Howdy one and all! I don’t know about you but I blinked twice and suddenly the calendar read June 28th and I felt shocked. Where did this month scamper off to? I am happy to catch you up visually on some aspects of June and I apologize for the delayed jewelry imagery and lack of an official, large, scheduled update — I’ve been listing new work as I have been able to, whenever I’ve had a spare hour. Thanks to everyone who popped by my shop this month to help us out by claiming a piece of jewelry or two! As I have conveyed in past journal posts, we are transitioning out of fire and into this farming gig and it’s going to take us at least a year, probably two, until we’re really underway here. Your support is very real for my little family and we are grateful for you. Thank you.

On with the news at hand! We’ve been inundated with visitors and early summer projects and once we cut and baled the hay and hugged and fed quite a few beloved visitors and finished planting the garden and packaged and shipped out all my jewelry orders for the month we drove to the city and ate dinner at an Indian restaurant and then sat down in an air conditioned movie theater to watch Top Gun. Have you seen it yet? It was thrilling and we loved it.

We’ve suffered a few small catastrophes here, nothing life altering, but we moved through them with acceptance and calmness, choosing to launch ourselves directly into problem solving mode! This is something we learned from smokejumping (I learned by proxy) — sometimes bad things happen and you can sit there and cry about it and have a pity party and make life miserable for everyone around you and pick a fight with your partners and wait for someone to come along and save you OR you can save yourself and immediately work on solving the problem, work together with joy as a team, and get on with the job at hand.

It’s been an incredibly cold, windy, wet spring and early summer here and in early June we had 1 inch of rain fall in 20 minutes and it washed out five acres we had just planted in teff which was pretty downright annoying. Robbie had been prepping soil for a couple months WITHOUT USE OF HERBICIDES and we watched all that hard work wash away in a flash flood. I told Robbie, “Congrats! You’re a real farmer now, blessed and cursed by the weather.” It will all be ok. We’ll still plant the field this fall with alfalfa but we’ve been forced to skip the teff. That’s how she goes! Something I like about what we’re doing with our lives is the way I am reminded constantly that I wield very little control over what life dishes up (including the weather). What I can control are my reactions, my emotions, my continued openness to learning and growing. Our job is to try our hardest to do our best every single day — the rest is not our business.

In the studio I’ve been diligently showing up and sitting down every single day to do work that brings me joy and to do work that makes you proud of me. That probably seems like a strange thing to say, that I want you to be proud of me, but I do. I want you to feel proud to support me in my work, proud to support our farm, proud to support my family. Recent batches of work revolve around hawk talons, badger claws, beautiful grounding jaspers, turquoise set atop milled ingots, square crosses, sagebrush, wolves and elk…it was a beautiful month in the studio. I can’t wait to see what rolls off my bench in the month of July.

Speaking of July, I am headed out on a journey! I am traveling to Spain with three of my sisters and a niece from Robbie’s side of the family (they are sisters-in-law but the term “inlaw” has always irked me and made me feel like an outsider in my own family so I refuse to use it and just call everyone my sisters and brothers and moms and dads and aunts and uncles and grandparents no matter if they are from my own bloodlines or my husband’s bloodlines). We will be walking a portion of the Camino de Santiago which is a Catholic Pilgrimage that terminates at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela where Saint James is entombed. I am really looking forward to being a pilgrim and have been attempting to quiet my heart and mind in preparation for this contemplative journey. I’m also looking forward to being with some of my family, walking the Spanish countryside for two weeks, nibbling on local salamis and cheeses and fruits, and slowing down for a bit. It’s a terrible time to be leaving the farm as Robbie will be working hard on our garlic harvest however, he insisted I take this trip so I go with his blessing which means the world to me!

One last thing I want to mention is Volume 9 of Modern Huntsman went to the printer and is currently shipping out. Modern Huntsman did a limited print on this book and subscribers to the book and pre-orders were prioritized so if you want a copy, you may not want to wait much longer to claim it! Pop over to the Modern Huntsman Website for ordering details. My story “Seven Times Slower” is published in this volume and I hope it touches the hearts of everyone who reads it — I wrote something simple and true about the life and death of a beloved pointing dog and I think you’ll enjoy the piece. It’s always an honor to work with my editors and to go to print with Modern Huntsman and I can’t wait to hear what you think of this volume! Thanks to anyone who has subscribed or purchased a copy of this volume and past volumes. I speak for the Modern Huntsman posse when I express our heartfelt gratitude.

And with that, I must sign off and head into the studio for the afternoon. I hope you are all better than well. I carry you in my heart.