2012 love/ 2013 dreaming

Well, now that it's been ABOUT A YEAR since I last wrote, I thought I'd throw something out there. And sorry, hang on to your hats, this is a LONG SOMETHING!!! Though I dearly love writing, blogging is hard for me. Not terrible, but difficult. It's time consuming and uploading all those photos is a total pain in the butt! Anyone else agree? It takes FOREVER. Plus, being a perfectionist doesn't help. I'll edit text and then publish and then re-edit and publish again, and I'll do the same times one hundred on photos! I'm hoping my post today doesn't take all afternoon! (update: it is.) So for those reasons and excuses I just never really get around to it, it's usually an all day affair.

Part One: The Haps
I adore living in our big, rambling, home by Deer Creek in Nevada City. We've had so much fun here and made the place ours all the way. Last year we had three noteworthy, grand parties. An Old West party, a Halloween bash, complete with strangers in costume who came and left and no one ever knew who they were, and a sweet little Christmas cocktail party with recipes from the finest bars in the US of A. Also last year in October my family found out that my wonderful sister, Heather of Moonshine Junkyard, was pregnant! Something she had longed for! So 2012 has brought new excitement, travels, coziness, and big big changes! I'm less of a party-gal than I was last year, that is FOR SURE. From the beginning of the year I could feel myself nestling in, wanting more time to chill and do homework and NOT have a hangover, like ever. I started hating them so so much. I stayed in and bunkered down a lot more than I have in forever.... and what do ya know, sometime in April, I GOT knocked up too !!!! :) It is my wildest dream to be pregnant at the same time as my sister, as well as to have all the adventurous times and windswept ways of my 20's and early 30's behind me in the form of wisdoms and memories. I am so so excited to be an older(ish) Mama. SO excited.

But before I embark on that wonderful exciting new sitch, here are a few views from my times of 2012 thus far.

In January my sis and my Dad and I went on another  Utah road trip to see my dear brother and his family and visit the beloved canyons, arches, and strange formations.

We hiked to Corona Arch outside of Moab on a cold beautiful January day. The next day we braved even colder weather and traveled to Goblin Valley State Park, a must-see during the lifetime of anyone with a beating heart.

For Valentine's Day, Art and I went to our fave hotel & casino- the Peppermill- to do a little gambling in Reno! We sort of LOVE gambling once in a while.

On February 22nd, my wonderful Grandma Georgie turned 100 and I got to see so many family members I've not seen in ages.

My grandma has 108 descendants, and she was an only child. That doesn't include the ones on the way! I find that mindblowing to think about. If her parents had never had her.... well, there would be a great shortage of Beattys!

In March Art and I helped our friend Kira (check out her music!) move to Portland and in turn we got to finally explore the city together and stay a few nights! We also got to see the very gracious Alela (check out her music!) and bunk at her beautiful bungalow home in the heart of all the PDX, complete with a little guest quarter. 

The Portland bus system is rad. It is SUPER easy to figure out, especially with a cheat sheet (Iphone).

Of course a Stumptown stop and a Voodoo Donut stop were necessary.

Alela, below, at the awesome breakfast joint Junior's with us.

Alela's home has little surprises everywhere. It's the kind of home you want to sink into, that you immediately feel comfortable and yet enchanted with. She collects tiny furniture, and there are miniature versions of bathrooms, victorian chairs, and tiny tables placed in careful, hidden places.

Ummmm, shopping in Portland is kind of dangerous.

So.... I'm thinking Portland might actually be "hipper" than Los Angeles these days. Like by a long shot. If you end up there anytime soon, I highly suggest trying out this amazing little hipster taqueria called Porque No? It's hipster, but not in the stand-offish vibe at all. You can get the healthiest taco bowls and tacos with seasonal (think brussel sprouts in winter) steamed veggies and cilantro sauces and rice if you want it. Ah heck, here's their website so you can take a look at their cheap, mouth watering menu and get your own idea about it. Also, the place is decorated like my dream restaurant. Talk about glitter and Catholic lore and turquoise and weird old 60's vintage hangy stuff to the max.

We had such a great time in those few days. There is totally a Nevada City CLAN living up there. We went to a birthday party for our friend Neal Morgan (please see his music as well), and there was a roomful of us! 

We always love to get a drink at the airport on the way out!

Because Portland was so awesome and inspiring in some very artful ways, and because I'm studying graphic design, I took a tour of Nevada City's very own Full Circle Press when I got home. My friend Briana works there and gave me a personal tour. I got a bit obsessed with all things letterpress!

Part 2:

Other Tidbits

Spring came. With all its green glory.

I was busy busy in my 4th semester of school, full time. It started out as such an easy breezy semester and ended up like being thrown into the homework fires of Hell. Despite having to be glued to the computer and sitting on my butt (uggh!) I maintained my running routine and occasionally took photos (bottom right of last collage) of the beautiful countryside I get to run through. And sometimes I see snakes too!

I also gained a new sister! When Emily wed my youngest brother Joseph Charles! She was the most gorgeous bride ever. A few pics from the gals getting ready below.

A dear new friend that had been staying in Nevada City for about a year had to return to her native lands of Norway, her Visa time was all used up. We took a trip to Reno for a goodbye party and celebrated the sadness with good cheer. But I do hope she makes it back for the end of the year! She really liked it here, despite it being a small town that can run out of romantic options for the single ladies....

And THAT'S about the time I found out I was preggers! Right around Mother's Day. I literally took ELEVEN tests over the course of a week. I took the first test four days before my period, because there was this particular moment during the month that had made it SEMI-possible, like BARELY possible,  and even with those kinds of dismal chances I start thinking every little quirk is a symptom. So I only took the test to ease my mind so that the end of my cycle would be less the obsess! ( I am WAY too good at obsessing about things)... I truly thought there was NO chance, but I just wanted to turn my secret-OCD brain off. So you seriously can't imagine my surprise when two lines came up. It honestly seemed kind of impossible, given all the other months we'd tried a year before with all the timing perfect and whatnot. I thought for sure it was a fluke, a misunderstanding between my eyes and I. Until I took test, after test, after test. Three a day to start, then down to two, then one a day. And even then it took so long to sink in!

Part 3:
Tiny one in m' belly
So. Being pregnant. It's been hard to believe even after the eleven tests! Art and I went camping the 3rd week in June to the vast deserts and he got to witness Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon National Park and I swear to you I felt so good hiking and camping in the 100 degree heat, I could have sworn I somehow was no longer pregnant. It was a bit scary even, but I tried to be very positive and we had a blast!

 I never really got sick in the first place, just a bit of quease from things that normally wouldn't make me queasy, or feeling funny (and yucky) after eating... other than that I had a really easy first few weeks. But on our camping trip all signs of being pregnant went ADIOS! I felt terrific. I could eat everything we planned on our menu, hiking was awesome, and I wasn't queasy at all! I just got lucky I suppose :) That was at 10 weeks in.

The day after we returned was my first visit to the doctor.
She found the heartbeat within seconds. I couldn't believe it, tears filled my eyes. The sweet little one inside me was just being easygoing! Everything was fine and dandy.

A couple weeks later I had a nuchal translucency ultrasound. Here is what Art and I saw.
13 weeks along.

And here I am a couple days ago. Maybe a bit more of belly, but my clothes all fit and I'm thinking I'm not gonna see big changes for a month or so still!

So there's one of the longest blog posts ever. I sure hope I can write another, maybe even one with just more Southern Utah canyon details and photos, before next YEAR! In the meantime, I'm pretty sure I've got a niece to see being born here any minute!

Love to y'all.......
Adie

The haunt of the dry wind

I suppose I am a little sad to have left. OK, maybe more than a little... but I am also glad to be here so that I might interpret the awareness and newness that I came home with. I went out to that sweet desert land, and I found what I wasn't looking for. Because I hadn't really been looking for anything, it just arrived. How I wish I could coast through my daily life with such little expectation.

What did I find? I found something ineffable and something that lives inside of my own heart. I found that I love the earth with such admiration and awe and reverence, and in all the holiest moments it seems she loves me back. I found that I need far less than I think I need on a daily basis. That really all I need is air, water, a tent, some food, music, and my good health (and of course I do need others to share the visions with because so goes my eager and selfish ways...) but that when I arrived back at my perfect and giant house it seemed museum-like and distant. Getting water from my bathroom sink to drink before bed seemed ridiculous and strange. Fresh shampoo, lotions, and a shower were all far too close at hand. Plug-in coffee makers, instant stovetops and light bulb action, shiny clean floors and an overflowing refrigerator- they all seem so easy and yet somehow I harbor a disdain for their promotion of my laziness. I have thoughts of moving away alone back into that vast land where I pitch tents nightly and brew my coffee in the open desert air. I dream that my life will one day consist of endless days of such activity. That the full moon will light my footsteps bright as any lightswitch again and that just a few groceries and supplies will suffice for weeks. I want my toes to feel dusty in their shoes, my arms to be leathery with too much sun, my smile to be pure in the early morning light and I- forgetful of how others see me.

But in the clean and modern house that I dwell in I do believe the week away in the Land that My Heart Lives In brought changes that I will cling to. I want to get up early and feel the morning cool before the heat and see the way the light streams upon the world from that other side of the sky, the one I am so shy of. I want to work every day inside my own skin, to climb hills and run mountains, to sweat and feel the sore of my muscles, to tire myself out before I fall into my bed. I want to stop and be quiet and witness the still language of the wilderness around me and its messages of perfection. I want to believe there is never anything to fear because there is a reason for everything. And know that these are not reasons able to be thunk of by human minds, but ones that far surpass our petty reasonings- they are universal and wild reasons beyond our imaginations. But I want to be able to recognize them, mysterious as they may come.

I try to figure what it was, what it IS about that desert scape that fills my heart with so much wonder and idea and inspiration. Mandy put it into words with "humble" and "humbling". Such hugeness, such insane natural majesty that sits so quietly, asking for so very little, is perhaps some kind of heroic example to my own selfish nature. I wonder why my fascination came so late in life and how much it really had to do with Ed Abbey and how much was lying dormant within me, a true love waiting to be awakened. But I DO know that the love is true. Anything that, in pure silence and stillness, moves my eyes to tears for no reason other than awe and gratitude for my aliveness has to encompass what love means to me. And when I say that I felt as though the earth loved me back I mean that is the closest thing to saying what I really mean. As we drove in the warm night through nowhere roads in Nevada we were guided to a sweet, brilliant place of shooting stars and kit-foxes and the rum poured just so and the light shone just right and the food tasted perfect and the air was clean and new. And each road led to what seemed like a perfect destiny, as though every wrong turn was only right, never wrong. Or maybe I could just see things much more clearly on that open road, and here at home all these appliances and wants and needs and obligations fill my eyes with specks and stones and I cannot see the Way of everything and nature and her smile.

The lush land is one thing, fertile and green and full of surprise. But maybe it is what seems like emptiness in the desert that I find so amazing and teeming with sources of life and beauty, because within it lies the kind of life that I admire the most. Life that can meet the utmost challenges. Humble lives that ask for little and live in the grandeur. The most paradoxical creation, the most majestic barren, the cleanest and darkest slate of stars. It is with that sweet humility that I am so taken. Creatures and canyons that know no different, know not of the fertile mountains of many rivers and flowers, know not of abundance or luxury, but yet live so gracefully within their simple and harsh surroundings. Flourishing in the minimum and existing within the raw. Those kinds of spirits break my damn heart. Kingsnakes and lizards and cottontails and coyotes. Hummingbirds and tarantulas and tortoises. Sandstone, cliff, boulder, alluvium, red Wingate, salt and limestone.

I can't be gone for long. I wrote all the words prior to this sentence three days ago but the photos wouldn't upload and then I got busy with the ins and outs of every day life... but even since this writing my heart has been literally hurting in the center of my chest. It's like I left a little piece of it out there, it honestly feels like something's gone missing. Some part of its core and I am not quite sure what to do about it. I guess I'll spend a lot of time reading Everett Ruess and Ed Abbey and Mary Austin and other desert writers, try to find some people who share and understand such a love, and save up some scrap change to get back across Nevada as soon as possible.

The air out here

Feels like air I remember from when I was seven. Escondido, California. Never too hot, never too cold. It's a temperate July day here, unseasonably so, maybe 75 degrees. I've got a scuff of a hangover hanging over my head. But ne'ertheless I felt compelled to write and put the feeling down. I've been writing music lately, a couple of new songs, and it feels so good. Life is so strange, how times come and go, how feelings come and go. And how you cannot deny them or force them to be there when they are not. But I suppose you can promote them with good healthy things like sitting down at the piano and rootching through notes and words in old books. Or old journals. But what a privilege when a feeling comes so strong sometimes (out of nowhere you wonder) about a certain thing and then does little tricks on your mind, fills your imagination with scenery until it slowly empties out over days, weeks, sometimes months. Sometimes it truly comes out of thin air  and appears like a phantom in my head, sometimes it is born from another's mind in the words in a book or a vision in a movie or song. Like the first time I read Desert Solitaire. That feeling stayed for months, and it comes back whenever it pleases with a vengeance. Just a photograph of red dust will spark it back into existence. But when a feeling comes out of nowhere and passes through me, that's a real mystery. For me the past couple of months it has been this early 60's thing like remembering something that I never was even alive for. But there it will be in my head, a scene from the world before the gleam of candycoated corporations and shining freeways to suburban strip mall sprawl. Like when there were just Main Streets, and those were still all that mattered. And the blacktop was for playing jacks and sittin' on stoops and girls wore high ponytails and checkered shirts and the heat was unbearable and there were flyswatters and cigarette smoke everywhere, and AC was an absolute luxury. And the scene gets stronger and stronger, until a song comes out of me.

It used to piss me off when people talked about misery being the root of great art. Like artists were so much better at what they did when their lives were not complete, when their hearts were broken, when they had drama and sorrow. I couldn't bear to believe that you couldn't be just as hearty of an artist whilst living a life of happiness & contentment. I wanted to have my cake so badly and to eat it as well. But I'm beginning to see that what used to piss me off so much was the fear that what they said would turn out to be true. And in the end, it probably does. Does one stop creating art when they are happy, or perhaps just a whole lot less of it? And doesn't it take a WHOLE LOT more initiative, dedication, and inner resource than it does when it just helplessly pours through with tears and instability? Honestly, from what I can remember of being heart-broken, music seemed to just create itself constantly in me then, and without much work at all. I didn't even try. Perhaps turmoil pushes the visions out, like a frothing raging river pushes the boulders through. And that's OK. I'll take what random and infrequent inspiration comes with happiness, but I suppose I cannot pretend that I wouldn't be overwhelmed with more song-visions if I was poor, single, and miserable. And not that this is just about song-writing or music. I mean, really, in all other aspects of life I thrive off of inspiration and the strange imaginations of sceneries in my mind. Sorry I'm going on and on about so little. I mean, no one really gives a hoot what I thrive off, little dorky me, and I'm absolutely fine with that. I just have gotten off on a tangent. I suppose this could all be summed up more optimistically if I just said that what I really mean by all of this is that I am so very very grateful and in awe of the mystery when a "feeling" comes without trying. It's quite precious now, and rare. I must seize the opportunity. I hate having to invent a feeling. I want a feeling today, but I may have to invent it. I'm trying to grasp what the day's vibe is and what with this blurry head of mine, I don't think I can figure it. But through the hazy curtain I do b'lieve there are a lot of little visions back there. Perhaps there are ten or twenty visions that have been just out of reach? Maybe there's one about unrequited love, one about a Fitzgerald-esque night, one about the red canyons and rattlesnakes? I might just have to keep pinching myself, like in a dream, to see if indeed I can forge ahead and get to the stuff of them. Or just hope that one comes drifting through the curtain and lands smack dab in the middle of my mind.

whitewhine.com

Revel Sun

Ah morning glory revel in all things wild

In awe and bask in the midst of the galaxy's child

The light that spills to these shoulders warms my throat

And the diving butterflies leap at the air and float.

Clicks and caws from birds in the fir tips bright

Their feather sweet bodies curtsy and flit in flight

The tiny ballet of the hummingbirds grace to a sip

At the nectar put out in the hopes of privileged glimpse.

And below my place on my stilted high balcony

The waters rush forth over boulders and logs and trees,

And buzzing insects seem to delight in mid-air

Like snowflakes in sunshine to gleam in the moment we share.

And ladybugs swarm like cities on old oak stumps,

Tales of a bear bounding down-creek, his lumbering thump,

Tiny tunes hummed by the coo and the trickle of stream

As I run down the path in the breeze of a true half-dream.

Come upon driftwood, manzanita, the scenery shifts

The forest earth has turned dry and the sun blazes stiff,

I caution and listen for still air to rattle and slide,

But the snakes have all hidden in afternoon shade to abide.

How lucky am I on the face of this blue green place

To breathe of this garden in rhythm with the wild drum of grace

To sing out in forces that cannot keep still in my heart,

To love this golden land with an awe its mystical art.