The Gatherer

Wasn't that old when I  started contemplating what I  might do when I  was. Been frequenting dumps and landfills since childhood when Jane, Robin's mom, drove us to the Idyllwild town dump in her old Model A Ford pickup truck, out on the Hemet side of the San Jacinto mountains, amidst great islands of majestic smooth as a baby's butt, deep dark red bark that defied the term bark, more like the skin of an exotic temptress; manzanita groves.  Jane always had a silver bell leather strip tied to one of her flesh side out round toed cowboy boots, jingling to scare off rattlesnakes, maybe or maybe just to be different.  We were the two poorest families in town and so scavenging was a survival skill.  More fun for me and Robin. Sometimes we even hiked down there through the manzanitas, unchaperoned. 

Later, in Palmer Lake and Colorado Springs, Colorado; Tesuque, Santa Fe and Eldorado, New Mexico , I continued that habit, building my first house around an old 30 foot trailer that I wrested out of a tight location where they kinda built their house blocking egress of the temporary shelter they called the 'Pink Palacio', gathering all kinds of scrap plywood,  pine boards and odds and ends from the Tesuque dump, commingling with Joe Blea and the Tesuque Pueblo governor, and also found other cull sources like old 2x10 fence rails and cottonwood short, round stove lengths for insulation. By the age of 24, had my own passive solar house for under $2000 and it even made it into a color glossy book on solar homes.

In those halcyon days, before transfer stations and the like, there were often old codgers, scarecrows that sort of were Mayor Domos of the pits and we helped them put out occasional spontaneous fires and the like, sort of like old geezer greeters who sat in their old pickup trucks while not conducting dump activities and directing people around.  I figured I might be suited to end up one of them in old age...or sell kindling on the side of the road; one or the other; if worse came to worst.

I am now approaching 70 and have a little ranch in the PJ/ ponderosa/gambrels oak/cottonwood bosque along the Galisteo creek and have scavenged all these years, creating a sizeable boneyard, hoarding boards and wire and trucks and what have you and making me feel like I overdid it all a little. I had also converted the cool custom donkey shed into a quintessentially funky casita made from repurposed and recycled materials from the boneyard and shop and shed; that was the design criteria; had to be repurposed or recycled; earthship style rammed tires, strawbale, cables and old steel, roots and sticks, paper and stones.

They don't have dumps any more and young ‘kid’ sit in air-conditioned guard houses at transfer stations so that leaves me out of a scarecrow job. 

So now I was decluttering the kitchen after Belle 'passed' or died, actually, and, of course I kept her too and buried her out here, which is another story. In the process of decluttering, decided to unclutter the old antique chrome, cast iron and sheet metal wood cookstove still in the kitchen since the early days on the homestead and actually use it again...to cook with!  So I jolted and started and was amazed today as I  found myself casually and instinctively gathering sticks from everywhere on the ranch floor, for the woodstove which thrives on kindling, as I  poked around doing chores and trompsing about and around the boneyard and realized that I  had many lifetime's supply of kindling lying all around the ranch, just everywhere, in little shanks and branches, just begging to be garnered off the land,  fulfilling my first and second choice of geezer occupations,  except that I  was the scavenger, the employee,  the boneyard mayor and the recipient/ best customer for the kindling...and the cook!  What a success story; reducing the wildfire 'burden’ as they call it, and cutting down (love that term) on the electric bill and getting good body stretches and heart healthy exercise, for the rest of my life!  Come on over, sit by the warm kindling-fed fiery cookstove and drink Cota herbal tea, ('Indian tea', Hopi tea,Navajo tea, Zuni tea, Greenthread) that grows wild out here on the land. Happy Gatherings !!

When Marta Raised Her Hand

When Martha Raised Her Hand

Tonight I sat down to a tasty modified migas concoction, inspired by a Texas/Mexico bordertown friend who, I have come to see, is highly conscious of the colonization of  what she calls ‘The Divided States’, or, ‘Gringolandia’, putting out massive amounts of powerful information on indigenous and women's rights, abuse and attitude issues on social media, every day!  The protests that occurred recently regarding the not-having-really-disappeared, deep, entrenched and insidious racism that is “the air we breathe” and cuts off other’s breath as my very Anglo late wife, Belle, said, along with her tongue-in-cheek, “You know I just really don’t like white people very much!”.  We just don’t get it sometimes! The culture of colonization rationalization that continues with the corporate welfare system and invasion of our culture, has continued the collective dysfunctions and it takes mass protests to shift the consciousness, even a little.

Here is an example:  The other day, during national peaceful demonstrations, there was an outside dinner party of adult friends.  One mentioned that he had recently given his version of the civil war event where, at the base of Glorieta Pass, at Apache Canyon, the Union soldiers snuck over Rowe Mesa and clambered down the steep western side of that landform, surprising the sleepy supply train attendants (as it was so cold the previous night that they could not sleep well) and….well….kinda won the war for the Union side, the ‘Gettysburg of the West’, stopping the rebels from reaching the newly discovered gold fields, which were often on ancient First Settler land; one of the contributing factors to the Sand Creek Massacre; the Colorado Gold Rush encouraged thousands of people to move across the plains, seeking their fortunes in Colorado's gold fields; moving over Cheyenne and Arapaho tribal lands.and others.  

The orator mentioned that there were 200 people attending this history session in Albuquerque.  After the rendition, an historian said, “Well, that seems like a good version; raise your hands if you go for it.” He said they all did.  Well, my activist and aware friend ‘raised her hand’ , “Were there any Native Americans there?” ( ‘there’ being double entender; the war or the history lecture?)  He said, “They didn’t have anything to do with it”.  She said, “Were they invited”.  He said it did not involve them and that there were none there. Well this started some lively conversation and I said, “Why don’t you listen to her?  She is ‘of color’ and it's about time we just be quiet and listen to another perspective, even though we are ‘experts’.  She said, “Wasn’t this their land?....  Why did they not come...  This land was stolen from them, no?”   

So here is what unfolded in my mind:  This land was Native land, for thousands of years, and was stolen by the Spanish colonists and then the US government.  The location of the supply train was at Apache Canyon.  The Union leader of the surprise attack was none other than Colonel Chivington who led the Sand Creek Massacre, up in Colorado a little later, where is the site of the only national monument in this country entitled with the word ‘massacre’  because there was one; perhaps 200 defenseless Cheyenne men, women and children were killed, mutilated, raped, creating a storm of controversy at the time!  It turns out that the civil war and the war against the plains Indians was nearly concomitant!  This is when plains First Settlers were chased down, killed, rounded up; buffalo populations were being decimated so as to take away Native’s sustenance and culture!  These are the wars that the monument on the Santa Fe plaza commemorated and referred to the ‘savage’ Apaches! In the same breathe. During the National Indigenous Day holiday time frame, protestors literally pulled down the obelisk with ropes and chains to the dismay of the city government which was stalling on that action and the police pulled away, to their credit this time!  Arrests were made, though, and part of the ironic poetry is that there were claims that the Union soldiers used ropes etc to get off the mesa, but anyone from around here and other accounts at the time said differently; no need to repel; just makes for drama of the fairytale (my word).  

Now why would Native Americans go to a civil war history meeting celebrating the leader of a massive massacre and who led the war against plains Indians during the civil war; same soldiers?  Why would noone raise their hands and say, “ This was native land previously; it was stolen”. It is now incumbent on whites, especially experts, to shift and listen very carefully to people of color who raise their hands; there may be something they can learn even though they think they are being preached ‘to the choir’. History (or, as Belle used to quip ‘Her-story) needs to be rewritten and challenged daily, as the narrative angles are changing.  Just go to the plaza and see for yourself.  Great things are in store for all of us!  Happy Historia Revisiting!

The Skinny on Crooked

The Skinny About Crooked

                                                                                            “I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains, I looked to the children, I drank from the fountains, there’s more than one answer to these questions, pointing me in a crooked line, and the less I seek my source for some definitive; the closer I am to fine.”

hese lyrics by the Indigo Girls speak volumes in terms of looking at our culture and finding some need to deconstruct and reinvent; there are some aspects that poke their verbal heads up that need some real serious work done around them.  What am I talking about?  As I grew up, I often heard the words, “stick to the straight and narrow path of righteousness”.  We talk about doing what is ‘right’ (as in a right angle, perhaps).  We talk about ‘getting even’, which is an expression fraught with difficulty and expressing a bankrupt philosophy of vigilantism and circular anger, where there is no justice, forgiveness or unconditional love (a concept that bears looking at). In Spanish the word for straight and the opposite of left is derecho, which originally refers to wind storms that are not like the tornado (tornillo, screw), which twists and turns, so derecho means a strong straight-moving wind.  In the criminal oriented lingo, culturally, we talk about going ‘straight’ or being an upright citizen and about doing thing ‘right’.  The crooks are the criminals who are crooked.  The gays are ‘bent’.  The definition of the word ‘definitive’ (a word sung by the Indigo Girls): A definitive answer is a final one; a decision by a court of law is one that will not be changed; means authoritative, conclusive, final, absolute, ultimate, supreme, a defining or limiting word. I think it also means to show the shape of and I am veering towards crooked more than rectilinear as a model for, well, beauty and truth and morality. I favor  cultural thinking that respects un-straightness as being ‘closer to fine’ ; as in, ‘every little thing is going to be just fine’.

The arrival of fractals and, especially, the work of “Benoit Mandelbrot ( 1924 – 2010) who was a Polish-born, French and American mathematician and polymath with broad interests in the practical sciences, especially regarding what he labeled as "the art of roughness" of physical phenomena and "the uncontrolled element in life".  He referred to himself as a "fractalist" and is recognized for his contribution to the field of fractal geometry, which included coining the word "fractal", as well as developing a theory of "roughness and self-similarity" in nature.” – Wikipedia

The Mandelbrot set is the set of complex numbers that are, basically, Z (squared) + c (a constant), resulting in absolutely amazing and dazzling shapes, twisting and turning and feeding itself in both large and small scales, infinitely and fractals and self-similarity turn out to be profoundly universal and are easily seen on coast lines and drainage system. What is important here is that the natural world displays crookedness constantly on all scales (having self-similarity) and so what we see and experience every moment that we view landscapes and viewscapes of all sorts are crooked lines; curves where, for instance, the human body can be very similar in shaping to sand dunes or hill country; jagged, craggy, roughly domed and almost never, ever straight.  The horizon looks straight, but that is because it is so far away.  A grass stem is straight-ish but never perfectly straight in any way shape or form, but immediately punctuated with curves as it works with gravity, leaves and tufts, gradations of girth. 

The Greeks concentrated on geometry and proportion and eschewed numbers as somehow ugly, leading to the Socratic notions of ideal perfection at the root of all good.  This fed very well into western civilizations values for centuries, only recently broken by the ultimately compelling notions of Einstein where space is variable and curveable and time is not absolute, where spooky entanglement and quantum physics blasted into our world and is zeroing in on our consciousness, bit by bit.  Numbers and being and nothingness and uneven-ness rise up as the new norm. 

So why do we refer to straight as being good and crooked as being bad.  Here is my argument:  I think that most religions and our more obscessive-compulsive sorts of value systems are based on the idea that we need to conform to rigid ideas, adhere to the ‘priests’’ admonitions to be spiritual and do not get attached to ‘things’.  Immediately, there is an irony, because the word spirit in Hebrew, for instance, is rua, which is the word for wind, but if I think of wind, I immediately think of swirls.  Because the wind is mostly invisible, I get the connection, but I want to meander here in favor of even ‘spiritual’ being un-straight.   In my mind, preachers do not want the general population to be attached to things because the church, as it were, often grabs the things themselves and keep the populace tithing and staying relatively poor and humble.  That may be a jaded comment, but I think that there are reasons for maintaining the wealth and the male chauvinist adultist power structures that are entangled with obsessions of various sorts (including depicting nature and the forest as dark and ominous; roots and branches as witch habitat) and trying to redirect the cultures around them to shape up to these rigid value systems.  It is well known that religions, in particular, have projected humans and especially male domination over the earth, the natural world, women and, sadly, children.  So nature (crookedness) is pitted against the church (straightness) and other OCD-based values in this culture and I think it needs to change and the people need to think of nature as full of light, among other aspects, and crooked as a wonderful natural value (like fractals and landscapes) and that straight and narrow is just that; anti natural and narrow minded.  If we do not do this, we will not be able to progress as a civilization, as we will poink ourselves and shoot ourselves in the foot with our own words, which actually  help guide our consciousness and our daily behavior.

As a ‘natural’ artist, these concepts are particularly poignant; my spheres are more like buffalo gourds, whose lines are wonderfully natural, as our eyes naturally discern.  The shapes of tree roots and branches can engage in ‘Lovetangles’  that resemble animated humans.  I do not hate straight lines, in fact, as a furniture maker I routinely work with table saws and tools of all sorts that chew out sharpness and straightness.  I think the world can, though, shift some of the subtleties around and land on fertile ground for working with and respecting the successful nature of crookedness and subtle touches of being hand-made and more in tune with the natural world, which is not a perfect sphere!

There was a crooked man and he had a crooked smile; he found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile;  he bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse; they all lived together in a crooked little house; well this crooked little man and his crooked little smile; He took his crooked sixpence and he walked a crooked mile; He bought some crooked nails and a crooked little bat and he fixed his roof with a rat-tat-tat-tat-tat. They ate a crooked dinner on a very crooked table; in came a crooked horse; from a crooked stable; they all had crooked dishes, in many crooked styles and after every bite, they smiled great crooked smiles.

Or…

There was a crooked man who had a crooked smile; who lived in a shoe…for a while … grew up wild..."

Again, there is a wonderful story that I heard about a tree in the forest and the young tree was bent over and crooked for some reason and all the other trees were straight and tall, overly proud and condescending and the tree was sad because it was so different and thought itself ugly, but then the foresters came and cut down all the straight trees for wood and left the crooked one standing and the lesson is that being different and curved and full of character is sometimes a really good thing.

According to the most common thinking regarding the origin of this rhyme, the character, “crooked man”, could be Scottish General Sir Alexander Leslie, set in the early 17th century during the reign of Charles I of England when, despite the animosities on the border between the English and the Scottish, a peaceful coexistence was needed and, I guess, found. Differences were tolerated and made more interesting; similar to the crooked tree story.

-Art Young

Happy Meandering!

                                            -Thor Sigstedt, Sept 6, 2019

This photo by Gabrielle Campos was printed in the Pasatiempo for their April 19, 2019 issue as a teaser in the Table of Contents for the article by Paul Weideman:  https://www.santafenewmexican.com/pasatiempo/art/from-buffalo-gourds-to-cast-iron-pours-artist-thor-sigstedt/article_2495a29e-a64a-59d6-abb1-6e3f79e51806.html

I think she did a great job as the photographer.  More soon....

http://adventuretrailsranch.com        more information is on the special event page of Thor's website 

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