Cabin Pictures, Self-Acceptance, A Flow of Water Breaks a Nightmare

How's everyone's weekend going? I hope that everyone else is getting more sunshine than we are: it's been gray, overcast, a little rainy. And busy, in a good way. Phil's friend Joe has been spending the weekend with us: right now, they're out fishing (but they may be back soon: I can see the wind starting to pick up and it's raining) but yesterday they made great progress on replacing the windows in our little storage room, which is part of the insulation project we're in the midst of. 

Here is our cabin from the south. I was wishing I had the 8x zoom on that lumix for this photo: remember that our cabin is 30ft from the edge of the bluff! I was standing right on the very edge to take the photo and had a scary moment when I almost stepped back to adjust! 

You can see how it's a solar oven in there when the sun's out, all that southern exposure! The red ladder is against the tiny storage room where they were replacing windows. The main room (about 10x16) is on the left. Underneath the main room, the gaping mouth is our crawlspace, which Phil built a better hatch for this week to keep out squirrels, porcupines and other critters who like to eat fiberglass. All the windows are going to have to come out of that south face too: an upheaval in waiting, since our counter, which is also my writing/work space, food prep space, our eating space and general space-on-which-everything-gets-put is right under the windows all across the south wall and everything is going to have to come off!

Here is the cabin viewed from the west:

A work in progress, as you can see. That glare to the right of the porch is some new windows, and the door that's halfway open leads into a small shed. 

While they were working on the windows, I was working on my poetry writing and also on some translating work. I felt fine about it. It has felt so good to me to make my poetry writing a priority and to view it as some of my most important work. And I love translating and take some pride in it - and of course, the fact that it makes some money is a good thing too.

Especially since having had some validation at the Writers' Conference, it's becoming easier for me to take my own directions and motivations seriously. Not that long ago, I would either have felt obligated to help with changing the windows, or would have felt guilty about being incapable of helping much - and similarly for every other project that I'm ill-equipped or disinclined to do: I'd have either forced myself to do it anyway or guilt-tripped myself. This feels like such a good thing, to accept the value of what I do and who I am. Especially living with a hyperactive greyhound like Phil, and with my own neuroses around burning calories, I've also tended to feel bad if I'm spending a lot of time doing sedentary work. But while there have been times in my life (not many, though) when I've 'needed' a lot of exercise, most of my life I've felt pretty awful if I exercise too much: getting time outdoors (which need I share with Phil) is the crucial piece for me, rather than getting out of doors and moving as vigorously as possible for as long as possible. Another thing that it's good to feel ok about.

How do we get around the trap of feeling that artistic endeavors are not worthwhile, because they're not consistently 'productive,' or productive at all in any traditional sense most of the time, and often require so much emotional energy without always providing a tangible harvest? I quit being a serious musician because of some of those kinds of considerations (and some life catastrophes years ago) - even quit writing for a bit at one point, but it seems like I can't not write, so that didn't last long. What do you think?  A less utilitarian view is more appealing to me at the moment, whereby the value of an activity, or of the resulting 'made thing' (a literal meaning of 'poem') isn't necessarily measured by some arbitrary monetary calibration.

A sweet little story from yesterday: as many of you know, we have a half-finished project to get running water in our home. We have a water tank in the 'bunker,' with a pipe buried 7ft down in the ground running from it to our cabin. Since there's a 16ft elevation change, we're hoping to be able to gravity-feed rather than getting a pump. This project had been stalled for some time, and the nightmarish problem that we were embarrassed even to mention was that when we poured water down the pipe (which is buried 7ft down, remember) it didn't come out the other end! 

Well, Phil and Joe took another look yesterday afternoon. Have you ever tried to push a rope? Well, they pushed a tight cable over half-way down the pipe from each end, thus reaming its entirety in two goes. (A plumber's snake, the traditional 'right tool for the job,' turned out to be heinously expensive to rent, and Phil is a master at improvising tools). They don't even know what they did, but after that, it worked!

Here is Joe holding the pipe outside our cabin, with water flowing into the rain barrel! Doesn't he look pleased?

Of course, by the time they were done, we were out of water - remember, we still haul it by the 6-gallon jug. We had just enough in the cabin for morning drinks. Small stuff, then, and nicely emblematic of the ambivalent exhilaration over the prospect of unlimited - or at least less-limited - water supply! (And now I'm at Safeway, using the internet and filling up water!)