A Song of Hearth and Home
People often say “Home is where the heart is” — generally, it almost doesn’t matter where you call “home,” as long as you are together with your loved ones. But home is also where the hearth is: the central part within a home where warmth and family and home all merge. (That’s my loose definition, anyway.)
Life and circumstance can, at times, present us with many challenges. Sometimes, those include redefining or substituting a temporary home until one can navigate a new path and around obstacles. When an opportunity arises that provides, once again, the opportunity to build anew a home once again to replace the temporary ones that folks must sometimes accept, it’s a powerful and potent event.
And we have the opportunity here to help make it happen for two of our own: Aji & Wings.
From a previous diary by belinda ridgewood:
So, if you’ve been reading this series, you already know that Wings and Aji had their manufactured home repossessed six years ago, when they missed a couple of payments and the lender refused to work with them because he “didn’t have to”. The land is fortunately Wings’ ancestral land, but they have been living in a 30-year-old RV that is not at all designed as a long-term residence for their high-altitude desert climate. They’ve been unable to get far enough ahead to build a real house. After a dangerous electrical fire a year ago, Aji decided they had to get out of that tin can somehow, and she plotted out a series of YouCaring projects to supplement what they could afford to pay out of their normal income stream.
Please read on...
Winter is Coming
Seasons change. Spring turns to summer; summer to fall. Fall turns to winter, which — fortunately — eventually turns back to spring. And so it goes.
As our global climate becomes less stable, more and more of us in various areas are noting that the seasons — and the weather which accompanies them — has also been changing. The snows are coming earlier in some areas. The cold and the heat aren’t following the same patters; storm may not occur more often, but when they do come they may be far more energetic, bringing more intense winds and rains. And cold.
Winter is coming, a little sooner than it used to, in and around Taos Pueblo. That changes things slightly — it forces Aji & Wings to keep track of the shifting changes, and to work with their contractors to ensure that outstanding elements are done in an order which makes the most sense, so that they aren’t literally left unable to complete the project before winter hits full force, and spring becomes the new target time.
The Winds of Winter
The wind can be relentless; the weather is bad enough when it’s cold. When it’s also windy, the wind is deadly. Aji once asked folks if they really knew what it meant to be cold —
Have you ever been truly cold?
I don't mean a little chilly; I don't mean shivering occasionally. I mean the kind of cold that sinks bone-deep, that simultaneously numbs and burns hands and feet, that defeats your ability even to think because all the while there's an ever-growing pounding in your head: 'Cold, cold, cold, cold, COLD."
I have. And it's like hunger; it becomes all-encompassing.
It is also deadly.
The question, and the description, was part of a group effort to help raise funding for the propane project. Winter, and the deadly cold, are real enough. Combined with driving, biting winds and the deadly cold becomes even worse: it’s chilling to bone. Literally.
The construction project is moving along — but winter is coming, and if comes earlier than normal and brings with it the winds and storms, completion of the home will have to wait until spring.
A Song of Ice and Fire
Photo copyright Aji, 2016; all rights reserved.
The mercury is dropping: ice is starting to form. It melts again, and isn’t permanent — yet. But the problem is that it’s forming: the season is changing, bringing with it the weather and ice that makes the new septic system a higher priority.
From Aji’s post:
That's part of the existing septic system, [mis]installed seventeen years ago. That's one of the rotted sections of pipe, because the folks who installed it screwed Wings over badly: not below (hell, not even near) the frost line, and with virtually no downward gradient.
Ice isn’t the only problem, though. Of course...that might be too easy a challenge. Remember the dangerous electrical fire mentioned above? It was from a brown-out. Says Aji:
Now every time the power company has a brown-out, I go outside and check the connections obsessively to make sure nothing's overheating.
That’s just one more things to watch for, guard against, double-check and live with — fire, and of course ice. Until the new home is built, anyway. The fire had one advantage: it formed the impetus for the current project, which has moved along successfully so far.
The workers are doing great work; the quality is fantastic. You’ve seen the images in previous diaries. If we can help keep the funding going, we have a solid shot at helping ensure that the project is completed before the winter weather hits.
What Dreams May Come
Let’s try an experiment. An exercise in thought and memory, touching on the senses:
Close your eyes.1 What do you see?
If you are blind, you may not “see” in the literal sense, so closing your eyes may not make as much of a difference to you than it would to a sighted person...but, sighted or not, when your eyes are closed, you “see” what your mind has recorded. Is it visual stimuli, received by the retina and transmitted via the optic nerve, or some other manifestation that presents itself in another form?
Eyes closed, think of your childhood. Take yourself back to a point where your mind recalls “childhood” and then, depending on where any such memories may lie, slowly scroll forward or backward through your memory until you arrive at a day that feels particularly special to you — choose a memory centered around a meal, one which evokes happy memories for you.
Pause for a moment as you fix that point in your mind. Place yourself there, feeling the space and people who were around you at that point: your memory is on pause — the world is still, frozen at that moment as you let the whole of the memory cache in your mind.
Now, press play on your mental memory controls. There’s sound, now — what do you hear?2 Eyes still closed, mentally cock your head to the left, then the right. Turn it now, first to the left, then to the right.
Do you hear the sounds of cooking? Of plates, or table settings being laid? Are there children somewhere, and adult voices in conversation?
Keep your eyes closed. Savor the feel, the sounds, the scents of that moment.
Now — what do you smell? As the thoughts of what the various smells are come to mind, here’s the test: with your eyes still closed, what do you see?
Do you envision the things you smell? And do the smells you recall help you to bring up that specific memory? What other memories can be drawn out, based on the smell?
Now open your eyes. What do you see? Is what you see tied intricately to the sounds and smells you sensed as you revisited the memory in detail?
That’s what we’re after — the synergy, and symmetry, of mental imagery associated with memory, with experience, and with life.
When you dream, your mind sorts and orders and shuffles and categorizes, making sense of things and storing away the experiences. They’re played back for you, and even as one part of your mind does the categorizing / sorting / sense-making, the other part(s) of your mind watch it unfold as a movie.
That’s one type of dreaming.
Another is similar to envisioning what you want — proactively defining it, shaping and providing details that help you make that dream your own: you envision it, then you set out to achieve it.
Sometimes, the closest you ever get is to envision it. Other times, you get lucky — with hard work, sacrifice, or the love & assistance of others, dreams can be achieved. They come true...and that’s an achievement which is always worth undertaking.
The best dreams are usually the ones we can share with others — sharing our vision, sharing the experiences or undertakings that help us reach out to accomplish those dreams. For that, we need to know how to communicate our dreams & desires to others. And that is where imagery comes in. Virtual, physical, verbal, or non-verbal — imagery helps us communicate in each form.
No matter what you seek to communicate, you’re always using a form of imagery3 to help shape and define these dreams, whatever they are, and to communicate them.
We all have these dreams — every one of us. And as I write this, my dream is to help further the work & accomplishments of the other folks who have been working so hard to help Aji & Wings achieve their dream: a dream of their new hearth & home, complete and robust, warm and inviting in spite of the winds and storms that accompany winter, and indeed every season.
Toward that goal, I created the image at the top of this post. It’s a Photoshopped image using two of Aji’s photos (one she titled in a post called “Thunderbird” and one of the home building progress), and adding the “Winter is Coming” text, which I customized only slightly. The original image that inspired me was this one by a DeviantArt artist named jp-3. That image reminded me of a picture that Aji had posted, called “Thunderbird.” The words — “Winter is coming” — applied not only to the coming change of seasons, but also incorporated the popular culture phenomenon of George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” (often referred to as “Game of Thrones”). GRRM’s words appear nearly everywhere now, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to tie in pop-culture references with the fundraising effort. I stripped jp-3’s DeviantArt image of the sky & clouds, the swords, and the wings, and overlaid it on top of Aji’s Thunderbird image. Then I took a silhouette of a feather, duplicated and reversed it, and put it where the swords had been. I combined Aji’s image of the ongoing construction with the Thunderbird image, and the result looked pretty good. Here’s the basic steps:
The process was straightforward, and worked pretty well: I was happy with the outcome. :) That, of course, let me to wanting to share a little more — partly about the source inspiration and providing proper acknowledgements, and partly about how I put it all together.
This gave me the opportunity to share not only the physical imagery, but also the virtual, verbal, and social imagery — all of which, combined in synergy and symmetry, provide what I hope is a powerful encouragement to everyone who is able to help our friends achieve their goal, before winter arrives.
Here’s What You Can Do
There are many ways you can help, and simply by sharing information about this effort is one of the easiest. Not everyone can afford to give — that’s one of the realities of life. But if you can read these entries, tip & rec them, ideally join into the comments — that’s important. It helps convey the importance to others, and to those engaged in writing the diaries. If you can share links to the YouCaring page, and to Wings’s website, that helps ensure that others who are in a position to give have a better chance of learning about our effort to help Aji & Wings get their new home built.
Here’s the list of other ways you may be able to help:
- The YouCaring fundraiser allows you to donate specifically to this cause. You can also share the fundraiser via social networks by using the “Grab Our Widget” button (and other social media buttons) on that page.
- If you prefer, donate via PayPal at Aji’s blog, or at her Tumblr blog where she posts her own writing and photography.
- Kosmail belinda ridgewood if you absolutely need to donate by mailing a paper check.
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- Their Amazon wishlist mostly supports the health needs of their rescue animals and themselves, if that’s more your style.
- Purchases from Wings Silverworks will help them make a living the way they’d prefer, by selling Wings’ work as an exceptionally talented NDN silversmith and photographer.
- And, as mentioned above, you can help immensely by Tweeting, sharing on FaceBook, tip/rec/republish these diaries on Daily Kos, randomly email your friends about it, and even drop it into casual conversations. This seems minor, but it is not! When you share, please link to this YouCaring page, or embed the widget!
Thank you, everyone, for reading and for whatever you can do to help our friends.
— GH
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Footnotes:
1 Do not do this if you are driving, or walking around.
2 If you’re deaf, you will still have a sense — sensations — that you can recall, a form of feeling the space around you: the rustle of air, the vibrations from the furniture moving as chairs are moved in or out, or the bustle of others around you…
3 Not everyone can actually picture images in their heads — something which is called aphantasia. But that doesn’t prevent them from communicating their dreams, or even from having them.
Wednesday, Sep 28, 2016 · 6:45:13 PM +00:00 · GreyHawk
I felt the initial image was incomplete, so I tweaked it — I added another layer of a photo by Aji, and replaced the wing silhouettes with actual silverwork by Wings (wings by Wings — heh). This, for me, created a more “complete” image.
