The weekend was tumultuous in many ways, but we put out some needed good. Thank you. It feels good to do good.
Thanks for continuing to donate needed foods to the Cambridge Food Pantry. Tomorrow, I’m planning a Hygiene And Health Day For Children, including shampoo and soap.
Today, on Fast Meals Day, Sarah offers various options to suit different tastes and dietary needs.
From Velveeta Skillets to Raman Shrimp Noodles, the pantry tries to give hard-working parents a break today.
Ian McRae, our sheep shearer and friend, amazes us repeatedly. Not only has he become a great friend to me and a pleasure to talk to, but it turns out he plays a beautiful guitar, but he’s also an aggressive chess player, as I’m learning.
In just a few weeks, he’s got some killer opening movies that defeated me the other night, although I put up a serious fight. We’re planning another round this Wednesday. I’m getting humbled.
The guitar playing knocked us out. A week or two ago, I found out he had ever played the guitar, and I nagged him to bring and play his guitar for us. He was as comfortable and into it as I’ve ever seen him.
Ian has changed so rapidly since I first met him four or five years ago – he was our farrier – and we began a dialogue that led to his coming out as a poet, but I know nothing about the guitar.
Maria and I saw, with our jaws hanging, that he was playing so beautifully and confidently. Ian is remarkable; he is out on his path in life and seems to know exactly where he is going.
He is no longer the angry and confused denier of his deep, almost boundless, creativity. I can’t wait to see him every week; he has enriched my life, challenged my intellect, and brought me back to playing chess, something I always loved.
He is creative, complex, and gifted. He can do whatever he wishes to do. He is Ian. I saw him glowing brightly when he stood in our barn, shearing the sheep and arguing with me for years.
He is also still writing his poems and reading them to other poets, something I thought he might never do. We don’t argue with each other. We hugged on the way in and out. I never had a son who lived; I would have loved one like this.
I need to sharpen my game again. We’ll see about it on Wednesday.
It could be up to 100 degrees by noon; I am thinking of all the people without air conditioners or excellent shelter.
Zip (above) loves the fire pile (for the Summer Solstice fire). He loves the nooks and crannies, and I bet it’s cool up there.
There is a heat advisory, but that doesn’t stop life on the farm; it just slows it down a bit.
It closes the gate until dusk when it is more suitable for grazing.
We found two eggs this morning.
Robin is in his hot spot.
Lulu is looking for shade; soon, the barn will be dark and more relaxed.
Zinnia’s in the garden bed.
This next dropped out of a maple tree; seeing how well-built it is is fantastic. It was almost indeed abandoned from last year or earlier in the Spring after babies were born.
Echinacea, from Maria’s garden.
Maria is picking Camomile for our Camomile tea – it’s great.
I take our visual work on the farm seriously, and so does Maria. I started taking photos to improve the credibility of the blog. Even the conspiratorial underworld can’t figure out how to make pictures lie, although, with AI, they have a better chance.
An example: One of the so-called animal rights people who are forever angry with me for not letting Zip sleep in the house for the winter (most of them have never heard of a barn cat) wrote to me yesterday suggesting that Zip didn’t have a heated cat house in the barn (he does not know Maria) because I wasn’t posting it on the blog. He demanded to see one.
I started to point out to him that it is 90 to 100 degrees up here in the hills right now, and he would be waiting a long time before we plugged it in and put a photo of it up on the blog again (I’ve done it three times). When Maria put it up, he hadn’t bothered to look.
I decided not to do his homework. Lazy, stupid, and arrogant are a deadly combination for me.
I wondered if he knew it was 90-plus degrees here and in half the country. Sometimes, even photos need to be changed. I asked him if he knew there was a heat wave, but he ran and hid by then.
And then, I deleted the message without replying further—no more enabling of people like that.
The most fanatic of them were hoping I’d get arrested for having a barn cat live in a barn—one called the sheriff to accuse me of animal abuse. (He loved the heated barn house, by the way.)
That ranks as the dumbest struggle I’ve had on the blog and the most significant waste of time. I wish I could explain it to Zip; he would get a kick out of it.
The heated barn cat will be plugged in sometime in November or October. It does make a neat photo; this will be the fourth or fifth time I post one.
Maria introduced me to the heated barn cat house. When our previous barn cats, Minnie and Flow, got old, we set one up for them. It still works great for me.
To our knowledge, Zip only went into his heated cat house once. He likes to sleep in the haystack in the hay loft in the winter or, even better, search for hungry mice in the snow. He is a winter cat, for sure.
I feel bad for the world’s animals; they seem to have no natural advocates who are sane or rational and have a lot of money. Where, I wonder, did all the people who cared about the welfare of animals go?
The Zip/winter issue is boring to me now, given what is happening worldwide and in our country. This kind of thing is one of the reasons out here that people hate liberals so much, and I am one.
But at the time—the more fanatic animal rights trolls were calling the sheriff—I was glad to have pictures of my life. Maria feels the same way.
Images tell our stories, the stories of our life on the farm. I had my troubles, but I was smart enough to grasp the importance of photography in my life, not just the farm. That came later.
I never imagined this would transcend animals and go to flowers in such a big way. Life is deliciously mysterious that way.
Maria’s blog is lovely because it uses photography to capture life authentically. I do, too. I’ll be posting it every Monday.
Several good people told me the flower below is called Nigella, or Love In The Mist.
I love the name; I love the quirky flower, an oddball if you can ever call a flower that.
it captures so much of what I want in my flower photography, but not all the time.
This is a time to go inward and strengthen what is inside; outside voices hold nothing for me. Anger bounces off of me.
I’m patiently waiting for someone I want to listen to and learn from. I don’t need to watch the same thing over and over again. I’m letting go.
Much of my life now centers around letting go, which is the path to peace of mind for me. Getting stuck on the past or failures and disappointments brought me a lot of unhappiness and anxiety. To me, it became the garbage dump of my consciousness. I needed to clean it out. I needed to let go. To do that, I had to figure out where this trouble and pain came from.
The more I did that, the easier it was—and is—to let go. Now I can just be me, take it or leave it. To me, good Jon Katz and wrong Jon Katz make life precious. I can bear almost anything but being a predictable bore.
I’m trying to make the Good Side bigger and bigger. It won’t be easy.
I’m not seeking sainthood or the approval of the billions of computer users on the Internet. I’m seeking my own approval. I’ve let go of many grievances, sorrows, and recriminations. I’m done with others telling me what to think. It’s true; I really don’t care what strangers who know nothing about me think about what I think.
I’m lighter. I know who my friends are and who they are not.
This is a sign-off tonight: I’m done blogging for the day. I had fun with flowers today; come and see.
I’m bracing myself for heat all week. The vegetable garden is drying up. People everywhere have been going through this; we haven’t until now. We will one day need a new and deeper well.
Those maligned scientists have warned about this for years; now, there is no escaping the truth. I won’t think much about it today; there is too much beauty around me.
I’m not thinking of yesterday either; I get it. I know what happened. I don’t need to see it again 100 times. How can the brain survive without harm?
Nothing is new to say, and we are expected to hear nothing for days, months, and years. I won’t do that to my consciousness. I know they have a lot of time to fill it out and many ads to justify, but they won’t be filling it out with me.
New flowers I find and bring home.
Flowers in our gardens or the forest.
Sometimes, the most miniature flowers are the most beautiful. These flowers, similar to the head of a pin, are shy about being photographed.
I feel like a painter sometimes, mixing up colors. I love the look and feel of wildflowers mixed with cut and garden flowers.
