Darwin's Thick Baloney-Fried Bread Cheddar Cheese Green Chili Sandwich

"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world..." Charles Darwin

The last few weeks have been spent immersed in cultural activities and traditional song and dance; the world around me has been very scattered because of bouncing from linearity to metaphorical thoughts. Add the community into that picture and you have a very powerful mixture of prayer - in sound, in physicality, in the mental and in the emotional - it doesn't get any bigger or better than this.

However, it has caused me (as always) to question the thoughts that linger into the wee hours of the night as I listen to the 10,000 songs that are to be learned.

I feel that the Pueblos of the southwest have maintained a strong connection to ceremonies of the old that have passed from generation to generation, from society to man to child. It has been a successful process until the last twenty years as generations of children have grown up in front of a T.V. which has literally destroyed the voice to ear to mind thought practice. It has created a strange hybridized way of learning which is still odd for the generation ahead of them. However, they are creating a way of teaching that is maintaining something of value. With every generation goes the proper knowledge and the songs and the speech patterns.

It's been sad to see the last of the old-timers leaving and to hear their voices pleading in speech to hold on to the old. It's heartbreaking. Why? Because it is old and I think every generation goes through these conflicts - fighting to keep what is changing to stay the same, but logically nothing ever stays as we want it to stay and even the old-timers of today were, in their own youth, being told the same things about aspects of loss and change. Yet somehow we have survived in sisterhood and brotherhood. We admire what is still here and what is maintained is still very big and complex and is to be revered.

But... if the language isn't being learned and the inflictions aren't proper inflictions then what survives?

That is the question...

What will survive?

Even the earth with all the rain we've been having isn't enough. The water is not as clean and as abundant.

The old village is a ghost town after 5:00 pm and that's where the hearth of the people is.

The food we crave now is destroying the mental prowess of the people.

The consumption of all the negativity: food, booze, pills, radiation etc... has found a way into our kivas.

I have always said that we are an endangered, enraged, ingrained species slowly fading out of its own existence like the Passenger Pigeon or the Baiji river dolphin.

Mankind, everyone included, has the honor of being the most destructive force to ever hit Mother Earth.

Humans have lent a helping hand too by over hunting and over population, driving a species to extinction is nothing to be proud of and it’s certainly not slowing down. We have failed is how I feel at times and the death of us all would be better. However, we are still here. Yet to see the end of the tunnel or the light at the end of the tunnel is futile. Something drastic is about to happen and will happen or maybe it already has begun and there's nothing we can do about.

The earth, our mother, is waking up. She is slowly turning over to see what has been happening.

We are living and loving in some interesting times - the most amazing times known to man.

We were chosen for this time - to struggle, to help, to fight, to love, to breed, to sing, to dance, to cry, to eat, to invent, to die.

I'm not afraid of change and I'm not afraid of being hurt or hurting, it's the craving of all the crazy ass things we have invented that bothers me.

I don't need a better, smarter phone. I'm too stupid but I want one.
I don't need another Mac computer but it would be nice to download more shit I don't need.
I don't need another car but damn it my neighbor just got one.
I don't need a flat screen T.V. I live in a round world but it would be nice to see Bonaza in HD.
I don't need a green chili cheese baloney fried-bread sandwich but... it tastes so damn good.

Many thoughts, my friend, as I go through hours of contemplation listening to thousand year old songs still being sung with a guttural voice bred a thousand years ago to be sung on this rainy night of August 24, 2012. I guess it boils down to this.

WE'RE STILL HERE! ---> THAT'S WHAT MATTER'S!!!

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change. Darwin

Anyone for a Darwin sandwich?

Friendship is a Crazy-Demon Lover

trouble easily finds the wandering soul, 
find the shoulder of a friend to make you feel whole.
maybe all she will do is listen,
create the moments of thought that glisten.

because the grey-journey is yours not hers,
the paths of darkness trails forged with tears.
where even love fears to tread the road,
and you're left alone with the load.

the fearless light is the thought of a friend,
wading through the wet cold nights at the end.
her warm hands greet your great return,
her smile awakens that fire that burns.

It helps to ask the question, "help me pull through,"
at times she may not be able to do so.
cries and tears can only be faced sometimes with knowing,
that at least there is a friend of a fiery-heart who is there glowing.

blessed are the friends that journey with us in silence,
as we drag through the doldrums of our ambivalence.
when in the devils of the world come forth with swords of impending end,
we can battle them cloaked in armor with a friend.

~ Mirabal

I don't have many friends but I do know many people (I do have thousands of friends... on my Facebook. Heehee.)

I choose to be alone most times. I guess it's always been that way and that's probably why I don't have many friends. I'm not a pot-head, I'm not much of drinker either, and so that leaves out the hardcore dudes from the village. Heehee.

Also because of my profession, and my extreme nature, I usually just hang alone. It's not that I'm curt or aloof rather I'm a pretty happy-go-lucky, friendly guy. It's just that friendship has its rewards and sadness just like everything else I guess.

I've heard that a best friend can be your worst enemy and the best thing for an enemy is to turn him into a friend. That being said, it's pretty damn hard to fathom mentally because it takes work, even years, to create friendship and it only takes a minute to destroy it.

My best friends have always been my blood family and my family has always just been there through thick and thin. By family I mean my mom, sister and my brother. Through the rock star days they were there and even spent a few nights in the mosh pits; through the angry teenage days my sister and mom tolerated the bullshit; through the farming days they were there... My blood family is the core of my life and now my girls - the Mirabal sisters - are so awesome, so unique and they're fighters too.

Mirabal sisters

As a boy I spent time with a skinny, sunburnt kid named "Funny" (not his real name). He was actually my hunting partner. We would hunt birds in the summer, hide from the irrigation work in his grandpa's apple orchard. We shared bowls of beans, watched Gilligan's Island on a battery operated T.V., found laughter at shooting at his cousins, had pig rodeos with grandpa's black and white saddle-back sow. He would make me laugh because he could imitate any old guy from the Pueblo and make helicopter machine gun sounds at the same time perfectly. As the years went by our hunting changed and we eventually parted ways.

My cousin Paul moved back to the Pueblo from Denver so he became my new hand-fishing, apple tossing, adobe-slinging friend and he was built like a wiry pit-bull.

"Funny" got in to pot smoking and drinking his grandpa's stash of Capulin-vino. By the time he was 13 he was a hard drinker. I see him every once in a while; his fat belly holding up an antique vibe of  a bike which he calls his burro-dodge.

Friendship is a bittersweet friend and she is also a wild and crazy one that never, and always, will let you down. You will wait for her forever and she will come when you least expect her.

She is also evil. She makes you smoke things that make the world go squirrelly. She will put the fear of death into you and make you cry your eyes out. She will laugh at you and make you laugh.

We as humans are lost without friends and it's friends that find us.

60 years from now when we're old and grey I will ask "Funny" to make that helicopter sound and imitate his grandpa looking for us in the corn fields.

With love and honor and friendship.

Your faithful servant,

Mirabal

Double Sitter or One Sitter? Friendship Holes & Hangin' With Da Man

Okay, so now I've gone off my rocker from too many days in the sun.

Let me start at the beginning.

The last few days have been spent collaborating with eight 15-16 year old young men, and their history teacher, from the San Francisco Bay area who decided to come as a group to hang with "Da Mirabal Man" before their school starts. 

They all wanted to experience a few days in the wild, wild west. The first night they camped out in my back yard next to the Rio Pueblo. Needless to say, as things unfold in the unexpected, it rained the most it has rained this summer that night and flooded them out.  Some slept in their van. Ugh, city boys -  freaking out, but surviving.

I have them on a regimen.  Each day starts out with a run in the semi flats on the edge of the gorge. There are amazing views but it was a bit extreme starting them out inside the gorge and then having them climb uphill to the top and cross trekking through sage brush lined trails. It's amazing! You can run for miles and never finish a run. The stronger you get the longer the trail becomes.

We lost our first young man this morning. He went back home after two nights and a day. I'll admit the runs are intense but not as intense as the middle-field work they're doing.

Middle field, AKA Heavy-Water, AKA Poison ivy area

A bit of history on the middle field (aka heavy-water-area) North of the Taos Pueblo - the one my partner Nelson Zink with Tiwa Farms is working on. It was the land that my Grandma Crucita cultivated as a young girl.  She was the youngest girl of four and when her older sister got married their father gave it to the bride as a present. Pissed my Grandma off because her sister's old man lost it in a fight when he stabbed a man and in compensation he offered the victim a 30-30 rifle and his wife's land instead of giving up his own.

For many years it was used for alfalfa and as a wheat producer by another family until I got it back about ten years ago. Grandma said, "I'm glad it's yours since I picked off all those rocks in that field..."

That's a bit of family history which reads much like the Hatfield's and the McCoys (but try the Lujan's and the Romero's... Heehee).

Anyway, from about 10:00 a.m. or so, after the sagebrush run, the boys and I go up to the field and start with the weeding - hand-pulling infestations of weeds that are swallowing up the much needed nutrients. Since the rows of corn have only been cultivated between the rows, and not between the corn, the weeds will still grow intensely up against the rows of corn. There's everything from morning glory to brown-eyed-susans to bind-weed to wild-spinach. There are even jungle looking weeds with fairy balls that carry little chili smelling seeds along the wind. Go figure. But these weeds can easily swallow up a harvest like a science fiction story...

Not at all easy work for the faint of heart, especially for one that has never actually seen how corn grows and have only seen it in grocery stores all pretty and shit. Often within the process they wander back to the van and drink up the water. It's funny and yet still demanding, it's mindless but yet an art form. It gives them moments of reflection and contemplation.

It gives me a field that doesn't get lost.

Moon over middle field

So where does the outhouse come into play?

Well, having eight boys in the house is weird for me because I'm typically always surrounded by feminine energy. I realize how much more they eat, how much more toilet paper they use, how much more energy they display on all levels. I felt a bit sorry for my Mom for just a moment (heehee).

We started talking about outhouses. I thought it was an intriguing subject since I grew up with them as a young boy and man. Grandma didn't get electricity until 1984 and water a few years after that (I think it was 1990). The San Francisco boys never imagined doing the number two holding their little baby cousin so he wouldn't fall in or having a little moment of conversation time with your Grandpa sitting next to you or almost burning down the wall trying to keep warm in the winter.  Some of the outhouses even had three holes. It was a pretty good idea with a huge family of boys to keep the smell away from the house, have no plug ups and no arguments on who is next. In fact, I thought for a moment of digging an old style double sitter just in case more of these CITY-BOYS wanna spend time WIT DA MAN...

Have fun and ALWAYS reach for the outer limits...

As always your humble servant,

MIRABAL

never this bad..

like old times

heehee

Believe In The Corn, Raccoons & Christian Rock

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change..." Charles Darwin

Okay, so how do I begin? The other afternoon I went down to the lower field and found evidence that some "water dogs" or el mapache or raccoons or coons, or whatever you wanna call them since they are a nuisance, were chewing on the tops of some fresh milking white corn.

Evidence of El mapache'

I hear many people throw the word Sustainability around like it's the latest big syllable catch word to dribble out the mouth and down the tongue.

Whatever context it is used in the word Fearless should be in front of that word.  Anybody who understands, and has committed themselves to acreages of land to cultivate, knows that to be sustainable is not enough. You must also be fearless to choose a life that is dictated by the earth and her changes can make you well up with all kinds of emotion: sadness, overwhelm, discouragement, anger, happiness, you name it. Earth work and the commitment to earth work has a reward that is only experienced by the few who know what it's like to fight through failure, stones, droughts, temperature fluctuations and, of course, bears and el mapache.

He just eats the new sweet milky part

They are the ones who are fearless; fearless-sustainable people like the old-timers.

We are only a smudging of our ancestors who carved out rows of clay and rocks only to reap a poor harvest that got infested with bugs and scorched during drought conditions. Me? Personally, as much as I would want to live in those days, there would be no way I could ever imagine the hardships that they went through. It seems all romantic and so contented in all the old black and white pictures I have.

It's a wonder they only lived to be around 45 or 50.  I would have been on my death bed by now if I lived in those times. Farming on the Pueblo hasn't changed too much. The corn is the same, the earth is the same, the acequias and the water wars are still the same. It's the people who have changed with their modern implements which help those weekend warrior farmers reap a good harvest.

To believe in the corn and the aspects of farming you can not take the easy out and expect the easy to replace it with a sometimes easy answer. That births an even more difficult task in the end.

Corn has been grown in the Southwest for a long, long time. It gave rise to the Pueblos. The fundamental basis for Puebloan culture is corn. Corn is culture. Puebloans, even in today's shadowy self, are corn people.
The Pueblo people have been successful farmers for centuries in an area of difficult climate conditions. Their success is due to many factors, among them using well adapted planting techniques and crops, advance irrigation techniques, and the successful transmission of knowledge from Pueblo to Pueblo and from generation to generation.

And... as knowledge goes, I just pulled out a very long extension cord to reach down to the south field, plugged in a radio and tuned it to some AM station that specialized in some Christian rock interspersed with some bible talk show. Either it will scare the shit out of the el mapache or he will be one well-versed theologian Coon.

If that doesn't work I'll change perspective and switch to the station where the heavy metal devil music can be played all night and lay out some traps. I hear water dogs love marshmallows.

I will keep you posted on this event, as the world turns and twists.

Much like the raccoon and the corn that grows in the high-mountain desert we have survived through many changes and deaths and have rebirthed out of all this to become the powerful, gutless, fearless, wild, wildest men that the west has ever seen.

"Bring it on... it only makes me stronger..."

Stretching out for the down hill ride to the harvest

Strong field of Taos Pueblo white and Peruvian cross pollination (some are over 10 feet tall)

White corn oddities

Another oddity good medicine.

Once again, my friends, be strong, fearless, and watch the sunrise and sunset. Pray for me and I shall pray for you.

Love,
Mirabal