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The View Eighteen Degrees to My Left

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Even Though a Majority Favor the Drug Peace in My Own New Mexico (As We Do Nationwide), What I’m Noticing in Interviews Like This Terrifically Thorough Half-hour One With the Land of Enchantment PBS Affiliate’s “Newsmakers” Program, Is That The Most Most Mainstream of U.S. Media Platforms Take My “Ending the Drug War is Inevitable and Good” Premise For Granted

 

I Would Still Love Hawaii Even If It’s Denizens Hadn’t Been So Nice to Me

 

My son just burst into my office (trailing a dripping water balloon in each hand that served the same purpose as a medieval bugle volley) to suggest that it was high time I hung one of our blown glass hummingbird feeders outside this window where I spend so much time. The first wave of the only creatures I’ve met with a faster metabolism than my own had been back from their Costa Rican vacation for nearly three days, was his basic point. Their silky, spider web-cushioned doughnut nests were already starting to rise in the usual cholla cactus cradles.

It was, as anyone serenaded, let alone stared-down, by a hovering hummingbird knows, not a bad suggestion. I explained to my replicant that I hadn’t been rushing the washing, filling and mounting of the violet, conical feeder I favor (itself a magnificent work of art, the second purchased from the artist at Oregon Country Fair), primarily because plenty of hummingbirds had been visiting my windowsill already. Heaving deeply from chests the size of wristwatch faces, they appeared grateful just to get a break from the buzzy feeding frenzy running 18 hours a day at every other corner of the adobe Funky Butte Ranch house.

But I also told him that part of the reason for my patience (one man’s laziness) is that, as the ecosystem currently stood here in the high desert spring, I saw just enough deer, quail and strange cats sipping at the graywater laundry runoff creek that happens to materialize at eye level the moment I look left away from my laptop, to keep me on the good side of distracted. Recent studies, I homeschooled, reveal that we need to empty our thinking mind periodically to allow space for constant neural innovation. For me “periodically” means “pretty dang often.”

In the end, this “Eighteen Degrees to My Screen’s Left” viewshed might be the greatest single influence on my writing during this Land of Enchantment phase of my life. Upon these now five minutes of reflection, I see that there’s almost no way the addition of a few dozen ruby-throated and rufous hummingbirds per hour would be a detriment to the (to put it mildly) inspirational vibe that I enjoy in my work space.

I actually have laundry runoff on my mind at the moment for another reason, long-shot though that statement reasonably seems. In fact I’ve just been writing about how hemp-based Doctor Bronner’s laundry soap recently won a sustainable wash-off. If you’ve already checked out Too High to Fail  you can read about this in my forthcoming hemp ebook for the folks at TED – more on that including release date in the next Dispatch. To be among the first to hear the details, you can follow me on Twitter.

The three months of in-the-field research for that project comprised a journey to places pleasant (Hawaii in January) and (on-paper) less so (Manitoba in February). It resulted in adventures including enjoying a hemp-powered limo ride in Denver, testifying for the Drug peace Era in Hawaii, and discovering farmer who powers his farm and town from a carbon-neutral personal hemp power plant.

I’m extremely excited (OK, as I always am when finishing a project) about how this one turned out, in this case because it’s my first multimedia ebook. When I first started out as an author, I could only dream that I would one day be unleashed to simultaneously tell a single story in word and image. I thought I’d have a book side and a film side. Which is to say, this project is a classic case of one that had me feeling lucky to be a professional question-asker.

OK, off to cook some hummingbird juice. Have you any idea how much it means to me that my not-yet-five-year-old offspring (at the moment watering our blossoming orchard) thinks and cares about my work day aesthetics?

Even With a Mountain Lion Treating My Chickens Like a Take-Out Buffet, I Can Run Up My Canyon Again Thanks to the New Funky Butte Ranch Dog: Meet Golden (Mutual) Rescue Abbie


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