Kaya and Wiley in the Colockum, eastern Washington. Love those classic Shepard ears! Photo by James Hyde, 2017.
Cris is here, sleeping off some of the travel wearies. She got here just in time for a big dinner last night with Wiley, Henna and James. They prepared the chukar partridge that we had brought home from the hunt. And then there was the second game of the Series on the tube, what a nail biter. So a party evening.
A good connection was made between Cris and James. He is working aboard a National Geographic ship that takes passengers on eco travel trips. He is on their dive team that takes folks on dives in these exotic places. He has been with them to Patagonia before and is heading down again soon so they were both talking Argentina. How fun!
Yesterday was complete with some great ups and downs. So glad that I have had all that inspiration about the North Star lately and keeping a steady focus there. Otherwise my life would be way too much of a roller coaster.
Having so much fun reading Pigrimage by Schriver about Pope Francis. Cris jumped right on it as she had never seen it before. The first part of the book has a lot about Buenos Aires and how the Church, geography and Argentine politics had a lot to do with his early formation. And now I am off to the second part about Jesuit training that was so influential. I have a new respect for priests that have been through all that, wow.
We have a walk this morning and I think that Catherine and Dana will be here. Then we have an invite to their place tonight for dinner. It is a place where hospitality abounds, so looking forward to that. Cris will love it. But inbetween I have some projects for us to work on planting a cover crop in the corn field and getting in five lavender plants along both along Phil’s Camino.
So, getting ready to make breakfast and get this show on the road. Getting light out and I can see it is overcast but that is supposed to burn off. Another day in God’s playpen! Love as always, Felipe.
It was hard work over the last four months of the harder stuff chemo. I lost ten pounds in the process. We gave that drug a good try but it didn’t do anything really according to the scan. So, we are off to the next hard drug in a while. I am doing some lighter weight stuff for a few times till I regain my weight and then hit it with that new harder stuff. Oh bother!
At home on Vashon tonight James is going to fix the gamebirds that we brought back from eastern Washington. Yea, the chukar partridge. The best way we have found to cook birds is to skin them, part them out, wrap in bacon and fry.
So Cris will be here in the middle of all that. Sounds like fun to me. Now to just make it through a few more hours of treatment.
Ah, back at the ranch after a quick trip to Seattle for my scan. Somehow I feel at peace right now compared to the usual anxiety that tends to build up at this time. I guess I am thinking about Cris coming tomorrow and that is keeping me occupied. Too busy to worry.
It’s a beautiful afternoon here. The barometer is way up. It is luring me outside even though I got piles of junk here in the living room from the hunting trip. Cris is coming have to straighten up. You know if no one ever came would we ever clean up? It is sort of a deadline.
She is coming in the afternoon tomorrow from Toronto. Somehow the timing is just perfect for me to pick her up after my treatment in Seattle. It is supposed to be a little rainy but then back to nice fall weather. That’s good because I’m going to put her to work while she is here. The trail needs help and the corn field needs more tilling. Then there is Tomatotown.
OK, I just realized that I have a walk in a few minutes. Kelly is coming I think. We were going to harvest any tomatoes that we could still find. Oh, and the Word Series starts tonight! Yike all of a sudden I am busy.
So excited about my new book Pilgrimage about Pope Francis. But that will have to wait for another day. Love you all immensely, Felipe.
Felipe trying to hit something with bow and arrow.
I don’t usually mention people last names on the blog but I do want to copy something that Steve Watkins put up on FaceBook. Steve just came out with a new book called Pilgrim Strong and he had his first book signing over last weekend. Let me see if I can pull this off, it is all quite good:
After a very long weekend and a four-hour drive home yesterday I went to bed with a book I found in a great little used book store. Its author is Eugene Peterson who wrote The Message bible translation. Peterson’s introduction to this little book includes three of the best pages of text I’ve read in a lifetime. I hope you’ll take a moment to read through it.
The Introduction from Eugene Peterson’s, Stories of Jesus.
“When Jesus opened his mouth and spoke, what came out, more often than not, was a story. He spoke in other ways also: he prayed, preached, taught, denounced, conversed, mourned. But stick around long enough and you are sure to hear a story.
Story is an act of verbal hospitality. Good storytellers invite us into a world that is “other” and larger than the one we ordinarily live in. All of a sudden we see things and people we had never noticed before. We hear words and sentences that make sense of what we’ve had intimations of, but couldn’t quite “place.”
Jesus was a good storyteller His stories draw us into a reality where we find ourselves in touch with the very stuff of our humanity. We discover that there is something MORE to life, something that we didn’t quite see or understand before.
The stories of Jesus are large and with a sense of God. Interestingly, though, Jesus rarely mentions God in his storytelling. What he does is bring us into a world suffused with God, a world permeated with God’s unspoken and unseen presence, and he does so in such a way that we know this is the world we were made for, the world where we most truly belong.
Jesus’ stories are brief. They range from a simple metaphor embedded in a sentence to a broadly sketched portrayal of a personal quest, dilemma, or situation. None of these is blatantly religious. Jesus employs ordinary things and persons as subject matter: salt and light, farmers and merchants, travelers and banqueters, money and seeds, parents and children.
Jesus throws these simple little stories into our ordinary lives and we think, “What is this doing here?” They appear so commonplace, so insignificant. We expect big things from a teacher the stature of Jesus — bold headlines, eternal truths, religious thunder. But these Jesus-stories are so unpretentious. More often than not, one or another of them lodges unnoticed in our consciousness and then, unexpectedly, begins to release insights, create new perspectives, shift the very ground beneath us so that we find ourselves reeling, reaching out for support.
When the story is allowed to complete its work, the sole support we find ourselves grabbing onto is God.
Jesus was once asked by one of his friends why he told stories. He responded that he told stories ‘to create readiness, to nudge people toward receptive insight.” His stories, besides inviting us into a larger world than we presently inhabit, pull us into it as participants. These are not stories that entertain, that let us sit back on a bench watching the action. We BECOME the action. These stories don’t tell us something new. they involve us in what has been sitting right in front of us for years but that we hadn’t noticed, hadn’t thought was important, hadn’t considered to be connected to us and our lives.
And then suddenly, we do notice. The story wakes us up to what is there, and has always been there. Without leaving the world we work and sleep and play in daily, we find ourselves in a far larger world. We embrace connections and meanings and significance in our lives far beyond what our employers and teachers, our parents and children, our friends and neighbors, and all the so-called experts and celebrities have told us for so long.
But Jesus not only told stories. He IS the story. The stories he told are trailheads into the story he lived and lives. Any one of the stories he told can bring any one of us into the story itself. Consider yourself invited.”
Eugene Peterson
Well that was a lot. I am going to make sure to read that a time or two more to make sure that it sinks in. Eugene is a very insightful guy. The translation of the Bible that I use most these days is his Message. It is a paraphrase and not a word for word translation. It holds the story important over the literal meaning of individual words in the text. Does that make sense?
OK, off to walk in a moment. Have to fill the bird feeders as I walk. They cleaned me out while we were gone on our junket. Junket away from the juncos.
Also very exciting, Cris from Buenos Aires is coming in on Wednesday and will be here through Saturday. Coincidentally I am reading the Pilgrimage by Mark Schriver, a bio of Pope Francis and the early part is full of info about that city which I know little about. Tell you more soon. Love, Felipe.
James took this pic of a elk herd that came by our camp. There was 40-50 in the herd and they went up on the hillside where you see them.
James is pretty serious about his photography and he wanted me to include some info for you: on instagram @jamesfchyde or Facebook.com/James.Hyde.121. . There.
That is what we came up with, the Elk Motel.Us guys: Felipe, Wiley and James.Felipe hammering out the daily blog post.
Hey, good morning. We are back at home. Got a good night’s sleep and am ready to tackle the day. Mostly have to clean up storm damage as we had some wind here and put away gear from the trip. James will be here to help.
So yea, I admit I forgot to pack the tent on our trip. That was the first time I have done that one but I always seem to forget something important. Here is a list from past adventures: gun, ammo, knives and forks, boots, coat, stovepipe. I seem to have a knack of leaving out one key component. But hey, that’s what keeps it exciting.
The guys took it pretty well and tackled the problem with aplomb. “OK, we don’t have the tent but what do we have?” So, we had the poles and the bag with the ground tarp, stakes and ropes. So in the dark we constructed something quite elegant I must say. The guys nicknamed it the Elk Motel as it was a little less monumental than the Elk Hotel which is the proper tent we are used to. The Elk Hotel has one window while the Elk Motel is mostly windows. But hey, this is largely why guys go camping so they can problem solve with primitive stuff like shovels, axes and duct tape. So, it’s all good.
Well off I go. I will wait till I get pic of the Motel before I publish this but you have three posts to read in the meantime. Love, Felipe.
The last morning here in the desert. Overcast sky overhead looking for the sun to break through maybe. The guys and Kaya, the Belgian Shepard, are up the hill back of camp chasing the tricky Chukar Partridge. I haven’t heard any shots yet.
I feel great about the whole thing now. Everyone has had some success. James has just been starting up the last few years bird hunting and he is finally starting to hit them. Wiley who has been doing great for years had a slow start this time. I felt bad because I had talked him into taking a different shotgun than the one he was used to and he was not hitting anything with it. Then yesterday on a whim I said why don’t you try mine and he went right out and got one straight away. And the cool part is that gun is a really old classic that Wiley inherited from his great grandfather Ollie and he had never used it. So, now he went with it again this morning, good deal.
So that’s the hunt. We are packing up to get back to Vashon today. So, this is the last chance to get a few more birds. I didn’t shoot anything except some tin cans and they aren’t very good eating.
I didn’t see the Big Dipper all night, too cloudy so I don’t know if it is still there. Had a dream that was interesting and thought provoking. I am still trying to figure it out as it is not as transparent as the last.
I will publish these posts from the trip tonight or tomorrow morning when I get home. So, take care, miss you, love, Felipe.
A new day dawns and I want to tell you that the Big Dipper was there again last night. It was a little overcast so I didn’t get as good of view of it but it was there. Nothing like making sure.
I had a goosebump moment yesterday afternoon. Remember how we were talking about the North Star and how it is the way to orientate ourselves. And how I was saying that to me Christ is the Big Dipper showing me the Way. Well, have been reading Mathew Kelly’s book Rediscovering Catholicism and pretty near finished when I ran into this about the saints on page 301.
“They were not timid, whimpering or noncommittal. They were brave and bold. Why? They knew their essential purpose. They moved always in the direction of the great spiritual North Star.”
Yea, no joke, “the great spiritual North Star”! How do we do it here at Caminoheads?!? Right on track.
Well, James, got two nice Chukar Partridge this morning. So he can take those home to show off and make a gourmet meal. Just as I am writing this a flock is calling up on the hillside. “chukar, chukar, chukar”, yea that’s what they sound like. Wiley and James are gearing up to run up there. There are quite a few birds around, you just have to get to them which is no small problem.
I’m going to stay here and drink coffee and talk to you. Oh, I hear some wing beats and some shots. Felipe reporting from the front. So, we are going to have a archery shoot this afternoon. We all have forty to forty five pound bows and it is very open here. I will be fun to do some long range shooting.
Well, maybe that is it for today. It is fun for me to do this away from home stuff, feel like a real reporter. Speaking of real reporters, Steve Watkins has a new book out or almost out called Pilgrim Strong. Let’s check that out.
Man, all of a sudden this feels like Spain, the Meseta, boarderline desert here where we are. I was up at six before the sun and made breakfast, went for a little hunt and back to do the dishes. I signed on as cook on this trip.
I was awake before dawn and spent a couple hours looking at the sky. I was toasty in my sleeping bag and had a good angle on the moon and the Big Dipper. All was quiet except for maybe a mountain sheep kicking some rocks loose.
The moon is in the final crescent so we see it early. There it was hanging above the horizon. And below it, as if it wasn’t pretty enough was another bright body, a planet maybe.
I just drew that on the IPad, all kind of by accident. Sometimes I just luck out.
But it was the Big Dipper that stole the show. When looking at this constellation you have to be impressed by its usefulness. The two stars that form the sidewall of the cup away from the handle point to the North Star. This being the most important star in the night sky. This is the same as True North. It saved my butt more than once.
The slaves escaping from the South on the Underground Railroad were told to follow the Drinking Gourd, their words for the Big Dipper. But beside its usefulness there is the beauty of the darn thing. There it is setting there like it has for millions years now.
What a treasure.
I was looking at the structure of it, the seven stars. It looks so perfect if not slight worn. So many have used it, yes it’s bound to be a little battered. The cup is in pretty good shape but the once elegant handle has a little bit of a crook in it. Well not anything to worry about really, just reporting. It still all points to the North Star, which is the important part.
And what if that was the really really important part. What if Christ, the Living Water, is pointing the way for all of us. What if that has been hanging there all this time to show us. Well I am not saying I made some important discovery but it will never be the same for me from now on.
Who knew science could be so fun. And who said the sky is science anyway. OK, time to figure out lunch I see the boys half a mile away and they are looking hungry.
