Midsummer Night Dreaming

The coyote howl always means something is up. There's a shift in the wind, the tide has turned in some imperceptible way. It means listen. At three in the morning, the dark side of the night, at the turn of the year there is hunger. Life climbs higher in search of sun, blood and satisfaction.
The coyote is supposed to be indistinguishable from the Eastern Timber Wolf genetically. Smaller than the gray wolf, its howl is higher pitched. But the common appeal to chaos is unmistakable.
The wild is the opposite of what is good. It wants disorder, destruction, tearing down the boundaries. We are supposed to get in touch with our wild side, acknowledging there are some things in us, our past, that are unspeakable, unnameable, indecent. But to be honest, the wild is anathema to us, it is what we are against. And the howl of the wild dog raises hackles because it is a language we still understand.
But listen closely. There is a nobility, an honesty in what the coyote sings. Co-existence and mutual respect are a good thing and that is how the wild and the human depend on each other. When I hear a coyote howl, it thrills me to know that the woods are alive. As long as they stay away from my sheep, everything is okay.
I am reading a book called A Fighter's Heart by Sam Sheridan - Nietzschean in a comfortable globalized jet setting way. It is about the world of ultimate fighting. In it Sheridan quotes a jiu jitsu master saying "everything fights". The universe is framed in such a way that conflict and struggle are part of life

Looking forward to decrepitude

There's something about planting a tree that makes you feel good about the future. Despite the dire predictions of global catastrophe, and the increasing likelihood that nothing will be done to avert the worst, (at least not if recent polls showing Americans remain largely apathetic about the threat are correct), you plant a tree and you feel that somehow everything's going to be all right. Planting 80 trees, however, is a bit of lunacy that leaves most sane people quaking in their boots. Not this boy, though, for whom staring into the dark cavern of bodily and mental failure from now on means getting one day closer to the sight of spreading apple trees putting out their lovely and life-giving fruit. The setup for grafting involved receiving shipment of scion wood (varieties including Northern Spy, Starkey, Liberty, Canadian Strawberry, Black Oxford, Cox's Orange, Keepsake, etc. ) and root stock - Antonovka standards - splicing them together with bench grafts, and wrapping up the work with protective plastic tape and a coating of emulsion. Nothing beyond the skills of anyone with experience of any sort of manual work and a minimum of dexterity with a whittling knife. Now they sit in the nursery bed through the summer, fall and winter to be planted into their permament locations out in the old cow pasture next year.

Speaking of eternal optimism, just caught the end of a Michael Moore interview on Canadian radio where he endorses Obama and expresses disgust at the turn of the Democratic primary. All i can say is what did anyone expect? This is a competition for the most pwerful position on the globe, and when push comes to shove the gloves will come off. Any of the three candidates you would think would put America back on track after the disaster of the Bush years. For the teenagers I teach, this is all heady stuff, but for me, I am tending my trees and thinking of The Who. I get on my knees and pray...we don't get fooled again.

Snow day in March

Wet, sticky snow, the Inuit undoubtedly have a word for it - the kind that sticks to things like Velcro, turning everything into a reverse negative of itself; that's the stuff we've got here this morning. Everyone is sick of it by now, although it's beauty is undeniable. I love the silence as it falls, a testimony to the temporary state of noise and the timelessness of a vacuum. We're living inside one of those magical crystal balls again, but we've had enough, thank you. Send it to the Wilkinson Ice Shelf, which is in danger of falling off and adding fuel to the fire of a warming planet.

Maple syrup producers are happy; snow cover in March delays budding on the maple trees. Last winter there was no snow to speak of and the maples budded in early February, drying off the run of sap. The snow insulates the roots, keeping them cool, the way it's supposed to be, apparently.

But we used to plant out our potatoes by St. Patrick's when we lived in West Cork. We want to dig, smell the beautiful rich smell of black earth as the spade turns it up. We have some leggy leek and cabbage seedlings on the kitchen and dining room windowsills, some potato seed in the basement in a couple plastic Walmart bins with holes punched in them for air. Everything's primed for spring, but old man winter ain't giving up that easily, this year. Good for him, I say. Deep down I'm always sad when the last of the snow goes. It makes me think of Frosty the Snowman melting. Even though I know he comes back again some day, part of me isn't ready for goodbyes.

Running Out the Clock

Went out for a run after work today. Still a foot of snow on the ground. Thought about the story I'm working on at the moment, how to layer the plots so one frame, the abduction, fades out, as the survival frame takes over - the relationships among the various people who have been kidnapped by the terrorist, the unlikely heroism, etc. Need to include a character, maybe a woman who is a struggling artist dealing with issues of personal identity and authentic expression. Maybe she can be found at a gas station, an unlikely situation, while they are on their way north to Vermont.

I find that I have very clear ideas of plot and character development often while I'm running and then by the time I have a chance to write them down they have usually faded. Still, all it takes is a couple of notes usually jotted down at the top of the page I am working on to jog my memory later, sometimes weeks or months later while I am rereading or editing.

Ordered seven different types of scionwood, a total of eighty trees to be grafted and eventually planted out, our small apple orchard, from Fedco in Maine. They should arrive sometime in April, about the time I have a break from teaching for a week. By then the lambs will almost all be born also. Stay tuned for pictures. The Icelandic ewes we have, this is our fourth lambing season, are very self-reliant and have never had difficulties birthing, although our oldest ewe, Sadie, developed mastitis and had problems nursing last year and we had to put her down. A cruel business, but not as harsh as watching her lambs die two years in a row. We tried bottle feeding, but it was not enough to keep them healthy.

Promotion for French Pond Road continues. The print edition should be out sometime soon after some technical glitches with the cover and then available through the website and Amazon. Watch this space.

March Madness

Home sick from work with the flu; with four feet of snow outside by the woodshed, it hardly feels like spring is anywhere near. Not much writing lately either, which always maks me feel down. Just read Timothy Egan's opinion piece in the NYT with St. Patrick's day around the corner, typically maudlin view of what constitutes identity. The soul of suffering is universal and not endemic to any race or people. But it is what makes us tick, therefore I welcome my sickness and yesterday felt almost alive walking up hill against the wind, feeling the shivers down my back. I couldn't get warm. Then my son Michael came running up the hill after me and when i turned and saw him coming, I realized my self-pitying was selfish and I needed to reach out and I did as he ran by.

Glad to see French Pond Road available on the Kindle at Amazon. The wave of the future is here my friends. Ernest Hebert, venerable dean of New Hampshire writers, has one. See The Valley News, Wednesday march 12 edition.

Without risk there is no faith -- S. Kierkegaard

French Pond Road

My second novel published this month by Hope Mountain Press. Billy Kagan back in the saddle, so to speak. I'm not expecting a barrage of sales, but it would be nice to see some support. In case anybody's interested, the ebook is available for download and the print edition will be soon, hopefully. It took me three years to write and revise, so this is all a kind of anti-climax. But it is nice to see the characters take on a life of their own outside of my study and my head. Hope Mountain Press might just issue a reprint of Birdman, at least in ebook format. Their website:
http://www.hmpebooks.com/

Thanksgiving Note -- Numb to Moderate

Thanksgiving at my mother's house always is an exercise in nostalgia, for the kind of family we could have been . We're past the recriminations, and now with the next generation moving into its stage of public dysfunction, it seems that we may have something to call our own, a style, something that can count as a legacy, a pattern, something. As far as the food, Mom finally got it together. After years of trying, the turkey was actually cooked right, carved right away from the breast, side dishes edible to tasty. Drinking moderate for the usual suspects, including moi.. Mom claimed she'd never heard me play an entire song through before. That's the kind of family we have. I took up the guitar in Mexico after buying a beauty in an outdoor market somewhere in the north near Durango. I bought my second in a pawn shop in New York City around 114th street and now, my third, an Ibanez, has decent action and am downloading all kinds of stuff and learning it. if i play an open mike this winter like I want I'll be chuffed. The human voice in song is the way we get closest to a true spiritual experience, listening, but especially by singing.