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Linger

February 10, 2019 by The Noisy Plume

I was telling a friend recently that the new year is a funny thing. We act like we get to go forth with a clean slate on the first day of the year but everything feels the same: life is all piled up all around, wobbling and wibbling in the wind. Despite all this “starting over” new year stuff, life is replete with brimming inboxes, half-finished projects on my studio bench, the letters I need to respond to, the grocery lists, the shrinking wood pile, the unreturned phone calls…stacks and stacks of living to do, tasks to never catch up with — part of me wants to catch up with it all and take a moment to swing the cat by the tail but I know it’s impossible. There is no amnesty! The new year demands us onward!

Well, I’m in rebellion. As usual. Big surprise.

I guess I can feel the shadow of the fire season upon us and I just want to take my doggone time. Some switch in me has been flipped. I can’t do this dawn until dusk workworkwork business anymore. There has to be space inbetween when I can let my hair down, put on my muck boots and a good wool layer and step out the door with the dogs to explore the river bank, unfold my lungs, crackle my back, listen to the rapids and the herons and the hawks. I’ve got to be able to saddle up and ride out if the sky demands it of me. Most importantly, I’ve got to be able to do these things without a guilt ladened heart, without apology. I have this one life to live, I want it to move more slowly, be more moderate in pace. Adagio…allegro…somewhere in between.

Today, down on the river, after breakfast but before second tea, we went strolling. The sky was breaking in the West, clouds shoveling off North and South of the canyon, a slip of blue sky on the horizon. Song birds were winging and singing, the river a blue rush of mountain water headed elsewhere. I lingered there, blond as last years rabbit brush blooms and just as easy in the wind.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: home, idaho, snake river, winter

I Must Go

March 3, 2018 by The Noisy Plume

I’m going to the ocean tomorrow and the thought of leaving the high desert causes me to feel a small, quiet anguish. Leaving the high desert, leaving my home canyon, leaving the sounds of the river…the tight yank required to pull my roots up for a moment creates an uncomfortable tension for me. I go places all the time but for some reason I balk at the idea of loading the car and hitting the highway. As soon as I’m out the door, the tension will go slack and I’ll know I’m headed to where I’m supposed to be. But I feel defensive, I don’t want to be distracted by other environments right now. I’m besotted with the desert, with her textures, with her moods, with her smells and sights. My writing and my metalwork are all about her at the moment. I’m afraid to look up from that inspiration and find myself elsewhere, astounded and full of wonder, pulled off in a new direction. But I must go.

I made a goal of trying to take more trips for the sole purpose of inspiration seeking this year (and all years to come). To not travel for work — to travel for the heart of my work, for the sake of my work — to travel less for freelance photography and modeling, to travel more just to keep my soul fresh and my eyes wide open, to use my cameras, to take the time to write and paint, to explore and squander my curiosity in broad terrains and exquisite cultures. To take back the road and choose my own path again. To meet my friends along the way and to enjoy the delicious lonesomeness of my escapades, too. To feel my heart brighten at the thought of homecoming.

I have a feverish wanderlust at the moment but it’s at war with my securely planted roots and rhythms. It’s a conundrum.

But I must go.To my desert, my sagebrush, my river canyon, my muse — Zane Grey said it best:

“The spell of the desert comes back to me, as it always will come. I see the veils, like purple smoke, in the canõns, and I feel the silence. And it seems that again I must try to pierce both and to get at the strange wild life of the last American wilderness — wild still, almost, as it ever was.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: home, idaho, inspiration, travel

Feather and Prayer

February 20, 2018 by The Noisy Plume

I visit an owl roost, past the end of the driveway, down on the edge of the river where the water gurgles around a small cut bank that is crowned by Russian olive and willow. The roost is a power pole I resented for a time until I deduced an owl was using it. Then that man made object became dear to me, it became the owl roost, something useful and lovely in its own way — I had a change of heart. I have never seen the owl that roosts there but I know it is frequented by an owl because I often find her feathers caught up on the sharp prickles of tumbleweeds and the blades of bunchgrass around the base of the power pole.

I collect those feathers of hers and I carry them with me further downriver as I walk with the dogs in the evenings. I hold them in my hands and absentmindedly stroke them and straighten them as I stroll. Whatever invisible things I carry with me are carefully pressed into those feathers. And I walk. I walk. Eventually I reach a bend in the river where I clamber across boulders to be above the water and I hold the feather out over the current. I do the last of my praying and thinking and then I set the feathers on the wind where they drift erratically, as feathers will, moving on invisible strings of time and air. Eventually they touch the Snake River and slide toward a set of rapids to be folded into the froth and fizz of living waters and I turn and make the long walk home in the gloaming.

Last night, in a rugged wind, I set out walking. I made my way down to the river, down to the owl roost and I looked for a feather and a prayer and there were many feathers. There were too many feathers, more feathers than prayers. I knew immediately what had happened. My owl had perished. I believe she was electrocuted while on her perch and was found on the ground, spent and burnt by high voltage, by the coyotes who made a midnight feast of her.

I gathered all the feathers I could see and walked with them pressed against my chest where the wind couldn’t rip them from my grip. I reached the boulder strand and stood out over the water, felt the mean wind punching at me, spoke my prayer and released the feathers into the gale. They flew one last time — tugged and pulled by the canyon air until they dropped into the teal blue of the river and disappeared into the madness of the whitewater.

It was a viking burial with wind and water instead of flame. I’ll miss that owl. Her feathers led me one by one into contemplation, awareness and prayer. I like to think that in the end, we set each other free.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: faith, home

Postcards From Washington

June 1, 2015 by The Noisy Plume

The weather is lovely. Wish you were here.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: fire season, home, studio, the log cabin, washington

Of The Prairie

November 14, 2014 by The Noisy Plume

Prairie.

I’m not talking about a valley between two mountain ranges or regions that are punctuated by flat patches of earth.

I mean prairie — interior lowlands, wide, weather conducing swaths of land that roar with silence when the wind isn’t ripping through bunchgrass, willow and scrubby poplar bluffs.

For years now, I’ve referred to the great northern plains as a caesura;
a wide breath of space that robs the mountains of the true meaning of grace,
a hard and undulating passage of land between the jutting lobes of the coasts,
the place the heartbeat of the wild is traced out
abstractedly

in the staccato of
star spangle

in the gleam of
old bones in the gloaming

in the conductivity of
tall grass and pungent sage

in the way the soil clasps hands with the wind.

It’s a place that gives and steals in both a merciful and merciless manner; bringing forth new life in steady arcs while old life fades to rust and bone split in two by wavering gold. It’s a hard place for anything to do its living and dying, but there’s a comfort in knowing the prairie always takes back her own.

You know me. And if you don’t, I’ll be the first to inform you of the fact that I spend a lot of time out on the land and it’s my great honor to be able to live off of it, to take from it what I need exist on physical, emotional, and spiritual levels — and to give back, when I can, what I can. Not a day goes by when I don’t step out into the wide arms of the world here and notice, firsthand, the cycle of energy between the living and the dead, the bones and the wildflowers, the trees and the mountain springs, the pronghorn and the sage. I’m connected, I’m plugged in, and I’m grateful to be so.

It’s a perfect system out there; left on it’s own, there is no beginning or end to it — just like the One that created it all — I’m talking about Alpha and Omega.

The mountains, the plains, the great oceans, they are the beginning, they are the end. There’s simply a smooth line, the birth and decay of wildness and beauty, the tall grasses splitting bone in two, the heave of the flowers and sage, the eruption of the sun each morning and the going down of the same.

How blessed am I to see it in full dimension as often as I do. To be almost blinded by the simplicity and perfection of the great feast, of the great unbroken circle of energy between the elements, between the coming and going of spirit, between the bloom and frost of the seasons and to exist there, wholly, belonging because I choose to belong in a deeper way.

The difference between the living and the dead is breath. Caesura. A great and quiet plain. The space between the dead and the living is an inhalation, an exhalation, a great pause, a long rest in the holy of holies. I see it all the time, at my own hands or the fangs and claws of others; the short rest before the bones and flesh are thrust into use once more; the timeless moment when the spirit departs and the body begins its transition into something new.

Ashes to ashes. Stardust to stardust, baby.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: home, prairie, prose, saskatchewan