Readings and Workshops

Events where I'll be reading or doing workshops

February 23-25, 2023 time TBA People's Poetry Festival, Corpus Christi, TX flash panel

November 27, 2022 7 PM Texas Poetry Assignment contributor reading (Zoom)

June 5, 2022 7 PM Texas Poetry Assignment contributor reading (Zoom)

May 7, 2022 Reverie Bookstore, Austin, TX, reading from Red Riding Hood's Sister

March 31, 2022 Scissortail Literary Festival, South Central Oklahoma University, Ada OK.

reading, A Door Into Night, Poems of the Fantastic

August 7 & 8, 2021 Georgetown Poetry Festival , Georgetown Public Library and on Zoom

2:15-3:30 Hewlett Room: Poetry Workshop: Out Of An Old Tale

Writing to draw on internal myths, led by Sarah Webb

6:00-7:30 Blue Hole Contributors Reading

various open mics

August 24, 2021 Texas Poetry Assignment Friendship Reading

https:zoom.us/j/98407046849 ID: 98407046849 Passcode: friendship

August 15, 2021 7-830 PM Texas Poetry Assignment Contributor Reading (Zoom)

July 11, 2021 7 PM Texas Poetry Assignment Contributor Reading (Zoom)

zoom 939 8432 6131Password TPAJuly11

Every Thursday night at 7 PM. Zen and Writing writing session 7-830 PM. by Zoom

co-leader with Kim Mosley and others

find the link on the Appamada Zen Center calendar by clicking on the event on the

calendar

Every Saturday at 1-230 PM Art Atmosphere Poets (Georgetown) by Zoom open to whoever comes

Zoom ID: 827 9757 2020 Password: Gull

I'll add to these as I emerge post-pandemic

I will be going on the road again this summer, something I have not done the last two years because of Covid and because my longtime traveling companion, my hound dog Rex, died. Hard to think of the trip without him, though I went in the several years before him with the little terrier Missy, who I picked up on the road.

Here is a poem about Rex (with part of it from the trip). It can be found at texaspoetryassignment.org in Texas Dogs.

Rex, Dancing

Sarah Webb

December 29, 2021

He watched the deer step like a breath

out of the aspen into our dawn camp

and did not bark, his body tense under my hand,

as we stood caught by the quiet of the deer,

the scent of hoof and pelt on the fog.

Other times he could not contain his joy.

He splashed down the shore of the lake

and bucked in alarm when he stepped on a carp in the shallows,

galloped the path left by the water's subsidence

and flung himself, heedless, into me.

Once he knocked me down, hard shoulder into legs

and when I got to my knees, swerved back to butt me head to head.

I have a tee-shirt of coyotes dancing to the moon

and he was like that—wild and yodeling.

I remember him racing off through sageland,

free of our van and leashes and being good.

He'd skid back under the fence to leap close, then out of reach.

Laughing dog, loose on the clouds now,

won't you swerve back this way?

This year I have a new dog, Maggie, a rescue who is learning to be brave. We have work to do before the trip, taking her lots of places to get her used to adventures, but she is coming along. She will never be a Wild Coyote Dog, but she has a sweet and gentle heart. Here's to Maggie!

Minimalist Travel (transferred)

Transferred from my 55 mph blog:

This is from my 2013 trip. That year I camped in the Toyota, with a cot-width bed with storage under it and a chest of drawers (of sorts). I took a tent too, but mostly camped in the van. Amanda and I camped together for a couple of weeks (she with her two cats, one of whom was receiving treatment in Denver). Later I drove out West with Rex the Hound Dog for the rest of the summer. I was the only one in that tiny Colorado park (8 sites maybe). I have taken the Toyota two summers and the Vanagon six summers

This year I'm back in the VW bus--Westy, Vanagon, whatever you want to call it. More room and it feels less cramped and dark, but both of them are minimalist. Living simply. I'm getting fond of that.

This is the Vanagon taken through the window from my friends' house in Washington in 2010. Rex was lying inside on the bed.

Ten Thousand Things (transferred)

2014 7-27 Ten Thousand Things (transferred from my 55 mph blog)

In a commentary on practice by my teacher Albert Low, I was surprised to read that he recommended looking down rather than at the scenery as one walked in nature, at least for the beginning student, in the “first fifteen or twenty years.” Since much of the long trip I take each summer is taken up with responding to the landscape, I was taken aback. I read carefully as he explained that “it is neither the trees nor the birds, the river nor the blue sky that weaves its magic: it is awareness. When we go out for a walk like this we adopt a particular mind-set, and this is compatible with practice. With the same mindset one can walk through the slums of London and feel the same communion.” One can be open and aware in nature or anywhere. We may hear the rustle of leaves; better, we may hear a police siren.

It is true that when I travel, my mind is more open and attentive, particularly to dramatic and beautiful natural things. Less so, when I am home. It’s not entirely true that I lack attention, since I have worked on being present over the years, but still, there is a differential.

It might be good, I thought, to take a look at my patterns of awareness as I stayed here in Washington state. Certain things draw my attention on my walks with my dog and cat: flowers and shrubs, bamboo and fern borders, projections in the sidewalk, lawn ornaments, ravens.

Animals capture my interest—a cat on the porch swing, a little spaniel being walked down the block, fish in a koi pond, a dead squirrel this morning, which my cat Murphy sniffed and pawed. The squirrels leap to tree trunks and Rex follows, jerking me round. Some of the animal-watching is protective—cats and squirrels may inspire a lunge on the lead. Other things are to my advantage too—trash cans to deposit the sack of dog poop, houses with for sale signs and information sheets (I have rarely found one I could afford), cars coming down the streets we cross.

Interesting differences in houses—roof lines, porches, towers and balconies, stonework, latticework, arbors, palm trees, brushy yards with weeds and overgrown hedges and trees hiding whatever is behind, squares of lavender or lily. Folk art—banners and prayer flags, lawn ornaments, screened images of birds (there are several on the walls around the neighborhood), hand-made signs. A child’s table with a single chair in a shady, postage stamp backyard. A paradise of wagons, three-wheelers, plastic playhouses glimpsed through the slats in a back gate.

Food being grown—grapes in arbors and along fences, espaliered apple trees complete with rounding fruit, herbs in raised beds, drying tangles of sugar snap peas, red gleams of cherry tomatoes, blueberry bushes, blackberry patches left to fruit among weeds, containers of lettuce plants and shaggy tomato bushes on decks and balconies, corn in a row along an alley fence with twine holding it upright, bruised apples on the concrete and green balls of English walnut.

Water in any form—the elaborate stream and falls at Anthem Park between apartment buildings a block away, the shine of something spilt along the asphalt near a dumpster, the shrr of water down a backyard fountain. When it rains, puddles and mud and beading on cars.

Stories—the two women, one black, with tight slicked hair, one a haggard blonde, smoking on the curb outside a residential home. The rose with a short stem abandoned on a metal table outside a Subway early on a Sunday. Underwear and jeans discarded beside the sidewalk, now covered with city grit and leaves. I look down into the gardens of Columbia House, which I believe is assisted living, and see an old man turning onto a path in his automated scooter or a group of women under a canopy playing cards. A man stops to let Rex enter the street, then waves and drives on as Rex veers to inspect a sapling. A young neighbor makes his slow way down the sidewalk, letting his cat trail behind. They cross a street and climb the steps to a porch.

Having read my teacher’s comment about everyday awareness, I let my mind open wider this morning. So many colors and textures to the sidewalk—smooth pale gray in newly paved spots, the gritty, moss-embedded dark of sections that date back to the twenties and have been lifted awry by tree roots, fish scale patterns on sloping corners where bicycles and wheel chairs need access, or red-painted metal plates there with raised polkadots for traction. Cracks and concrete patches, lines of grass or moss, a rain-melted wash of chalk, a scattering of dried fir needles. Someone has sprayed mysterious turquoise markings down the center of the alley—repairs intended?

To some degree, I always participate in what Rex sees. What has he pulled toward? what is he sniffing? He has a much different view of the world. The base of trash cans and dumpsters call him, and mysterious scents. He stops at bamboo piled at the side of the alley, and we walk over the blonde blades which have fallen across the alleyway. He sniffs and paws at a spot like any other in the mulch of a flowerbed.

Today as my mind softens, our trip down the alley is a progression of sniffings, at little nubbins of green with purplish flowers, hairlike fibers of flower or weed, the corner of a gate. On my walks I can tell myself stories about what I attend to (why does the family have peace doves and Tibetan prayer flags, are they pacifists? I remember picking brown-eyed Susans like these for my mother.) Rex’s world is full of things I cannot easily put into words. Since I cannot participate in their olfactory significance, they become random dips into the texture of life—arch of grass, board dark with rot, splay of pebbles, shadowy brown irregularity. Rex is showing me the ten thousand things that make up life—really, below the ten thousand things, not to emptiness but at least to things less codeable in language. That is valuable practice, I think. At the least, it feels good to do.

Rex sniffing the air

The view from the road, creosote, concrete, and mountains

Traveling to Heal the Soul (transferred)

transferred from 55 mph blot

“I share the belief of many of my contemporaries that the spiritual crisis pervading all spheres of Western industrial society can be remedied only by a change in our world view. We shall have to shift from the materialistic, dualistic belief that people and their environment are separate, toward a new consciousness of an all-encompassing reality, which embraces the experiencing ego, a reality in which people feel their oneness with animate nature and all of creation.” —Dr. Albert Hoffman

quoted from Parabola newsletter Dec. 9, 2011

While I think that it is not just environment we are separate from (try other people, for just one thing), I do strongly agree with Dr. Hoffman that our culture has gone astray in a fundamental way. My trips are my fumbling attempt to find a way back to oneness--with the world I experience as I travel through plains and mountains and with the people I meet. And through silence and simplification, with whatever comes.

We have followed the materialist, dualistic road so far as a culture that we are in terrible trouble. I do not know what will happen as the world heats up. We will change, whether we want to or not. For me, my response to the crisis is to look toward the root, the separation we feel. Others, with a different bent, may respond with political or scientific solutions. Seeing our difficulty as a sickness of the soul, I am responding by addressing the soul.

Pools in the Desert (transferred)

Sheldon Wildlife Refuge—Pools in the desert mid-August republished from my 55 mph blog

originally August, 2014

I am staying tonight at one of my favorite places on the trip, Sheldon Wildlife Refuge and their little warm water pool. The pool, Warner Pool I think it's called, is just one of Sheldon's many pools for the tired traveler. The other travelers are birds, who swim among tall reeds—tule? They are a bluer green than cattails (which are also here) and taller and more tubular.

It's Sunday night here and quieter than some times I've come. I went swimming in the pool with a grandmother and aunt and a young boy, maybe six years old. There was a lot of discussion—and some hurt feelings—about whether it was okay to spray each other with the water gun. The grandmother entered into the spirit of the game and advanced on the boy and sprayed him back. The aunt threatened dire consequences if she were sprayed. The boy got mopey and announced he had swum enough. I thought it was because of the aunt's threat, but then it seemed he had gotten a face full of water and lost his zest for the game. The gun was put away, and they swam on more happily.

The water is warm to get into and then just mild. I lay on my back and floated. With my ample figure and my water sandals I can float perfectly flat. A wind came up and filled the cottonwoods around the pool.

When I came back to the Vanagon I reoriented it to funnel the wind into the interior through the popup window, one of my desert tricks. The hard part was to keep the bus in deep shade but not have the tree and its brushy trunk block the wind.

Another trick is a tiny fan about the size of my hand that my daughter got me. It plugs into the portable charger that I use for things like a lamp or recharging the computer. I have another charger that I reserve for emergencies, like the Vanagon not restarting because I've forgotten to turn the headlights off or used the interior lighting too long. This old bus (1991) doesn't have some of the safeguards that newer vehicles have, like switching the lights off when the vehicle is turned off.

I've rigged up a screen for the front side window out of a dog barrier that I thought I was going to use to keep Rex out of the front at night (I decided that if I wanted more than a fraction of the bed I'd better keep him in the front even though the cat box was up there). One of the nice things about a Vanagon is that it has two middle windows with screens for a crossbreeze and when the popup is raised it has a big screened window above. The hot air goes up and out the popup window. If I am parking in a hot place like a grocery store parking lot, I open all the screened windows and raise the poptop, so the interior doesn't heat up on the animals.

I was going to wet down a towel and hang it in the front driver's side window, but my feet felt crawly and I looked and big red ants were climbing up my legs. When I'd moved the bus, I'd gotten close to an ant hill. By the time I got them all off me and the driver's area and found a new spot for the Vanagon, the sun was going down behind a hill and the air was cooling. So I didn't bother with the towel.

Of course, swimming is great for hot places. Not much help for Rex and Murphy, though. Murphy positioned herself in front of the fan, which was blowing air in from the deepest part of the shade. Some of the air reached Rex, though, unfortunately, it was previously-owned-by-a-cat air.

Besides Sheldon Refuge another fantastic place to camp is Sunset Bay by Cape Arago and tidal pools that stretch maybe half a mile out to an island. Sea lions and seals congregate on the reef there and you can watch them from an overlook. And the campground itself is on a sheltered little cove, almost a perfect circle of protected water. It's the only place I know of on the coast where you can actually swim in the water (as opposed to jumping up and down in the waves. Sunset Bay has everything—a sand beach in the cove with protected water, sculptured cliffs and rocks there and nearby, tidal pool, and a beach by the tidal pools that is some places cobbled rocks and one place (this is an old memory and there have been many storms in the thirty years that have passed) a beach area that is not sand but many many tiny shells, so fine you lift a sprinkle in your hand to see them, delicate little snails and corkscrews and winglets and the smallest of mussels.

I was going to tell you about some other great places, but maybe later. I'm getting tired. Every once in a while I hear a big bullfrog groan from the bird pool just past the campground. I'll walk Rex there in the morning before we leave. And maybe take another swim. When you travel like this, you need to take whatever chance you get to bathe.

Military Backup (transferred)

7-28-2014 (transferred from my 55 mph blog)

Rex got a walk up to Main Street, where we strolled the shops (tattoo parlor, vintage store, CPA, architect, new marijuana outlet). When we got back Murphy wanted out, to goggle at a passerby and sniff her way along a neighbor's fence. Rex and I came too, as military support. There are supposed to be fierce cats in this neighborhood, and I know one for sure, an orange beast who terrorized my terrier Missy several years ago.

On this trip, a black and white cat disappeared into an alley, then an orange one—younger, I think, than the old bandit who caused Missy problems. The orange cat advanced down the alley at Murphy, who seemed unconcerned, sniffing at the wine bottles in a neighbor's recycling bin. I took a step toward him and he disappeared, but he circled round to come up the driveway. There is a little cut-through to the trash can there, and, sure enough, when I looked down it, he was creeping up on us. When I appeared, he fled. Murphy seemed unaware of these interactions, but I doubt she was so nonchalant. I imagine her whirling, claws out, if the tabby had gotten near.

Rex is usually patient with this sheepdog role—it's extra time out of doors, after all—but today he kept pulling hard toward every smell. I was taking notes in my journal, and it was hard to balance pen and paper.

The neighbor who walked his cat down the sidewalk a few days ago came out and put something in a car. A voice in conversation was audible from his porch, and I saw an older man with a cup there. Murphy investigated behind a fir bush, peeing I think. As she came out, she shook herself, freeing herself from spider web. We made our slow way back to the steps, Murphy stalking on hard, lion steps.

When Rex hurried in, she sat to consider. I opened the door wide enough that she could see that was no trap from her rival. She and Rex have been skirmishing at his food bowl, and she has taken up residence on top of the plastic storage box that holds their treats.

A few minutes later as I cleaned the cat box, she went to the door again. She must be beginning to feel comfortable outside the house. We went out. I hosed down the cat box as she wandered. No Rex this time.

With my slowness

I stop the world.

I choose the time--

you can wait.

--Murphy the Cat

Murphy, World Traveler (transferred)

transferred from my travel writing blog, 55 mph

5-31-2014, originally

Murphy exploring the alley in Washington

My cat Murphy comes and butts her face at me as I write at the computer. She is demanding I feed her once again. I feed her a lot now because under her long fur she is angular and bony . Sometimes she throws up what I gave her, or a thin clear liquid.

I get up and stir the food in her bowl. Stirring brings the gravy to the top, and often that is enough to get her to eat again. Sometimes I open a fresh can. Every few days she takes medicine, and then she eats a lot. She and I have this conversation about food five or six times a day. She has kidney disease, and if I don't get her to eat, she will waste away.

Her name is Murphy. I think she is fifteen. She came to me off the street, but one time I was told her age by the friends in whose house she was born (she left because kittens grew up aggressive and chased her away). She might be older.

When I go on my summer expeditions with my hound dog Rex, I have been leaving Murphy home with house sitters, but this year she is coming along. I can't ask a sitter to interact with her as intensively as I have this spring. And the water at our house has turned so salty that no house sitter would be happy staying here.

I'm glad I'm taking her. I've wanted to every year (and she has wanted to go, jumping up in the van and yowling), but I was afraid it wouldn't be workable. Last summer, however, I had my eyes opened. I camped with my daughter in Colorado, and she brought her cats along, Lelu to be fitted with a prosthesis by a vet there, and Mika so she wouldn't be left home alone. I camped in my Toyota van, and they stayed in the VW bus. I was surprised how good a home the VW turned out to be for them.

I had some questions to answer before I made the decision. Would Murphy handle the drive okay? Could we travel without losing her?

Murphy is an indoor-outdoor cat. At home when I walk Rex, Murphy often comes along, and she will follow us along the shore, even a mile. She hunts, and I'm almost certain she has interacted with the skunks, possums, raccoons, and armadillos that live here. I wasn't worried that she would be frightened and run away if she were suddenly out of doors. But how would she behave in unfamiliar territory? And would she put up with not getting to leave the bus some days?

I went forward cautiously. I drove Rex and Murphy to a different spot on the shore, outside Murphy's territory, and I let them loose. Rex did his usual running around, and Murphy began to explore the plants that have grown up on the exposed lakebed. She didn't streak off, but I did have to walk fast a couple of times to keep up with her. When it was time to go back I wondered if I would have to corral her and carry her, but, no, she followed, and when I opened the van, she hopped up into it. So, we could be out of doors, as long as there was good visibility.

Then I took Murphy along with us as we visited my daughter in Oklahoma. It's a seven-hour drive. The carrier was in, and a cat box. I let her roam free, and after about two minutes of complaint, she found a place to settle. She came to my knee a couple of times to ask about it all. Once she got up in my lap and purred. The return trip went well, and a second trip, too, so that answered one question. She could handle the drive . She didn't throw up, but she didn't eat while we were on the road, so I may have to spend a multiple days at campsites more often this year. On trip two, she ate in the evening after we arrived.

I boarded Murphy at a vet in Oklahoma the first trip, but on the second we stayed in my daughter's driveway in the VW bus (plugged into the garage for AC, and one night, heat). Rex and Murphy could co-exist in a small space, I found, though it was best to raise the poptop and feed her on the surface up there, particularly if I were going to leave the bus. More than once I stepped out only to come back to Rex gobbling Murphy's food.

My daughter and I spent spent a lot of time in the fenced backyard with the two of them. Once Murphy had thoroughly explored the yard, she wanted to get out of it. She could slip through the sagging gate or climb the mesh of the fence, or slip under. I had to give her my attention or off she'd go. I soon saw, however, that she didn't travel far, just into the shadow under the bus, or strolling toward the sidewalk. It was easy to get her back.

I looked up once from weeding, though, and she was nowhere in sight. I crouched to look under the bus, but she wasn't there I climbed the street, calling for her. “Murphy! Murphy!”

What was I doing thinking I could take a cat on the road? I reproached myself.

My daughter's house abuts a creek overgrown with bushes and trees. I followed the path along it, but no Murphy. I crossed the bridge and asked the workmen at the bed and breakfast. They hadn't seen her.

Finally, I put Rex on his lead. “Find Murphy,” I urged him as we hurried along. We looked in the bushes in the empty lot across the creek, then crossed to the bed and breakfast. “Find Murphy!” I said again. Out she strolled, from a bush at the edge of the bridge. She had gone a house away.

Murphy got a lot of practice being cooped up in the bus. She sometimes tried to get out, but all I had to do was put my hand in her way. Her desire to go and explore may build up on the trip, though, so I've looked into harnesses. That is the one part of our preparation that has not gone well. I bought a harness for her, but I can't get it over her head. I'm not sure she would tolerate it anyway, as she rears back when I try to slip it past her ears. I may get another type, shaped like an X that reaches up from under her belly and velcros closed. I need to get in gear if I am going to do that, though, because I haven't found any in the stores, just online, and it may have to be made on order. If we don't get a harness, however, I think we will be okay.

If I lose Murphy on this trip, I will regret it bitterly. I do have another choice, to stay home this summer (and probably the next, given the slow progress of her illness). But I am looking into it carefully and taking precautions. And there's this: last night as I was setting laundry in the bus to take in to the laundromat (the salty water here bleaches out my tee shirts), Murphy hurried out of the dark and jumped up in the bus. Are you packing to leave? her mowr seemed to ask. You had better take me too!

The Ancients (transferred)

(Transferred from my 55 mph blog)

I wrote this up from my journals today as I am putting together my book.

2009 6-12 The Ancients

A little fly dances to my nose

and out of reach.

My arm follows up and out.

I return to my sitting.

I was tired and slow that day. I poked around camp until noon, knowing I’d be staying over. When I went out I followed a portion of the Falls Trail, my body aching. The trail took me by gray ant nests, huge ones. Walking toward me, a woman grinned. I puzzled over her smile as I hiked until I realized why. It was my tee shirt. I was wearing one of my favorites, black with white petroglyphs all over. Mixed with the usual petroglyphs of goats and thunderbirds were a space saucer and Mickey Mouse and a jackalope and who knows what else.

When I got back I sat in the shade to write. A fly pestered me. He piggybacked on my hand as I wrote, then danced around my shirt. After a while I lay down my journal and straightened my back to meditate. The fly returned.

I went up to the Visitor’s Center--I was at Bandelier National Monument--and sat in an outdoor courtyard. Ravens were talking, herk, herk, awp. I saw a feather or twig drop from them, but when I went over, it wasn't there. Raven trick.

My doctor had told me about Bandelier, said it was his favorite place to go. He and I share an interest in American Indian art and ancient sites, so I thought I’d give it a try. I understood why he liked it when I went out to the cliff houses that afternoon. From the trail I could see many dark openings, some natural, some clearly made by people carving out the tuff (volcanic ash solidified into soft rock). I saw one cave with a rectangular shape inside. Depressions, marks, and tiny caves scarred the cliffside. Higher on the path I could see bigger caves and people climbing into them.

It was hard on my knees, but I climbed the many steps to join them. I was glad when I looked into a room. It had a fire-blackened, gouged-out ceiling. I wondered what it would be like to live in the tiny space and to look out into the flood plain below.

At the next cave house, bigger and higher on the cliff, I plucked up my courage and climbed to go in. The ladder was roughly constructed out of logs of cottonwood or pine, steps tied on, and the hands of visitors had polished the wood shiny. I have a fear of falling and went up fast, not giving myself time to look down.

Holes riddled the wall in the house, some perhaps for drainage, higher ones to let out smoke. The room was round, blackened above with soot, cream-colored near the floor. A pictograph covered a part of the wall, almost obscured by flaking and smoke. Its dark zigzag circled an arc of the room in a fluid and messy movement, as if it had been applied with a large brush. The zigzag ended in a more complex painting, perhaps the face of a man with a headband and stylized feather. It had been painted more thickly and precisely in a colored plaster. The feather image was white, and where hair might be, black. The “face” was red and a side bar red, and the features or interior details black and white.

The space was appealing. It was bigger than the earlier room, with a window, an alcove depression where things could be set, and a ledge for a fire. I stuck my hand up where the smoke would go, and found a flue. I wondered how far the flue would have to reach to let the smoke escape. Logs with hook-shaped stubs had been plunged into the wall, places to hang baskets and things like clothing (I read the people at Bandelier wove cloaks of turkey feathers). It was very satisfying to stand there, to imagine living there. It probably was the size of my camper-bus inside, slightly bigger, and round, of course. All the stuff you needed to live would be near to hand--food and blankets and weapons and your place to cook. And you could look out at the landscape. Not so different than the bus.

My breath tightened as I looked down the ladder polished by so many hands and feet. The ground seemed far below. But others were waiting to come up, so I turned and fumbled with my foot for the first log. A step, a step, I told myself, and moved methodically down, holding my terror at bay.

I lingered at two grottos where sunlight filtered between the cliffs down into slender cottonwoods, and a soft moisture filled the air. The path didn’t enter the small refuges; too many feet would destroy the , I imagine. They seemed cool and leafy and mysterious.

Below the cliffs, I walked among the adobe-brick houses, some built in front of cave houses, apparently to extend their space. Lower yet were partially fallen houses and nearer the stream, the ruins of others. A circle of ruined rooms surrounded a kiva.

Before I left Bandelier I walked a long way down Fry Trail and felt the landscape. The walk was hard on my back and legs, but I was strengthening. I saw two mule deer and a black beetle being eaten by red beetles.

I wonder what the appeal is for me of American Indian ruins and petroglyphs. Despite some family stories of Creek or Cherokee blood, I have no kin ties. I did enjoy my time teaching the Kiowa tribe and learning about them, and I have friends from several tribes. Really, though, I think the draw is something else. The art that I see on the stones and walls, the simpler lifestyle, living in the land, those are things I want in my own life--art, simplification, oneness with the world around me. They are all things that come from my traveling too. Not the community the cliff dwellers had, though.

When I traveled to Ireland and Scotland, it was the ancients who intrigued me--the carvings of spirals and rings and cups, the barrows, the stone circles. And when I taught linguistics I would have spent weeks if I could have on the roots of Indo-European. What were the words that revealed their lives? Spirit was shining, bear was taboo to name, no original word for wheel but words for salmon and beech and apple. And the earliest words yet, before Indoeuropean, 13,000 years or more--I and nose, father and mother, sun and moon.

When I go on the road to lead a simpler life, I’m not looking for austerity or self denial. Simplifying is not wanting things and not getting them; it’s turning to what is most essential.

Women Who Feed the Ravens (transferred)

Women Who Feed the Ravens (transferred from my 55 mph blog)

2013 7-13

I walked down to the elementary school playground, where I could let Rex off lead. Usually he makes one circuit of the playground and then goes back to the gate. If there is a dog to play with we might go two. He uses the bathroom and sniffs around the base of the building. Sometimes, like yesterday, he snuffles in the grass and finds something to eat.

As we walked along the play equipment, a raven croaked at us furiously from the top of the swing set. I raised my phone to take his picture, which seemed to alarm him further. He flapped into a tree, continuing his calls. Another raven joined him.

On the other side of the chain link fence, an older woman was kneeling to dig in her garden. Her small dog stretched onto the fence and barked. The woman looked up from her lettuce. “The crows are sure fussing today.”

I showed her my i phone. “It’s black and small. Maybe they think I’ve got a dead raven.”

She looked doubtful.

“My dog?”

“I don’t think so.” She snapped a lettuce leaf into her basket and added, “I see ravens and crows all the time. They come to my bird feeder.”

Rex trotted up the handicapped ramp to the school to sniff the entrance, and we continued around the playground. A woman in a kerchief was sitting at the table on the far side of the playing field. She didn’t have a dog, but a raven stood near her on the sidewalk. As we neared, she suddenly stood and, stepping to a section of the grass by the walkway, spread her arms as if blocking passage. The raven flew up and away.

Rex ran to her and began snatching something from the grass. It was the same area he’d found something to eat the day before. “Go, go!” she shouted at him. I hurried over.

“I feed the raven,” she said, as I hauled Rex by his collar. “Meat in the grass.” Her wide Slavic face was distressed. “Dog no eat.”

I fought to clip Rex’s lead. “The ravens? You feed the ravens meat?”

She gave a sharp nod. “Mama ravens need meat for babies.”

No wonder they’d been fussing, I thought as we left. Perhaps they had been calling each other to the feast--but they certainly had been warning each other about that interloper dog who gobbled bits they hadn’t found.