On the Open Road

We fired up the old bus, Miss Shelley, for a springtime tour of the land. Up and down mesas, along dirt roads and highways and foot-trails we went, getting a little lost, but even more found.

 A night on the banks of the mighty Pecos river, doves singing in the willows, children playing in the dirt, light falling in unexpected ways, a burst of rain, an old lowrider cruising slowly past the cows.

Back in time to the old red rock villages hiding like forgotten gems in the piñon juniper scrub. Past acequias flowing full, and freshly tilled fields flooded with that snowmelt bounty.

We’ve traveled this stretch of land many times, but each time we crest the horizon it is to find the mountains and mesas opening anew, bigger than before. There are layers upon layers of history to peel back, roots to sink deeper, stories to discover and tell.

When we pause to listen and look, or at least travel very slowly (as Miss Shelley loves to do), it all comes pouring forth.

We’re Universe in a Grain of Sand people, my husband likes to say. Oh, New Mexico, you might be sandy, but you are home.

Walking in Place

Another ski date, this week. Oh, I love when it is perfect, that snow.

Just as good as that was the very ordinary family hike in the foothills this morning. We moseyed along a stream bubbling with snowmelt, the air full with the smell of willow trees before they bloom with spring leaves. Little feet splashing in mud, sliding on ice. Little hands holding our big ones.

And a very special treat was a hike with a friend and her baby (mine were home with papa). So much talking and sharing, so much to say about life and motherhood and marriage. So much sun shining on our faces.

Sometimes it is hard to get out on the land, away from our obligations and the busyness that creeps in even when we are always on guard against it. Sometimes it is a great push (against whining and time constraints, stress and no snack) to claim this space for ourselves and or families. To insist upon it.

It is a holy thing to me, these hours spent wandering our homeland. These mountains have carried us through the seasons–from winter on into spring and beyond, from our free and easy years into the slower footsteps of family life.

When we are planted in place, I’ve noticed, we can’t help but grow.

Postcards from High Summer

Summer, that season of such bounty, unfolds before us. And behind us. Maybe even within us.

It’s been a good run, so far.

We’ve been known to leave home, a handful of times. But always in our home away from home.

Slowly as a snail, we go to the good green places.

We’ve watched our mountains burn down and waited for rain.

We’ve been missing the frequent trips into said mountains (closed till rain comes), but getting occasional doses of green when we can.

Our meals are simple-simple. With the occasional pie.

Pulling the bedraggled weeds from the bedraggled vegetable patches (oh, it’s so dry!), making a feast from twenty two green beans and thirteen kale leaves. The bounty of less? Everything is precious!

Getting uber organized, but mostly on paper. Which is a pleasure in it’s own right.

Maida’s been learning to sit, and then to crawl, to delight us all endlessly.

Cora is her constant champion.

I’m saying no to too much of anything that calls me away from these empty-full days, from the gentle way life unfolds when there isn’t obligations or deadlines or ambition for more than a clean sink.

Thinking that there is one ambition I plan to fully indulge: learning to spin the rolls of fleece we carded these last few weeks.

Saying yes to the simple, nourishing, celebratory things that come along–knitting night with my compañeras is heaven. Live music on the plaza with all the locals is a constant pleasure.

Not to mention swinging in the hammock.

Or turning Thirty.

And especially not to mention swimming in the kiddy pool under the apple tree each afternoon, and gazing up into the green canopy and feeling kind of sad that there won’t be an apple harvest this year, and also strangely elated that I can continue this lazy streak well into autumn’s habitual canning season (okay, I’m mostly sad).

Happy that the Man of the Place is not so lazy. Happy for all the amazing things he’s accomplished on our humble city lot sized paradise.

Spending evenings writing in my journal, reading novels, knitting this and that. Only occasionally remembering to read blogs, and much less frequently to write a post here. I feel as if I’ve been freed at last from the World Wide Web. It is lovely.

In essence, this summer has been like a long retreat at a Vipassana meditation center where the refrain is nowhere to go, nothing to do, no-one to be.

We’re just here, in the backyard.

Thanks for dropping by!

And a book, too.

And now I’d like to introduce my other baby, which was also “born” last month.

This book was conceived just before my first daughter, and came to life the same month as my second daughter.

A fruitful few years.

The Return of the River is an anthology of community voices speaking on behalf of our little river, which was named most endangered river in the USA back in 2007. A little literary activism, if you will.

I’m so proud of it!

You can learn more about our river and the book it inspired by checking out this article from our weekly paper.

The Way Home

I can’t say why I love this land the way I do. Maybe it’s the years of walking the same paths, of watching the seasons cycle in and out, the droughts come and go. Perhaps it is simply that I have so long been held in the strong arms of this arid landscape.

In any case, I welcome the shifting seasons that return us to the arroyos and piñon-juniper hills that surround us. We leave behind the high mountains, with their lush green summers and brilliant fall colors. (Long gone are the days of our radical adventures skiing and winter camping.)

Now we just mosey. Up and down the same paths we’ve taken for years. The occasional coyote, a cawing raven. Sunlight shining through the lacy gramma grass. Onto our faces.

We know these well worn trails by heart.

We’re home.

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River Blessing

The River Blessing is my favorite community ritual.

It’s been happening for a couple hundred years in this same spot–San Isidro, the patron saint of farmers, is brought to the river in a procession. There’s lot’s of singing, and flowers.

Some years, there’s no water in the river. Some years, there is.

I can’t help but wonder if maybe it’s us who are blessed by the river, and not the other way around.

River Love

What a glorious and busy week it’s been in these parts.

I was consumed with getting ready for this reading featuring fifteen contributors from the book I edited (it’s still forthcoming, but soon, soon).  Yes, before I quit plastic I had a life as a literary activist. (I should put that on my tax forms instead of Extreme Eco Housewife.) The reading was dedicated to honoring a vital but much neglected part of our community: our river which was once named most endangered river in America. We had music, poems, and stories from some of the most talented writers and musicians in town, and a wonderful packed house.

Here I am giving my little speech at the beginning. The reading was in a gallery currently showing an exhibit about the Santa Fe River. Fitting, right? Basically what I said in my talk was this: “Our stories, poetry, songs, and art are a crucial part of breathing life back into the river. I believe this kind of praise and honoring feed it in a vital way, and that they are possibly as essential as water. For a river can flow with water and still be invisible and neglected if it doesn’t live inside us…By re-storying the river we bring it back to life in our hearts and minds, smoothing the way for its physical restoration.”

Have you gifted your river, mountain, forest, shoreline, woodland, canyon with a story-song-picture lately?

On the Land

Hiking familiar trails in every season makes me feel most a part of this land.

Sweet smelling, abundant land.

And to see this girl growing and coming to know it, too–oh my.

::

Thanks to the path, thanks to the feet.

Thanks to the many wonders they bring us to meet.

Mending the Land

My garden is a small part of what I consider home. Home is the high mountains rising up in all directions and framing the huge valley with various watersheds winding towards the Rio Grande. This open space, with the vistas I know with my eyes closed and the trails I have followed in all seasons, is my home.

Pretty as it is, this is a landscape that has been severely altered and damaged in the last few centuries. Like so many things in the West, and, I suspect, landscapes everywhere, it is close to impossible to tell what is “natural” and what is a remnant of a once intact ecosystem.

The other defining feature of my home ground is the river. Once free-flowing and healthy, today it’s dry as a bone save for what the city water managers decide to release from the reservoir that supplies this town with its drinking water. The river today is a deep, severely eroded ditch largely denuded of plant and animal life, and heartbreaking to behold. Despite this, we walk it almost daily. It doesn’t always run with water, but contains the flow of our days.

I say all this as a preface to my garden post, as a bit of grounding that will help you to see why I consider nurturing this small piece of land an act of healing. For years my garden has suffered because of my stinginess with water. I couldn’t justify watering a few lettuce plants at the cost of the river. My efforts at conservation yielded not much more than bitter greens. The city gives saved water to developers, the cycle of overuse continues. Now I see watering this land as an integral part of restoring the river. Water soaks through my rich soil, trickling back into the water table. The water I use nurtures a kind of ecology, devised by me, yes, in a sort of hit or miss way, but an ecology nonetheless. It sustains insects, bees, birds, and abundant plant life. It is a patch of soil that is fed and cared for rather than stripped and neglected.

Here’s the huge pathway that used to divide two of my garden beds. (Both of which were in the shade, as it happens.) I spent this spring turning it into fertile beds. Which brings me to another kind of healing–the gift that comes from regular connection with the land. From relating to it in the intimate way that is the gardener’s–touching, digging, sowing, watering, harvesting, smelling, sensing. From the give and take of energy exchanged. From the mutual care-taking that happens when one eats food grown from the soil one has fed. This is healing of another kind of cultural wound, the kind that comes from disconnection with natural cycles, removal from food production, and an acceptance of the loss to human and plant communities that is its inevitable result.

The next level of healing that takes place in the humble garden is of the broken system we are so entrenched in–the system that keeps us reliant on imported food, petroleum powered corporate agriculture, and an economic system that doesn’t aid our communities. At the same time we are shut off from our neighbors, our land, our water supply, and our own resourcefulness. It’s a question of dependency on the System vs. interdependence with Place.

So that’s why I water my garden now. By hand, often, and thoroughly. That’s why I turn kitchen scraps into black gold, and keep on trying. It doesn’t always yield what I hope for. But at the same time it yields so much more.

And each year we become a little more whole, my land and I.

A Special Thank You to Old Man Winter

Lot’s of gratitude in our house these days for the super abundant snow pack blanketing our mountains.

Seeping into the earth, down the mountainside, spilling through our taps and, blessedly, into our most beloved and dry river.

Our walks have meandered down from the ridge tops we frequent in the winter back into this once-again running, much neglected riverbed.

We hope for a long season of flow, the health of the willows and native plants, the birds and beavers, all the creatures that share this waterway.

And give a special thanks for the watering of our own thirsty souls.