Arrow & Ampersand

My life in fits and starts

[patrick-alan-coleman]

[patrick-alan-coleman]

[patrick-alan-coleman]

Prayer-full

For the bulk of the last decade, I lived my life in a culture of modern cynicism. By necessity, such cynicism is selfish. It places the world at an arm’s length, offers little hope and prizes pith over empathy. A cynical culture sees little to be championed. Each individual trudges through the mess, wry and jaded, thousands of Holden Caulfields refusing to grow up.

Because nothing can be good and genuine; because the world is only allowed in with a kind of insatiable irony; because the big “whatever” hangs over society at large, there is a sense of simply giving up. Nothing is above reproach so all are reproachful. Nothing is sacred aside from the self. And the self is just trying to get by – just trying to be a distinct enough self in a society of the same, too narcissistic to acknowledge another.

It was exhausting. The darkness pervasive.

It took me a few months living here in the wild before I realized that narcissism is not introspection. And when true introspection and meditation on the state of my humanity began in earnest, it was a little bit devastating.

It occurred to me that to recognize my humanity and the ways in which it had been damaged, was also to acknowledge the humanity of others. It occurred to me that our essential humanness is a fragile thing. It can be so easily damaged. It can be twisted. In some cases it can seem completely lost, though in my estimation, it seldom is completely lost.

I’m not sure when I began to pray on a semi-regular basis. I’m not sure what it was that floated up from deep inside of me to place those prayers on my lips. All I know is that while driving a backroad, or in the quietude of my first quarter cup of morning coffee, I’d silence the radio or turn away from my computer and suddenly be speaking with God.

Maybe speaking isn’t the word. Pleading would be better.

Pleading for what? A bit of solace. Some comfort. Forgiveness. Some deep change within myself. Some swift tide to help wash away the darkness; to make me a better man; a better father; a better human on this planet.

I find myself praying for my family. Praying for strangers. Praying for the world. I find myself weeping, prostrate on the carpet. I find myself staring up at the ceiling, the prayer just pouring out, eyes searching for … What?

Let me tell you that I have no religion to speak of. When I was a kid I gave myself up to a sect of pentecostal fundamentalist Christianity that was aggressively proselytizing. I spoke in tongues. I raised my hands. I wept. I knelt at every alter call. I was baptized in a lake. I was born again.

But I was also drinking heavily with my buddies on Saturday nights and engaging in all kinds of ungodly carnal acts with girls in the youth group in the back of the church van. Spiritually, I was a complete mess. Combining an ecstatic religiosity with rampant hormones and teen-age rebellion did not work in my favor. Or anyone’s favor, really.

So I grew up. I lost religion. Floundered in a kind of witchy, metaphysical Buddhism for awhile and finally entered into a cynical anti-religious phase, certain that belief in any higher being was for the weak-willed and superstitious; that religion had done more damage to our world than good; that there was no point to it all and that in the end we’d be lost to the dirt forever and ever, amen.

So, maybe I’ve become weak-willed and superstitious. Maybe I’m in need of a crutch. Maybe I’m misguided. But I’ve come to believe that I need a higher power, grander and more powerful than the self. I need some idealized version, some unfathomably perfect representation of the best in all of us, to have some greater purpose for my life on this planet.

What is best in us? Love. Empathy. Forgiveness. Selflessness. Inspiration. Creativity.

When I send up my prayers, I feel I’m drawing on some unseen pool of compassion. Some overarching, great big love up above.

This is my understanding of God. Do I feel there should be a greater focus to this concept? Yes. I do. Do I know what it will eventually be? No. I do not.

Is any of it grounded biblically? That’s a harder question.

The Bible is a book made my men. And being made by men, it is bound up in their egos, regardless of how divine the inspiration or how distinct the vision and voice that guided their hand.

It was a book built selectively. Texts were added and omitted, sometimes politically. At its core is an idea of morality that is crucial to the survival of a civil society: Do not steal or murder, be faithful and honest, love one another …

But pervading it all is God. As an omnipotent being, God is unknowable and often chaotic. It is jealous and angry and demanding. As the man, Christ, God is more compassionate, more human and reassuring, embodying the best in us. As a holy spirit it is empowering and inspiring and full of awe and wonder.

As a reader, in my depths I fear that vengeful, powerful, smiting deity and yet I long to have the assurance of being cleansed by Christ’s sacrifice and wonder at the mystery and inspiration of a holy spirit.

As a man looking for answers, however, I’m still unsure where I stand. Can I find guidance and comfort in the Bible? Absolutely. But I can find guidance and comfort in the compassionate words of the Dalai Lama, as well.

I’m still searching. I’m still finding my faith.

And right now my faith is most solid in prayer. When I pray I believe I’m being heard. I believe that the great body of wondrous love and compassion is taking up the plea.

And when I ask for forgiveness, faith requires that I believe I am forgiven. That belief also requires that I forgive myself. When I ask for compassion, when I ask to be a better person, when I ask that comfort be given to my fellow human beings, faith requires that I behave with compassion, with an eye towards my own betterment and a heart full of love, ready to provide comfort.

That’s powerful stuff. It’s the balm to soothe the ugly wound of cynicism. It is recuperative to the undone human condition.

It’s just the beginning.

[patrick-alan-coleman]

Unrequited patriotism

pa·tri·ot·ism

noun

devoted love, support, and defense of one's country; national loyalty.

un·re·quit·ed

adjective

not returned or reciprocated: unrequited love.

I have a deep and abiding love of my country. My family roots are tangled deep in the history of this land and this nation. My great grandmother on my father’s side, for instance, was full Cherokee. On my mother’s side, my family line trails all the way back to Thomas Nelson, one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence.

So perhaps there is something in my blood that makes me feel so connected to the vast expanse of the United States. There is no place in this country that I have not loved, and I’ve seen nearly all of it, from Alaska to Alabama (Oh, Hawaii, we’ll meet someday).

In my core, I am a child of the west and all that it stands for. I am a child of freedom and enterprise. I am a child of exploration. I am a child of displacement and trails of tears. I am a child of violence. I am a child of hope and tenacity. I am a child of the mountains that surround my home and the hard-scrabble dusty places where my grandmother struggled to raise her family for a time. I am a child of the rains of the Pacific Northwest. I am a child of pine forests and range-land.

More than that, I am a child sprung from a lineage of truly American individuals. As such, I have a bottomless affection for all of the people of this country. I do not believe in the false dichotomies created by the media, catching viewers through manufactured disdain. We, as a people, are much more complex and ambiguous than any Pew Research Center Poll might suggest.

I have sat beside people of all creeds, colors, sexual orientations, political philosophies and religions. I find that if we allow ourselves to see one another without the lens of the television screen, we will see we have far more in common than we would at first believe. After all, at the core we are all human beings who share this common American experience and all of the pain, joy, frustration and wonder that it entails.

This is my patriotism and it runs through me every day of my life. So why would I suggest it was unrequited? Because it is my belief that those who govern our country do not have the deep abiding love for the people they are meant to represent.

As an American, a good deal of my experience happens in the confines of laws and regulations and processes put into place by state and national governments. They are put in place by men and women operating under the guidance of the seven articles and 27 amendments of the constitution, meant “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”

I’m not sure how concerned our representation is about the general welfare. More often it feels as if they are more concerned about the welfare of their next campaign, manifest in who will fund it and for how much.

Lawmakers no longer write legislation. Lobbyists write legislation. The last time I voted I do not remember voting for a lobbyist to represent me. Nor do I think a lobbyist would care to represent me.

I am glad that our political system moves slowly. It’s supposed to. It was meant to be centered on healthy reasoned debate. But a debate on how best to ensure justice, domestic tranquility, defense, general welfare and the blessings of liberty for the American people.

I do not believe the American people are the focus. In fact, I believe through the cynical lens of legislation, my fellow citizens and I are largely out of focus.

Where is the love and adoration for the electorate? Where is the adoration of the constituents? I’m not sure. And that’s why I feel my patriotism remains unrequited.

I’ve lived in places where the fourth day of July is celebrated with lusty irony. I’ve lived in places where it is was celebrated with a joyful and ernest reverence. Maybe one could use a tiny bit more of the other and vice versa.

All I know is that when I raise the flag, I will think of the millions of people held in that field of 50 stars. I will celebrate their hopes and dreams and ask blessings for a country that deigned to give its people the freedom to, if not achieve their happiness, then at least to pursue it.

 And I will hope one day that my patriotism will be returned.

[patrick-alan-coleman]

April

The storm obliterated the mountains and the plateau all around, but our mesa remained sun flooded through the day.

The black piled up along the outskirts, miles high. The wind came through, mean and cold, but only sun came down and blue.

There were bald eagles out there in the fields, plucking up the afterbirth of newly born calfs, wheeling in the sky before settling on the startling detritus in the greening grass.

There was a time I would have built an American metaphor from such an image. Some cynical remark for a world perceived to perceive me as other.

Now I know these things as just part of this world. Meaningless. Beautiful. Only that.

Today, I built a paper. The good deep work of editors. Making words fit in the spaces left by commerce.

Tomorrow the object will emerge. The whispering grey pages. The columns and cut lines. The photographs. A solid thing I've built.

And the storm will pass, piling needed snow on the peaks. And another day will come, marked by the infant cries. Marked by hope that somewhere we're needed and essential.

We'll talk of the Midwest as we look out at the mountains and begin to prepare our way.

[patrick-alan-coleman]

Daylights and Deadlines

There’s a newspaper needs to be made. But there are shelves full of books also; a springtime out there coming on smooth and slow; a back porch newly without snow; sunlight dripping from the bright blue sky and a quiet, profound as a black velvet backdrop, upon which can be heard: the sound of ice melting, flies, prairie dog bark, cat purr and a sky full of birds welcoming the warm.

I take a book from the shelf, shed socks and head outside. Feline company rolls madly on the solar soaked deck. A breeze comes by, gently chilled. A character calls out from the pages.

Inside, communiques continue to flash in -- one after the other. There’s a newspaper needs built. And build it, I will. After I watch this muddy road a bit. Watch the mountains purple-up in the day. See the bald eagles swoop down.

Taking in the news of the mesa.

[patrick-alan-coleman]

Home on the Range in pictures. Last half of 2012: Part 1

[patrick-alan-coleman]

Facebook, you're my big crybaby.

My disgust with the reaction of many Facebook users to the Sandy Hook slaughter caused me to turn away from the social media site for some time. It was a conscious digital exile brought about by my need to reflect on tragedy and ways to help, rather than instantly react to instant reactions; doing nothing but adding to the unbearable din.

I don’t really fault those folks who were yelling their often unreasoned opinions down the internet hole. Were it 1912 rather than 2012, they’d likely have voiced the same feelings to friends and family in pubs and restaurants or around the dinner table. After all, those spaces were traditionally used as venues to express knee-jerk reactions to local or national or global events. I mean, it’s human nature. People have always needed some way to get out the pain and frustration and anger and sadness. It’s just that it used to be more of a private exercise. Or at least one practiced in a small and trusted community. It might have resulted in an evening’s worth of conversation where ideas would be expressed and maybe challenged, maybe championed, maybe changed.

Either way, taking the ideas to a larger community would require writing a letter to the newspaper, or for the truly energetic, maybe printing and distributing a broadside or a pamphlet. But the process of writing it all down to be published and printed would generally require some serious thought in order to make a cogent and persuasive argument.

We, as humans in the developed world, have created ways to make it much easier to broadcast our protean thoughts, fresh with huge emotion, to whoever has decided to tap in to our stream of consciousness. The result has been a river of largely unedited information from all corners.

Many times that flow is simply benign: lunch updates, photos of parties attended, reports on the morning’s commute, that cute thing the dog/ cat/ child did. But sometimes, and this was particularly true after Sandy Hook, the flow becomes a vitriolic and unreasoned spew.

I decided I didn’t want to be a part of it or get any of said spew on my already cluttered and messy mind. I have enough things to worry about. So I took myself out of the loop.

At first, the quiet of turning off was welcoming. I needed the time to reflect and mourn and be enraged and sit in that wash of emotions and try to just honor them with mindfulness. There would be time for opinions later.

But after a day or two of being away from the Book of Face, I began to experience a truly troubling phenomenon: I was thinking in status updates. Now, perhaps I’d been doing this for a long time. It’s just that before, when those thoughts would pop up, I’d gambol on over to the laptop and bang out a sentence or two about that thing that just happened that I thought interesting enough to yell across a crowd of 306 people, hoping that someone might comment back or give me the ol’ digital thumbs up. However, I wasn’t allowing myself that option. So I worked and ate and walked around my house distilling the world into bite sized chunks of content that wanted to be broadcast. It was truly bizarre to have these things form in my mind and just rattle around there – made to be put out in the world but instead just hollering to no-one across my personal network of ganglia and neural pathways.

In my twenties, when I felt bold enough to call myself a poet (and largely lived up to the title), I used to think in lines of poetry. That was how I understood the world. What I felt or saw became an image, or a series of images. The world that I expressed through my writing was obfuscated with words used to abstract my life into a series of scenes and emotions that would condense the big visions into crystalline chunks. That was the idea anyway. My poems were my status updates, spoken at open mics, or on the street, but consciously crafted so as to express something deeper than my latest dinner. Or rather to express, at least, how that latest dinner echoed back through all the others I’d eaten or the history of dinners through the ages. Hypothetically, of course, I don’t remember any specific dinner poems.

But I stopped writing poetry. I can’t say how or why it happened, but it did. And slowly, I stopped thinking in poetry. To find, then, that I’d begun thinking in “Facebook” was altogether jarring.

The jolt has been enough to make me question the role of social media in my life and I’ve begun to realize that maybe I don’t need something that will allow me to say whatever I want whenever I want. Maybe there are many people who don’t need this.

I wonder how many of the 306 actually give a single shit about my moment to moment status, much less two. I know there are a handful that truly do. And maybe they even give enough of a shit to comment. And I do appreciate that. I’m a notoriously absent friend. I get caught up in my own life and have a tendency towards isolation. Social media makes it easy for me to maintain relationships that would have otherwise been lost to time and distance. I believe there’s value to that.

But I also believe that Facebook and its ilk can perpetuate a false sense of community that when opened for examination reveals an emptiness and a lack of substance: “How could I feel so lonely when I have so many friends?”

This idea has become very pertinent for me as of late. You see, my family isn’t doing particularly well. Two recent deaths and some health issues have caused us to spiral into a dark depression that I cannot seem to save us from. I work far too hard for a job that pays me far too little money and far too much stress. Our current pregnancy is causing me no end of panic as I wonder if we have it together enough to have a second child. The town we live can be very cruel and impatient, particularly with my wife. We have no real friends here. We don’t see anyone socially. Our days are filled largely with just ourselves, a kind of tag team against a big ugliness that has us panting on the ropes and hoping that someone would stop the fight.

In essence, for nearly every day of the past month I would have answered the new “How are you feeling, Patrick?” Facebook prompt with a two word answer: “Like shit.”

Yes, I work very hard to find the good in our days. And believe me, I know how good we have it. I know how lucky we are in the grand scheme of things. How blessed. And I try to give a thankful prayer every day that we are were we are. Still, the days recently have been full of an exhausting hurt.

Now, the promise of Facebook is that I could post these troubles to a welcoming and caring audience who would offer support and understanding. And I believe that would likely be true for the first couple of posts. But eventually it would be too much. I’d be removed from feeds or muted or maybe even “unfriended”. I know this because I’ve done the same thing.

So here I am, faced with the desire to talk to a supportive friend and being offered either the easy choice of a few electronic sentences that will eventually be lost in the din, or the harder choice of making a phone call.

These really are the only options. I have no friends here to sit and drink a beer with and empty my soul of troubles. But, increasingly, forays into Facebook have amplified my loneliness and confirmed my suspicions that we are suffering from a plague of selfishness in this society.

I’m so very guilty of that selfishness. And I have been for a long time. But I’m trying to change it. I really am. And perhaps now I’m reaping the consequences of selfishness.

Social media prays on selfishness with a lure of community. And in the wake of Sandy Hook I saw so much selfishness on Facebook and so very little selflessness. Maybe I wasn’t looking in the right places.

So in the end I’ve come to a place where I need to decide how I will use Facebook and similar sites that might pop-up in the future. I’m not wiping away my account, because it actually is a valuable link to important friends and family. However, I’m going to restrict my interaction with the site to posting long form blogs (like this one you may still be reading), the occasional photo, and the really big stories in my life that might actually mean something to distant acquaintances who’d probably rather not know my thoughts on the latest change in local weather.

That said, I’m going to make more effort to reach out to those I miss and those I need. And I hope that those who would call me “friend” for real, might actually call me.

Maybe, if everything goes right, I can strengthen faded friendships and start thinking in poetry again... Or maybe in a new way more perfect and beautiful.

[patrick-alan-coleman]

Hard Work. Honoring Returns.

Change is never easy. That much should be abundantly clear to anyone who’s ever tried. Wether that change is geographical, spiritual, mental or philosophical, a change requires perseverance and gumption. It requires effort and wherewithal. Sometimes, it even requires enduring a great deal of pain and discomfort.

It doesn’t appear that the great wide universe that spins through our lives welcomes conscious change. Particularly if that change is for the better. I think it’s because positive change means fighting entropy. It means fighting the movement of all things towards disorganization and chaos. And fighting entropy means expending energy. Sometimes it means expending energy that you may not believe you actually have.

It’s enough to make a human being like myself throw his hands into the air and proclaim that the whole bullshit game is rigged for failure. After all, that’s how it feels sometimes.

What’s easiest in this world? To sit and watch. To let the world go by with all of its ugliness and ecstasy and insanity and beauty and brutality. To let those in the world with their hands on the pretty machinery feed you all the ease and comfort you desire. To let yourself spread and welcome the degradation of the small pities offered up under the hot lights of reality television. To drink and smoke and throw yourself into the warm pit of intoxication again and again.

I’m so goddamn exhausted. I feel ground down by a year that’s been marked by more unhappiness than joy. I feel undone by a year filled with more grief than gratitude. I feel lost in the wilds of loneliness where friends have become shadows in the wires and distant voices on the telephone.

But then I look out at the country outside my window: the mountains thrust into sky, pink in alpenglow; the fields softened in white blankets of snow; the folds of the plateau defined by the sunset; the deer grazing in the sagebrush; the moon rising fat into a black sky that is crystal with perfect sharp cold...

I look out at that country and I feel blessed to just be a witness to it all. I feel the big power of the beauty. I feel renewed.

I’ve been working hard of late to discard a selfishness that’s built up around me over the last two decades. It’s a self centeredness that’s calcified on my spirit layer upon layer, becoming a hard shell. I seek selflessness. I seek to be more giving. And I’ve been trying so goddamn hard to make that happen. I want to welcome my fellow human beings with love and an open heart. I want to be helpful and generous.

Change is difficult.

I’ve been working hard to be more grateful. I’ve been working hard to look into my life and recognize how blessed I am. I’ve been seeking a sense of happiness in my days, hours, minutes.

Change is difficult.

I’ve been working hard to be more creative and productive in my life. I’ve been working to keep learning and developing a better understanding of the world.

Change is difficult.

People who’ve known me for a long time may not know that I pray. I probably don’t pray as often as I should, but I pray more often than I ever have and with more thankfulness and sincerity. I pray out of necessity. I pray because sometimes crying out for help or offering up thanks is the only thing that makes sense, if only to hear yourself proclaim your own need or your own gratitude. I pray because it does bring solace.

I’ll probably never stop swearing or drinking whiskey. I’ll probably never develop the body of an Adonis. I’ll probably never be famous. But, goddammit, I will strive to be the best human I can possibly be by doing my utmost to live with grace and gratitude and generosity of spirit and love for my fellow human beings.

I could list a dozen things I’d like to stop or begin in the coming year, but I will instead resolve to do the hardest thing I can think of: continue to work for positive change in my life and the lives of others and honor even the smallest returns.

[patrick-alan-coleman]

Greased pig contest, San Miguel County Fairgrounds, Norwood, CO

[patrick-alan-coleman]

Fixing Fences

He moves in darkness as it seems to me~  Not of woods only and the shade of trees.  He will not go behind his father's saying,  And he likes having thought of it so well  He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

-Robert Frost

I'm inclined to believe it's Robert Frost's elves who pull these wires down; who tangle them until their barbs are twisted up one against the other, braiding the thorny lines so that any manner of animal can scuttle through.

"Good fences make good neighbors" is what old Rob's neighbor said. It is most true where there are cows. And there are cows here, just beyond the fence line. As I walk along the stutter of salvaged wood poles with tools in hand, I part a stand of feral willows to find them there, placidly chewing their private regurgitations. They rise moaning when they see me approaching in my bright white hat, wondering, probably, if I've come to make them move somewhere out of their patch of scrub oak shade. But I only mean to keep them out of the Laperousse land, which is already overrun by the industrious prarie dogs. There are no fences fit to keep those burrowing barkers away. It could not be built deep or wide enough. They know it too, and taunt me when I turn my back to twist a sinew of bailing wire around a rough wood pole, securing another droop of barbed wire.

The elves have not been too terrible to the fence I walk this morning. The dangered-up wires that strretch from the county road to the canyon remain unbroken. There is no need for the fence stretcher today, and I'm saved from bleeding myself with the spool of barbed wire that waits threateningly on the back of the ATV.

Like all things here, I'm newly initiated to fence repair. It was just days ago, Kitty and I squatted beside the road closing the gaps in wires that had been severed long ago: practicing cutting the sharp wire, practicing wincing at the scratches and punctures, practicing twisting and stretching the lines until everything is taught and tidy and unpassable. Taking turns with it. Trading barbs, as it were, as a thunderstorm rolled in.

It's odd to walk a fence line you've just met. Every step shows some others hand in long accomplished mendings. There is old wire bound to new, each repair with it's own method of twisting -- another kind of ranchers signature. Not as distinct as a brand, but clear enough. There are histories in the wire, and I have no way of knowing how long this fence has stood, or how many have approached it. But with each repair I make, my amateur mark is left, and it will remain there, out in the quiet with only the cows to regard it.

[patrick-alan-coleman]

Rain

I watch the radar with an intensity that most men reserve for pornography, or fantasy sports stats, or stock market analytics. In my tracing of the pixelated globs across this stretch of county there is just as much desire and hope and anxiousness.

All around, the mesa coughs up puffs of fine dust. Our movement across the landscape becomes hazed and every surface is dulled. I pull my finger across the dashboard and write my name in big capital letters. I come home to wash after a morning in the fields and my hair is so dusted that under the shower head it smells like a desert after a deluge.

I begin taking stock in rumors that percolate through the brief lines in the tiny market. They say there's moisture in the gulf. They talk of monsoon season. The check out girl refuses to believe any of it. I go home and look for rain sign in the forecast. The radar is an empty slate of grey.

Someone says that you know the rains are coming when the prairie dogs start to build higher mounds. So I watch them too for some sign of new industry. But all they seem to do is stand there, looking out over the landscape the way I stand there and look out over the landscape, all of us seemingly dumb animals in the dryness.

I become obsessed with the fires. The state's like magician's flash paper. One spark and it flares so fast and bright that all we can do is stare in surprised wonder with our jaws hanging in the aftermath of the flash. But this is the most terrible and disturbing trick. Homes vanish. Trees. Lives up in a puff of smoke. 

Dry thunderstorms roll over Lonesome Home in the night. Outflow winds gust the curtains towards the ceiling and dry lightning fills the room with sudden sharp shadows. I can't sleep. I can only watch out the window for signs of fire.

Just months ago I lived in a seemingly endless drizzle -- in a damp world festooned with mosses; streets dotted with puddles and streaked with little streams. I loaded my home on a truck in a downpour. I left with the smug satisfaction that my life would soon be free of the constant damp dreariness. Now I wish for just one wet day.

Then, one morning, I wake beneath a dark layer of cumulus thunderheads. The forecast offers good odds of rain. I boot up the radar and set it in motion. Deep green globs creep across the screen with centers of candy apple red. All I can do is watch them come, pacing between computer screen and living room windows, hoping to match their path.

Lightning builds sharp jagged ladders between earth and sky. Thunder rattles the windows. In the distance, a curtain of rain sweeps across the countryside dropping its wet folds over fields and trees and cattle -- all of it dissolved into a bright mist. The world is eaten up and disappears bit by bit. Soons it's at the windows and the house fills with the sound of waterlogged static, as if someone's tuned the world's radio to the empty space between stations.

Ruts fill with rainwater and the mesa gives up a sweet sigh scented of wet sage and dampening grasses and rainstruck earth. The air is heavy with humidity, good and thick to breath in massive thirsty gulps. I throw all the doors open to welcome it in. Wood swells. Cats rush in, dripping from their whiskers. 

On the radar a deep green line of storms lines up over the mesa, a rumbling supply train full of rain. I watch it pass all night. The good earth around me drinking deep until the dark finds us drowsy, and satisfactorily soaked. 

[patrick-alan-coleman]

Past & Present & Pipe Repair

Days here on the mesa creep by, measured out in the growth of alfalfa, the movement of water, the repair of pipes and cutting of willows, small distances run, a child’s naps, lines cast into the reservoir, and afternoon beers. And there is quiet all about. The kind of wild quiet that is actually a stillness woven with the high barking reports of prairie dogs, or a sudden gusting hush through tree limbs, or the crackle of grasshoppers in flight, or the rhythmic rustling of crows wings overhead. And I admit I can’t remember when I had quiet enough to hear a birds wings. There’s space for a person to think up here, and I’ve often found myself thinking out loud in a running dialogue covering subjects like past wrongs and current worries and how much it hurts when fingers are crunched in the fence post driver. It’s odd to suddenly become aware of your own voice in the tangle of the country’s sounds: encouraging through a sweaty task or exasperatedly reprimanding for using the four wheeler to pull three full sections of irrigation pipe from the line instead of just the one intended. It’s not uncommon for me, given enough silence and time, to think about the kind of person I am and weigh my history against the the proposed remaining balance of my life. Sometimes aloud, and sometimes internally. My mind has a tendency to fill with the mistakes I made as a child and young adult (and increasingly middle aged man) and wonder if they can somehow be diminished by future good. So I sit, with work-gloved hands crossed at the wrist, and look out across the back 40 from under the brim of my brined baseball cap, and ponder.    Wiser folks than I have suggested a person should strive to live in the present moment. They say what is past is past, and what is in the future is unwritten, and that true happiness can only be achieved by being with the world in this very moment. But I feel that the past is always with us, marked on our bodies or on the land, distinct as scars. Marked in our brain as a jumble of neural pathways that fire electric when the present world offers up a scent or a vista or a circumstance that we’ve known before. So isn’t the past always a part of the present moment? And shouldn’t it be weighed with as much concern? Isn’t that, after all, how we learn? And why not think of the future? Why not forecast a better self into the days to come? Why not dream up a robust ever-after of happiness and fortune? Shouldn’t all these things be considered when approaching the world as it lays out there in the fields and forests and mountains and plains and cities beyond? But then you’re startled back into the day by the sound of a crow’s wings overhead, or your own voice asking silly questions. The irrigation pipe isn’t fixing itself. The child isn’t laying himself down for a nap. The body isn’t benefiting from miles un-run. The beer is still waiting to give up its refreshing solace. So self reflection is subsumed by the necessities that make these mesa days creep by. And maybe that’s what the wiser folks meant to say. Maybe not.

[patrick-alan-coleman]

As the days tumble by up here on the high and windy range, I've been getting lost in the minutia of irrigating in a drought, searching for and being rejected for jobs (due to lack of hard news experience), and the joys of driving the Jeep home from Star Trail on quiet back roads, watching the deer scatter and the magpies glide beside me... Home to my lovely wife and child. This living seems to agrees with us. 

So, you'll forgive me for having been distracted away from the above video project: A morning of alpaca shearing that occurred over Memorial Day weekend at Piñon Wood Ranch. Enjoy

[patrick-alan-coleman]

No Country for New Media? (Or: Ed Tom Bell Don’t Tweet)

“Rural communities need access to the internet!” It’s a cry I’ve heard many times as our world becomes more wired. And from my old perspective in a thriving little metropolis, with much of my life and work linked directly to new online media, I’d always agreed that there was some kind of deep unfairness in the fact that rural peoples were so isolated from the webbed world.   “Oh, those poor bumpkins,” I’d think to myself. “This just proves how most of us are literally disconnected to the plight of the salt-o-the-earth working folk. If only we took the initiative to deliver unto them the bright shining promise of a fully downloadable, surfable, rss feedable, amazonable, streamable, facebookable viral meme-able future.” (This is actually how I talk in my head) Then it came time for me to move to that techless wilderness. I’ll admit some denial: Surely in these, our modern times, a town of 450 souls would be wired for high-speed. Surely I’d be able to connect to my beloved Netflix Instant. And there had to be some use for Twitter there, right? To receive the farm report perhaps, or learn of the latest small town scuttlebut? How could a population, no matter how small, live without Yelp, or Craigslist, or Foursquare, or... Websites? um... Blogs? ...Geocities? …hello? ...anything? Country Folks Can Survive Before I moved to Norwood  I conducted some online research in my sparse spare time. The town did not give itself up freely. There was the requisite Wiki page, a colorful website for the intriguing Happy Belly Deli (which’s quickly become a favorite food/coffee stop despite the fact their website no longer seems to exist), and a page for the Chamber of Commerce and their many videos touting the wonders of the Wright’s Mesa region. And that was about it. For a city guy who relied on a web presence to help him decide what and where he should go at any given moment, it seemed there was naught but a dry digital wind whistling past a cybernetic waste where a town should rightly be. On your way into the actual real life town by the Eastern approach, up out of the canyon and across the rolling mesa of pastureland and hay fields, you’ll pass by two saloons in quick succession: Jack’s Hitchin’ Post Cowboy Bar and Two Candles. Neither one of these places have websites (that I’ve found, and lordy knows I’ve looked), though to be fair, The Hitch does have a Facebook page that currently looks like this:

However, outside each establishment, eschewing the digital for a “We’re-not-doing-anything-that’s-so-complicated-you-can’t-figure-it-out-at-25mph” analog approach, you’ll find a calendar of events. In the Hitch’s case it’s a lighted marquee that recently read “Sat: NRA Sun: Mothers Day Brunch”, while the more bohemian Candles has an enormous chalkboard often decked in flowery script: “Open Stage!”. And that’s all you need to know. What would websites serve these joints? The locals know what these places are all about. They know who owns them and who tends bar and if anyone’s confused as to what might be going down with the Open Stage they’ll walk up to the Candles’ proprietor when they see him at Clark’s Market and just, you know, ask. And what of Twitter? What of Foursquare and the rest? What about of-the-moment updates? Well, I could be the “mayor” of every business here if I so desired. However, much of new media relies on smartphone connectivity, and cell coverage around here is ugly, making my 4G connection as worthless as nipples on a batsuit. Also, no one gives a shit about what you’re doing now or planning on doing later... If they want to know what you’re having for lunch they’ll simply walk past your table at the Happy Belly and take a gander for themselves. As for of-the-moment news updates, small town gossip is as good as Twitter. In fact, in the time I’ve been here, I’ve learned everything I  might need to know about this local scandal without once reading a blog post, tweet, or (old school) newspaper. In fact, it seems that the whole point of Twitter is to make large scale communities more like small ones: Your neighbor might be miles away but you can go back and forth about what-have-you as if you were running into each other at the post office. Radio On Hey, you’re on Trash or Treasure. Who’s this? Mike Oh hey, Mike. How’ve you been? Great, thanks! What have you got for us today? I’ve got a smoker I’m looking to sell. It’s custom built, like new. It weighs a lot so you’ll need help taking it away. Okay, what are you asking for it? A couple hundred but I’m willing to listen to offers. And how can people reach you? They can call... And so it goes at 10:30 in the AM on KOTO radio out of Telluride. For a good 30 minutes or more (depending on demand) folks from around the San Juan listening region will call in looking to sell or buy household goods with few restrictions. They give a description to the jocular DJ (who they often know), along with their location and phone number, live on the air. It’s basically an analog broadcast Craigslist without all the unsavory bits generally associated with the online classified service. But Trash or Treasure isn’t the only Craigslist-y service KOTO offers their listeners for free. They also have an on-air “ride board” to connect road-trippers with would be passengers, and a lost and found to reunite folks with their misplaced keys, sunglasses and cell-phones. Of course they also offer a local news broadcast and give airtime to anyone from folks promoting local library events, to fringe types who want to rant about car exhaust and its links to the welfare state.

KOTO isn’t an anomaly in the region. It shares its section of the dial with at least two other community minded stations that cover a good deal of southwestern Colorado. They may not have Trash or Treasure, but they are just as community minded, offering event calendars and civic information for those who live out in country. Translators dot the countryside and your neighbors are as close as the radio dial. Who needs the internet? Outliers All this said, there are new media pioneers out here, though they’re mostly centered around the cosmopolitan mountain burg of Telluride. Sites like Telluride Inside and Out offer straight-ahead online content, offering coverage of everything from fashion to music events and film. And blogs like Telluride Newb offer up killer videos and some tight, snappy writing that would make Slate and Huffington Post readers feel right at home. These examples are the exception, but they’re vibrant enough to prove there’s a place in the world for new media in these geographic outskirts. Clearly the new media world depends on online ad dollars, and it may be that there’s just not enough monetary justification for the kind of shiny web 4.0 experience that’s slowly starting to take root in the cities. But it could be that it’ll just take someone from the country to figure out how to connect users with the content that makes sense to their lives, and convince businesses it's in their best interests to participate. In some ways, it seems to me there is an untapped market here, even despite sparse connectivity and few-ish eyeballs. Hello World So it would seem that the country will do what the country has always done. The internet is largely about convenience, and country living has never been about convenience. People out here are used to making do. It would seem the only reason a lot of people would want to get connected is because the world is forcing them to. Do you know how hard it is to pay a student loan by sending a check via mail? It’s very very hard. Believe me. I’ve tried. It’s become increasingly necessary to get connected. But it’s not as if there aren’t benefits. Amazon is a huge boon to the country. Ordering goods online means avoiding the 3hr round trip to the nearest city with a big box store. It means saving gas. It means more time to irrigate, to fix fences, and to stare at sunsets. But I think there could be even more benefit for people in rural communities to use the world shrinking power of the internet. Country concerns are necessarily world concerns. New media has proven to be a powerful tool, and outlets like Twitter can be an amazing way to reach out to the rest of the world... when used correctly. The internet can be a hugely valuable tool to give strength to voices that have commonly been unheard. But it will take some serious gumption for historically isolated mind-your-own business communities to take the step into the wired world. The liberal urban concerns that I had about getting rural communities online have turned out to be a tad backwards and condescending. We can’t ask the country to get wired on someone else’s terms. The little communities already have ways to communicate without having to turn on a computer. Still, finding that bigger voice with the world at large could be a huge revolution for the country even though it may take a serious leap of technological faith. For me, it’s about seeking balance. I’ll tell you my story here. And anyone from anywhere can read it. Meanwhile, I rarely reach for my phone anymore, and checking updates on social media sites is no longer restless habit, and more of an occasional way to talk to the world I left behind. I’m perfectly happy to have it that way.

[patrick-alan-coleman]

Message to a Friend

After I wrote the following email, I realized it was also the perfect update concerning my feelings so far about relocating to these wilder climes. I thought about redacting the profanity, but this is how I talk with my friends and to remove it would be dishonest. Apologies to the more genteel and proper readers. What follows is the message to my friend Joel Byron Baker, in its entire.

Joel,

We've landed and've finally kinda got our shit in order (which hasn't been too easy considering we jumped right into ranch work as soon as the U-Haul was unpacked). The views are unparalleled, the sky is fuckin' huge, and ranch work suits me, despite the fact my body is more used to getting fat at a laptop on my dining room table than lumbering around the fields in high rubber boots, shovel in hand. 

I'm going to start running again soon. My body feels just about acclimated to the 7,000+ ft altitude and there is a rough-but-probably-runable four-wheeler trail that twists through the acreage on the ranch. For awhile I was walking it in the afternoons with a big black Bouvier des Flandres and a super-fat Labrador. While it's a fairly flat path, there're a shit-ton of ankle-breaking rocks and prairie-dog holes, but one sunset found me curious and I trotted between the ruts for a ways in my cowboy boots, which wasn't too terribly uncomfortable (probably due to the downhill slope and gentle covering of grass in that section). At any rate it convinced me that the trail was worth a go. I'm gonna map it on Google Earth to find the distance. 

My focus has been a bit scattered and, as ever, I'm a total failure at returning text messages or phone calls. But know I think of you often and look forward to the day you visit so I can show you around. I found myself talking about you the other evening when fate found me shooting pool with some locals on a Saturday night at the Lone Cone Saloon. I was rusty on the felt, but shot well enough that I didn't make a complete ass out of myself. After awhile the chef went home and the bartender locked us in. The conversation turned towards how religion had no place in shooting pool and I begged to disagree, talking about how we had once enjoyed shooting pool during churchtime on Sunday afternoons, which was a kind of communion with some God or the other. I stood there for a bit leaning on my pool cue, looking all raggedy and unshaven and thinking of you.

It's incredibly quiet here, as you can probably imagine from your Eastern Oregon days, and I think this country has much in common with that side of the state. I imagine if I'd stuck around in the city, Kitty and I would have eventually been called across the Cascades to find some sort of rural living. I know we've been here for a very short time but this mesa already feels more like home than Portland ever did. All that's missing are friends to share the sunsets and the mountains with, but I'm sure we'll find them around here somewhere eventually.

I know people say you can change the scenery but it's harder to change yourself. I know that all the baggage I carried with me around Portland wasn't lost on the road to Colorado, but I have this strange feeling this place is going to change me for the better. Maybe that's wishful thinking on my part. Still, I have this sense there's a man emerging that's been somehow stifled and confused about the world for years. It's almost like a religious feeling. And I am struck with the remembrance that the last time I felt fervent about any kind of religion was when I was a boy growing up not far from where I live today.

I'm not sure if you know how truly superstitious I am. I understand that superstitious people are easily labeled as ignorant fools, but I can't help myself from seeing signs and spirits in the world. It's always felt to me that the signs and spirits are stronger here. It's the land of coyote, and it can be unsettling sometimes to know that trickster is bumming around these canyons and cliffs and plateaus. I dunno. Maybe I'm just tapped into the radioactivity from the uranium that laces the region. Did you know that Madame Curie received shipments of uranium ore from just down the way from me? Yep. It's a strange place I've come to, and I'm a stranger here... but Jim Morrison was just a paranoid drug addict with a fine voice, so I put no stock in it.

I do miss you very much. I know we didn't see each other as often as we could have when I was there, and now I don't even have the chance that I'll discover you at my door after a run across town, most likely in some ridiculous get-up. Ah well. I don't suspect the distance will dull my fondness. 

I hope you are finding love, and joy, and money... In that order. And I hope we'll see each other again sooner than later. But until then, please keep in touch and know that I am forever your friend.

Love,

PAC

[patrick-alan-coleman]

Here Come the Waterworks

The sun was setting over the La Sals, causing the sky to turn the color of fruit punch. The four of us stood at the edge of the field watching the long wheeled-pipe of the rolling irrigation sprinkler charge with water for the first time this season. The spray from lower release valves was caught in the light like watery blossoms, and they bloomed along the dull shine of the pipe, one after the other down the line, past the motor and further. Soon the water hit the end of the pipe, the whine of main irrigation valve changed pitch, and the sprinklers came alive like some kind of back-country Bellagio water show.

"It's a beautiful sight," Mom said with a sweet happy drawl in her voice. 

Generational ranchers and neighbors Jake and Preston looked on and nodded in agreement. "Makes the hay grow," Jake said.

There, in my borrowed boots and work gloves, feeling like a little kid playing dress-up in his Daddy's suit, as self-conscious as a city boy can be amoung true country folks, I couldn't help but agree that the sight was breathtaking in it's own way.

After the spectacle of that first day, the damn sprinkler system has caused nothing but grief. There have been been bent pipes, broken pull strings, a motor so difficult to start that by the time it sputters to life you stand there winded with aching arms wondering what the hell ever made you decide this whole thing was a good idea.

Thankfully, over two weeks in, I still believe this was a good idea. Our house (our gorgeous house with the amazing views) is slowly coming together. The cats are happy. The baby boy has room to roam and babble. The wife's becoming a pro razor driver and wears her Carharts with the kind of unmitigated gusto only matched by Lady GaGa when she squeezes into her favorite naughty latex Oompa Loompa suit. And I have become the stellar irrigation technician that I always knew I could be. 

That sounds snarky, but moving water through the fields is pretty satisfying work. Sure, the two days spent cutting willow switches from the ditch before the water came was not the most pleasant task, but the last four days of placing damns and channeling water into dry patches has been quite rewarding. Yes, my hands are swollen, unaccustomed to hours wrapped around the handle of a shovel. Yes, my neck is actually red. Yes, my body aches in the morning. But there is something I enjoy about trying to read the lay of the land and make the water go where it needs to go. And there is the added bonus of taking a breather, lifting your gaze and being stunned into quietude by the views.

All of which will last only as long as the water does.