Colour is a fiction of light

Sail on, silver girl, sail on by

Your time has come to shine

All your dreams are on their way

See how they shine …

Like a bridge over troubled water

I will ease your mind

Like a bridge over troubled water

I will ease your mind…Paul Simon

I started 2026 with an immersion in hot water.

It’s something I can do because I live in a place with a choice of mineral hotsprings spas.

Unfortunately, capitalist greed is king, and access to all the geothermal water in this town is commercially controlled, unlike those rumored old times times when Apache people would avail themselves of the soothing and healing qualities offered by the naturally occurring mineral hot springs on the swampy banks of what is today generally called the Rio Grande (USA) or Rio Bravo Del Norte (Mexico). Or when the Spanish conquistadors came through, around about 1590s maybe, looking for Eldorado and finding Ojo Caliente de las Palomas. I will take the latter any day. ‘Swhy I live here, with very little gold coin but plenty of doves and hot water and all the magnificent fiction of light a soul could yearn for.

De colores, de colores

Brillantes y finos se viste la aurora.

     De colores, de colores

Son los mil reflejos que el sol atesora.

     De colores, de colores

Se viste el diamante que vemos lucir.**

To start the year off I splurged and booked myself a soak at the newly renovated and become too-expensive for regular soaking, Hoosier bathhouse. I wanted sunrise and picked the Cedar Tub which does actually feature a beautifully shaped cedar tree. Immersion beneath this cedar tree was my favorite way to soak at this establishment way back, before it changed hands, when it was less than a third of the price today, and one could just walk in and get your soak card punched while the resident cat wove its way between yourself and host creating bond and community. Now one books online. Which is where, hoping for sunrise, I picked the earliest possible booking at the outdoor soaking tubs.

I didn’t get sunrise. New Year’s Day turned out to be one of those rare overcast mornings more typical of the Pacific Northwest than the Chihauauan desert. It wasn’t exactly raining, but the fog was low, heavy and damp in a dripping tap kind of way. Highly unusual. Since I was getting wet anyway, these conditions were not a problem, and the low light possibly tempered all the shiny silver of outdoor soaking tub metal privacy walls.

Potted palms and a very beautiful but very spiny barrel cactus have joined the cedar tree to provide ambience. Idle thought:  is this the best choice of ornamental plant to have in a small enclosed space where people are derobing down to bare skin?

I lie back in the lovely water in this (for me) upmarket cement water tub, banishing all idle, alarmist thinking, enjoying my new year treat, letting the hot mineral water be a bridge over the currently very troubled waters of the world. Let it go. Let it be. Seagulls, the beautiful but sometimes scavenger rats of the skies, drawn to the nearby downtown grocery store dumpster, float in the soft silver fog above me, enhancing the coastal dysphoria, their calls just audible above the splashy water sounds from the continuously running hot water pipe. Ascending into fog on the wings of a gull. Is this some kind of obscure new year wheel of fortune messaging or just what is? Sail on silver girl…

Back home at the shala, I find somebody has walked a path across the mulch of my freshly planted cereal rye bed. Pesky curious felines, just have to be investigating everything I am doing, all the time! I dare you to undo the serenity of an hour’s immersion in hotsprings water!

A few mornings later, I catch the full moon as she sets at dawn, peeping over the western fence, through the branches of the winter bare cottonwood.

Sail on silver girl, your time has come…

In a Land of Enchantment twist on the raven and the sun story, a robin brings me a little golden orb. Some kind of magic? A New Year’s gift for providing clean bathing and drinking water for the birds?

Maybe. I suspect the golden orb could be the seed of the pyracantha berries which everybody avian is currently enjoying. Meanwhile I enjoy the colours of the light on water shattering as one of the resident robins splashes in a variation on the cement water tub which I had soaked in to start the year.

December just past was so unseasonably warm that aphids are still a problem on my winter greens, kale and collards. I use up some of the small, old garlic, the tail end of last season’s harvest, to make a pungent garlic spray. Though I don’t like the freezing desert January nights, we do need some cold for the garden’s health, the earth’s health, to balance the bugs.

Since I’m creating alchemy in the kitchen, I make another batch of (vegan) chile spiced apple sauce walnut carrot cake muffins. That’s breakfast and/or snacks sorted for a bit. Find them at The Rooster Deli & Cafe. Open early. (aka the kitchen)

In these first days of the year I’ve been enjoying the sun outback in Cafe Paradiso, occupying my hands doing the arduous work cleaning last year’s harvest of cereal rye.

I don’t know a less time consuming way to do small batch winnowing, but it’s a peaceful thing to do in winter sun, scraping my thumbnail along each ear to make the grain pop out, under that beautiful blue enamel tin drum sky, in a winter garden. It’s the reason I spent last cool season, the best time for outdoor infrastructure projects, making outdoor rooms. This time of year the indoor spaces of a stone and adobe structure contain such a chill that I prefer being outside. Once upon a time haciendas such as the shala would have had fireplaces.

Barley, radishes and fava beans are currently doing okay under the bare mesquite tree in front. I’m still not the world’s best radishes grower. Once this seed is done, I’m not doing radishes any more.

There’s plenty of cleaning, composting and pruning kind of work to do in the front where garlic and spicy Asian greens are also thriving, but mostly I just love being out there at sunrise when everything is suffused with enchantment.

Sometimes, however, I do have to draw myself inside, away from all that confection of light, to do stuff.

The Year of the Fire Horse (February 17th) cards are taking shape.

Blocks for the three colour print were carved in the sunshine outback, though if you were on my mailing list in 2014, you might remember the horse design from then, there.

In those days, I collaged the cards with piles of bling and fun ephemera. I had lots of time, it seems.

Now that I am retired from professional employment as a high priestess of knowledge, and in thrall instead to a life of quiet obscurity, a hugely needy house and demanding but oh so rewarding garden, I am just making block printed cards, no playful additives.

For this Fire Horse year I have introduced two background colour blocks, one for the surround, one for the horse body to make it a three colour print. Still pondering which colour ways I like best. Friends and family will get their cards before mid February. Inshallah and USPS and your country postal service willing. Weather and wind permitting, cards will also be available at my farmers market booth, currently on winter hours second and fourth Saturday mornings in the park on the banks of the rio where a brand spanking new boat dock is being built! A boat dock to launch a kayak on the river a just few blocks from my house! Imagine that! If you can’t make it to the farmers market, and want a fire horse or two, you either know how to contact me, or can comment below.

Until then, I’m away with the fairies, listening for distant drumbeat of galloping hooves. Drawing nearer. You would be too (away with the fairies, I mean) if you lived in this enchanted fiction of a life.

**From the traditional Spanish Folk Song De Colores, a song of joy and celebration of all the colours of the creation. The song has been covered by many artists, including the Los Angeles rock group Los Lobos, so I thought it a fitting anthem for the time of the Wolf Moon. Various additional verses, sometimes specifically honoring farm workers have been added at different times. It is usually sung in Spanish. Where I live.