Blog-aversary

 Today says I've been blogging since 2008! My first blog was Goddess in Clay. It's been completely dismantled, and no longer exists in the la-la land of blogs.

So I wrote a few months, then decided to expand and include posts of my own functional clay work...which I started making also in 2008. I had retired in 2007, and recovered enough to start working in the community studio in downtown Black Mountain NC.

Those first efforts were pretty sad, but I was not deterred. I had already studied ceramics and got a BFA many years before. I even spent many Saturday mornings in summers selling my wares at the Tailgate Market.

In the meantime, I would sit here at a computer (I think I've been through one CPU tower and am on my 3rd laptop) and read about other people's lives all over the world, and share little bits of my existence.

For me it was fun to have different topics for different blogs. And so the pottery one, where there used to be recognitions based on how many pottery posts were made in a year...evolved into all art...Alchemy of Clay. 

And since people really responded to photos of the area I lived in...Living in Black Mountain was born (2013-2024) then finally retired as I focused more on this one, When I Was 69 (2013-present.)

However, I had other interests, and started Three Family Trees (2018-now) about my genealogy interests, and Open Yesterday's Pages (2024-26) about anything historic, and then Inner Workings  started just last year for my more serious thoughts.

Then the opportunity came to move to live closer to one of my sons, and perhaps breathe better in drier conditions, so I moved to Durango CO, and within a month I knew I needed to start a new blog Life in Durango!

And I even tried at one time to write a blog about the clay studio, which I kind of let fall away after a while. Most of my blogs are still active, except maybe the goddess one...so I put goddesses in whenever I feel like it, wherever I'm writing. And I sure don't have anything to say on most of them, except this and the Durango one. I keep trying to skip this one...but hey, something is worth sharing, and boom, here I yam!

I enjoy interacting in comments...and making replies. I know few other bloggers do this, but that's ok. I do have busy days when I just barely read blogs at all...but there are seldom days where I don't connect to the www out there at all. I admit to being a blog-addict!

So when blogger started having problems last month or so, I was really worried. I've thought of this as a safe place to store all kinds of information. It's not just the social connections, it's an archive for me. 

I know some of you have been blogging longer than I have, and it's really great to have those friendships. And I also have the sadness associated with those who have died, or just stopped blogging for some other reasons. I have a good-bye blog which will automatically post (if blogger so chooses) whenever I'm no longer able to write here. I just keep adding little bits to it, taking some off, and setting the publication date forward a few months time. So there might be a bit of silence before it finally is posted...and I imagine that's just the way it will have to be.

Until then, I'll see you in the funnies!

Where have the small farms gone?

"The American Farm Bureau Federation documents that over 160,000 farms vanished between 2017 and 2024. In 2025 alone, another 15,000 ceased operations—8,000 of them small farms generating between $1,000 and $9,999 annually."

Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more They Are Killing the Farmers and Nobody Is Asking Why. John Walter Sep 28   READ IN APP   Editor’s Note What follows is assembled from verified documentation: bankruptcy filings from U.S. federal courts, European Union parliamentary records, United Nations agricultural reports, audio recordings of farmer protests in Brussels and The Hague, and interviews published in agricultural trade publications and regional newspapers between 2024 and 2026. I have confirmed every statistic through primary sources, every quote through multiple recordings, every name through official documents. Some individuals requested anonymity—not from government retribution, but from banks holding their mortgages and corporations controlling their seed supply. Others insisted their names appear in full. They want their testimony preserved. When the Last Tractor Leaves Arkansas: The Reckoning That Farmers from Stuttgart to Brussels Have Been Trying to Warn Us About The Thirty-Three Bankruptcies That Led the Nation in a Category No One Wants to Claim In February 2026, Arkansas led the United States in agricultural bankruptcies. Thirty-three farms filed for Chapter 12 protection in the first twelve weeks of the year—the highest number in Arkansas in the twenty-first century, more than double the previous year’s total. Georgia followed with twenty-seven filings, a 145 percent increase from 2024. Nationally, Chapter 12 farm bankruptcies reached 315, marking a 46 percent increase and the third consecutive year of rising filings. These figures represent only farmers with sufficient assets to require court protection. They exclude the thousands who simply walked away, who sold combines and tractors at auction for scrap value, who woke before dawn one morning and decided never to plant again.  The Colorado River Missed Its Deadline: Fifty Thousand Jobs and the Water That Never Came While Midwestern farmers grappled with fertilizer costs, their counterparts in the American West confronted water scarcity reaching crisis proportions in 2025. The Colorado River Basin, providing water for 5.5 million acres of agricultural land and 40 million people, has been in structural deficit for years. In 2025, negotiators from seven states missed deadlines for establishing new operating guidelines. Agricultural water use accounts for approximately 75 percent of beneficial uses in the Colorado River Basin and about 60 percent of all consumptive uses. In California’s Central Valley, water scarcity has already forced fallowing of hundreds of thousands of acres. The Public Policy Institute of California estimates up to 50,000 jobs could be lost in the Central Valley alone. Imperial Valley farmers, producing two-thirds of U.S. winter vegetables, faced impossible choices. Some sold water rights to urban areas rather than continue farming. Others shifted to less water-intensive crops with lower profit margins, accelerating financial distress... Three and a Half Times Higher: The Suicide Rate That Agricultural Economists Do Not Include in Their Spreadsheets Farmers in the United States die by suicide at rates 3.5 times higher than the national average. The suicide rate in rural America increased 46 percent in recent years. Between April 2024 and March 2025, 259 farm bankruptcies were filed. Each filing represented not merely financial event but psychological trauma... Seventy-Nine Percent Control One Quarter: The Consolidation That Is Not Foreign Ownership But Something More Systematic In 2025, American farms making $1 million or more in annual sales increased by 50, while farms generating $1,000 to $9,999 fell by 8,000. Nearly 79 percent of farms generate under $100,000 in annual sales yet control only about one-quarter of farmland. Millions of acres are now owned by investors who will never set foot on the property. The Union of Concerned Scientists has identified this consolidation—not foreign ownership, which receives disproportionate political attention—as the genuine national security threat... The Warning That Has Been Repeated Since 2024: What They Know and What We Refuse to Hear What emerges from this accumulation of data is systematic destruction unexplained by individual failure. Jose Maria Castilla warned of “crazy laws.” Caroline van der Plas warned that “when the farmers are gone, they are not going to come back.” Florian Poncelet testified to persistence: “We’ve been protesting since 2024.” They are warning anyone who will listen that the system is breaking, that abundance assumed as birthright is conditional and temporary. The skills required to farm well take decades to develop. The knowledge of specific places takes generations to accumulate. Once lost, this human capital cannot be replaced. They are warning us. They have been warning us for years. The question is whether we will listen before the warnings become memories, before the farms become suburbs, before the soil becomes dust, before the hunger becomes our own. ---------------------- Thanks to John Walter's newsletter. I have cut out all the data which refers to European and Indian farmers. It's gruesome reading, and you are welcome to sign up for the newsletter. I found several links required me to subscribe to different sites, which I declined doing. My other concern (minimal in the face of these stats) is the sentence regarding "The suicide rate in rural America increased 46 percent in recent  years." It doesn't say when that percentage is measured from and to. from the internet, posted by  former potter, John  Bauman

Full moon

 

Saturday just before dawn, 6:30 am, Sept. 26, 2026, Durango CO. The highest point of land is Perin's Peak.

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I honor the North Carolinians and all the helpers who were faced with the devastation from Hurricane Helene 2 years ago today. See my post Life in Durango, where I talk more about it.

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If we merge mercy with might, and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change, our children’s birthright.

AMANDA GORMAN ------------------------- Holidays to hold this day: Ancestor Appreciation Day Consumacion de la Independencia (Mexico) Crush a Can Day Daughter’s Day (Fourth Sunday in September) Day of the French Community Gold Star Mother’s Day (Last Sunday in September) Google’s Birthday International Day of the Deaf (Last Sunday in September) Morning Show Hosts Day National A.J. Day National Chocolate Milk Day National Corned Beef Hash Day National Doodle Day National Gay Men’s HIV/AIDS Awareness Day National No Excuses Day National Police Memorial Day National Scarf Day Priesthood Sunday (Last Sunday in September) Turkmenistan Independence Day World Day of Immigrants and Refugees World Deaf Day World Tourism Day Sunday Sept. 27, 4:28 am

Ixchel - weaver of fabric goddess

 “Goddess as Mother is the Weaver of the Fabric of the Universe, with many ancient Goddesses imaged this way. This power came to be feared, rather than revered – in Her “character as creator, sustainer and increaser of life” the Great Goddess came to be seen as “negative and evil,” by a consciousness that desired “permanence and not change, eternity and not transformation, law and not creative spontaneity …(turning) her into a demon.” This consciousness, which Neumann calls an “antivital fanaticism,” feared being “ensnared” in the “web of life, the veil of Maya.” Sometimes the weaving activity of women became known as the cause of illness or a curse with some Christian traditions even forbidding knitting. Ixchel the Weaver, Mother, Queen, Grandmother to the peoples of Southern Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, and most of Central America, came to be symbolized by an “overturned vessel of doom” – yet “for centuries, women have made pilgrimages to Her holy places.” Austen describes Ixchel as sitting “at Her loom with Her ever-present bird companion, the nest weaver, who is associated with Goddess throughout the world:” Ixchel “easily and with great presence ... in the bliss of creativity” spins “from her deepest being” and breaths the “breath of eternity, ... the life force into each being.”

-Glenys Livingstone Ph.D., A Poiesis of the Creative Cosmos: Celebrating Her within PaGaian Sacred Ceremony – Girl God Books

Art by Lauren Raine

My friend Mary Moon told me about Ixchel, whom I had never known much about. Thanks to Girl God Books of Norway for this posting this on FB. I'm in awe of Ms. Raine's weaving of ceramic strips in her art.