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The Sharpest Edge

On special days, remember your loved ones on the other side with candles, special foods, and offerings from nature.

“…here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)”
— e.e. cummings

Today is All Saint’s Day.Tomorrow is All Soul’s Day. It is also a Full Moon, cycle of completion and fruition.

I woke last night to a bright light in my face, Grandmother Moon.It was All Hallow’s Eve, the night the veil is lifted between this world and the next.My Dead Loved Ones were closer and we whispered through the night, delighted to be together, consoling one another that on this side we’re doing OK, and on that side we’re doing OK.I’ll see you again some day, I’ll see you again some day.

I went outside in the deep fog and said prayers with Grandmother Moon.I greeted my recently departed and asked they take special care of some friends who just got there, and others who will be arriving soon.They will.The air was damp and cool in the night. My dog was by my side, wagging her tail, and I cried because I don’t want to say goodbye to her, someday soon.

This edge between the living and the dead is razor sharp.Life without our Loved One is living with a carved out space in our hearts that nothing can fill in.It feels like falling, like in those dreams where you are falling – but you don’t wake up and you keep on falling.It feels like nothing can help or save you and that you will never again find peace in your heart. My slim advice: cry and remember your Love to whomever will listen, as long as you need to do that. It will soften and shift.

It is a sharp edge also because of our own terror of our own death, of saying goodbye to family, kisses, strawberries, butterflies, babies, wind, water, dogs.We are afraid, most of us.And these days, because we are so separated from Mother Earth and our place in all things, because we have tangled and reduced our connections, we feel even more lost.

It will be OK.It will all work out, on both sides.

Remembering and honoring our Dead weaves new connections between the worlds, and roots us deeper to The Mother.When it is our time to die and to leave – and we will, like it or not – we may die in terror or in another more peaceful way. I pray we each die with a sense of connection to this side and to the next.

What helps me stand at the sharpest edge:

  1. Spending these days when the curtains part to visit and praise my Dead, along with millions of others around the world, connects me.You could make a special place to remember your ancestors and loved ones, put out a photo, light a candle, bring a bit of candy (we have lots of that hanging around today!) and a pretty leaf. And then remember Them with sweetness and honor as you go about your day.
  2. Stories and thoughts from other people: Fresh Air from WHYY: Terry Gross interviews poet Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno about her collection of poems, Slamming Open the Door.
  3. Being proactive and getting information: Funeral Consumers Alliance is a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting a consumer’s right to choose a meaningful, dignified, affordable funeral.
  4. Really good books: You Only Die Once and who doesn’t love Gary Larson!  This is a good one for kids: There’s a Hair in My Dirt

Peace Friends.

More About Jane

To add more about Jane  —  I don’t want her story to inflame the anti-dogmushersout there.   Her story is unusual, not born of intentional cruelty but human ignorance.

We dogmushers come in many personas, like horse owners, but most of us are kind and considerate of our animals. They are our canine family, our transportation, our athletic superheros who we depend upon to carry us through this often harsh and brutal land.  Mine are also my business partners. As with all animal partnerships, humans are the weak link, who sometimes lay the burdens of their own emotional misgivings or shaky egos upon these amazing beings.  But most of us love and care for them beyond anything the average person can understand.  They eat the best of meats, salmon, fats, and commercial dogfood. (My favorite costs nearly $50 for 40 lbs.)  They have sound houses with thick straw.   They are well-conditioned, and in that process can perform athletic feats beyond that of any known animal on this planet. Running and pulling a sled for 150 miles per day in sub-zero weather, day after day.  There are no reins, nothing to keep them moving only their own will.  They are bred for this and running is what they live for.  Trying to take one for a “walk” in the summer means you must have strong shoulders and hands. They cannot do anything but pull, and with a smile, while you struggle to keep up.

Living on the Edge on the High Desert of Washington

Tara Here. Now how I got here… That is a direct result of Intentional Manifestation.

In 2001 I ventured to North Dakota to try to “do life” with a man who represented himself as “a rancher.” All was not quite as he presented it during our courtship that began as an Internet romance. But oddly enough, I fell in love with his life and his ranch and his child and the man. I am writing a book, the working title for which is 48 Days in North Dakota in which I discuss small-scale ranching and the challenges presented when one tries to get into farming or ranching–having the passion but not the family experience.

Four years later I found the land I call The 3-Bell Ranch. It is everything I “put out there” almost ten years ago, even before my journey to North Dakota. There are acres and acres of pasture for my horses. I’m flanked by State land. The views here are absolutely breath-taking. The energy of the land soothes the soul and heals the body.

But it didn’t feel like that when I landed here a year ago!

The house was a ramshackle shack suffering from years and years of neglect from owners whose love of the land and passion for being orchardists led them to a life of the edge– the plight of small farmers, orchardists and ranchers all over this country. It took only two years of being paid late by the Gold-digger Co-op to launch the snowball of financial ruin that smashed them flat;  they were forced to rip out their cherry trees and apple trees –for here, in Central Washington, if you don’t maintain your trees (i.e. spray them), you must remove them. With the trees went the irrigation. Without irrigation, noxious weeds took hold. And without income from the land, the bank foreclosed.

I bought the land at auction – gambling that I would find water when a well was dug for household water. The well turned out to produce 35 gallons per minute, and was 180 feet deep. In a conversation with Fred Cook, of Cook’s Irrigation, I learned that 20 years ago, a well at this location would have only been ten or fifteen feet. The water table’s receding. Water rights are at risk. Without water the Okanogan Valley will consist of sagebrush, a bit of bunch grass and an array of noxious, invasive, non-native species such as hounds tongue, Russian and Diffuse Knapweed, Baby’s Breath, Dog Bane, Saint John’s Wort, and so on and so forth. Without irrigation it will take 30 to 40 acres to feed a horse or steer during the growing season, but there would be no way to grow hay here except on small areas where the water table is so high that “sub-irrigated” grass will grow.

There is so much to learn about living in this country.

Water is precious. Every drop is precious. Without irrigation there would be no apple trees, no cherry trees, no pear trees, or hay crops or tomatoes or lettuce or any viable commercial crop.

People are on the edge here. When the recession struck the U.S., not many people  here felt it; they were already dirt poor. If you look at the second hand shops you see it. People use things far beyond their “worn” status; they use them until they’re spent– beyond thread bare– beyond “worn out.” They’ve been sewn, glued, welded, mended time and time again until there’s just nothing left to mend.

—  LIVING ON THE EDGE, PART II —

Years ago I was part of a cadre of teachers in Washington who had been selected to teach other teachers how to use technology to improve student achievement. In our State-wide meetings, those from Eastern Washington used to complain that Western Washington controlled the State and that their needs were neither understood nor adequately addressed. They were so right. Eastern Washington is a different world. It’s beyond Beyond. People here are honest, true, and friendly. They take care of each other. There’s an unspoken pact of reciprocity.

In July 2009 I had the opportunity to spend several weeks in the company of some really amazing young men who installed permanent irrigation sets on the large, unwieldy portion of my land I refer to as the “back 40”– a 12.5 acre field that has been fallow for seven or eight years now. “We’ll get her done,” they’d say. “Don’t worry; you’re in good hands.”

A rational person would look up and exclaim, “No one can do that!” but here, everyone does the impossible. They have to. They have to rise to the occasion, to step onto that frayed tightrope believing that it will not snap under their weight, knowing even if it did, someone, a neighbor, a stranger, God perhaps, would catch them before they hit bottom.

“We’ll get her done,” is the ‘signature quote’ for the Okanogan. It’s a hard life. A life on the edge. There is a daily reminder that we are fragile, interconnected beings.

I feel at home here in this place where the word “impossible” does not exist. And so here I am with my horses, mules, pony, dogs and rabbits, living close to the land, documenting this existence through video and digital photography– my passions. Each year I share some of my favorite images of horses in a calendar I call Horse as Horse in Okanogan County. The calendar features my herd shot at liberty in wild areas of Central Washington. And my next project will be to create brief videos documentaries about agriculture in the Okanogan as well as training videos teaching people skills such as selecting irrigation systems, strategies for installing them on large tracts of land, repairing lines, sprinklers, etc. as well as instructing people about using horses in small scale farm operations.