Pictures!

Ducklings at a little under 3 weeks old.

Their first swim hole! The "pond" left over from an above-ground pool.


Some of our year-old flock behind the coop.






Swimming in their current "pond." We are having some folks from a local eco-friendly pond building place visit us soon to advise us about building a pond in our yard.

On their way up the steps to bed tonight...

...and up....

...and up...


...and in to bed.

Ducklings

Our five little Indian Runner ducks are four weeks old now, and absolutely adorable (pictures will come at some point, I promise). They are still spending nights in a pen in our indoor porch, until we get the duck house built (hopefully this weekend), but their days are spent outside.

They have us trained so that in the morning we open their pen door, they peep, quack, and waddle through the porch onto the deck and then one by one flip-flop their way down the stairs to the grass and waddle in an urgent shuffle together to their kiddie pool. They spend their days splashing in the kiddie pool, eating grass and bugs, exploring the yard, and getting acquainted with the chickens. Around 8 PM, from the evening hush there arises a tremendous peeping and quacking from the backyard as the ducks decide en masse that it's time to go to bed, at which point they shuffle back across the yard up to the stairs, and hop and flop their way up the steps (it's remarkable to see ducklings doing this). We open the porch door, and they peep/quack/waddle their way through our porch back into their pen. If we merely open the porch door and then take the liberty of going back in the house to finish whatever we were doing while they go into their pen by themselves, they emit a very special, nasal, high-pitched, URGENT peep, which means that YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO STAY WITH US UNTIL WE MAKE IT ALL THE WAY INTO OUR PEN, THANKYOUVERYMUCH!!! Once they're in their pen and the door's closed, we're at liberty to do whatever we please.

Life is good.

Astray

Been astray. Rearing kids. Raising a new batch of chicks to replace the hens we lost over the past year, plus five ducklings just for fun. Getting all my spring seedlings into the garden and weeded, keeping an eye on this year's resident birds in our birdhouses. Spending time with my husband and keeping our relationship alive and happy. Cooking, cleaning. Life.

I turned 35 this spring. Turning this particular age has been a doozy. Twenty-seven was a big one for me, too: leaving my early 20's and approaching 30 without a partner, without a career, without having traveled as much as I'd always thought I would have by that age. But where 27 was mostly about taking stock of what I'd accomplished so far in this life, 35 has got me taking a good look at exactly how far into this life I've already come. I'm accustomed to thinking of myself as "a young person," and now, 35 staring me straight in the face, I'm realizing that that's just not true anymore. I'm not a young person. I'm as old as the folks I used to babysit for when I was "a young person."

It's calling for a shift in my concept of myself, and at the same time is forcing me to reconcile with my mortality. I'm no longer in the start of this life, I may be halfway through it already!

Day Fourteen: Writing Break

Sat out tonight with the lass. Giving myself a writing break for the evening.

Day Thirteen: Sick

No sit tonight. Doing taxes + sick with a bad cold + raining out = me going to bed instead.

Day Twelve: Awakening

Out with the babe again at dusk today. Today she listened and looked intently around, then nursed and slept in her sling, which left me free to focus my attention on my senses. I sat in the yard again today, since I can't ascend the tree with her, but tonight I easily maintained my focus on the happenings around me rather than on the happenings inside my head.

Many cars, and many robins singing a couple different types of songs. Made me eager to learn bird language some day. Their short, quick squeak of a call - is that their alarm call? They would do that one from tree to tree, seemingly saying it back and forth to one another, but another bird kept singing a lovely fluid song in the midst of all of them, and didn't seem alarmed by the robins.

I am finding that the stillness I experienced last night was fairly easy to tap into when I began my sit tonight. I remember that right about in the middle of the challenge was when this happened last year, as well. It feels as though I've awoken my senses thoroughly enough to be able to call on them more rapidly, helping me move into a "sensing" state and out of my "doing" state. I've also found tonight that I've "remembered myself" (to use Gurdjieff's phrase), or remembered to check in with where my attention was, quite frequently even after coming into the house, so my awareness is starting to reawaken in the other areas of my life now, too - not just during my sits.

Day Eleven: Entering the Forest

Sat by myself in the tree this afternoon for twenty minutes.

Moved vaguely through the sense meditation and then began sitting without putting any conscious effort into any type of awareness. I found that my thoughts kept taking over my awareness, marching on and on. I hit a point where I felt like my whole gift of a sit was going to be for naught because I couldn't even name one sensory or spiritual experience I'd had. Despite my brief sense meditation, it seemed as if I'd spent almost the whole sit lost in thought.

So I went through the sense meditation again, just as quickly as before, but far more deliberately, forcing myself to really explore the reaches of each sense: what I could hear in front of me, to my right/left/above/below, etc. When I'd finished, I worked at combining them, and as I did so, I experienced the same sort of kaleidescopic vision that I remember having last summer (wrote about it here in my blog). In this type of vision, all of the pine needles and branches, when viewed with my peripheral vision, seem to fuse and create hundreds of sheets of movement, akin to the way looking through water can play with our visual perception of things.

I found my body become very, very still without my having to work at it, and when neighbors appeared in thier yard, it was the most natural thing in the world for me to tun my head a millimeter at a time. The idea of jerking my head around to see what was happening seemed foreign. It felt that I had become part of the forest, just another tree resting against my white pine, such stillness did I find within myself.