The Beautiful Black Hills
September 9, 2011 § 2 Comments
So we went to the Black Hills. This family vacation had been talked about for probably two or three years before we were able to make it happen. We missed each other so much this time around – especially me, stranded way out here in the Wild West – so my sister and mother and I started talking about it in mid-winter and with great determination and schedule-manipulating succeeded in gathering the family for a week of fun. Hooray!
All Midwest kids, it seems, go to see The Four Faces at some point. It’s a classic family vacation. We went when I was about ten, all us kids leggy and curious and adventurous. We were all at getting-along ages and we remembered it as The Best Vacation Ever. So what would it be like now that we’re all adults?
It turned out to be fabulous.
(Note: my sis and her husband John get the credit for all these photos, since I’d let my battery die half the time and failed to live up to my tentative new photographer identity. Thanks, Elena and John! You are stars.)
One of the days was wonderfully cool and overcast, so it was a good day for driving through Custer State Park. Everyone fell in love with the place. I felt somehow both giddy and content, wearing a fleece and drinking coffee and wandering around when we stopped to explore, as we tend to do.
We made friends with the buffalo (I know, bison, but nobody says that).
We made even better friends with the “beggin’ burros.” Everyone else seemed afraid to get out of the car. We weren’t. The burros liked us a lot.
We climbed and climbed and climbed on rocks! Needles Highway was especially exciting.
One of the days we went to Bear Country USA, which I didn’t remember as having so many animals, and especially so many bears, and best of all, baby bears wrestling to their hearts’ content. I wanted to cuddle one. Like a lot. Dad said to my sister and me, “That’s why these rails are really here. It’s not to keep the cubs in – it’s to keep people like you out!” Yeah . . . good point.
Part of me always feels a little uncomfortable with wild animals in human-controlled spaces, a.k.a. captivity, but here’s a fact I learned while there: the life expectancy of a bear doubles in captivity (20-40 years) as opposed to in the wild (10-20 years). Wow.
Then there was Crazy Horse, and of course Mount Rushmore – it is awesome how close they let you get to Mount Rushmore now.
I have to admit that part of me isn’t totally sure about all this business of humans manipulating nature (with dynamite!) to make what we perceive as important art. I can’t help it – I studied these sorts of things in college. Still, we humans also manipulate nature to grow food, to plant flower gardens and orchards, to make towns and cities and recreation areas, which are other perhaps more benign yet also, in their own way, artistic projects, many of them good. I don’t have a stance to take, but it’s something to consider: what is our right as human beings in this place? What is the right of the place itself?
At both of the mountain carvings, I find myself nudged towards contemplation: about the past, about politics, about purpose and perception. Something to visit, for sure! Dare to think. Conclude what you will.
Some days, we were just content hanging out at the campgrounds. We loved our locations (we stayed at two different places), our tent site, our cabin, the pool, and the view. And oh, boy, especially the bounce pad at the second campground! Usually tiny little kids were all over it, but one afternoon it happened to be empty and our family of grown-ups had a grand old time.
Of course, we ate splendidly. But that will get a post all its own. Stay tuned.
The best of all of this, of course, was being with each other. It felt like each minute had to be hung onto, fully savored, noted in the mind and heart. Family. We are not perfect but we belong with each other, we love each other, and things are just better when we are close by.
The second best thing was the beauty of that country. It somehow felt familiar and yet wild. In so many places the trees and the rocks made shadow and quiet, the way they came together on the landscape. The open meadows had us all catching our breath, and then breathing more deeply, that clean air and the wind all in our ears. “How beautiful. It’s just so beautiful,” my mother kept saying.
It was.
Seeds and sky
September 7, 2011 § Leave a comment
“Keep your eyes clean and your ears quiet and your mind serene. Breathe God’s air. Work, if you can, under His sky.” – Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
A favorite book on a favorite subject
September 5, 2011 § Leave a comment
As I was writing the previous post, and thinking about good words in the world, I happened to remember this book. It is the book that made me want to try my hand at nonfiction when I was adamantly going to be a young adult fiction writer. I am so glad. This book is written in a way that reminds you of snow falling in a dark night. There is something quietly powerful, quietly beautiful. Read it.
The Rural Life by Verlyn Klinkenborg
Measuring
September 5, 2011 § Leave a comment
The pictures and stories from the Black Hills adventures are still coming. I haven’t forgotten. I’ve just been focusing on other things, and I want to spend a nice good time on it so you have a nice good full-ish story when I tell you what a perfectly wonderful vacation we had.
For now, I am in normal life. It is not always my favorite place to be. I like it – oh, I totally love so many of the things I get to do each week, and then at week’s end I go through the rich vivid things I’ve gotten to do, and touch, and see, and there is so much color and life in it. But do you ever have those moments when all the things you have been quietly, or not-so-quietly, brooding and stewing over for the last day, or week, or even months just pile up on your chest so that you literally feel like you can’t breathe? When the pain from this-or-that – sometimes little pains, sometimes big ones – that you have been suppressing for so long suddenly pushes back? Things are good, things are fine, you keep telling yourself and everyone else, and there you go still grabbing onto hope and trying to be everything you need yourself to be, and not always succeeding.
I am crawling out of that and noticing how easily lately I can get shot down into that tailspin. Sensitive, much? I thought I outgrew it after life punched me in the gut a few times, but nope, it is still there. This is certainly a little bit of a feel-sorry-for-me kind of thing but much more of a I-am-really-tired-and-running-out-of-ideas-for-how-to-fix-stuff kind of thing. Although, actually, the ideas abound but the means to actualizing them gets gritty. Do you have what it takes, girl? And if not, where can you get it?
So much of life can seem to be about measuring up. For a perfectionist this is exhausting. We have to extend grace to ourselves and to others. We just do. Everyone slips; we are human. Everyone caves to their disappointment and pain sometimes. And everyone is just trying to make it. Some are trying to not only make it, but to help others make it, and to love the world and its people, and this is incredible.
Some recent reading of comments to online articles and youtube videos and such has made me shudder. How wretched we can be! How vile, and hateful, and hurtful. (Sorry if you’re one of those sorts who thinks everything is relative and okay, and we should be able to say and do what we please, but it isn’t and we shouldn’t in all cases.) Some of the things said seem to ask for someone to track that person down as they are on the verge of truly troubling crimes, and I’m not exaggerating. It’s startling how hiding behind online names/personas allows people to be so open that they walk and so often cross a precarious line, moving from freedom of speech towards assault.
Yet at the same time there are good-hearted, well-intentioned nonprofits abounding. There are people dedicating their lives to the well-being of other humans, animals, the earth. There are people who cry for others, who fight for others, who equip others. Maybe these people are so busy doing these things that they don’t have the time to lurk and comment on the online news and entertainment pieces. (Ooh, that’s a comforting thought.) The negative comments and the mindless ones far outweigh the good ones. I’m going to stop reading these follow-ups as, usually, they go round and round and only make me end up despising humanity and wishing to be a sleek, cheerful, laughing bottle-nosed dolphin instead. Or maybe a baby bear. At the same time I wonder who is hiding and why they are hiding and how they got to such places, and if someone can reach them somehow. Everyone has a heart; some hearts have just gotten clouded or overgrown with thorny tangles.
I don’t know. What I do know is that as I, the formerly avid real book reader, become a part of the online writing community (one that is now huge and happening), I want the voice I have – even one that is from an imperfect, still-wandering, often a wee bit discouraged person – to offer light, hope, encouragement, and kindness. I hope you can find these things here. I hope you feel free to check me if too much criticism, anger, or even resentment creeps in (I am still human, not a dolphin, unfortunately). I sometimes imagine tossing (magically biodegradable) gold glitter out over the earth’s surface, over the people in parks and the people on bicycles and the people walking stolidly to work along the sidewalk – sparkling handfuls to make the day a little brighter, to garner a surprise and a smile.
Can words do that? I like to think that they might.
Wind and calm
August 31, 2011 § Leave a comment
Today at the horse barn, as we moved horses from pastures to paddocks and paddocks to stalls, and contented them with their evening feed, in blew a great gust of wind. And another. It forced us to squint, to turn sideways, to push hair out of our faces. At times I could hardly see for the dust that went blowing around.
“It feels like I have dirt in my teeth!” I told my coworker, as we maneuvered our way through horses who, fortunately, remained fairly calm despite nature’s fuss and fury. Inside the stalls the shavings spun into mini-whirlwinds.
White-grey skies. A few handfuls of raindrops blew sideways with the wind. Doors closed for a quiet barn.
Back home, I found cedar shavings in my hair.
As I pulled them out I couldn’t help grinning, thinking, What a funny small thing to make me happy this day!
Ballerinas in New York
August 30, 2011 § Leave a comment
Just wanted to direct y’all to this sweet collection of photographs posted on http://www.chicquero.com.
Ballerinas take over the Big Apple by Dane Shitagi.
Tulle, toeshoes, sidewalks and city lights!
Problem solving
August 30, 2011 § Leave a comment
I’m starting to think about what’s next after the farm season is over. It’s scary. I’ll figure it out has been my most-used phrase lately – lately being the last several years or so.
It seems like I always need more experience. And experience can be hard to get. But one of the things I feel like I can do, and ought to be doing, is look for ways to educate myself. I have to admit that I don’t read the way I used to, before college hit. Blogs and facebook keep me far too entertained these days. Whatever happened to books?
As I scroll through job possibilities and think about the things I want to do and the things I need to know better, I can’t help noticing the gaps in my education. Or, perhaps more accurately, the misdirection of some – not all – of my education. It’s troubling and yet not something that can’t be remedied in its way. It’s just up to me to fill in the blanks, since I didn’t realize a major in agroecology would have been a good partner to my major in English until too late. Fortunately, one thing college does for you is teach you how to learn. If you want to learn something, find the resources and get down and do it!
So. I’ve got a copy of Rodale’s Ultimate Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening (which is very long and chock full of information) and a copy of Rodale’s Vegetable Garden Problem Solver (which is acceptably thick, but not overwhelmingly). The goal I’m setting for my not-fully-educated, not-reading-enough self is to read this second book cover to cover, and to have it completed by the end of September. In addition to paging through the Ultimate Encyclopedia a little each day. I suspect I’ll share excerpts and discoveries along the way, so for those of you blog-oriented readers like me with even a small interest in gardening, you might consider this your SparkNotes!
Also. If you haven’t heard of The Rodale Institute, you might want to check them out. They are responsible for lots of research, information-sharing, publications, and general forward-movement of all things organic and sustainable. They also have festivals – the next is an Organic Apple Festival on September 17, complete with apple picking, farm tours, and apple cider floats. Don’t I wish I could go! You know how I love a good farm event. Muy bien!
Storms
August 30, 2011 § Leave a comment
Since we’re on the subject of water I just have to share another song – a favorite piece from one of my favorite groups, on their new album, Bright Morning Stars.
Be careful in real storms, obviously, especially hurricanes. But what a beautiful use of symbolism; the images and the harmonies make nature feel right there.
Clean
August 30, 2011 § Leave a comment
This morning I lingered in the bath. There is something just wonderful about slowly squeezing water from a soapy sponge, letting it slide down your skin and wash you clean.
So many metaphors ask to be brought up here. I love them all. I don’t know about all that “What’s your element?” stuff but I do feel like water and I, we somehow go together. If there is any truth to it water would be mine. I grew up alongside Minnesota lakes, wading in the shallows, easing in the coldness in the impatience of late May, slipping out to swim at midnight during summer camp, so maybe that’s why. It seems wrong to be without water access, to not be able to freely immerse myself in it all summer long, with no ridiculous fees to pay for the privilege. This is part of why Colorado has been hard for me; and part of why Coot Lake, though only swimmable for Miss T. and wadeable for me, has been such a relief and gift.
I could go on about the environmental problems we’re facing and how water is among the most important of issues. But most of you know those things and others have written plenty about it already. I did, for a class in undergrad, and I don’t really feel like reliving that experience, honestly! A great organization I’d recommend if you care about water issues, though, is Blood: Water Mission. I supported them for awhile when I could, and right now I can’t, but I meant to go back to it eventually. You can find a list of other water-oriented organizations at Water for the Ages.
It’s also perhaps a bit insensitive of me to regale everyone with my love for water when back east water is causing so much damage. Flooding has, in the past, harmed my beloved Midwestern states as well. Still, I can’t fault the rivers and the rain. Weather happens. Some of the damage we might have prevented through our own actions, some of it not. But I’d far rather a rainstorm than a sandstorm. We will recover. We’ll get stronger. One of the marvelous things about the floods that happened in Missouri and Iowa a few years ago was watching how communities came together. It is always good to see people caring about other people. Proof of love.
As I’m all clean from my bath and feeling cool and happy, my soul seems to be asking for a scrub as well. This song by Needtobreathe is one that I’ve played over and over, have had as my ringtone, and can’t stop going back to now and again. When I start to accuse myself of being broken, start to feel that I am valued for what I am or am not able to do, start to think failure and disappointment are all the future might hold, this song gives me a reminder of who I am.
Pedal
August 28, 2011 § Leave a comment
A kind friend gave me her old bicycle and I am sorry to say that it has sat unridden for two months.
But last night I needed cornmeal from the grocery store, which is pretty close to where I live, and when I went out to my car I just didn’t feel like driving it.
So I looked at the bike. Adjusted the seat. Hopped on. Flat tires, but there is a gas station near the supermarket. As I rode along I remembered how it felt to have everything outside of me be more accessible. No barrier between me, the sky and weather, the sounds of movement along the road.
It was nice. Especially after the tires were pumped up. Wheeeee!
So, even though I generally have a mixture of love/hate feelings towards cycling (it takes longer, requires effort, and is kinda scary on many roads), as the weather cools down I am determined that I am going to ride that bicycle more than I drive. How lucky that both of the places I work are well within biking distance. How silly that I’ve been spending money on gas and polluting the air and wearing down further an already-old car, when I could have been bicycling all summer and making both myself and the environment healthier. My somewhat legitimate excuse is that the intense heat would really have made the trips back and forth miserable, and possibly even not good for a girl who’d been working in the hot sun all day.
Other goals, along with this one? (a) Get up early and walk the dog every day. In order to make this, and the biking to work, happen without a great deal of crotchety-ness, (b) go to bed by 9 p.m. at the latest most nights.
Whoa.
For a grad-school-trained night owl, that’s a lot to ask. But it can be done! It will hopefully lead to more productivity, improved health and happiness, and stories and photos drawn from a slower and more engaged perspective.
Here’s to sleeping. And pedaling.
Kinds of Honey 