some windward tidbits

a day of brief brushes in seattlelands,
wandering eyes and hello's to burst open scarf-covered tunnelvisions.

here's two gems from windward, so you can see my world a bit...
farm life confessions from windward...filmed by ethan
windwardian farm life, music video edition (steve's the one playing the guitar)

on boredom and what ensues

the rains are here and
soft animal bodies slow down, idle hands pick up books, and
this weekend i found myself bored to be idle bored to be breathing,
losing passion and excitement for small things--
what does a body used to being busy do with all this time,
when plants are going quiet and becca-goat's milk is drying up
and the animals are thinking of fucking and sleeping quiet
and the food is getting stored away for snowed-in days.
i forgot about this!
i forgot that when things get cold bodies get quiet too,
more thinking and planning and appreciating.
i meditated on boredom for an hour. then i looked at the leaves for a while.
this time of year they are beautiful here...green and red and yellow on the white oaks.
dancing in and out of oakmoss sculptured empires.

today i made fresh ravioli with squash & collard green filling and white sauce and navy bean soup and rice pilaf! we burned a big pile of wood, railroad bits and pieces of stuff and brush--a huge bonfire that went all day and we took turns tending. the first frosts have already come and much in the garden died with it though kale and chard are still goin strong. and the rains came! bringing some cold cold misery and some delight--the ground softening and wriggling a little in its descent toward sleep. no longer having to water baby trees and strawberries and the little ginseng plants that are struggling to make it in this strange unfamiliar climate. i had a slumber party with steve and ethan and we read some lewis carroll...other relationships are flourishing too, conversations with walt about patriarchy (always) and i led/mediated a convo about the gender roles/expectations folks were raised with (became mostly a convo about family structures, but definitely breaking ground-setting stage for future conversations).

i have also been thinking of
autonomy and independence, developing and having
chest surgery, talking to my parents about
clothes in urban/rural places, wearing and having feelings about
desiring and loving, differentiating between and embracing
families, creating chosen
fear, finding and routing out
friendships, nurturing sexual and divided-by-space-or-time and intimate
gender, initiating conversations about
hate and enmity, the value or lack of value of
"natural" "law," what is, if anything
quiet, allowing myself to be
shakers, gardening practices of the
sluthood, everything about
traveling, doing-being-becoming-planning

that is something,
i am feeling glad to be in the world today
glad you are too

topsoil is my prophet

"Then an old man, a keeper of an inn, said, Speak to us of Eating and Drinking.
And he said:
Would that you could live on the fragrance of the earth, and like an air plant be sustained by the light.
But since you must kill to eat, and rob the newly born of its mother's milk to quench your thirst, let it then be an act of worship,
And let your board stand an altar on which the pure and the innocent of the forest and plain are sacrificed for that which is purer and still more innocent in man.

When you kill a beast say to him in your heart,
"By the same power that slays you, I too am slain; and I too shall be consumed.
For the law that delivered you into my hand shall deliver me into a mightier hand.
Your blood and my blood is naught but the sap that feeds the tree of heaven."

And when you crush an apple with your teeth, say to it in your heart,
"Your seeds shall live in my body,
And the buds of your tomorrow shall blossom in my heart,
And your fragrance shall be my breath,
And together we shall rejoice through all the seasons."

And in the autumn, when you gather the grapes of your vineyard for the winepress, say in your heart,
"I too am a vineyard, and my fruit shall be gathered for the winepress,
And like new wine I shall be kept in eternal vessels."
And in winter, when you draw the wine, let there be in your heart a song for each cup;
And let there be in the song a remembrance for the autumn days, and for the vineyard, and for the winepress."

from "the prophet"


i love to hear your voices from afar! what pleasure, what warm reminders of our shared and overlapping and distantly tied worlds.

i am settling into the simple pleasures here--a jar full of warm goat milk, feeding the bunnies corn husks before i sit down to my oatmeal, farmer's cheese with bee balm flowers, cold cold hands while i strain the sprouted wheat for the chickens, tucking the beans and tomatoes in at night, wandering into the woods to find baby trees to water and talk to. my relationships with each person spiralling and growing in richness and depth as we skip from bare facts of our lives to the architecture of our dreams and desire,
small consensual touches and warmths, testaments to our humanness,
always pandora in the background (now sponsored by starbucks...?)
and golden sunrises and sunsets,
i am learning always to ask for help (opalyn, i'm not ready to twist off the head of a chicken yet...but i skinned a chicken yesterday, undressed this beautiful hermaphroditic silent bird without seduction but with solemnity and love and a thankfulness for my own fragile skin, contained blood, moments to live in the world.)
i am reminding myself always of how my body and mind are interwoven...
fighting anxiety with sun salutes,
finding peace in stacking firewood, wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of poop-straw (the most valuable of the ignoble resources), chopping, plucking, clipping,
khalil says "you work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth.
for to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons, and to step out of life's procession, that marches in majesty and proud submission toward the infinite.
...to love life through labour is to be intimate with life's inmost secret.
...and what is it to work with love?
it is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.
it is to build a house with affection, even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.
it is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit.
it is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit,
and to know that all the blessed dead are standing about you and watching.
...work is love made visible."

we are redefining work!
as i move away from jobs, embrace the in-betweens of alleys, dumpsters, travelling, excess, closed loop systems, living from my labor,
i am finding my sanity and peace here in living in the service of life, flourishing in parallel to flourishing.

i have been here for a month! (today is windward's 33rd anniversary.) halfway through my time, stronger arms and heart, my body used to tiny pleasures and tears and small pains and love and missing--these things that never run out.

hokay lovebuddies...food to share, food to make, food of communities.

on the thought of hunger as a circuit which keeps us alive, life comes with death, fuck annual monocrops and the degradation of topsoil all over the world (it takes so long to rebuild itself) and i cannot deny my own addiction to grains, grains, grains. perhaps they are more deadly, more environmentally damaging than responsibly farmed meat. perhaps this is imminent, perhaps environmentalists should drop their vegetarian ethics and focus on eating from their bioregion and perennial polycultures and the animals that graze happily on pastures (and not federally subsidized corn that is making people jobless and hungry everywhere!)

amid those thoughts, and thoughts of community and love and food for souls and tables,
here are three recipes--two old one new--that have fed many a soul in many a living room.

peanut noodles, eliot-style.
things you really need (for a pot o noodles, say a 3-4 person serving): about 2 big spoonfuls peanut butter*, 1-2 T oil (in order of idealness: sesame, sunflower/something like that, canola, olive), 2-3 T soy sauce or Braggs, a small dollop of vinegar (i.o.o.i.: rice wine, apple cider, white, red/white wine; balsamic does not taste good), about 2 T something sweet (molasses, white or brown sugar or honey as you desire), something sour (lime juice or lemon juice; about 1 lime, half a lemon, or 1-2 T of juice), noodles or quinoa or rice or something else to put it on.

nice additions: basil, lemongrass, peanuts, carrot or cucumber pieces (add at the end, otherwise they get cooked and a little squishy), sesame seeds (the more the better!), crushed red chili peppers or hot sauce, coconut flakes/shreds.

* jiffy/skippy peanut butter tastes good (and then you don't usually need to add sugar) but yeah, it has corn syrup and is pretty nasty too. these days i prefer good peanut butter and then adding a little extra oil/sugar and mixing hard.

a note: it's actually easier to mix it all up in a bowl and then pour it on. if you're mixing it into the noodles or quinoa, it can be hard to mix. but that's fine too. if you like it saucy, add a little more water and liquids.


no-knead whole wheat bread
this is the master recipe from this bread book i've been working with by hertzberg & francois (zoe and jeff...we've gotten rather close.) it's a pretty good whole wheat, can be made into anything from pizza dough to rolls to baguettes to focaccia to sandwich (sanduiche!) loaves. it's pretty tasty. i don't have all purpose flour here so i've been using 4.5 c soft white winter wheat flour and 3 c. hard red winter wheat flour.

so the background chemistry-info is that usually you need to knead bread to get the gluten to develop and align into a protein-net that'll trap the gas bubbles produced by the yeast fermenting, producing the desirable Airy Crumb. but an alternative way, remniscent of how artesanal bread is made in bread shops and some larger-scale conditions, is to use a high-moisture dough and refrigerate it...if there's enough moisture, the gluten strands will go mobile and align by themselves! aw yeah. so this bread ends up rising ~3 times: once after you mix it all up, once when you take it out, and then when you stick it in the oven.

you Can use the dough after the initial rise, but i think it works better to refrigerate it for at least a day and then bake it. you can refrigerate it for up to 2 weeks and it develops some good complex sourdough-esque flavors after about a week.

here's the original recipe (makes 4 1-lb loaves)
1. in a container that you could refrigerate, mix together: 5.5 c whole wheat flour, 2 c all-purpose unbleached flour, 1.5 T yeast (2 packets), 1 T kosher/sea salt (i use a little less), 1/4 vital wheat gluten (i use 6 T). (also add any herbs, sliced olives, garlic, onions, dried fruit, nuts, etc. you want.) no need to proof the yeast (unless it's really old.)
2. mix with 4 c. water; don't knead, just mix until it's homo-geneous.
3. allow to rise for 2 hours covered by non-airtight lid or plastic wrap. after that, refrigerate and use it over the next 14 days. (after a week, it starts getting a nice sourdough-like flavor. and if you reuse the bowl you mixed it in for another loaf, the flavor gets better and better.)

when you want to bake it:
1. cornmeal/parchment paper/grease a pan. cut out 1/4 (1 lb) of the dough. dust it with flour and make it into a ball--don't squeeze it too much, you're trying to keep as much gas bubbliness in there as possible. form into a loaf, sprinkle with seeds or whatever, and let it rest for 90 minutes (40 minutes if you didn't refrigerate the dough).
2. preheat oven to 450. just before baking, sprinkle loaf with water or paint with egg white. slash with a serrated knife.
3. stick it in there for 30 minutes! when you put it in, also stick in a cup of water (in a metal bowl/broiler tray/cast iron pan). that makes the crust crunchy.

yum. so it takes about 15-20 min to mix up and then 15 or so minutes when you want to prep it to bake it. which is pretty sweet.

here's one more that's a staple in my life.
curry polenta
- sautee some garlic and onion with curry powder, turmeric, etc.
- add cornmeal. about 1/2-2/3 c is good for one person, 2 c is enough for 4-6 folks (ish).
- mix that up and let the cornmeal brown a bit (just for like a minute or two). then add water...enough to cover the cornmeal, usually about 2ce the amount of cornmeal you added.
- let it boil & shit until it's a texture you like...anywhere from creamy to pretty solid. add, if you like, cheese or nutritional yeast, some braggs, hot sauce, herbs, etc. traditionally if you let it get solid and cool a bit you could in theory slice it and bake, fry, do whatever you want with it. pour sauce on it. whatevs.


the rains are arriving here...it's grey and chilly and the bunnies are a little anxious to run around and get touched but i don't want to deal with muddy bunnies. i am dwelling in routines and trying to hang on to spontanaeity and emotional honesty, honor that in myself and others. keep things in the open, imaginable realm. yesterday we bottled the hard cider we made--it had probably surpassed beer-alcohol-level, in the 10-13% range. there's such a funny balance here of being wary of dependence and alcoholism and thinking of this hard cider as responsible caloric preservation, and then craving rituals and explosion and celebration too. probably the community leans toward the former rather than the latter. it's good for me, to distance myself from needing those lubrications and addictions to allow me to act.
and...today there's chili on the stove, yesterday i made baguettes, reading about monocrops and cannibalism,
standing close to people and wondering about how they work on the inside,
how much and how little i know about these folks.
silence is deceptive, when it suggests that all that could be said has been said,
sometimes it's comfortable and most of the time i find myself treading water, confused by silences,
the stimuli that keep this little community alive.
ruben playing the flute.
john lennon on the radio.
ethan napping.
gina clattering, tapping out her anger in pots and clattering spoons and bubbling pots.
a shelf full of good d.i.y. books and cookbooks, "how to live on wheat," "home cheese making"...
am i boring or bored? i'm not sure.

on being obliged to watch

on tuesday, whitey the sheep was slaughtered*. i felt obliged to be present for a lot of reasons, none of them peer pressure--i wanted to bear witness, to experience the impact of a life passing to take responsibility for the role of death in producing a meat- and animal-driven lifestyle, to face my complicitness, to see which parts or which people seemed cruel, if any...i don't think anyone is particularly cruel, and it's not easy for anyone. walt says that if it were easy, one shouldn't be doing it--there's a risk of detachment, of becoming too capable of killing something without thinking about it too much. i took the opposite route, holding on tight to the memory of whitey eating as she bled to death from her neck, slowly crumpling onto the ground but never in pain, never bleating--in short, remembering life as the cost through the process of removing the hide, fat, organs, cutting up the meat into chunks the next day.

in some ways, the experience of watching whitey die and the next day eating a bite of her was a beautiful closed-loop system...her body going to nourish windward, the people and earth and animals, and the impact of the flock on the land is being balanced so that they can survive the winter and to make space for new lambs to be born. i'm coming to feel and recognize my place in these cycles and circles of things--domesticator and cultivator but also spreader-of-seeds, feeder-of-bunnies, enricher-of-earth, consumer-of-predators-and-prey. the truth is that i, and most people i think, don't have nearly enough information to figure out how to choose a diet or way of living that impacts the earth as little (or as positively) as possible...monocrop agriculture and the cultivation of annual grains has fucked a lot of shit up too. and although humans have fucked up a lot more than our due on this planet, it also doesn't seem quite right to put us on the top of it all, the Ruiners and the FuckUppers...the earth has evolved along with us, animals evolved to live in synchrony with humans, cars replaced natural predators in controlling the deer population...how do we begin to take responsibility for all this?

something is always dying for us to eat,
and i think that is one reason i felt obliged to watch.
watching whitey get hoisted up, dying quietly--it didn't make me want to eat meat, really,
and when i ate a little it tasted...okay, i guess.

all my little molecules and cells, nourished on this and that, more and more from this land, from the garden and the goat milk and the soft white wheat, and eventually i will be eaten by a tree hungry for bones and calcium or some grasses or maybe some critter. who knows. but that it as it should be, i think, in this cycle of nutrients and lifegiving and lifetaking. life and death and birth go together, cycling and cycling and keeping each other in check--what separates us is not our faces or our speaking abilities or our ability to build televisions, i think, but our sense that we have a choice about how we want to compete or cooperate, take responsibility or destroy, take lives gracefully in order to live or destroy life in order to dominate. we don't know how, or we have forgotten why, to keep ourselves in check. how to recognize that the resources for us to live and bear children are no longer available...because they're not, we're past topsoil and living on fossil fuels, eating and drinking this painfully extracted blood of the earth.

and what to do with all this knowledge,
all this information that we were never told,
i was never taught,
some of me craves cities and traveling, people people people,
easy small relationships, opening myself daily,
i am not ready to settle and dwell. not here, anyway.
but it lets me see the possibility of how it might be done,
how we might live responsibly with the land and its critters--plants and animals and bacteria and us.
nothing is easy. but we have so many choices.

*the words chosen carefully to describe death are prolific...culling, harvesting, giving death to, slaughtering, butchering, doing...rarely killing.

dog-eared memories and waxy dreams

i have been full of dirt and cider,
memories and clean air,
rustling oak trees and adjusting to new folks.
i have been quieter than i know myself to usually be...strange. i miss playing and shouting. but it will come.
this place is beautiful
and i realized quickly that the grass is always greener somewhere else,
some waxier dream,
i am confused by having free time, no deadlines, self-managed tasks,
by having no projects i am heading up,
no zines underway,
only holes to dig, apples to cut, fences to fix, bunnies to pet;
i find myself missing theatre, graffitied walls, (structure?), good friends,
find myself struggling to feel joyful to be alive in a new way, without comfort or easy laughter or touching souls or everything shared,
aching sometimes, breathing deep sometimes,
opening myself to be affected by the people around me deeply, to cut away the shame that it is so easy to walk in with
without knowing i bore it.
remembering how to start.
remembering how to surface.
remembering to speak what i have come to assume...
i meditate everyday and feel glad to be alive and have a working body.
and as i begin to see how things developed here, i am not so ashamed of not being an expert,
not so stressed about soaking up everything--this place grows slowly, i am growing slowly here,
rhizomes tenatively crawling out, leaves not too withered and
i meet friendly soil. there are baos and games
there is curiosity and suddening into large questions,
there are parched awkward moments but there is plenty of food and roof and blankets to go around.
things do not stop in me, they start--
love does not stop, it starts--
a place can not be everything, but it is a home for now.

moments from the first eight days

tonight i am weary...spend hours picking dusty-shiny red apples (and ate too many)
so for now here are some pictures of my world from the past few days.
i am finding a rhythm, drawing and yoga-ing and making bread,
working on digging this big square hole and gardening and feeding the bunnies.
there is much silence here, and some storytelling. things are slowly busy.
we have in abundance: carrots, soft white wheat flour, apples, pears, goat milk/cheese/yogurt, cucumbers, kale, chicken eggs, buckets, giant plastic containers that smell like chocolate hydrowhey or mint syrup.
my body is glad to be here, glad to be working and moving and lifting,
to be strong,


my new friends are in a constant cuddle pile.


my other new friends!


my new human friends slaughtering chickens...i degutted one. strange, beautiful, fragile, strong, confusing, wearying.


my househome, named "opus"...decorated within with bandannas and the smell of lemongrass and a pile of mango chili lollipops.


bread! i just discovered vital wheat gluten which, since we mill all our flour here (from soft white winter wheat and hard red winter wheat), is all whole wheat...and all whole wheat flour makes a dense (delicious) bread. more experiments with refrigerated dough (an alternative to kneading...i'm reading this breadbook by hertzberg & francois) in the works.

sarah proposed putting up a dreamwall-piece-of-paper.
ethan prefers nonverbal communication and is thinking about making pine needle soup.
we talk about when we were stoners and "sustainability" and derrick jensen.
still,
there are half cigarettes and
lots of toast
and lots of hellos and goodbyes
and talking about dreams in the morning.

"different enough to make a difference?"

or, "notes from the land of goat cheese."

today i woke up in my trailer and fell promptly back to sleep.
when i reawoke, the blue lace-edged curtains and the billion bandannas were swaying and my toes were cold and the world smelled different than yesterday's world.

it's been awhile--four squids on a trip across eight states in a car smelling of bodies and tea tree oil and endless toast and warmth, camping in the rain, dreaming of burritos and kitchens, marmot humor, building a compost toilet, looking at each other in mirrors and reflections and eyeballs again and again. things becoming beautiful and every day entering someone else's little world for a little while and leaving a small trace (a wine bottle? a whiff of body? artificial toeprints?)

traveling through so many worlds, remembering the feeling of explaining myself and being alone in a new place, pulling in and reminding myself to stay open and not to hoard my memories and histories...it's been hard to write honestly for me, hard to parse out the emotional-intuitive-rush from the practical-factual-blurs. so now i find myself in a new kitchen, a new heart, and i'm a little lost without my handsaw and flogger but excited. and i feel far away but not so different.

this morning i held a day-old chick...there are a couple of them trying to break out of their eggs, and some don't make it--still eggs with a couple cracks. there are also guineas and peahens and quails i think, and a couple goats and sheep and two cats and 10 humans and a small garden with a big sign that says "rhubarb." my first job here was to make bread; then walt pulled me aside and told me the focus of my internship here will be bread-making...experimenting, researching, compiling a log for future windward breadmakers of how to make really good bread with the soft white wheat and other stuff growing locally. apparently a working person needs about a million calories a year to survive and people can eat about 4 pounds a day (which is why you couldn't survive on asparagus); 200 pounds of apples a year, he said. i think apples and bread sounds better than apples alone.

this is a funny place, a mix of old and young and influences ranging from philosophy degrees to years of polyamory to something about the military (seems like a community fetish) and something about the Six Nations and something realistic. their up-front intellectualism has kept it pretty much white. it's really research-oriented, as opposed to primarily producing for farmers' markets or being a leisure sideproject...it's an investment for the people who live here in surviving past a collapse and an opensource project in creating not only an environmentally sustainable homestead but a sustainable community structure. the care and love is scattered over a half-mile of little trailers and projects, fences and gardens, greenhouses and ramshackle somethings-that-once-were.

there's a little music; not much art around; i am the only tranny with a handsaw (though i haven't held a handsaw here yet.) but the people seem good (this kid andrew is into wildcrafting and medicinal forest-gardening/agroforesting and sarah & lindsey are thinning the forest...opalyn is working on gasification and they've got some wormies trying hard to compost...lots of building stuff and slow projects taking form) and i'm sure i'll learn a lot.

and there's so much goat milk-cheese-yogurt! more insight and maybe a picture promised with my next post; my heart is still weighing and swaying in my chest.