We didn't even time it to end on the new moon.

The moon is dark, it is the new moon which is Lunar Samhain, time of transition from old to new harvest year. When the crops are all in and it’s time to set seeds. We will celebrate with a bonfire at the end of work week on Thursday. Normally I bless and cook beans, but instead it’s Mo’s birthday so I made grandma’s chicken and dumplings from scratch, except we’d already eaten most the chicken off the carcass making it more like chicken broth and dumplings but not that Mo cared. Chicken broth, dumplings and tons of veggies right off the farm. The dumplings are blazin, I cant wait to tell grandma how good at this I’m getting.  Sunday night I made her enchilladas, passed down to her 4 decades ago from a Mexican couple named Albert and Alberta.  They were the bomb, am I allowed to say that?  About my own food? The chicken dumplings are sitting right now for the night so the flavors can soak in which is good because at night we try not to get in to any thing other than fiber cereal or fruit. Unless your me in which case like tonight you add jack cheese to the top of the garlic bread and stick it in the broiler for your ‘while I’m cooking chicken dumplings for lunch tomorrow’ snack.


The police busted up the Occupy Oakland movement. We watched in people-reported video snips online. It’s true civil disobedience though, peaceful dissidence so the people will assemble again. I pray for them everyday. This is the only way. We don’t have tv so we try to rely on the local public-supported radio for as much news as possible, I don’t let corporate media influence me so anyway it’s better for me this way. The past week the works been long but what was left in the field is almost entirely, finally, all done. We didn’t even time it to end on the new moon. Saturday I sat a long time in the orange side-light of the barn on upside down buckets with Jon. He played Palmetto Bug Stompers and we talked for hours, working peacefully side by side. It felt like a movie and more than once I thought relish this Kelly this setting and this peace, this nowhere at all else to be. It’s like a movie, the mythic sense is that real, and I told Jon so and he instantly agreed. Later, that night on our walk when we reached the bottom of the hill and stopped at the gate to rest he saw two shooting stars.

I like making friends. We laugh so hard that we cant even find breath to start the jokes that will come next. Today our boss brought the new Wilco CD and put it in and Tweedy’s singing “Sadness is my luxury” made me exhilarate with the irony: my decision to devote my life to true inner happiness and light, to devote my poet’s calling to this power within. To no longer buy the lazy-man’s excuse of cynicism or nihilism or darkness in order to create or be. Suffering should not be a requisite. That’s why I am so enamored of the uprisings all over the world, apathy among moral, thinking people is the worst social ill of all. Worse even than greed. We meditate and use our visions to see the world we want to see. We focus on solution. I got the offer from insurance for my car, barely anything at all. I didn’t expect this: to be starting the new harvest year carless, homeless, on the west coast. Reminded again that men see you for who you are while boys always project their fears. And also, almost entirely debt-free with no money tied up in the corporations and banks! Like my mom said on Sunday on the phone, I’ve had it easy, an easy, easy life. She’s right, so so right and I am grateful, and willing to lend my heart to the rest of the world. Willing and grateful for this work and life on the farm, the like- minds and inspiration, this quiet life in the hills and sharing in each other’s processes and changes we wish to see. Willing and grateful to believe in what we can be.