February Events

February is rolling along at Blanca Flats. The March wind started a couple of weeks early, slamming the house with giant gusts from the East. We have a few projects going, including a strawbale addition, which will provide better insulation for the front door and protect us against the wind's wrath.

This was one of my Valentine's Day presents: a Lonely Alien creation informally known as the Samosa (as in those deliciously deep-fried Indian appetizers) Quesadilla.


Ingredients include organic merlot potatoes from nearby Rockey Farms, Asadero cheese, cilantro, tomatoes from the Sand Dunes Pool, chili pepper and cumin. The Samosa Quesadilla has a delicious combination of Southwestern heat and exotic spice.


After the Valentine's Day lunch, we took the dogs to the Dome for a walk at their favorite sacred site. Shelby would kill me if she knew I posted this picture of her with her eyes closed.

Eric's latest project will improve the traffic flow of Blanca Flats considerably. The sign for nearby Alma Street has been missing for several months, probably blown away by the wind, or blown off its stake by a bored neighbor with nothing better to do than shoot street signs. Eric decided to recreate the signs after one of our friends got lost on the way to our house because the sign was missing. I've gotten very attached to this sign. Alma means "soul," after all. I don't want my soul hanging up on a sign in the middle of Blanca Flats, where some drunk can shoot at it. Would you?

On the Scrat Hills

There's something very satisfying about climbing a hill that you see every day. At the top of the basalt hills south of us--we named them the Scrat Hills, after our beloved artist cat who disappeared in 2010--I felt that I was part of these slopes. I often have a sense of loss or frustration with the distance between myself and the features of this landscape. I've always talked about climbing the Scrat Hills. On the afternoon we climbed this slope, I finally felt close enough.

This is "The Dome," an outcropping of what appears to be igneous rock. The rocks are covered with bright green lichen, which makes The Dome even more conspicuous in the dun landscape. The Dome is the Blanca Flats equivalent of Ayers Rock in Australia; there's something sacred about it. Even the dogs are drawn to The Dome.

The land stretching out to the mesas looks like the floor of an empty sea.

Jake and Shelby climbed the hill with us . . .

Looking out towards la Culebra, you can see nearly all the way to San Luis. I loved being surrounded by the soft basalt slopes. Despite living at the foot of one of the highest mountain peaks in Colorado I'm not much of a mountain climber; old hills are more my speed.

* * * *

Today I was reading some of my earliest entries in this blog. I started the blog in 2007, around the time I launched my now defunct author's website. I was frustrated and confused (still am, to some extent) about how hard I had worked to steer myself off the course that felt the most natural to me. Why do I deliberately turn away from the projects, the visions, the work that feel the most important?

Maybe the photographs I've been taking and the short poems I've been writing don't mean much in the scheme of things, but I love the fact that they just exist, like the dry grasses and the stones here. They grow or they don't grow, live or don't live, but they're present. They exist. Nothing else I've done has given me such a sense of release from the wounded monster of my ego.

This is an excerpt from my October 10, 2007 entry:

I built the house that I huddle in now, my legs cramped from crouching, my back sore from staying curled up in such a small space. I poured a hasty foundation over dream-sand, threw together walls that rattle around my ears. I worked hard—maybe not honestly, but hard—to get to this place and build that house. I must have had faith, at some point, in that journey.

Would I be any more willing to take an entirely different direction, one that leads more directly into my heart? That path is hard, and I might be too soft for it now. There’s no guarantee of shelter. On this trail, you risk an exposure that’s both beautiful and brutal. The food you gather on the way is sparse and mysterious--stones and shadows, leaves and light, the occasional peace that comes when you’ve accepted that there isn’t anything but this.

That journey begins when I refuse to say ‘yes’ to anything I can’t completely, utterly believe in.

The heart, in solitude, has to learn to recognize its own voice again.

Valley Light

These photos were taken at Viejo San Acacio, the oldest standing church in Colorado. Of course, the church is neonatal compared to other historic buildings in the country or the world, but the relatively brief history of Costilla County, it's considered quite old. See how the blue of the Virgin's grotto echoes the sky?

Now that I look back at these photographs, which were taken on the first evening of the new year, I think I was photographing the light more than the church.

The church is adobe covered with stucco. We've looked for Viejo San Acacio in the past, without success. Finally we referred to the trusty Gazeteer to find the church, which is not located in contemporary San Acacio, a very small community that hangs onto its heritage despite its diminishing population and the growing number of vacant buildings.

There's something profoundly moving about the light in this area of the Valley. It has a full, burnished tone that's far, far older than the structures it illuminates. The light resonates with a rich, low sound that draws me back to the city of San Luis -- as if the homemade tortillas they sell at the local gas stations weren't enough. I think I would know that light even if the high desert terrain and the mountains weren't there to provide a context.

New Year Begins

I'm having trouble getting back in the swing of things at the start of the year. I've been puttering around with a few personal projects, spending a lot of time scavenging in the desert with my camera. It's January 3 already -- shouldn't I have won the Nobel Prize for something? 2012 is flying by!

Seriously, I've been downshifting for a long time. I think this landscape poked a hole in my ambition. I don't have a lot going on, and I'm starting to like it that way. It's hard to scrape up a lot of ambition when you live in a suburb of Mars.

I'm very happy to have two tanka included in the first issue of Inner Art Journal, an online journal devoted to tanka, haiku and other simple forms of poetry. There's a wonderful article on tanka practice posted on their home page. It's a simple, quiet journal -- easy to stay focused there.

I hope your year is off to a good start.

On the Last Day of the Year

A fierce westerly wind began to blow early this morning, as if to make up for yesterday's calm, idyllic weather. By midday, Blanca was all but submerged in a sea of dust. Eric took this photo of our new sunflower windsock. He decided that today would be the perfect opportunity to test the sunflower's relentless optimism. I thoroughly expected the windsock to be somewhere in New Mexico by the time we finished running our errands in town, but it clung to the post, as cheery as ever.

After the trip to town, we decided to the last afternoon of 2011 at Mountain Home Reservoir with the dogs. The reservoir must be a testimony to our recent drought; the flat, frozen dish of water lay at least 50 yards from the boat landing across an expanse of sand and weeds.

But the frozen water had an austere beauty -- the mysterious opacity of ice. The last evening of the year looked something like the last evening of the world.

The dogs, who apparently didn't mind the signs of pre-apocalyptic drought, had a blast. Jake wore an orange bandanna for the occasion; Shelby wore a purple one.

On the way home, this view of the Blanca Massif met us on the other side of a crest in the road. This stunning, unexpected gift seemed like a good portent for the new year.

Updates and Reflections

This year has been . . . memorable. I'm going to miss 2011, not only because I love the number 11 and got a thrill on the 11th of every month, but because a lot of gnarly yet positive changes took place. I had a difficult slump during the summer and early fall, but I'm coming out of that and have been working on some new projects.

I'm updating Tsisnaasjini again. Somehow I drifted into writing tanka to accompany the photos. Tanka are kind of like haiku on steroids -- a form of Japanese poetry that consists of 5 lines. I've been reading tanka for several years now, but didn't begin writing them until recently. The form seems to lend itself to my haphazard, amateur study of this microcosm of the desert; with tanka, I can capture my observations in a distilled format. I can compose tanka when I'm not sitting at the computer, which is a big plus, since I spend about 15 hours a day sitting down and am always looking for an excuse to get up. I think of tanka when I'm walking, doing dishes, lying in bed early in the morning, or just puttering around picking up rocks.

The Soaking Life is a new project that Eric and I have been working on for the past few months. This blog is dedicated to the pursuit of health and happiness through sitting around in hot water until your skin shrivels up and slides off. We are posting reviews of hot springs we've visited, healthy recipes and articles about balneotherapy, or the therapeutic use of hot, mineralized water. Eric just posted an extensive bibliography of books and articles on balneotherapy. I'm about to head over there to post a blog on the health benefits of sulfur. Please stop by anytime!

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving menu at the Lonely Alien Cafe:

• Pork tacos
• Chicken enchiladas
• Vegetarian tamales
• Parboiled organic merlot potatoes
• Salsa, salsa, salsa
• Crabapple bread
• Sweet potato pie (possibly two) with the skins left on!