Day 4 at Dry Creek: Climate Change; Dealing with Groundhogs; Composing a Vegetable Garden; the Curse of the Middle Way; Missing Marci and Writing Poetry

1.

I arrived at Dry Creek Friday night followed by a strong, sharp wind from the south.  That is something relatively new to the west.  As a child, winds were predictable.  When they came from the north, they were always biting, no matter the season (freezing in the winter, crisp in the summer); when they came from the south, they were always balmy, no matter the season (warm in the winter, scorching in the summer).  When they came from the west, they were the temperature of the season.  Winds were predictable then.  About 2000 that began to change.  We now occasionally have fronts come with cold winds from the south.  I’m not sure what causes that, although my guess would be an erratic jet stream.   I’ll have to research it.  The bigger question is why doesn’t such a major shift in weather make the news?  Except on the Weather Channel, climate change doesn’t exist even though we witness it all around us.

However, Memorial Day weekend is predictably cold here--winter’s last merrymaking before summer knocks on the door, enters, and kills the murderous party with sunshine and awkward pleasantries.

Therefore, I planted the vegetable garden Saturday wearing a heavy, hooded coat over a sweatshirt.  On an earlier trip, I’d made three large planting beds out of railroad ties, raised not for the convenience of harvesting, but rather because the soil where I wanted the garden was mostly a gravel and sand fill brought in when our house was built. 

One of the beds before planting

So, for the garden, we laid chicken wire on the ground (to keep the groundhogs from harvesting from below) and then filled the large railroad tie boxes with rich soil dug from the bottom of the irrigation pond.  The rectangular beds gave me three regular geometric shapes for the theme of my garden composition.  To add the variation, I used sandstone river rock to create a circular path inside the boxes--a quarter of a circle for each box.  Then, because the final box is missing, I carried the circle out into the void with a three-quarters circular flower bed.  A round table will sit on part of the flagstone patio here.  The trick is to lock shapes into larger patterns like images in a poem--where they both stand separate and bleed together simultaneously.  It is totally collage.  Gardening and poetry require the same thought patterns--how do I group?; how do I separate?--how do I do both simultaneously?

One of the beds after beginning to frame in the trail

The vegetable garden with completed trail.  Next will come a rail fence.



The completed garden from the back.  A rail fence will frame it in and discourage deer.

2.

Sunday morning was cold.  I went to sacrament meeting and meant to stay for Sunday school and priesthood, but during the closing prayer, I started to cry inexplicably over Joe, my step-dad, who passed away last winter.  So, I got up and went over to the cemetery, which is near by.  My mom has been so devastated she hasn’t ordered his headstone even though we buried his body back in January.  As there was nothing said in church to trigger the tears and I haven’t cried since the funeral, I think Dad was telling me to get this taken care of.

So, there you have it--my impeccable ability to alienate my audience.   I’ve alienated my conservative base with by mentioning climate change and I’ve alienated any atheists or agnostics by mentioning that I believe my stepfather (along with my father) talk to me from the other side of the veil.   The only possible audience I have left is the new-agers, but I’m sure I’ll get around to offending them sooner or later.

It’s hard to have a significant audience when your thoughts don’t fall into neat categories.  Though I practice Mormonism because it is what I believe, I am a Buddhist by nature, for I always find myself in the middle.  For example, I can’t fully identify with either conservatives nor liberals, zealots nor atheists, artists nor laborers, and so although I would love to experience the camaraderie of agreement, which I’m sure must be the most pleasant experience in the world, I always find myself on the outside looking in--too connected with the group to walk away, say forget you, but not connected enough to fully join in. Buddhists say that enlightenment is the middle way.  I find it to be more of a curse, but they’d probably agree with that, at least in theory, if not in practice.

3.

Last night I went to bed tired but dreading it because I’m here without Marci.  I couldn’t sleep, so I wrote two versions of a poem--the first, very quickly, a journal entry really.  The second version I pried loose from my personal life--hoping to intensify images by freeing it from actuality.  Right now, I’m not sure which I like best, perhaps the first, because it sounds less forced.

Alone (Version 1)

On the wall is a poem

about the cold, the road

and missing you.

Outside deer lurk

in the darkness

waiting for the light

to go out so they can attack

our vegetables.

In the cemetery they lurk also,

eyes set on the flowers

on Dad’s grave.

It’s been cold and gray.

I’ve been missing you.

Alone (Version 2)

Moonlight on lacquered lead paint.

The wall is a poem about the cold, the road,

the stale smell of the butane heater.  “Missing You”

dribbles out from the end

of the broken shower.

Minus signs bounce

off icy green

tile.

I want to hear you talk about feeding chickens

cucumber sandwiches under the warm willow.

Viewing or Not Viewing through Multicultural Lenses: The Clash of Cultures at Ground Zero of the Eclipse Pathway in Northern Arizona

This is not the blog I intended to publish tonight, which was going to be titled, “Ecclesiastes 3, the Solar Eclipse, and the Browns at the Navajo Village Heritage Center”.  It was to be humorous and somewhat irreverent.  That’s before I learned many traditional Navajos find it culturally offensive to picnic or celebrate during an eclipse.  Lino Footracer, a friend and relative through marriage, passed along a facebook post by his father:

"Eclipse of the sun the Navajo Way.... The sun has male qualities, is the father of Hero Twins through Changing Woman, properly named Jiigo Na'eii... Traditional observance: avoid the sun rays by staying indoors, shut any openings even cracks in the wall, do not drink or eat anything, speak softly, avoid laughter, face the east and offer prayers...afterwards offer corn pollen to the four directions and spread white corn meal around the hogan....mom's teachings.."

Then, I wasn’t going to post a blog at all.

Such are the dilemmas of our multicultural era.  Cultures overlap everywhere--it’s hard not to step on toes, and yet I think we should try to comprehend each other’s background and not trivialize sacred things. 

Wally, Shane, Everest, Tyler and Rio view the eclypse

However, I finally decided to post because currently there are some popular ethnocentric views projected on Native Americans which I believe are as bigoted and inaccurate as views held in the past, just not as mean-spirited.  The American Indian is often romanticized into something that doesn’t exist.  White people who have been disenfranchised by their own culture and are struggling to find themselves have created and projected a single image of what it means to be Native on diverse cultures, which like all cultures, are further diversified from within.  On the Rez, Indians refer to these kind-but-lost whites as Wanna-be’s.  Although, I consider the Navajo Nation my second home, I am not a Wanna-be.  I am white, Mormon and proud of who I am.  But, I can also testify that I never felt more at home than when I lived in Tsaile, deep in the heart of the Navajo Nation.  One does not have to be absorbed by a culture to love it.

Further more, what I learned from living on the Rez is that there isn’t a single Navajo Culture.  It’s a multiplicity of beliefs, that when woven together, create the great blanket called Diné Bikéyah or Navajolands.  For instance, many of my Navajo students were traditional, but just as many belonged to the Native American Church, or were Baptist or Mormon.  Likewise, towards the end of each summer, my sons would attend Bible school at a tent revival near by.  Although we are active Mormons I felt, and still feel, this was good for them, for knowing is always preferable to ignorance.  So often I’ve been judged because of my religion by people who know nothing about it, and so I’d hate to return the favor.  I don’t know if I exceeded or not, for we each have our own free wills, but I wanted to raise children who would embrace humanity with arms wide open.  You can’t do that unless you know who you are yourself, which is why I feel sorry for those Native American Wanna-be’s.  But you also can’t do this isolated completely in your own culture.

So, if you are a traditional Navajo, I hope you will not be offended by this, but my Navajo family, myself and some friends, both Navajo and biligaana (white), we prayed, we laughed and we watched the eclipse.   If that bothers you, I understand, and you probably shouldn’t look at the remainder of this post.  If it doesn’t, well, enjoy. 

Marci views the eclipse

If you're white, innocent (or ignorant), however you view it, like myself, I hope you've learned something.

Ahéhee'

How to Create Big-Garden Impact with a Few Plants or Reflections on the Creative Process

Mother's Day Garden--Labor, 4-hours, cost $50 (without the bench)

I was a writer long before I knew how to write well.  Although I wrote a few things in high school, the drive to create worlds on paper came pretty much all at once--the summer I first fell in love.  I’d had crushes in high school, but I’d never been consumed.  Then, while working myself though college, I met Shideh, a gorgeous Iranian, with long kinky black hair, a slender nose and a mischievous pirate’s smile. At least at first, she was also interested in me, but I didn’t have a clue how to deal with my new feelings and soon botched things up royally.

I didn’t have a clue how to fix reality.  I realize now being myself probably would have worked just fine, but at the time that didn’t occur to me, and so I was driven to correct the course of events on paper.  Even after I’d recovered from that fiasco, my compulsion to reorder my universe on paper didn’t subside until many years later when I found happiness.  Then all of the sudden, I had no reason to write.  For whatever reason that drive seems to have returned despite my contentment, which is good, because I’m not one of those artists willing to sacrifice happiness for the sake of art. If you have to stay hungry, so to speak, to be creative, I’d rather work at the bank, live in the suburbs and come home to a wonderful wife and kids.  Let someone else be driven to genius by their personal demons.  I want to live.

The important thing here is that I became a writer long before I could write.  Compulsion was the key.  I think some years from now I will look back at my new urge to landscape the same way.  At the time I recreated my world to where Shideh and I lived in a Le Corbusier-like glass and steel mansion perched on a sandstone mesa looking over Lake Powell near Bullfrog Marina, I thought I was writing well.  In fact, I thought I was a genius.  Only later, when I learned my craft, did I realize I’m only almost adequate.

I think I’m at the, I’m-a-genius stage as a gardener.  And since experience has taught me it won’t last, I’m going to enjoy my pompous, ignorant bliss as long as I can.  I’m going to assert, make recommendations, get on my high horse, and tell you what exactly needs to be done.  Then, somewhere down the line, I’ll have to retract most of what I’ve said and start all over again.  But, that’s how we create: first with unreasonable passion and then with restrained will.

So, here is my garden creed now:  1) when possible, work with the stone and plants already there; 2) use flowers as accents along the edges of nature, where you want to pop-up the borders;   3) use natural contours, paths and structures to consolidate textures and colors into larger patterns.

The site--Boulders and the shade from a tree
allowed some natural grasses to take hold.

Here, I created a mother’s day garden for my mother-in-law, Bonnie, using these principles.  My father-in-law, Wally, actually did most of the work over time by throwing rocks he liked under a tree.  The rocks and shade from the tree together altered the sandy, desert environment enough for wild grasses to come up.  Those rocks and grasses were all I needed to create a fairly inexpensive garden that took less than four hours to create.   Yet, the rocks and grasses were not a garden in and of themselves.  In the wild, they would have been beautiful, but on the lot, they just looked scruffy because there was neither a transition nor a border.  In the wild, the landscape would slowly transition from sand to savannah as the shade grew. Or, just as likely a creek or something would separate the two.  Here, neither happened.  So, my job was to make something happen.

The finished garden.  Path, rail and drive create an island. 
A small ribbon of flowers pop the edges.  Black hanger and lantern tie in the bench. 
Flowers--$25;  Lantern--$12; hanger--$9 

At the Flute End of Sustainable Living

Painting of our irrigation pond by Lloyd Brown

To borrow a phrase from William Stafford’s poem, “At the Bomb Testing Site,” I now realize that I’m at the flute end of consequences“at the flute end of consequences.”  It is so apparent that I know next to nothing about sustainable living, as you’ve probably figured out, and yet with the media available these days and the amount of acreage we have, something is bound to happen.  It’s hard to comprehend how much living just four acres can sustain:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tl01au5pXm0

It’s even more boggling what can be accomplished in just 4,000 square feet:  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpRxU-Ze-9E&feature=related

And even though I have 10 acres with access to another eighty (provided the extended family approves of my projects), these videos make it clear that sustainable living does not require inheriting “just a continent without much on it.”* It is a possibility for everybody.  

So, with “hands gripped hard on the desert,”* I wait for change--something gloriously positive.

Heck, I may even cool off in an all natural swimming pool and watch history unfold:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JoQthEBl6U&feature=related

*From William Stafford’s “At the Bomb Site”

Teaching, Zen, China, Gardening, Generation facebook and the End of America in 358 Words

My snapdragons

I sit out on the front porch on a cool evening after hard day of teaching.  Research papers were due and time-management is not a strength for eighth-graders.  They only care after the deadline has arrived.  Then it’s pleading time.  I wish I could be stoic, unmoved, or at least Zen--feeling in a deeply, compassionate, yet centered way, at peace, knowing it is better for them to learn cause and effect now then later.  I could smile and say, “I see, I see.”  But I can’t do that.  I get angry: “My social security depends on the likes of you!  Do you want to pledge allegiance to China!  If I end up working in a sweat shop for United Nike of Chinese America, I’ll hunt you down--the laziest of all generations!”   Then I give in, let them slip past the deadline again, because I just don’t have the heart to fail them.  Terrible teaching, terrible parenting, terrible being.

So, I came home exhausted, and there were plants to water.  I thought maybe I’d wait until morning, but I felt guilty.  What if I kill some of them?  So, reluctantly, I grabbed the hose and began my job.  As usual, I weeded while letting particular flowers soak.  As usual, it happened.  As the shadows grew long and the air cooled, the redundant pulling of weeds and noting improvement slowly melted my troubled day away until I was relaxed enough to sit on the porch and watch the first stars appear behind wispy, tropical looking clouds and the mimosa tree, the scent lilac still strong in the air from our scrawny little bush.

My snapdragons being watered

And now I write this blog totally at peace.  Even though I know America is the titanic.  It’d be a great novel, if there was a plot.  But there isn’t, because in order to have a plot, someone has to have a goal.   No goal, no conflict, and this generation doesn’t have stress--only facebook, texting and videogames.

Okay, maybe I’m not at peace, but the air is still sweet.   

Acquainting Myself with Cultures through Quotations: A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry (by Marci)

               I have been copying quotes from books since 2006.  When I first began choosing quotes, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to record; plus, I had a small journal, about 4” by 6,” so I had to be discerning.

                Perhaps if I went back and read some of the books over again, I would record more.  As it is, I only recorded three quotes from that first book, The Devil in the White City, a book of nearly 400 pages.

                I am currently reading The Warmth of Other Suns, which is nearly 600 pages long.  I’m about half-way through and I’ve already recorded 18 passages.  However, there are books that I never quote from: the language is ordinary; the author never voices anything in a unique way.

                In 2011 I bought a larger journal.  Its pages are about 5” x 7”.  I felt like I needed more room and once I had space, I may have went a little crazy--or maybe I became more inclusive.

My two quote journals.

                One problem with recording a quote is that I have to stop reading and copy it down or take the risk of forgetting where it is.  Sometimes, I book mark it for later. Often, when I go back to the passage, I decide it isn’t what I really wanted.

                In June 2010 I read A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry (©1995, 603 pages).  What follows is my reaction to it:

                Now that I’ve read about this India, I would like to read more.  I want to understand India from a personal point of view.  Sure, this book is fictional, but it seems too strange and depressing to not contain some truth.  I want to read some nonfiction.  Maybe I can find a book like Kaffir Boy, written by someone who grew up in India during the 60s and 70s.   It’s such a different life than that experienced by Americans.

                It’s terrible to think about living like Omprakash and Ishvar.  They were helpful to those in need and ended up living sad lives.  You wonder why anyone would try to stay alive if life is just one terrible event after another.  Om and Ishvar have peace for a short time and then a lot of pain and sadness.

                Aunty Dina and Menack also have difficult times, but have something to fall back on.  Om and Ishvar only have each other. 

                This is a book professors should use for discussions about why bad stuff happens to good people.  How could anyone living in these situations think there’s a God who cares about them and answers prayers?  It’s easy to believe in God when you have most of your needs met, but once you begin losing everything, it’s more difficult.   Om and Ishvar are in the same situation as Job:

What Dina sees from the bus exemplifies this India:

                One evening, while the slow local waited for a signal change, she gazed at the railway fence where a stream of black sewer sludge spilled from an underground drain.  Men were hauling on a rope that disappeared into the ground.  Their arms were dark to the elbows, the black slime dripping from hands and rope.  In the slum behind them, cooking fires smoldered, with smoke smudging the air. The workers were trying to unblock the drain.

                Then a boy emerged out of the earth, clinging to the end of the rope.   He was covered in the slippery sludge, and when he stood up, he shone and shimmered in the sun with a terrible beauty, his hair stiffened by the muck, flared from his head like a crown of black flames.  Behind him, the slum smoke curled to the sky, and the hellishness of the place was complete.  (pg. 67)