Is this really a new post?

I kept putting off blogging. The last time I wrote something was in September, almost two months ago. I wait for inspiration, for something new and ingenious to share with the cyber world, and as you can see, nothing really made the cut. I'd felt that my writing and thoughts were getting repetitive and that scared me.
Now that deer-hunting season is upon us, I've prepared myself with thoughts of woodsy-memoirs, willing to make the binding internet promise of blog postings, when I obviously fizzled out with my South Dakota Turkey Hunt.
Writing inspires reflection, inspires action, inspires inspiration.
The internet is not a book page. A blog is for reaction, discussion, sharing, so I need to just write away. This is a place for typos, musings, and creativity:  I can always hit the edit button. :)

Sometimes the hardest thing is forcing yourself to take time and do something you love.

I am from

My body is filled with sunlight, boiling beneath my skin (because I’ve been trapped indoors for too long). Soon I must return to where I am from.

 I am happiest in the dark early mornings, when I am blind and finally focused on what’s going on around me, inside me. There is no hum of machinery slowly, constantly fraying my soul. There is no concrete, only snapping twigs when I venture off course carelessly. When I am so lucky, I can lean against my family, against their bark, and watch the horizon as new color marks another day. They support me as I see pink, the flushed cheek of a friend whose face I can no longer touch; the orange of the pressed flower I sent my grandmother in the last letter. I wonder where it is now, that flower, broken in the bottom of a storage box? Pressed into her bible? Does it matter? Soon all is the shade of blue, of white, and there are flowers growing beside me.

And it is today. Here in my home, lessons are easier and much more complex than the foreign language of classroom conversation. I am growing as an elm, my mistakes turning into mushrooms at my feet. I can be as a fiery red thorn bush, aggressive and angry, ripping at anything that comes too close. Tomorrow I will be an apple tree. You can bury your favorite dog under me. My home is my body, my soul. I am the woods and it is me. I breathe because it lets me, I breathe because it tells me that life should be so simple. And I breathe because of the wind, because when it blows I am inspired to finally exhale. I cry because even the clouds need release.

I am a tree replanted in front of a house. My feet are buried in cement. I try to hear the birds and I try to blink and be happy but my limbs are being bent to allow for power lines.

South Dakota Day 2: Friday April 15, 2011

Windburn, Gobbling, and Much Needed Exercise

Note:  Like a fool, I procrastinated the documentation of my wonderful South Dakota Trip day two. Although I will never forget the heart pumping, adrenaline-filled last day of the trip, the in between long hiking days are fading from my mind but they are not to be forgotten. They too have a lesson, so I will try my best to remember and recreate, using my vague notes and my slowed sense. I will also try to keep the emotion behind each entry the same as it was during the hunt. Everyone knows attitudes change over time, and I’m afraid that once again I am a new version of myself.

4:30 am – 12:30 pm

                I woke up early from a horrible night of dreams involving an unsuccessful quest to get to sleep. What horrible luck that is, to dream about restlessness and insomnia only to wake up feeling the same. My only hope to get moving this morning was to chug coffee from local gas station (four sugar packets, two creamers). We drove around on the windy roads this morning, stopping to send out calls, begging for the wind to carry with it a gobble and also to die down enough for our own yelps to be heard. Soon we gave up realizing that we could barely hear each other through the screaming gusts. Instead we put our heads together and asked the famous question:  If I were a turkey where would I be? The answer:  Somewhere out of the wind where I am able to display for my lady hens.  So we jumped back into the car and carried on, following the dirt road to the valley where we stopped to clean my bird last year (and where my dad got his while my sister and I made a prolonged feathery mess during a not so professional cleaning). We hiked for a little bit that felt like a lot considering the amount of hiking I am used to (panting up and down the school stairs).

I must admit that I wasn’t confident about this morning’s conditions. It was windy to the point that I felt my face falling off, and it had snowed the day before after the initial change to spring had already teased us. I thought my sister was being hopeful and delusional when she said she heard a gobble that my dad and I had missed.  Soon however we were ducking down-- squatting in search of the Tom we heard rapidly approaching over the crest. We would creep forward in pursuit and then take our turn in hiding. It was a stalemate between aggression and shyness. He would come forward as we became trees. We snuck a few feet his direction when he turned his back or his gobble became more distant.  Finally, as we crouched listening, trying to locate the nearby and camouflaged bird, I saw the beauty. It was 100 yards in front of me, displaying, and slowly moving away from us. After my initial surge of adrenaline, and after my heart returned once again from my throat to my chest, we stood up and continued after the bird. We climbed the hill in pursuit, my own face flushed from excitement and windburn until eventually, at the top of the mountain, it ran away… spooked…most likely from my eagerly peaking head.

And now, In order to distract you from my amateur mistake, I will describe the weather. You will appreciate the scene painted before you, and maybe, if I’m lucky, you will tell yourself that the tom merely had grown excited about the sun’s appearance. He was running off to a field to soak it in. Realize, although it was windy and there was snow on the ground, it was melting fast. The sun, like I said before was out and depositing happiness on everything it touched. The sky was blue, and I was sweating from all the hiking/rock climbing. Actually, although initially the snow seemed like a stupid surprise from Mother Nature, it ended up benefiting us. We used it to follow the spooked bird’s tracks, and figure out where it came from. We followed the three-pronged prints as they joined and separated from other sets. We reenacted in our minds the strutting tom as we saw the drag marks from the displaying wings. Eventually, after bobbing around with the seemingly random paths, we found their roost site. We now knew where we were setting up for the evening hunt.

Once we got down from the hill/mountain, I was almost running to the car to celebrate the fact that I A.) was able to change out of my too warm and without traction boots into my hiking ones and B.) I was soon going to be able to use the bathroom which my now adrenaline-free-self realized I needed badly. But of course as we were driving on the road away from our morning hunting area, we saw a group of turkeys feeding at an opening between two hills. Of course we turned around and pursued them, stealthily jogging the side of a parallel hill. And of course after scaling the side of a hill, we got too close, and ended up lying flat on our backs and not moving for an hour. Eventually after tests of patience, leg-cramps, and full bladders we backed off since none could be identified as Toms. Of course I enjoyed every second of it. Eventually we arrived back at the hotel.

1:30- 7:38 pm

To kill the time of the usually inactive afternoons, we travelled down the back roads sight-seeing and reminiscing. We visited the land where I shot my first Merriam last year. We then headed back to our estimated roost site from our morning tom. We scaled the hill again (better boots this time) and sat waiting. We heard gobbles, but we saw no birds. Later as we descended the hill after shooting time expired in the eerily light night, all I could think about were the smells around me. I must remind myself to look up the type of cedar I was leaning against. I need to collect and store in my memory all of the scents of the plants as we descended the hill that night. I don’t know if it was the large moon, the blue tint of the darkening sky, the dew collecting on the grasses, or really just the crushed aromas of the plants below our feet, but this rushed momentum down the hill passed too quickly. It was Wonderful.

The Answer

The Answer
By Katy Turner

Let me walk with no agenda
to where the failed days are still rewarding.

No judgment,
no burden, no facade.

Let me take off all that is me
and become what is meant to be,
Who is meant to be.

Let me drop what is now and
run to the woods,
my solace, my love.

Let me rise with the sun and let it warm my heart
like you never could.

Let me sing with the barred owl at dawn,
and let me scream my lament with the crows.

Let the dew upon my feet be the tears
that wouldn't fall.
I wipe them off so easily.

I am the moon, I am the sun,
the displaying turkey, the loping deer.
I am the morel living with the dead.

Let me be the maple,
the bramble, the peat.

Oh just let me be.
Let me be me.

In my home.
In the woods.


With the answer.

Nature Journal: Deer

• Ok, yes humans are more evolved then deer. We have a higher "intelligence," yet when we enter the deer domain we are weak. Would we still be good hunters today if not for the ammunition, the gunpowder, the machine that we have at arms length that only takes a finger to operate? There’s the bow-hunting yes, but as a society, how much would the world be different if we devolved our culture a bit? Just a scrambled thought I had today when thinking about hunting. In the end the deer and the human make different uses of their surroundings. One is with it, is the stealth of the slow swaying tree beside it, and the other? The other is marching, banging drums, and roaring to the surroundings “I am man, I am man: Do you see this concrete beneath me? I have built it!”

Nature Journal: Geese

As I see the geese line up around the river getting ready to fly away, I am filled with envy. Their wings have no limitations. My legs have a sort of ball and chain that was issued to me when I chose this path. Most of the weight is money, responsibility that I took on when I began taking out loans, but there are also expectations. It just kills the wild in me thinking about all the years I will be spending to pay off this debt. I think about how heavy that chain will feel, and though with time it may come off, I wonder if that old bird inside me will be fit enough to really fly. To really feel the wind whip across my face. I would be the grayest goose, zigzagging across the sky, honking up a storm. Free.

Nature Journal: Change

• It’s the smell I think that excites me about the fall. The summer is beautiful, heavy, bright. The fall brings a wonderful aroma to my face. The crunching of the leaves adds a music to my ears as I walk about. The colors stimulate my mind as I paint the them in my memory, but they too fade with time. Perhaps weather is the only change that I truly welcome. Usually I drag my feet with anything new, or my heart explodes in tragic anticipation. With the changing of the seasons, I feel weight getting lifted as I tell myself that with the changes around me, so I can change, Like the leaves on the tree before me, I can be beautiful. I can figure things out. When the snow falls I will be closer to being who I want to be. Perhaps with the chill will come a confidence to take another step forward.