Look At Me, Mom, I’m Blogging!

The Cazadero Hills

Yep, I’m doing it—finally starting a Blog of My Own. No longer will I be merely Pontificating and occasionally sending out those ruminations or reports of interesting moments, mostly when I’m in some sort of trouble. (Although I will keep doing that.) For a long time I’ve been considering writing an actual blog, a kind of online diary. What stopped me was a number of considerations:

I already write for two blogs on religion, On Faith http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/starhawk/

and Alivemindandspirit
http://www.alivemindandspirit.com/index.php?category=1
and I believe the entire internet is a conspiracy to keep writers at work on thousands of short little pieces that never add up to anything that might actually bring in money, while distracting you from holding down a day job.

I ask myself questions like, “Why in hell would anybody care about this?” Do you really care if the chickens got out? If my bags are delayed in the airport? If for some unfathomable reason you do, and the growth of blogs suggests that people are endlessly fascinated with the details of other peoples’ lives, should I encourage it?

I’ve never succeeded in keeping a diary for very long, except at times when I was on vacation and could sit in some sidewalk café somewhere sipping espresso and writing in a notebook, pretending I was Anais Nin.

But, the post-modern world has finally caught up with me and prodded me into blogging. I draw the line, however, at tweeting—until I’m in the midst of Iranian crowds resisting the election or some similar uprising back home. Should you be addicted to tweets and really, really wish you could get mine, here’s a sample of what they would be:

11:53 PM. Plane late, bags delayed.
11:58 PM. Waiting at baggage, still no bags.
12:05 AM Baggage belt stopped.
12:13 AM Baggage belt going again!
12:39 AM Everyone else has bags, mine missing.

Or:

4:53 PM Tried to put chickens away early, white one escaped.
5:03 PM Caught white chicken, red one escaped.
5: 13 PM Caught red chicken, black one out.
5: 28 PM Sitting on ground, crying in chicken yard.

What I’ve been wanting to write is a blog about my life in permaculture, in ecological design applied to the land, primarily, I thought, my ranch up in Cazadero where I spend as much time as I can. Kind of a West Coast Under the Tuscan Sun, or rather, Under the Cazadero Rain, but with more composting toilets and probably fewer fabulous meals in hidden, stone-roofed Tuscan bistros, alas. And I came back last year from my summer travels, all eager to begin—and discovered everything in the garden was basically dead, the greenhouse was desiccated, the forest garden limping along, the olives, even, gasping—and it was just too depressing. Time passed, life happened, things changed, and now that I finally got the blog thing up and figured out how to use it, I’m about to leave again.

Nonetheless, I’ve decided to begin now. For one thing, I will be travelling, if not exactly on vacation, and travel often stimulates me to want to describe what I’m seeing and occasionally think Deep Thoughts about it.

So what is this blog about? Dirt Worship seemed to cover the ground (oh, that was a bad pun!) of both earth-based spirituality, permaculture, Paganism, the Goddess, life on the ranch, activist efforts to prevent idiots destroying the earth and everything good on her, gardening, composting toilets, and more.

So let me begin with a short description of my last evening on the ranch, before taking off for the summer. It’s mid-June, and a late May rain still keeps the grasses more green than gold. The sun is low enough in the sky to give everything a golden glow. The roses are spilling over themselves in the garden, pouring out blooms like American Idol contestants belting out love songs. David, my partner, and I are just up overnight to celebrate our wedding anniversary and we stroll up from our one-room cabin down in the redwoods up to the garden on the ridge.

Buck and Greg, the feral radical faeries that live in the yome by the olives (a yome being a cross between a yurt and dome, hope that makes it clear—essentially, a geodesic tent with some structure) are walking the goats. Buck and Greg are handspinners, widely known around the area as Two Guyz that Spin as they take their wares to farmers’ markets and have opened a small shop in Monte Rio. The goats are three angora goats. Elton (I did not name them), the buck, is majestic, with a long beard and backward curving horns, and vast sweeps of black, white and gray hair. Valentine, the doe, is white and curly, and her kid, Valentino, is a miniature of her although he’s already growing horns and starting to butt Elton in the stomach. And Pretty Boy, the Komondor, a kind of giant Hungarian sheepdog with dreadlocks, is prowling around, on guard against coyotes and cougars.

Here's Elton, our buck

In the evenings, Buck and Greg stroll around with the goats, letting them munch the grass on the roadside and clear brush from under the trees. This spring the goats have done almost all the mowing, aided by the chickens whom we move around in a portable chicken house tractor, and a bit of scything.

It’s a great pleasure, watching goats eat. They munch so methodically but with such enthusiasm, seeming to smile as they tear and chew. Goats are browsers, not grazers—they don’t just eat grass but love to tear leaves off branches, chow down on twigs, brush, thistles, overhanging leaves. The whole world is dinner, when you’re a goat!

And here's Valentine, the doe.

A lot of this blog will chronicle the challenges, the mistakes, the moments of sheer permacultural disaster and despair that life on the ranch entails. When you’re your own water company, utility and general repair person, when you’ve got three off-the-grid homesites to maintain and not a lot of money nor innate mechanical ability to draw on, when you live in a place that gets 80 to 100 inches of rainfall in the winter months and no rain at all generally from May to late September, when your spring is only producing fifteen gallons of water an hour going into the dry season, when you’ve optimistically planted up far too many gardens, forest gardens, orchards, olive groves and fedges for a person who is away most of the time, well—let’s just say there’s always something that needs to be fixed. Mostly, I work on my attitude. Instead of telling myself “I’m fucked, I’m doomed!” I try to say, “Oh, how exciting! Another interesting challenge in physical reality that has a real life solution I am highly capable of finding!”

That works, sometimes. I will get into the challenges, because I think it’s important for us, as we herald the green revolution, to admit our mistakes and help each other learn from the challenges.

But I wanted to start with one idyllic moment—the way I’ll think of the ranch when I’m on my travels.

And so we leave the ranch—rose petals gently waving a farewell on a soft, summer’s breeze, goats miraculously not eating the rose petals, chickens softly clucking in the twilight, feral faeries pulling dreadlocks off the dog and spinning them into yarn. Life is good!

Pretty Boy, our Komondor sheep dog.Life is good!