“I will be gone from here and sing my songs
In the forest wilderness where the wild beasts are
And carve in letters on the little trees
The story of my love, and as the trees
Will grow the letters too will grow, to cry
In a louder voice the story of my love…”
“…Omnia vincit Amor, et nos cedamus Amori.”
1. “The Eclogues of Virgil”
2.
Once I had a child
She was smiling like sunshine
She could see it all
Like she’d been here before
here before vashti bunyan
“he was not expecting to uncover much we did not already know: kids love dolls and dinosaurs and trucks and cuddly monkeys, and will construct worlds around them before eventually, inevitably, disregarding them for ever. “At their age, they are pretty all much the same,” is his conclusion after 18 months working on the project. “They just want to play.”
image: Alessia – Castiglion Fiorentino, Italy
from this gem: Toy Stories by Gabriele Galimberti
This week:
1. meet jellyspoons, mocha, and james
2. 1975
3. llama kisses
The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.
I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
Take, from my palms, for joy, for ease,
A little honey, a little sun,
That we may obey Persephone’s bees.
You can’t untie a boat unmoored.
Fur-shod shadows can’t be heard,
Nor terror, in this life, mastered.
Love, what’s left for us, and of us, is this
Living remnant, loving revenant, brief kiss
Like a bee flying completed dying hiveless
To find in the forest’s heart a home,
Night’s never-ending hum,
Thriving on meadowsweet, mint, and time.
Take, for all that is good, for all that is gone,
That it may lie rough and real against your collarbone,
This string of bees, that once turned honey into sun.
the necklace, osip mandelstam
The rooster frantically gathered the gang of hens, wrangling them up toward the backyard pasture.
Sitting on the wooden fence, a hawk watched and waited for the opportune moment to strike. It never arrived. The black rooster had successfully ushered the hens to safety.
Afterward, the hawk, perhaps more curious and contemplative than hungry, spread out its wings and flew away – up into the old pine tree across the street.
An old folklore:
If a hawk is flying above, throw a horseshoe into the fire and leave it there until hot; and the bird’s claws will become so clinched that it will be unable to capture your chickens.
“Why do farmers farm, given their economic adversities on top of the many frustrations and difficulties normal to farming? And always the answer is: “Love. They must do it for love.” Farmers farm for the love of farming. They love to watch and nurture the growth of plants. They love to live in the presence of animals. They love to work outdoors. They love the weather, maybe even when it is making them miserable. They love to live where they work and to work where they live. If the scale of their farming is small enough, they like to work in the company of their children and with the help of their children. They love the measure of independence that farm life can still provide. I have an idea that a lot of farmers have gone to a lot of trouble merely to be self-employed to live at least a part of their lives without a boss.”
― Wendell Berry, Bringing it to the Table: Writings on Farming and Food
image: here
A black rooster spends its days in our backyard, watching over the queen hens like a young vaquero with a red buckaroo hat. And when he dances, his wing feathers point downward, and he circles around a hen on the tips of his claws – rooster pirouettes, and the faint sound of Castanets or the cockerel waltz, as they sometimes call it.
The homestead feels, almost tastes, like a farm – four goats, three llamas, three cats, two hens, and the black rooster. This past weekend, we rescued six more chickens, a handful of eggs, and a peafowl egg that we hope will hatch in the next few days. Hints of a harvest in the orchard emerge – fresh lemons and grapefruit in the coming months. Most of the 26 nearly dead pomegranate trees lover planted and cared for have shown life – green leaves and red flowers (…perhaps, we’ll get a pomegranate or two before the first desert frost).
Every morning, blue work gloves are pulled lean and tight around my hands, and old red clogs tip tap across the packed earth, leaping across a mud patch left behind from irrigation day and into the barn, scooping up the morning hay. Occasionally, I tango with a llama while the wild birds call, the chickens cluck, and the rooster belts out his manly crow. A young doeling named Pearl makes a dash to eat the leaf that has just fallen from the tree. Three little girls wake, wild-haired and gangly, the oldest holds her baby sister. They look out into the pasture from the sliding glass doors – they’re waiting for the okay to join the morning dance.
image: A Navajo woman holding a rooster. Photograph by Loomis Dean. USA, May 1951.
p.s. “Linguists have speculated that the words “buckaroo” and “vaquero” may derive from Arabic words related to cattle, transliterated by some as bakara or bakhara, and suggests the words may have entered Spanish during the centuries of Islamic rule. The word for cattle in Arabic is Arabic: بقر baqar, and the Arabic word بقار baqqār means “cowherd.”
