Winter As If the First Time

It's been a while, so this is going to be a long one. Winter hit me for the first time in my life without the cushion of central heat and other modern conveniences. Or money, for that matter. I felt for the first time the sense of urgency to batten down, finish projects, chop enough wood, and gather food before the snows and the crystal cold.

I worked a week of construction to fund propane tanks and flours sacks. I learned how to use an industrial nail gun and began to feel my body change with the new joys of labor to hasten and firm it further.

Also, the last few months have been an intense spirit homecoming as well. It began with a release, allowing myself to grieve. The financial hardships made me consider pawning my piano and Shevy continued to patiently talk me out of it. I finally actually set it up and played. Then I tearfully told him one evening, as the sun set on the mesas through Jo's kitchen window, that I missed playing and that I probably shouldn't sell the piano because music is my primary way of opening my heart. He didn't press the fact that this is what he had been telling me all along. I hadn't played in months, and I hadn't played very much for years. Not since the Armless Children production. He started to do reiki on my left shoulder, which has consistently given me pain since adolescence, and he said there was a black mass there in my chest. More specifically, it dawned on him that it was surrounding my heart. Afterwords, I home drove to my trailer, thinking of the dream I had last winter in which I was speared in the throat by a giant from the depths of a cave. He backed me into the ocean and I turned into a fish. I thought of the black mass as a scar of the wound in my throat, the silence, the silence that had taken me at times through the years into a dark part of myself and I wept behind the wheel watching the crescent moon rise. When I got to my trailer there was a message on the machine. My sister Shannon's cow, Annie, had her calf, a beautiful boy, Gustav.

A few days later I wrote a song and I haven't stopped writing songs since. Music helps me listen, to the birds, the trees. The woods asked me to listen and yet I also knew that I am not meant to walk into the woods to take something, some sort of meaning perhaps, but to give something. I felt strongly that I was meant to sing to the woods, to offer my voice as I had nothing else to give. I found myself terrified, but I sang facing East, greeting the day. I was embarrassed and afraid, even as I knew that I do not have to be afraid of offering and renewal through song. I met my old man in the woods. Not my father, but the adult me I look to as a guide. He said, go ahead and sing, what the hell are you afraid of? Now hardly anyone can get me to shut up. Grandfather Pine, thank you.

Shevy, Max and I finished building their hearth and chimney, the front porch deck, the composting toilet and the stony path to the front door. We moved the pop-up, the Spartan and the chickens to the new acreage on Great White Father Road. Thank you, Jo, for being so infinitely generous. We also have a pregnant pygmy goat, Tina Turner, and two pygmy/la mancha goat crosses, Nelly and Jorge thanks to Jo. She has also let us use her solar panels, so we're pretty well set up now. We have solar power, propane and wood heat, a composting toilet, big water tanks, and if we heat water on the stove, we can even take showers! The day we finished the hearth we went to a bona fide hog roasting up at Tony and Eden's across the valley, which was great fun after all this work setting up the trailer.

Genevieve, Max and I processed apples from one single tree in Ramah in an epic day of making applesauce and apple butter until the wee hours of the morning. Genevieve and I joked that in the city we stayed up past midnight going to shows and in the country we stay up late canning. It was a good laugh and we were quite delirious by the final batch. Afterwords, we still had baskets upon baskets of apples to use. I dried some of them and made apple pie filling to freeze and made up new recipes. So many apples that I wrote a song to honor the tree, called the Apple Tree of Ramah. You Tube posting of the song will come soon! We also made a batch of cherry mead! Yum!

An unexpectedly heavy snowstorm swept through just before Halloween. Our chainsaw wasn't running well to get much wood and I spent a morning sawing juniper by hand with the bow saw. We hadn't gone to the well in time before the blanket of snow trapped us in and so by the second day we were melting snow on the wood stove to drink! I thought it was rather fun and during the snow days I took up drawing again.

Mike and Genevieve left for Thanksgiving and had a few projects to finish before leaving town. I helped them finish the fence for their llama and pygora goats (amazingly cute and I fell in love with them), which we made old-west-style out of juniper limbs and hog wire. It's a good looking fence, if I may say so myself. Also, I helped Genevieve plant their fruit orchard of apples, cherries and apricots and learned a few things about fruit trees from her. I watched their animals and stayed in their vintage bus while they were away. Many things made themselves clear to me while I stayed on their beautiful hill, which lies on the edge of Candy Kitchen near the Zuni Reservation. I heard the elk and slowed down enough finally to feel how the land lived. I learned to cover my spit if I spat on the ground. I learned to walk softly and slowly enough to not need shoes among the rocks and cacti. I learned more about being in the land as much as I would be in myself, in my body, present and grounded. I watched how the red ants worked during the day. I watched how the moon sank like a celestial longboat through black waters, fleeing the wolf Manegarmr, son of Fenrir, as my Norse ancestors would have said. I felt the passage of time as a tree grows to the sky and earth, like Yggdrasil itself, like the corkscrew dance of planets in the cosmos, and how it lives more than it passes.

I drove back to Texas with Jo down to her family near San Antonio and met Ariel later that same day (after driving all night) at a cafe in Wimberly. Wimberly reminded me a little of Oregon, with it's cute little shops and creek-fed forested hills. I had the pleasure of meeting his friends and see the buffalo once more. The next day, the sun and warm breeze on the lake were mesmerizing. It felt like summer. I wrote a song on the shore, watching the water sparkle under the ducks and mating dragonflies. We wandered the grass with our shoes off, singing songs and telling stories. That night we built a fire and stayed out under the skies in our sleeping bags, watching the Geminid Meteors streak across the night.

The next day we drove up to Denton and stayed with Ma and Gramma. The first thing Ariel and I saw was the giant gas rig they erected to drill right behind Gramma's house. The papers have been talking about it and people are making noise, but it infuriates me that it is still legal to drill that close to residential areas. It is not acceptable. More on this later...

Cardo's Farm is always evolving and so much has happened in the last few years. The Denton farmer's market is expanding and more people seem to want to get involved. I got to meet the bull calf, Gustav. And I got to be a part of chicken harvest, which involved 30 or so chickens. We had a plucker, which made it easier. This time, the logistics and flow of cleaning the birds really sunk in and yet it is still difficult spiritually. It felt good to gather and offer thanks and prayer for the birds beforehand. I am still processing this cycle.

It's Christmas day and I'm about to start helping Ma make yummy foods, so I'll wrap this up real quick like. All in all, this winter has transformed me in ways I had not expected and I am finding that every moment is another step towards myself, my calling. That's a damn good feeling. Thank you friends and family, I love you more than words can describe.

Squirrel Hunts and Pie Chomps

Another sunny day in Candy Kitchen.

Harvest Festival was Saturday!

After so long, Max was finally picked as a pie judge (a highly coveted position indeed) for the pie contest this year. He ate almost a whole pie. The winning pie, apple-strawberry-raspberry, got auctioned off for fifty bucks. Shevy bid on a massive zucchini in the vegetable auction (it won largest veggie, I think) and won it for four dollars. It was quite fun! Max rolled into the pick-up as we left, belching and moaning with the enormity of his position, made official with the "Judge" ribbon in gold lettering.

We're almost finished remodeling the kitchen in Max and Shevy's mobile home. We put up the last of the ceiling yesterday. Now all we have to do is paint, install the woodstove and lay the flooring for the living room.

Lots of rains have come through and since the cats and dogs are all gone, mice and squirrels have taken to rummaging in my pantry for midnight snacks. I have had virtually no sleep. Yesterday morning I found a bold, fat squirrel kicking back in the pantry. I shooed it, and as it walked out the door like it owned the place, the girth of it even caught Max's eyes. He cried out in alarm, "There it is! There it is! Oh, my God, it's huge!" He barely escaped with his life as the enormous squirrel threw it's weight out the door rudely, barreling past Max like a barbarian.

Upon closer inspection of the empty glass milk bottle sitting on the floor of the pantry, I found a fairly fresh, organic free-range mouse...

It's high time to adopt kittens.

Whirlwind Through the West

Shevy and I drove Northwest last week all the way to Portland from Candy Kitchen, just for long enough to pick up my things. We had been scattered with remodeling the trailer, moving and Shevy's school in Gallup. We hadn't had a full nights rest in a while. We pretty much left without too much thought, not packing a tent, for example, or enough food. Shevy had been craving summer sausage for a good while, so that was packed with some cheese, peanut butter and a loaf of honey bread I had made the night before.

The weather was pleasant enough, but on our heels was the remnants of the storm Jimena. North of Gallup until Colorado is all desolate desert. Shiprock looms out of the sea of dust like a primeval castle of Gods. Past Mesa Verde and Canyon of the Ancients is a more lush string of little pioneer towns. Monticello, Utah was under construction and smelled heavily of asphalt. Somewhere along this route was an amazing anti-meth mural.

On the way to Moab, we stopped near Church Rock to make lunch and check if the rear axle was leaking too much gear oil out of the right seal. A cop had stopped someone across the highway. We sliced some sausage and cheese to snack on. Pulling out back on the highway, Shevy forgot to signal and so the cop pulled us over. Neither of us had showered in no one knows how long and I hadn't brushed my teeth in a few days. The cop came up on my side, even though Shevy was driving, I suppose because of the narrow shoulder. I was very conscious of how I must have smelled. The cop asked Shevy to step into his patrol car to talk. They talked a good while and I wanted a cigarette for the first time in weeks. The cop came back up to my window and said he smelled weed. He asked if we had smoked weed in the car. The look on my face must have been incredulous to the point of disrespect. I laughed, probably rolled my eyes, said no, then held up the large summer sausage and asked, "You sure it's not the sausage?" He actually laughed. No, he had smelled that too. Shevy had consented to a search, since he knew there was nothing in the car and it would take less time than refusing, so the cop asked me to step out of the vehicle and the asked if there was anything in my pockets. I said no, but felt that I did have something, something that looked very much like a pipe from the outside. "Yes, I have this," I said, brandishing my pee tube. "What's that?" A little roughness to his tone there. "A pee tube." I held it to my crotch and stuck my pelvis out like I was peeing. I laughed hard on the inside, probably letting surface a smirk, and stood aside while he half-heartedly searched the car. He let us go with a just a warning. I laughed almost to Salt Lake City over the fact that in one interaction I waved two phallic objects at a cop.

Utah is gorgeous, full of carved red sandstone, forests and rivers. We reached Salt Lake City after dark and I cried through it, as I always do. Something about the place makes me feel so sad. Maybe it has to do with the world's largest open pit mine there? Energetically, the place is like the Swamp of Sadness for me. We put on power metal and trucked almost all the way to Boise before fatigue was overtaking me. We pulled over in a rest stop and slept in the bed of the truck until dawn.

We reached the Oregon rainforest in the afternoon. I felt strong nostalgia and longing for this place that has become such a deep part of my heart as the rain came down into the green black of the mossy forest.

I had missed my friends so much! They are all so wonderful! We had good times eating, watching movies, drinking beer at the bluffs and playing music. Thank you all for being so wonderful, helping me store my things (Ro, Spence and Casey, thank you so very much!) and sharing. I can hardly wait to come back in the summer.

Shevy and I packed my things. We only stayed two nights and one full day. I didn't want to leave so fast, but things had to be done back home. That and I'm nearly broke now and (stars above!) the city is expensive. We whirled in and whirled out and I hardly had time to even think about the fact that I was, in essence, finally moving away from the city. I had mixed feelings because I have such good friends here and there are still things I feel are unfinished here. But I will return to visit, and soon.

On the trip back we slept under the trees in Dry Canyon, Utah in the open air, since we didn't have a tent. All day I was dreading all the possibilities: condensation on my sleeping bag, campsites being full, sounds, bears, etcetera, thinking it was going to be a terrible rest. It was the best night of sleep I've had in weeks. It was cozy, dry, quiet and we were the only ones in the whole campground. Another lesson in letting assumptions go. The rest of the drive went smoothly. We watched hawks soar through mesas and bighorn sheep walk over the mountains.

The rain from Jimena flooded Ramah but Candy Kitchen was just a little damp. It's been raining since I returned and last night was an amazing lightning storm of molten gold sunset with purple lightning bolts zapping through deep ocean blue clouds.

Yesterday, Shevy and Max went to an Albuquerque flea market for a wood burning stove. They brought home a beautiful little Vermont Castings for only 500 bucks! Also, Mike and Dean gifted me a gas spitting 4X4 Subaru that backfires every time I down shift. It's so fun to drive! I was looking forward to mudding and this morning I got the chance, sliding from one side of the road to the other, coming to rest in the driveway like a drifting boat. Fantastic!

The chickens have been laying again, the wolves howling often and the birds are bringing a symphony of fall. I made two batches of wheat tortillas from scratch and pulled up the dog fence by hand. My hands are bruised and sore, but it was a good feeling to use my body until exhaustion.

I'm looking forward to the winter: wood chopping, more afternoons with the pot of tea, my Underwood and Oxford dictionary. I can feel the Halloween chill starting in the air and can almost taste the breads baked inside the little snow submarine under Zuni stars.

I left the city, finally, after so long.

An Unearthed Appreciation for Water

Today I took a luxurious two minute shower, turning off the water while scrubbing with soap.

It was much needed after scraping mold and rat poo from the vintage trailer we are remodeling.

The other day we loaded around 150 gallons of water into the water tank, bucket by bucket by bucket, hand hoisted. That's not the usual routine, but we didn't have the water pump.

I thank the ground and the rain for every drop. And thanks to the monkey who invented pumps. It sure does take a hell of a lot longer to move water without them.

Settling in for the Season

August 2009 011
Originally uploaded by Billy von Raven

Yes, the time has come to land for the winter. After much deliberation and procrastination, I have decided to stay here in Candy Kitchen, New Mexico. I will be coming to Portland for one weekend only to get my books and musical instruments. My brothers have been so kind to hand me their beautiful 1950 Spartan trailer they are living in now. We are moving to a larger piece of land on a hill. They have just bought a fifty foot mobile home and our autumn project will be restoring it.

The winter here is like some place in Narnia: snowy, starry and frigid. I'm very excited to spend it here, making books and drawing. I will be keeping in touch through mail primarily, because the land we are moving to will not have electricity and I no longer have a cell phone. There is very little reception out here anyways.

Seeing the Milky Way every night keeps me sane and joyful. When told my dear friend Amanda the other night about the stars, I finally understood myself, in saying it out loud, that much of my survival of childhood depended on sneaking outside at night just to look at the stars and know that there was something bigger out there, something expansive and beyond all the pettiness and cruelty, the confusion and claustrophobia. Something without judgment, something that merely is, without definition and pretense. The stars are my mother and father.

Today I walked through the oak grove in the sun, through the red rocks and barrel cactus and let myself delight in being now, without being caught in ideas about what I should be doing and producing or the future. Just living. It is so beautiful that it hurts.

El Morro, Atsinna, Dragonflies and Thunder

This morning we climbed El Morro, which means 'the bluff' or 'the headland', a bulwark of red and white sandstone standing against the sapphire sky. At the top was a partially excavated Zuni pueblo, called Atsinna.



A Zuni ranger popped out from under the half-buried first floor and greeted us. He told us that over a thousand of his people once lived there and that they travelled first from the Grand Canyon and went all through the West. Each time they moved, it is because they were given a message by the Sun or the Moon. He spoke of the Red-Gold and Turquoise Dragonflies as spiritual messengers. We stood in the middle of the world, he said, what the White Man calls the Continental Divide, the saddle in the North. Other rangers, he explained, would tell people to stay away from this, don't touch that, don't sit on the ruins, but not him, he invites, beckons people to join and listen. He said sometimes people came and told him they were one-quarter Navajo or one-eighth Lakota and that they would ask him what he was. He shook his head. "We are all mixed." He pressed his firm, flat hand against his heart. "It is here that matters." He told us he was restoring the pueblo because now that it has been excavated they must repair it frequently to keep it from eroding. Grandmother, Grandfather or Sister is here in these rooms, watching and laughing, he says, they can see me but I can't see them. They knew of this time now, when the world would become heavy, too heavy for the gods to hold, because there would be too many people. There would be a great time of scarcity and sometimes the future is sad, but he would continue to teach people, tell the children the stories of his Grandmothers, all the children, regardless of their skin, because this is what he must do. He talked to us a long while and finally said he must end his break.

We thanked him and ventured down and around the box canyon. We were thirsty and hot. A pool under the bluffs harbored bees and dragonflies, just past the petroglyphs of rams, hands and snakes. In a very short while after coming down from the ancient Atsinna, in time for us to take shelter at Inscription Rock Cafe, the monsoon poured down cool rain and hail on the desert.

After a Monsoon at Dusk

The silence is deep enough that you can hear the plants grow and the heart leave footsteps in silt. The pinesap and sagebrush fill the air. A lone crow or dove whoo calls and breaks. The white-jade of sage reaches in delicate tendrils above the dark green. Little bulbs of flowers rise like drops in shocks of white, yellow, lavender, orange and red. The blond grasses shoot out of dark roots and hold rain like pearls. Sounds envelop you in the silence, such that the pack of wolves seems to be in the sunset instead of in the purple darkening East. The soil grows alive in hillocks of fungus, moss and succulents. Pine sprigs hold droplets underneath, gleaming spiders' eyes in the last grey of twilight. Night falls like feathery down.

A Funeral of Birds

My brother Shevy picked me up from Zuni in the midst of ominous clouds, but the rain didn't break as we drove up into Candy Kitchen through the green pines and red sandstone. When we pulled into their acre under the piñons, I noticed a dying baby swallow in the bed of the truck. She had fallen out of a nest, perhaps, in Zuni where they darted around the eaves of the roofs. She was severely stunned and too young to make it without her mother. She opened her black eyes and beak a few times weakly, sometimes sputtering and spasming. I didn't have the courage to kill her and when I tried to set her in a tree, she would seize violently until she started to fall. Knowing the kitten was prowling, I set her at the foot of a tree. The kitten would have a play at hunting.

I felt regret at not having the courage to kill the bird. Max consoled me, "The kitten got hunting practice. Babies killing babies."




I was not consoled. I had never taken an animal's life myself and had wished I had, to spare her the minutes of kitten torture before she died.

The next afternoon, some of our neighbors spontaneously visited all at once and convened in the driveway. The UPS truck pulled in randomly at the same time to deliver Shevy's chainmail supplies. The dogs barked briefly, but without enough urgency to warn us of the coyote passing across the road with a red young chicken in its mouth. We marveled at how close it got at such a leisurely pace, as if flaunting the kill. Shevy and Max don't have guns and the coyote disappeared in the pines to the South. After a check of the chicken houses, we determined it was our neighbor's chicken.

Young Mike, who lives down the road, had a violent, rapist rooster to kill for a neighbor and Shevy and Max had been thinking of taking their rooster Spud as well, as he's been pecking the hens quite rudely. We decided to meet here to harvest the birds the next evening.

Shevy had to work that afternoon so Max and I distracted ourselves with projects. We built a deck in front of the trailer, put a loaf in the bread machine and cleaned up the kitchen.






In addition to the rapist, there was another hen who has been eating eggs, so she was also collected. Mike and I drove them ceremoniously in a banged-up hearse he and Genevieve had just fixed up. As we drove back to Shevy and Max's, he told me it had carried 27 bodies. A good number.

I was the only one who had been a part of chicken harvest, plucking and eviscerating, but none of us had killed our own meat before. We dallied, preparing nachos and listening to metal. The trailer filled with the ring and sheen of sharpening knives. Mike brought a knife his grandfather had made by hand. That was to be the knife we would use to take the birds. We were children who had not yet shed blood, so we had to steel our nerves for the kill. We decided to ritually carry the raping and baby-eating birds out of the hearse. Mike donned an executioner hood made from a Navajo Pride flour bag with eye holes cut. Shevy hooked his chainmail belt on with a cut-off Punisher skull tee. Max wrapped a cloak about his shoulders. With the Darth Vader theme playing out of the trailer, Max and Shevy marched the chickens around back and Mike came up in the hood, carrying a sword. It was unplanned and we laughed nervously. Shevy tried to open the cage and pull the cock out, but he protested in a flurry of squawks and feathers. We suspended the ritual, growing nervous now, and prepared for the actual harvest. The chickens knew their fate and that this was only ritual.




We had waited long enough. Dusk was coming. Shevy and Max decided to save Spud for another day as it was getting late and we already had two to butcher.

We cut a hole out of the corner of the executioner hood to turn it into a kill bag. A table was set with a cutting board and construction plastic. Max covered the bottom of a 5 gallon bucket with earth to catch the blood and feathers. I knew it was up to me to start it, having had the most experience. My voice was beginning to shake but I opened the cage and grasped the rooster firmly from the back. It let out a bloodcurdling scream, which scared Max off to the the pop-up at the back of the land. I whispered to it as we put it into the bag.

I was thankful Mike was courageous enough, without speaking, to take his grandfather's knife first. I held the rooster and, after a few starts and fits from the bird, Mike slit its throat. Dots of dark velvet blood hit his face. We breathed in the evening, Shevy above us, Mike holding his head and I his body. This was opening us all to the doorway in which all flesh eaters of our ancestors passed through. Shevy was in a trance, eyes open, concentrating on calming the bird as he crossed over into the spirit world. Mike and I spoke of meat eating, awareness, a few laughs broke the fear.

The vat of water was still on the flame, so we bled out the cock and went on the the hen. It was my turn to handle the knife. The hen was calm. I looked her in the eye and massaged her throat, then drew the knife through her neck. The cut wasn't very deep but she didn't protest much and ruby blood spilled downward. I drew the blade across again to hasten her death and apologized to her out loud. My nerves nearly gave and sadness welled in my eyes, but my intent grew hard and clear like the knife. Mike and I held her until she bled out and the last shudder of life left her. I went into the trailer to ask Max to bring the water. I dunked the birds and began to show Mike how to clean them, starting with the rooster. (I will leave out the details of evisceration, but for those who haven't done it and are interested, the best site I've seen so far is the blog on How to Butcher a Chicken.)

Dark came upon us and it was Mike's turn to clean the hen. The coyotes began to howl and I looked Mike in the eyes and laughed. Shevy brought out a lantern. Their crops were full of grain, since the neighbors who sent them to us didn't know to fast the chickens before harvest. It was messy and we were inexperienced. The hen had a fully formed egg with a soft proto-shell and yolks at various stages and sizes clinging to the back of her ribcage. We stood mesmerized before her. Since she had been eating her own eggs and the eggs of her friends, her liver was yellow and she was mostly bright yellow fat.

It was well after dark when we finished. Mike and Shevy went to bury the bucket of blood, guts and feathers out West behind the land for the coyotes: an offering of sorts to let our chickens alone. Max and I cleaned up the site. He dumped the vat of fatty, bloody water on the turnips. As wolves howled from the Sanctuary to the East, we washed up at the water tank on the shed deck, the grey water going into the blood bucket to rinse it. Shevy then dumped the bucket away to the North. He came back with a quartz crystal spear he found there and placed it on the table where we slaughtered.

Mike bid us farewell and we sat in the trailer for a while, mostly silent, until almost midnight. Shevy said to me, "You don't look so good."

I hesitated. "I'm processing...that was my first kill."

He nodded. "Oh, I didn't know."

We eventually shuffled off to bed, warning each other we might be kept up by coyotes. Half-asleep, continually I reminded myself we cleaned everything up. Through the night, I heard wolves and coyotes yipping and howling and kept smelling wafts of bird fat and death.

In the morning I awoke with a heavy humility. I had looked a soul in the eyes and took its life. For the first time in this body, I felt a sense of adulthood. I placed the quartz under the piñon pine where we spilled the birds blood. Sunday we will feast on chicken and dumplings, BBQ chicken and greens, and give thanks again.

Dancing and the Night Adventure

I have been reading Zinn and writing my zine, cooped up in this Federal housing on the Zuni Reservation for weeks. Shevy and Max came over and I began to spazz about how silly it was that the carpet was white in a desert filled with red sand and just how on earth the woman who lives here can keep the carpet so white with a dog, a baby and a toddler. I wanted to have the house in the same condition they left it in, but I am simply not a neurotic cleaner. I'm actually a poor cleaner. I think a little dirt and dust is great. But I am neurotic about doing a good job, so I started to scrub the carpet insanely and wailing loudly about how all the mother must do is clean this god-forsaken carpet. I couldn't seem to get one speck of dust out if it. Shevy and Max tried to calm me and took me out of the house for the first time since I've been here. The dog Guinness has severe separation anxiety and so my instructions were to crate him if I left, so he wouldn't pee on everything, destroy blinds, or try to run after the car. This is the main reason I haven't left until now, as during the day it's much too hot to crate him. So I crated Guinness in the backyard and we went off to Ramah to céilí dance.

Céilí is Irish social dancing, a little like square dancing, in sets of 2 partners. We learned the Siege of Ennis and the Fairy Reel. I hadn't had so much fun in I can't remember when! Though it was quite funny, because my gender was confusing to some of the folks and céilí has traditionally specific roles for boys and girls. Shevy drank a bit of Jameson and I drove us back to Zuni in his pickup. They were going to stay the night with me and drive to Gallup in the morning to pick up Sparkles, who was getting his balls chopped up. Shevy was a little tipsy on whiskey and explained his plan for telling Candy Kitchen that I was trans. I thought it was highly amusing, since publicly supporting my decision to be trans in his small rural community would be a testing of the waters, since neither he nor Max is out to most his neighbors there.

When we got to the house in Zuni I was laughing and went out back to let Guinness out when I saw the busted open empty crate and no Guinness. My stomach fell. I called for him, driving the pickup around the Reservation, while Shevy cleaned and gutted trout to fry up for dinner. I grabbed a flashlight and took off in the moonlight through the valley between the mesas to the East. I walked all around almost to the lake, the silvery moonlit grass sticking in my socks. There was no sign of Guinness and the dogs on the Reservation were uncannily quiet. I heard faint coyotes to the North. I sat with Shevy and Max, eating in relative silence, and recalled that he had no collar. We waited, lounging and digesting wordlessly. Shevy and Max finally went to bed.

It was one in the morning and I put on a pot of coffee. In dismay, I formulated what I would say to the couple if their dog didn't come back. I sat in the yard drinking coffee, jumping at every sound and softly calling the dog's name. I was about halfway through the coffee when I heard whining around the side of the house. I called for Guinness and I heard a clamor over the fence. Guinness bounded up grinning like a dog, covered in mud. I squealed with relief, almost in tears. He jumped inside and around all over the white carpet, mud practically flinging, and I was never so glad that the goddamn carpet was getting dirty.

A New Place, A New Way

My time in Zuni is almost up. Two more weeks and I'll be going back to stay with my brother for a bit until I ride a train Northwest. This desert I'll miss sorely.

The beautiful swallows have built a nest at the corner of the house, which the cat, Luna, watches with predatory constance on the window sill, her tail swishing in violent bursts.

Rains come in huge, quenching drops from heavy thunderclouds riding the blue like dark chariots.

Bulwarks of red striped sandstone, millions of years old, rise on either side of the valley. Sky riders have passage on rainbows that arc into the valley at nearly every rain.

Dawn turns the plains at the feet of the mesas into molten gold, the near-white grasses shimmering with a brightness that nears pain, like the true form of a god.

The warbles of great elder ravens can be heard amongst the pine and juniper, whose language is more ancient than the trees and stature is as tall as a human child. They fly as strong as kestrels and hawks, their wings nearly as wide as a human is tall.

Lizards and snakes scurry across the pink sand, through gnarled shrubs, scraggly grasses and spiked cacti.

And finally, after dusk is the blackness, the jet of galactic dust clouds even blacker than the sky itself, and the stars that sparkle on the night waters. Stars that cannot be seen under the electric web of the city. Stars which I will return to, first to see again with these eyes, then to greet me when the Valkyries take me to their halls...

Until then, I will walk through the streets of a city on the edge of the Empire, to gather my strength and will, gather my knowledge and skill, gather my allies and return to the hills with a band of heathen queers to live the way we choose, to live with the hills instead of off of them, despite the calls and comforts of the Imperial Cities...

Great-Great-Great Gramps

I started reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States again and it prompted me to do a little research on the reasons why my family left Germany one hundred fifty years ago.




Young Ernest Gottfied in the Midst of Revolution and Civil War

All I know about Ernest Gottfied Schmieding, my great-great-great grampa, are basics: when and where he was born, married and died. Also, that his maternal grandfather was a paper-maker and his paternal grandfather was a merchant. The rest is historical conjecture. He was born in Herne, Germany in the year 1836. Herne is in the Westphalia (roughly translates to Western Plains) region of Northwest Germany, around the same latitude as London, and fairly close to the Netherlands. Herne is on Emscher, a tributary of the Rhein, in the Ruhr Area, which is now the fourth largest urban area in Europe, after London, Moscow and Paris. It has been called an industrial complex. This is what it looks like today:




The Ruhr, at the time of Ernest's birth, was afire in the the Industrial Revolution, with mines and factories sprouting everywhere, mainly coal and steel. Before the Industrial Revolution, people had been farmers for at least eight hundred years. A horse market fair had been established in the 15th century there, and today it has grown into a full-blown carnival fest called Cranger Kirmes, the second biggest fair in Germany after Oktoberfest. Last year, in 2008, 4.7 million people attended the 110,000 square metre fairgrounds, earning it the nickname of "most crowded fair in the world".




Some Pagan Musings

The Pagan Saxons were the ethnic natives of Westphalia, who fought the invading Franks and also the conversion to Christianity. After a hundred years of attempted conversion, they were finally and brutally converted by Charlemagne in the 8th century, who destroyed Irminsul, their giant pillar or world tree, sacred to either Ziu (Tyr) or Wodan (Odin). Bees, whose honey was made into mead, were also sacred in the Irminsul symbol, representing the tree stumps where they made their wild hives.




After a reign of nearly a thousand years, The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation declined and finally dissolved in the Napoleonic Wars thirty years before Ernest's birth. Napoleon raged across Europe and set his youngest brother Jérôme-Napoléon Bonaparte as puppet King of Westphalia. When Napoleon was defeated by the Prussians and the British, the Congress of Vienna established the German Confederacy, which was a conglomeration of 39 states and 4 city states, the most powerful of which were under the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. Others were under the jurisdiction of the Kings of Denmark, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Bavaria, and Saxony along with other lesser German Dukes.


Revolution




Herne was under Prussian rule in the Province of Westphalia when Ernest was born. The people were poor, oppressed and censored. The Industrial Revolution made working conditions terrible. Cholera outbreaks and famine were spreading. When Ernest was twelve years old, in 1848, revolution broke out like fire across all of Europe.

The people of Germany demanded freedom of the press, free elections, a constitution of basic rights, the right to assemble, the right to arm themselves and trial by jury. In February, 1848, news of French Revolutionary victories spread to Germany. In March, the city dwellers demonstrated and the peasants rose against their still feudal states. What came to be called the March Revolution began. In Berlin alone, hundreds of demonstrators were shot. Within months, however, work was begun in Frankfurt on establishing general elections and the drafting of a constitution. The Verfassung des Deutschen Reiches (Constitution of the German Empire) was passed about a year later. However, within a few years, the rights were being undermined and revolutionaries were executed or imprisoned for lengthy terms. Unification was imminent and tensions between the Austrian Empire and the Prussians were rising. In 1866, when Ernest was 30, civil war broke out. The Prussians were at an economic and military advantage, with extensive railroad systems, needle guns and fast loading rifles. Prussian rule was inevitable.


Staten Island




Ernest fled to the United States, reached Staten Island and married nineteen-year-old New-York-born native Anna Ophelia Greene. Hopefully, Ernest didn't have any illusions about the United States. Maybe he wasn't aware that the States were still in the aftermath of American Civil War that ended the year before. True, slavery had been abolished, but working conditions were not a whole lot better. You would work 18-hour-days and get paid maybe $3 a week. They probably lived in overcrowded tenement housing, some of which still had no indoor plumbing and no windows, just a pump and an outhouse for over a hundred people to share. Thousands died from unsanitary conditions.




Ernest and Anna Ophelia started to have children. Workers were granted an eight-hour day after a three month strike of 100,000 in New York. But the rich got richer, Rockefeller founded Standard Oil and became America's first billionaire, and the poor were being laid off, evicted or killed in heaps of trash and sewer by the hundreds and thousands. In 1873 the country slumped into a depression. The following year in New York City workers assembled in protest and police responded with brutality. Women and children were stampeded by fleeing protesters. Bystanders were clubbed. Thousands more went on railroad strikes. Police again attacked, shooting and bludgeoning protesters in the skulls.

Ernest and Ophelia left the country for Ontario, Canada for at least ten years to escape the slums and sweatshops of New York, but eventually came back to settle in the United States in the Shelby Township on the Eastern shore of Lake Michigan. The biggest industry in Shelby was metal. The Industrial Revolution was in full swing and working conditions in the iron mines and factories were still unsanitary and inhumane. Ernest and Anna had six kids to feed.

But in 1871, three years after the birth of their first child Charles Thomas, my great-great-grampa, Germany was united under Wilhem I, Emperor of the Prussian Second Reich.

Even though times were tough in the States, Ernest had escaped and spared his grandchildren the horrors of the Third Reich to come decades later.

The Monsoons are upon Zuni

Thunder is galloping in from Defiance Plateau. The wind is whistling between the stucco houses. The rain comes in waves, the sound indistinguishable from the wind-swept trees. It is four-thiry in the afternoon. They are right on time.

I saw the strange centipede again this morning. The yellow goat's beard seedheads, which look like large dandelion seedheads, are in full bloom. I sat behind the corn and squash this morning to draw a charcoal of the mesas behind Blackrock Reservoir, which is dry but verdant. The scanner here doesn't seem to work with the computer, otherwise I would have posted the drawing.

I've been sprouting adzuki and lentils, so I steamed some and made tostadas on fried corn tortillas with cheese, cumin and chili powder. They were tasty-fried-delightful.

Filled with too much caffeine and a bit human-starved (three-and-a-half days since I've interacted with one), I galloped and skipped to Finnish-folk-death metal, giggling and pretending I was a unicorn. I'm laughing out loud recounting this. I must have been inspired by the two or more double sky-wide rainbows that have appeared to me over the past few days.

The rains are subsiding. They'll most likely be back at the same time tomorrow or the next.

The photo was taken by David Bazan about a kilometer south of here. It is a Zuni cemetary.

and the con-men...

Yesterday a dumpy white dude in jeans knocked on the door.

"Hi! Are you the owner of the house?" He was holding a can of Glade.

"Nope, I'm just house sitting."

"Oh, cuz if you were the owner of the house I could shampoo your carpets!"

I looked at him with puzzlement, wondering how he'd do that exactly with a can of Glade, but I just smiled and shook my head.

"Ok, thanks! Have a good day!"

Later at dusk a young good-looking Zuni knocked on the door. He had tattoos and a CD in his hand. He spoke nervously.

"Hi, I was...I'm wondering if you would like to...I'm selling my paintings."

"You know, I'm house sitting for this family and I don't have any cash."

"Oh. Ok. Can I have a drink of water?"

I wasn't going to deny him a drink of water and, while I was aware of the disparity in that the white family I'm sitting for has thousands of dollars worth of electronics and hundreds of dollars worth of liquor while the local youth go door to door for a little cash, I still wasn't going to let him in the house.

I made an excuse as I shut the screen door behind me. "There's a dog."

I came back out with a glass of water which he finished quickly.

"Thanks."

"You're welcome."

"Thanks. You too." He didn't hear what I said and was already walking away.

The Double Rainbow Over the Storm and Power Flickers in the Uranium Capital of the World

Last night the edges of Andres, the first named storm of the season, bore all the way up here to Zuni, New Mexico. Andres itself is about 1,200 miles south, off the Pacific coast of Mexico, and may develop in to a full-fledged hurricane. The storm whipped up wind, spattered rain, and dropped strange fiery polyps into the sunset. A titan double rainbow filled the entire sky, while the mesas behind were aflame with the dusklight.

The power flickered and turned on the shorted-out jacuzzi on the back porch. Shevy and Max were over and we didn't know what the sound was at first. We lifted the cover to see the swirling water around the jets. The water was cold and the smell of chlorine was overpowering. We decided that even if the jacuzzi was working, we wouldn't want to expose our bodies to that much chlorine.

It seemed the storm was over and night had fallen, when the power began flickering on and off. Neighbors cheered and whooped war cries every time the power died. After four or five flickers the power went out for good. Shevy informed me that power companies were notorious out around the Reservations. Not surprising.

The power came back on in the middle of the night, blinding me in bed. Luna, the cat was out all night hunting mice so I couldn't sleep, having had explicit instructions from my hosts to keep her in at night from the noisy, roving packs of wild dogs, whose barks (and yelps of the domesticated dogs desiring to join them) kept me up just as much. At sunrise, Luna nonchalantly galloped up near a destroyed and de-limbed mouse as I watered the corn.

Today, I learned that Grants, about 75 miles east of here and around fifty miles from my brother's land, was once the Uranium Capital of the World. I knew the proximity of the Trinity Site, the first atomic blast in the largest military installation in the United States, the White Sands Missile Range. I didn't know that it was (and we are) so close to the largest uranium deposits in the nation. Through the 1950's to the 1980's the area was the largest producer of uranium in the world. The miners were, of course, mostly Navajo, Zuni, Mexican and black. The first one to discover the uranium in 1950, a young Navajo named Paddy Martinez, worked as an impoverished miner scout under the railroad industry until he died, while earning corporations a killing. The operations boomed, busted, saw another boom after the 1973 Oil Embargo, and started winding down in the 1980's with falling uranium prices. The mines have mostly been closed since but in the last couple of years, uranium mining corporations have been trying to move back in to New Mexico. They are meeting a huge opposition from the Tribes, whose sacred sites are in some of the proposed mining areas. In fact, in January, Strathmore Minerals Corp. announced to its shareholders:

Strathmore believes that Roca Honda may be one of the best undeveloped uranium deposits in the United States. The New Mexico Operations office was opened in Santa Fe in 2005 and permitting activities for Roca Honda began in 2006. The project attracted Sumitomo Corporation of Japan and a joint venture agreement was signed in July, 2007. An ongoing permitting effort and feasibility study is underway.

Strathmore and Sumitomo are going in together 60/40, respectively.

And just a few weeks ago, Uranium Resources, Inc. announced intentions to file a petition for a review on whether or not a proposed site in Churchrock, New Mexico is Indian Country and therefore under the jurisdiction of a permit from the Environmental Protection Agency.

Grants, New Mexico is now mostly a prison town, running most of the state's prison systems, but they seem eager to get back into the lucrative business of uranium.

Robert Gallegos, once a miner in Grants, published this poem in the 1982 collection, Ambrosia Lake:

we live and die to mine
to eat as we are eaten

in the mine there is the music
of the train
and the whistle of the miner
as he walks down the track

deep in the stope there is a song
whose verses are buried in the muck
and the slusher keeps humming
while the skips knock on the guiderails
as they go up and down the shaft

it's just a shallow mine
this open grave
wherein will rest a miner
until nothing is left but bone
white as the day moon.

Metal and the Black Night

I've spent my time the last few days humbly, reading in the corn garden overlooking the mesas, writing, or, embarrassingly, on the Internet or working out on my host's Bowflex machine listening to metal. I remember seeing them on infomercials and I always wanted to try one out. They're pretty ingenious and fun, like a whole gym in one machine.

I got hold of a Zuni metal band I found on Myspace called Corrupted Vision that plays around the Reservation and they invited me to a house party next week down in the village. I was so excited that I could hardly sleep. So I set up my typewriter on the dining room table and started writing a fairy tale, The Warlord's Daughter, about a beautiful princess born without a womb who overthrows her father. A good father's day tale.

I tried to go to bed around one in the morning, turned out the light and everything, but Guinness the dog needed to go out to pee, so I got up, put on a pot of coffee and like a true bachelor tore into a half-baked batch of brownies the mother of the house had left me. I opened the door to let Guinness out and the black night sucked me out, even though I was shivering in my briefs. The Milky Way stunned me as if cymbals were crashing through the sky. The dust lane loomed through the heavens like a dark sword surrounded with the gossamer filaments of the Orion Arm. The moon is nearly new. Meteors sparked down the edges of the sky. Star clusters (whose light left them when Pangaea on Earth began to split) appeared to my naked eyes. Jupiter's bright disc looked to truly have girth before the points that were the stars.

As coyotes and wild packs of dogs wailed and yipped in the distant bluffs, I thought again how I truly literally cannot see my place in the universe in the city.

The Zuni, A:shiwi

Nestled in the red banded mesas of Northwestern New Mexico is the Zuni Pueblo, largest of New Mexico's nineteen Pueblos and, being geographically isolated, the most traditional. The Zuni, like the Hopi and other Pueblo Peoples, descended from the Ancient People, sometimes known as the Anasazi. Culturally and linguistically, the Zuñi (according to the Spanish) or A:shiwi (their tribal name, Shi'wi, meaning “the flesh”) are unique among the People probably because of their isolation.

The Zuni have lived in this area for at least 1,300 years. When the Spanish invaded around five hundred years ago, led by none other than the tyrant Coronado, the Zuni lived in six different villages, but after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, the Zuni retreated to the top of the mesa Dowa Yalanne, Corn Mountain, for twelve years. After the return of the Spanish and a "truce" offered by the general Diego de Varga in charge of the reconquest they came down from Dowa Yalanne and established the present day Pueblo, Halona:wa known simply as the Zuni Pueblo.

Through the continuous attempts of Christianization first by the Catholic Spaniards and later the Mormon and Presbyterian homesteaders, the Zuni have remained autonomous and deeply spiritual. The People of Halonawa are mostly artisans of silver, ceramic and fetishes. The snake and horny toad fetishes my mother bought in Gallup when I told her I was trans were made by a Zuni artist. The snake and horny toad actually appeared to me at dawn the day I was to return to Texas.

Beginning on the full moon, the A:shiwi began their annual fasting in preparation for the summer solstice, called Deshkwi, in which no money can be exchanged. A few days before I arrived, the A:shiwi danced the solstice Rain Dances.

Shevy drove me to Black Rock, a "suburb" of federal housing four miles outside the Zuni Village so called because of the outlying fields of rough volcanic igneous. I will be house sitting for a family who works with the hospital literally up the street. Everything is red except the deep azure of the sky, the ground, the mesas, the houses, the rock half walls and community buildings. From their yard, you can see a dried up reservoir to the East (Yuna:wik'o, Wolf) and to the South (Donashi, Badger) sits the sacred Dowa Yalanne, Corn Mountain, or DY according to the white people. Corn Mountain is a two mile walk from the house.

The father of the household, an osteopath at the hospital, got home late and had to return to the hospital to finish paperwork. He informed me that many of the patients he receives have been beaten to a pulp, mostly from domestic violence, or have complications from alcohol, such as cirrhosis.

At the end of the night, the mother told me that "They really like heavy metal here." Apparently, metal bands play in their garages up and down the street.

I silently rejoiced. How very like home this would be.

The rain woke me this morning, pouring from the downspouts. The midsummer Dances called forth the green. The swallows dipped and glided around the house. I put on coffee and saw young Zuni running through the tall grasses before the red and green mesas, down the foot trails that run throughout the whole area. A Zuni Spirit came to me, a strange centipede with tall spidery legs like an Asian Dragon. The insect clamored toward my toes and then away to the corner of the room.

I pulled a book from the shelf and read of the Spanish Missions, Our Lady of Sorrows, one of which I remember seeing late one night on the way to Candy Kitchen and being spooked like hell. My sister, Sashenka and I had planned to camp in the Manzano Mountains State Park. But it was late at night and the cemetaries and missions that were nestled in with the brown camping signs were haunted with an evil that spooked us so terribly that we decided to drive though the night to Shevy and Max's instead of staying there. This book finally told me why these missions haunted us so. The Native People were enslaved to build these missions, inspired by fear with hanging galleries and whipping posts.

Staring out at dawn on the mesas, I could not help but mourn. But the memories of last night's Rainbow Maidens, sacred also to my Scandinavian ancestors before they too, much longer ago, were subjected as mere savage Pagans, danced in the same sky before the Zuni Mountains. The Rainbow Maidens reminded me of the great Strength.

Flight to New Mexico

Ma and I arrived at the DFW airport, which is literally the size of Manhattan, early enough to get turned around in the clover weave of terminals and not be late for the flight. We finally reached my terminal and I checked my guitar and backpack right on the street. I bid farewell to Ma and went on through Security.

As my Smith Corona passed through Security, the woman screening flagged me down and asked me to step aside with her. The guy behind me joked, "Whatchu got in there? Samurai swords?"

"Yeah, not too many people use these anymore." I replied.



The Security personnel were friendly and curious. "What is that? Oh, a typewriter? How do you open it? Are you a writer? How old is this thing? Do they still sell ink ribbons for these things?"

It passed the time as they wanded it for potential bombs and bullets, all the while the intercom's insipidly pleasant female voice warned of the High Terrorist Threat Level. "All unattended luggage will be confiscated by Airport Police." The disturbing reality of this Big Brother in airports is always surreal for me.

By the time I was finished with Security and reached my Gate, they were already boarding my group. We buckled in for the flight and the soothing female voice on in intercom stated that we would be landing in Albuquerque in about an hour and forty minutes with the lovely temperature of 64 degrees. Having dealt with the first rounds of near 100 degree Texan weather, all passengers in the plane, including myself, sighed contentedly.


Indeed, the clouds were gentle and cool, with Albuquerque subdued and surrounded by blooming desert mountains. The Century cacti are in full gorgeous bloom. On the way to Candy Kitchen, my brothers and I stopped for a while at a rock shop called Mama's Minerals. Shevy had to pick up jewelry supplies, so we spent a good while browsing. Max and I talked him into getting some hand-carved skull for amulets.

The drive home was pleasant and rainy. They have a new wooden sign at the corner of Sunburst Lane. The gardens that I helped plant before I left in the late spring are sprouting up. I met the new kitten, Aspen, who is a little adorable terror. Shevy made beef fajitas and they caught me up on the latest country gossip.



The pop-up camper is Queen Squishy Cat's abode now, which pleases her because she no longer has to share a trailer with two other cats. She slept with me all night and was very satisfied with getting absolutely all the attention.

This morning we ate fresh bread and jam for breakfast. I stepped out of the trailer with my mug of Yuban coffee and smelled the juniper and sand, sagebrush and wild flowers. Fiddles and lilting voices floated out of the trailer, recalling ancestors from across the Atlantic.

Shevy said in earnest that he missed me and Max gave me a Finntroll shirt, his form of affection. Love welled up in me like blood from a mortal wound. More than any place I've been, this place feels like home.

The wind whispers tales from across the Divide through the pines. The wolves howl at night under the piercing stars. Beetles crawl through the shadows of the gnarled trees, through scraggly orchards and rock-lined beds of kale, cabbage and spinach. The flaming wildflowers are firing up all around the rock shrine circle, erected by my brothers for the ancient Norse deities.

Shevy just made me an amulet strung with leather cord out of one of the skulls and fossils he got yesterday.



Tomorrow I go to Zuni to see the house and family where I will be care-taking a garden, a cat and a dog for the next month.

Texas Rangers Game and the Sunday Brunch Culminating in a Motorcycle Ride

Saturday Amanda's dad Brad gave us tickets to the Texas Rangers game in Arlington. The Rangers played the LA Dodgers. I had never been to a baseball game before. Sara, Chris, Amanda and I all drove down together. We pigged out on Sonic beforehand. I had chili cheese tots and felt vaguely poisoned with sodium and meat product. But it was good. The Stadium was huge, and walking up in throngs of Texan sports fans, hearing loudspeakers and the Star Spangled Banner, I was struck by the overwhelming feeling of history. Here I was, a country heathen not so well disguised in the midst of the citizens of the Empire in the Coliseum. Between my obvious queer appearances and Sara's loud remarks making fun of the war and some things about Iranians, the large redneck sitting next to Amanda was squirming in his seat. Amanda told Sara to pipe down, "We're in Texas!"

The game was slow. After four innings no one scored. Sara and I mocked the corn syrup content of the margarita drinks being sold by the walking vendors. She said something to the effect of feeling like she was getting diabetes just watching the people eat. One of the lights wouldn't come on so the game was delayed. We entertained ourselves with paper fans folded out of the baseball program. We bounced an alternating oompa dance to the baseball organ. Finally three scantily clad young girls ran out onto the green to toss free shirts at the restless crowd. More cheers erupted than sounded for the actual game. Sara and I donned elitist musketeer accents and said silly things like, "Unhand your shirt, wench!" But no shirts were tossed our way.

An hour and a half later the lights still weren't on so we became bored and left to go drink at home and watch the lightning to the north. Via internet phone Chris retrieved that the Dodgers won 3 to 1 with one home run each. All in all, we had a fantastic time.

Sunday morning Ma knocked on my door announcing the commencement of brunch-making. I helped her make cheddar biscuits while she cooked off bacon, potatoes and eggs. Her boyfriend Gary joined us to eat. It was delicious. The best meal I've had so far, though I have been sampling some tasty Texas wares such as enchiladas, chicken-fried steak, BBQ and fried catfish. My mouth is still watering.

Mom invited me to take a ride with Gary on the motorcycle. I accepted. With my mother calling "Hold on!" we rode off to see the country roads west of Denton. The wind was cool on the sweltering day. The sun beat down and wafted up from the cycle at every stop. Sweat beaded on my back and chest. We rode through wildflowers and past streams. Butterflies and birds flew around us. We stopped to pick horsemint for Ma. He joked about popping a wheelie and I wished he would have. A great blue heron took off in flight at a stream next to us. On the way home he joked that I should jump off a block before and pretend I fell off to Ma. I hopped off ungracefully and presented the mint to Ma.

A nice end and beginning to the week. A nice farewell to Texas, for in two days I fly to New Mexico.

Sired in Storms

My sister came over last evening with a twelve pack. I'm leaving Texas again in a week. A vague sense of urgency comes over me when I'm about to leave family. I have to keep reminding myself to stay present instead of going over all the things I feel I must do before getting on the plane or the train West.

It was well before dusk when the sky began to darken as we talked over Tecate and through drags of Bugler and Bali Shag. Old fears, old shames, old regrets began to unknot themselves slowly as we spoke. Little whips of wind started up. Lightning flashed in the distance, an odd golden light came from somewhere beyond the clouds. Each flash of lightning left a quick and true smile on my sister's face.

My mother drove up and parked just as we were speaking of the tribulations by fire in which our family was forged. She walked up, sat down. Gramma walked out with the poodle in her arms. Thunder rumbled. We spoke of our blood bond that was smelted in such a furnace that siblings of other families remarked on our powerful alliance with each other. This bond would grow more powerful as we continue to open to one another, as we continue learning to use the hammers and blades we were smithed into for creation rather than destruction or rather than carrying ourselves without use, as if our vigorous inception was a only a burden.

Lightning cracked and the thunderclap came fast behind it. The wind began to rise and out of trees arose the ascending wail of the storm siren. "What does that mean?" my sister vocalized. I said something about a tornado warning. Mom told me to check the weather radar before shutting down the computer. We dashed indoors and there was no tornado, but a wall of high winds and lightning that had already knocked out power, tree limbs and traffic signals. An oil well had been struck by lightning.

We battened down anything that could be blown away, scattering here and there. The rain came down in torrential sheets and the trees began to bow before the wind. I raised my arms to the sky, beamed and yelled out loud, "Now this is rain!" Laughing as the downpour drenched us to the skin, Shannon and I ran around to the back of the house to see the gutter spout cascade an absurd amount of waterfall into the back porch, which was already a few inches deep in water. We came inside sopping wet, slapping drops on the brick floor. We toweled and changed.

The front passed us quickly. We ordered pizza and ran for another twelve pack. Mom announced leaving for her boyfriend's house. She kissed Gramma on the forehead and Gramma mumbled disapprovingly, "Now hurry back." When Mom was driving away, Gramma muttered, "Boyfriends. You can't live with 'em, you can't live without 'em." Shannon and I laughed.

We ate and drank and smoked, listening to tremors of thunder, watching the storm die down and the sun set. Gramma went to bed. My sister looked into my eyes and in her smile was her heart. The beauty overwhelmed me and I spilled over in gentle tears.

We Unashamedly Villainous and Wicked Heathens

A talk with a dear friend this morning led to the roots of the word heathen. She had heard the word mostly in a socio-political context without the religious connotations. I looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary and reacquainted myself with the etymology. I looked into similar words: heretic, villain, vulgar, wicked and pagan, to be exact. All except heretic (which comes from Greek āίρετικός, meaning able to choose) have roots in words meaning someone from the country, a rustic, a farmer, a peasant.

The word heathen, dating to at least 971, is the oldest as far as being used to mean a non-Christian. From the OED,

A. adj. 1. Applied to persons or races whose religion is neither Christian, Jewish, nor Muslim; pagan; Gentile. In earlier times applied also to Muslims; but in modern usage, for the most part, restricted to those holding polytheistic beliefs, esp. when uncivilized or uncultured.

The word has generally been assumed to be a direct derivative of Gothic hai{th}i, HEATH, as if ‘dweller on the heath’, taken as a kind of loose rendering of L. pāgānus (orig. ‘villager, rustic’, later, after Christianity became the religion of the towns, while the ancient deities were still retained in rural districts, ‘pagan, heathen’).

The first known recording of word pagan as being a non-christian heathen hearkens from around 1440 in Morte Arture. It is from the classical Latin pāgānus, meaning of or belonging to a country community. It's earlier forms are payen and paynim, meaning the same thing, recorded in a Kentish Sermon around 1275. The word itself probably dates from the 4th century, further back than heathen, but was used before in the Roman Empire to mean just a countryman or civilian.

Vulgar(from Latin vulgus, meaning common people) and villain (from Latin villa, country house, i.e. one from a country house) date from the 14th century. The word wicked (derived from OE wíc, town, village or farm) was first found recorded around 1275, not surprisingly, as an adjective for wifman (wickede wifman).

Well, hell, I'm proud to be among cuntry folk!

The Indigenous Norse

This is a great blog on the indigenous Nordic people called Saami. The music can be overwhelming, but it's incredibly well-researched, though sometimes translated confusingly. It's multi-lingual and packed with references and photos. Fun! I just wish I could read half the links...

The Saami

My brother in New Mexico is practicing Nordic shamanism. Next time someone says "I have a problem with European Pagans practicing shamanism, isn't that appropriating Native American culture?" I shall refer them to this blog, which says among other things, "Rock carvings and rock paintings indicate that Shaman practicing in the Nordic and the rest of the Saami areas go back to the Neolithic period and even further."

They even used a drum, called runebomme, and a striking Thors hammer rune-carved of bone!

Here's the post on shamanism:

Saami Shamans

And just what, you may ask, do these interludes of science and history have to do with Western Rambling? It helps me put the present in context. Then I can look back later and figure out why exactly a week in the Texas Hill Country in a cabin lit with oil lamps and watered with rainwater catchment, while buffalo grunt outside, made me think of my ancient ancestors in Scandinavia...well, really, it makes sense.

Pappy's Guitars and Cypress Valley, Texas

My Ma and I drove down to stay with my brother at Cypress Valley Canopy Tours, where he is so lucky to be running a farm. The Texas roads were exciting.



Cypress Valley is a beautiful place, nestled in the Hill Country west of Austin and near the Pedernales River. The creek bed is overgrown with palm ferns and old growth cypress trees, littered with fossils and quartz.

My brother has a cabin out there in a field next to the buffalo with his own (scorpion and hornet infested) outhouse. We used a shovel to dig holes for our business.






I found myself enamored with the buffalo, as if I was seeing an old friend for the first time in centuries. Zeus, who cannot be seen in all his glory, came down to the field as a buffalo, and I was open-mouthed and paralyzed as this god stood before me.



And the farm: My brother Ariel has planted the Three Sisters: corn, squash and beans, as well as tomatoes, eggplant, and an assortment of other vegetables. He raises chickens, two goslings, four top bar bee hives, and helps care for four horses. Every Saturday he takes his produce to the Austin Farmer's Market. I helped him plant, lay irrigation, feed the animals and mulch some beds.







Bees! Yay!



A thunderstorm moved in the night after Ma left and my brother and I stayed up late talking and listening as the wind thrashed the aluminum roof and thunder rolled through the sky. Ariel has an outdoor shower on his porch which I happily used when he was off running errands.

I got to take a zip line tour of the canopy and jump into the lake like Tarzan on a rope!





On a more personal note, just before we came down to the Hill Country, an old family friend had just returned the heirloom Les Paul guitar that our father had promised to my brother Ariel. In a briefly emotional moment, Ariel got to play the guitar for the first time in years.




Likewise, Ariel had a guitar of our father's that I had always wanted to play, a hollow-bodied electric. Ariel never played it on account of having a handmade Rosas from Spain. Ariel entrusted it to me and I took it back with me on the bus.



Thanks, dude. I love you.