Sedentary Travelogue #9: An Open View

I finally managed to readjust my schedule and have been waking up earlier once again. Last winter, Maxwell and I would go out between midnight and 1 and bury ourselves under the piles of blankets (him purring madly until we both fell asleep) and then I would wake up around 7 or 7:30. Although that's not terribly early in the scheme of things, it was still around sunrise, which seems early enough. But this spring and summer, I got caught in a stay up late(ish), sleep late(ish) cycle which I found hard to get out of. The last few mornings, I have woken up and been disappointed to note that the morning was cloudy since it was light out but there was no direct sunlight. Yet as I stayed in my blankets (it's getting cold again) the faint orange glow, with leafy silhouettes, would appear on the side of my tent. There were no clouds; this was just the beginning of sunrise. Maybe it's something to do with the cold. Who knows.

The other morning I got up before sunrise and went off for a walk. It was a fine walk for many reasons and was particularly filled with red-headed woodpeckers. I spent a fair amount of time watching their stark black and white bodies dart about the trees and dead limbs, saw the rattling of their red-hooded heads as the hill echoed with their rythmic knocking. I also had the pleasure of witnessing an eruption from the prairie grass as a group of 5 or 6 wild turkeys clattered into the air as I walked near them.

On my way back home, I was coming up to the little grove down the hill from everything else where Kalen and I have our tents set up. I heard another kind of rythmic knocking and realized that Kalen was working on his house, hammering at some plank. As I got closer, I looked up to see Kalen leaning over his floorboards, wearing a black and white checked jacket and a bright red hat pulled over his ears. The resemblance was uncanny and I've been pleased with the thought of it ever since.

The turning of the seasons is certainly upon us. I saw 5 geese flying south the other day. The temperatures have certainly dropped at night. And I recognized many of my old constellations from last Fall have appeared on the eastern horizon when I go to bed now. And like everything else on the landscape, we're working hard to secure warm shelter and housing before the temperatures really drop. We in Skyhouse decided not to even attempt completing the first floor of our house for this winter as time was running low, certain lumber supplies hadn't shown up yet, and we wanted to make sure we could focus on really completing our other work projects. I've been doing a lot more construction work these past few weeks than I did for much of the summer, as I'm overseeing our primary building work since we dropped the priority on the other project. I'm working on completing the cabin that was built last summer. This mainly involves developing good earthen plasters for the walls, doing the actual plastering and properly sealing or protecting them for durability. I'm also working on putting the floor into that cabin, which has just had a gravel floor this year. Almost all of this work involves learning about and getting to intimately know about earthen materials. The plasters are made from earth, the floor will be made from earth. It's great dirty work and as always very rewarding to watch progress develop under my guidance. And more exciting is the fact that the knowledge I'm gaining (half of which is almost instinctual and goes beyond what I could read or write about) will be of great use to most of the building projects going on here in the future. It's exciting to feel myself tied into this ancient tradition of humanity's by becoming an earth builder.

I realize I haven't written in a while, but only one other juicy tidbit occurs to me for the moment: bluegrass. Allegra, a good friend of Cecil's who is living over at Sandhill right now, has been teaching a few of us some bluegrass tunes and harmonies that are so electrifying to my ears I feel like I've down a cup of coffee everytime we finish singing one. The harmonies are so ... vibrant. And it's gotten me to launch back into my fiddle practicing again. So the fiddle work is coming along and I'm starting to feel comfortable with it again. I recently got a few pointers from a visitor who came through who's played the fiddle for years. One of the biggest pieces of advice he gave me, however, was to try to get a full-size fiddle. I've been teaching myself and practicing on this beautiful half-size fiddle (usually made for kids who are learning to play) that David and Carolyn gave me. But I've decided that the time has come to actively seek a full-size (which if anyone out there has one which they're thinking of parting with...).

I usually practice down by my tent, looking through the scratchy honey locusts with their horizontal branches over the meadow grasses. The sound of the fiddle is such a mystery to me. It is at once strange and alien and yet so utterly familiar to the ear. It resonates with the wood of the fiddle, the wood of the trees, the wood of our houses, and it reveraberates in my ears and throat. Of course, my skill is still far from anything worthwhile compared to anyone who's fiddled for a while, but I've definitely gotten far enough with the instrument to make good things happen.

I have been aware lately of the importance of new perspectives. I mean this quite concretely and not in the sense of seeing things from other people's points of view. The top peak of our largest grain bin has become a common perch for me of late, when I've wanted to just sit still for a while. And sitting there, I see all of our project's work laid out before me, yet it looks totally different from when I am down on the ground. When I took my walk with the woodpeckers the other day, I wandered off of our land and went up into the ajoining steep hills across the road. These hills, framed with tree lines, are a cow pasture for our neighbor and make such a lovely view that it is commonly known as Vista de la Moo. Hiking across that terrain, I turned around and saw all of these familiar sites of my new home. Yet is wasn't familiar at all, for I'd never seen them from that direction. The effect is limited, I'm sure as if I go there often enough the freshness of the view will diminish. Still, there is something important that happens at those moments. The difference of the site awakens my senses and makes me pay attention once again to things I've seen a hundred times before. I live for those moments. I feel as though simply creating that effect in my physical surroundings allows me to open my mind to that clarity in all things, as though having that freshness of vision is not an event but a state of mind. I have been thinking recently about the nature of love and I wonder if it is similar. That it is not so much an event, focused on an object, but rather a state of mind that is vehicle for how you relate to the world around you.

But what do I know? This is just the view from my life here in the hills.