food for thought

poetry on a Thursday evening

A night out away from sadness propelled me to the Harwood auditorium to see and hear three women I've known as inspiring acquaintances for many years. Their visit was part of the SOMOS Summer Writers Series that continues until end of August. These well known and well published authors have been friends for 25 years. Eight years ago they started a press in Santa Fe called Tres Chicas Books. Nine quality volumes so far, and the latest is a selection of their poetry called Love & Death, Greatest Hits. 

The poets are Renee Gregorio, Joan Logghe, Miriam Sagan. To have all three in one book is a treat. Joan is Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, Miriam has published more than 20 books, Renee is poet, master somatic coach, creator of poetry dojos. They are all writing teachers, award winners, powerful beautiful women. A few years ago Miriam and I taught a six-day intensive retreat on writing and knitting memoir. It was fun (and intense) and I learned more from her than my students learned from me. We may do it together again someday.

miriam, joan, renee

I raise a toast (with fresh raspberries)! And thank them for a wonderful evening of gorgeous poems (interconnected by virtue of their long relationship) rife with humor, love, grief, happiness, inspiration. All the world resides within those poems.

I've gotten to know so many creative and talented people during two decades in Taos. There is a distinct feeling that when you're working alone you're not alone, no matter what you're doing. You can wear your dancing shoes to breakfast, a Renaissance costume to a the river, jeans to a wedding, step out at midnight and dance, enter your creative interior and drop out for awhile, sleep under stars, tote your notebook and pen to the edge of a lake at 12,000 feet, eat summer raspberries until your mouth and fingers turn red, create fiber beauty and books, be stunned by sunsets, feel icey rain on your shoulders, bake cookies.

what she did
On a rainy cool afternoon I baked biscotti (an authentic Neopolitan recipe that came from I-don't-know-where). It's been a while and I forgot to add the baking powder. As they baked and I considered throwing it all out and starting over, I text messaged My Son The Chef and asked, "what happens when you forget to add baking powder?" he answered, "may come out real flat!" I left them in the oven and since biscotti tend to be flat anyway, they're fine (maybe a tad hard). We've sampled enough to award 3 stars. I invited chef son to join us for coffee and biscotti, but forgot that he lives 750 miles away.

rainfall like a blessing

wet birds with ruffled feathers

inside, cookies bake

every story starts somewhere

petroglyph? cave painting?
I managed a long walk with Spike today in a cool 64 degrees! What I haven't done in a while, haven't felt for days. Camera in hand, happy dog on leash, comfortable lime green sneaker sandals,  the summer park. This animal-like carving was simply peeling weathered stucco flaking off the adobe wall, illuminated by morning sun and leaf shadow.

Wild currents growing against the cemetery fence remind me of when we moved into the house my father built in 1949 in the northeast Bronx and my mother and I, on a rare walk, found great bushes filled with them. We went back with my blue plastic beach bucket and filled it with the sweet/tart fruit. She baked muffins just like Peter Rabbit's mother (they were current buns in the book). I remember them as delicious, warm from the oven, good sweet butter melting into each half. I haven't tasted any since.

We didn't have a clothes drier either and my mother hung the laundry out to dry in the summer air

Another 21st century artifact - not sure what this is/was, but it looked mysterious in the morning light - as if it's been there for eons. A sacrificial altar, a grinding wheel? A Knights Templar chariot wheel? A part from a giant's spindle? If I were a fiction writer (which I am not) I might conjure up a story about it and the animal shaped thing on the wall nearby. Maybe someone already has.

the way we were is not the way we are
We breathe our breath, the world spins, drama fills the sky with cloud shapes and thundery noises, we hope that if it rains it will last for more than a few minutes this time.

...in a landscape without past or future time 
- in this instant, in all instants, transience and eternity,
death and life are one
                                   Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

time passages

Very late last night, lights also on in neighboring houses, I finished another pair of socks. Deliberately chosen for their bright and cheerful colors.

I gaze at them in the sun's light this morning, can't capture the glow with the camera. Just a touch of illumination from the east. Comfort socks. We learn yesterday that the girlfriend of the young man who took his life last week, took hers. She jumped off the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge on Monday night. The news came after her love's burial on Tuesday.

The Rio Grande Gorge Bridge is 650 feet above the river, the sixth tallest bridge in the United States. There have been many suicides through the years. When you jump, death is guaranteed. Two young people in the last two weeks. There is no explanation, no words to assuage the grief, tragedy, finality and waste that has occurred. All I can do is write and knit and wonder about destiny as I approach a birthday many decades more than their ages. How do their families cope? Why don't walls of protection made from love work anymore?

more tea please

a flock of colors, with tea

Morning dawns chilly. A welcome change, more normal than summer mornings so far this year. I wanted hot tea. Not a mug with a tea bag tossed in, but a pot - an authentic Brown Betty English teapot filled with a good dark black tea. Before the tea shop closed I bought a box of the strong mellow black tea I liked best. It turned out to have a whole story behind it, as part of the price goes to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution that saves lives at sea around the UK and Ireland.

Apparently the founder, Mary Taylor of Cornwall ("Lifeboat Mary"), looks after "her boys" at the lifeboat station with tea and cake and biscuits and has been doing so since she was a girl. So, even though I won't have to save anyone at sea today, nor is it likely that I'll enjoy the goodies that go with the tea (cake and boys), I can drink it and play with tea cozies. And make plans to knit a couple more (I'll check the yarn stash later). I've discovered that writers especially like tea cozies so I'll have some to give to friends by fall.

depth of texture
Why am I writing superficial stuff about teapots and cozies? I know I've waxed poetic about them before. But it's all I can do today as I get back to my desk and begin to pull the necessary details of my life together that were abandoned when our neighbor's son took his life a week ago today.

[when] the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight

each day
dozens of cars have passed back and forth along our dirt road from early morning to late night. It was impossible to distance ourselves from the tragedy. Not only because of the cars and people - which were always within sight from our second floor kitchen windows - but because we care about the family and they seemed to want us to sometimes be there too. We made some food to bring over and attended all the services (at their home) with 150-200 attendees each time. Yesterday under a white tent with a red stripe, against a cloudy blue sky, in intense noon heat, their son's ashes were put to rest on the family's land. Land they've owned for more than 100 years. They are a large and close extended family and I had the strong sense that Floyd was ensconced forever within a snug sphere of love. Today, of course, they face the reality that won't go away when the last of the mourners leave.

return to self
It's not about me, I know that, but profoundly moved yesterday afternoon I sought books for comfort. Poetry, Buddhist teachings, my own writing, and came across John O'Donohue's poem Beannacht (Blessing) from his book of poems, Echoes of Memory. He was an Irish poet priest best known for his book of Celtic wisdom, Anam Cara. All quotes are from the poem.

And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life

what exists?

space and time tools
According to Dr. Robert Lanza (scientist, author), "energy doesn't go away at death....[it] never dies, it can neither be created nor destroyed." Based on a scientific theory called biocentrism, the theory is that an infinite number of universes exist and everything that could possibly happen occurs somewhere - death does not exist in any real sense. Lanza says, "the alive feeling - the 'who am I?' is just a 20-watt fountain of energy operating in the brain" and doesn't go away at death. This is an interesting and difficult concept. That space and time are simply the tools for putting together the whirl of information occurring in our minds. I don't understand, but I'm trying.

the properties of matter
Namely, yarn. Picked up at the PO on the way to Elevation, my friends, and a latte.

These Lorna's Laces yarns are part of the Limited Edition Harry Potter series that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. I like the colors and will wait for magical inspiration to decide their destiny. First I'll try to complete a couple more sock UFOs - like these just finished.

Opal "Surprise". It feels good to knock off finished pairs - especially since I usually complete one full sock before moving on. I guess I'm playing a self-imposed psychological trick on myself. What's one sock? Nothing to it. Beats that second sock syndrome that so many knitters suffer from. And assuages guilt re possible (!) future acquisition!

all talk, no action
Every day we hear that the rain is coming. Weather predictions actually showed thunderstorms every day last week. Unfortunately, clouds built up, wind came in, a few drops fell and that was it. At least here. There may be areas where real rain is falling, but we haven't seen it yet. We're hoping that usually drier August will bring the long-delayed rains.

Quite the contrary
to what I'd thought, passing clouds
are sometimes simply
the moon's entertainment,
it's lovely decoration.
                    Saigyo (12th c) trans. S. Hamill

even the mountains are sad

We have lived in the same neighborhood in Des Montes for 21 years. Our home is one of eight on a dead end dirt road surrounded by a breathtaking mountain landscape. When we bought our house and land the roads in Taos didn't have names. You'd visit friends with a set of abstract directions: turn left at the cow sculpture; the fence with the yellow post; the second cattle guard. We all had PO boxes and there is still no mail delivery outside of town. At some point of progress, residents were asked to submit road names. Ours became the name of the family who originally owned most of the land we were on and who had homes and young families. We lived in their midst. We felt kind of old. We were already grandparents and had left our family in Connecticut to start a new life in New Mexico. We hoped they would learn to love it. Some did. Every summer our granddaughter came out for a few weeks. Her visit was the highlight of our year and she soon became friends with the boy next door. He was just a few months older and they spent summer days together; we'd take him with us on picnics, or to the Pow Wow or do some of the other things adults do to entertain children. Around age 7 Kira announced "he isn't like other boys" - meaning he was more gentle, eager to do the things she liked to do. Crafts, homemade puppet shows, coloring, baking cookies. Once the three of us picked all the lavender from the bush that flourished that year and hung it upside down on the kitchen rafters to dry. The next time they were together, Kira and Floyd removed all the dried buds from the stems and filled two quart jars with the fragrant herb. I found a forgotten half jar of it today in the back of a cabinet.

One very hot summer afternoon I had to divert Kira from noticing Floyd and his two cousins stark naked jumping on a trampoline next door, splashing each other with the garden hose. Being so young, all she noticed was that in the tall grass they seemed to be floating up and down on thin air and asked how it was possible. I admit that for a time I harbored a selfish secret wish that they would fall in love someday and live in Taos near us forever. That didn't happen of course; at visit's end they each returned to very different worlds 2000 miles apart.

On Wednesday night that boy took his life. I don't know why. His family is devastated and it's not a question we will ask. They don't know the answer either. We can only send our thoughts and prayers, cook and deliver humble food for the steady stream of family and friends coming to be with them. Many hearts are broken and it's hard to wrap our minds around a life being voluntarily cut off at 22 years. Why?

Last night's sunset was so strange and magical that I stopped along the road on the way home from the grocery store to attempt to capture something elusive, brief and bright.

Call it loneliness,
that deep, beautiful color
no one can describe:
over these dark mountains,
the gathering [summer] dusk.
             Zen poem (12th c) trans. S. Hamill

something essentially noble

How cool is this giant cappuccino cup! It sits on the roof of a tiny coffee bar in the Taos Ski Valley. I imagine it filled with liquid blue sky and cloud foam.

A cappuccino would have been a perfect accompaniment to my sojourn into the woods late this afternoon, but most places (on summer schedules) were already closed. So Spike and I walked the paths around the village (trails closed due to wildfire danger) and stopped by the numerous river tributaries to listen, and smell the piney scents. I jotted some notes and felt a great peace descend after an annoying morning when details and information just wouldn't come together. Sometimes I take things for granted and memory goes a bit fuzzy. This summer I've complained about the heat and smoke but sort of forgot that only 8 miles away, at more than 9,000 feet, it's always cool! Foliage is lush, rivers run cold, numerous wild flowers grow. Osha (Love Root) has been used medicinally by Indians and Hispanics for centuries.

Green Corn Lily (Indian False Hellibore) in abundance is highly toxic! I learned that people have died from ingesting it - thinking it wild onion or making what they think is gentian wine! Ooops!

But best of all is my ghost in the woods.
At a gathering a couple of years ago I met a woman who showed us prints of pictures she had taken. She said that every time she took photos with her digital camera, they revealed spirits (transparent ghostly blobs). I refrained from suggesting she have her camera lens checked because I'd just met her and she seemed a bit wobbly and quite attached to her photographic evidence. So, it came as a surprise when I reviewed my photos at home tonight and found a spirit had visited my pictures. Proof positive, yes?

I invoked the spirit and asked it to help me finish a project - lo, it did!

Stories within stories create a strange effect,
almost infinite, a sort of vertigo....dreams that
branch out and multiply.
                                    Jorge Luis Borges