Woke this morning to a white world  and snow still spinning wind slanted. The robins are the May flowers.

It could be January in the mountains here. Where petals would be falling is snow.

Yesterday my whole day was a care-taking day. Sometimes I tell people I'm babysitting. The girls protest.  I got an old baby-doll to sit on so I could continue to use the phrase. Julia was at a sleep-over. It was Fiona and me all day. She is six. In the morning we shoveled two paddocks clear of horse poop and spread a few weeks worth of piles in the pasture. I use the flinging method piching forkfuls as far as I can sideways, over my head, in every direction. Fiona did the shoveling and flinging too until there was no more to be done. She was wearing rhinestone flip-flops. Across the road are two big cottonwood trees and three nests. We walked over to explore them before lunch. High up there is a red-tail nest. Lower in the second tree is a magpie nest. They look like crow nests but magpies construct stick roofs bower like. Lucky magpie babies. Hanging on a limb end is the third nest a small woven thing. Near the trees downwind we found an owl feather and then another and another and then a splat of downy under-feathers thick in a kill circle Among them were several chunks of coyote fur the owl might have nipped or taloned off in the scuffle.. The field is pocked with ground squirrel holes. Was the owl so intent on it's prey it didn't hear the coyote? And what sort of meal is an owls all feathers and eyeballs. Fiona will take some feathers and the fur to school for show and tell. She had a ballet recital practice mid day. After I dropped her off I took the dogs on a walk. I tied them outside the grocery store while I picked up something for lunch. A homeless man was in line in front of me buying dog biscuits. When I returned to the dogs he was feeding them the whole box. Sticky was in his lap.  Across the street someone was breaking up large panels to fit inside a dumpster. He was jumping on them. Gnomi and Sticky were interested. They were old wooden door panels. I saved the rest from slaughter and loaded them into the truck for a wall of my yet unbuilt shed. Dawn was eating lunch outside when we finished our walk (with Gnomi and Sticky it's more like a  blurred rampage of swamping swimming  and snarling. I'm the only one walking.)  Fiona tried a dog biscuit  after ballet. We took the full recycle bins to the recycle center and then did a big grocery shopping. Along the road we passed a dead magpie not squished just broken necked. I backed up and picked it up. At home we drew a huge picture of the day and traced the dead magpie into the picture

This Yak and her baby (two days old) need a new home. She is friendly.

I can't imagine being another kind of person and its easier to want what you already have. If It happened I think that person would claw her way out of my body.

I like to live in the world raw we have been given. Today  there is a cold rain. Everything is glistening dark and subtle and such a change from snow.  Today is the day when the growing can be seen when things turn greener by the hour. We will get wet and it won't matter.  I want to live  where the world dictates.

I think I am a finder more than a searcher. 

I spent the week end at a friend's ranch. The fences are maintained to keep out the cattle. There are deer and elk and wild gosling safe along the river, badgers and coyotes and old cars, out-buildings alive with rodents and bats. I slept in a hand hewn log cabin ark shaped. The rain fell all night. The sound itself washed me clean beneath my skin. In the morning we walked to where the rain had turned to snow under the cold sky. Dudley found wolf tracks set deep in the snow melt soil. The pads were bear paw in breadth. Gnomi and Sticky ranged from one weather seared winter kill to another. It is Ute land. I found a hand sized stone tool on a steep slope where the sage turns to pine. We looked it up it's called a Tang Knife. I picked it up with my left hand and cupped the palm flesh around it's sharpened edges. That hand feels different now as though it is holding some secret from the rest of my body.

Today is Celka's birthday. I love births that they are something so powerfully of the earth from the seed growing inside, the birth and then we spend our years learning about letting go about trust and living with something we can't control.

I read the story about Jon's mother's dying.  Thank you Jon. I have kept my ideas about death to myself mostly because I think people would find them callous. I think maybe they are the opposite no callouses built up not even skin just a moving into death without barriers of any kind. Death even the thought makes me cry a gut reaction from my Fathers unexpected dying but they are such comforting tears. I am not afraid of me dying or anyone. It came about from skinning things, from cutting open still hot animals, from watching bones in the desert turning to dust, from holding baby birds cupped in my hand as they gasped one last time.....It came about from living too.  I think so much of our searchings and empty feelingness  and clutchings on to things are shields and blinders that never would protect us from death anyway.

I am not interested in easy so much as living with grace with ease not differentiating between hard and easy.  Water can turn sharp stones smooth

Marjory gave me her red velvet couch. It's cushions are filled with down. I drove it car top to Utah to replace the ancient horsehair stuffed green one on my porch. I am happy to arrive and settle in almost  any place but being home in Utah turns me gleeful.
I just returned from a long wander. I went back to the petraglyphs as a good place to begin. The day has been windy. This morning a wispy eagle shaped cloud flew by my window. In my scramblings I had to hold fast to rocks to keep from being blown away where I usually walk upright. Once the dogs lost my scent it couldn't hold to my tracks in the wind. I heard them first then saw them up wind together on a flat open expanse howling for me like coyote pups. Sticky held me so tight with his mouth when we reunited his teeth broke the skin of my arm. Sometimes I think I find what I need, I find more than that, because I go empty pockets into the land. I think I find water because I have no container. There are always a few things to fill my mouth. Bringing food, a snack with me might take my mouth my throat and belly away from where I am. Today I found another stone tool the edges rose tinged as if in anticipation of the flesh it would have bloodied. I came home full and hungry and fried up some eggs from Lynette's chickens. Gnomi and Sticky licked the pan clean.
I am being a voice for all that:-)

I am a (displaced) hunter gatherer. It is not in me to cultivate. Yesterday I was eyeing my compost and thinking about a garden but couldn't scar up any earth around my cabins with something like that.. I picked some of last years rose hips. There is a place a few miles away where they grow in such profusion there is more red than thorn.

I read something about condors: "A condor is five percent feathers, flesh, blood and bone, the rest is place. Condors are soaring manifestations of the place that built them and coded their genes."
That is how I am feeling about what I am serving

The bear came back through the canyon the other night and left swooping paw prints dirt painted around the tipi walls this time the claws left holes pin pricking light through the canvas. We looked for tracks in the mud by the stream and the sandy washes and found none. This is the bursting forth week of greening. The aspen trees that were naked white exposed five days ago are green umbrella'd and dapple limbed. The wildflowers are drinking the last moisture from the soil and laying down their roots and later their dried bodies against the erosion that anyway happens. I found the bear tracks. I went back. A back foot looking like a baby sasqwatch and two front paw impressions below the cottonwood tree where the ground stays moist. It is a young bear. 
A storm blew in. Everything but the cabin shook and blustered all night. Sleet turned to snow. I lit candles and settled with familiar comfort into the cold.  I realised how much security I find in this hyperboreal pocket in swirling snow and darkness. The clouds rose up once and showed the mountains fresh white. Yesterday it was nearly ninety degrees. We swam in the hanging rock pool. High above a green tree'd alcove in the cliff wall we saw a nest and heard the pre-historic squawking of hungry unfledged raptors. Sticky caught  and swallowed up a rock squirrel.

I love living in a place where the landscape exciting itself is the constant, an unsupervised play ground for the elements and me a plaything.

I keep my camera in a small red bag slung across my back. I left an inner pocket unzipped. The one where I keep a spare camera battery. Somewhere in yesterday's wanderings it fell out. Today was the day to find the battery. When I began the back-tracking my body turned contrary and didn't want to search for it, didn't want to make determined steps. I forced the looking. The battery cost fift dollars. In that resisted determination I got lost. The mountains showed themselves in a place that threw my bearings off and startled my spirit. It caused what I think of as me (nothing more than my thoughts) to close up. I had to go back to the truck and start over in the tracing. I found the battery lying there as out of place as I had become. I zipped it tight into it's pocket and returned to the kind of feet-felt meander across this jagged land where I am always placed and never lost. Something as enormous as the whole world tells me where I am.

My parents played their way through every day. Washing dishes, preparing lectures, driving the car, packing a whole house to move, shingling a roof, taking a bath, getting lost or getting a flat tire,  everything was a possibility to  play. They played without us, it didn't take children to play. That is all I knew. I don't know how to not play.

The other side of the weaknesses that are as necessary to being. I am imagining Gandhi's legs like brittle sticks or the eagle who has more weight in feathers than in bones.

It feels as though every day turns into a pilgrimage.   Yeats and the pilgrim soul.

When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false [or]1 true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead 
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.