A Very Lucky Man

This week two guys have been working at my house, sanding and staining the windows.  From 7 to 4 every day they've had a front row seat for my life.  Today I was leaving the house and I got to chatting with one of the guys.  As I wheeled my bike to the truck he said, "you're a very lucky man."

These Days

My uncle Dan gave me a Glen Campbell recording for my road trip.  Southern Nights and Gentle on My Mind are my favorites, but I was struck by These Days, a Jackson Browne song.  Listening to Glen sing I was reminded of an incredible performance of Pony by Tony Rice.  Both songs are written by individuals other than the performers but both songs capture these men at the end of their careers and both songs sound like they were written for them.

"I don't do too much dreamin' these days"

If you want to view paradise...

simply look around and view it.

Sometimes marketing works in ways I hadn't expected.  Pair a haunting version of Pure Imagination by Fiona Apple with a stark view of the reality of our food landscape and this is what you get.

Say what you will about Chipotle.  It's probably the same things you could say about Whole Foods, but the reality we face is that so long as the Market is deemed the ultimate in our food system, large scale distributers like Chipotle and Whole Foods have a tremendous opportunity to change the system from within while the local, non-GMO and organic movements seek to change it from without.  If you need food fast, it's good to know that at least one fast-food chain seeks to find harmony, or at the very least, elevate the conversation.

Covered

"The story goes like this: A decade ago, the 22-year-old Siskind cuts a remarkable album with producer Tucker Martine (Decemberists, Beth Orton) and guitar god Bill Frisell. Then Siskind gets sick. Very sick. The album disappears. Enter Justin Vernon, who stumbles upon a copy. His band, Bon Iver, happens. Vernon starts his own label and rescues Siskind’s criminally neglected work, whose emotional rawness is typified by this song’s sly chorus. “Baby, I got you covered,” Siskind coos, before completing her thought. “So covered, you won’t get out.”

"The record is layers and layers thick.  Sarah's voice, earthy and mournful, is brilliantly offset by Bill Frisell's dreamy guitar work.  The songs themselves play like a collection of tiny novellas leading you from one scene of quiet longing to another.  The album is moody, mysterious.  Even the album art is plain black and white, Sarah never looking directly at her audience.  It was only with many listens, weaving through the intricate ribbons of guitar and root-bound vocalise, that I began to unravel the stories, rich in detail and reverie."

Sources:

http://www.nodepression.com/profiles/blogs/sarah-siskind-un-covered

(From Covered, chigliak.com/artists/sarah-siskind)

Sunliner debut at Four Corners Folk Festival

Sarah and I have been making plans for a duo project named Sunliner.  Our first show under the name Sunliner went off Sunday at the Four Corners Folk Festival, fittingly, the place we first met.  It was completely inspiring, I'm looking forward to our finding time and a budget to record this amazing music.

Ruby was serenaded backstage by Darrell Scott.  Lucky girl.

Summer Garden

Greens for days and thriving Three Sisters.

Garden

My relationship with this piece of land continues to evolve.  Last night as I was digging cucumber sprouts out of the compost (volunteers make for great gardens) I unearthed a family of mice living in my compost heap.  Twice I uncovered them, intending to disturb their home, send them packing, but both times, as I watched the adorable baby mice squirm, I was reminding of my own adorable baby and   both times I recovered the mice and decided to let them be.  Before heading to bed, I set a mouse trap in the pantry and this morning there was a fat healthy mouse in the trap.  Mom?  Dad?  Maybe those mice won't make it after all...

I'm on my fourth or fifth reading of Michael Pollan's first book, Second Nature.  Most recognize Pollan from his blockbuster The Omnivores Dilemma, or the curious Botany of Desire but his finest work, I believe, is found in his discussion of man's place in the world.  Second Nature explores his relationship with an abandoned farm that he slowly works into a true garden.  Not a garden in the American sense of the word, all tomatoes and carrots, but a garden more in the English sense, a landscape consisting of grasses, trees, plants, and of course, vegetables.  His discussion of nature is particularly interesting to me.  There are few places in this world that are untouched by man, and arguably, due to our effect on air and climate, there are none.  As stewards of this earth, or at least as enlightened being living on it, we have an opportunity, if not a responsibility, to see our place in it as natural and not alien, and to use the tools and knowledge at our disposal to shape the landscape, to consult "the genius of the place" as he would say, and to find a best-use scenario that encompasses the needs of every plant and animal in it, not the least of which, our own.

I've found as I grow older, as I work in and with the land, planting and cutting, weeding and digging, that my careful input has a greater and more positive impact on the land than merely letting nature run it's course.  Living on this piece of property has given me added perspective, for here is a place that has not been "natural" for many years.  If you poke around the fields and woods you will find old rusted plows with 40 year old trees growing up among the tines.  30 year old locust trees dominate a once thriving boxwood grove.  Only through careful, meticulous and consistent editing (a fancy word for weeding with a chainsaw) has this land begun to emerge as something more than a random collection of woods, planted and otherwise, and fields.

So it is with the saw, the weedeater, the mower and the hand clipper that I reclaim and shape this place, this garden.  Our traditional vegetable garden encompasses several square feet (for now) but I see this entire place as a garden, 80 acres begging for attention because the oaks can't fight the locust and the paradise trees on their own.  Trails give access to the far corners and now that spring has sprung, the spaces are truly gaining their character.  My time and energy is limited, but my vision is not.   To abandon this place "to nature" would be unnatural.  It's a garden, a place where humans and mice (and one fat raccoon) live in harmony, so long as they stay out of the pantry.