Sweet Advent Season To You All

On a Dark and Stormy Night....

A sweet farm girl

Slipped on her super decoder spy necklace

and became

Goth Girl

Defender of Pink Princesses and
white fluffy puppies
everywhere.

To Our Friends on the Other Side

What About Your Inheritance?

Ilona's Response:

To some inheritance means that when a relative dies they will receive a portion, or all, of the late relatives possessions. Money, land, or slaves. To others it means priceless memories. Extraordinary, or maybe just ordinary turned extraordinary, keepsakes.
Sometimes inheritance means the simple matter of blue eyes from a blue eyed mother, brown hair from a brown haired father, a crooked tooth from a crooked toothed grandfather.
Once I had land, keepsakes, a dowry to inherit. No slaves, my Papa did not hold with such abhorrence.
The only thing I stand to inherit now are a rickety wagon, two tired horses, five dogs, and a bow. And that has to be shared with three brothers and a sister. Though a large part of me is filled with bitterness and sorrow for what we lost, I do recognize what we have now.
I do recognize the import of these things I have inherited. The soft foot step, so soft not even the sharp eared lynxes can hear me; that is from Papa. The rock hard steadiness of my hands, the swift clarity of decision; that comes from my mother. My dark look from my dark father and grandfather. And the curse of dreams from my beloved Nana.
Yes, these details of myself, these substances of myself that no one can
take, these are my inheritance.

Excerpt from Assignment #2: Inheritance:

"For your second prompt, please explore the nature of inheritance. What did your character inherit from her ancestors? Start with the physical things, perhaps hair color or right/left hand preference. Which elder passed on those glorious eyes? Did perhaps those same beautifully colored eyes come with less than perfect vision? If so, did glasses become their frame or their disguise and how was that choice affected by the attitude/behavior of the original bearer? This same perspective can be applied to so many of the gifts and even so-called curses we inherit from our family....

After exploring what your character has inherited, find some quiet time and space where you can imagine what one thing you would give as a legacy to your great grandchild. As straightforward as this sounds, I have experienced the most transformational meditation around this question.... This vision is like a picture I carry around in my heart locket. Every decision is weighed against that picture, each choice is compared to the unspeakable joy and rock solid love of that moment. However this meditation manifests for you, find a way for your character to make it real. Build it right into the fabric of her being so that her choices are impacted by the determination to achieve that legacy."

.

Your Life, Your Story, Let's Get Started

Alicia's Response:

"I've put the memory of that night away like a room with one door in and one door out. So clearly do I remember being the girl who stands outside that room, hand on the doorknob, ready for anything. Funny, when people say that..."ready for anything"...they don't really mean anything. They mean a happily-ever-after, tall, dark, and handsome or short, blonde, and rich kind of anything. They certainly don't mean crushing terror or retching pain. They don't mean death.

That girl who stands there one hand on the door knob and one hand on her hip, tossing a fat glossy braid over her shoulder, she certainly wasn't expecting that truck to come out of nowhere, barreling down a hill with no road, smashing into her car with no warning. In fact, when she opens the door and walks into that experience, that memory I don't think of, she tells herself "I didn't see it coming."

The girl on the other side of that room, through the Out Door, the one missing a hand, she makes sure she sees everything. her fat glossy braid lies heavy down the middle of her back. Her hand presses back against the door, holding it shut, pushing herself forward. She is not ready. But that's okay.

Because she will be. No matter how many more rooms she has to live through, next time, she will be ready.

Excerpt from Assignment #25: Experience as a Room

You’ve been with your character for several adventures and quiet moments alike by now. I’d like for you to pick one or two and imagine them as a room with two doors – one exclusively for entrance and the other exclusively for exiting. Take a while to get a comfortable image going because you are going to walk your character right smack into the middle of the scene....

When you have the scene clearly and lushly imagined, place your character outside the In Door. You may be able to feel their anticipation as their hand rests upon the door knob. This experience, this room, will change them. Your job is to record those changes. Begin by feeling deeply into the character to identify their Before portrait. You have the benefit of knowing the experience that awaits them and even how your character responded to the individual elements of the experience. Quickly, without over-analyzing, check into those memories and awareness of your character Before they entered the room."

Buy Assignment #25 $10.00

I admitted to my homeschooled daughters a particular weakness in my own research skills. For good or bad, I tend to be obsessive in my investigation until I have found atleast one respected source that agrees with me. In my defense, all facts and opinions get fair consideration in the final analysis - I'm just not satisfied until part of the sampling of other opinions includes one that looks like mine.

Very often, this other source has been able to articulate my thoughts and feelings far better than I had, bringing clarity and expansion as well as familiarity. Such is the case with Dmitry Orlov's latest post on Club Orlov. If you've not read much of his work, time spent cruising around his blog will be well worth it. Mr. Orlov brings the task of Journey School Stories right into your lap with this excerpt:

But there is also an alternative: compose your own fiction instead of accepting anyone else's, then go ahead and turn it into reality. A good first step might be to write a short story. It can be very short, and it doesn't even have to be particularly interesting. Something as trivial as this might do for starters: “The next morning she woke up and, instead of having a bagel with cream cheese and a cup of coffee for breakfast, she fasted until sundown.” And then, the next morning, she woke up, and something curious happened: this short story came to life, and so it came to pass. Next came other stories, each a bit longer than the previous one, bridging the present and the future in new ways, and eventually spanning decades. And as these decades rolled by, these stories too came to life.

This, as I see it, is the best way forward in a depressed and increasingly demented and accident-prone country that is heading straight for collapse, where the present (reality, what people think is going on, common notions of the state of things) is degenerating into useless noise—the clamor of clueless but self-important people desperately begging you to continue giving them your attention, so that they can stuff your head with more “B”-rated trash. But if you ignore them long enough, they will go away. Don't hope, don't wish, don't dream, but do write your own fiction and use it to create a present that works for you. Invent places for yourself and for those you care about in your stories about the future, and then go ahead and live in them.

Towards this goal, we will begin posting excerpts from our own Journey School Character Development program. While we'd love to have you as full-fledged participants complete with your own character and seasonal gifts, this task is too important to each of us, to all of us, to make it solely contingent on the exchange of money. Each week, we'll post a bit of the Assignment for free, offer the purchase of a full PDF of the single Assignment for $10, or of course, the entire 26 Assignment program with Character and gifts for $300. Our family has been working through this program for personal healing and character development in our own fiction for quite some time. So, we'll also share our responses here on the blog and hosted on our website www.luckyfarm.us in character specific collections.

See you next week for the beginning of your unique story!

Assignment #1

We've decided to share with you all excerpts from our Journey School Stories character development workshop. Zoe is first up with her response to Assignment #1, Childhood Memories. Best wishes, Lisa.

by Zoe Mathias

My name is Ilona Evenfrese.

When I was but a tiny infant, I remember being warm, and my mother was singing to me. Rocking back and forth, humming a soft lulling lullaby. Whenever I hear her singing it now I cannot understand the smooth guttural growling words, but though I can't quite recall the words I know I understood them then.

Smells waft through the warm air, isolated to the house by bars of icicles.

Nana and Inga are making bread. Sweet ginger bread with just a pinch of grape root ,"Shh Ilona, don't tell anyone. It's an Evenfrese secret.”

Let's see, a touch memory. Ah, that's it. When I was five years old my baby sister Maeve was born. That morning my Nana and Papa gave me a beautiful purple wool dress. I could feel the springy hairs of wool itching gently against my skin. That night Papa took me in to see Mama and baby Maeve. The baby had the softest skin, so soft I could hardly tell she was real.

I was just old enough to pull the string back on my little bow the first time Papa took me out with him and my big brothers. My father hunts at night, like the big cats. I met an owl that first time, as my Papa and brothers crept ahead. He caught me with his yellow gaze, and he whispered his name to me, the small word floated by my ears, carried by a silent wind.

For as long as I can remember that fleeting time that is between winter and spring is my favorite season. It seems like such a magical time, where life is waking up from a cold, death like sleep. The trees are stretching and reaching from skeletons in to lovely flowing creatures. When every gray has a tinge of pink, green, orange, red, purple, and yellow.

The bees buzz, and my tongue tastes again the absent flavor of gold, mellow reassurance that is honey.

I was eleven when they came. It was a clear October day, the kind of day that gets people ready for frost. They wore black coats with the insignia of a powerful, bloody house. A red boar with a long jagged scar carved into its shoulder. They threatened death if we didn't leave, and as good with a knife as my father was, he was a peaceful man. We left with one wagon filled with us, my brothers' dogs, my sister's cat, and a few dear things.

A month after we were exiled, my Nana disappeared. We looked high and low, but we did not find her. A week later I dreamed my Nana was in our ancestral graveyard. She was fighting one, two, three, four guards. As she put her old kitchen knife in one guard's belly, another drove a long bladed hunting knife in her side. Her red blood stained the snow over my grandfather's grave.

The next day a loyal family friend gave us the news that my Nana was dead, killed in our graveyard, but not before she gutted one of her attackers.

From that night on I have asked every god in the other world for a dreamless sleep.

€

Welcome Home Honey May

We brought home our newest member of Journey School way back on June 3rd. It's seems paradoxically impossible to believe that it has been an entire month ago and at the same time, that she has not always been with us.








Our own little MaryLou was only a week old when Honey May was born at the small dairy next door. We'd spoken for the calf (if it would turn out to be a heifer calf) as soon as we knew the cow had been bred. We had been expecting a black calf and were quite excited at the idea of white, red, and black calves on our little farm. Our neighbor gave us a call early Saturday, May 29th -- a beautiful honey colored heifer calf was born that morning to her all black mama. After chores and coffee, we hurried over to meet our new baby. So soft, so sweet, so light colored!

Even earlier Sunday morning, we got another call from our neighbor - a call for help. Honey May's mom was down with Milk Fever. You may have never heard of milk fever, indeed we had not until exactly one week before when our sweet Gjynni was hit with the terrifying malady. I didn't blog about that. It shook me to my core for days afterward - honestly, I was nearly incoherent and still have difficulty finding words real enough to describe the experience.

Let me start slowly and I'll try not to lose my breath again. Milk fever especially effects dairy cows - within a day of calving, their bodies receive the signal "Need Milk!!" and they go into overdrive to produce milk for their baby. Sometimes, for complicated causes, their bodies demand more and more and more milk. Calcium is pulled from every source - blood, bone, organs - and the cow becomes rapidly, fatally chemically imbalanced.

We had been planting potatoes in our little inherited garden when I noticed Gjynni looking....... wrong. I mentioned my concern to everyone and asked that we all keep an eye on her. Within half an hour, we were leading her to a smaller pasture with more shade, offering kelp, salt, mineral block and a bucket of fresh water. Another 15 minutes later and I ran to the house to call our vet. He couldn't make it for an hour. We called our neighbors. By the grace of god, they came immediately bringing experience, knowledge, and calcium. At this time, I could have simply pushed over our gorgeous 1800 pound unflappable curious girl. If we didn't hold onto her halter, she just wandered in circles, becoming more and more unsteady and disoriented.

With increasing desperation, we offered everything in our toolbox of natural medicine - minerals, herbs, homeopathics and Reiki. It was actually in giving the Reiki that I began to lose my grounding. Gjynni simply felt less and less there. I have treated injury and disease under intense circumstances but never have I known that death was quietly waiting to step in the very next moment. And there was nothing I could do to stop it. There was no bleeding, no fever, no respiratory distress to be mitigated. She was simply dying and I couldn't stop it.

Our vet, however, could. He arrived within what I sincerely believe was minutes of losing Gjynni and immediately administered intravenous calcium. As quickly as she began walking away with death, she returned to us. Within about 45 minutes, she was standing solid if still not quite all better. It took a full day and a half before we let her go unobserved for more than a couple of hours. And believe me, we learned about Milk Fever and gathered all the tools we had no idea we needed just two days prior.

So when Linda called, we mobilized. Within 15 minutes, we had the cow propped upright, administered two tubes of oral calcium, had the liquid calcium warming in a bucket of water, and were loading the two syringes for subcutaneous injection. Our vet still had to come to the farm to administer calcium intravenously but death itself was never paged. The emotional difference in the two events is inconceivable.

I was reminded during that week of when we dehorned our bull calf Quincy. Honestly, if you believe you want and need to hone your first responder crisis skills, get a family cow. We have learned more, and learned more completely, about disease and injury by living closely with our animals than through any training or workshop. I think because these animals mean so much to us both practically and emotionally and yet are not valued in the same way by the rest of our culture (you can't call 911 for a cow), our level of stewardship simply must reach higher levels. I am proud of all that we have learned, proud of my amazing family, and drop-to-my-knees humbled and grateful for the resilience of our animal partners.

On a side note, Quincy grew up just fine. He's now the expectant father of not one but three calves next Spring and likely three more next Summer. While he probably won't be a long-term resident of Journey School, he has done his job beautifully and we are glad to have known him.

This Time Is Different

One more post in response to the Gulf Oil disaster and then we want to introduce you to our second new calf. This article particularly caught my attention because it was published in the New York Times. Not a left wing bleeding heart blog or a radical environmental magazine but the NEW YORK TIMES for pete's sake. Maybe, maybe, we will finally get it. I hope you have time to read the entire article but if not, Mr. Mykleby's letter makes a very clear point.

“I’d like to join in on the blame game that has come to define our national approach to the ongoing environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. This isn’t BP’s or Transocean’s fault. It’s not the government’s fault. It’s my fault. I’m the one to blame and I’m sorry. It’s my fault because I haven’t digested the world’s in-your-face hints that maybe I ought to think about the future and change the unsustainable way I live my life. If the geopolitical, economic, and technological shifts of the 1990s didn’t do it; if the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 didn’t do it; if the current economic crisis didn’t do it; perhaps this oil spill will be the catalyst for me, as a citizen, to wean myself off of my petroleum-based lifestyle. ‘Citizen’ is the key word. It’s what we do as individuals that count. For those on the left, government regulation will not solve this problem. Government’s role should be to create an environment of opportunity that taps into the innovation and entrepreneurialism that define us as Americans. For those on the right, if you want less government and taxes, then decide what you’ll give up and what you’ll contribute. Here’s the bottom line: If we want to end our oil addiction, we, as citizens, need to pony up: bike to work, plant a garden, do something. So again, the oil spill is my fault. I’m sorry. I haven’t done my part. Now I have to convince my wife to give up her S.U.V. Mark Mykleby.”

Who Tortured the Pelicans

Who Tortured the Pelicans?
We did.
I did.
When I drove to the store to buy chips and cheese and maple syrup.
Do you know how much fuel is burned to make syrup from sap?
Do you know the entire path from subterranean oil pockets to plastic wrap?
I do. And still I drive to the store.

I could tell you I have no choice.
What a big fat stinking lie.
I have a hundred options.
Some are hard. Others are even harder.
The easy ones are made easy by surrendering to the tide
of a million feet following a path set down as
The right way, the real world.
This path leads to a slimy red beach covered
with slaughtered pelicans.

But I am just one little ol' gal - I'm just a
Drop in the bucket. I cannot
Save the pelicans. Can I?
I can save maybe one pelican. Just like my
Child is one child. Her life would be worth
Choosing a different path. Or so I've prayed.
Please god, spare this one child.

Is one life worth following the hard choice?
Will I never eat maple syrup again?
I don't know, is it worth a pelican's life?

Stop Protesting, Begin Thinking

I'm going to take a break from our regularly scheduled happiness. It would be wrong not to do so.

The news is full of "protests" - protesters advocating a boycott of BP gas stations, protesters angry at Israel's latest attack and justification, protesters demanding that Arizona behave as if they didn't indeed have unbearable crises they must address, protesters wanting the government to step in use a nuclear bomb to stop the flow of oil into the once rich Gulf, for God's sake. Every protester wants someone else to make things better, better according to their own perspective of how things should be.

Enough.

My heart aches so badly, I rant rather than speak. Fortunately, Fe at planetwaves.net is more than capable of speaking the words we each MUST hear.

There has been an incredible series of risks and innovations that have moved the world from the industrial to the virtual age. We’ve gone from steam engines to 4G networks in little over 100 years. We have invented ourselves to a place where we’ve eliminated distance between people on different continents, changed night into perpetual day and made the leap past our planet’s gravitational field into another part of our solar system. We have been supermen in that we have overcome the known boundaries of the world, exceeding well past them.

Longing for a new horizon has been hard wired in the consciousness of this country since it began, and indeed into the consciousness of humanity. Once we found our way to our furthest western shore, we unfortunately brought that consciousness to other nations, assuming it was our manifest destiny to use others’ resources to feed our material ambitions. We have gotten used to exploring the new boundaries: space, power, energy, chemistry, knowing that miracle cure, that mystic power, that marvelous new thing — regardless the cost to ourselves and others — was just around the corner. Our needs and ambitions have far exceeded our planet’s capacity to cope and right now, there is no horizon but deep water. We haven’t invented anything yet that can save us from ourselves.

I’m not advocating halting our quest to knowledge and innovation. On the contrary, we need to constantly improve the quality of our lives. But that improvement is not going to be from our gadgets, toys and vehicles or for that matter our energy sources. Our improvement needs to be in the quality of our thoughts and feelings, which affect how we live. It begins not with a product but with me. I need to take a look at what I’ve been thinking and reacting to and realize that I must confront my consumerism, my vanity, my insecurity and my desire to isolate myself from people different from me. This is more than just about driving too much. Its about what I spend my time on, what I’m chasing around pointlessly for, and what cost these pursuits have on our world.

Part Three: Hope Defined

by RaeLani Mathias

Hope is a primary color. It has a lot of smaller words under it, like other smaller colors. All those other smaller colors are easier to define but when you try to define a primary color, it's a lot harder. It isn't easy to define the primary color because you can define the bottom colors with the primary. But when you try to define a primary color you can't use the bottom colors because they aren't big enough to explain or even express the primary color because the primary color is so powerful.

Hope is one of the main building blocks for our world's society. It seems to glue things together in a way that no one can see, but just encourages a feeling that life will be okay. It gives comfort to those who are scared.

Hope is a word that most people use - like a person who hopes for a better day tomorrow for things to start a new way, and a person who hopes for a good harvest.

I have hope for two things right now. Hope that the government can get its act together before something bad happens, and hope that my mom doesn't give me another essay like this one again.

I think hope is important. It gives a sense of strength and a will to break free from what holds you down.

Meet the newest member of Journey School

For Morty Sunshine's first birthday he got a little sister! Marylou [pronounced mar-YUH LOE] Hope Stanfield nee Kruckman was born on May 15^th, almost exactly one year after her brother. He was born around four in the afternoon, she was born around five. Not only do these two share a birthday, but their mama, Gjynni, decided to have both of them when we were gone.

Marylou has a last name of Stanfield because we had left that morning for the district track meet which was held in Stanfield. We were gone all day and didn't get back until seven pm. Our neighbor told us that Gr, Rae's livestock guardian dog, started barking around five, heralding Marylou's arrival into our world.

Marylou is named after the donkey in the movie Holes. As the story goes, Marylou was over one hundred years old, and really liked onions. We're hoping Marylou the calf doesn't eat too many onions when she comes in to milk. We pronounce Marylou as mar-YUh LOE because in the movie Stanley Yelnats is teaching Hector “Zero” Zaroni to read and at one point in the movie Zero and Stanley take cover under a boat named Marylou. But because Zero is just learning to read, he pronounces it with all the letter sounds.

It's one of our top favorite movies and we had a hard time choosing between Marylou, Kissin' Kate Barlow, or Anabel Lee. If she had been a boy we would have named her Theodore or 'Arm pit'.

She's named Hope 'cause this kind of hope is as vulnerable and as vital as our little calf.

Part 2, Hope Defined

by Jeff Mathias

In our continuing exploration of our family's definition of Hope, here is Jeff's offering. Click on the title of the song to listen to the version we first fell in love with from the movie "Thelma and Louise". The lyrics are below. While you're enjoying the tune, please scroll through to see some of our photos we believe illustrate Hope.

House of Hope by Toni Childs

Children laugh

Children cry
They're the future of our time
Will they hold us to blame
For all the things we've turned away
I don't like what i see now
I don't like where we're going
I don't like it, no
You and i, we're getting older now
You and i, who will show them
If we don't show them how

I want to know is it true
Is there a house of hope for me and you
I want to know is it true
Is there a house of hope for me and you

Children laugh
Children cry
They're the ones who will survive
Will they know what we've sold
Nature's gift we've turned for gold
I don't like what i see now
In my life, what i see now
I don't like where we're going
I don't like it, no
You and i, we're getting older now
You and i, who will show them
If we don't show them how


In this house of hope
In this house of hope
In this house of hope

You and i, we're getting older now
You and i, who will show them if we
Don't show them how