2021-06-14
The Organic Trail

THE ORGANIC TRAIL

On the precipice of this eleventh hour, I sit in silence and in complete darkness - apart from the sacred glow of my phone, my only guiding light by which to write - while all: wife, children, and puppies two - sleep about me.

Granted and gratefully, there is the exceptional charm of the chimes twinkling in the desert wind, that desert wind which has become one of my favorite sounds, especially when I’m tending to the girls of the coop, up there, where the wind whispers it’s soothing lullaby to me all day long.

Admittedly, the inconvenience of our lives lately can be exhausting at times though. We’re moving about like Roger Miller, while someone pushes a broom of polyurethane across 3,000 square feet of concrete. I don’t think I’ve slept in the same bed for more than two days consecutively in five weeks. We’ve only been able to get through half our boxes, because every couple of days we’ve had to move everything out of one room into another.

The double-edged sword is that we desperately need furniture, but by adding a piece here and a piece there, as we get to know all the secondhand and consignment shops in town, along with troll Craigslist and Marketplace, every time we bring home a heavy piece of western-style solid wood furniture, we end up having to move it out of the room where we want it the very next day.

Anyway, anyhoo, we got the beauty of the land to fall back upon. Everyday our senses bask in the magnificent giant clouds that are like pillows for the gods that inhabit the vast blue sky; the sunsets that paint the mountains upon the horizon are likewise amazing; and there are all the awesome little things we discover everyday - the tiny pools with hundreds of black pollywogs, the little rock gems that we dream of making jewelry with; the mud sweat huts, gray-water showers and tiled porches we likewise imagine constructing.

And despite the scorching Santa Fe sun, I’ve enjoyed making my little cactus gardens and continuing to add to the Organic Trail, laying down hundreds of branches of deadwood that I fill with pitch black soil from beneath the juniper trees and then line with colorful stones.

So, perhaps the worst thing isn’t this temporary rut of inconvenience we’re in, but rather that we have lived a life far too convenient till now, one which prevents and discourages and impedes us from grounding and observing and seeing the light and wonder of nature.

We literally have not sat down to watch anything on Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime in five weeks now. Speaking of sitting down, much of this time we have been without furniture to sit upon, which helps us keep moving. And I haven’t “cooked a decent meal in six weeks” (what favorite movie am I referring to here?), if only because we’ve had no decent kitchen to cook in.

That alll said, I really do miss having easy access to a coffee machine and a drawer full of well folded clothes and a bed I can sprawl and rest upon for a good uninterrupted six hours.

Whereas last night no one slept well because Barker & Zeus didn’t like the kennel we had locked them in and whined incessantly about in the middle of the night for an hour - it’s 11:31 now and I’m still comforted by the enchanting breeze and silence, occasionally complemented by a symphony of church bells and chimes. So, hope lies before me. Thus, I best lie down to indulge in a few hours of slumber.

Goodnight, buenas noches, boa noite.