The Four Agreements

This comes from The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom, A Toltec Wisdom Book by Don Miguel Ruiz. I hope to instill these philosophies to my children by example.

Be Impeccable With Your Word: Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.

Don't Take Anything Personally: Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering.

Don't Make Assumptions: Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness, and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.

Always Do Your Best: Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse, and regret. 

 Sophia riding Molly

Build, Grow, Love, Be.

Great progress has been made on the rabbit hutches and they may get finished tonight instead of tomorrow. Caleb is here helping. Yes, he is back again. :-) Anyway, they will be strong and secure and a good clean way to keep the woolies. That is my latest name for the collective rabbits. Tomorrow I will build a grooming table and the get to the slow process of cleaning and trimming. I need to take photos too!

I have a ton of more seeding to do. However, I did some more thinning of my broccolli starts and silly me I can't just pull up the little tender extras without attempting to re-root them. I feel like I am wasting when I thin them out. All the instructions tell you to do this, but for some reason I can't toss them. I will see how lucky I am in a few days. I will be selling and trading some of my plants. To my friends and family here in WV, just let me know if you need early plants. I am using organic soil. The plants are being raised with care and are infused with love. Plus I will beat the nursery's price. I will update you on my starts and when I will have early summer plants.

I also have fertile eggs if you want to incubate them yourself. Baby chicks will be coming every 21 days, so check in there. Speaking of eggs... My eggs are out of Denny (the auto egg turner) and are now on the screen being hand turned by me.

This blog is more like a daily journal for me. I hope you will enjoy reading it. I find the more I write, the better I get at it. What you read here, is a form of organic writing. I hardly ever start with anything in mind and it travels as my mind does. Not every post will win a Pulitzer prize! haha! Sometimes I leave out a word or punctuation may be off. I don't care. If people are entertained by my bad spelling. Well, I happy to have entertained them. Really! You get the real me, warts and all. Let's be real together. You can comment you know. Don't be shy. ;-)

I am filled with a renewed sense of purpose. It is a good sign that I am on the right path. The things that I am doing make me feel more centered, physically in tune, and I am in a constant state of living my spiritual path. It has been a long time coming, but I do want to share with you as my dreams and aspirations come true. Good news travels less fast than bad news, so we will be slow and steady here. Positive vibes out, positive vibes in. I am doing my part to heal this world. Not just the economy or the ecology, but the collective consciousness that ties us all together. Take time to turn off the news and walk barefooted on the earth. Heal yourself and heal the world. Breathe. Smile. Be you.


For now, that is all the wonderful I have here in the wilds of West Virginia.
~crow

Woolies

So wow what a great day yesterday was and another fantastic day in progress today.

I ended up with three English Angora Wool Rabbits Two blues and a lynx. The buck (boy) is the lynx. His name is Yoda, The two does are blue and their names are Blue Topaz and Tahoe. Tahoe was a surprise pick. I am so happy that she joined my new herd. These are purebred rabbits and two are registered. The third has no disqualifications and is slated for registration. I will have plenty of pictures and stories to follow.

Why did I choose this breed? Well, they are a eco friendly sustainable animal to raise. I plan to learn how to spin the wool later. Right now I am focused on the housing and grooming. These beauties need to be groomed every week. The wool will be harvested from the rabbit and will be gathered and stored. The pellets will make great organic fertilizer for the garden. They will also bring a new flavor here. They are so friendly and have wonderful personalities. Blue Topaz is a bit timid. But my new friend and rabbit guru Sara says she may get a better attitude after she is bred. Breeding will happen soon. It is Spring for heaven's sake!

More to follow...

Appalachian Rain Sustainable Industries

I couldn't post my blog earlier. It seems to be working now. Knock on wood.

Tomorrow I am heading out to meet the lady at:
http://www.appalachianrain.com


I am very excited to meet her. I will be happy to meet Yoda and Blue Topaz and bring them home to our little farm. I need to get a good night sleep, but I am worried that I won't. It is snowing. lol! I noticed tonight that Sophia has the same affliction. She couldn't sleep, coming down stairs to ask, "Have they posted anything yet?" She is hoping for no school, or at the very least a two hour delay. Me too.

Saying good-night from Wild and Wonderful WV.
~crow

Today it is raining.

There a flood watch out for our area until tomorrow. We also have a wind advisory. I am often watching, talking, and thinking about the weather. Rusty says I am obsessed with weather. I guess if you were to be obsessed about something it is a pretty safe obsession. I don't want to be a meteorologist or anything. However, I am a weather watcher. :-) So the snow we had on Sunday is all but gone and we have rain and it will continue raining. 

The river is swollen and muddy. It should be, we are in the rainy season. I remember last spring when the river came over it's banks. I did some video with my phone. It excited me. Just like the thunderstorms did in FL. Extreme weather wakes up something primal in me and I get a natural high. Maybe that is why I am obsessed about weather. I am a weather addict. 

Now wait, is this unhealthy? Does it interfere with my regular day to day life. Yes. Does it interfere with my relationships. Yes. So, perhaps I need to go through some sort of intervention. I can't sleep when we are having a snow storm. I am tired the next day, and am sometimes cranky.

But wait. Part of my religion/s is to follow the wheel of the year. To reflect or mirror and follow according to the seasons and equinoxes and moon phases.  There is time for hope and birth, to plan ahead, to plant the seeds or put an idea into motion to begin again, to grow and then to be thankful for the harvest and there is the dark time, when it is time for me to look inside myself. 

Noticing each day and what it brings is part of me. I do not know why it pulses in my veins so strongly. It is of my nature. I do not have a choice, even though I have free will. Perhaps it was a past life. Perhaps it began when I was a small child. Who knows. All I really know is that today it was raining. And,

It was another wild and wonderful day in West Virginia.

~crow

Introduction 1 - Sling Blade

OK, it is break time from my Spring cleaning.

I took this photo yesterday after our little adventure. I am going to introduce everybody here at the "beet farm" in future blogs. This is our pig Sling Blade. Rusty named him. "uh-huh". He joined us in the fall after we saw a piglets for sale sign at a local farm. He is a friendly little guy. Sling Blades "likes" are food and 'tillen. He LOVES cookies and feeding him gives me great joy. You can't help but smile in his presence. He most always has a dirty nose, which is a sign of his happiness. 

Sling Blade is particularly happy right now. We moved him the day before yesterday to the garden. We had to electrify the fence to keep him in and safe and keep out predators. The dog run is close by, so the alarms will sound if anything or anybody strange comes into our territory. One of my neighbors told me that coyotes were after his goats. We have not seen any coyotes since we have lived here and our goats (you will meet them later) are about two years old. I think our dogs do a good job of deterring predators. Sling Blade could do without dogs, but he ignores them and doesn't give them any of his energy. Pig are very smart, and have a keen sense of smell. Maybe that is why he ignores the dogs! 

I just went out to feed and water everybody and of course Sling Blade. I stepped into the pen and gave him some good scratches on his back. He was warm from the sun and I told him he was a good buy. He has his whole area tilled. Amazing. 

I am thankful for the laughter and smiles he brings and he deserves many cookies for doing the job of a plow or rototiller. He is about as green as you can get. He takes no gasoline to power and only leaves fertilizer. It is a 50/50 relationship.

You may be thinking to yourself "Are you going to eat him?" Well, our plan is not to. Our goal is to be self sufficient here and grow quality food. I think if we begin to raise animals to eat, we probably shouldn't name them. :-)

Yet, another Wild and Wonderful day in West Virginia!

~crow

Snow Fever

What do you do with Spring fever on an unexpected snowy March day?

Here is one idea. Take a trip with me now.

Today's journey started out to heading to a work related destination. Go make a visit to a site, and snap some photos for a report. We will call this site and all others described below as *Area 52.

 

*Area 52

*My Tour Guide "Bubba"

 

After the initial site visit we continued on.. *Bubba is an experienced driver and has traveled all through these mountains. It was snowing and I was a bit nervous to be get stuck and stranded in the middle of nowhere. There was about 6 inches of snow already on the ground. I cautiously agreed, despite my reservations. We curved off the main road on to a small dirt road and then darted into another "road". It was more like a path that was big enough to squeeze a truck through. Trees down, ground eroding from the creeks and waterways that flow over and through the mountains.

It was a bumpy ride in. But it was so beautiful. I wished that I had brought my good camera with me. The one I had was an inexpensive camera, but luckily you can take a zillion pictures with it. I just couldn't get my pictures to speak. If you know what I mean. I couldn't frame out how vast the landscape was. How tall the trees were and the silence and sanctity of it all. I was truly in a Winter Wonderland. Fresh fallen snow and no tracks, except for our own. Hopefully you can capture the feeling from the next two photos, then you can times that by as many pictures that my cheap camera can take. 

We continued on deeper into the forest and pretty much skirting the sides of mountains. No houses, nothing but white and wild.

 Stream

My guide pulled up to a clearing and said, "this is where we get out". I jumped out of the truck excited to see what was next. 

 Abandoned Substation

 *A fellow explorer

 Mineral drips, perhaps Calcium Carbonate.

 Past the substation was an abandoned coal mine.

 

Inside the mine entrance.

A bat hanging.

View of the substation from inside the mine.

I have to stop here and talk about the coal mine. Both Bubba and I got a sense of something dark energy. I don't want to call it evil, but it was an uncomfortable feeling. The photo captures the eerie vibe. It was in contrast, both visually and in many aspects to what I had been experiencing just minutes before. I was looking down and found a cool fossil. We didn't stay long. Perhaps it was the manifestation of all things past and present there. I am not sure.

We shook it off, and headed back to the truck. On the drive out I was less in the universe and more in my old body. I got a sharp shooting pain in  my leg. I couldn't believe what we had driven through! 

On another road we stopped so I could take this photo. It is an area that has been reclaimed from coal mining. As you can see below, the coal seam ran along the mountain. Miners went in and scooped out the coal. It looks like it was recently replanted. The smaller trees were put in after the coal was gone.

It is so wild and wonderful here. There are some stark contrasts to all of this natural habitat. People live here. We do some awful deeds, even in our efforts to help the earth. I don't know if most people are like me in this regard. I seem to search out the loveliness. Even where all hope might appear to be lost. The following photos speak to my view. Along the way...

 Love by Defacement

 Prejudice and Orbs.

Botanical in Red

Humorous

 

God and Goddess

Why not try to find beauty wherever you are? Does it always have to be a pristine view? Can we see the contrast and appreciate what is assumed to be ugly and find some beauty, some attribute we can be grateful for? Appreciate the dark, because without dark, the light would be nothing. Without our sorrow there would not be the overwhelming sense of joy. Like a sad movie that makes you cry, but then when the funny part comes it makes you laugh even heartier. And it feels so good. 

Do we get angry at the kid who defaced this bridge, or do we look at the images and cuss-words and and wonder, who did this and why? Join me and remember, even if it is for this second... That all the parts of you are beautiful. The sparkling pure white you is also the graffiti-ed you, and the dark scary part of you is the same as a crystal clear flowing stream you. You can't love only parts of a whole. That is not love. 

Love embraces everything. Following the switchbacks and around and through the Mountains...

It was another wild and wonderful day here in West Virginia.

*Places and names have been changed to respect the privacy of others! lol

Winter's Last Kiss

 

  Mother Nature reminded me today that we are not quite yet into Spring. I went outside to savor the sound of falling snow in the woods. It sounds like a crystal whisper, smells like pureness, and looks like you are at the edge of The Mystery.