Notes From Coyote

Q & A on the “Debates”

Overdone, Overblown, Over……..

Sun Spots?

In Heaven…
the mechanics are German
the chefs are French
the police are British
the lovers are Italian
and everything is organized by the Swiss.

In Hell…
the mechanics are French
the police are German
the chefs are British
the lovers are Swiss
and everything is organized by the Italians.

Staring at Reality

For Want of a Coach

The Game

An Issue of Trust

The Underground River

    After years of driving by cattle feeding lots with the vent setting on inside, cursing the kind of consciousness that allows this treatment of animals to continue unabated, I, we actually, have moved into “organic” entirely. No, neither of us will entertain going “vegan”, the taste of a good sirloin is much too enticing to abandon.
    What put us over the edge was the viewing of the film, “Temple Grandin”, the story of an autistic girl grown into a wise and intelligent woman who has pioneered and championed the humane treatment of cattle in slaughter pens. How “humane” and “slaughter” can be reconciled becomes the core of the story, though the subject of autism and how it is viewed and treated by her determined mother and the treatment community is important too.
    The “over the edge” part for us was the coming to terms with the fact that we still wanted meat in our diet, but cannot countenance supporting an industry that cares nothing about the entire process of bringing animal products to the consumer table. Yes, we pay more, but we eat less and we do it knowing that with the money we spend we are, in direct effect, voting for what we want and believe in when it comes to the humane treatment of the animals that serve to feed us.
    This is what we look for; labels that assure that the animal in question has been raised “cage-less” and on feed that is appropriate (for chickens). For beef, the “organic” label has to do with grass fed, no antibiotics. Right now we have no way of knowing what the slaughter circumstances were, I wish we did. We can only assume that if the animal was well and appropriately fed that its end was consciously chosen as well. So far I’ve been unable to ascertain a means by which all of these considerations can be addressed. At least, not in our part of the country. There are “traveling slaughter” companies that actually go to individual ranches and farms in the East and slaughter animals in humane ways, but these are small operations and limited to that section of the country. Out here, and, it seems, everywhere west of the Mississippi, feed lots are the rule and the usual, sadistic would seem the best description, killing of animals prevails.
    Yes, I agree it seems a stretch and incredibly self-serving and a gross rationalization to tease out some “humane” method of killing in order to please a palate. And what about the fact that it takes a huge toll on the environment to raise cattle, sheep and pigs to begin with? All of that taken into consideration why not simply choose vegetables?  All true. But under the circumstances, most of we omnivores are not going to become vegetarians in support of principle so we may as well accept the fact of that and at the very least, honor the main providers of our protein, honor them as not only food sources but as life forms that co-exist on the planet mainly for our gastronomic pleasure. Dogs, cats, domestic birds, fish in aquariums….so many of our fellow creatures are treated better by us for far less reason then these who, in real terms, serve us. In life and in death we owe them, at the very least, respect. 

    ps, An email from "organicranchers.org" assures me that they are indeed following Temple Grandin's recommendations. Their per pound prices are a bit too steep for us....but they are being responsible.

    For me a definition of “classic” would be, something that continues to evoke a feeling. That “feeling” is not limited to an evocation of the time in which the piece was created or encountered, but it also brings the present more alive. In other words, it transcends time and place.
    One of the most powerful understandings I’ve had of this was when we visited the Lincoln Memorial in D.C. last year. I always thought that I would be greatly moved by being in the presence of that wonderfully majestic sculpture of Lincoln. Every time I see it pictured whether in full sun or shadow or beautifully lighted at night, I always feel a fondness for it. But once in the Memorial itself I hardly looked at it. Instead, it was the words of the Second Inaugural carved into the granite of the walls to the right of the statue that drew unexpected tears and such strong emotions in me that I concealed them as I stood there reading. I had read and heard these words many times over the years of my strong interest in all things Lincoln, but for some reason, nothing I can make clear to myself even now, seeing those words written in stone I suddenly knew them in a way I’d never known them before. I “knew’ them in the sense that I felt them whereas previously I only understood them.
    This was totally unexpected. I was not more emotionally “hyped”, in fact, I was surprised that I didn’t feel what I expected to feel as I entered the Memorial. We were in a crowd of people, it was mid-morning, “Glory, glory Hallelujah” not playing, so when I turned to my right and began reading those words, I was taken off guard by my response. Those words were, ARE….”classic”. The last paragraph of the speech reads; “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
But reading them here isn’t the same. Not even for me. When I read them there I understood and felt their power. The printed page does not do them justice. They belong thirty feet high and carved in granite.
Martin Luther King’s words, which I have edited here for space but tried to keep most of the content for their power have that same impact:
“…………..even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
“And this will be the day -- this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning:
“My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim's pride, From every mountainside, let freedom ring!
“And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:
                Free at last! Free at last!
                Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

    That one still gets to me every time. That speech changed my way of seeing the world. Up to just before Dr. King made that speech I had been persuaded that he was just a “trouble maker”. That race relations were not too bad. That all this “stirring up of the negro was pointless.” (That’s my father talking.) From that day forward I began to see much more clearly what was going on in our country.
    This morning I awakened with John Kennedy’s words in my brain, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country!”
    Time to make that statement again I think.
    But it’s not just the powerful words of great speeches that fall into this definition of “classic” after all. Leonard Bernstein, upon the fall of the Berlin Wall, brought together the New York Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Kirov Theatre Orchestra, the Dresden Children’s Chorus, Bavarian Radio Chorus, and more….all for Beethoven’s 9th, which, for the occasion he re-titled the, “Ode to Freedom”. An incredibly moving concert which even transcends the music of Beethoven…if you can imagine such a thing.
    Classics in music can be listened to over and over again, not in an obsessive way but in order to hear nuance and experience new depth and beauty in the perfection of the piece. Any listener of good jazz will cite “All Blues” by Miles Davis as an example, or any track in that album for that matter. I can list a hundred in this category but I will, as in a; trapped-on-a-desert-island theme force fit only ten. (I was about to say “five” but just found that way too limiting.)
    In no rank order these ten would include: Shelly Manne’s “Summertime”, Count Basie’s “Dickie’s Dream”, Dave Brubeck’s “Georgia on my Mind”, Woody Herman’s “What are you doing the rest of your life?”, Oscar Peterson’s “Nighttime”, Stan Kenton’s “Fuego Cubano”, Patrick William’s “Mr. Smoke”, Miles and “Summertime” (yes, again) Ella Fitzgerald’s “Our love is here to stay” (ballad version), Pavarotti’s “Nessun Dorma”, Kathleen Battle and Jessie Norman’s “He’s got the whole world in His Hands”,
OK, OK, that’s eleven but I was just getting started and already edging towards a top twenty list. Man, that was hard! (Yeah, it was twelve counting the “Ode…”)
    Sue me.
    Moving on to movies, again in no rank order and just ten that I could (and have) watch over and over: “It’s a Wonderful Life”, “Treasure of Sierra Madre”, “Casablanca”, “Dr. Strangelove”, “Harvey”, “Pleasentown”, “A Face in the Crowd”, “Brigadoon”, “The Wizard of Oz”, “The Last Temptation of Christ”, “Sergeant York”,
(I’m having a hard time following my own rules here.)
    TV series (just five here): “Rome”, “Foyle’s War”, “Mayberry RFD” (not “deep” but beautiful) “West Wing”, “Hill Street Blues”. (Many “sub-categories here but this will do for now.
    Books: well, as a rule I don’t re-read but I do keep a lot of books I’ve loved. I don’t know why I don’t read them again, probably because there are so many more to read. Of course I could say the same about music but there’s the time involved and so forth. But here’s a “forced list” of five of my favorites: “Hummingbird’s Daughter” (Urrea) “House of Sky” (Doig) “Alone in the World” (Bode) “Song of Heyoekah” (Storm) “Velveteen Rabbit” (Williams).
    I know, seems an odd lot, but these I would read again. In fact, I’m going to start on “….Heyoekah” this week.
    Well, that’s it. I could go on and on with this “Classic” list making but this will do. And now you know more about me than before I started this exercise.
    Come to think of it, so do I!

    “A sure sign that a generation is passing is that it is judged as becoming more and more 'unfashionable' in every way. This isn’t limited to clothing styles and music or, as the New Yorker is fond of noting, not possessing the “right” watch. At a more profound level, the way Life itself has been explored and explained becomes more and more passé according to the newly arrived “experts”.
    “I note that I am way out of step with how the generation just behind me, my own children sees the world of “faith” for example. And the generation behind them, their own children, don’t connect with how their parents see. A kind of “revenge” for grandparents.
    “I don’t know if this is just a product of education. I have been moving away from “that old time religion” for a long, long time now…and yet, today I found myself weeping over passages in a book relating the experiences of six young Croatian girls who claimed to have seen a vision of the Madonna. I don’t connect with any version of a “Madonna” but what I do connect with is the intensity of the experience. And I long for it.
    “There......I admit it, I long for it. For the intensity of that experience of faith founded upon something concrete…something real.”

    I wrote all the above a few weeks ago as I became submerged in what I can only describe as a “crisis”. I haven’t added “spiritual” to that description because I can now see that I’ve been in a spiritual crisis for years, a state I was unaware of until I came to consciousness about it which could only happen when I wrote the above and found myself emerging from it! And the cause of my emergence was that I was smack in the middle of reading “The Spiritual Detective” by Randall Sullivan and was experiencing huge emotional upheaval(s).
    What drew me to this book was that I was trying to find out if anyone else was having doubts about spiritual experiences and had those doubts been resolved or not? And if not, why not? And if so, how? 
    The nature of my own “crisis” was simply that my rational, logical brain was giving me hell over my decision, or perhaps desire, to believe. To be invested in faith.
    And……as it turns out, these experiences of dark passage are necessary precursors to what ultimately resolves the issue. Let me see if I can lay out the road map of events, all of which I now see were pieces of the awakening I sought.
    To you, being outside of these events, they may seem mundane or even products of a kind of madness, but frankly Mz Scarlet, I don’t give a damn! These things were real, not imagined, occurrences and they moved me to where I am today. Without them, I would still be floundering so I give them value because they changed me.
    From this point on I will not apologize for anything I say that I might imagine you will think is “crazy thinking”. I will lay out the facts:
    A few weeks ago I noticed that my adjustable razor was always out of adjustment. This razor is an old Schick adjustable which opens from one to ten. I keep it adjusted at the number 4. That’s a comfortable shaving adjustment for my face. I have been using this razor for about forty years. I ALWAYS leave it adjusted to the number 4 when I finish shaving and put it away.
    Always.
    So, you can imagine that my attention was drawn to the fact that suddenly a few weeks ago, that razor was, when I picked it up to shave in the morning, adjusted to around 7! At first I chalked it up to my own faulty memory. Thought I had just misjudged the adjustment the day before. No big deal. No “deal” at all.
    But this went on day after day. So now I began to pay attention on how I put it away. I’d make sure it was set at 4. Next morning, 7!
    I thought Elizabeth, knowing what a creature of habit I am, was playing around with me. “Did you change the setting on my razor?” I asked.
    “What? Why would I do that?”
    No trace of “playing around”.  She wasn’t involved.
    Next day, same thing. And for several days after. Finally I had to admit to her that I suspected that either I was going crazy or we had a poltergeist. A friend of ours who had experienced poltergeists said, “No, they are generally destructive or trouble making.” This didn’t seem to fit that description. Besides, I’m not sure I believe in poltergeists.
    One other possibility, besides suspecting I WAS going crazy, was that a spirit was trying to contact me and using something that would get my attention.
    So, I got myself a notepad for journaling and began a process I had used before to open myself, I call it “interactive journaling”. It’s sort of like automatic writing, I write the date on a piece of lined notebook paper, then write out my question. Then, beginning outside the left hand margin of the paper and writing in between the lines as fast as I can trying not to think but to allow whatever comes up, I write as fast as I can. Forget legibility and spelling, just GO! And what happens is that I get a clear communication about the question I have asked. This is never something I could have imagined or made up. It is a clear response, something clear of ego or desire. It answers the question better than I might or would have.
    As I say, that’s what I did this time. And what came up?
    Well, it was not what I thought, as usual. But it was something that had lain deep in my fearful soul, it was the old “worthiness” thing again. I thought that one had died. Of course it had in my brain. But not in my heart. So here it was again, I did not feel worthy of God’s love. There it was spelled out on the paper before me, the assurance over and over that I was indeed worthy and had to come to know this as Truth!
    I put the journal down and went to sit in the kitchen. This is something Elizabeth and I do each morning. We sit at the kitchen window and watch the drama of the birds feeding outside. This was mid-afternoon. No big bird action going on, most of the seed had already been grazed away….and then suddenly a huge hawk flew into the window in front of me, not just once, not just a glancing, accidental blow, this hawk banged into the window over and over again in front of me and then, veering off to my left and around the corner of the kitchen, began the same assault on the glass doors. This went on for about two minutes and then he flew off to one of the two chairs under the juniper in front of the kitchen about twenty feet away. He sat on that chair finally flying off about an hour later.
Something trying to get my attention I wondered?
    Next I went into my office and suddenly just ten yards or so in front of my office windows, a red tail hawk sailed across the field about three feet off the ground to a spot under a pinon pine and began to feed on something there. Immediately a raven landed in back of him and began to peck at his tail. The annoyed hawk kept turning on the raven to chase it away but finally when another raven landed and joined in the red tail took off to the top of a tree nearby. The red tail was my first “totem”, the first spirit animal I took to be important to me as I began my own spiritual journey more than thirty years ago.
    Something going on?
    I went into the bathroom to shave and midway through, still puzzling over all of this hoopla, a tiny fly buzzed by and suddenly I got it. A fly, an unlikely presence in the middle of January, and the center of the “Coyote” card in the Tarot. The fly which represents “bugging ones self” over little things, which is, of course, what I had been spending my time doing. As quickly as that realization dawned I laughed at the sudden knowing, and note that the tiny presence, the fly, had died. Dove into the water in the basin and was gone in that moment. And just as suddenly, in the same instant I heard the strains of Stan Getz on the radio I'd left playing in the living room, it was the beautiful melody; “A Time for Love”.
    Yes, I GOT it.
    All of these things were addressing what I was going through. Each and every occurrence was calling me to attention, drawing me away from inner turmoil to a larger realization. It WAS a “Time to Love”…..my self.
    Two days later on the road to pick up Elizabeth after her journey to Texas, a time of being apart for too long for both of us, while driving I pulled out my Tarot deck to see what card would come up to “speak” to me about what I had been going through. Years ago when I had come upon “interactive journaling” as a discovery of a healing tool for my self and other, I had been asked in that writing if I would like to “….see the face of my ‘teacher’” Answering “Yes.” with trepidation the writing counseled me to “Cut the cards!” and there, staring directly at me was “The High Priestess”, a female figure clothed in blue who held the Truth in her hands and whose feet rested on Intuition.
    In reading “The Spiritual Detective” I was being exposed over and over again to people who were experiencing the vision of “The Immaculate Conception” also identified as “The Mother”, and “The Virgin”. None of these concepts were part of my own spiritual iconography. But I was having, as I noted, a strong emotional reaction to what these people were experiencing and what Randall Sullivan was writing about. I couldn’t figure out why, but I knew it was real for me.
So, these many days later as I drove across Texas I was about to cut the cards and asking to see that card that had meant so much to me so many years ago, the “High Priestess”. I picked up the deck and tuned it over in my hand and there at the bottom of the seventy eight cards she was.
    Yes…..I laughed.
    I laughed in the knowing.
    Weeks have gone by and I am more alive in my own faith than I have been in a long, long while, and today I happened upon a book lying on a table at a friends house. It was an old Time magazine dedicated to Mother Teresa and towards the back of the issue was the story of the years of spiritual struggle she reported in letters written towards the end of her life. Of how often she knew only “darkness” and “emptiness” in her spiritual life, and yet how she continued and persevered in her work….and was all of that, in the end, resolved?
    As the priest who wrote the narrative in that magazine observed; “ Was the darkness Jesus went through in Gethsemane or on the Cross resolved?”  In the end he is said to have uttered the words, “It is finished.”  The message is that every one must pass through these darkness’s in order to come to the this truth, that in order to have faith one must determine to make a choice, to decide, in the face of doubt, that faith is the answer.
    As courage is an act undertaken despite fear, so Faith is an act undertaken despite doubt.
    For me it comes down to something as simple as this: Roger Welsch a writer who used to do CBS Sunday Morning reports called, “Postcards from Nebraska” was told by his granddaughter that because he often wrote and told stories about spiritual matters that were not easily explained away by rational thought that he was a “…..member of the Church of There’s Something Going On Here.”
    I’m a member of that congregation.

by

Winter Prosapio

"Ranch" Wranglin'

You probably don't have these little adventures where you are. Pity, what tales will you spin over the warmth of the hot air register next winter?

So, I start up our truck (a Toyota Tundra V-8) in preparation for a trip to the wilds of the National Forest about 200 miles south of Albuquerque and the "Check Engine" light goes on. This never promotes a warm feeling, but our consultations with our neighborhood Toyota "whisperer", a retired chief mechanic for the firm, has comforted us with the fact that this is usually just an emissions thing and will not really threaten the mechanical well-being of our vehicle or necessitate the postponement of our trip. So, off we go, only a little apprehensive.

We encounter no problems. The truck runs just fine.

When we return, further consultations encourage a trip to the dealer, "I don't have the electronics to check this thing out." says the Whisperer. So to town we go, secure in the idea that it won't take much to just turn the light off.and perhaps, tweak a "thingy" or two.

Turns out a pack rat, one of our least favorite forms of furry wildlife, has eaten a small wire in the engine called the "knock sensor".

"Do we even need this thing?" we ask the Whisperer.

"Well" he equivocates, "maybe yes, maybe no."

The message seems to be, might as well get it fixed. It's only about $25 in parts anyway.

.and around $600 in labor.

This teeny wire is under the manifold which means the top of the engine has to be taken off to get to it, and..

So, one day later the "Check Engine" light is off and we are $712.26 poorer.

Ah, but Wait! as they say in those terrible TV commercials, There's More!

So we begin the pack rat "strategy", keep hoods open on our two vehicles, put out live traps and two trays of poison.

The next morning I go out to check the traps; empty. But so are the two trays of poison! And our neighbor LaJuana's dogs are walking away.

Oh, oh. I run to their house and break the, possibly, bad news. "I think one or both of your dogs has eaten the rat poison I put out last night."

A quick call to "Poison Control".

"Pour hydrogen peroxide down their throats until they barf it all up." is the advice.

We start with the "easy" dog, a funnel down the throat and pour the stuff in. Immediate barf, no trace of poison. It's the other dog.

The "difficult" one.

About thirty eye dropper loads later, he is no fan of funnels, up it all comes, and despite his protests we have saved his butt. (The vet also advises a course of "vitamin K" to treat potential internal bleeding and stress.)

Two days later there is the sound of turmoil around the live traps. Upon investigation I find the traps have been overturned, and the same survivor dog has dragged a now beaten to death pack rat out and left its body next to the trap.

Problem is, the poison, which had been left on top of the engines so the dog would not get into it, is gone. Did the dog also eat that along with the bedraggled rat?

Since he's still on the vitamin K regime he should be OK.

We hope.

We get rid of the martyred rat and get ready to run errands, this time with the car which is parked next to the truck. We start it up.

The "Check Engine" light goes on........

The (Biological) Facts of Life

Fact: The more coyotes trapped and killed, the more coyotes will breed. That is the way coyotes protect their populations.up to a point. Coyotes breed once a year and in a litter of up to twelve only twenty or thirty percent survive.

Fact: Pack rats give birth to litters of up to fourteen every forty days.

Fact: Mice give birth every nineteen to twenty-one days. Litters can be as many as ten.

Fact: Rabbits give birth every twenty-eight days and litters can be as large as seven.

Fact: The top predator of each of these here in New Mexico is the coyote. We don't have enough bobcats, mountain lions, or foxes to come close to dealing with these populations of rats, mice and rabbits. Yet, the State of New Mexico, and many other states, Florida for example, has an "open season" on coyotes. In other words, coyotes can be killed the year 'round, every year and forever. The State, the Fish and Game Department in particular, maintains a war on the only predator that can keep the most damaging rodent pests at bay. What kind of sense does this make?

This is a wrong-headed philosophy born in the 1800's that led to the elimination of most of the important predators in the west, the bears, the wolves, the foxes, and it persists today now focused on the coyote. You would think this kind of thinking would have gone out with the awakening to the dangers to the environment of DDT and the crazy idea that toxic waste dumping could simply be ignored, but there persists this blind knee jerk thinking that there are wild things we can do without and ridding ourselves of them has no effect on the balance of nature. One coyote catching and killing one pack rat wipes out the potential for the birth of around seventy three more pack rats a year. Of seventy mice, of seventy three rabbits. (These are conservative figures.) We're just figuring on one mother each here.

On our little patch of ten acres there are at the very least three pack rat dens, uncounted numbers of mice and a herd of cute little cotton tail rabbits getting less cute and more numerous week after week. And we haven't seen a coyote in months. This is a problem.

There are seasons on every other predator in our State. How these seasons are determined is based upon breeding habits and assumed populations. That word "assumed" is important. Nobody really knows how many bobcats, mountain lions, deer, bears, or foxes there are in any given area. We have some ideas of the range it takes for each animal to survive, but we don't know how large the populations are. Nobody is counting. It's just business-as-usual as the bobcat, fox, and mountain lion slowly get wiped out. And as for coyotes; they are lumped into the same category as pack rats. Who cares? There are plenty of them. Yet they are the one remaining predator upon which we must rely to keep some semblance of balance in the environment when it comes to the rodent population. They are what is called a "keystone" predator. Eliminate or diminish them to a great degree and the entire environmental system gets thrown out of whack.

In areas where domestic and feral cats are allowed to roam, bird populations plummet. If cats are controlled by coyotes, birds survive.

A cold but effective fact.

When one of our two cats was eliminated by a coyote, the remaining one got a lot more careful about going outside to hunt. He took down a few birds, not many mice and a couple of gophers in his lifetime. Coyotes are much better hunters than cats. And they don't go after birds.

It's time to work to put the natural world back in balance. The Sioux phrase; Mitakyue Oyasin translates; "We are all related." This has always meant that we are related to all of life. The native people knew the importance of this truth. Without respect for it, our world begins to careen quickly towards another native, this time Hopi, truth; Koyaanisqatsi. Life out of balance.

Not long ago a trapper said to me; "Don't you want me to manage the wildlife?"

"Manage the wildlife?" No, I want to manage the humans. We as the top predators on the planet have done more damage locally and world wide than any so-called "varmint".

("Varmint or varmit is an American-English colloquialism, particularly common to the American east and South-east within the nearby bordering states of the vast Appalachia region. The term describes farm pests which raid farms as opposed to infest farms - mainly predators such as foxes, weasels, and coyotes, sometimes even wolves or rarely, bears, but also, to a lesser degree, herbivores and burrowing animals that directly damage crops and land." Wikipedia)

This pejorative has been used to dismiss all wildlife as a nuisance. Something to be rid of. Look at this definition. Once the first three are gone those that "damage crops and land" are home free. And the top five noted here do neither. Once we eliminate them it's pesticide time. Does it make sense to poison the Earth to make up for the lack of natural pest control afforded by nature?

We cannot continue to treat the natural world with the same kind of arrogant disregard our ancestors evidenced in wiping out the buffalo, the passenger pigeon, the ivory billed woodpecker and thousands of other species directly and more thousands indirectly through ignorance of the interrelatedness of all of life. It is time to wake up to the fact that on spaceship Earth, all life is important and sacred, that means we owe them due respect. Yes, coyotes included.

We haven't begun to know the importance of each in the vastly complex web of life but just because we don't know what the consequences of our ignorance may turn out to be doesn't give us a license to kill without regard. It is time to care for "all our relations" and work to bring what is left of the gift each offers on our Earth back into harmonious coexistence with us. Surely we must know by now that our hubris has been leading us to an environmental dead end. Literally.

Existential New Mexico

They really take this "Land of Enchantment" stuff seriously at the New Mexico Highway Department. Here are the latest entries in the weird road signage category: "Dust Storms May Exist".

In Colorado, a more pragmatic state I've noticed, the above sign would read; "Dust Storm Area, Use caution." But in our state we are not sure that we can rest on the assumption that dust storms do exist, hence the hedging.

This sign was followed about fifty feet further on by, "Zero Visibility Possible".

It is true that there is a high school nearby and this sign may refer to the inability of teenagers to grasp the long range effects of current behavior. This is, of course, pure speculation on my part, but then these signs do promote that kind of open ended thinking.

In fact, I have often been aware that "Zero Visibility....." is "Possible" even probable given the myopic nature of prediction when it comes to making life choices. Take my marriage to Elizabeth for example. When we married I took on the parenting of three young children. "No problem." was the phrase I uttered when the proposition was laid out before me. Now right there was an example of "Zero Visibility......" for sure. In fact, neither of us could see very well at the time as I recall. There wasn't any warning sign about ".......Storms May Exist" either, but then what does one do? We drove merrily on and were none the wiser until well after we had survived the crashes.

The signposts of life, they're posted, but not always succinct.

The other day I asked Elizabeth what some of the current pop music lyrics are about. I can't bring myself to listen past the "noise" to plumb those depths. "It's about anger and how screwed up the world is, that sort of thing..unless it's 'alternative' and then it's like the 60's and about how we should make the world a more wonderful place, etc., etc."

What brought this question up was that I was listening to the lyrics of something from "The Great American Song Book" (the collection of music, mainly from the 30' and 40's, by composers like Porter, Gershwin, Rogers and Hart, etc). This, in case you are not familiar, is music which is about human relationships so you'll hear, "Love is just around the corner." or, love sought or lost, "Stormy weather", "Blues in the night", or "Black coffee"......and so many, hundreds, more. But today none of this language is heard.

Here's a lyric that just occurred to me which would be totally out of the question to be sung by any suitor today, "I took one look at you, that's all I meant to do, and then my heart stood still....." the only response that might elicit would be a 911 call. This, it seems to me, means that the language of love has been so coarsened that there is no beauty left in it. And a whole generation, maybe two, of young people consider that their only meaningful relationships are made up of silly, and "safe" flirtations on, "Face Book, or "Twitter". Flocks of boy-men are still living at home at 30, while girl-women don't bother with "commitment" but dither about spending all their time suiting up for some undefined something. Neither can admit to their true hearts desire, they can only experience this as a "virtual reality", a kind of computer game about sitcom love. Not having the experience of romantic love at a young age, when it begins to amp up and supply most of its juice, they plod along into adulthood and settle for approximations.

Elizabeth believes that all of this is a result of kids who were raised by others while both parents worked so the kids never really bond or learn to trust love as a constant and as a foundation for themselves. The concept of love becomes a myth, a fairy tale as real as Santa or the Tooth Fairy, something that can only be found in a "Lord of the Rings" fantasy but certainly not a genuine or even an important part of real life.

The idea of romantic love began, history says, in the Middle Ages, and was the stuff of poets and balladeers who built upon stories of knights and fair maidens, of dragons and castles. These tales found fertile ground then because they tapped into a yearning that was beginning to be felt in our psyches. Once we figured out the food- shelter-clothing thing we wanted something more in our relationships besides the fulfillment of sexual need and physical security. We wanted the luxury of being wanted for ourselves by another. That would be the "sociology" of it at least. Then there's the psychology and mythology, all built upon the biology after all.

Well, back to the music; right now I've got Billy Holiday singing a very painful version of "Sweet and Mellow" with a poignant tenors played by Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young echoing her words. I've listened to this track about fifty times over the years, it was recorded in 1957, but this time it has taken me to a deeper level of listening and feeling. Billy's failing voice, a thin, raspy sound brought on by too many years of booze, heroin and persecution transmits so much of the suffering a lost relationship causes that, though I no longer am in the midst of that kind of angst, I can still connect with the memory. Maybe that's the thing young people today are fleeing, and maybe Elizabeth is right, perhaps this current avoidance of all things romantic is based on the original pain of abandonment felt when a kid is left in the care of someone else for most of its formative years and it is now totally suppressed so it has become a knee jerk reaction to anything that approaches the possibility of a heart involvement.

Is it "Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."? I'd like to be able to beat a retreat here and say, "Who knows, maybe we're better off." But the drug and alcohol use in our society, the loss of civility, the general tenor of things, the meanness, the worship of things over the well being of people......I know we're a materialistic society, but it seems to me, and maybe it's just the selective memory of age, but it seems things have gotten a lot worse in our society despite all the opportunities via communication to make them better. Though I don't get involved in it "Facebook" and Twitter" and all the other so-called "social networking" venues seem to only be about self promotion, a seeking after that illusive "15 minutes of fame" rather than any genuine sharing of thoughts and feelings about anything more than current events and "who's hot?".

I guess the short of what I'm saying here, is that the concept of romantic love, as a value, has fallen on hard times and we are the poorer for it. In order to be totally free and independent it seems most people are fleeing emotional involvement to avoid any possibility of loss and pain and instead have only invested in the superficialities of being human.

Oh well, that's just the "romantic" in me thinking that the World should trust the heart again instead of placing all trust in the head. Obviously a bias.

How Raven (Elizabeth) Believed Her Name

It began simply enough, I had given Elizabeth the name, "Raven" not long after we met. Both she and my then youngest daughter Winter carried it. Physically there was the black hair of course, but the name fit them because of much more than that, though Elizabeth remained unconvinced. Raven, like "coyote" is the trickster-teacher in the spiritual world and the wise-bird of legend and real life. It is also the one bird that seems to experience being a bird as much more than just a daily effort of hunting and gathering. Watch any raven for awhile and you will see a bird who is having fun while going about the business of living. This bird has a lot to teach.

One day, not long after sunrise, a few people arrived at our place to set up for the "Sun Dance" that was to begin later that day. They parked in our lot and went down to the dance circle site to begin preparations.

About an hour later as they were returning for supplies and I stepped outside to greet them just as a flock of ravens flew overhead. Suddenly one peeled out of the bunch and circled down to land on one of the parked cars. The owner walked to it, opened the door, and the raven hopped across the roof and perched on the door and began preening. The man held his hand open and the raven dropped a feather into it. Right about then I figured there was something out of the ordinary going on.

I ran inside the house and grabbed my camera as Elizabeth walked over to the car and held her left arm out to the bird, which jumped onto it, walked up her arm to her shoulder, nipped her on the left ear, then hopped across her back and nipped the right. Then it hopped down her right arm and flew off into a pine tree nearby.

There are many more details to this story that Elizabeth is prone to add, but these are the bony facts of it. Now I will add all of the "disclaimers" to please the scoffers; thirteen miles away, as the raven flies, there was a raven that hung out in an equipment yard. I don't know how long that bird was there, but it did seem to not be bothered about the proximity of people.

That's it.

So let's consider the odds, it's Sun Dance time and a flock of ravens flies over, what are the odds that one of them might be that people "friendly" raven? There were maybe ten ravens, so perhaps 10-1. What then are the odds that this particular flock would fly over this area? Given all the points of the compass they could choose, let's say, arbitrarily, 360-1. That they would fly over on the morning of a Dance we'd have to add 365 to that so 725-1. And add to this that this particular bird would select to land here and walk up the arm of a woman who sought confirmation of the name "Raven". this is such a long shot that I'd have to give it lottery odds. A million to one shot. And I'm sure a real statistician would add permutations which would add to this number considerably.

I think it would be a much harder sell to convince anyone that all of this was pure chance. I mean, it would at least instill a glimmer of doubt in a professional doubter's structure of belief would it not? But in fact, when I tell this story, and/or the one about the coyote skull (see "A Story") to a committed skeptic I know they think I am telling a story that is primarily a metaphor, or that I am outright lying.

Or maybe that I'm simply a nut case.

If there is a confirmed skeptic reading this I can only say this; these are not manipulative tales told to attempt a conversion. They are not metaphors created to "teach", and lastly, they are not lies. What they do for me is to take me down to the foundations of my own spiritual belief they tell me that I don't have to make a great leap-of-faith or put on hold my own reason and logic to believe that there is more to this mystery of life than the marshaling of "odds" can resolve.though the worship of pragmatic explanations can dissolve just about anything that is inexplicable by any other means of understanding.

Besides; I am a skeptic.....and they certainly convinced, and continue to convince, me.

I know that these things did happen.....happened to people who were neither gullible nor innocent of life experience. They were simple occurrences to be sure, no Lazarus raising, no fishes and loaves, but impactful, and quite to the point of what was needed.

So Elizabeth's name is Raven! Of that she is very much assured.

Me too.

A Story

I'm a jazz fan. It's the music that brings me home to my self. If I've been exposed to a day of really bad music, on hold for minutes that seem to be stretching into hours, and it's been Kenny G, or rock ("Classic" or not, I can't take much of it) or the boring and predictable Bam! Bam! Bam! accompanying the rap, hip-hop noise emanating from our 16 year old's room, after a time I need my head and heart cleared and jazz is where I go.

Sometimes I will find myself needing to explore an old piece that has drawn my attention once again and I will play the same track over and over and over, hearing something in it I haven't ever heard before, though I've listened to it a hundred times. Miles Davis and "All Blues" will catch me like this on occasion.

Some poetry is like that for me too and I will re-read a piece again to recapture what caught me the first time, or to hear it afresh to awaken me to what I missed in the first go 'round. "The Road not Taken" is one like that.

I have a story of my own that I re-tell now and then because I think it will help others to hear it, even though some I know have probably heard it ten times over the years. In reality I tell it more for me, because I need to re-visit the emotions that were present when the story was born into my life those many years ago. It's a "touchstone" of sorts, a place to which I return to reawaken faith and hope.

This is the story:

But first.....just a bit of background. This story didn't spring entirely from the moment, there were many "tributaries" that fed into the stream of it. It's often true that a spiritual awakening, or a "miracle" happens when the ground is already prepared for it.

Not always, but mostly.

To be brief I will just say that I had been looking for a way to understand and believe that there was more to life than our just being, as my brother-in-law contended "animated pieces of meat". But I was deep into "proofs" about this. I wanted the facts not just hopeful leaps of faith or assurances from people who burned a lot of incense and meditated all the time. I wanted to be convinced!

I'm still that way about most politics and "Best apple pie!" claims.

I had come north from my apartment near El Paso to the mountains outside of Albuquerque. I'd come to visit friends and to gather some shreds of cedar bark from the trees that grow in the area,. I was using six to eight inch lengths of it to create small smoldering fires for the daily ceremonies I was committed to performing at the request of a medicine man I was working with. This was part of my personal spiritual quest. One of the "tributaries".

He had taught me a little ritual to perform with the trees in order to gather the bark in a "conscious" manner. This was simply a process of taking a pinch of tobacco up to the tree selected and offering a prayer about why I was gathering the bark and that I would be using it for good purpose, and wouldn't be taking much.

This seemed to me to be a nice way of keeping a person aware of conservation which is what I figured it was really all about.

I like to keep things "rationally" based.

Another tributary was this; I had been seeking a name. I wanted some sort of spiritual identity and through a series of very odd events occurring over the preceding months I had come up with "coyote" a name which carries many levels of understanding.....but this is another story.

The events which led me to this name could be considered "magical" by some, but for me, they might have simply been random occurrences and I thought I might be making more of them than they deserved. The real dilemma was that I was the one doing the "interpreting". Since I didn't trust anything I might come up with as coming from "The Source", my interpretations didn't amount to any kind of proof I could consider valid.

So to prove that; the name was real and therefore purposeful, and thus, that there really was a Creator spirit running this show and all of this ceremony and ritual was worth the undertaking, my criteria was this; someone, unbidden, would one day hand me a coyote skull as a gift. That would be the proof I would need.

Kind of a tall order but not unusual for a skeptic.

The scene was set.......and there I was doing my obligatory ceremony with the tree of my choice, one chosen at random from among thousands of possibilities in the Cibola National Forest at the foot of the Sandia mountains.

In the midst of this undertaking I was suddenly struck with this thought; "This isn't the right tree."!

This was a very uncharacteristic response for me because I'm a point-A-to-point-B kind of guy. I don't reflect much on "feelings" about right or wrong trees. I was just doing a ritual after all. But there it was, and the feeling of "wrongness" persisted until I looked around at the forest of cedar trees and picked one that, and this is my memory of it, was "greener" than all the others.

I walked over to it and began my ceremony again, feeling "right" this time.

But midway through something in the branches, deep inside and right up close to the trunk, something glowingly white, caught my attention. I moved some branches aside and stepped inside the shade and saw, hanging in the fork of a main branch, a skull.

A coyote's skull.

All these years later I can still feel what I felt then though time has lessened the impact. Tears flooded my eyes and my legs could not hold me up. I could only cry and say, "My God! It's all real! It's REAL!" My shock at that realization was only equaled by the guilt I felt that I could ever have doubted......and then came the pure joy of the reassurance that this tangible gift represented.

Then I wanted to tell someone, anyone......to reassure them, to spread the news of this experience. But there was no one near to tell and, after I sat with all of it for a time, I determined that keeping it all inside seemed important. Letting it permeate every cell to purge the doubts felt like the best use of this miracle. And I had no doubt then, nor do I have now, that that's exactly what this was.

I have chosen to tell this story again now and then but only when I felt the time was right to it revisit that feeling, to bring it back to life in me and share it with those who need it. There have been many other "miracles" since then, but nothing so clear-cut, so out of the "could be explained away" category. And of course, I could, if I worked very hard at statistics, probabilities, and permutations, explain even that one I suppose

Well, considering the odds, maybe not.

Sometimes, when I am feeling unloved, or more accurately, unlovable, I will finally whittle all of those who might possibly love me down to my daughters of whose love I am absolutely sure and then I stare at a picture I have of my wife Elizabeth and, once again captured by her warm soul eyes, I will be brought back to my center. From there I can rebuild to a place of balance.

This coyote story never fails to ebb the tides of doubt which rise as hours of facts begin to overtake my moments of faith. Just as the sure love of my daughters and my life partner, the poetry of jazz and the depth of prose bring me back home to sanity, it reminds my doubting brain and my cautious heart of what I came upon in that forest of cedar. It was not something imagined or dreamed, it was a tangible gift I could, and still do, hold in my hands. A reality that brings me spiritually alive once again and without the specter of doubt to cloud my hope.

And this is also true; I know, that despite my strong intent it is impossible to convey the power of this story to another to instill the same response I had to this experience. How can I paint a sunset so that you can see it or send my experience of deep love to you so that you can feel it? The Bible has never convinced me of virgin birth or resurrection and though Carl Sandberg has told me of the "Wilderness" he cannot take me there, I will have to put on my own hiking shoes for that. And so it is for "miracles". All I hope to do by telling this story is say that it is possible for any human being, searching for something to believe in, to find it.

The method is simple; fight to keep your own mind and heart open to all the potential for magic. But don't wait for it, actively seek it out.just as it has been said: "Seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you." It takes work, whether that be doing the ceremonies and rituals or just walking in the woods, to overcome the inertia, but the rewards for those efforts, if you believe in the worth of hope, are priceless.

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