worlds biggest and a visitor

check this monstrous calabacita...its practically a pumpkini love it when i have to search around in the jungle of an overgrown garden and i find stuff like this. I'm afraid to cut it open.

and just now we had a visit from this wanderin' mare.

soakin' up the last summer

I'm trying my best to be present with my time here, instead of blocking it all out and/or just concentrating on the bad things in order for the leaving tol make sense. both of those are tricks i learned as a child that moved a million times.

i can finally sit out in the grass or in the woods without crying...which is nice. sometimes i feel my eyes get hot and i may choke a bit but thats all. it seems to be about letting go of ideas, my ideas of what my future was going to be....ya know, like dying here and being buried on the land.

anyway, heres the last of the garlic. i fucking worship garlic. esp. right now since the crappy clinic did a horrible job on a filling of mine and now theres an abcess and they want to do a root canal. which medicaid doesn't pay for, and i'm like "no way" so i'm all about cleaning my blood.....and that there pile of gorgeousness is a whole bunch of blood cleaning just waiting to happen.

and heres a sampling of flowers from the pasture. I'm so happy to have sunflowers again now that the llamas are gone!!! they ate em all....maybe next year the women buying the land will get the beauty of the wild iris, which the llamas also ate.

and heres marcos...the big man i call him. i don't see him very often but when he decides to grace us with his presence, this is usually what he does....typical.

death and telltales

last night an owl came to rest outside my house. i heard the very loud call from in the house and snuck out into the moonlight thinking it must be really close, like on the porch or the front gate. I saw its silhouette right away....sitting on top of the power pole next to the house. It was huge! Everything was very still, and i stood there quite a long time transfixed and hoping to catch a glimpse of its wing span.
which i did.
and it was just as enormous as i'd hoped.when i finally went back inside i called my friend and left a long winded voicemail about the visit and how magical and how it always makes be a bit edgy when the owls visit because it has always then been connected to the death of something. sometimes an animal friend, sometimes a human friend.
this has happened to me many many times. sometimes the visit is in the flesh , sometimes in dreams. sometimes the person that dies told me of a dream or sighting, or the dreamer or seer then has an animal die... i've both dreamt and seen but not yet died....obviously!

an ex girlfriend of mine that commited suicide had not only dreamt about them (first time a few nights before her dog died) seen them and heard them often in the time i knew her, she was on the free way one day when the car in front of her hit a great horned owl and so she stopped by the road side and brought the body home feeling bad about it being left on the highway.
we took it to the woods out back and left it strewn with flowers.

so ... last night this big ol' owl continued its cry through the night....made it hard to sleep it was so loud.

i made sure to gather the cats inside.

then earlier today i made a call to the woman who's land i'll be staying on down near santa fe. just to check in about a few things.
She runs a sheep rescue, has maybe 15 sheep as well as some goats.

She sounded like a wounded bird when she aswered the phone.
Last night some roaming dogs got onto her land and mauled one of her sheep. It was the one she had bottle fed and raised herself....she used to sit at cafes in town with that lamb sleeping on her lap. she was his mother.
his name was anhil and he died at the animal hospital this morning.

i remembered the owl when i got off the phone....i also remembered her telling me a couple weeks ago the 2 great horned owls had come to her house in the night.

so go ahead, call me supersticious...its just a spinsters tale.....but between you me...ya gotta mind the owls.

yum.

the first squash of the summer. The calabacitas are huge, i can't wait to fry em' up.
The yellow scallopini is tiny but i couldn't resist picking it. A native plant,packet says "predates columbus"....hell yeah.

taking a bit of right here right now time

diosa has my favorite backside.
this of eva just cracks me up...hopefully will make you laugh as well.
heres the smilin' godiva...note the burry-seed-like plant life clinging to her wool, this is a big pain in my spinner-ass.
i've begun harvesting the hops. such a lovely sight for someone with persistent sleep and worry issues. hops knock me out...yesss....and they make beer, all praise a good beer.

the last harvest then new ground

when my batteries are charged again i'm gonna take some pictures of my garden stuff....its been so nice to eat collards and carrots and garlic and such....theres nothing like fresh garlic, so different than the dried out stuff from the store.Squash isn't quite there yet, but the plants are huge! i love squash, so easy to grow, the grasshoppers don't eat it and it grows with such unstoppable, satisfyingly enourmous audacity.

and the new closing date for the land is sept. 10th. i've decided to stop my search for something to buy and instead focus on getting out of here and into one of the handfull of temp. housing choices i have for winter....
a woman with ei, some sheep, goats and a horse, and 5 acres near santa fe has said i can come there for a spell.
my sheep yoda has said i can come there for a spell. she has a big herd of sheep, some milk goats, pyrenees dogs and a donkey.
theres an empty farm over the mountain needing a caretaker for the winter.theres 23 acres and a big house.
theres the huge organic farm where the llamas went to down south.
and my friends down the valley need a caretaker for their farm as well, also with a huge sheep herd, milk goats, chickens, alpacas,horses...you name it.

all of these choices allow for my own animal herd to come along which is grand.

i'm partial to the ei woman near santa fe as she is also near albuquerque....and thats where the poetry is....which i need like i need my heart to beat.
there is, ofcourse, ridiculous amounts of work to do to get out of here. and, testimony to why i'm leaving in the first place, i sure could use some helping hands, its too much for just little me.

beyond winter and spring...who knows. either something do-able will emerge here in new mexico or i'll pack up and head home to upstate new york..
now that would be something to write about, eh?

hops on the vine.

movement

today i started the process.
i began putting tools in tool boxs and milk crates,gathering plant pots and plastic sheeting from the garden,making piles of categorized objects, gathering trash into the truck to be taken to the dump....
i don't think i was allowing myself to begin this process till the women buying the place actually came, saw the place, and were real in front of my eyes all full of their excitement and love for the land and house.

so it begins....moving. something i've done like 36 times in my 36 years.
seriously.
but i haven't had to do this for 4 an a half years.
this mountain my oasis of standing still.
same sunrise every morning.
gave me this.

but something this last cold cold winter snapped inside said enough.
enough hungry from suckling on open space quiet on your own.
i'm full of open space quiet. thats all.
my oxygen tank to carry with me.
i've got air
but no food.
i needed air more than anything else.

now i need food and human sweat and spit
beside my own worn frame and stringy muscles
laughter ringing in my ears more than wind snapped me
in 2 this winter.

something in me let go today.
dark movements deep within.
i'm boiling water to clean my altar and the stuffed animals i've had since i was born. they're covered in 4 year dust.
waiting on a shelf.

so i begin to gather and sort and pack of discard for the 37th time.
i should be able to do this with my eyes shut and dreaming.

housing is a right, right?

i've long since stopped posting photos of each property i get all excited about only to have it not work out for one reason or another.
that last being an overpriced adobe on a 1/3 of a freakin' acre over on the radioactive yet yuppified side of the mountains between taos and santa fe. radioactive because when that huge fire ripped through los alamos labs back in 2000 or so, the very radioactive smoke plume drifted up an over and blanketed the mountain communities to the northeast of the labs. folks have tested their garden veggies as well as the dust in their homes to find it all highly contaminated.....yet the price of land continues to soar. testimony to the illusionary rip off that is real estate and the pretense of "lifestyle".

anyway....i close on my place here on the 10th of august. still with no destination confirmed.

today i'm of the mind says i should try to buy a piece of raw land outright, then get a yurt and build a little barn for the critters. wouldn't have plumbing but i'd be a little closer to the cities(poetry, food, friends) and i wouldn't have any debt hanging over my head or cutting into my fixed income......this is todays plan....tomorow could be completely different.

my mom keeps reminding me that wanting plumbing and friends nearby and enough food to eat is not asking too much. its good she reminds me of this because i do start to get lost in the swirl of internalized poverty crap to the tune of poor people don't get those things, and what do i expect when i never finished college and i've been on disablilty for a million years and i've never had a credit card and i haven't had a legitimate job since i was 21 years old and i'm crazy and sick and what do i expect????plumbing and food and community????? silly woman.....

so you see moms words are what i need.....its not too much to ask for a decent quality of life. and so so many don't have enough food or running water or intact community...

at least i'll have a chunk of cash...although its obviously not enough to buy a home. i'm going to go to a bank tomorrow and see if they will lend me anything at all. i don't have much optimism around this, but at least i'll know for sure. i tried to get my free credit report yesterday and apparenty i don't have credit. not bad credit, just none at all. i don't exist in credit world. which on one level is just fine...cuz fuck this whole having to prove your worthy of going into debt by perpetually owing money and paying it back...with interest.
its a racket...the whole thing.
there has got to be a better way. something far more usefull and clever to do with this nest egg i'll have.
i just don't know what that is.
and times' a tickin'.