choruses

she did it!
Still in time-to-feng-shui-my-life mode. Get rid of useless objects; clear away the dust on the shelves and in my mind. Goodbye one dozen old notebooks! Admittedly, they were more about notes and quotes, fits and starts, than actual workbooks or journals, but there is simply no room for them anywhere and I take that as a message from the universe to let go. Feels good. Getting lots accomplished in what I know is only a brief lull between projects and travel. Wise words read during a quick lunch guide me. May Sarton (At Seventy) wrote:

If I can be wiser about not feeling so compulsive about everything, all will be well.

Just listen to the wind outside (blowing hard and dry), hope for rain,  enjoy the sound of bamboo windbells in the window in the next room tossed by currents of air; clonking exotic melodic notes, shape like a Chinese character. Maybe Joy?

I woke yesterday morning wondering what was about to happen that meant joy and then remembered...
        May Sarton

begone dust on my ch'i!

Feeling like a puff of wind could do me in as I photographed his huge (4-5") puffball growing in the middle of the gravel driveway with wind howling and dust blowing around. Intact and silky, it stopped me on the way to the garage.

wildfires
obliterating mountains here as they rage around Ruidoso and other parts much further south. The Floresta has declared Extreme Fire Danger throughout the state. No campfires and no smoking in the woods.

Chokecherries
The anthology manuscript has been sent to the printer and I feel a sense of brief relief as it's now out of my hands until the final proof comes in a couple of days from now. I'm excited about this year's edition. The cover is a whimsical dreamy pastel by Barbara Sayre Harmon (not a good photo here).

In her late 80's now, she has lived in Taos since 1949. She and artist husband Cliff call their home Teahouse of the Taos Moon and in the past were known for regularly throwing dances and parties for other artists and characters (her word). She also writes children's books and there is an interview with her in Chokecherries. I got to know her on the phone as we discussed her painting and the poem she rendered in calligraphy for the back cover. She is a delight. But there's more to the book than the covers. An incredible roster of writers and poets is represented in this edition, including poet/musician Joy Harjo. Stay tuned, I'll list others soon.

feng shui-ing my life
So what did I do today? With that sense of relief? Freer than I've been in weeks? I turned the house upside down (so to speak) and have been cleaning and moving furniture around all day! not at all like me. I tell myself the house is a mess because Ron and I are interesting people with creative passions that outweigh domestic duties, but really, we just like to do our thing, are kind of lax, and basically ignore the house until it is no longer ignorable! Besides, we're having a guest or two in August, I'm leaving for my month-long retreat in two weeks, and I wanted to put my workroom back to guest room. We moved my worktable into the living room and I think I love it there! It's all so pristine and uncluttered. Even Spike took to it right away.

The 21st century macbook with it's snazzy new green shell sits beside an old 1940's Remington portable. On a rickety ladder, I retrieved it from the top of the tallest bookcase where it's been since the bookcase was built about six years ago.  It's so cool! It was thick with dust and still needs a swish with a damp cloth, but I couldn't wait to put it on the table. I think there's even a new ribbon around here somewhere.

I'm taking the rest of the day off (it's nearly 5) even though I haven't finished cleaning yet and moved a lot of stuff-still-to-be-sorted into the downstairs bathroom where it's cluttering up the room.  Tomorrow is another day and tonight  I'll pour a glass of wine, put the pasta water on...if I can get out of this chair with my aching body that's definitely not used to cleaning, dusting, and furniture moving. But in the realm of Feng Shui, I think we just moved my worktable into the prosperity bagua (corner) of our house.  Nice. I may have to set new goals to fit the promise. And Ron, who is doing something outside (not much) has been warned: don't block your ch'i by blocking any part of your entire front door. The problem is that we're never quite sure which of two doors is the front.

...the universe does not make mistakes.
It may look like chaos for a while....
but keep the faith...the energy you have 
put out toward your new goals 
will make good things happen.

Karen Rauch Carter (Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life)

marginalia

The way I feel. A bit shaggy (need a haircut), a bit dusty (no rain), small, sort of (what's the look on his face?) depressed? restful? resigned? windblown? All of the above applies to my mood for the last four days. Too many details can destroy any sense of well-being that may have accidentally slipped into my thinking. So I decided to take a short break (details be gone!) and just muse a bit here. Unfortunately my musings keep taking me to a cottage on a balmy Bahamian beach, barefoot (that's balmy, not barmy) and it's hard to multi-task effectively in that state of mind.

My daughter sent me a text message that read: don't wait for the storm to be over, dance in the rain! Good advice and just what I needed at exactly that moment. She's trying to dance, too. No matter how distant in years and miles, mothers and daughters sometimes have a mysterious bond that asserts itself in unlikely times and places. I'm grateful - it wasn't my fate with my mother.

And then it got cool and rained a couple of days ago. My mind immediately flew to wool. Something other than the endless round of socks that I seem to be stuck in - as I am every summer. I rummaged around in my stash and came up with this lovely stuff.

Southwest Weaving's Rio Grande hand-dyed sport weight merino. I have lots of it and SW Weaving is gone. The colors are rich and appealing and I'm thinking clapotis again. It would be the perfect project to bring along on my writing retreat in July. Almost mindless (the knitting, not the writing) and no pressure to knit a second matching one or even finish it in quick-time.  And it won't take up much room in my bags. So, tonight, if I am not once again bogged down in details, emotions, words and numbers, I will begin it. If sanity holds.

And this is the end,
the car running out of road,
the long nose of the photographed horse
touching the white electronic line.

Billy Collins makes me think and laugh. This excerpt is from "Aristotle," in Sailing Alone Around the Room.

of summer kitchens & graves

 

if you lead, I will follow, anywhere that you tell me to... (Carole King)
Remember that song from her album Tapestry? It's been on my mind in relation to my small camera(s). I always have one with me (and my iPhone, new, novel, fun). Most ordinary days I never quite know where I'll be or what I will encounter so my pictures tend to be minimalistic journal entries grabbed quickly. If I were an artist they would be sketches, but alas, I have no talent in that area. In the last 3 days I've been to Santa Fe twice and around the park a couple of times. In SF one afternoon we stopped into Clafoutis, French cafe and bakery. ooh la la! Yummy salads of grilled shrimp and chicken, beets, almonds, pineapple, tomatoes, greens...a baguette...

The desserts are to die for (see above: raspberry cream "baskets"). We bought a bag of fresh-baked Madeleines, all puffy and light, but I wasn't fast enough with the camera and we ate them before they could be immortalized.

And still on the food thing: the SOMOS Storied Recipes cookbook is shaping up nicely. We have more entries than we thought we'd receive and the stories and recipes are being vetted, edited, categorized by our chief/chef editor. Here's what I find interesting. For those writer/cooks who also happen to have Italian names (and many who do not), Italian food is high on their lists of favorites. Phil Roberts, the man who inspired the chain of Buca de Beppo restaurants (southern Italian-immigrant cooking) said:

being Italian is not the blood in your veins,
but the spirit in your heart

I like that thought and apparently many others agree. The cookbook will have a delicious assortment of non-Italian recipes from many places and experiences. It will be available in October, stay tuned.

when he grills shrimp,
he threads them on rosemary sticks
                    (Frances Mayes)

she's receiving guests...
still following the camera, I was perplexed and amused when I saw the latest adornment on Mabel Dodge Luhan's headstone in Kit Carson Cemetery. As noted before, visitors leave gifts. Her writings and life were and are an inspiration to many people who come to Taos. Her house, now a B&B inn/workshop/performance center (preserved in her style), is a short walk from the cemetery. Old cottonwood trees still sigh and provide shade, people still sit under them, hear pigeons cooing nearby, write, knit, dream, hear gurgling water in the acequia in spring. Guests, writers and artists who have been in intensive retreats leave notes, crocheted doilies, poems, silk flowers, special stones. A fur-trimmed sweater.

I do wonder what provoked the gift-giver to leave that nice sweater on the grave of someone long dead? I suppose it's about her words and the compelling images they evoked, the interesting life she lived: New York socialite, world traveler, writer, hostess, wife of Taos Pueblo Indian. The people she knew and "collected" - D.H. Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe, Frieda and Dorothy and even Carl Jung. No one is dead who has left their writing behind to inspire future others they couldn't even imagine they were writing for.

...when I remembered the clamor and movement out here beside this river, listening to the inner sound of these mountains and this flow, the rumble of new York came back to me like the impotent and despairing protest of a race that has gone wrong and is caught in a trap.
                     Mabel Doge Luhan (Edge of Taos Desert)

take it anyway

no animals were harmed in the taking of this picture
A family of yellow-breasted birds is homesteading nearby and training their babies to fly. I caught this one (almost wrote: on film; I'm so last century), not because I have an ultra zoom on my camera, but because it's so young that it didn't quite know what to do when I approached - I know I could have put my finger out and it would have hopped onto it. If it had, a kerfuffle of feathers would have ensued; the parent birds were going crazy a little farther off, trying to keep an eye on the monster human with the camera and three other fledgelings ready to fly off on their own. Lots of sharp warnings were sounded. The thing is that I can't identify this bird. I checked my trusty Audubon Field Guide but it's not clear; warbler? kingbird? goldfinch?

They're super-cute though and they all look healthy and strong. I'm so Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm these days. Horses in the field, birds on the adobe wall, a snake in my neighbor's yard, my dog resting in the shade, the wind cooling things down. Yellow birds and all. Cholla blooming near the Rio Grande.

Sounds idyllic, no? It is in a way. Local friends on facebook are always waxing poetic about the place (well, most of them are poets), but life goes on with it's joys, difficulties, messy bits. This isn't
lalalandia. Someone I care deeply for has been in a hospital far away for a week with a mysterious ailment that still goes undiagnosed. Stress begins to fall on me like rain as I realize the first week of June is over already and I'd better work double-time if I'm to complete the schedule I'd optimistically mapped out  for this month.

As poet Ruth Stone said"
You have to allow yourself to take joy,
otherwise you're no good to anyone.

brief time off

It's Rosa fendleri time again and once more I'm regretting where I planted, a few years ago, the tiny wild plants dug up from where they were happily growing in a nice moist spot near an acequia way away from the house. They are now thriving, 7 feet tall, behind adobe walls! They're crowding out the apricot tree (no sign of apricots) and the thorns of this pretty delicate-looking rose bush are evil! These wild roses grow everywhere. I remember versions of them at the edge of Narragansett Bay; in Connecticut woods; along the Atlantic shore. I saw them in Mexico. I severely trimmed the bushes back last December after harvesting the rose hips that I unsuccessfully planned to make jam out of. But they're tenacious. And pretty. Just don't get too near. They resemble the color of the socks I finished the other night, don't they? This must be my prom-dress pink period.

slow movin' time...
Having met, yesterday, the first two deadlines that drove me to extra glasses of wine the last couple of nights, I had a low-energy day today and just went with it. Summer has come to our valley and at times there is a blue and green stillness when the wind doesn't blow, when the only sounds are the birds and the insistent invisible buzzing of insects in the tall grasses. I only felt a twinge of guilt this day as I read, wrote, puttered.  And now, early dinner time, the artichokes are cooking, the salmon is waiting, and I plan to watch a movie tonight and knit. Tomorrow is another day and the craziness starts all over again...I'll think about it tomorrow...

returns

The horses are back (two more arrived after I took this photo), and the yucca is in full bell-ringing bloom again.

There's a large patch of multiple yuccas out on our land - very picturesque - but I don't feel like walking out there (it's raining lightly) and my camera's zoom isn't powerful enough to snap them from the deck of the house (another justification for the new super-zoom I have my eye on?).

But no time now to think of that. Super busy finishing up the two of the three already deadlined editing projects (the reason why I haven't posted here since last Wednesday). Storied Recipes cookbook is a go - we received many submissions with fun and interesting stories and hope to have it published by October or November. Will keep you informed. Our cookbook meeting was appropriately enhanced by Bonnie Lee Black's Lemon Squares (in March she won the Gourmand International Award in Paris for her memoir with recipes, How to Cook a Crocodile). I ate 4 - OMG ! I had a sugar hangover this morning, but it was worth it. The photo doesn't do them justice but I was so anxious to try one that I didn't take the time to set the camera. Do you think I have a problem?  I'll think about it tomorrow; today I'm on the wagon.

and she kept knitting through it all...
hangover and everything...finished a pair of Alpaca Sox sox. Lovely pink/mauve/candy color. Love what Stephen Beal wrote in his book The Very Stuff: poems on color, thread, and the habits of women...

I have to admit I'm suspicious of this color.
Wary, even though I've come to use it a lot.
For one thing, if my daughter were going to the prom,
I would not select this fuchsia for her gown.
On the other hand, she might.
                       (from 3607)