Tuesday, May 26, 2009 - Pittsfield MA
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First Mowing, home farm orchard, Red Rock, East Chatham NY, May 24, 2009
The season's first mowing is finished
One of the urgencies bringing me back to Red Rock by mid May each spring is the need to mow the fields before the growth gets beyond the capacity of Power-Trac PT-1845 Articulated Tractor's roughcut mower to handle the tall grass. Now that the mowing is done I can move on to other things - like finding the sources of those two pesky leaks in LD that are still eluding me - and are driving me crazy!
Great Horned Owl
Have a look at the neat picture I got of one of a pair of Great Horned Owls? I spotted a few minutes after I took the picture above. They were hanging out in the woods off to the left of the field pictured (for those who know what the following means, if you walk up to the evergreens in the picture and turn to the left you are standing in what was known as the "orchard" looking off the bluff and overlooking my grandparents now abandoned farmhouse).
Night camp
Wal-Mart Supercenter in Pittsfield MA
Wal-Mart Store #2228, 555 Hubbard Ave./Suite 12, Pittsfield, MA 01201 - (413) 442-1971
- Good level parking lot
- Verizon cell phone service is good
- Verizon EVDO Broadband service is good
- Find other Wal-Marts in the area
- Check the weather here
When Hope Dies
When you give up on hope, something even better happens than it not killing you, which is that in some sense it does kill you. You die. And there's a wonderful thing about being dead, which is that they—those in power—cannot really touch you anymore. Not through promises, not through threats, not through violence itself. Once you're dead in this way, you can still sing, you can still dance, you can still make love, you can still fight like hell—you can still live because you are still alive, more alive in fact than ever before. You come to realize that when hope died, the you who died with the hope was not you, but was the you who depended on those who exploit you, the you who believed that those who exploit you will somehow stop on their own, the you who believed in the mythologies propagated by those who exploit you in order to facilitate that exploitation. The socially constructed you died. The civilized you died. The manufactured, fabricated, stamped, molded you died. The victim died.
And who is left when that you dies? You are left. Animal you. Naked you. Vulnerable (and invulnerable) you. Mortal you. Survivor you. The you who thinks not what the culture taught you to think but what you think. The you who feels not what the culture taught you to feel but what you feel. The you who is not who the culture taught you to be but who you are. The you who can say yes, the you who can say no.