[Because the Methow makes music in the key of blue:  sterling, aquamarine, Arizona turquoise, Bainbridge Island beach glass & lapis lazuli.]

[Because what is more Methow than: sterling,blue, deer & a Methow River rock with the most delicate little black vein?]

I had such a wildly beautiful epiphany while working in the studio today.  I recently told a friend about a silly little fear I have and her response was, quite simply, “Do not be afraid.”  It was such a straightforward response it nearly shocked my boots off.  Let me tell you what I realized!  A good friend does not encourage, nourish or foster your insecurities and fears.  A good friend tears those nasty weeds up by the roots and with a most fractious spirit, she casts them into a burning barrel, pours kerosene all over them and drops a lit match on the mess.  Then she stands there beside you and makes you watch that awful crap* burn away into ash, wind and nothingness.  That’s what a good friend does.  I just thought I’d tell you.  Consider yourself informed.

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I had a transportative experience while working.  I was playing Hey Rosetta! on the stereo and was suddenly, mind out of body, spirit out of physicality, transported!  It was the craziest thing.  I grabbed my journal and scribbled the experience down:

I am in the studio listening to Hey Rosetta! while I work and I am suddenly transported to Red Hill in Pocatello — it is winter.  I am running the ridge, an exposed space, the wind is a banshee.  I am listening to music as I run.  The earbuds I’ve stuffed in my ears help dissolve the screech of air that funnels down valley.  It’s tyrannical with its claws and biting teeth.  It makes my ears ache.  My lips are numb.  It is snowing and my shirt is plastered with white.  My face is wet.  The wet is slowly crystalizing.  Later I’ll cross up and over the train yard and look South to Scout Mountain, the peak will be dressed pure as a bride in glancing white.”

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It was just a daydream, but at times, my daydreams can come on so fast and strong that I am displaced in the withins of myself and when I come back to the here and now I feel lonesome for the space my imagination took me.  And gosh, am I ever craving a winter run now.

Do you daydream?

What do you daydream about?

*Sorry for writing “crap” — that was rather common of me.  No other word would do.

Lastly:

It’s old, but it’s still so good.

https://www.thenoisyplume.com/blog/2012/08/28/5028/

A Watermelon For Titus

It was just his size, so naturally, I picked it for him.

Tomorrow Titus McFlightus will be spending the day in his cage at the base, getting used to the sights and sounds there, the wind in the trees and the gurgle of the water in the trout pond.  In the days to follow, we’ll begin opening his cage for him, hoping he’ll learn to frolic with the group of cedar waxwings that lives in the trees there — some of those birds are his siblings and original family!  There’s something kind of beautiful and right about placing the wild back out in the wild.  I’ll miss him dearly.  Wish us (and him) luck!

I hold my hands up

cast the last small fettering stack of intangible things into the fire

of a setting sun

and so

feed the Phoenix waiting to rise.

There is a twist to the season now

a collection of last gasp energy

before the spin and crimson exhalation of autumn

like a collected horse

moving into an arena turn

at a slow jog:

the tuck and mechanical pull of shorter days.

I can feel it flex, furl and bend.

The sun is slipping South.

Every night I think the sky rears up to offer me ornate shards of rebirth

a star I never knew

the craters of a greater vessel swimming with loons.

I slip into slumber with my hands open

my arms outstretched

I’m adrift on the rippling surface of a mountain lake

all the grey promises I make myself are carefully fulfilled.

Each evening becomes unreaching

moon tossing

breeze glimmering stone throw distances

hungry red mouths of trout

river lick

granitic mountain tongues flinging praises at an ancient throne.

(Wistful is a place for people who do not belong anywhere

and so

everywhere is theirs for the claiming.)

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I haven’t known how to evolve, I simply do or I don’t.  When the time comes, I morphose into something similar, but new, or independently new altogether.  It isn’t a conscious thing.  I can’t tell myself to do it or make myself do it.  It’s quite strange — adaptation, I mean.

I can’t begin to pinpoint how the changes take place, the impetus behind the motion of unzipping the suit I’m wearing, stepping out, and then stepping into a new suit.  Zip.  Like a change of skin.  Like switching out a truck tire that has flattened in the sun and wind, muddled and mingled with gravel and weeds.  Out with the old.  In with the new.  The seasons are independent, I suppose.  Rhythmic unto their very selves.  The invention of new drums and horizons.

One winter, I walked into Walrus & Carpenter, the used bookstore in Old Town Pocatello, and Will, the owner, exclaimed, “Why Jillian!  It’s you!  You’ve changed!”  Speaking in bursts of exclamation is common for Will, it’s one of the reasons I like him so well, we seem to speak in similar dimensions.  I’m sure I looked concerned by his outburst because he put his hands in the air, palms open towards me, as if he was stopping my objections in my throat, and he chased that first exclamation with this, “It’s not a bad thing!  It’s how artists are!  Always changing in timbre and hue.”  Except I can’t recall exactly what words he used and that last bit of phrasing about “timbre and hue” is actually my interpretation of what he was saying.

I was maybe a bit embarrassed by what he said, perhaps a bit thrilled as well, to be noticed, to be changed, to be suddenly introduced to myself, wearing the newness I never noticed.  I wonder how often it happens to me?  Change?  Hue and timbre modification.  Day to day?  Once a year?  Does it reveal itself in the colors of clothing I choose to wear, the ring that doesn’t leave my right hand for a month?  The way I write, make, cook food?

——————————————————————

I had a dream.  I was in a forest.  The trees were moaning, rubbing trunks in the wind, stretching cork cambium to breaking points beneath rungs of sunshine.  I thought I smelled a pie baking, somewhere in the woods, berry stain and butter fry.  There was a catastrophe of jigsaw bark on the forest floor and the unmistakable scent of solaris and pine sap.  I walked through the mess, tried to fit thousands of small similar things together.  My wrists wouldn’t bend.  My joints were fused.  I was the tree.  Soundless and small.  In the midst of everything.

https://www.thenoisyplume.com/blog/2012/08/23/5004/

Babes In The Woods

[sterling & green tourmaline]

[sterling & Kingman Arizona turquoise]

Just a couple of things I’ve been working on — made for woodswomen, or women who like the idea of being in the woods.  They’re in the shop now!

Private Journal Entry, August 19, 2012

I woke up very early this morning, around 5AM or so, before the dawn began to widen her grip on the world.  I must be more bird than girl these days.  The cool of morning felt tremendously refreshing after a hot, sleepless night.  I poured myself out of bed, onto the plank floor, and walked directly out of the house where the world was edged blue and just beginning to ache with the first leaping of light.  I went walking with Tater Tot, up the ridge behind the house.  On the far side of this ridge is a cottonwood with a snaggy crown, the kind hawks like to perch in, and rightly so, as it allows them an unhindered view of the fields below.  This morning, perched in that bony old river drinker, was a red tailed hawk.  I could see his silhouette inked black against the dawn.  I walked up the slope to get a better look at him and check for feathers on the ground beneath his perch.

As I drew near the cottonwood, I spooked a doe from her bed, she bounded out across the meadow, stopped, and turned to watch me from a distance as I tooled about beneath that tree.  Someone has been irrigating it, there is a hose running just slightly underground to its roots.  I’m glad someone has been caring for it, it adds so much beauty to the edge of this meadow as the slope is mostly bare but for large groupings of sage and bunch grasses.  In the middle to lower branches of the tree I noticed a nest and thought it strange it was built so near to the ground.  I kicked off my flip flops and quickly climbed up the tree to check inside the nest to get an idea of what kind of bird built it but it was utterly void.  I did sustain a few more nicks and scrapes to my legs but I don’t care, they already look so terrible from hiking the river banks and wading while fishing that all my vanity has dissolved into resigned practicality.  I look a bit like a six year old girl who frequently falls off her bicycle.

But for one small grouse feather, I made my way featherless and back down to the gardens, watered all the vegetables and then walked out across the upper pasture to the other hill that is colonized by ponderosas.  The largest pondi of the group has a beautiful, wide and gnarled crown.  Four feet off the ground, I can see where someone wrapped the trunk in a coil of barbed wire some time ago.  The tree has grown out and over the metal in most places — nothing can contain the spirit of a ponderosa pine onces it gets to growing and standing tall.  I bet that loop of barbed wire, just under the bark, feels a bit itchy.  I bet, on moonless nights, this tree reaches down a branch and gives itself a good scratch around its midsection, when everything is sleeping.  I’ve seen the owls use this tree as a perch and I often check the ground beneath it for owl feathers.  Today I found a crow feather, one more grouse feather and eight northern flicker (red shafted) feathers.  Either a flicker frequents this tree or died beneath it and the wind and I are slowly exhuming it’s plumage.  I have found fourteen flicker feathers here now in three weeks time.

As I made my way back to the house, the sun was just capping the East side of the valley and the birds were begining to stir.  I stepped inside the house, put a kettle of water on for coffee, uncovered the bird cage and fed Titus who was in his usual morning frenzy.  After making him a birdbath, I opened the French doors to the deck and was delighted to see and hear a small grouping of cedar waxwings in the apple tree.  Titus, hearing his own language trilling in through the open doors, set about singing back and hopping wildly about on his perches, it was a bird jamboree.  I can’t imagine what the waxwings are saying.  It’s probably something like, “It’s a beautiful day, I’m a dashingly handsome bird, let’s go find some berries my darling bandit friends.”  I always wonder what the animals are saying to each other.  I also wonder if they know how beautiful they are.  I wonder if they stare at their own reflections in the rivers and lakes, oblivious to the world around them, blinded by their own beauty…that’s the sort of behavior that will get you eaten by a bear.  I suppose the vain ones are always eaten first, in that being vain takes away from your awareness of the world around you.  It’s survival of the fittest, not survival of the prettiest.  It’s probably best to be beautiful and clueless about it, in the human world too.

The forecast for today, last I checked, was 102F with chance of thunderstorms, I hope they’re wrong about that.  This heat is exhausting.