Moving back to Toas...the Universe is talking to me

My own silence weighs on me with the burden of a necessary self-examination. Trust your intuition, even if it appears there are no options. When your body and emotions are telling you something is not right, when your kids are acting crazier than normal, and your dog/puppy has turned into a psychotic attack dog, when your house plants are suddenly all sick and dying, and the recently (past two and a half years) quiet parrot has started screaming like a banshee again, when you're afraid to go outside and feel like a prisoner in a strange house, maybe it's time to listen to what the Universe is saying.

We moved the farm to New Mexico over the past two months. We are just outside of Taos in a place that is not unfamiliar, but strange with the taint of money. Is all of Taos like this? I just don't remember. Maybe I didn't care.

Tipped trailer, surprisingly not damaged...except the hitch.

On the move, I wrecked the trailer on La Veta Pass...flipped it on its side on a patch of ice...thought I was going to flip the car too, but managed not to. And as we came to a stop facing the wrong direction on the wrong side of the road, facing the guard rail a few feet away, my adrenaline shooting through my veins, it did not occur to me how close to death I had brought my children and myself, but how that damn pass seemed to have it in for me. It was on the other side, heading up from Taos that I hit a deer some years ago and trashed the front end of my Xterra to the tune of five grand. Lucky for me no one was hurt in either of my La Veta Pass adventures, but I sure have a hard time driving through there now without a full blown panic attack coming on.

E-ship shell, sage and Taos Mountain

But now we have landed in northern NM and the weekend we had to build a chicken coop was one of the coldest all year. The arrangement we have now puts the llamas and chickens some miles away at another property until we can build them fences and shelters here near the house we are renting. They are in the shell of a burned out Earthship on the north side of Taos, but you can't see them from anywhere, unless you are really looking for them.

Passive solar chicken coop in Earthship shell

We managed to get the coop built and everyone arranged, but it still took several lights for warmth and a few weeks for our hens to start laying normally again. I guess they are traumatized too. We did lose a few to coyotes, I'm guessing. All we found was a mess of feathers that might have once belonged to one of the four missing hens. Now, the chickens are guarded by llamas who are enclosed with electric wire.

Nothing is ideal, but we are getting by. We have found a few egg customers already and Richard touched base with some old co-workers at the Corps.

Taos is Taos...so much the same but with more people now. There are places built up here too, just like in the big cities. There are kiddie car shopping carts here too, but some of these have their own bumper stickers, reminding the young drivers to treat everyone with kindness. There is an Occupy Movement here too, but I have not met anyone or gotten involved yet. It seems I'm too caught up in the drama of my own life. I was reading Howard Zinn's A Peoples History of the United States... and got way too angry with the founding peoples of America to continue, convinced that we are now in some strange tenant farmer situation, and I'm angry and disappointed at the elitist, judgmental folks who run the world. (Yes, I have been examining my anger issues and trying to release my need to draw these situations into my life.) It would seem that 1% of the white and powerful, the rich and corrupt, have been doing bad in this country since it's very beginning.

I am driven more than ever now to find a community of like-minded folks who want to be the positive change this planet needs to survive the coming downfall of the powerful American reign. I think a lot of the west gorge area and the mesa where people seem to make their own rules. I long to meet and talk with some of these open minded folks to see how their community differs so vastly from the mainstream world where resources are hoarded and people are exploited to gain more.

We are still searching for our piece of land to build our little sustainable farm, and I'm afraid that the place we are now is not really doable for more than the very short term. It is an emotional minefield of some variety, and the energy is wrong. I'd love to have some peace and not have to worry about my dogs and where Richard left something, and how the llamas and chickens are so far away.

Since we moved into this house, I have been dreaming of Paris. Weird. At night I dream of moving to France...packing, getting on a plane, making all of the arrangements. Can't figure it out. When we lived in Portland, Oregon for a total of four miserable months, I dreamed of Africa. I never did figure that out either, but I'm guessing it has something to do with being in an unhappy situation and looking for a way out.

I certainly don't want to offend anyone, and hope I don't, but when the kids, the dogs, the bird, the houseplants and my dreams are all telling me that something is not right, shouldn't I do something about it?

Maybe the Mountain is testing me again. But you know what...I won't be chased off this time. It doesn't even matter. I won't go back to a house that is on the verge of falling into an old mine shaft because of earth tremors caused by fracking. No way.

I made it back to my beloved NM and I'm not leaving. Stay tuned though. We may end up out in the sage sooner rather than later.

This is my new kitchen view.

An Arroyo Seco sunset through trees...another view  from the house.

Nothing beats a New Mexican sunset when the sky is on fire and the day goes out like a fresh painting. I have come home to the land of art, where every scene is a magnificent creation by the Master Artist.

Just a few wells in the neighborhood...should generate some revenue for the county.

Since last April, we have been surprised to share our pristine mountain views with the big oil companies, who seem to be moving in post haste, taking advantage of that every 40 acre rule. Say hello to our new neighbors!

This first well is the second to come to our neighborhood--added about a month or so ago. We can see this one from our house, but at least we can't see the evaporation pit.

Oil Well #2 -- second well in the neighborhood

The second well in the photo below was the first one that came to our quaint little town last April. Big producer...or so I hear. 100 barrels a day. Is that why they added another pump? And still the drill is there...or maybe that's the pipe machine.

First well in the hood, but second in distance from our house. That fence contains the evaporation pit.

Oil Well #1. Still drilling. Going another direction maybe?

And the newest drill in our rural atmosphere....

Oil well #3...they look big and scary when they are actually drilling.

Oil Well #3 --pumping in that water (or...)..helps with that "horizontal" drilling

Big and scary. Drills with little red lights on top, flashing in the night so the planes won't hit them. Kind of ruins the view of the bright stars and the Milky Way.

Took these photos on our way up to the Springs for my daughter's first Occupational Therapy session. It went well. Even got to spend time with the angry teenage girl (my second oldest) who doesn't seem so angry now that she's discovered the calming effects of a little herb we'd all like to legalize. My oldest though, who lives in Texas, is pro-cop, anti MMJ, and anti-Occupy. Makes a mama proud.

Noticed some other odd activity in the hood: bobcat taking out trees up the road toward the national forest land. More fencing going in. Unused roads look like they are seeing some traffic. My guess? I think we've got two or three more oil wells coming in.  And it just F*** 'in pisses me off! There was no disclosure about this crap when we bought this house! Fracked up, man!

On the positive side (Is there one?) I did get a few responses to my CL ad looking for a rental in the Land of Enchantment. And one was another Earthship. Go figure. I guess people who build/live in E-ships are just my kind of people. It sounds perfect! A place of opportunity and healing...a divine structure to reside in while we search for our new permanent place. The best thing is we get to head down there to check out some of these rentals. Nothing beats a road trip to New Mexico. Except staying maybe.

Negatives: need to find homes for some of the critters...maybe. Guineas, cats, some chickens. Need to move before Wells Fargo repossesses the truck, and our house falls into one of the old coal mine shafts (fracking DOES NOT cause earthquakes or tremors. Oh, wait, it does.) Need to move before they begin on the new coal mine to open between our house and the good old Uranium, Superfund Site, Cotter Mill (which is trying to get a license extension, in case they decide to re-open perhaps).

This place is just getting way too toxic for the likes of humans. It is time to bail on the Prison town and begin again in a place that fights the Big Corporate Oil/Gas/hazardous materials energy companies like their lives depend on it...because, they do.

Good luck little Chuck!

I gave away my baby rooster today, to a nice woman who I think will appreciate the bond between a gal and her roo. One of Charlie's sons (looks just like his dad) has gone on to rule his own roost and take care of his own harem of laying hens. Good luck little Chuck!

And, it turns out the other chick I hatched from an egg is also a rooster...Chuck's brother, a Barred Rock,  Black Star Cross. Kind of funny looking, but he's coming into some pretty tail feathers now and some have a hint of green. Interesting boy. Not crowing yet. A late bloomer? I think I will call him Gideon, from a dream I had some weeks ago of a baby with the same name. Didn't understand the relevance of the name in the dream, but it seems fitting for my lonely little orphaned rooster who is just nineteen weeks old.

I have been so caught up in the Occupy revolution, I have not been writing or doing much of anything really.

Took the kids to the city for their autism screenings. Turns out my son is fine, perfectly normal...well, his role  model, his older sister, has taught him a thing or two, which might be questionable, but otherwise, it's all good.

My little girl, however, is another story. That's how the doctor told us. Another story. Diagnosed PDD-NOS, which in autism lingo means not full blown autistic, but on the spectrum. Pervasive Developmental Disorder - Non Specified. She has many autistic traits, but she also speaks and can communicate, even if it is a little off. So there we have it. They'd like my daughter to undergo therapy once a week. Speech, occupational, behavioral...learn how to be social, in a normal way. What does that mean? I'm not even social in a normal way. Although, I have to admit it has been an issue for me in my own life. Maybe my daughter can learn how to talk to people and stand to be in the same room with more than say five individuals. If not, hey, I will understand.

Still got New Mexico on the mind. In a bad, bad way. Or good. I search through Craigslist daily, trying to find a place we could rent with all of our critters. But I also have been trying to find homes for some of them. Anyone want a nice, male, neutered indoor cat? It turns out my son may be allergic to all of the animals anyway. His next blood test will tell us.

The oil drilling in our neighborhood continues. There are now three within a mile of our house. Fracking? Yep. Heard it from several people now. But "there's nothing to worry about,"and "it's not that bad," and "maybe the town will use the revenue to fix the roads," or "a little fracking is not as bad as a lot of fracking." Right?

Wait...what?

"Oil fracking is not as bad as gas fracking." and "give it some time and they will go away."

How long? Long enough to grow a tumor out of the side of my head? Or maybe when our water smells like fuel? Or maybe when the ground starts to shake and our house actually falls into one of the old abandoned coal mine shafts 300 feet underneath of us? How long? Maybe when they put a drill in the empty lot next to us? There's one in the next town over...sits smack in the middle of four houses. I'd say those lucky families are less than 300 feet away from that nightmare. Evaporation pits. Sure, they are using chemicals. "Not that bad"...how do we know if they won't tell us what chemicals?

Abandon ship! Abandon ship!

I think it's time to move on now to a community that doesn't favor profit over human health.

Not in my back yard, damn it!

And since NM still calls to my spirit, I think it's time to listen and find another place. They have autism therapists down in Santa Fe. I checked. Even a DAN! (Defeat Autism Now!) doctor. And the home school laws in NM are a bit more lax than in Colorado. Plus, you can collect and harvest rainwater. It's not against the law. Imagine that! And, as everyone knows, the Land of Enchantment is home to the most interesting people one could ever hope to meet. As one of my old lovers once told me...I'd fit right in. And as my family and friends always ask...who'd want to live in New Mexico? Exactly! Too many people here know me now.

I'm going to die in New Mexico, I promise. It'd be nice if I could do a little living in the land Georgia O'Keeffe came to love. The land recorded by Ansel Adams and written about by Tony Hillerman. It is an artist's paradise...a land where the muse runs free with wild and crazy abandon, dancing with the wind under skies ablaze with glorious, smoldering  sunsets. 

It is home. Even if I don't live there yet. I will get back to the land where my spirit sings in harmony with the energy vibrations of the mesas and mountains and the beautiful sage. I'm coming New Mexico, I'm coming!

Taos Time

Got Taos on the mind, like some old lover that won't let me forget, singing some desert serenade, urging me to fall in love again.

On May 13 of 2002, I sat in my pretty, little, black Neon, smoking a cigarette, staring out into the weirdness that is Taos, and wrote this short poem. My 2000 Neon was my writing studio, my personal space, my little Frogger, hopping across roads to deliver pizzas (until R drove it over a hill and put a hole in the floorboard...it still ran, but it was tainted by a man's harsh handling, scarred by a unconsciousness that didn't understand that by loaning my little car, I was entrusting him with a piece of me.)

                                                 

Taos

Wildlife in the yard—

A black and white magpie,

Three red-breasted sparrows,

And a big wolf dog

Wandering by.

Wildness in mountain time 

Where nothing is quite right.

Peculiar smallness-

A place where free spirits still walk

Half-dressed down the street.

Magpies walk,

Wolf dogs talk

And music from the heart

Resonates with the sunshine

In time to the wind chimes

That hum with the breeze.

-K.A.Bennett 2002

Taos was my muse, as it seems to be with so many people, and although I lived a lonely life there, my creativity blossomed in words and in paint, in photographs and in ideas, and maybe that was the gift the Mountain gave to me. As I read of Taos now, and see photographs of latilla fences and old adobes, I think of how much I miss her, that old town that I drove around delivering pizzas into the night, dodging dogs chasing me and biting at the tires of my car, trying to decipher houses without addresses and streets without signs (they have those now!). What an adventure the Taos days were, and had R been the person then that he has become today, perhaps we could have stayed and the Mountain would not have laughed us out of her shadow.

Maybe it isn't too late. Or maybe it is. Is there an adobe in my future yet? 

I miss the sage like I could never imagine. Lately it consumes me...my longing for the open sky and the scraggly sagebrush that is my soul mate. The closed minds that surround me in this right wing town beg me to recall a different time, and a different mind, a younger me, someone free, not bound and constrained by the conformity all around, and by the system I live in. I want to be free again. I hear the desert calling again. It is almost time to go back home again. The sage is singing and the wind whispers my name.

Time to Wake Up!

We have this little chicken....a rooster actually. He's one of the two hatch-lings I let our broody hen hatch a couple of months ago. In the last couple of days he's started this pathetic, scratchy crowing, like an adolescent rooster who's voice breaks in all the wrong places. I heard him the first time today, and thought, what is that...a chicken with an egg stuck? When I realized the little guy had found his voice, I smiled, and thought about our fledgling Occupy movement that is just starting to find its own unified voice. Like that little rooster, the Occupy movement is young and full of energy, and sometimes our voice breaks as we all try to air our grievances with the corrupt corporations that run our politicians and our country. But I have no doubt, that like that young rooster that lives up the hill in my llama barn, the Occupy movement will find its unified voice and grow strong, singing out across the nation and around the world. "Cock-a-doodle-doo." "It's time to wake up!"

Last week Richard and I took our kids and headed down to the first Occupy Pueblo demonstration. What a life changing event! I reunited with an old friend, made some new friends and watched as people joined together in a courageous attempt to stand up for themselves against the corporate system of greed that has taken so much of our power away as a people, and as individual human beings...the evil, brainwashing, soul-stealing 1% that would keep us all in our sheeple skin, unquestioning, punching time clocks, making profits for them as they sit in their ivory towers and comfortable lives, turning a blind eye to the people they step on in their endless greed. Can it be that we as a nation have finally woken up? And not just to the greed that runs rampant in Wall Street and our political system, but maybe some of us have begun to wake up spiritually from the slumber our spirits have been in since the consumerist ideology has told us we can only be good enough, pretty enough, smart enough, wealthy enough if we go out there and support the capitalist system. More, more more.

Our entire society is based upon a failing system. Peak oil has passed, wall street has crashed and the big banks got bailed out. A few young people...college students...in New York City decided to band together and say enough is enough. College students can't pay their student loans (heck, I'm middle aged, a late in life graduate, and I can't pay mine), houses are getting foreclosed on at an alarming rate, jobs are being eliminated, and our hardworking Americans are being thrust out into the streets, creating a huge, HUGE, population of homeless people that includes veterans, and families with young children. The unemployment rate is absurd. No one can live on minimum wage, if they are lucky enough to have a job, and the banks are pounding on our doors: "Give us more money!" The big corporations who got bailed out won't give us a break. They got to write off their debts, why can't we?

So, Occupy Wall Street was born on September 17, 2011 in a park in NYC, across the street from Wall Street...a peaceful protest of individuals gathered together to voice their unhappiness and frustration with the Coporatocracy that has been running this country, been running the world with their unjust wars, their environmental degradation, their corrupt healthcare system and unhealthy agricultural system.

Finally! Here it is then, the wake up call for the American people. The American Dream is over folks. Even if you can get a decent paying job with fairly good health insurance, it can only last so long. And sure, some of us might be able to get by until our last days, when we hand our planet over to a younger generation who is asking, "what do I do with this mess?" But I think it has become our responsibility to stand up and fight the fight with those brave souls who began this, dare I say, Revolution?

When Richard and I fled the city, we were looking for a better place where we could raise our own food and raise our children in a cleaner, safer place while the world fell apart. Isn't it ironic then that my kids and even myself are not healthy, but suffer from unknown symptoms, even though we eat an organic, locally grown, no red meat, little dairy diet? What is going on?

Yesterday we attended the first Occupy Canon City demonstration, where a couple of dozen brave souls stood together on a corner in front of the Wells Fargo to show our solidarity with our brothers and sisters across the nation and around the world in the Occupy movement, and to support the Occupy Wall Street Occupiers, where this Revolution began.

It's a scary thing to put yourself out there and stand up for your rights and the rights of an American people, most of whom are still asleep at the wheel, driving to their dead end jobs for very little pay, and going home to a house they can't afford or a house that's value has dropped so significantly in the past two years--what is called "upside down." We had one of those babies in the Springs, a beautiful 100 year old Victorian, we had to offer in a short sale, because the interest only payment was too high as Richard's pay continued to be cut every year so the "corporation" could see more profits. Everything we put into it over seven years...new windows, landscaping, remodeled bathrooms...all lost. We were lucky to walk away without a bill.

It has been our dream and our goal to live sustainably on a piece of land and cut our ties to the consumerist culture that has hoodwinked so many people into lives of slavery to the system. So, certainly when this movement began, we were supporters from the get go and will hang in there until drastic change comes about in the American political system and the Corporatocracy is disbanded and eliminated. Richard and I have always been about building local community, and it is in the days, weeks and months ahead that that community will become so important as we help each other to survive the coming chaos.

Yes, I think this is the beginning of what all of the great spiritual masters would call the Global Awakening" and it ain't gonna be pretty folks. It is also the collapse of an American, no, WORLD culture of consumerism, which was on its way after we reached peak oil. We can stand in our towns and Occupy and band together to stand up against the 1%, which is phenomenal, but we really, really need to think about what our future as America looks like. We need to rebuild our communities and learn from the Occupation on Wall Street. In one month they have formed a egalitarian, working society in their park, a community where every individual is valued for what he or she brings to the table. Remarkable and wonderful. I am in awe of the way things are working out.

And of course the Corporatocracy will fight it. And mainstream America will fight it too for a while. People are scared. What do we do next? What happens when it all falls apart? Where do we go when our jobs no longer exist and the shopping malls have been shut down? That's where community comes in. Find it. Build it. It will save your life.

Last night when we got home from our Occupation, followed by a dog training class for my girl Honey, who was very well behaved at the protest, there was the most horrendous noise in the neighborhood. Metal on metal, squealing. They are drilling another well in the oil drill across the ravine. There is already a pump in, next to the evaporation pond. I suspect this new hole is for dumping the chemicals to extract that hard to reach oil that hides between layers of shale and rock. I'm pretty sure they are fracking less than a mile from my house.

I'm crying now, as I think of how we moved here to give our kids a chance...a future. And now we are stuck with a house we can't sell...it is just worth what we paid for it two years ago...dropped in equity 50K. Before we joined the Occupation, we were making a list of pros and cons about abandoning this place, this house, this property we have built barns on and put gardens in, and running to a clean piece of land we could buy outright with our next tax refund. Sure, we'd have to start over, and maybe live in a tent or a camp trailer for a few years, but maybe my head would stop hurting and my kids' autistic symptoms would go away.

Yeah, I'm ready for a Revolution! I will stand and fight this fight as I can, for my children, for my neighbors, for the planet. It is time to start over. Abolish the corrupt systems and begin again. Clean slate.

Cock-a-doodle-doo! Wake up!!!