Sitting in the Dark Looking Out on the Lights of Juarez

        --for Bobby & Lee Byrd

There was a time I read slow and methodical.  I had time then.  That is about all I had.  I was alone on the U.S. / Mexican border, my life spiraling out of control, angry at God and the universe for a deep shyness I couldn’t seem to get out of.  But books were solid back then.  I worked alone in a high office looking out over a bridge between two nations and I boxed up books.  The building was old, mostly vacant.  At noon I rode the elevator alone down to the first floor where there was a tobacco shop ran by an old man also alone.  I walked past the shop and out the front door carrying my book, whichever one.  I read a lot back then, even at my slow pace, because time was not an issue.  Usually, I crossed the street to a Chinese restaurant, a buffet, but not that good of one, and not that popular.  But it had a corner booth that was usually free and looked out on the street.  And there I sat and read. 

Poetry--Woven Stone by Simon J. Ortiz, The Selected Poems of Paul Blackburn, Pictures of Brueghel by William Carlos Williams.

Other times I went to the bar in the hotel next store.  It was a tall building, famous, and totally vacant except for some guy’s pent house on the top floor and the bar on the bottom floor.  I should remember the name of the hotel, but I don’t.  I should remember the name of the bar, but I don’t.  At night it was sometimes crowded and rowdy.  But in the day it was almost vacant.

I sat at the bar, drank rum, stared at an amazingly beautiful blond named Kimberly, and between spells of being mesmerized by her sparking blue eyes and dimpled smile, I read:

Fiction--Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, Rick DeMarinis, The Year of the Zink Penny, Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits, Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, Burges, A Clockwork Orange, Waguih Ghali, Beer in the Snooker Club.

I read and absorbed and looked into Kimberly’s eyes.  For whatever reason, she didn’t mind.  She invited me out once, and I went, but she quickly realized I couldn’t talk.  So I read.  She’d fill my glass now and then.  Then tell me about her abusive boyfriend.  I never knew what to say and she didn’t seem to mind.  She would go back to washing glasses and I’d go back to reading.

Criticism & theory:  The Outsider by Colin Wilson and Cubism, Steiglistz, and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams by Bram Dijkstra.

After lunch, I would ride the elevator alone again, box up books while looking at sunlight shark off the steam of cars on the bridge razor sharp--I can’t remember if they were coming or going--until the buildings turned pink and the lights begin to appear.

Then I would head back to the bar for a couple more hours.  It wasn’t as quiet.  Kimberly was busier.  But the books were still solid and I was just killing time, partly to avoid my apartment, and partly to go back to the now completely empty office building, ride the empty elevator up, open the office door, turn off the lights, and there in the dark stare out over the lights of Mexico.

Eventually Kimberly became pregnant; then we learned that the bar was being closed.  The regulars promised her a big party to mourn the closing of the bar and celebrate her soon-to-be child.  But drunks aren’t very reliable.  I bought something for the baby.  I had no car.  I didn’t know what I was doing.  I don’t remember what I got, but I do remember I walked miles through Mexico looking for the perfect way to say all my mouth refused to.  It wasn’t expensive, but it was right.  Or I thought so.  She might not have, except only two people showed up at her party--a girlfriend and myself.  The bar was empty, dismal.  I didn’t know what to say.  Neither did she, and certainly not her girlfriend, so she gave me a hug and I wandered out into the night with a hole inside me the size of the black void of the Franklin Mountains surrounded by the lights of El Paso.

I don’t miss that life now. Nobody would.  There were lots of astoundingly good people, like the Byrds and Kimberly, but I wasn’t in a place where they could reach me.  I have a great life now.  God, hearth, family, home, way too much to do.  It is foolish to want for anything more.  But, of course, I do. And on a night like this, when the snow is coming down heavy and the fire is dying low, I do miss reading slow and methodical--that and sitting in a dark, empty room of a much younger, much smaller Cinco Puntos Press and looking out on the lights of Juarez totally astonished.

Permacuture: The Back to Eden Revolution and Paul Gautschi

Today I arrived home from work, tired as I often am after a long day of work and a forty-five minute commute.  I was also somewhat depressed.  Day after day of drought—still, cold inversion air on the valley floor holding in pollution, even here in this big, open rural valley, over seventy miles from the population of the Wasatch front.

But when I arrived in my drive, I found five doe and a buck.  My driveway circles in past the old barn yard and makes a big J ending at my house.  The deer were on the inside of that J and just watched as I drove by, circled around and got out of the car on the other-side of them.  They watched me carefully, just in case, but we have built a relationship.  During the deer hunt, they crowd right around my house, strip my grapevine between the house and front walk free of the last grapes and leaves.  This fall they even ate the pansies in a pot on my front porch.

I use to fight them, throw rocks and profanities at them, as they do love to pull up bulbs and strip the bark off trees.   Then last fall, I decided the most significant thing about Dry Creek is the abundance of deer and wild turkey.  Wildlife is what makes here here.

Of course, the deer are not going to leave if I toss rocks and swear at them.  But, they did use to run.  And I haven’t found any more damage to my plants since I decided to make friends.  All that has changed is that I’m angry less often and I can get a lot closer to them.  There also seem to be more buck.  I don’t know if that is because of my changed relationship or not, but I’d like to think so.

Permaculture, according to Bill Mollison, “is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labor; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single product system."

Dry Creek belonged to the deer long before it ever belonged to my family.  Someday, I want a large botanical garden here of small, diverse ecosystems, mixing edibles with decorative plants in ways that are festive, whimsical and practical.  But however I do that, these designs will have to leave room for the turkey and the deer.  There is nothing I could add to this landscape that could compare with the deer.  They give meaning to here.

Pemaculture, which I’m just learning, like Buddhism, emphasizes stillness—learning from nature and implementing the same processes only at an excelled speed—rather than laboring against nature.  One of the first steps to understanding permaculture is to comprehend that the true roll of the gardener is grow soil.   If the soil is good, plants take care of themselves.  I’m in the preschool stages of this education and I spent way too much time watering last summer because I hadn’t mulched enough during the fall, but I’m learning.

“Grandpa’s Orchard” at Dry Creek last spring—Because this is part of the old barn yard and the natural composting that goes with that—scatterings of hay, straw, piles of dung, etc.—soil is good here.  The trick is to speed up that process over the rest of the property, where topsoil is shallow to nonexistent.

Enjoy this video of the “Back to Eden” farm and begin learning permaculture for yourself.

Paul Gautschi--He's a little outwardly closer to God than many of us are comfortable with, but he knows his stuff. If you want to know how to build soil, he's your new guru, no matter your crede.

  

Cold Winter Reflection: the Real Work Is Not in What We Do, but in How We Do It (Mamas and Papas and The Killers)

Cold – winter – west.  Last year, the first year back at Dry Creek, cold was a novelty I attacked with relish.  Bringing in firewood, plowing, shoveling, feeding chickens—the deeper the snow, the lower the thermometer, the more I loved it.  This winter it has been wearing me down along with my work.  That, unfortunately, is how we humans are—always looking for a way out, always looking for a way to avoid the labor of the moment.  California dreaming.  And once we’re  there, California becomes a reality.

There is an ache that is born deep in us.  The feeling, no matter where we are, we don’t quite belong.  That is the magic sadness that drives literature.  All songs, all poems, all stories, one way or another, are the search for home--or just as often, for paradise, for Eden.

The need to be still haunts us all, alludes us all, drives us on—and yet we still don’t find what we are looking for. 

Out the car window, the Tushar Mountains are spectacularly rugged, spectacularly white.  When I lived in the city I longed for such sights.  God grand and right in your face with his over-the-top creation.  I ached to communicate once again with river stone and brittle wood.

Occasionally, I am still blissfully in awe of grandeur.  I love returning from work only to startle herds of deer and flocks of turkey from the lane to the house.

And yet just as often I return home from work as the last sun slants across Main Street of our small town and there will be a sort of sadness sink deep inside me.  Damn, where is everybody?  Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a Denny’s?  Or just a ma & pa joint with a great big plate glass window looking out on Main?  Someplace warm other than home to read a book and listen to clinking dishes and conversation.

But there really isn’t.  There’s fast food out at the freeway and an overpriced restaurant at the motel.  No town center.  Not anymore.  Just houses, churches and farms, and beyond that the wild.

But I know if I ever have to move somewhere I will be just as lonely for here.  Perhaps that is our life’s work—to realize paradise is not a place, but a state of mind, not an escape but the labor of turning wherever you are into its own unique kind of paradise, whether in Alaska or the Bronx.

Labor, as the work is never done.  The real work is not in what we do it, but how we do it—our connection to God and other people.

 

Notes from the Road: A Utah Highway Poem (and Paul McCartney's "Everybody Out There")

      1.  I-15, Fillmore to Cove Fort

McCartney on the stereo,

pollution stained sunlight blinds my eyes.

No city in sight, but even here, spoiled

air.  My son sits tense. 

He wants my computer back.

     2.  Cove Fort to Beaver

Cows graze copper grass before a languid pond.

The man in car next to me talks to himself with hands

animated like black birds stormed

against a rusted sky.  Get me out of here.

What is real?  Cottonwood.  Rabbit brush clumped.

Juniper.  The silence between songs takes on meaning

I think.  I teach sometimes.  Mostly I count points,

assign value to busy work.  Everything

we do is to allocate significance to the insignificant.

A line of shiny metal boxes heads north.

A line of shiny metal boxes heads south

on their way to somewhere not here.

Movement.  Charts.  Traffic.  Progress.

War.  Always war.  Causes to be caring for.

   3. Utah 20

A cigarette dangles from the mouth

of the man in the dark green sedan.

If I was significant I could place that

on the back of the eyelids of the nation

and it would mean something

worth remembering.

I could get numbers.

My value would increase.

I wouldn’t have to stand in line

to do good.

The Tushar Mountains stand loaded

with fresh snow glazed

gold before an azure sky

and but for the grace of God

go you and I.

©Steve Brown 2014

Morality Is Simple, but Not Easy: Hypocrisy Comes Naturally

I’m not sure why I blog, other than that there is something deeply satisfying about putting thoughts to page and getting them out there to an audience, no matter how small, almost immediately.  It comes close to the satisfaction one receives giving a public reading. 

But, like a public reading, it has its drawbacks.  One is it’s difficult to take back what you put out there into the universe.  Of course, this is true with all forms of communication, but because traditional publication is such a long, drawn-out process, with lots of polite rejections prior to acceptance, not to mention the revision dialogue after acceptance, there is lots of time to reflect prior to publication.

Anyway, my previous blog post doesn’t sit well with me.  I used some faulty logic and cheap propaganda techniques, but that’s not what bothers me.  Some things need to be said.  Sometimes it’s better to say something rash, out of anger, than say nothing at all.  What bothers me is that I made a personal attack against someone I absolutely do not know: Gregg Alton, a vice-president for Gilead Sciences Inc.

As a society, we know, unlike Christ, we fall short of perfection—some of us, like Gregg Alton, very short of perfection. 

I have no way of knowing how far short of perfection Gregg Alton falls.  For all I know, he’s a wonderful father, a kind supervisor, and perhaps even very generous with his donations to the community.  And to be honest, if I was a vice president for a drug company that basically developed a miracle drug, I too might be tempted with the following thought:

"We didn't really say, 'We want to charge $1,000 a pill…. We're just looking at what we think was a fair price for the value that we're bringing into the health care system and to the patients."

Although that's a natural human reaction to success, it doesn’t justify the price.  I stand by my claim that in effect Gilead Sciences Inc. is requiring an $84,000 ransom before freeing hostages of Hepatitis C.   That act simply is immoral.

But speaking out against policy and attacking individuals are two very different things.  Though I consider myself overall to be a good person, I have sank to some pretty deplorable acts in my past.  I am in no position to judge the content of character of others. 

Thus, the need to apologize:  My readership is small, and I doubt Greg Alton will ever read my post on Gilead Sciences, Inc. but that doesn’t change the fact that my attack was wrong.

I could erase my previous post, but I don’t want to.  Though flawed, it makes some good points.  So, instead I will attach this to it.    

Hopefully, I learn to reflect a little before hitting the “publish” button and don’t have to do this too often.