summer

September 7, 2021 by The Noisy Plume

[sterling silver, dendritic opal and fossilized walrus tusk — cut and polished by me]

Thinking aloud this morning:

There are infinite ways to employ creativity. Math is creative work. Gardening is creative work. Fly fishing is creative work. Stalking an elk is creative work. Sculpting is creative work. Building a livestock enclosure is creative work. All humans are creative. Not all humans are painters, jewelers, writers, engineers, architects, homemakers…and yet, everything we set our hands to offers us a chance to employ our creativity.

I am a silversmith, a writer, a photographer, a gardener, a farmer, and an extremely proud homemaker. All of my work encourages my creativity. All work is creative work. If you are not employing your creativity in your job, don’t treat your job like it’s not the right job for you when the real issue might be that you simply are not employing your creativity to your work. It’s easy to coast. It’s easy to be complacent. It’s easy to make macaroni and cheese from a box for dinner. It’s meaningful, creative work to look in the fridge, see what tailings of food are there, and to take those random ingredients and create a delicious, well crafted, wholesome meal.

We improve the world around us — our communities, our neighborhoods, our homes, our relationships — when we strive to apply our creative power to every problem that requires solving, when we challenge ourselves to create, to fix, to build, to craft, to leave beauty and remedy in our wakes instead of trash, brokenness and chaos. To live creatively, to live artfully, is to actively apply our creative energy to everything we touch.

Don’t sit back and let someone else deal with the problem. If you have time to complain about it, you have time to fix, build, or invent a solution. Why wait for someone else to employ their creativity while your own creativity festers, rusts and rots…and is begging to be used.

Grab the bull by the horns, use your mind, use your hands, use your heart, and live creatively.

https://www.thenoisyplume.com/blog/2021/09/07/blend-in/

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: garden, summer

Summer Portraits and Scattered Thoughts

August 24, 2021 by The Noisy Plume

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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: summer

Summer Snapshots

August 25, 2018 by The Noisy Plume

…I owe us all a couple of real posts and I have plenty of thoughts and stories to share so here’s hoping I can use some of my time for blogging this week! I hope you are all well.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: idaho, summer, the farm

We Ride Out

July 9, 2018 by The Noisy Plume

We ride out beneath a filthy, wildfire sky. He walks beneath me like a drunken sailor, buddy sour and unwilling to leave Resero without brattish behavior, without an attitude. I calmly correct him, urge him forward, flick his shoulder with the tail of a rein and he walks straighter, falling into his fast, flat walk so the horizon bobs between his pricked ears. We ride closer and closer to the setting sun, to a sky strewn with smoke-tarnished clouds, rising and falling our way up the drainage like water in reverse. I feel guilty for taking this time to ride when there’s something, so many somethings, to play slave to at home. We ride on. I hunch in the saddle, my spine remembering its position at my studio bench where I’ve been flicking and feathering flame for days. I’m unable to shift my hips with his gait, crippled by my craft, tortured by tensions. I’m too tightly coiled.

At the top, it’s gold spilling in every direction, the breath of the Spirit falling soundlessly and gloriously all around. Gold on sky on grass on cloud on my own skin and bright light, shaking and streaming in all directions. I am molten, precious metal — poured out and flowing and curling with smoke as impurities burn out of me. I take a breath. I take another. I feel my body expand and contract, busy with the simple act of consuming wind and sky…like a wildflower. My shoulders drop. My spine softens. Finally. I kiss the air and we run. I crouch down and his mane whips my face. We go that way, exhilarated, gasping, intoxicated by freedom, by each other.

We drift back down to earth and into a smooth, fast walk. I drop the reins across his neck and set my palms to rest on my thighs. He knows the way. An owl hunts the edge of dusk. Nighthawks do their gleaning, twisting and turning on their trajectories with sharp wings, slicing invisible things into smaller pieces.

Two coyotes move through the sage, deep in the distance where the land curls up again in a soft wave. They stop to look over their shoulders at us. He pricks an ear, his gait grows choppy, he looks back to the path and we smooth out together and cover ground. Behind us the sunset flares, the sky grows red as a woman scorned. We turn down the canyon rim towards home.

One hundred yards down the road he spooks, long legs scrambling in every direction, eyes wide and wild, nostrils snorting air like a boiling kettle and a rattlesnake shoots off the path while shaking his snare drum at us. I reach my free hand to grab the horn of my saddle and painfully jam it as directions are reversed beneath me. My wrist yelps as it shifts into an awkward angle against the horn and my ring finger turns against itself. We’re running uphill. I sit deep, drop my heels in the stirrups and slow him. Stop him. I run a hand beneath his mane. I let him breathe. I whisper to him that it’s ok, I’m here, I’ve got him, I’ll take care of him, he’s safe. I work through his shivering, white-eyed flight instinct and he settles beneath me.

We turn and make our way carefully down the trail again. I make him stand. Spooled up tightly beneath the sage the snake shakes, rattles and rolls. His tail is thunder and there is lighting in his fangs. I see his diamonds shining bright black in the shadows. I hear him rambling like a sun-stroked prophet. We move past, careful, slowly, we move past. Two miles from home, I pull my phone from my saddle bag and call Robbie. I tell him all the things I couldn’t tell him the day before because I was angry and frustrated and overwhelmed:

I love you. It’s too much for me. I don’t want to live this dream on my own, it’s our dream. Your job is killing me. We need to take our leap of faith.

I hear him echo all my words. It’s going to be ok. We say goodnight.

The moon comes up, filtering down through smoke and ash, shining dimly on my back as we ride the last mile home. We spook once more as an irrigation sprinkler hisses at our passing. I hear the metallic clank of an iron shoe pulling free and landing on gravel. I sigh aloud. He hops and limps beneath me, suddenly tender of foot in the quiet of the gloaming. The farrier is already scheduled for Monday, that’s something. In the distance, Resero whinnies, his voice is like a star in the night to guide us safely home.