Garden Update and a Happy Surprise!

No deep thoughts here...just tomatoes and an unexpected happy surprise.

Tomatoes and peppers coming out of our ears, so to speak, though more accurately, coming out of compost and soil, and especially of the late summer rains that finally came. All the hose watering, all the carrying shower water and sink water and every last bit of saved water doled out during 5 months of drought didn't do what a couple weeks of regular rain did.

Sliced tomato with mozzerella, tomato soup, BLTs, salsa, omelets, tomatoes sliced, diced, fried, casseroled, in salads and sandwiches, given away, stuffed, broiled...and you thought zucchini was the garden wunderkind? Oh no, this year it is tomatoes...

...and peppers. But that's another story.

And I love them.

And I LOVE this journal which just today I won from Tami Chacon . Isn't it great? Take a look at her etsy shop, Choose Joy Studio while you're at it, because there's a lot more of her work there and you just might find something you can't live without.

Gracias, Tami!

PS: see the acorn squash next to the bowl of tomatoes up there? That's the mystery vegetable!

"Be happy for this moment...this moment is your life"

I heard this the other day in, of all things, a trailer for the movie "Unfaithful" and ever since, random moments of each day have been transformed.

Not because I've accidentally bumped into a hot Frenchman, but because every time I remember it

I realize it is true.

Each moment - every single one - is my entire life.

Right here.

Right now.

In whatever circumstance I find myself -

from gorgeous summer evenings

to

sitting at a stop light.

This is it.

And I am happy.

Little Miracles

I'm pretty much in love with spring and summer.

The spasms of crazy growth, bright colors and explosions of sunshine and flavor, feeling the wind blow up my skirt, seeing storm clouds gather on the horizon after a long drought, hearing rain fall, all make my heart open like a flower.

Seasons come and go in life, love, time, weather, passions.

Bright summer mellows into the gold of autumn, followed closely by months of quiet and white cold.

Seasons come and go, and come again; each time returning - just a bit differently, holding new possibilities and a changed perspective.

...

Watering the garden today I found yet another volunteer mystery vegetable popping up in one of my containers. It's vaguely squash-ish with tender buds opening deep beneath those umbrella leaves.

Squash, if that's what it is (I'm not sure yet), is incredibly hardy, as you might expect of a staple of this high desert mesa and its people.

The seed that sprouted here has survived deep freezes, scorching heat, cycles of flood and drought, burial and excavation, worms, ants, and the composter's shovel. This is the second one (the other is slowly crowding out the thyme) and both are doing better mixed with flowers and herbs than the one I actually planted in the garden proper.

I pulled up what I thought was a grass stem beside it, only to find that it was ginger root, about half as thick as my little finger, but definitely ginger. I patted it right back and hope to heck it will grow.

I find it just amazing that this:

turns into this:

and, tested by the vagaries of climate, eluding foraging robins and scavenging mice, enriched and strengthened by the company it keeps there in the compost bin and the garden soil...becomes this:

all over again.

Little deaths.

New shoots,

new roots

15 Minutes to Live

Oh Facebook...

My friend and fellow painter, Lisa Wilson, re-posted a link to this writing challenge, and sucker that I am for a challenge I signed up immediately and jumped right in, just moments awake and on my first cup of coffee no less. If you are similarly inclined to mine the depths of your consciousness (you can wait until you're awake if you like), the link is to the right.

I do not promise to post everything, but here's my first 15 minutes of off-the-cuff writing for today.

We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

15 minutes to live and a story to tell.

My stories are spelled out in great detail, painfully, excruciatingly, boringly detailed in my journals of oh, about 30 years, and yes, a lot of that is about fear. We are afraid of the truth of life…that everyone and everything ages, decays, dies but we all too often stop there at that point where what we know seems to end.

If I look around me, though, I am reminded again and again that life always follows death. Hiking the Sangre de Christos, over last autumn's dark and sodden leaves, I pass a narrow, linear swathe of iridescent moss and wildflowers. I pause and wonder briefly at it until I see beneath them the shadow of a fallen tree that has long since crumbled to dust. How long has it taken to decay to the point that life springs so exuberantly from it? I don’t know, but within its ghostly outline an entire new ecosystems thrives.

Like magic, the household waste I throw into the glass jar under the sink and later toss into the compost pile changes, sometimes in a matter of days, into rich brown humus that in turn nourishes the garden. Turning it I find worms, roly polys, burrowing bugs that eat and excrete and feed the robins who have built a nest in the nearby apple tree.

Friends and family, even those I know for such short period in my hospice work, die yet their voices and stories and presence continue to move and speak to me, reminding me of important truths, often ones I never heard while they walked this earth. Death does nothing to quiet them.

Relationships come to an end and if I pay attention to the hows and whys, the lessons learned from them inform and guide future relationships.

And one day I, too, will die. I have no worries about whether there is a life after death or what it might be. There is no need for fear. Life tells me so.

Life, death, life – that’s just how it goes.

and unsurprisingly, this was in my in-box as I closed this post:

I Did It!

I did it !!!

I finally finished an Art House Co-op project!

But darned if it doesn't seem that I've missed the deadline. I was absolutely certain that the deadline was June 15 - but Art House is re-designing their website and there is no mention of AMLP...and to make things worse, I happened on a blog post about it with a comment saying that the deadline had passed --- last month.

Oh well, it's in the mail anyway and I had fun doing it.

(Ahhh...a sigh of relief - I finally found something official that says that the deadline for signing up has passed, but the deadline for postmarked entries is June 15. Yes! One or more of mine will be traveling the country this fall - how exciting is that?)

This is what grew from the theme "Neighborhood Characters". At first I started taking photos of people but in short order the 'characters' I was shooting became the city and the surrounding land and people - the culture, I guess you'd say.

Remember, this is a disposable camera; the kind of camera that tilts a quarter inch to the right when you press the capture button, one in which the lens is conveniently located right next to where you hold the camera so at least one in 5 photos includes a finger, and is in general the sort of camera that would be my last resort in any given photo op.

No instant replay, photos that have to be developed before you delete, no photoshop crops and brush ups - and a finite number of frames. There was something about this challenge that I liked.

I haven't shot film in so long that it was like watching a thriller only to have the dvd die out on you right before the story is resolved. But at any rate, here are a few of the ones I sent on to the Brooklyn Art Library. Now I guess I'd better get started on the sketchbook thingy.

A Reality Check

This one hit me blindside.

I was checking in on Facebook and found a post a friend put up about this movie, "Earthlings".

I was totally unprepared for what came up. I will say here that I both encourage you to watch it (the trailer) and to turn it off when you must. Painful and thought-provoking.

I have never really thought of myself as an "animal lover" though I have two dogs and I love them. Each in their unique way add to my life and, truly, it's hard to imagine life without them. But I've always thought (true confession) of PETA people as being a bit over the top. You know...maybe they could spend their energies on, say, Doctors Without Borders, or Amnesty International, or even just their local homeless shelter. Humans uber alles. Ok, I admit this.

However just a few minutes of this movie with the knowledge that these could be "my" pets were so horrific that I had to turn it off. I can't conceive of watching the whole thing. I get it.

Really.

That little bit of film made me want to be very, VERY conscious of what I eat, wear, consume. All too often those actions are thoughtless. They seem simple, automatic, yet in truth they are profoundly important and profoundly difficult to sort out.

For many years I was a vegetarian until children and a meat eating husband dropped into my life and eventually I caved. Now single with children grown, I've been turning back that way, even towards a vegan diet, but not consistently and not with any real agenda except that it feels better to me physically.

This film has given me reason to think beyond my health alone.

Leather shoes and belts? Handbags and car seats?

Dead animals. Did they just drop dead of natural causes.

No.

But cloth shoes and bags? Vegan shoes??? Isn't this a little ridiculous?

Such seemingly simple things but ... they aren't. Cotton is grown with pesticides that are harmful to everyone, human and animal alike. Rubber soles on vegan shoes: at what cost to the environment? To the people who work in the factories? People who work for a pittance to make the clothing and shoes I wear?

Of course there's organic...at a cost - to me, anyway.

Such seemingly simple things but ... they are not. It's a lot to sort out, and once you become conscious of the choices the path stretches out as far as your life runs - with more decisions at every turn.

It sounds heavy, and I suppose in one sense it is, but in fact the positive choices I make lead to joy; to a better, cleaner, more sustainable and happy world.

I can't change the world, little ole me, all by myself. I can't stop the war in Libya or Monsanto's pollution and greed, or human slavery on my own, but I do have this one wonderful life to do pretty much as I please.

I'm thinking....

Happiness

Whiling away the hours in an airport layover yesterday I found this book, "The Happiness Project". (I especially like the covers for other countries which you can see by scrolling down if you click on the link.)

It piqued my interest - after all, who doesn't want to be happy? It's not that I am not happy; much of the time I am, but there are days when it seems to be a long climb out of a blue funk, so...I browsed through it and then went online to find the author's blog/website, also named "The Happiness Project".

It made me think, so...

In the spirit of it all, let me share ten things with you that make me happy today:

Being home again

Having the day all to myself

Taking a long hike in fresh spring air

Watching my dog, Sawyer, chase a dust devil whirling tumbleweeds 3 feet above his head

Seeing not one, but five golden-winged hawks soaring overhead, close enough that I could count their wing feathers

Hearing silence

Seeing fresh snow on the mountains

Walking over volcanic rock knowing it landed there over a million years ago,

blown from the Valles Caldera eruption, some 30 miles away

Walking beneath petroglyphs that remind me that people have lived

and walked in this very place for a long, long time

and their art endured, too.

Reminding me, it's time to

I've done it again

Yes, it's time for the new Sketchbook Project - 2012 Edition.

Yes, I admit, I've entered once before and not completed my sketchbook. And yes, I am currently involved in AMLP (A Million Little Pictures) also by ArtHouse Co-op, and YES, I'm also staring down the other project...The Fiction Project.

Which strikes terror in my breast...what was I thinking? Writing is not my strong suit.

Yes, I need a 12 step program for this...what can I say? I love a challenge and even when I fail at said challenge, I sign on for another one.

But this time the folks at ArtHouse Co-op have done a few things to make it easier and better.

1. They say they are using better paper (this is key, let me tell you)
2. The project is going global both in scope of artists and in exhibitions
3. (Best of all!) there is a theme that is "untitled". My last theme was "secret codes". I had some great ideas for that and even had a stamp made, but ...by the time the stamp came other things had intervened, I was distracted, and I didn't finish. This time the field is WIDE open. Hooray!

Up above, by the way, is my one and only use of the stamp I'd made...and it's for a totally different project. Oh well.

Sometimes Life Knows Best

Since DEEP I've not been painting much. It was such a time of growth in so many ways and I was introduced to so many amazing women that I think I needed a time to just let it all settle.

This past week I've felt a natural movement towards my table.

THE table.

The one with paint, glue, paper, pencils, stamps, ink, newspapers and magazines, brushes and pens and, oh Holy Mother! (and I say this in the most reverent way) color and images.

Feels good.

Balance

resting in child's pose...

arms outstretched,

back and neck at ease,

forehead resting on cool tile

ahhh.

it's been a long week

a long slow breath

settle into balance

and the mind follows

Prayers in the Afternoon

This is not a pen, it is a prayer.

One must have compassion for that.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Lying under the apple tree

I am writing my life...

inspiration

observation

and yes,

it is a prayer

It's Official - It's Springtime

Yes, it is springtime. This is the proof - the first, the very first apple blossom bloomed today.

Oh, I've known it's spring by the warmer weather, the blasted dusty wind that blows across this high desert country, and by the calendar, of course...but to me the apple blossoms are the surest sign and the most anticipated simply because there is nothing else as beautiful and delicate.

Horatio Alger wrote this poem about them. It's a little on the sappy side, but sweetly sappy is how my heart feels when the apple blossoms bloom.

I sit in the shadow of apple-boughs,
in the fragrant orchard close,
and around me floats the scented air,
with it's wave-like tidal flows.
I close my eyes in a dreamy bliss,
and call no king my peer;
for is not this the rare, sweet time,
the blossoming time of the year?

Happy Endings

Oh my gosh, it's been way too long since I've been here. Instead I've been busy with Natasha of Creative Nachos and crew, writing and playing with images, paint and paper in her workshop, Oh the Stories You'll Tell.

I'm working on my photos for AMLP, too. It's been fun looking for all the crazy characters around town and trying to snap their photos - what I'm finding is that this part of the country itself is the character. I'm about half done and for a while, that was pretty much all the photography I was doing because, as you know, I lost my little Lumix camera.

I had torn the house and car up looking for it, re-walked my favorite hiking trails with eyes on the alert for a shimmer of blue, even shook down some friends, thinking it may have fallen into their hands inadvertently, but all to no avail. I had about given it up as lost forever and was thinking about buying a new one when.....

....one day, almost two weeks, a snow, a rain, and a lot of sunny days later, I was at a favorite trail close by my home. I often take a short cut from the parking lot there at the beginning of my walks with the dogs, but this time I went through the gate and what did I see but a wee little scrap of paper tucked into barbed wire on a fence post.

I snatched it up, hopeful but doubtful at the same time. It was worn and bleached by the sun and wind and a little frayed around the edges and all I could make out on it was something that might have said "found ... camera".

It had been written against something soft, maybe the wood post. I couldn't even tell if it was in pencil or pen. There were indentations that could be a phone number and a name but that was all I could see and most of that was guesswork. Tantalizingly at the very bottom fairly clearly could be made out "call me".

I tilted it this way and that hoping the evening sun would cast tiny shadows and allow me to decipher the message.

Not quite.

Of the three or four numbers I thought I could see, I tried every combination I could think of as I walked. All were either out of service, asked me to leave a message, or answered and said, 'nope, not me'. I was giving up but as I walked back to my car I had an idea... a totally BRILLIANT idea. Remembering my childhood days of Nancy Drew, the Hardy Brothers and secret codes, I found a dusty, abandoned lighter in the depths of the car console and clicked it. Bingo! I ran the flame ever so gently under the writing on the paper and as if by magic words began to appear.

And the words said:

I found a camera.

Call 471-XXXX

Camille

I called. She called back 5 minutes later. It was mine! What a wonderful day. What a kind, honest, wonderful person! We made arrangements for me to pick it up a few days later. I felt like I'd recovered a long lost friend; as indeed I had. I wanted to have a party.

Happy endings.

Little Pictures

I really don't have anything else to say

Treasured!

Many thanks to Trina at TLA Designs who included this photo of mine, taken from the Rio Grande Gorge bridge outside of Taos, in her Etsy treasury This Island Earth. It's a wonderful treasury of photos of, well....this island we call home. Take a look and while you're at it you might find something in Trina's shop, too.

In other photographic news I am kind of devastated to find that I've misplaced the cute little Panasonic Lumix that inspired this blog in the first place. I still have my Pentax digital SLR and that's a powerhouse of a camera, but you can't beat the Panasonic for portability - it slips into (and apparently can slip back out of) a back pocket with room to spare and takes sharp, clear, true to color pics with ease. I hope I just put it somewhere obscure or it slid into some corner of the house and I'll find it again soon.

Meanwhile, I've signed up for the Arthouse Coop's latest challenge, called A Million Little Pictures, or AMLP for short. My disposable camera and theme, 'neighborhood characters', arrived by mail yesterday. By mid-June I'll have photographed 27 of Santa Fe's 'neighborhood characters' (shouldn't be hard to find them in this town) and sent the developed pics back by mail. Later some or all of those photos will tour the country on exhibit. Cost? $25. Practically free, and there are lots of interesting themes to choose from. It sounds like a lot of fun and I'll be sure to share some photos later. Meanwhile, check it out for yourself by clicking on the link to the right.

Lemon Yellow Mellow

The poetry of the earth is never dead.

- John Keats

An Alternate Valentine's Day

Love this Etsy treasury! Check it out. I'm honored to be included with this mixed media piece.

In wilderness we can saunter,
every step creates a more informed muscle.

The depth of a canyon as it twists and turns
corresponds with the surprises and complexities of our own minds,
now free to wander.

Terry Tempest Williams
"Red"

Desert Moon

Last night the moon was almost full,

the sky almost clear.

I haven't stood outside in the cold to watch

the moon in a very long time.

Way overdue.