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Done.  Period.  $200.00   I like how things translate.  These windows that have been a big pain in the butt to me translate to paying Kelly's man to help me build better Buck Shelter for Gideon and Sunny Ray and maybe some left in case it turns out i might need another cord of wood.  i like very much how money becomes translated immediately into Stuff.  Needed stuff.  Cash=Stuff.    In this case,  paying Kelly's man to help me means paying Kelly's man to sustain their own world there,  which includes Magic and Barbara.  Buying a second cord of wood means giving Window money to Evan,  the young Wood Guy who has a young son and is making his family's  way in this world.  It never would have occured to me to ask $200 for these windows.  It was offered as a fair price.  And i have learned to take a fair price and then send this fair price Out.  So.  Ok.  really OK and DONE!

Whew.

F

 

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nothing is Right here yet,  but it's what i saw this morning.  

I received  Eating Stone yesterday.  Ellen Meloy's final words.  All i have managed is the prologue.  I have read it i don't know how many times.

"On one of my last winter days with the desert bighorns,  they no longer kept me out of their world.  With motions I had come to know as an exquisite unison of liturgy and physics, they closed the distance between us and herded me toward a threshold, a place best described as a hairsbreadth.

Their slender legs rose like smoke from stone, curving into pale rumps.  The rump carried all the muscle, the force that was capable of pushing their stocky bodies up a sheer cliff  with nothing beneath their hoves but air and a foot hold barely larger than my lower lip.  This is what you will find at the center of the desert bighorn: dry, verticle  space.  

Their haunches held but small tensions now.  The sheep stood about like mildly bored ballerinas.  Black hooves found cusps of white snow.  Breath condensed in milky wraiths.  The wind did not matter to them.  They moved serenely among themselves, brushing flanks warm with blood,  weaving me toward that breach of transmutation.

Something in their amber eyes told me that I was about to change,  to be given a language without tongues.  I wanted to leap into that wild side…their side…then bring back their startling news from the other than human world.  But I was weighted with a wobbly confusion about how to see,  how to behave.

After so many days among the bighorns,  in the end it seemed best to quiet the mind and act like a rock.  I am simply here.  I thought, here at the periphery of several hundred pounds of Ovis with lovely rumps and eyelashes as delicate as fish bones.

I then became the first rock in history to be overcome with feeling, a serene aching aimed at nothing in particular, only a cobalt sky with no edge but winter's cold and a river rimmed with ice and a band of rare mammals, whose own biology and history could have lost them to the world"

Ellen Meloy   Eating Stone.

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28 responses to “today”

  1. Dana Avatar

    The face on your cloth is deeply searchingly beautiful. I await the unfolding.
    Congratulations on the completion of the windows and the good that will come of your effort.
    Ellen Meloy. Wow. On my list for sure.

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  2. Stephanie Avatar
    Stephanie

    The windows look great! I love the arms reaching out and up to the bright bits of color in the sky.

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  3. handstories Avatar

    The windows, and all that they mean are wonderful. I like that solid understanding of worth, too. & it may not be Right to you yet, but there is glorious-ness in your new cloth.

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  4. Marti Avatar
    Marti

    Tossing the confetti of life into the air and exulting in the fact that life is filled with color, with small moments, with large intentions, with confusion, with sadness, and with the quiet joy that comes from understanding that it all, is the whole of it.

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  5. Marti Avatar
    Marti

    My comments refer to the newly pinned cloth.

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  6. Michelle in NYC Avatar

    Oh my–first the end of the great task and the re-purposing of it’s payment for the good of many! Then the spring colors scraps and a she juggler, placed with pins upon a gay dyed field! And then the exquisite passage from a woman who knows how to communicate. Stunning post.

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  7. Nancyk Avatar

    wow dancing with the joy of finished work
    and then dancing with joy on cloth
    you have just given me an embrace of warm joy
    ain’t life grand 🙂

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  8. julie Avatar

    What is really magic to me about the economy you all have created is that it is based on meaningul physical activity…you sand (and snarl), he splits and hauls wood, they care for goats, etc…it is all honest and Real. Does that make sense?

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  9. jude Avatar

    a full spectrum of juggling and we all play fair.

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  10. Tina Avatar
    Tina

    It is a wonderful feeling when giving an opportunity to pay it forward….I know exactly how you feel! It is one of my most favorite things.

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  11. Judith in N. CA Avatar
    Judith in N. CA

    Oh, Grace, those words of Ellen’s moved me to tears..and all of a sudden I was transported back to the days of my shepherding..during the cold, dark winter nights of sitting in the deep straw in the barn..being at one with my birthing ewes..the tears of joy that fell as each and every little lamb joined us here on earth. The sounds and smells…steam rising from that small hot body, the nickering momma sounds. I swear some times the ewes would look over at me as if to say…it’s okay, we do this all the time..relax, Judith.
    I am stunned by the face on the new cloth…can’t wait to see how this one evolves.

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  12. .cynthia Avatar
    .cynthia

    the windows look amazing..so crisp and clear..and the cloth… she is .happy with where she is..waiting to see where she goes..where you take her..and i am finding such rightness in the juggling of it all..and think of us sitting in our many separate places. if not .rocks overcome with feeling..then surely sharing it…gentle day grace

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  13. Liz Avatar

    The windows are absolutely perfect … beautifully done
    And the new cloth spurred me to look up “whirligig woman” google images … such a whimsical folk art form
    But yours is already more fluid than the women frozen in wood … with cloth flying about her and her body swaying to some unheard song … I await her unfolding

    Like

  14. Liz Avatar

    And Ellen Meloy made me chuckle in self-recognition with this:
    Perhaps in a herd of gazelles there is always one animal that faces the west when all the others face east, one animal that drinks backward at the water hole and is actually not very gazelle-ish at all, but rather awkwardly assembled and inclined to involuntary utterances …

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  15. grace Avatar

    today, Thursday, reading Eating Stone
    this woman, Ellen Meloy, i am so connected to her

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  16. grace Avatar

    i stand and try to figure out how my own body would be if i wanted to replicate this Gesture…feeling my own arms, the position of my own spine

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  17. grace Avatar

    looking for it. looking for what this Cloth wants

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  18. grace Avatar

    yes. all this. and all the small joys that toss themselves

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  19. grace Avatar

    the dyed field is Deb Lacativa’s mind…i LOVE what she does

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  20. grace Avatar

    grand…it is. in such a gentle way, it is Grand.

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  21. grace Avatar

    very much. That’s what i love about it all. It is such a clear clean equation. This = This. Pure. Nothing complex. This = This.
    Alz B’s son has more paper dollars than he needs. He doesn’t WANT
    to deal with the windows. He is happy to dump the anal window work on someone else. He dumped it on Paul who can do anything, who did some of the windows but not these last two. Paul had been payed ahead for all of them. But Alz B’s son had two to go. And he didn’t want to deal with them. So, here i am….thinking it would be a piece of cake, this Work at Home Work. Finally, yesterday, my bathroom sink counter was FREEEEEEEE of window and sheet and paint brushes and and and
    and i will take them in the next days and put them in his shop and DONE. He will leave me a check in the fruit bowl, a beautiful cobalt blue glass bowl that holds fruit and my checks for work done. And i will cash it and pass it on in dollar bills for what i need. It’s grand. a kind of Joy, really

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  22. grace Avatar

    playing fair. playing fair and attending to What Fair IS

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  23. grace Avatar

    it’s smooth and gentle and gives a sense of Rightness, which is
    joy

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  24. grace Avatar

    glad you are here. Glad you tell me a small story about steaming small bodies

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  25. grace Avatar

    yes. sitting as rocks. Us. yes.

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  26. grace Avatar

    me too. i don’t know yet, much about this Cloth

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  27. grace Avatar

    i loved these words too. yes.

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  28. Stephanie Avatar
    Stephanie

    Just a comment about how much I’ve enjoyed coming back to this and reading everyone’s comments. So multi-faceted, everyone seeing and absorbing and reflecting in their own ways and from their own lives. Then putting everyone all together, like a quilt of many dimensions and colors.

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