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Homecoming


Last week was a very bad week. From a cow drive with too many bulls, to 30 mosquito bites that made me sick (due to monsoon season, a blessed thing, and sleeping out at cow camp), to suffocating afternoon heat and nights too hot to sleep, to waiting out the rain inside the hay trailer because the storm came on too fast to get the tent set up. From finding one of our dogs dead to getting bucked off hard. Last week was a very bad week.

When the days get rocky and we hit a rough patch, I find myself saying a phrase to myself, a phrase that bubbles up unbidden: “I wanna go home.” I have moved almost 40 times in my life. The seeking for the comfort of home is engrained in me, even though this fall marks my tenth anniversary in the same place. Home has come to mean something to me other than physical location or a building, though I now have a very nice office space of my own that is welcoming and expressive of my creative self. But over the years, my real home, the place I go for comfort and belonging, is the page. The blank white page waiting for me to nestle in with pens and words. So, as I struggled to my feet after that long-legged, red-headed firecracker of a mare blew up with me, I sought air, first and foremost, but as I began to breath normally again, that old familiar phrase came to the surface. “I wanna go home.” And I knew that the next morning, during a time of passionate reflection, sitting in a camp chair, coffee in my tin cup, the sun making a miracle of the sky as it was also reflected off the surface of the dirt tank, with the cows coming down out of the trap for hay, I would bring the hard week home to the page, that I would begin to write it all down.

Morning pages are my habit, my practice, my faith. Julia Cameron laid out the philosophy of morning pages in her book The Artist’s Way, and I developed this habit of writing three pages of longhand every morning before anything else well over a decade, and five books, ago. I show up at the page every morning, whether I am at home with coffee from the percolator, on the road with that constant seeking of decent coffee in a hotel, or in cow camp, having rolled out of a bedroll on the ground, drinking the best coffee in the world boiled in that old blue pot. This homecoming, this watchfulness, at the beginning of every day, has stood me in good stead. It is a part of my creative process that can’t be replaced.

And so, it is true. The morning after getting bucked off hard, I sat, stiff and sore, and started. I moved my hand across the page. I took the story home.

In just few days, we will also gather together. We will have a homecoming celebration at Yavapai College in Prescott, Arizona. We will gather with our family of heart, those who live a similar life, growing food, and we will share our songs, our poems, our stories on stage. We will take those words that have come during times of passionate reflection and give them more life by sharing them aloud. What we all bring home to the page and then to the stage are lives lived loud and proud. One of the biggest lessons I have learned, through a decade of making my living cowboying, is that if I stay at home, stay on the page, I run out of anything fresh and real to say. Only through a life lived out there, doing a job, doing meaningful work, riding through places of breathtaking beauty on days that are hard and long, only through loss and joy, sweat and effort, miles and smiles, a shared joke at the end of the day, relationships with other species and the weather, only then, when I come home, do I have something to write about, and share, as we gather again at the Arizona Cowboy Poets Gathering.

Amy Hale Auker writes and rides on a ranch in Yavapai County, Arizona. Her first collection of poetry, Livestock Man, will make its debut at the Arizona Cowboy Poets. She is the author of Rightful Place and Ordinary Skin: Essays from Willow Springs as well as two novels, Winter of Beauty and The Story Is the Thing.

More from Amy at:

Livestock Man is available, as well as Amy's other books, from her website, www.amyhaleauker.com, online booksellers, and the publisher, pen-l.com.

Come to the Arizona Cowboy Poets Gathering in Prescott, AZ, Aug 9-11. Information: azcowboypoets.org

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