The previous post has a comment by someone I didn’t recognize. He lives in the Cascade foothills and writes at a blog you need to visit, The Farmer de Ville Chronicles. Outstanding writing, as usual a wake-up call to me to stick to what’s real and all around me. He must have a regular writing gig, and I’m ashamed that I don’t know about it.

His lifestyle reminds me of where I’m always heading in my own life, aside from lengthy detours through what most of you would call the “real world,” except of course that it isn’t — not the one God gave us, at any rate. I always arouse a kind of snarly, defensive sensibility when I make that point, that 90 percent of what we think is proper living is actually a kind of killing joke. Not surprisingly, most of us take umbrage at assertions that we live on top of a house of cards of printed lies and misconceptions. Well, too bad. It’s true, however. As true as true can be. This isn’t what you think it is and won’t turn out to be what you expect.

Spend some time reading what the Farmer has to say. Smell the herbs and feel the sweat dripping off the end of your nose.

The sunlight streams in through a little window and the open door. I notice, but I’m not ready to rise and roll instead, pulling the down comforter up around my shoulders. The air that pours in with the sun is in the 40s, delicious on my hot, turned-over face.

My wife always gets up first and walks to her studio for breakfast. What that really means is a private hour or so with the newspaper and the cat. This time of year, she leaves the back door open in the bedroom when she goes, with just the screen door closed. That’s only a few feet from the bed. She tells me softly when she leaves, and that’s when I wake up just enough to see the yellow brightness, sometimes, before I drink deeply of the coolness and burrow back down under.

That last hour is quality sleep like you wouldn’t believe. Not deep but well-deserved, satisfying in an early-Saturday-morning kind of way. (You can tell you’re an old bastard when you start discussing different varieties of sleep like vintages of wine.) The dream state is just across the divide, too. This is a good time for startling holograms from the unconscious.

When I do get up, it’s never too warm for the heavy fleece bathrobe from L.L. Bean. In a couple of hours, it’s much warmer outside in the sun. The doors and windows are flung all the way open, but it’s still not too warm for that bathrobe. Last week we had a string of two or three hot days around 90, and the warmest it got inside this old adobe was 70! That’s with a strong southwest wind blowing hot air in the windows, mind you.

To be outside in this air is an astonishing gift when it’s not blowing so hard. By 10:30 a.m. Saturday morning, I’d decided to wash the car. It was cool in the mottled shade of the old elm tree and gratifyingly warm in the sun. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and only a gentle breeze. It was 70 degrees and eight percent humidity.

Every step I took was like a blessing. The shadows on the ground were living art. I thought if I moved more deliberately, I could have more of that moment become my whole life.

Here’s an image that will no doubt show up at 750 x 499 pixels on FotoFeed next week. I took the shot on Rt. 518, just over the pass on U.S. Hill coming from Peñasco. A picture of a guy taking a picture… I know just how he feels! That’s Taos Mountain in the background, with Wheeler Peak (13,153 feet) even farther back and slightly to the right.

Splendor in the pines

This spot is maybe 20-25 minutes from our house, which never ceases to blow my mind. we stopped here on the way back from an impulse trip to have a picnic on the Rio Pueblo: tall trees, green grass, a roaring river, plenty of wind and no one else around. If and when we move to a bigger place, that easy access could be lost, unless we manage to stay in the same neighborhood.

I just watched Obama’s speech in St. Paul on video. (That link might not work, very heavy server traffic) If that doesn’t do anything to you, you must be made of stone. Pure campaign gold, too. He even has them roaring to “heal the planet…” This is what I felt when I finally paid attention. What a gratifying change. What a class act. He makes me feel good about myself. So far I’m not hearing much bullshit at all.

Usually when politicians declare an issue, you can see the lies written on their faces, and you know right away whose pocket they’re in. With this guy, you get the feeling you’re part of the process, like we’re all in this together. This is strong medicine, because it’s the truth.

I want to write about the heart. I can’t possibly finish this in a blog post, but I want to start.

Today I know that now, right now, is the beginning of the rest of my life, on which there are no limits. The “secret” is being true to myself, the fact of which I’m only beginning to feel. True to my true nature, I should say, in the context of a calm, slowly building joy and union with with all Creation. This isn’t an intellectual exercise. The locus is the natural world.

I grew up with a thousand reasons to be unhappy. In my case, it’s partly psycho-genetic. My granddad used to take the train from the Eastern Shore of Maryland to Philadelphia for a day to visit art museums. My grandmother, daughter of a “shoutin’ Methodist” circuit riding preacher in West Virginia, wouldn’t hear of it. “What’s the point of that,” she’d reprimand him, “there’s nothing there but pictures on a wall!” — but he’d go anyway. I never really got to know him — he died while we were overseas and I was 10 years old — and I wish I had. I’d like to ask him what he felt about those paintings and what they meant to him, since there was not a stick of anything you’d call art in Granny’s house when I came back to Chestertown as a grownup.

One day Granny gave me her father’s saddlebags, however. That’s right, my great-grandfather used to ride a mule to a different church every Sunday, before he landed a regular parish gig in his later years. I kept those saddlebags for a long time, until my aunt in Maine asked for them back, a typical Farr family manuever. That was only a few years ago, mind you, and though I deeply resented her asking, I realized the only way to avoid more injury to myself was to send them back immediately, along with every other family artifact in my possession. I had quite a collection, too. I’d come to sense that these things were actually poisonous, although sometime in the late ’80s I’d exorcised the saddlebags by taking them to my great-grandfather’s grave in Parsons, West Virginia and smoking a pipeful of dope, exhaling over his tombstone. She doesn’t know that and probably never will — shortly after I sent the musty relics back to Vassalboro, she walked out of her house and tripped, hitting her head on a rock, and hasn’t been the same since.

They can’t hurt me any more, I can only hurt myself (as I was taught to do). Hurt follows hurt, and love follows love.

I give myself permission to be. The sound you hear is singing in the blood.

Jesus, the wind… they’re now calling for sustained velocities of 30 to 40 mph tonight, with gusts up to 55 mph. This stuff has to blow the bird nests right out of the trees, and it’s been going on for months, with the exception of the first two days this week. I’ve never seen anything like this in all my days.

Possibly the most insightful and on-the-money essay most of us will ever read, Mutiny of the Soul, by Charles Eisenstein at Reality Sandwich. Here’s an excerpt:

Nonetheless, it would be ignorant and fruitless to pass judgment upon those who do not see anything wrong, who, oblivious to the facts of destruction, think everything is basically fine. There is a natural awakening process, in which first we proceed full speed ahead participating in the world, believing in it, seeking to contribute to the Ascent of Humanity. Eventually, we encounter something that is undeniably wrong, perhaps a flagrant injustice or a serious health problem or a tragedy near at hand. Our first response is to think this is an isolated problem, remediable with some effort, within a system that is basically sound. But when we try to fix it, we discover deeper and deeper levels of wrongness. The rot spreads; we see that no injustice, no horror can stand in isolation. We see that the disappeared dissidents in South America, the child laborers in Pakistan, the clearcut forests of the Amazon, are all intimately linked together in a grotesque tapestry that includes every aspect of modern life. We realize that the problems are too big to fix. We are called to live in an entirely different way, starting with our most fundamental values and priorities.

We don’t “fix” our situation, we step outside of it into something completely new, and I mean new inside your head to start with. Here’s another taste, but please read the whole thing. I agree with every single word:

When you find the right life, when you find the right expression of your gifts, you will receive an unmistakable signal. You will feel excited and alive. Many people have preceded you on this journey, and many more will follow in times to come. Because the old world is falling apart, and the crises that initiate the journey are converging upon us.

It’s a fine day here in Taos, New Mexico, U.S.A.

The wind is only gusting to high subsonic speeds, and less than a bushel of elm seeds has made it under the screen door into the living room. At the back door, the ants are pouring into the bedroom. Theirs is only a brief invasion, however, for I will visit WallyMart this afternoon and purchase a fine bottle of industrial waste to spray around the building. Life is tolerable, if not exactly satisfying.

The oral surgery I underwent on Monday requires I stick to mostly liquid food for several days. I’ve discovered that this is tantamount to starvation and pine for starch and grease. Last night I went to Albertson’s and came home with a box of instant mashed potatoes, which clearly saved my life. Right now I’m eating jalapeño cheddar flavored cheese dip with a spoon. Oddly, this concoction isn’t mentioned in the list the doctor gave me.

The Taos News just called to ask if it was I who sent the emailed letter to the editor yesterday about a stupid real estate development set to destroy a nearby watershed. I allowed as how I was, but told the lady to delete the message. Every place I’ve ever lived has been ruined by the locals, and Taos is no exception, so I decided to let them wreck Miranda Canyon in peace. It isn’t for lack of letters to the editor that enraged mobs haven’t hanged the developers from the nearest cottonwood, after all. (Lack of something else, perhaps, but I’ve just gone through my pockets, and it isn’t there.) The Taos News enforcer was thoughtful enough to berate me for changing my mind — “This is the second time you’ve sent and cancelled a letter, so maybe you want to think this over more carefully in the future!” — and I hung up without exploding.

(Out of little miracles, a space is cleared…)

The local housing market continues to offer up rentals fit for meth freaks and the blind. A nice lady at the north end of town has a home she wants to rent: $1,200/mo. for a contemporary structure (High Nondescript style) surrounded by an acre of dirt, all the more jarring because that part of Taos County is mostly fabulously green and wonderful. I’ve never understood the sensibility that values the interior of a house over what one sees around it, but there you go. I know I should be careful, but just seeing “3 bdrms, 2 bath” in a classified ad has me reaching for a glass of Drano. I don’t want 1100 square feet chopped up into useless bits, I want an open floor plan in a setting that reminds me why I chose to be born a human being on the planet Earth. As I write this, the breeze through the open door briefly stirs the giant wind chime we have hanging in the living room, and ethereal tones are shimmering in the air… This matters because we bought it as a magical act to help us find a home, and it doesn’t go outside until we have one!

When I was a boy, I was always attracted to ponds. Living ponds, filled with tadpoles and bluegills. Two days ago we walked along a flooded field in the late afternoon and listened to a thousand frogs. I can’t believe how long it’s been since I heard amphibians croaking unmolested. I also can’t believe how any complete person, whole in body, mind, and spirit, can ever take any action that diminishes the flowering of nature in this world. It is the world, after all, yet I so often feel as if I’m the last of the goddamn Mohicans or something. As a species, we are apparently the necessary agent of our world’s destruction and inevitable rebirth without us. Even if this makes a kind of sense, why does it hurt so much? I often say I feel as if I’m from another planet (THIS ONE!), but shouldn’t there be more people on the bus? What happened to them, and where did they go??

Perhaps I will go easier on the ants and use boiling water instead.

(Organic calamities beat artificial ones, every time.)

It’s really very simple. I had to be closer to things like this. A good friend once said that “you can’t live on scenery,” and she was sort of right, but the fact is that one can experience these things first-hand. Once you’ve done that, it becomes as necessary as water and air. I might not be able to “live on scenery,” but now I can’t live without being close to it. (And yes, where I used to live is beautiful, too.)

Lobo peak (yesterday)

There’s a trail to the top of that mountain, so easy that kids can hike it. Very healthy kids, I might add, and no, I haven’t done it yet. This summer, perhaps! And check out today’s FotoFeed for a shot taken about 20 degrees to the right of that one and at higher magnification.

Just what is this, you know? What makes this lumbering bag of bones and blood get out of bed in the morning?

There we were in southeastern Colorado with the weather turning grim, and my wife wanted to keep on heading east. I was fixated on getting to McCook, Nebraska and urged us north into the wind instead. The duststorm that hit us next was blowing at 60 mph, like nothing I had ever seen, bringing us at least three times to a dead stop on the backroad two-lane because we absolutely couldn’t see a thing. The punishment the car was taking made me wince. When the blizzard followed right after the dust, it was almost like a relief, but then I started to get scared. I thought my wife wasn’t going fast enough, that we wouldn’t get to McCook before it got dark. With the snow blowing so hard, once we lost the light, the road would be invisible.

We got there just fine, though, and had dinner at a barbecue joint down the road from the Holiday Inn Express. I’d made the reservation on my cell phone while we were still an hour away, shouting over the roar of the storm and straining to hear the service rep on the other side of the world.

For the next few days, Iowa. Relatives and eating out. Stores, curbs, traffic lights. Humidity. A rural industrial landscape, for the most part, its charm now more a memory and a brand. Dubuque was a long dance of shopping and eating. Serious eaters along the Mississippi, too! Shop, eat, shop, eat. Where does it all end?

Heh.

On the way back home through eastern Colorado, the new car took two serious hits to the windshield from flying rocks in the middle of nowhere. One of them made a 10-inch crack. I was emotional collateral damage for at least 50 miles.

A couple of hours later, we were flying across a vista impossible to photograph, so huge and so dramatic it was: sun and clouds and snow-covered mountains, a highway that stretched forever, and nobody on it. As we approached northern Taos County, I felt we were being lifted up into an exalted realm. Coming into Taos itself, disappointment: too many mud houses and too few trees, all the unanswered questions I’d left behind for a week.

But I still don’t get it. Okay, it’s back to chaos, but what would I do if everything was fine? If I had all the money and comfort in the world but still heard my minutes ticking away, what then? Hell, why do we do anything? I did have the thought, though, that I was an expression of unnamable, inexhaustible energy, and that most of my upbringing and subsequent socialization was based on turning it off… One’s duty is therefore absolutely clear!

I wish anything more were, but that much we got knocked.