10/4/2011 - horse manure
Great honking piles of it, black and fly-ridden, at the Bunker Hills Stables, and the groundskeeper Jim opens the gates to the paddock and lets me in. Round, greenish brown and ripe-smelling, flakey, I scoop shovelsful into my plastic tote bins to haul home to my garden. Keeping all the car windows open, I drive home with my dark, delicious mess. Here's what I think of--the ripe, green mats of grass on the underside of lawnmowers, a little of the sweetness of shit, like that guy smelled in the outhouse scene in Ulysses by James Joyce...the end of a romance...and something else. As I'm driving home, it doesn't smell so awful, more like band-aids, and I'm wondering if that's just the perpetual dose of worming meds that horses have to take...smells like a cross between band-aid and cunt...innocent and forthright, like it can't help smelling like the inside of a horse's colon, and what all it's been through. Katharine's raspberries all tasted like a mild, fruity version of the horse's colon, now that I know the smell, cause she mostly uses horse manure. Sensible, it smells like (unlike the oratorical version of horseshit), and willing. Horseshit smells like a future garden like lettuces and parsnips and tomatoes yet to come, smells like the pieces of clay soil and humus that blend and melt with it. I love the compost, love the dark manure as much as if I had expelled it myself.

09/21/11 Trees that listen

It was one of the triplet giant cottonwoods in the backyard, the one that most often gets my attention. I wanted to meditate, and so I put my arms around the tree for that moment, to stop and listen. Stillness. Then because I'm singing a lot this week, I just started singing something...the tree responded immediately. I felt something "pop" inside the tree, and it suddenly felt like the tree was showing me its whole life, the fibers from below the strength with which it holds its trunk, the swaying of branches so high above us (it's a mature tree-over 40 feet, I'd guess), I even felt the fluids moving below its bark-skin...The tree heard my song, then i was feeling the tree move and flex its muscles.

9/20-1/2/11

The distant barking of a dog....is it mournful? Almost, but maybe just punctuation in the calm of the night...Are someone's chickens being raided? Not in this neighborhood. Does it sound like the percussion in the jazz album you're listening to? You betcha.

9/20/11 Trees that heal themselves

The siberian elms in the backyard, dozens of them, most years have bare scraggly fingers scraping toward the sky from the woodlot. But this year they reach (I finally noticed tonight) they reach with full, bushy, plump, leafy limbs, healed, I'm sure, by the boatloads of rains we've had this year. Really, you would have thought most of them dead, but they've only been dry. This year, lots of moisture.

9/19/11 A truly misty morning...

Little beadlets of moisture, you don't know where they come from, they hang on you, make the fading brown grass greasy, dust everything with these tiny moist pellets, like teeny beads, elemental and new.

8/25/11 The changing and important emotional lives of men

It used to be that I wouldn't pay much attention to men's feelings--either they didn't seem (to me) to have much, or they seemed to favor that one--anger, and I had to duck. Lately, I've been witness to a wider and wider range of sensitivity, self-reflection and tenderness from the men in my life. Recently helped a teen young man with a range of feelings over a breakup. At work, had a man dissolve to tears on the phone with me (among other things) and I had to apologize for being too harsh. Also, men my age on the dating scene seem to be reeling from the feelings they have around rejection and dishonesty from...women (??!!) they've encountered, and setting up certain boundaries for themselves. Go men!! Have those feelings!! Talk amongst yourselves!! Figure them out!! We can help each other!!

8/24/11 6-word life summary:

Firm footing in overflowing life stream.