The Farm is Quiet

We didn’t always get along. He’d lash out at me and I’d lash back, words against spurs, pleading, screaming, questioning. I wanted him to understand me, wanted him to listen to reason. We didn’t speak the same language, hold the same context. We shared a home but had very different perspectives. I was annoyed by his actions and often cursed his life, a flood of angry shadow work bubbling up from my depths. But that didn’t mean that I wanted him dead.

The sun burrowed out of the clouds of this long winter and painted the hillside green grass green. Tall firs and hemlock punctuated the misty skyline. The old growth wood of the barn almost glowed in the golden light. Spring! I was so ready for a change.

I fed hay to the goats and grain to the pigs with their little dirt covered faces. I collected eggs from the nesting boxes in the darkening coop and laid out swaths of grain for the chickens which they instantly attacked. The yard was quiet in that roadside farm sort of way- birds chirping, goats bleating, pigs snuffling, hens clucking, trucks rumbling by.

Yet something was missing. That shrill call of a dominant male lording over his ladies, a familiar and constant refrain that echoed through our days. I thought perhaps he was up the hill under the scotch broom and fir boughs. Or across the street at the Foodbank jousting for scraps. But his ladies were all here…

I wandered over the land in the beauty of the evening and felt myself being drawn towards the pond. I wasn’t necessarily looking, but in the lower field I found piles of feathers. Soft, tufty gray ones and rigid jet black ones, a tangle of long curved feathers, black and white and iridescent green.

Rooster feathers.

No no no.

But yes, the land was quiet and rooster was not simply hiding in the plum trees ready to attack me for coming too close to his harem. He had been attacked, was gone. Coyote or eagle? Maybe a stray dog? More questions than answers in a pile of plucked and ripped feathers, no body near by.

A flash of green in my palm, I held his mangled feathers in my fist and wandered back into the house with a bucket of eggs in my other hand. His torn up beauty and potential offspring balancing on either side of my body. We will bury his weightless remains under our new lavender plants, fingers in the soil, burying roots that will slither down through iridescence. We will eat the (fertilized) eggs and digest the reality that there will not be brilliant black and green offspring this year. We will feed the hens in our quiet(er) yard. I’ll still be on guard for a while when I hear a flap of wings and rustle of feathers running towards me, but the memories will dissipate with the decomposition of feathers underground.

RIP Rooster Midnight

My Reality

 

A plume of salt and spent air and force crystallize the sky.

Inhalation. 

Focus on the curly edges of the kale leaves, I told myself (over and over) when she said, “You keep bringing emotion into this. Just stop. This is reality!” She listed off all the ways in which I was CLEARLY not within the realm of which she spoke. The leaves blurred into the wooded horizon as my anger and resentment welled up and overflowed in a tirade of words. 

 

This was not my intention.  

Teeth clenched, fins in motion.

I wanted to be calm, non-reactive, mature, but in the heat of the moment the thirteen-year-old in me leaped into (re-)action. The thirteen-year-old that was grounded for unfounded reasons and spent weeks writing dark poetry in her room. The girl that was told she was a spoiled brat for being independent and doing what she wanted. That was full of vitality and creativity and wide-scoped dreams and was (is) mocked for “being dramatic." 

Deep buried resentments spy-hopped at the surface. An ocean of relationship rippled and shook.

Instead of breathing into the pain, doing my shadow work and all that woo (goodness), I yelled back, teeth bared. I accused, I cried. I’m not proud of this, but it happened. My head spun with all that I wanted to say, how I wanted to be understood. But how can you be heard if the other doesn’t want to listen? How can I keep my heart open to others who have closed theirs so tightly, especially when my throat is tight and my hands are clenched and I'm yelling and I really really really don't want to be but I can't seem to help it? 

And what the fuck is reality? 

I am breathing, feeling, living every day and every day is real. My dreams, thoughts, and emotions are real. Even my fanciful imagination is real. So when I am told that I am not living in reality, I am confused. This confusion has been happening my whole life. From theater school to traveling around the world to living and working on boats to living on an island and growing my own food, I haven’t lived a particularly mainstream life, but this has no bearing on whether or not it is real. 

I am real therefore my life is real. Reality.

Flukes in the air, diving deep into the dark, thoughts swim and circle around reason. 

After the pain and sadness slowly receded alongside the anger (not disappeared, but ebbed enough to breathe), I have been able to see this flood of emotions as a call to contemplation: what do I believe about myself and my world? I know that what anyone else says or thinks about me is none of my business, that accusations strike a nerve in this way only when there is doubt within myself about my skills, intelligence, about how I live my life. 

What a gift to have this brought to light, I say through gritting teeth and tears.

So. What do I believe? What is real to me?

Here is the reality (in this moment) that I create:

People are good. I don’t want to believe that everyone is out there to fuck me over. If that what is supposed to make me a good business person, then I don’t want to participate in that kind of business. I’ve built my businesses on love, connection, and beauty. There is no need to be nasty, just honest. If we could all just be honest about what we need a lot of the nastiness would be avoided. This is what is real to me.

I live in a place where I can grow a lot of my own food and buy/trade for the rest from neighbors. This is not an idealistic or a hippie lifestyle. I’m not sure what being a hippie actually is. I do wear dresses in the garden and have potlucks and craft nights on occasion. Does that make me a hippie? If growing your own food is hippie, I’m not sure what the opposite of that is other than co-dependent capitalistic matrimony (in which I am woefully still engaged to a degree). Growing one’s own food and buying locally is much more practical and sustainable than relying on the industrial food system for far less nutritious food. It is also far more “traditional” than how the majority of Americans live presently shopping at Target and Costco and buying strawberries in January. Growing food is not a luxury. It takes hard work and planning and effort. The callouses on my hands are real. The kale and garlic on my dinner plate are deliciously real.

I enjoy my work. Whether it is sailing or cooking for other people, I like how I spend my waking hours. Not 100% of the time, but much more often than not. I have worked hard and created this way of life for myself instability (flexibility) and all. Sometimes it feels like I just fell into these passions. I believe that is what happens when you say Yes to what you love. And it is not that simple and easy and the bumps along the way are reminders of this, but those bumps are meant for refinement and growth. I want to spend my time doing something I feel strongly about in the way that positively affects the world. For me, cooking with food from my garden and from smaller farms in my area is revolutionary. I start and join in conversations about nutrition, local economies, self-sufficiency through my job. And I eat well, too.

I am not in the camp that JOB must equal SUFFERING. This is my reality.

I love what and whom I love. I might not get society’s approval but I cannot follow what this society implies I should love. Or whom. Age, gender, profession, appearance…my heart chooses and I am learning to follow, to let the judgments fall away and keep my heart open to the infinite possibilities of love. Why impose restrictions when the world is infinitely generous? This is realistic.

My reality is based on love and emotion. This is what makes us real, just like we learned in the Velveteen Rabbit. This is what children inherently know. I don’t want to shut my heart off in order to be “successful” because in my eyes that is a very empty success. And unnecessary. I wouldn’t be able to write or connect with people or cook beautiful food without this love, without this openness for emotions. This is my reality.

I’m sailing to Alaska in a month and, I admit it, am scared about dying. About my life changing. Of leaving a comfortable farmhouse for rough seas- what's the point? This is what is bringing me alive in this moment. I am immersed deeply in the contemplation of my life, realizing what is most important to me, accepting who brings me alive and who drains my vitality and how I can release the latter. I could die, this is the reality, but this is also the reality every single (safer?) day of my life. Or your life. My question is: can I die with an open heart, whenever and wherever that may be? Death is real.

I surface again, nicked fins, broken teeth, full belly flopping into oncoming waves. 

I am in love with my magical, fantastical life. It hurts sometimes, too. But I choose to believe in the full range of feelings and possibilities, that we are here to create and love and play and swim through it all. This is my reality. 

What’s yours?

On Fear

I have been reading about fear. I have been absorbing the notion that what we fear most is not necessarily the harm that could befall us, but more so the bodily reaction to fear, that anxiety and sense of losing of control. I have read that we need to accept the actual feeling of fear because the circumstance doesn’t really matter much. You cannot stop potentially painful things from happening (car crashes, violence, falling off a cliff) just because of your fear of those things happening.  I mean, sure, you can lock yourself up at home, but what if there is an earthquake that takes down the house or a brown recluse hiding under your pillow? You are still full of fear, even hiding under the covers. 

We are a fragile fabric of skin held up by breakable bones and powered by a mechanical system programmed to eventually fail. So why did this finite system program fear into the mix? For our safety? Or so that we can learn how we move through the world?

And in this book I am reading it also says that we have basically the same physical symptoms with fear and falling in love. Fluttering heart, lack of breath, time stops. They are the same. It is simply the perception that differs.

I think of sailing. How I push myself every time I step onto a boat. How the loss of absolute control has become a standard in my life. Perhaps I compensate in other areas on land for this lack of control when I am at sea. The ridiculous thing is that I am no more in control on land but it is not so immediately obvious among the houses and cars and perfectly ordered cans of beans on grocery store shelves. The straight lines and speed limits lead me to believe there is order, that we have covered Nature over with smooth dominance and therefore we can function in predictable ways. 

There are no straight lines at sea. The horizon is curved, flying fish arc above and below the surface, even becalmed water holds circular movement. Fear is transformed into alertness as every moment changes the course. Out there it is visible. Out there, I have been scared, for sure, but the ocean doesn’t allow for the what-ifs to accumulate for very long. The blank canvas of the sea makes anything possible and so those what-ifs spill over and color the sunsets with their oranges and reds. In a place that may seem more dangerous, fear is replaced with a horizon-less love.

Then I think of living on land and all the complications that arrive with this choice. Taking care of a house and animals. Having a job to pay for such things. Making time to do the things I love (like writing and cooking and sailing). And the fear creeps in. How can I be more scared of this ‘stable’ life than a squall at sea? Is this why I need my dose of sailing, to remind me of that fearlessness? Is this why I am so adamant about sailing to Alaska, something that truly scares the shit out of me? Or will this simply be another adventure in a long line of adventures, a way for me to feel alive, special, but no more the wiser or stable? I sit and stare and worry, brain spinning, hands still.

So I go into my kitchen and cook. I go to my laptop and write. I go work on the boat or go for a swim. Instead of standing on the cliff and fearing the fall, sometimes I actually jump. Not all the time, but I am learning to jump, fall, release and let the love rush in.

When we face our fears, be it a rogue wave or a husband waving me home, we face death and we face life. We are always alive…until we aren’t. And no amount of fear will ever change that reality. So jump. Live.

Counting the Ways to Live

Black rings of pigment soaked through the newsprint and rendered his astrological forecast on the opposite page unreadable. Two sides of fate unknown. On his side, the obituaries bled sadness in words like “survived by”, “gone too soon”,  “memorials” but these, too, were buried under ink. Some photographs- men in WWII uniforms, women with bee-hived coifs- remained unblemished. The wedding pictures with couples in pointed collars and polyester slacks, poufy dresses and long middle-parted hair, the ones that edged up to his generation, (imprints of the 70s in blurry black and white. His 30s) those were the ones blackened with spirals of ink and underlined numbers.

When my dad was slowly dying of an incurable, unknowable, unyielding degenerative brain disease, when he couldn’t actually comprehend much of the daily news in his hands, he reduced his search for meaning to solid numbers. Greater or less than. Or equal to. 10/03/1941. Circles for greater than. Circles for younger than. Circles for sicker than. Or run over by a truck. Or killed in Iraq (but those were the really young ones and almost didn’t count). 

People were living longer. But not him. Terminal, they said. Those guys in white coats with the listening pieces and pens scribbling on white flatness. Those guys that were the thing that he was. Doctor. That thing that seemed to his family, maybe to him, like a lifetime ago.

He was in his late 50s in a time when 80 was the new 70 and terminal only seemed to mean “try harder”. But there was no trying harder to survive, no fighting, no recovery. Just research drugs and brain scans and proven degeneration. He knew he wouldn’t live to 70. Maybe not even 60 (the new 55?).

He would lose his mind and die. That was the only certainty, they said. No why or when or how (exactly), but a certainty about an end that had been easily ignored before the diagnosis. The circles proved it true. Death could happen.They were younger. He was already losing. He stopped taking the medicine that could have slowed the progress of glucose digesting his frontal cortex. It made him feel sick. Yet which sickness was worse when death was so clearly imminent? He wanted to control something, get even somehow, even if the pills equaled zero.

I would find the thumbed-through, marked-up newspapers on the coffee table and shudder. What was the point of keeping score?

Now I understand.

There are pillows propping up my head. I have lost track of what I am reading because I am doing calculations in my mind. The author says her son is 22 and she is 44 and therefore she was pregnant at 21 or 22 and that is 16 years younger than me. My sister was pregnant two years ago at 37. My friends have newborns, toddlers, teenagers. 36, 34, 19.

Shit. 

I do not circle their kid’s names in thick black ink in books I’m reading, on baby-blocked birth announcements, on my computer screen when the posts of little fingers and toes and poop reports outnumber the political musings of the singles. I do not cut up my diaphragm to speed up a process that I somehow feel caught up in from the sidelines, unsure of whether or not to play. I do not throw around possible baby names with my partner (that is a lie. I have. I do. Not all the time. Not much recently. But it happens). But these numbers haunt me. Each moment seems to be simultaneously a lost chance and an artistic project saved. I want to have control. I want the death of my un-familied life to come at just the right time. After I have done things, become someone, published a book, sailed the world (or at least to Alaska), lived fully. Because somehow I think that a child would bury my current way of being. That I would lose a part of my mind that creates stories, that dreams in nautical miles and waves and whales, that thrives on long walks and slow drinks and sleeping in. I tell myself I am not quite ready for the death of this life. So I wait for a perfect time that I know may never come. The doctors say that I don't have much time left. Where is my courage to lose all that I know and discover something else/more? And really, I'm not even satisfied with the amount of creative space in my life as it stands! Time is running out to change, to be, to publish, to procreate! And I do nothing. 

When my dad lost his mind and even those numbers on newsprint became a jumble of incomprehensible shapes, the pictures un-tellable stories in his inaccessible thoughts, he became happy. Un-recognizably (to me) friendly. Not all the time, but more than I had ever seen. Or felt. He seemed to be another person. And even if I was embarrassed when he licked ketchup bottles at restaurants or pet every dog we passed whether or not the startled owner consented, I could see the joy and curiosity bubbling up and taking the place of all the self-criticism and grief and anger. He was at home in the present moment and did not seem to comprehend the past or have any thought for the future. He became outgoing and talkative (as he had been decades earlier) even if his speech was limited to a few words repeated over and over and over again.

Do That. Do That. Do That.

He was living a different life in the same linear, bodily lifetime. 

One where he would Do That without thinking of the outcome or consequences, where expectations had little room to squirm and disrupt the present moment in his disintegrating (enlightened?) mind. 

Like a child.  

And in so many sometimes-subtle, sometimes-dramatic ways, this is what we do: live many lives within the parentheses of this body in ways that we do not (cannot) cognitively understand. Whether or not we consent to let go of the control we think we have, we are constantly dying and discarding, growing and layering, and always carrying forward. 

The story is not over, even when the numbers stop making sense. They are always just incomprehensible squiggles on a page even when we think we know what we are looking at. Maybe that is where the next story begins. We are not a chapter but a novel. None of this is calculated. No amount of adding or subtracting, comparing ages, comparing lives will mean anything. I know this. Or I think I know this. He was 61 when he died. I was 25. I am 38. 23 years to go. All numbers, all dreams, pages to turn. What if I let go of the concept of knowing and figuring and simply breathe into this day the desire of my body to live, to give life, to survive and be survived?

Who will I (we) be then? More than a photo circled in ink, more than a number filed into a hospital database, more than a ma.ma.ma? Or less. Greater than, less than. Equal to what? 

This is not an equation. There is no formula to figure out dying, birthing, living.

There is only space and time and body and love. 
>Do That. 

Gratitude to the Chicken

Red warm against the back of my hand.

 The combed head in my palm, my fingers holding the little flap of skin between trachea and spine. Against the hills and valleys of columned bones is where the vessels lay. Now severed, now flooding the valleys with warmth, staining feathers with cells they’ve never noticed beneath the surface, dripping onto skin that is not of its own. The scaly legs kick into the air, the brilliantly colored wings flap, the hills of the neck twist and shiver. Freckles of blood cover my arms, are Pollock-ed against the back of the stainless steel sink. My gut is twisting in time with the spasms, my eyebrows knit in concern. Did I do it right? Is this fast enough? Can they feel the pinch and slice, knife through skin, forward cut one vessel, slide down and back the other? 

Two streams of blood, two eyes shutting, many cycles of breath and heartbeats emptying the body.

Stillness.

It is afternoon and I am outside in a field. 

My arms are scrubbed free of blackened red flecks, a few feathers cling to my tangled hair, my mind still holds images of slowly hinging beaks ceasing mid-breath. I carry a basket in my hand and shoo chickens from my feet and laugh at the chaos. I open secret-looking doors and am consistently delighted by finding eggs in golden wood shavings, sometimes with hens defending little bundles of DNA.

Warm in my palm, the energy of potential life.

We gather the eggs and put them into a cool room next to where we slaughtered chickens that morning. We head out again. We started the day with feeding the chicks in the barn and we end doing the same. Little fluffy bodies in our care. Little fluffy bodies that have a fate already determined. Is that a bad thing? Even if they don’t know their fate? Or maybe they do? Do they communicate with one another, can they feel the knowing that at nine weeks of age they will be processed into the next version of themselves, consumed at dinner tables and ooohhhed at at fancy restaurants and boiled into broth that cures the common cold? Is there comfort in the knowing? Maybe even pride? 

Anthropomorphizing aside, maybe chickens feel it all. Maybe they feel more than we do, maybe their clucking language contains a more complex lexicon of emotion than we humans will ever begin to fathom. Perhaps, like so many other species of animal and vegetable, they are the ones in control and have lured us into breeding them, caring for them, eventually ending their lives in a fairly humane manner (at least on this farm) all so that they have some structure in their lives. A structure they (perhaps) crave. A structure that many humans (me) wished they had. Would it be comforting to know that at 50 years of age we would be stuffed into a metal cone face down and pinch slit slit Done? Would our lives feel less frantic if the end date was determined? Of course there is always the chance for an accident. The chicken with the wing ripped off by a raccoon or rat would tell you so. But what if we just knew?

It is still warm after the sun has set. We scream down the dark road on the back of a motorcycle, our bodies blurred to trees and grass and the cows invisible in the fields. All this motion, all this energy moving forward, fragile and full of potential, our death already waiting for us at the end of some road, known or not. And as we hit a bump on the asphalt I wonder if this is it, the end, the pinch and slit and I think of the chicken perhaps orchestrating this all, including my ride on the back of a bike and that my fate is already determined. So I lean into the warm body in front of me, full of love and life, and I smile at the structure of the universe as we move forward into the darkness.

Mourning

Feathers at the window.  A heart shaped mark where she hit. 

We untangle limbs and mouths, slip cloth over tangled heads of hair. 
We open the screened door and step out onto hot concrete, the astringent smell of the desert invading our lungs: sharp intake, sigh. 

An angel, wings hunched and shaking, lay gasping on the ground. 
Her deep black eyes wide with panic, 
wide with what the fuck just happened, 
wide with a glimpse of the shadow descending. 

We bend over the broken body, lay hands on the bird’s beating chest, breathe with her ragged breaths. A single drop of blood on her beak, head twisted impossibly behind her supine bluegreyness, legs kicking into which she once flew. 

The window is an inverted photograph of this afternoon: the robin blue sky, billowing clouds of the West, pinyons and junipers climbing past the frame of upper sill. 

She was flying into a dream and smashed into this reality. 

Chest heaving (hers, ours) her strangling tongue flicks into dry air once more before stillness descends.

Mourning a mourning dove, my melancholy cry of childhood summertime, I cradle her in my hands, I lift her into a tree to keep the dog away. 
We say words, we hold hands, we cry at what is lost 
and what is meant by this 
and for what is to come (for her, us).

Today the ants have moved in, her body a feast for tiny legs and grasping jaws. 

We soar, we break, we die, we nourish* 

*Not necessarily in that order. 

Before I go...

My stomach tightens and churns.
I am going to sea.
I pull my hood over tangled hair, wrap my neck and feet with wool, pull on rubber deck boots and worn purple gloves.

My heart tingles and leaps.
I am going to sea.
I am in love with the idea, the action, the motion, the creatures, the deep dark mystery. I am elated and terrified. This happens each time I pack my sea bags and stumble down the dock. I imagine all those things you don’t want to imagine: the ship sinking in a storm; falling overboard on a night watch; knocked in the head by the boom; appendicitis 1000 miles out; fingers, arm, leg yanked off wrestling a line. These are things I should not think on, should not say or write lest they come true (knock on wood, spit over your shoulder, turn around three times).

Death follows me as flying fish skimming over the waves and swallows fluttering above the boom. That is why I sail. Not because I want to die, but because I want to live more fully, experience each breath with gratitude, savor each step on land or boat. I feel death’s whispers mingling with salty air and I respond with a quiet reevaluation of my life. What are my deepest longings? Who would I want to talk to as the ship was going down? What dreams have I neglected? What haven’t I done that I would like to do? Who are my people?

I have time out here to think and process and dream. Sometimes it hurts as scenes are played and replayed and no matter how much I try I can’t change the script. Sometimes I come up with ideas that make perfect sense 500 miles off shore but seem ludicrous back on land. Sometimes on dark nights I create strings of words and the stars help me garland the heavens with my stories.

I am a mere inch of fiberglass away from the dark and murky depths of the sea. I can feel her breath casting the boat over her back. I want to explore the depths of my own dark and murky soul, to meet her at the edge of dreams and tumble through the world together.

I don’t want to conquer mother ocean, or the wind, or death: it is not possible. I want to explore the things that frighten me down in my core because I know it will cause me to love them, the world, myself, more deeply than the deepest grains of sand at the bottom of the most remote canyons in the sea.

We motor into the river and the fear drops away. We raise the sails and I whoop in joy. I catch myself smiling and laughing and dancing across the deck. The wild dark waters swim across the hull and welcome us in a frothing confluence of salt and fresh. My belly is calm. My heart is light. With this movement forward, with this action of raising cloth to the wind, I find a piece of my wild self raised to the sky.


We have not left the river, we are not in danger yet, these waters are swirling but calm. On the ocean we will face bigger waves, bigger winds, bigger challenges, but we will be held by the seas that shake us. We will be exactly where we all need to be, reaching or close hauled or running on the perfect course, as crooked as our wind-dictated path may seem. Death will holler through the rigging during squalls and tuck us into our bunks, our eyes red and fluttering after four hours on watch.

Death and life, night and day will dance with the dolphins and whales off the bow. They will sing with us to the stars. They will steer us to the islands through our salty hands.

We will be wild, we will be peace, we will be alive as we are cradled in all that is and was and will be.