Morning Note

I feel so very blessed to be taking this little trip. Mr. Moon and I travel well together and being together every minute of the day turns out to be a delight instead of a problem.
We laugh so much when we travel. God knows that Helen, Georgia gave us plenty to laugh about.
And sometimes you just HAVE to laugh.

Anyway, we're about to head on out again. I love our time in the car. I've been reading The Yearling out loud and the writing is so fine, the sense of place so strong, the characters so beautifully fleshed out that I feel we are living with the Baxters and the Forresters as we travel down the highways, as we ride along the back roads and through the small towns.
And they are good traveling companions too, those people of the Florida scrub and the critters who live with them and around them.

One more night out and then we'll be home. Where my people live, where my critters roam.

I feel blessed.

Can't Complain

I started writing a post last night and it was all full of woe-is-me and can-you-believe-this!? and it was about my mother and one of my brothers and it started like this:

Jesus and I haven't been writing about anything that cuts to the bone, reveals my flesh recently. Why is that? Why do I feel as if anything I write here might lead to disaster? Is it that with Lily about to give birth I am completely afraid of tempting the gods? Who knows? But honestly. My life is not entirely all rainbows and buttercups, Daffodils and Miss Reds and Miss Penny with her brain injury healing up. No. There are...situations.

And then it went on in that vein and darlings, you really would read it and weep...with laughter. It was so filled with self-righteousness and indignation and you know what? I'm not going to post it because....
Well, because my life IS almost entirely rainbows and buttercps, Daffodils and Miss Reds and Miss Penny with her brain injury healing up. It's all of that and so many butterflies out right now you can't believe it and cooler temperatures and lower humidity and, and, AND, Lily about to give birth and my four wonderful children and my husband, my hard-working husband.

Here's what he did this weekend:


Not by hand. Oh no. He rented a backhoe (and he used to own one and was the envy of every man who met him) and he and our neighbor dug a new sewer line over at Lily and Jason's house.


"Shit runs downhill," he told me. "And that's all I need to remember."

Oh, Mr. Moon. My hero.

While he was backhoeing, Jessie and May and Lily and I were gathered at Lily's house to make a plaster cast of her belly. As May said when we were leaving, "I haven't had that much fun since we cleaned your apartment, Lily."
And she was not being facetious, either. Anytime I gather with my kids it's a damn good time. We laugh. Oh, how we laugh.


In this picture, Lily thinks she's hearing a cat throw up but actually, it was just some equipment outside. A backhoe maybe? We vasolined her belly and then started covering it with strips of plaster gauze. I am sure there's a real name for this product but I don't know it. None of us knew what we were doing, but May had just spoken to some other friends who had done the same thing a few days before and they had given her lots of advice which came in handy, indeed.
We plastered her up and then removed the cast and then more hilarity ensued.


That's May and Jessie posing with Lily's belly and breasts, pretending to be pregnant. Jessie was trying out her tranquil mother-face but the giggles took ahold of her before I could snap the picture.
We ate watermelon and we discussed our plans for the birth while the men worked outside on the sewer line and at one point, Lily leaned her head onto my bosom and I said, "Honey, are you okay? Do you need a nap?"
And then I realized she just loved her mama.

So look- how can a woman with this life complain? How can she even mention...situations?

Lord, we all have situations. But mine are nothing, nothing, NOTHING compared to the joys and blessings all around me.
And I know it.

And then, as if to underscore all of that, after I got back from yoga and taking the dogs to the groomer this morning I went into the chicken house to find this:


A tiny green egg. My heart did leap. I'm not kidding you.
I think it must have been laid by Miss Betty (aka One Fine Chicken) because she is tiny and has green legs. Here she is:


And this is how tiny she is compared to Suzie the Rooster:


Of course, short of DNA testing, there is no way to know for sure who laid that perfect tiny egg but I think in my heart it was Betty. She's such a good chicken. She lets me pet her, even when she's awake. I'm so proud of her.

And look- this is my life- and how can this be? This life of giant, towering oaks in my very own front yard and tiny, sweet chickens, in my very own back yard, and a daughter about to have a baby and all my children who make me laugh so hard and who laugh at me and tell me things I would never, ever tell my mother in a million years.

Somehow when I held that little egg in the palm of my hand it seemed to sum it all up for me. The miracle of it all, the magic of it all, the richness of it all, all wrapped up in the most perfect shape of the most perfect food (except, of course, for breast milk which also comes in a pretty perfect shape) in the entire world. I felt like I had the entire world in the palm of my hand.

And I do. I have the curve of an egg, the curve and dip of my daughter's belly, the curve and shape of my husband's face, and hands to reach out and hold all of that.

"How you doin'?"
"Can't complain. How about you?"
"Doin' all right."

And the light is shining through the trees on a Monday at noon and I rejoice and no, I cannot, I will not complain.

Down On The Farm

Yesterday I worked in the garden all day long. I weeded and I mulched and I dug trenches and put composted chicken shit in them and I planted cucumbers and I tied up tomatoes.



I planted two eggplants and my peppers look so good that I think I'll go buy a few more to put in. I've pulled up the bolted mustard and fed them to the goats next door. Those goats run to the fence when they see me coming. The baa and they bump each other out of the way as I toss the spent plants over and they pull at the greens and tear them from the stems and munch them with great and obvious delight.

The potatoes are doing well and I think we could probably dig up a few already. I love the way just-pulled-from-the-ground potatoes respond to the knife. They're so crisp they practically explode away from it in pieces. If you cut them. Which I don't, if they're the new, baby ones.
I'm excited to see how my blue potatoes turn out. They're the shorter row on the right.

All day as I worked, it threatened rain. Thunder to the northwest and great dark clouds and even a few heavy drops but then nothing. Nothing at all. By the time I finished I turned on the sprinklers, thinking that surely that would get the rain to come, but no, it did not. I kept checking the radar and it looked like surely we would get a squall at least, but radar lies, children, it truly does.

You've never seen anyone as filthy as I was by the time I was done working. I'd had my hands in the dirt all day and composted chicken shit, too. My hair was soaking wet from sweat and I'd probably smushed fifty mosquitoes who'd had the temerity to try and feed upon me. Whenever I'd find a bug in the garden, I'd pick it up and take it to the chicks and put it in their box and as always, Mabel/Maynard would be the one to find it first and the others would chase her/him around and try to take it but that bird is the bug-eatin'est bird you ever saw. Mr. Moon actually chopped a worm into six pieces the other day for them. He's nicer than me. To chickens, at least.

I was taking a shower when he got home and I showed him what I'd done in the garden. We had to check the chicks, of course, and we oohed and aahed because they were on their roost, all lined up like the big chicks they're learning to be. I came back to the house to grab the camera but by the time I got back to the coop, they'd all scattered, of course.


I'd picked broccoli and collards and snow peas and onions and I made a stir fry for our supper with all of those, a red pepper, two carrots, tofu and peanuts. Here are the vegetables being wokked.

It was a perfect day, short of not getting rain. I love getting filthy in the dirt, I love having a body strong enough to dig and bend and pull and plant. I love getting things tidy in the garden, tucking up the mulch like a nice, airy blanket around the plants and I love the sight of things growing. Nothing makes me happier than all of that. And then to come inside and cook what we've grown and sit down to eat with my love- well, here we are. Heaven of a sorts.

Our old house, our two acres, our birds and our crazy dogs. The garden we've made. Unlike the people who lived in this house a hundred and fifty years ago, we don't have to depend solely on what we raise in the garden and the chicken coop and the hog pen. We have Publix, eight miles down the road. But if there's anything more rewarding than eating what we've raised with sweat and muscle and dirt and water, I don't know what it is.

Well, seeing my kids all in one place, having a good time with each other, laughing. That's the very best.

And reaching over in the bed at night to find my husband, to pat him and feel his hand touch mine, to turn over and go back to sleep, knowing he's there beside me.

How did I get so lucky?
I have no idea.
But here I am, lucky and knowing it. Working and growing it. Writing and showing it.

Now. Could we please get some rain? Not to be ungrateful or anything, but could we?

Light At Last

It's been two darn good weeks for me and I'm just feeling so damn grateful today.

Three days ago (only three?) we elected a new president and I'm still trying to integrate that one in my mind and believe you me- NO PUN intended. "Integrate" is a word that we used back in the old hippie days to represent the sort of processing that change in the brain requires.

I'm so glad I got to be a hippie.

I was talking to my yoga teacher this morning and I told her that two things really profoundly affected the way I see the world. Of course there are far more than two, but these are really important.

One was being lucky enough to travel to Europe when I was seventeen. I turned eighteen in Paris, France. I was able there to see that the way we do things here in the USA, which I had always been told was the greatest country in the world, was not necessarily the only way and besides that, seeing Michelangelo's David sort of gave me the insight that maybe the US hadn't quite come up to the level of culture and achievement that other countries had.

Among other things, including the way their soup tasted.

The other influence on my life which opened my mind to a completely different way of thinking was taking hallucinogenic drugs.

Yeah. I did it. More than once. And I'm mighty grateful I did.

My yoga teacher was curious about that one. She's never done any such a thing but just recently had to detox from the "medications" her doctors had her on for pain and it was a difficult process, to say the least. She asked me how I'd "gotten" off the hallucinogens.

I explained to her that for me, at least, hallucinogens are the opposite of addictive. It's sort of like childbirth, only without the physical pain. Not something you need to do all the time. I did it until I figured out that I'd learned all I needed to learn from that particular teacher and then I quit.

And I think that's true. They weren't a recreational experience for me, but an opening of the mind.

Mindbirth?

Soulbirth?

Not unlike seeing The David or a giant Sequoia or holding your just-born baby for the first time and realizing that there is far more going on in this world (and perhaps others) than my little mind had ever possibly perceived.

There are keys to the doors of perception, as old Aldous Huxley pointed out and I've been blessed to hold a few of them in my hand.

But you know what they say- Before enlightenment, chop wood, haul water. After enlightenment, chop wood, haul water.

Not saying I'm enlightened. Oh hell, no. But I've had my moments where I believe I was pretty darn close.

Moments when I realized viscerally to the tiniest particles of my bones and blood that yes, we are all one. Not that we are just a part of it all but that we ARE it all. Along with the trees and the rocks and the birds, this oak table I'm writing on, and that redneck down the road.

And that the divisions we see are merely illusions.

But like waking from a dream that we desperately want to hold on to, these sudden beams of enlightenment, whether chemically induced or not, are difficult to keep with us in the form of their original full power and harder still to explain.
I think perhaps there are people who can do this, who are even born knowing these things. The Dalai Lama? That homeless guy who walks down the road with his eyes closed, chanting and blissed out? Keith Richards?

Haha.

Just making sure you're paying attention.

But for the rest of us, life is a constant road of knowing and not-knowing, of seeing and not-seeing, of remembering and forgetting, of being reminded and remembering again.

At least for me.

And in the last few weeks, my soul has been at rest enough to take in so much goodness and to remember a few of the things I've learned. To be at peace enough to be grateful, down to that place where I know what's important and what's not and to feel blessed beyond measure.

My family and the love we share is something I never thought I'd have. Not like this. Not like it's turned out to be. It's blown all my perceptions of what a family can be.

My friends and the support and humor they've offered me is something I'll never be able to express my gratitude for appropriately.

The people I get to play with at the Opera House give blessings to me that they have no idea they are offering.

My home.

This country that I now have more love for than I ever knew I could have.

The simple joys I experience while metaphorically chopping wood and hauling water, whether it's digging in the dirt or sweeping the floors of this house I love or baking a loaf of bread.

Sleep and it's soft curtain of darkness which is the sort of darkness which is light-shot.

The very basic gratefulness of living in a world filled with the sounds of birds and the wind moving through the trees and taking tongue in the windchimes.

The water that bathes our planet.

The ability to write down and share what I feel and dream about and am grateful for.

A body which is aging but which is still strong and which has served me so well, especially when it came to creating life and delivering it and nurturing it.

The experiences I've been blessed to have, both the ones that seemed ecstatic and the ones that seemed too hard to bear, because they've made me who I am.

My husband, whom as we grow older together, I cherish and adore more each day.

These things and so much more I am blessed with.

I was blessed with them a few months ago, too, when I was crazy, but I couldn't register them, not in any constructive or real way. The place I was in was so dark that I couldn't see them, even though I knew they were all around me. And so, in some ways, I am feeling most blessed to be at this more peaceful, sane place where I can feel them, where I can hold them and see them and study them and know them.

I find myself tearing up a lot recently. Joyful tears. Not just at the big, huge things like seeing Obama get elected and seeing the faces of his wife and children. But at the smaller things, too, the more personal. Trying to tell a friend how much she means to me. Attempting to do the same with my husband, his arms around me. Telling a child of mine how proud I am of the person he or she has become.

Pure, simple, open-hearted gratefulness fills my heart and my eyes leak that which over-fills.

And I have no elegant words of ending today. This is just what it is. I feel enlightened in the sense that my being is filled with light and in the sense that my soul feels light, as if a huge weight has been removed from it and I can breathe again, smile again, feel all my blessings again, remember the lessons I've learned again and honor them all again.

Amen. Again. And again, and again, and again.