Sidetracked Charley

Life seems to change when we least expect it. And we are prone to see those changes as failures as if success is for the situation to remain the same. In fact, success should be about rolling with the punches. Anyone can walk on even ground or keep in step with a marching band. Picking your own path or setting your own rhythm is the challenge. It has been a challenging month. So challenging I have not had time to write a blog in three weeks. No time to pause and catch my breath and re-access. Sometimes the pauses are enforced by other circumstances. And you are stuck in a lobby, or a waiting room, or exam room having forgotten your tablet and your cell phone; all the magazines are five years old; and there is no one to talk to but yourself. But you know things will be changing if on no other level than how you see yourself. And there are no quick answers. You have no plan for the days ahead easy at hand. A choice is to see it as an opportunity. A game changer. The cha...

Part of the whole deadly triad of blaming others and impression management is campaigning for agreement. We are herd animals. Especially the extroverts among us. We are not comfortable being shunned or blocked of even not getting enough likes for our posts on social media. I call it the deadly triad because in just a few hours, thanks to Facebook and email, we can create opinions which once took months to spread by word of mouth and telephone. Thank heavens we have gotten beyond literal lynch mobs. But maybe what we have now is worse, because we do not even have to think about what we are doing when we post on social media. Nor can we take it back easily because once it is out there it is out there. And some organizations like the Right to Lifers who want to kill abortion doctors don't just shop for agreement but campaign for it. They post names and addresses and hit lists of those against what they believe on websites they manage. And they celebrate in a post when one of t...

I am an artist and a poet. I know how to manage impressions. I have also, in my somewhat checkered career, worked in advertising as a copy writer, been a free lance writer, a theatrical set and costume designer, and acted. You could say I have an advanced degree in impression management. But I seek to be very honest and up front in my personal life. Poetry, not so much. And while I am at times a real sucker for the narcissistic personality disorder in friends (more and more briefly friends) I am also really good at spotting bullshit. I am sure I could have put that more poetically.   There is currently a lot of impression management going on in my little town. And today that means you take it to the ethernet. Let me say that just because it was posted on Facebook does not make it gospel. It does not even have to make it close to the truth. Generally I just read these little mini-dramas and not like or comment. FB does not have a button for Liar or even Dislike so not likin...

Alone in the field The end of the year always brings about agonizing reappraisal. And a questioning of my assumptions. It is always easier to do this with others but not as easy to do it with ourselves. I have promised myself to do better this year at that. A local business just announced it was closing. They blamed us locals because we didn't shop there enough. But who would want to? I asked myself. And I was one of those that shopped there. They stocked products I wanted, but increasingly I was willing to drive over the mountain to get those products. The economy gets a lot of blame for failure of businesses. I do not have enough money to shop local a lot. I try to eat at least one restaurant meal a week. It is a budget line item. If I had more money I would spend more money. I blame the economy for the low sales at my studio. That and Google Maps had me in the wrong spot. But maybe it is that I am not a good painter. Or I have a toxic personality. Admittedly nobody need...

Red Tail Hawk on the Sentinel Tree  The last week of November begins. It brings with it the Full Beaver Moon. I am not sure why the Indians of the Southwest named it that, but for me it seems it may be the last month when beavers can be seen before they go to ground below the ice in their dens. November is the 'tween month. Between Indian Summer and winter. It is the month where we do not take snow seriously because warm days which follow will no doubt melt it. Ski areas are seriously blowing snow to be ready for a ski season which used to begin now. It is the month were ice appears on the ponds and lakes but it also disappears on the ponds and lakes almost as fast. It is the month of preparation for winter, whether you a beaver stashing twigs under the water, or a bear putting on hibernation fat, or a human stocking up on firewood and pantry essentials. The snow does not get serious until middle of December. It is then you best have a plowman lined up for the driveway...

I choose to walk in beauty. To see around me peace. I seek the silence of love. And shun the noise of violence. J. Binford-Bell November 15, 2015 It is often a solitary path, but one with great rewards. I will be on social media a lot less in the future and just to post positive messages and images.

Where have all the flowers gone? Once again the world was shaken by an unspeakable act of violence and yet everyone wants to speak about it. The news media platforms are full of it with all the gory details. Social media is full of pundits with all the answers. Including, but not limited to their favorite cause, be it ISIL or guns or inadequate policing or the wrong religion or praying to the wrong god. And everyone has their favorite solution to the problem. In the US it is take away the guns. France took away the veil. The military want to take lives. The police all our freedoms. None of these have been the answer. Many of these solutions have been the root cause of more violence. And yet we ignore that. It was all about we didn't take it far enough. Guns ought to be harder to get, we need to drop more bombs, spy upon the populations with more, strip more people naked, ban the black hoodie, forbid the religious veils and habits, close all the borders, police all the neighb...

I need to take a long lonely drive to Raton to reflect. But life has been rather busy of late and empty road time not on the schedule. Frankly the schedule of late has not allowed a lot of space for reflection in the studio or behind the camera or walking with the dogs. So, oddly enough, I am looking forward to the dentist today. That is an hour drive to Questa through the Moreno Valley and over Bobcat pass and through Red River. And after the dentist it is off to Taos for the passport renewal before returning through Palo Flechado canyon to my side of the mountain. Without the errands and appointments this route is called the Enchanted Circle. For me it is in a lot of ways a passage through the past. I once lived on the other side of the circle in Questa. Red River was a frequent jaunt for work. And I drove the route from Questa to Taos more than I wanted. I hated Taos as much then as I do now. And, in fact, frequently went north to shop in Alamosa, Colorado instead. After l...

My Cat Thicke Because I am an artist, and a blogger, and on several social media sites I Google well. But Thicke leads me in likes. Paws down. And my photographs of Thicke do very well on several photographic pages I participate in. He certainly has fan appeal. Wondering if he should be my logo. Should I take advantage of him being my unofficial studio cat and make it formal. Yesterday I attended a workshop on how to put my business on the map. Yes, I Google well, even Google image well, but Google maps has trouble locating me. Evidently it also has a great deal of trouble locating a lot of others in my neck of the woods. Literally. But would they zero in on my location if I listed it as the home of Thicke? Tag words or labels help your posts, be they photos or blogs, score high in Google ratings. I use New Mexico a lot. But I am wondering as I am trying to put Binford-Bell Studio on Google and the map should I be using Thicke as a tag word? You got my spots right? In t...

Out of Sync I have been feeling out of sync this summer. I blamed it at first on just being too busy with things out of my comfort zone. And figured it was just a matter of scheduling my life better; paying more attention to my physical and emotional self. Doing those things seemed to take entire too much time. And money. And they also got me overly involved with things like teeth and numbers on cholesterol and blood pressure and calories and sodium. If schedules are tight to begin with then something has to go. One area I almost immediately noticed was art. Even time with my camera ebbed. Since painting and photography are my means to Zen then I was defeating my purpose of paying more attention to my emotional self. But then I began asking myself if all the syncopation was internal. We are part of the universe and certainly our communities and when both are on wobble it is natural to be effected. Some conflagration occurs on the heels of change. Change can be good but it can ...

Holidays are traditions long observed and in a lot of cases very out dated. Take Thanksgiving, for instance. Yes, take it away. Christmas decorations have generally been up for almost a month by the time Thanksgiving rolls around. It is recognized as officially the beginning of Christmas buying and nothing more. Few of us are thankful for much beyond the sales, a day or four off work, and football games. I am not even wild about Turkey. Stuffing yes, turkey no. And in a country dedicated to separation of church and state a holiday that includes praying seems a contradiction. Speaking of contradictions, consider Columbus Day. An Italian that sailed for Spain and never actually made the shores of what is now the United States. And had he, then he would have simply claimed it for Spain. A couple other nationalities made it first we have now determined. And that is if you do not count the three waves of the earliest immigrants to our shores. Note: nobody is indigenous. But I guess yo...

Shooting for the Moon At sometime in my life I was introduced to logic. Maybe more than once. Lewis Carroll, under his real name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson supposedly invented the logic puzzle . But Einstein got credit for the famous Zebra Logic puzzle  that Dodgson did. His writings under his pen name of Lewis Carroll are laced with logic and illogic, riddles and unanswered riddles like "Why is the Raven like a writing desk?" The mere question assumes it is. And the answer? "Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front!" Frankly, always liked it not having an answer. Or Poe wrote on both seemed logical. Logic is the offspring of the Greek syllogism . All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, Therefore, Socrates is mortal. Syllogisms are the core of deductive reasoning  or top down reasoning. The conclusion is valid only if the premises are valid or true. But there are valid arguments and sound ar...

Great Mullen on Bear Trail A former friend told me nobody liked me but her. She alone could put up with my aloof personality and separateness. I had a husband who said something similar decades ago. He died recently, alone, in a jail cell. But my mother raised me to believe the naysayers in my life. I seem to seek them out. If this is friendship and love then I prefer to be alone. I have learned to make friends with myself. And enjoy my own company. Not having someone to meet for lunch does not prevent me from having lunch out. I do not need to go to church, as mother often advised, to meet the right man. As if life is complete only if I did. I am an introvert. Not a solitary human. I have found other introverts on my path. And we enjoy walking together from time to time. On yesterday's walk with two friends and three dogs I found myself hanging back to observe. I do that a lot. I was not observing my friends so much as our dogs; our truly best friends. They took the tra...

Aspens turning on distant mountains Google has given up fonts with serifs. I remember those days with the calligraphy pen practicing the strokes which so naturally gave you serifs. I think I first did that in the seventh grade. I was so proud when I got it right. Now it seems kids do not even learn cursive in school.  And to be honest I love Arial with no serifs the most of all fonts. And my cursive daily looks more like printing. I must acknowledge Penelope, my roommate in college, who taught me prep school script which was actually printing. I practiced it in my first ever journal. I have a shelf on a book case which contains all the journals I have managed to keep before Y!360 and my first every on line journal. I still love journals and buy them. I have four currently with a page or more written in them. There is the garden journal which I am religious about only in the spring. Time to update it. And then there is my ceremony journal in which I keep records of ...

Shadows and light in Taos Once again I have been asked about where to live in Taos. And once again I had a difficult time explaining to the friend of a friend that I do not live there. Would not live there. I lived in Taos County for nine years and so wanted to leave that county I was willing to get a divorce to do so. I live on the other side of the mountain now. I try to explain to people how very different this side is. The Mountain Between us We're the wet side. We can drive through the pass to the other side in 45 minutes to an hour. But there is a huge cultural divide between the two sides. Taos was on the Camino Real and settled by the Spanish who took the land from the Native tribes who lived there. Then they enslaved them. The Moreno Valley was settled by miners at Elizabeth town and homesteaders who took advantage of the 1862 homestead act to settle the Black Lake area and the Moreno Valley grasslands. The Trujillos and Torres built huge ranches by blending...

The Palisades in afternoon light Truth is where you find it. It can be in a book or a movie or a short scene from television episode. Or, quite frankly, for me in alone time on the road to Raton. Or maybe the road to Raton is just the processing time I need; the pause to meditate on the signs showing up in my life. There was this StarTrek episode with Harvey Fenton Mudd as a pimp for women to be wives of miners on a far and distant planet, Mudd's Women. He gives the women pills to transform them into goddesses and it turns out it is really an inside job. How we perceive ourselves is so much a part of how others perceive us. I first saw this show originally decades ago so it has been stashed in the back of my mind for a long time. Yesterday it joined up with another scene from something I just watched in season four of Longmire. It dealt with a rape victim and how part of her was stolen and she needed to call it back to her to be whole. Nobody could do it for her. It isn...

The Play's the Thing We met in the laundry mat I was in an off campus apartment He was in just out of a marriage house. He invited me to tryouts for Night of the Iguana. I didn't much like him Don't think he liked me I got a small part and lights He had a bigger role A brain and a car. I first fell in love with the theater. The director fell for all I could do My neighbor was in charge of delivering me. I remember my first lines Spoken in an amateur play I do not remember our first kiss The first time we shared a stage I remember better. I designed the costumes and sets for the Importance of Being Ernest He slept with the ingenue I did a 20 minute monologue In Androcles and the Lion. I played Mercy In The Crucible Proctor laid the lead witch I danced the cast parties With every actor but him. Moving in with him Seemed just another role A part to be studied And memorized Line perfect. The curtain never came down I just exited ...

A call to remember things some best forgotten from decades past and gone. Dead she said. Not unexpected news how and where was. A cell in the county jail. The child of bright promise died a drunk. A man at the end  I thankfully never knew. I left to avoid knowing. The call became more about the past  we knew not him. Alone drunk in a cell the professor died. Jacqui Binford-Bell September 1, 2015

Old Friends I have long known that photographers are only truly happy with a camera in their hands. And paradise may be having a photographer buddy to share fstops with. I say maybe because there are photographers and there are photographers. We don't all want to capture the same subjects. Or talk about the same things while scouring the landscape outside the car looking for the next object of attraction. And there is nothing more awful than being in a vehicle driven by a non-photographer unless you forced yourself to leave your camera at home. Better to travel with just your camera. But the last three days have been awesome with my photographer friend from the east coast visiting. Since her last visit I have been cataloging old trucks to share. And yesterday we hit the truck trail. Some were old friends of mine. And some I had saved for her visit. International at Eagle Nest And some were eureka moments while looking for buffalo and antelope or discussing the nex...

My friends, who have weathered the storm, have taken to calling my split with long time friend and neighbor as the divorce. In the beginning I protested. But, upon reflection, I can see what their reasoning is. But this blog is about life after divorce. Or as I would put it -- re-entering society. Never easy for an introvert, be it entering or re-entering. Life has gone on, as every divorcee discovers, without my participation. There is a lot of catching up to do. I am way behind on conclusions others have made about several other mutual friends. Maybe this stage of life is prone to having breakups with long term relationships. We could form our own support group. Since others have been on the same path I find the general population was already trained to not ask about the missing friend, who was previously attached at the hip. Well, mostly everyone. At a dinner with friends in Taos, owner of the restaurant where we dined, asked where our once mutual friend was. She didn't ...

The story goes that in the wild west killing wasn't a killing offense, but recreation. Only two things a man could be hung for were stealing a man's horse or his water. Both were cruel methods of killing someone. You have to live here to understand that. And you know you will never move when you totally understand it. Horses are not as important any more. We have roads and cars and conveniences closer to us than when the Camino Real was the only road and all else were horse paths. But water is still very precious and very necessary. People still get killed over stealing water but the bodies are better hidden. Poisoning water may be even worse than stealing it. You cannot steal it back. Poisoning it has made it useless for everyone including the livestock and the land and the wild creatures. So the recent news of the toxic spill from the Silverton Gold Mine into the Animas River is to us westerners worse than a madman in Aurora killing people in a movie theater. And yet ...

What is it about the ennui of late summer? Spring has its push to get the garden planted. And the first days of summer is that list of all the things which must be done while the weather is still nice. I still have that list. I have added to that list. Only a couple things scratched off. I got the spouts on the bathtubs changed out! And Totally cleaned the bathroom. Both bathrooms. Had a new toilet installed in the rental unit. Gave up on the lose tooth just falling out on its own and had it pulled. In Stephen King films they seem to fall out so easily. With all the rains, mowing grass seems to have taken a big chunk of the time this summer. And yet I am very obviously behind on that. A professional is coming next week to catch me up. But I rather like the three foot tall grass and all the wonderful wild flowers blooming just every where. I am behind on photography. Going to blame the broken Nikon on that but I had another Nikon to use. The photo treks I planned were curtailed...

First the disclaimer: This blog has nothing to do about lions. I just felt like posting a happy picture of lions to erase all the pictures of a dead Cecil currently on the internet. This blog is really about a tooth. My ex-tooth. And that I will put off going to a dentist until it is so painful I consider pulling it myself with a pliers. I know I have blogged about how I feel about dentists before. This blog about The Tooth and nothing but The Tooth . Because that is what your life becomes about when you have a bad tooth. Your focus at every meal is how to chew on the side The Tooth isn't on and in such a way the movement of your mouth or tongue does not touch THE TOOTH. THE TOOTH becomes the entire focus on your life. Even when it isn't hurting you are thinking about The Tooth. You think that when at last THE TOOTH  is gone you can get back to normal but then you get to think about not exploring with your tongue where it was, and how much it cost to have it gone, an...

Bridge on NM 434 I have been working in one form or another on a series of articles about the New Mexico Department of Transportation announcement to widen a stretch of road I frequently travel. It will take them five years to widen eight miles of which five is too narrow for two way traffic. It is essentially a one lane road without adding logging and cattle trucks and tourists with RV's or flagmen. For all the years I have lived here, approaching 20 in Black Lake, we all knew the road needed to be widened but we were sure it was impossible. The state engineers' office doesn't think so. The five year plan is afoot. And now it is not whether or not it is impossible but whether they can do it without a complete road closure for at least three years of that five. Frankly, I love that we have something other than politics and religion to discuss. Or for that matter the never ending discussion of widening of NM 64 over Palo Flechado Pass to Taos. There are always the n...

Dad's story, told at every family gathering after I entered college, was that they could not get me to run away from home and so they ran away from me. I never thought it was funny but I did come to believe it was one of the luckiest things to have happened in my life. Mother had registered me for college. I was not even aware she had done it until she got me up one morning and told me I needed to go enroll at the local school, University of New Mexico. So much of what occurred in my life following Mother's cancer was rote or automatic. I just did what I had to do. What people told me to do. Or in the absence of anyone making a decision I just followed the crowds. Like a lemming rushing to the sea. Keep on keeping on. When I stopped to think I thought of suicide. I kept a notebook of all the thought about methods. I didn't want to make a mess that Mother would have to clean up. Or that would horrify my sister should she be the one that found my body. A friend of min...