Trampling Out The Vintage

If you have a garden and a library

2012-01-13T13:10:00.000-08:00

you have everything that you need. - Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Relax, wilson.” I think to myself as I open the door to my office. It’s my 3 year old daughter’s favorite place in the house to nap. Before I turn on the light, I can hear small thuds and rustling of what I am sure are books being pulled from my shelves. There she is swimming in a sea of open novels and poetry volumes with a huge smile on her face. A first edition Sinclair Lewis acts as her pillow and she shamelessly flips through a copy of Steinbeck’s “Cup of Gold” that belonged to her Great-Grandmother. I want to be pissed-off that she isn’t asleep, yet, but I can’t.

“You did this to yourself,” my wife says. And she’s right. It isn’t my little girl’s fault that Uncle Walt was part of her first few hours in existence. So I begin to scoop up the books off of the sofa and stack them on my desk to be put away later. I tuck her back into the blanket and kiss her forehead. Teaching young people to love literature is a reckless endeavor, “so few get it all, and the hordes receive nothing but the pleasure and pain of an overdeveloped consciousness.” (Harrison)

Kyle's Creed

2012-01-12T10:51:00.000-08:00

Live deliberately and free of whims and fads.

Be objective in the pursuit of truth and consciousness.

Live among the masses, and avoid the flattery and publicity of high positions.

Acknowledge unworthiness before God.

Be kind to your wife.

Never give up on an article of clothing because of its age.

Use up every bit of talent God gave you.

Exhaust yourself building, growing, and creating things of intrinsic value. Be them gardens, houses, chairs, paintings, poems, or children; give your life value independent of the commercialist narrative.

Happy New Year

2012-01-01T19:27:00.000-08:00

Looking into the future, here's to some pieces from the past.
Just a Farmer
A Farmer's Holiday
Directions
Fairy Tales
Slow Food
Autumn
Clocks Slay Time

Any Given Sunday

2011-12-18T10:03:00.000-08:00

This image belongs to Gary Ernest Smith. He retains all rights.

He rolls out from under the down blanket into the cold, and he stumbles to the woodstove in his long johns to start a fire and warm the home. His body hangs loose from his shoulders and he rings his face as his head thumps with the consequences of the night before. A glass of water goes down his throat and churns in his stomach before he pulls on a pair of insulated coveralls and tall rubber galoshes. A sweat and dirt stained Stetson is pushed down tight over his head before he steps outside into the 20 degree morning. He glances to the side of the house and contemplates the ebb and flow of his firewood stack. The wind blows a light fog over the pastures and chickens scurry into the barn after a Bald Eagle’s piercing cry sounds from a cottonwood along the creek bank. The cold wind gusts and the man’s senses fire wildly. His nausea and headache vanish under the cold clean air.

“Good morning ladies.” He calls out to the heifers as he throws a bale of hay into the manger. The cows eat at a furious pace and he walks around outside breaking the ice off of water troughs with a splitting maul.

A Veterans Day Post

2011-11-11T08:10:00.000-08:00

Independence Day. July 4, 2000

This morning, I stood in the mirror and shaved around my mustache. I saw them in the mirror. Just a bunch of damned kids standing behind me. I couldn’t look up any more and I cut my face with the straight blade. Some were only fourteen year olds and some seventeen year olds, but they all drowned in olive drab. They were kids that will never experience babies with young wives. Little kids, it just plain wasn’t fair and I don’t know why I made it through and they didn’t. Some of them smiled and some of them just stared. I looked down at the tattoo on my forearm and looked up to see Larry who was with me when I got it. He fell on a Tuesday morning. The Chinamen over shot our front line and we heard it coming back to us. The shell hit about ten meters to my left. It cracked off and I lost hearing in my left ear. The shards bloodied my forearms. Larry didn’t get up.

That evening, all the crowds and families gathered around the baseball field for the fireworks. When the first flash of light came into the sky, it caught my attention and I tried to act like I was enjoying myself. The corresponding thump of the explosion hit my forehead and made me choke. Then I stopped smiling. The explosions, blasts, flashes and throngs of people rattled on until my heart could not sit still inside me. It ran fervently and my eyes swelled up. I felt as though someone was sitting on my chest and it fought to beat hard enough to shake them loose. My mind raced. My arms went numb and my hearing stopped. All I could feel was the pounding of my heart in my neck and the sound of the explosions on my face. The muscles in my stomach tightened, retched, and knotted. “Where are the boys?” I thought “Those sons-a-bitches left me. Where are they hiding?” I turned my twisted and grimacing face over my shoulder to look for the rest of my squad, but I knew they weren’t there. I was alone. They were all gone. More pain in my chest. “Where are they?” I screamed inside. “Why did they leave me? Oh God. Where did they go?” The cold colorless young and bloodied faces sprang forth in my consciousness and I cringed with every blast. “Why am I still here? We were just boys. How does anybody just move on? I can’t live without them. Oh God help them.” We left a piece of ourselves with each other and when someone died we went cold inside. I didn’t think I could live without them. I couldn’t breathe because they weren’t breathing. With every blast another breath left me. “Where are my boys?” I jabbered. “Those bastards, they left me.” I could see silhouettes of some of them standing in the crowd around me. Some of them were grinning and others just looked solemnly at me and watched. “Oh God, I left Larry in the jungle. What the hell were we thinking, us boys? Thinking we could be heroes. We just shot at them Chinamen and they shot right back. We didn’t care, we just killed them. And they killed my friends. It was my fault. I should’a died. I should’a let those boys live. Oh God let me take their place! Oh God take care of my friends.” The doctors told us we were just shell shocked when we left and that it might be a while before we felt like ourselves again. But friend it never leaves you. This fourth of July is 50 years later and they’re still there with me. And tomorrow morning the same boys will be there looking at me in the mirror while I shave. But my mustache is white now, and my grandkids might be in college. They’re still dead. The skin on my face is a little looser and I’m a little softer, but they’re still inside of me.

Irreplaceable

2011-11-07T14:23:00.000-08:00

Image and all its rights belong to Gary Ernest Smith

Bloody knuckles man
Calloused hands man
Single Malt for breakfast man
Great Depression man
Pitchfork man
Open the door for your wife man
Clean your boots off for church man
$100 bill in the collection plate man
Union man
Roll your own man
White whiskered man
Faded service tattoo man
Greatest Generation man
We hate to see you go, man

Dear Fingers

2011-11-07T13:04:00.000-08:00

Write something.
That embodies the human condition
Accurately
And improves that of my readers,
If only by awareness.
One that all can read.
One everyone wants to read.
And when they do read it,
They laugh.
And they say,
“I see that trait inside of me.”
Then they might say,
“I like that about me.”
Or,
“I wish I could change that about me.”
They might even say,
“Someone else is that way, too?
Maybe I am normal.”
Could say,
“What happens next?”
With a sigh
Or,
“Why does my sweetheart die?”
So in 50 years
When they read it
They can still tell
I tore each word
From my guts.

Dirty Money

2011-10-25T14:26:00.000-07:00

Danny’s shack was formerly a barn on a repossessed farm in Bakersfield. When the bank took the farm, Danny took the pieces he needed in a few truck loads and put together a dilapidated shelter with a wood fire cook stove and a bath tub. A dozen cable spools were used as tables outside and ten or more bindle-sticks leaned next to the door of the shack. Someone was always coming back from the river with a pot full of water to boil on the stove and fill the tub for their first bath in months. Danny’s sister Gabriela was sleeping with a senator in Sacramento and the politico would send their parents $10 a week for the hospitality of their daughter, and especially for their silence. When their parents died on a trip back in Guanajuato, Danny kept on collecting the money for them. In a few months he bought a Model AA pick-up and small piece of land next to a wash in Tehachapi. Nearly a dozen hobos flopped in the willows next to the shack at any given time. Danny would buy old soup chickens from the egg farmers, bacon ends from the packers, and sacks of beans and onions to feed the disparate group of wanderers. He kept shelves of toilet paper and kegs of whiskey for his compañeros.

He was an eccentric Catholic. He believed in the peace that comes from giving compassion. He, also, believed that fornication was good for the loins and gave one strength. As many homeless women shared his bed as men slept in the willows. Every morning he would pray, give the sign of the cross then kiss his fingers and say, “Gracias a la virgen.” And by virgin, he really meant his sister and her adulterous companion.

When the sound of heavy metal smashing and screeching could be heard and the smell of coal smoke mixed with steam could be smelled, the hobos would grab their bundles, fill their canteens with whiskey, stuff their pockets with toilet paper, and hop the train to wherever it was headed. With a high-ball whistle, a new bunch would shuffle into camp.

On Fridays, the mission would send an Irish priest, fresh out of the seminary in Dublin, to bring provisions. “El Padre!” Danny would yell as the little friar walked up and set sacks of carrots and corn meal on a cable reel.

“Ye be prayin bay?” The young priest would ask.

“Pues, why don’t we pray now, Padre?” Danny asked as he lit a corn cob pipe.

“Wot do ya tink yerr doin smokin in a prayerr?”

“I’m not smoking while I pray, Padre, I’m praying while I smoke.” Danny smiled before the friar bowed his head and offered up some words on Danny’s behalf. “And thank thee for my whore seester.” Danny muttered after the friar’s recital. The two men embraced before the friar began walking down the path toward the mission. “Don’t you get that shitty feeling you’ll be missed, Padre.” Danny said while laughing. The friar shook his head and smiled without looking back.

The View

2011-10-08T08:18:00.000-07:00

A little boy walked down a mountain path, eyes fixed on the ground directly in front of his feet, taking special care to not trip, and punishing himself for each instance in which he stumbled. Then an old man called out from the trees. “Chin up, son.” The voice said. “You know what’s down there without staring at it all the while. Look up, boy. There, where the sun rises out of the trees between those two peaks. Do you see it?”

Then the boy stopped and watched the grey sky turn to blue, pink, and amber before the fiery star rose out of a baleful night. “But that’s so far away.” The little one said. “What if I never get there?”

“Set your sights on it, anyways, son.” The voice rang out from the trees, once more. “The view makes the walk worthwhile.”

70 Years Later

2011-09-11T20:21:00.000-07:00

There is a one room grocery store with a coke sign on the peak of the galvanized metal roof. A single gas pump sits on the edge of a covered drive. The door is open and through the screen you can see David sitting inside at the counter reading a Field and Stream magazine. He has a Brewers cap on and old overalls. When his parents died in '85 the probate courts gave him $5 million for their old farm. You couldn't tell by looking at him, or the gas station for that matter. A freezer with the word ”ICE” hand painted in blue letters rests on the porch up against the white wood siding with the paint peeling off. A Rhode Island Red hen is being chased by a Barred Rock rooster and a Black and Tan Hound named Ol’ Hikry looks up without lifting his head. The Knucklehead that David got new in ’48 leans next to the shop door. He rides it to work everyday that the weather is good. Stakebed pick-ups hum by on the way to the elevator and a hawk perches on a moss covered wood post next to the highway. A Holstein cow buries her face in the clovers and grass in the field across the road, and a storm whips cirrus clouds into town as a warning. A 4H kid walking his lamb down the road with a cane is startled by Henry Jackson’s straight-piped Model T Roadster. Henry bought the old roadster for his fortieth birthday in 1963. He pulls up to the pump.

“You know Jesus was a Ford man, donchyou, Hank?” David yells as he limps out to pump Henry’s gas. “That’s why He walked everywhere He went.” He laughs at his own joke.

“Dave, what do you call a 13 year old girl from Milwaukee who could outrun her six brothers?” Henry says. “A virgin.” He laughs at himself, also. “I’m gonna miss you when you go, you old Guinea bastard.” Henry tells David.

"Not if your black ass dies first.” David says as he reaches out to shake Henry’s hand. David reaches in the cooler and smiles while handing Henry a Coke in a glass bottle. The old Ford cranks to a roar and Henry peels away in the gravel waving his hand in the air at his old friend.

David walks back into the store and Ol’ Hikry looks up, again, without lifting his head.

Clocks Slay Time

2011-09-05T09:09:00.000-07:00

Painting by Jean Paul Hubbard

It was a yellow afternoon and the ceiling fan was clanking rhythmically. It was a screen door slamming and fish frying kind of afternoon. Strings of onions hung next to strings of drying chilis in the shade of the porch’s eves. The smell of smoke mixed with pines as it hung in the air. Two drakes squawked at each other as they quibbled over a hen. A Marten climbed a Box Elder tree then peeked greedily into the empty nest of a Robin. The wash hung out on the line to dry. The skeleton of a green Schwinn bicycle lay next to empty railroad tracks. A bulldog waded lazily along the shoreline. A little girl with cherry on her face and chocolate milk stains on her dress pushed a wooden wheel barrow full of Coreopsis down the walk. A pile of peaches sat on the counter. A colorful butterfly became entangled in a spider’s web not moments before the beautiful yellow spider devoured it. The father and the boy sat in silence on weathered rocking chairs under the porch.

“How are the apples doing, Dad?” The young one inquired, awkwardly.

“Oh, the apples are doing pretty good, Son, but the worms are doing better.” The father said before another prolonged period of silence. The boy sat restlessly and uncomfortably in the silence.

The father consumed the Grolsch Beer, bleu cheese, red grapes and French bread that lay on the table between them. They both looked up and stared curiously as a tanned woman with thin bony legs, a supple belly, pleasing breasts, and a shapely but yielding buttocks walked by. Another period of silence ensued while the father tilted the green bottle back and used his fingers to shovel cheese, bread, and grapes into his mouth. The father began to smoke tobacco that he grew out of a corn cob pipe that he made, himself.

"Dad, smoking's not good for you." Said the boy.

“What do you kids call it now-a-days, Son?” He then paused, “Multitasking? … Yup, that’s it… multitasking. Now, that shit is dangerous, Son.” The father said. Then they sat in silence and watched as the sun sank into the earth.

The Evening Dews and Damps

2011-08-16T10:31:00.000-07:00

God writes a lot of good comedy. The trouble is, He has so many terrible actors1. Grandpa was one of the good ones. I can imagine him saying, “It’s going to be a beautiful funeral, shame I’ll miss it by just a few days2.” After 83 years of plugging away at this mortality bit, he’s been called-up, back home.

I dreamed about him the other night. He and I were swinging hammers together on a home that I’d never seen. He was in his 30’s, thin, muscular, had neatly combed hair, denim pants, and a tight fitting brown button up shirt. He was cutting a hole for a vent when he slipped. At first he was irate. Then, while shaking his head, he began to smile. He started laughing a hearty full bodied laugh. My own laughter ensued. It was vivid. It was a tender mercy3 to have seen him that way one more time. As I awoke, the thought came to my mind, “By God, he’s building a mansion in heaven.4”

Yea, when this flesh and heart shall fail,
and mortal life shall cease,
I shall possess within the veil,

a life of joy and peace.5

– John Newton

1. Garrison Keillor
2. Garrison Keillor
3. Psalms 103:4

4. John 14:2

5. Amazing Grace

The Song Sings Itself

2011-08-01T14:27:00.001-07:00

July, 1972. The day was hot and yellow and two teenage brothers were in the driveway arguing over some mundane triviality. They wore no shoes or shirts and their shorts were cut off Levi jeans from the thrift store. The crisp dry grass stood motionless in the stagnant air. Dad was in the garage turning wrenches on an old Ford tractor when the two boys commenced to going to fist city. Under the pounding of clenched hands, the little fits of anger turned into tears and bloody noses. The tall white clouds began to build upon each other in the deep sapphire sky. As blood and tears fell into the dry earth, so did the clouds begin to thunder and gum ball sized drops of rain created little billows of dust as they descended into the powdery soil. The drops grew into torrents as the boys eyes turned toward the sky. While the monsoon fell on them, the dirty tears mixed with blood and the rain washed their faces before it ran into the creek banks.

Choices

2011-07-25T13:26:00.000-07:00

As Americans we must, daily, make the following choice: Will I choose to spend money on garden fresh vegetables now or at the doctor’s office later? You must choose one.

"The doctor of the future will give no medication, but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, diet and in the cause and prevention of disease." Thomas Alva Edison

Redneck Stonehenge - A Rural Rant

2011-07-22T13:08:00.000-07:00

As urban sprawl continues to run rampant throughout the United States, the interface between suburbanites and rural folk can sometimes become problematic. A few years ago in Hooper, Utah, the situation got comical. A conglomerate of yuppie shit heads bought big lots next to some hayfields upon which they would build their starter mansions and begin to live what they like to call “the simple life.” Much to their dismay, they came to realize that those pretty horses and cows take shits, then flies land upon those road apples and pasture pastries. And who’d a thunk that those pretty fields need to get plowed by dusty old tractors every year? You mean bacon actually comes from somewhere? Then, did you know that when something breaks down, a farmer doesn’t throw it away?! The nerve of those people… not changing their lifestyle to accommodate the neighbors. It seems as though Rhett Davis had enough of their complaints when he erected a fence of old cars that he affectionately refers to as “Redneck Stonehenge” out of spite.

Which brings me to the neighbors. A retired L.A. police officer and his hair dresser wife. When they bought the property next door, they proceeded to apply the oceanic proportions of Round-up needed to turn their property into something resembling the surface of the moon. Occasionally, they could be seen in the front yard with their Hoover, vacuuming whatever had blown its way onto the surface of their gravel. After the chickens had meandered onto Menopause Manor a few times, they proceeded to unleash a shit storm of deafening bitching that would make Rachel Maddow look like Gandhi. This is before they called the police, of course. Needless to say, a fence was erected… upon which we grew a small crop of green beans. They then proceeded to demand a portion of those beans. The beans were, also, on their side of the fence, after all. So this morning, when the gobble of a turkey and the quack of a duck became the winter of discontent, I felt like dragging the old Chevy that I rolled as a teenager up to the fence and spray painting “Howdy Neighbor” on the side that faced their ostentatious abode.

I suppose that the point of this whole charade is that there are condominium complexes in straight lines, with square shrubs, curbs around the lawns, and HOA’s full off miserable bickering nags that would welcome the addition of yet another wretched backbiting idiot. There is a list of CC&R’s longer than “War and Peace” beckoning you to a place where you can take your decaf white chocolate and shove it up your bold mocha latte.

Let Freedom Ring

2011-07-04T23:29:00.000-07:00

There is a straight dirt road that runs east to west intersecting hay and potato fields. It is also the border between Washington and Iron counties. In the bed and on the tailgate of a Duramax pick-up, legions of children laugh and scream with excitement. My two year old is among them. She smiles and jumps as she watches in anticipation while her uncle lights bottle rockets with his cigarette. The rockets explode in a variety of colors and patterns. The smell of the burnt powder mixes with the must of a rain on the breeze. My infant kicks his fat little legs with each burst of color and my college sweetheart leans against me. America is not a ballot box, a gavel and a gown, a disconnected talk show pundit, or rich men in a white house. America is people.

"Freedom has its life in the hearts, the actions, the spirit of men" - Ike

Dad

2011-06-19T10:04:00.000-07:00

When I became a father, it occurred to me that I didn’t have all the answers. I still don’t have all of the answers. Here I am, supposed to be some form of a leader, a teacher, and maybe even an authority on life. That same life in which I am still anxiously engaged and learning, myself. In reflection, I am beginning to understand why my father exhibited less indignation and more humility in raising me. Not only is leading and teaching with humility effective, but such humility is a model for interpersonal relationships across the board. Love people, encourage them to do what you think is right, then the praise them for all of who they are (even and especially when they haven’t heeded to your encouraging).

I do have my own set of values, and I try to be objective in those values. But the reality is that my children, by virtue of their individuality, will form their own. The role that I play in helping them form those values will be entirely up to them. I can only hope that they will be more patient with me than I was as a defiant young person with my father. Furthermore, I hope that when they arrive at adulthood they have occasion to look back and say to me what I am about to say to my father.

Dad, I love you, and I respect you and your experiences.

Barnyard Quartet

2011-06-04T22:31:00.000-07:00

There may not be a more soothing orchestra in the history of mankind than that of sprinklers ratcheting from the wheel lines, the low of a longhorn in the night, crickets singing from the pasture, and toads croaking from the puddles.

Junkie

2011-05-28T07:23:00.000-07:00

It’s the damndest drug.
I’m driving the black truck too fast down a narrow road. The Dodge gets a little squirrely as it bottoms out on a cattle guard. Mopar bellows out of a glass-pack. Adam Carroll’s harmonica and Steve Earle’s mandolin hum from the blown out speakers. The wind pulls at my beard through the open windows. The Pinions, Ponderosas, and Junipers are pungent in the 70 degree mountain air. A group of rock chucks bask in the sun atop a pile of granite boulders. The light illuminates thousands of bees bouncing from blossom to blossom. A coyote stops in a pasture of thick grass. His ears are barely visible above the green and he peers through the waving blades. He stops for a minute longer and stares. He knows I won’t shoot him from the road. The truck goes silent as I pull the keys out. While I walk along staring at the earth below my feet, something catches my eyes and I stop to stare, myself. The rocky peaks and crevasses are still heavily packed with shining white snow. The air is so clear that though the peaks tower thousands of feet above me, it appears that nothing separates me from them but this earth’s mundane physics. And my mind won’t be troubled with such trivia as mortal physics. So I gawk at the pine trees growing out of the old igneous rock steeples and the emerald carpets glowing in the valley below. Then, in some odd communion, the passages run through my head… “A leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars.”…”We are as much strangers in nature as we are aliens from God.”… “The pedigree of honey/Does not concern the bee ;/A clover, any time, to him/Is aristocracy.” My eyes begin to open widely and take in the light then, staring at the surroundings, my mind quickens as a shot of dopamine hits my brain. I’m soothed and the pleasure fills my chest.
“Break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean” — John Muir

Más allá de los Sueños

2011-05-19T21:26:00.000-07:00

La unica cosa que quiero es estar en la playa, en el Mar de Cortez, y en la sombra de un arbol lima con mi familia. Quiero ver mis hijos nadando para langosta y cangrejo. Compramos camarones de un muchacho en una barca azul. Mi esposa tiene sus dedos en la arena. El agua ocasionalmente llegando a los pies de ella. Preparamos ceviche con ingredientes natural y frescos. Mi padre toma Tecate todo el dia. Mi mama tiene dos mojitos en las tardes. En los Domingos matamos un conejo para la cena. Nuestras casas estan cercas. Las ventanas nunca estan cerrados. Cada invierno obtenemos una vaca Chimpano, que no conoce grano, para el congelador. En las mañanas los niños buscan huevos en el patio. Las gallinas cantan sin decoro y los mariachis tocan las guitarras en El Centro. Mi esposa ofreca las servicias de ella al consultorio de medico MSF en La Paz. Mientras tanto, estoy escribiendo la conducta de todo, escribiendo las poemas de mi alma, los pensamientos de me mente, las palabras de me lengua, las doctrinas de la tierra, y los sueños de las estrellas. Es todo que quiero. Es la unica cosa. Es mi sueño.

Learning

2011-05-07T07:45:00.000-07:00

“Papa, I have cows in my nose.” The little boy said as they drove down the lane of dairies they called The Old Milky Way. In Papa’s shop, the boy ran his fingers over the tools and counted welding rods in the cans. This is where the boy learned that anything he ever needed, he could build for himself.

The tractor bumped through the dark brown clods, the disc harrow clanked chaotically, and the exhaust rhythmically popped. The boy sat on his father’s lap atop the machine. Grandpa walked along behind them looking for rocks that pop up from under the disc. This is where the boy learned that anything he ever needed, he could grow for himself.

His mother set the boy on her lap and read from children’s encyclopedias. She would teach him phonics, spelling, and grammar, among the history and science. This is where the boy learned that anything he ever needed, he could think for himself.

Grandma would put the boy on her lap and recite melodious rhymes and stories. Peacock feathers, spinning wheels, and hoards of old hats hung in the room. This is where the boy learned that anything he ever needed, he could dream for himself.

The boy and Grammy peddled the tandem bicycle down the boardwalk together. They rode past carnivals, shops, food vendors, and the sea rushed the beach. He watched the waves spit, felt the salty breeze on his face, smelled the kelp, and touched the soft white sand with his feet. This is where the boy learned that anything he ever needed, he could experience for himself.

Her eyes were a brilliant clear brown and her countenance was kind and full of spirit. Her smile and the freckles on her cheeks were hypnotic. She loved him in spite of his faults and made him want to be a better person. This is where the young man began to learn that everything he ever needed was to give himself to someone else.

The baby girl and the tiny little boy blend his characteristics with those of their mother. They are aware, awake, and conscious little beings. They observe, and learn, and repeat, and build upon. This is where the man learns that everything he ever needs is to exist in someone else.

Spring in Rural America

2011-04-18T21:14:00.000-07:00

Gary Ernest Smith retains all rights to this image. It belongs to him solely and entirely.

Spring will make you feel like a rich man. So long as you don’t think about it burning up and turning yellow in a few weeks. A mind like mine sees the thick green grass growing from the cedar and pine duff and thinks in excess. All that green. The cows’ll get fat without so much as thinking about it. Not a sprinkler in sight and that grass keeps getting taller and fuller. Kids look for any reason to go outside with their shoes off. You look for any reason to let them. Honey bees are bouncing from Hyacinth blossom to Crocus to Peach blossom. Pink peach blossoms. The trees that you grew from pits that the neighbor gave you. Her name is Caroline. You call them Sweet Caroline Peaches. The greenhouse gobbles up the sun’s energy and the green stems erupt from your raspberries’ dead raspy canes. You throw a little more cayenne in your food. You buy soap that smells like peppermint, grapefruit, and coconut. Family pictures in front of a cottonwood trunk. You feed the horses fat carrots that overwintered. You ask for seconds on the yolky eggs that you sop with whole multi-grain toast. Cast iron pans with a patina of bacon fat. That rain that percolates arouses an almost erotic pleasure as it purrs on the brown metal roof. Better flip over the John Boat so it doesn’t fill up with water. Your brother and sister gave you the boat. It was your wife’s grandpa’s boat. There’s a picture of him and your wife on the refrigerator. He’s holding your wife as a baby and sitting on a metal swing. She’s just in a diaper, no shirt. They are both smiling beyond what words can commune. Grandpa Bill lives on, by God. His boat is outside in the yard and that little girl is a momma now. The grass keeps growing. Fat rabbits swell with their young inside. The white pigeons set on an egg. The ducks are audibly excited. You turn the light in the chicken house off. Call the neighbor and set up a time to shear the lambs together. Set the goat kids up on hay. You better borrow the neighbor’s big tractor for that chore. Better split up the hog and the sow. He’s eating more than she is. Finish “Angle of Repose” and put it back up on the shelf. Thank you, Mr. Stegner. Call an old friend. Make sure you shut the door to the shop so the rain doesn’t get it. Walk out there in the mist and soak it up. Radishes, onions, garlic, arugula, cabbage, carrots, turnips, and beets; all coming through the soil’s dampened crust. There are more cookies, still, on the counter. Chicken fry homegrown steaks for the boyscouts. Your wife makes them biscuits, too. More biscuits, please. Not much better than those biscuits. Time to paint and stain the wood on the house. The wood on the shed. The wood on the chicken hutch. Till up the weeds. Plant the corn. Plant the sunflowers. The grapes are budding out. Mr. Bingham gets the wheel lines’ mover motor running, just in preparation. The creeks swell. And for a moment, it’s all how it should be.

An Agrarian

2011-04-02T23:29:00.000-07:00

This image belongs solely to Gary Ernest Smith

The truest measure of a civilization is the relationship its people have with their food.

In the United States of America’s food system, 10 kcal are expended in growing, transporting, and storing food for every 1 kcal of energy that a human being receives from that food. 82% of 308 million U.S. residents live in an urban environment. That is to say that their food is shipped in and their rubbish out. What are they doing in there? In the year 2000, the service industry accounted for or $2.1 trillion of the $9.8 trillion GDP. The financial sector came in a close second with $2 trillion of the GDP. In no mixed words, 40% of one of the United States’ most lucrative economies came from intangible and unreal products. 40% of our country’s talents produced virtually nothing independent of the behavior for which money is being exchanged… ambiguously serving one another.

In 1900, 41% of the United States population was employed in agriculture. Only 1.9% of Americans were employed in agriculture in 2000. In the same year, only $1.3 billion (1%) of the GDP is a result of agricultural produce. Why? Do the statistics tell us, implicitly, that agriculture is undignified, unintelligent, or generally unworthy of and unfit for bright people? My answer is no.

An agrarian can be a poet, a scientist, a student, a preacher, a prophet, and above all a valiant and integrative pursuer of objectivity. In agriculture, like any good work, the agrarian can create a product that is a sovereign manifestation of his application of knowledge, craftsmanship, diligence, and free thinking. When the last berry is picked or the baler makes one final plunge, the thing that stands before the man is the article by which he is evaluated. The ambiguity of a manager’s explanation, the uncertainty of a television advertiser’s effectiveness, and the salesman’s subjective justification of a slogan’s expediency all vanish into the reality of their impotence. But the protein content in a bale of hay stays. The cup of berries’ degree of Brix remains, still. “The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, who has no real effect in the world. But craftsmanship must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.” (Matt Crawford)

We get out of agriculture what we put into to it. If we use loutish shortcuts, then the quality of the product is so compromised that it is a façade or a skeleton of its former potential. An orange grown on a tree that’s been machine pruned and ripened by ethylene gas is a shadow of the fruit grown on branches that were selected by the thoughtful eye of a caretaker for pruning then ripe picked by discriminating hands.

But there is more to agriculture than the moral and cognitive externalities. I think of a most infamous situation in modern history and its likeness to our current economic quandary. Enron Corporation was at the leading edge of the business world. In an effort to increase their favor in the public eye, Enron’s leaders made self-gratifying half truth representations of their financial status. The subsequent favorable valuation of Enron stock reflected the people’s favorable opinion of company’s financial status. The charade continued to inflate Enron’s value until someone had the gumption to ask the question, “What are you guys actually doing to earn money and be worthy of your stock’s valuation?” What followed was a moral and economic tragedy. Even in the wake of our recent crisis, the United States of America is ahead of the world, as GDP values go. And our GDP estimates have continued to increase since 2009. Is there going to come a time when Americans collectively ask, “What are we doing to earn the money that gives us this image of prosperity?”

And is there going to come a time when, in addition to the economic paradox, Americans collectively ask, “Is what I’m doing making me happy? Is what I’m doing demonstrative of an objective competence, am I communing unambiguously with the future, and does my work have value independent of the commercialist narrative?” Furthermore, will we ask ourselves, “Are the items upon which I spend my money contributing to the veneer of integrity or its authenticity?”

For the few fading agrarians who can answer those questions with a resounding confidence, I applaud you. For everyone else, we can be better.

"A farm includes the passion of the farmer's heart, the interest of the farm's customers, the biological activity in the soil, the pleasantness of the air about the farm -- it's everything touching, emanating from, and supplying that piece of landscape. A farm is virtually a living organism. The tragedy of our time is that cultural philosophies and market realities are squeezing life's vitality out of most farms. And that is why the average farmer is now 60 years old. Serfdom just doesn't attract the best and brightest." (Joel Salatin)

The Root of All Evil

2011-03-31T06:52:00.000-07:00

Her mother was a looker in her time. Now Momma’s hair was nearly all grey. Her skin was still taught but weathered and yellow. Her butt was small but soft and loosened. Her stomach was no longer flat for it had made space for children. Her tone of voice still rang with fervor and she still worked as though she had the stamina of one hundred teenagers. As Beronica began to understand her mother she started to dislike her less. The fact that mother earned her age had never occurred to the young blooming girl. Every grey hair was paid for by nursing a baby, and each soft spot in her aging body was purchased by a humble family.

Papa took Samuel with him during the day. They were shrimp fisherman and cast their nets from a wooden boat painted with teal paint. The paint had begun to chip and the brown undercoat was surfacing in spots around the keel. In the evening they mended their nets and cleaned the boat before walking wearily towards their home and the Mazatlecas. It is a city founded on the wonders of women. The great mermaid Mazatleca is portrayed in stone at the warf as a tribute to the salt footed women who run the city day in and day out as the men drift about foamy green currents and scoop tons of camarones from the sea. The women wash, peel and cook the shrimp, beans, dorados, and tomatoes. They combine simple and whole ingredients to make treasures of the cuisine mas rica en el mundo.

Beronica is bilingual. She is admired and adored for it. Her broken and poorly articulated English earns her respect among locals and interests among tourists. She waits tables for tourists at the local bars and restaurants. At five feet tall she is just the right height for young drunk huedos to look at her from their stools as she brings them more Pacifico. Her waist is thin and her hips are slightly curved. Her chest is small but proportionate. Her shoulders are angular and her face is olive and far more fair than any of her relatives. Her smile is wide and her lips full and rouge. Her eyes steal the show. Men might stop and watch her from across the market but when she looks over at them they might, as well, pant. They are large round eyes with whites and dark browns providing deep clear contrasts.

Los Coyotes take terrified young people through the desert into Arizona for a nominal fee. If the immigrants can’t pay, then the coyotes find another way to take the fee out of them. Some have maquiladoras in Tijuana where the men and ugly women work off an infinite debt. The good looking women and young girls are often raped or left in the desert if they protest. Mama made sure that there was enough money to spare Beronica the terrible experience that a cheap coyote would provide. Mazatlan is no place for a bright young woman, her mother thinks. The culture is too old and too set in poverty. Her little girl deserves more. Samuel, the elder brother, loves the city. He loves to dress up and chase tourist girls on the weekends. While he’ll never be a millionaire, he is far more advanced than many will ever dream of. He loves the simplicity. The canteros in the streets and the children riding bikes with baskets full of fish make his life complete.

Mama became obsessed with her plans for Beronica. She was miserable with these plans. She needed her daughter to taste wealth. Beronica could marry a nice white man and cook him mole and chile relleno. He would love her and spoil her and they would never have a single emotional quarrel, they would have enough money to fix even that. She would be the proud Abuela of beautiful little chubby fair haired and well mannered babies that spoke in Vos. They would be proper and clean. Her son in law would be a banker or a corporate officer. He would be so grateful for sending him his little bride that he would send money even though they told him not to. They have so much money there. Everything pays so well. He will look at us and say “I admire those people for being so frugal, humble, and working so hard. They deserve so much.” Her son in law will be fit, even though he sits in his leather chair all day. He will make love to her and she will understand real pleasure, not this cheap Mexican emotion she calls love. Maybe she will have a car, a large diesel car with air conditioning. Maybe they can visit. Even the cruise ships stop in our little fishing city. Oh how wonderful her son in law will be. She will cook him a feast when he comes. He will learn how to fish with Papa. They will only trouble Sinaloa with vacation and then will go back to their city to live that dream. Oh how Mama wants to be young again. She wants to leave this place. She wants to have a career and to sleep in softened machine washed sheets with a rich white man. So she cleans instead. She is quiet and dreamy. She scrubs and sweats out her lusts. She hopes for Beronica and the future.

One evening Beronica overheard Mama and Papa discussing their daughter's trip. This was the first the girl had ever heard of the plan. She was scared and betrayed that her parents wanted her gone, but she yearned to please her parents and their expectations for success.

At 2 a.m. that Saturday morning, Momma’s little girl rifled quietly through a drawer that was thought to be secret and came upon two thousand dollars wrapped in a corn husk. Her mochila dangled from one shoulder and she looked back at the house with nervous contempt and emotion. If they wanted her gone, then she'd leave alone. She’d show them. She would drive home in the nicest car and she’d bring them all gifts, when they asked her to stay she would tell them that she must return to her job in California. She would be better than they were and she would hold it over their heads. She walked towards el centro and stopped in Our Lady’s church before she left. Outside was a bearded man with no shirt playing the guitar and singing the New Testament word by word to his melody. She prayed and later walked outside in the city lights. The paleteros scuttled home on their bicycles and taco vendors swam through the crowds with their carts. Prostitutes paraded up the sandy paved roads and borrachos grabbed them as they walked by. Bars full of tourists shook with latin music and glowed in neon tones. She walked with her head down quickly to the bus station. The archaic Mercedes bus had no windows and croaked along kilometer by kilometer until she reached Nogales the following afternoon.

In Nogales a white man in his early twenties with thick hoop earrings and long matted facial hair looked over the crowd. Some of the immigrants carried bed rolls. Some came from farm country as far south as Chiapas and others from Monterrey. The ones that had been through the most desert had Clorox bottles full of water tied together and draped over their shoulders. Los coyotes picked through the immigrants and divided them up amongst themselves. The coyotes collected their dues and looked at some with an eye of lust and anticipation.

Beronica handed eighteen hundred dollars to the man with the facial hair and he nodded. His car was a silver BMW with metal bars welded in the place of his rear shocks so the border patrol couldn’t see the weight in the trunk. A set of golf clubs rested on the back seat and he wore a white Titlist hat and polo shirt. He opened the trunk and pointed for her to get in. Beronica climbed in and rode for what seemed to be hours. She awoke as the car slowed to a stop and she could hear the gravel under the tires. The man opened the door and said, “We have a little problem.”

“Lo ciento, no entiendo.” She replied in a half awakened voice and through squinting eyes.

“You still owe me 500 dollars. Comprende? Cinco hundred dolares.”

“No entiendo senor, tienes todo mi dinero.”

He smiled a vile smile and lifted her by the hand out of the trunk. She was unsure by his demeanor. He put his hand on her defined hip and she pushed it off. Her look of offense turned to one of horror, instantly. He grabbed her and pulled her towards him. She would not benefit from a struggle, and she would not be heard screaming. He unbuttoned his pants and then hers. She lay lifeless and quietly sobbed into her hand on the seat where the golf clubs had been before. He removed her clothing then intense and overwhelming pain and heat shot through her and she winced and whined then wailed uncontrollably. He began many young girls’ journeys this way, but something was different feeling about her. She offended him because she didn’t fight back. She laid there as if she were willing to undergo any torture to accomplish her intentions. He pointed his disgusting and violating hands to her clothes and her thin naked body arose to put them back on. He opened the trunk and pointed for her to climb in. She grabbed her mochila from the car and walked with her head held high on the road towards city lights.

“I’ll show them all.” She said, “I’ll come back rich.”

Fairy Tales

2011-03-14T22:47:00.000-07:00

When the clouds make a ring around the moon, it’s going to rain soon. So they told me as a child. Who cares if it’s a wives’ tale? When I came in tonight, that’s what I saw. I am inclined to believe them, this time.

Her lips are perfect. I stare at them at times. She’s sweet, smart, stubborn, and makes Job’s patience look ridiculous. She has freckles on her nose and brown eyes with a crystal like clarity. She’s my wife. Folks say angels are real. I am inclined to believe them, this time.

My son looks like me when he sleeps. There are two pairs of Levis in my bureau, new Georgia boots drying on the hearth, and Girl Scout Cookies in the pantry. This afternoon I ferried the tractor from the heap to the berry patch, bucket full of composted manure after bucket full. With each scoop, the chickens swarmed in to pillage the newly uncovered soil. My dog, barking occasionally, ran back and forth along side the machine throughout the entire process. My little girl swayed like a pendulum on the swing, smiled, waved, and yelled “Hi, Daddy!” This evening I burned some cull lumber in the rock fire pit behind my house. The light flickered off cedar and pine boughs. I hear that dreams do come true. And I am inclined to believe it, this time.

Good Morning Sun

2011-03-10T08:31:00.000-08:00

Photo courtesy of Nathan Wotkyns www.wideangleart.com

Image Copyright Nathan Wotkyns 2010

This morning I held my son and he wriggled with excitement, then cooed and smiled as the sun’s rays shown through the cedar and pine trees. We stood in front of the windows in my living room and watched for a moment. The view really was quite beautiful and his excitement at seeing the light on the trees was inspiring. I imagine that he had waited eons to view this spectacle. “We get to look at this everyday, son.” I whispered to him. We watched for a moment longer.

How To Be A Man

2011-02-23T14:10:00.000-08:00

Everyday. Put a bag of tea in an old mason jar and set it in the sun. Put on Levi jeans and Georgia boots. Eat honey or jelly on whole grain toast. Sit on a cottonwood stump and be still. In the summer, fly fish. In the winter, take stem cuttings and plant them in the greenhouse. In the winter, work in the woodshop. In the summer, weed and water. A child tags along at your heels no matter the season. The animals need fed, no matter the season. In the summer time, there is a salt shaker on the fencepost and you use it on the tomatoes you eat for lunch. In the winter, at noon, fry two of the eggs that you gathered that morning. Dip oatmeal cookies in milk. Work is play, play is work, hard, life is toil, sing and smile. Politics are for rich lazy men. Your only competition is the sun, try to outwork it. Slave to nobody, no system, no bank. Split wood. Windmill pumps water. Plant, reap. Respect your mate. On your birthday, do pull-ups; one for every year. The sun goes down, you got done what you could. That’s good enough; it has to be. Fry a cubed elk steak. Make biscuits with sour milk from the neighbor. Eat potatoes and carrots that you dug. Serve dinner to your wife and daughter, first. Wash the work off of you. Change your clothes. Read “1000 Beautiful Things” at bedtime with your kids. And sleep because you’re tired, not because it’s bedtime.

Plastic Paddy

2011-02-23T12:43:00.000-08:00

Between my ears echoes the voice of the greats
Spoon fed by Shaw, James Joyce, and Yeats.

A Blarney Stone kissing Yank family
County Waterford and Edmund Burke in the tree

Corn beef and cabbage on the 17th ate
A breast full of healthy government hate

But a countenance full of more laughs than ire
Drinking whiskey with logs and not peat on the fire.

Claddagh on finger and head under cap
Old fiddle and bow rest on my lap

Continents away and separated by sea
Like hell we’ll forget of whom we’re progeny

Cornfields and Stars

2011-02-12T23:30:00.000-08:00

Three others and I stood in the stubble of a cornfield tonight staring up at the heavenly orbs in a clear and matchless dark sky while ruminating over quantum physics. The vista and discussion were surreal.

What Dreams

2011-01-29T23:03:00.000-08:00

Any given Saturday, it’s there. The gold 1973 Chevy truck’s long bed is loaded with cut cedar firewood and sitting outside of a five and dime that is tucked into the pines. He walks out drinking a Coke from a glass bottle. A bit of the wet soda drips from his trimmed gray beard. An SLR camera, a split cane fly-rod, and a lever action rifle sit on the passenger seat. His wife provokes him playfully as she climbs into the middle next to him. He is wearing a long-sleeved thermal shirt under clean pressed denim overalls. He has a tweed cap and leather Wellington boots. The large Chevrolet engine thumps and cracks through fiberglass mufflers and the step side truck rolls down the oiled road. He teaches English and Literature courses a couple of times a week through the local community college and sends small pieces that he’s written for various literary magazines and journals through the mail. Their one bedroom house is meticulously constructed of the finest granite and hardwood materials. It is luxurious and humble rolled into efficiency and sustainability. Home is homemade and debt free. He converted the barn loft into a guest apartment with bunks for the children to stay in when they come home to visit. In the garden he grows multi-colored carrots, asparagus, artichokes, cabbage, snow peas, onions, garlic, striped tomatoes, tobacco, and sweet peppers. The berry patch provides sweet plump fruit for preserves and hundreds of cuttings and sprouts to re-pot and sell the following year. He’ll take throngs of cuttings from pomegranate, grapes, willows, honeysuckle, and cottonwoods then grow pines and pecans from seed and sell them all. The little raised planter in the front of the petite brick home is overflowing with Chamomile, Echinacea, Papaver Somniferum, and peppermint. Two old Ginkgos grow on either side of the house. She and he sit on the front porch under the shadow of the Ginkgos in rocking chairs that he made from cull. He smokes his pipe tobacco with raw opium to soothe his tired and broken body.

There was a point when he, like so many others, had to make a decision about his quality of life. While so many of his contemporaries chose to spend their lives working so hard to pay off the financing of things they never wanted to begin with... he said, “no more.” No more whimsically working away our existence indentured to another. No to working his entire life just so he can slip into a wheel mounted aluminum box and watch television day in and day out for the latter portion of mortality. Yes to mindfulness. Yes to a racing heart. Yes to a dream.

The moon comes up.
The moon goes down.
This is to inform you
that I didn’t die young.
Age swept past me
but I caught up.
Spring has begun here and each day
brings new birds up from Mexico.
Yesterday I got a call from the outside
world but I said no in thunder.
I was a dog on a short chain
and now there’s no chain.
-Jim Harrison

Good Morning Ponies

2011-01-23T11:02:00.000-08:00

Still air and a sprawling mountain valley. There was hard frozen snow on the ground. I tried to inch closer to them, but he wasn’t having it. The big bay stallion stared at me. I didn’t imagine him as stoic and authoritative. He was too young and weary. The two mares, one chestnut and the other bay, stood closely behind him switching their tails. He neighed some profane and ill-tempered neigh. Conceding that I could get no closer, I took the picture and the mustangs loped over the knoll. An old ruin of a homestead lay in shambles; the cobblestone wall and fireplace were the only remaining integrity of what was formerly a structure. An icon of one's failed attempt to live inside of a natural world... outside of one's self. Mount Wilson was covered in snow in the background. From one vantage point I could see three bald eagles. They were old and stoic. Not at all bothered by me or my alien presence. Indian Peak was at my back. The snow made it impassible. I intended to cross over it and then into the Wah Wahs to the North, but we were bound by the snow to stay in Hamblin Valley. That was alright, though. My companion and I didn’t see another soul, besides the ones on hoof and wing, the entire time we were in the valley. Just the way I like it. I could hear for miles, see forever farther, and could smell no trace of humanity’s artifice. The perfect way to begin a day.

Ideal

2011-01-18T13:57:00.000-08:00

Objectivity

The absolute form of which is truth

The pursuit of which is integrity

The emotionally charged babbling of ignorant masses is its absence

Liberty

2011-01-17T19:56:00.000-08:00

Liberty is a tide. Occasionally a person comes along and ushers in that tide. The thing is that every boat on the water floats a little higher. Not just boats with HMS painted on them. Every color, shape, and size of vessel is elevated. Dr. King was no product of high society. Like many of history’s greatest, he was once an ordinary boy and an ordinary man. By some stroke of creative genius, perseverance, and providence, he ushered in a liberty the likes of which “civilized” society had hardly seen. We celebrate him and his model. We accept responsibility for our role in the water level.
“It is true of the spirit as it is true of battles — only the winners are remembered. Surely most men are destroyed, but there are others who like pillars of fire guide frightened men through the darkness.” John Steinbeck

Children

2010-12-29T13:18:00.000-08:00

Cherished contentment

So oft I know you well

Yet other times

My weakened mind

Brings upon me hell

Divine is born

The veil is torn

Hope for better than me

Hope it is

That fills my breast

Beloved progeny

Happy Christmas

2010-12-24T08:13:00.000-08:00

What I write today isn’t about converting to any one form of Christianity. This isn’t an emotional gushing. I simply want to talk about how these basic Christian principles are among the noblest of human virtues.

The Lord of the Universe chose to become incarnate in about as far from pomp and circumstance as possible. He was not born into a family of lawyers and wealth. He was born to a carpenter and a Bedouin. A construction worker and a shepherd woman. In the stench and the filth of a barn, no less. The King of the Cosmos… in a barn. An ordinary baby into a seemingly random family and He changed the course of existence. What an amazing archetype. A ruler in the eternities wielding every atom of every molecule at His fingertips. One moment watching comets frolic in His front yard. The next choosing to reside in a trough where livestock eat. Forgoing luxury in lieu of being swaddled in rough cloth. All this, mind you, not because He had something to learn. But, rather, to teach. Not using legislation, no popular media outlet, He used His example. Not choosing to manifest as a professor, magistrate, or even a passing traveler, He came as a baby subject to the same possibility of grief and affliction as you and I. A baby. His purpose was His own, but in the spirit of His example I am in awe of the potential for changing the world that resides in each little child. This season is theirs.

Matthew 18:5 And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me.

“When God wants a great work done in the world or a great wrong righted, he goes about it in a very unusual way. He doesn’t stir up his earthquakes or send forth his thunderbolts. Instead, he has a helpless baby born, perhaps in a simple home out of some obscure mother. And then God puts the idea into the mother’s heart, and she puts it into the baby’s mind. And then God waits. The greatest forces in the world are not the earthquakes and the thunderbolts. The greatest forces in the world are babies.” (E. T. Sullivan, The Treasure Chest, p. 53.)

A Farmer's Holiday

2010-12-16T14:47:00.000-08:00

Image of Gary Ernest Smith's "Family Farm 2010" He retains all rights to the image.

Let’s call a Farmers’ Holiday
A Holiday let’s hold
We’ll eat our wheat and ham and eggs
And let them eat their gold.

A bust follows every boom. Dad held out and wouldn’t sell to the developers. He had stubborn pride in his lifestyle and his heritage. He wasn’t about to abandon it all in the name of some quick money. Now he’s sold all of the market animals and he put the family’s ground up for sale. But everyone’s put their family ground up for sale, so it aint going to sell any time soon. He does get a couple dollars for a dozen eggs from the hens that he kept. They just sell off the front porch in bit of a stand that he made to peddle garden vegetables, fruit and berries. He, also, shares a milk cow with the neighbors, just to drink. He don’t sell any of it. He’s been building rocking chairs out of culled lumber and trinkets out of barn wood to sell in the newspaper classifieds. In the little town of about 5000 residents, there are three banks. The whole of the county can’t find two nickels to rub together, but the bank managers take their bailout money out to eat at about three times a week, own their houses outright, and wear their clean Stetsons while they drive their new pick-ups. We defaulted on the operating loan Dad took out to buy seed. The wildlife folks found an endangered frog in the river and they cut off about half our ditch water in order to preserve it. We had about enough water to get things sprouted then we had to let it go fallow. The grain died. Can’t sell it if you can’t grow it. The only reason we had to buy seed, anyhow, is because the neighbor went genetically modified. The outfit that designed that genetically modified seed sued dad for cleaning and saving his own. Dad says that even if he had built a block wall in between his field and the neighbors’ to keep out the genetically modified seed, he couldn’t afford to go to court and prove it. Dad settled and agreed to not save his own any longer. The only way a guy can afford to buy seed is by going to the bank. The banks don’t care about no frogs in the water, though. Dad says that a lot of the folks in the corridors of power worked for the banks or the seed company at one point, so going to anyone at the state for justice is just clutching at straws. A new farm is foreclosed on every week. Folks in town talk about Atlas and middle class. They talk about “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and the fascist aristocracy. The bank men’s kids wear new shoes and Abercrombie clothes to school. I was happy as a damn lark to get a pair of socks for Christmas. My uncle is out of work, too. He used to run a loader in the gravel pit down the road. He would sit me on his lap and let me drive when I was a kid. He sits at home now on the unemployment extension that the Washington fat cats so graciously gave us to tide us over until such time as we’re able to fill their coffers, again. Uncle plays the violin. He plays day in and day out. They’ve formed a string quartet in town and they play shows at the social hall. The bank managers are all fat and sassy while Dad and Uncle’s families only eat the sack beans from the cellar and homemade bread from the food storage flour. Some of that ground elk and gravy on mom’s home made bread aint bad, though. For Christmas this year, we’re doing home made caramels and popcorn balls with the fresh milk and sugar from the food storage. We do it on the heating stove rather than in the kitchen because the wood is free for the cutting. Mom’s picked up a full week’s worth of sewing jobs because there’s no more stock to sell and Dad can’t find a side job. My older sister and her husband moved in with us when she was with child. Their baby boy is born now and they’ve got a wolf carrying hospital bills at the door. The state says that our family has too much land to get on the Medicaid. Dad says that we should exchange produce for the doctor’s bills. The doctor takes pity and agrees to it, but the hospital don’t have any need for it. I was to go to college next year after I graduate. But there’s to be no money for that, either. And the government, they say we’ve got too much land to get an allowance for tuition. Grandpa says I don’t need to go to school. Grandpa was a hobo during the Great Depression. He don’t mind any of this. Nothing is as hard as riding trains from jungle to jungle and going days at a time before being able to bum food scraps. He’s a regular Professor Grampy, he is. Always tinkering in the garage and inventing odd contraptions. Content to eat egg, flour, and water pancakes for every meal. For weeks he’ll sleep on a cot in the shop, living on apples and woodstove fried duck eggs that he gathered in the yard. “It’s all gotta stop,” he says, “Folks get hungry enough, they get stepped on enough, and they’re going to take what’s rightfully theirs. It’ll come. The time will come. The time when the corporate sales and the government’s patronizing little doles won’t quench the folks’ thirst for justice. They aint ever going to stop stepping on you until then. They might take some of the weight off of this foot or that, but they’ll still be stepping on you, by God. But it’ll come. That time’ll come. White folks, black folks, red folks, yellow folks, queer folks, straight folks, atheist folks, Christian folks… it’s all the same. They all work for the same fellas in suits and gowns with gavels. It’s all gotta stop,” he says, “and by God it will.”

“Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten. And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow. ...and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.” – John Steinbeck

"There was a child went forth every day" - Walt Whitman

2010-12-09T08:34:00.000-08:00

There he is. My father. Kind, lovely, and generous. Then from moment to moment he’s cantankerous, pig headed, unjust, and lazy. Carrying on concerning consciousness, ideals, and fancy thoughts about the divinity of our minds. Always writing something. Meanwhile the wolf is at the door and he can’t pay. He’s to be out of a job, again. We might have to move, again. He can’t afford to be educated. He can’t afford Christmas. He can’t afford the clothes that he bought me. I hear him and Mom talking through the door. More wolves. This damned system, he says. He asks Mom if she’s alright. She doesn’t mind the system, she just wants to be able to have clothes that fit and a car that starts. She doesn’t want to sift through the collections notices that come in the mail. The system is a figment of his imagination, to her. But she doesn’t say that; she says that she’s fine. We just need to work things out, or to catch a break, she says. We eat porridge. Nobody eats porridge. It’s made from 6 grains, he says almost religiously. He’s proud of the 6 grain porridge. He buys it because it’s cheap and it sticks to our insides, he says. He’ll cook pinto beans on the wood stove all night. The beans come from a big sack. I think they’re cheap and stick to our insides, too. Everyone has the farts, afterwards. He tinkers in the shop. Like Sam Hamilton, he says. He feels like a man, he says, fixing this or building that. Not like a cog in the machine, he says. He’s proud of the furniture. He and Mom built it all, he says. I don’t like when he’s on the phone. He talks for a long time about things that I can’t understand, and even if he doesn’t yell, he’s cross when he gets off the phone. He still gives me hugs, though. And he loves me, he says. He picks me up and hangs me upside down. He’ll put his chin in my ribcage and I laugh. I laugh enough for both of us, because I can tell that he’s not laughing. I love him, too. I don’t want to be a cog in the machine, either. I don’t think, at least. But can I still pay the bills and not be a cog? I would pay the bills for him so he doesn’t have to be a cog. That’s a funny word, cog. When I play with my friends, they don’t know what a cog is. They don’t know who Uncle Walt is, either. They don’t think it’s funny when I say, “Out damned spot,” like Dad thinks it’s funny. I wonder if my friends are part of the system. I wonder if they get toaster waffles for breakfast and fish sticks for supper. That part of being a machine would be good. Dad talks to me in Spanish. I understand, but I can’t say it back, so I reply in English. I think that’s part of not being a cog, being called mija. I think getting the eggs from Grandma and Grandpa’s house is part of not being a cog, too. I put them in a wire basket for Grandpa. Sometimes I break them, but Poppa doesn’t mind. I don’t think he’s the system. We feed apples from the trees to the cows at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. I’m sure people in the system don’t do that. Dad smiles and tells me that he’s happy I know where food comes from. I like it when Dad is happy.

-Eden Wilson

Zealotry

2010-12-01T20:51:00.000-08:00

“By 'radical,' I understand one who goes too far; by 'conservative,' one who does not go far enough; by 'reactionary,' one who won't go at all.” - Woodrow Wilson

In my geographic region, the church that I belong to transcends the definition of a religion and adopts a role closely resembling that of an ethnic group. It becomes a pious culture rather than a positive set of values by which members conduct themselves. Similarly, in other parts of the country, Contemporary Christianity seems to engulf the members and the belief structure becomes more of an identity or an end itself, rather than the means to a charitable, productive, and humble life demonstrative of and emanating those beliefs. I think of traditional Catholicism in Italy, Ireland, or Mexico in the same light. That isn’t to say that all of the members of the respective religions are living the rote rather than the rule, but the assertion and my observation (erroneous it may be to some) is that the representative majority is only going through the motions. Then the battle over faith vs. works erupts futilely. One group lauds their own empty charades and the other insists that the laurels of their ideals are sufficient enough to void the need for living Christian principles.

Political zealotry is equally destructive to human integrity. Political fanaticism leads Americans to become consumed with the self proclaimed rectitude of their own political ideals and the flaws of their ideological opponents. This consumption requires so much effort of and evokes so much frustration in the mind of the zealot that living one’s own political ideals must take a back seat to promoting those ideals. This moral and cognitive decrepitude has become the cornerstone of the American political system and a defining attribute of a great many politically “active” individuals. This is a fundamental bipartisan defect.

My own flaws are beyond words and immeasurable. So I claim no inherent superiority. But I have watched some people and I have learned some things, and I do, still, insist that-
the calling is simple.
for individuals to live deep and quality lives.
to be that change you wish to see (Gandhi).
whatever the change is.
to have the depth of maturity to live.
and, also, to let live.

Gifts

2010-11-29T16:52:00.000-08:00

“The hills were thirsty and the people whined for their crops. Yellow years were good years. Egos were also shriveled in the drought. The dreams and aspirations that can only be born out of want were more abundant in the yellow years. The devices and methods that only poor, worried people can create come into existence to improve, to entertain, to enlighten, and even to distract in the dry times.” – from my book, “Ven Mijo”
There is a unique virtue in lack of wealth. Even that relative lack, which others may perceive as luxury. The actually quantity of wealth is not unimportant, but it is of less consequence in comparison to the feeling that one has when he or she has less than before. One thinks differently. One improvises. One looks at oneself and one’s company in a different respect. Values change, priorities change, and we panic. Life is different when lived as we’re knocked back on our heels. Virtuoso. Growing pains.
I had a need. A temporal item in my life became damaged and I needed a new one. The woman who helped me replace the item is inherently generous. But knowing something of her current economic situation, I cannot help but wonder how dire circumstances have influenced the charitable transaction. This is meant to be a compliment. God bless you, your misfortune however big or small, and your act of generosity. Heaven help us if people become too comfortable for charity
"If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones." - Steinbeck
.

Snowing on a Sunday

2010-11-28T13:56:00.000-08:00

“…as is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains…” - Thoreau

It seems strange to me that I can be delighted by such a trinket as having a kettle of water on the wood stove so I can have tea on demand all day long. I fed the old pumpkins to mom and dad’s chickens. I can’t taste the pumpkin in the eggs, but my are those yolks deeply yellow and dense… not translucent whitish yolks in the eggs from the store bought products of complex economy. The snow is going on 15 hours. I left this morning to get enough wood to last through the storm. Reading Frank McCourt and listening to Garrison Keillor inside for the remainder of the day. Eating toast… one slice with jam and one with honey. The brightness of the snow elevates my mind. Such a damned good mood, today. I think I’ll work on my books.

Automatically Instantaneous

2010-11-09T18:03:00.000-08:00

Take our kids to day care
Put in a frozen dinner
Stop by Jiffy Lube
But stay in the car, of course
Download “The Mickey Mouse is Starving Games”
On our I-Nookindle
Imported water, electricity, food
Sterilized
“I Voted” stickers give us permission
To be apathetic for the next two years
The vet will put the dog down
For a small fortune
Instacare
We’ll finance it
Direct Debit
Bankruptcy Cruise Control
Bureaucracy vs. Intellect
Too big to fail²
Put our injection molded brains on
A particle board shelf

In Love

2010-11-03T19:46:00.001-07:00

I am in love with a laccolith
Upon which grows millions of Pine, Fir, Oak and Aspen
And the way the pink autumn sun falls on it
Or maybe a handful of soil
And the billions of micro-organisms inside
The order of which is surely the face of God
Perhaps the stars in a clear mountain sky
My love could be the whole order of Lepidoptera
Or my daughter walking shoulder deep in tomato plants
Maybe the waves in my wife’s hair
The contours of her face
Friends who drink hot apple cider and rum
Poetry and prose leaping off antique yellow pages
Cottonwoods on the creek bank changing colors
The beat in it all
This life

Hitch Up the Paddy Wagon

2010-10-29T14:48:00.000-07:00

Hitch up the Paddy wagon
Try to burn that Freedom Ride
Have the Sherriff build a cage
Pack all the Beaners up inside
So Lucy Stone can’t find a way
To make a Chief of Sandra Day
We’ll charge the A.I.M. a fee
When they go visit Wounded Knee
At all costs, Bull, segregate
We’ll cast a vote for Cal Prop 8
And keep the poor dependent, see
Let’s hang them from the welfare tree

Are we not all, first, humans?

“Of Equality—As if it harmed me, giving others the
same chances and rights as myself—As if it
were not indispensable to my own rights that
others possess the same” - Walt Whitman

"Delicious Autumn! My very soul is wedded to it" George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)

2010-10-23T10:30:00.000-07:00

That soft percolating autumn rain falls, and the grasses grow furiously out of the fallow ground that had been buffeted by a midsummer dry spell. All of the sweet corn has been picked and packed while grains are drying on the stalks. Tourists and snowbirds begin to pack up and head down into the deserts to spend the winter golfing. Blaze orange becomes more prevalent in local dress. Pheasants, deer, trout, and elk are cut, wrapped, and laid carefully in deep freezers. Cattlemen catch cows to move to winter pastures. Sunday drives through the canyons capture images of oaks, aspens, and cottonwoods changing into fall colors. Peach trees also change. Apples begin to swell with their trees’ syrup. The root cellar is filling with preserves… berry jellies, jars of vegetables, soup bases, pie fillings, boxes of potatoes, and we plant the buckets of tulip bulbs. The cool dark cellar smells like it was meant to be; there is nothing artificial about it. Chiles dry as they hang in a bundle from the eve over the porch. Pumpkins, bundled corn stalks, a bale of straw from the valley, an old scarecrow, and gourds are arranged near the red front door as if they are a subconscious pagan shrine to fertility. Mourning Doves are flocking together by the dozens. I watch a female Peregrine Falcon dive into the flock and a male Mourning Dove turns to a cloud of feathers in the bird of prey’s talons. A barn owl watched me ominously last night. I walked within feet of the large grey and indifferent creature. My father steps back and looks at his firewood stack. He admits that it isn’t as high as last year’s, but justifies the shorter stack with harder wood. Coffee and Bailey’s Irish Crème while on the porch smoking a pipe. A large red moon showing through the clouds. The threadbare Carhart jacket emerges from the closet and long johns from the cedar trunk, once more. The Baumgaertner family drinks copious amounts of homebrew and they eat schweinsbraten and potato dumplings in excess. The air is clean. Books are freed from a prison of dust as they are lifted from the shelves where they spent the work season. The first fires are lit. The hay is baled up. The equipment is greased. And we are reminded of the dynamic reality in which we live.

Words and type

2010-10-20T20:24:00.001-07:00

“Do you like to read?” he asked me as he sat across the table from me at the sushi restaurant.

“Do you like to breathe?” I thought to myself.

Have you ever met anyone who turned Maslow’s hierarchy on its head? There’s this story about Socrates, see. I’m sure it’s complete bullshit, but it goes like this. Socrates brings this guy down to the water, right. So the guy wants to be a student of Socrates and Socrates gets all Socratic and decides to teach him something, ok. Socrates holds the guy’s head underwater. When the guy comes up, Socrates says something like… “When you want to learn as badly as you wanted to breathe, then I’ll teach you.”
Well f%$kin’ “A,” man. That’s what I’m talking about. I’m drafting a paragraph in my head as I walk to the mailbox. I’m reciting Thoreau in the shower. Do you understand the gravity of this, man? I have 588 favorite authors. I read Don Quijote en el propio idioma. I don’t want to hear all that patronizing ego bullshit about being smart, you know? F$%# smart. I’m not smart. I can’t remember where the hell my wallet is half the time and where my keys are the other half. But I have the stories and morals and images in my mind and they arrived there on millions of words in type. I love overalls and dirt and the smell of gasoline and all the unsophisticated attributes of stereotypically unintelligent men. Then there is Emile Zola, or Angelou, or Steinbeck, or Hesiod immediately on my lips in the midst of a conversation. A thrift store Emerson copy costs as much as an item on Wendy’s value menu. To hell with the hamburger. There’s a hole in my duck overalls and the wind blows the dried steer manure back at my face as I sit on the tractor and fill the trailer. I smell like shit as I rattle off “Song of Myself.” Mumbling Proust as I screed concrete. Shoveling compost and narrating the Bhagavad Gita. Better yet, sitting idly in a hammock in the shade of a Box Elder tree going over Edmund Spencer with myself. I’m not dropping f%^#ing names to sound smart by association. I don’t care for recognition. I don’t give a damn about academia or credentials. I love books. I love words. I love to digest them. I love to create them. I love what they can do for people. I love that they can deconstruct the past and make a framework for the future. I need them… words, books, type. I ache and become anxious for them.

A woman laments to me about something her child struggles with in school. I’m so lucky to have a smart daughter, she tells me. In my heart of hearts, I am grateful to have a healthy and responsive child… but what the f%$^ does luck have to do with her intellect? My daughter and I read more classic poetry together in her first year than you have in your entire life; I want to say to her. That’s not a damned accident. Think about that next time you throw frozen fish sticks in the oven and play video games.

I’ll tell you how I am lucky, though. I am lucky to have an eccentric storyteller father who cut oak to burn in the potbelly stove and heat our trailer. I am lucky enough to have a mother who wore shit for clothing herself but spent lavish amounts of money on books for a toddler. She bundled me in a blanket on her lap and read to me in front of the fire. I am lucky to have a wife who in the late stages of her pregnancy can barely heft the 80 year old Royal typewriter off of the oak table and set it on the floor for my daughter to play with… but she does.

"If only you’d remember before ever you sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won’t even underline that. It’s too important to be underlined." -J.D. Salinger

Slow Food

2010-10-06T19:34:00.000-07:00

A biscuit is a remarkable thing. Craftsmanship, ecology, anthropology, creativity, and sensuality are embodied in the biscuit. Two hundred years ago a family put up a little cabin next to a coulee. The towering snow capped mountains drained their cold melt into sprawling valleys. Generations later, descendants continue to refine tillage methods and fertility regiments. They produce a white wheat kernel… sweet and mild with traces of the valley floors’ mineral content. The whole flour of which is light and rich. High mountain pastures full of Indian grass, Cheat Wheat, Rye, and Fescue are trodden over by a Holstein cow. She clips the stalks of the grasses off and mashes them between her flat teeth. Occasional patches of vetch, clover, and windblown oats and barley provide a savory bite. She digests and absorbs and gives off sweet milk and butter fat. Take the churned butter fat and sour milk, add leavening and white wheat flour in the correct proportions, knead methodically as has been taught through generations and cut, then set in a cast iron oven. The coals from mesquite limbs warm and glowing lowly. Honey bees floated from crown blossom to crown blossom, one apple tree after another. All spring they toiled feverishly. The fruit of their labors in a blue quart jar. Golden and thick. It spreads naturally over the cooked biscuit. There are few more luxurious combinations of unrefined matter. Texture in the mouth and richness on the tongue that one could never find in a box. Best part, yet, is that the baker is stuck with me for eternity.

The Laziest Man

2010-10-01T10:52:00.000-07:00

Not too long ago I was having a very honest conversation with myself. I said, “Self, I don’t particularly care for work. I suppose I'm just not that ambitious.” You know what he said to me? He said, “Well, me neither. I prefer walking on dirt roads in the mountains with my wife and the both of us listening to that little girl explain in great detail why, in fact, she does not need to wear shoes. We might do some gardening together. I’ll fix an old motorcycle and feel like a surgeon. I should like to discuss religion and politics and economics and literature with educated people. We'll make some furniture from hard woods. At bed time, we might read poetry to the kids. Sometimes, I’ll go fly-fishing. And I’ll write, and write, and write some more. Oh, I’ve considered the lilies of the field. I might, in the future, consider myself to be one of them.”

“Now you have heard that I am the laziest man in the United States, yet I tell you, and I believe, it is perfectly demonstrable that there is no such being as a perfectly lazy man. Just consider that every man has a gift either large or small. It may be to play billiards or to imitate Paderewski. Whatever that gift is man takes a native delight in exploiting it, and it is a most difficult thing to prevent him from exercising that gift. There are hundreds of interests that the human race possesses. In the case of any particular man ninety-nine out of a hundred of these interests may not appeal to him, so that so far as they are concerned he is the laziest of beings. He is too lazy to do this, too lazy to do that, but when you arrive at his gift he is not lazy. It is difficult then to keep him from working night and day. So I frankly admit that in regard to many human things, I am, if you like to use the term, phenomenally lazy, lazy in every way that you can possible imagine, until it comes to writing a book. Then there is no more industrious man in the world than myself. Let me alone and I will work with my pen until I drop from fatigue. Then the only trouble my family has with me is digging me out of my chair when my day’s work is done. To the extent I described, then, I am lazy or industrious as you please. Understand, I don’t philosophize. I leave that for newspapers to do. I simply state a fact.” – Sam Clemens (Mark Twain)

Contentment

2010-09-30T09:50:00.001-07:00

“My crown is in my heart, not on my head, Nor decked with diamonds and Indian stones, Nor to be seen: My crown is called content: A crown it is, that seldom kings enjoy” Shakespeare’s King Henry VI

No concourse of angels for me. Mine are lots of little enlightenments. Little bursts of satisfaction, wanton as water. Unsolicited revelations. Contentment without being compelled. It does not happen often. So when it does, I take note. The whirlwind of office politics vanishes from my mind without so much as an inkling of effort. My two year old daughter Eden laughs hysterically as I tickle her armpit with my beard and chin. I make stir fried shrimp and vegetables with coconut milk over rice. Shelley and I smile over nothing overtly funny. We sit on the sofa after dark and watch Lonesome Dove. I day dream of harvesting pistachios in the week to come. And in the spring I plant more berries.

“All the Buddhas of all the ages have been telling you a very simple fact: Be -- don't try to become. Within these two words, be and becoming, your whole life is contained. Being is enlightenment, becoming is ignorance.” - Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh “Osho”

Restoration

2010-09-13T12:44:00.000-07:00

Image Courtesty of http://czarofthewoodsfarm.blogspot.com

If harmony is success then they’ve achieved it. They have perfect fluidity in their bodies’ motion. Not perfect men, but true with themselves and honest with their convictions. Integrity. Good stewards of a talent or two or ten.

A Tongan wave rider. His hand cups into the white foamy tops of the short long waves. He jostles front to back on his board as though he were dancing. Like his body is writing poetry in honor of his Polynesian ancestors.

A fly fisherman in Montana. His false casts, in the setting sun’s twilight, tip toe through the midges.

The small man from Palawan wearing a straw hat and leaning into the single bottom plow as if it were choreographed. The caribou (water buffalo) marching and breathing a melody to the plowman’s unspoken rhythm. Dry farm. Natural fertility.

A pig farmer in Pennsylvania scratching the animals behind the ears and on the bellies.

Cultures drying and withering in the onslaught of progress. And we invest our talents in trying to fix a flawed system. A broken and complicated way of life so eagerly replacing ambition and craftsmanship with polluted inheritances and mindlessly made things. Yet we persist and the system pervades. Reformation upon reformation absorbs our resources. While the most absolute solution eludes us. The hippies moan about ecology that they understand only superficially. In the name of progress, others seek to milk the ecological cow without ever feeding it. They pull endlessly at the shriveled and cracked teats. And reformation upon reformation of the broken system perseveres, only to add further complication. But the solution is not so problematical. Surely it is romantic and naïve. But the educated and their cold calculated reformations are perpetuating in futility and for naught.

A girl heads for the land of the pines. She’s gone to Sweet Carolina in more than just her mind. It’s not an escape or a break. It’s a cognitive and moral paradigm shift. A lifestyle that doesn’t require one to vacate from reality, for the reality is pleasure enough. Let it not be mistaken for ease, rather the work is both physically and psychically nourishing. Where there is little to wind one up, one needn’t spend free time winding down. The weekend leisure and recreation then builds upon one’s character rather than replenishing the virtue that was compromised during an orthodox week. And a human being grows along with the spring planting.

A man leaves industrial New York for the woods. For the novelty and rarity we call rural. He grows his own groceries. He notices the way the sun falls on the leaf. Perhaps he ponders this plant’s synthesis. He can behold the bold moon unabridged by the city lights. He is awakened, like Emerson, by those heavenly bodies’ rays and he has the same certain reverence. His is no ordinary reformation. There is no bureaucracy conducting him but that of his own righteous mind. His is a restoration. A restoration of self-governance. A condemnation of the bondage that is orthodox codependent life. A restoration of self-reliance. And in so striving to become a more independent self, he is able to become a more interdependent self. A sense of community will grow around such integrity. A plow cultivates freedom just as effectively. A restoration of freedom obtained by reducing one’s sense of economy to its simplest terms. A quality of life that is not easily attained elsewhere. A restoration to what was and what ought to still be.

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that History has to teach” -Aldous Huxley

Image courtesy of Laura Wilson

The Sequel

2010-09-12T12:52:00.000-07:00

But what of the sequel? In the movies, you know, boy meets girl. The chemistry is extraordinary. They are witty, sarcastic, and they overcome some trivial and cliché yet compelling obstruction that kept them apart. Then the story ends. What happens when Romeo and Juliet have to sit down and decide which bills to pay? What happens when things become ordinary? I doubt it would make compelling cinema; because one can’t film you smiling at the way that your wife twitches right as she falls asleep (the same way that she’s done for years), and the pleasure that the idiosyncrasy brings you. A screen can’t do justice to the bitter but oh so sweet emotion in response to a toddler’s voice waking you in the wee hours of the morning. Can a motion picture show you how I secretly love it when she does something small and annoying just to piss me off? She’s conscious of what, indeed, pisses me off, and I cannot feel but a little satisfied when she exploits that knowledge. Our home is filled with her handcrafted hardwood furniture that is warm and enduring. She uses my grandmother’s cast iron pans. She holds my daughter’s hand as they walk up the snow dusted path in the midst of the conifers. My happiness.

“To get the full value of joy, you must have someone to divide it with.” – Mark Twain

The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history (emerson)

2010-09-04T08:19:00.000-07:00

“I’m spoiled. I have to hunt where it’s lovely, which means that I am no longer a serious American sportsman of the blast-and-cast school.” – Jim Harrison

There is a line of Russian Olives a mile long. The alfalfa and corn fields are irrigated by center pivots and the corners that border the line of trees are filled with native grasses. I’ve found this immersion in the flora and fauna an exceptional means of learning taxonomy. As we walk along the tree line I can hear a fawn fumbling through the underbrush mere feet away. The fawn and its mother walk calmly out of the end of the tree line and disappear into the grass, once more. The Mourning Dove’s wing in flight has a very distinct sound. One grows accustomed to the sound so as not to rely on sight alone to locate the birds.
“It’s barbaric,” I’ve been told. And it certainly is, in some instances. From one extreme perspective towards hunting, people prefer to outsource the killing to slaughterhouses that are deliberately omitted from the consciousness. As a matter of principle, some elect to eat only vegetables. But, even then, one must relent to the fact that tillage is no less a violent enterprise for the fields’ burrowing residents. On the other extreme of hunting, the endeavor is one of bravado requiring the objectification of all creatures non-human. This hunting contains its own popular culture fed by expensive firearms and brand name attire.

But there are few more intimate relationships in the natural world than the intimacy in one creature laying down its life so another can live. This is not a popular notion and so it does not require the popular (expensive) tools. It is basic. One creature extracting nourishing matter from another living form is no less miraculous and divine handiwork than the grass drawing nutrients from the billion year old soil in which it grows. In some circles, it might seem a paradox. That destroying and consuming something lovely could be, also, beautiful. But it is beautiful, to me.
“Spiritually, hunters can study and internalize the natural histories not only of their prey but also of our own omnivorous species, at once empowering and restraining themselves with empathy… But as with all ‘good work,’ to use poet Gary Snyder’s term, hunting can open these doors only if we think about what we are doing and why; only if we work at it honestly, with no loutish shortcuts; and only if we intend it to be physically, spiritually, and even aesthetically rewarding. We take from hunting what we put into it, just as with the rest of life.” –David Petersen

things he can afford to let alone.

2010-08-25T20:38:00.000-07:00

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”-Thoreau

The MBA toting school district superintendent rides by on a candy blue geezer glide. His paisley bandana and Oakley sunglasses match. The new Ford pick-up trucks have remote control starters. The weekend warrior next door has a brand new John Deere compact utility tractor. It’s fuel injected with a hydrostatic transmission. He has five acres he calls “the ranch.” He buys his produce from Walmart. He and his wife can’t stand each other. “The Diary of a Wimpy Teenage Vampire” is the next American classic. You can download it on your ebook reader. The senior architecture student doesn’t know what a plumb-bob is. Republicans seek to destroy individual rights. Liberals systematically devour liberty. Young people play Guitar Hero in front of the television rather than striking a real steel chord. Lady Gaga comes over the satellite radio. Everything is disposable. Everything is automatic. Thinking is old fashion.
Intellectual accountability is optional. The hoards complain of destruction and pollution while they and their plenty sit atop a hill in a home built to hold exponents of the current number of residents. A kid in the mall wore a shirt that said “F$%K the American dream” …congratulations kid, I think you’re winning.

I kick start a 40 year old Triumph hard tail. I can feel the timing and the carburetor’s breath. My International Scout sometimes calls for a squirt of starter fluid when it’s cold outside. The newest tractor on the place is a 4020. It’s been split and rebuilt twice. They sold all but 40 acres to developers. We still grow the best peaches on the planet. We feed the bruised fruit to the happy cows. My wife and I lay in front of the fire when it’s too rainy to work. I read Balzac’s “La Comédie Humaine” that I purchased from the thrift store. My square, compass, and level never gather dust. I love freedom and defend it openly. I sit in the homemade rocking chair and play grandpa’s Gibson. Etta James plays off a vinyl. My daughter is the fourth generation to use this typewriter. The pine trees killed by bark beetles burn in our wood stove and heat our little home. Our kids read Walt Whitman and William Butler Yeats. They eat grapes from the vine and gather eggs in the morning. They’re not scared of tarantulas and they don’t like to wear shoes. They can see the stars at night and wish upon them often. We know where our food comes from and we’d rather fix something than throw it away. We live modestly by choice. There is no bureaucracy to protect us. We’re a dwindling minority, but we will not go away.

Intent

2010-08-16T10:23:00.000-07:00

“The little bum in the gondola solidified all my beliefs… by whipping out a tiny slip of paper which contained a prayer by Saint Teresa announcing that after her death she will return to the earth by showering it with roses from heaven, forever, for all living creatures” (Kerouac).

The old frail man had fingers black with soot from the charred stick that he used as a pencil. The walls inside of the box car were covered from floor to ceiling with poetry and pictures that one might only see as he struck a match to light a cigarette. His pants were stained the color of rust that matched the floor. As he lay down, he tucked a soup can under his head for a pillow and spread a newspaper over his legs for a blanket. Then he began his discourse.

“Confidence is contentment, son. When a man believes he is capable of some feat, he is more likely to try it. Even if the man fails, his likelihood of succeeding is greater than if he had done nothing at all. When a man is happy with himself, he is less likely to have to berate someone else in order to buoy himself up. See, confidence and contentment with yourself let you appreciate things in a just way. Even things that are bigger than you, boy. Like this star here, why, I’m not at all mad at God or the universe that this star here is prettier than me. Why, then, be jealous or full of contention when someone or something comes along that you, ultimately, admire? That skin you’re in, son, that’s the only one you got. Get comfortable because mortality could be a hard trip, otherwise.
...

And when you get to be alright with being who you are, you’ll realize something. Humans have the urge to create. It’s what we do. Don’t let our consumer culture condition you to think anything but. You were born to make something. To fashion something. To plant a garden, to build a table with your hands. To play a song, to paint a picture, to create an image with words. To bring up children. Each medium is no more or less divine than the next. Don’t be mistaken, though. Because you were made to create don’t mean that you’ll be good at it right off. That’s part of the trip, see. It’s gonna take a helluva lot of effort and practice to create something good. More effort than shuffling through a nine to five and payin’ a baby sitter or buying a table made of pressed sawdust.

...

There’s gonna come a series of choices and we’ve made it real easy to take the thinking out of those choices. But resist, son. Use that grey stuff between your ears. Avoid debt like the plague. Read copious amounts of classic literature. And live on beans and rice because you want to… not because you have to.”

His talk went on and I listened intently about a life free of system, process, or mechanics. An idealist. Aware of everything and slave to nothing. Divine.

I’ve seen choices differently in my journey. I’ve made some well and I’ve made some wherein I was less conscious of the outcome. In the end, though, things are just like the boxcar prophet said they’d be…
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.” (Frost)

The Earth Delights to Feel My Bare Feet

2010-08-06T13:24:00.000-07:00

“I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods. Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.” ~Wendell Berry

When I turn the corner at Diamond Valley, everything changes. The temperature drops, the sounds and smells of town fall away, hills and fields line the road, and you see the mountain. One of the largest laccoliths on the continent captures the whole of the vista. The mountain is smiling after last week’s rains. The sight of radiant green brings me joy. My mood improves almost instantly. There is lightning in the distance as the sun sets. The rain comes on quickly and after the better part of an hour the clouds disappear with the same haste.

My dad and I walked along a path in the midst of thick scrub oak. The path narrowed into a grove of firs. A large cat came to the edge of the trees and stood watching us. Her flat face and light eyes etched into my mind. She turned as to not be bothered with our trivia. That was years ago.

Today I drove the tractor in between the rows dragging a cultivator. This year there are no diseases and few pests, while last year contained every manner of plague. How cyclical we are, if we let ourselves be. That log house is aging well. It looks better than it did in the beginning. I suppose the two that still live there are aging well, also. I don’t mean that they still look 20. I mean that they’re proof of life’s fruition. Family friends come by. We pick cucumbers and the abrasive hairs on the vegetables make me itch. My wife pushes my daughter on the swing that my great grandfather hung. Daylilies nod in the breeze for a period that seems endless. A thought. That a small home may let you see through time. How rare. I can see heaven from here.

Photo By Laura E. Wilson

Zion

2010-07-29T12:56:00.001-07:00

(Image Courtesy of Nathan Wotkyns)

http://www.wideangleart.com/

I sat in Sukhasana on the edge of the river. I dipped my straw hat in the cold water before putting it back on my head. The cottonwood branch that I used as a staff lay across my lap. My back rest was a 2,000 foot tall sheer sandstone cliff, 150 million years in the making. The water flowed over the smooth basaltic stones in the river bottom, polishing them and inching them downstream. Vibrant green ferns and brilliant colored columbines erupted from cracks in the rocks and streams of ancient water sprung down the rock faces. My bare feet tired but not aching from the walk. My mind was still. I closed my eyes. The sound of the water running down the canyon, a penetrating hum. My Bodhi Tree.

Purple Women

2010-07-16T12:53:00.000-07:00

To Jenny Joseph

Photo © Norman McBeath

The town that sprouted up around the spring fed creek in the 19th century grew to 400 residents in the wake of WWII. The largest home, being completed in 1968, was 800 square feet. It was the youngest building in Running Water. Hale County had every service and tradesman a person could ever need. The thing is, Running Water residents didn’t really have much that they couldn’t do amongst themselves. The largest wave of returning GI’s came from Pennsylvania with that old Dutch work ethic and the Amish sense of righteous community. That doesn’t mean that the people of Running Water were stiffs, see. They came out West to raise hell. They just decided to raise hell together, is all. As years progressed, rows of fruit trees engulfed the town in endless and dynamic symmetry and Fibonacci sequences. Peaches fermented in vats and in the starlit nights you could hear the slow simmering sound of stills cooking the alcohol out of the fruit mash. The smell of the clear liquor settled like a fog on the town in those cool summer nights. Running Water wasn’t a town of whimsies. There weren’t many accidents in folks’ behavior. Laws were broken with intent and decisions were made consciously, right or wrong. If someone said something cold, by God, they meant it and the recipient probably deserved it. And because that sense of justice was alright, folks didn’t mind the confrontation much. That it is to say, it didn’t happen very often because folks were generally comfortable with themselves and one another. The only thing that all folks have in common, anyhow, is some sort of suffering, and the folks at Running Water were no different. Good things happened and bad things happened, but they happened to everyone. A baby was born into one family and a grandpa passed on in another family. The ups in one family matched the downs in another family, so when you laid the undulations on top of one another, the community was pretty level headed. The way of thinking was that it’s as alright to be down as it is to be up, and both were bound to change before long, anyhow, so you might as well just enjoy the damn ride. Since the physical location of the town backed up into the hollow of some hills, there was only one road in and out of it. On the first street corner coming in, lived a widow woman named Hartman. She was a tall stiff necked woman with long trapezius that made a triangle atop her wide shoulders. She was pretty when she was younger, but she was mostly pretty because she was younger. When her youth left her, so did her superficial desirability. She ran the most successful farm in the county. She was diversified in a variety of crops and livestock. She built bunk houses for the immigrants to stay in when they stopped to work for a few months before they went on to Chicago. She was brutally kind. Brutal in the sense that anyone would do just about anything for her, simply because she was so good to them. She worked when she needed to, barefoot in her purple dress. She made supper for guests and they cleaned up without so much as being asked. She’d run the cultivator up the rows if there were any weeds left after the Mexicans hand picked them out of a sense of duty to her. She had her romances with an occasional passerby and sipped brandy after eating an ice cream cone as she sat on the porch each night. She’d sing Patsy Cline in a shameless and awful out of tune vibrato. She’d paint a horrible mess on a piece of canvas and hang it in the barn. The barn was full of her art. Her paintings weren’t supposed to be of anything or to have any meaning; she just wanted to blot out the empty white space in front of her. She ate pork sausage and gravy over biscuits, eggs, and tomatoes. But she was beanpole thin from the long hot sub-tropical farm days. She ate Kale and Cabbage and Gulf shrimp and local beer and she belched out loud. She swore that her days above ground and vertical were numbered and she would never live another minute engaged in something less than that which made her happy. On the front porch while drinking peach liquor, she told me, “When I get to those pearly gates, they’ll have a list of judgments longer than ‘War and Peace.’ But on that list won’t be that I was ugly to people. No, no, it will not.” And she handed me my supper.

Warning by Jenny Joseph-

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple

With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.

And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves

And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.

I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired

And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells

And run my stick along the public railings

And make up for the sobriety of my youth.

I shall go out in my slippers in the rain

And pick flowers in other people's gardens

And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat

And eat three pounds of sausages at a go

Or only bread and pickle for a week

And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry

And pay our rent and not swear in the street

And set a good example for the children.

We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?

So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised

When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

Dog Days

2010-07-08T07:02:00.001-07:00

I wrapped my arms around the turn table, squatted, and arched my back lifting it off the ground. Stumbling through the front door, I set it on the porch. The amplifier next…the particle board and veneer cabinet speakers last. At 13 years old, the most vulgar music I’d ever heard was James Taylor’s “Steamroller.” So, naturally, I wanted to hear more of it, and loudly. The vinyl was in impeccable condition, so I put the needle down on Steamroller again and again. I played James Taylor and John (Cougar) Mellencamp records all day. When it grew too hot, a clan of barefoot and shirtless boys marched together in “Stand By Me” fashion to the shallow creek. For hours we stayed in the cool clean water. Our hands reaching under rocks and ledges and pulling out crawdads by the dozen. When we amassed sufficient buckets full, we marched home, nabbing slightly sour apples along the way. In the waterfall we bathed and in a knot hole we found a coon kit who we named Bandit. He was reared on calf’s formula. The grass served as our bed each night, with dogs sleeping at our feet. A remarkably loud chorus of toads chirped from the puddles in the field. Turkeys perched on the water tank and in the cottonwoods. From great distances, we could aim our .22’s at the water tank and hear the delayed ping of the small round chiming off of the metal. I read Cannery Row in Grandpa’s lazy chair. Himalayan berries stained our hands and mouths purple for weeks on end before school began, again. As though one could learn more inside four walls than from a creek bank, James Taylor, and Mac and the boys.

Illegitimate Poetics

2010-07-05T21:36:00.000-07:00

Jay Bird
In my next life I will be a Jay Bird
And they will call me Cyanocitta, but I won’t mind
And my daughters will come in pale green and spotted eggs
My wife and I will spend winters in Mexico
Naked
My morals and ethics will extend no further
than the fervor with which I build a nest
I will use a statue of La Virgen as a perch
as it should be used for nothing else
There will be no Marquis de Sade wielding a pen inside of me
In the summers we will nest in a fruiting mulberry tree
overlooking a berry patch
And nearby vintners will tie flashing to their grapevines
but I’ll eat their grape seeds as I watch them toil in futility
I’ll save my songs for when I’m alone
I’ll be there when the buds come on
and I’ll leave when the first frost drops the leaves
The simplicity of a Blue Jay

Champagne in Heaven

2010-07-03T14:08:00.000-07:00

15 years old. A midsummer night. The first time I was drunk. A bunch of redneck hippie kids trying to be suave. His dad was out of town. What a riotous and gloriously obnoxious time. He was always so happy. There was a big starry night sky and the smells of pinions and cedars. We put him in the ground today. Another midsummer day. It doesn’t feel like him, though. A caricature of him went in the casket. The youthfulness, the mischievousness, the hearty laugh, and the perpetually friendly countenance are things that can’t be forgotten. Those thoughts and behaviors. Our perceptions. He’ll live in them. His parents look confounded. How naïve we were to think that our parents had it all figured out. His kids left, now, without him. This isn’t some cliché lecture on the fragility of life and how it should be treasured because you never know when it’s over. It’s already over. It’s already borrowed time. Accept it. Cope with it. And then pack as much radiant living into it as possible. Everything that is now, exists because of everything that was. And everything that will exist is because everything exists now. We’re part of a whole. We are a transitory link. What we leave for the future is a choice. Make it with real intent.

Zen

2010-07-01T06:56:00.000-07:00

There’s a wingback chair
With the fabric torn off of it
A pick-up truck with no fuel in it
And a rebel motorcycle with a laborious cause
There is a poet with an atrophic tongue
A revelator with no ears to hear
A pregnant belly with an empty stomach
Two angels’ faces on sweaty old pillows
Nature’s emotional frustration
To be not gentle with one’s self
Ecstasy is transitory
So is pain, cyclical
Comfort in being
Uncomfortable
Is grief
Is impermanent, still
I cultivate Verticillium wilt
Responsibly, organically
The wrinkles
On my father’s hands
The culmination of his grandfather
And me, the commencement
Of him
And her, the commencement
And to be the culmination
Of me
I am happy now
You are not there
And I am not here
But the opposite

Trampling Out the Vintage

2010-06-27T20:27:00.000-07:00

My father mentioned that the blog archive is relatively difficult to navigate. The archive is a bit cumbersome and I am presumptuous enough to think that new readers may want to read older material. Here are a few selections that had more hits than others. Pardon me if this is annoying and kindly disregard. Otherwise, the titles below are links to past pieces.

Many Thanks,

wilson

Now and Then
Campers and Closets
Cheap Sushi
Reluctant Environmentalist
Last Supper
Burnt Marshmallows
When Irish Eyes Are Smiling
First Snowfall
La Vida Mia
Happy to Dance
Noon Day Rest: After Millet
Dear Japhy
Vanitus Vanitatum

Luna Lunita Lunera

2010-06-26T21:20:00.000-07:00

NASA photograph

It’s just a spot in the sky
It’s only a shining orb in the night
It’s simply a radiant globe
that floats through my life once a month
I watched it change colors
From orange to piercing white
I see its valleys and mountain peaks with my naked eye
It pulls the germination from the seed
And the stalk from the ground
It pulled my daughter from the womb
And the seas from the shores
And the howls from los coyotes
And it sucks the light from the opposing orb
The order and majesty and omniscience
I see it notices me
Does it notice you?

He Owes His Soul to the Company Store

2010-06-23T12:03:00.001-07:00

Exceptionally middle class. Socioeconomically dynamic. Do the rest of the people with whom I’m categorized even think about this shit? My folks didn’t have money, and I'm not saying that’s a bad thing. You get creative when you’re broke. We didn’t go on vacation quite so much and we planted flowers and vegetables a little more. I didn’t have a difficult childhood. For all intents and purposes, I was a spoiled kid. My parents were nurturers and cultivators. The largest source of anxiety was answering the phone when the bill collectors called or when the house showed up in the newspaper’s tax sale list. I began to regard money contemptuously. That monetary masochism has, in large part, continued through today. Money is a sadist and we simply can’t put it away from us. The heads of my family lacked a formal education. And as people typically covet things that they consider scarce, I was encouraged to go to college as a means of advancing myself economically. Like millions of other socioeconomic middlemen, I didn’t inherit a family business, not a college fund, and I didn’t get government grants. Away I went, debt financing my dreams. I was 17 when I went to college. I watched, throughout childhood, as my parents would deliberately bounce checks at different stores to buy groceries. Either bounce the check or don’t eat. I bounced my first check at 15 years old and the lack of financial prowess hadn’t improved much in the two years afterward. Only after receiving a higher education in finance did I realize the systemic problem and precarious situation that we products of this educational and financial system are faced with. State run schools are operated like for-profit entities and financial institutions are sheltered, coddled, and stroked by our wealthy and elite governing bodies. The socioeconomic divide is deliberately widening and being strongly safeguarded. The upward mobility of the middle class is simply not to be allowed. So I eat on the run to my sedentary and mediocre middle management job and the cholesterol increases in proportion to the stress levels. We pick and choose which bills are to be paid on time and which are late. Thank goodness the bank got TARP money, though; I would hate to stop getting phone calls from their student loan offices. It would be a real shame for the free market to be effectual. There was a time when these United States fostered an economically vibrant environment. One in which sheer ambition was rewarded. You put your shoulder into the plough and earned a reward. It seems as though, now, us little people are sharecroppers begging our livelihood from crooks with gavels and gowns. I have come to accept that we are without a predisposed competitive advantage, and one must simply resign to the ultimate realization of this machine’s entangling grip. Any amount of ambition will prove utterly futile. Success, in today’s America, is not earned it is inherited. Wealth is perpetuated and not achieved. The American dream has been contorted into a host of small men working feverishly to fill the coffers of an American aristocracy. There isn’t a single leader or party that is clean and certainly none that can fix the problem. There are millions of Lemmings completely convinced of their rectitude in sustaining this absurd and mindless set of traditions. Let’s stop.

"Racism is dead. Society's paramount battle, today, is between the have and have nots. The reality is that if you let poor people study economics. They'll know too much." - Anon

Ornan's Offering

2010-05-30T09:31:00.000-07:00

Waist deep in a wheat field.
A bushel in my arms.
The sun setting in a pink mountain sky.
Bats bobbing and swooping sporadically.
Frogs croaking in the ditch water.
The smell of hay drying in tall windrows mixed with
the sweet smell of sweat blowing in the wind off a horse’s back.
I see my feet stepping from furrow to furrow.
Saṃsāra

Six String Psalm

2010-05-22T07:41:00.000-07:00

Sanctify my hard calloused tips
With strong and agile joints
Give me digital pit bulls
Howlin’ like Wolf
With a dancer’s grace
Until my hands turn blue
Hobo blue

Three pieces of limestone on my desk

2010-05-18T16:51:00.000-07:00

My senses die entirely in the winter. Enveloped in gray and cold sterility. Numbed by dormant and lifeless seeds and eggs, I drift into the pages of books and my imagination wrestles with the winter demons. Then come the smells of spring. The warm sweet ecstatic smells of spring flowers pouring their pollens and nectars into the air to reproduce. The sun giving energy to moss and then the nymphs. The patches of snow cling to the shadows of trees and ledges beneath boulders. There are few places so inherently meditative. The man who calls Muir or Stegner a lunatic or a romantic has never stood in solitude in the shadows of 200 year old pines and firs. Barring a man’s absolute ignorance and imbecility, this place is a transitory link between human and his divine potential. I dare submit that the solemnity and the purity of the surroundings may even convert the imbecile to a higher form of consciousness. It is, certainly, awakening to me. I sit alone and motionless on a granite boulder for the better part of an hour and watch the stream spill into a pool. I can’t see them, but I know they are there. The cool clean Salvelinus fontinalis… their little red spots, golden bellies, and long beautiful red fins with white tips. I sit very still, as to acclimate. Then I dip the small bead head nymph into the stream and the trout softly inhales it. I pull him out and wrap him in a wet handkerchief before laying him in the creel. Just hours ago, I sat on the porch and the buzz of each passing vehicle became white noise. In town, everything eventually becomes white noise. Our lives’ complexities become mechanized and ordinary. Mindlessness begets mindlessness and we overlook the small things that ought to bring us pleasure. This stream, though… I’m aware of it. When we fall, it’s a tragedy. But I watch the river and I see it fall then heap itself upon the rocks, and it’s glorious. I’m aware of the peat moss ledges and the fallen logs. I see the moss being steered by the current and the granite pebbles settling in the clear bottom. I see an American Robin bathing in a shallow eddy. The sounds, the colors, and the smells of life teeming in the soil and beneath rocks are invigorating. The most pressing insight that I hope to communicate is that this is real and available. The experience doesn’t require a BMW, a familial endowment, or a degree. Transcendentalism is not simply a literary genre to be discussed by graduate students in cities far removed from the method itself. The love and responsible use of the natural world is not reserved exclusively for tie-die wearing street fair attendees in Northern California. This experience is yours and mine to be had…irrespective of political affiliation or religious conviction. The potential for calming the woes of our communities lies less in political policies and sensationalized films. The solution is in the mountains. Go there. Where the trees don’t care about our educations, our callings, political appointments, poverty, gluttony, or egos. Go there. There is still a place where your intellectual and emotional appendages don’t matter. There is still a place where you are just you.

Dear Chamomile Blossoms

2010-04-30T06:18:00.000-07:00

On Hanson Lane
We sang the Dreidel song at recess
At St. Anne’s there was Sister Luz
An old Mexican Nun
I loved her como una abuelita
She rarely wrote my name on the board
My grandmother took pictures of me holding a flag
We sent them to uncle Mark in the Persian Gulf
My aunt drinks red wine and paints
We ask the I Ching
My wife heals patients
The first Sunday of the month people testify
Dad tries to outwork the sun
He smiles and smells like whiskey
My daughter is a genius
She sings Hey Jude in the bathtub
Mom feeds the chickens
She writes a story
My father-in-law paddles the canoe
His wife makes biscuits
An old woman made me tea
She was frail, weathered, gray, barefoot, and hunched over
She didn’t speak English
It smelled like apples
She called it Manzanilla
I ride my bike in my corduroy jacket
My beard suits me
There is divinity in all of you
I am because you are
I am that I am

California Dreamin'

2010-04-20T18:17:00.000-07:00

Drinking sweet tea from Grandma’s blue mason jar
Playing a six string Gibson guitar
The Alyssum grows wild near the road in the ditch
An old brindle pit-bull scratching an itch
Dragging a two bottom plow to stay alive
Singing a Country Boy Can Survive
Brian’s daddy’s old truck is the color of a penny
We wave as we drive past George and Lennie
In the field I’ve a vision of Grandpa’s mules and a thresher
His memory brings me a joy beyond measure
Helen has lavender in her hat band
Like men and mice off the fatta the lan
My little girl climbs right up on my lap
We crawl under a live oak and take a nap

How to alienate myself and piss off everyone I know.

2010-04-14T20:41:00.000-07:00

High budget bohemian new age naturalist
My dad is a guilty man
So I can afford to be bohemian
They paid my tuition, see
So I could focus on creativity
Cattle suffrage is the cause I espouse
I live in a hundred thousand dollar tree house
Hear my metaphysical decree
While mom and dad pay the bills for me
I expect a heavy granola subsidy
Now that dad sold his company
I always think of the hungry Ethiopian
While playing my thousand dollar mandolin
I always think of the hungry and homeless
When I call that leather sofa soulless
I really dig the hippie archetype
But I’m a little less Kerouac and a lot more hype
It’s a shame that we live amongst poverty
I only drink organic coffee
I love my 2010 Subaru
But Mommy, real jobs aren’t good for you
I had to have a new Trek mountain bike
To ride to the PETA hunger strike
I flew to see Yogi in Angul
I love mother earth because it’s cool
I’ll preach daily about Thoreau
But true simplicity, I’ll never know

My foreign policy is “Yee-haw”
Thus saith Sean Hannity
I can’t even spell “diplomacy”
Our government is way too big, I say
But there should be a law against being gay
My surgery got sent to collections, still
Why vote for that socialist healthcare bill?
My congressman fights for me hand over fist
But next year he’ll be a corporate lobbyist
Our old fashioned values in the capitol prevail
If the sex scandals don’t send our politicians to jail
The bible is literal and absolute
Conserve… like hell! I vow to pollute
How dare he pull that old race card
I’d like to hang that nigger out in the yard
Those wetbacks really should learn how to talk
Presin wun fer English is too much of a shok
Toby Keith is a brilliant man
I wrote a dirty joke in the can
Them folks on welfare, to hell with them all
My wife and her credit card is loose in the mall
The libs have got this country hurtin
What’s the big deal with Halliburton
I completely believe in unwarranted raids
But I think we shouldn’t waste time on AIDS

Cowboy Poetics

2010-04-05T10:28:00.001-07:00

“From the heroes in the bright lights of Vegas
Through the poets of the sage and thorn
A proud legacy of a nation, thank God, the cowboy was born”

– Chris Ledoux

Photo compliments of George G. Gleason Photography

Me
Muddy Waters
my wife
and my daughter
Jim Beam and Blue Spruce dreams
Pablo Neruda y mi alma desnuda
A twelve string Les Paul
And Marlin four-forty-four on the wall
My Carhartt coveralls still recovering from fall
The snow began to melt
Sun on my face, I soon felt
I tied flies all winter long
To a “Buffalo Grass” song
I walked through the Cedars today
I thought I saw Gus McCrae
An Appaloosa named Little Guy
A big starlit sky
Dutch ovens on the fire
What more could I desire?

Ornithos

2010-03-31T20:52:00.000-07:00

“A man's interest in a single bluebird is worth more than a complete but dry list of the fauna and flora of a town.” – Thoreau’s Letter to Daniel Ricketson.

My pet Turkey’s name was Junior
I wrote my name inside the front cover of my book
It was called “The Book of North American Birds”
I made pencil drawings of specimens on the blank pages
The chicks smelled bizzare
Every new mortal creation has a unique odor
One night the door flew open and I heard Dad’s thumping feet on the porch
A crack and the wisp of a .22 filled the night air
A Possum got into the chicken coop and killed twenty chicks
There is a finality and omnipresence in nature that humans try only in vain to simulate
I sat in the grass and leaned against a granite boulder beneath the River Birch
I saw a Barn Owl in a tree walking back from Costas Twin Lakes one night
I trapped a Cardinal in a milk crate so I could see its red up close
We turned Pheasants and Chukar loose in the pasture
I could hear them at night in the tall grass
Silhouettes of Peafowl could be seen amidst the oak branches in the twilight
The Latin nomenclature fell clumsily off of my tongue

And now, I do believe that…
“Every child should know a hill,
And the clean joy of running down its long slope
With the wind in his hair.
He should know a tree...
The comfort of its cool lap of shade,
And the supple strength of its arms
Balancing him between earth and sky
So he is a creature of both.
He should know bits of singing water...
The strange mysteries of its depths,
And the long sweet grasses that border it.
Every child should know some scrap
Of uninterrupted sky, to shout against;
And have one star, dependable and bright,
For wishing on.” (Edna Casler Joll)

La Grande Odalisque

2010-03-08T19:04:00.000-08:00

La Grande Odalisque, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres 1814

“If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late? Nobody.” ~J.D. Salinger

I’m looking at her and nodding attentively… but dear Lord, is she boring. I should say that her throat is incapable of making all but one tone. All I can think of, though, is those jeans she’s wearing. Dark denim jeans with little tears in them, showing her the soft tanned glow of her thin lean legs. And the little rear pockets… I can see through them. Her hips are slim yet curved and her small hard posterior like a set of perfectly round glass bulbs from a Christmas tree. She drags from her menthol cigarette and I continue to pretend to be interested. What’s this I hear? You don’t say. Why, I have her convinced that being a pastry chef really is the most difficult job on the planet. And the whole of civilization hangs on it. I see a few 20 year olds at the next table giving her the up and down. She is hot, boys. But are you willing to go through this? I don’t know if I am. You know… I wonder if the Padres will pull there heads out this year. See, thinking about baseball is for more than just sex. I consider it my premier form of intellectual foreplay. She expresses her disdain for the throng of the matinee enthusiasts and their preference for Cheese Danishes while I think about the first round outfield draft choice. It’s a beautiful thing, baseball. She’s a great looking blonde, though. I take her to PETCO Park to watch games, occasionally. She doesn’t give a damn about baseball, but by the time we leave she’s left any inhibitions for intimacy in a pitcher of beer. She hates baseball and I hate hearing about the room temperature chocolate that ruined her afternoon. So we each carry on our own conversations. Only, she doesn’t know that. Her chest looks fantastic in that little baby-t. The health department did what? I say with my eyes as I take a drink of the salted margarita. She doesn’t want to hear anybody but herself talk. I don’t mind; that means I don’t have to multi-task. I wonder if I can get Yadier Molina in the fantasy league draft this year? I want to watch a baseball movie tonight. I hope she has to work. She leans back and her shirt uncovers her stomach and waist. She’s the kind of girl who takes her own picture standing in front of the mirror in a push-up bra… you know with the pouty lips and the sultry looking eyes. Ask me if I give a damn, though. She thinks William Faulkner is the guy from Star Trek. She’s a quick one. When she bats her eyes, she blinks for a long time. That’s on purpose, too. Oh, we all talk about how horrible her type is. Vanity-the destructive force behind the demise of progress and originality. But we still stare and fantasize and she allows… no, encourages us to. Condemn Venus Kallipygos then ogle over her. At least I’m honest with myself. And I listen on and on. Oh dear Narcissus, how we all love to hate you… our dearest vanitas vanitatum.

Dear Japhy

2010-02-20T19:39:00.000-08:00

Vintery, mintery, cutery, corn,
Apple seed and apple thorn,
Wire, briar, limber lock
Three geese in a flock
One flew East
One flew West
And one flew over the cuckoo's nest

Pomp and circumstance plays over the PA. The graduation candidates march to the beat. The names are read in alphabetical order. The grand machine revolves, yet again. This procession is a cultural lobectomy. Nurse Ratched (the glorified politician and dean) shakes the hands of students she’s never known. The creative ones sit in the chairs and smile while their proud parents sit in the stands. First generation academites filled to the hilt with student loans. Mom had kids and Dad got a shovel after high school. These kids, by God, were going to aspire to more. But more of what? More phonie friends, more interest payments. The creative ones get stuck in the Combine, see. That one there, with the converse shoes, he’s a veritable Cheswick. That pretty girl on the left, she’s a regular Billy Bibbit. For chrissakes, that makes me Mr. R.P. frickin’ McMurphy. I sit up on the stage with the rest of the faculty and the wealthy alumi. Well there’s a Chris McCandles shaking ol’ Ratched’s hand, it’ll only take four or five years as a salesman at Nordstrom’s before he falls into the machine’s cadence. And that one with the untidy stubble on his face. He might be J.D. Salinger if the abacus isn’t etched into his eyelids after a year working for his father-in-law. And her… she makes Louisa May Alcott look unintelligent. She’ll be a genius if she can stay ahead of her lazy upper class intellectual parents and their middle management dreams. Oh the Japhies of the world, may you go prowling boldly into the wilderness. I really am tired of just getting along with students; I want a student that I can respect…someone who has the courage to be an absolute nobody (Salinger). I want to believe and plan and dream. I listen to name after name read aloud and I drift off behind glassy eyes. Then I say a sort of prayer and faith and a dream of even just a few people “…refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.” (Kerouac) Then I laugh out loud and the row of suits beside me leans forward and scowls at me in unison. I just scratch my beard, rub my own bald head, lean back and slouch down in the chair with an immovable smile. “Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this Planet…” (Emerson)

Antidisestablishmentarianismologist :)

2010-01-29T19:13:00.000-08:00

I am not a prophet, a theologist, a physicist, or a biologist. But as a person grows and begins to have a greater appreciation of the natural world, she or he is presented with a set of opposing ideals on the origin of existence. Our culture teaches us that these ideas are entirely mutually exclusive, and within these exclusive ideas are endless factions. This is the condensed story of my rationalization. These are not revolutionary ideas, and so I rely heavily on the philosophy of my predecessors for evidence. The time in which we live is glorious. We have the freedom to discuss such matters, we have evidence enough to analyze, and we live in a time where there is still enough of the natural world left to immerse ourselves in (I’m afraid the latter is more than can be said for our children). As an adolescent, my father encouraged my interest in the local flora and fauna by sending me hunting with my grandfather’s .22 rifle in hand. My mother, in the meantime, taught me, diligently, to be an effective reader. After the purchase of numerous paperback dichotomous keys (first for birds then trees and insects), I began to identify the local organisms and memorize their nomenclature. The diversification of organisms began to interest me. As a teenager, amidst experimentation with different lifestyles (what is life but an experiment?), I considered the relativity of time and existence. The freshman philosopher on my right shoulder and the Catholic schoolboy on my left commenced to intensely debate (on a very sophomoric level, still today) our being. “The time is far spent for quibbling,” I decided. I needed to put down a rationale. How could creationism, evolution, and the doctrine of impermanence coexist? How could I transcend these finite definitions?

In the beginning, God created heaven and earth. He called the evening and the morning the first day¹. Today, the Muslim and Judeo-Christian community maintains this creationism tradition. But what little we know about time is that it is relative. Is time not all one day and measured only by humankind² ³? Our mortal day is defined by one revolution of this orb on its own axis. What more, then, does one day in this eternity mean?

Using the speed and direction with which our universe expands, we can look backward to its origin. 13-14 billion years ago the universe was one particle. Due to incredibly dense energy and radical temperatures, the particle exploded. In terms of the origin of our universe and ultimately the origin of man, Thomas Aquinas’ cosmological argument4 illustrates that energy was required as a catalyst for this concept commonly referred to as the “Big Bang.” The point from whence the expanding universe came has been referred to in popular culture as the “God Particle.” The energy, thereby, being inferred is God. The different titles and explanations attributed to this energy are awe striking. It is a testament to the intelligence of humankind that this metaphysical concept has permeated virtually every philosophical and religious sect.

This brings us to humanity. If the notion of timelessness or the relativity of time is applied to creationism then the evolution of species is not a difficult concept to digest. Buddhism offers that “existence of every single thing is possible only because of the existence of everything else5.” With evolutionary ideas and theories being developed and tested the world around, we should relish at the awe, wonder, and order in the natural planet. Condemning this profound scientific analysis of divine handiwork seems to me somewhat of an insult to divinity itself.

The connection between faith and matter is not the fancy of some romantic poet. It is the will of whatever God may be, and so it is free to all women and men. The world is an open book and every aspect of the book’s hidden life and final cause we can come to know. A harmonious life loves all truth and virtue, and being so harmonious with nature, one can be purged to understand the text6. As I subscribe to my religious convictions and 5 billion other humans subscribe to theirs, I hope to keep in mind the interdependent co-arising of the minds of humankind. And I work towards providing all human beings the right to worship how, where, or what they may in accord with the dictates of their own conscience7. There is no more encouraging reality than the unyielding ability of human beings to lift themselves up in a conscious endeavor8. 'Time' worn-out in cultivating that ability is well invested. In a period when so many exhaust themselves in bitter opposition to one another, this is a beacon and pillar. The responsibility of individuals to lift themselves up according to the dictates of their own consciousness is a tower. The responsibility of the collective to ensure that the individual is unhampered in doing so is a beam.

1. Genesis Chapter One: The Holy bible, king james version. (1979). Salt Lake City, UT: Intellectual Reserve, Inc.
2. Alma Chapter 40 Verse 8: The Book of mormon. (1981). Salt Lake City, UT: Intellectual Reserve, Inc.
3. Chapter 18: Hanh, T.N. (1998). The Heart of the buddha's teaching. Berkely, CA: Parallax Press.
4. Reichenbach, B. (2004). Cosmological Argument. Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Retrieved (2010, January 27) from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmological-argument/
5. Page 132: Hanh, T.N. (1998). The Heart of the buddha's teaching. Berkely, CA: Parallax Press.
6. Page 17-18: Emerson, R.W. (1994). Nature and other writings. Boston, MA: Shambala Publications, Inc.
7. Article of Faith 11: Smith, J. (1981). The Pearl of great price. Salt Lake City, UT: Intellectual Reserve, Inc.
8. Page 74: Thoreau, H.D. (1993). Walden and other writings. New York, NY: Barnes and Noble Books.

La Vida Mia

2010-01-25T10:37:00.000-08:00

Make sure to turn the music player (bottom of page) off before playing video.

“And no man touches these divine natures, without becoming, in some degree, himself divine. Like a new soul, they renew the body… As it were, for the first time, we exist… Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Caesar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobler’s trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar’s garret. Yet line for line and point for point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build, therefore, your own world.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson.

I gaze upon these sage hills and meadow valleys often. Today the breeze blows calmly yet authoritatively. The sweet tasting dust and the tart pollens are suspended in the humidity. It feels cool on my face and my matted beard. The plough turns the clods asunder and creates long deep furrows. Soon enough the soil will turn to powder, the oats to the roller and the shafts to straw. The well pumps will test their fervor and the canal water will dwindle in width and breadth. In the meantime, the chickens gravitate to the cool moist rows to pick through roots and insects. One variety of tulip wilts while another bursts from its stem. The oak trees’ buds quickly turn into bright green leaves and the grey ghostly bark becomes enlivened. Over the white rails, the neighbor sits atop an old case tractor and flips manure onto his fields. One pasture’s wheel lines shower the glistening grass as the farmer’s grandson assembles hand lines in another. The unkempt apple trees line the canal. A white pitbull waits patiently in the bed of his owner’s truck. The sprinklers go quiet, then the mover motor starts and marches the wheel line on. A red-tailed hawk swoops towards a mourning dove and the dove dives into a rose bush. The hawk perches on a mound nearby and peers ponderously into the thorns. Two hammocks sit on the lawn and untidy honeysuckle vines engulf each of the porch’s pillars. Four heavy rocking chairs sit and stare solemnly and emptily into the west. The firewood pile reached the depth of its ebb and begins to grow with green wood, once more. Neighbors stop by to purchase eggs and the dogs bark. The new growth in the greenhouse smells as unique as the smell of a newborn baby. Calves spring from their knees clumsily and bounce at one another. As the sun drifts into the western hills, the wind blows and the empty chairs nod in agreement. Oak and fruit woods are burning in a barbeque pit and carry through the afternoon air. The must of beer floats through the trees as farm hands rest on their tailgates. This day has been lived. No deals or barters, no politics, no news, no celebrities to worship, no fingers to point, and no clothing or shoes for idolatry have marred the creation. One cannot cast his seed upon stone for roots, by the wayside to be devoured by birds, in the sun to be baked, or among thorns to be choked. Living, this day, has been casting upon good ground to become ripened in life and bring forth good fruit. The universe was created for this day. The culmination of Divine handiwork was successfully manifested. History was written in preparation for living today. As the frogs begin to hum, I struggle in vain to keep my eyes from closing and my mind from slumber. Goodnight world. Thank you.

Vincent van Gogh's Noon Day Rest: After Millet

2010-01-15T11:15:00.000-08:00

“I will plant Barley this fall,” said Silas as he lay against the straw. “And I will buy a thrasher of my own in the spring.”
“You don’t like the millet?” she said as she untied her bonnet with her tender blistered hand. She leaned down and gingerly rested her soft beaten palm among the stems. Her bright dress was dulled by the dust and a line of sweat mixed with soot lay underneath her hemp rope belt. She rolled a cloth around her wooden shoes then folded her arms and settled for a nap. As she rest, the automatic tension in her muscles gave way and her body became slack and heavy.
“Thank you for sharpening the sickles, Rebekah.” He said while he exhaled and pulled the mashed and disheveled felt hat from his head over his face. It smelled musty and a ring of salt had formed at the edge of the wicked perspiration. His denim pants were thin and threadbare, but his heavy white shirt was sturdy and blotted with grease from the thrasher wheels. The grain wagon axle bowed under the weight of the mound of small hard grain kernels. Silas’ shoes laid beside him and the sores on his bony masculine feet breathed deeply the noon day air. The cattle stood tied to the grain wagon and occasionally leaned to eat the stubble and straw. The dry hollow millet shaft crumbled in their flat grinding teeth. Just then, the breeze blew through the heavy heads of grain on the neighbors parcel and the pasture danced to some inaudible universal melody. The breeze blew through Silas’ sweat soaked shirt and the air cooled on his skin as the moisture evaporated. He sighed with pleasure and his body fell loose. “I should have been a lawyer,” he relented to his beautiful young wife. She looked up at him with deep blue eyes and her chestnut bangs blew across her face.
“It is a way of life, Silas. Perhaps not the best way to make a living, but it is a way of life, Love. What would your father say of you indoors all day? Why, you’d be fat and you wouldn’t look to the sun, but to a clock. What then Silas?”
“I would have an office and a diploma and my dignity,” He stammered.
“I don’t know the dignity to which you refer, Love.” she smiled and ran her hand over his chest. The breeze blew more slowly and the sun dried their clothes to a stiff finish.
“And what dignity is this, Rebekah?”
“When our star rose out of the horizon this morning you were brushing the horses. The soil became warm and the soil organisms squirmed in ecstasy. I watched you sit on the stone wall and I could all but feel the sun on your face. I remember your father sitting on the stone wall… his red hair and his long red beard shining in the morn. You lay your hat in your lap and cross your arms at the wrist, just as he did. Now, he bequeathed himself to his soil so he could become part of the grain that feeds you. And you… your dignity is his eternal life. And when you resign your flesh to the landscape, you will live forever in the grain of your progeny.”
Silas’ large body lay beaten in the ensilage. Silas sinks into the monotony periodically, only to be buoyed up by his intense and deliberate wife. She is bright and mean… and beautiful and unapologetic.
“And why barley?” Rebekah continued as she redirects his thoughts.
“I’ll haul it into the roller mill to make a good cereal for us and the horses. The millet flour will do, but I can hardly stand the cereal. And when Alma foals, the baby should like some barley, also.” He smiled when he thought of his Appy mare swelling with her child. He was proud of her fertility and had more faith in her ability as a mother than he did faith in his own ability as a provider. The sun drew high into the sky and the cirrus clouds began to disappear under the relentless star. They both stared silently into the azure eternity before they heard the belts on the thrasher begin to flap in the strange rhythm. The gypsies began to hurl the bushels of grain onto the conveyor. The kernel processor whirred around and the grain poured into the cart while the ensilage scattered in a broad pile. They reluctantly began to stir, but only in their minds. Their bodies continued to rest for a time. As the sun drifted behind their pile of straw, they relished in lying close to one another. In their stone walled home, the smell of lamb roasting wafted through the thatched roof. A gypsy woman prepared pie shells and added the vegetables in preparation for the roast to complete the shepherd’s pie. A basket full of various colored eggs was in the way, so the woman moved it and three horse flies took to the air. Silas and Rebekah loved the woman. They loved the stone walls and thatched roof. They loved the hot days and the cool nights. They loved the ewes that bayed in the morning for food and the hens that scratched through the Dutch tulip beds. They loved the bright burning stars in the heavens and the cold water in the brook. They loved the rain in the spring and the lady beetles shortly thereafter. As they rose from the pile of hay, they looked ahead renewed and refreshed. The sweat began to drip into the sores on their hands and feet, but they were not be bothered with such trivia. The sun beat down and the air was stagnant, but they worked with fervor and obsession. He pulled his hat down over his ears and she tightened the hemp rope about her waist. The stone barnyard wall cast a shadow over a fawn that watched intently. Those words and ideas ran through their minds over and over again. Whenever you are mired in the millet harvest, a noon day rest ought to be prescribed. And along with that rest, a healthy dose of reflection and a glance at eternity wouldn’t hurt.

I'm Happy Just to Dance with You

2010-01-06T20:43:00.000-08:00

There are things you forget, see. In the still of the morning the acorns can be heard falling on the dew covered soil. The smell of eucalyptus on the heavy moist breeze of the afternoon. The sound of Grandma telling some profound story in a lackadaisical tone or Grandpa saying something sage and sarcastic. Almost two centuries of experience and education at the head of our family paired with some of the most fertile ground and the most sanctified climate in the world. Can there be any wonder why we enjoy going back? In my mind, there's the image of Cera and the girls planting crocus bulbs in the front yard while Grandma reads the Quran for fun (because that's the kind of thing she does). Grandpa leans on his walker and waters the fig tree while he sings some fantastical rhyme. Korynne leads Eden by the hand speaking in mother-ease and the twins lay sleepily next to one another. Paul is off to Bible study. John, Dick and Donny pitch horseshoes. Dennis, Brian, and little Donny feed apples to the neighbor's horses. Doloris is making shakes in the kitchen and Randy is playing hymns on the guitar. Helen and Mark are cooking vegan stuffing. Uncle Jim and I are in the living room talking airplanes. Kimmy is lying on the sofa while the newest great grandchild grows within her. Chris is somewhere behind the scenes conducting this great orchestra. Jess and Margaret are looking down in awe, and until the next procession of Wilson cars comes back to our little California hick town, that's just how it'll dance around in my head.

Rudolph the Red Nosed Neighbor

2009-12-23T10:23:00.001-08:00

Heavy handed and light hearted. His attire was made of entirely Levi jeans and threadbare flannel shirts. His 65 year hardened exterior would chase teenagers out of his backyard but his soft voice and generous spirit would calm young children. His pockets were always full of butterscotch candy or widdled figurines. He was a modern day Boo Radley or Uncle John Joad. He stunk of rum and cigar smoke and his blonde hair was combed over the balding middle of his head. His face was brown and wind burnt. He had the bulbous red nose of an alcoholic. On Thanksgiving Day, the ambulance screamed into his drive. The paramedics hauled him away while the young neighborhood children stood in the street crying. On the first of December we were raking the leaves in his front yard when we saw him again. Walking down the street with a deliberate stomp in a hospital gown and hospital slippers with his bare ass hanging out the back.

“Did you walk all the way from the hospital?” I asked him.

“It isn’t going to kill me any faster.” He replied begrudgingly and slammed his front door without so much as thanking me for raking his leaves. Moments later he came out dressed and cursing furiously under his breath. “I’m the same sick at home as I am in that damned hospital bed.” He grunted in his German accent. He and I raked the leaves into piles and watched them smolder and emit that sweet, white, and damp smoke.

That night he left five quart jars of homegrown blackberry preserves, a 20lb sack of his own wheat, and two dozen eggs of various shapes and colors on my door step. That morning, the children ate pancakes floating in blackberry jam. He didn’t say thank you with words the same ingenuine way that most of us do. On Christmas morning the ambulance came again. It didn’t come in a hurry though. The paramedics’ pace was slow and somber. He came out of the house, this time, on a gurney and covered with a white sheet. The old man spent his last days alive living, by God. On New Years day the attorney knocked on my door. He handed to me a hand written and barely legible piece of paper, “For all the curtain climbin’ snot nosed little farts that brought me happiness.” The letter said.

“I assume he’s referring to your children, also, Sir.” The attorney said without emotion. My lip quivered and my eyed watered a little when he continued, “Your children are the beneficiaries of Rudolph’s estate.”

“Can you come in for lunch?” And he came in with his briefcase in his left hand and three sticky little hands holding on to his right.

Snowfall and Homemade Berry Ice Cream

2009-11-30T19:30:00.000-08:00

What fools the Babylonians were to build a tower when God had already created mountains with spires of pines reaching unto heaven. I stand breathless and motionless while I stare at the tops of the trees enveloped in silence and flakes of powder falling from the sky. The most beautiful beaches that I’ve ever seen and the most sophisticated feats of man that I’ve witnessed shrink in comparison to the mountains as the snow falls slowly and lays still on the granitic soil. The sweet strong smell of fir, spruce, and pine gum fills the thick, moist, and cold air. Everything is cleansed by a blanket of white. I feel clean and I don’t want to leave. So I just stand in the middle of the path and stare. The low gray blanket of clouds blots out the sun, but the world around me is so bright. As I walk along, a small grove of aspen and their white bark emerges from the coniferous surroundings. They are crooked and naked standing eerily amongst the shades of evergreen. A frozen creek cuts through the roots and forest duff exposing layers of decomposed granite and black organic matter. I take photographs and some exposures catch the falling snow. An elk has rubbed its velvet on a young spruce and scarred yellow trunk shows through the grey bark. The flakes grow larger and larger then engulf the clumps of grass that show through the skiffs on the ground. I think of each flake of snow and I think of the spring. The run-off will fill the irrigation reservoir. I picture my nephews running shirtless through the sprinklers in the field holding watermelons that the snow melt grew. I picture my berry vines sucking up the moisture and my little girl with homemade blackberry ice cream on her sun burnt face. I stand and look up at the trees disappearing into the low clouds. As the snow continues to fall, our rock moves through the universe and I’m reminded that time is relative and that soon enough we’ll enjoy the fruit of this early winter snow.

Posthumous Awards

2009-11-26T13:01:00.000-08:00

The little girl in my lap replays one of my earliest childhood memories. I can recall running my fingers over the glass keys. As I hit multiple keys at once, the hammers jammed together just before hitting the ribbon. She presses the space bar and the typewriter jumps from right to left. I laugh and my eyes well up a little. She models me and laughs through her pacifier. As I look through the window, I see the new Chevy sedan drive by. Two Marines sit erectly and stone faced as they drive up the dirt road to the neighbor’s house. Another posthumous award… Another blue star on the flag pole turns to gold. Dear God, am I tired… In the tool box of my pick-up there is a pair of Georgia Boots with a quart jar of home made whiskey stuffed in the right foot. My rifle lies on top of the boots so I lift it and extract the jar. The 140 proof burns as it runs down my throat. “Ooorah devil,” I think to myself and take another swallow. I’m trying not to cry, but at the same time I wish I would. I think it might make me feel better. I go back inside and sit, apathetically, on the sofa. Not anything I can do to bring ‘im back, I suppose. I talked to his Dad the other day. Things were on the up. I don’t know what to do with all the loss. It is some consolation that the nothing disappears forever in the universe. This is the same matter. I remember him walking through the pasture leading a calf.

“Do you see O my brothers and sisters?
It is not chaos or death – it is form, union, plan – it is eternal life – it is Happiness
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And I filter and fibre your blood

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.”

And, finally, I cry… ever so slightly and just for a moment.

Sustenance

2009-11-22T18:52:00.000-08:00

The rain falls lightly and steadily. It falls without rhythm, and with a purr it percolates into the fertile mountain meadow. The full and fat heads of triticale, oats, and barley gently bend under the moisture, but they do not break. The planted fields grow green and yearn to grow tall for the thresher. The early summer air cools as it blows through the gentle mist. This is the perfect day. The cows switch their tails as they chew their cud. The children run through the tall timothy and orchard grass with their arms spread. Droplets collect on the small developing apples and cherries. My wife and I make love in the morning before breakfast. The luke warm shower and peppermint castile soap awaken me. The pancakes are made from the same barley as the whiskey in my coffee. The hens cluck in the front yard as they peck through the clovers and an old randy rooster perches on the handrail of the porch. My fingers dance stiffly on the old royal typewriter and the tobacco in my grandfather’s pipe smolders in an organic sweetness as he sits on the front steps. The twelve year old climbs up on the 8N tractor and I hear it pop musically. He drags the spike harrow in between the rows of berry vines with the care of an artist. Then he makes another pass because he enjoys the authority and the responsibility. His little white pit bull runs beside him nipping at the harrow all the while. The ten year old puts on her straw hat and snatches a bamboo pole from its leaning spot near the door. She will spend the day standing in the drizzle and watching the narrow stream cut through the dark fertile soil. She throws the hooked kernel of corn under a peat moss ledge and waits to pluck out brook trout for supper. Her little brown bulldog lies lazily on the stream bank and snorts. My wife walks down the gravel road towards the neighbors’ house to nurse their influenza stricken children. The dairyman passes her a quart of ice cream for her trouble as she returns. The twelve year old pulls the old Ford tractor into the barn, the ten year old comes home with a string of golden red fish, and the two dogs lay next to one another under the porch. My wife and I hold hands with our children and grandpa; then we bow our heads in quiet meditation to give thanks and to ask for the continued blessings of sustenance; the sustenance for our minds and for our bodies that is the sustenance of our everlasting souls.

Act of Contrition

2009-11-08T09:14:00.000-08:00

As I boarded the Hanoi Taxi for home, I was full of a paradox of emotions. My first day home, I needed new tennis shoes and proceeded to the shopping mall. The crowd moved by as if I wasn’t there. I peered through the endless people searching for the Vietcong that I had conditioned myself to sense. But there were just people… bankers, students, painters, hot dog vendors, and hippies. My crew cut and erect neck made me a different kind of target. Why they hated me, I’ll never know. I hated myself enough for them all. Speaking with the saleswoman was excruciating. I hadn’t had that type of informal discussion with a civilian in years. It was typical for me to have my rifle in hand and to be shouting orders. But meekness crept into me and I could not look her in the eyes. I almost worshipped her and every other person I spoke to just for the sake that they were alive. How could killing people make me love others more? This was certainly not a byproduct that I had contemplated. I was a valiant soldier… when the draft letter came; I refused to shirk the responsibility. I fought with courage and served with honor. Upon my return, however, I was filled with a dark and unbearable guilt. No amount of patriotism should require of good men the annihilation of another, I thought. I took headshots at civilians deliberately and accurately for duty’s sake. They were threatening. I did so proudly. So why did I become engulfed in such darkness? I suppose that there never was an absolute answer for such a question. I know that I wept secretly for years after and my sleep was interrupted by replays of the day that we lost half of the entire company. When I spoke with people, it was in a nostalgic, lowly, and kind tone of adoration. From thenceforth, I could not bare to see another human fall any sort of victim to me. What bizarre, shameful, and ironic behavior. And unwittingly, my life became my atonement. Only contrition would bring me relief from my self-loathing. Could I have ever been contrite without a broken heart? Friend, I have tried to excuse and justify my past with no avail. I could not find the resolve within myself. Perhaps others may have had the courage to find it within themselves, but I could not. And I cannot judge them, for my envy prevents me so. Out of my darkness, however, came contrition. Oh, that prudent contrition… that compulsory contrition. I spent decades moving endlessly and modestly through life. I lay at night in small drafty houses lulled by contrition and a feeling of inherent fault suffocating the arrogance out of me. There was never twisting or gnashing, just a simple and calm contrition. I shan’t guess what will come of me. Whether I’m right or wrong, I do not presume. Contrition makes a man content to simply exist. What I can say for myself is that my life began hot, fast, and powerfully. I am determined to finish these years, however, in a manner that can only be described as… Contrition.

Cpl. George H. Lysander
Bravo Company 2nd Battalion 501st
Vietnam War, 1966 until wounded at Dong Ap Bia 1969

When Irish Eyes Are Smiling

2009-10-29T19:36:00.000-07:00

They say that Guinness once spilled on the floor
so when the pub closed for night.
Out of his hole crept a wee brown mouse
and stood in the pale moonlight.
He lapped up the frothy brew from the floor,
then back on his haunches he sat.
And all night long you could hear him roar,
“Bring on the Goddam cat!”

The sun lit the horizon just before dawn, and one could see an outline of the two bedroom home. The paint had chipped off of the majority of the cedar siding and the grey wood grains covered the house.
Donny was about six feet tall and 185lbs with only a slight contour to his body. He had deep red untidy stubble covering his thin 40 year old face. His chest and arms were muscular yet undefined, while his lower body was thin and very lean. A black Cheilteach cross with the words “Éire go Brách” below it was tattooed on his sun burned back. Before the sun cracked through the pass, the baby awoke. She passively cried in protest. Donny stumbled from the bed and the floor creaked beneath his wiry legs. He smacked his lips and tongue together to savour the taste of the previous night’s Jameson. The baby lied in bed looking up at her father as he leaned over the crib. Her chestnut hair was tousled and her blue eyes grew with excitement as she saw him. Her pacifier hid her mouth, but the shape of her eyes radiated some sort of ancient happiness. Like a druid spell, she cast warmth on him and he crookedly parted his lips in a half smile back. He held her and she laid her cheek against his barren chest and its thin short red hair. He brought the child into his bed and laid her next to her mother before he went and warmed a milk bottle for her. Then, as the girls lay in bed, he fried two scrambled eggs and sliced a Roma tomato for breakfast. He lightened his coffee with a cloudy helping of Baileys and drank the scalding drink quickly before consuming the eggs and tomato. His attire was simple and practical. He was adorned with Georgia Wellingtons, Levi jeans, and a white cotton T-shirt. He kissed the girls as he held their faces in his long and thin calloused hands. His red door closed behind him; and, with the momentum, the Chladaigh door knocker banged against the door in resonation. The fall morning was cold and the smell of the light brown California dust was in the air. The clanking of the chain link belts on the potato diggers rang loudly through the cold clean atmosphere and it made the hair on the back of his neck stand up with goose bumps. He strolled with a deliberate pace through his small apple orchard and examined the fruits’ readiness for harvest.
“Tomorrow they will have to be picked.” He said out loud.
He would have to drive into town to find the modern day fruit tramps and harvest gypsies to provide the labor. The 1978 blue Chevrolet was once a simple ¾ ton pick-up truck. The hood ornament from his grandfather’s 1948 Oldsmobile was mounted on the hood behind a bumper he made from two inch steel fence pipe. Leaf springs were stacked in the rear to tolerate a load that couldn’t really be quantified and a wrecked motor home provided the engine. Donny turned the key and the paper speakers poured out a distorted Flogging Molly song. At 30 years old, the pick-up roared through the two inch glass packed mufflers and Donny began the hour drive through hay and potato fields into town. He made rounds to the feed store, the tractor dealership’s parts counter, and then to lunch at the diner beside the hardware store. Patrick McCarthy stood at 6’2” and had a wide but lean frame. His light red beard was trimmed neatly about his fair skinned face. Patrick sat at the diner bar eating stew and holding a tall red Murphy’s draught when Donny hopped up on the stool beside him.
“How’s things?” Donny asked.
“Be better if I had your money,” Patrick said as he laughed with his mouthful.
“Are your apples ready to pick?” Donny said out of the side of his mouth while looking at the menu.
“They’re right as rain,” Patrick said quietly and nodded without looking away from his bowl.
Donny devoured a Guinness and a shepherd’s pie before they walked side by side to the hardware store to speak with the group of laborers standing on the street corner. In their broken English, the laborers agreed on a wage and made arrangements to pick the men’s fruit the following day. But the two could see that the laborers had hesitantly agreed to the union. Then they told the two men that they had been stiffed the week before by a cocky Napoleon type hay farmer named Joe Smootz. Smootz was a County Commissioner and the largest land owner in the valley. Joe was going to be on the ballot for the state legislature that fall. As their luck would have it...The short fat middle aged man had, by chance, just then parked in the hardware store’s dirt lot. As Joe walked by, he looked arrogantly and hurled vulgar epithets in the Mexican laborers’ direction. Donny and Patrick turned towards Joe Smootz, who simply smiled at them. But without so much as taking a deep breath; Donny took his left fist and put it upside Joe’s right jaw. Donny shook his head and sighed.
“It wasn’t so Goddam long ago that our people were just miks, paddys, and potato niggers.” Donny said to Patrick. “I can’t stand to see good working people handled like that.”
Donny carried Joe in his arms like a red Irish Jesus carrying a lost lamb, and set the limp sleeping man in the passenger seat of Joe’s little car. Feeling that he’d done right by the fat little man, Donny shook Patrick’s right hand and squeezed his shoulder with the left. Donny climbed up in the seat of the blue Chevrolet and headed back out into the valley. He bore his teeth and laughed as he reached over and scratched his freckled arm. His hazel eyes grew and then they squinted slightly as he looked towards home and down the long strait road lined with potato wagons, hay fields, and rows of apple trees. He thought of his loud little Suirsider baby, his passionate wife, a dusty bottle of Jameson, fat Joe Smootz, and then the fruit tramps; amidst his own laughter, he began to sing…
There's a tear in your eye,

And I'm wondering why,

For it never should be there at all.

With such pow'r in your smile,

Sure a stone you'd beguile,

So there's never a teardrop should fall.

When your sweet lilting laughter's

Like some fairy song,

And your eyes twinkle bright as can be;

You should laugh all the while

And all other times smile,

And now, smile a smile for me.

When Irish eyes are smiling,

Sure, 'tis like the morn in Spring.

In the lilt of Irish laughter

You can hear the angels sing.

When Irish hearts are happy,

All the world seems bright and gay.

And when Irish eyes are smiling,

Sure, they steal your heart away.

Burnt Marshmallows

2009-10-25T13:33:00.000-07:00

I love burnt marshmallows. I love bread crusts and thunderstorms. I love peas, asparagus, and hard math. I love secrets, cooties, and book reports. I love road trips, bedtime, and sandwiches stuck in the VCR. I love bandaging skinned knees and dirty bedrooms. I love Calamine Lotion and new eye glasses. I love your itchy sweaters and taking care of bee stings. I love bugs in the washing machine and sticky fingers. I love smelly circus tents and bubble gum stuck under the kitchen table. I love wooden flutes at six on Sunday morning, French fries in the seat cushions, and ceramic hand prints. I love knock-knock jokes and fireflies. I love wizards, Hannah Montana, stepping on toys, and stick on tattoos. I love teeth under pillows, milk mustaches, and wishing wells. I love fishing and not catching anything. I love climbing trees and puppies. I love reading Uncle Walt with you at bedtime. And above all...
I love you,

Your Dad

The last supper.

2009-10-10T20:05:00.000-07:00

I have never taken so much pleasure in watching someone eat, let alone watching five people eat. All five boys sat anxiously around the table as their parents made them small plates of mutton, brown rice, and salad. The meal was not the typical child pleaser. As a matter of fact, I burned the mutton a little on the grill. Even I was a bit apprehensive about how enjoyable dinner might be. I sat down to eat before my brother and sister finished preparing the little boys’ dinner. As I cut through the burnt chop and stuck a fork into it, I felt the toughness. I put it into my mouth and the unpleasant char mixed with typical old ewe gristle. The sauce was an exercise in futility, it had no redeeming effect. The small portion I had, unwittingly, served myself was barely edible. I undertook doing so with chagrin. As I looked up from my horror, I noticed an odd and almost unheard of phenomenon. Each little boy sat starry eyed and salivating as their parents set the small plates in front of them. The children had been running through the corrals playfully chasing another lamb and the chickens. They were soiled and tired. But above all, they were hungry. This was no generic, “I had to walk all the way from the Escalade to the living room,” type hungry and tired. These boys proceeded to consume every particle of grain, meat, and vegetable that lay before them with a fervor not common in 21st century middle class households. There were no complaints about flavor or texture. There were no panic-stricken cries about wanting happy meals. No one sniveled “he’s looking at me!” The boys simply ate food for the sake of living and the nourishment needed to live well. My mind did as it often does… it wandered. It wandered to a time that I cannot recall. A time when eating was more than just something everybody did a few times a day. I thought of my great grandparents and how it probably never occurred to them that our biggest challenge today would be that we have too much. I thought, mystically, of the Joads, a Dharma Bum or two, and all the Dubious Battles of the like. Then the intensity of the boys’ happiness for sustenance reeled me back in and I smiled at the sight that not everyone these days has the opportunity to experience. Oh what a beautiful thing it was. God bless hungry little boys.

He called himself a reluctant environmentalist…

2009-09-29T15:25:00.000-07:00

"We are as much strangers in nature

as we are aliens from God" - Sir Ralph Waldo Emerson

An oak leaf does a curious thing after it falls from the branch. As the oak leaf turns yellow, the edges begin to curl upward until they create a cup with serrated edges. The leaf cup is precisely the size of the balls on toddler feet. Thus began my childhood. As a youth, my friends and I would run through the sequoias at Camp Nelson precariously chasing a mother black bear and her cubs. I can recall, as an adolescent, dangling my feet over the edge of the canyon at Tuweep and watching Lava Falls dance ferociously thousands of feet below me. No tourists, no rangers, no guard rails… just a teenager, the Canyon Grande and desert flowers. On Sunday my wife and I took our daughter into the mountains. Indian Peak towered high above us. One hundred miles from even a small town, we were alone. We sat below a pinion pine tree while we cracked pine nuts in our teeth and sucked out the marrow. My daughter ran her fingers through the sandy loam and we looked up above Cougar Spar at the elk foraging on the mountain side meadow. The shrub oak was orange and the aspens yellow. I imagine Zion and Bryce to the east, packed with would-be naturalists and their cameras hanging sloppily from their necks. Parking, shuttles, gift shops, lodges, and other commercial interests are nowhere to be found out here, though. I love this ground. I love the elk that will provide sustenance for my family this year. I love creation. I sit and say to myself, “what, the hell, good is life if it isn’t lived wildly?” I wonder how many speakers of the house have leaned against a pine in solitude or how many presidents in this post-industrial America have watched brook trout swim up a mountain trickle. I wonder how many Sierra Club members know what lies in the wild beyond the National Park tours. I wonder, for how much longer, my children will have these places to escape to.

I’ll have the earth, please… with a little salt, if you will.

2009-09-23T09:55:00.000-07:00

It looks like the kind of place where you’d expect to see something like Cooter’s Garage. There’s no getting around the fact that it is a railroad town. There are a handful of people that work on nearby farms and at the county jail that receives prisoners from Vegas, but the Union Pacific railroad carries the place. The small city blocks have three homes across the front and back, and from the side of each block one can see the lots meeting in the middle. Each of the 400 homes are wood sided, painted in mild colors, have metal roofs, and are each roughly 1,000 square feet.

The Knotty Pine Lodge sits on Main Street, a stones throw from the tracks. Inside are two heavy set 40-something women in jeans and t-shirts. One woman has a Def Leopard hairdo, except it is grey. The other woman has long straight light brown hair in a pony tail. Main Street runs parallel to the tracks and as I open the door to the restaurant a long train pulled by three diesel electric engines honks and screams through town. The women prepare an excellent chicken fried steak with gravy and a side of tomatoes. I begin to talk with a man named Jim in the booth next to me. He’s a retired machinist from western New York, and (as I come to find out) an alcoholics anonymous facilitator. “The food is terrible, I come here for the service,” he says just loud enough for the women to hear him. He smiles and continues to eat.

You’ll never see it on Fox or NBC, but this little town’s success is more important to every unwitting American than any endeavor that comes out of Wall Street or Washington D.C. You’ll never see Jim on E tv, but I guarantee that whatever God you believe in is aware of every hair on Jim’s head. I leave the little dusty valley with a burning confirmation that the universe is pretty damn good, and a helluva lot smaller and more similar than we let on.

Bookies

2009-09-11T09:43:00.000-07:00

Bookies… not the gambling kind. A different kind of Mafia… underground intellectuals. These are my kind of people. I peer around the bookstore and watch people lightly lift volume after volume from the shelf. I nod at a girl in her mid twenties. Dressed in a navy blue polka-dot dress with a knit sweater over it, she replies, “mmmhello.” in an odd and unsociable tone. She goes back to running her fingers over the spines. Teens in sideways baseball caps and jeans falling off their asses flip through the biography section searching for sports stars’ stories to satisfy their high school reading requirements. I ask an employee, “do you have any books on self-publishing?” The pretty young brunette looks puzzled and turns to her supervisor. The middle aged short haired woman smiles and asks us both to follow her. She walks briskly as to not waste a moment’s work. “Is that all?” she turns to me as we stand before the appropriate shelf. “Certainly,” I say to her and smile. The brunette walks awkwardly back to the service desk. A heavy set thirty something woman sits reading “The Heart of Buddha’s Teaching” in an orange lazy chair. Her left arm is covered from her wrist to her shirt sleeve with green tattoos of violent images. “Who’d a thunk it?” I say to myself. There I am with Peter Bowerman’s “The Well-Fed Self Publisher” in one hand and “Capitalism and Freedom” in the other. My beard is growing longer and I wear a Bob Marley shirt with loose basketball shorts. I chuckle audibly at my own paradox. “Thank you ladies!” I say as I raise my hand and wave the bag of books before I walk through the double doors towards the parking lot. I would love to spend the rest of the day in there. I suppose, at least, that’s where my mind will stay anyway.

Magic Cows

2009-09-10T17:20:00.000-07:00

I sit on the mowed rye grass so we can be at eye level with the calves. My daughter watches with an animated expression from my lap as the cows wet their nostrils with their own tongues. She smiles and wrinkles her nose, showing her two front teeth alone in the top of her mouth. While she laughs in awe, a calf wraps his long tongue around a pear in my hand and smashes the sweet wet treat between his flat efficient teeth. Two of my brothers and four of my nephews do the same and a veritable feeding frenzy is happening around us. I tell my nephews, “After you feed the cows these pears they are going to use the food to grow. And when they are grown, they will be made into things like hamburger for you to eat. These cows go to the store for you to buy.” Brendan (the four year-old) answers back with a genuinely amazed, “WOW! Cows are magic.” I laughed at his comment and replied, “They are pretty magical.”
I sit there with Eden and ponder as my nephews pull pear after pear out of their balled up shirts and laugh franticly. It really is magical that there are billions of microorganisms in this soil creating the perfect fertility for these leaves of grass. And photosynthesis uses the energy from a star to make life of those nutrients. Even, that star which resides a perfect distance from our whirling rock, that we may be beneficiaries of such a phenomenon. I think of those great ones who, before me, were mesmerized by the universe. Plato, Aquinas, Einstein, Whitman, and so many more who were and are perplexed by the order that comprises and perpetuates creation. As a young student I resented mathematics, especially as it pertained to philosophy. But as I grow, I grow to love it. This Universe is awe striking and wonderful. Something that, by nature, is empirical and orderly yet paradoxically infinite and creatively frenzied. Think of the cosmic stuff and processes that can surely be quantified, yet the counting of such things would baffle the most sophisticated supercomputers for centuries. One cannot deny the surety of at least two points when pondering these realities: that this event we call mortality is finite, and that this organism we call existence is not. So, in conclusion, here’s to dreams, ideas, and labors that transcend the finite. Here’s to things like magic cows.

Sunflower

2009-08-31T08:08:00.000-07:00

The sun burns red on the horizon. Junipers, like spires, jut into the sky. The rolling hills move in waves of yellow and green. I step close to one flower and the yellow face seemingly stares back at me. Each of the petals is roughly the size of my index finger. The foliage is large like a calf’s ear and covered in a felt like velvet. In some of the bright yellow centers, mourning doves have picked out the large seeds. While the bright yellow sunflowers dominate the foreground, rows of vines and fruit trees lie on the outskirts of the perceivable distance. A villa no more than fifteen feet square and two stories tall separates the sunflowers from the vineyards and orchards. The Mediterranean red tile roof and the weathered red door stand out in contrast to the beige plaster and the yellow dancing fields. A woman with brown hair lying on her shoulders walks with the rhythm of the wind. Her hair hangs in loose and natural curls. The woman’s blue jeans have holes at each knee and her bright white shirt clings to her body. A light skinned infant clings enthusiastically to the threadbare white shirt. The infant girl has waves of curls like her mother. The two turn towards the west hills just as the sun sets into the billowing clouds of red. The green spires turn black and the villa looks as though it is glowing. The sweet flowers and the ripening fruits’ smell settle into the valley floor in the cool late summer night. The infant girl cries as her mother lays her in the white crib. The child runs her fingers along the crib’s bead board side and quickly falls asleep.

Happy Anniversary Grammy and Pop

2009-08-31T08:05:00.000-07:00

“What is that?” the boy asked as he turned his torso and pointed is thin index finger towards the workbench.

“That’s a… bookshelf… for your Grammy,” he answered. His hair was neatly combed and his beard trimmed. The black t-shirt he wore was taut over his chest and around his arms. The shirt had a pocket on the left of his chest and a piece of chalk protruded from it. His Levis were clean and faded, and a folded red paisley handkerchief lay in his back pocket. His hands worked quickly and with indescribable precision. The tattoos on his forearms would shift over the striations in his muscle.

“That is no bookshelf,” the boy thought to himself. “I’ve seen him make a bookshelf… I’ve seen him make me a bookshelf.” The boy lingered and prodded, touching the tools and the benches as he sauntered around the shop. As the boy steps out the garage door, the gravel crunches below his feet and he walks towards the home’s back porch. He bends down and runs his fingers through the thick stiff fescue on the back lawn. He picks up a sow bug and puts it in his pocket just as Grammy looks out the window and calls him in for supper.

“What is that, Grammy?” the boy asks as he stands at the sink.

“That is Lava soap,” Grammy replies as she picks it up and runs the water over his hands. The sweet suds and the pumice make the boy smile.

The house smells like meatloaf and as Pop walks in he yells, “Meatloaf again?” Then he laughs a deep sarcastic laugh. She serves us meatloaf with vigilance and sets a loaf of bread and a tub of Country Crock spread on the dressed table. Dusty, the fifteen year old black cat, whines from the back door and anxiously awaits her nightly ice cream dessert. The retired bombers fitted with flame retardant can be heard buzzing around the southern California skies as we eat.

And today, as I type, my little girl squeals and smiles hysterically from the living room. She isn’t so far off from being the age of that little boy. And it wasn’t so long ago that Grammy was a little New Englander girl picking blueberries and gathering coal from the railroad tracks. Just a stitch ago, Pop was riding a flat car with his legs hanging over the side.

Now, the horses turned into tractors, the automobiles got faster and faster, the highball whistle of the steam engines went to sleep, and this planet wheels obediently around its sun. And just like time does, it keeps going. But it is not forgotten. It is never forgotten.

“Lord, how the day passes! It is like a life, so quickly when we don't watch it, and so slowly if we do.” - John Steinbeck

Cheap Sushi Weekend

2009-07-20T14:15:00.001-07:00

I walk into the living room and Makisi is laying on the couch. The high desert heat on this Fourth of July causes the humidity off of the Great Salt Lake to stick to my face. Through the west facing front door, the sun can be seen resting atop the mountains. The TV is on and the National Geographic channel has a special on Hubble’s deep field photographs. I think of this rock wheeling around that star, itself spinning at incomprehensible speeds. I sit in the lazy chair and notice that somebody purchased a sack of McDonald’s value menu burgers. “I think I will,” I say to myself and pick up two of them. Makisi is my cousin. In the utter selflessness that defines Tongan culture, my aunt and uncle gave Makisi to my aunt’s widowed sister. We sit in the hot living room and the rest of my cousins walk in. We proceed to the park where Makisi will have the opportunity to sing. He’s amazingly talented. His first bona fide public performance goes off without a hitch. He sings incredibly. The small crowd gets goose bumps and the thickness of the occasions’ emotion blankets the park. I am too lucky to be surrounded by creatures who nurture one another’s social consciousness. I sleep on the emotion and then return home the next morning. As I pull into the drive I see my father, the philosopher and politician, in the garden. He is happily drunk and wandering through the plants. He smiles excessively as he sees me drive in. The heat and blight are warring with the tomatoes and my Father is entertained. “If we could see the miracle of a single flower,” I imagine him saying to himself, “oh with an impartial eye,” he saunters on mumbling, “even the blight is perfect, suffering is common to all,” his eyes fix on the yellow curling leaf of a tomato plant “nothing is lost in the universe,” he says as he lifts the brown ½ gallon carboy of blackberry wine to his lips. His long sleeve white shirt is riddled with holes and the jean shorts he wears are heartily broken in. He jumps into the passenger seat of my pick-up and says, “let’s go get sushi.” Which is a common proposition. As we pull out of the drive I glance down at his license plate and smile at the “FRMRJON” personalization. My Dad… the redneck bhikku. We sit in the Harmon’s cafeteria and eat the sushi out of plastic containers with chop sticks. He huffs and breathes deeply as a large piece of wasabi melts down his throat. I laugh as he shakes his blood red face.

Trampling Out The Vintage

2009-06-14T08:56:00.000-07:00

"O, for a draught of vintage!" - John Keats

“My life’s research can be summed up in a brief statement,” said the Nobel Laureate Biologist, Dr. Moore, to the 2009 graduating class. “We are exceptionally foolish, The God of the Universe is incredibly gracious, life is worth living passionately, and people are still worth loving.” His throat shook gently and his eyes grew glossy with the last statement. He went on…

"Our human nature is to classify things, perhaps especially ourselves and one another. As you go abroad and continue the lives that you’ve started here…I want you to retain, in your orthodoxies, the ability to see the underlying commonalities between all humans. I want you, in the pursuit of your passions, to maintain an intellectual flexibility that leaves room for individuality. The temptation will arise to pledge allegiance to a socioeconomic taxonomy… to an established classification that implicitly defines a social hierarchy. But the souls of our species are growing ready for change. I urge you to be that change and resist the desire to categorize your affections into a pre-determined ideology. See, I don’t want you to mistake this for an excuse to be apathetic or absent of enthusiasm for your beliefs. Now, rather than using your convictions to cause rifts in our human family, let those beliefs draw you together. Let your knowledge bond you together as a species and give honor to the divinity that is you. Finally, I believe that the best speech is a short speech... so good luck and godspeed the plough to you all. "

And he stepped down from the podium to sound of applause.

The Whole

2009-05-10T19:22:00.000-07:00

Thought

Of Equality--as if it harm'd me, giving others the same chances and rights as myself--as if it were not indispensable to my own rights that others possess the same. - Walt Whitman

The whole is, indeed, greater than the sum of the parts. Our reality is that every particle of matter in the universe, each in its own unique configuration, has a basic familial relation. Among organic matter, the familial resemblance is uncanny. Ultimately, though, the grandeur of our existence is that we have the ability to exercise higher faculties, even that deliberate attribute called love. This poetic and divine awakening enables us to transcend our basic earthly structure. When our bodies become the compost that feeds the pastures and our souls go to reside among the suns, globes, and spheres… will our legacy be that we gave too much or too little? The human epic is the battle between warring ideologies. The social consciousness and the economic consciousness fight for a cognitive foothold. Guilt, envy, pride, intellectual fatigue, and hatred are among the byproducts of this epic encounter. We perceive this inner struggle as effective intellectual exertion. But when we waste our time in a stupor of consideration, we again settle into an intellectual haze. The sullen and lonely chasm has only one means for crossing. To deliberately and actually demonstrate love is to rise above the categorical matter and exercise some semblance of divinity. Love is the highest level of intellectual illumination and exertion. To not simply idealize, but to realize love (as a means for unending progression) is eternal life. Gross product shall decay, merchandise shall decompose, earnings shall rot, and accretion will putrefy. But charity is immortal. The commission is to independently moderate our fierce fight for accumulating parts or products by exercising unyielding ethics then increase our efforts for the prosperity of the whole human condition; it is to turn swords into ploughshares. The calling is for the individual soul to independently espouse this unpopular cause for the sake of the undying human spirit. An enlightened mind is the most prized and nonperishable possession. As a soul conforms to egocentric materialism, the acquisitions come at a human cost. But as an individual becomes independently dedicated to the idea of nonperishable prosperity, the tide of the human condition raises every soul at sea. The height of the human condition is the everlasting metric.

21st Century Declaration of Codependence

2009-04-18T20:57:00.000-07:00

We hold these fallacies to be infernal excrement, that all Anglo, Christian, heterosexual, affluent males are created equal. All others are endowed by this superior demographic with certain alienable privileges cloaked in a banner of pseudo capitalism and quasi democracy. Whenever any form of self-governing liberty becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the government and the wealthy to alter and abolish such liberties and implement a long train of abuses and usurpations.

The recent years and present state of the Union is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations inflicted upon America’s people by this bipartisan Federal government and the corrupted wealth that perpetuates this governing form, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these Citizens. We, therefore, the People of the United States of America, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of this union absolve all allegiance to perpetuating the current untenable form of governing and make claim the American People’s right to conclude peace, conduct effective commerce, grow in personal wealth responsibly, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent Citizens may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

Prescription for a Paradox

2009-03-23T15:55:00.000-07:00

Do I contradict myself?

Very well, then, I contradict myself;

(I am large—I contain multitudes.)

- Uncle Walt

Observe recipe as follows:

1 Italian suit (Cole Haahn shoes, belt and tie)
1 Part hunter
1 Part lazy
1 Pair Nike Shorts
1 Part supply side economist
1 Part personal socialist
1 Part Dodge pickup
1 Part vegan
1 Part surfer
1 Part gentility
1 Part Keynesian economist
1 Part vulgarity
1 Part open
1 Part kalua pig consumer
1 Part vegetable oil Mercedes
1 Part farmer
1 Bob Marley T-Shirt
1 Part idealist
1 Pair Dickies overalls (Georgia Boots)
1 Part pessimist
1 Part pious
1 Part ambition
1 Part lover

Spritz with mercy, sprinkle with justice, garnish with works and adorn with faith. Heartily mix ingredients and wait.

Long Hair

2009-03-20T12:37:00.001-07:00

“Long hair minimizes the need for barbers; socks can be done without; one leather jacket solves the coat problem for many years; suspenders are superfluous.” – Albert Einstein

I submit that the underlying and overarching schema of the (developed) world’s social and economic malignancy is that, in the family setting, children are not being taught to discern between necessity and desire. Complex and commercial overconsumption is the status quo.

One Eternal Round

2009-03-09T19:48:00.000-07:00

This afternoon, I have been thinking…a little saddened at the decline of my progenitors’ health. Initially my mind considered the frailty of the state of mortality, of life as we understand it. Then I began to reflect on the current state of my family. My five month old daughter rings in my mind, Christopher and the twins, DJ and Lena’s girls, Shawnalise, Colby, Isabell Christine, Rynne Mae, Donny, and Mr. Thomas. I pictured Brian and his long hair sitting on a tractor and Lauren on a plane to Washington. Which brings me to the thought of how fragile life is not. Life is the most persistent circuit of incidents in the history of history. Life ebbs and flows, undulates, and ripples away and back. I think of the fruit of my Grandparents’ loins and how it seems as though…with the birth of every great grandchild, Grandpa’s health deteriorates a bit…as though he is giving part of himself to us as fulfillment of some universal law. I feel guilty for aging, though. Perhaps, I am growing at his expense. That is, nevertheless, the reality. He gives to me the love for the ground. And I use it gratefully. My daughter laughs and I hear his Donald Duck voice. I see the unrelenting traits of all my progenitors in me (and to be in my progeny) and I think of the ripples of a pebble in a pond. E’er expanding and recurring. Touching the farthest corners of the pond. I think, Grandpa, that… by me, my blood, and your posterity your life is an overwhelming success. In the thought of someday (possibly) missing you, my mind tries to piece together the words of an old poem.

Old age superbly rising! O welcome, ineffable grace of dying days!
I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,
And all I see, multiplied as high as I can cipher…
edge but the rim of farther systems.
Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding.
Outward and outward and forever outward.
My sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels,
He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit,
And greater sets follow, making specs of the greatest inside them.
There is no stoppage and never can be stoppage.
We should surely (in some form) bring up again where we now stand
And surely go as much farther, and then farther and farther.
A few quadrillions of eras do not hazard the span or make it impatient.
They are but parts, anything is but a part.
See ever so far, there is limitless space outside of that,
Count ever so much, there is limitless time around that.
My rendezvous is appointed, it is certain,
The Lord will be there and wait till I come on perfect terms,
The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine will be there

This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look’d at the crowded heaven.
And I said to my spirit- When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of every thing in them,
shall we be satisfied then?
And my spirit said- No, we but level that lift
to pass and continue beyond.

And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me.
And as to you Flesh I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me.
I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing,
I reach to the leafy lips, I reach to the polished breasts of melons.
And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths.
I hear you whispering there O stars of heaven,
O suns – O grass of graves – O perpetual transfers and promotions.

Do you see O my brothers and sisters?
It is not chaos or death – it is form, union, plan – it is eternal life – it is Happiness
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And I filter and fibre your blood

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

Phalanx

2009-03-07T19:56:00.000-08:00

The baker rises at four in the morning to bake his shells and mix his filling.
On his green and rusted tractor, the hay farmer drags his harrow through the dust.
The artist, she paints and makes love.
The nurse, she loves as well.
The Catracho climbs a banana tree.
The Matai watches his sons prepare a feast.
I see the librarian riding her bicycle and the mayor welding in his garage.
The carpenter builds a mantle.
The Rabbi passionately sings and the Bhikkhu works in quiet dignity and solitude.
The tea farmers pluck the leaves from the branch.
The mother soothes the suckling babe.
The president, the chief, and the prime minister each lay awake and restless.
The Chinaman caresses my clothes and I carelessly stain his handy work.
The vaquero rides herd on my supper and the Somali dreams of the excess.
The Russian doctor comforts his crying patient.
The calves grow, the oats grow.
Each is cut from and woven into the same divine fabric by some watchmaker o’er head.
Each is royal and likewise divine.
The Phalanx inhales deeply and sighs as one.
The organism lives and lives on and advances towards its exultation.

Provenance

2009-03-04T08:02:00.000-08:00

1. In the beginning there was Pigasus.
2. He was hot, dripping with His own filth, devouring, and lazy. His wings grew small from atrophy in proportion to His belly growing large from lust.
3. His eyes in a glaze, He bellowed a flowery and hypnotic frenzy to the spirit animals o’er whom He presided. Anesthetized by His diction, the spirit folk trod after Pigasus with impulsive joy.
4. Upon reaching the edge of Zion, He turned to face His obedient progeny. And they were afraid and cried unto Him for mercy. Then the Great Pig swallowed the spirit animals up.
5. The spirit animals dwelt in the belly of the Great Pig for three days and three nights. Though, the passion of the swallowed ne’r governs in favor of the swallower. With jealous attention, the spirit animals consumed and discarded the monstrous idol.
6. Out of the belly of the beast They howled; They the vigilant, the active, and the brave.