Reality

I know you are knowledgable,
But can you break open the sky with your facts?
Can you make reality waver,
As a million feelings of love consume the room?


I know you have immaculate research,
And your lit corridors are impeccably sterile,
But can you create peace out of the fabric of belief?
Can you liberate the being you stifle in your soul
That is more powerful than the world?


I know you can see the future,
and know the stars' probability of error,
But do you know their souls?
Can your soul look into my eyes
And know who I am?

Laundry at Night

When it is warm enough, I have to get the laundry in by dark, or it gets covered with bugs.  Ants seem to think that the lines are their personal highways anyway, I just don't like the nocturnal bugs in my clothes, and especially not in my baby's diapers! 


Unfortunantly right when I need to get the laundry in before dark in the summers, is also right when the kids get cranky, tired, and hungry, and also right when my husband thinks the world suddenly needs to revolve around him.  He's fine the rest of the day, but just once a day can't I drop everything at a moments notice and pay attention to him?  It's hard to drop anything at a moments notice when you are living off the land.  Everything is a web of things that other things depend upon.


Hathor the Cowgoddess calls this the bewitching hour.


Once it freezes, though, sometimes it is too cold to take the kids outside with me, and I enjoy the best time to hang up laundry being in the middle of the night.








The death in the air stings my throat and shrinks my nostrils.  Sometimes it's too cold to breathe.  Tingling points of ice touch cover my exposed skin.  Clouds trail in fast motion as the wind whips through the night.  The silence and peace and utter lack of humans refreshes me.  No nagging.  No tugging.  No neighbors looking over concerned.  No judging.  Just peaceful night surrounding and loving me.  I am invisible in the dark.  I dare take the luxury of looking up at the stars.  This is my time.  I have no deadline to perform.  All I give in exchange is my scant sleep.  And stars are better than sleep.  I let the sky engulf me, happy in its unconcered beauty.  It is not a slave of small human concerns, what one person said, or what is or isn't on sale.  It does not care what deadlines were met or what car did or didn't start.  And when I become part of it, neither do I.  


It takes effort to hold the cloth on the line in the whipping wind, while I get the clothespin to stick.  But this is effort without interruption.  I can let my methodical self take over.  In the dark cold of the night, others' happiness doesn't depend on me being overly flexible, and I can be as rigid as the cold that permeates through my clothes.  


Civilization, common sense, and life itself, beckon for me to return to the warmth inside.  But I am free!  Free of concern about everything else, and I inhale the black coldness.
Each item I hang, will dry quickly in this wind, and I think of the luxury of having several clean diapers for my baby.  The luxury of his screams not ripping my soul as I scrounge for something to put on him, before he soaks me while he nurses back to sleep.   If only I could always enjoy creating happiness in life, while remaining separate from it, as I do now.

Hanging out the Laundry

The few dead leaves rustle back and forth in the wind.  Neglect has caused the line to bite into the tree as it's bark folds around it. The smell of soon to be damp dead grass kisses my toes.  My feet, unintentionally tearing the dry covering, make a love path of exposed dirt.  The ball of my  bare foot digs into the not quite softening earth, as my weight shifts, baby and all, from basket to line to basket to line, lulling him with my slow deliberate rhythm.  The dark frozen earth gives calm peace as it rubs onto my bare skin.  The almost sharp wind caresses my face through my tangled hair, and the smell of last years apples finally looses it's grasp on the tree.  My fingers are just cold enough to know I am alive as I hurridly shake them to give myself a little more time to complete my task.  The ridges of my face taste the cold they are exposed to, and the baby snuggled deeper in his pouch.  The dead grasses make patterns on the ground that only living things can breathe, as the wind blows a longer strand against my bare ankle and life down my throat.  Mischievous eyes drink in the open world, safe in my presence, as the kids peek out from the hammock they have made out of an old sheet.  Little eyes exposed to the wild of the wind, as hidden bodies wiggle in the constant movement that is a child.  As my fingers burn with the coldness of my task, I feel the peace of working in the closeness of my children under the open sky, and the calmness, that I have carelessly trod on in the rush of life, washes over me like the wind.

The Whole Big Family

I love alternative building books!  I have always loved building things and dreaming of building things.  For fun, I would spend hours and hours designing "my future house", complete with fountain/waterslide in the living room. 

The first substantial alternative building book I read was "The Hand-Sculpted House", all about building with cob (a clay mud, sand, straw mixture)!  Like I have found is true for most alternative building books, it was not only a book for building, but a philosophical book for life!  I love the things I learn from these books!




Then there are Michael Reynolds' earthships, made out of dirt pounded into old tires.  I love how his book starts out with beings of light finding incapatability with other living things in humans, and deciding to become human in order to influence us.  Beautiful spirituality.  I will never forget the picture I saw of divers in the ocean, completely surrounded by old tires, as Reynolds testified that these were the building materials currently readily available on earth.




Birdwings

  Your grief for what you've lost lifts a mirror
    up to where you are bravely working.
  Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
    here's the joyful face you've been wanting to see.
 Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
    If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
    you would be paralysed.
 Your deepest presence is in every small
 contracting and expanding,
   the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
    as birdwings.

  From The Essential Rumi Coleman Barks with John Moyne - See more at:
http://allspirit.co.uk/rumibirdwings.html



And the poetry of Rumi, that I only accidentally found when looking for more books on  Ceramic houses by Nader Khalili.  I love Nader's writing as well, and found it very enjoyable to read "Sidewalks on the Moon" with my son.  It is a book about his life, including his upbringing in Iran.  It was so nice to be able to see into his life and culture (his writing really pulls you in), especially right now with all the people with guns over there. 

        

But my favorite architectural book, as far as spiritual philosophy, is not necessarily an alternative building methods book.  True, it does bemoan the state of affairs that have brought us to unused mowed lawns surrounding suffocatingly monotonous ticky tacky houses.  But it is not about building with mud, garbage, or even underground.  It is about what is built, the way the design of a building affects our whole lives. 

                            

Here it talks of the kitchen as the soul of the house.  How a large friendly kitchen is important for happiness in life.  How preparing food together is just as important as eating food together, and how the atmosphere a home creates around a table can make people want to linger, and turn eating food from a chore that is quickly done, to an experience that changes your whole life.  
Gordon Neufeld goes further to explain how parents being the source of food for their children, strengthens the family relationship.  This is hard in the culture of this time and place to imagine that we are the source of anything for our children.  Food, knowledge, entertainment, is all promoted as needing to be instantly available to everybody.  But missing in it all is love.  I used to think that I was indoctrinating my kids with a love of books and reading, because when I really sit down and spend time with them that we both enjoy, it is when we are reading books together.  But this is no more a means of indoctrination than mealtimes together are.  In the chaos of rapidly changing cultures that is accelerating in our modern reality, family naturally still finds its crevices to hold on to.  And the actions we perform, without need to analyze and judge them as healthy or not, naturally fulfill the roles our children need them to.

Yesterday we all got in the car together as what the toddlers refer to as "the whole big family".  It was just a short drive to the library before it closed for the night, but it was my most enjoyable experience of the day.  When we are all in the car together, we don't have outside distractions.  We talk and laugh and joke together, and a calmness and security settles over even the most begrudging siblings who have fought that day, and we realize how much we really like being together, how much we really love each other.