Jamie facilitating a Constellation
So, I begin to gain a little confidence with adding media and such to my site. Here will be a first post (I hope) with an audio clip of me speaking about divorce at a Family Constellation Workshop. Please do let me know if you couldn’t open it or hear it and, most of all, what you thought about the content of what is being said.
I am sitting in my favorite coffee shop in Lincoln, NE following a two-day blizzard. I think I am done posting items about our construction project–the straw bale house. We still have lots to do but will probably table it now until spring. Mudding in the winter does not quite work. There is a woman singing here in the coffee shop. A woman on an accordion is accompanying her as she sings and plays the cello. Her music is much like a chant–droning lyrics and harmonic sounds. I like it and it kicks me into an interior space. She just invited the audience to join her in an improve–give her the subject. Somebody said flowers and another said orchids–and whiskey.
On the way down to Lincoln Milt and I had a lot of time to explore our lives. We both realized that there is a theme to most of the work that we do. We care about whatever it takes to build a strong inner core of strength (and humanity). I know for me that it doesn’t matter whether I am writing, teaching, doing constellation work, doing Bead People project or, or, or, I’m always working toward building that core in myself and others.
Lately I’ve been noticing that the advertising, the programs on television, the internet–everywhere I turn adults are being portrayed as selfish children. They whine, act stupid, and disrespect one another. I keep trying to figure out what is going on in our world. Why has it become fashionable to be a brat? And if our world is full of children and brats, who will take care of the important matters that need tending to? We should be fighting against the dumbing down of our society, and we should be fighting harder now more than ever. I don’t know if anybody has seen that silly woman on the Target ads but I, for one, will do no shopping at Target this year. It may be a small action but it makes me feel better.
When I wrote Albert’s Manuscript, I was struck by the vision it contained of the gigantic, spiraling movements of humankind on earth. First Man told Albert in his vision that there would be four great movements in the human spiral. Interestingly,they all begin with a ‘W’. The Walkers, The Watchers, The Weavers–and the Weepers (or Whiners). Albert learned that in this time, at the end of “The Wind of a Thousand Years,” we must be careful to nurture the children because they will be the weavers of the new world. I think this is much more than just a story. I just posted this book as an ebook at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/6758 This was also the story that came before the shorter “Bead People” version, so I hope you will take a look.
I can’t seem to decide what course my own life should take right now. Part of me wants to retreat from the good fight (against creating a nation of selfish children) and another part of me wants to push ahead and do workshops and offer alternatives for parents, partners, and individuals. It feels like most of my adult life has been focused on helping others to achieve their own creative potential. Am I achieving my own? Am I standing strong and solidifying my own inner core? That will be the question on my mind over the next months.
On a lighter note, I made a mountain of lefse with my grandchildren today. They had a snow day and we had a lot of fun. I guess that is part of my mission–watching those little weavers grow and gain strength. They have wonderful, brilliant minds and I love to be around them.
Jamie
Today, at last, we began applying the plaster to our straw bale cabin. Never mind that it is nearly October 1-we are getting there. The work has been grueling, but we continue to push on and it feels like we turned a corner today. We bought an old stucco spraying machine for $300 and we just weren’t sure whether we could get all the crap cleaned out of it enough for it to do the job. Today, my brother Jeff came over with a magical machine that he called an air chisel and he banged the old cement out of that machine. Later, with a few false starts (pulling tiny plugs of cement out of it) we were able to put the clay slip on one whole side. It was a sweet moment! I also mixed my first batch of plaster and plugged the spaces around the earth bags on two sides. We are not quite baled in but will be within a few days. The work is slow but so satisfying. And I can’t tell you how great it is to watch that open space become a home. I love it. Even though my hands ache and my body is more tired than I thought possible at this age (I will be 56 in Oct.), I would not choose to be anywhere else doing anything else.
My little $20 cement mixer is doing an amazing job of turning sand, clay, water and straw into a durable material for plastering. It becomes this giant doughy lump inside of the machine until the only thing I can do is grab it out with my hands in big clumps.
Milt and I have dreamed about building a home just like this for 20 years. We had children, bills, jobs, etc., but we never let go of the dream. Now, it I amazing to really be doing it. Although we are probably two to three weeks out, we are already thinking about lighting a pretty fire and cooking a nice meal in our new home. I am dreaming about my garden next summer and the summer kitchen I will build to process all of the garden goodies. We have in mind chickens and Cornish hens to deal with the bugs and further enhance our diet. I think winter will come and go in an eye blink and we will be refreshed and ready for phase two. Next summer we plan to build the summer kitchen and small studios, one for Milt and one for me.
So many things have come together to help us put this dream together. I don’t know how I will ever thank my brothers especially. You cannot imagine how nice it has been to have a metal shop just across the field. Today I walked over to the shop and asked if they could make me a mixing paddle to attach to a drill-fifteen minutes later I was walking home with two varieties. They are magicians with metal.
For those of you who have been reading my blog for awhile, you may have noticed a dramatic shift between my concerns for students in Pine Ridge and my current concern for whether mud and straw will stick to a wall of straw or earth bags. My love for teaching and writing is still alive and well-it is just that with Mother Nature pulling inward again toward winter, I have to keep my priorities straight. My choices are to push forward and hope for the best-or go back to Rapid City. We are pushing forward.
Blessing to all. May all the forces of nature converge and give you exactly what you want! Like my guru says, Grace and Self-Effort are the two wings of progress.
Jamie
No, I am not feeling down. I wandered into the woods today and picked my first quart of wild blueberries. Heaven. As I was picking I kept hearing songs in my head that had the word “blue” in them. And yes, I was singing to the berries. It was fun to crank my body around with something besides raking and belly dancing.
Things are coming together for building our strawbale. We got set back a bit when the “indestructable” tamarack logs we bought last summer were rotten. Since we want to start with good materials, Milt has been out searching out the log situation. I think he has it covered now and the roof should go up maybe next week. Then we play with straw. I think we will be like the three little pigs. After the straw house, I want to build a stick house (cord wood), and one from brick (cob). For now I have been breaking down mountains of slash and spreading the composted dirt over the “yard.” Do you call it a yard when there are ten acres of undeveloped woods and field? I guess it will be–I planted grass seed into part of it today.
It is time for me to get back to my own writing. I can feel the itch begin to build and I think I will start with returning to the novel “Still Mountain” which I never finished. Or maybe morning pages to see what is “composting” down inside of me.
Tomorrow we start a three day festival in Cass Lake with the Bead People. I am looking forward to it but I want it to warm up. The blueberries must like this cold weather but I am longing for a bit of sun and heat. We have been running our small heater in the camper to stay warm. Brrr.
Life in the northwoods . . .
Jamie
I couldn’t let this day end without writing at least a short post. It was quite a day. We shipped the textbook to the printer today along with a few quick prayers for it being as error free as it can be at this time. To celebrate, I got on the Bobcat for the first time and dug into my slash pile. I am usually a bit intimidated by pieced of equipment that are that much bigger than I am. But I have to admit, I got what could possibly have been a testosterone rush. I have been plucking at that small mountain with a garden rake and this was definitely the right tool for the job.
Then, to further top off an amazing day, our rafters were delivered this morning at 8:30 am, and at sunset we swam in a wonderful lake appropriately called “Grace Lake.”
I still have quite a bit of work to do on the Instructor’s Manual for the textbook,, but for the first time since I left South Dakota, I felt free. This Saturday we are doing a Bead People event and I just spent an hour with a wonderful magazine called Northwoods Woman. I had to smile because the fiction story in it seemed so, so familiar-my kind of story. Do you suppose that is it for me? I am a Northwoods woman who has found her way home again? I have been out in South Dakota for over 30 years. The other day I couldn’t resist checking up on my favorite blueberry path to see how “my” berries are coming along.
Life is good.
Jamie
We have been on the run since our trip to NYC. Milt has been re-editing Video Letters From Prison based on the great info we got from Fernanda. In the meantime, the plot for our strawbale has been leveled and a load of clay arrived on the property today. Now that he got the rough cut done, we will be seriously looking at “rasising the roof” and laying the foundation for our new house. I feel a little bit like I am in a dream. I’ve had a pattern in my life of not really believing good things can happen to me. It is strange, because great things DO happen to me. My life is blessed beyond what I could ever have asked for, and yet I look at that leveled plot of land and have trouble “seeing” the house there. I’m working on it–both my belief systems and my vision.
I remember when my dad built our first house. I was in junior high and the housebuilding took two years and all of our help. My sister Becky and I used to sit on the floor (no walls or roof) of our “bedroom” and dream about when we would be actually sleeping there. In the winter we used to jump off the “floor” into the snowdrifts below. I can remember digging ditches, nailing siding, and doing whatever else was required. I also remember that we had to move in before it was done and our living space was the downstairs “rumpus” room. I think that is was an early name for “family room.” There were 7 children and my mom and dad but we did take over the bedrooms so it wasn’t totally a camp out.
June 18th was the anniversary of my Dad’s death. It was also the day my parent’s married and my sister’s birthday. She was born one year after they married. I think, since I am thinking about Dad and building houses, I will post a little thing I wrote about him several years ago.
Later,
Jamie
My Father’s Hands
Last night I dreamed my father gave me a beaded bag with trails of heart-shaped beads wandering across the pale cloth. Something in my soul wants to finger the trail of beads to discover what he meant by this gift. Does he mean follow this trail, my darling girl, the trail that is both made of the heart and leads to the heart?
So many books about mothers and daughters, fathers and sons-but what of the daughter caught by a golden thread to her father’s soul? What of that child?
I am a grown woman, a grandmother now, who looks down at her own stubby fingers one day and sees her father’s hands. They are not the hands of a piano player or a dancer but the sturdy hands of labor, of getting things done, of endurance and strength. Iremembers his hands in one scene and then another: tying myskates in winter, sketching the walls of his new house, or solving an intricate problem on paper as if each blunt fingertip had its very own brain, and only when his hands moved could he think.
I remember the warmth and strength of his hands as he kneaded the calves of mylegs late in the night when growing pains hurt badly enough to wake me up crying. I see his hands holding cards in a favorite game of whist or bridge or gently patting the shoulder of a friend he meets on the street. I see his two hands resting on a steering wheel while driving to Grandma’s house or holding the very edges of the Sunday paper after church, a plate of powdered-sugar donuts hidden on the other side of the news. I remember the way my father’s hands would pick up my needlepoint project and run the yarn through six rows tugging just a little too tightly so that I could always see in the tapestry of the finished work, his rows beside my own.
It is his hands I see holding a Louis L’Amour book late in the evening letting go only to take a sip of the beer warming on the side table; his hands building two of our houses to shelter those he loved most; his hands fashioning the ugliest boat ever out of wood and plank; his hands turning wood, twisting metal, picking berries–and then building a special screen to roll the berries down to clean them.
I see his hands playfully slapping my mother’s backside or holding her against the fridge to steal a kiss, and his hands wielding the razor that plowed a smooth path across his lathered chin while I, sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, waitied for the moment when he would turn and growl and try to kiss my cheek like a rabid dog until Iscreamed and ran out of the bathroom giggling.
All of this I see in an instant when I look down and see my own square hands, so sturdy and strong.
And then I see his hands, swollen and bruised, a blueberry stain on the back where the IV had kept him alive for three more minutes, five more minutes, and then that last and final breath, of death. And then he was gone, living on in the short fingers of my own hands that crack in the winter just like his did.
My father’s hands.
(Note: My father married on June 18, had the first of eight children on June 18, and died on June 18. It was Father’s Day on the day he passed on.)
Today was an odd day. The sun was shining and there was a cool breeze–a perfect day for gardening. I planted dill, replanted my tomatoes, added some cukes (replacing the frozen ones) and then began to feel guilty for not working on the text book project or Video Letters. I snitted around a bit and then asked Milt to add a small table to our trailer so that I could spread out the three working manuscripts I need for the text book project. Within 30 minutes I was spread out in a corner of our trailer. The table will have to come down in time for the bed to come out–but it was so pleasant I got a lot done.
It is challenging living with less and making the best of small things. I like it. It makes me feel light on the earth, which was one of my goals. I look at that comma before which and wonder is that right? The text book I am editing is a grammar book, and I dream about dependent and independent clauses at the moment. I am hoping to have this part of the project wrapped up within a week and off to the printers.
“Going Green” has become a marketing tactic. I find that very interesting and a bit paradoxical because what we really need is to use less and find other ways to fullfill our desires. I think the spirit longs for great things and when we do not feed it great things, it settles for the small things.
One other thing I did today was work with a tiny space beneath a spruce tree. I’d found this metal bushal bin in the woods behind our trailer yesterday, and I have decided to turn it into my “Lisa” garden. I erected the “drift kabob” my sister gave me last summer (a metal rod with artistically drilled and stacked pieces of driftwood on it)/ Beside the bucket and the driftwood is a small windchime our niece gave us long ago. It is one of the few pretties that came with us to MN. What is a Lisa garden? When my daughter got married one of the guest gifts was a small packet of flower seed with their name and wedding date printed on the package. I ‘ve carried that around with me since they got married and now I plan to plant a mini Lisa garden. I think I will plant a small garden for each of my children, and whenever I tend it I’ll imagine all the good things that are growing or will grow in their lives as they mature.
I think the berry patch belongs to my mom. Last summer when I was maniacally picking blueberries, I was in the patch that my mom and I used to pick before she died. Even now, over a decade later, I would lift my head and imagine I could hear her calling my name. We used to call out to each other as we wandered the woods to keep from getting lost or too far apart. W also planted two Concord grape vines in there this afternoon.
I love that garden. It is across the meadow from my trailer and my newly developing gardens because we needed immediate access to water last summer.
It is clear that I am beginning to unwind from a hectic winter and spring. I’m not sure where my thoughts will take me. I just now overheard a couple screaming at each other, throwing the ‘f’ word around and calling each other effing stupid. I think about how gently I pulled those grape vines from their bucket this afternoond, taking care to expose as little as possible, adding water immediately, covering them quickly. People need to care for each other just as gently. We should watch our mouths. We need to be awake and aware and active. Now. In 20 years of marriage I have never used that word with Milt. Why would I want to hurt someone that I love?
For those of you who are tuning in, friends and strangers alike, take good care of those you love–the yield will be beyond measure.
Jamie
Today I wandered around and kicked up hills in the sand and dirt and planted acorn squash and pumpkin. I thought it would be fun to see all these plants just roaming whereever they want to go. In my small garden in Rapid City I had to contain and train and cajole them to stay put. One year I had a pumpkin plant that took over nearly the whole garden.
I am experimenting with different things. In one spot I tried a “trench garden” where you dig a three foot deep trench, fill it with trash paper and cardboard, and the fill it in and plant on top of it. In another spot I tried bag gardening–bags of topsoil with the tops cut off and the seed sewn right into the bag. It is supposed to be a good way to start a first year garden. I only put greens and cilantro in those. Maybe I’ll call my pumpkin and squash garden “Free range squash.” I still have two grapevines to put in and then I need to replace my tomatoes and cukes. I also created a “Tool Tipi” today. That was fun–two trashy looking closet doors destined for the dump came together to provide a shelter for my rakes and shovels. It actually looks kind of cool. I stapled a rice bag over the top to give it a little more water protection.
The sun shone. The ticks roamed. The mosquitos smiled. And it was a wonderful few hours under the newly blue sky. There is just something about working with dirt and sand and my own trash pile that makes me happy. And then I ended the day with my second belly dancing class. My sister and two pretty nieces are all taking belly dancing lessons. They are one session ahead of me but I can shimmy with the best of them. I am not sure if my right hip aggrees, but that is what happens when a 55 year old woman shimmys.
Next week we fly to New York City to work with a “film doctor”. Fernanda is going to spend a day asking us questions about Video Letters From Prison and helping us to hear our own answers. No mystery as to why we chose her to work with! Gaydell–thanks for signing on. I miss you! When I figure this straw bale thing out I still may come and plant one on your land. Tell those other bear lodge eaters to sign on, too.
I’ll keep you posted,
Jamie
Tonight I am realizing that it is time to decide what to do with the time I have just freed up. It has been raining, cold, and gray and my old Minnesota depression threatens to return. I need some new goals. A long time ago when I found myself in a similar situation, I decided to ride it out for awhile and see what the greater forces wanted me to do. I entered a quiet period of aloneness and meditation and that is a little how I feel right now. I’m nearly done with the text book I’ve been editing and Milt has become fully immersed in producing his film, Video Letters from Prison.
Now what? I can’t be sure if family constellation and teaching are still up for me. Time will tell, I guess. I do know that we will be breaking ground on our strawbale house sometime in the next week–rain or shine. My first goal will be to learn how to put pictures on my blog! How is that for a short term goal? And how about if I make a goal to add something to my blog every day.
What is your goal? What direction are you heading in?
Jamie
After a week of getting settled, I’m finally feeling here. On May 22 I went off contract with Oglala Lakota College, and then I went to Lincoln, NE to watch my grandkids for a week. Now, I am back in our little tiny trailer in the north woods of Cass Lake, Minnesota. It is pretty wild. Not the land but the fact that we would sell most of our stuff, clear it all out, quit a good, steady job, and leave to live in a 8 x 16 foot trailer. I’ve had moments of thinking we must be nuts, and other moments of taking a deep breath and falling into my body. All 24 of my blueberry plants survived the winter. I sat one day and plucked or cut all the pretty blooms off so that the plants could have another year to get established. I wonder what I need to do to get established?
Since we already had a substantial bit of land tilled up and fenced for the berries, we decided this year to just put a few vegetables in there and concentrate on building our house. Unfortunately, it has been so cold that the cukes and tomatoes we bought froze last night-on June 5th. Unbelievable! I obviously don’t need to worry that I am getting my garden in too late.
A lot has been accomplished in just over a week. The power folks came in and put our electricity in and the next day my brother’s showed up and helped us pound a well. Milt and I “witched” the spot we wanted for the well. My brothers gave us each a pair of slim rods bent just enough to hold in the palm of your hands. We walked all over the area near where we want to build. It is amazing how those slim rods seem to have their own energy and slide through our hands and cross over the “water spots.” We chose the place where it was strongest for both of us and we got water within 12 feet. We pounded down to 20 feet and then added a pump. When we tested, we were getting ten gallons per minute.
As much as I love puttering and planting and playing with this bit of land, I also want to settle into myself to see what is next for me. I have left behind the regular family constellation work I was doing, my full time teaching job, plus all of my other creative pursuits. What now? I am hoping that an irresistible urge to write comes over me at some point but I’ve decided not to even push that. I am not going for a subsistence kind of lifestyle-just a simpler and healthier one. I love that crystal clear water flowing from my well, and the berries blooming on my bushes. (Although I did do a terrible bloomicide.)
So, stay posted and I will see what comes up. Milt and I have two big projects that we are finishing and then hopefully the warm weather will come and we will begin building our strawbale house. We staked it out the other day and got it approved. Exciting.
Onward,
Jamie