What snagged on the sunflowers: a love letter.

Fields and fields of sunflowers stretch away from my arms, out from the steering wheel, green and yellow nodding heads. They all say yes to this drive I'm learning so well from San Francisco to Chico and back and back and back again. They line the road in numbers I've never seen, rows next to rows making squares of beauty growing, watching that blue sky, neverminding those clouds.

I speed by over and over with my aching back, stiff arms, restless legs, impatience growing. But also ideas and emotions. Like steam rising from a pond in early morning, but imagine it in motion, a mist of ideas and feelings streaming off my watery body as I move from home to home, snagging on sunflowers and catching in the beaks of those black curvy-billed birds I've been seeing the past few days.

This idea of coyotes in my mural, a vision from under the black oak on the hill looking down over the farm and the grinding rock there. Those brokenhearted family feelings of letting go and getting ready to fight, like a cat bunching her haunches. Images of my new home and the creek that runs through it, the black walnuts towering over the little red house and the whirlwind of energy and doing that is my new roommate. More feelings around the massacre of the Maidu at the farm, and how it's actually more than that: everywhere I've lived has been stolen from someone. Remembering the grinding stones beneath my mother's house. The spring next door to my apartment and the shell mounds on the edges of San Francisco. Everywhere I live has been stolen unfairly from someone and this mural is just the first time I've really realized it viscerally and felt like I personally am part of the thieving and the benefitting from the theft. This desire to do what seems most like the right thing in each situation, such an impossible task but still trying anyway just because that's the person I want to be and that's the world I want to live in. The simple plain joy of eating a purple black plum ripe in my mouth as I drive and leave my mists hanging in the sunflower fields.  

And always traveling with me there's the thought of you and all this love between us. I want to share each day each thought each affirmative sunflower face most of all with with you. So I am. Like this.

Foothill Roots Farm Mural: Part 1

I'm going to paint a mural!! On this big blank shipping container:

Let me tell you more. My friends Diane and Pat have a new farm, Foothill Roots Farm (the astute reader [you] may have guessed this from the title of this blog post). The farm is in Meadow Vista, near Auburn, east of Sacramento in the Sierra Nevadas.

I got to visit the farm a couple of weeks ago. It's pretty wonderful. Diane is an old friend of mine- she has been one of my mentors in life and I owe a lot of my skills to her. In college, she'd always take me climbing and telemark skiing and was patient with all of my fears. In fact, she's the person who convinced me to apply to Outward Bound, which ended up being the best job ever. Anyway, she's awesome.

Diane and her husband Pat have now mostly left the world of climbing and skiing and outdoor education and have gotten in to that other adrenaline junky sport: farming. For real. They interned somewhere or other and learned a bunch of stuff and now they've started this farm in Meadow Vista.

What's amazing to me is how much work they have done. They just signed the lease on the land like 9 months ago and they already have a CSA going and a farm stand on Thursdays (3-7pm if you want to go by and buy something delicious to support them!). It's hard for me to understand how two people have done all this.

They've put up fencing, put down drip tape, put up a green house, cleared brush and grass, planted, furrowed, seedlinged, transplanted, thinned, covered, uncovered, mulched, and other things that I don't know the words for.

They've got this old tractor from the '50s that they've converted to solar power somehow.

Pat says, "we've converted this old tractor to solar power somehow!".
Just kidding, that's not what he's actually saying.

The day I was out there helping, there were two other people helping. Diane told me that
was the most help they'd had at one time.

They've had some help, in the two days I was there people kept dropping by to check things out and a couple people came by to volunteer. Apparently, if I'm remembering correctly, this is the first farm ever in Meadow Vista. From what I could tell, the community seems real excited and supportive of them being there.

"Ready?"
"Ready!"
"Farming!"
"Farm on!"
(I'm not kidding, they were climbers before they were farmers.)

The farm is on the old Simpson Ranch and has some interesting history, past and present, which I'm still looking in to. I will write about that in another blog post. I'll also talk about the materials I'm going to use, the process of painting a 27'x8' mural, and brace yoursefl, I'll probably be asking you for money in every blog post!

I'm happy to paint this mural so I can learn experientially how to paint murals, get some exposure as an artist, support my friends and a good cause, and all that good stuff. Other than personal satisfaction and exposure, I'm not getting paid and am paying for supplies from my own pockets. Contact me if you'd like to get involved or want to help out with things like time, materials and/or money. It would be nice to be able to recover some of the costs. I'll write more details on costs in another blog post as well.

Thanks for reading! I'm excited to share this project with you on my blog as it unfolds! Feel free to share it with people you know!

Invitation

To live a life of fig jam and swimming holes

long walks and at least two kinds of hummingbirds

naked desert showers and coyote song

belly laughs and belly love

nighttime kisses impervious to mosquitoes 

big blue sky of a blue not taken for granted
my company for hockey sometimes

massaged kale and steak cooked perfectly two different ways
teaching and learning to catch with a mitt 

crying because it hurt when the ball hit

and stubborn refusal to stop learning 

at least until it's just not fun

and then also

canoeing fishing coffee 

tea sailing sit-ups 

pushups beer banter

and learning more birds
walking more miles

and each new thing that makes you come alive

with me.

The Shape of Letting Go

Coming home from the ceramics studio 

driving so close to your house

what used to be your house

I look that way 

think of you every time

feel a pull towards places you used to be

like my feelings are clay

and love is gravity.

Then driving down the eucalyptus hill

towards my home now

longing for the way you move

through the world and through me

my mind, my lungs, my heart

I work at my feelings like clay

and form the shape of letting go

and the shape of acceptance

and loving anyway.

Smoke Signals

Thunderheads and lightning on a hot day in Southern California. We drive to the post office and pass three fire trucks going the other way.
"I wonder where the fire is," my mom wonders.
An hour later, back at the house, I go outside and see smoke is billowing over the near mountains. I run through the house to find my mom. She's not there. Planes flying around carrying water. I find her outside directing the arrival of a new manufactured home (she works in the community where she lives, selling manufactured homes). I point at the sky, and hope she doesn't get too nervous. A few years ago, her entire community was evacuated. I'm a Wilderness First Responder and I know how to stay calm in emergencies.
"I know, I've been watching it" she calmly informs me.
We come back inside. I urge my mom to start packing now in case we are evacuated. My mom is much less worried than I am, "oh, the fire trucks haven't even come in from this side to fight the fire. Last year, they were driving up the street to fight it. Take this one," I carry the box of family photos she points out to the pile of papers and boxes. I go outside to check the smoke. Looks bigger to me. I pack my things. My mom calmly goes through papers. She tells me there's a phone tree in the community in case they need to evacuate. I pace. I go outside to check the smoke. There's more white in it this time. My mom tells me that means they are pouring water on it. I can smell the skunks that are nesting under the house. Another water plane drones by. My mom is still sorting papers, putting birth certificates and other things in a cardboard box. I pace. Earlier there was a single column of smoke that started billowing white from the water. It split in to two columns orange and black and spread out in either direction. The fire itself is a couple hills away, I can't see it, only try to read it's signals in the smoke. The phone rings. It's the call. I stand up. My mom answers. I hold my breath. She frowns. She hangs up.
"Is it the phone tree?" I ask, because she hasn't told me.
"No, it's a sales call," she laughs. I resume breathing and notice I have my hands over my heart.
"Oh." I sit down.
We check the smoke together. It's more spread out now, covering more of the horizon. But it's also thinner, more orange. My mom calls a coworker who's son-in-law works for the fire department and finds out that the fire is in Chihuahua Valley. We look at a map. I estimate it's four miles away at most. Another plane flies over the house.
"Well, this was a good little drill," my mom says good naturedly.
"Were you even worried?" I ask.
"Well, not really. We went through this last year and I was nervous. Now if it had been really windy, that makes the fires travel fast. But it wasn't particularly windy."
The sick feeling in my stomach is starting to go away.

Hope

Hope is a funny thing. It's rope that burns your hand and also holds you, keeps you from falling.

Clay!!

There is a lot of stress in my life these days. Work, family, car almost getting towed because I forgot to move it on the day they were painting stripes on the street, you know, the usual. There was a time when my guitar was my journal and my therapist at once, I'd sing everything I felt. That doesn't seem to be happening for me now. 

But you know what is happening for me now? Clay! It had been about 8 years since I had touched clay, but I found out about Ruby's Clay Studio in San Francisco and started going to their drop in hours. Just to remember how to work the clay, I made a couple of dinosaurkangarooalligator creatures.  They are sitting on my dresser top now. 

Different people see them as different things, and I'm fine with that. I see them as full and happy of whatever I want to fill them with. Especially the fatso one with her arms around her belly. She's so full! Uhhhhh!

Now that they are done, the obvious next move is big slugs. 

There's something about moving clay around with my hands, all the mooshing, smoothing, cutting, forming, that is so good for getting my mind off what worries me. I don't think about whether the group in the field has enough water carrying capacity for their dry camp tonight. I don't think about my sister and her choices. I don't think about missing my partner and being lonely in this city.

When I come home from the ceramics studio I feel like I'm doing good work with my life, and am filling the rest of my time with worthwhile things. I feel like I am the person I want to be when I grow up. I feel whole and complete.