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December 31, 2007
If you stay awake
More Rumi. Yes. I have been taking him everywhere with me. Carrying him around in my purse. Knowing where the book is when I'm at home (it could easily get lost in the stacks) so I can grab it at a moment's notice. It's silly. In my snug and warm thoroughly modern life, sitting in front of my computer with my TheraFlu, I feel like a character in one of those ice and winter bound books about the proletariat. You know, the Dr. Zhivago-esque character with the little round spectacles and the fingerless gloves, sipping tea in the bitter cold, so cold you can see his breath in the shabby tea room, clutching his poetry book because inside of its cloth and cardboard cover is bound up all of the beauty. (This is what spending years toiling away in a bureaucratic machine will do to you.) You know, the oddly tragic character who'd rather have books than eat? (Although I'd draw the line there, if I had a choice in the matter anyway.)
If you stay awake
for an entire night
watch out for a treasure
trying to arrive
you can keep warm
by the secret sun of the night
keeping your eyes open
for the softness of dawn
try it for tonight
challenge your sleepy eyes
do not lay your head down
wait for heavenly alms
night is the bringer of gifts
Moses went on a ten year journey
during a single night
invited by a tree
to watch the fire and light
Mohammed too made his passage
during that holy night
when he heard the glorious voice
when he ascended to the sky
day is to make a living
night is only for love
commoners sleep fast
lovers whisper to God all night
all night long
a voice calls upon you
to wake up
in the precious hours
if you miss
your chance now
your soul will lament
when your body is left behind
--Rumi
The Wild Hunt
Åsgårdsreien
(The Wild Hunt)
Loudly through air at night they haste,
An uproar on wild black horses!
As a storm the wild crowds travel by
With nothing but clouds for foothold.
Over the valleys, the woods and meadows -
Through darkness and weather, they never heed.
The traveler throws himself frightened to ground.
Listen... what clamor! It's the forces of Asgard!
I have very vivid dreams. Have ever since I can remember. And I treasure them, these gifts from the unconscious. Sometimes I can figure out what they mean. Sometimes I can't, at which point I simply sit back and enjoy them. I don't usually share them with anyone except Dennis, who thinks they are exceedingly strange and wierd and interesting. But after writing about Odin and his eight-legged horse Sleipnir and The Wild Hunt recently, I had a wild wild dream which I'll tell you about here--
Angry clouds were brewing above the house, and the wind was howling, tearing at the trees and the grass. The kids and I were inside, terrified, watching the storm through the windows. It had engulfed our ranch in wave after wave of steel gray wind and rain. I stood at the front door, horrified to look above and see Odin and his host of ghostly hunters in the clouds coming over the mesa. I was calling for the dogs, "Lila! Red", and they came running to me from someplace way out there in the churning dust. If those heelers would have had their tails, they'd have been tucked in between their hind legs. They scampered inside, whining and huddling around my legs. The kids hung behind me, clutching the hem of my cotton dress.
I was too afraid to try and make my way to the pasture, to see if the hunters had stolen my horses or not. I thought about them lifting my percheron horse Toby up high into the air and snatching him away from me. I though about how upset my daughter J. would be if they took Caprichosa away with them. But I didn't have the courage to leave the doorway.
Dennis, my husband, was suddenly there, seated in a convertible in the driveway, with his sunglasses on, and the wind whipping at his blonde hair. I called and called after him, yelling at him to come inside. But he didn't seem to hear me through the howling gale.
I stood there, watching the storm in helpless, terrified fascination, afraid for Dennis out there in the thick of it, afraid for the horses, for me, for the kids, not knowing what to do.
Do I know what it means? No. But it will give me something interesting to mull over while I'm doing the dishes.
I can begin to feel dismal in the dead of winter. Hemmed in. You know? Longing to ride a horse over the interesting geography we have here in Northern New Mexico. Heck, man, I'd settle for being able to walk outside without getting blown over by the howling winter wind. But that'll have to wait until spring.
I do enjoy exploring the inner geography. Mounting those Lewis and Clark type expeditions.
There's a whole country inside of each and every one of us. We are filled with vast plains and mountains and forests and oceans and stars.
My very own armored horse
Alright. I'm at home with a bad cold today. Basking in the warmth of the woodburning stove and my computer monitor, box of Kleenex at hand, sipping that ghastly TheraFlu.
We got a new monster computer for Christmas. You can play any game out there in the world on this thing, which was my #1 requirement when building it with Dell, because my outdoorsy husband doesn't do well with these short winter days and needs something interesting to occupy his mind (and this is the same man who spent six years on a nuclear fast attack submarine at the bottom of the Pacific ocean, so cramped and crowded that you hot racked [shared a bunk bed on a rotating basis] with your fellow submariners ...), and our other computer was from the stone age, so he'd been playing some very old games again. And again. He enjoys those big, historic epic games where you build civilizations. Needless to say, he's quite overjoyed with this monster machine.
I've never played computer games in my life, but did some research on the RPG games (Oh, that's role playing games, by the way, for you uninitiated who are not in the know like I am this morning. I'm so cool, I actually understand some of the lingo.)
Came home with Oblivion.
And the deciding factor in making this purchase is that you can ride a horse in the darned thing.
Of course, my kids spent a lot of the blustery day yesterday galloping around, slaying monsters, etc. in the beautiful virtual countryside. And the game is really for them. Frankly, I doubt I'm smart enough to play it through, and the kids just seem to intuitively know how to use this technology. While I may never own a set of full-blown armor for my very impressive and very real percheron horse Toby--who is staring across the fence towards the house as I write this now, mane and tail blowing in the bitter wind, I can see him through the living room window--I can satisfy my medieval armor horse thing in the virtual world apparently.
I used to read the cyberpunk novels, but not so much anymore. I devour science fiction. And in a previous life, when I used to have an interesting career filled with vibrant, intelligent people (it's a long story about being lured into middle management with another of the science companies in my small town and then three CEOs and four years later, being laid off with the rest of my peers, and winding up in the belly of the beast of a bureaucracy for job security reasons where I have been thoroughly assimilated much to my chagrin), I was officed next door to one of the leading AI (artificial intelligence) gurus for years. So this whole thing, virtual worlds, artificial intelligence, has been of interest to me for some time. I doubt I'll become a gamer, or anything like that. I really enjoy this reality way too much, and for me, a good book will always be more interesting. But I suspect I'll dabble.
I'm even customizing Oblivion with the modifications available out there. (How about that flying armored dragon? You should see my ten-year-old boy's eyes light up at that idea.)
Geesh. I'm a geek.
So today, it's Theraflu and some virtual horseback riding.
December 29, 2007
Rumi - Guest House
This is a windswept winter time. Breaking the ice off of the horse trough every morning. Bitter cold. Blue. I've been carrying Rumi around with me this week.
This being human is a guest house
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
House Guests
I was disappointed over the holiday that my houseguests were not very interested in seeing my beehive that's sitting in the garage at the moment--all pristine and white, with it's sweet metal roof, the neatly stacked boxes, the frames with their beeswax sheets--waiting for the bees. (Although I guess it is kind of an unusual hobby to aspire to, with a potentially limited audience.)
I did learn from them, however, that my grandpa, whose been gone since I was a little girl, and who worked on the railroad all of his life in rural Oklahoma, had actively hunted for bee trees every spring. He didn't have any beekeeping gear to speak of. He made do with what he had--some wire mesh that he fashioned into a beekeepers hat of sorts and an old lard can filled with rags as a smoker.
They say he never got stung. Once.
Although I'm not quite sure I believe that.
For several days, I've been walking around accompanied by this image of the grizzled old Scotsman. It's a picture of him raiding the hollow trees, hands filled with honeycomb, bees buzzing, carrying home a bucket of the sticky sweet stuff to his family. Frankly, for many reasons I won't go into here, the man was a stranger to me.
And suddenly he is my grandpa the bee charmer.
All this time I'd been told pretty much how he was a sweet old man but one who'd been bad with money, didn't have much of a reputation in the teeny tiny, red dirt town, gave my irreputable uncle all of the money he did have, while others went without. I've seen the shack they lived in. I have a nicer hen house now. One time there'd only been onions to eat. The teller of these tales had in highschool only one pair of underwear, and that wasn't his favorite sweater he wore every single day, but the only one he had.
My Grandpa The Bee Charmer did have a team of horses once, when his cousins talked him into leasing a farm as a sort of family business where they never did any of the promised work, but raided all of the pecans from all of the trees like a bunch of scheming trash birds, leaving him even more broke than before.
I still remember my grandpa's funeral, where my uncle, who was drunk as a skunk as usual, threw himself across the new grave and bawled like a baby, fat Jack Daniel's tears rolling down his hot cheeks. I remember as a kindergartener sure not knowing exactly what to think about that. My uncle's gone now too. And I don't miss him one bit, although I do feel sad for someone who lived such a life.
I'm not glossing it over. Not rubbing on the glowing beeswax. Not waxing poetic. It's just that I'm wintering over in a hive dripping with stores, a place that no amount of disinterest and no stories about who did or didn't do what can raid. That honeycomb is filled.
While the holiday houseguests have left, and my house is back to normal, they've given me quite the unexpected gift--
My Grandpa the Bee Charmer.
I will sit and hold that one for a while. I might even invite him to sit with me underneath the pinon tree this spring, where we'll watch the bees together.
December 26, 2007
Come to the root of the root of yourself
"I will give you what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, what no hand has touched, what has not arisen in the human heart." Jesus, in the Gospel of Thomas
I get a little pensive usually, on the day after Christmas, but today is worse than usual. I trudge through Santa Fe this afternoon, bundled up in my down coat, wool hat pulled down nearly to my eyes, cranky that I'm at work and not at home with the rest of my family and the horses, amazed at all the tourists gleefully sloshing through the mud and snow, still buying things.
And I'll have to admit, I do peer, kind of half-interested, kind of partially out of habit, kind of bored, into a couple of store windows decorated with big red ribbons on my way to the sandwich shop to see if there are any really good deals I can't live without. Even here, in the middle of the oldest city in the continental U.S. (now don't laugh, you Europeans with your ancient stone castles), in the midst of all of this beauty and art, at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, I am overwhelmed by a sense of plastic, of the candy-apple-red, electronic-singing-Santa-Clause variety.
And I realize that I'm lost.
It's like that time Dennis and I came down from the Trail Rider's Wall way up in the Pecos, and found ourselves in an alpine meadow with the grass nearly up to the horse's bellies, somewhere above Beatty's cabin. Quite frankly, we didn't know where we were exactly. The trail had ended, disappeared right into the ether, I swear, and he just made his best call about which direction we should head home in (although he only told me about that part later, after we were safely off the mountain), all the time with the sun racing towards the horizon.
I start thinking about how far removed I can get from where I want to go. This journey I endeavor. What the heck was yesterday all about, I ask myself, as we all seem to be back to business as usual? Bah. I say. Humbug.
I feel my eyelids getting heavier. The lenses of my perception clouding like the fake snow on the store windows. The made-in-China Santa Claus with his fire-engine red cheeks is holding his big jelly belly and jeering at me through the snowflakes. All these people I don't know are crowding around me clasping their plastic. They are the same as me. They are me. And then I remember.
Don't go away, come near.
Don't be faithless, be faithful.
Find the antidote in the venom.
Come to the root of the root of yourself.
Molded of clay, yet kneaded
from the substance of certainty,
a guard at the Treasury of Holy Light --
come, return to the root of the root of your Self.
Once you get hold of selflessness,
You'll be dragged from your ego
and freed from many traps.
Come, return to the root of the root of your Self.
You are born from the children of God's creation,
but you have fixed your sight too low.
How can you be happy?
Come, return to the root of the root of your Self.
You were born from a ray of God's majesty
and have the blessings of a good star.
Why suffer at the hands of things that don't exist?
Come, return to the root of the root of your Self.
You are a ruby embedded in granite.
How long will you pretend it's not true?
We can see it in your eyes.
Come to the root of the root of your Self.
You came here from the presence of that fine Friend,
a little drunk, but gentle, stealing our hearts
with that look so full of fire; so,
come, return to the root of the root of your Self.
Our master and host, Shamsi Tabrizi,
has put the eternal cup before you.
Glory be to God, what a rare wine!
So come, return to the root of the root of your Self.
December 24, 2007
Upon his snow white ... horse
Upon his snow white steed
With wind and lightning speed
St. Nicholas leaves the sky
And comes a-riding by
The little hare hops nigh
And lifts his nose up high
The stag with pointing horn
Leaps over bush and thorn
And all the creatures dear
Are drawing quickly near
Before St. Nicholas bow
Their little heads so low
And we will learn a tune
Of sun and star and moon
And sing our happy lay
Sing on St. Nicholas Day!
—Traditional German
Who wants a pony for Christmas?
Geeeeesh. I thought every girl wanted a pony for Christmas.
Wild horses
I think this is a simply lovely video of a girl and her horse. Look at all that spirit shining inside and out.
Sigh. I remember being that young once ...
December 23, 2007
Horses and Heelers Whooping it Up in the Snow
Bitter cold Pecos Mountain morning. Standing in the middle of a snow-covered pasture with horses galloping all around me.
Fat Red Dawg and Lila Jane getting their exercise.
December 22, 2007
Winter Solstice and Sleipnir the Eight-legged Horse of Odin
Winter Solstice is the shortest day of the year. And the sun will be making his return. With Christmas near, I think about birth and rebirth. And I'm also considering one-eyed Norse gods and eight-legged horses. This is why I love myths. So many wonderful images to describe what's happening around us, even as I write this.
The Texas Liberal writes about the above image. The Nordic God Odin had a hand in killing the Frost Giant Ymir. The picture is of Odin riding his horse who was named Sleipnir. Both Odin and Sleipnir seem to be doing well in the picture. Killing a frost giant is also a reminder that with the Winter Solstice now behind us, the days will be getting longer. That is good news. Before you realize, it will be spring and summer.
Sleipnir (Norse, "gliding one") is the legendary eight-legged horse belonging to Odin, the Father-God of the Norse pantheon. Sleipnir carries Odin between the world of the Gods and the world of matter. The eight legs symbolize the directions of the compass, and Sleipnir's ability to travel through land and air.
The eight legs of Sleipnir are probably symbolic of the eight spokes solar wheel, and probably relate to an earlier form of Odin as a sun-god. There is some evidence that Odin himself was at one time anthropomorphized as a horse; Sleipnir's ability to travel instantaneously associates him with sunlight.
Sleipnir is also said by some to be the shamanic horse that can be used to travel to various consciousness levels. The horse was the swiftest on earth, and could bear Odin over sea, through the air, and to and from the land of the dead. According to Sigrdrífumál in the Poetic Edda, Sleipnir has runes carved on his teeth.
In the norse mythology Odin is the god of war, poetry, knowledge, and wisdom. From Wikipedia, Odin is an ambivalent deity. Old Norse (Viking Age) connotations of Odin lie with "poetry, inspiration" as well as with "fury, madness and the wanderer." Odin sacrificed his eye (which eye he sacrificed is unclear) at Mímir's spring in order to gain the Wisdom of Ages. Odin gives to worthy poets the mead of inspiration, made by the dwarfs, from the vessel Óð-rœrir.[1]
Odin and his horse are associated with The Wild Hunt. I'll leave it to you to learn more about that if you wish, but from this image you can imagine how some folks used to (and may still) think about thunder.
Odin also hung himself from Yggdrassil, the World Tree, in his quest for the knowledge of life and death. (Sound familiar to anyone?) He has two pet wolves too. With whom I suppose he kicks some serious butt.
Happy Winter Solstice. I can almost feel the rising sun warming my face.
December 21, 2007
Bees unexpected
My first beehive, our his and hers white beekeeper's suits, the bee gear (including this way cool smoker), and three gigantic tomes of bee literature and wisdom arrived in the mail recently, a birthday gift from my husband. I just attended a two-hour lecture An Introduction to Beekeeping, in which I was surprised--in the midst of all that technical talk about building hives, Colony Collapse Disorder, pesticides and big corporations, pollination, broods, biology, genetics, etc.--at the instructor's description of his deep spiritual experience with bees.
He said it in so many words, how these tiny winged creatures draw him closer to the divine. He spoke eloquently about watching his bees collecting the pollen from the plants he'd sown, and how when the combs were drawn and the honey was made, a good portion for the bees and some left over for him and his family, that he knew he too was a part of it all--of the soil and the sky and the sun, and something more. When he said that, when he became that open for just a minute, I was looking around the room to see if anyone else had just been rended through to the core by the same bolt of lightning. But if they were, I couldn't see it. And I doubt they could see mine, although I've been told that I can be pretty transparent at times.
I'd never thought of bees and transcendence.
Joseph Campbell talked a lot about being transparent to the transcendent as part of the process of waking up. What am I getting at here? I'm not sure where this is headed.
But I must tell you, I found myself sitting in absolute rapt attention in my seat in that drafty conference room with its low wattage lights as the instructor talked about the bees scouting out as far out as 12 miles away from their hive (pretty heroic for such little girls) to collect the pollen from a variety of sources and then bring it back to the hive to produce the golden honey. And the beekeeper's description and stories of the bees collecting pollen took my thoughts to the unlikeliest place. To somewhere I had no idea I'd go that night.
In that dimly lit room, bundled up in my snow boots and goosedown jacket, sipping tea from a styrofoam cup, I found myself thinking of Sophia, divine wisdom in the canonical Bible and the gnostic texts, and how she seeks and gathers up the sparks of the divine. Sophia's journey is nothing if heroic.
And her journey is mine.
On the Nativity of Our Lady.
The fragments of light still trapped in the material world are collectively the anima mundi, the Soul of the World.
The Soul of the World still suffers. She is the anima mundi who cries out for redemption from the cruel and oppressive system in which she is trapped. The Holy Sophia still sorrows for us lonely ones in this world. As stated in the Sequence of Sophia, “I will never fall asleep upon the green grass, while the earth rings with the cries of the exiles.” We can seem to ignore and often even forget the world’s pain until we remember something better, our true and perfect home above the aeons.
We can not go to that perfect home until we find and bring back those sparks of light, our own human souls, which are trapped in the world. We must recover that pearl of consciousness that Sophia sowed in us in the beginning, for only through human consciousness can the redemption of all creation occur.
All I could see in my mind was this image of the bees buzzing to and fro, hovering over the flowers, seeking the precious pollen across such amazingly long distances, and bringing it back. Did you know that without bees, we'd die? Pollination is essential to our having a lot of the food we take for granted. The bees remind me of Sophia, who seeks the sparks, helping us to find the pearl of our own consciousness, without which there isn't a lot of life. Helping us to return to the place from which we came ... back to the beginning. Home.
I've experienced some staggering moments of gnosis when I'm with horses. And I think, my goodness, what will the bees spark? As if they haven't already, and I don't even have any of my own yet.
I tell you, I'll never look at a bee quite the same again after that lecture. I'm devouring the bee books. I've developed a taste for honey. And a longing for lush green grass in the wintertime. I dream of walking barefoot and of dripping honeycomb. I find myself opening the thick beekeeping volume with all the reverence of a holy book. I will be the gatherer and the gathered. And I will get stung.
I can't wait to get started.
December 20, 2007
The Earth's Drummer
The woodpecker is known as the Earth's drummer. The woodpecker represents self discovery. As they peck into and through trees and dead wood, hidden layers of one's psyche are revealed. (See sayahda.com and birdclan.org)
I'm becoming very fond of my nosy neighbor, even though he likes to drum on the side of the house at sunrise and makes the heeler dogs woof and howl. Left up to their own devices, Lila and Red Dawg vigilantly guard the yard against any intruding woodpeckers. They can run fast on those stout heeler legs, but not quite fast enough to get this feathered percussionist.
The woodpecker is becoming less skitterish these days. He used to just peek at me through the clerestory windows way up there in the blue, generally after pounding out a thunderous drum solo on the cedar shingles. I think he wanted to know if anybody was listening.
He's rather difficult to ignore.
But I suspect he knows that.
I increasingly catch site of him clinging to the posts of the front porch, peering in through the dining room windows as I'm going about my business. So I stop and stare back, across the gleaming pine table top.
And my heart beats a little faster as I inch around the dining room chairs, the cutlery and the stoneware, careful not to knock over the mountains of neatly stacked and folded laundry, towards the glass, trying to get a closer look before, in a sun-dappled flash of feathers, he's gone.
Dust
Thinking a little more about my kids recently being scared to death by some slack jawed inbred yokel (term borrowed from writer I'm about to cite below) at their catechism class, I've got a response, which I'll settle for writing here, instead of saying directly to the slack jawed inbred yokel, who I don't know because they go to catechism class when they are at their dad's house, not mine:
Dust good.
No, not the stuff on my furniture that I'll swish away before my mother arrives for the holidays--the dust in Phillip Pullman's Golden Compass.
Father Jordan Stratford at Ecclesia Gnostica in Nova Albion on Authority and Dust. When Pullman kills off the Authority in his books, he's doing us all a favour. Rather than the mad Archon against whom the characters rebel, Pullman sides with the Dust, a barely detectable essence of permeating Divinity; a concept of God far more subtle, demanding more reflection, than pray-n-obey.
Well, he certainly said it a lot better than I can. But after contemplating the books for some time, this is pretty much how I see it too.
Ever since reading the Narnia series years ago for the first time, which I do love, by the way, I've been troubled by that train wreck C.S. Lewis gives us at the end.
(What's that little horse on the compass stand for, I wonder?)
December 17, 2007
Straight from the horse's mouth
Disclosure: Straight from the horse's mouth is where I get to be opininated.
We had a little brush with the real Magisterium this week.
My little ten- and eleven-year-olds go to catechism class when they are with their dad and stepmom. They told me that their catechism teacher (I have no idea who this person is) told them that they would "hurt God's feelings, that God would hate them, and turn his back on them" if they went to see this movie The Golden Compass, which, of course, they and several other kids in the class had already seen. In fact, I know my children's dad took them to this fantasy movie based upon a series of popular fantasy books, because Dennis and I wound up sitting with them (that old bobcat thing again) during the show, as we were all there at the same time, quite by coincidence.
As you can imagine, my children were upset by the teacher's statements, but they've got good enough heads on their shoulders to ask questions, which they did, of me, anyway. Initially, I was so amazed by the whole thing I told the kids that certainly a catechism teacher wouldn't tell kids that God would "hate" them if they did something or other like going to a movie. But they both confirmed that the teacher did indeed say that.
[ Pardon my snorting sounds of complete incredulity here ... ]
I teach my kids to think for themselves, but they are also kids, and vulnerable to people with agendas that are, in this instance, not very nice and who apparently aren't concerned about using some pretty severe scare tactics to push their agenda on innocent children. (Yeah, let's scare them into the fold.) I told the kids that a person like this wouldn't dare make a statement of this type to a group of thinking adults who are half awake. Because someone would say, "I disagree with you wholeheartedly." Heck, they might even get up and leave. I would. And if I had my act together, all the synapses and sparks firing, I would manage to do it politely. But kids are easy targets for this stuff, I told them. I told them that just because someone is in a position of authority doesn't mean they've cornered the market on the truth, or that they're necessarily even interested in it.
I told them that teacher was full of shit. (OK. I'm not always polite. You may have to squint your eyes to see the spark of the divine in me sometimes.)
Straight from the horse's mouth--It's not my church, but I've spent quality time with the righteous, and I'd bet you not one parent in the herd crowd said a word about that teacher's statement. (That convenient word infallibility, with all its trappings of earthly power, just leaves me cold. Chilled. To the bone.) And with the historical troubles with RCC priests here in this neck of the woods, I wonder who would bother to listen to their bleating?
I've decided to leave it alone and not call the church, since I'm not a member there. Taking on the system only sucks me in, which is not where I want to go. I patched this up with my own two kids, which is all I can do, and I think they even learned something important. As for me... Yes, I can acknowledge the sparks, even though they are buried somewhere deep down, layer upon layer, and I feel a sense of pity and loss for the person who is so sound asleep, so lost in the dream, that he/she made this terrifying statement to a group of impressionable little kids, but I stay as far away from these folks as possible.
Gentle as a dove and wise as a fox? Read that somewhere, and I kind of like the idea.
Good to get that one off the ol' chest.
My big horse needs some big attention
The snowy weather finally broke. So I caught some rays in the horse pasture yesterday afternoon, sitting in one of the old Rubbermaid adirondack chairs we have down at the barn. (It's not the beach or the carribbean, but it fits my budget. And also, it's just a pleasant way to spend time with the horses. You can catch us down here on many a Friday night with the horses in the summer.)
Toby my percheron X is obviously in need of some attention. And, no, I don't feed him tons of treats by hand, there's no sugar in my pockets, and I didn't slather myself in molasses.
This is just my very big, very friendly, and quite nosy p-e-t.
December 16, 2007
Christmas Tree Quest
This is our Christmas tradition.
Yesterday, we spent three hours in the snow-blown wilds looking for a Christmas tree. We ride around in the back of the pickup truck, with Dennis in the driver's seat, so we can spot the best ones. Then we get out, argue about the tree, and go on to the next one, convinced there's a better one just around the bend in the next valley. Until finally we are all so cold and tired that we actually choose one!
Well, it would be all the more fun if we were zipping about in a horse-drawn sleigh, but we always have a blast just the same. We were hoping to see the elk herd that lives around these parts. One year, a couple of them leapt over a fence right in front of us, and then bounded off into the pinon, as we were standing there with our tree. That's kind of a once in a lifetime thing, I guess.
I love getting the Christmas tree from the mountains.
December 15, 2007
The Snow Miser
I know all the words to this song. I find myself humming or singing this sometimes at this time of year. Yesterday, as I was strolling through the Plaza in downtown Santa Fe, admiring the Christmas decorations, and I swear I heard a fellow singing this to himself.
Snow Miser is the best. The best.
Anyone remember this from the old stop motion Rankin/Bass TV special The Year Without Santa Claus?
Oh Lord, I know the words to this one too. Why can I remember this from so long ago, but not basic algebra?
Zaftig
zaf·tig [zahf-tik, -tig]
–adjective Slang. 1. (of a woman) having a pleasantly plump figure.
2. full-bodied; well-proportioned.
Also, zoftig.
[Origin: 1935–40; < Yiddish zaftik lit., juicy, succulent; cf. MHG saftec, deriv. of saf(t), OHG saf (G Saft) sap1, juice]
She's on a diet. Really. For a while, I had myself convinced the Red Dawg was just big boned. I don't get this. Lila, the blue heeler, is svelte. I feed them both the same. Maybe it's that Red Dawg considers napping to be a sport? (Especially when that means curled up with a certain 10-year-old boy.) And now with us being in the dead of winter and all, there's not a lot of horseback riding going on, which is also a favorite sport of hers. Well, running behind the horse, that is. Although you'd never know it from looking at the big gal.
Red Dawg. a.k.a. ... The Red Zeppelin. The Chorizo (a sausage we have in Northern NM). Pork Chop. Twinkie. The Chunk. Square Block.
December 12, 2007
The keeper of the secrets of the forest
Bobcat--Lynx Rufus
Constellation of the Month: Lynx. Johannes Hevelius is credited with the creation of this constellation saying that anyone wishing to study the stars in this area would need the eyes of a Lynx.
Wikipedia. The Lynx teaches us that even the smallest can succeed in life, and that the world can unfold itself to those who stop and listen. The lynx is not a guardian of secrets so much as the one who knows them, especially when it comes to those secrets that are either obscured by time and space or are completely lost to the world. A lynx may guide the listener to a secret, whether it be a lost object or a hidden truth that is somehow relevant at the present time.
I've been dreaming about that old bobcat whose eaten all of my chickens, geese, and one very good barn cat. I find myself searching for bobcat tracks in the mud. In the snow. Both in my waking and sleeping. I'd pretty much resigned myself to the idea that it's highly unlikely I'll actually lay eyes on this elusive cat who's been dubbed the keeper of the secrets of the forest by so many since, I don't know, the dawn of time or whenever it actually was we began to tell such stories.
Until I found out that I can see him in the night sky. If I really look.
I've spent so much time thinking about the bobcat, I wonder if there's something he's trying to teach me? Is it a "meaningful coincidence" that a critter embued with such mythological significance has crept out of the wild and into my waking life during a time when I've been stretched nearly to the limit of my often very small capabilities? I'm starting to think so.
With my ex now showing an interest in J.'s equestrian vaulting and her love for horses, I've had to acknowledge what until recently has been a hidden truth, or more factually--one to which I've been highly resistant. That is, that even people I don't like much and who've done unpleasant things to me have a spark of the divine in them too. The concept isn't just limited to people I like, agree with, or get along with. I'm a gnostic, and if you don't know what I mean by all this "spark" business, then my grandma J., who was a Southern Baptist, would have summed it up neatly by drawling, "We're all God's children."
When I made the conscious decision to embrace this idea a while ago and to try and live it, when I began thinking of the divine spark in each and every man, woman, and child, well, that's when the bobcat came strolling out of the forest and into my barnyard.
I find myself now all of a sudden on Sunday afternoons in the company of my daughter's dad. This is exceedingly weird and uncomfortable, I can tell you. But, I am able to hand him a brush and have him groom the vaulting horse while the kids warm up. I find that I can make small talk about the vaulting horse, about vaulting, about the equipment, about how J. is doing with the vaulting, and I discover, to my utter and compelte amazement, that I can treat this man with whom I've had so much history, so much bad blood, exactly the same way I would treat any parent who shows up for vaulting.
And I'm no longer so afraid.
I see what this means when I look in my daughter's eyes. It must be a terrifying thing for a kid to have parents who are at great odds with each another. Maybe like the bottom of the whole world could fall out from under you at just about any time.
This may not seem like a lot to you or anyone else. I'm not talking about miraculous reconciliations or anything like that. I'm not talking about Christ-like forgiveness, although I'm working on that (but not all that confident it will happen in this lifetime, although I seek to be liberated). What I'm talking of here is mere civility. What I'm talking about is that I can say, "Isn't it cool that your dad showed up to watch you vault?"
What's happened is the old bobcat, the guardian of the secrets, has taken his claws and rended the very fabric of me to expose a little more light. That constellation of stars is almost impossible to see in the pitch black night sky, say the astronomers. Says the part of me that can't see her way in the dark at times. Says the part of me who's constellated some of her thoughts and feelings into a hard lump of cole, a dark star, a black hole.
I stand on the front porch of my ranch house in the middle of the night, searching the sky until I find it where the elusive stars shine outside and inside, thinking that maybe I'm developing the eyes of a Lynx. Just a little. I'm not completely certain.
But I know that old bobcat is more than a chicken eater, that's for sure.
December 10, 2007
A ride on the back of a polar bear
Bloomberg. Golden Compass' Is Top Weekend Movie at $26 Million
After watching Lyra ride Iorek the polar bear across the sparkling tundra beneath a star strewn sky on the big screen the other night, in what I found to be a thrilling, utterly breathtaking cinematic moment, I wonder if we'll see an increased interest in polar bears from girls? You know, kind of like the girls and horses thing?
Although, given that polar bears are big carnivores with a taste for seals and people (I don't believe I could afford to keep one fed), we probably won't see any rush from well-intentioned parents to go out and actually get one for their little darlings.
That's where my idea kind of falls apart. But I couldn't help thinking as I was watching the film, Lyra clinging to the bear's fur, of the thrill, the absolute joy of a gallop on horseback. In the night. Beneath the stars. I've done it. I bet several of you have too.
My fifth-grade teacher instilled in me a lifelong love of story. Science fiction and fantasy to be exact. I remember the rainy afternoons when he asked us to put our heads on our desks in our dreary, underfunded public school room, and he'd open a book, and we'd be transported to another world. All of us together. You see, story was very democratic. It didn't matter where we came from, what kind of house we lived in, who our parents were, or what we looked like, we shared that common human gift, and we all had access to it with a minimum of effort (especially in gradeschool)--our imaginations.
I've tried to find that teacher. To tell him what his stories have meant to me for a lifetime. But to no avail unfortunately.
I'm a big believer in sacred story too. Art transforms. Lifts our spirits. Just like this scene in this beautiful film did for me the other night. Just as my imagination saved me when I was a little girl.
I am tempted to think that the shrill little man from The Catholic League of America (the one I see on CNN and Fox screeching in outrage at free thought and free will and story that doesn't fit his view of the world) ought to take a ride on the back of a polar bear. It would be damned good for him.
Who are this little man and his ilk? The imagination police? Maybe he'd like to get rid of the greek classical myths as well while he's at it.
Lucky was not so lucky after all
The current score--
Bobcat - 10
Me - 0
Some of the sensitivity-challenged members of my family had named our remaining hen "Lucky". Well, she wasn't very lucky after all. That old bobcat made off with her in the broad daylight yesterday.
Right now, I am henless, roosterless, gooseless ... We've just shut up the whole hen house until the spring.
We finally felt that we had done enough research to actually have some level of competence to buy all of the beekeeping equipment we're going to need, including the hive.
Check out these guard bees (above) in this gorgeous Flickr photo by Max XX. From what I've read, if the bees feel really threatened, the guard bees will line up at the door of the hive and actually look at you. If you have a whole bunch of these guard bees looking at you, from what I gather, then you'd had better get out of there, pronto. Can you imagine that? Bees--looking at you. Who would have thought?
Just wait until I get my bees in the springtime, you old bobcat. How about 70,000 of these comin' at ya?
Think there's any chance I can train them to do my bidding? Mwah ha HA HA ha ha ha HA!
Well, R.I.P. er ... Lucky.
Let's go to the beauty parlor ...
This morning, as I was pulling strands of hay from my hair after feeding the horses, and after the piss poor offers from the Wife Swap people, I realized that I am in sore need of a day of beauty.
So, where shall we all meet?
Let's drink coffee, gossip, get our nails done, look at trashy movie magazines, and get our hair all rolled up. (This is starting to remind me of my Aunt L., who always drove a cadillac, no matter what the circumstances, and who got her hair done once a week like clockwork in the beauty shop that was part of the gas station in her itty bitty tiny town in Oklahoma.)
More on The Swap
Well, the Transylvanian Horseman predicted correctly, and the Wife Swap people have told me that I can trade places with this lady for a week.
All I have to do, they say, is get the pigs to market. I told them that would be fine. I could probably handle this, although I'm going to have to read up on pig wrangling. Not enough controversy for the producer, apparently, and then she suggested that I could go here--
Cool. I said. Pigs and wine (that may be wishful thinking, because this looks kind of like one of those Bible Belt places where you can't lay a hand on a good California or French merlot) in the great out of doors. Now that's my kind of afternoon. When do I leave?
Finally, she came back at me and suggested that this very interesting woman might be a candidate, although I'd have to sign some kind of agreement saying I would be careful to not break any of the 300+ glass chicken statues she has around the house--
At which point Dennis said absolutely, unequivocally NO to the whole idea. No one needs an extra $20,000 (yep, that's what they told me they pay each family for an episode) that bad.
Well, there goes my slightly used Western Hauler. Sigh.
December 7, 2007
Swap?
I guess I'm part of the YouTube generation now. I just got an interesting email from the folks at the television show Wife Swap. Really. I've been recommended by someone who shall remain nameless here. Hmmmm... Would they let me swap places with one of those ladies who spends all of her time at the spa, getting her hair done, manicures, shopping? I would like my very own butler for a week. Heck, maybe two butlers.
I'm not sure I'm strange enough for the Wife Swap folks, frankly.
Who would you want to swap places with if you could? Do you think there are any debutantes out there who'd swap for a week with me?! Do you think Toby, Teyla, Miss Mornigstar, Caprichosa and the highly opinionated Pinon would like them? A little video roundup of life around these here parts ...
December 3, 2007
Equestrian Vaulting: Basic Seat--Twist left and right
Here Jessie is working on her equestrian vaulting basic seat on Irish Draught horse Shakespeare. She twists to the left (to the inside of the circle) and to the right (to the outside of the circle). While remembering to keep her hip bones pointed forward. This is more difficult than it sounds.
Vaulting is definitely a thinking sport. Also a wonderful way to develop the rider's seat. Also a great way to boost confidence and inner strength.
Shakespeare is the ultimate vaulting horse. This handsome horse is used to gold-level vaulters, and when our newbie vaulters lean forward, falter, or lose their place, he gets concerned and slows down or stops. He really takes care of those kiddos in his charge.
So about my vaulting horse in training... My percheronX horse Toby lets me stand on his back on my knees, and he will tolerate the mill and all kinds of arm waving and other ridiculous stuff I make up during our training sessions. I think I could stand on his back all the way up, and he wouldn't mind. I just have to get an experienced longer out here to try it with. I can lay flat on his back with my feet draped off of his ample hindquarters. I can sit sideways and backwards, and drape my legs along the length of his neck, swing them back and forth, and he's OK with that. We can run alongside the big boy at a trot on the longe line, and he will tolerate it, with a bit of talking to. He's still trying to figure it all out, and expresses only a bit of concern, not resistance so far. I've done a bit of Roman Riding on him in my round pen. He has given me a few tiny bucks when he's nervous about something, but doesn't seem adverse to strange antics on his back.
And the PercheronX horse has a lovely round trot and canter, with lots of lift. I swear, I could stage a chorus line up there on that broad back of his. I think he's really going to be a vaulting horse.
I am hoping someday for the type of grace and confidence that Jessie's vaulting coach has. Marcy is a truly elegant horsewoman. She and Irish Draught Shakespeare are a fine match.
I'm hoping that eventually we'll be able to give this experience with horses to lots of kids. Maybe kids who have never had a chance to be around horses before, but who would love to. That's the cool thing about vaulting--its accessibility.
To give horses to kids. Now that's a big dream of mine. Toby fits in there somewhere. And gaining the skills to be able to reach the kids who could benefit from it is something I'm going to have to figure out.
Well, I'm working on it.
Some very pretty equestrian vaulting
Here's some very pretty equestrian vaulting. J. is glued to the horse's back. Sinking into it like molasses. Feeling the horse's back rising up beneath her.
I've misplaced J.'s vaulting shoes somewhere deep in the terror of my closets. But purple wool socks work out pretty well after all!
December 1, 2007
Sleigh bells ring
Wouldn't you love to have some of these for a team of draft horses?
