When it is too early to be awake. When the sun has yet to rise and my mind has been telling me for a couple hours of all the things undone, the decisions unmade, the shortcomings and impossibilities. And my other mind has been quietly saying not really, so what, doesn't matter, because my body is still wanting rest, my cells saying replenish us, saying we will keep you alive to work another day but you have to give us time for ourselves.
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| Harvest |
Sitting by the cookstove, having made a fire as quietly as possible, and reheated a cup of coffee, taking it out of the microwave when the timer says one second, before the jarring five-beeps of 'done' disturbs the other human in the house who is still asleep, I am studying.
In my left hand is the book I have been trying to finish before the second renewal on the interlibrary loan expires. A deceptively small book of nearly 300 very dense pages in size 9 font. A book that turns out to be a kind of manna for a hunger that I am still discovering exists in me. A book I was advised to read by my colleague Janet, a risk-taker, daughter of immigrants, survivor of bad behaving bosses who were let off in spite of being called out under the 'protections' that claim to give us the right to labor in safety. Janet, a speaker-upper and sufferer of doubts, lover of human beings and desirer of change. Of course I'm reading it.
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| From the garden |
And plowing through the tall grass of learning inside this book, occasionally I reach a hawthorn thicket and lack the gumption to pick up a machete and hack my way forward. I make a few feeble attempts to push ahead and consider going back. Taking the easy way out. But by now, I've absorbed too much of this study, this learning that feels like a missing element introduced into my personal reactor, allowing neurons I never knew I had to start messaging each other, oblivious to my intention.
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| Wes, Abby, Punch (grown up) in the barn |
This book of strategy, of magic, of agency, of future. It simultaneously evokes relief and dismay, possibility and doubt. It calls forth the manifestation of the high school teacher, weirdly savant, who expected us to imagine social engineering through the lens of science fiction written by extraterrestrials. Which made perfect sense to me, when everyone else thought he was crazy.
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| Gate to mailbox |
It calls forth the bizarre contrasts of a life with both the self-choosing of hermitage and manual labor on the ranch and the dogged commitment to a job in a hierarchy where a superior reminds me,
Don't forget, I get to decide what you do with your brain.
And so this book, this infectious changeling breaking out of its birth-shell to replicate in vulnerable hosts like me, leads me to a decision.
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| Wes caught a frog in the marsh |
I have decided to remember. I have decided to listen to the people who arrive inside this ecomap of self where I am experimenting with making sense. For whatever reason they choose to be here. For whatever reason, as yet unknown to me, that has brought them here.
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| Punch (Opuntia - Prickly Pear) as a puppy |
And this morning, as the sky turns from black to matte blue in the west and to streaky grey-blue on the horizon of the Seven Devils in the east, I remember Yesenia. Because she is here in the kitchen with me. Right now.
And I wonder why. And I think of her fierceness, her quiet apologetic confession when her heart is not right and she needs to lie down for a moment, her casual declarations of intention in business, her crossing the blood barrier of culture and language and family and success. And I think of her among the agave plants and the cricket protein and the fruity paletas of entrepreneurial exploration, bouncing back and forth among the powerful monied and the powerful poor. And I think of the invitation of fiesta, that I could not partake in but longed to, Dia de los Muertos, at her tiny house in its bigger yard that I have never been to in Southeast Portland, an invitation to be with family, to speak and love in the sounds of other languages of us, the people of earth.
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| Altar -- Dia de los Difuntos |
So in spite of nearly a year since I last thought of Yesenia, this person I know very little about, I text her to thank her for visiting me in the predawn in the kitchen where I am sitting next to the ticking fire of the cookstove, with the sound of the wind flowing across the fields outside, and I tell her mi mama fallecio el fin de Junio. I tell her how the day my mother died was a day of love and friendship and humor. How astounded I was at the gift my mother gave me of being able to wash her corpse and the revelation of beauty and strength cultivated over 94 years that allowed her to achieve her life-long desire to donate herself to students of medicine as an aged female with no disqualifying conditions, because her own life was transformed by the gift of education when she was young and poor and studying the bodies of others who had given themselves to be dissected, to be revealed in their glorious intricacy and variation.
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| Con mi Mama |
I have decided to remember there is a reason people come up behind me and are tapping at my senses. They are speaking and I'm going to listen.
From Sara at Magpie Ranch, home of Bunchgrass Beef.
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| Fairy Godmother of Systems Change |
