9-9-12: Voluntary Chaos, Remembering 9-9-9 and Touring the Abyss

Isn’t this hilarious? All the different odd parts flowing into each other. I love the Mayan Cib symbol as well.

 

   

So here it is the 9-9 of 2012 already, whew! Does it go fast or what. Except for those periods of elongated timelessness. This week it was the buck herd providing me with entertainment, all 7. They’ve taken to hanging around in the back yard. Not constantly, but maybe every few days they come by, or sometimes it will be just one or 2, but frequently all 7. They are quite a spectacle with their newly de-fuzzed antlers and unruly activity. It was totally the Buck Show out the windows the other morning. Of course my camera battery was dead. Great animal antics. They were coming right up to the house, eating the trees, standing up on hind legs to reach high branches and walking sometimes 5 or 6 steps on 2 legs. And they now butt each other with their horns and are such characters. I chatter at them out the windows so they get used to the sound of my voice, and they are no longer too scared of me.

Wants to come in and
use the internet??

 











Oh, now this was something. These great horned animals, and what do the little guardian felines do? They run riot through them, and all around the house. They totally act up as guardians and sometimes actually frighten them off. They like to do this scatter maneuver, where suddenly the whole lot of them will leap -- jump -- bolt --- vanish at warp speed in all directions as if on cue, it’s so sudden and so fast - which of course is greatly disturbing to the Boys. During the Buck Show the cats were attentively on watch at the window sills or perched in the yard. Cats, they are incredible guardians. I have no idea what it is they are responding to when they scatter like that. Sometimes I’m left just shaking my head going “WHAT, you cats??!!” It’s clear that it’s very purposeful when they do it. But I can’t figure it out.     

Very cute, the cat and the Buck 
were hanging out together

   

Well, animal powers. Tuning into their frequency is a great delight for me. I just love the wild energy of them. So the Bucks and the Turkeys have decimated my greens beds. DECIMATED. It looks manicured. I don’t even chase them out any more. Have at it kids, it’s mowed. They thankfully have not been able to figure out my “tomato garden”, which is turning out to be an excellent way to go. Deer are too lazy to plow through weird barriers of cages and permaculture, same for turkeys, it’s too small to venture into. So what if they eat a few protruding tomato shoots. With enough winter squash and pumpkins outside the arrangement, nothing but gophers will bother it.

Turkeys, in the greens bed

Chair gateway to the
tomato garden

Actually I spoke too soon - my contractor reports that the other day, yes those naughty turkeys found the door and made it into the tomato garden. He has been very good to shoo them away in my absence. I now have to barricade the entrance with a silly chair arrangement. 

James, my contractor

So here we are, the 9-9 gateway. I’ve got chaos in all directions in my house. Taking my DNA upgrading lumps voluntarily by initiating another phase of house renovation. This funky lil house..... it was falling apart. It was built in 1953 so what does one expect, the elements are fierce on structures out here. Each year for the past 7 years I’ve had another section of it upgraded. For the most part I’m not interested in buildings, but I do really love to redesign my living space. This house had the yuckiest, cruddiest asbestos siding and little dysfunctional windows, with the exception of one very nice large window in the living room. Tiny rooms impossible to heat with a single woodstove.   

Cutest lil woodstove!

So I’ve changed all that.  Now it has simple wooden siding treated with herbal oil as a finish on the outside. It has a master bedroom-bathroom suite with an old claw-foot bathtub, double closet and sleeping loft. Of course Kristine must have her quaint windows with no screens. 

OF COURSE
the flowers must match
the paint job!

I know, they’re not code. He’s bringing everything else up to code, and the original windows were non-code anyway.... What they   lack in political correctness, they make up for with a designer color scheme and meticulous paint job only a nutty artist could conjure forth. The whole color ensemble is taken to the nth degree and enhanced by purple and orange flowers in the yard.

Voluntary Chaos, check it out:  2 yucky rooms will now be one large art studio for all my crap, heated with it’s own woodstove and complete with lovely windows and a nicely placed doorway.  I can’t wait to use this room!  My art life has been somewhat dysfunctional for some years.  It’s really dysfunctional now, with art crap in every room to clear the way for the contractor.  

Yikes, my art stuff, it’s frightening.  Baskets. Bags of fabric, bags. Seeds and dried botanicals. Herbal Product. Yarn collection. Clothing for cut-up. Paints, paintings, easel and brushes. Stuff for paper craft. A costume queen’s wardrobe. Drums & percussion instruments, gathering dust. A whole set-up for outdoor marketing & stage art. 

Look what the cats did to the tent, those brats, they insisted it was a feline trampoline.

Naughty cats, wrecked my marketing tent

Yarn Horde

More bags of fabric
spilling into the living room

Riboon etc. for flower crafts

                My 
     Art 
           Crap               

Years of paintings

Bags of Fabric

It WAS a hallway

I’ve been thinking back to the very intense 9-9-9 gateway, remembering what was going on those few years ago. I got to tour the abyss. Mind you, I still don’t live very far from it. It doesn’t take much to send me back there, but things are different now, my structures for work and income are more diverse and resilient. At that time, I got shoved hard under the bus by a tyrant who pushed me out of the farmers market I helped him start with all my expertise. And suddenly, I didn’t have an income. To complete the picture, my yoga class fell apart too. No savings. I had to be very VERY careful about driving around because I was still in that big gas-guzzling van that got about 11 miles to the gallon. I had to ask friends for some dried beans and produce to eat as I pretty much was out of food for awhile. I had no money for propane so was cooking on a little wood fired hibachi grill outside. Bills did not get paid too often. That experience took me right up to the very edge of my life collapsing here, which I by no means wanted to happen. I’ve been building foundation for nearly 20 years for a larger, culture-wide break-down, it would be terrible to be driven out so late in the game. Not that various circumstances and people haven’t tried -- they have, and continue to. They will not succeed.

Out with the old....

No, I am tenacious as all get-out. I had to re-invent myself and life (again). I had to totally surrender to the experience and wait for things to reform around me. It was horrible, but it taught me a lot. What I’m dealing with now as financial stress and uncertainty is NOTHING compared to that. Then, I nearly got sucked irrevocably into the debt death spiral. Now I live hovering right above it, sustaining, making it on very little american dollars and a lot of hard work, self-sufficiency and give-away. Most people would be horrified at the way my finances work out. I have no idea at any given time how much money is coming my way until it lands in my hot little hand. Tricky to remodel a house and pay a contractor, thankfully he’s easy and will take payments. And by the way he does great work!

James, he's a master at his craft

 Meet James, my awesome neighbor down the road. He’s a master at taking an old cruddy funky house and turning it into something wonderful. He’ll sit there and patiently listen to my whacky ideas for windows and design, then he goes into his store room and pulls out all this cool stuff -- salvaged bits of plumbing, windows, doors, wood and trim he’s saved from the many houses he’s remodeled. He usually brings me a selection. 

Here's how they will go

Here's what he brought

He knows by now to save all the good wood he’s yanking out of the walls --- can you imagine, the inside walls of the house were full of these great rough-milled 2 by 6‘s? I told him, you take all those out and we’ll use them on the INSIDE of the rooms, go buy boring standard 2 by 4‘s at the hardware store to replace them. The walls of this house have literally been turned inside out, including some really nice milled pine planks that formerly were under the yucky asbestos siding and are now interior paneling.

He requires no architectural drawings or anything like that, we just talk about what I want at various junctures and he does it. Sometimes I tell him, tear that wall out first, I need to see it deconstructed before I can see how to put it together again. I sew, which is very similar to construction, so we are on the same page where design is concerned.


No, I am no longer in the abyss, for which I am very VERY grateful. What I now do for work is local enough and diverse enough that if a class bombs out somewhere, or a garden client cancels, it’s hard but not totally devastating. I can get another client or start another class. Plus the last couple years I have a foot hold in the local community center where I work at the desk one afternoon a week, in addition to it being an awesome place to hold classes. I teach herb classes there, hatha yoga various places and have a handful of garden clients. As far as herbal work goes, I continue to study, experiment, grow and make product and then usually give or trade it to any who ask for it or need it. Herbalism is incredible, I can make all my own personal care products and medicinals. Between that, and cutting firewood for heat, growing as much food as possible, trading and bartering - I manage to make it, just barely. I have jumped through a hell lot of hoops and endured things bordering on the ridiculous and untenable in order to continue to be here, doing this, but here I am.

He crawled in the sewing stuff,
stored under my loft bed

Wants to iron his fur I guess

Sounds awful, you say, WHY???? ..... Because the shot at truly creating Paradise on this earth and succeeding at it is worth fighting for. Certainly worth evolving for. For me it started in the back yard, quite literally. But that is a subject for another blog...    

Uh oh.... spat!

  

Isn't he cute???

Last night there were priceless animal antics, quite late. At one point I heard this noise in the bathroom portion of the room - it was definitely a non-feline ruckus near the waste basket. Then I didn’t hear it any more. A while later I heard it again so I turned on the light -- and there he was, Bernie the Opossum, newly having crawled out of the garbage can where I’m sure he had bedded down for a little while! So he’s gone from growling at me to coming in, checking out the food bar ( the cat fud bowls now get put away at night), and wanting to hang out in the house..... 

There he goes!! 

What a grinner

It’s hilarious. I can walk right up to him, squat down to his level and have a little chat. He’ll look at me for a few moments, wiggle his ears and then he scoots out. Never seen him drop dead and “play possum” yet.

F-f-f-fat Houdini...

So after Bernie made his exit last night - this is between 2 and 3 a.m., - a bit later I heard another non-cat noise, only to turn on the light and see Fat Houdini coming into the room to say hi.....

By then I was wide awake and had to sit up for awhile in the dark. Great view of  the stars out here, it’s very soothing. Well I laughed like a nut thinking about all the wild animals freely romping through my world, and that I should consider it not only humorous but something of an accomplishment, a success. The   culture of yuckdom would like to call me a royal freak - no husband, no children, no television, very little money but making it, somehow... lots of   plants.... living alone out in the woods with a pack of cats, surrounded by a sometimes surreal looking garden and a bunch of charmed creatures ... awake at odd hours of the night, spewing loony-tunes laughter. And calling it a successful life. 

Can you imagine I worked really hard for this? Yeah, the culture  would call me a freak or worse.  Too bad. I’m not worried about it. I know how to survive the Abyss, work with Nature, Plants, Tech and the Unseen. Pretty useful, in this time of shifting realities.

    

 Okay one last thing: Know your plants....

Newly cut cabbage core

 

Inside the Tomato Garden

If you like cabbage, and want to grow it more easily than starting seeds, here’s great way to speed the whole process up. Buy a cabbage and cut it so that the core is intact. Place the core in a dish of water, and within a few days it will start to sprout little leaves.

Cabbage Starts

Keep it in the dish for a couple weeks, then plant out in soil with good fertility. It will slowly grow roots and sprout several cabbages on the stalk. They like high soil fertility, water, shade cloth in the summer if you live in the Sierras, and will ideally become perennial.

Here's one planted

Cabbage cores, sprouting

  More on enhancing the immune system, gut flora, cabbage, kimchi and wild animals next time.

Be well, everyone!