WAITING FOR SPRING

The wind is blowing outside and the sky is grey.  The previous three mornings we enjoyed coffee outside in the sun, I got some tan on my bare feet, listened to dueling ravens and watched the local cats fight over their territorial rights to our back yard. March is such a transitional month.  It is too early to garden, but the trees are getting buds at the tips of their branches. The snow is gone except on the mountains and we would be happy to have some more. The paradoxes of this time of year also fit my state of mind. Raising my anticipation are the undecided temperatures mingled with grey boredom while looking for tangible signs of green. I have always found it incongruous that spring seems to be as much about endings as beginnings. Maybe that is why it is not easy. Yet, change by principle is never comfortable.

I used to get depressed each spring. I also noticed that in the news, obituaries are abundant in spring. According to researchers, this is statistically normal. Maybe spring is about turning things over as much as it is about starting a new cycle. Farmers traditionally turn over the soil each spring in readiness for planting new crops. Birth and death are just the up side and down side of the same material. 

Still too Shy to Get Close, But Hopeful!

I’m staying inside today except for about 20 minutes guarding the little black stray so that one of the local fat cats doesn’t chase him away from a dish of leftover treats. I also bought several books on Amazon this afternoon. During the past three months, I’ve purchased and read more books than in the previous 20 years. Life in Taos, for years has been about immediate experience and survival, now the urge is to cook a new mental stew and adjust the flavoring. The use of this analogy probably comes from renewed interest in cooking.  I’m in the mood to sharpen some old skills and take others out of the closet. 

PQ is painting every day except Saturday and Sunday.  He has about six paintings finished and started working on another one. It’s interesting to observe his working pattern. Because I worked in retail, I painted mostly nights and weekends, he was a welder so takes weekends off. Interesting isn’t it how these patterns stay with us after there is no longer a reason to keep them. I guess people are creatures of habit and pattern like all other animals. 

UPDATE TWO DAYS LATER

We have new snow beginning yesterday. Weather is always changing. Maybe that’s one of the reasons we all like predictability and habit. It helps us feel that when we put one foot in front of the other there will be something under it, but sometimes there isn’t anything under us but our habits. I’m thinking that somehow I’m walking on air in anticipation of the next turnover. It’s that in between space that leaves me blank. Thus, I don’t have much to say.

DENVER AGAIN BUT DIFFERENT

We were in Denver for three days last week. The fact that I haven’t been in contact very much with my Denver family since mom passed began to gnaw on me about a month ago.  I’ve noticed that when something like this comes to mind there is a reason and some event is likely to put it up front.  That something was an email message from my cousin Dan that my aunt Ruth had passed on.  I felt immediately that this was something I must honor even though we are trying to be more frugal lately and avoid traveling unnecessarily.

Although my aunt had been gradually leaving this dimension for several years due to Alzheimer’s, I believe we are all connected in ways that don’t fit within any orthodox religious or scientific model. There is a definite association between her passing and my recent thoughts.  Although we were settled in after the last trip to Arizona and PQ was focused on painting for his upcoming show in Jerome Arizona in May, I’ve learned that if I don’t follow my intuition I will certainly regret it later and it will become an obstacle in the natural flow of life.

Rachel and PQ, Coffee Before Heading Home

 The drive to Denver was surprisingly easy. There was snow on the ground, and threatening clouds swirling in four directions around us, but there wasn’t any snow on the highway as if a shield surrounded us.  Our friend Rachel invited us to stay with her and the offer was gratefully accepted.  We were saved from hunting down a motel and it definitely aided the budget. Besides, being in her home gave us good catch up time, since we’ve been out of touch since our crazy and somewhat magical shared adventure in search of the Denver train station last summer. 

As long as I can remember when something comes to mind as “I wonder why I’m thinking about this”, it will soon be up front in the space/time world. Aunt Ruth and uncle Bob may be the reason I ended up living in New Mexico and traveling to Arizona whenever possible. My parents traveled primarily for family emergencies and weddings. Dad never had a paid vacation and anyway he leaned toward the utilitarian. Whenever we went more than fifty miles from home, there was a specific reason and we drove straight through without stopping for “points of interest.” 

When I was twelve, my Uncle Bob and Aunt Ruth took me on a road trip through the Southwest.  It truly was the land of enchantment for me.  I remember climbing the hill to see Camel Rock near Santa Fe, eating fiery hot enchiladas for breakfast in Albuquerque, then off to Arizona for the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert. We camped at the Grand Canyon, and on the way to Monument Valley, we picked up three Navajo men and took them to their horses about fifteen miles down the road.  Only one of them spoke a little English. 

I remember back then, there were still many hogans (traditional Navajo dwellings) made in the old style.  Each hogan sat alone almost blending into the desert except for the inevitable late model Buick parked nearby that appeared larger than the house. It was my first awareness that comparative proportions were a cultural value. I found it fascinating.  This was on the way to Mesa Verde.  I loved everything about the Southwest.  Cedar, Pinon, cactus, red dirt and the unlimited sky unchained me from dreadful things like school, church and unhappy parents. In the Petrified Forest, I felt that I was walking on jewels, in Monument Valley, earth and sky were in love with each other as Mother Earth and Father Sky should be. Inspirited magical items such as Hopi Katsinas, Navajo Sand Paintings, rugs and Pueblo Pottery, inhabited each trading post and curio shop.

Although I traveled the next year with Uncle Bob and Aunt Ruth to the Northwest and into Canada and enjoyed it enormously, the Southwest distinctly changed my soul. Mesa Verde reset my life direction in several ways. I still recall sitting on the stone and adobe wall surrounding Spruce Tree House while imagining life there 600 hundred years earlier. It held something primal and essential missing in the present.  Perhaps it was the clarity of the sky, the powdery red dirt, strangely familiar Juniper and Pinon and the idea of actually belonging to a people whose way of life directly connected them to a place and its creatures.  Perhaps this is the reason for a lifelong fascination with history, archaeology and tribal peoples including my own Celtic ancestors. There is this deep desire to go back to the essence and source, hopefully for a vision of that stage in time before things began to fall into disconnected pieces as if this discovery would reveal the place where the fabric of human life was torn.

Approaching Blanca from the East

My Uncle Bob is the last family member of his generation as close as a days drive.  This brings to my awareness how quickly time passes. PQ and I have discovered ourselves with surprise in the shift that accompanies membership in the oldest generation of our immediate families. What is being an elder all about? It seems that our homogeneous contemporary culture has no place for this stage of life beyond decrepitude and the nursing home. Sometimes I wonder if that is the real reason that so many people succumb to Alzheimer’s and other degenerative diseases. The medical priesthood suggests that the cause is that people are living longer now.  But, this isn’t necessarily true.  One of my husband’s ancestors lived to age 120, and his close friend lived even longer. There is a well-known picture of him and another of a Taos Pueblo woman who was also well over a hundred when photographed. They had deep wrinkles and history in their eyes but they were not senile.

Blanca west of San Luis

Our trip back to Taos was awesome.  For the first time in years, I could feel and see the landscape as I first saw it.  Well, not exactly the first impression, but as I experienced it in those first years after moving to Taos with clear eyes. It is comparable to seeing through the window of a long neglected house after years of scum are removed. The way to the future seems to come by mending broken roads from the past.

The Sangre de Christos were strikingly accoutred in white robes as we headed west from Walsenburg. I had to take a few shots from my iPhone as we approached and passed Mount Blanca. The trip home was surprisingly short but rich in sites and memories. As I write, PQ is painting with Kiowa Gourd Dance music playing in the background. This reminds me of several trips to Denver with his parents, Joe J. and Frances Suazo. Joe J. would bring his hand drum and the two of them would sing to me all the way home.  I suppose I’m feeling nostalgic.

AT HOME ON THE ISLE OF TAOS

Winter is keeping us inside a lot causing time to lose its sequential nature: days seem scrambled at random, but I think we have been back in Taos for two weeks after two weeks in Cottonwood, give or take a few days. As I was mentally comparing the features of my two favorite places over coffee this morning I realized Taos seems to exist on a different dimension than the rest of the world, probably why it seems like home to those of us who lack a sense of membership in the “real world?”

Occasionally I feel claustrophobic here. In the early days, this place was miraculous. I could hardly believe that I was living in a place quirky enough to eliminate the cultural, economic and professional stereotypes of that other world that I came from. This was planet Taos.  I mentioned the claustrophobia thing to a friend who has lived in many parts of the world including Taos and she suggested that what I was experiencing reminded her of life on an Island. I suppose this means a small island since we all live on North America, i.e., Turtle Island. Although I’ve never lived on a small Island I’ve often wondered if it wouldn’t feel like entrapment after a while.

Taos changes on you. Sometimes it feels safe, cozy and magically protected from the impersonal demands of the outside world and then one morning you wake up to Shangri la over taken by a black magician with a sense of humor. It’s either a trickster or that egregious Spirit of the Mountain. However, I’ve noticed that small mountain towns all have some of this “crazy kinfolk” feeling. However, here It’s different than just a normal dysfunctional family, because there is also an element of witchy glamour. I mean glamour in the old sense of enchantment.

When I was a teenager in Denver, I got a first glimpse of the outrageous side of the Taos spirit. A couple moved next door to us. The man was from Chihuahua and the woman from Taos. She was a great cook and shared fresh tortillas, beans, and occasionally green chili, but she was also tottering on a narrow ledge. We gave her privacy and never said anything when she shared (frequently) that some relative was witching her, and often witnessed her doing counter witching ceremonies in the back yard.  I suppose it was her way of staying in touch with home.

Encouraging Mid-winter View

For some reason this brings to mind the distinctiveness of Taos houses.  Something about them resembles Hobbit Houses. There is more going on than merely the characteristic combination of Spanish, Moorish and Indian architecture. Of course, I’m talking about the old ones. However, there is more involved here than mere passage of years. Time for these houses is architecturally compressed, and sometimes it’s impossible to know if a house is 20 years old or 200 years old. To be fair, this is true of all of northern New Mexico, even in Santa Fe’s old neighborhoods.

Taos houses are often cute like Hobbit Houses with irregular walls, wavy floors, meandering rooms that roam here and there, probably each added to an original one-room structure as the family grew. Doorways between rooms can be any number of shapes in the same house and the walls may be white wash or various bright colors such as blue, purple and yellow. The furniture is generally an offbeat mixture of the local folk version of Spanish Colonial, Mexican, second hand store American, and contemporary WalMart. Heating is often an adobe horno (called a kiva fireplace by relators) or a wood stove. Water and plumbing are usually dependent on crossed fingers and wiring is something you’d rather not know about. 

Our house in town is a newish adobe (only seven years old) Habitat for Humanity house in an area that was sagebrush and chamisa ten years ago. I look around the house and notice that Taos style is already setting in.  This house contains personal history through the Taos filter. There are drums, rattles and fans on the walls now along with our paintings and pieces dating back to my Denver life.  Furniture from my childhood home, mom’s last apartment and things brought back from Arizona. The oriental rugs came from mom’s house, my last Denver house and PQ’s dining room. I look around and realize that I purchased very few pieces, mostly from WalMart, yard sales and second hand stores. The house is personal history but it would never blend the same way anywhere else. The Taos house spirit gives its own abiding personality to each house. There is something endearing about Taos houses even when the roof leaks, the electricity goes out and the cesspool overflows.

The Dining Room Table

Despite all this, Taos homes don’t look poor or ugly. Oh no, I don’t want to give that impression. Even the pell-mell but organic architecture and furnishings are not ugly just as the natural landscape is never ugly even though rugged and sculpted by the elements.  I think that is the key. Nature is the designer and arranges everything, inside and out. The superficial poverty and rough clad individuality is just a mirror image of nature trying to hold its own and make a statement against the lopsided rule of technology and money. Maybe we are helping to balance the bigger world. Yet, its serious work and now and then we need to retreat to Arizona for rest and realignment. 

Magical things happen to us in both Taos and Cottonwood/Sedona. It seems that it is more intense as we move back and forth between them, and the magic is still teasing us with tempting promises of more, at least for now.  Here in Taos it is snowing again. We are spending most of our time indoors and PQ has turned our dining room into a studio.  He has a lot of painting to do for an upcoming show in Jerome Arizona in May.

NEW YEAR VS. OLD HABITS

This is the last day of the first month of the New Year. I am finally getting used to writing 2013. It is also the last day of PQ’s birthday month. He celebrates the entire month of January or at least the rest of January after the 21st. We are in Arizona for a few days so that he can enjoy the lower altitude and warmer temperature. Also he needed to recover from celebrating his Birthday. However, our main excuse for being here this time was an opportunity to see one of my first and dearest Taos friends who now lives in New York City and is visiting her son in Phoenix.

The drive out here was beautiful.  We were barely ahead of a storm all the way but the cloud activity in the sky and the unusually clear air took the monotony out of that long stretch between Gallup and Flagstaff. As we were driving, I could see remnants of old Route 66 here and there and remembered that life-changing trip I shared with my aunt and uncle when I was twelve years old that included Southern Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico.  I knew immediately that the Southwest was my true home even though it took a long time to get there.

Old Route 66 was closer to earth than I-40 is. I remember only two lanes that moved along at a slower speed and at the same height as the desert brush and red earth. The immense sky came all the way to the ground back then, just as it would if you were on foot among the red rocks, dust and brush. For some reason that long ago experience floated to the top of my mind vanquishing the big time gap between now and then. Sometimes I feel like I’m viewing right now through a double pained window and the past through a dirty window but this new year’s first month seems to have cleaned my perception all the way back to that first road trip to New Mexico and Arizona. What does this mean? Are we on the edge of an overall cleansing experience? That might be ominous. But I'm enjoying the memories.  The philosophy behind modern technology is apparent. It takes us further away from the landscape, into disconnect and abstraction, as the highways get higher and wider and the cars move faster. But this time it isn't working and the landscape floods in through a wormhole of memories.

My dreams have been full of tumult the last few days. I’m apprehensive that life is about to become a pot of stew stirred up again by the top chef. That is usually both good and bad for those of us who are used to drifting quietly at the bottom of the pot like cubed potatoes. At the beginning of this New Year, I can already sense that the time has come that PQ must decide to prepare for a lung transplant and that I must find an income.  We have been postponing both of those decisions for the past three years.  In reality, that is what I see for 2013, the end of postponing. We went to Sedona this afternoon and hit some of our familiar spots but the feeling of unrest wouldn’t go away, so I suppose I’m stuck on how to begin. And, I must admit that everything important starts this way.  I’m working up the courage to jump out of the familiar box.  But this time, I’m counting on being smart enough not to jump into another box.

Sorry, I'll be more careful with my aim next time. Courthouse Butte on the left Bell Rock peeking up near the center.

I discovered this afternoon that my iPhone camera does panoramic shots. Probably the rest of you that have iPhones knew that all along. That feature just appeared accidentally on the Court House Butte Trail, and I didn’t know what I did to launch it. I’m posting that first panoramic photo although it isn’t very good, but perhaps it’s a sign of other undiscovered features. PQ’s favorite bracelet given to him by a Navajo Medicine Man seemed lost forever two years ago and then just before Christmas a new one of the same design but even finer came into his life. I’m thinking these are signs, however mundane of other serendipitous possibilities.

NEW YEAR'S FREEZE

Winter is still holding us in a freezing grip. After a very long mild autumn, the weather suddenly became Arcticesque about a week before Christmas (more or less). In Taos, it is still below zero almost every night. Recently it was minus thirty degrees in Angel Fire on the other side of the mountains. However, except for the fact that cold air really gets to PQ’s lungs, we haven’t paid much attention to it. It is great to have the holidays in the past and finally be over the border into 2013. January has always seemed like a stationary month on the Calendar like a closed stage curtain waiting for the play to begin. The anticipation of an unknown future is the only energy I detect.

Mystic Mountains on the way to the Post Office

Meanwhile, life is quiet. I’m learning to use Word Press on a test website (at this point it seems easier just to code from scratch), reading three books and the current issue of Parabola (I’m a Gemini and like to read several books simultaneously). As a child, I enjoyed mixing food together to experiment with flavor combinations in restaurants, much to the embarrassment of my parents. Now I enjoy simultaneously reading several books on entirely different subjects to combine interesting associations though sometimes the mix is a mystery. I believe the learning process is alchemy. If you feel stuck in a box but want to think outside the box, tear up the box and presto, you’re out of the box.

 PQ is very quiet. He watches animal shows, true crime shows and movies on the TV for hours. Now and then, he checks the Pueblo house to make sure that it’s OK and that the guy he hires to take snow off the roof is still keeping up with the snow. I’ve noticed that he is feeling more responsibility for the old Pueblo house. As we get older, we are more aware of irreplaceable things taken for granted by the young. Neither of us has been painting. I’m thinking I may just put an easel up in the kitchen, although the light isn’t very good. 

 Many things happen behind the scenes or under the radar during quiet times. I’ll admit that I feel uneasy. This is probably the “monkey mind” at work. I never had an end-of-the-world sensation about the passing of 2012, but I do sense a turning over, like farmers turn over soil for a new crop. I suppose if you’re a bug in the mud that would seem like the end of the world. Mother Earth is the ultimate farmer.

Territorial dispute, some local drama from the window.

We are planning to visit Cottonwood, AZ again toward the end of this month. This is our first big New Year event. As a highlight of this trip, we plan to meet a friend who used to live in Taos and is visiting her son in Phoenix. We haven’t seen each other since 2001. I last visited her when she lived in Phoenix, and I remember that it was one week after 9/11. It was also my first visit to Sedona. We will be completing a circle.

 Right now, I’m feeling a bit entrapped by Taos. Although I love this place it’s an intense relationship and like all intense relationships, sometimes you need some downtime, to regroup, refresh and get some perspective. The money from mom’s house is gone, we are back to being low cash Taosenos, trying to figure out how to do the things we live for, such as going to Arizona, eating out, painting, and blogging. Also, we both need some dental work, I haven’t seen a doctor for over twenty years and if PQ has a lung transplant, although his insurance pays for most of it, we would have to live in the city where he gets the surgery for several months, paying rent.

PQ’s surgery is still an open subject, but I suspect that this is the year it will become an issue. Now and then I have to remind myself that I’ve lived on faith most of my life but it’s often been a cliffhanger. I suppose my fear is that I’ll have to get another Taos style job that offers low wages, no insurance no vacation time, no paid holidays and barely enough to cover the utilities while tying up time and energy for things I’d rather be doing. My ultimate dream would be making money doing something I actually like to do and do well. I don’t want to sell things to tourists or even locals anymore. The new challenge is getting out of this box. I’m now fantasizing tearing it to bits. Fortunately, PQ has a lot more confidence about materializing whatever we need.

I never write New Year resolutions. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a sure way to defeat yourself. Nevertheless, I can sense some new issues for this year, but I don’t want to know too much, it spoils the effect. New should be new. I’m open and I’m hopeful, and even though PQ’s health and the march of time places some limits on our future, I sense some powerful changes in the works. The alchemical mix of time, faith and anticipation can transform blah into bright.

 I just heard the TV weather guy say that the cold snap (more like a big bite) is about to break, although tonight is still supposed to be below zero, today the temperature got to +34 degrees, an upward progression that is supposed to continue.