Musical Inclinations

Two of several reasons we've been so busy (and not updating the blog):















I'm taking fiddle lessons while Jon is enrolled in guitar. We've also been practicing and teaching ourselves at home from online video tutorials and sheet music. It's such a blast, we're wondering why we didn't pursue music this passionately earlier in our lives. Our first round of lessons ends in just a couple of weeks, and we'll miss them!

We experienced the unifying power of music last night when my family came over to celebrate my mom and dad's 50th wedding anniversary. We had a small, informal family dinner at our place (BBQ ribs and potato salad with celebratory champagne!), and I broke out my fiddle to play a song I had been learning all week for the occasion: Auld Lang Syne. The song couldn't be further from an anniversary song (look up the lyrics sometime), but it's such a beautiful song on the violin and it's in my songbook, so I couldn't resist playing it for them.

As I played (despite the screeching and missplaced notes--I'm still learning), I watched everyone's face relax and their eyes wander off into distant places in their minds. But nothing was more gratifying than to hear my mom begin to softly sing along--in French. Apparently, Americans aren't the only ones who sing this song each New Year's Eve. And my mom said that during WWII, people sang it to each other as a way to say "we'll see each other again". It was so moving to play along with my mom's sweet voice.

Then my brothers took a stab at playing my violin--which was pretty funny--and Jon broke out his guitar, which prompted my brothers to participate in showing him a few chords, since both of them are proficient in guitar and bass. The evening became a serenade of various instruments and my mom and I listening to bluegrass tunes I want to learn to play on the fiddle someday from my iPod in the other room.

As Leonard Bernstein is credited with saying, "music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable." Last night, it certainly brought our family together in a delightful way we've never experienced.

Name Our Farm!

We're ready to register our farm name in the state of New Mexico, and we'd like your help!

Here's the backstory on a few name candidates we've come up with. Vote in the poll provided below the backstory!

A few facts about the farm:

• produce only, driven by market requirements and our ability to grow (so far we've grown watermelons, cantaloupes, tomatoes, Japanese eggplant, herbs, chiles and sweet peppers, beans, cucumbers, and squash)
• we'll be a local provider, not national (within 100 miles of the farm)
• we use organic practices but are not certified organic (at least not right away)
• not only do we plan to sell our own produce, we'd like to also distribute for other local farmers

Name Candidates:

1. Thunderhead Farms - We always marvel at the enormous thunderheads that accumulate in the big skies of New Mexico during summer growing season.

2. Que Sera Farms - After the song "Que Sera, Sera", "what will be, will be". With farming, so many elements are out of our control, and each season is a miracle. "Que sera" is also a great life philosophy--have faith, let go, and live in the present.

3. Maximus Farms - As many of our friends know, Maximus was our first pet together (a very fat cat), and we moved him to the farm from San Francisco. He's since passed, and we've entertained the idea of naming our farm after him, designating a % of any proceeds to Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Kanab, Utah.

4. Cat Scratch Farms - Just a funny name, and indicative of our two current cats. Again, % proceeds would go to the animal sanctuary (which we plan to do no matter what we name the farm).

5. Labyrinth Farms - "A thoughtful path to better living." We were married in San Anselmo at a seminary that featured a meditation labyrinth. The labyrinth became a symbol throughout our wedding festivities, and we plan to build a small one on our farm. Labyrinths symbolize spiritual focus and make for cool (and memorable) designs. Many small farms feature a "corn maze" or labyrinth for kids to run through during harvest festivals, and we could incorporate something like this into the farm.

Please vote! Also, comment with your own ideas. We'd love to hear them!

poll by twiigs.com

The Sound of Silence

It's been a long time since we've updated the blog. Busy times! Jon has been researching and writing articles for the Health Fitness Professionals Network in addition to preparing for Spring projects on the farm, and I've continued to be overwhelmed with work at Autodesk--but better busy than unemployed!

We're also trying to decipher and wrap up our tax return (like everyone else in the U.S. this month) while trying to figure out what we want to do when we grow up. It's been long days and long nights at our desks, eagerly awaiting the first budbreaks of Spring....

And just Monday I made the delightful discovery of finding already-flowering crocuses while accompanying the cats on their daily outing in our courtyard. Then I noticed that all of our other bulb flowers have started to break ground. If you have a garden and haven't planted bulbs--they are the most gratifying display of early Spring after a long, desolate winter. Can't wait for longer, warmer days!

Sabbatical Recap VII - Playing in the Desert

One of the highlights of my sabbatical was an overnight camping trip near the Chihuahuan Desert in southern New Mexico. Jon and I decided to do the overnight trip on one of the two days the Trinity Site is open each year, so we could stop by the historic site and learn more about the Manhattan Project and the first atomic test detonation on July 16, 1945.

So, we packed the car and took off for the long, six hour drive through Socorro, the Trinity Site, a gorgeous area called the Valley of Fires (a sprawling valley of ancient petrified lava that's really something to see), then off to Alamogordo to head to our campsite at Oliver Lee Memorial State Park. It rained on our way through Alamogordo, one of New Mexico's dramatic, Indian Summer thunderstorms that lit the brooding sky on fire and cooled off the 80-degree temperatures.

We arrived at our campsite after the rain, and a couple hours before dark, just in time to set up camp in the waning daylight. The campsites around us were abuzz with activity: families setting up their tents or hooking up their RVs to a water source, walking around to orient themselves to the grounds and exercise their dogs--until suddenly Jon and I noticed that the campground became very quiet. Everyone had disappeared, and we realized that we were the only ones left on the grounds. We joked that perhaps incognito G-men from the nearby White Sands Missile Range stealthily abducted them and that perhaps we were the rejects.

I walked to the ranger station to see if anyone was still on duty, but it was closed. Instead, I found an announcement on the bulletin board that a full moon was to rise that night. Everyone had gone to a 7:00 storytelling about native American moon folklore at the group shelter. Apparently the park rangers do this for every advent of a full moon at Oliver Lee park, and it's such a great idea. Too bad we missed it, but we certainly didn't miss the drama and the glory of the full moon slowly making its grandiose entrance over the Sacramento mountains escarpment, shining brighter than any flashlight ever could. It was so close to the earth, its light shone nearly like daylight well into the wee hours of the morning--and it was fabulous. We toasted the moon with a glass of wine while cooking our dinner over an open fire and retiring to a game of gin rummy by moonlight.

In the morning we cooked breakfast, packed camp, and took a quick hike up part of the Dog Canyon trail, the main attraction at Oliver Lee. We didn't make it very far into the canyon before deciding to turn around as we were running short on time, but by all accounts it's a New Mexico hike you don't want to miss. On our drive out of the camping area, we were greeted by a tarantula wandering lost in the road, perhaps to tell us, "y'all come back now, ya hear?". This was the first time either of us had encountered a live tarantula in nature, and it was the crescendo to an already fascinating trip.

After our short hike, we headed to White Sands national monument to play in the blinding gypsum dunes for a couple of hours before making the long drive back home. Growing up in New Mexico, I only had one opportunity to visit this unique place in all the world but was thwarted by a haboob-style sandstorm, and being only 12 miles away this time around, I didn't want to miss even just a short visit.

Mid-way home, we had the pleasure of stopping at Laughing Sheep farm near Lincoln, New Mexico, to stock up on grass-fed beef, pork, and elk--the latter for dinner that evening, thanks to the fine cooking skills of our dear friends and neighbors Karen and Jerry. After communing with nature as we had that weekend, it was fitting to sit down to a well-cooked meal that was itself well-fed.

Some people travel the world on their sabbaticals--a wise and wonderful choice--but I chose to explore local treasures, and discovered that I am none the poorer.

Happy New Year! 2010

We wrapped up a wonderful 2-week holiday season with a New Year's Eve "Around the World" party with friends Scott and Chere who drove all the way from the Phoenix area, and our neighbors Jerry and Karen, before they left for their second lives in SE Asia this week (sniff, sniff).

For the party, we prepared several small dishes from around the world, accompanied by their local libations. So, for Ireland Jon made shepherd's pie (technically, he made cottage pie because he didn't include lamb) and paired it with Guinness and Irish soda bread. For Italy, we arranged fancy salumis and artisanal Italian cheeses on a platter, and for France we prepared my mom's traditional New Year's Eve French onion soup, paired with a 2008 Beaujolais.

From North America, we had deviled eggs, French onion dip with Ruffles, and a local microbrew from Albuquerque (Marble I.P.A.), and blue tortilla chips with salsas and guacamole with Coronas to represent Mexico.

For Asia, Jon and Scott (who doesn't like fish!) prepared ahi tuna sushi paired with sake to represent Japan, and Jerry and Karen graciously presented us with Southeast Asian delicacies such as Laotian and Thai jeows (spicy dips) with purple Cambodian dipping rice.

At midnight, to ring in the New Year, we "flew" to Russia and indulged in whitefish caviar on seaweed rice crackers with crème fraiche accompanied by sparkling wine (Gruet, from New Mexico). Finally, we traveled to South America with chocolate Brigadeiros (a type of Brazilian fudge), displayed with a bowl of floating candles, to honor a Brazilian new year's tradition.

What a great way to ring in the New Year, but it's time for moderation again. Gotta go--all this writing about food made me hungry!

Sabbatical Recap V - Books I Read

I know it's the holidays, and I should be writing about wintertime glee (and I'll get to those posts), but I've saved several draft posts to savor and recap the short-lived seven weeks I had off earlier in the year (a.k.a., sabbatical). While I didn't physically travel much (save for a brief trip to California), I did manage to take a journey in reading, catching up on a book I've been meaning to read for years, as well as being introduced to a new author (to me), a new way of eating, and an education in art.

Books I Read on Sabbatical

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner. Although I was an English major in college and read a good deal of modern American literature, I had never heard of Wallace Stegner, a legendary American short-story writer, historian, environmentalist, professor, and novelist. It's not a dramatic novel with lots of blood, sweat, sex, and tears, but a quiet novel about the subtelties in a lifelong friendship between two couples. One would think, with a topic like that, the book would have been a snoozer, but I couldn't put it down. Stegner writes descriptions as if you were in the novel yourself, witnessing the characters first-hand as they win their victories and make their mistakes, and living the story as it unfurls.

Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body's Natural Ability to Heal Itself by Dr. Alejandro Junger. Aside from my early education in the wisdom of the Bible, I've read a few books I can say have fundamentally changed my way of thinking about taking care of the everyday business of life, among them How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (don't knock it before you read it! Everyone should take a refresher on this book in the 21st century) and Die Broke by Stephan Pollan. Clean is another one of those books that reset my basic understanding of something we all typically do about three times a day (EAT!) and the effects of our modern lifestyles and environment on our bodies and overall well-being.

Clean prescribes a healthy three-week cleansing program to reset your body's rhythms while balancing physical, spiritual, mental, and emotional activities in a demanding lifestyle. And the best part about the cleanse: it's not just water and grapefruit--it involves real food everyday to uberboost your health. After the three-week program and continuing some of its principles in my everyday diet, I haven't felt or looked this healthy in years!

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon. I remember when this novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 2001, and I've been wanting to read it ever since. Eight years later, I finally picked it up and embarked on the amazing 656-page journey myself. I took two months to finish the novel, but it was worth every page. There were a couple of slow parts in the journey, but I savored every minute of this story about two young Jewish cousins--one American, the other Czech--during WWII in New York City, the rise and fall of the superhero comic book era, and the dawn of the nuclear age. In some places, the novel reads like a comic book itself, and takes you on a colorful, forbidden escape. Most of the novel, though, is a metaphor for life, love, art, sexuality, innocence, and childhood, peppered with the perils of war and the power of hate on the stage of world history. Most authors would be taking on too much to tackle all of these topics in one novel, but Michael Chabon nails it in a single bound.

Smile of the Buddha by Jacquelynn Baas. This was required reading for one of my art classes during sabbatical, and it was a pleasure for me to learn about artists such as abstract expressionists Agnes Martin and Ad Reinhardt, and Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi. The book explores the influences of Asian thought (particularly Buddhism) on modern-era European and American artists, thus the title of the class I took, "Bridging the Gap". Each week, we read about one of these artists and how Eastern thought influenced their work. After discussing the chapter in class, we'd emulate the artist's work using their principles and techniques. Each week was a meditation and helped me slow down during the first few weeks of my sabbatical.

It's rare that I have the time to even read one book in a month so if nothing else, this sabbatical allowed me time to expand my library and stretch my thinking.

Sabbatical Recap IV - Adventures in Art

I spent a good deal of time in the art world during my sabbatical, and for that, I am grateful. Not only did I visit local museums to appreciate others' art, but I had the opportunity to enroll in a couple of art classes: another monotypes class at New Grounds Print Workshop in Albuquerque and a unique course called "Bridging the Gap", with celebrated local artist Deborah Gavel.

Deborah's class was about bridging the gap between Eastern and Western ideologies in art and thinking through using the five senses. For example, in one class, she had us work with encaustic (melted) beeswax to evoke our sense of smell. In another class we worked with precious metal clay to exercise our sense of touch. She had us work with subtle shifts in color to use our visual senses. Next week we'll be going to a video art installation in Santa Fe to engage our sense of hearing. We never figured out how to do taste, but we did talk about creating art with food. An intriguing idea....

We read the book Smile of the Buddha and talked about each chapter as a class once a week before getting into our work. Each class was a meditative exercise for me, and transported me to a calmer, more thoughtful place in my creativity than I had experienced before. I thank our friend Shelby for introducing me to the class and to Deborah, who was a fantastic guide through what I find to be complex terrain--the world of art.

The book introduced me to artists I may have heard of but knew nothing about: Jasper Johns, Agnes Martin, Ad Reinhardt, Constantin Brancusi, and others. While I didn't like all of their work on the printed page, I was particularly inspired by Agnes Martin. One evening, Deborah brought in a guest speaker to our class, Mary Lance, an award-winning film producer who had interviewed the elderly Agnes Martin in her Taos studio before she passed away a few years ago. Mary compiled the interviews into a movie called "With My Back to the World", which we had the unique pleasure of viewing in class that night. After watching Agnes paint and hearing her views on art and life ("I’m very careful not to have ideas, because they’re inaccurate" and "when we are born we are full of ambition and ego, but as we get older we begin to understand that we have to adjust"), something switched in me. The simplicity, honesty, and innocence of her work inspired me. This piece is my tribute to her gentle, thoughtful, lonesome soul:

My other piece from Bridging the Gap class may not show as meditative or calming, but the process of making it was. I'm calling this piece "Red Tornado" because it represents a recurring nighttime dream about tornadoes that I've had for decades, while also representing the turmoil of the daily struggle we all experience. This piece originally began as a grade-school collage project cut from old magazines and glued onto cardboard, but as we continued to work on the pieces, more and more layers of media, such as encaustic wax, string, fabric, and even precious metal clay pieces, fused into them. To me, it was the process that was the art, more than the finished piece itself, although I'm rather pleased with it and want to continue to work on it.

I also pulled out some old pieces to reminisce about classes I took in San Francisco, where I first learned to paint. Here's the first reductive charcoal piece I completed in Nina Wisniewski's "From Drawing to Painting" class, which started the evening after 9/11/2001. It was my very first painting class, and appropriately so, as I had been completely changed by the events of that dreadful day in human history. The class was an emotional haven for me during that time, and perhaps because of my heavy, contemplative heart, new channels of artistry opened up within me that I didn't even know I had. I'd like to do more of these reductive charcoals now that I'm looking at this really elementary piece again....

During my time off, I also enrolled in another beginning monotypes class. I didn't feel as inspired as I did in my last monotypes class. I felt more whimsical, and ended up producing a chain of nautical pieces, which goes with my longing to be near the ocean during this sabbatical:

I also relished the opportunity to visit local art museums and galleries: Bright Rain Gallery in Old Town Albuquerque with my mother, Albuquerque Art Museum with my mother-in-law during her visit (an artist in her own right), I even joined the Georgia O'Keefe museum in Santa Fe as a member after taking a long, languorous tour of the museum again for the first time since it's opening day more than 10 years ago, when I lived just off Canyon Road in The City Different. I also watched the made-for-cable-TV movie about Georgia O'Keefe, starring Joan Allen and Jeremy Irons. She had such an intriguing yet complicated and somewhat sad life. I suppose that's true of so many great artists. Perhaps that's why I can't seem to produce anything "great"--I'm too normal and happy. :-)