caught

The path through the little woods at the back of our five acres shows changes that have transpired through the winter. After the snow has melted, you can see the pine and spruce branches that have broken, fallen and gotten caught by other branches or vines.

Often needles and branches fall onto a neighboring tree of a different species. It's a simple thing, but I never tire of looking at the configurations these couplings make. The unity touches me.

And for a bonus, this pretty evergreen tree (sorry I don't remember the name) was covered with petals from the magnolia tree next to it at one of the gardens at my university.

the band meridian

Here's hoping the technical difficulties will be resolved soon! I just reloaded the photos, hoping everyone will be able to see them. Blogger, please be well.



Click on photos to enlarge.

My nephew Paul, and his wife and kids came to the farm this weekend for a photo shoot of our son Peter's band Meridian for their new CD. We had SO MUCH FUN! Course it didn't hurt that a lot of photography happened. I followed Paul and the band around snapping my own pictures of the experience.

Mike Z, bass player, also has other talents:

Paul is a great photographer (a graphic designer by profession), and he led the guys through at least 10 scenarios in an hour and a half!

Here is Paul and Manda's third child, Aden, picking a queen anne's lace from last year in the meadow. It made me think about all the photographs we see, and what we don't see outside the frame. What else was going on around that scene, who was there, what was the mood?

The mood for us yesterday was happy, productive, and fun. I loved every minute.

Below, Brian is the lead singer, front. Then drummer Mark, Mike Z, then our son Peter, guitarist, in the back looking away.

They ended up in my studio, which Don and Peter fixed up for me (used to be a chicken coop). The light in there is great. In fact when Peter and Brian had a final photo session while they played, the sound was great too. Maybe it should be a sound studio too!

Aden, Eli and Lydia watched their dad shoot. Have you noticed how comfortable kids are with cameras these days?

If you haven't already, give a listen to Meridian by clicking here. You can also download their new album, "Listen to your breaking heart," which is wonderful, in my humble and unbiased opinion.

baked oatmeal

Thank you to those who commented in the last post about wabi-sabi. I loved that conversation.

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Shirley at work gave me this recipe. It is delicious, satisfying, and it's handy to bake it, say in the evening, and reheat it through the week. I eat mine heated, with milk poured on. But you can slice and eat it on the go. Add anything to the dry mix that suits you: favorite nuts, blueberries (I'll try them next), other fruit, seeds, wheat germ, whatever.

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Baked Oatmeal:

2 ½ cups long cooking oatmeal ("old fashioned" - not "quick oats")
½ cup brown sugar
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
½ tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp nutmeg (I leave this out)

1 cup milk
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
½ tsp almond extract

2 Tbsp butter – melt in pan that you will bake oatmeal in in the oven while it's preheating

Mix dry ingredients in one bowl and wet ingredients in the other and mix together - it will be just moistened.

Bake @ 350 degrees for 35-40 minutes

wabi . . sabi

Do you know about wabi-sabi

It's a Japanese concept, and like Feng Shui it can't be understood or acquired quickly or easily. It can take a lifetime to start to grasp its meaning.







I'm reading The Wabi-Sabi House: the Japanese art of imperfect beauty, by Robyn Griggs Lawrence.





Wabi is appreciating the aesthetic of "poverty" -
not indigence, but simple, humble, spare, minimalist
living.





Sabi is growing old with grace, having the patina of age, being weathered, rusty.







Together wabi-sabi is about slowing down.

It's about the beauty of things as they are, now, and as they age, valuing imperfection and transience.

It's about honoring material things.

It is uncluttering your space.

It is clean.

It's about authenticity.

It's "removing the huge weight of material concerns
from our lives."

It's doing more with less.

It's in tune with Nature.




Mostly it's about respect.

It's about being considerate of others.

"If you are always thinking of other persons,
you can understand the real wabi-sabi."

radical & poo-free

Arthur Dove's 'Clouds and Water' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC

Daughter Lesley told me recently about a blog site she found of a small crafty businesswoman who posted a bunch of helpful tips for simple, green cleaning.

I haven't read about house cleaning there yet, but I will. I still have some Clorox Green cleaner to use up.

I did adopt the tips for facial care and shampoo-free hair care. She recommends this site for instructions on the poo-free hair care thing, and this site for the facial care thing.

Facial care:

I'll let you read the particulars at those sites if you're interested, but basically the facial care is merely cleansing your skin with equal parts olive oil and castor oil. Like she says, why would I put anything on my skin I wouldn't put in my mouth? I massage the oil onto my face at the end of the day, then lay a hot washcloth on it for a little facial. When the washcloth begins to cool, I gently clean and rub my face. It feels very soft when I'm done. I used to have flakiness around my chin and nose. Since cleaning my face with these oils, I have none.

Hair care:

The hair cleaning part is a little trickier, and I'm still figuring it out since we all have different hair types, lengths, etc. But since I already only washed my hair every 3 days before this, I was a good candidate to try it, since some people find that it takes a couple of weeks for their hair to adjust and stop generating extra oil, making their hair look greasy. Anyway, one tablespoon baking soda dissolved in warm water, massage into scalp and let sit a minute. Then rinse with a cup or so of water with a tablespoon or two of apple cider vinegar in it. I've done this twice now, and both times my hair was soft, bouncy and shiny. And it did not get the greasiness, thankfully. Please do look at those instructions for answers to questions. It does take some getting used to not having any lather. But that is just a psychological ploy someone taught us, that we need lather and suds to get things clean! Thems are chemicals that create that illusion - SLS and SLFS (sodium lauryl sulfate, sodium laureth sulfate) - YUCK.

As the woman at this site says, shampoo got introduced in the 20th century, it's a detergent, and it strips our hair of natural oils. So, conditioner had to be invented to put the oil back in. Pretty ridiculous, and pretty typical of much of our oh-so-modern world, la-di-da! (who said in a movie "la-di-frickin-da"? Was that Shirley MacLaine in "Terms of Endearment"? Oh! No! It was Chris Farley in "Saturday Night Live.")

It's funny how this feels so radical and new when it's not. I love that.

blogging & daffodils

I've been blogging for a little more than 2 years. I really love it for the immediate gratification of instant publishing, and especially for the relationships that have begun and developed with friends and other bloggers, including members of my own family. And how fun to have new blogging friends within the last few weeks, since Don began his chicken blog and they came over from there.

Two years ago, almost to the day, I posted these same daffodils and I've been thinking about that this week.

Blogs give us a chance to show the continuity of our lives through personal details. My blog is called Synchronizing, inspired by the little handheld device I use to coordinate my PC work calendar which says "synchronizing" when the data is being shared between the computer and handheld via a port hookup. I thought it was an apt word and concept for what I was going through at the time, which was learning to live in the moment.

Two years later, I'm re-reading Eckhart Tolle's Power of Now because I need reminding. I'm not worried about enlightenment, I don't strive for it. But I need to practice, again, letting go of judgments and labels that separate me from people.

I'm grateful to the daffodils for reminding me that we're all connected, all hooked up under the surface. I also love living on this farm and feeling Nature's cycles infusing me with a new rhythm. Well, I guess it's a very old rhythm, isn't it.

old book

Among the many things I inherited from my parents are a number of old books. My dad had books floor to ceiling in many rooms of our house.

This one, published in 1938 in England is a collection of 100 paintings on color plates.


I had never heard of this painter before, Gianbattista Moroni. The painting, above, is titled 'Portrait of a Tailor,' which is in The National Gallery in London.



Apparently my mom gave this book to my dad in 1939, before they were married (in 1941). (My brother Nelson kindly corrected the year of their marriage, which I posted wrongly as 1939 before.) My father was a Baptist minister.

He was also an artist in his own right, drawing this pen & ink of a hart, which he turned into the personalized book plate that is inside the cover of this book. This drawing was also etched into the headstone at my parents' grave (photo at bottom). His surname was Hart, and a 'hart' is another name for a deer. He loved the verse from the Psalms:

Psalm 42:1 (King James Version)
"As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God."

Click on the image above to see the detail better.

pitchers

I haven't counted the pitchers we have, but here are a few, in the china cabinet I inherited from my dad. Any oak furniture we inherited were pieces my dad picked up. (The other wooden heirlooms were from my mom's parents or grandparents, or even great grandparents).

The little Belleek (bowing) lady in the top and second photos is one of my faves, given by my sister Nancy.



This little madonna is not a pitcher (obviously), but a soft stone sculptured piece from our days in Turkey. Don't recall exactly where we picked her up, out East I think, maybe Cappadocia.

The stacked pitchers below are for sauces and gravy. The bottom one, along with the stacks of plates and bowls here, are from the Johnson Bros set I bought at auction for $55 - service for 12! Later the set was appraised for $2,000. :)

Bishop

People usually think our fine barn cat, Bishop, is a HE. That's a natural assumption.


But she is a SHE, named for poet Elizabeth Bishop. (Bishop and her brother Blake were the second pets I'd ever named, since I didn't have pets growing up -- 'Blake' for William Blake, of course. We had to give Blake away to a friend. The first pet I named was our Beagle 'Madeline.' I remembered naming her after Jane Seymour's character in 'The Winds of War' TV mini-series because of her big brown eyes. But I just looked up that show on http://www.imdb.com/, and it aired in 1983, well after we got Madeline in 1978, and Jane Seymour wasn't even in it. I think I'm losing my mind.)



Elizabeth Bishop


I fell in love with Elizabeth Bishop's poem 'The Fish' in a poetry class with my mentor, Diane Wakoski back in 1993. This poem swept me up into the possibilities of what poetry can do, how in just a few lines, the reader is transformed along with the poet.

(After planning this post, Don told me April is National Poetry month. That's nice.)


The Fish

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
-- the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly--
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
--It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
--if you could call it a lip--
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels--until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.


Elizabeth Bishop

when animals die

Caution: This post has photos of dead animals.

Tuesday Don and I met at a restaurant to mark our 30th anniversary with a small celebration. Within a minute of arriving, not anticipating the effect it would have, he told me one of the new chicks - one of the White Crested Black Polish like the one above - had died that afternoon. I began to cry, and when the waitress came by to take my drink request, I couldn't speak or look at her. I'd had a stressful day at work, and the harsh reality of our little chicks' fragility came as a shock. Finally the waitress left so I could pull myself together. Poor Don felt terrible.

We didn't have pets in our home growing up. I think it was my dad who wasn't comfortable with animals, since Mom had dogs as a girl. As a result, I didn't have first-hand experience with the life and death cycles of pets, which would have been a good way to learn about death.

Since moving to the farm in 2003, I've had encounters with animals, such as these wild fauns that felt comfortable in our yard last summer after apparently losing their mother, probably hit by a car. One year the barn cat we inherited with the farm was hit by a car and killed (Rudy, not Bishop). How kind our neighbor Bill was to respectfully pull Rudy off the road into our yard before we got home.


On my 35-minute drive on country roads to work, I see a lot of road kill. Since the Department of Natural Resources doesn't remove animal carcasses from the roads any more, we get to watch the process of decomposure.

This deer was a mile from our house when I drove to work Wednesday. She's lying there right in the triangular spot at the middle of an intersection, a strange sort of cautionary traffic sign. It looks as though someone was planning to drag her off, with that blue rope around her neck. They gave up, I guess, and Thursday morning the deer was still there, but the rope was gone.

We see crows and buzzards picking at the flesh of the animal carcasses. At first I was disgusted by the sight. But after a few years, I'm grateful to watch the food chain at work and to know that the flesh of animals killed by human drivers will be eaten by other animals. By the way, if you hit a deer and kill it with your car, you are welcome to take the deer home, which many do for the meat.

Recently Don taught his 3rd graders about decomposers. If, for example, Thomas Jefferson's dog had not been decomposed by those organisms, it could still be lying visible in Virginia today.

I'm sorry if these pictures bother you. I must be becoming more of a farmer than I thought, because I'm getting used to such sights. I know that the deer population would grow completely out of control if we drivers didn't kill some of them and hunters didn't take their share. (I've hit two deer while driving. Both of them ran off, so I don't know if they died soon after that or not.)

I don't like seeing any animal die these violent deaths. But it is even harder for me to see the newest life forms die so quickly, like the quail chicks and chicken chicks Don is raising, even though I know a certain percentage of them will die in the natural order of things, even as babies. It's especially difficult when I've held them in my hands.