wide sky visions and green tunnel joys

A month since I blogged? I don’t believe I’ve ever gone that long in the five years I’ve kept this blog.

The barn I work at is in the river’s valley, a very broad valley, and the sky there is a wide sky. Today it was too too blue dotted with the big fluffy clouds that look like you could bounce on them, and wide open. When I see that I always think that it looks like skies that are in paintings. My husband always says, “Yeah, wonder where they got that idea?” At least I am amused by him. At the barn you can often see what weather is coming if you know what direction it is coming from. I like the feeling of possibility there with that sky.

At home we more often hear and smell what weather is coming than see it. Our home is high up on the mountain and the vista here is more narrow, at times even acute. The mountains, the hollers and the draws are steep and the trees are tall. I like the feeling of being in the loving embrace of mother earth.

I had a friend who walked the entire Appalachian Trail, bottom to top in one fell swoop by himself, way back in 1981. He said most of it was like walking inside a very long green tunnel. Two or three times you would come out on a bald mountain top, like the Roan or Whitetop, but that's about it. In Pennsylvania the trail was for a time beside a road and that was a relief, but most of the time it was just one very long, very green tunnel. He was on Katahdin about a day’s hike from the end when three days of rain set in and he was stuck in his tent, sick, and with only corn meal to eat. He did not stop short but persevered to the end. Then hitchhiked home.

We’ve been homesteaders, or back-to-the-land-ers, or otherwise independent cusses for a long time now. That’s our big sky vision. We’ve spent time on it, developed skills, mapped out the cloud formations of it, and bounced on them to boot. We’ve done it long enough (and are competent enough at it) that maybe we don’t have to think every day about how and why and what to do anymore. In fact, we’re competent enough at it that we can branch off and explore other paths along the green tunnel, without getting lost because we have the big sky vision to guide us.

Without vision, all one has is the tunnel. If all one has is the tunnel of daily existence, one can mistake a smoother, level, sandy path as “the path I’ve always known I should be on”, and one can mistake a rocky outcropping that one slides down a bit painfully as some big setback or something other than just how life is sometimes. Without the vision, one is only wandering aimlessly calling random events epiphanies or tragedies.

Ah, but vision doesn’t guarantee that one will not end up sitting in a wet tent with a runny nose for three days eating only corn meal mush. Sh*t happens. But sh*t that happens in pursuit of vision is a good story, while sh*t that happens without vision is just whining. Vision gets you up the mountain, lack of it just thinks maybe it might be nice to do.

Husband was explaining to one of the kids the other day why time seemed to go slowly for kids and quickly for adults. He said that life changes a lot for kids, what with them growing, changing, developing but that adults tend to get stuck, doing the same old same old day after day after day, living for the weekend or vacation or retirement or otherwise some other day than today.

I’m still milking the cow and making the bread and washing dishes and pulling weeds and playing with the family. But I’m also working at the barn and riding more and daring to teach just a bit and even riding someone else’s horse in a horse show (to train the horse).

I have wide sky visions and green tunnel joys.

for Cathy.

In the land of not make believe

the strawberry forest

falling down the gooseberry hole

and potatoes, hilled once then mulched

And in the land of what productive gardens really look like:

onions and spring cabbages amongst the weeds

and a favorite photo because so very much in growing in this -- an old lettuce bed about to be cut back for probably the last time, some bush summer squashes of various and sundry varieties, some young brassica plants of some sort, some cucumber seedlings, some volunteer potatoes (soon to be harvested), and probably other things too.

And in the land of good and plenty:

big onion forest

peas, peas and more peas (three beds of them going all the way back to the fence row)

carrots!

blueberries in prayerful abundance

and a new perennial bed with . . . raspberries and yes, those are figs in those pots!

In the interest of updating from a month ago:

the chicks have grown a good bit.
We haven't lost any (knock wood) but a cat did claim a couple of wings. The cat is in lock-up and the chicks in the infirmary recovering.

this spinach bed has been completely cut over two or three times and is trying to bolt and still it tastes good.

And just because I like them:

the pillars of mercy and justice

a favorite hen named Snowflake

and because it really is important that a boy eat his spinach, and because this does it for him

Morality Lost

“I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need.” Philippians 4:12

I do not think that life is whole without a spiritual aspect to it. I think one of the most useful spiritual views is that of self-actualization, which is basically when what you want to do and what you ought to do are the same thing.

Abraham Maslow was the psychological theorist who came up with the idea of a hierarchy of needs as it related to human motivation. Most importantly, he was the first to look at exemplary humans rather than mentally ill or neurotic people; to look at what is going on inside of extraordinary people. (In fact he wrote: "the study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy.” This is an idea I extrapolate to a whole lot of areas.)

It starts with the physiological. You need to breathe to be alive, eat, be warm (shelter, clothing), sleep, have water, pee, and have sex. Homeostasis. One might be concerned about what one eats after one has enough to eat. Then there are the safety needs -- a world that is predictable and orderly and where those basic physiological needs have the likelihood of being met continually. Owning a house and having some established food production are key here if you ask me.

The next level are the social needs, belonging and acceptance. Some people go so far as to form cults or gangs to satisfy these needs but most of us suffice with family and friends. Esteem is the next level, and if you don’t know how to esteem yourself, here you will seek the esteem of others by external means. Self-esteem is always an internal phenomenon, manifested most usually as confidence and self-respect. It isn’t something that can be taught, or given, or learned, or earned but is far more of a decision of independence.

And then, finally, there is self-actualization wherein lies morality, creativity, acceptance,
the ability to solve problems -- and while Maslow didn’t put it in here, to my mind, spirituality. Peak experiences is the catchphrase that comes to mind.

Maslow was not without his detractors, mostly people who dispute how strict the hierarchical nature of the needs is. It makes some sense that one cannot really think that deeply about morality when one is trying to figure out, from scratch, where one’s next meal is coming from. At the same time, creativity can be all the more important if what one has to eat is some form of beans and corn every day. And that is sort of where I am coming down in this exploration.

I think people are shortsighted and foolish to not consider their physiological and safety needs beyond “I can make the payment this month” and that any exploration of kinship or morality or creativity in the absence of taking care of the physiological and safety needs is a pretense. It is the sort of pretense that costuming serves when one lacks real self-esteem -- one pretends as a character instead of being a character.

But at the same time, and this is the key I think, one cannot surpass the physiological and safety and social needs to reach esteem and spirituality. It would be my posit that the only real way to explore, say, morality would be to grow one’s own food and build one’s own house because only in that way does one understand the labor and resource cost of such and take that into the moral consideration. I think that is why most monastics lead a simple life -- to stay in touch with the physical realities.

In a sort of “hither world, thither world, all worlds are one” way, there is no spiritual reality without the physical, nor any physical without the spiritual, and there is a great deal of suffering that results from the illusion of one separated from the other. It is why what you choose to eat matters to a small girl in Tahiti; it is why where you chose to drive today matters to a Inuit; it is why what you chose to speak to your friend matters even to someone you have yet to meet, and how you choose to conduct your business and the example you weave for your children matters. It all matters. To everyone and everything.

You only know the price and the gift of the chicken if you hatched it, raised it, looked it in the eye, fed it, worried over it, then chopped its head off and cleaned it and examined its bowels and aged it and cooked it and ate it. It isn’t awful or grand; it just is. But it is something that almost no one has experienced anymore. And it is in that that we have lost our morality.


thanks to Madcap and to Penelope

The Last American Man

or maybe the next to last.

“Living on the road my friend, is gonna keep you free and clean
Now you wear your skin like iron,
Your breath as hard as kerosene.
You weren't your mama's only boy, but her favorite one it seems
She began to cry when you said goodbye,
And sank into your dreams.
Poncho was a bandit boys, his horse was fast as polished steel
He wore his gun outside his pants
For all the honest world to feel.”

When I heard these lines from the Townes VanZandt tune Poncho & Lefty after I’d finished the Elizabeth Gilbert book about Eustace Conway I thought, hmmm, those lines could be about him. Too early to tell whether the next couplet (about no one hearing his dying words) will be as true or not.

When Eustace showed up in NYC in his buckskins, he was called Daniel-f*cking-Boone. My mother used to say to us, “I don’t know why in the world you all want to live that Daniel Boone life.” You could say I felt a connection.

I guess if I just got down to it, I’d say that you have to read this book. Really. But it is complicated for me because the author is a bigot at the beginning of the book and that horribly irritates me. Examples? She describes Eustace’s neighbors as the “aptly named Hicks clan” and goes through this thing about red necks in SW Virginia not knowing where Maine is when clearly it is that they do not give a sh*t about a man walking from Maine but do care about a man walking to Georgia. I’ve read her other work and she does not engage in such bigotry about Italians, Indians, Balinese, the poverty stricken or uneducated of any area, hell, not even her fairly hated ex-husband . . . just about hillbillies. I am so sick of it being ok to malign hillbillies. Hillbillies are the very last niggers, or at least we are the very last people you can cop derogatory attitudes toward and still be pc and "inclusive". Then too, there are some simple mistakes that irritate me because they show her ignorance in ways that Eustace would understand -- a passive solar office building with room for two work spaces could not possibly be 20 sq. feet (this is like checking out in the supermarket with 3 items that sell for $1/each and the total coming to $13 and you not noticing that something didn’t add up right) but must be 20 feet square. Or that Eustace’s horse is not a Standard Breed but a Standardbred.

So there’s that. Which pretty much disappears after the first one-third of the book. But then in the last one-third of the book she takes on the doctor/counselor role to diagnose our beloved Eustace, to tell us what is wrong with him, when frankly what is wrong with his is just as obvious from his story as what is so right about him. Just tell his goddamn story already.

But, if you can read this book and get past the author, well, Mr. Eustace Conway is a character, a most admirable character. Both perfect and perfectly flawed.

What I really admire about Eustace is that he lives with reality. The author says he’s the only person she knows who doesn’t live in metaphor but is the real deal. Yeah, that. Nature doesn’t say, “let’s reach an agreement here.” With nature, it really is, lots of times, one way or the other. You screw up, you pay the price. I totally get Eustace’s hard-ass-ness. Because nature, and life really, is hard-ass. But life is also forgiving -- like the bread is edible even if it isn’t perfect and at least as this author portrays him, he doesn’t quite get that. You don’t want to try to fillet a squirrel but, you know, maybe you can relax on some of the other stuff.

And maybe there is some problem in talking more about your life than you live it. But considering that most people don’t even have a life, considering that most people pay lip service to tons of things without really living any of it, considering that people are not human if they are not in touch with the earth, I think Eustace’s life says quite a lot.

I am also amused that he seems to have quite the following who don’t like him. That in itself is a testament that he actually stands for something.

doing and being are one

When we were finishing up the planting of the corn, that old song “Family Affair” started playing in my head. Pretty much everything for us is a family affair.

The day finally came around to get the corn planted. First there were the plowing and the disking days, of course. Then the potatoes got planted, about 170# of them. Then it set in wet again, and busy-ness and commitments and things we had to do besides, and the corn was just a tad late for us. Not that it matters all that much. A lot of times stuff planted early sits there and doesn’t grow much while it is cool but when planted when it is warm it really takes off fast. This is why sometimes in the summer when we are trying to stagger things being ripe by planting things every two weeks, stuff not planted at the same time will mature at the same time anyway. Seeds don’t actually obey the seed packets you see. But still, it feels antsy when things are late getting planted.

The day to plant the corn had been anticipated; the “I think we’ll get to plant it on Thursday,” sort of anticipation. And the day before, “I think we’ll call all hands to the garden tomorrow for the corn.” And again the morning of, “If we thaw some chicken and make some deviled eggs, we can gather salad from the garden and have a big chef salad with grilled chicken after we plant the corn.” So everyone knows it. And everyone has seen it done and done it before so they know the work, know what to do.

Everyone made sure they ate something for lunch. Lunch for us usually isn’t very formal but a picking out of which leftovers you want so you don’t starve before supper. Breakfast and supper are more formal in that we make something and we eat together. Not that we don’t eat lunch together, we usually do. And not that in the hot part of summer, we don’t have dinner in the hot of the afternoon and snack for supper, we do. I guess maybe you have to be part of this family to understand how it flows and works like a well-oiled machine.

Husband went to the garden first to start the preparations. Before long the kids actually got antsy and said, “Isn’t it time to go down now?” Yeah, ok, let’s go. Boots on and bathing suits under clothes. A big jug of water. The big tomato plant we’d wintered in the window sills. A bucket and knife to graze for the rabbits. Food for the dog. Ready. Set. Go.

In the garden, husband had started laying off the rows. The girls placed the seed while eldest and I covered. I should have remembered my gloves because I got a blister on my palm from the rough handle of the shovel so I switched to the hoe. Youngest had a job but I was so busy with mine, I don’t remember what his was. I don’t know how many rows there were, each of two kinds of corn (bloody butcher and hickory king), but a lot. Because we grow a lot of corn. It takes about a pound of corn to make two big pones for our family for supper, and it takes about 2 ½ ears to make a pound which is a little over one corn stalk per meal and we’ll figure on eating it every day. That’s how we plan on feeding ourselves. And we’ll try to grow at least twice that much. We’ve had several good corn years but if there’s a failure we want to have enough in storage to see us through. Think of the seven fat cows and the seven lean cows.

We planted the sunflowers too, lots we hope (we have no idea what the germination will be). The potatoes are mostly up and it will soon be time to hill them. Before ten days or so we’ll need to make the thread net over the baby corn plants so the crows will leave them alone. We harvested lovely lettuce and spinach and garlic and onions for the salad, and I toured the rest of all that is growing. The kids swam in the creek.

I asked the kids at one point, “Did I make you come to the garden to do this, or did you choose to come to the garden to do this?” Because, you know, I hadn’t really asked, I’d just coordinated with “It‘s time to go to the garden now” thing. They looked at me like I was a crazy lady but then said, “Because we wanted to plant the corn.”

No doubt that it helps that they know where food comes from. And that isn’t the store.

And it rained on the just planted corn last night! Even now the thing-that-is is stirring, swelling, growing, moving from a kernel in an ear to making an entire plant with two more ears full of kernels. It produces something, is productive, and thus is a model for me in my own life, doing and being.

Oh, and desert was blueberries frozen from last year, and fresh cream whipped that was as yellow as the buttercups the cow lays down in.

May Means

chicks

and locust blossoms (fried)

and spinach (and salad from the garden)

Spring Auction

That's the scene when you walk up outside at the fairgrounds for the Draft Horse and Mule Auction, spring edition. Lots of trailers, lots of trucks, lots of people, lots of horses. Most but not all of the people have on hats. All of the "real" people have on appropriate footwear. It is your footwear that gives you away. Interesting.

Isn't that a pretty pair? They were a Percheron/Spotted Draft cross but neither came out spotted.

This is taken exactly at my eye level; my attempt to provide perspective as to how big these good ole boys were.

A mule for my daughter. There was also the cutest little yearling mule there with four white socks. But in the end, I always go for the classic mule look.

This is Betty Sue if anyone remembers her from her being here a few years ago. My neighbor had bred her, foaled her, her baby died, he sold her, the new owner foaled her, she didn't catch this year so she's at the auction for sale. I think she remembered me, I swear I do.

Now, this little mare is also in that first photo up there. She's a Percheron cross (it didn't say with what but something not too big, my first guess would be quarter horse) and she's in foal to a big Thoroughbred. I'm always a sucker for the pregnant mares, the two for one deal and if I were to pick one I wanted to buy before they went up for sale, she'd be it.

Not all the horses looked this good. A few were skinny. So many needed some work done on their feet. And since they won't sell horses until Saturday, most of the ones for sale aren't even there yet.

I had a mission this year. My horse has lost some weight as he's aged and I needed to get a smaller collar. I knew I only had enough money for a used bargain one but I was quite shocked at the rise in price of the new ones since I bought mine. Like double or triple. Leather has done this too, partly because environmental regulation has made it pretty impossible to tan leather on any scale anymore. I'm all for the environment but I think we should think about some of this stuff twice. And don't get me started on the stupidity of the slaughter legislation.

This is my friend Billy. I grew up with him. His horse's name back then was Rex, a big grey racker who could park out, hoo boy. Billy's girlfriend's horse was Teardrop. My best friend's horse was Honey. They were all such good horses and good times. Billy helped me critique the available collars of the appropriate size and I got a good deal without even having to bid. Man, you had to bid fast today if you were going to get in so I was glad to not have to do it although I did have my number.

Next we'll have to see how it fits.

Life Ain't Always Beautiful

Warren Buffet tells a story of a woman who survived the Nazis. She was the only one in her family to survive. She told Mr. Buffet that every time she met someone she asked herself whether or not this was a person who would hide her from the Nazis.

Now, being the practical, funny, sideways sort of person that I am, I don’t think about who would hide me, I think about what sort of person I’d want to hide me. Because I don’t want a weak idiot who’s going to tell the first storm trooper to knock on the door exactly where I am hiding to hide me. Or someone without, say, food. Etc. I’m sure there were people like that who tried to hide people during the Holocaust but I’m sure we don’t have those stories because those people didn’t actually survive.

Only the smart, clever, tough as nails ones did. And many of those didn’t.

I happen to think that what is now happening in this country and in the world could be devastating, and people could be dying from what will happen, and likely not only in third world countries. Our family lives in a sustainable way, which means that we are not so affected by those vagaries of the wider world. We might be people that other people would wish to hide with. In fact, lots of people joke that way; “Oh, I know where to go” in case of this or that.

What I have thought about is what sort of people I would welcome in. Living sustainable is quite rewarding but it does require a few things -- hard work, hardiness, cheerfulness in the face of hardship, and pretty well all other things that have “hard” in them.

It is not an easy life. It is a worthy life.

So, will you be looking for someone to hide you? Or deciding who is worth hiding? Because doing for others is partly a matter of willingness, of kindness, of generosity, of morality. But it isn’t possible to do for others when you can’t even do for your own.

The woman who was hidden from the Nazis and survived, the woman who asked herself whether or not she thought a person would hide her should she need hiding, observed that she found it very difficult to make friends. You think? Real friends don’t come by the dozens. Real friends don’t just say the easy things. Real friends, well, . . . .

Plow Day

just almost the very last furrow

We’ve been wondering if it was ever going to get dry enough. Which, after years of drought is a wonder that no one complains about. Still. Middle of April and we hadn’t plowed. The dogwoods are not out yet so it is not time to plant the hard corn, but it is a little late for potatoes. Not that potatoes don’t just sit there and stare at you for a couple of weeks when you plant them early, and can be some in danger of rot or mice or, if they do decide to grow, frost damage. Still. It felt behind.

nearly the whole field

I had not thought we’d get it all plowed so quickly. Not that it is that large. But last year, while we did it all in a day, we started in the morning and finished in the evening, giving the horse a large break in the middle and I remember him being tuckered from the effort.

This year I’d recruited my younger daughter to ride the horse every day she could, slowly increasing the distance, and she’s been doing that, oh, probably about a month, maybe more. He did so well and I am so proud of him and of her. He is so big that just hauling his large self around is taxing (our plowing doesn’t require much of a pull) and a month of walking the hills and when I’d stop to let him blow at the end of a row, he’d be shaking the lines saying he was ready to go.

Donkey, by the way, was not winded at all.

blowing

While daughter was getting him in shape, younger son also decided he was a good horse rider. So he rode some today and also took his turn as assistant plowman. The girls took the opportunity to weed out the strawberry bed. And everyone played in the creek of course. Including, after we were all done, the horse.


Meantime the dog found the cool of a deep furrow

and one of the cats kept a running commentary from the cool of the road.

It was an exceedingly pleasant and productive day. We were well pleased with it and ourselves.

all photos for this day taken by elder son.

on a recent sunny morning

hen laying in nest box

hens dusting and preening

grass growing
(my favorite)
(and see the cow way back there?)

coltsfoot

fiddleheads and jewel weed seedlets

spinach bed
(this will soon be harvest-able)

onions backed by heal all blooming

wise old sage plant

turnips backed by music garlic
(thanks to my friend who gave us that bulb those years ago)

seedling bed

blueberries mulched & peach trees blooming

Appalachian Blue and Green

Jesus was a farmer

Someone mentioned that they might know of a cow for sale, a heifer so I’d have to be training her to be hand milked, but a full blooded Jersey and expecting a Jersey calf too. I sure would like to have a look at her.

And then my husband asked a question, something like “if you had two what would you do with them,” and I misunderstood what he meant because I answered that I’d make sure I could get the new one in milk and then I’d beef our old one (after her due date although I’m very sure she is not with calf -- I’m totally willing to be surprised however). No, what he was asking, he said, was what if I bought this new cow and she had a calf and then my old cow had a calf too?

I’d feel very wealthy, I said.

In school I remember learning about different number bases, like ours is base ten but you can have base eight or base twelve. I had a knack for being able to do this, to throw a switch in my mind and think mathematically in a different base. It was just a trick as far as I was concerned and I didn’t much understand why other people struggled with it.

I also took two years of Spanish in school. I didn’t learn all that much but I did learn that I could only really understand the stuff when something in my brain switched. With the language I couldn’t make it switch like I could with the math but still to this day although I don’t speak Spanish at all really, I can very often understand what is being said (in a general way).

That switch thing is one of the things I think is happening now. The paradigm is changing, is in the middle of a switch, and no one knows the language of the new paradigm. A lot of us are making good guesses I think, but all of us are making mistakes to go with it, dragging along parts of the old paradigm that we can’t even imagine not being there. Take the Lynn Miller essay that I referenced in the last post. I think Mr. Miller is brilliant but later in that essay he tells about a new endeavor he has taken on in order to help farmers keep their insurance paid (among other things). I happen to think that this particular idea is asinine and that the new paradigm is unlikely to have insurances to pay, and particularly not what we know as health insurance because third party health insurance is one of the reasons people are so dang unhealthy today.

Anyway, I don’t want to talk about insurance, or health, or even SFJ. What I want to highlight is the new paradigm, and our blindness to spots of it. Ah, but who knows where my own blind spots are?

I'm sure a new paradigm will have to incorporate that wealth is not money but is production, and that everyone will have useful things to do. I think those refusing to do this will be hungry. I think health by way of a decent (not a restricted) diet and lots of work will largely replace what we've come to know as "health care". "Education" as we know it will be a welcome victim. Energy is the biggest change and is what will lead the change in everything else. I think people will resist these until they are dead. They will refuse to learn the language. They are covering their ears even now and singing "lalalala" to themselves.

I think having two cows in milk, one to sell, a couple calves to raise for future milkers and beef, thus being able to also fatten pigs with the extra milk, not to mention butter and lard and all the other things that come from such adventures, I think all of that is real wealth. I still don't think the current cow is pregnant. But I would be very tickled to be wrong.

One more point: I think there is a real difference in having a blind spot and a refusal to speak the new language. As far as I can tell, our government is in massive refusal mode. But then our government *follows* her people by and large -- our government had a reserve of food when people thought that was important but when people started mortgaging their houses for a vacation, the government wondered what it was doing with these stockpiles and got rid of them. I know people who KNOW what is happening (as surely Obama must) but who insist that there is no higher calling that having a good time now, blast the future or some poor chap starving somewhere -- I have to have my tea and oranges from China now.

I think of the line in the song, "and when he knew for certain/only drowning men could see him/he said all men shall be sailors then/until the sea shall free them."

Visualize Worthiness

Milking this morning I saw the first hint of the mountains putting on her petticoats. The first green, after the crocus and daffodils and forsythia bloom, after the grass begins to grow, all the leaves beginning this year’s journey.

But this is also the time of year that the bones are most visible, noticeable, study-able. These mountains are old. Ancient. And they are not only my home but my genetic home. And they have bones. This time of year, with the leaf mold matted down by the snow and rain of winter, with only the trilliums and bloodroots breaking from the forest floor, all the fallen wood is visible. It is amazing, branches and whole trees nearly cover the floor in deadfall.

Below the deadfall are the rocks, sometimes forming what could be a dragon’s backbone. With the trees bare you can see small variances in the land, a little prominence there, a tiny dip over there, things that the green leaves will soon mask like a thick down comforter. The ridges. The hollers. The bottoms. Where the water flows sometimes. Where the water flows all the time.

It all means something. I don’t know exactly what it says but it speaks to me.

We have a new neighbor, new meaning he’s been there a couple of years. He’s an idiot, as are most new neighbors. It comes with it. Expect if you move anywhere at all to be a stupid new neighbor for at least awhile, and if you stay beyond that, your children might actually have a home because a sense of place is not an easy one to come by. This new neighbor overpopulated his pastures with ornaments and then underfed his hay. I expect he lives off investments whose value has been cut in half in the past year. So now he is logging his land. And not just logging it, as the land beside us was logged twenty years ago and all the trees over 16” diameter were taken, no. He’s stripping it. And it is steep. And he no doubt intends to expand his pastures. While he has them overpopulated. With pasture ornament long-horns.

And I watch. His bones are not from here and he will soon pass. When he cannot buy his life anymore, his destruction on this hollow will pass away. And this hollow will re-flesh itself. There will be some bones left to tell the tale but they will only whisper that something odd happened here while the riot of growth, cycled with rest, takes over.

Lynn Miller is editor of the Small Farmer’s Journal, and he’s written several of the most important books to have read if you are using draft horses, or horses to draft (which, frankly, after my big guy dies is the direction in which I think I will go). And with all his verbosity, he can be quite the poet. In the latest mailed issue, he wrote the following (long excerpt from much longer piece but really, it is worth it):

Then my brain goes meandering from location to person to people to these wholly predictable and largely lamentable times.

A few yesterdays ago we were set in a vulgar gaseous economy of absurd excess and biological disconnect, but it was OUR pattern. Want it or not, each of us owned some aspect. Maybe it was far distant and three times removed but it was there nonetheless. Now, as so many pieces, large and small, of our soured society and economy shrink and slough off, we are perhaps to be excused our apprehension and fear. We have been dependent on a vast, irresponsible ‘supply’ system and the presumption of unending growth. Now, where will we get this or that mechanical part? Or a gallon of milk? Or our heating oil? Or our prescriptions filled? Think I’m going too far with this? Think the system is “fundamentally” sound? Think that it will never breakdown that far? It already has.

Take as an example of our system’s collapse horses: first, artificial liquidity (borrowed money) made it possible for people to purchase lots of pet horses for their backyards. Second, fuel prices drove up the cost of feed. Then a curious mix of sentiment, political correctness and market realities did away with horse meat markets. Follow that with bank failures and the stock market crash which meant that now millions could no longer afford the yard ornament equine they owned. Now, we have a glut of unwanted horses (not speaking of our good work horses here) and no place for them to go. Out west, thousands of horses are being turned loose on public lands.

My point in this horse aside is that even here we are affected in ways few would have predicted just a couple of years ago. Where will we go with an unwanted horse? Sure, we may remind ourselves that not all horses are equal, yet in some final analysis they are all equal. Be it Seattle Slew, or old Dobbin, the beer company lead team or the three legged Shetland pony, if any of them show up at the local stockyards for sale, they will be turned away. And, then there is the likelihood they will be abandoned or neglected to their great discomfort. You can apply these sorts of concerns to a growing list of things in our lives. What is to be done with all of those over-priced super-sized vacant suburban homes? What is to be done with these millions of neighbors who are out of work? What will be facing our soldiers when they return from war zones overseas? What will become of all those unsold cars and trucks? How will folks get by when they can’t get heat and food? How will production agriculture get through a growing season without production credit? How and when will it hit those still standing?

He goes on to say that the world is in dire straights because it accepts the false premise of money as wealth, and that instead we must question and answer with what is actually worthy of our lives, work, dreams and prayers. Because of false abundance, because an entire life can be spent goofing off now, many have never really bothered taking a good measure of their values, determining what is truly worthy.

Thus the title of this post (also stolen from SFJ's cover). Visualize not world peace (because really, you are not willing to give up a single convenience for it). Not whirled peas. Imagine what it would be like to be worthy. Imagine what a life worth living would be.

Visualize worthiness.