Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Monday and Tuesday

Monday was one of those get to work early, grab whatever is around to eat type days. For breaky I had an over-easy egg on toast. For lunch I had a Subway sandwich, ham and all the veggies. Yeah, I know, factory farmed ham is disgusting, but when you are working your ass off sometimes it feels like you need some extra protein. But I need to get rid of all "conventional" meat products in my diet. For dinner I had noodles and Four Cheese sauce by Newmans Own, with some mozzarella and romano on top, my fast lasagna type food for when I am starving. I also had some tortilla chips and salsa when I got home from work.

Today I had a pb&j for breakfast (what the hell, right?) Then I had some more of the noodles and sauce for lunch, and I am making butter poached Rockfish with baked potatoes and sauteed beet greens with red garlic. I think that will be a nice nutritious meal for the evening.

Tomorrow I have to use up some kidney beans so I am going to make red beans and rice, maybe casserole style. That's my plan anyway.

Sunday, June 28, 2009

Sunday afternoon and evening

Wow, this feels like a job now.

The cinnamon rolls were great, we ate them with grapes and cherries and coffee. Later in the day I had a piece of an omelet with asparagus and red pepper and sharp cheddar. Then I ate a quick cheese sandwich and some nuts. We had a couple deviled eggs and crackers with cheese before we drove home. Basically, it was a lot of different little snacks.

Alright, well, enough of that. Also, I won't tell you that I ate a piece of cold pizza from Friday night a minute ago.

Sunday Morning

This morning I am making cinnamon rolls for the first time in my illustrious baking career. I made the dough last night and let it rise twice before punching it down and refrigerating it. The recipe is from the Fannie Farmer cookbook. I added walnuts and raisins and they are in the oven now. I will let you know how they taste.

Last night I did not have a late night snack, although this morning I felt like my body wanted more food yesterday. Well, in any case, I'm off to to the melon patch.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Rest of Saturday

So for the rest of the day today, I will report as follows. For lunch I had a very quick sandwich of aged cheddar and mayo. For dinner, we had a lovely meal of pasta with the aforementioned asparagus from the garden, crimini mushrooms, onion, garlic, and red pepper, and a salad of romaine lettuce with a blue cheese dressing, roasted beets, walnuts, and onion. I'm enjoying a summit beer right now as the sun sets over this lovely place, the Hilty Homestead, and the crescent moon is shining brightly above the fireflies blinking over the shadows of grass. Fremenine is playing piano and I am pondering a late night snack already, why is this??

We did have a long day, and the gardens are almost clear of weeds, the corn is beautiful, the sky was mercifully clear of pure sun most of the day. The rains came a tumbling down this morning supersaturating the soil.

The food I eat

This morning I had an idea. I am going to turn this blog into a food blog, and let you, the world, know all the food I eat in the day, for a a week. This will give me a rough idea of my diet. I don't understand my food habits very well, and documenting them might be helpful to me, and possibly interesting to you. And I won't start with last night because I ordered nasty nasty pizza, so let's just forget about that, shall we?

I will include beverages I have with meals.

This morning I made a fritatta with crimini mushroom, asparagus and arugula from the garden, red pepper, red onion, red garlic, scallion, mozzarella and monterey jack cheese. I used six organic free range eggs, Hope salted butter, sea salt, fresh pepper, and dried parsley from the garden.

I also had Peace coffee and Edenblend, a soy and rice beverage.

I had a peace of honey wheat Great Harvest toast along with the frittata. I don't usually put butter on my toast, I just eat it with the egg dish.

So far, yum.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

The linkage of the soul to the elements to the wind and forever gone. The night stars seem cynical some times. The toilet flushes oddly, and voices reverberate in heads made of clay, ink, and tiredness.

God is a strawman argument. Our discussions are as pointless as daisies in the field, as poignant as the death of salamanders. My mind is as coagulated as the milk in a thousand year old churn.

Why not give me your heart, why not give me your soil. The sunset is heartbreaking heart-braking hearthshaking...I do I do...love you

Saturday, June 20, 2009

Pure Ego

Maybe the secular world is the spiritual world, the separation between the mundane and sacred isn't real, and everything you've ever thought could be transmuted in an alchemical transition toward enlightenment. So what is the awakening? Why am I conscious? This is the road map toward illumination. Perhaps all religions and politics are nothing but naked pride preening on a throne of pure ego. Leggo your ego, homo erectus. Give the universe a chance, just once, before your mask allows you the comfort of illusionary stability.
Beautiful dreams of flying into island mountains, indigenous peoples, a magical dance out of a bag, trying to communicate with the magical artifacts, waking to birdsong and leaves shimmering.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

funky frozen frogs




Talk about frozen Jesus syndrome...

synchronized bioluminescence

Ill with Change

Taking refuge in the buddha, dharma, sangha when the going gets rough...torrential downpour, the rain is what differentiates us from other planets...Driving to Outback to buy a red maple (acer rubrum) to replace one that died at a project in Woodbury. Up late, again again again, watching movies, moving pictures, action, violence, spells, sex. As a freeloader, freethinker, freedom fighter, free agent I am overwhelmed with choices, to do whatever, how do you balance it out? I have to get up, after all that beer and cheese, get up and figure it out, make the day work somehow.

Somehow, the day always works out, in a way. I guess when it doesn't is the last day, when I'm in the newspaper, when accidents happen. The terrible openess of a blog, of a social network. We open ourselves up constantly, why, no idea. Because we must, because we want to connect, because the connection is more important then the actual thing.

Almost done with the design. Still need lawn signs. Need to figure out dinner, already. Need to stop watching the clock. Breakfast is killing me. Too tired to shine. Too many eggs in one week, says my doctor.

Always adjusting to the new situation, always adjusting the skin of separation. The new day, new job, new friend, new food, new this, new that. The adjustments are what tires me out. Adjusting to my addictions, my failures, my heartsickness, my overwhelming joy. Ill with change.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Is it too much?

Is it too much to ask that you share your dreams with me?
Is it too much to ask you to keep them to yourself?
Is it too much to to try to ride this wave to the end, when the end never ends and beginnings are always beginning?
Is it too much to ask if I can sleep away the day?
Is it too much to ask you to be my friend even though you are already are?
Is it too much to try to make it make sense, when my senses are shattered by it.
Is it too much?

Monday, June 15, 2009

Chalky lime days

Working with limestone all day creates a cloud of alkalinity in your nose and eyes and ears. Your lungs are coated with calcium and your fingers and back are sore. Working with stone in general destroys clothing and weakens bone and muscle. The weather has been blessedly cool, and I am happy to work out in the life giving breeze all day. Perhaps one day I will be dying and I will remember these easy halcyon days of stonework and golden youth, as I do my early years as a Taoist poet teenager. The sun sets on my home and I go back to bed.

Saturday, June 06, 2009

Bolad's Kitchen

-This is some of the most beautiful writing I have ever read, by an author I totally love, this is about his new school-


Bolad's Kitchen
Teaching forgotten things, endangered excellent knowledges, but above all a grand overview of human history as seen from a particular Martín Prechtel way in the search for a comprehension regarding the survival of unique and unsuspected manifestations of the Indigenous Soul in overlooked pockets of peaceful living during isolated times throughout the world as well as the worldwide historical displacement of indigenous people, plant and animal life-ways and the subsequent survival of core vestiges of these deep life and culture respecting understandings that still live in various everyday life styles among many of today’s mixed peoples and ecosystems. A way of hands-on village-style teaching in hopes of developing a language, consciousness and way of living that feeds and gives life to the Indigenous Soul of the Earth whereby scientific discovery working on behalf of a true spirituality of the Holy in Nature could give humans a real usefulness within the whole, instead of a fearful rationalist synthetic flight away from life into depression and extinction..




My experience has always been if you love something or someone passionately enough you will amplify your heart, eschew ancestral biases, open your mind, train your hands and go to any extent to learn the language of what you love, to comprehend and be comprehended, in order to converse with the Divine in the thing you love.

Since I was a child, it has been my own love of the Divine in Nature and my constant wanting, like a suckling child for the life-giving milk of her ever-changing conversation, that has led me to passionately learn as many of the intricacies of her vast and wild life-giving nature as I could, fearing otherwise to lose her relationship with my own undomesticated soul. Though she lives on inside the nature of every small magnificent thing, it is our attempted understanding of the way these intricacies are brilliantly and multi-dimensionally entangled, in which each containing a uniqueness of its own and an independent quality of her whole, are yet utterly interdependent and reliant on the other’s diverse natures and staggered existences in order to maintain their own and live on, that I call education.

A people who do not want this kind of education are a drifting ship of sleeping orphans, a culture numbed by a lack of stories. But orphans can wake up and those who do, hungry for this kind of education, could apply themselves to it and replant the world with life-giving culture. As a people we must learn this to continue as a people.

Love is always a matter of learning how to live in an unknown land. It is not just translation or about being secure in what one knows, but about learning how to give a true gift to what one loves by learning what it loves. Love is always about learning the Nature of things.

Learning should have a diligence that comes from love. That no matter how much pain one bears or to what lengths one has to go in the process of learning what one needs to know to speak and listen to one’s love, it will have all seemed as a simple minor event compared to the delicious inundation of one’s soul by the fascination of our heart’s desire.

Like an obstinate great hard green boulder of cultural assumptions and literalist intractability pounded down into a beach of jade sand by the persistent pulsing waves of one’s divine desire, once achieved, the hardship of what seems to anyone outside of love an awful toil, becomes to anyone in love a vague fulfilling memory inside the ecstatic swirling and swimming our hearts do finally have when the distance between what we love and what we have become in order to understand it, finally inextricably mix to form something more extravagant and beautiful than either of its parts.

Because the world is a boundless compendium of stories told in as many languages as there are things to know, the language of galaxies, of rocks, the languages of weathers, plants, and rivers, languages of animal and human cultures, I have never understood knowledge as a finite possession but more like a corral of wild language horses, with an ongoing responsibility to sustain and maintain them, upon whose unruly backs we must learn to ride; sometimes into the heart of twelve layers of holy stone, or into the heart of an old Jewish steel vendor in Armenia, or into the language of the tears of the Divine Female whose ever-birthing womb is a mouth that speaks this natural teeming earth and universe into tangibility at every present moment.

This is something of the kind of approach I am trying to plant here in New Mexico, to cultivate a "never-before-seen school" from my own ongoing learning, stemming from my search for the Divine conversations with my love of the Holy in the Natural and cultural earth of humans, animals, plant and the geological-astronomical.

From a dry objective point of view, this "never-before-seen school" of mine would probably be classed as a "school of spiritual ecology." But to me this sounds about as exciting as a rusty, dented, mud-clogged exhaust pipe spewing monoxide into the crisp desert air, while clanging off its brackets under the backend of a cold, over-sized reservation school bus dragging all the tense Pueblo kids through the winter’s rutted mud to the beating rooms and Anglocizing indoctrination pens on a slushy January day when we should have all been on adobe rooftops deftly cracking and spitting piñon nut shells, simultaneously chewing and swallowing the delicious meats while we were wrapped in smoky old Pendelton blankets watching a Buffalo Dance and thereby continuing our true education into the great conversation with the Holy in Nature.

As anyone can sense, the word "school" is something of a problem to me and applying any semblance of the word to this wonderful learning get-together we have been able to keep alive here in my native New Mexico leaves an evil aftertaste in my mouth. Therefore I did not call my new school a school, but by the more cryptically beautiful name of Bolad’s Kitchen. In keeping with the focused love of learning and spiritual way of thinking that I wanted to engender in the school, I left, in the beginning, the meaning behind the title of Bolad’s Kitchen as a riddle whose comprehension and discovery by the first person who then made the effort to correctly research the meaning and my reason for using it as the name was to be given free tuition to the first sessions. After several students in an excellent show of their love of the real beauty of language and human ancestry, every new yearly session of Bolad’s Kitchen ever since has begun with students applying themselves to a riddle of much deeper proportions.

Bolad’s Kitchen classes are a four year courses where people can continually pursue their interest in learning more in depth, with more time to do so, the connected overview of all the things I teach and believe, in a continuous way, picking up where we left off, without the limited geographical framework and time restraint of my annual workshops, conferences, etc. This of course includes a more in-depth participation and development of what I wish people to understand by reading my books, and the tangible learning of many indigenous and ritual life skills that I have always considered basic necessities for living on the earth, but which are rarely taught anymore.

Though I have a fairly clear and steady heading envisioned for Bolad’s Kitchen during the years to come, we shall have to adjust our rudder as often as we need to navigate the wreck-strewn waters of modern life and world situations in hopes that Bolad’s Kitchen continues as an ongoing event. My dream is that some of you who having attended as much as you can become such that I would claim you as valued villagers who understand and love this learning enough to be retained as paid teachers at Bolad’s Kitchen, continuing to inspire people in an understanding rooted in my own stuff but going out into the world with your own spiritual DNA and discovered abilities, thereby possibly causing a new knowledge and spiritual flowering beyond the present imaginings of any of us. If I do find teachers after a few years, then this would free things up for me so that I could really get to teaching even more delicious subjects to those interested hand-picked people who have attended the Bolad’s Kitchen. On the other hand the whole thing could fail magnificently, but it would never fail miserably, for in this scared industrial age failing magnificently in any attempt to feed the Holy and keep rare large thoughts alive, thereby creating culture in the process and maintaining the nobility of the natural soul, is a beautiful wild horse worth feeding and trying to ride, even if in the end he just runs off, thundering back to the untamed pastures of the Divine.

I intend to continue many of my annual, workshops, lectures and book events around the world, reviving the Behind the Eyes of Sleeping Bears Writing Retreat, along with a series of drawing and painting workshops in the New Hall. But all of these will be quite separate happenings with their own ways of going.

Blessings on all of you.
Martín Prechtel

Priorities

I think perhaps our nation's priorities are completely fucked up when we spend 2 billion dollars to make sure people can watch digital TV, yet thousands are unemployed, laid off, homeless, sick, hungry, etc... It really chaps my hide that TV is such a high priority for us Americans. Maybe we should get rid of the damn things.

Monday, June 01, 2009

life itself

We need a world in which people will be able to explore their gifts. As it is, we mainly strive to survive. This is a sin. The dominant cultures, the death cultures, work hard to maintain this status quo, so that you and yours must constantly strive to survive, instead of exploring what it means to be alive.

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