my new job in Seattle

So, I'm just back from a quick trip to Seattle where the big news is that pygmy goats have been included in Seattle-city ordinances as acceptable pets. Pets that you can milk. The ordinance was "unanimously" accepted and heralded as "another step towards sustainability" . . . whaaaa???.The hitch in this giddyup is that NO intact male goats will be allowed in city limits. All the pygmy billy goats will be required to be neutered/castrated (called 'whethers' on the farm). Billy goats have a bad tradition of urinating on their heads to attract females . . .and a few other testosterone-driven behaviors that aren't attractive to apartment dwellers.

But . . .sustainability without MALE GOATS?? Please folks.

Hence, my new job! I will be "The Inseminator", travelling to high-rise duplexes with straws of wiggling genetic material, waving my building-security-scan card to get to the fifth floor where Mrs. Cumming's milk supply is at risk of drying off because Lil' Bit hasn't been serviced in ten months. I'll have a clipboard, perhaps a pair of goggles, a folding stanchion for giving the girls grain while business is being taken care of.
Seattle, here we come!

Error is not such a great sin as denial

--Irene Allen, Quaker Silence

Untitled

Ever have episodes of your life that you remember and identify as a strange vignette? Something entertaining and worth remembering, but with little or no bearing on current events?

In the summer of 2001, when I was newly married and living in a basement apt in Anchorage with my husband (who was often gone on multi-day trips with Princess Tours) I volunteered for the Anchorage based 'Alaska Center for the Book'. That summer of 2001 they inaugerated their "Reading Rendezvous" in the park behind the beautiful main library. This involved bookseller vendor booths, add-on stories, dress-up for kids, and one of my favorites: a pet rescue group that had children read books to ailing canines. It was the first annual, so many things were held together with duct tape . . . including the fact that I, somehow, became the food vendor coordinator. It was August, and no one had heard of our event, so I ended up blindly calling a lot of people with names like "Sally's Salmon on a Stick" and "Sugarville Ice Cream" only to find that most folks had already committed to a farmer's market or other event. (I got these names from a governmental computer print-out of every licensed travelling food truck in the entire Mat-Su area.) Things looked grim. I pictured hungry children and angry parents with extremely low blood sugar. Finally, I got a hold of a man in Seward --Randy McKettle (his real name)-- who generously said he would donate one-hundred bags of . . . yes . . .KETTLE CORN. The only catch was that, due to his fair and farmer's market schedule, I would have to drive to Seward to pick it up. And I would have to drive down and back (2 hours each way) on a Thursday night for a Sunday event . . .with my open-bed Toyota truck.
So . . . uh . . .at the veterinary clinic we'd just ordered the state-of-the-art bright blue body bags (even a Hefty(R)) can't hold a deceased 140# dog. Randy McKettle was soooo impressed with these bags! I drove back up the highway with a Toyota load of blue Santa-Sacs of kettle corn.
The only other image from this time . . . Alex and I were in such a small apartment we had to stack these bright blue bags along the wall in our bedroom for three days before the event. . .sleeping EVERY NIGHT in a fog of salty-sweet . . .dreaming of ferris wheels and giant turkey legs

Whidby Island and Hedgebrook Writers' Colony

About an hour away from my mom's house is the "Hedgebrook Farm" a writers' colony that I've applied to for a stint in February. I walkd the gardens-- where all the fruit pictures are from. Right across the street from the colony is an alpaca farm. My "economy car" turned out to be this i'm-too-sexy-for-the-ferry sportscar with California plates . . .so when I pulled up to the writers' colony a cluster of faces were staring through the screen door of the farmhouse . . . Michael Crichton? Clive Cussler? Rowling? No . . .just another "Carthart Cowgirl" (a phrase someone else greated me with later in the day at Whidby's waterfront).

more photos

Exceptional People

I hardly can even tell whether to use the phrase “fortunately” or “unfortunately” in introducing the topic—the reality that for the last two weeks I have been listening to words and reviewing actions that have repeatedly stung me dumbfound, elicited no response but tears and open palms, nausea and confusion. (sorry, I’m not talking about the Bush administration and Iraq). In my confusion, I’ve found myself following the same pattern in delivering responses, a shadow-boxing that shames and belittles me.

There is one phrase that echoes here, one that I think we’ve all turned to when feeling alone, when pondering ostracism, when questioning our actions, when wanting to believe that we are making good decisions despite all evidence to the contrary. It is the white flag of the subconscious going up, begging against all : “This action is OK! I am OK!”
“We are exceptional people”

Unfortunately, such a benign set of words is behind nearly every excruciatingly painful human action you might consider—from deeply intimate issues to the horrors of genocide and flag-waving invasions. A more often heard rephrasing of this is “God is on our side.” With so many people certain they are exceptional, we end up watching the argument collapse.

What makes a person? How is one “exceptional”?
A person? A massive cloud of spirit trapped inside the struggling perimeters of a body that continues to chemically tune the flesh and spirit with emotions and past experiences?
An “exceptional” person? Someone who thinks they really understand what a human is and needs.


We punish ourselves with the phrase “we are exceptional people” because within it we fail to trace our borders, we fail to admit the power of our desires, needs, rages, and griefs. We fail to consult the mystery in ourselves. We fail to give ourselves permission to be wrong, permission to discover more about ourselves.

We are NOT exceptional. Thank God(dess) for that, because it means we’re in good company

Stripping the leaves

It takes a single night of bluster to denude the birch trees of their little yellow heart-shaped leaves. The leaves come down in sheaves, papering windsheilds and roadways and the bellies of everyone's yard. To drive through them-- as they're falling-- is to think of snow, th only other thing as silent and weightless and wind-rippled as leaves.

Weekends at the ER clinic often leave me with things I must choose not to think about, OR give broad space and time in my head to understand. One index of what we deal with there is the couple that came in with an elderly dog for euthanasia and by the time I had the sedative drug in my hand and walked back into the room, the dog's pupils were fixed and dilated, no heart rate, cyanotic-- and, unfortunately, the brain stem response that stimuates "agonal" breathing was in overdrive. I had the collapsing couple step out into the lobby (where another woman with a dying dog was sitting on the floor) and quietly explained why the dog's whole body was arching with his "breathing" effort, and that I would let them back into the room in a few minutes. What was amusing about this shift . . .because we always add some goofy humor . . .I got to work with two supersized gentleman-techs-in-training who were both over 6 feet and 200 lbs. I made lots of jokes about not being able to get through the hallway with supplies and the laundry basket because "there's too much beefcake in the way!"

Writing? Yes. Job at UAF. Yes, I think. Trip to Seattle area this week. Yes. Needing friends and support this week. Yes.

Who would've thought?

Nibbles of Pleasure: the "discovery" of Wendell Berry

For months now I've carried Wendell Berry's name around as an unread talisman in my life, an intuited kinship, though I hadn't cracked a single spine of one of his books. Any of his 30 (or is it 40?) books of poetry, fiction, essays were hard to find. I imagine this is like the "used Toyota phenomenon" I discovered when I went to buy a used Tacoma a while back--they're just so popular they don't circulate often or for long. At least, I hope that's the case. (I'm having a flash-memory of my last (non Wendell Berry) special order from the bookstore when they said "Congratulations! You're getting the last copy available in the country! You must know something we don't." I responded, "Or I'm just crazy.")

A few nights ago I plugged in a video from the local university with Wendell Berry reading from his work. ***I just had to delete the previous line because I'd accidentally written 'reading from MY work.**** But that was the sensation I got in watching the video! I jumped up from the couch and retrieved a journal of mine from '94. Oh kindred! Father-thinker! Thank you, thank you Mr. Berry.

I'm sure there will be more entries on this blog about him as I read more, but here is one of his short, simple, joyful poems and the accompanying memory it evokes:

"The pasture, bleached and cold two weeks ago,
Begins to grow in the spring light and rain:
The new grass trembles under the wind's flow.
The flock, barn-weary, comes to it again,
New to the lambs, a place their mothers know,
Welcoming, bright, and savory in its green,
So fully does time recover it.
Nibbles of pleasure go all over it."

During the middle of a farm workday in late April,I radioed Donna to ask if Dale (farm steward) was on the farm. "No, I don't think so, why?"
"The sheep are in the North pasture. Did you let them out of the winter paddock?"
Donna said she had not. I walked down to their empty, dirt and straw winter pen to find a foot-wide break in the fencing between the pen and the pasture--each side of the fencing fluttering with clumps of fleece. In the time it'd taken me to find the problem, Dale had indeed arrived on the farm. He found me walking up the hill. "The sheep got out" I said
"I see."
I remember clearly, how we both turned around and looked out at the field -- white and black and brown and tan set against bright, bright green.
"They look good out there." I said.
"Sure do."

(In early spring you have to be very careful to slowly reintroduce pasture . . .a few hours every day increasing over a week or two.)

From Wikipedia:
"According to Berry, the good life includes sustainable agriculture, appropriate technologies, healthy rural communities, connection to place, the pleasures of good food, husbandry, good work, local economics, the miracle of life, fidelity, frugality, reverence, and the interconnectedness of life. The threats Berry finds to this good life include: industrial farming and the industrialization of life, ignorance, hubris, greed, violence against others and against the natural world, the eroding topsoil in the United States, global economics, and environmental destruction. Berry is among the most eloquent of contemporary Christian authors, frequently referring to the Gospels, the stewardship of Creation, and peacemaking.


"Solving for pattern", coined by Berry in his essay[5] of the same title is the process of finding solutions that solve multiple problems, while minimizing the creation of new problems. The essay was originally published in the Rodale Press periodical The New Farm. Though Mr. Berry's use of the phrase was in direct reference to agriculture, it has since come to enjoy broader use throughout the design community.[6][

Days of Awe (minus dead chicken swung over head)

"The ten days starting with Rosh Hashanah and ending with Yom Kippur are commonly known as the Days of Awe (Yamim Noraim) or the Days of Repentance. This is a time for serious introspection, a time to consider the sins of the previous year and repent before Yom Kippur.

One of the ongoing themes of the Days of Awe is the concept that G-d has 'books' that he writes our names in, writing down who will live and who will die, who will have a good life and who will have a bad life, for the next year. These books are written in on Rosh Hashanah, but our actions during the Days of Awe can alter G-d's decree. The actions that change the decree are 'teshuvah, tefilah and tzedakah,' repentance, prayer, good deeds (usually, charity). These 'books' are sealed on Yom Kippur. This concept of writing in books is the source of the common greeting during this time is 'May you be inscribed and sealed for a good year.'"

Among the customs of this time, it is common to seek reconciliation with people you may have wronged during the course of the year. The Talmud maintains that Yom Kippur atones only for sins between man and G-d. To atone for sins against another person, you must first seek reconciliation with that person, righting the wrongs you committed against them if possible.

Another custom observed during this time is kapparot. This is rarely practiced today, and is observed in its true form only by Chasidic and occasionally Orthodox Jews. Basically, you purchase a live fowl, and on the morning before Yom Kippur you wave it over your head reciting a prayer asking that the fowl be considered atonement for sins. The fowl is then slaughtered and given to the poor (or its value is given). Some Jews today simply use a bag of money instead of a fowl."
courtesy of http://www.jewfaq.org/holiday3.htm

And . . .why??

"This year--for the first time in history--female veterinarians outnumber men, according to the AVMA. Veterinary classes are on average 75% women (sometimes up to 90%)" --NAVC Clinician's brief

Then, there's the dearth of people going into food animal medicine . . .DRAT, I'd have to take physics and another standardized test

On Silence

The longer one keeps silent, the easier it is to stay silent, in corners of our lives as well as on blogs. On an ordinary Thursday this week I got a card from Brooklyn with the green-pen lettering of a close friend from boarding school in 91-92. I last tried to call her a decade ago,the ten years easily Jedi-mind-tricked into "a few years back." The card came addressed to me in my married name, last legal 3.5 years ago. I am "Cat Whitney" again, while she now goes by her lovely middle name, but still (my heart smiles;) "Your Liz" in the card. I am thrilled and speechlessly daunted by the task of filling the silent bridge between she and I. And the great geographic distance . . .some of my closest ties in the lower 48 (Denver, WA-Sequim, Upstate NY, MD, North Carolina, Oregon, as well as East Coast) have atrophied and whithered simply for the pain of never being able to share basic life events, celebrations, or transitions. Staying in touch is not so hard. Staying close--from this great distance--has proven painful. Like most things, I think we simply choose to commit to the attempt of doing so, hoping we get the strength along the way.

Despite the broodiness of the opening here (brooding chickens are actually quite noisy and grounded) things are going well. I'm having some career whiplash while I've been substitute teaching in many different special ed classrooms. One day I found myself correcting a 16-year-old's spelling of 'virgion' (in a hallway note that was intercepted by us "adults") and the next I am in an elementary school boys' bathroom pulling up pampers on the sweetest young man with cerebral palsey while he has both his hands on my shoulders and is asking if I can come back tomorrow. Starting tonight, however, I am a veterinary technician again, literally both day and night, for fifteen days. Somewhere in here the UAF teaching job should coalesce.

I have been to two of my first yoga classes, and I'm amazed--at both how much I NEED this class and how difficult it is for me. Everything from the pace, the deliberation, the core strength required . . .it's all new. I am just so much more task oriented than yoga asks of me. I miss farm work. And, for many different reasons, I'm REALLY missing Overlook Farm in particular. I even miss the snow and the maple "Sugar Shack" where, in this season, they'll be curing their landrace garlic, onions, squash, potatoes (BECCA, how should I cure the farmers' market taters up here? Will it make any difference if I do it and then put them in the fridge, not a root cellar?). The spring lambs should be 40-60 pounds by now, having spent the summer on nothing but pasture and mother's milk. Watching them play with eachother last spring, running and running, I know that their lives have been very sweet and appreciated by all farm visitors. Their meat will be great gift.

And writing? Yes. Of course. I applied to Hedgebrook writing colony for February 2008. I've sent off some things. I should have some news in the next month about various other literary endeavors. Balanceing writing time, "family" time, a weird work schedule, and the reality that I do need good sleep (5-6 hours a night doesn't work well for me) often involves spinning "the guilt wheel-of-fortune."