Prairie Mandala

We live on seven acres of prairie here at the Row. A couple acres of that is house, outbuildings and lawn. The rest is wild pasture, in which we’ve mowed an elaborate system of walking trails and two tent circles (one large circle, where I hope to someday put a tipi when I’ve save enough for a kit). It’s a beautiful, meditative walk that takes one past the original 1800’s homestead house – now hunched over and leaning toward earth – around the meditation tower & dog pond (dry in the summer), and then along crisscrossing trails through an open field of mixed grasses or in the shade of a shelterbelt. In the summer, when the milkweed blooms, the monarch butterflies dance along the trail, and one can see depressions where the deer have slept the night before.

My ultimate goal is to create by mowing, with hedges or with rocks, a labyrinth big enough to walk. I’m not sure what it is about labyrinths that fascinates me so; maybe it’s the idea of walking toward the center, the heart, which seems a good metaphor for a path I think we should ALL be on – a path toward self-discovery. So I’ve got the pasture labyrinth on my 10-year plan. In the meantime, here’s a labyrinth poem…

MANDALA

                                   

Mandala, yantra,

map of the hidden world,

chart of the heart’s constellation,

we are born at your center

and with our first breath scrabble out

to the edges where we navigate emptiness,

pillage and expose to the sweltering sun

the nothing out here, our skin flaking like mica.

We have nowhere to go but in.

Sometimes muscle memory or despair

pulls and we creep back to you, grope

along vine-covered walls on hands and knees,

blood and bone wired together

with coaxial cable and speaker cords,

our pulse digital, our eyes a matrix

of dimming pixels. Again, we  get it wrong,

drag with us the din of signals sent or received,

echolocation of fear, manufactured fog

against our own reflection. Somnambular,

paralytic, hollowed-out, we ride shockwaves,

drift away from ourselves away

from the heart's deep metronome away

from the center's pinpoint stillness away

from Love's dark labyrinth away

from the only divine number, One.

Mandala, tantric lens through which

we could finally glimpse ourselves,

we’ve never had anywhere to go but in.

Light the way to your radiant center,

light the way to your angular private rooms

washed in cobalt, saffron, magenta,

light the way to your bed of roses

where, if God is anywhere, It is here.

2009 Marcella Remund

Post-Snow Pea Census

After a couple days of bone-chilling cold and bitter northern winds, the temp climbed enough yesterday to result in hours of hypnotic snowfall. Jack Blizzard has cleaned up the dingy brown of prairie winter with a beautiful blanket of white. A good snow muffles sound, too, so the Row is exceptionally quiet today. I’ve got a batch of bison jerky in the dehydrator, a pot of vegetable soup cooked up, two hats and a pair of fingerless gloves to finish knitting, and—argh—a late faculty evaluation to get done.

Ray was out early with the snowblower, making peacock paths. We lost another of the ABBA boys sometime over the past two days. He’d been limping around on legs that looked broken or splayed, until finally, he wasn’t able to roost or make it to the food. Ray found him this morning, a peasicle tucked out of the wind behind the bird food can. He’ll go in the burning cage later today, ashes to ashes. So now we are 13.

I’m not pining, though. Mom reminds me that had the pea-boy lived, I would have done myself in trying to rig up some sort of pea-walker to help him get around. And when I run the numbers in my head—6 peacocks when we moved in, 13 now a year-and-a-half later—it’s scary. I have visions of myself wandering the acreage one day…I’ll be reading poetry, dressed only in peacock feathers, nibbling on gamebird pellets, with 2 panting dogs and 150 high-stepping peafowl in tow. I’ll lose my capacity for human vocalization. I’ll scratch up grass seed with my overgrown toenails. I’ll sleep at night perched on the footrail of our brass bed frame. Tourists will drive by slowly, hoping to catch a glimpse of the “crazy peacock lady.” Poor Ray will have to arm himself against the reporters crouching in the brush, their high-powered telephoto lenses perched on tree branches.

X-Treme nurturing seems hereditary in my family—my mom keeps her mail carrier supplied with Chex mix—and it could very well be my undoing if Jack Blizzard and Mother Nature, in their infinite wisdom, didn’t occasionally step in to even up the scales. But Ray carved out a beautiful path to the pyramid building, so I’ll ponder life’s amazing tendancy toward balance as I head out to feed the barn cats…

Going All Prairie Girl

I grew up in the Omaha, spent 20-some years in a city I never had to leave and couldn’t possibly get to know. There was noise, 24-hour light, fast-moving everything, busy people everywhere. When we were tired of our own neighborhood, north Omaha, we wandered into South O, snuck downtown, or cruised out to West O. When that wasn’t exotic enough, we crossed a bridge into Council Bluffs and there we were, in the foreign land of Iowa, without once leaving the city lights.

It was perpetual motion, constant stimulation. If we wanted a cool light show, we parked just outside Eppley airfield fence, spread blankets on the hoods of our cars, laid back and braced ourselves, then waited for our bones to rattle around in our skinny little bodies as jets took off overhead. Sometimes we played chicken on the train trestle over 30th Street. Sometimes we jumped the fence at the Water Works and played balance beam on the rims of cement holding tanks. We ate Chinese at King Fong’s, where the tables were inlaid with mother-of-pearl and we had to point at pictures on the menu to order. We shared pancakes and bottomless pots of coffee at Village Inn at 2 in the morning, to watch the post-bar folks drift (or stagger) in. We hung out in the Greyhound depot in the middle of the night and smoked cigarettes, imagining peoples’ stories as they got on and off the buses.

So when I moved from the city to a little farmhouse in South Dakota, ten miles from the nearest dinky town, I felt Dorothy’s pain—lions and tigers and bears…oh my. I couldn’t imagine a more complete desolation, except maybe on the surface of Mars. I wasn’t sure how people survived the dark, the quiet, the oceans of corn. And it was summer. I hadn’t been through a South Dakota winter yet.

I have almost three decades under my prairie belt now. I’ve spent some of it in the country, some in small towns, some in smaller towns, and now back in the country. Once I knew I wouldn’t be eaten by roving wolves, I started to like the slower pace. When my friend Paul from New York came to visit and asked, on the drive from the airport to my house, “Are those real cows?” I rolled my eyes. You don’t get it, my rolled eyeballs said.

I knew I’d gone Prairie Girl all the way, knew I’d never go back to the city, when I came up over a country hill one morning at sunrise. A perfectly illuminated Maxfield Parrish landscape stretched out as far as I could see, and I actually wept, it was so beautiful.

I don’t have the lights at Eppley any more, but I can walk 30 feet out my front door on a moonless night, spread a blanket on the ground, and watch the Milky Way. And I may have to pawn a guitar amp or two for the gas it takes to get to decent Chinese food, but just out my east windows tonight is the moon, breaking over the trees in a cloudy sky. She’s half in light, half in shadow, a grinning wài pó or a bright yin yang, reminding me again why I’m out here in the dark, in the quiet, on the prairie--BALANCE.

Knitting the Prairie

We’re supposed to have our first serious frost tonight. I have a few plants to bring into the greenhouse—geraniums in a pickle crock, a China Doll and a schefflera, and I suppose I’ll have to pull up the last of the basil and figure out what to do with the curry and fennel. The tomatoes will have to fend for themselves. The vines are so thick, they can keep each other warm.

The flock stays fairly close to the house on these cool days. They like to hang out on the south side of the house against the greenhouse windows in the afternoon, where they can soak up the heat bouncing off the windows while they admire the mysterious and magnificent creatures in the reflective glass. I modified my spoilitude and cut back on feeding them, hoping they’ll do something about these grasshoppers—peacock popcorn.

Cool autumn nights are perfect for knitting, a fuzzy blankie on my feet, and skeins of wool yarn in my lap. I just finished Yogi’s new sweater in blue cotton and bright multicolored eyelash yarns, and I must say he looks very preppie chic in it, especially with the turtleneck rolled. The colors & furriness match his naughty personality. Jada’s sweater is plain variegated wool in earthtones, with a subtle lace edging—slightly girlie but still working-dog tough. I also finished five small drawstring bags in various colors of the most luscious alpaca, which I’ll fill with fun trinkets for Christmas presents.

I’m working on a möbius scarf right now, knit in a lacy stitch out of Lamb’s Pride worsted in a rich chocolate brown. I like the seeming impossibility of the möbius pattern—a scarf that appears to be an endless twisted loop, no beginning, no end. It’s a conundrum, much like life at Uncannery Row.

The cool weather also makes me long to haul out the spinning wheel. I’ve got tubs full of fiber to spin up, including a couple bags of Jada’s fine Australian Shepherd fur, some camel, alpaca, and—best of all—raw silk. I’ve been thinking, too, about spinning in some peacock down and maybe even some milkweed fiber. Spun together, these fibers would make an amazing desert-downunder-orient-prairie yarn. Then I could knit it up into the most fabulous overalls with a matching turban…mmm…