windthread

how stuff just is

the other day,  and i haven't gotten back that far yet,  Linda of Summertimes commented about how i used to say....barring the Unforseen....a lot.  Then,  something changed and the Unforseen just became how it is.  Just became the new now.  And i liked that a lot and still,  want to get back to it,  and to Thank her for bring that up.

 

and for today,  at least,  the Toad can have his flag.   

There are several Fires in California,  like maybe 300.  It's how it is in California in the summers.  Right now there is a fire called the Wall Fire.   Began burning Friday night and into Saturday and into today.  This morning it was 7 miles from The Hill.  They went to see what they could find out but were turned back with little information.  The area was closed off.  Evacuated.  

so anything else i can say here is just my imagination and speculation.  Fire does what it will.  almost like an Entity.  I think today of it as like a Dragon.  Hungry.  Unpredictable.

so there is not much use in saying anything more.  Me or YOU.  What it is will be what it is.  And we don't know that right now.  So...today the Toad can have its flag.  

going again

after the day of not going.

 

13 x 17  Mostly Deb Lacativa but small pieces of commercial in Here and then the Path...that blouse from young days.  The back,  Lace Lady's plant marked linen.  The Glennis moon.  

there did remain the folded bottom to create a pocket for keeping...maybe some artifacts of Here?

it's in the Shop, maybe spoken for.

 

a fragment of Sky and a soft piece  of Sun.  a Crow,  Goat,  Toad.  at the bottom, a stream.  There will be a fish.  I keep seeing the toad holding a flag.  I am resisting.  We'll see how that goes.  Maybe the Toad needs a flag.

 

 

live like a Crow

the "signs".  coming from different directions.  

i decided today that i didn't have to do   A N Y   T H I N G.  I've never done this before.  Ever.  I fed Tay and Tazmeena and the Goats.  I checked the feral family's water.  I came in and finished my tea and lay down on the couch futon and fell asleep again.  i dreamed but didn't remember,  didn't care.  This is all happening by  approx 9 am.  I woke originally at 6 am.  By 9:30 am i'd slept twice.  Washed dishes from all the cooking yesterday and cleared the kitchen counters.  Thought about Stuff.   Went Out and looked at the inconvenient truth of the 1/2 ton of Alfalfa and decided that i would switch Form of my days...would go Out when Sun approached the Rim...do the WORK then.  It was hot already.  For whatever reason (there are some)  i don't have so much Heart for the heat right now.

similar things X 2.   So i slept 4 times today.  20 minutes each,  give or take.  Dreaming,  not remembering and in between i saw Tina Turner on Utube chanting the Peace Mantra with children and then followed the sidebar to her doing Proud Mary Live in 1986,  i think,  and then followed that to her and Ike Turner doing Proud Mary i think in 1971 and then her and Beyonce,  to gether and then her and Mick Jagger.  Followed by 20 min. of sleep with dreaming but not remembering the dreaming...

it all feeling like Groping for Something.  this uneasy Groping for something

and then i went to Kaizenjourney.blogspot.com and she said

What Art Can Be Used For

and there was a very small and elegant photograph of i think daisys near water...near a stream

and these words

"when the thread is thinnest...when we sense the tragedy of endings...when life and grace is threatened by deafness and ugliness...when tenderness is bullied....when fences of enclosure overshadow the last scrap of commons...then,  which is now,  comes a ferocity on the side of life,  to protect,  to cherish and to envoice what cannot speak in human language."

Jay Griffiths

from Myth and Moor

so i go to Myth and Moor and see this is from an interview with Sharon Blackie in Earthling Mag,  March 2012

and i think how so so Beauty FULL it is that we are weaving our own Indra's Net...holding each other

and i think how daughter told me 2 days ago that there were FISH.  FISH in the canal down at the bottom of the Hill.  They thought there were no fish.  But suddenly there were minnows.  and when i talked to her yesterday,  she told me.  That when sitting silently when the Solar salesman was there,  sitting silently in a camping chair,  her eyes closed, (because she was exhausted and needing to sleep) (she works nights)   telling me that she heard MANY birds.  But they are not SEEN because they are UP in the canopy of Trees...  She had said before that she see s   few birds.  And she said there was a CROW.

so after all day,  of such Adriftness,  I thought.....Yes.  Live like a Crow.  How they ride the thermals.  How they recognize humanity,  INTENT.  How they recognize Intent,  yet Continue.  Learning.  Doing what is necessary,  but then maintaining Their Own.

i looked at this today.  I just like it.

 

 

and i forgot.  I need this here. 

Naomi Klein said....5 steps:

1.  Know what's coming
2.  get outside of your home and defy the bans
3.  know your history
4.  follow the $
5.  Advance a bold counter plan  

Crows would understand this.  perfectly.  

 

 

Dystopia

today is my son's birth day.  Same as the Dalai Lama's.  But he is on vacation trout fishing,  fly fishing,  in Creed Colorado.  So this day was spent with long.  long.  conversations with the female children i have spawned.  both of them.  one on the heels of the other.

the first was with Alyssia and we talked about specifics of getting Electric run on that Hill,  preferably Solar but being told it will cost $20,000.  and well...no point here,  the details,  but the conversation drifted to how difficult it is to create a really very Simple Life,  and how willing we might be to understand what simple might mean.  and somehow the Naomi Klein book came into it and she said maybe its time Gramz...you might like  Parable of the Sowers.  She is a voracious reader.

 

i don't much like science fiction.  I tried reading Dune and read some,  because it was the thing to do,  but i didn't like it.  it's Scarey.  i don't like scarey or violent.  The closest i have gotten to dystopian is the movie The Postman with Kevin Kostner and then  Blade Runner.  For whatever reason,  they were ok and i could watch them.  But Alyssia is right.  Today,  this president of this United States is "over There,  with the rest of the world,  or a part of it and he is saying things that are unbelievable to me.

and things that will CHANGE things.

Those cats,  under the house.  For them,  it is already a dystopian world.  Always has been.  The bummer is that i have named them,  without trying,  without thought, really.   Leona,  Wheat and Spider.   the mother,  Rainbow.

What a mess,  that.

and i forgot to say,  which was part of the whole point...when they were there,  on that Hill,  yesterday,   there was a

Crow

 

 

today. Storms from the East

all stitched down,  stitched Into,  stitched Together

 

i imagine some other things but then...i don't want them.  This.  This is Enough.  There is Here.

There is There.

There is the free and open and clear space in between.  Just a path.

Free

 

this article in the Nation, July 3/10...  an excerpt from Naomi Klein's new book....

No Is Not Enough:  Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

"A great many people,  myself included, have understandably used the word  "shock"  to describe Donald Trump's election and the first months of his presidency.  Though he breaks the mold in some ways,  Trump's tactics do follow a script,  one familiar from other countries that have had rapid changes imposed under the cover of crisis.  In this first week in office, for example, Trump signed a tsunami of executive orders that had people reeling,  madly trying to keep up.  Since then,  he's never allowed the atmosphere of chaos and crisis to let up.

But as i've reflected on the word "shock" while writing No Is Not Enough,  I started to question its accuracy in this context.  A state of shock is produced when a story is ruptured,  when we have no idea what's going on.  But in so many ways, Trump is not a rupture at all,  but rather the culmination...the logical end point... of a great many dangerous stories our culture has been telling for a very long time.  That greed is good.  That the market rules.  That money is what matters in life.  That white men are better than the rest.  That the natural world is there for us to pillage.  That the vulnerable deserve their fate, and the 1 percent deserve their golden towers.  That anything public or commonly held is sinister and not worth protecting.  That we are surrounded by danger and should only look after our own.  That there is no alternative to any of this.

Given these stories are,  for many of us,  part of the very air we breathe,  Trump really shouldn't come as a shock.  A billionaire president who boasts he can grab women by their genitals while calling Mexicans "rapists" and jeering at the disabled is the logical expression of a culture that grants indecent levels of impunity to the ultrarich,  that is consumed with winner take all competition,  that is grounded in dominance based logic at every level.  We should have been expecting him.  And indeed,  many of those most directly touched by the underbelly of Western racism and misogyny have been expecting him for a long time.

So maybe the emotion beneath what some have been calling "shock" is really, more accurately,  horror.  Specifically,  the horror of recognition that we feel when we read effective dystopian fiction or watch good dystopian films.  All stories of this genre take current trends and follow them to their obvious conclusion...and then use that conclusion to hold up a mirror and ask:  Do you like what you see?  Do you really want to continue down this road?  These nightmare futures are horrifying precisely because they're not shocking...not a break with our underlying stories, but their fulfillment.  I've come to believe that we should see America's first nuclear-armed reality-TV president in a similar fashion:  as dystopian fiction come to life.  Trump is a mirror,  held up not only to the United States but to the world.  If we don't like what we see...and throngs of us clearly do not...then it is clear what we need to do.

We have to question not only Trump but the stories and systems that ineluctably produced  him.  It's not enough to superficially challenge him as an individual,  foul and alarmingly ignorant though he may be.  We have to confront the deep-seated trends that rewarded him and exalted him until he became the most powerful person in the world.  The values that have been sold to us through reality TV,  get rich quick books,  billionaire saviors,  philanthrocapitalists.  The same values that have been playing out in destroyed safety nets, exploding prison numbers, normalized rape culture, democracy-destroying trade deals,  rising seas,  and privatized disaster response.

At the same time,  perhaps it's OK...healthy even...for us to be just a little bit shocked by Trump.  Here's why:  Those stories that produced him were always contested.  There were always other stories,  ones that insisted that money is not all that's valuable,  and that all of our fates are intertwined with one another and with the health of the rest of the natural world.  The forces Trump represents have always had to suppress those other, older and self-evidently true stories, so that theirs could dominate against so much intuition and evidence.

The persistence of these other stories should remind us that,  while Trump is the logical culmination of the current neoliberal system,  the current neoliberal system is not the only logical culmination of the human story.  Which is why part of our work now,  a key part...is not just resistance,  not just saying no.  We have to do that,  of course.  But we also need to fiercely protect some space to dream and plan for a better world.  This isn't an indulgence.  It's an essential part of how we defeat Trumpism."

small wounds and just going

i have a sliver of wood stuck under the nail of my left index finger.  a sliver.  it throbs.

i poked my left  eye into a tip of a salt cedar branch yesterday.  it feels like i have cinders in my eye.

my left hand is still doing something i don't know why.  Maybe from trying to pry that gas cap out?

but aside from all those left things,  there were some right.   

Nogal had gotten out by pushing his way through a weak part of the fencing where it connects to the back wooden privacy fencing.  I am imagining that since i was just not coming to bring feed,  he felt he needed to take matters into his own hands.  There is a lot of Kochia there, next to the fence and i imagine again that he just was pushing first his mouth and then his head through to get at that and when it "gave",  he thought why not?   I patched it with a piece of cattle panel and a lot of baling wire to weave it in.   He has had no interest in it,  so i'm hoping it might seem like a dream to him and i will learn my lesson about talking too long on the phone.  So ok.  We go.

 

This Cloth.  I am so into this Cloth.   It is pointing out to me that i am no longer feeling any need to add things or Not add things according to any  "rules"   It simply is what it is.   And  i am loving the freedom of using Colors that i never would have,  even not that long ago.   as in,  Earth is not necessarily brown.  The ground here is from Deb Lacativa,  a damask,  old.  thin.  almost a pearly quality to it.  It's perfect for the story this Cloth is telling.   It allows the story this Cloth is telling to be almost some kind of Song,  no words,  just sounds.  And it's interesting to me that the Glennis moon that could go no where else,  is so right,  here.  In the There.  

So this Cloth is a song.  I like that.  I like that i was able to understand that.  it makes me feel really, really, really Good.

 

 

it happened

he got out.  Nogal.  i'd been on the phone,  a long time.  Jan the dog trainer called because she'd not heard from me.  It was a looooong conversation,  and Good,  but long,  way into the feed time for Goats and i knew that,  but they were quiet so i talked.

but...Ho.....went out and there he was.  Nogal.  OUT.  Tay with him,  they are about the same size.  Tay is 90 lbs.  So now i know.  She was out there,  with him,  i don't know how long ...they were out there, together.  First time for both of them,  out,  together.   I said to her...Bring Him and she ran behind him,  softly,  nothing much,  just running behind him and i held open his gate where the feed bowls are and where Ten Zen was eating,  just held open the gate and told Tay to bring  him and it wasn't nothing amazing or whatever,  but i held his gate open and he went in ...because it's where the feed was and i still can't tell how he got OUT?  i guess over the low part of the fence?  i don't know,  but he WAS   OUT and quietly just out and Tay was there with him for some time without indicating she was and so in a way it is NOT good....that he DID get out,  but in another way it is GREAT because he was out...gently,  quietly, and Tay was there,  just being there...no comotion,  just there

oh, eeeeeee

this is a whole new thing.  Once they know...........................oh, eeee

 

 

 

 

from here to there

 

so now there's time for another Cloth and of course,  it's about  Going.  the path here is from a blouse from the 60's.  I've gone many places since then.  Many were left unmarked and only live in my memory.   

instead of tearing  off what seemed to be excess at the bottom,  i instead folded it so it's now a long relatively narrow horizontal pocket.   Maybe to hold where i've been.  All that,  maybe being thought of as many,  but really,  just the same pretty much over and over.   a place of earth.  the repetition of beings of that earth,  Moon and Sun.     Looking...up, to  There,  lo and behold....Earth, Moon and Sun.

Here...There    From....To     Same.

just pinned for now but as i worked at the pinning i thought that one of the good things about waiting is that the bugs should/might be worked out of internet connection.  I am so used to uploading the day from the camera into Picasa.  Allowing some distance and objectivity from the Immediate.