Expecting

February 23, 2012
JustLiving Farm

Yesterday, with the help of a few friends, we reshaped, remodeled, and temporarily organized the barn into a kidding area.  This came the same day I received notice a friend of mine is pregnant.  As a guy I really don’t have a clue what it means to be an expectant mother, but as a parent I do know what it means to be expectant.

I know it drives folks—it did me at one time, a little nuts when folks compare the human condition of pregnancy or raising children to that of animals, but I know few folk who are parents and work with animals that don’t make the comparison on a regular basis.  For instance, today, four out of twelve does have bagged up—that telltale sign of goat utters filling and teats enlarging.  This stage of pregnancy says soon: soon birth, soon mamas making the sound only mamas make with newly birthed babies, soon baby kids finding they have legs, soon the first taste of milk, soon babies learning the mystery of life with sky and wind and straw.  This sooness has the demeanor of the four does quite different from that of the other eight and not all that different from other mothers, four legged or two legged, living this stage of life.

When the demeanor, the expectation, of these mamas become what it is, then we are compelled toward the barn to ready stalls and a loafing area in anticipation of birth.  In only a few hours the barn was readied for the first birth of the year.  Now we wait.

It is nice to be ready, to have shelter and warmth in the time of expectation.  And I reckon that is my hope for all expectant parents, to have a warm place for new life to enter which allows their youngsters to live and learn and love the mystery of life with sky and wind.

© David B. Bell 2012

Clay Vision

Brandon's Monster

February 12, 2012
My Future

There are some things better left said by clay.  I learned this from Mr. Kent, our high school Art Instructor.  Clay dries as clay wants to dry depending on the environment you are working in.  In other words, it dries when it dries.  Probably a lesson for all of us, we control a lot less of Creation than we would like to think.  A great lesson for youth…work the clay, have a vision on where you’re going and what you want, but be free and flexible with the outcome.  You only have as much say concerning your creation as the world allows.  Listening to the voice of clay, or the voice of air, or the voice of humidity is a lesson for all of us?

© David B. Bell 2012

Delight of Conversation

January 28, 2012
My Future

Just a little over a week ago the Mount Adams School District honored My Future, Belinda, and David for community service and support.  This was a wonderful moment in the midst of a busy school district board meeting.

Just over a year ago, My Future began offering art and choir during after-school hours.  The numbers of students were small and have slowly grown since then.  My Future is not popping at the seams today but the slow growth has allowed for one important thing: conversation.  From the beginning, My Future has been about everyone doing art.  Adopting an idea from at least one cultures way of understanding the supper table where everyone sits down and eats together, so is the goal of My Future; everyone, youth and staff alike, participate in art and choir together—at the same.

Richness percolates up because sitting around a table for an hour or so, pulling a clay pot or decorating a mask, eventually leads to conversation.  Sometimes conversation is only between the youth, but then like a bump on a log, staff has a unique opportunity to hear what is happening in the community’s life.  Sometimes youth forget who is at the table and the conversation becomes very interesting.  However, most of the time, they are very aware who is at the table and conversation is all about what might get a rise out of staff.  It is engagement such as this that makes My Future enjoyable.  For being honored by the school board, by adult peers is very satisfying, but being in the conversation with our community’s youth is an opportunity of delight

© David B. Bell 2012

Sunflower Snow

January 23, 2012
JustLiving Farm

I walk by them every day.  Each spring we plant more sunflowers than we will ever harvest.  This isn’t so hard, a sunflower or two will produce all the seeds we’re going to eat for a year.  We plant the rest for birds to partake during late spring and early winter.  By now, they have figured out how to get the last seed out of the flower head.  So, I walk by those stems and flower heads that were so green and yellow last summer, each day, without thinking much about them.  Then the sun came out.  With sunlight touching the snow buildup on each head the sunflowers presented a beauty that comes after life has slipped away.

© David B. Bell 2012

How To Censor Voice

January 18, 2012
Yakama Mission

However you might take it, a banning of books or “The books… have been moved to the district storage facility because the classes have been suspended,” what is true is students in Arizona have lost the opportunity to formally, intentionally, and critically engage in conversation concerning ethnic studies.

A year ago a law went into effect as a result of Arizona Superintendent (of) Public Instruction John Huppenthal ruling that would ban “classes that promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, encourage resentment toward a race or a class of people, are designed solely for students of a certain ethnicity and advocate for ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of students as individuals.”  Last summer Huppenthal announced the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) “Mexican American studies program was illegal,” and that he found a number of texts used in the program were troubling.  A few of the troubling books that have been removed from TUSD classrooms are Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire and Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years by Bill Bigelow.  Rethinking Columbus gives voice to such writers as Leslie Marmon—”Ceremony,” Suzan Shown Harjo—”We Have No Reason to Celebrate,” and Pulitzer Prize winner N. Scott Momaday and his “The Delight Song of Tsoai-Talee.”

When speaking on the Doctrine of Discovery I often mention we need a new way of understanding our history and make a statement something along the lines that “after all, history is written by those who win the war.”  The statement is not new and most people give an affirmative shake of the head.  We get it; we understand that it is those with power who have the opportunity to write history.  What we miss is history is also being written by the subjugated, the oppressed, and the colonized.  However, their voice does not carry far beyond themselves and their supporters because those whom the dominate structure gives power does allow it.  Give it some thought, how many of us who are adults had the opportunity in grade school, high school, or college to become familiar with writers such as Paulo Freire, Leslie Marmon, Suzan Shown Harjo, or N. Scott Momaday?  What we are watching in Arizona could easily become a case study of how dominate culture halts and removes those voices who dare propose another way of understanding history, life, and landscape.

*Censored News: Indigenous Peoples and Human Rights:  http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2012/01/banning-of-books-signals-revolution-in.html?spref=fb
*Tucson Citizen.com:  http://tucsoncitizen.com/arizona-news/2012/01/17/tucson-district-denies-ban-of-mexican-american-books/

© David B. Bell 2012

Playing With Crayons Conceptualizing Art

January 16, 2012
My Future

I find it really cool when youth come up with something new, something I’ve been struggling to figure out, but haven’t.  Lately, during My Future afternoons we’ve been using crayons as an art medium.  We started gluing crayons onto poster-board and then used a blow-dryer to melt them.  Afterward melting, one would take a pen or sharpie and draw in image to fit the crayoned board.  Youth did this for awhile and then moved on to drawing first, then placed tape over the drawing, then melt crayons over the board and tape, and then remove tape for the final effect.

While the youth were working on finding new ways to use crayon’s I started playing with the idea of finding a way to attain texture that was both more concentrated and detailed.  After a few days of working with crayons and being very unsuccessful, I gave up.  Then a day or so later, I walked by the crayon/blow-drying area and there was Ms. K using the dryer to essentially paint with crayons.  There it was…just what I was looking for!  Working on a volcano, she was creating texture by building up layers of crayon!  Her lava became flowing and bold giving to it a feel that it was rolling down the board after it was dry.  Ms. K had taken the basic suggestions on how to use crayon and heat and conceptualized a new way of integrating it with her imagination.  Cool Stuff!

The first video speaks to how Ms. S took our suggestions and began using tape to integrate crayon and drawing.  The second video shows Ms. K using her crayon painting technique.

Crayon Drip

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Crayon Paint

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© David B. Bell 2012

A Handsaw Winter Sky

January 14, 2012
JustLiving Farm

I can’t get over winter days when I watch the sun rise, Mount Pahto shimmers to the west as if showing off a new coat bought at the last snowfall sale, full moon blessing mountain above its northern shoulder, and winter blue sky unfolding.  Such days awaken cold and frozen, but as the day yawns and picks itself up, the thermometer moves above freezing and the day is perfect to get done a few of those chores best left to ungloved hands.

Last spring I didn’t quite get the haystack bulkhead done before we started loading hay against it.  Over the holidays, we sold the last bit of the haystack in the uncompleted area.  So, for the first time in six months I could finally get back to it!

The nice aspect to this chore is the haystack is a long way from electricity.  Well, not so nice when the bulk of the work was going on, but great for this season.  For such distance means a handsaw.  Sure, I could get the generator out or I could go buy one of those fancy cordless circular saws, but sometimes it is just nice to grab a saw by the handle and enjoy the feel of steel against wood.

Perhaps what I like best about sawing wood on a sunny blue-sky day is remembrance and reflection.  I can’t help but think that daddy and his daddy before him each picked up a handsaw, much like the one I am using—hand saws haven’t changed much in a lot of generations, and sawed wood.  Daddy was a carpenter in addition to everything else.  He crafted the wood toolbox that now sits in the shed out back.  This toolbox didn’t sit in the shop, but traveled from one jobsite to the next.  What amazed me, growing up, was the toolbox had a tray that slid out from the back holding five handsaws, each for a specific job.  As I got some age on me, what then amazed me was the realization some of those saws had been sharpened so many times their blade width got smaller as it moved away from the handle toward the tip.

Any longer, the art of sharpening a handsaw is a lost art.  I remember driving to town with daddy to drop off dull saws or pick up sharpened saws.  The building was across the road from the train depot and restaurant—there wasn’t a whole lot more to town than that.  You had to walk up a set of wooden stairs to a loading platform and then go into the saw shop through a wooden door that slid off to the right.  Daddy was a quiet man, best I remember, but I remember having a lot of time looking around the saw shop while he and the man who sharpened saws talked.  We would walk out of the shop with sharpened handsaws and saw blades for the old 77 Skill saw.  Today there aren’t many folks who sharpen blades of any kind.  Few people use handsaws and most circular blades are carbide tipped; when the owner is done with a blade they toss it away and head to town to buy another—our throwaway societal structure doesn’t do much to support the saw blade sharpening industry.

I don’t often take daddy’s handsaws out and use them.  I choose to use my own and leave his alone, I guess because they are more of a tool to pull youthful memories to the present rather than to saw wood.  And that seems to work well for me, because when I take my own handsaws down off the wall and head out to saw wood where there isn’t electricity, I feel a little more tied to those men who went before me, and a little more tied to the relationship they had with the land, the mountain, the wind, and family.

© David B. Bell 2012

Epiphany

January 8, 2012
JustLiving Farm
Yakama Mission

Epiphany.  There are no other days like the days of epiphany.  The Christian church holds today a bit more special than others—Jesus’ Baptism.  There are many others.  Hopefully each of us experiences epiphany, sooner or later, time and again.

One who speaks to epiphany well is Wendell Berry.  Below is a poem I had the good fortune to recently be turned on to is Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front found at In Context.

The photo is a mosaic of the “Baptism of Christ,” created in the mid-12^th century. Found at the Cappella Palatina di PalermoI in Palermo, Italy.

Is possible exists between a modern writer and an artist of the 12^th century?

Manifesto:
The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

 

Of Exploding Pies and “Confetty”

January 03, 2012
My Future

The first day of My Future after the holidays brings a fair amount of energy.  After a two-week break youth return to the art room with a story about something that went well or something that went really bad during their time off.  Laughing almost always joined the really bad stories—there’s something about story of an exploding pumpkin pie (I still am not sure how that one happened!) or opening an oven door for a last minute check on the pheasant only to find the oven was never turned on!, that when told well grabs laughter from below furrowed eyebrows and throws it into the room.  Yet, along with the laughter, the youth came back with a creative bent.  Perhaps it was the laughter or the new story Auntie told that stretched the boundaries of reality or maybe it was a hike in the hills and the amazing sight of creek water trickling beneath ice, but whatever the case, this was a day to break a few boundaries and try something new.

Creations arise from imagination, crayons, paper, and a blow-dryer.

© David B. Bell 2011

Six Days Sometimes Equal Twelve

Photo by Jeff Kent (White Swan Art Instructor)

December 30, 2011
My Future

The sixth day of Christmas has me thinking about the sixth day before Christmas.  After months of practicing the My Future choir presented their first formal performance to the good people of White Swan.

The Winter concert has become quite a concert in White Swan.  It has become that because of the community’s good luck to have Mr. Chang as the school districts band instructor.  In a few short years the White Swan band has not only grown but is playing at a competitive level when school bands come together.  Due to his and the student’s hard work, the Winter and Spring concerts are not to be missed.

To have My Future invited to join a successful school event is quite an honor.  So, when youth walked up before a packed audience in the High School gym there was a fair amount of queasiness mixed with strained smiles.  Then the music began.  Voices lifted and floated, mingling with air and space, finally whispering into ear.  Time slowed, the voices of neighbors and friends embraced community, faces calmed, and ears rejoiced.  Then, as music and voice faded, the audience responded.  When no one was looking queasiness left the room, strain joined with joy, and celebrating smiles decorated singers and listeners alike.

Today is the sixth day of Christmas, but in a way, we have already enjoyed twelve days!

© David B. Bell 2011