I don’t usually have much interaction with the anthroposophist (Rudolf Steiner devotées) communities which abound in this area. I like the people, usually, very much, but the dogma is too heavy for me. Camphill is a Steiner project that cares for developmentally disabled adults in a village setting, where they live and work side by side with normally-abled adults and their families. Its presence here (about 10 miles from my house) means that we often see the residents out and about, which I think is a great thing for my kids, and for me. (In California, I now realize, I almost never saw disabled adults, and rarely children. Where were they?)

Anyway, the people at Camphill tend an herb garden and make wonderful teas (really, tisanes) with lyrical names like Douceur de Fete (one of my favorites.) They also make the prosaically named Tea for Colds, which seems to actually help. So, with my head stuffed and snotty with a cold, I made myself a cuppa just now, using my newest (non-local) fave acqusition, my Tea Stick. (Pricey, but genius. If you drink loose leaf tea, get one.) And I poured the nearly-boiling water into my favorite new mug (one thing you may not know about me is that for years now, I’ve been searching for the perfect mug. It’s more challenging than you might think, but I think the search is over.) My mug was made by a potter/friend down the road who gave it to me in exchange for using my home as a location for a photo shoot for her new website. So my soothing tea was in my perfect mug, which soothes the palm of my hand in addition to holding my medicinal tea, and I thought: this is all from right.here. If I had a younger horse (and, let it be said, was a better rider) I could get to both of them in an afternoon. And that thought just made me so happy that I live in this random, odd, lovely place.

Meanwhile, last night I made a discovery that also has everything to do with where I live and what I do here, and it also made me shiver with quiet joy.

Mary Oliver is one of my favorite contemporary poets, but I only recently discovered this work of hers. To make it even better, I found it on a work of art made by my teachers and friends Karen Arp-Sandel and Suzy Banks Baum. If you live near me, check out their collaborate mail art show, Femail, at the Berkshire Art Kitchen.

Praying

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patcha few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorwayinto thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak

~ Mary Oliver

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” ~ Albert Camus

What is it in the universe that’s sending so many words of wisdom my way lately?

Maybe I’m just paying attention. It’s a good time to be observant, at least here in my corner of the world, which is blessed with white snow covering the scars on the ground, blue skies that range from palest aqua to intense, nearly purple depth, bare trees that reach up up up like so many finely wrought sculptures. The beauty here, as it almost always does, stuns the eye and the mind, and especially this week, when we’re all wrung out by powerless sympathy with the too-traumatized people of Haiti, it provokes intense attention and gratitude.

I wrote a post a while back on The Sister Project about the tradition of the commonplace book. Also known by the insanely evocative Latin phrase silva rerum, meaning ‘a forest of things’, these are journals of bits of found wisdom, collections of quotes and sayings and our reactions to them. We do this now, of course, whether in our Moleskines or our Facebook pages or our blogs, but the naming of the practice is all but lost, and I think that’s a shame. How do you keep track of the words you discover that move or provoke you? Can you share some of them with me, here, or over at The Sister Project?

Don’t move. Stay still. Once you find a place that feels halfway right, and it seems time, settle down with a vow not to move any more. Take a look at one place on earth, one circle of people, one realm of beings over time. ~Gary Snyder

Patience from Glowing Heads on Vimeo.

I have little to none these days, not patience, not time to create, but this is a beautiful reminder of the immense pleasures in both. Hoping you are all having happy holidays.

That’s more than I can say about most of the last 30 days preceding. The last month has, in a word, sucked. Between the H’s terrifying accident, and its aftermath, both physical and emotional, I am completely spent. I used nanowrimo as intensive therapy, escaping into my fictional world every.single.day, even if I didn’t commit any new words to my draft. It was an amazing outlet, and exhilarating to prove to myself that I could actually write a piece of fiction–something I literally haven’t done, save fragments, since high school.

This month, I’ve got a new immersion project, which I’ll reveal at some point, and I am, as a wise friend counseled, just trying to get through the month.

But in every other way, the last 29 days of writing the first more or less complete piece fiction I’ve managed in, oh, more than 30 years, has been a great gift of solace and escape during a dark and difficult time.

I did it.

I wrote over 50,000 words in November (my word processor says 50,323; the official NaNoWriMo counting machine only gives me credit for 50,048, but I’m not going to quibble with victory.) This is over 150 pages of prose, the longest thing I’ve ever written, including my college thesis. (It’s possible that the final report I wrote for my graduate school field study was longer, but that was a group project and it was for business school, so it definitely.doesn’t.count.)

I ought to feel gleeful and exhilarated, but the last few weeks (outside of my little novel-writing bubble, that is) have been so painful and difficult that those particular words are not, at least for the moment, part of my personal lexicon. Even so, I am proud of myself for completing a task (a notoriously elusive accomplishment for me) and prouder still for synthesizing a million fragments of story into a semi-cohesive whole. I like the idea of my novel more than I like the draft itself at this point (and even the hard-to-please H genuinely liked the story, when I, in a moment of incredible and inexplicable vulnerability, pitched it to him a few weekends ago) but I think, I think, I can turn it into something that while not anywhere in the neighborhood of art might still be, for someone out there, a worthwhile read. I still have sections to excise, whole chapters that need to be conceived, the work is far, far, far from done. But still, I think I owe it to myself to say–

Congratulations to me.

Today, I drove all four of us to the kids’ school. The H and I had breakfast, then went to the market and I dropped him in Great Barrington while I went to see my shrink (how badly did I need that appointment today? Oh, badly.) I picked him up, and drove him an hour to catch the train to NYC where he has a meeting tomorrow morning. I drove back to the kids’ school (an hour and five minutes) to pick them up to take them to get their flu shots. I drove them to the pediatrician (20 minutes.) We drove back to school, so Dido could finish his day. The Babe and I went for lunch (for me) at 3 p.m., and then to her ballet class. We drove back to school, and then home. Let’s not even discuss my carbon footprint, shall we?

I am quite relaxed, actually about all this; my biggest dilemma is how to manage the animals: the dog can’t stay home alone all day, so she’s going to need to ride along with us most mornings; I will hike her (good for us both) and then leave her with the H at his office while I go about my day. The horses have to be fed and turned out in the morning, every morning, so I now have to do that before taking everyone to school, rather than my prior routine of doing it after they leave. But there’s no way for me to get up early enough (5:30? not happening) to do stalls before school, too. As a result, over the last few days, the kids and I have gotten into an evening routine. Dido does his homework, then we all go down to the barn together. They, who have steadfastly resisted much barn work for the last eight months, have suddenly gotten with the program (fear of maternal meltdown perhaps? though that’s never had an impact before, really) and have started helping, a lot, with cleaning stalls, feeding, watering and stocking the paddock with hay and water for morning. By the end of the half hour “shift”, they’re done working and are just running and playing by the barn while I finish the last details, but that’s lovely, too; then we go back up to the house for dinner. Between that and the time change, they’ve been falling into bed at 7:30, and mostly are asleep by 8, which is, no exaggeration, bliss.

The H was in L.A. for work last week, and without getting into too much gorey detail, had a seizure, something that has never happened before. He was driving at the time, and so wrecked his rental car and shook himself up quite badly. Thankfully, he wasn’t hurt much and mercifully, neither was anyone else, for which we are both beyond grateful. Even so, it was a terrifying experience for both of us, and I was happy beyond happy to have him home, safe if not completely sound, on Friday night.

Until we know why this happened (and we suspect a reaction to some medication he’s been taking) he can’t drive. This means that I am back in the twice a day commuting gig, one which made me nearly insane when we first moved here. There’s nothing to be done about it, so I am trying to figure out how best to integrate the extra hour of commuting into my already packed days. My first sane step was to decline the opportunity to take on yet another volunteer responsibility at the kids’ school.

We’ll muddle through this, but it was a shock. Ah, the chaos of life.

Last weekend, maple on fire

Technically speaking, I practice only half of animal husbandry. I do not raise animals from birth; my hens aren’t broody and even if they were, we eat their eggs; we’re not breeding horses or cats or dogs (though we do have a lovely yearling warmblood, Hal, living here now, thanks to our friend Katherine, who’s training him); the only reproduction going on here is wild and unintentional.  But we do spend a whole lot of our time caring for animals of all kinds: Dacos, and the horse who boards with him; three barn cats; a house cat, the three remaining chickens, our dog…you get the idea. It’s an investment of time, energy and no small amount of emotion.

On the weekend, we try to do barn chores as a family, a welcome change for me, since most weekdays, I do them alone. I have a pretty good rhythm now, at least when the H is in town (as he’s not, this week) of making my tea in the morning and then heading off to the barn as soon as he and the kids leave at 7:30. Even if I tarry, I like to have all the chores down there done by 9, so I can get to work early enough to feel like I have a lovely expanse of time in front of me. Saturday, miraculously, the adults in the house slept in, until after 9 a.m. (I literally cannot remember the last time that happened) and so I didn’t get to the barn until late,10 or so. Our plan was to groom both horses, clean their stalls, and then take turns riding Dacos. But when I haltered him and led him out of his stall, Dacos couldn’t put weight on his right rear leg. This was the first time in the ten months we’ve had our beautiful gelding that he’s come up lame, and it was a shock.

Instead of calling the vet, I called Katherine, our resident (practically–five of her horses are here, so I see her morning and night, most days) equine expert. Cold water, analgesic, stall rest, waiting were the components of her prescription, and so began the first test of my own fortitude for the equine project I’ve undertaken this year. Shoveling shit is hard work, but not taxing. Ditto tossing hay, hauling buckets of water, spreading clean bedding and picking hooves. Worrying about the health and future of an 1100 pound beautiful beast is a greater challenge. Two days into this program of rest and rehab, the leg is improving: still swollen, still warm to the touch, but neither symptom as severe as Saturday, and the leg can now bear some weight. If it’s not better in a couple more days, we’ll have to call the vet.

Dacos is a gentle, patient horse. He has quirks: he has never learned to be tied, meaning that when you saddle or groom him, he simply stands,  untethered. This is not something anyone would recommend, but he does it, and has never surprised us with a dash or snort or kick; he just stands, watches, waits and cooperates. He likes, under saddle, to pretend to spook, to see how his rider will react (best not to, and then, whether reassured or disappointed, he calms and readjusts.) But mostly, he’s just interested in us. He bends down to sniff and nuzzle the children, puts his cheek next to mine and gives a soft exhale of grassy breath, takes treats from our hands with his lips instead of his teeth, watches us as we clean or lead or feed him. He let me blanket him in his stall in the dark last night without so much as a start. He’s sweet, and we are all four of us holding our breath a bit to see where this injury will lead.