Wyzga On Words

Laughter Is As Necessary As Food, Air & Water.

 

No matter  who we are or where we are; no matter our race or creed or gender; no matter our skin color or language - we all laugh the same.

We just don't do it often enough.  Maybe we forget.

The older I get I find there is plenty to laugh about.  As a former nurse I can tell you with certainty that laughter is the best medicine.

Art Linkletter thought so, too.  Time out of mind Linkletter worked in a TV station playroom asking children questions and listening for their responses.  As you'll see, what made it all work so  well was how Linkletter made the kids feel: as if someone was really listening to them.

Here are a few that might bring a smile to your face:

Kids Sat The Darnedest Things1

Kids Say The Darnedest Things2

Kids Say The Darnedest Things3

If kids are not your thing, perhaps The Laughing Buddha might be.

Or, if you prefer puppies, have I got the farm for you.  Juniper Moon Farm and Day #1 of their three-week old Maremma puppies on Day #1 eating solid food.  Kinda reminds me of growing up with 6 siblings.

TIP:     Laugh well and often.  It certainly makes folks wonder what you're up to.

Green Reduces Stress.

 

Environmental psychology researches the value of open space on humans.  Apparently, a stroll in the out-of-doors or just looking at green spaces helps reduce our stress level as well as supplying  much-needed time for exercise, solitude, contemplation, reflection, perspective, a break from the daily, noise-driven routine, and the like.

Check out GardenVisit.com to get away for a week or a moment.

And summer being the time of fresh produce plenty, visit pick-your-own places at Pick-Your-Own.org. As children and gardeners can attest, there's a special joy in getting our hands dirty.

Women Are Natural Storytellers And Listeners.

I am delighted to have been invited to join Kathy Hansen's blog, A Storied Career!

Just in case you missed us, over the next several days I'll be re-posting the interview she conducted with me and began publishing on April 9th.

Click here for Question #6.

Earth Music - The Animal Orchestra.

Last week at Juniper Moon Farm I was trying to sleep in the yurt out in the pasture after a long day pitching manure, scouring a chicken coop, mending fences, gathering eggs, and a plethora of other truly wonderful farm chores that invigorate the heart and spirit as well as muscles you did not know you had.

Overhead the moon was full.  Outside the temperature had dropped to a frosty 40+.  Somewhere in the woods an owl hooted, a whippoorwill "sang", and a  mocking bird made a mockery of the still country night.

Unbeknownst to me, this was "Earth Music" as celebrated in Bernie Krause's book, "The Great Animal Orchestra."

Click here to read a thoughtful review of Krause's book as written for the NYTimes Book Review by Jeremy Denk, who seems to love the music of the outdoor wild places nearly as much as Krause.  Excerpt.

"Bernie Krause’s new book, “The Great Animal Orchestra,” is not about this beastly symphony; it is about the symphony of beasts that surrounds us, a vast orchestra in the process of being silenced, perhaps even more endangered than our human animal orchestras.

Krause’s term for this symphony is “biophony”: the sound of all living organisms except us. He is a man with a calling. After a stint with the Weavers (he replaced Pete Seeger), a foray into electronic music and some not-too-surprising drug use, by “Hardyesque chance” he ended up in the Muir Woods recording nature sounds for an album. Now he is high on hippo grunts and insect drones, having spent decades recording and archiving wild soundscapes. He chronicles his life choices and epiphanies, guides us through nature’s sonic treasures, makes interesting assertions about the musicianship of animals (human and nonhuman), and begs us to pay attention.

In Krause’s world, everything is seen through the lens of sound. He even maps by ear. In one fascinating passage, he surveys a Costa Rican jungle, dispensing with the “100-meter square grids,” which anyway “nonhuman animals don’t understand.” He ends up with “amoebalike shapes, each an acoustic region that, while mutable, would tend to remain stable within a limited area over time.” Yes, I thought, as irritable honks floated up Broadway and through the window of my apartment: we all live on mutating maps, in the land of the audible, whether we like it or not. Krause offers endless odes to sonic nuances: the timbres of waves crashing on the world’s beaches, the echo effects brought on by dew, the acoustics of night and day, the dry, hot rattles of deserts, the way baboons bounce their voices off granite outcroppings, to send them deep into the forest. But at the same time that he wants us to feel sound’s sensual pleasure, he wants us to respect it as an indispensable tool of knowledge. Krause records a forest, before and after environmentally sensitive, “selective” logging. Though the forest appears mostly unchanged to the eye, the soundscape is devastated; the true damage can only be heard.

Krause spends many pages challenging the human monopoly on musicianship. He asserts that in the wild, animals vocalize with a musicianly ear to the full score of the ecosystem — a mix of competition and cooperation. Since animals depend on being heard for various reasons (mating, predation, warning, play), they are forced to seek distinct niches: “Each resident species acquires its own preferred sonic bandwidth — to blend or contrast — much in the way that violins, woodwinds, trumpets and percussion instruments stake out acoustic territory in an orchestral arrangement.”

I did sleep well that night and every night thereafter - even the one where I was on a two-hour watch: roll out from under the woolen blankets, pull on my BOGS, trek across the pasture flashlight in hand, and squint out across the darkened fields to make sure none of the pregnant ewes were in labor.  It's all a matter of listening to the music of the earth.

 

The LambCam Is On! At Juniper Moon Fiber Farm.

 

Lambing season at Juniper Moon Fiber Farm could always use more hands.  And mine were there April 2nd through 6th.  Turn on the LambCam to catch the action!  I'll have stories to tell when I get baaaaaack.

Really, Now! Who Has Time To Write Poetry?

I am reading "The One-Straw Revolution" by Masanobu Fukuoka.  Michael Pollan calls this little book,

"One of the founding documents of the alternative food movement, and indispensable to anyone hoping to understand the future of food and agriculture."

Why would I read such a book? I want to feed people organic apples and the foods one can make with apples.  We can always use a good apple, grown right - and a nice slice of pie.

In one chapter Mr. Fukuoka reflects on how the times have changed.  Not just for farmers but for all of us. In the act of cleaning his village shrine he uncovered bit of haiku written by villagers time out of mind.  Then, he notes, even farmers had time to write poetry.  But no more - we are hurried.

This seems true for all of us.  Even for me when I catch myself (again) eating a meal in front of the computer screen instead of appreciating what I prepared perhaps sitting in the sun.

It can be different, even if only incrementally. We just need to step out of the cave:

From Out the Cave
    by Joyce Sutphen

When you have been
at war with yourself
for so many years that
you have forgotten why,
when you have been driving
for hours and only
gradually begin to realize
that you have lost the way,
when you have cut
hastily into the fabric,
when you have signed

papers in distraction,
when it has been centuries
since you watched the sun set
or the rain fall, and the clouds,
drifting overhead, pass as flat
as anything on a postcard;
when, in the midst of these
everyday nightmares, you
understand that you could
wake up,
you could turn
and go back
to the last thing you
remember doing
with your whole heart:
that passionate kiss,
the brilliant drop of love
rolling along the tongue of a green leaf,
then you wake,
you stumble from your cave,
blinking in the sun,
naming every shadow
as it slips.  [from Straight Out of View. © Beacon Press, 1995]

Women Who Pursue Their Own Desire. What Dream Is Yours To Capture?

One flew planes and the other swims with sharks.

One died at the age of 90 and the other is 62 with an ocean to cross.

Both are one more reason I gotta say, "We're not here for a long time but a good time."

Betty Haas Pfister was 19 when she paid a dollar at an air show to fly in a plane.  Over the next decades of her life, Pfister made her home in the sky.  Excerpt.

"It was the first of hundreds of flights that Betty Haas Pfister would make — dozens as a member of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs, during World War II, and many more as one of the nation’s most successful female competitive pilots. (And not counting those as a Pan Am stewardess in the days when women had a much harder time getting hired as pilots.)

Ms. Haas Pfister, a two-time winner of the All Women’s International Air Race, died on Nov. 17 at her home in Aspen, Colo., her daughter Suzanne said. She was 90."

Do you know what captivates me most?  Two things: the photograph of Pfister sitting on the nose of her P-39 fighter, and then when WWII was done with her she found her way to live life her way.  Excerpt.

"As one of 1,074 WASPs, Ms. Haas Pfister ferried planes from factories to domestic airfields or to ports for shipment overseas. WASPs also towed targets for aerial gunnery practice. Thirty-eight died in accidents. But by December 1944, with the war winding down, the women were deemed no longer needed and the unit was disbanded.

Ms. Haas Pfister found work as an aircraft mechanic and, very occasionally, flying cargo planes. In 1948, for Pan American, she became the first stewardess ever hired with more than 1,000 hours of flight time. “She got to travel all over the world,” her daughter said. “But she’d rather have been in the cockpit any day of the week.”

Several years earlier, Ms. Haas Pfister had paid $750 for an Army surplus P-39 fighter that she named Galloping Gertie. She flew in dozens of air shows and races around the country, and in 1950 she won the All Women’s International Air Race from Montreal to West Palm Beach, Fla. Two years later, she recaptured that title in a flight from St. Augustine, Fla., to Welland, Ontario."

Closer to ground is another woman who refuses to give up. I blogged about Diana Nyad just as she was getting ready to swim 103 miles of open ocean and then when she called it over. In her story recently told to Elizabeth Weil of the NYTimes, "62 And Life To Go," Nyad is going at it again.  Call her crazy.  Call her determined.  Just don't call her quits.  Excerpt.

 "But as Nyad approached 60, she didn’t feel satisfied; she felt regret. Her 10-year relationship with the woman she calls the love of her life ended in 1994. Four years after that, Nyad sat outside a Los Angeles hospital while that woman had a baby with her new partner, Nyad needing to be there. Nyad’s father died the same year. Her mother died in 2007. Single and childless, she was a romantic without a lover, a striver without a goal. Shouldn’t her existence add up to more? “I wasn’t going to adopt a child, but I knew I needed something of that order,” Nyad said when we met early in November. “Something that would require everything in me. No time for neurotic meanderings about the past, no luxury of that. Got to be my best self.”

So Nyad started swimming again, training for Cuba, hoping to master the crossing that eluded her in her prime. Nyad suddenly seemed happier, secretive, tanned; her friends thought perhaps she had taken a lover. After five months of pool training, Nyad flew to Mexico to test herself in the open water. She did two long swims off Todos Santos — six hours and eight hours. “That’s when I knew I could do it,” Nyad says. “Endurance is not a young person’s game. I thought I might even be better at 60 than I was at 30. You have a body that’s almost as strong, but you have a much better mind.”

My hands are showing their age.  Yet, if it truly is as Nyad says, "Endurance is not a young person's game," then count me in for another life!  We're not here for a long time but a good time.  If you can touch that dream, you can catch it.  What's yours?

What Is Your Good Work?

I look at my hands turning older and think of all I still want to do.

In the act of trimming a lamb's hooves I am concentrating, focused on the task at hand and the warm body nestled under my arm.

I am reminded that now is the time to be your own unabashed, unashamed true self.  This world needs all the breath we have.