- All I've done for want of wit, to memory now I cannot recall... I only seem to write in this thing when I'm about to leave. This is my final el'jay post.

Once again, transition is calling me to leave. This time I'm abandoning the Gallup Depression for the heights of the San Francisco peaks. I'll be counting eagles, rabbits, and prairie dogs ( Read more... )

- Streams of beautiful lights in the night, but where is my pastureland in these dark valleys... It's snowing over the Zuni Mountains, fat, wet flakes dropped in torrents by looming overhangs of clouds. It's snowing over the roadcut on Route 40, the rudely clipped slice out of the hogback ridge softened by gusting peals of winter laughter. The ( Read more... )

- On the day that I turned twenty-three, I was curled up underneath a dogwood tree... The Fruit Bats sang about an earthquake and I remembered, looking down the Christmas-light-lit kitchen table, the time I was at another head of another kitchen table looking through candle-light at Gwyn, the night my parents weren't home, and we went swimming. ( Read more... )

Continued...

I don't mean by all of this to imply that Navajo is a dying culture (or Fiji or Lenape or Makah, for that matter) or that the appellation 'Diné' is in any way appropriate.  I mean to indicate that members of my own Euro-American culture are attempting to eradicate this culture.  The attempt is entirely transparent to us- it just ( Read more... )

-  What did you learn in school today, dear little boy of mine...  There's a difference I take pains to impress upon my students between schooling and education.  Schooling is when I, acting as a teacher, know something you don't know, which you ought to know, the knowledge of which will make you a better person, almost as good as me.  Education is ( Read more... )

-  So it's so long California, reckon I'll be a-movin' on, I'm leavin' even if I had to crawl…  Stately in the morning blue, before the naked sun crested the eastern mountains and sprayed living gold on the sandstone and Joshua trees, two feral burros ambled past my face.  Stringy muscles bending under pale hide, they drifted like cinematic ghosts ( Read more... )

-  I am leaving I am leaving but the fighter still remains...  I was reading the other day about something called a Po function.  You insert the symbol 'Po' in between two or more phenomena, to indicate a relationship.  Often, it's used to show connection where connection would be overlooked, or assumed not to exist.  The example given was 'flying ( Read more... )

"...But Porcupine said, 'Do you really want me to go to the Man yonder, who eats bushes?  He will come and swallow all the sheep, as they stand in the kraal.  You need not think that even these bushes will be left, for we shall be swallowed with the sheep.  A Man who devours things as he does- walks along eating the very bushes among which he walks ( Read more... )

"...While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core." - W.B. Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree

-  We'll find a new way of living...  So, I came back to write some words about living in a city, and I discovered a bunch of poker-obsessed European people claiming to be my friends.  The internet, I am given to ( Read more... )

-  Peace and quiet and open air...  I think November is the month of correspondence with women I have loved.  Spent the last week biking up and down the ridge to Grass Valley, where I'm doing some landscaping for Habitat for Humanity.  I know every pothole and steep bit of grade along that canyonside.  Took a tumble one afternoon and busted up my ( Read more... )