[SIGH]

Tonight I re-read a blog post I made on my website shortly after I moved to Colorado. Click here to read it. (Gerard posted a few replies but bear in mind that English is not his first language so you may have a little trouble getting what he's trying to say.) It's a really good post.

Reading my own post made me feel a little better. Though how lame that my shoulder to cry on is often my blog. Makes me cringe.

I have this weird thing where some stories, usually completely fictional, can reach through the pages of a book or the flickering images of a screen and do terrible things to my emotions. It isn't as simple as weeping for a minute after a sad movie and then going home as if nothing happened. It's more like a dark curtain descends upon me and I stay trapped in it for days, sometimes weeks. It isn't depression, at least not any variety I've ever heard of. I really can't describe it very well at all and it's probably best that I don't even try. But it inevitably results in me doing some extremely deep soul searching.

I want more than anything to talk to God. I'm not ready to die, I just need to know that God is real. I'm not necessarily asking to know details, just that our lives are not in vain. I need to know that we're here for a reason and that death is not the end. I need to know that we'll meet again on the other side. I need to know that the suffering people of this world will find eternal comfort, that their suffering was not needless. I need to know that hard earned bonds of love and friendship chiseled out of a lifetime will not just fade away like a campfire at dawn, having served no purpose greater than to keep someone warm for a few hours. I need to know that the vast majority of humanity who believes in some kind of afterlife and higher power aren't just suffering from mass delusion. Culture and tradition can flavor the details, but generally the very core belief is the same: we die, we go somewhere. We don't just cease to exist. Surely that means something.

Most of the time I feel rather confident that there's no need to worry about afterlife and purpose and all of that. Mostly I feel that I've seen and experienced enough to know that there is purpose to our existence and sufficient evidence to assume death is not the end. But now and then something will happen in my life that triggers my mind and I dive very deep. It doesn't have to be anything bad or even real. Like I said, the right movie or novel can do it. For whatever reason, I happen to be an extremely sentimental person and far too nostalgic for my own good.

You know this is really far, far more complex than I can even hint at here and I feel like I'm grasping. I desperately need to express myself but I don't have the energy to write a novel tonight, and even if I did and you chose to read it I would only end up succeeding in making you cock your head in confusion. On nights like these I mostly find myself saying silent prayers until I tire myself into sleep. Guess it's time to start.

Snow Day!

As I mentioned in a previous post, the Front Range is about 19 inches behind on snowfall this year. March, typically our snowiest month, has brought only an inch of snow to Boulder.

Well, we're going to make up for all of that today. Yesterday forecasters said we were in for a mild blizzard today. So far this morning we've had over 6 inches and we're predicted to get up to 19 inches by tomorrow morning. A little further east on the plains could see over two feet. Schools and businesses have closed and I'm curled up on the sofa watching it come down. I'm off tomorrow anyway, so I've got a nice 4 day weekend of doing nothing to look forward to.

I love the snow but it's a bit weird this year. Flowers and trees are blooming everywhere and the days have been warm and spring like for quite some time. It's like going from winter, half way into spring, and then back into winter. But this snow is very welcome. It's a nice wet spring snow and it's bringing a healthy dose of moisture to the plains. Looks like spring is going to be a lot greener than I thought!

Road Trip to the Grasslands

Today Gerard and I decided to do something a little different. We've been soaking up the mountains for two years, so we decided to see a little bit of the other Colorado, the grasslands to the east which make up some 40% of the state.

We meandered through a lot of small cow towns on our way out east, none of which were remarkably different from anything you'd find in the Texas Panhandle. Eastern Colorado has about as many stinky feedlots as Texas. If you know anything about a feedlot, you'll understand why we eat only 100% grass fed, locally raised meat. About the only other thing that turned my stomach was all the prime agricultural land north of Denver that had been covered by sprawl in the form of strip malls and cookie cutter houses. One thing that stood out to me on this trip was how rural properties tended to get smaller and trashier as they got closer to the big cities. But once we got beyond the Denver metro commutable region, the scenery changed markedly.

The first notable stop we made was the town of Fort Morgan in Northeastern Colorado. It was surprisingly nice, and it had a very nice history museum which we spent about an hour perusing. We learned about everything that happened on those soils from the roaming ice age animals and pre-historic people, to the bloody battles waged between Native Americans and the Federal Government, to the birth and career of Glenn Miller to the modern farming economy. Afterward we hand lunch at a picnic table in a white gazebo in the town square. It was a beautiful day.

After lunch we headed up to the Pawnee National Grasslands, specifically seeking the Pawnee Buttes. What a gorgeous drive. The rolling prairie seems to go forever and the wind never stops blowing. You can see thunderstorms rolling 100 miles off, and if you look really closely, you can see the Rocky Mountains 150 miles distant. We hiked the Pawnee Butte Trail and got some good shots, but pictures can never really do justice to landscapes like these. They can only hint at the beauty and do nothing to convey the spirit.

As we were approaching the buttes, a thunderstorm rolled over. We took shelter in a small canyon. There was no rain and it passed quickly, but it was amazing to watch it roll overhead and disappear on the horizon. We were even treated to a rainbow as the finale, stretched over relatively pristine prairie, in a scene that must've been little changed for thousands of years.

Dotted throughout the prairie was the occasional old house or barn, long abandoned. We stopped at a couple and poked around a bit. I wondered who built them, and thought about the good and bad times those families must have had as their lives unfolded within those walls. I wondered why they left. I stood next to one and looked around. In all directions as far as the eye can see there was nothing but short golden grasses and the sound of a lonely wind. Most of these fields didn't have fences around them, and the roads were dirt. Sometimes there would be a couple of large trees near the house, dead now from thirst without people to water them on these parched plains. Little seemed to move except the grasshoppers at our feet and herds of pronghorn on distant hills. Pretty cool.

Click here for some photos.

Also, I updated my website. Click here to view.

Sourdough!

As a follow up to my post earlier today, here is a photo of my first sourdough loaf. I definitely need to practice my technique and make some adjustments for altitude, but it's a very tasty first try.

Ingredients:

• Unbleached, unbromated, organic white flour grown on the Great Plains of the United States
• Water
• Sea salt
• 100% wild yeast culture
• Lots of TLC.

The Urban Homestead

The calendar may disagree, but spring has arrived in Colorado.

And so begins a new season of work for the homesteader, urban or otherwise. Gerard and I were talking this morning about cycles (not the bi- or motor- kind). Successful athletes train heavy, punctuated by periods of active rest or "back-off" sessions. Most nutritionists agree that periods of fasting or, at the very least staggering you caloric intake, can help keep you lean. Even the concept of weekends offers respite from the daily grind, a cycle of work and rest. And so too the farmer and backyard gardener must stir from winter's rest to begin the planting that will end with the harvest. Nature, indeed everything I can think of, runs in cycles of on and off periods. Maybe that's why I get so much pleasure from abandoning "fresh" tomatoes in January and savoring them only during the summer months when they can be grown in my back yard. It just feels natural.

Of course that's not the only reason, but I have to say I have a much greater appreciation for some of the things which are most mundane to the average supermarket shopper. (I know, I was one of those supermarket shoppers most of my life.) Never before was I as excited about the warm months as since I moved to a place where winters are long and intense. Never have I looked upon a ripe red tomato or dark crisp vegetables with such adoration as I have since I gave up the supermarket. Never have I savored a hot slice of bread slathered with butter as I have since I started baking my own bread and churning my own butter. Why? Because I now know how wonderful these things really are. I no longer take them for granted because they aren't granted to me anytime I want them. I know how precious they are and how much work it takes to get them. When I was a child my mom told me how, when she was a little girl growing up dirt poor, for Christmas they would sometimes get a little fruit and it was a big treat. I remember I snubbed my nose and thought what a lame Christmas that must have been! Of course I was spoiled by her childhood standards. We weren't rich, but anything I wanted to eat was in the kitchen any given day of the year. An apple or an orange meant nothing to me. I wanted armloads of plastic toys. Can I honestly say my childhood was better having had the "luxury" of caring about an abundance of plastic toys more than a few pieces of fresh fruit? Life seemed so unfair if my mom wouldn't (or couldn't) buy me a toy I demanded. I never knew what it was like to long for something that could actually impact my life, like food. How might that have affected me as an adult? How might that today influence my ability to deal with the curve balls life throws?

My quest to be self sufficient, local, healthy and as free as possible from corporate overlords has taught me a lot of exciting and difficult lessons. It has taught me a lot of skills that are lost on most Americans but that at one time were quite commonplace. It has given me an entirely new perspective on the world, a much greater appreciation for the things in my life, and a sense of wholeness and joy that no amount of material things could ever bring me. My most recent conquest: bread. I've been baking my own bread for a couple of years, but until recently I was still a slave to the little plastic packets of commercial yeast. Obviously, those are new fangled products invented by someone who wanted to make a buck. Specifically, it was a man named Charles Fleischmann who introduced pre-made yeast packets to the world in 1876. Yet people have been baking bread, even leavened (risen) bread, since the stone age. How did we manage all those millennia until yeast packets became widespread in the 20th century? One answer: sourdough. After a few failures and months of digging, I finally was able to cut through all the myths and misinformation floating around the internet to discover the delightfully simple formula for bringing this ancient culinary wonder into my home. Mix flour and water and feed it daily for two weeks. That's it. At the end of two weeks you have a jar full of strong sourdough culture that can be propagated indefinitely. How amazing is this: the very organisms you need to make a fluffy loaf of bread live in abundance in the air and on the very flour that will become your bread. All you need to do is coax them into a dense symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast with a little bit of food and warm water. With your sourdough starter you can make all sorts of delicious, nutritious breads and pancakes, no mass produced industrial plastic packets of genetically modified superyeast is necessary. That, my friends, is an every day miracle.

So it was on this sunny Sunday morning over my first batch of fluffy sourdough pancakes, slathered with home churned butter and preserves made from last summer's peaches, that Gerard and I discussed the cycles of our lives. Though I gave up church and organized religion many years ago, I suppose this is our way of honoring God or the Universe or the Great Spirit and all the true wonders of this world. Our church is our chemical-free home, stocked with clean foods grown by the loving toil of real people, our neighbors. Our tithe is the labor we invest in growing, preserving and preparing the nutrition given to us by the rich soils beneath our feet and the warm sunshine that shines on our faces. And our prayers are understanding the miracle of it all and never taking for granted the luxury of having so much good food to eat.

Eckhart Tolle believes that all the beauty of nature spanning the vast expanse of space and time was unknown until humans, in all our sentient complexity, came along to tell her how beautiful she is. I suppose that's another reason why I spend so much time figuring out how to churn butter and make sourdough. It's my way of honoring the beauty of nature and saying I acknowledge that I am part of her and her endless cycles.

Chasing the Antelope

If you're down and confused

And you don't remember who you're talkin' to

Concentration slips away

Because your baby is so far away.

Well there's a rose in a fisted glove

And the eagle flies with the dove

And if you can't be with the one you love

Love the one you're with.

Don't be angry, don't be sad

Don't sit cryin' over good things you've had

There's a girl right next to you

And she's just waiting for something you do

Well there's a rose in a fisted glove

And the eagle flies with the dove

And if you can't be with the one you love

Honey, love they one you're with.

I've had that song in my head all day. It was a gorgeous day and I decided not to work. I've really been in the mood to run and bike lately. It always hits me this time of year. Spring wakes me up and gives me energy. Most of the trees now have buds and the daffodils are pushing up out of the dirt and life starts anew for everyone. I spent the whole day biking around Boulder doing not-so-urgent errands just because I could. I went by the Boulder Bookstore to browse the "Popular in Boulder" section. I dropped off a small bag of clothes at a charity. I returned a book to the library. I picked up lunch from Whole Foods and delivered it to Gerard at work. I stopped into REI for a new pair of sunglasses. I also bought a new bike helmet at University Bikes (the best bike shop in the world) and scored a couple of vintage cowboy shirts at Buffalo Exchange. I biked along the creek and through several parks. There were people with their dogs, people playing frisbee, people picnicing, people fly fishing, people doing yoga, and hot shirtless guys jogging or playing flag football. And all this I did on my bike, mostly on quiet bike paths that wind throughout our fair city. I stopped off late in the afternoon at The Cup to have an iced blackberry tea at a table on the sidewalk and people watch as the sun went down. Gerard and Cris eventually joined me and we just talked and laughed for a couple of hours, then caught The Hop home. I prepared a dinner of smoked pork chops and roasted winter squash, all from local organic farms, which we enjoyed with the windows open listening to the sound of Boulder Creek. Really it was a perfect day, one of those days that reminds me that life in Boulder is extraordinary. There are no "bad" parts of town, it's beautiful, clean, quiet yet alive, and everywhere is accessible in minutes via bike. It seems absurd to wish for more.

I finally started reading a book I bought years ago called Why We Run. It's a pseudo-scientific examination of why people like to run and the biological and archaeological evidence related to running. The author is a marathon runner and professor. In the very beginning he talks about "chasing the antelope." Basically, the condition where humans find it necessary to always be chasing something that's fleeter and faster and very difficult or impossible to catch. For a stone age hunter it was, quite literally, an antelope. For a modern recreational runner it may be a 100k race. For a poor inner-city kid it may be a college education. Maybe for you it's landing that person you have a crush on, taking that long dreamed of trip to Europe, or somehow acquiring a 100 acre dream ranch in Colorado complete with farm house, a big red barn, water rights and fantastic panoramic views of snow capped mountains. I'm just sayin'. The point is the "antelope" can be anything and is certainly different things to different people. And sometimes we catch the antelope after a long chase and feel great satisfaction. If it was particularly difficult to catch, taking a tremendous amount of work and/or time, we savor it all the more. But inevitably we start looking for another antelope. It isn't because we need another antelope per se, but because we need another chase. We need to feel the fear of possible failure combined with the exhilaration of possible victory, the anticipation of the unknown and those first sweet moments when we know we've done it. It's really the chase that keeps us going in life.

I'll be honest. I obsessed for years over moving to Colorado, specifically Boulder. Also factored in there was finding the "perfect" job, making a certain amount of money, and living my own idea of the "perfect" life. Years I obsessed over this with little progress that I could see at the time, though unknowingly I was closing in on my target. I stalked that antelope relentlessly, but never could get within throwing distance. Then, out of the blue, I found myself standing downwind with the antelope just yards away, completely unaware of my presence and perfectly aligned for the money shot. I took it, and at one fell swoop I found that dream job, got the big salary, and was whisked away to Boulder all expenses paid. It happened almost overnight. Of course I was ecstatic. I had just brought down a trophy I had stalked for the better part of my adult life. I was stunned. I couldn't have been happier. And then a most peculiar thing happened when the glow of victory began to fade. I asked myself one day, "Can I now die happy?" It's a stupid question anyway, but at that moment I realized that now that I had my long awaited trophy I didn't know what to do. Was this it? Was my life over? Was it time to sit back and enjoy the spoils for the rest of my life? Was there nothing more to look forward to but being a successful socialite (or a mountain man as I was pushing more for at the time)? All my life I had so looked forward to something big, and that something's head was now mounted on my wall. And strangely that made me sad. Sad because I imagined myself with no more purpose, nothing else to really strive for or look forward to or work toward. Was I to now spend the rest of my days pining for the feelings I had BEFORE I got my prize antelope? I was an extremely social person in Austin until the end when things started moving toward the transition. At that time I became extraordinarily focused on the kill and fell out of touch with most of my friends. I remained mostly asocial in Boulder, especially in the beginning, as I tried to make sense of it all and settle into this new reality. It was all so weird to me. Wonderful, but weird. Now it's beginning to make sense.

I'm happy to say I have since found (or remembered) several new and forgotten antelope and, sure enough, they have begun to restore me. Continuing my education and, most obviously to anyone who knows me or reads this blog, a ranch are two particularly fleet footed bucks I now have my sights on. Understand it isn't that I don't actually want these things and just made them up for something to do. I do very much want these things. But I now realize the importance and the role of the actual wanting. The pursuit that results is what actually makes me feel alive. Similarly, I also now have a better understanding of both the benefits and the pitfalls of extraordinarily single-minded pursuits. Laser focus can help you get the things you want, but it can also make you forget what you've already got. I wanted Boulder so bad I forgot my friends. I want a ranch so bad I've forgotten Boulder. It's kinda like the song says, if you can't be with the one you love, you can at least love the one you're with. But that doesn't mean you have to give up the chase. If I get my dream ranch, that'll be a wonderful thing. But if I don't, the years spent living in the heart of Boulder while trying on some level to get it will also have been wonderful, just in different ways.

Today was a good day. I always learn something when I take time out to step back and let the Universe teach me.

GREENS!

And reds and yellows and oranges too! We got our first greens of the season! One of our farmers has a greenhouse. Combined with the extra warm weather this year she now has an early crop of fresh greens, and the farmer's market is still 4 weeks away. Spinach and rainbow chard were among the items in our pick up this week and they were the prettiest things to my winter weary eyes. I sauteed the chard in butter and olive oil with onions and a little salt and served it up with leftover bison pot roast. I had all but forgotten how creamy and flavorful fresh chard is. Wow! A taste of the market, a taste of things to come.

The weather service is predicting possible record breaking heat this week. We could see 75 degrees in the next day or two, which hasn't happened this time of year since 1902. It's perfect spring weather (if a bit early) and many of the trees already have buds. The crocus are in bloom and I'm expecting to see tulips any day now. Spring fever is setting in and the world is waking up.

So I now have five places to garden this year. Two community garden plots, plots on two different ranches, and a home-owning friend a few blocks away who I convinced to turn her entire back lawn into a garden. Plus I've secured a volunteer spot on one of my favorite local organic farms which I regularly patronize at the market. I guess technically that makes six gardens. I hope to learn a lot.

Tonight I'm going to sit down with some homemade oatmeal cookies, a tall glass of milk, and go through my seed catalog one more time. I have to finalize my order so I can get those seeds in the ground. It's going to be a big year for me!