some rain and reading

We had two days of rain & snow and humidity. It was a wonderful thing. Mother Nature has calmed our dust storms and smoky air. A feeling of Spring is now in the air. Hopefully more rain is to come. 

Taos is a place full of diverse cultures & lifestyles. And it is a small town, which has not grown much. The population having expanded only a couple-thousand people in 100 years. It is a town that was once a Pueblo, then became Spanish conquered land, then grew into a community of Hispanic farmers & ranchers, and then the Anglos showed up. First the Anglo "artists" who discovered the light, and were intrigued by a place that seemed outside of conventional America. D.H. Lawrence wrote, "...it was New Mexico that liberated me from the present era of civilization, the great era of material and mechanical development." 

Following them were the Hippies, Outdoor-enthusiasts, Minimalists..., other people looking to escape conventional America, and found here that a person can still live mostly "off the land" and even "off the grid".

I haven't yet figured out how/where/who I am, here in New Mexico. And I'm the sort that needs to feel I know where I am.

"What is New Mexico then? How to sum it up? It is a vast, harsh, poverty-stricken, varied, and beautiful land, a breeder of artists and warriors...It is itself, an entity, at times infuriating, and at times, utterly delightful." --Writer, Oliver LaFarge

It is a challenging place, a place that feels not really on the map of the America I grew up in; it is a beautiful place, sometimes heartbreakingly so; a place with mountains that are ever-changing shapes and colors; it is full of diversity but lacks in community; it is a place that encourages creating art; it is a place where Anglos live, but will never truly be from; a place where speaking Spanish is normal, and English secondary; a place where everything comes with green chile sauce; a place full of space and yet full of walls; and it is a place that relies upon the land and people before relying upon technology or any government.

I started a project of reading what other people have said, written, believed about moving & living here. In a way to help me piece together my own understanding.

"It is the land that holds us here. It is the unrelenting land, this great, fierce, challenging, canyon-gutted, mesa-muscled land, which holds us & which gives us space enough to write a life on---and leaves it to us whether we have courage enough & faith to fill the page." --Writer & Professor, John DeWitt McKee

friday

The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still, — and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!

–Willa Cather's New Mexican sky, Death Comes for the Archbishop,1927

friday

Published in 1954, Maurice Sendak & Ruth Krauss collaborated on this little book about friendship.  More illustrations and history of the book can be found here at BrainPickings.

The two pages I thought made for a happy start on this Friday.

root of the root

post-snowball fight

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

-by e.e.cummings

i've been on many different journeys of the heart, but it wasn't until I accepted, truly accepted, that I deserved true, equal & honest love in a partner, that I was able to find this love I have now.

january warm light

"the real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?"
-annie dillard

a little january sunshine in the kitchen window.
we had faspa on sunday. and it was a nice reminder of the friends & community we have here. and I'll think we'll have another.

we're still snacking on the peppernuts. and the zwiebach lasted until yesterday. 

my sweet little niece called to invite me to her birthday party. which may be at the zoo. and I told her of course, while thinking to myself of how much more difficult it will be than last year. and a reality of, I may not be able too. and I'm trying to balance out what my life here is compared to what my life is there. 

i keep thinking that i'll have a moment of inspiration. that my desire to create things will find its key.  as if all of my interests will finally have a combined a-ha moment, and i'll have my quest in mind.

thank goodness for sunny days in wintertime.

seemed like the kind of day that needed to end with a few candles lit, and some silence. the snow that has fallen all day has been beautiful & serene. the tragic news from a school in Connecticut has been painful & terrifying.

"Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul."
-Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

from boxes

Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed.

-Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury.

I'm reading an old favorite. And I'm finding things I'd forgotten. The picture is also an old favorite.

young and old

i'm looking for the face I had 

before the world was made.

-Yeats

in motion

 

in motion

you walk,

you get muddy.

water in motion

will not see the stars.

you walk,

you go blank.

you stop walking,

you dream.

-federico garcia lorca

selected

The sunlight in a
yellow plaque upon the
varnished floor

-William Carlos Williams

february silence

gift

you tell me that silence

is nearer to peace than poems

but if for my gift

I brought you silence

(for I know silence)

you would say

   This is not silence

   This is another poem

and you would hand it back to me.

-Leonard Cohen

neruda's chickens

picture from one of my windows last night.

this morning woke up to a cold, gray, dingy January morning.
And this poem was inside my head. A friend once read it to me.
I suppose that means I was also thinking about that friend this morning too.


A Certain Weariness

I am weary of chickens:
no one knows what they are thinking,
and they look at us with dry eyes
and consider us unimportant...

Pablo Neruda

the snow, again

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, behold

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

-Wallace Stevens

the snow

It makes an even face
Of mountain and of plain, --
Unbroken forehead from the east
Unto the east again.

-Emily Dickinson

yoknapatawpha

happy birthday, william faulkner. I believe you'd be 111 yrs old.

thanks for being so brilliant. you and your "little postage stamp of soil" of which you wrote about.

even though I'm pretty sure I stopped thinking about being a writer, when I discovered the bar at which you set. It pained me really. As I read "As I Lay Dying". And sunk into the reality of what powerful skill truly is.

"The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."

the thing with feathers

"Hope" is the thing with feathers --
That perches in the soul --
And sings the tune without words --
And never stops - at all --

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard --
And sore must be the storm --
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm --

I've heard it in the chillest land --
And on the strangest Sea --
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of Me.

--Emily Dickinson

soon it will all smell like fall

the farmer's market is still full of tomatoes and obnoxiously-large zucchini. but the green beans are long gone, and the cucumbers harder to find.
and soon all the cantaloupe, with a perfume slightly rotten, which permeates the outdoor market, will be replaced by pumpkins.
right before the sun goes down, the cicada songs burst overhead. the insect hum so loud, you have to raise your voice to be heard, when talking with a neighbor on the sidewalk.

read this in Updike's "Marry Me" last night,
"She was still in the kitchen when he came in the back door; the cry of cicadas, the dry football smell of summer's end, followed him in."