Quid Nunc?

How To Begin - Getting The Fingers Back On The Keys

2012-02-13T13:41:00.000-07:00

Home alone, except for the cats of course, on a blustery cold grey day, with a buggy tummy that kept me up all night. I should probably be trying to sleep, and soon I guess I will. But the fact that I haven't blogged for over three months, not written anything at all, is beginning to prey upon my soul. I think about writing, I write all kinds of things in my head in the middle of the night - but then when daylight comes, about all I manage to write are a few necessary emails and some this 'n that on Facebook.

I have noticed that some of my dear old friends (Lisa, Robin, Jackie, Kat, Judith) from early blogging days, when we called it journaling, are writing copiously in their blogs - and my resolution is to spend some quality time reading back through their posts, both to get caught up with their lives and thoughts, and to hopefully inspire my own fingers to move on the keys. I follow many blogs, at least nominally, but I don't often really sit down and do consecutive reading of posts. This seems to me like a mistake, and one that I am going to try to rectify. I will begin today, while I feel too crappy to do much of anything else.

Long Day's Journey Into Family

2011-11-06T20:04:00.000-07:00

Long time passing with no blogging here, due to Life Constantly Happening. As long as I am tethered to a desktop computer (laptop stolen soon after we moved to ABQ) I can only blog when I'm at home, and at home with nothing else to do, at that. This seems to happen very seldom. Much of August was spent traveling across the country to get to my niece's wedding in Philadelphia, a lot of Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Tennessee in between - along with a little Virginia and Maryland. The wedding was a delightful gathering of the clan, my niece was beautiful, as she always is, my brother and sister-in-law were proud and happy, the groom seems like a really great guy. Having made the mistake of moving so far away from most of my family, occasions like these are wonderful opportunities to see everyone, watch the kids growing up, meet the newest family members - and, since a big party was involved, dance our butts off. I have lots of adorable nieces and nephews, as well as a growing number of great-nieces and nephews, and most of them were there in Philadelphia for the wedding.

But, the New England gang wasn't able to come - so, as we were only a day's journey south, when the Philadelphia diaspora happened and everyone packed up to head home, Gail and I headed to Cape Cod, where we met up with my niece Jessica and her two little girls for almost a week of camping at the beach. My nephews, Jess' brother Tom and her partner Steve, were able to come out for the first night and join in our big cookout, so I was able to see everyone I am related to, with the exception of another nephew who wasn't able to get to the Cape, during this big trip East.

We had of course planned this camping excursion well in advance, and I have to say it was just more fun than should be legal - but it ended in a scramble to leave the Cape before Hurricane Irene got close enough to blow us off. Jess and the girlies went back to Rhode Island to get their own digs battened down, and Gail and I took down the tent and spent our last night in the car (it's a Honda Element, so we often sleep in it when camping anyway), got up before dawn and made it off the bridge before the traffic piled up on Rt. 6. This time by the water filled up our ocean-homesick souls, and sent us back to the high desert vowing to immediately start saving for next year's sojourn on the Atlantic coast.

Postponing The Final Answer

2011-08-14T06:46:00.000-06:00

I've been working on Robin's third question, What do you consider to be the big question or conundrum of your life? for several days now. I'm off on a three week trip for several family events on the east coast, and this question has done what perhaps it was meant to do - made me start deeply thinking about a lot of things in my life up to this point - where I've been, where I am now, where I can possibly go from here. I am saving what I've written so far in a separate post which I may eventually publish, or it may turn out to be too personal to want to put it out there in public. In any case, I don't have time right now. I will be thinking on this as I visit my nephew in jail, attend my niece's wedding, camp with another niece and her two little girls in North Truro, see my remaining siblings, all my nieces and nephews as well as great nieces and nephews, and in general have family immersion therapy. The answer I am working on to this question has everything to do with family and home, so it will be most interesting to see what comes up over the next three weeks.

I think, Robin, you may be as good a pastoral counselor as I imagined you might be - to get me thinking like this by your virtual questioning - what would you be able to do in person?

Okay, I'm Game

2011-08-11T21:50:00.004-06:00

Over at Robin's blog Metanoia, something interesting is going on. In a post titled "Try This" she offers five lists to make - no explanation, no context, just do it. So, okay, I will.

1. Five Colors:

Leaf-green, Sky-blue, Brown, Smoky grey, Bright orange

2, Five Cities:

Boston, San Antonio, Paris, Santa Fe, San Fransisco

3. Five Landscapes:

Cape Cod dunes, Ponds at Bosque del Apache at sunset when the cranes fly in, Sandia mountains when the setting sun colors them red, Chincoteague beaches, with ponies and waves,Texas Hill Country in the spring, with bluebonnets.

4. Five Interiors:

My sister's beautiful redone basement (I could describe it, but you have to take my word for it), a friend's herb shed/workshop on her farm, our own living room in the winter with a fire in the kiva fireplace, any darkened bedroom with the sound of sleeping children breathing, my mother's kitchen (this one is just a memory now, long gone) with the long table where we all used to eat, the big stone fireplace, the wonderful smells.

5. Five Things You Might Wear:

Big linen shirts, sandals, jeans, gardening gloves, straw hats.

Okay, there's my lists. It's past my bedtime, but I may have to go see what happens next. There's a second question coming up, and I have to at least go see it.

So - Second Question: Within each of your groups, do you see commonalities?

1. I think the commonalities here are that these are all colors I love in nature - the first two are obvious, smoky grey is the color of winter skies, and right now my backyard is riot of oranges, in the flowers that are blooming.

2, Yes, absolutely commonalities - these are all cities that are sui generis, each one unique, with histories, representing a culture, brimming with culture in fact - great walking cities, cities with great food.

3. All of these are places I love, places that have spoken to my heart, places I'd gladly have my ashes deposited so I could be part of them forever.

4. This one is a little harder - but I think they are all interiors that connect to my family or friends, that say something about life to me, life as we humans live it, especially together.

5. All comfortable, practical things. It's all I can stand to wear. I've just been through a week of shopping for something to wear to my niece's wedding later this month - and in the end it's going to be: big white linen shirt, a pair a of black linen trousers, black strappy sandals, with turquoise necklace and bracelets. That's as good as it gets, for me.

Purslane, The Wonder Plant

2011-07-21T08:49:00.003-06:00

When I posted yesterday about my wretched gardening summer, in which I had no food crops, I forgot to mention a very important one. I can make no claims to planting this or tending it - I have no credit whatsoever for its thriving in an empty planter where a lot of things died during the winter. This crop is considered a noxious weed by people who have velvety lawns, and the internet is full of advice on how to remove it from your lawn or garden. But purslane (Portulaca oleracea), the crop in question, is anything but noxious. It is, in fact, one of the most nutritious of green plants. My niece Jessica was the first to inform me of this plant's virtues, when it showed up in our lawn in North Truro. Jess is a wild-forager, and very knowledgeable about herbs and edible wild plants.

Purslane (also called by older names: Verdolaga, Pigweed, Little Hogweed or Pusley), is native to India and Persia, has a lengthy history, grows all over the planet, and is eaten as just what it is, a leafy green vegetable, in most other cultures. We have such a plentiful crop of it this year that we are eating it daily in salads, where its sour/salty taste adds flavor to the other greens. It is full of vitamins (notably A and C) and minerals (just about all of 'em), and more omega-3 fatty acids than fish oils. It is such a valuable food that last night Gail jokingly said "maybe all we should eat this summer is purslane!" And maybe she's right; it's both free and ultra-nutritious. But what about dark chocolate? Maybe dessert after the purslane? Anyway, while researching the plant for this post, I found links to tons of recipes using it, mostly for salads, but it's also recommended for stirfries. When the weather gets cool enough to use our stove again, I will certainly throw it into my first stirfry dish. Here are some good links for recipes and general info on purslane for your eating pleasure:

http://www.prairielandcsa.org/recipes/purslane.html

http://www.culinarymusings.com/2008/06/purslane-not-a-weed-but-a-wonder/

http://www.prodigalgardens.info/purslane%20recipes.htm

If you have a yard or a garden, you have purslane., I promise. You may have been weeding it out, but today's the time to start improving your health with a healthy serving of little hogweed. Here's a photo from my planter to help you recognize it. The purple flower is not part of the purlane plant, but a sprig of Russian sage that is flopping over onto it. It forms a spreading mat of succulent leaves on thick round stems (all of it is edible), has small yellow flowers, grows anywhere and everywhere it can find enough sun. It thrives even in our drought, and, as you can see, has eternally endeared itself to me this year.

Oh, at last!!

2011-07-20T22:20:00.001-06:00

And then, this evening into tonight - it rained. When I came out of the Continuing Ed building at the University, it was starting, and as I drove to pick up our takeout dinner from Thai Vegan it really poured. The streets were a nightmare of oily runoff after so long without rain to wash them, water in the gutters two feet deep, people driving like drunks - myself included - half the time I couldn't see a thing with all the water from the gutters and puddles being splashed on the windscreen - and it was a joy, a carnival of delight. I called Gail to make sure it was happening at our house, and it was. I sat out under the back portal after it got dark, soaking in the sounds and smells as the sweet slow rain kept falling. No watering for me tonight, just sleeping with the fan blowing in the soft mists, the chorus of deliriously happy crickets, maybe a little thunder from time to time.

It rained, I'm saying. It really rained, real rain. It rained!!!!

In The Good Ol' (But Very Difficult) Summertime

2011-07-20T09:16:00.002-06:00

If it weren't for the delicious coolness of the early mornings, I think I'd be a stark raving madwoman by now. I head out as soon as it's light to see what's happening in the yard, do a little hand watering of pots, deadheading, and just commune with whatever is making it thru these deadly months. Summer seems to be an endurance course this year, with the heat and drought the hurdles I'm having a very hard time getting over. It is well into the monsoon season now, and though it has rained in some parts of the state, mainly northern areas, here in the Albuquerque area there have only been spot showers of very brief duration. We can practically count the drops. Every afternoon the clouds build up, both east and west of the city, but aside from some thunder, nothing happens.

In the spring planting season I could already see what was coming, and we were already well into a drought (no precipitation since sometime last October), so I held off on planting anything. No food crops this year, no lovely spring lettuce, no summer tomatoes or peppers, not even much by way of herbs. My thyme and variegated sage bought it during the subzero winter temps, so I was only left with oregano, chives, garlic chives, mint and culinary sage. A month or so ago I couldn't stand the emptiness of my gardens, so I stupidly went to Lowe's and bought a few perennials to put in pots, deciding to simply think of them as annuals and not be upset when they didn't make it. Which is a good thing, because most of them have already decided to leave plant hell, my yard, for plant heaven, wherever that may be. Our water bill for last month was outrageous, so I am going to night watering only, except for things in pots which I do by hand with watering cans. I am very worried about the trees and shrubs, which I drip water, but am adding some hand watering at night when it won't evaporate.

Gardening has always been my way of enjoying the summer months, a form of recreation, exercise, enjoying the outdoor environment, as well as meditation and destressing. This year it has become its own form of stress, which is really silly. I'm starting to detach from obsessing on keeping things in perfect shape, just trying to keep what I can alive, and enjoying whatever IS alive, especially whatever is managing to bloom. The yard is still full of birds, butterflies and bees, so life does go on, and I continue to hope for those afternoon clouds to drop some blessed rain before monsoon season is over. There are some pretty good chances for this to happen later in the week. We shall see.

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Photos: 1. Geraniums in pots by front gate. 2. This year's favorite hollyhock color. 3. A crowd of Mexican Hats.

The Joy of Composting

2011-05-21T12:04:00.001-06:00

Eating as we are has a side effect that could either be considered a drawback or a gift, I suppose. It is the enormous amount of organic waste that piles up daily in the compost bucket by the kitchen sink. Everything goes into it: peels, cores, shells, rinds, trimmings, grinds, teabags, even used paper towels and coffee filters. The paper towels are made of recycled paper and the coffee filters are unbleached (most of the grinds go right under the roses as food for them). So, drawback or gift? For me, no question - a wondrous gift. All of this stuff goes into the compost bin in the backyard, where it gets mixed with mulched up leaves and plant clippings. We just mulched up leaves last week, and they aren't too well-incorporated into the pile yet, but they will be soon.

The center of the pile is full of fat happy worms, turning cantaloupe rinds, peapods, wilted cabbage leaves, onion skins, and old tea leaves into black gold. We've been here five years now, moved the compost bin with us from Delaware (although we did leave the compost there, dumped it out into what had been our big vegetable garden, and our neighbor came over and scooped much of it up for his garden across the street), and started filling it up from scratch that summer. Since then I have emptied it several times, using the resulting product in garden beds, planters and pots. It is very full right now, with the addition of the leaf mulch, but it really needs some time to cook before I can use it. Workng on the compost always makes me so happy, makes me feel connected to everything I love: the earth and the cycle of life and death that is constantly happening all around us. Because of the drought we're in and the recurring cold weather, weather which froze the emerging leaves on several much-loved plantings, I haven't really done much planting yet this year. I think June will be my big gardening month, and hopefully there will be some loads of compost ready to go. The slogan "Compost Happens" is a fun euphemism for the real phrase, but in fact, it doesn't just happen. It entails some knowledge and a bit of work: Here are some links to sites that can get you started on your own Black Gold project if you don't already have one going, and maybe give you some tips if you are not quite sure what you're doing:

Compost Mania offers both advice and equipment (although really, equipment is nice, but optional).
Composting Section on Journey To Forever advice, philosophy, The Big Picture
163 Things You Can Compost - A fun list of just exactly what it says.

-- "Man's work with Nature that furthers Nature's aims is the work that rewards him the best." (I-Ching)

Is Vegan Pizza Our Favorite Supper?

2011-05-18T22:47:00.004-06:00

I ask myself this question, but I find I do not know the answer. It is our favorite supper when we are having it for supper. As we did tonight. A big fat pizza full of veggies, of which we could only eat half, so there is half left for lunch tomorrow. It is for sure one of our favorite suppers. And here is how I make it:

I am a big fan of shortcuts when cooking, as a pizza like this would have taken me all afternoon to make, if I made everything from scratch. This would have left no time to work in the yard, go to the Y for the daily workout routine, and pick up a few things at Trader Joe's. So, the first shortcut is the crust - we love Rustic Crusts line of pizza crusts, the Tuscan Six Grain being our favorite. I bake the crust for about five minutes on a pizza stone, then haul it out of the oven and let it sit and wait for the toppings to get ready. For the topping I use a mix of fresh and frozen veggies. Tonight's fresh veg were zucchini, mushrooms and garlic, the frozen were the SW blend from Whole Foods (red and green peppers and onions), roasted corn kernels (from TJ's). I added some green chile to the mix, sauteed it all until it began to soften. I used TJ's no-salt-added fire-roasted salsa on the crust instead of tomato sauce, as this pizza has a Southwestern bent, then piled on the veggies. I sprinkled it all with Daiya shredded cheddar cheese alternative (a great find, it melts and tastes truly almost like cheese), put it back on the pizza stone and baked it for ten minutes in a 450 degree oven.

The first time I tried to make a veggie pizza I didn't prebake the crust, didn't precook the veggies, and it ended up a total catastrophe. I kept on trying to figure it out, and tonight's was the best ever yet. I use different vegetables, sometimes use the Daiya mozzarella fake-o cheese, and just have fun with it. With a big green salad it is a supper that makes us feel happy and blessed to have such a delicious and healthy treat!!

P.S. - Ho! No sooner do I mention Daiya cheese sub in a post, but Ellen Kanner writes about it in her Miami Herald column, The Edgy Veggie. She includes a recipe for cheese grits, a dish I learned to love as a high school boarding student in North Carolina. Feels good to be in such exalted company. At last, a vegan cheese that tastes like the real thing.

Forks Over Knives, or How To Save Your Own Life

2011-05-18T12:09:00.004-06:00

So, life (thank the goddess) goes on, and I seem to have less and less time or inclination to sit at the computer. Well, no, the truth is that I quite often have the inclination, but since for the past almost seven months now I have been exercising more and more often than in the past forty or fifty years put together, and have become convinced of the real dangers of spending too much time sitting in a chair, I don't very often act on that inclination. I do miss spending time writing things longer than emails or Facebook status posts however, and since we're all going to be raptured (or the Chosen will be raptured, and I guess the rest of us will just fall into the Great Void) when Judgement Day happens on Saturday, I thought I'd spend a little time on the old blog today (with frequent intervals to get up and jog around the house, mind you).

It's really too bad about that judgement day business, especially if it really happens. Gail and I have been spending so much time and effort on getting healthy and fit at this late day in our lives, and wondering why we waited so long - be a damn shame to waste it on getting tossed into la nada by worldwide earthquakes and so forth. I personally would really like to go down a few more sizes and maybe run a 5K race for a worthy cause of some sort before it's all over. Maybe even a marathon eventually. Well, I guess we'll see.

In the meantime my more immediate goal is to be able to see a movie whose progress I've been following for a while now. It's called Forks Over Knives, and it's about the benefits of exactly what Gail and I have been doing since her Coronary Artery Disease diagnosis in September, eating a plant based, nutritionally dense, vegan diet. We've also been doing yoga, working out on the treadmill and weight machines at our local Y's, and as soon as the outdoor pool is open (Memorial Day, and we can't wait), swimming, daily. The movie apparently doesn't deal much with exercise, according to Roger Ebert's review "...Although regular exercise, especially walking, is invaluable, the film shows only a little exercise and focuses singlemindedly on nutrition." Ebert is most enthusiastic about this film, and says what we have found to be true during our Medical System Journeying after Gail's diagnosis: " 'Forks Over Knives' is not subtle. It plays as if it had been made for doctors to see in medical school. Few doctors seem prepared to suggest proper nutrition as an alternative to pills, stents and bypasses." No doctor has recommended the path we've taken; quite the contrary - the recommendations are all for invasive procedures and/or medications. The reactions to our telling them our plan has universally been snorts of derision. So, we took the initiative to read the very doctors featured in this movie, T. Colin Campbell and Caldwell Esselstyne, and embark on our own vegan adventure.

I've been writing about this adventure in this blog since we started, and think it's time for a little update. Gail, who was not really overweight to start withbut did have some of the dreaded belly fat, has lost fifteen pounds, her cholesterol has dropped many points, her blood pressure is now very low normal, and she never has any angina, even when racing away at high speeds and inclines on the treadmill. I, who was quite overweight, have lost almost fifty pounds and my blood pressure is closer to a good normal reading than it has been in my entire adult life. I won't have a physical and tests until November (first apptmt I could get), but I am expecting my cholesterol to be lower than it has been since I started having it tested in my forties. It has always been high, and doctors have wanted to put me on medication for years now. So, Gail and I are living proof of this movie's premise, laid out here by T. Colin Campbell himself:

For more than 2,800 years, the concept of eating plants in their whole-food form has struggled to be heard and adopted as a way of life. However, recent evidence shows that more than ever a plant-based diet is not something to be ignored. In fact, eating a plant-based diet has become an urgent matter from several perspectives. Not only will it improve your health -- and the evidence behind this claim is now overwhelming -- but it will also dramatically reduce health care costs, as well as reduce violence to our environment and to other sentient beings.

The fact is our nation's economic stability, already crumbling due to the repeated bursting of bubbles such as technology and housing, has been hard hit by spiraling health costs that seem to have no end in sight. Despite this, as a nation, we are sicker and fatter than we have ever been. The epidemic of obesity and diabetes, especially in the young, forecasts an economically unsustainable public health challenge with the gloomy prophecy that today's children may not outlive their parents.

Who will protect the public? Not our government: The U.S. Department of Agriculture's nutrition pyramid is laden with food that will guarantee millions will suffer ill health. Not the American Dietetic Association, which is controlled by food corporations. Not the insurance industry, which profits by selling plans to the sick. Not the pharmaceutical industry, which pockets billions from chronic illnesses. And not the medical profession, in which doctors and nurses receive virtually no training in nutrition or behavioral modification, and are handsomely rewarded for administrating drugs and employing technical expertise.

What can save America is a plant-based diet, which will help individuals recover their good health, and which in turn will set our health care system right (as well as our economy). However, for this plant-based diet to take hold, the public must be endowed with nutritional literacy, the kind of knowledge that is portrayed in the new documentary, "Forks Over Knives."

"Forks Over Knives" focuses not just on the research that both of us have been engaged in over the last four decades, whether in China and Cornell or at the Cleveland Clinic; it also traces the journey of several Americans as they move from a lifetime of eating mostly animal-based and processed foods to a whole food plant-based diet, and the extraordinary medical results that follow. It is educational, entertaining, and literally life-saving.

See this movie if it comes to a theatre, or even a town, near you. It would be so great if this movie actually provided the impetus this country needed toget itself off the track of degenerative illness and onto one of real health care. (Cross-posted to Women On.)

Getting Ourselves Back To The Garden

2011-04-23T20:20:00.001-06:00

Recently we treated ourselves to an Albuquerque Biopark membership, something we have meant to do ever since we arrived here five years ago. Now that we have it we go to the Botanic Garden at least once a week, sometimes two or three. Of course this is the best time for those trips, weather still very enjoyable, everything in the gardens coming into bloom, birds everywhere, air full of pollen and allergens, no no, forget that part - we just take our Zyrtec. Yesterday we thought the myriad of irises in the Gardens would be coming into bloom, and we are mad for irises, so we spent over an hour wandering from iris patch to iris patch, lost in delight. They are just coming into bloom, with millions of buds to come, so we are very happy to have future delights in store.

We finally ended up at the Japanese Garden, joining a family enthralled by the swarming hordes of koi in the water beside a rocky platform at the edge of the pond. We soon discovered why the fish were swarming there, the kids were dumping Doritos into the water. Not a good idea for the koi, I'm pretty sure, but I was not the boss of them, and their parents were right there, so I kept my mouth shut. When I lifted my eyes from the koi and looked across the water, I was amazed to see a very plump black-crowned night heron sitting on a rock gazing intently into the water in front of it. I've never seen one of these birds there before, and knowing that it is a fish-eater I felt sure a nature documentary was about to play out in front of us.

Most of the larger fish that live in the pond were over by the Dorito kids, but there were some still swimming elsewhere in the water. The heron waited and watched patiently, then suddenly spread its wings, leapt into the water and stabbed a pretty small koi with its beak. It had a hard time clambering back up onto the rock with the fish in its mouth, and I wasn't at all sure it would be able to enjoy its wriggling sushi snack. But it managed to gobble up the entire fish, over a period of about fifteen minutes. We walked around the pond to get a view of this meal from different angles, wishing devoutly that we had a video camera with us. Koi disposed of, the heron resumed its vigil, although I can't imagine how it could manage to down another one. I understand why it was such a very stout bird, and suppose that it has taken up residence somewhere near the koi pond. The gifts of the BioPark are many and various. The wood ducks who were also enjoying the pond ignored the whole scene. They were simply enjoying the wind, the sun, the water, the lovely afternoon. We left them all to their own pleasures and went off into the nearby Bosque for a very long walk by the river. A lovely afternoon of enjoying the bounty of Mother Earth on her name day.

Earth Day Thoughts

2011-04-23T19:19:00.002-06:00

I posted a very crabby status on my Facebook page this morning, an Earth Day status, but not one of flowery hope and cheer. I don't have much hope, flowery or otherwise, and I have been sadly dead out of cheer for several weeks now. This is what I posted this morning:

Yes, it's Earth Day, the one official day we set aside to celebrate the planet. What if we all really believed, and lived as if we believed it, that every day is Earth Day? We've had Earth Day once a year for forty-one years now. It's time to start having Earth LIFE, not Day. Time for serious legislative actions, not symbolic ones.

I posted that crabby message after seeing a photo on an AOL gallery of photos from Earth Days starting with the first one in 1970.When I went back to try to get the photo, the gallery was gone, so I can't put it in this post, but it was of a protest somewhere, early in the history of Earth Day. The photo was of protesters in front of a building (maybe the EPA) who had poured out oil on the steps of the building, and were holding signs demanding safer regulations for offshore oil drilling. This was a photo from possibly forty years ago, and look where we are today. Look at all the "earth days" that have gone by, and almost exactly on Earth Day of 2010 itself we had the monstrous BP Deepwater Horizon blowout and nonstop oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico. Really, we are such silly people - for forty-one years we have celebrated one day out of the year with local fairs featuring recycling demos, booths selling herb and vegetable plants, maybe someone showing how their solar thingy can heat a bucket of water, and so on. Symbolic acts have been the hallmarks of our Earth Day celebrations for as long as we've held them.

In Bolivia they celebrated their Earth Day (which they call the International Day of Mother Earth) with a law granting rights to Mother Earth equal to the rights shared by humans. In this document Mother Earth is defined as: "a unique, indivisible, self-regulating community of interrelated beings that sustains, contains and reproduces all beings. The Morales government in Bolivia also plans to establish a Ministry of Mother Earth to implement this law. The rights for Mother Earth include:

the right to maintain the integrity of life and natural processes
the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered
the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration
the right to pure water
the right to clean air
the right to balance, to be at equilibrium
the right to be free of toxic and radioactive pollution
the right to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities

So, maybe this law will also only be symbolic, but what a huge symbol, what an ongoing committment to the earth. Here in this country our government can't agree on a single action to actually DO something about climate change and the rest of the imbalance we are imposing on this planet. I find it hard to get excited any more about Earth Day.

P.S. I wrote most of this yesterday, but finished it today. Don't know how to change the date so it shows yesterday, April 22, 2011. But that's the correct date for this one.

Vegan Foodies Continued: Ellen Kanner

2011-03-01T18:03:00.001-07:00

This may turn into a long ongoing series that nobody but my vegan niece will read, but oh what the heck, I'M having fun!! One of my favorite new foodie gurus is Ellen Kanner, another writer, like Mark Bittman, with a long food writing pedigree. I first discovered Ellen as the author of the Meatless Monday blog on The Huffington Post, and still enjoy reading her weekly wisdom there. Not least because she always closes the post with a recipe. This week's MM post is particularly wonderful to an old sixties hippie like myself. And, in addition, in it she introduced me to a new vegan foodie, Nava Atlas, about whom I will soon be posting. Ellen writes a column for the Miami Herald, , has a Facebook page, as well as a thoroughly delightful blog called Edgy Veggie (loving that name so much) in which she doesn't write anywhere near often enough to suit my tastes, no pun intended. However, who am I to talk? Her CV includes writing for all the top foodie print mags, as well as a novel, which I am about to put on my waiting list from the public library.

This is a snippet from a piece called "Welcome to the Broccoli" under the "Culinary" tab on Ellen's website:

"When the goodness of real food, fresh produce and lovingly cooked whole grains gets into you, it makes you feel terrific, too, in a way that a can of diet whatever can’t touch. It’s food that lets you know you’re being nourished, cared for – there’s not enough of that, as far as I’m concerned. I think it’s one of the reasons we’ve got a problem in this country.

You’ve heard of the French paradox, that mystery enabling the French to eat lavish, leisurely, artery-clogging meals while remaining svelte and chic with cholesterol levels that don’t make their doctors scream and hurl statins at them.

The American paradox, by contrast, is just depressing. We know more than we ever have before about nutrition and diet, yet we’re in an obesity epidemic. Obesity goes far beyond not being able to look hot naked. It compromises your health, period.

You know this. Everybody knows this. And what are people doing about it? Pointing fingers, filing suits against food manufacturers for making them fat, drinking soul-destroying diet meals-in-a-can or saying damn the torpedos (or scale) and ordering double-cheese pizzas. Eventually, though, the binges and the blaming, the purges and the pills lose their luster – and let’s face it, when it comes to instilling healthier lifestyles, not to mention joy, they just don’t cut it.
Eventually you’ve got to get back to yourself and get back to real food. There’s you. And there’s the broccoli. So let’s begin."

I have to say I'm only sorry that it took me until I was 67 years old to get down to the broccoli. I had a realization of just this, the "goodness of real food letting me know I was being nourished, cared for" yesterday after supper, when Gail and I were eating our incredible navel orange sections (with a few squares of deeply dark chocolate, yes) after dinner, and I was ruminating on what we'd had to eat all day - the fresh blueberry oatmeal, real oats with big fat juicy bursting blueberries cooked in for breakfast, the quinoa/vegetable soup, with raw veggies and eggplant hummous for lunch, the vegan spinach lasagna I spent Sunday morning making, with a big salad of organic greens and cukes for dinner. As I thought about it all, I had that ahah!! feeling, a feeling of gratitude and wonder at how good it had all been, how good I felt after eating it. It's one of those moments I will have to engrave upon my memory, for when the chipotle cheese burger commercials late at night make me want to bash my head against the wall.So, thanks for the inspiration Ellen Kanner, and keep that broccoli comin' on.

A Whole New World: Vegan Foodies

2011-02-25T12:10:00.020-07:00

As a former all-foods foodie, in the days when food was for me, not merely nutrition, but reward, self-medication, and entertainment, there were many food writers whom I enjoyed reading, both as inspiration and just for the fun of it. There are not only cookbooks, and food memoirs (Ruth Reichl is my favorite in this category) there are websites and blogs, Facebook pages....ah, the list goes on.

In my new incarnation as a vegan foodie I am challenged by the search for replacements for these sources of fun and inspiration. And to my mild surprise, and great delight, the discoveries are piling up. I will be writing more about this in future posts, but my latest discovery is the one I want to address today.

Some of you may be familiar with Mark Bittman, a professional food writer since 1980. Mark is currently writing in the "opinionatorblogs " at the New York Times, as well as in The Diner's Journal blog at that same paper, has a website, a Facebook page, has made numerous TV appearances (Good Morning America, in particular) and quite likely more media presence that I don't even know. His writing is omnivorous, not limited to vegetarian or vegan, but does include those modes, in his articles and in his cookbooks. His recent column on McDonald's new addition to their breakfast menu, their "Wholesome Oatmeal" has garnered a lot of publicity all over the Internet, and is what has truly endeared him to my heart. We were so happy when we saw this announcement, just before a road trip to Texas. Road trips are especially trying for us as newly-minted vegans, and if the ubiquitous eatery was going to be offering something we could eat on the road for breakfast, we were thrilled. Our first bowlful of this "wholesome" item cured us of this naive hope. We declined the brown sugar and the cream that McDonalds adds to a bowl of cereal already evidently containing "11 weird ingredients you would never keep in your kitchen,” as well as "more sugar than a Snickers bar and only 10 fewer calories than a McDonald’s cheeseburger or Egg McMuffin...Even without the brown sugar it has more calories than a McDonald’s hamburger." poured on our own unsweetened soy milk and managed to eat that morning's breakfast. It was our first and our last. Without even knowing about the weird ingredients, it bore no resemblance to the oatmeal we make in our own kitchen every morning. For our next road trip I made up a pan of Oatmeal Cake, cut it into squares, wrapped them up and tossed them into our Road Food bag. If we stay someplace with a microwave, we can warm it up and have it with soy milk, if not we can just eat it as is. Either way it only has ten ingredients, not a single one of them weird.

I am now a faithful reader of as much Mark Bittman as I can find, am going to pick up his book Food Matters today if I have time. Because although his new slogan is "Eat Real Food," I think that this phrase "Food Matters" is the heart of Bittman's philosophy, as it now is also mine. On my way to fifty pounds lighter than I was at the beginning of this journey, I am able to see that food does indeed matter, in ways that are new and wonderful to me - as nutrition, as fuel for my increasingly more fit physical self (a post on this is in the works too!), as a way I can contribute to the healing of this planet.

Eating Animals

2011-02-24T17:33:00.004-07:00

I have just finished reading Jonathan Safran Foer's book, Eating Animals, and I will never be the same again. My partner and I became vegans just over four months ago, after several years of being mainly vegetarians. Our earlier decision not to eat four-legged creatures was based mostly on our experiences of driving through the Texas panhandle, seeing, smelling, and being horrified by, the feedlots full of cattle wallowing in mud and excrement along I40 and other highways in the area. We continued to eat the occasional chicken and fish, as well as eggs and dairy, but came to feel worse and worse about the whole thing.

As I have posted here, and on my Facebook page, the ultimate decision to eat neither animals nor any animal products, came about for reasons of personal health, when Gail was diagnosed with coronary artery disease, and we began our research into ways other than invasive procedures and medication to help her recover. I know people, most notably my niece and her partner, who have been vegan for many years now out of a moral conviction that eating animals is wrong. Reading Foer's book has placed me someplace I never thought I'd find myself, squarely in that "eating animals is wrong" camp. It's not exactly the "I'll never eat anything that had a mother and a face" position that my niece holds, but it's getting closer. I love Saffran Foer's writing, have read his earlier books, both novels, and much to my suprise found this nonfiction book equally engaging. His writing here was as offbeat and captivating as his fiction, and I read it straight through almost without stopping. To quote the book's website:

"Like many others, Jonathan Safran Foer spent his teenage and college years oscillating between omnivore and vegetarian. But on the brink of fatherhood—facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child’s behalf—his casual questioning took on an urgency. This quest ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong.

This book is what he found. Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir, and his own detective work, Eating Animals explores the many stories we use to justify our eating habits—folklore and pop culture, family traditions and national myth, apparent facts and inherent fictions—and how such tales can lull us into a brutal forgetting."

In the past couple of days I read that Duke University and Univ. of North Carolina have chosen Eating Animals as the summer reading assignment for their incoming freshmen. It is an excellent choice for young people on the brink of being in charge of their own life decisions. As one of the students on the choosing panel stated: "For me, it's not just a book about food, It's a book about being really active in making your own decisions." It delights me to think that Saffran Foer may be instrumental in helping them make some very good ones.(Crossposted to WomenOn)

Frosty Paws

2010-12-17T13:19:00.108-07:00

So, here I am, sitting in the room we call "the office" since it is where our desks, file cabinets, supplies, computer/printer and so forth are located, trying to keep the circulation going in my fingers by typing. The circulation is imperiled by the fact that when I woke up this morning I discovered that the furnace was not working. At all. We don't keep heat on at night, as we sleep in flannel, down, quilts, and cats, and rarely need any extra heat. But as soon as I get up into the icy winter house, I turn the heat on. Our highest setting at any time of day is 69, once in a great while 70. This morning when I turned the thermostat up to 68, nothing happened. And it still isn't happening. It's 33 degrees outside, and it sure feels a lot like that in here, despite the space heaters I have going in this room and the kitchen. I've closed these two rooms off to the rest of the house, and from time to time I go turn on the oven for an extra little blast of warmth. We called the company that services our heater and swamp cooler as soon as we could, and supposedly at some yet-undisclosed time today a technician will show up to see what's going on and presumably fix it. This happened several weeks ago, on one of the only cold days in November, and THAT technician seemed quite vague and unsure of his fix. It's a quite new furnace, and this is a mystifying problem. I don't want to build a fire in the fireplace, as I keep imagining that the fix-it guy will come and I'll be released from my waiting - I have a lot I need to do do in the world outside this house, and don't want to leave a fire burning while I go to La Montanita for food resupply.

I'm always amazed when anything of this nature happens: malfunction of necessary systems, power outages, big roof leaks, and so forth - to see how dependent we really are on these systems. We have all come to take heat/light/water on command as a given, as well as all that comes to us piggybacking on those utilities. We take having what we want where we want it when we want it as the Natural Order of the Universe, and when that order of the universe is interrupted, we freak.

I think of my friend Kathy, working with Innovative Communities.orgFoundation in Guatemalan villages, where there are no systems to malfunction, where poverty and natural catastrophe are the governing orders. Kathy and the people she works with are replacing traditional unvented open hearths with safe, fuel-efficient stoves, installing water filters for families at risk from water-bourne illness, providing school supplies and library books for children. I knew Kathy when we were both privileged young women studying abroad in France, and we have remained long-distance friends ever since. The work she is doing is amazing and the people she works with are the ones who should inherit the earth when all our power systems finally wink out completely as our way of life collapses. As I do believe it will, perhaps even within my lifetime. I should be learning to live much more sustainably, to depend far less on these external-to-me systems. So, I put on more layers, I eat two zucchini-mushroom tamales,( warmed in the microwave, because not all of my systems have yet collapsed), let the fix-it guy in, he finds it to be a bad pressure switch, and now he's gone to pick up a new one. A good one, I hope. And then I read that in England, where they are having a terrible run of freezing weather: "Thousands of homes could run out of heating oil over Christmas and rationing will be introduced if the freezing weather continues, the Government has warned." None of us are ready for what is eventually coming down the pike.

If you'd like to know more about ICO's work in Guatemala, there is a blog, with wonderful photos and day-to-day stories of what is happening. It will take you right there.

Doing The Happy Dance

2010-12-16T16:59:00.001-07:00

Getting good news is just such a kick in the pants. And we have great good news. Before we went to Denver last week Gail had a new lipid panel done. Yesterday we saw her doctor for a report on said lipids. And the report has major changes from the one she got in October, the one that occasioned her stress test, which brought the diagnosis of CAD, and therefore our new eating lifestyle. Her numbers have all improved - bad cholesterol down, good cholesterol up, triglycerides waaay down, cholesterol in transition from dense and heavy to light and fluffy (something no one has ever mentioned as a marker before), blood pressure totally normal. So, to celebrate we went to yoga, then to Whole Foods for an enormous salad, then for a forty minute fast walk in the mall. The mall is our least favorite place to walk, but it was dark by then and we had to get a birthday present for my niece anyway. The important things in our lives now are eating vegetables, beans and salads, walking every day, yoga twice a week, meditation and breathing exercises. Gail is by no means out of the woods, but she can at least see the sunlight from within the trees. We are continuing this regime, she'll have more blood tests in three months, another stress test in six months. I think even if she is ever given a clean bill of health we will continue as vegans, perhaps adding in a little of the good oils, and more things like nuts and avocados. We have both lost weight, feel so much better, and are now at least True Believers, if not Total Fanatics.

I have to thank Bill Clinton here, for giving us the original impetus to take this route (rather than the catheterization/angioplasty/stent/medication route) and my niece Jessica for sending us her copy of Eat To Live, by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, (the book that has now become our bible) and for helping me dive into vegan cooking. As anyone who has read the sparse entries in this blog over the past couple of months is aware of my initial displeasure with the diet, putting it mildly. I have had serious mental breakdowns over trying to shop, cook, and eat this way - sometimes daily. Over the past several weeks I have made some peace with chard, black beans, romaine, broccoli, whole grains, etcetera. The results of the diet as shown in Gail's blood tests, and in the fact that she almost never has any angina any more (a small amount once in a great while when we go uphill too hard and fast), firm up my resolve to become the best vegan/low fat/low oil/low salt cook I can be.

Before we went to Denver I rambled around online looking at Denver restaurants, and discovered an unbelievably wonderful vegetarian/vegan place downtown called Watercourse Foods. We took Gail's son Evan and his two kids there to breakfast on Sunday - with totally positive results. They do serve eggs, so Char could have scrambled eggs with her vegan French toast, and Ben could have eggs and "normal" pancakes too. The existence of such a place fills me with joy and delight. It IS possible to eat in this hyper-healthy fashion and still be a foodie, it is, it is!!! Watercourse is enough to make me think long and hard about moving to Denver. Do check out the website, it is beautiful in and of itself. The artwork on the site is from the walls of the restaurant, by a phenomenal artist, whose other work is entirely different from what is on the walls at Watercourse.

Maybe Life Will Go On After All

2010-12-06T12:02:00.000-07:00

Oh my, it's over a month since I have posted here, and then it was just a little recipe for Oatmeal Cake. It's been a difficult five weeks since posting that recipe, although it is somewhat embarrassing to admit that the difficulty has been adjusting to a diet that is so foreign to my nature. Embarrassing, but true, that I have spent these weeks in utter misery over missing the foods that I have eaten and loved all my life. Eaten, loved, gained large amounts of weight on (gained, lost, gained, lost - the same old story everyone knows all too well), packed my arteries with cholesterol, raised my blood pressure, reached pre-diabetic status, yes, and so on and so forth. Anyone who has read my post The REAL Change of Life, knows what I am talking about in terms of this new diet. It's interesting to me that some of my friends seem to have interpreted what we are doing as Vegetarian - when in fact it is so much more radical than that. Being Vegetarian, which we were for some years, seems like distant dream to us now. Even just being Vegan would be a piece of cake (oh those food metaphors, they are everywhere, aren't they?) at this point. My main reading in the past weeks has been Vegan cookbooks and websites, looking for recipes that would make life and eating more enjoyable. But so many of the recipes I find contain oil as a major ingredient, (and oils are off our list) that I haven't found too much to add to my meager repertoire.

But - I've been inventing my own recipes, adjusting other people's recipes to make them possible on our plan, eating far less ( and here I have to cite a post by our guru Dr. Fuhrman about hunger, what it is, how we experience it, how it changes on his diet plan: Redefining Hunger.), feeling much better physically, losing weight, and constantly bitching and whining about it all. Last night after supper I suddenly realized that all three meals we had had yesterday, all cooked and eaten at home, had been delicious and enjoyable. It was a huge revelation. Yesterday's meals were: for breakfast, oatmeal with warm mixed berries, lunch: pinto beans and rice on corn tortillas, with green chile salsa, the obligatory big green salad (to be known hereafter as the BGS), tangerines as dessert, and for dinner: the BGS and roasted vegetables (fingerling potatoes, sweet potatoes, parsnips, red, green and yellow peppers, onions, garlic, butternut squash), apple slices and Barbara's raspberry newtons for dessert. My feelings about yesterday's meals were a huge revelation - maybe we CAN continue with this program, and maybe we can, especially Gail, be healthier than we have been in many years. And, btw, the discovery of Barbara's newtons, several kinds, has been a godsend.

One of the biggest problems with such a radical approach to eating is that food/eating is one of humanity's biggest social constructs. Almost every social occasion we can imagine revolves in some way around food, its preparation and consumption. Even our neighborhood book club has turned into a showcase for our members' gourmet cooking. Which I enjoyed and participated in while I was eating like an ordinary person, but now we are contemplating dropping out of book club altogether. And as I moaned on Facebook, starting such a program coming into the Major Food Holidays was a crazy move. We couldn't imagine what to do about Thanksgiving, didn't travel to any of our family celebrations, nor accept any local invitations. We did survive the holiday, thanks to great food resources here in this city. With mushroom/walnut loaf and Southwestern cornbread dressing from La Montanita, creamed spinach and mushroom/sage gravy, half a berry explosion pie from Whole Foods, and our own BGS, all of it vegan (Gail didn't eat the pie crust, but I must admit that I did. I am not a saint, by anyone's definition.), although we couldn't know how much oil and/or salt was in any of it - we made a holiday compromise. The food was all entirely delicious, the lack of animal products not a hardship at all. We'll be going to Denver to visit Gail's kids soon, and travel, like social occasions, is another difficult task. We'll take what we can with us for road food, shop at Whole Foods when we get there, and relax a little while we're eating with the boys and their families. Gail is having her cholesterol checked tomorrow, so she feels a little stepping out of the box will be okay. A little. A very little.

Great Breakfast Treat, Oatmeal Cake

2010-10-28T10:17:00.004-06:00

A cold morning, water in the birdbaths lightly frozen over. The birds are emptying their feeders in record time, and I am feeling quite guilty about forgetting to fill them last evening. It's still too cold to go out there and do it right now in my jammies. But it's the perfect morning to bake up a panful of Oatmeal Cake so we'll have it to take as a portable breakfast for fly-ins at the Bosque del Apache next week. Oatmeal is a breakfast staple for us in winter, both in our previous life, and our New Improved Vegan/no oil life.

This is something I used to make for breakfast when we ran Marigold's, our guesthouse on Cape Cod, only now I have modified it for our new diet to exclude eggs. sugar and oil. It is actually quite good, with the banana and applesauce providing a nice sweetness. It makes a grab & go breakfast if you don't have time for a sit-down, or can be heated up with fruit for a tummy-warming morning start.

Oatmeal Cake

1 1/2 cups quick-cooking oats (NOT instant)
2 cups soy (or almond/hemp/oat/etc) milk
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 1/2 tsps baking powder
1 (or more, as you like) tsp cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla
1 large banana, mashed
1/2 cup applesauce
handful chopped walnuts
1/2 cup raisins (cranberries are also great)

Oven at 350.

Spray 8" round or square pan.
Soak oats in milk about five minutes.
Add nuts/raisins, vanilla, banana and applesauce to soaked oat/milk mix.
Mix dry ingreds separately, then mix in to oat mix until well blended.
Pour into baking pan, bake 40 - 45 minutes, until golden crust forms on top.
Let cool before cutting. Serves six, or keeps two in breakfast treats for several days.

The REAL Change of Life

2010-10-25T13:49:00.002-06:00

So, here's the story: About a month ago my partner, Gail, was diagnosed with Coronary Artery Disease, to be known hereafter as CAD. She'd been having some chest pain when we walked, especially if we tried to pick up the pace, or go uphill. And in NM one is often going uphill. Once she turned sixty-five, and entered into the wonders of Medicare, she finally saw a doctor, had blood work revealing very high cholesterol, a stress test with abnormal results, and got a diagnosis. And a referral to a cardiologist. I went with her to the cardio visit, and listened to the recommendation for catheterization, perhaps angioplasty, perhaps a stent, blah blah blah. We've been primarily vegetarian for about four years now, having fish sometimes, organic poultry once in a great while, no red meat at all. But once we stopped eating meat, we, alas, started eating way too much dairy and eggs. So, even before Gail's diagnosis, we had (thanks to all the publicity about Bill Clinton's turn to a vegan diet before Chelsea's wedding) dropped the dairy and eggs, and started a vegan eating plan. My niece, vegan for years now, recommended a book to us, Eat to Live, by a Dr. Joel Fuhrman. We took it out of the library, read it cover to cover, and began following his principles. In it he mentions yet another doctor, and another book, Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease, by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn. This one is even stricter in his principles, but we're trying to keep up with it all.

A vegan diet is just fine with me, vegetables, fruits, whole grains, nuts, seeds, soy products, and so on. The problem with these cardiac diets, especially Esselstyne's, is that they also omit all oils and fats, even those with veggie sources, as well as salt and sugar. It's hard to imagine how hard it is to cook without oils, especially olive oil, which is a staple of my culinary existence. Earlier this month, but after we had started this life change, we took a trip to the east coast to visit family members in Washington, DC and Bristol, Rhode Island. Traveling while eating like this is less than fun, or easy. We managed to pack a lunch for the plane rides to D.C., and my sister did her very best to deal with this (she's even more of an olive oil fan than I am) while we were staying with her. From D.C. we took the train up the coast to Rhode Island, to our joy discovering an oatmeal breakfast from Au Bon Pain in Union Station, and carrying veggie and fruit snacks to sustain us. Once we got to Jessica's house, we could relax. She, her partner Steve and their children are vegan, and actually trying to cut out the oils and fats from that way of eating themselves. So, we ate well and heartily, and I learned a lot from them about vegan cooking, and tricks for palatability, despite the lack of oils and salt. Since my cholesterol and blood pressure are also sky-high, and I have been steadily gaining weight over the past many years, it is clear that, though I have no angina, we both are in the same cardiac ship of fools.I've already lost a sister to heart disease and diabetes, and my brother has had two heart surgeries, as well as diabetes. Suddenly it seems, I have no time to waste.

I've posted a fair amount about food in this blog, and will probably be posting a lot more from now on, with a very different slant. After only about a month of eating according to the Good Doctors, both our blood pressures have come down, Gail's to normal, mine to practically normal, I have lost almost thirty pounds, Gail has lost six (she was not actually overweight, but wants to get down to "medically thin," at which point her cholesterol should have diminished to normal or below. For me "medically thin" is in the far distant future, but it is also my goal. Since returning from our trip, life has been a whirlwind of cleaning out our refrigerator and cupboards, throwing or giving away the things we no longer eat, shopping every single day at one of the many good markets available to us here in ABQ: La Montanita Food Co-Op, Whole Foods, Sunflower Market. I plan to hit Talin Market soon, it's a huge international grocery with things from all over the planet. I'll be looking for spices and seasonings there to rejoice our palates. They also have fruits and vegetables there that I've only read about in books. After we shop, I cook. Constantly, it seems. Eating out is no longer an option, as just about all restaurant food is full of salt and fat, both obvious and hidden. There is one restaurant, Annapurna's, that we are going to check into to see if it will sustain this diet. We have eaten there as vegetarians, not yet as vegans on cardiac diets. So,, stay tuned, lots more to come.

The Disconnection

2010-09-19T15:06:00.003-06:00

After my post the other day on the attempt to rescue my mind, I found this post by a friend on - yes - Facebook. It's called How to Disconnect from Your Online Life, and comes from the BBC. Apparently I am far from the only one with the problem. It is my current intention to do more blog reading and writing, although I don't intend to sign up with "the Suicide Machine" and "kill" my FB "avatar persona," whom, I think, is pretty much my real life persona. I've even made some real friends, as opposed to virtual ones, via the social networking, which I count as a real plus. Kind of scary though that there are young people in the world now whose "entire life has been lived online." Yikes.

Okay, off this chair, away from this screen right now. Out into the so-called Real World.

A Post Script on 9/20 - as I seem to be riding a wave: Is The Internet Making You Lose Your Mind? My question exactly. And the answer seems to be a possible yes.

Trying to Rescue My Mind

2010-09-17T14:20:00.003-06:00

To my astonishment I discover it has been well over a month since I posted anything in this blog. I have missed writing more than a phrase at a time, as one does on Facebook - but Facebook is the perfect enabler for someone with the brand of attention deficit disorder I seem to have in a very serious way. My ADD takes the form of being interested, nay fascinated, in way too many things. I am spellbound by gardening, cooking, food, politics, the politics of food, birds, travel, ecology, the emerging world of sustainability in all things we humans need and do, wildlife and its protection, literature, poetry, art, hiking, kayaking, and many many more. On Facebook I can flash from one to another of these subjects, read posts, write posts, click on links, "like" new and wonderful pages and websites - a bit of pollen here, a drop of nectar there, never taking the time to really absorb anything or read it to the end. The Internet offered too much of this mode of communication and learning already, and then I fell into a social network. Doom.

I'm not writing in my blogs, not reading other people's blogs (okay, I AM reading my niece Jessica's blog with lots of pictures - to keep up with her life with two small children, a three year old and a new baby - it's so wonderful and funny, I am addicted), not reading many articles in any deep or thorough way, fear I am going to lose the ability to write in complete sentences, let alone put them together into paragraphs. The saving grace is books, real ones, that I can hold in my hand and read as far away from the computer as I can get.(I fear the Kindle and its kind would be the last straws for me - so, no.) Since my last post whining about having nothing that I felt like reading, I have found reading matter to keep me occupied. One fabulous novel (probably more slanted towards female readers than male, though by no means "chick lit") by Dana Sachs, called If You Lived Here. was one of the best contemporary novels I have ever read. Everyone to whom I have recommended it agrees. Unfortunately I followed it with one of my favorite writer's latest book - Louise Erdrich's Shadow Tag. This is a brilliant book, but a deeply painful and disturbing one. I could not put it down, but this story of a marriage in shreds and flames left me shattered and bleeding. The review to which I link is an accurate expression of my own thoughts and opinion on the book - so I think I'll leave it at that.

Currently I have embarked on a Ursula K. Le Guin reading binge, starting with a book of her essays called The Language of the Night, which led me into the first volume of one her young adult series, Gifts. I hope to escape for a while from both this world of teabaggers and discord in which we are all living, as well as my own scattered and disordered world of interests and passions. I will weed, rake leaves, turn compost and live vicariously for a while in another world. If I can just stay off Facebook.

Reading Matters

2010-08-09T12:34:00.005-06:00

I had a "page" on this blog that I called "Reading," but I consistently forgot to write there about what I was reading; and a few days ago while attempting to catch up on it I somehow managed to completely delete it. Nobody looks at those Pages anyhow, so, I think I will just write in the blog itself when I feel like discussing what I am reading. Or, not reading. I'm currently having a very hard time settling into anything that really grabs me. Wonder if others have those strange blank spells.? Nothing you pick up, no matter how great the reviews, or enticing the cover, grabs you and makes you want to turn the pages. It's kind of a Reader's Block, instead of Writer's Block. The book for our neighborhood book club, meeting tomorrow evening, is The Art of Racing in the Rain, by Garth Stein, which I declined to read. It is narrated by a charming and personable dog, and after Gail (who very seldom cries) finished the book in heaving sobs, I knew I was going to skip it. Since childhood (remember Old Yeller?) I have avoided dog books - their sole purpose is to break the reader's heart. Our own crazy little old dog's death is still too recent for me to risk waking up that pain.

We recently found Sea of Troubles, in a new paperback reprint. It's one of Donna Leon's Venice mysteries that has been, mysteriously, unavailable for far too long, and I devoured it in a couple of nights. There are two others that seem to be missing, and I'm hoping they're next in line to return. If you love a good police procedural, captivating protagonists, great food, and exiting locations, Leon's series of books with Commissario Guido Brunetti will be right up your alley. I have never been to Venice, but from these books I feel I know it, in its contemporary form at least. It's clear from these novels that Italy has its share of the woes and tribulations of modern life, but the beauty of this ancient city also manages to shine through. Many of the mysteries have to do with environmental problems, and political corruption, as well as immigration problems. All things we are familiar with and think of as our own national difficulties. But, after I finished with Sea of Troubles, I was right back into my lack of enthusiasm for anything I pick up to read. I have things on hold with the library system, but lack of funding has forced them to seriously cut back on the number of copies they order, and it can take weeks and weeks to get a popular book.

So, while I wait for my holds on the latest titles by Jane Smiley, Anna Quindlen, Scott Turow, James Lee Burke, Sharon McCrumb, and others, I am desultorily picking at one unread volume or another off our shelves. We are trying not to buy books right now, so it's the long hard wait, unless I lose control completely and find myself at the register at Bookworks with a stack of new books in my arms. Anyone have any suggestions?

Poem For the Day

2010-08-08T10:11:00.004-06:00

Cherry Tomatoes

by Anne Higgins

Suddenly it is August again, so hot,
breathless heat.
I sit on the ground
in the garden of Carmel,
picking ripe cherry tomatoes
and eating them.
They are so ripe that the skin is split,
so warm and sweet
from the attentions of the sun,
the juice bursts in my mouth,
an ecstatic taste,
and I feel that I am in the mouth of summer,
sloshing in the saliva of August.
Hummingbirds halo me there,
in the great green silence,
and my own bursting heart
splits me with life.

(Thanks to Garrison Keillor and The Writer's Almanac)

Still In The Garden

2010-08-05T13:20:00.002-06:00

The monsoons seem to be affecting other parts of NM much more than they are us here in Albuquerque. Other parts of the state have actually had flooding, whereas I am happy if my rain barrels fill up at least halfway. Things have perked up, though, and I recently read the reason that our rains make the plants so much happier than water out of the hose, even when mixed with fertilizer. The rains are nitrogen-rich, especially when they fall during a thunder storm, and nitrogen helps plants grow, develop and reproduce. So, whether it's from the rains or the fish emulsion, or what, everything in the yard is looking healthy and happy. Even, or maybe especially?, the weeds. Tomatoes and cucumbers are coming on strong, arugula has recovered from the snail attacks, and all the herbs are gigantic. I was sad when the vitex blooms were over, as I'd waited for them all spring, but my sadness quickly dissipated when early one morning I saw a flock of goldfinches chowing on the seeds of the spent blooms, just the way they do on the sunflower heads full of seeds.

We are so fortunate not to be suffering the heat wave that other parts of the country have. I read the weather forecast for anyplace I have loved ones, and reading the Dallas weather is beginning to scare me. I called a friend there this morning, just to be sure her AC was working, and she was okay. My sister (also in Dallas) got what she calls a tacky, redneck, aboveground pool in June, when temps in that city first went to, and stayed 100 degrees or more. I think the whole family is staying in the pool around the clock, with heat indices of 110 and over currently. Most of the country, except the West, is going through this heat horror, but I'm still waiting to hear Jim Inhofe and others like him get behind calling this global climate change. They were plenty quick to scoff at what they still call "global warming" when the country was drowning in blizzards and freak winter storms - sure, easy to mock "warming" when it's pouring snow and you're wearing every warm garment you own. But, why are they so quiet about this freaky deathly heat? I suggest that everyone in the country needs to read Bill McKibben's latest TomDispatch post, and Tom's intro to it: A Wilted Senate on a Heating Planet.

Rain, Rain, Lovely Rain

2010-07-26T15:42:00.002-06:00

After so much whining and bitching - both here and on Facebook - about our lack of rain, our dry and dusty life, my wretched thirsty gardens, I just thought I should write a short happy post about the wonderful weekend of rain, continuing into today, that we have had here in Albuquerque. According to one news station, yesterday's just-over-half-an-inch of rain was a record-setter for the day (shows you how little rain we get, doesn't it?). It is still, however, the second-dryest July on record. Oops, sounds like I'm moving back into the whining and bitching mode. Oh no, stop that right now.

My gratitude for this moisture is truly boundless, it has been the best weekend of the summer, for sure. I spent a lot of time sitting out under the back portal just watching the birds enjoy the weather, hopping in the yard, flying overhead in wild happy swoops, - reading, and breathing in the damp air, rehydrating body and soul. Gail and I went for a long walk yesterday in the rain, which is a slow and steady drizzle, really. We got wet, but it felt entirely wonderful. There were masses of wildflowers and grasses where we walked, and you could almost hear them saying aahhhhhhh. Showers and thunderstorms are forecast off and on for the entire week. My idea of an enormous gift. And as I sit here typing, it is raining yet again. The smell of rain is coming in the window fan, the rain barrels are filling, the plants are sinking their roots ever deeper. Life is good. (Photo of wildflowers and grasses, Phil Chacon Park Something wrong w/dater on my camera. I took this photo yesterday,)

More Thoughts From The Garden

2010-07-23T10:26:00.003-06:00

Perhaps I should just rename this blog "Garden Thoughts." As those seem to be just about the only thoughts I have nowadays. I used to think about my classes, lesson plans, student problems, stuff like that. For many years I thought about those things. Of course, as always, I do think about things like the stupidity of the cranky right wing, Wall Street, Timothy Geitner, et al's objections to putting Elizabeth Warren in as head of the newly formed Consumer Financial Protection Board, the latest blatant lies and deception of those monsters running British Petroleum, the fact that this is on track to be the hottest year since anyone's been keeping track and that we're unlikely to see any sort of effective legislation to control climate change getting passed in my lifetime - stuff like that, yes. But really, during the active hours of the day, before it gets close to one hundred degrees in my yard, most of my thoughts have to do with what is living, even perhaps thriving, what looking droopy and discouraged, what could go in that empty space right over there, why the tithonia seeds I planted turned up their toes and croaked soon after sprouting (when last year the same plants, grown from seed, were the stars of my late summer garden), will I be able to find any aster plants to put in for fall? And many more ruminations in a similar vein. Actually, most of the time my thoughts are with the possibility that it is never going to rain again here in the NE quadrant of the city of Albuquerque.

Well, I began this post two days ago, and am just now getting back to it. Still hasn't rained here, though a friend on the outskirts of Grants up on the toes of Mt. Taylor reports a lovely "plant-loving" steady rain last night. So I guess, I'll go out and water for a while, continuing to wait and hope. Because I am watering, and feeling bad - but not as bad as the city golf course mangers should feel, at using water for this purpose, things actually aren't looking too bad. The sunflowers everywhere cheer me up every morning, the roses are finishing up their second bloom, all the sedums are happy as pigs in mud - I'm thinking of just sedums next summer, forget anything else. Okay, as many kinds of sunflowers and sages as I can manage as well. Also going to research native grasses, the tall waving kinds, for several places.

Garden Thoughts

2010-06-29T13:51:00.005-06:00

Here in New Mexico rain is a precious thing. We have had no measureable precipitation in Albuquerque since May second. That's nearly two months now. It had gotten to the point where I was watering some of my plantings every darn day. So, when yesterday as I stepped out the door to head to work, the skies opened up and let loose with first hailstones then raindrops, I and every other gardener in the city whooped with joy. It rained all afternoon. It was still raining when my class was over and I headed across the parking lot to my car. It was still raining while we ate supper. It stopped long enough for a gorgeous break-in-the-clouds sunset, then rained off and on during the night. We opened up every window in the house to let in the cool wet breezes for the evening, and left the bedroom windows open all night. This morning when I went out to do my morning tour of gardens and planters it was like a new world. Everything was perky and happy, refreshed in the way that only rain can bring. All the watering and fertilizing in the world can't accomplish what one good long gentle rainstorm can.

So, I have brought in most of the remaining lettuces and lots of herbs. The greens are starting to bolt, they have reached their limit of heat tolerance. I think there is one more harvest of lettuce greens, but they will be pretty bitter. The arugula is growing apace, partly in the shade. I need to thin it, bring in the thinnings for a salad. In the past weeks of heat we have been eating salads just about all the time, varying them with sandwiches. Even toasting bread for sandwiches has been almost too much heating of the kitchen. We are impatient for the tomatoes and cucumbers to get busy and produce some fruit - but I have to keep reminding myself it's only the end of June. The tomatoes have blossoms, the cuke vines are strong and healthy but no blossoms yet. This year I haven't done too much with flowers, though the sunflowers and thithonia seedlings are getting ready for going into the ground. The maximilian sunflowers (perennial native sunflowers) have spread hugely across the back of the yard and once they bloom they will be magnificent. I lost some perennials over the very cold winter, and am taking my time deciding what to use for replacements. The agastaches and mallows are about ready to bloom, which should bring more hummingbirds back into the yard. What we've had lately are flocks of bushtits in the front yard, at the suet and in all the small trees and shrubs. They are such darling birds, so very busy and full of themselves. I'm thinking of a trip to High Desert Gardens either today or tomorrow, at least to stroll, observe, and think about what I'll buy next. Soon I will be a lady of leisure (more on that in another post) and have time time time for all the gardening I can stand.

Hands Across The Sand

2010-06-25T18:10:00.001-06:00

If you live, work, or play anywhere near a large body of water you may run into some crowds tomorrow around eleven a.m. your timezone. That's when the event being called Hands Across The Sand is taking place on beaches and shorelines all over the world. From the Grist article about the event:

Saturday could bring the biggest public demonstration yet about the Gulf oil gusher, when Hands Across the Sand gathers people on beaches around the world at noon to hold hands in support of coastal economies, oceans, marine wildlife, and fishing industries.
Organized by surfer and Florida restaurant owner Dave Rauschkolb, the dispersed event looks to be aiming for a surfer zen vibe, as opposed to the angry demonstrations against BP that have arisen in New Orleans and elsewhere. (The precedent, fellow young folks, is the 1986 Hands Across America chain.)

Even here in the desert we will be participating. Here in Albuquerque we will be holding hands on the Bosque Bike Path that follows the Rio Grande, and on the old Alameda Walking Bridge across the Rio. The Rio Grande empties into the Gulf of Mexico, and is therefore a wonderfully appropriate place to share in this protest. I don't know if I can pull off a "surfer zen vibe," but Gail and I will add ourselves to the numbers gathering to make our voices heard across this planet. I know it's late notice, but if you feel that we need to begin now (actually we needed to begin thirty years ago, but we'll take what we can get) working for a clean energy future that doesn't include ill-regulated freeform off-shore drilling, then check the Hands Across The Sand website map for your closest location. All hands on deck, or on the sand, the bridge, the edge of the pond in your local park.

Natural Delights

2010-06-02T07:59:00.000-06:00

In addition to wasting far too much time on Facebook, as mentioned in the previous post, I have been spending most of the spring outside. Mainly outside in my own immediate surroundings. The first spring task was to get rid of the weeds that sprang up in great profusion in the yard/gardens as a result of a somewhat wetter winter than we often have. We managed to get most of that done before it began to warm up to summer levels. It was a cool though hideously windy spring, and the spinach and chard that I planted in the late fall have continued to thrive. In addition to those two I now have four different varieties of lettuce, cilantro, basil, as well as lots of perennial herbs in profusion: sage, thymes, chives, tarragon. We are rapidly moving into summer heat - by the weekend it will be at least one hundred degrees, maybe a little higher by Sunday and Monday. So we are living on salads, sandwiches full of vegetables, and smoothies. The kitchen gets so hot in this weather, that I can't even bear to turn on the stove. The Growers' Markets are opening now, so there are loads of local produce available, in addition to the salad fixins in my own back yard. I've planted tomatoes and cucumbers too, but it will be a good while before they show up. Exciting news is that Deborah Madison's new cookbook is finally out.titled Seasonal Fruit Desserts: From Orchard, Farm and Market, it's one that I've been eagerly awaiting. It will be awhile til I can afford it, but I can drool over it in bookstores, pick up some ideas while browsing. There is so much gorgeous fruit available now, we have been inventing our own dessert delights - strawberries and watermelon in ginger sauce, mangoes and oranges with mint and lime, to name just a couple. Nothing fancy, but cool and delicious.

Facebook Ate My Brain.

2010-06-02T07:36:00.000-06:00

I have been MIA from blogging for far too long now. I think Facebook is to blame. It seems to have eaten my brain. It's just too easy to spend a lot of time there, not really writing, or even thinking. But I have to say I love it. I have reconnected with many people from past layers of my life; people I actually cared about, but since my life has always been quite peripatetic, I lost touch with classmates, friends, students, as I segued from one location/job/lover/incarnation, to the next. So, oddly, part of what I am enjoying on FB is the Search. It speaks to the detective that has lived in me since the Nancy Drew years, and is evidently alive and thriving. In addition to finding misplaced people from my past, I have also connected with an immediate community right here in Albuquerque, many of whom are very involved in local politics, others devoted to local gardening. These are communities with which I can interface (can we believe I actually used that word in that way??) in real time and space, some may in fact become Real, as opposed to FB, Friends. So, if you're on FB and I don't know it yet, come visit over there. I'm a shameless hussy for collecting more new friends, as well as getting back in touch with previous ones.

The City of New Orleans

2010-05-07T08:27:00.001-06:00

On this morning's Writer's Almanac, Garrison Keillor has this wonderful little literary musing on the city of New Orleans (the place, not the song that celebrates the train by that name). I particularly love the Truman Capote quote here, and want to find the essay from which it's taken. I have spent a lot of time thinking about the Gulf states in the past couple of weeks since the Deep Horizon disaster. I love this part of the country, for so many reasons. It is unique, and beautiful, and has suffered so much in recent years. I post this here as a small tribute, with thanks to Mr. Keillor.

On this day in 1718, the French Canadian Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville discovered the city that would come to be called Crescent City, the Big Easy, and the City That Care Forgot. But he called it La Nouvelle Orléans, New Orleans, named for Philippe d'Orléans, the Regent of France.
New Orleans is famous as the birthplace of jazz, and for producing many great musicians, including Louis Armstrong, Fats Domino, Mahalia Jackson, Harry Connick Jr., and Wynton Marsalis.
But New Orleans also has a rich literary history. It is sometimes called "the least American city" because it has such a distinctive feel, and for years writers have struggled to put New Orleans into words. David Simon, the writer and creator of the new HBO series set in New Orleans, "Treme," described how impossible it was to explain the city to an outsider. He said that he and his co-writer, Eric Overmyer, "imagined the pitch meeting, and we imagined trying to explain New Orleans and being unable to. If I could explain it to you sitting here now, I wouldn't have to do the show. That's the problem: you literally have to drag whatever executive you've got to New Orleans, throw him into a second line, get him drunk, take him here, take him there. It would have to be a lost week: you're not in America anymore — you're in New Orleans! We couldn't imagine being able to do that."
John Kennedy Toole was a New Orleans writer, born in 1937. Most people don't recognize his name, but the title of his only novel is famous: A Confederacy of Dunces (1980). He grew up an only child, with a domineering mother who was convinced that her son was a genius and controlled his life. Although his father worked as a car salesman and mechanic, they lived in a nice part of town and his mother had illusions of grandeur — she was from an old New Orleans family, her great-grandfather a hero in the Battle of New Orleans.
Truman Capote (books by this author) was born in New Orleans in 1924. His mother was 16 years old, a beauty queen, and his father was a nonpracticing lawyer, and his parents lived together in a hotel and soon sent the boy to Alabama to be raised by aunts and cousins. But he spent part of every summer in New Orleans while he was growing up. He dropped out of school as a teenager, went to New York, and made it his adopted home. He went back to New Orleans briefly to start his first book, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). And he wrote about it in his essay "New Orleans," which begins:
"In the courtyard there was an angel of black stone, and its angel head rose above giant elephant leaves; the stark glass angel eyes, bright as the bleached blue of sailor eyes, stared upward. One observed the angel from an intricate green balcony — mine, this balcony, for I lived beyond in three old white rooms, rooms with elaborate wedding-cake ceilings, wide sliding doors, tall French windows. On warm evenings, with these windows open, conversation was pleasant there, tuneful, for wind rustled the interior like fan-breeze made by ancient ladies. And on such warm evenings this town is quiet. Only voices: family talk weaving on an ivy-curtained porch; a barefoot woman humming as she rocks a sidewalk chair, lulling to sleep a baby she nurses quite publicly; the complaining foreign tongue of an irritated lady who, sitting on her balcony, plucks a fryer, the loosened feathers floating from her hands, slipping into air, sliding lazily downward."
Anne Rice (books by this author) was born in New Orleans in 1941, and sets her popular novels there — she is particularly famous as the author The Vampire Chronicles, beginning with Interview with the Vampire (1976).
The playwright Tennessee Williams, born in Mississippi in 1911, made New Orleans his adopted home, and had such a profound effect on the community that the annual literary festival is known as the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche says, "Don't you just love those long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn't just an hour — but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands — and who knows what to do with it?"

Reflections

2010-04-28T12:40:00.001-06:00

Sorry to borrow the title for this post from you, Cynthia, but it was exactly the right word.

I do apologize for obsessing about the Poem A Day thing, but I have truly been obsessed with it for this entire month. It has been a mental challenge, and a good one. I think that by doing it I have worked through some things: my feelings of regret and sorrow over this move - the anger with myself that I have had for the past four years since we did it, grief over the deaths and losses that have happened during this time. The way I have hated being here, refused to open myself up to the good things about this place and our life here. Days spent mostly in the yard cleaning up gardens, welcoming spring, planning what I'll do in the gardens once this cataract surgery business is over and I can see clearly, work freely - these have been days spent thinking poetry all the time. I write in my head for the most part, no words get processed or put on paper until they have flowed through my mind for quite a while, been discarded, rearranged, reimagined. So the birds, trees, flowers, dirt, weeds, and compost have been my companions and inspiration for most of the month. I could only wish that it had been possible to take a beach walk now and then. But walks along the river have substituted pretty well.

Right now I'm hoping to be able to do the last two prompts, for days 29 and 30. Twenty nine, tomorrow, should still be possible - but as I'll have the first (left eye) cataract surgery on Friday, a poem for the thirtieth may have to wait a few days. The doctor's office can't seem to tell me (they say they won't know until the first checkup, on Saturday morning) whether I'll be able to read and write well enough to use the computer. The final part of this is choosing my five best efforts to send in to Robert Lee Brewer before May 5th. I've been working on trying to make this choice - and it's not easy. There are clearly quite a few that I won't choose, but the truth is that there are more than five that I feel pretty good about. Anyone who'd like to help with this choice is welcome to go to Poetic License and leave your opinion. It would be doing me a big favor.

New Home For My Poetry Challenge Efforts.

2010-04-26T11:01:00.000-06:00

I thank with brief thanksgiving whatever gods may be that this month is almost over. Thirty poems in thirty days. And we're only on number 26 right now. Moving these poems around from place to place has been almost as exhausting as writing them in the first place. Finally what I have done is create a whole new blog for them, it's called Poetic License and it's here.

Unfortunately it starts with Day 1 and goes on chronologically to the current effort. But, if you know where you stopped reading them, you can just look in the sidebar and find your place. This is the very last fooling around with this I'm going to do, and I want to thank the faithful few who have been reading my attempts at this Challenge. And welcome any newcomers.

In Defense Of Looking Back

2010-04-21T11:15:00.001-06:00

The Poem A Day Challenge rages on, and there's still a week to go. I have been keeping up, though not publicly posting my efforts. There is one prompt I haven't been able to write from - though I am still working on it. After agonizing for the first couple of weeks, I realized that thirty poems couldn't all be torn from my heart, and I might as well have some fun now and then. So, I had fun with yesterday's prompt, which was either "Looking Back" or "Not Looking Back." I got very maudlin with a couple of attempts, personally and regretfully looking back, but then as I was pruning the big Russian Sage out front, one of story-telling's most famous lookers-back popped into my mind. And this is the result:

In Defense of Looking Back

Don’t look at me like that.

I know you think me cowardly,

Call me slow and weak.

If you had ever loved this way

You would have done the same.

Half mad with grief and loss

All I wanted was to touch her,

Look at her once more.

I thought I’d saved her from the Underworld.

I didn’t know the fury of the gods.

How could I not look back?

On Vision

2010-04-20T10:18:00.002-06:00

I was browsing through my old private AOL Journal (exported to Blogger - or should that be imported? - when AOL Journals closed) yesterday, and happily came across this poem by Lisel Mueller that I had included in a post there. I'm not sure why I included it then, except that I loved it, and had seen an exhibit of Monet's paintings from his old age in New Orleans some years ago - the poem helped me understand the paintings, made me love Monet even more. I'm not sure how historically based the poem may be - much of what I've read tells me he struggled against the growing blurriness of vision and loss of color perception caused by his cataracts. In any case, I know I'm certainly struggling with mine. As a visual artist Monet was dependent on his vision, but he used even his aberrant perception in his waning years to put his impressions on canvas. It was his loss of color more than loss of the sharp outlines that distressed him; But I'm finding it very hard to live without those edges. My opthamologist tells me I probably won't have to wear glasses for distance vision after the operations, and perhaps only nonprescription reading glasses. It all seems much too amazing to believe, for someone who's worn glasses for almost sixty years - since she was seven years old, and now wears bifocals. It's interesting to note that Claude Monet did have The Operation, in 1923, three years before his death.

Monet Refuses The Operation

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolves
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

Lisel Mueller

The Eyes Will Have It

2010-04-15T10:54:00.003-06:00

I don't know if spring has been the death of blogging for me, or if I should blame it on Facebook. Or the Poem A Day Challenge. Whatever the cause, my impetus to blog has been in serious death throes for a while now. The end of the term is of course another likely culprit. Facebook has been a real entertainment, but it's beginning to wane. Spring calls me out of the house every day until the day gets too hot, to get things cleaned up, weeded, cut back, planted, ad infinitum. It is so utterly spring here now, the fresh green leaves of the big cottonwood outside the kitchen window greet me every morning and make me smile even before I get the coffee going. The redbud and the lilacs are glorious right now, irises blooming a rich deep purple. I just cut the remainder of my winter greens, some chard and spinach, for a stirfry tonight.

I won't be able to do much in the garden, at least of the bending, stooping, lifting sort (and what other sort is there?) for a while soon, as the next milestone on my life journey is coming up in two weeks. I've been procrastinating about an eye doctor visit much too long, but very aware how blurry my vision was becoming. I thought I just needed new glasses. But no, I need new eyes. And so, I'm having cataract surgery, both eyes, one eye at a time, the first one on the thirtieth of this month. Everyone tells me I'll be so happy once it's over, that it's like a miracle, and other exuberant forms of propaganda, but I'm fairly freaked out about it nonetheless. Blog readers who have already been through this - I'd love to hear your experiences. One of my sisters has had one eye done, and she is in the "it's like a miracle" camp, and she doesn't suffer medical procedures lightly. I dreamed last night that I found an old pair of glasses in some stuff I was going through, and they were perfect, I could see absolutely clearly and was so happy because it meant I wouldn't need to have the cataracts removed. Perhaps the glasses stand for the lenses I'll have IN my eyes once it's all over, or perhaps it's just about how nervous I am. (Cross-posted to Women On)

Now We Wait And See

2010-04-09T10:08:00.030-06:00

So, today it finally happens - the hummingbird feeders go up. Or at least a couple of them. I'll wait until I see some hummers actually on the first feeders before I put all of them up. The black-chins are first, and have already been observed in the area. It's still so cold at night and in the mornings that if they're here they really need the supplemental nutrition of feeders in order to survive. The plants that offer up their usual source of nectar are not yet blooming, or certainly not here in my yard; so really for these early birds the feeders people hang will be the only source of energy for a while. And boy, do these little guys need energy. This site is really your best source of information for all things hummingbird. I find I refer to it constantly throughout the summer as questions occur to me. Just took this photo of my feeder and my darling redbud tree.

Later the same day: Thinking of the hummers must have been an inspiration. I've been struggling with Day 8 of the Poem A Day Challenge since yesterday morning. Knew where I was going, but couldn't figure out just how to get there. I think I've got it now, this afternoon.

Vuelo De Las Brujas, by Franciso de Goya Y Lucientes PAD #6

2010-04-06T11:25:00.020-06:00

Although I wasn't going to post any more of these on this actual blog, I can't help but share this one here. The prompt at first made me say "OK, this is the day I give up." Here it is:
"For this prompt, write an ekphrastic poem. According to John Drury's The Poetry Dictionary, ekphrastic poetry is "Poetry that imitates, describes, critiques, dramatizes, reflects upon, or otherwise responds to a work of nonliterary art, especially the visual." So, I've provided links to two pieces of art, and I want you to pick one (or both) to write an ekphrastic poem. (It would be helpful for you to mention which art you picked.)"

Pocahontas, by Annie Leibovitz
Flight of the Witches, by Francisco de Goya

Could any two pictures be more different? Egad. But clearly, Goya is the one to write about, if writing there will be. Once I started it became surprisingly easy. Even fun.

The Witches Entertainment

There is no moon tonight
and cloudcast hides the stars.
Put on your hats, my beauties,
soon we ride
skyclad
across the darkling Spanish plain,
seeking louts who wander
from the taverns in the town
wanting only
the warmth of their own beds,
fire on the hearth,

a sodden night of sleep
too drunk for dreams.

We shall remake them
fly them,
dumb creatures of the earth,
to ecstasy and terror in our arms.
By hidden light of dark day stars
cross tossing stormy seas
to visit cannibals
eaters of human hearts.
Then drop them
bloody, riven, gnawed
through forest leaves.

They will hear music
played by monsters
around a ring of fire
deep within the midnight trees
dance with us
strange sisters,
then sleep
abandoning despair.
From unreasoning sleep awakening
they will not remember.
Will not care

In The Garden

2010-04-05T11:58:00.004-06:00

Damn this Poem A Day Challenge, it's kept me in the house for far too long. So, I spent this morning in the yard, and going right back out there while I can. I've been watering everything; the back is done but I need to get out into the front before the winds start blowing. We are under a wind advisory for the afternoon, and it is supposed to be almost eighty. Not weather to encourage shy young sprouts. The redbud tree is starting to blossom, and the irises we freeloaded when a neighbor thinned hers out two years ago are finally going to bloom. I think there are things that didn't make it through the winter, but I'm waiting a while longer to be sure. I don't know if it's too cold here for the salvia leucantha, but none of them seem to be showing signs of life.

I was surprised when we moved out here in spring of 2006 to see the profusion of lilacs blooming everywhere in ABQ and Santa Fe. There was one small and stunted lilac in our backyard, which has only had a few blooms in the intervening years. This year it is entirely covered with buds, covered, I tell you, and it, along with the irises, is giving me a reason to live a while longer. Okay, and also I saw my first tiger swallowtail in the front yard yesterday afternoon. Black-chinned hummers have been sighted in the Bosque, so I have to look out my feeders, get some filled and hung on the patio. Too busy to go to work, it looks like - spring has sprung.

Re The Poetry Page - Updated

2010-04-03T16:15:00.004-06:00

April 22 Update. I've taken down the Poetry Page, and am putting my Poem A Day Challenge poems in my private blog. If you're interested in reading them, please leave me a comment and I'll invite you to that blog. It was too messy to try to put them all on one Page.

Now that I've come entirely out of the Poetry Closet, and you know the secret vice I have practiced in that closet from the time I first learned to write, I will disclose that in my list of Pages in the sidebar to this blog there is a page called "Poetry." I posted some of my previous poetry on it, but then didn't have the nerve to show it in the Pages list. Now I have decided to use it for however many of these Poem A Day challenge prompts I can write something for. Days 1 and 2 have gone there, with some revisions; and Day 3 is also there. Day 3's prompt goes like this: "take the phrase "Partly (blank)," replace the blank with a word or phrase, make that the title of your poem, and then write the poem. For instance, your poem might be titled "Partly Cloudy," "Partly Crazy," "Partly Out of Touch," or whatever," Or whatever indeed. It was hard for me until I looked around my house with a open inner eye - and then it simply wrote itself.

Poem A Day Challenge, Day 2

2010-04-03T08:52:00.011-06:00

It's pretty unlikely that I'll be able to keep up with this challenge as the month proceeds. Right now I'm Home Alone on a long holiday weekend, with nothing much else to do but keep the home fires burning, read, noodle around on the internet....and write poetry. Real Life will return with a vengeance all too soon. So I'm taking advantage of this time to do this writing. And already I'm a day behind!! Yesterday's prompt was "water," something that I think about a lot here in this dry land. I've written several responses to this prompt, but this is the one I think I'll keep. The subject of this poem, BTW, is a real place. See it here.

Leonora Curtin Wetland Preserve

It hasn’t rained for months.
The Santa Ana winds
Are blowing dust and grit
Into every pore and cranny
of furniture and skin.
The mountains
have been invisible for days,
cloaked in wind and dust.
My lettuce seedlings in the backyard struggle,
need water twice a day.

Yet I know, not far away
there is a miracle,
a place for rehydration of my
dried out desert soul.
Pocket wetland, eye of water,
waving cattails, lily pads.
rushes, reeds and ferns.
All the thirsty green things
find home and shelter here.
Even in the hottest days of summer
the air is damp and green,
alive with forbs and flowers, nodding willows,
butterflies and birds.
Bullfrogs wallow in the shallows
at the edges of the pond,
bask on rafts of rotted vegetation,
under hovering damselflies.
High desert miracle of hidden wetland,
watercress and cactus side by side.

Still About The Poetry

2010-04-02T14:20:00.018-06:00

So yes, National Poetry Month. Several of my friends in this virtual world are poets, and quite good ones at that. I had been planning to post about the Poem a Day challenge that is part of celebrating the month, but didn't get to it fast enough, and some of these blogging friends have already leapt into the fray. The challenge is on the Poetic Asides group at Writer's Digest. Robert Lee Brewer has the Guidelines, the prompts and his own daily attempts. Yesterday's prompt was "Lonely" and here is my shot at this topic:

Still in my pajamas on Good Friday afternoon,
Under the portal,
watching white-winged doves
blown across the powerlines on Santa Ana winds,
helpless as leaves or straw.
Two thousand miles of mountain chains and prairies
Away from everyone I love,
Sorting through the morning mail,
listening to the wind,
Waiting for the phone to ring.

Two others who are writing for this Challenge are Theresa of the blog Theresa Williams Author, Exile Edition, who has posted her first day's poem, and Cynthia of Sorting the Pieces with this lovely essence of "lonely" Haiku. We are already on the second day now, and the prompt is "Water." I will be following Theresa and Cynthia as they write their way through the month. If you join in this poetic fun, please leave a comment and let us know so we can follow you as well.

National Poetry Month

2010-04-02T12:12:00.006-06:00

April is National Poetry Month: "a month-long, national celebration of poetry established by the Academy of American Poets. The concept is to widen the attention of individuals and the media—to the art of poetry, to living poets, to our complex poetic heritage, and to poetry books and journals of wide aesthetic range and concern. We hope to increase the visibility and availability of poetry in popular culture while acknowledging and celebrating poetry’s ability to sustain itself in the many places where it is practiced and appreciated."

At the Academy website there are many different ways you can participate in the enjoyment and propagation of poetry in this country, from signing up to receive a poem a day from Poets.org, to finding coming events honoring the poets and poetry of your own state on the National Poetry Map. For instance, when I clicked on New Mexico, I found this perfect poem by a poet whom I do not know at all, John Balaban:

Passing Through Albuquerque

At dusk, by the irrigation ditch
gurgling past backyards near the highway,
locusts raise a maze of calls in cottonwoods.

A Spanish girl in a white party dress
strolls the levee by the muddy water
where her small sister plunks in stones.

Beyond a low adobe wall and a wrecked car
men are pitching horseshoes in a dusty lot.
Someone shouts as he clangs in a ringer.

Big winds buffet in ahead of a storm,
rocking the immense trees and whipping up
clouds of dust, wild leaves, and cottonwool.

In the moment when the locusts pause and the girl
presses her up-fluttering dress to her bony knees
you can hear a banjo, guitar, and fiddle

playing "The Mississippi Sawyer" inside a shack.
Moments like that, you can love this country.

This poem evokes an Albuquerque of years gone by, although I know for a fact that this version of it still exists in the Hispanic enclaves of the south Valley. So, who is this guy? I asked myself after I read the poem. A little searching brought me a lot of information about Balaban, and now I am embarking on a search for more of his work. He's an amazing human being, as well as a fine poet, as this interview from TriQuarterly makes clear. So, there you are. One brief visit to the National Poetry Month site, and I'm off on a new poetic adventure. With a reason to crawl used bookshops' poetry sections, one of my favorite occupations.

Feast Day at Laguna Pueblo

2010-03-31T10:52:00.004-06:00

A short post on the final event of the week of spring break. On Thursday of that week, my friend Maryam and I headed west early enough in the morning to get home to Albuquerque by dinnertime that evening. We drove the rented Ford Escape like bats out of hell, while listening to a couple of audio books I'd brought with me from the library. It's quite surprising how much faster an audio book can make a trip. On my way from ABQ to Dallas I listened to most of a not-terrific mystery by Lisa Scottoline, and although she's no one I have to read more of, it certainly made the miles fly by. It was wonderful though to have live human company as well as a recorded voice on the trip home, someone to pass the trail mix bag across the seats and take turns pumping gas. We had already caught up on news and gossip while I was in Dallas, so we could enjoy listening to stories, Maryam knitted while not driving, and I just vegged when she drove. Knitting is not in my bag of tricks. Alas.

Friday we had a power breakfast in order to last through what had the possibility of being a long day; and drove west on I40 to the pueblo of Laguna for the big spring feast day, March 19, Feast of St. Joseph. Joseph is the patron saint of the pueblo, and all the villages belonging to this pueblo come together to celebrate with dancing and feasting on this day. My partner, Gail, works with a woman who is from the pueblo, and she, her daughter and mother were to be dancing in the festivities. The idea of Catholic saints as patrons of the pueblos is perhaps startling to many, but is really no different than what happened all over the Old World when missionaries started converting the tribes and peoples of those times and places: a rich mixture of ancient spirituality was taken in and became part of the new Christian religion. There is currently an exhibit at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center here in Albuquerque that features this tradition here in New Mexico: Saints of the Pueblos will be on display through next year and is worth a couple of visits.

We arrived at Laguna in time to watch a good deal of the morning dancing, in weather that flipflopped between bright sunshine and rain showers. When the dancers broke for lunch, we found Gail's friend Kim and her family, and were invited to follow them to the house where they were going to eat lunch. Once we had set foot through the doorway, we were automatically part of the lunch crowd. As our hostess Julia said: "If you come into my house on this day, you stay and eat in my house." So, of course we did. We felt quite honored to be included, eating with the dancers in their beautiful regalia. After lunch we thought we would be able to see more dancing, but soon after we left the shelter of Julia's home, a huge wind came up, whipping the dust and sand into our eyes, forcing the vendors to start taking down their booths and tents. The wind soon brought stinging hail and freezing rain out of the scary black clouds that had been threatening (see photos), and we three decided to give up and head home. Taking pictures of the dancers, or the pueblo in general is not allowed, but it is possible to take pictures of the church. This Mission Church of San José de Laguna is three hundred years old, and is the heart of the pueblo. I wish I had been able to take photos of the lovely paintings on the inside walls of the church, but had to content myself with the exterior only. We drove home in rain, hail, even some snow, in a wind which made keeping the car on the road a real challenge.

The santero, Charles M. Carrillo, who created the retablos in the exhibit mentioned above also has a book by the same name as the exhibit, Saints of the Pueblos, where he explores this topic in depth. I think I may have to buy it and get a little better informed on the Pueblos and their Santos. There will be more feast days ahead, and hopefully once we retire ((soon, very very soon) we can have the time to explore many more of them.

Barn Owl Box Livestreaming Video, Updated

2010-03-30T15:28:00.037-06:00

I posted on this yesterday, but have found more info and have continued to watch the nest. Annoyingly enough, I
still can't embed the code for this, but there are now five babies, no, four babies, one unhatched egg, in the box, Magee the daddy owl is very much in evidence, and it continues to be amazing. The Owl Box.

These are barn owls in San Marcos, CA. They have become famous through the live streaming webcam placed in their box by a guy named Carlos Royal. Learn more about Molly and Magee at their website, Molly's Box.

More good stuff from Earth and Sky here.

Spring Break in Dallas

2010-03-30T10:35:00.001-06:00

My spring break trip to Dallas was fun, but a disappointment in terms of seeing any wildflowers. It was much too early for the areas of north Texas I drove through as well as for Dallas itself. An Austin friend tells me the flowers are really coming out now, and the blog Homesick Texan is asking on Facebook for folks to send in their photos. This is the time I am really a Very Homesick Texan, wishing I had the time for another trip over the border and down to the Hill Country, or to East Texas, to glory in the miracle of a Central Texas spring. But my class continues, and then come my cataract surgeries - so I'll have to say "maybe next year." By next spring Gail and I should both be truly retired, able to roam as and when and where we like. (Bluebonnet photo from Homesick Texan Facebook page)

Despite the wildflower disappointment, I enjoyed my nieces and a great meal at Gloria's with friends. Most of a day spent at the Dallas Arboretum's spring event Dallas Blooms was spiritually improving, although it was a little early even there. And the crowds were astounding. In truth I enjoy a visit to the Arboretum on a day without an ongoing event, just wandering through the various gardens, pools, copses, and of course the gift shop, without throngs of visitors everywhere. Here's a few photos from my day of tiptoeing through the tulips - and what Gail thought was a giant rat is in fact Ferdinand The Bull, smelling a bouquet of flowers.

Twelve Step Recovery Program Desperately Needed.

2010-03-27T08:53:00.004-06:00

I asked for help when I first signed on to Facebook, but now I need a twelve step program (surely there are some?) to rescue me from its alluring clutches. Life has disappeared into a sinkhole of roving the net, searching for former students, family members, guests from our days of running a bed and breakfast on Cape Cod, high school and college classmates, friends from all over the planet, both Real and Virtual, and catching up with their lives, which it is possible to do minute by minute in fact After two and a half weeks on the damn thing, I have sixty five friends, some requests still unrequited, and I can't stop searching. I've fallen and I can't get up!!! I notice that some folks, mostly young people, have two or three hundred "friends" on their lists. How is this possible? I'm sixty-six years old and I don't think I've known that many people in my whole life. How can my nineteen-year-old niece have 322 Facebook friends? The grand-daughter who has only been on the planet thirteen years have 122? See? I'm obsessed. Look at me, using one Internet application, Blogger, to write about another one, Facebook.

While my garden goes unweeded, real friends in real time and space uncontacted, phone calls unreturned, lesson plans left hanging. My name is Mary Ellen and I have become an addict. Gonna go to Facebook and search for a recovery program. But first, if you're not already there, will you please sign up to be my Friend?

Poem For The Gift of Rain

2010-03-24T13:03:00.001-06:00

Night Rain, Late March

Awake at two a.m.

and then again,

three-thirty, eyes wide open,

under comforters and cats.
Listening to nocturnal blessing of

rain pounding on the hallway roof,

dripping into barrels just

outside my bedroom window.

The rain we haven't heard all winter,

falling through gravel mulch,
dry drifts of autumn leaves.
Soaking deep into roots of

cottonwood and olive.

Pores of the earth

drinking in the clouds,

the snowmelt

from the mountains miles away.

It may rain all night

on river, gardens, roof.
But there is purring at my shoulder.

I fall asleep til dawn.

Checking In

2010-03-22T12:00:00.013-06:00

Home from Texas; drove back from Dallas with our friend Maryam, in time to go out to Laguna Pueblo on Friday for the Feast Day dancing. We took her to the airport yesterday, and now it's time to get down to real life, no more fun and games - back to work, gotta go grocery shopping, not a thing but beans and eggs in the house, doing laundry this morning. More on both trips, Dallas and Laguna, maybe tomorrow.

After the sunshine and flowers in Dallas we were surprised by yet another spring snowstorm here on the weekend. But then, it moved on to Texas too. What a strange year. Today it will be seventy, then Tuesday night another storm will blow in, quite possibly bringing yet another round of snow. Great for the mountains and the skiers, and I must admit to gratitude for the moisture it brings to my yard. We have high expectations for spring, forgetting that it is actually the most changeable of seasons, as often cold as warm. The explosion of weeds in my yard assures me that the flowers are on their way. And my silly forsythia bushes are actually blooming.

Help Me Rhonda, Help Help Me Rhonda - Or Anyone Else

2010-03-13T07:41:00.002-07:00

I won't be posting for a week or so, unless I get big inspiration and some unexpected time while I'm in Dallas, but if anyone has a minute to read the post I just put on Women On, asking for help with my new Facebook life. I don't really understand a thing about it. Perhaps I am, as I have thought for years, just not a Social Network kinda gal. So, anyway, let me know your thoughts. Do you Facebook? Why? Should I keep this? Why?

Have a wonderful week, it's spring break for many of us - maybe it will actually be spring??? Soon? Redbuds, daffodils, forsythia, tulips. They should all be there at Dallas Blooms.

Let Us OUT Of Here

2010-03-11T07:48:00.036-07:00

A blogging friend posted a comment at my last post, to the effect that she had put her patio plants out on the patio, and they were looking great and happy out there. She is in Dallas, TX and I am in Albuquerque, NM. What a difference 640 miles make. As I type, it is snowing like mad here, has evidently been snowing for quite a while, and shows no signs of stopping. My outdoor plants, which are, as you can see, mostly succulents and cactii, have been screaming at me lately to LET THEM OUT of this house RIGHT NOW. They are in sunny south and west windows, the cats can't get to them, they are watered as needed, one of the crowns of thorns is blooming, the other is just about to, you'd think they would be happy as pigs in mud. They spend the summer on a rocky ledge in the back yard, among pots of perennials of a nontender sort, in morning summer sun, where they double in size every year; and their impatience to get back out there is palpable, emanating from them in waves.

Or is this what the therapists call projection? The snow is beautiful, but quite unexpected. I was planning to spend the morning weeding in the perennial beds. Like my jades, aloes, crowns of thorns, sedum, rosemary, and geraniums, I am desperate to GET OUT. It's supposed to be almost fifty degrees today, so this snow will be gone before dark. But this strange stormy weather, say the necromancers, is supposed to go on through at least the rest of the month.

Already Gone To Texas In My Mind

2010-03-09T10:44:00.007-07:00

Well, spring comes and goes at this time of year, doesn't it? We've had some delightful days in the low sixties with sun and blue skies that tricked me into thinking winter was really over; but now we are having off and on storms blowing in from the Pacific, dumping feet of snow on the mountains, bringing cold winds, hail, and, blessedly, rain, to us here in the valley. Night before last we had a rain in the night that filled up my rain barrels, watered beds and planters. When I went out to do some weeding yesterday, however, I found dry earth only inches down - so I am hoping for more precipitation before these storms blow off into Texas.

As I myself will soon be blowing into Texas, this coming weekend in fact. My spring break is next week, and my nieces in Dallas both have the same break, so I'm heading across El Llano Estacado to visit them and their parents for several days. A dear friend also lives in Dallas, and she too has that week off, so she will be driving back with me for a long weekend visit with us here in New Mexico. I badly need this time, and a road trip, to blow the cobwebs of winter out of my soul. Gotta go to the library and find the perfect long audio book to last me at least to Amarillo. From that point on there should be some wildflowers already blooming, at least according to the Sightings page at Wild About Texas Wildflowers. I wish I had enough time to detour down to Austin and visit the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center, but that trip will have to wait a while.

What I will be doing, however, while in Dallas is visiting The Dallas Arboretum for Dallas Blooms. This floral festival began last weekend, and lasts until April 11. It seems early to me, at least for the way things are here right now, but according to the websight, there are many things that should be blooming in mid-March. Crazy teenage girls, forsythia, tulips, irises, flowering quince, maybe even azaleas? Hopefully sunshine and balmy weather? I'm there, baby. Just have to get through this week's classes and blustery storms, and I'll be there in a more than virtual way.

Storm Clouds Moving East On My Day Off (Poem)

2010-03-09T09:15:00.000-07:00

STORM CLOUDS MOVING EAST ON MY DAY OFF

I went outside just now

To move the trash cans to the curb.

The wind was like a hammer

Against my chest, my face.

The mountains in the east

Had vanished utterly

In curtains of fog and snow.

But it was clearing in the west,

Cloud patches tearing loose from ragged blue.

Back inside, I joined the cats

Watching from the bedroom window

In a patch of sun

As house finches emptied feeders

In the plum trees' naked branches.

Looks like the weather guys were wrong.

Here in the valley
It will not snow today.

Blue In The Face

2010-03-08T14:20:00.025-07:00

Well, I tried to keep from doing this, but I just can't help writing a little post about the two Big Prizes of Oscar night: Best Director and Best Film.I don't know about you, but I certainly expected James Cameron and Avatar to waltz away with both those prizes last night. I was as thrilled and surprised as Barbra when she gasped and said "Well, I guess the time has come," before announcing Kathryn Bigelow as Best Director for The Hurt Locker. Then Tom Hanks jumped right in and delivered the news that Bigelow's picture had won Best Film. I was thrilled and surprised first, yes, because Bigelow is the first woman to win these awards, and I still have enough residual seventies feminist in me to rejoice at this achievement; but also because The Hurt Locker was so much better a film than Avatar. Both movies were about war and its atrocities, but oh how differently they conveyed their intended themes. Avatar won the technological awards it deserved, but amazingly the Academy was able to recognize the complexity and subtlty in the delivery of Hurt Locker's message, whereas Avatar's admittedly noble messages were delivered with all the finesse of a sledge hammer. InPeter Bradshaw'review of The Hurt Locker in the UK paper The Guardian, he says:

The war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan and the "war on terror" (to use the increasingly forgotten Rumsfeldian formulation) never really got their John Wayne/Green Berets moment in Hollywood: a big movie whose unembarrassed purpose is to endorse the military action. Most of the serious responses have been liberal-patriot fence-straddlers, multistranded stories urgently set in Washington, the Middle East, south Asia and elsewhere, tying themselves in knots in an attempt to acknowledge a dovey point of view while covertly leaning to the hawk's – pictures such as Stephen Gaghan's Syriana, which showed torture in terms of CIA man George Clooney being tortured by an Arab, Robert Redford's mealy-mouthed Lions for Lambs, Gavin Hood's issue-fudging Rendition, and Peter Berg's The Kingdom, with its feeble moral equivalence between jihadist zealots and the US army.

How weird and ironic, then, that the nearest thing we have to Wayne is also the best and most insightful anti-war film about Iraq: Kathryn Bigelow's blazingly powerful action movie The Hurt Locker, whose unpretentious clarity makes for a refreshing change. Bigelow is, in dramatic terms, on the side of the soldiers. She has a single location – Baghdad – and wants to find out what is going on inside the US combatants' hearts and minds. Debating the purpose and origins of the conflict is not the point. Yet, for my money, Bigelow says more about the agony and tragedy of war than all those earnest, well-meaning movies that sound as if they've been co-scripted by Josh and Toby from The West Wing.

So, my favorite moment of Hollywood's Big Night was Ben Stiller meandering out to deliver the award for Best Makeup in full bluefaced Na'vi guise. Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin were entirely unfunny, but Stiller had me rolling.

Beach Attitudes

2010-03-03T11:21:00.005-07:00

Every day I get a poem in my email box, courtesy of The Writer's Almanac. Sometimes they suit my mood, sometimes they make me smile, sometimes they break my heart. Today, without inspiration for writing anything, and without time to research a post, I'm simply passing along a poem from a few days ago. One that did all three of the things I mentioned above.

Beach Attitudes,

by Robert Dana

Blessed is the beach, survivor of tides.

And blessed the litter of crown conchs and pen shells, the dead
blue crab in all its electric raiment.

Blessed the nunneries of skimmers,
scuttering and rising, wheeling and falling and settling, ruffling
their red and black-and-white habits.

And blessed be the pacemakers and the peacemakers,

the slow striders, the arthritic joggers, scarred and bent under
their histories, for they're here at last by the sunlit sea.

Blessed Peoria and Manhattan, Ottawa and Green Bay, Pittsburgh,
Dresden.

And blessed their children.

And blessed the lovers for they shall have one perfect day.

Blessed be the dolphin out beyond the furthest buoy,
slaughtering the bright leapers,
for they shall have full bellies.

Blessed, too, the cormorant and the osprey and the pelican
for they are the cherubim and seraphim and archangel.

And blessed be the gull, open throated, screeching, scolding
me to my face,

for he shall have his own place returned to him.
And the glossy lip of the long wave shall have the last kiss.

Adventures With Ruth

2010-03-02T13:33:00.002-07:00

Weren't we all heartbroken when Gourmet Magazine went belly up? I certainly know that I was. November 2009 was the last issue of the magazine, and I cooked several of my Thanksgiving dishes out of it in a tearful farewell gesture. Ruth Reichl was editor of Gourmet from April of 1999 until its demise ten years later. She has long been one of my favorite food writers; and her memoirs, Tender at the Bone, Comfort Me with Apples, and Garlic and Sapphires, hold the same place on my bookshelves and in my heart as Laurie Colwin's two collections of food writing, Home Cooking, and More Home Cooking. These women write about both cooking and eating food with a verve and passion that makes their books as readable as any novel.

I was worried about where I would find Ruth Reichl after she was no longer editing Gourmet, but even before that November issue came out in print, I read that she would be hosting a PBS series called Adventures With Ruth, wherein Ruth and a celebrity companion (Frances McDormand in the first episode) would travel around the world tasting, cooking, exploring our favorite subject: food. Once I knew its starting date, I called my local PBS station to find out when it would air. Imagine my sorrow when the program director told me they would not be carrying this program, at least not the first season, and after that, who knows? I threatened never to renew my membership (an empty threat, yes), I begged and pleaded, but the answer was still simply, no, not this season anyway. Today I was noodling around Gourmet online, as a result of some recipes featured on AOL's Welcome screen (good recipes too), and discovered that I can watch this season's episodes of Adventures With Ruth right here on my computer screen. They are all there on the Video link on the website. In living color. Now, all I have to do is find time to sit here and watch them. I've started Episode One this morning. Maybe I'll start getting up even earlier in the morning, as the days grow longer and lighter. Start the day with my walk and then a cup of coffee and time with one of my major idols in some exotic locale. Life is good again.

Chestita Baba Marta Everybody

2010-03-01T11:30:00.006-07:00

I think we don't celebrate anywhere near as many traditions and occasions in this country as we could. Every morning I get an email from Garrison Keillor's delightful Writer's Almanac. There's always a poem, and then information about the date, usually literary birthdays or events, always interesting and informative, often (it's Garrison Keillor, after all) quirky. This morning's quirky little bit of information was about some of the holidays that are celebrated around the world on March 1st. Most of these holidays have to do with the hoped-for coming of spring.

My favorite of these is this one from Bulgaria:

In Bulgaria, today is Baba Marta, or "Grandmother March Day." Baba Marta is a mythical figure, a temperamental old lady with big mood swings that correlate with the Bulgarian climate. When she's happy, she brings warm weather. When she's angry, the winter frost persists. So today, people in Bulgaria go around greeting each other "Chestita Baba Marta" — which means "Happy Grandmother March" — hoping that the old lady will be cheerful and bring warm weather and sunshine. And today in Bulgaria, people wear martenitsi. The martenitsa is a red and white brooch-like adornment made of yarn. It is supposed to make Baba Marta have mercy on the wearers and allow them be happy, so that they may all welcome the coming spring as soon as possible.

I thought this was intriguing, so looked it up on the ever-informative Internet, and found this great site with lots more about Grandmother March and the martenitsi: history, traditions, and best of all - folk tales about the day.This is a day for cheerful optimism and hope, for getting rid of the winter doldrums, pleasing Grandmother March so that the birds will return, the fruit trees will blossom into life, the beasts bear their young. It's too late for this March 1st. not a scrap of yarn in the house - but by next March I'm going to have a little stash of martenitsi ready for greeting Baba Marta.

Remarkable Creatures

2010-02-28T12:41:00.096-07:00

Neither prehistoric creatures nor strong-minded independent women are unusual or surprising to us in our current time period. But the remarkable creatures of the title of Tracy Chevalier's latest novel are just those two life forms: prehistoric marine animals and the fossil hunting women who first discover them. Remarkable Creatures is Chevalier's sixth published novel, although only the second one I have read. I loved Girl With a Pearl Earring, and can't imagine why I stopped reading her after that.This book gripped me from the first page, and didn't let go until I finished it several nights ago. Even Apolo Ohno and Lindsey Vonn couldn't tear me away from the spell of this story. For maybe the first time in my winter-Olympics-loving life, I watched the athletes with one eye from time to time, but my real attention was on Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot as they dug and toiled on the beach at Lyme Regis, then toiled even more fiercely to have their discoveries acknowledged by the "learned gentlemen" of their time. Their time being partly the Georgian Period and partly the Victorian, hardly good years for outspoken intelligent women. Darwin's Origin of Species was published in 1859, twelve years after Mary Anning died, but as Ruth Padel says in her enthusiastic review of the book in The Guardian:

New life is formed from extinction and death," wrote Darwin in 1838, in a private notebook. Some 20 years later, he based The Origin of Species on the fact that fossils document a continuum of life forms, demonstrating that millions of species died out as others took their place. A generation earlier, however, when Tracy Chevalier's rough-petticoated heroine was pulling out of cliffs in Lyme Regis the evidence that would go into this insight, nobody wanted to believe that God did not, as one of Chevalier's characters puts it, "plan out what He would do with all of the animals He created.

On the book's website the story is summarized quite briefly thus:

In 1810, a sister and brother uncover the fossilized skull of an unknown animal in the cliffs on the south coast of England. With its long snout and prominent teeth, it might be a crocodile – except that it has a huge, bulbous eye.

Remarkable Creatures is the story of Mary Anning, who has a talent for finding fossils, and whose discovery of ancient marine reptiles such as that ichthyosaur shakes the scientific community and leads to new ways of thinking about the creation of the world.

Working in an arena dominated by middle-class men, however, Mary finds herself out of step with her working-class background. In danger of being an outcast in her community, she takes solace in an unlikely friendship with Elizabeth Philpot, a prickly London spinster with her own passion for fossils.

The strong bond between Mary and Elizabeth sees them through struggles with poverty, rivalry and ostracism, as well as the physical dangers of their chosen obsession. It reminds us that friendship can outlast storms and landslides, anger and and jealousy.

So, yes, that's sort of a fossil version of the story, but if that was all I had to go on to entice me into reading it, I might not have done so. This summary doesn't give the reader any idea of the richness, the historical texture of the novel. So many strands of what was happening in science, in religion, even in literature (Jane Austen is briefly an offstage character), are woven into the tapestry of this story, yet it remains vibrant and alive, never stuffy nor boring - as historical novels can often deteriorate into being. Chevalier's forté is taking historical events and characters, then using her own magic as a writer to put them into novels.The bones of her stories are factual, but the magic lies in the way the author can imagine the characters' interior life, motivations, emotions, interactions.Mary and Elizabeth are entirely real to me, I hated to say goodbye. Spend some time exploring the book's website, a rich resource; read Padel's review linked to above, and see if this doesn't sound like maybe your next read. I promise it will be an engrossing one. And I intend to put Chevalier's unread novels into my library queue at once.

La Curandera, Part One

2010-02-25T11:41:00.009-07:00

In my post yesterday about my afternoon at the Biopark, I mentioned the Curandera's Garden. This bas relief is the centerpiece of that garden, and one of my favorite elements in the Biopark landscape. It shows the Doña arriving at a household laid low by illness, being welcomed by the very worried Señora of the house, showing her where the patient waits. The Curandera is laden with bundles and bags containing the healing items, plants, and herbs of her trade.

So then, who is she, this woman laden also, as her face tells us, with the burden of her years, the sorrows and ills she has seen and cured, or not, during her life? She is the the Hispanic American version of what in medieval Europe or Colonial New England would have been called a witch, has been and is still, in other societies, known as a shaman. She is a traditional healer, of both bodies and souls, called upon to treat both physical and spiritual maladies. She uses medicinal plants, herbs, and flowers, which she grows herself in rural areas, or anywhere she can have a plot of land. In cities or towns she may purchase her materials at a botánica, stores that sell medicinal herbs and items used in folk traditions like curanderismo, santería, macumba, still alive and well in contemporary North American areas with Latino and/or Caribbean populations. The curandera of early New Mexican tradition in the Biopark sculpture would have had an extensive garden containing such plants as the wild datura, maguey, prickly pear, various sages, apache plume, ocotillo, agaves, mints, uña de gato, buffalo gourd, mallows, indian tobacco, and many more. She would have grown, harvested, dried and prepared them herself or with her daughters. Her patients would have suffered from bodily ailments, such as heart disease, gout, diabetes, menstrual pain, pregnancy complications, or from diseases of the spirit, such as depression, mal de ojo (the evil eye), susto (fright or most likely, panic attacks). or grief. For these spiritual maladies she might perform a limpia, a ritual cleansing of the soul to rid it of "lingering clouds" and "festering wounds" from the many slings and arrows of human life experience.

One of New Mexico's most popular native writers is Rudolfo Anaya, and his most popular book is his first, a novel called Bless Me, Ultima. It is the story of a young boy, Antonio, whose 1940's childhood and spiritual development is greatly influenced by a curandera known as Ultima who comes to live with his family in rural New Mexico. The link I've given here has an extensive summary of the book, but if you can find it outside of the Southwest, I advise that you simply read the book itself. Curanderísmo has never gone underground in Latin America, and in these days of expensive medical insurance/ care and waves of immigration from the south is thriving all over the USA. This article by Patricia Rivera from the Wilmington News Journal, Curanderas Offer Traditional Help, gives an interesting glimpse into how the ever-growing Latino population of Delaware is using Curandísmo instead of, or as a supplement to, modern Western medicine.

Although I have a wealth of further information and thoughts about this subject, instead of letting this turn into another of those lengthy posts that no one reads, I'm going to close out this first chapter, and return to Las Curanderas tomorrow. In the meantime, benditos sean.

Post Script, March 1. 2010 - I really am going to continue writing about curanderísmo. My research has gotten out of control, and I'm well on my way to a fullblown article, maybe a Master's thesis. Gotta decide what I'm doing here.

A Walk In The Park

2010-02-24T14:02:00.013-07:00

One of the conclusions drawn from the research I wrote about a couple of days ago, was that we'd all feel better more, and be better people, if we got out and took a walk more often. I walk for exercise as close to daily as possible, most often on the mean streets of my city. But that's not what the article meant. It meant get out into the trees, the wildflowers, the birds, in other words, Nature. I had no classes yesterday, and after working in the house (laundry, getting a strata ready to bake for supper) all morning, I really wanted out into the emerging sunshine. It's been so cold and grey, so unlike New Mexico, that I just haven't been inspired to make an effort to find good places to walk.

Although the sun was shining, it was still quite cold, and I wanted someplace I could enjoy the bounty of Nature, yet have someplace to warm up if I really couldn't take the cold wind. And, in fact, I was inspired. I thought of the Albuquerque Biopark, a facility that comprises the Zoo, the Aquarium, and a wonderful Botanic Garden. I did some errands along the way, and arrived at the Biopark about three - only to find, to my horror, that it had been invaded by hordes of people and equipment filming for the TV show In Plain Sight. Once I got through the active filming area and into the gardens, I was almost the only human out walking the paths on this cold sunny day. So I walked for over an hour, visiting the Curandera Garden, the Desert Garden, the Heritage Gardens, and a long time in the Japanese Gardens.

When I got too cold, and wanted to see some blooming plant life, I went into one of the glasshouses, full of green, and brightly blooming, tropical plants. I couldn't stay long, because my cold glasses fogged up ferociously and I soon became much too warm. It was either take off many layers of clothing or head back out into the cold. I did another tour of the Japanese Gardens, the newest feature of the Biopark, and a place of such tranquillity. These gardens are full of water features, the sound of falling, rippling water everywhere, the sight and smell of water a boon to my dehydrated desert soul. I meandered back by the big pond in the middle of the park, where wood ducks and mallards were having a wonderful time, a few mothers with strollers were sitting on the rocks letting their children enjoy the birds and the water. Despite having to thread my way through the filming business again on my way out to the parking lot, I left feeling like I'd had a brief vacation, from daily life and chores. It's so easy and close, I need to remember to get back there more often.
(More photos from the Biopark on my Flickr photo storage site.)

Personal Foods

2010-02-23T10:42:00.008-07:00

Just want to point out for those of you who may be unfamiliar with Deborah Madison, that she has a little article in the current AARP magazine bearing the title of her latest book: What We Eat When We Eat Alone.
The subject of the book, and the article, is what Madison calls "personal foods" and describes her own in this lovely paragraph:

Weird foods notwithstanding, when Patrick and I started posing the eating-solo question to friends, we discovered that most people have one or two dishes (what I call "personal foods") that they cook for themselves alone. Personal foods do more than satisfy hunger; they nourish us in a deep and even spiritual way. My personal food is toasted rye bread covered with a thin layer of cheddar and marmalade, a treat my grandmother enjoyed daily with a cup of dark tea. We shared this toast when I visited her as a child, and I've always been drawn to its pungent flavors.

One of the reasons Deborah Madison has become my food guru shows up in the above description - she recognizes and is not afraid to talk about the "deep and even spiritual" dimensions of food. Her cookbooks speak to that need within us all to be nourished by what we eat at exactly that deep and often spiritual level.

Deborah's husband Patrick's personal food is shown, in an improved form over the Arkansas original, in the photo: grilled pimento cheese panini, which the couple sometimes has for dinner, with a glass of French champagne. My current eat-on-my-own food, what I often have for lunch before leaving to teach my afternoon class, is a flour tortilla with strips of roasted green chile, a shredded Mexican cheese sprinkled over them, then grilled in the toaster oven until the cheese melts and I can smell the chile. It's a sort of quesadilla, I guess, though much less trouble to make. I don't know how spiritually fulfilling it is, but it's mighty good, and keeps me going through an afternoon of trying to get across the difference between direct and indirect objects to my adult ESL class.

Anyone have some personal or solo-dining favorites to share? I'd love to hear them.

Can Nature Save Our Very Souls?

2010-02-22T10:09:00.024-07:00

I have long thought that one of the things most wrong with contemporary society is the distance from Nature at which most of us live. It has seemed to me that the materialism, greed, lack of community, lack of empathy with both other humans and with our planet that mark our society so strongly must result from living and working in a built environment, bombarded by relentless media and the advertising that comes with it, constantly immersed in commercialism, financial worry, the acquisition of "stuff" and all the dehumanizing effects of life in this environment. In a previous post I wrote about my own personal restorative experience as a volunteer at the Rio Grande Nature Center, an experience that continues and only gets better with passing time. This place and the time I spend there, as well as many other natural places and experiences in my life have taught me that Nature is for me a deep healer, the place I go to pull the fragments of my life, my soul, back together, if only temporarily. And, it often is temporary - we all have to return to the traffic, the jobs, the griefs, the bills and worries of daily life in the 21st century, but some of the effects of time spent on a beach, a riverbank, a mountainside, in a forest or wetland, observing birds and other creatures, listening to the wind, the waves, birdcalls, coyote howls (Nature is never really silent, I have found) - some of the transformative power of this time stays with me for a good while, at a core level.

So, I knew that nature makes me, and probably most of us, feel better. But one of my ranger friends at the Nature Center passed along this press release from the University of Rochester on the results of a study researched and written by a team from the university, and published last September in The Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. ( available only by subscripton) . Titled Can Nature Make Us More Caring? Results of Immersion in Nature on Intrinsic Aspirations, the study reveals the surprising fact that experiencing our natural surroundings can have social as well as personal benefits. Richard Ryan, coauthor and professor of psychology, psychiatry and education at the University of Rochester goes on to say: "While the salubrious effects of nature are well documented, from increasing happiness and physical health to lowering stress, this study shows that the benefits extend to a person's values and actions. Exposure to natural as opposed to man-made environments leads people to value community and close relationships and to be more generous with money."

The four experiments in this research interestingly show that exposure to nature can affect our priorities and alter what we think is important in life. In short, we become less self-focused and more other-focused. Our value priorities shift from personal gain, to a broader focus on community and connection with others. The researchers explored responses to extrinsic life aspirations, such as financial success, or being admired by other people, and intrinsic aspirations, like deep and lasting relationships or contributing to the betterment of society. The research subjects exposed to the nature images scored significantly lower on extrinsic life aspirations, and significantly higher on intrinsic life aspirations.Good explanation of the research methodology here.

In an article in Scientific American, P. Wesley Schulz, a psychology professor at California State Univ., San Marcos, draws from this research many of the same conclusions about society that I have simply by observation - that there has been a huge decline in the amount (and quality) of time spent by both adults and children in the natural world, and that " this reduction in our exposure to the natural world could drive large-scale shifts in societal values. As their results show, experiences with strictly built environments lead to life aspirations that are more self-focused. These results may help explain the increase in aspirations for fame, wealth, power, achievement, and other self-enhancing values in Western society and predict that this trend is likely to continue." I think this large-scale shift is already happening; how could anyone who has lived through the past decade not see where our aspirations as a society are focused? So, what is the answer? There are many useful applications in these results for architects, city planners, and others responsible for the environments in which we live, parks and greenspace will help, but maybe what we need to do is load Wall Street, Congress, and K Street into a fleet of large tour buses and drop them deep in the wilderness of the Canadian Rockies, leave them there for a period of months, with only the barest essentials for survival. After that they could be subjected to the same tests the research subjects responded to in Ryan et al's studies. If their responses indicate a major change in the intrinsic values of these groups, maybe they could return to work. I dunno, though. This may be such a collection of dead souls that expecting them to reconnect with their authentic selves is merely day-dreaming.

Yes, okay, it's a daydream. In the end all we can do is keep ourselves and our children as closely connected to the natural world as possible. In the words of Netta Weinstein, one of the study's authors: “We are influenced by our environment in ways that we are not aware of,” she says. Because of the hidden benefits of connecting with nature, people should take advantage of opportunities to get away from built environments and, when inside, they should surround themselves with plants, natural objects, and images of the natural world." (Cross-posted to The Blue Voice.)

Love Poem For Haiti

2010-02-20T13:15:00.004-07:00

One of my sisters sent me the link to this last week; Nelly Lambert, the author, is the daughter-in-law of a friend of ours, she's a Ph.D. student in English and American literature at Catholic University who lived in Haiti as a child, from 1983-1987. The poem was published last week on Politics Daily. I was so deeply impressed, moved and delighted by this: the images, the language, the feeling of the love of a sensual child for the place that formed her, that I wanted to share it here. Another of my sisters who is a historic preservation architect went to Haiti last week, with a team assessing the historic government buildings for restoration, and her comments to me about the resilience and strength of the Haitian people at this moment in time echo Nelly's words in this poem. Haiti's people are indeed stronger than her buildings.

LETTER TO HAITI: A LOVE POEM

Desire....The opposite is death. So do you wonder? How could you possibly wonder!
-Blanche DuBois

Dear Haiti,

I thought I would write you as

A beautiful but destitute woman:

Everyone wanted you; no one would marry you.

No one dared marry you,

Not that you cared for marriage.

But you are not that woman.

So, then I tried Hemingway-

No, better Graham Greene-

Breakfasts of kumquats and rhum-coke calm;

A strange epoch in which time stood still

Save for the slow decay of the gingerbread porch.

But that was all just picked up from what I read later.

Next, I looked for something in your shapes:

There was your physical form, a Siamese twin

Trying to wrest herself free, to be on her own;

Or, there was the way your name sounds like Hades in English,

And in French, like high,

And when you say it, like I.

But no accent or point of view quite captured you.

The truth is I don't remember you in a word or a story.

And, being away from you for so long,

My memory has had to filter through all the talk

Of impatient longings to write your ending.

I thought I would write you tragically,

But that too was a borrowed impulse.

Still, there is a tone, a quality of sound,

Of air, a sensibility that stays with me.

You taught me to see colors

I cannot find anywhere else.

The closest I've come-

A dusty turquoise, let's say-

Is always slightly too muted or too dark.

The pinks are too aggressive - not your pink.

But sometimes, when the daylight is warm and wide,

I'll notice I'm wearing your colors,

Painting the streets with them,

Giving them away to friends.

You are a gorgeous one. Everyone agrees.

I remember your beasts and your flowers,

Though I can't recall their names.

I can still hum pieces of your lullabies,

Though I couldn't sing them from start to end.

Even now I can ask for ice cream in your creole,

But I wouldn't know how to write it down.

And, after all this time, I can still picture

Your steamy mountains,

Your beaches of black sand

Sparkling like powdered onyx,

Your women carrying

Heavy loads on their heads. No hands!

In your care, I learned to do it too.

Now I see you. There you are

Walking up the hill

Balancing a basket of fruit on your head.

You cannot find your children.

You will keep looking, I know.

I was a sensual child in your lap.

We are all like that with you.

We all love to touch your world.

You will keep walking up the hill.

I have seen you do it before.

You are stronger than your buildings.

Your head is level. Your babies are laughing.

(Photo of painting by Carlo Valtrain, Girl With Water Jugs, from Haitian Art Online .)

Makin' A List, Checkin' It Twice

2010-02-18T10:19:00.002-07:00

In the deeply unlikely event that anyone is looking for the piece I posted on Tuesday: "Turn Turn Turn, A Shrove Tuesday Meditation" just to let you know, I moved it to a private blog. It seemed, on consideration, a little too personal for public consumption.

I am currently doing a little housekeeping on this blog, it was beginning to feel extremely cluttered and messy. So I am moving all those link lists on the sidebar to their own separate pages, which will show up in the PAGES section, to be found, for now anyway, at the top of the Home page under the Moon Phases widget. I just discovered this feature, and think I will be happier with collecting my links this way. Those link lists grow ever longer, and doing this will make whatever I leave on the sidebar much more visible. Let me know what you think.

The Place That Saved My Life

2010-02-15T11:21:00.011-07:00

Well, maybe that's a little dramatic, but it's really how I feel about this place. The place is the Rio Grande Nature Center State Park, on the banks of the Rio Grande river, on the western edge of the city of Albuquerque. It's a small park, no camping or boating, the main purpose of which is education. School groups, senior citizen groups, scout troops and others, all visit the park and are taken on guided educational tours of the facility, learning about the river, the woods and ponds, the birds and creatures that live there. Educational volunteers also go to the schools and give classroom programs with hands-on materials, (Pond by Visitor Center)

There's an architect-designed Visitor Center, native plant gardens, cottonwood trees full of birds year round.There are beavers and porcupines in the woods, coyotes from time to time. Sandhill cranes winter in the fields and on the wetlands, wood ducks and Canada geese build nests along the edges of the pond pictured above, and red-eared slider turtles bask on logs in the sun. It's a place close enough to the city to be an urban getaway, yet with a feel of being far away from the freeways and shopping malls.

Two months after my partner and I moved out here to New Mexico in early summer 2006, there was a tragic death in my family back east, and I spent that fall and winter immersed in grief, the inability to function in any normal way. During that time Gail and I would go out to the Nature Center as often as we could, for long quiet walks and birding. It came to feel like a haven to us us both, a place of peace and healing. I hadn't found a job yet, and felt incapable of looking for one. When I discovered that volunteer training was about to be offered at the RGNCSP, I signed up immediately and spent six weeks of early spring attending classes every Saturday. The group (Old cottonwoods self-pruning) of volunteer trainees was friendly but low-key, mostly about my age, many of them retired teachers, not overly interested in the sort of personal questions and chat that I could absolutely not handle; and the educational rangers just interested in how much we could learn. I looked forward to the classes as an occasion to get out of my own pool of mourning briefly once a week, learn the native plants and animals in a uniquely stressfree fashion, connect with the natural world and even endure some human companionship that didn't ask anything of me I couldn't give.

We walked the trails, discovered where beavers had gnawed down trees, found their burrows in the river bank, found gopher and rabbit holes, hawks' nests high in the trees, tried to identify forbs and shrubs that were barely leafing out. We concentrated on what we were learning, and at the end of the six weeks had a potluck, met many of the old volunteers, and signed up for the work committees of our choice. (Opuntia in native plant gardens.)

I signed up as a front desk greeter in the Visitor Center and a gardener in the native plant gardens, and began working at these tasks pretty much immediately. In the gardens it was hard hot work that kept panic attacks and bouts of sobbing in abeyance; at the front desk it was harder, because I had to manage a semblance of normalcy: welcome people to the park, answer questions, convey information. And I got better at it every time I put on my volunteer vest and nametag and took up my post. it was impersonal, yet it felt very good to share a place I loved so much with visitors from all over the country, all over the world in fact.(Outdoor classroom in the cottonwoods.)

Once I was able to face looking for a job, then finding and holding the one I found, I had less time to spend at the Nature Center, so have temporarily dropped work in the gardens, as my own gardens now take up a great deal of my spring and summer available time. I have been at the front desk for the past three years though, usually for an afternoon a week. I've welcomed hundreds of visitors, showed children the exhibits in the Center, had a chance to use my foreign languages often, directed people to the trails, birding sites, and gardens; in general felt like the Ambassador for the Center on my afternoons at the desk. I take a short walk somewhere on the grounds whenever I am there; and Gail and I go for longer hikes by the river on the weekends. Some of the rangers and other volunteers have become friends, and it feels to me now like not only a personal haven, but a community, a sort of home. A sanctuary. A place that saved my life when I really didn't know if I would be able to keep going on my own.(Snowy Sandias, Candelaria wetlands in foreground.)

There is a new class of volunteers in training currently, and the Volunteer Co-Ordinator asked me if I would be interested in giving a "testimonial" at this coming Saturday's class. A short talk on my own experience as a volunteer at the Center, why I started, why I continue, what they can expect if they complete the training and actually put on a khaki vest and a Volunteer nametag. This post is a sort of preparation meditation on what I might say Saturday morning. I'm not sure if I'll tell them that this experience saved my life. It might be Too Much Information for most people. But, then again, perhaps I might. We never know, do we, when we are in the presence of someone whose life might be in tatters, might need to know there can be, sometimes, salvation. In so many unexpected ways. In explaining to children about nurselogs or hummingbirds, telling people where to find a hawk's nest high in the cottonwood canopy. In weeding and sweating in companionable silence in the bird garden on a summer morning; in walking a trail to check for fallen branches or trash. In being a part of a place that is sanctuary for so many species of creatures and plants.(Panoramic view of Rio Grande and RGNCSP)

His Feet Are On The Noble Path

2010-02-10T13:08:00.014-07:00

Ah me! Despite the pile of library books waiting by the couch, I find myself unable to settle for reading any of them. The reason for this is that I recently finished The Godfather of Kathmandu, and am finding it hard to leave Krung Thep (the Thai name for what we farang call Bangkok) and Nepal, for any less exotic locales, and Sonchai Jitpleecheep for any less endearing character.

This novel is the fourth in John Burdett's series of mysteries set in Bangkok. Burdett's protagonist is Royal Thai police detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, son of an American father and a Thai mother. Sonchai is a devout Buddhist, he calls himself a monk manqué, and it is this aspect of the novels more than anything else that keeps me waiting for the next one. These novels are gritty, to say the least, grisly is actually more accurate. The strange thing is that they are also quite spiritual at the same time. Sonchai's quest to become ever more enlighted, to be a good person, making merit, living according to the teachings of Theravada Buddhism is not easy, living, as he does, in the midst of such astounding corruption and squalor, in a city awash in the sex and drug trades, a police force that aids and abets both undertakings, Sonchai's efforts towards his spiritual goals are every bit as absorbing (possibly even more so) as his efforts to solve the fantastically horrible crimes he is assigned by Col. Vikorn, at once his boss and nemesis.

It is the character of Sonchai that makes me love these books. John Burdett's own essay on how he came to write this Bangkok series explains a lot. It is clear that he has immersed himself in the life of the city about which he writes, and the philosophy of his main character. Theravada Buddhism is an ancient study of human consciousness,"a radically honest and penetrating assessment of the human condition" which I find fascinating, even inviting. Sonchai finds in it a way to cope with the moral ambiguity of much of his life, with the pain and suffering that surrounds him, with his own divided nature, being half Thai, half farang. The story in this book wanders around Asia, introduces way too many fantastical characters, and is, ultimately, quite farfetched. Nonetheless, Sue Grafton's newest alphabetical mystery starring Kinsey Milhone in coastal California just isn't grabbing my soul by the neck and leaving me panting for more the way that Burdett's anguished detective always does.

Read more about Burdett and his books in this NYT article: John Burdett: Detective writer at work in a seedy Bangkok district. (Photo from Photo Gallery at Burdett's website.)

Oh What A Beautiful Morning

2010-02-04T10:33:00.004-07:00

We have been feeling quite put out and envious of the snow that the rest of the state has been getting storm after storm since early January. We can look up into the foothills and the Sandias themselves and see the covering of white, while we have just grey cloud cover and unremitting cold. But, last night we finally got a dusting here in the city ourselves, and it certainly brought the birds into our yard. The hanging feeders bring in tons of sparrows, finches, juncoes, chickadees; and the seed dropped from them onto the ground brings several different kinds of doves (as well, unfortunately, as that urban species of pest, the pigeon). (Photo: Male Downy) But it's the suet feeders on the cottonwood that bring the woodpeckers, and this morning I couldn't tear myself away from the kitchen window, where the cats and I do our winter birding.

There was a pair of ladderback woodpeckers, and a pair of downies, bopping up and down the trunks and branches, flashing to the suet blocks for a bite, then back up into the branches to check for insects. They are in fact all still there as I write this now. It's a marvelous show, as the males flash their red patches. There has been a curvebill thrasher on the cottonwood suet feeder for the past weeks, but I didn't see it this morning. The snow brings that wonderful negative ion feel-good high, and I'm looking forward to going out for my Thursday stint at the Rio Grande Nature Center shortly. (Photo: Male Ladderback) Both photos in this post are from the pricelessly fabulous Western Views US photoblog.

Visiting the Cranes, Part 2

2010-02-02T13:09:00.042-07:00

Saturday morning we reluctantly dragged ourselves up and out of bed somewhere between five and six a.m., put on many layers of clothing, and stumbled out to find Julia already on her second cup of coffee. The birds which have overnighted on the ponds fly out for the day's foraging in the fields at sunrise, at this time of year a little before seven. I grabbed one of Jana's homemade granola bars, we struggled into our muddy boots, and set off to watch the morning's fly-out. Jana came with us this time; she is herself a photographer, (Scroll down thru this site to Jana's Snow Geese photo at the bottom) so came armed with her lenses and tripod. It was another morning of early thick grey clouds, and the birds were in no hurry to fly out of bed either. They tiptoed around, murmuring and squawking, getting into various formations and lineups preparatory to taking off. Something I find extremely interesting about the sandhills is the great variety of their vocalizations, something that made me wonder if anyone is doing research on their use of voice communication, as that is what it clearly seems to be. A little googling once home at the computer led to the discovery that scientists working with Operation Migration and other crane projects' work (with both Whooping and Sandhill Cranes) have found seven communicative vocalizations: a basic call, the Contact or Brood call, Flight Calls: "Attention, please! Danger!"
"Do not land here! Keep flying."
"No problem."
"Come here. There's some food."
The Guard Call: "Do not enter. This is my territory!"
"The unison call: We are a pair. We belong together and this is our territory."

As the light rose behind the mountains from the east, small groups of sandhills began to lift out of the water into the brightening air, making such a wonderful rushing sound with their great wingbeats. Then, group by group they rose, as the sun fought its way through the clouds to color the pond water with faint pink and the sky filled with the huge birds. The snow geese were the last of the overnighters to leave the ponds. We were unable to tear ourselves away from this spectacle of liftoff until at last it was full daylight and the water emptied of all avian life save for some ducks, who clearly intended to spend the day right where they were. When even Jana was willing to pack up her cameras and head home, we all went back to The Dancing Cranes for coffee and more of the previous night's apple cake. Before we left the B and B, we went to Jana's studio to see the her photos and jewelry (she does both). Julia bought a lovely silver clay pendant, I lusted after several photos and pairs of earrings, but we are on an austerity budget, and the trip itself was an enormous luxury for us.

At last we headed back up the road, stopping in Socorro at a most unlikely find, a coffee shop worthy of a place in any urban setting, where we augmented our breakfast with heartier fare to sustain us for another trip to the Bernardo Wildlife Area. The gates were still closed, "due to bad weather," though the sun was now shining brightly. Despite the sun, there was a brisk and very cold wind, but we set off on foot again, so Julia could get some pictures in a better light than she had the day before. The mud was still all-encompassing, but thanks to that mud, Julia was able to get wonderful shots of the cranes' impressive footprints. The bluebirds were still flocking around us, and we saw several hawks which I think were redtails, sailing above us on the wind. We had to cut our birding through the mud shorter than we wanted, as we had to return to Albuquerque for a memorial celebrating the life of our wonderful neighbor, Betty Evans, who had died early in the new year. The drive up I 25 took us through snow, sleet, rain, and a mix of all of them, not to mention that ferocious wind.

We pulled into our driveway in pellets of sleet resembling mothballs, pulled off our boots, which by then weighed twenty pounds apiece, I'm sure. Gail and I changed into respectable clothing, while Julia settled down for a cozy read with the cats. The Bosque is birding heaven at any time of year, but it gets pretty hot and full of mosquitoes in the warmer months. We may make it back down in the spring for warbler migration, but the big birds will be leaving for their northern grounds later this month, so I'm most grateful for this cold, muddy, wonderful visit.

NOTES FOR VISITING THE CRANES

All photos in these two posts were taken by JuliaOsgood. She has many more of them, which I hope will soon be posted to her blog (link above). Here's Julia and me in the Bosque. Gail took this one.

For more information about Sandhill Cranes, check out these links:
International Crane Foundation
Cornell Lab of Ornithology

For completely mind-boggling photography of the area and birds I've written about in these posts, check out this site from a guy who has spent the past three years traveling around the western USA taking photos of wildlife, many of them of birds. Scroll through the link I've given above, all the way to the end. Here is the link to his whole site, Western Views U.S., which has marvelous indices and archives. This is a labor of extreme love, a site for naturalists and photographers to return to time after time.

For anyone truly interested in the subject of the lands and life discussed in these two posts, I recommend this book from the UNM Press, Desert Wetlands, Photos by Lucian Niemeyer, Text by Thomas Lowe Fleischner.

Visiting The Cranes,Part 1, At Last

2010-02-01T09:59:00.009-07:00

Before it gets just too far behind me, I'm going to tackle writing about our trip down to the wildlife refuges along the Rio Grande last weekend. The Ladd S. Gordon Waterfowl Complex encompasses four waterfowl areas located between the towns of Belen and Socorro run by the New Mexico Dept. of Fish and Game. The Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge just south of Socorro near the tiny village of San Antonio is administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. There is another NWR along this corridor, Sevilleta, that is less accessible to the public, and is largely a research facility. As you can imagine, this Rio Grande corridor is an amazingly rich area for many different recreational wildlife activities, such as hunting, fishing, and the one in which I engage, birding. These areas are managed to provide food, water, shelter and space for many species of wildlife, but are perhaps best known as the wintering grounds for many bird species, most notably the Sandhill Cranes and Arctic Geese, but including birds of prey, many species of ducks, as well as irruptive flocks of smaller birds.

My partner and I have been visiting this part of New Mexico for many years, long before we had any thought of moving here. We fell in love with the landscape, and the magical dance of the wintering cranes on our first exploratory trip out here, and have been returning as often as possible ever since. This trip was to introduce our friend Julia, from Austin, to these Big Birds. As she had begun the year with a trip to the Texas Gulf coast to see the Whooping Cranes who winter there (my post on that same experience here), she was delighted to complete the circle in this way.

The weather promised to be dreadful, and up until the moment we got in the car on Friday we were not sure if we were really going to do it. But we bravely packed our foul weather gear, binoculars, trail mix, Julia her cameras, and set off down I 25 for our first stop at Bernardo. This area is part of the Ladd S. Gordon Complex, with a driving loop supposedly accessible to the public. It had rained ferociously that morning, and we pulled off the access road into deep mud, only to find the drive-in gate closed and chained, with a sign stating "CLOSED DUE TO BAD WEATHER." There was no bad weather that we could see, and we could hear cranes calling from just around a big clump of brush and trees. So, we set off walking along the trail through ankle deep mud. After fifteen minutes of walking, we were past the obscuring brush and walking along open fields full of cranes and snow (arctic) geese. There are two observation towers on the trail, and while Julia took her time taking photos along the edge of the fields, Gail and I explored both towers. It was just entirely too muddy to walk the whole loop, and after about forty-five minutes we were quite cold and hungry. On our way back to the car we started seeing bluebirds darting in and out of tree branches, down to puddles on the ground, and up to the top of the observation towers.There are three possible kinds of bluebirds here right now, eastern, western and mountain. We finally were able to focus on a couple of them closely enough to decide it was a flock of mountain bluebirds, with perhaps some western bluebirds mixed in.

Terminally hungry and cold by now, we stopped in Socorro at a small Mexican café for a warmup and lunch. From there we went on to San Antonio to find and check into our Bed and Breakfast, poetically called The Dancing Cranes (They don't yet have a website I can link to, alas, as it is a lovely place.). It had been recommended to me by a friend, an artist who spends a lot of time birding in that area, and we were most grateful for her suggestion. Our hosts, Jim and Jana, were very welcoming and had helpful suggestions for where to go for the evening fly-in. At the Bosque we explored the Farm Loop by car and by foot, seeing hawks, flocks of pine siskins, more bluebirds, a bald eagle; then headed for the North Ponds to await the Main Event. Fly- in happens more or less at sunset when the cranes and geese fly in to the refuge ponds to take shelter there for the night. It is usually an occasion for hordes of people with cameras sporting lenses the size of antiaircraft missiles to line the banks of the ponds and photograph the landing birds. The weather was so cold and windy, so threatening of snow or rain, that there were very few of this human species that evening. We stayed watching and listening to the birds flapping in and settling for the night, as the sun managed to break through the thick grey clouds and give an approximation of sunset behind the mountains, stayed until total darkness fell on all avian and human life. Back at The Dancing Cranes Jana had a delicious vegetable bake, red wine, and apple cake waiting for us. Weatherbeaten and exhausted, we all went to bed about nine o'clock, knowing we'd need to be heading for fly-out predawn. (To Be Continued)

T'ai Chi Cranes

2010-01-30T11:09:00.004-07:00

I'm not going to have time today to write the post about our visit to the Refuges last weekend, but Julia has sent me the link to a little video she took down there, and posted to YouTube. Don't they look like a group of people in the park doing T'ai Chi? Make sure your sound is on when you play this video. If I get up early enough tomorrow, maybe I'll have time for a real post.

For Salinger, with Love and Squalor

2010-01-28T17:11:00.018-07:00

I crossposted a piece this morning at both of the group blogs for which I write, Women on and The Blue Voice, on the death last night of Howard Zinn. When I had finished writing that post, I discovered that J.D. Salinger , another writer who had greatly influenced my (very) young life, had died today. If you are anywhere near my age, you probably read Catcher In The Rye at an important moment in your adolescent life, and chances are it had a lasting effect on your teenage years, even into young adulthood. It was published in 1951, when I was only eight. But I read it the summer I was fifteen, read it in secret at night, against my mother's express injunction against it even coming into the house. I read it with passion and the joy of discovery - the discovery that there were others out there in the greater world as rebellious and alienated as I felt myself to be.

In school we were reading The Scarlet Letter, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and other such Masterpiece Theatre classics - Reading Salinger was falling into a book that actually spoke the authentic language of my teenage anger and confusion. It had a huge effect on me. I copied out whole chunks of Holden's stream of consciousness into my diary, identifying completely with Holden and his lonely struggle against the phoniness of the world around him.

In college I went on to read the two novels that feature the Glass family, Raise High the Roofbeam Carpenter, and Seymour, as well as Franny and Zooey and Nine Stories - falling in love with Salinger's manipulation of the short story form. I practically memorized the story For Esmé with Love and Squalor, and discover that I still retain many of the lines. I wrote many stories during those years, trying to copy Salinger's style and manner, and of course failing miserably. Salinger went into seclusion in his New Hampshire home after writing these books, though he often claimed he continued to write, strictly for his own needs and pleasure.

I am now sixty six years old, long past my years of teenage angst and confusion (not that I don't have plenty of angst, not to mention confusion, but it's way different now) but if the rumor is true that there are fifteen books written during his years as a recluse locked in a safe in Salinger's house - I have to hope that his agent will find them and get them published. It's interesting to speculate on what they might be like, what Salinger became in those lonely New Hampshire winters, where he journeyed in his strange and wonderful mind. At the library today, I looked for any of Salinger's works, but found none on the shelves. When I asked about this, the librarian told me they had all been checked out today.

Visiting The Cranes,

2010-01-26T10:42:00.003-07:00

If anyone actually reads this blog, he/she/they might be wondering where I've been for the past week. I mentioned in an earlier post that we would be heading down to the Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge, and that is exactly what we did. Our friend Julia came out from Austin to go with us for a visit to the wintering sandhill cranes down there, before they head back north next month. I don't have time right now, heading to a dental appointment, to really do justice to the trip. Julia took a million photos, will send them on to me, as well as uploading them at her own blog, South Austin Backyard Naturalist eventually. I hope to have time to write it all up here later today. Unless I need to spend the remainder of the day with my head under the covers - my usual reaction to spending time in a dental chair.

Ten Things

2010-01-19T12:46:00.014-07:00

This post comes as a result of a note from Aine of the blog The Evolving Spirit.Her blog was the recipient of what she calls an award, though I would call it a meme, which involved listing ten things that make her happy, then passing the meme on to ten other blogs. As I was sort of in two of her ten blogs, I'm only doing the listing part here at this one, and hoping that at Women On, where I also blog, we can come up with ten other blogs to send this to. This was a wonderful assignment, causing me to reflect on the many things in my life that daily induce happiness. The difficult part was choosing only ten of them!! I didn't include chocolate, or flowers, or bodysurfing....oops, I think this is cheating. So here are my chosen ten, and though I'm not officially sending this on, anyone who chooses to play is welcome to do so.

1. Children. Almost any old children, anywhere - and this includes babies. My own nieces, nephews, and grandchildren of course are great sources of happiness. But children anywhere, in the supermarket, airport, restaurants, playgrounds, always bring a smile to my face. They are often under-appreciated by those accompanying them, so I often try to bring a smile to their faces as well, making a silly face, whispering a bolstering word or just a grin.

2. Birds. Birding is one of my main pastimes, and I do it anywhere I am, including my backyard, where we often have large crowds at the birdfeeders, fountains, and in the big cottonwood. In the spring and summer I plant for them, and last summer's many different kinds of sunflowers brought flocks into the yard well into the fall.

3. Working in the garden. Working hard, getting dirty, sweating. In the spring and summer I work outside as much of every day as I can. Middle of the day in the full sun and heat is out, of course, but early morning and evenings are simply heaven. The hummingbirds keep me company as I work, so - there - that's two things at one time, garden and birds.

4. Rain. This one is a corollary to number three - as it is so dry here that I, along with all my plants, constantly yearn for rain. Whenever it actually rains, like this morning, I am so happy I often go out and dance in it. Well, not this morning, as it was quite too cold to dance. But my heart was dancing. We've had no rain all winter, so this week's storms are manna for all our dormant roots.

5. Green chile. This is strictly a Southwestern source of happiness. Since coming to NM I have discovered the joys of cooking with green chile, and am constantly experimenting. I love how it smells here in the fall, with green chile roasting in the parking lots of every market and farm stand. It is a wonderful smell, one that you can practically taste, saying ahhhhhhhhhhhh: tamales! stew! soups! warmth in the winter's cold!

6. Meaningful Work. I've done a lot of things in my life, but mostly I have taught. For the past ten years I have taught English to speakers of other languages, starting in Delaware, continuing here in NM. My current job is at the University of NM, teaching immigrant employees of the University, service employees for the most part - and wonderful people with such enthusiasm for learning this language, for helping their children with their schoolwork, for becoming citizens. This is work that makes me happy into the marrow of my bones. I love it.

7. Singing. Best of all is singing with a group, but so far I haven 't found a compatible group to sing with here. I tried one out, but didn't enjoy the music selections, and they expected the singers to learn parts a lot faster than I am capable of. So, I just put in a CD and sing along at the top of my lungs, or make up words to the tunes that are always playing on the jukebox of my mind. I sing when I'm happy, and it makes me happy to sing, so it's a full circle.

8. New Socks Especially in the winter, when my feet are always cold. We just got a bunch of delicious warm new boot socks on sale, they're great colors, soft and cozy, and every time I put on a brand new pair my feet and I hum with happiness.

9. Farmers' Markets. There is almost nothing more beautiful than the piles and basketfuls of freshly harvested vegetables and fruits, braids of garlic, loaves of bread, jars of jam, artisan cheeses, handmade pastas that show up every weekend, and some of the weekdays, at the growers' markets here in town. Even on a day when I don't purchase anything, just browsing the stalls, talking to the growers, smelling the earthy richness of it all makes an hour or two at the market a peak experience.

10. The Moon, which is currently a beautiful silver waxing crescent. It's not hard at all for me to understand why people once worshipped the moon - I think I probably still do worship it, in my fashion. The full moon rising over the mountains in the winter has been the subject of much famous photography, but nothing beats the breathtaking experience of seeing it in person.

Heading For The Hills

2010-01-19T10:25:00.018-07:00

In order to get away and stay away for lengthy periods of time from the TV, computer, radio (in the car I listen to NPR all the time), and news of postearthquake Haiti, we spent most of the weekend hiking in the Sandia foothills. Ever since last Tuesday (has it already been an entire week?) I have been utterly compelled to stay connected to every bit of news I can find, and just needed some surcease. Unlike the dead, injured, homeless Haitians, I have the enormous good fortune of being able to seek surcease from my merely virtual connection to this catastrophe.

And as an aside I must say here that if this doesn't make us all stop in our tracks and realize our good fortune to live in this affluent, well-equipped country, what ever will? In 1989 San Francisco suffered an earthquake of a similar magnitude, in which sixty some people were killed, and nearly 4000 injured. Compare the numbers coming out of Haiti now (the estimate of the dead now stands at 200,000) with those, and the mind boggles. I could write an unending post on the tragedy that is Haiti, but other people are doing it elsewhere far better than I could. I tend to be a chronic complainer about many petty things, but please God, I will be able to realize that I actually have next to nothing in my life worthy of complaint.

Back to our escape from the media. I'm still on winter break, and Gail is off on Fridays, the weekend weather was gorgeous, and we had nothing beyond a few minor errands to take care of. So, we got out the guidebooks we've been accumulating since we moved out here, made up some (a lot!) trail mix, and plotted three hikes up into the foothills of the mountains that hover over the eastern edge of the city. We have made lesser attempts to hike a few of the many trails up there, but they were really more on the order of long walks. This time we did three day-hikes, each one longer and more ambitious than the preceding, and felt exuberantly proud of ourselves, not to mention how good we felt just from all that exercise, sunshine and fresh air. I have found the mountains to be a source of healing and comfort ever since the first time we traveled out here, which was just after the death of a very dear friend. The enormity of the space out here in the West, like the enormity of the ocean, makes clear how very small we humans really are - lets me know that I really am (as Lily Tomlin says in The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe,) only a Speck.

The summers are so hot here that the fall and winter are the only times we can bear to do this sort of thing. Plenty of other people hike all year round; our neighbors spend every weekend in the mountains hiking and camping. That's not gonna happen for us, but from now until the spring winds begin scouring us, and the heat starts pounding down, we're going to continue exploring the foothill trails that are so close to town; branching out to some of the closer state parks and some overnight camping as we grow braver. This proximity to natural recreation was one of the main reasons we moved here, besides proximity to the grandchildren in Denver, and it's time to start enjoying it. This weekend a friend is coming from Austin for a visit and our weekend nature adventure will be a birding trip south to the Bosque del Apache NWR. But of that, more later.

The Turning of the Wheel

2010-01-15T09:29:00.006-07:00

Well, the wheel of the year turns on towards spring, and I have to admit the winter holidays are really over and turn myself toward the task of taking down our decorations. This year, for the first time in at least twenty, we had a festive Yule tree, which because of our young cat, Sadie, we set up out in the front portal. We could see it through the big living room window, and enjoy it every time we came in or out of the house. Having it in the house would have been just too much for all of us, she would have had everything on the floor repeatedly all through the holidays. We chose a fairly small piñon pine, New Mexico's state tree, fresh from the hills around Taos, and had a wonderful time pulling out our ornaments and lights and putting them on our little tree. Because the tree was out in the cold air, there has been no drying out and dropping of needles; and it's still as fresh as when it started. After we take it down, it will become first a bird feeder, then mulch for the gardens.

The adornment I am most loathe to remove is the wreathe on the front door, pictured above. It's wound with a string of battery-operated tiny blue lights, and is such an upliftingly cheerful symbol of the wheel of life, the circle of the year, the cycles of nature. I often wonder how many people know how connected to our pagan origins the celebrated decor of contemporary Christmas
actually is? The greenery, the lights, including candles, ornaments, yule logs, all a faint remembrance of honoring of the sol invicta, the return of light, the hope of life continuing, the return of spring, the planting of a new year's crop, the turning of the wheel.

Before AOL trashed its Journals component, I wrote there in a journal I called "The Windmills of My Mind." I moved its contents over to Blogger when the Journals were closed out, but no longer show it as a public blog. I wrote several entries there on the ancient celebration of the Winter Solstice, including this one, from five years ago, on the evergreen wreath. I think it bears reposting here today, as I contemplate taking down our wreath, and moving on into the new year in both my heart and my actual life:

WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN ?

The wheel of the year has almost fully turned, and once again we approach the Solstice. Last year I wrote on the ancient traditions of Solstice through history, and all over the world. Now that my year has slowed down, and I have some time to think and write, I will return to this wonderful and rich treasury of lore. This time I want to focus on some of the themes and decorations still common at the winter holidays, show how they have come down through the ages from times and places when Nature was still recognized as a force and an influence upon our lives. Solstice of course celebrates the turning of the year, the return of the sun; the promise of light, warmth, life, overcoming darkness, cold and death.

Because I just unpacked and hung on our front door a lovely handmade wreath sent by a friend in Maine, I want to start with just that, the making and decorating of our homes with wreaths of evergreens. The wreath itself is in the shape of the oldest of symbols, the circle. A symbol to be found in every culture on the globe, from ancient times to the present. A symbol representing so many things, all of them related: the cycles of life, eternity, the goddess herself, death and rebirth, the moon, the sun. So, we make a circle to symbolize the rebirth of the year, the return of the sun, the unbroken cycle of life. We make it with evergreen boughs, branches from the trees that hold the promise of renewal in the depths of Winter. For our early ancestors the existence of plants that did not wither and die, drop their leaves and appear dead, with the onset of the long dark days of winter, served as a metaphor for the undying deities of the natural world. In nature religions every one of our familiar green branches has a meaning, a symbolism: pine, fir, cedar, juniper, all symbolize continuity of life, protection and prosperity. Holly symbolizes many things, among them the old solar year, protection and good luck.

So – don’t put up those plastic wreaths this year. Take your children, go out into the real world, cut boughs and branches of the evergreens that grow in your area (you can’t hurt them, the more you prune the more they grow), form them into the shapeof the wheel of the year. Place them on your doors, your walls, your altars, to celebrate the continuation of life, to ask for protection and prosperity. The colors red, green and white are the Druidic holiday colors – so, put holly berries and ribbons on that wreath, ask the Great Mother to help us through another turning of the wheel.

I would be remiss not to mention how the wreath has also transformed into a Christian symbol over the ages, through the lovely ceremony of the Advent wreath. Advent is the liturgical season of preparation for the birth of Christ, and here the wreath is a symbol of God, the eternal, and of eternal life in God. Four candles are placed on the wreath, three rose colored, one purple. The wreath usually has a place of honor at the middle of the family table, and one candle is lit each Sunday evening during Advent. We did this all through my Catholic childhood. I have to say that making and lighting the Advent wreath is one of my fondest holiday memories.

Our Ties to Haiti

2010-01-14T11:06:00.010-07:00

At the group blog WomenOn, I have posted some links for people looking to donate financially to help with the relief effort in Haiti. However, amazingly enough, over two million in donations for aid to Haiti has already been raised through our mobile phone accounts. Information has spread mainly through word of mouth on the internet social networks; and this method of helping out is easily available to anyone with an account with a major wireless carrier. NYT article with links to all necessary info here.

If, like most Americans, readers only know the contemporary history of this island nation, they probably know it, as Robert Parry notes in the first paragraph of his brief history of our early historical connection with Haiti:

... because of some natural disaster or a violent political upheaval, and the U.S. response is often paternalistic, if not tinged with a racist disdain for the country’s predominantly black population and its seemingly endless failure to escape cycles of crushing poverty.

Parry's article gives us an interesting glimpse of our country's little known early history with Haiti, history of which I was completely unaware. Haiti and America's Historic Debt.

I know of the twentieth century connections, the occupation of Haiti by American forces, from 1915 to 1934, under Woodrow Wilson, and the "peacekeeping" military mission in 1994, under Bill Clinton, but this early history involving Hamilton, Jefferson and Napoleon was entirely unknown. Perhaps at this time of devastating catastrophe, we can finally repay our historic debt to this country whose history began in slavery and bloodshed and continues in poverty and political strife. The current day Bill Clinton feels that there is hope for Haiti, even after this tragedy (What Haiti Needs) Let us hope that he is right.

(Crossposted to WomenOn.)

What's In Your Piles?

2010-01-12T11:16:00.020-07:00

This is something I used to do back in the AOL JournalLand days, when I had a good coterie of readers and, dare I say, virtual friends. I think I did this on The Bibliophiles, my book journal. It's a fun activity to do once in a while, see what interesting things we have in our various piles, how they change over time (or not). I just finished A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, and have some thoughts on it in my other blog, here. It's kind of a relief to turn to Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford as a less taxing read, the first book in my first pile. As it's winter and about my only outdoor activities are walking and hiking, my main offtime activity is reading - so there's quite a few piles around the house:

On the nightstand:

The Monster In The Box, Ruth Rendell
Alimentum; The Literature of Food, Issue 9
Owls and Other Fantasies, Mary Oliver
What We Eat When We Eat Alone, Deborah Madison/Patrick McFarlin
Wherever You Go, There You Are, Jon Kabat-Zinn
Deep Economy, Bill McKibben

By the couch:

Xeriscape Plant Guide, Denver Water
New Mexico Gardener's Guide, Judith Phillips
Native Texas Plants, Sally Wasowski
New Mexico Bird Finding Guide, NM Ornithological Society
Desert Wetlands, Niemeyer & Fleischner
Poems FromThe Cranes Two, Judith Roderick
The Quilts of Gee's Bend

And, worst - or best - of all, the pile of new books I've bought, or from the library, waiting to be read. I call this my "Reason to Keep Living" pile:

Too Much Happiness, Alice Munro
In The Kitchen, Monica Ali
Hardball, Sarah Paretsky
A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore
The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver
The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood. I started reading this one, before she came for an appearance at UNM, then set it aside when a flood of library books from my hold list showed up all at once. I will return to it when I get a library dry spell. (Cross-posted from WomenOn)

Reading A.S. Byatt, with correction added Jan. 12

2010-01-11T10:30:00.012-07:00

Because I've alluded to A.S. Byatt's latest novel, The Children's Book, in a couple of earlier posts on this blog, here and here, I feel I should perhaps provide a little more information, in case any readers might want to check it out themselves. Her 1990 novel, Possession, was hugely popular in both England and America, and won the prestigious Man Booker prize that year. My partner and I were running a women's guest house in North Truro, on Cape Cod at that time, and for a couple of years I found Possession in every room I went into to tidy or turn over. I didn't have time then to read such a large novel while working all the time (the way one does when one owns a guest house), but did finally take it on later.

Any adjectives I might choose sound trivial and trite when I use them to talk about that book, and again if I were to try to describe this latest, even longer and more complex, novel. Byatt's longer fiction is certainly not for everyone, with its massive infusions of historical, literary, and cultural information, its inclusions of writing within writing -letters, poetry, fable, in this new book also children's stories, all emanating from Byatt's astoundingly fertile powers of creation. As the Feminist Review says of the book: " it is a story within a story and is layers upon layers where so much is happening that the reader is afraid to blink her eye for fear of missing something important."

This novel was shortlisted for last year's Booker prize; although it didn't win - Alice Munro's new book of stories, Too Much Happiness, was the winner, and the next volume in the pile on my desk waiting to be read. (Jan. 12 Correction: Alice Munro won the Man Booker International Prize for 2009. A writer of whom I have never heard, HilaryMantel, won the Booker itself, for a novel called Wolf Hall. One I shall have to search out.) It is entirely beyond my powers to summarize this intertwining series of plots and characterizations; and the review that I find has managed to do that best is Her Dark Materials by Alex Clark in the British paper The Guardian. Another piece that served to enlighten and explain some things about the novel for me was this interview with A.S. Byatt herself from the Man Booker Prize website. I struggled with this book, but I must say it kept me enthralled, captivated in fact, for the two weeks it took me to read it. The first paragraph in Clark's review may give you a glimmering of how light a read this is not:

The moral seriousness of AS Byatt's fiction derives much from her concept of responsibility; and responsibility, for her, is most importantly the business of marshalling and applying one's intellect to every area of one's life. Her new novel, a staggeringly detailed and charged re-creation of the period between the end of the 19th century and the first world war, overflows with people attempting to define their responsibilities, whether to fulfil them or to evade them; with those in pursuit of enlightenment or seeking to manipulate it; and with some simply attempting to unearth who they are and what they should do to survive.

The Literature of Food

2010-01-10T09:12:00.013-07:00

We had an early dinner at the Nob Hill Flying Star on New Year's Eve, fabulous bowls of matzo ball soup and a shared slice of falling up cake. The food was, as always, delicious, the soup just what a cold evening needed, the cake a perfect celebration for a year's beginning. But as much as I love Flying Star's food, I may love their magazine rack more. I have always been a magazine addict, and this rack turns me into a slavering junkie. I could spend hours browsing, many more dollars than the budget allows, if I were given my head in this situation. I rarely buy the expensive magazines that are my favorites, literary journals, environmental and political philosophizing, cooking magazines. But, while warming my tummy with bread and soup, I picked up the current issue of a journal (well, bookazine, I see it's called on the website) I've glanced at, longingly, on previous visits: Alimentum; The Literature of Food. This issue, Number 9, had as its centerpiece an interview with Deborah Madison. It cost an astounding ten bucks. I began to read the interview, but it's hard to read while eating soup, and I gave up. But I couldn't leave that unfinished interview, and really wanted to see what the rest of the issue had to offer. I bought the magazine.

After finishing A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book yesterday, I was too entirely exhausted (both intellectually and physically), depleted, devastated and shell-shocked to start reading another book, so I took Alimentum to bed with me. I'm sort of saving the Madison interview for desert, but I read several poems and short stories as appetizers and first course. So far I'm not really impressed by the literary level of the work, but I have a ways to go before a final decision. The website gives only short excerpts of the pieces, which I find irritating. I'd find an entire piece or two a lot more indicative of the work as a whole than these little bits and pieces. The artwork, however, is wonderful. I might subscribe to it for that alone.

Deepfreeze Day

2010-01-07T11:29:00.006-07:00

It's miserably cold all over the land, especially in the Midwest, although the arctic air has dropped all the way down to Texas, it's also spreading through eastern New Mexico; and in Florida the crops are freezing, and iguanas are falling out of trees. Yes, apparently the cold-blooded reptiles become immobilized and lose their grip when the temps fall below forty. In honor of this wretched January weather, to make it a little more bearable, all I have to offer today is Mary Oliver's

Cold Poem

Cold now.
Close to the edge. Almost
unbearable. Clouds
bunch up and boil down
from the north of the white bear.
This tree-splitting morning
I dream of his fat tracks,
the lifesaving suet.

I think of summer with its luminous fruit,
blossoms rounding to berries, leaves,
handfuls of grain.

Maybe what cold is, is the time
we measure the love we have always had, secretly,
for our own bones, the hard knife-edged love
for the warm river of the I, beyond all else; maybe

that is what it means the beauty
of the blue shark cruising toward the tumbling seals.

In the season of snow,
in the immeasurable cold,
we grow cruel but honest; we keep
ourselves alive,
if we can, taking one after another
the necessary bodies of others, the many
crushed red flowers.

Edible Institute 2010

2010-01-06T10:05:00.017-07:00

I am so excited right now, it's hard to type. Do you live in one of the cities or areas covered in an Edible Communities magazine? These are all across the country, even a couple in Canada, and my closest is very close: Edible Santa Fe. I have been an aficcionada of this publication since I picked up my first issue, soon after we moved to New Mexico. I read every every word of every issue, then lovingly tuck them into a pile on top of the kitchen bookcase where my cookbooks are kept. The stated purpose of the publishers is this:

EDIBLE COMMUNITIES, INC. is a publishing and information services company that creates editorially rich, community-based, local-foods publications in distinct culinary regions throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. Through our publications, supporting websites, and events, we connect consumers with family farmers, growers, chefs, and food artisans of all kinds. We believe that every person has the right to affordable, fresh, healthful food on a daily basis and that knowing where our food comes from is a powerful thing. We are a for-profit, member-driven corporation - individuals who own our publications are local-foods advocates and residents of the communities they publish in - a business model that not only supports our values, but also preserves the integrity of our member publications and the communities we serve.

and they live up to every glowing word of that mission statement. It was in the pages of Edible Sta Fe that I first discovered Deborah Madison, who has fast become my favorite food and cookbook writer, and every issue brings information about a local farmer or food/wine producer whom I am delighted to meet and add to my growing store of local resources. So, yesterday while browsing the website, I came upon the announcement that later this month the first Edible Communities Institute will be held - be still my heart - right here in New Mexico. In Santa Fe, to be exact. At The Bishop's Lodge Ranch Resort Hotel & Spa, to be even more exact. If you follow the link do be sure to read the history of this place. If you are a Willa Cather fan you will already know some of it (A Death Comes for the Archbishop reader particularly.) This event is billed as: "a gathering of influential writers, thinkers and eaters celebrating sustainable ideas." And here is the announcement and agenda for the Institute, featuring an amazing roster of speakers and panelists, who will be discussing the issues that are currently closest to my heart, mind, and stomach: why sustainability matters, the importance of local and organic foods, the pushback of industrial agriculture, labor and human rights issues in the sustainable agriculture movement, and not the least of these, a panel on The Southwest Foodshed, Sustaining the Agricultural and Culinary Heritage of the Southwest, with Deborah Madison as one of the panelists.

I have to go now, make my online purchase of a ticket to this event, plan how I will explain the fifty buck extravagance to my partner, when we are sworn to a winter of belt-tightening. Don't worry, I'll think of something. Just getting a chance to go into the Bishop's Lodge is worth it to me. Then you throw in Tom Phillpott, Deborah Madison, Lisa Hamilton, and Fred Kirschenmann - how can I not go?

Not A Lot of Comfort or Joy for the Hungry

2010-01-04T10:07:00.012-07:00

The "holidaze" is finally over, and though it has been wonderful for both of us to be home, enjoying time to read fat novels by the fire, go to movies, take naps, cook hearty soups and stews, breads that make the house smell like heaven; I'm just as happy to leave the forced cheer that is endemic to this time well behind us. We don't do a lot of holiday shopping, but even the most trivial grocery store errand has an enforced accompaniment of tidings of comfort and joy, or sleigh bells ringing, snowmen melting. It begins soon after Halloween, and may not have ended yet; I won't know til I have to set foot in a commercial establishment.

Yet the truth is that for many in this the richest country on the planet, this period of several winter weeks is merely an extension of the pain they endure every day of the year. With more time to browse the Internet, read up on issues, I have become ever more aware over the holidays of the constant rise in what our government, unwilling to use the word "hunger," calls "food insecurity." While I have been cooking green chile stew, black-eyed peas, pumpkin bread, and albondigas soup, many families with small children have had only what they could glean at local foodbanks, or purchase with their food stamps.

The facts and figures on this are available to anyone who cares to find them; Feeding America, formerly America's Second Harvest, has a Hunger Factsheet that will provide a loud wakeup call to anyone who cares to read it. The New York Times has been running a series of articles on what they call The Safety Net, the most recent of which both deal with the growing dependence of many Americans on food stamps. The first, Food Stamp Use Soars, is scary enough, but the article published yesterday, Living on Nothing But Food Stamps, documenting the rise in the number of Americans who have no cash income whatsoever and are feeding themselves and their kids on their monthly food stamps alone, is way past frightening. This latter article includes interactive maps of the USA that will show you how your own state, and county, is faring on this issue. My state, New Mexico, has experienced a sharp rise in families living on food stamps, a fact that doesn't surprise me at all, as I recently learned that NM ranks third in states where children are receiving both breakfast and lunch on the school program that furnishes free meals to families in need of them.

I think this is a situation that we don't really comprehend, unless, or until, we are living in it, or in close touch with our local food banks, or choose to make the effort to find out the reality. Food banks are in desperate need of donations; all over the country they are falling short of the supplies they need to feed those who come to them for help. Feeding America has an action center, and a food bank locater, where you can get in touch with your local resources, either for help, to donate, or to volunteer. As little fondness as I have for WalMart, I have to note that they have recently donated 35 refrigerated trucks to Feeding America food banks across the country, including Roadrunner Rood Bank, my own local bank. As part of the truck donation, a full truck- load of food was also given to the food bank and included items such as applesauce, green beans, corn, oatmeal, peanut butter, jelly, macaroni and cheese, cereal and other items totaling more than 17,200 pounds food. It is estimated that the 35 trucks donated to food banks nationwide will help transport up to 52.5 million pounds of food every year.

Early this year Feeding America will release their latest report on hunger, Hunger in America 2010. It will be of great interest to see how the numbers have increased in this report since the last one done in 2006. The statistics will be frightening.
(Cross-posted from Women On)

Here's To Better, Greener, Healthier Days Ahead

2009-12-31T11:15:00.010-07:00

As we prepare to enter a new year, a new decade, many people are setting out their thoughts on the year and decade past. I have to agree with these words from one of my favorite news/opinion sites, Common Dreams, sent to me in a fund-raising email this morning:

Ten years ago tonight the world nervously awaited midnight. Y2K.

Would computers freak out as the new century began? Would the networked modern world grind to a halt?

Or would all those stockpiles of bottled water and canned food sit unused on cellar shelves?

Ten years later, we realize that it wasn't Y2K that we should have feared. It was the decade to come on the other side of midnight.

Big events stand out: The stolen election of 2000. Bush. Cheney. 9/11. War on Afghanistan. War on Iraq. Abu Ghraib. The Patriot Act. Guantánamo. Katrina. Economic collapse.

But even more disturbing were the slow-motion trends: Global warming. Foreign policies driven by fear. Too-big-to-fail corporations increasingly dominating our political system. Growing disparity between rich and poor. The privatization of our schools, prisons and military.

Farmer Monte of my favorite Albuquerque institution, Los Poblanos Organics, writes in a more hopeful vein:

I want to go on record and say that we needed this year. That we as a nation, and even as an international community, were living a gluttonous unsustainable lifestyle before we went on a diet in 2009.

A housing industry that was giving out loans to unqualified people (me being one of those people as I look back at my home purchase). A society that was living with a negative savings rate. And financial institutions with as much regulation as the island from Lord of the Flies. So in those regards, we needed a deflating year like 2009 just to get our heads back into reality(..I) am a firm believer that some of the best ideas come out of the most challenging of situations. When things are easy, we rarely find an amazing solution. It makes common sense though. We are creatures of the path of least resistance, we are creatures of fight or flight. Therefore, when things are easy, we choose the simpler path. We choose not to push ourselves.

But those are the old days. And out of the deflated ruins of that old economy a new one will and is emerging. My hope is that with these challenges, we will build back an economy that is more lean and more green. Energy has gotten to be expensive so being green has gotten to be a smart financial move for companies. With that, we all (including our planet) will be better off.

Not mentioned in these lists of woes is the global spread of the H1N1 virus. We can rejoice that it did not meet the worst expectations for it, and become the sort of plague that Garrison Keillor speaks of in his Writer's Almanac entry for today, with a quote from Samuel Pepys' Diary on this day in 1665:

"Thus ends this year, to my great joy, in this manner. I have raised my estate from 1300l. in this year to 4400l. I have got myself interest, I think, by my diligence [...] It is true we have gone through great melancholy because of the great plague [...] But now the plague is abated almost to nothing, and I intending to get to London as fast as I can. [...] I have never lived so merrily (besides that I never got so much) as I have done this plague time [...] and great store of dancings we have had at my cost (which I was willing to indulge myself and wife) at my lodgings. My whole family hath been well all this while, and all my friends I know of, saving my aunt Bell, who is dead, and some children of my cozen Sarah's, of the plague. But many of such as I know very well, dead; yet, to our great joy, the town fills apace, and shops begin to be open again. Pray God continue the plague's decrease! for that keeps the Court away from the place of business, and so all goes to rack as to publick matters, they at this distance not thinking of it."

1665 had been an awful year in London. The plague began to spread in April, with just a few people dead by the end of the month. But by August, 31,159 people died in that month alone. Overall, about 15 percent of London's population was killed. And Pepys believed that the death toll was even higher than recorded because he had heard first-hand that sometimes clerks were so overwhelmed with names that they didn't bother writing them all down.

In late June, King Charles II and his court left London for Oxford, and many rich people did the same, applying for "health certificates" and heading to country estates. A lot of the wealthy doctors went with them. By early July, Pepys had sent his mother and wife away to Woolwich, outside London. But he did not want to leave. He stayed in London to work, and he recorded in his diary how empty the streets were, with all the shops closed, and how sad it was to see corpses abandoned in the street or houses with red crosses on them and the words "Lord Have Mercy On Us" scrawled on the outside.

So, things could have been worse I suppose, these past years, and may yet be, in the coming year, coming decade, but we can be grateful that medical technology has kept us from corpses in the street. There is always hope. May anyone who reads this have good health, bountiful crops, improving finances, and copious joy in the year ahead.

Another Version of What To Do When It's Below Freezing

2009-12-30T12:33:00.004-07:00

Or, Ghosts of Christmasses Past

Once the huge Thanksgiving project was over, I felt a serious sense of anticlimax. We weren't going to have much of a winter holiday bustle; we shop for family gifts all year long, stockpile them in the office closet, so there wasn't much shopping to do, no trips to plan, and we wouldn't know if we were having any visitors until we saw the whites of their eyes. I had a few final classes between Thanksgiving and the end of the semester, so even that wasn't much of an occupation. Thus, a quandry: what to do with the long cold hours I can no longer spend outside gardening?

Fortunately I came across a pile of photo CDs when I was cleaning out a box of office stuff moved here from Delaware - and a new obsession was born. I spent many hours between Thanksgiving and Christmas transferring photos from the CDs onto my computer (they had been on an older computer, the laptop that was stolen soon after we moved to New Mexico) and then onto my photo storage/sharing site on Flickr. I think I finally have all of them on Flickr now, though I may find a few hanging around and take care of them later. It has been a wonderful trip through past happy times with friends and family, causing feelings of both joy and sorrow. I've put a link to my Flickr photos in the sidebar here, and would love to have visitors share them.

At the same time I was doing this, we were also working with paper photos from other unpacked boxes moved here three-and-a-half years ago, sorting them, copying some of them, then framing them to hang on walls, stand on shelves, in general have our faraway (in so many ways) family members close to us. It was quite strange living here for these years without photos in our living space, and what we have done to remedy this feels very very good.

Posole, A New Mexico Tradition

2009-12-29T11:37:00.013-07:00

Under my sidebar section called "Foodies" there is a photo of a pan of posole cooking on my stovetop last week. Posole is a sort of soup, or stew, of dried corn kernels, locally known as chicos, meat, onions, garlic, red or green chile, various herbs and spices. Just for fun I googled this dish today, and found interesting, and well-documented, historical facts about its origins. According to this Wikipedia article, they lie in ancient and startling Mexican (Aztec) religious tradition. The meat with which the corn was first cooked was human, from the bodies of prisoners of war after their hearts had been removed in ritual sacrifice, and the posole was eaten ceremonially by the entire community in a sort of special-occasion communion.

Today it is still a special-occasion food, eaten during the winter holidays, a dish of dried corn kernels (though many recipes call for the much blander canned hominy) locally known as chicos, red or green chile, onions, garlic and various spices. Since the arrival of the Spanish in Mexico in the fifteen hundreds, cannibalism was discontinued, officially anyway, and the traditional meat cooked into it is pork, although it is quite delicious made with chicken or turkey as well. I make it with turkey presently, though I hope we will eventually wean ourselves off even poultry.

We had lunch at Garcia's Kitchen the weekend before Christmas, where many customers were slurping down bowls of the traditional red chile/pork meat posole. This inspired me to go home and make a batch of green chile/turkey sausage posole for our friends who were to arrive that night, on their way to Santa Fe. I often use Bueno's frozen corn kernels. I also like to use blue corn dried kernels when I have them, though they take a good deal longer to cook. I first boil the corn for an hour or so, sauté chopped onion, minced garlic, and green chiles and add them to the simmering chicos. I add whatever stock, vegetable, chicken or turkey, I have on hand, cooked turkey meat,fresh cilantro, some mild red chile powder, a pinch of dried cumin, then let it simmer for as long as it takes. It is a food that only improves with time and its own interaction. The longer the flavors blend and mingle, the better it gets. I serve it with a choice of toppings: sour cream, avocado, more cilantro, grated cheese.

I hope you can get past my historical notes on the origins of this delicious winter meal and give it a try yourselves. There are a ton of recipes for Posole on the Internet, so just pick one that looks good and give it a try. Feel free to experiment, New Mexicans all have their own idiosyncratic recipes.

If you live where the basic ingredients of dried corn and chiles are not readily available, you can find them at these websites and have them shipped to you: This one is in Idaho, strangely enough, but they have it all: Purcell Mountain Farms. These folks have an Albuquerque address, so I assume that's where they are located: New Mexico Connection. Their catalogue looks like a treasure. The Bueno Foods' site also has both ingredients and recipes. You don't have to use the pigs' feet. I promise.

Winter Reading

2009-12-28T16:58:00.008-07:00

It's that deep waiting stillness that only comes before a storm. It's been dark and cloudy all day, with a chilly sunlight occasionally peeping through. The birds are ravenous - it's impossible to keep anything in the seed or the suet feeders; they are emptied as soon as I fill them. Most recently this afternoon I went out and liberally smeared the cottonwood's trunk with my favorite new find: bark butter. It's a product resembling peanut butter, and smelling strongly of peanuts too, but containing beef suet and corn as well as peanuts and peanut oil. I stir in some seed mix, then spread it on the tree bark, in much the same way you'd spread peanut butter on a sandwich. It has brought a whole new group of birds just outside the kitchen window: several different kinds of woodpeckers, chickadees, creepers, even a curvebilled thrasher shows up most days. I need to go out and do one more feeder refill before it's totally dark, or the crowd of finches, sparrows and doves that arrives at first light will be very angry with me. They know snow is on the way, and they're tanking up.

It has been truly cold in the Southwest, or at least here in New Mexico, through most of December. My sister and her family were planning on coming out for a Christmas visit, and they did actually pile into the car and set off across north central Texas, only to be stopped cold near Wichita Falls, by dangerously icy road conditions, which would only have gotten worse as they approached the Panhandle. Friends from Texas who were in Santa Fe for their winter vacation encountered the same conditions days later on their way back home. So, we're sitting tight for now, with a wonderful glut of very fat library books, and plenty of firewood. It's an embarras de richesse, for sure.

After a rocky beginning, I sped through John Irving's new opus, Last Night in Twisted River. (This is but one of a gazillion reviews, you could read them for as long as it takes to read the book. But the book is better reading.) The beginning put me off with a surplus of information about logging in the north woods of New Hampshire (of course New Hampshire, it's John Irving), a subject I care next to nothing about. But, I persisted, and soon fell into the narrative that began in the logging camps mid twentieth century, and carried me along, much like the river carries the logs, through fifty years of our less-than-glorious history. The protagonist is a writer, whose life and career clearly follow Irving's own history in many ways. The story is filled with most of Irving's familiar themes: New Hampshire, bears, Exeter, college teaching, strange sexual relationships, parentless children, father/son relationships, the constant knowledge that life is an accident waiting to happen. There is a wonderful new theme also running through the story, as we follow the writer's father's life and career from his beginnings as a logging camp mess cook to his final ownership of a gourmet restaurant in Brattleboro, Vt, we vicariously share Dominic's amazing repertoire of food categories, preparations, and menus. As one reviewer noted, it's not a book to read on an empty stomach. Or, I might add, when you have a houseful of holiday goodies that have been gifted upon you. If you have ever loved John Irving, and you have some time to curl up by a fire with a fleece throw and a cat or two, this book will keep you happy through some long winter afternoons.

Now I have started an even fatter book than Irving's, A.S. Byatt's new enormous novel, The Children's Book. I am a serious fan of Byatt's, not just the book that brought her a lot of attention some years back, Possession, but of her shorter novels and her wonderful short stories. I have loved her and her sister, Margaret Drabble, also a very literary writer, for many years now. We are all of an age, and I am very pleased that they have the stamina to continue writing books that will keep me reading well into my old age. It's too soon to say much about The Children's Book, (though it's already on the "Best of 2009" lists that are starting to appear) as I haven't gotten very far into it today. Time to make some soup, light a fire, settle in under the fleece and cats and start turning pages. Ahhhh, winter. And, Gail Godwin, Anne Tyler, Tracy Chevalier, and John Burdett all have new books!!

Hundreds Gather to Protest Global Warming

2009-12-22T10:41:00.001-07:00

Food and Books About It

2009-12-06T09:53:00.009-07:00

My apologies to the squeamish for the worm photo in my previous post. It's hard for me to understand squeamishness about worms, knowing how incredibly beneficial and important they are for the health of soil and gardens. My outdoor compost bin needs time to rest and work over the winter, so I have high hopes for this new outlet for the large amount of vegetable waste we seem to create in our everyday life of cooking and eating.

And vegetables are really what this post means to be about, not worms again. If anyone read my preThanksgiving post about what green vegetable I would prepare for the big feast, they might find a followup of interest. I was obsessing over the boringness of green beans, and my real desire to do the not-always-popular, especially with children, brussel sprouts. I was saved by a recipe in the (alas final) November issue of Gourmet Magazine for a dish with both vegetables, as well as chile and mint. I was putting green chile in one of the dressings (as well as chestnuts and dried cherries), and mint in the salad, so I chose to do pinon nuts and garlic with the green vegetables. Blanching the beans and sprouts in boiling salted water kept them fresh and green, then I sauteed them in olive oil with the nuts and garlic. It turned out to be one of the stars of the show. People who said they had never liked brussel sprouts before had second helpings, AND asked for the recipe. So, thank you Gourmet, and how I hate to see you go.

Today we are venturing out, as the daytime temps are finally rising above freezing, to see my favorite food writer and cookbook author, Deborah Madison, at Los Poblanos. She'll be signing her books, and I'll be right there in line with my two, Vegetable Soups from Deborah Madison's Kitchen, and Local Flavor: Cooking and Eating from America's Farmers' Markets. She has many more books, and in time I will be able to afford her magnum opus, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. There's plenty in the two I have to keep me busy for a good long time, however. If you like to read about food, and I have to confess I love nothing better than a good food writer, Local Flavor is a joy to just curl up in an armchair and read. Deborah will be doing her book signing in the Farm Store at Los Polanos Organics, and I hope for enough time to do some browsing in the store itelf. Los Poblanos is an incredibly beautiful place in the North Valley, which includes an inn and conference center as well as an organic farm providing bountiful boxes of produce (and now bread, meat and milk as well) to its CSA members. It may well be warm enough this afternoon for a good walk in the Bosque into the bargain. All in all, it sounds like a wonderful winter Sunday afternoon.