windthread

Immersion at LottaBurger day

After working,  needed to go into town and after all was said and done stopped at LottaBurger for a green chili cheese burger and fries.  I lucked out.  More than half of the customers...you wait a long time for your order...more than half were Navajo.  So i got to stand there a long time with the sound of their language surrounding me,  soaking in to me.  It's the language i "pretend" speak and sing to Tay and the Goats.  I just make sounds.  But waiting today,  i could see that i am pretty good with this.  Close.  Most of my language immersion happens at the Laundromat,  so today was a plus.

 

Keeper of Seeds   Over in the shop,  in my never ending quest to support Goats with cloth.

 

and then,  just right away,  right THERE,

 

they are pretty much the same,  but maybe one is better for some eyes than the other?

 

and tweaked a little darker...Can you See?????  Was Right There....totally....can you see the profile of the face?...all i did was darken the nose,  the mouth,  the eye,  the eye just a little,  the rest...just the incredibly elegant random marks on cloth...  

How i see Young Wind,  scattering seeds,  spilling baskets,  pulling at the hems of the old womens skirts....

I love this

 

in a window of a small tin home

got back from work and found all the seed pots,  the wooden things to set the flat on.   Cleared the place in the SUN there and tomorrow when back from work,  i'll fill them with earth.  Wednesday i'll place the seeds.  

 

more about Home

the beginning of the book lays the groundwork for Allen's thoughts about Feeling at Home.  So he begins talking about Emotions and Feelings.

"Neurologist Antonio Demasio suggests that the simplist animals are best thought of as having reflexes, rather than emotions,  but that animals with only a small and rudimentary brain, such as fruit flies or sea slugs, show evidence of having emotions.  What these very simple animals might not have are feelings:  an ability to internally experience emotions.

The fear we feel when confronted with danger,  the anger at encountering an obstacle, the joy of gaining a valued object, the sadness at loosing one, the disgust after consuming or viewing something unpalatable, and the surprise that stops us in our tracks when something unexpected happens....these are just some of the major emotions that make behavioral flexibility possible.  For us, conscious humans,  these emotions are not simply acted upon, but experienced and remembered and contextualized as   feelings.

Today there is not doubt in modern cognitive science that emotions are "real" and universal  psychological, neurobiological, and psychophysiological phenomena,  and that while culture is seen as providing the context in which emotions are expressed,  culture is not their ultimate source.

[Psychologist Paul Ekman]  identifies the following as being basic emotions:  amusement, anger, awe, contempt, contentment, disgust, embarrassment, excitement, fear, guilt, interest, pride in accomplishment, relief, sadness, satisfaction, sensory pleasure and shame."

I can't rewrite the whole book here,  but the above quotes along with so much more preface Allen's thoughts about  "feeling at home".  What IS it, to feel at home.

so many things have risen up for me,  one that i have to admit that the most constant thread or story line of my dream life is the effort to "feel at home".    And the second today... how all the months, years, really,  in the Old Cowboy's Final Time,  how they were predicated upon his thinking he wanted to die in his own home.  Verbalizing this over and over and over.  But when the time to die came,  home became unclear.  Home often would blur into the ranch in Colorado.  And as he processed his final days  of life,  neither place was Home.  He did not feel at Home.  He felt adrift.  

I am so loving * this book but/and my guess is that it will help me formulate and understand things so far unarticulated  (in myself)  about "feeling at home".  What that means for me.   *and i note that .......Love is not mentioned......

 

From yesterday,  that i couldn't access,  so found the originals...

 

 

Double click.   Emotions/Feelings

 

Upon seeing this article,  these photographs in that old Natural History publication,  i instantly related to this monkey....i   "was at home" with her....i "knew" her.  So much so,  i cut one of the photographs out and framed it and it has been with me ever since, more than 20 years,  i see myself in her.  So, i see this in some way as a self portrait.

 

and i have had this photograph,  or a copy of it,  for even longer.  What it meant to me,  when i left a nice two story frame home in a nice neighborhood in a nice college town to live in a 1972 Ford Econoline Van.  Swearing i would never own a home ever ever again.  

and then jumping ahead,  home to me being a Place to keep our "stuff"

 

our stuff,  being things that help us live.  Here,  Tay's art now also with Chinche's death pouch that Mo sent.

 

and this small Cloth of Holy that Nancy Krampf sent accompanying the seeds.  I doubt that she knew but she did "know" that the stone on it is a Petoskey stone,  from the northern shores of my birth state, Michigan,  from those north shores where i would go to "feel at home" in those early times,  before i left home.

so,  i am Full of thoughts about Home.  Maybe a place where you can define your own particular and peculiar sense of things...of Resting...away from demands and expectations of others...

 

and the sense of love i feel when looking at this blurry print out.  Diorama.  Always Diorama.  Like i saw in that glass case in the Museum of Natural History in Detroit when i was maybe 4 years old.  Diorama.  and i somehow held it inside me as symbol of home and recreated it over and over and over and probably will once again.  So i need to know about this,  this "feeling at home".

 

 

 

an interesting day

i read a little in the morning.

 

John S. Allen,  a neuroanthropologist and research scientist at the Dornsife Cognitive Neuroscience Imaging Center and the Brain and Creativity  Institute at the University of Southern California.  

 

and it feels as if Things that i don't even know are coalescing by the moment.   Right in the beginning, he talks of Emotions and Feelings.  Differentiating.  And i was reminded of those pages i had torn out of some Natural History publication years and years ago when my home then was in a very simple wooden workshop with a wood stove.  The place where my mattress was on the floor and the Goat,  a strong young Nubian Goat, EBie,  slept with me in there,  on the floor.  Next to the mattress.  Her eyes slitted half shut half open,  chewing her cud.  So i went to the belov~ed  Picasa Mess to look for those pages...

and i found them.  I found a Lot.  and in this moment,  i went over to Picasa to upload some of what i found.  But for the same unknown reason that has stopped me before,  it's stopping me again.  I wanted to show you pics of those pages from the Natural History publication.  and then somehow important,  i wanted to show you a pic of my maternal grandmother.   But i find that i cannot access them.  So...ok.  I accept this.  ok.

and then it was finally a warm enough day to spend a large part of it OutSide and i did.  Just wandering.  Tay and I.  How we can wander SoFar is such a small space, really, 

we did

and i came in to do this

 

stitched the face onto a piece of cloth  to send with a Thank You to Nancy Krampf  for an incredible package of wildharvested flower seeds from her canyon in Kanab Utah.  The drawing i'd done a while ago,  it's been in that basket on the altar  and today i saw it as a Protector Spirit of Canyons.   Just stitching two pieces of cloth together gave such deep pleasure.   What she might do with it, i have no clue.  It's almost nothing.  But it's Something.   And the simplicity of it was very appealing.  Very.

Enough that i drew another face

 

and stitched it to two other scraps of cloth.  The faces are fast...as if they are just there.   These are small,  this one just a little larger,  larger than a 3X5 index card.   What Are They?  I don't know,  but i like them a LOT.   I thought of the word Mudra.  You can google that.  Gesture.  Gesture of the Hand.  So they are cloth Mudras.  Small gestures of the hand.  Feel good.

And because i am going to need to be OutSide a LOT as these days warm toward Spring,  they are perfect to fill the need to Make.   

 

 

 

Home

Reading some in that book

Home   How Habitat Made Us Human    by John S. Allen  

more to come about this.  Probably a LOT more.

And because i have a home with a Wall,  in a room for Cloth,  

This can happen.  What a LUXURY.  I can look over in the early morning and SEE things.  This morning because the light was Just So,  i saw something on the Cloth that i hadn't before.  It is visible somewhat in this pic but not as it was in person at that moment...but i will look again tomorrow morning.  As the day goes along,  the light changing,  what i saw becomes invisible.  Maybe it needs to stay that way?,  this Cloth being about the Invisibles....

 

 

the Stick House

 

small additions but that took a lot of time Being With.

 

so today.  

 

and this evening,  as i was washing dishes with the over head kitchen light on and the still light from the Evening coming In,

 

this one that i needed to move to this small piece of wall where Patricia's fragments usually are, needed to move so i could look at the Cloth of the Invisibles,  ..... Look.  Look how certain parts caught the Light...just beauty Full.  Again...this is a Deb Lacativa cloth...always always BeautyFull.

today

a LOT of very very small very very invisible stitches.  But Everything is Here.  and it now has that "hand".  That feel of a cohesive Cloth.  I think i do NOT want to continue with making a "path" with the black and white thread stitches.  There are SO many almost invisible marks on the cloth itself...and really,  more how it is here,  in this landscape of the Invisibles,  just marks...i think they are enough and right.  

the clouds

 

the Earth of the Habitat,  or whatever it is...a piece of Deb Lacativa's cloth,  of course,   and i love how it went when stitched

 

the small,  and i mean small,  fragment, dark with the blue dots and beneath it,  the first of the marks of the Language.

And so,  a day.  How Good it feels.  This day.

GOAT NOTE:   Gideon was lying down when i took the evening feed.  Between the wall of the Albatros and the feed bowl.  He didn't get up.  But lie/lay there and just ate.   Little Jack Flash got the whole rest of the bowl to choose from so was happy.  Nogal and TenZen had a completely peaceful day, start to finish.  This batch of grass hay is more loose and finer.  A lot of waste.  Cinderella has acquired a way of walking that accomodates a long left rear hoof.  NEEDS to be trimmed.

Smiling

How i can spend a whole day just looking,  making the most minute adjustments,  re ~adjusting,  looking, imagining,  standing back,  moving close, .....a whole day of it and be totally absorbed and come out at the end of it still so totally not knowing anything much at all about What It Is.   Where its "going".   And feeling really happy about it all.  really Happy.

 

and this is Good.   What IS it?  well,  it doesn't matter.  Its a shape,  a thinness,  almost like a mirage but it's just very good and OK here.  Just enough above and just enough curved.   I sigh.

Dee,  on her blog asked the question:  what we might want to do before we die.  And i thought,  while i was feeding Goats,  cleaning up the kitchen, stoking the fire.  And in this moment what came was i would like to have a conversation,  as long as it took,  maybe days....with my kids.  My original two and their kids and their kids.  Maybe all of us in one place.  Yes.  All of us.  together.  And i would like to tell them how much i loved them and Why i loved each one of them...what it's given me,  their mother, their Nana,  their Old Nana ....While Staying My Self.   I would like it if they could ask any questions and i would like to answer those questions Well.  I would like this "early on",  like not on my death bed.

The second thing would be to feel that i had done Well with my meditation practice,  which i guess we can call my Spiritual Practice.  Gone as far with it as I was able.  Having really worked.  Done my best.

and in the moment,  i guess that's it.   And in this meantime,  to live each day fully.  Just going.  Doing the best i can.  Being in Response to the moments as they come.   Yes.  I think this is it.

And i am going to leave a Goat Note sometimes at the end of the Day.  This is the year that i hope to come to some conclusions about Us Here,  whatever that means,  so at the end of the days.  Anything that will help.

GOAT NOTE:   it was Monday that Nogal was crazy.   It got me up in the middle of the night with worry about What To Do.  And instead of trying to avoid it,  as in quiet the thought,  the anxiety it brought,  i instead decided to let it run on,  however it ran on.  And in a short while,  like 20 minutes in the dark,  the Night Mind pointed out that it was just how Goats ARE.    It was anxiety provoking to ME,  but for Nogal and TenZen,  it was complete Goatness,  with no emotional/intellectual baggage.  They were simply expressing themselves honestly.   Buck goats are driven completely by their hormones.  It's all that really means anything to them beyond the age of three.  If they could,  they would spend each and every day breeding.  All day.  Begin Again in the morning.   THIS and only THIS would make them content.  

I "knew" this, intellectually,  but had not absorbed it on a level of day to day.  I need to.  Nothing will save me from it.   They are here.  Being themselves.  I am here,  being myself.  I need to surrender. So yesterday,  it did not escalate or even continue.  There was some Display before evening feed but very little in comparison. 

Today, day 3 was relatively quiet.  They moved around together as they usually do.  Some Dominance at feeding time,  but half hearted.   So,  a reprieve for this time.  But i am on notice that things are changing.  

And Why was it like it was on Monday?  Maybe the WIND which affects everyone,  human and animal.  Maybe it was Onday and her intensity and the does response to that.  Maybe both.  Maybe neither.  But the important thing is that it Changed already.  And will Change again.  

 

 

 

 

 

the Ocean of Wind

not so much as yesterday,  but continuing.  WIND.  so much like the ocean,  that constant Roll,  and to me so much like labor in childbirth,   that expanding/contraction,  as we go into it,  no stopping it...it is what it needs to be.  Transition,  but with WIND here,  can go for days.  

What was supposed to be a short trip into town turned into quite the opposite.  No point to detail but the day was eaten up.  What there was of it to salvage

spent with a lot of looking.  a lot of just sitting.  sitting quiet.  looking.  Feeling it.

 

and this fragment rose up from a basket.  So fragile.  Like a piece of Kleenex,  but so much more fragile.  It wants to be on this Cloth.  But where????

 

i tweaked the color so All can be seen.  Not how it is "in person",,, but  still,  in person,  all these incredible marks are very much there and each is stunning in it's own right....how can i work with a piece of Cloth with these natural markings and 

add

anything,  any thing at all to it?????   This is what i am wondering.  How?

a monday of many things

Work away and then.   

Just when you start describing how things ARE,  they suddenly begin to be Something Else.  I mentioned the commotion yesterday with Onday looking for trouble.  This seems to have energized the does.  When i got back home,  there was all manner of things going on.  Just Going and Celia,  the youngest and most docile positions in the herd were totally Into it.  Much chasing and rearing up and headbutting.  Their mother,  Lucky Star moving near and for whatever reason,  the Triumvirate feeling the need to make their own Point in it all.  So that.  And then,  as the day wore on between totally cloudy and brilliantly sunny,  Stuff began over in the buck yard with Nogal and Tenzen.   As i'd thought,  Nogal's Threeness is coming into play.  He was all over the place,  running like a buckling,  pirouetting ,  flinging his legs sideways....UP onto the roof of the buck hut,  spinning off into mid air and landing to begin again.  Half baby,  half buck man.  TenZen just standing,  watching.  Then it came time to feed and Nogal ran the long distance between both feed bowls,  not letting TenZen eat.  

SIGH.  Now what.  Quiet till tomorrow.  Then, we'll see.

Printer out of ink.  the new one,  since granddaughter was here.  Don't know how to work it so a call in for Tech Support from her and while figuring it out,  we talk of the kids coming in the summer,  of how  she had said those words,, ,  in the course of a conversation when she was here,  ...."i want them to know you"...and how that marked my heart,  like a tattoo and how i do NOT want to go live in California and how i think there are other ways and how why not they come for a good Chunk of time in the summer????  How i imagine that we can build that shade house and even a pond Out There,  where the Raft is?????  Tho i don't have television and stuff,  we could occupy a good chunk of time building these????  They will be 7 and 8 years old.  Perfect.  So we talk of that.

and then,  maybe there will be the chooks by then.  They can be in charge of collecting eggs.

 

Tay working to clean the pan of stuck on refried beans.

 

Cloth on the Wall that Michelle saw and thought we live in the same place....it IS like August,  which is at her House now,  but this one..a Face that i sometimes need....

 

and all the while a part of my mind is with the Cloth that's happening now and how if you can see them,  the small very small dark stitches of marks are the language that i am looking for with this Cloth,  not english.