Re-inventing the Wheel of Life

I/we are reinventing the homestead. I, we, Changing Mother Earth, Heavenly Father, Teachers and Guides: "the old gray farm, it ain't what it used to be..."

Horse-drawn plow and cultivators from an old farm in SE Vermont, 1940 manure spreader from Burton Hodges' 300-acre farm, old seed drill from farm on North Troy, a 30+ year-old draft work mule from the Amish renamed Ahab... 65 year-old half-breed farmer outa Multitudinous, West VA, 64 year-old gardener outa Paris-Haiti-NY-JP, Mass., and a teacher, finally--a true teacher outa Quero Apaches in New Mex. Her presence is a spiritual fact here... The reborn farm awaiting grandchildren coming home...

So we bought this 10-acre 200-yr-old farm in the dead [ahhh...] of winter... Snow melted, revealing 8 acres of stumps, highly acidic soil from the now-departed softwood trees, and a fair amount of hard clay. Bought this farm to farm the land... shucks. De-stumped for three years: first bulldozed West pasture; did it correctly the following year (no bulldozing--used an excavator), and cleared & seeded the North pasture.

South and West pastures seeded for horses last year--horse and mule are now chowing down out there--not haying them 'cept a bushel of tall grass which Paris scythes... Donkey, Clair-audient, stays in her barn 'cause of the deerflies. And that is her listening-tuning station.

Oh, a garden near the rental house and West garden soon to be fenced in and cultivated and planted with what's being germinated indoors. Inch by inch, we are getting there! All sorts of loving guiding, ancestral and otherwise, spirits.

Worksongs, Headphones, North Pasture Stumps

Rhythm to sustain. An extra dimension of creativity.

Headphones and rhythms--sustaining momentum: joyful workings: dissolving the Puritanical stiffness into poetic flowings. "That ain't the way we do things around here..." We just don't work to the cadence of brain-chatter, see? So you just work, think, comment & chatter, finish up, and naturally go listen to the news or a talk show for a couple hours.

Nah. Work songs to dissolve precisely that mindless chattering into oneness. Yeah, them headphones only look funny and threatening to some--and they add joy and heartfelt appreciation to others... Get the left-brained tyranny outta its own way Archie... and the Tao in the barn manure -- and in the new garden, and in your/my body -- can naturally discover a whole new now, together.

In maybe 7 hours, the removal of the up-rooted stumps in the North Pasture will begin, and hopefully be completed... Are we creating the land--the landscaping? Re-creating it?

I don't know, my inner eye is seeing and feeling the terrain under what is now an elephant grave yard of tree-stumps and logs, and I see the musical/flowing potential of that 2.5 acres, as well as listening to expert agriculture advice on what to do with the land next...

I would like to think my choice will come out of the song that is in the land, earth and eight-directions vibration 'singings'.
No matter what my 'inner realist' tries to impose onto the land, the horses, wind, rain, crops are gonna have the final say-so. And the musical life/aliveness in my limbs, amplified and sustained through these earphones, is going to bring me all that much closer and quicker to that mysterious 'yes'.

Just listening to the bull frogs, guinea hens, donkey hee haws, horse neighs, mule grunts, wind, and yes, the music from the radio or head phones, gives me a vision; a movement into, towards LIFE. Towards appreciation...

Going for Broke

Tilled guest garden & a part of the West garden -- and new tiller broke. 1947 Case tractor broke. Old sturdy disc harrow broke. Maybe I need to listen to messages carried on the wind ...

Dance of the 4-Leggeds

Put electric tape & posts into the maybe 3-acre West pasture -- for the mule and the haflinger -- along the creek beds. Black flies on my back, in my hair, ears, elbows, pants... along the creek.

Had to be done--the mule devoured everything edible out in the South pasture; scalped all the oats & timothy & clover out there in no time flat. Then, alongsde the mule, the haflinger thinks she is a starving 4-legged state-of-the-art muncher. Ate up the grass in what was the goat garden -- now brown dirt. Out there, right now, munching & competing with one another -- two kids fighting for 2nds on desert.

Mammoth donkey gave up on them -- watches from afar, "Plenty to eat around here y'all... just chill..."

Heat wave coming Tuesday; got swarming flying insects manure to shit-shovel; fly bite swellings all over my body--feel like 80 ... Gardener says 'too dry--no commercial garden this year, just eats for family and friends and the very hungry [been there].

Put red, blue & orange ribbon tape on the electric tape line so the moose might walk on by. Gave the moose the SW pasture as a trade off -- worked for two years... except for the young moose buck that acts like it's in a romantic swoon for my Clair mammoth donkey. Go pick on a MOOSE yer own size...

Impatience!!

Impatience is my chief feature--the primary self: wanna see results NOWWW!! Black or white/either-or, qualifiers: all or nothing. Either it was a total transformative event, or it wasn't.

How I sabotage wisdom, intuition, love, abundance. Just slow down to the pace of the heartdrum-beating in the bones--the mindful, warm breath--as if I have arrived.

Tractor still broken. Rain and snow abated for a couple days. Mantis tilling, horse-fence rebuilding. Moving stumps and branches.

West garden & the Medicine wheel... Eototo: wind ices up half my body--left side warm: yin and yang.

Mule Fence

Mule fence is started--just waiting for Dennis and his trusty bulldozer to arrive tomorrow and finish the stump pulling/relocation job he created late last Fall. Pulled stumps have been shedding their rich topsoil from the ganglion-like roots, and waiting all winter for the bulldozer to move the entire tangle of stumps 50' along the back dirt road,so we can stump dem mooses crossing there and pulling apart my horse fences.

Steph already went to work yesterday with the lighter weight stumps -- creating the beginnings of the soon-to-be-the-end-of-the-Mount-Harmony-Farm-moose-crossing.

The new double-ized double-duty Mantis cultivator is assembled and at work on the carriage house guest house garden...

I am chain-sawing broken branches all over the farm...

Bear and Goose

Bear[Eototo] decapitates/eviscerates goose [Nene], leaving intact an incompletely-formed egg inside her.

Mother Goose and I have an intimacy. Only, my head is in the way. Now it 'comes down to' honoring, by listening to my heart's yes & no, and I-don't-know -yet. I can choose to listen, and ask "What do I want truly, goose and child-man Marc?

The Harvardians arrive. They study the trail of goose feathers. "It was definitely a bear that took your goose. You see, the bear got the suet and emptied all the sunflower seeds from your feeders, even twisted your iron feeders--it musta been ravenous."

"Nah, it is connected to my doo-wha-gon-chada" I blurt out, speaking before thinking. They study me very hard.

"Hey folks, I ain't a trail of goose feathers. I ain't a this or a that. I am a me, I am Goose."

So, how about the timing of the inner me/myself/and I, and the external timing of interrupted farming after upset--the most authentic, creative blending of the two: I completely rely on my new-found inner guides to navigate this ever-changing, unfamiliar agriculture/farm reconstruction landscaping. Three years ago, for example, I converted what had been goat paddocks into lush, generative vegetable gardens, which I sold at local markets. Last year, with all the rain, it turned the gardens' organic fertilizer, years of labor, raised beds, mature manure & returning crops--into an aquarium--a fishbowl.

This year, this agriculture year--it is gonna be, for me, about the how before the what. Sorry, I am here for the poetry folks. Turn up the music mate. The bear don't lose track of the scent of her path to her cave/den, no matter what--and goose is in the bear cave/den, with her golden eggs.