Summer Portraits and Scattered Thoughts

Let’s start with news from the farm, it’s a (mostly) very nice place to begin.

My garden looks pretty awful this year. It was heat stressed for the better part of six weeks. We had relentless triple digit weather at the farm and everything in my gardens seemed to want to curl up and perish even though I flipped the irrigation schedule to twice a day and additionally hand watered some sections which seemed perpetually parched. I reckon I might have to dream up shade structuring next year if we have another sustained heatwave like this year. Whew! I feel a little sweaty and tired just typing about it and remembering it.

My garden looks pretty awful this year, also, because Idaho Department of Agriculture sent out a couple of folks to pick up garlic samples for testing and while they were in the shop building they unplugged our electric box that fires the electric fence that keeps the pigs out of my garden and they did not tell me about it. A few days later, I woke up to…PIGS IN MY GARDEN. They destroyed most of my melon patch, squash patch, and dug up a good portion of my potato row while trampling a few other things. I was pretty miffed about it at the time. I replanted squash and some of my melons have bounced back a bit but it was a full blown disaster zone for a while. Rather heartbreaking.

Two of our jenny turkeys have successfully hatched out chicks and I have them all in our nursery coop. I ADORE TURKEYS. We have found baby turkeys to be quite susceptible to immediate and terrible death. They’re such fragile things when they’re young. While I’d love for them to be out and about eating bugs and nibbling tender plants they will almost all certainly die if they aren’t in captivity for the first month of their life, we learned this the hard way.

Pumpernickle, our wonderful sow, gave birth to a nice little batch of piggies about a week ago. They are such sweet things. Something awful and bizarre happened. One piglet sustained an eye injury somehow and wound up losing his eyeball because maggots found their way into his eye wound and began to devour him. Let me tell you something, it’s one thing to come across carrion that is being processed by bugs and beetles and worms but it’s another thing altogether to see a young critter being literally eaten alive by maggots. I did my best to doctor him (I only puked once) and as the situation progressed it became apparent that he was in extreme pain, he wasn’t going to survive, he was going to have a slow and terrible death, so we decided to put him down — at our farm, this involves a shot to the brain with our small .22 rifle. Instant death. This is one of the most difficult things for me when it comes to animal husbandry — knowing when to ease the suffering of livestock and set them free by granting them death and there is nuance between this and harvesting a mature animal to eat. I feel many different emotions when we harvest animals to eat, but I do not feel sad — I’ve thought about this a lot and I’ve talked about this in the past many a time and in the past I thought I did feel a sort of sadness for our harvested animals but now I’m not sure that’s one of the emotions I’m feeling. That said, I feel deeply saddened whenever we must make the choice to end the suffering of a sick or hurt animal — I have a sense of sadness that is related to the nature of young life ending too soon. I don’t know if any of this is coherent, sorry if it’s not, I’m tired this week and my mind feels like it might be spinning its wheels. I think about this stuff ALL the time and just when I think I know how to express what I’m thinking something shifts and I have to start my thought process all over again.

I really love each and every one of our animals here, they enrich my existence. I want them all to have the best lives we can possibly give them and I want them all to die excellent, quiet, calm, clean deaths but sometimes nature takes over and believe me when I say, nature can be a bloodthirsty hag — she’s sunsets and coyote pups and wild sunflowers but she’s also a real bitch.

I’ve been trying to chip away at studio work here but it seems like I endure at least one small farmtastrophe almost every single day that drags me away from my studio. It starts to drive me crazy after a while, being creatively unexercised, but it’s just that time of year. I keep doing my best. That’s all I can do!

I was up in the high country on horseback for a few days in July, just in time for the big fireweed bloom. What a beautiful world we live in and so much of it is edible. Sometimes I move through a forest or along the riverbank at home and I point out to myself everything that can be picked or collected and eaten or steeped as nutritious teas and it’s astounding. Did you know fireweed makes a nice nibble and a nice jelly and a nice tisane? It’s also easy on the eyes. This fuchsia hue is one of my favorite colors on earth.

I wake up every day now and feel like the state of the world is a small, sharp knife sticking through the meat of my ribs and into my heart. These are hurting times, fearful times, worrisome times, lonely times.

Hurt, fear, worry, loneliness.

I wake up every day now and I look for hope everywhere, watch for pinpricks of light and warm sunbeams and good hearts and helpful souls and I root myself in those details, situations, people.

I have realized lately how important it is that I feed my spirit with great care. The human spirit can be sullied in a thousand different ways and one of our greatest duties to ourselves (and others) is to use caution and care in our own lives, to moderate our intake of all things, to guard what we allow our eyes see, to be careful about which ideas we allow to take root in our minds, to sift through and sort out good from evil. It’s tricky work.

I am busy seeking beauty and redemption and wisdom. They come to me in simple forms that ring out like thunder in the night.

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“Our hands imbibe like roots so I place them on what is beautiful in this world and I fold them in prayer and they draw from the heavens light.”

[Saint Francis of Assisi]

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I have been thinking of you all as this summer draws to a close. I hope your gardens and your local farmers have fed you well. I hope you have had time to relax and rest and drape your bones over the earth in the shade beneath a mighty tree or two. I hope you have sipped iced tea. I hope you have picked berries. I hope you have discovered new music and new artists and new teachings. I hope you have read one hundred wonderful books. I hope it has been a glorious season you will remember forever.