Also at http://ulteriorharmony.org/?p=702
A couple days ago, I got called out for overfeeding the chickens. Slightly, the turkeys too.
The young chicks are so numerous and so voracious, there's no chance of overfeeding them--I'm hauling out a 50lb sack of their feed every other day, and every morning their bowls are picked clean.
But the feed is too expensive to have it ending up on the ground because the chickens not cleaning it up well due to abundance.
Ooh, way to chastise and chasten me! You all know how much I dislike waste. Chickens, with their ability to clean up, are patron saints of the blessed realization that there is no such thing as waste, so I could have blamed on myself pretty hard for making very-chickens wasteful! But I haven't been beating up on myself quite so much of late, since all that time on the road. Just like the "injuring the attack-rooster" incident (which I shared on Facebook and may tell in more detail here as things shape up), I'm recognizing that this is part of the learning curve. In fact, it's part of "knowing what you're looking at" once again--knowing how to gauge food consumption.
As I fed this morning, I was meditating on what feeding these chickens meant to me--why it was that I'd ended up overfeeding them. Turned out, my heuristic hadn't been "Chickens need x amount of food per day." Instead, it had been "I'm feeding someone else's chickens and I really want to show that I'm responsible and reliable." If there's visibly food in their feeders, the message is "I won't neglect your precious birds." In retrospect, I might have communicated my worth more appropriately by underfeeding: "I treat your expensive feed with respect."
I'm glad to have taken the metaphoring and nonverbal communicating out of the "how much feed will they eat?" equation. Who knew so much could be said with farm chores?
***Diving in in medias res*** I know it's been over two weeks since my last post, and that this is my first post from my new abode! The easiest way to break a hiatus is simply to dive into the middle of it, so, voilà. As I continue to ponder my "dual blog and what is the blog about anyway" existential challenge, though, it does occur to me that a continual thread of mine is investigation of metaphors, so I'm contemplating how that might be promoted and centralized.
Otherwise, here I am--what do you want to hear about?
Sending desert love!
Ela.
And at
http://ulteriorharmony.org/?p=700
In my previous post, I mentioned developing a mindfulness practice of bringing awareness: to what I'm experiencing by naming it. Very often, naming equates to differentiation: what I am seeing is remarkable (i.e. I'm remarking upon it) because it is different from other things I see.
Within a couple hours of leaving the Bay Area yesterday, I got up into the high country and have been back in snows, above treeline, back down again and up again. Fascinating what a barometer the trees are. Or an altimeter--get too high up and they disappear. These scrubby silver-green shrubs give such a monochrome cast to the scenery. Much of the Nevada stretch of my journey yesterday and today looked like this; even more monochrome when more overcast. I passed a flock of sheep who all looked the same color as the shrubs around them.
Something else, though, that I sought to put a name to, was the quality of the sky.
It looked like this in northern CA, in Mt. Shasta country, also. The "difference" is how the clouds stack three dimensionally, at the same not-very-great height but one behind the other, as if suspended above a stage set. It says big sky, broad mountains, the clouds like speech bubbles in between them.
This is Bryce Canyon. Snow on red rock, labyrinth of the mind.
The "natural bridge" blew me away, but this photograph doesn't do it justice.
Utah is one hour ahead of CA, NV--and AZ, since AZ, very sensibly, doesn't participate in the daylight savings nonsense. I got a late start this morning after driving too late last night, later than I had energy for, and when I crossed into UT and learned (smart phone!) that I'd "lost" an hour, I repined a little--even less time to do stuff. But with the next heartbeat, I decided not to consider it an hour lost. I'd been gaining and losing elevation for two days straight, but my ears could always pop. I, of all people, well know that time cannot be lost.
Also at http://ulteriorharmony.org/?p=697
I'm still alive, and I'm in Berkeley! I was offline for four days of the ferry from Haines to Bellingham, then some serious driving, some wonderful hospitality, and catching up with dear, dear friends whom I haven't seen in way too long. Interesting that when I was in England last fall, I found myself telling people it wouldn't be so long until the next time I saw them (it had been three years that time). And now in the Bay Area, I've been saying the same thing to my friends here. Conceptually, AZ feels so much closer to everything/everywhere. My car has come down with a bunch of fairly serious issues. I'm so glad I caught it yesterday and so grateful that my friends have a mechanic they trust who is taking care of the issues today. In my first post from the road, my lesson 2, in part, was not to over-worry about noises or smells my car may or may not have been emitting, so it's interesting that the rider to that lesson now is to follow intuition. When the road pavement was washboarded and it sounded like a blown-out tire, I was glad to recognize that there was no need to worry along those lines. On the other hand, taking my car to the mechanic this morning because "it might be nothing but it's a specific noise that happens in a specific context that wasn't happening until last night" may have averted a breakdown in the middle of nowhere.
I'm sitting here with the atlas and trying to figure out the best route from here to Bryce Canyon, where I want to stop on my way to Tucson, preparing my spirit for the next reach.
In WA, OR, and CA the past four days have been full of torrential rain, with some thunder and lightning. Very different driving than in AK, very different flora. It was sweet to see my first palm tree a little ways north of Sacramento, my first prickly pears on the 405 west of Sacramento.
So much is different, of course. My conception of how many miles I can cover in a given time changes depending on the roads--the "220 miles = ca. 5 hours" based on Homer-to-Anchorage algorithm is gone. Stop-go traffic for over four hours in the Seattle area on Friday; three hundred miles in less than five hours on Saturday morning.
Different, too, being in an area with fruit trees everywhere, and produce stores everywhere. I'm so habituated to there being maybe three places in town where produce is available, and that's all for about seventy miles.
With all the friends I've visited, it's been as though no time had elapsed, although we hadn't seen each other for seven years. This gives me some hope and good feelings about preserving the precious friendships I just drove away from in AK. There is something so grounding about these enduring friendship connections: that they exist, that they continue even with nothing physical supporting them. As I pay attention to my own relationship with, orientation toward, connection with, the outside world, recently I've often become aware of being on autopilot; of looking at things and simply not knowing what I'm looking at. Without labeling, without judgment, I've been using my gift of language to put words, very very simple words, to what I'm seeing, using them as little mantras to bring myself to the present. Also, of understanding what I'm seeing to compare it to what I've seen elsewhere; to acknowledge and understand how one place differs from the next place. It is deepening my engagement with this transition, so that I'm inhabiting the place in which I currently am, rather than just blowing on through lost in my head.
Here are some pictures of what I've been seeing.
Snowy conifers from the boat:
Snowclad mountains in the distance; snows receding in the foreground:
Ketchikan--still in AK but a whole different climate. Mountain and ocean right there together--land at the dock and the road goes straight up. Some of the town hewn straight through native rock:
Crocuses and buds in Ketchikan:
A standard view at an opening between two stores in Ketchikan's front. Many big generic touristy stores; many businesses closed; Ketchikan is bigger than Homer but evidently much more seasonal and dependent on the tourists on the summer cruise ships and ferries. There were a couple stores with the strident label "We are staffed by natives of Ketchikan and are open year round to serve our community," with a strong implication of all the negatives of these affirmations. Not everyone loves the tourists!
My camera didn't come out for those three days of driving and visiting. This is Cafe Borrone in Menlo Park, which I never visited when I lived there but is now the place where I reconnected with two lovely friends.
And this is the view from my friends' porch. Oh, I spent so many hours here when I lived in Berkeley. Oh what dear friends, how good it is to see them!
More soon when I'm back on the road! And more awareness around seeing. I always hear what I'm hearing, so it's interesting to be paying more attention to seeing like this! Anyone else?
