon emerged to look for edibles the cats might have left behind. She did not recognize my blanketed shape in the recliner as human and so circled me, pausing six inches from my wrapped feet to check out this dark mountain of me she had not noticed before on her patrols.

My respect for her wildness warred with my pleasure at getting such a very close look. Again I was happy I’ve resisted the urge to get a dog. I was glad that my very dear, very conservative, friend was not there with his belief that all raccoons have rabies and should be shot on sight. This one had babies, not rabies.

The best front porch sitting requires receptivity hard to achieve with a protector beside you. Yet this same protector created our entire evening with his idea of storm watching, his generosity with hail. I swallow the paradox. It tastes clean and good.

Neo-Shaker Values

We lay in bed in our first home. He was holding his left arm crooked, forearm straight up, palm bent back and opened upward as if he were holding a crystal ball or perhaps a great sandwich he’d built and was admiring from all sides before consuming.

I peered into his empty palm. “What do you have there?” I asked.
He rotated it toward me. “This is the front door,” he said. We were talking about the house we would build.

“The ground will come here on this side,” he lowered and rotated the hand again for my inspection, “and here on this side. There will be a swale here behind the house” he gestured with the other hand, “and the grass will come straight up over the roof.”

I could begin to see it. That was the late 70’s. Copies of Mother Earth News could be found by our couch, in the bathroom and under the bed. We were going to have a house with a grass roof. Yippee!

We had no architect or contractor. We had one summer to get something under roof that we could live in. We had $22,000 and after the long driveway was bull-dozed and graveled, the well drilled and the site leveled, we had $14,000 left to build a home.

The first summer we got under cover and divided the space into two small rooms for sleeping and the rest we left open as combined living, dining and kitchen. We made the ceiling 12 feet at center and cut oaks for support posts. The floor was concrete and still is. Windows and cabinets came from an assortment of buildings being demolished. I painted them to match and put on new hardware.

We built an outhouse of rough sawed wood. The inside was painted white and I made a sunburst stained glass window for it that splashed afternoon rays around the interior with the full spectrum of colors. It was actually a rather dazzling place to be; with its odd assortment of olfactory, kinesthetic and visual opportunities. It was a good place to ponder paradox. Especially in the warmer months.

The second summer we doubled the size of the house adding a bathroom, large multi-purpose room, small walk-in closet and laundry-tool room. A wide hallway gave access from one large room to the other. Eventually I built an carved glass partition between the two.

We did not need a lot of space but we wanted a spacious feeling. I set up the flow of rooms and window placement so you could see through the entire house north-east to southwest. Outside and inside seem all in the same space because of the many windows on three sides and the lack of neighbors. We also added five skylights.

I notice and enjoy the creative energy that seems to flow in architectural spaces that are not designed to a particular style. I’m also most comfortable without a lot of self-conscious artiness around me.

Our house was not meant to look eccentric. It was created in response to its setting. It was created in gratitude. It was created with great frugality. I wanted it to please without impressing. Maybe you could say it was built with Shaker values but not in typical Shaker style. I don’t know. I’m too close to it. I do know that the scriptural imperative from Colossians 3:23 was, and is, always in my heart as I work. “And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men;” And though I’m quoting scripture here, I do not mean to be stating anything about my own spiritual values. There is something about this hill that just draws that kind of feeling out of the heart.

Share Without Being Over-run

All creatures have at least minimal requirements for their home. Any of us, however, are capable of missing the big picture in our push to make ourselves comfy. Sometimes our homes shelter us. Sometimes they lie in the path of a tsunami.

I erected two bluebird boxes on posts in 1987 with the help of my friend Ed. One I placed where I could watch it from the porch. It faces south. The other I put up behind the house near some fruit trees and I oriented it east, where I could see it from my hammock.

Every year since then I have watched bluebirds sit on the south facing house. They go in, they go out. Male and female confer about it, but ultimately, in spite of my agenda for easy observation, they build in the home with the view to the east and the other box becomes a battling ground for diverse species. Wrens usually win. Despite a few calamities caused by snakes or rival birds, the eastern box has fledged maybe as many as 50 families since the 80’s. The south one, zero. If you want to see bluebirds, you have to get with their program.

I am an artist. That’s how I've made my living for 30 years. Last Wednesday I went up to my studio to pack up for an installation and I saw that a Carolina wren had constructed a charming tunnel nest of leaves and moss in behind my inks. She had half-raised a family since I'd been in that room. I fastened the door open for her easy access and she continued to fly in and out with food while I loaded the car. I looked just once at the babies. Five fierce little heads waved inside with gaping mouths.

I knew something was wrong the second I walked in there today. No cheeping. No hopping mad mother. At first I thought squirrels, with whom I also battle for control of my studio, had killed them. Then I thought with trepidation of snakes. When I found five little starved bodies deep inside the cavity I realized what giant calamity had probably befallen them. I was the most likely source of their devastation. They made an unfortunate choice of real estate. It could happen to anyone.

Earthquake, fire, toxic soil, tornado, aggressive neighbors, the list of potential threats to what we view as 'our property' is very long.

I was sick over this unnecessary loss of life. I would have shared my space with these birds until they fledged.

I'm less keen on sharing studio space with squirrels but after years of struggle I have to admit that building my shop under a grove of nut trees was maybe a bit myopic and, again, all about me.

How to share without being over-run; an unanswerable question on a large or small scale. All solutions seem to involve either violence or some kind of myopia. I prefer to weigh that question day to day rather than opting for any kind of 'ultimate solution.' I try to make decisions on a case by case basis. This is not an entirely comfortable position for me but it does leave room for possibilities.

Maple Appreciation Day

I often work straight through Memorial Day, Labor Day and the Fourth of July. There is always so much to be done.

I prefer my holidays to mark stellar moments of weather and circumstance rather than the sacrifice of veterans or the birth of our nation, both of which have my gratitude all year round.

There are a few annual holidays that can not be marked in advance on the calendar. You have to be ready to act when they show up. Maple Appreciation Day is my favorite.

One Day in late May or early June I will wake up to air of such transparency that the sun illuminates every leaf, every curl of bark. Dark shadows are thrown by the trees. Breezes are light, just tickling the hairs on your arm. The maple tree which shelters my hammock is in full leaf and all prior plans must be layed aside.

Maple Appreciation Day is celebrated with all your senses and all your need to re-create. The accoutrement of the day are blankets, good novel, reading glasses, beverage of choice, snacks, binoculars, bird identification book, pillows and, of course, a double wide well placed hammock. The attitude is one of receptivity and gratitude. I do no work on this day, though sometimes I am inspired to by what I see or think about.

Animals do not register the occupant of a hammock as human and will often come quite close. You might be thumped from a nap, and look up to see that a cat-bird has landed on the suspension chain and he's drawn a bead on you with his curious eye. You are close enough to see without optical aids and admire the rusty patch of feathers under his tail when he flies . He or she, they look alike.

Mostly there is the liquid light of the day illuminating layer upon layer of the green leaves alive and overarching you.

I swing like a baby in a cradle. I dream and think about my dreams. The garden, the fields, the clouds soak into me and I let them live behind my eyes. Sun sparks through gaps between leaves and bless me in my vulnerability.

This is the holiday that fills me up to the brim and makes sense of all the mowing, pruning, mulching I will do over the summer. This is the day where I can watch blue birds swoop down for food and back to feed their babies in a rhythm that will remind me to be gentle when I mow around their home. Today I might see the fox with her twins.

Face-off With May

Red may be the color of danger and sacrifice, but green is the color of aggression. Green wants to live. It is our sanctuary, our breath, and we will all be buried under it some day.

I hate spring. That’s an unpopular position and I don’t really know anyone who shares it with me.

April is beautiful enough. The greening grass, the trees with their first blush of red are lovely if you didn’t know what they were all up to. But eventually you understand that each bud is a little fist-faced birth pushing toward life. Everything’s sap is rising but mine. And just maintaining the view, keeping the long driveway passable, battling the invasive exotics and ousting poison ivy from the most traveled pathways, is overwhelming to me in scope. There is a new crop of borer bees in the soffit every spring and I must deal with them or they will be thumping me in the head and making pumice out of the porch ceiling until it one day falls on my head.

Weeds in the garden and a winter’s worth of windfall sticks and limbs have to be pulled or picked and heaved away. There is the issue of nursing along a 20-year-old much abused lawn tractor and encouraging it to take on another season of rampant growth and radically uneven terrain. If it can, I can, I think to myself.

Bless its heart, it started right off this year. The slogan ‘nothing runs like a Deere’ is the only advertising hyperbole that I’ve ever found true. I did rather impress myself with a starting technique that requires a great deal of positive energy and at least five of my two hands. There is a short somewhere in the wires behind the ignition switch so sometimes you turn the key and nothing happens. In that event you have to open the hood and gently move the wires with your left hand while turning the key with the right. While the motor is trying to turn over, you have to also move the choke forward all the way then back down, let it rest 5 seconds then turn the key and move the choke forward again until the engine catches and then quickly pull it back down to running position. Oh, and for the first start in the spring, to give yourself the best odds of success, you have to spray carburetor dryer into the top at exactly the same time as you turn the key, jiggle the wires, move the choke. It sounds impossible and it almost is, so I feel gloriously competent, and grateful, when it works. This year it worked.

I cranked up the compressor and put air in the tires, blew off the mower deck, then rode like an Indian princess being carried aloft by her servants in procession to her wedding. First stop was the front porch to do the spring tune-up. I’m an American. When we’re up against great odds, we love our machines.

I’m a nature loving, tree hugging American. I love the birds, raccoons, ground hogs, foxes, bunnies, possums and chipmunks that share this hill with me. I love the view from the house. And the green inferno that wants to rise like a tidal wave to block my view of the horizon must be subdued. It was reluctantly that I made friends with the tractor and things like brush killer and rodent poison. But I can't allow rodents, snakes or bugs in the house. I've tried it. It doesn't work. And I want to see out.

Since the 70’s I’ve made a lot of compromises. Every truce is uneasy. The assaults of nature on all my boundaries are blessed. And I, armed only with an old tractor and some hand tools, face-off with May, with about as much chance as Don Quixote had against the windmill giants; my expectations about as realistic. Fussy May with its pastels, its pollen ridden air and its unbridled passion-riddled growth is the giantess. I’m just one sneezing little woman, with an old lawn tractor, a pair of nippers, and an electric weed whacker. I can’t hope to win. I know which side will truly draw the blood. Deep down, I must have been born for war.

A Matter of Layers and Depths

When I wake up in the summer bedroom I see back-lit red geraniums, their deep green leaves like paws stretching up. I see a panorama of tree tops and hillside and other too aggressive green growing things that I try not to think about before my second cup of coffee.

My husband and I cobbled the bones of this house together in two summers. We used cinder blocks and stuff we could buy for practically nothing at auctions or cut down out of the woods. If a house can have a soul, this one does.

Maybe a building can earn a soul by sheltering its inhabitants kindly in spite of disasters, or maybe it has to be blessed from the beginning. Maybe being conceived and built by amateurs and having taken shape very slowly in response to what nature was already doing so well, it grew an indefinable essence in excess of it’s architecture and accoutrement. If you were to name it’s style you might call it Neo-Tudor Hacienda, or Villa Mother Earth News or Ode to the Perpetually Unfinished. I’ll bet in the years I’ve been here at least 50 people have walked in the door and said, “If you ever decide to sell this place, call me.” They didn’t know what it was about the place that they loved. There is a philosophy behind it’s creation but I’ve neither examined nor wavered from in all these years.

Where is the value in this home that I and others respond to? The view is both far reaching and private, but not all that unusual for this area. Having virtually no disposable income, I’ve not been able to finish either interior or exterior and just basic maintenance is a question of fits and starts and the cause of frequent despair. I suspect my home’s value to me and others is a matter of layers and depth and I love it the way you might just adore a homely man or woman whose intelligence and empathy captivate your desire.

I am in the grips of a long term affair with a piece of real-estate. Light and gravity and weather have aged us both and encouraged me to ponder the mysteries of beauty and wealth, in other words ‘value.’ My battles here have created, as much as expressed, my aesthetics and my ethics of ownership and sense of who I am and who I will be when I’m done here.

I nearly fell over my work boots backing up the hill.

“Here?” he asked.

“No, not quite. A little higher.”

“Here?” he called from below, moving toward me through honeysuckle as I backed up. We were getting further and further from the road-side building site his practical nature was opting for. I’d been backing up hill for 20 minutes.

“Here,” I said.

He caught up with me and turned to look.“You’re sure?” he asked. But we both knew the answer. That was the late 1978.

Here I am in 2008. For three decades I’ve been in this spot. For 25 years I’ve been the sole human observer. Here I have come to feel awe for the interplay of nature, entropy, vision and weather. Though I don't yet know exactly what that means, it is through this blog that I intend to examine it.