dreamy dreams

Maybe it's because I have a Very Exciting Event happening this weekend.  Maybe it's that my mind is finally (relatively) quiet after a solid 6 weeks of freaking out.  Maybe I'm eating too much cayenne pepper, too close to bedtime.  Maybe it's a combination of the three.  Whatever the cause, my dreams are coming out of hiding; stepping into my conscious memory way more willingly than they have in quite a while.  For a long time they were playing Cinderella with me; dancing with me through the night and then leaving me alone before dawn.  But this week, they're sticking around long enough for me to write them out.  And they're GOOD ones, too!  It's like the dreams have all decided to put on their favorite party dresses for the occasion.

I now present a short list of the pretty things my unconscious has thrown at me in the past few days:

* Sacrificing and then diving after a collection of rings off of a dock on a windy, silvery Irish coast at dusk.
* Caring for a small, snowy owl, physically feeling her weight press her talons into my arm as she balanced there.*
* Traveling towards a Boschian crystal palace in a land of ice with my best friend since high school.
* Hanging out in a clearing in a freezing palm tree forest with green, misty light.

Not too shabby.

In other news: in the past week I've sewn a pair of white yoga pants, had my first tutoring session at my new job, watched my little brother turn 19, made a bad-ass eggplant parmesan and painted/rearranged the whole dang house.*  No more electric yellow, blue and green!  Now the colors on our walls are called dreamy things like MIRAGE LAKE and GRAY GOOSE.  Which, when combined, sound like something a Tchaikovsky wannabe would try to write a ballet about.*  Which is just fine by me!

And now that I'm done talking about dreams and home decor, I'm going to drink some tea, do a tarot reading and then read from my 470 page book about the chakras.  Because I am becoming a caricature of myself.

Night!



*Just like the lady in the picture!  Only with clothes on.


*Well, almost the whole dang house.  I still need to make new curtains, bring in a lamp, sofa and another bookshelf (who would have GUESSED I'd need another bookshelf?) from storage, and  put up some more art.


*It would be the 19th century equivalent to those pathetic Disney knock-off videos near the grocery store check-out that I was always worried some unwitting relative would get for me instead of the real movie. Those things looked terrible!  I also think the idea of scalawags running around 19th century Europe trying to pass themselves off as Tchaikovsky by writing shitty ballets about various water fowl and bodies of water to make a quick buck.  Which is, I think, a fun image to end this post with.

New Things

Anybody out there?

It's been an embarrassingly long time since my last post.  And an even more embarrassingly long time since the last thing I wrote about actually happened.  I am so ashamed.

But I've been busy!  Busy finishing up the tour and coming back to A-Town.  Busy moving into a new home.  Busy working.  Busy planning.  Busy trying to talk myself out of said plans.  Busy having emotional breakdowns and trying to counter Mercury's well-played attempts to f*** my s*** up.

But this little hiatus from blerging has made me realize how much FUN it is to talk about myself ad nauseum, so I'm back on the wagon!  The format is going to be a little different now; I still have a lot of half-baked travelogues from my cross-country ramblings this summer, so I'm going to be writing those (with the wider perspective/higher level of forgetfulness that two months distance brings to the table) and mixing them in with posts about the things I'm getting up to now-a-days.

Because I'm getting up to THINGS.  To borrow a phrase from a dear friend, I'm doing a thing, ever!  MULTIPLE things, in fact.  No more aesthetics of renunciation for THIS girl!*  Events in this past month have forced me to abandon my tried-and-true approach to achieving goals* for something quite a bit more proactive.  Which is liberating and terrifying at the same time.  So I'm hoping to expand the scope of this blog to include my attempts to process and live up to these changes I'm enacting in my life.

I also plan on significantly increasing the number of funny animal photos as much as possible.  So there's that to look forward to.

Mwah!!!

* Just paralyzing anxiety!
* Step 1: Daydream about goal.  Step 2: Make a superficial attempt to research steps to achieve said goal.  Step 3: Get infinitely depressed about the amount of work/risk/time/money it would take.  Step 4: Eat a pizza while growing more and more resentful of the world for not making everything effortless for me.  REPEAT.

Nederland, CO

DISCLAIMER: This is a picture-heavy post, after days and days of trying to be excited about the subtle changes in the landscape as we moved through West Texas and New Mexico, driving into the mountains of Colorado kind of smacked me in the mouth. I got a little bit over-excited by Nederland for reasons that will be expanded upon throughout this post, ended up taking way too many pictures, and even after about a month of processing my time there, I found myself unable to cut down on the amount I felt it ABSOLUTELY IMPERATIVE of me to share on this here blerg. On second thought, this disclaimer can be applied to the ridiculous amount of text accompanying said pictures. My apologies.

  

All my appreciation for the stark beauty of the former states we had passed through were dashed upon the dramatic snowy peaks of CO. Spending too much time in Texas made me forget how much I can be affected by landscapes. Being in a place that makes your jaw drop in awe every time you look around you kinda makes you wonder why you would spend time anywhere else. I like to wonder about the first European explorers stumbling upon these incredible, melodramatic peaks; how amazed they must have been. So most of the drive to Nederland was taken up with the three of us incredulously pointing at view after view, taking a million pictures, forgetting that they would mostly be blurry as hell because we were, you know, in a moving car.

So we arrive in Nederland, which it turns out is like my dream Northern Exposure-type mountain town (they even have a yearly festival called Frozen Dead Guy Days, in honor of a frozen dead guy they found. Which is the plot to an actual Northern Exposure episode. Meta!). As I'm kind of overwhelmed by all the things I love about this place, I have again resorted to my trusty old friends, BULLET POINTS!

*There are huskies and big beautiful wintry dogs everywhere. And FOXES!

*They have a CAROUSEL OF HAPPINESS!  

Brian rode on a duck.

This one looks like the GRUMBLES!  I MISS MY DOGS!

I got to ride on the bunneh.

*Aforementioned jaw-dropping landscape that makes you amazed that places like this actually exist.  

*Everyone has hippy tendencies. There are lots of adorable children in tie-dye. Everyone loves music.  And they do things like put on concerts on a stage they built by the creek on their property.

SHMAAAA!

*These same people also do things like build a hot tub out of a gigantic metal tub with a fire underneath. Which was wonderful, even if it did make me feel like Bugs Bunny in the cartoons when he bathes in a gigantic cook pot.   

*People also do things like invite you to their vacation homes for breakfast tacos and a hike.

I always end up looking like I'm getting shot by the Hudsons AK-47 in pictures.  It makes everything look a little more sinister than I expected.

*And when you end up accidentally knocking on the neighbor's door looking for those breakfast tacos, waking up the people who live there, they do things like invite you into their homes to listen to music and drink coffee.  

*I'm convinced they have the best smelling air in the world.

*I'm also convinced they have the best tasting water in the world.

*I was COLD! In JUNE! Sweet!

*In related news: They have scarily cold and snowy winters. If you know me, you know that this is incredibly attractive to my Romantic draw very cold weather holds for me.

*Even though it has a population of only 1400 or so, there are Thai, Indian and Nepalese restaurants. And really, really good pizza.

*While there aren't a whole lot of businesses, the ones that are there are pretty incredible. Crystals, sparkling pale violins with horse heads carved into the tops, etc.

Hells yeah.

Something I've been preoccupied with for the past several years is whether or not I should settle myself in a big, cultural center-type city or an itty-bitty town in a beautiful rural location where I can run around in the woods and play in the snow while conversing with woodland critters and pretending I'm a fairy. Would I become too distracted and alienated in a big city? Would I get bored without regular visits to museums and ballets and having to drink at the same bar every night while living a more pastoral lifestyle? I just don't know!   

Nederland was the first small, rural town where I felt I could probably settle without too much fallout. Their coffee shop could be my favorite coffee shop. Their pizza place could be my favorite pizza place. Even in a city with a million options, I never feel comfortable until I find my set favorite places to go, and even though Nederland didn't have a huge variety of these places, my basic needs were covered. And then all of the filler space between my potential favorite haunts, rather than being suburbs, slums or shopping malls, is filled with mountains, aspens, pines and streams. Something to think about.

Something to obsess about, actually.

I'll write in more detail about this in my post about returning to Missoula, MT, but I imprinted on the landscape in this part of the world at a young age; it informed the vocabulary of images that furnish my imagination, and encountering it again made me feel weird.   

It was like running into your first love years later as an adult, and still feeling that same deep, resonant and exciting connection you originally felt with them as a teenager. It's unsettling- it makes you feel like you've been missing out on something that could possibly complete you, and like an earthquake has been set in motion inside you that could totally uproot your life. It made me think crazy thoughts, like forgetting about grad school (for a while at least), moving to Tiny Towne, CO, getting certified and trying to get a job teaching high school. And it scared the bejezus out of me.   

Scared me enough to put me into a pretty deep funk for a couple of days, which I tried to dig myself out of with a copious amount of journaling and navel-gazing. I think that the fact that I'm at a bit of a crossroads in my life right now mixed with newly remembered passion for mountains and made me feel the need to throw myself wholeheartedly into the emotional housekeeping you have to do when you're getting ready for a big change in your life. Moving requires you to not only go through and pack up all your material possessions, but to do the exact same with your psyche and your emotions; taking stock of your attachments and attitudes (baggage, if you will), cleaning them up, getting rid of the things you don't need that are just weighing you down, deciding what you actually DO need (or aren't willing to give up) and preparing or streamlining those things for use in their new environment. It kicks up a lot of dust. And things get messier before they get cleaner.   

Brother Kitteh

Especially when you're considering taking a few steps you've never taken before. Like living and working in a new town, rather than just living there as a student. Or moving with alongside someone else (whaaaat!). And changing the grad school plans I've been developing for the past couple years. Being in Nederland caused me to involuntarily start focusing in on these issues; it felt like a new chapter of my adulthood was calling me, which is kind of scary. And it made me feel like I needed to do all that psychological packing and do it FAST. But I eventually got shaken out of the darker part of my funk in a pretty exciting way.

Remember earlier when I talked about my deep-seated desire to galavant with forest critters? WELL GUESS WHAT IT HAPPENED IN NEDERLAND. After the show while I was rifling through the van looking for my toothbrush, I stepped back to close the door and saw some eyes shining at me. Eyes that ended up being attached to a BEAUTIFUL FOX WITH A HURT FRONT PAW, who was in the process of scurrying away from me. I totally lost my shit (foxes are among my favorite forest critters, and I'd never seen one in the wild before) and started frantically clucking and calling to him the way I do to get dogs' (or small children's) attention.  

BEHOLD!

And it worked! He stopped, turned around, trotted curiously towards me, and sat down about 2 yards away, looking at me from behind is pointy, pointy snout. I squatted down and started shuffling closer and closer, making kissy sounds with my hand outstretched in front of me, looking like an idiot. Once I got too close, he'd run off, circle around me, then sit down and the ritual would begin anew. Eventually he got close enough to sniff at my outstretched hand for a minute before disappearing for good. All in all, it was pretty magical, and definitely gave me warm fuzzy feelings for Nederland.

In fact, all three of us van-mates had pretty warm and fuzzy feelings for Nederland. We did things like driving back to spend Brian's birthday after the show in Fort Collins, picking up property listings and talking to people about exactly how bad the winters were, and what people do to support themselves in so small a community. So I guess the town threw everyone else for a loop as well. And even now, over a month later, we're still pretty smitten with the place.   

After we spent B's 32^nd birthday eating pizza, drinking beer and jumping on a trampoline under the stars, we reluctantly left the Ned for Denver, and then moved onward to Telluride for five days of sleeping on rocks, taking unbelievably cold showers and lots of music.   

Om Nom Nom.

As well as a RIVETING ESCAPE FROM ALMOST CERTAIN DEATH!!!* Stay tuned!

*Or just extreme discomfort. I'll let you be the judge.

Santa Fe Part Dos

Now, if I know anything that's going to turn my mood around in a new city, it's visiting their cathedral. This is one of the things that got me through my time in the aformentioned boring, rainy English town.

I love cathedrals. I love the way they look. I love the way the smell. I love all the energy and spirit that has been poured into these buildings by generation after generation of people. And I especially love the art.

Something I've come to realize about myself lately is how strongly I feel myself drawn to devotional art, or at least art with some kind of spiritual theme to it. Whether it's a medieval Russian icon or a Joseph Cornell shadow box that functions as a shrine to Lauren Bacall, the sense of wonder and awe that is expressed in these kinds of works feels really positive and human to me. Even if it belongs to a religious tradition that I'm not involved with, I tend to prefer it to most art that focuses on more staunchly secular subject matter.

The cathedral was named after St. Francis, although apparantly it used to be named after the Madonna. Although St. Francis is definitely my homeboy because of our mutual lurve for all things furry and feathery, I do think it's kinda lame that they just up and took the cathedral away from mama Mary.

But the joke's on St. Francis, because it turns out Mary has a stronger presence in that space than he does. Unfortunately, my camera's batteries decided to fly up to heaven while they were safe in God's house, so I wasn't able to get any pictures of what was definitely the highlight of my trip to Santa Fe, so you'll have to rely on other people's photos to see what I'm talking about.

Walking past the altar, I wander into a chapel on its left and am confronted with THIS:

 

This is the chapel for La Conquistadora, the oldest icon of the Madonna in the United States (see how she shines above that frail, kinda pathetic icon of St. Francis below her?). She was brought over in 1624, and eventually traded her wooden (willow, to be exact) gold-leafed body for real clothes in the style of a Spanish queen, which was the most popular way to venerate her sister icons back in Spain. She bounced around the New Mexico area a little bit and eventually settled in Santa Fe when the cathedral was built in 1717.

 

While marveling slack-jawed at her beauty, I overhear one of the cathedral guides talking about her outfits, and immediately walk over to include myself in the conversation.

Turns out she has over 200 ensembles, all hand made and donated by her followers, with particular meanings ascribed to each detail. Some were give in honor of a loved one, some as a material addition to a prayer, and some in thanks for a prayer answered, but all with a story behind them. Here is a short list of some of the garments that the woman described to me:

*A white gown made out of a womans wedding dress, donated on the anniversary of her wedding and her mothers death, with a cape that is blood red velvet on the reversible side (this is what she was wearing the day I saw her, they were getting ready to flip her cape to the crimson side for Pentecost that Sunday)

*A robe made from the vestements of Santa Fe's first archbishop, now dead and gone

*A dress so heavily embroidered with jewels and gold that it takes two people to lift it

*A cape made out of ermine from a group of her followers in Alaska. The men hunted, shot and skinned the ermine, and the women designed and sewed the cape

*A bunch of crowns (kept in the bank, as they are so valuable) made from melted down jewelry church members had donated to her

*A collection of precious crosses, one of which is covered with diamonds and sapphires, is worth $100,000 and was just left on her altar after mass one day in 1960

*A cape made from the uniform of a WWII soldier

*Native American dresses, Chinese kimonos, saris, a wool cape depicting the San Luis mountains, and about a million other things I would love to have a Manda-sized version of.

I love, love, LOVE THIS! Apparantly it is one person's job (the cofradia) to pray and meditate upon the time of year, current events, and upcoming holy days and decide which of her outfits would be most appropriate; what the people would benefit most from seeing at that time, and dressing her accordingly. There are times of the year where she changes every day, and times of the year where she wears the same thing for weeks at a time.

 

As someone who loves devotional art, and who also really REALLY loves beautiful clothes, La Conquistadora seemed tailor-made to make me happy. I love the idea that by piling on as much precious and stunning materials as possible, taking the most glittery things the earth has to offer and concentrating them into small, overwhelmingly beautiful works of art (be they icons, ceremonial dresses or cathedrals), people try to portray just a fragment of a reflection of what they're feeling on the spiritual level. And finding that expression in something as seemingly mundane as doll's clothes is very compelling to me.

Also, the fact that she's not static; that she changes according to the seasons, the changes in the city, and the fact that her image is constantly being added to with every new addition to her wardrobe, I think creates a beautifully shifting, mutable and personal icon for people to connect with; it makes her a mirror of her community.

I walked out of the cathedral in a much better mood, ready to be inspired by my surroundings instead of alienated by them.

And inspired I was! We stopped at a restaurant on a balcony overlooking the (now sunset-lit, less populated by both tourists and vendors, and infinitely more mellow and appealing) plaza, drank beer and ate guacamole while listening to some pretty fantastic blues from a very talented man with an eyepatch and a guitar.

By the time we left, much to our delight, FREE MUSEUM NIGHT had begun! Aw, yissss!!! We stopped by the Museum of Fine Arts and the New Mexico History Museum, and both were pretty amazing. No photography was allowed at the Museum of Fine Arts, but I was pretty blown away by their photography exhibits. If you want to see some beautiful stuff, check out Tamas Dezso.

The history museum was very well-appointed indeed. And they had a vast collection of feathers, gigantic mantilla combs and a variety of other things that are good to put in your hair. Not to mention all the old jewelry, saddles, arrows (displayed by being suspended in groups over your head), pottery, old photographs and all sorts of other artifacts that kept me in an ephemera-induced stupor until the museum was closing down.

   

Santa Fe in the evening is incredibly nice. We ended up having a long conversation with an artist from Ethiopia about his work and his experience moving to New Mexico, and about how one goes about making a living in a city like Santa Fe.

 

And I found myself getting inspired. And not in the way I expected. Rather than marvelling at the work I saw being done in Santa Fe, I just felt driven to start doing more creative work myself. To make those beaded earrings I wanted to find outside the Palace of the Governors and didn't. To make a version of that piecey cotton white dress, but add a waist so it didn't look like a sack. To start painting again, which I haven't done regularly in a few years now. To learn how to embroider and carve.

So rather than wondering at the work of others, which is what I had expected to do, I ended up just feeling driven to try my hand at everything I felt myself attracted to, and to do it in my own aesthetic.

I came home with a few treasures as well. Both of them devotional/objects of worship in some sense, hoorah!  Pictured above is a tiny devotional crown that I stumbled upon when I was still in my La Conquistadora haze.  Shmaa!*

And my other souvenir is a fetish necklace I bought off a drunk guy on the street who kept rambling incoherently about Dallas-based sports teams. It's multi-colored with hummingbirds:

 

Well, you can't really see it. Mostly I just wanted to post this picture so everybody could see B's sartorial prowess IN FULL EFFECT!

We also had some pretty good drinks and mexican food during our stay. Pictured above are the lightest and fluffiest margaritas I've ever had in my life.

And remember that balcony with the beer, guacamole and eyepatchy blues? Well, despite being open and hopping for 20-some-odd years, it happened to be closing down the next day because the owners of the building had apparantly found a more profitable use for it. Which brings me to this photo:

I think this sums up how I feel about Santa Fe pretty well. A beautiful, rough-hewn Madonna covered with dolla dolla bills in a store window, backed up on either side by a wealthy white woman patronizing an Indian artisan. There are truly beautiful, inspiring things in Santa Fe. There are amazing, brilliant, creative people. There is a massive amount of history; a fascinating mix of Spanish and Native American influence that is unlike anywhere else I have ever been. And, at the risk of buying into the hype, "enchanted" really is the most appropriate word to describe the landscape. But for the most part these things have been covered up and cheapened with a thick layer of tourist/gentrification money, turning Santa Fe into the Disneyworld of liberal white people. And while Disneyworld is fun, it's kind of a buzzkill in one of the creative centers of the world.

But all in all, it was a wonderful day, even though my feet were black with dirt and my heels were cracked (not to recover fully until I got to Idaho) by the end of it.

THE END

 ^*Shmaa- a sound of absolute joy and contentment, usually emitted at the sight of something extremely cute.