windthread

began this last evening.  This morning added water to make it easier.  But today,  straightline 4o something mph WINDs  so…it waits till tomorrow.  For one of the Vitex.

 

and this….

after all the "work"  with trying to "get better"  at Goat stuff,  I look at this and realize that i am no better at all.  If this buck kid had been born here,  i would be deluding self with ways i might find someone who would want him as a potential herd sire,  i would be putting off castrating him,  wethering,  what a nice word for castration, but still and yes,  putting off castrating him until it would be a mute point and i would have yet one more BUCK Goat here and there's NO ROOM.

another case of Stand,  and Face what you know

after morning feed,  i went on to water the 3 new trees and then to the big pots where i'd planted the shelling peas around

 

 

 

 

letting the water run slow,  to not disturb the seeds that haven't come up yet

 

squatting and gazing,  the kind of gazing that isn't really seeing,  but just Taking Things In in a very soft focus way,  noticing how the early light of Sun made this branch of Light and…. and….suddenly i was realizing what i was gazing Around Near and At…..you probably can't really distinguish them,  but there are FOUR eruptions of leaves amidst the gentle debris,  and they are

Yerba Mansa!!!!!

I had moved the big pots to encircle that plant to try to keep it from Tay's travel  but it had looked like it didn't make it and all last summer a cucumber vine  in one of the pots had covered the ground there.  And here today….Yerba Mansa.  Growing.   Growing.      I'll need to wait until the peas come and are done,  then move the pots into a larger configuration,  giving the Yerba Mansa space,  more Sun light.  They  spread by root runner.  There will be more and if they go toward the Iris,  YES!  These are the kinds of things that for me,  life is For.  Trying.  a lot of times,  Not.  But some times,  YES and this is Joy.

 

OK.  7 Crows and 5 Lizards.  The right numbers.  Everything stitched except for just a few places,  but pretty much.   The Dreamer needs another strand of hair.  Yes and Ok.   

How it still looks angled on the left…?????…in the photograph,  but not to the eye?????

 

and not in this pic…at a distance….

This camera is still a mystery to me.  Things to learn.  In time.  I am grateful for this day.

AND THIS JUST NOW from Jan the dog trainer……

 

Sunny Ray's boy.   Look at him.  He could not be more beauty FULL….perfect,  his markings pure Elegance…Gideon's grandson.

Goats are heart Makers and heart breakers.  Bucklings have no Use.  But i sit and look at this and i can barely stand it.  This little strong and fierce life form.

 

i woke this morning to an Email from Jan the Dog Trainer.  When she got back from Albuquerque last eve she noticed something different…and in her Doe Yard….another Goat,  a tiny one!!!!  One of her young does,  10 mos. old,  there are two,  from TenZen last year,  one of her young, too young does,  had a kid!  NOT the one she had seen sneaking  into Sunny Ray's pen,  but the Other One.   !!!!!    It's a little buckling…which is not so great as if it were a doeling,  but still,  for her a good thing because she can now,  well, soon,  milk this one.  For me it is Grand!  Sunny Ray is "a proven buck"!!!  After all that initial ya ya that he seemed to be sterile,  NO!  HE IS GOOD!  

 

and then i spent the next 7 and 1/2 hours STRAiGHT stitching the borders.   It doesn't show here much at all,  but it's is there…to the eye…all accept for the bottom and i am not sure if i want that "closed in".  Will wait till tomorrow and see how it feels. 
This border thing,  it's as much as i will ever get to "a finished border",  i think.  I can't bear to close the edges in by turning them.  So this is a compromise.  It seems to work.  so OK.

 

When i went to bring the 3 new tree/bushes over near the water to a sheltered place,  i saw this and pulled it.  What IS it?  Instinctively i know it's not good for Goats,  but What IS it?  And how had i not seen it before????….it's BIG

 

have sent an email with pic to Bill.  He will know.  And even if it isn't good for Goats,  i have to Admire it…LOOK at the size of the seeds….how amazing it is

Tomorrow i need to finish this Cloth.  In order to be ready for the Art Thing in Magdalena.  Which part of me feels good about and part does not.  Those 7 1/2 hours….they TAKE.

Tay ran tonight when i was out feeding and giving water,  she RAN hard and fast and so close that sometimes she rammed me or ran over my feet.  She has feelings.  When i fed the Goats tonight,  the doe Goats also rammed close….not hard,  as in to do harm,  but close to it.  Tho they don't need me to be doing anything in particular WITH THEM during a day,  they somehow just need me to be Out There…moving around,  just going.   Things need the just goingness.  and if it isn't happening,  they express themselves

 

 

 

 

 

the google logo melting…how many of us in this country really care…..?

I spent most of the day stitching.  Nothing much to see because it was Invisible Stitch…the sky, which is almost finished.  

 

the patterned canyon and then the foothills tentatively stitched.  And then…the dark mouth of the Arroyo where the lizards are coming from.  A strand and a half of hair.  More hair needed to show the work of Wind.  Slow Cloth.

In between i went Out and sat,  closing my eyes and Visualizing this Place first,  then moving out slowly,  i went toward the east of this continent because that's the direction i came from, to the ocean then and i Visualized all the places i know about that are divided by this body of water.   I Visualized everyone who writes here and at Jude's,  them,  in their Places.  I did Meta.

 

Thelma of Mike and Thelma the now defunct Native Plant Nursery,  brought me three one gallon pot trees.  2 Vitex or Chaste Trees and a third which they think is a pear.  I had asked a while back if they had any trees or large bush beings left.   At the time they said no,  but here they are today.  The pear….i'm not sure about.  I'll plant it but i will choose to do nothing that people do to save fruit from insects.  The two Vitex… i have one out in the Middle Oasis.  They grow well,  require next to nothing and bloom all summer if you clip off the dried blooms…Purple…for Prince i'm thinking….and BEES LOVE LOVE LOVE them.    I want to put one of the Vitex right out from the front porch in what used to be a place i grew various things but now is a runway of Tay's.  She wouldn't understand any plants,  but a small tree/bush she will go around.  And it will provide late afternoon shade for the chairs under the Old Apricot in case i ever fix them.

and

the third pound cake.   It's not really this shape.  But the collapsed center,  yes.  Better today than last time but still, collapsed.  I was thinking that i could pretend that this is on purpose,  and use the dented middle as a kind of Bowl for fruit?…the juice would seep all around the sides?  eee.   I have decided that it must be that twice now i have substituted fresh lemon juice,  2 T for 2 Ts of the milk.  I like the hint of lemon.  But maybe i will get lemon extract. Keep the milk it's correct amount.  Substitute the lemon extract for the vanilla.   

This time i baked it in the toaster oven.  It's a Good toaster oven,  Breville,  convection oven, so it's not that and it has a glass door so i could watch what was happening.  Halfway through the baking time it looked all great and like it should but then suddenly….  But it will taste fine and work to maintain the new layer of fat i am acquiring which is the POINT.   

Something with the doe Goats today.  They RAN.  They RAN back and forth Front to Back down the Migrational Coorider like they were being chased by a Cheetah.  There is an overturned metal horse water trough just at the end of the Cooridor to the Midde Yard that acts as a Drum when they gallop over it…..all day.  They jumped and twirled,  they head butted but so softly it was funny to watch,  the rising up on hind legs,  coming down to barely touch foreheads….barely touch…but they were so Involved in whatever it was….actually, it's still going on…almost dusk…and they continue.

it's 7:16.  Supposed to storm tonight.    After a couple or a few mouseless months,  i hear that clatter in the Tin Cat of someone trying to get out.  Will give him/her a ride to the ditch bank in the morning.  And that's it for Earth Day,  2016

8:09 p.m.  GREAT Thunder….rolling down from the Rim

 

 

 

 

 

today is my daughter's birthday.  4o something years ago,  i was in labor.   She was face up.  Would not turn.  Took 21 hours.  Sometimes slow,  sometimes the total opposite.  They wanted to turn her with forceps.  I refused.   I was Into It….i LOVED it….i was deleriously happy with it and finally for unknown reasons,  She turned and slid out.   And this has been Our Way over all these years.  She does things for  ways known only to her.  She does things in her own time.  I am so Glad to have received her.  

Michelle sent me a link about a movie,  1 hour and some minutes about dying.  It's called Mortal.  she'll post the link.  but it's blog.mortalfilm.com.  It  can be viewed for free through the 25th.  So 3 more days.   It's Extraordinary.  Much of it is things we might be very familiar with but it is put together in a way that takes in all the ways of looking at dying.  There are two parts of it that for me were priceless…the young woman with ALS and the scenes of the disembodied Energy walking the Earth.   I watched it first thing this morning and then had to go to the bank to send money to Alyssia.  She is in Hawaii and she and her woman Kimberly had somehow not read the fine print and miscalculated their expenses.  So…eating peanut butter and jelly for a few days already,  so i sat there,  waiting to talk to one of the uhhh,  what would they be called,  the two women who deal with Issues,  Anna and Neata,  waiting and watching people come and go and seeing them as beings who ALL entertain thoughts about death.  It's unavoidable,  entertaining thoughts about death even if for only a moment at a time, but i saw all of us in the same boat,  knowing.   But going.   and it was very Beauty Full,  how this is.  Just a big US.  Knowing but going.

This evening,  just before this,  i needed to change the water in the Buck tubs.   and for whatever reason,  Nogal was completely into whole body touch.  Usually he will be ok with ear scratching,  chin,  but tonight….his whole self.  He stood so still and i went down his spine, crown to tail.  Sides.  Underbelly.  Legs.  Whole self.  ???????????  Never since he was just a newborn.  TenZen watched and thought about it.  Goats are mysterious beings.

 

 

so here they come.  Following Mo's suggestion,  the second from the right is done with some very wonderFULL thread that Jan had recently sent.  It worked except for it's very hard to do a split back stitch…well, really,  you can't.  but i like it, too.  The others with a single strand of the 6 floss and well,  they will take some imagination but that's really ok i think.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

from day break    

i think this is my most loved  Cloth in certain ways.  I want to go to where this Cloth was From and sit there awhile

 

How many Crows?   Are they just coming from the Crack in the Sky?  or are there Many?

 

today there is a shadow of a Crow on her face.  I didn't do that.

 

then,  the Lizards.  I don't know if i can make them this small with thread,  even a single strand of 6 strand floss….small.  they are small.  these are with pencil.  Can i do it?

 

Toad egg cloth strung around the structure for the green beans as trellis

 

seeds planted at the foot of each stick

"Thirty years ago,  Edward Abbey wrote a novel,  The Monkey Wrench Gang,  in which his hero blows up Glen Canyon Dam,  the huge desert dam strangling the Colorado River upstream from the Grand Canyon.  Getting rid of the dam was an outrageous idea then,  though the novel helped spark the birth of the radical environnmental organization Earth First.  In 1981,  the group announced its existence by running a three hundred foot sheet of plastic,  bearing the image of a mighty crack,  down the dam,  which never seemed quite as eternal and immutable again.  "

Rebecca Solnit

 

somewhere here on this blog maybe in 2014,  i wrote about the implosion of the Elwha Dam.

you can go look on Utube about that.

the Condit Dam in 2011,  the Elwha Dam in 2012,  the Glines Canyon Dam in 2014.  FREE.  FREE flowing rivers.

the lower Elwha Klallam people began when the dams were built.  They never gave up.  They never quit.  The dams are GONE.

 it's Dusk.  this day is ending and i am feeling so small.  just so small.  But i am here.  Caring.  i am here caring and so small.  but i am here,  caring tho so small

 

 

 

 

in a blue sky,  this moment,  pale,  translucent white in a blue blue sky blue sky,  still over in the East,  across the ditch

followed Sydney and Talulah over to Rudy's the mechanic's place in case Sydney's truck quit and also to bring them back to their house.  Shared some concerns with them and felt good that Talulah who is only 12 didn't hesitate to offer her thoughts  and was very sure of herSelf.   I told her that.  Stay sure to listen to instinct.

Cleaned for Allan and brought home a ton of food from his Bernie potluck,  the curried pasta especially.  He will try to get the recipe for me.

Watered the Pea plantings.  If they took,  any day now they will RISE

 

the Face and then just some single strands of thread to be able to envision what her Hair might be like

"What lies ahead seems unlikely,  when it becomes the past,  it seems inevitable.  In 1900, the idea that women should have the vote was revolutionary;  now,  the idea that we should not have it would seem cracked.  But no one went back to apologize to the suffragists who chained themselves  to the gates of power,  smashed all the windows on Bond Street, spent long months in jail,  suffered forced feedings and demonization in the press."

Rebecca Solnit

 

 

 

Awkward.  Awkward moments when it seems things just will be at a standstill.  There is no next to be had.  Often when beginning on work away days.   Which today was.  Often there's nothing to do but wait until a day can unfold from dark morning and release whatever it is that can happen.  In this moment i am thinking that i will need to draw the face before i can know how to go forward from there.  Draw the face.  See her hair flying in Wind.

this afternoon i kept wanting to ADD MORE Earth,  but for its own reasons,  just this much is what it is.  And i think about how when i travel and watch the land here splay out around me,  this is often how it appears….simple.  Not much.   

So…i'll wait.

 

There is "company" in the Way Back.  A roadrunner.  A roadrunner that is completely comfortable mingling with the doe Goats…moving between then,  almost touching their feet, in out and around.   When i go Out,  i yell at it to go away and it moves off some but does not go away.  They are very strange "birds",  really,  feeling more reptilian than bird,  though they have feathers.   They are omnivores.   I don't know what attracts it to the Goats and the Way Back.  They hunt baby rabbits,  baby quail.  They hunt Lizards.   I keep trying to get a pic but the above is how it always comes out.   

 

LATER

"Schell describes how the United States lost  the war in Vietnam, because,  despite extraordinary military superiority,  it could not win over the people of that country and finally lost the confidence and support of its own citizens.    "In the new world of politically committed and active people, it was not force  per se   but the collective wills of those peoples that were decisive."  In other words,  belief can be more effective than violence.  Violence is the power of the state;  imagination and nonviolence the power of civil society."
Rebecca Solnit

 

 

 

these are at Bear Mountain.  When i was there a couple weeks ago i got some.  They are $2 .  I can't capture the oh so vague hue of the photograph of some…such an almost invisible color,  one a bluish,  one a greenish but just so so so vague you are not sure you are really seeing it.  Then 2 are just a very soft grey, black/white/Grey.  Some are blank inside.  Some have verse.

 

the print is tiny.  I use the magnifying glass to read it.  Double Click here.  It is a part of what they are that the print is so small.  The whole feeling of them,  the image,  the print,  the words have a dreamlike quality.  They are all photographs of such familiar scenes that i have seen in New Mex over and over.

the photographer is Margaret Menache    the word crafter is  Chandra L.K. Bales

Yesterday i bought all the rest in the card rack.   Danielle,  as she wrote up the sales slip commented that she will see that i meet Margaret.  That because i am so taken by her work,  she knows we will like each other.    Another reason to appreciate Danielle.  She has interesting sensibilities,  interesting responses.  Margaret is in Albuquerque.

i had sent the first batch every few days to a friend who i used to clean for,  the one who gave me the truck, Sonny,  when  They moved to Salida, Colorado some years ago.  He has been having Stage 4 Melanoma and with treatment was declared in total remission 2 days ago.

Creating these message carriers,  the image and the words,  they could not have imagined that this would be their Work.   At some point,  Margaret the photographer either got the idea herself or as suggested by others,  to create cards of her images.  Maybe she sells prints of the photographs too?  I will come to find out.  But anyway,  either her own mind said Do It or she followed suggestion of others and i am sitting with them today,  being soothed,  softened,  lulled by them.   She could have said

No.

She didn't.  And i am grateful.  

So much talk about "selling" off and on.  To me,  other than the most basic of food,  someone's creative Beauty is so much like food for my Heart.   And i give that energy substance called money and in turn, they buy food.  It's Grand and oh so Beauty FULL.

So,  i don't understand the No.  

Why not?

 

i cleaned house and lit Nag Champa.

8:25 pm.  lit more.  Ok.  

 

the smoke from the incense curls.  The dog sleeps.  

it's 9:07pm.   I will go lie down in my bed.  Outside my window,  there is no war.  there is no earthquake.  No one is shooting  guns.  The smoke curls.  The dog sleeps.

 

it began with Oddness that i would never have imagined and well,  not from the DAY,  which only seems to Carry things….and i worked to let that Oddness go,  to not let it be toxic

There was the book signing at the Library in my town of Socorro

 

this began in the Women's Writing Group that i started at the public library when i was still involved with Story Circle Network.   After a couple years,  i stopped participating.  The Group continued.  Karla continued.  She continued with her single Passion of the Titanic.  Today there was a Reading and a book signing…her self published book.  I do not at all love the mystery of the Titanic but i do love the mystery of Karla's love for it all.  She wore a Titanic T Shirt and Titanic socks.  She has Titanic key chains and there were Titanic ice cubes in the shape of the ship in the punch bowl.  Love is what it is,  myriad and Karla loves the story of the Titanic.

I had arranged to meet with Danielle at the Bear Mountain Gallery in Magdalena this afternoon,  after the Book Signing.  "Weather" turned ify and could even have meant snow at that elevation.  So i sat outside the Library in town and wondered what i was doing.  Why.  There was a huge urge to just go back home.  Instead,  i turned the key in the ignition and headed to Magdalena.

 

so here we go.

I like her very much, Danielle.  She's blunt.  She's had that Gallery a long time.  She's lived in and loved/not loved Magdalena for a long time.  

I took five cloths.  not all finished yet.  we laid  them out on the jewelry cases and looked.  I walked around and looked at the wall space,  at what is there from day to day.  One whole wall "belongs" to the weavings of Dan Klinglesmith…of the publicity  blurb above.  His weavings are FINE.   There are paintings.   I'll take some pics when i take these lightweight Cloths to hang.  But  things there have WEIGHT.  The Cloths are incongruent.  In the center of the Gallery room are nicely hung quilts and rag rugs.  They have Weight.  The Cloths are so 

light

so light,  so light

We talked.  I said i wanted her to see them in this Space so she could know what they Are and Are not.  She asked what i  imagined i wanted from the hanging for the gallery and studio tour…did i want to sell them all?  Did i want them to simply BE there?  What was my intention.  Again,  i really like her.  She doesn't mince words.    We took a long time.  We looked at all the wall space.   We thought.  

and i came home with a formal inventory print out to fill out and send by mail on Monday.

and ok.  it's good that i went.  It's good that the Cloths will be there and it's good that i Stood and Faced what i know.