I believe they call that revelation.

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

The problem with Narcissus was he couldn’t lift up his stream and carry it around with him in his pocket like we can. Self-awareness is not the same as self-perception. Unfortunately. Philosophically, we’re four generations all living at the same time struggling with the same disadvantage: disadvantage. When it comes to witnessing one’s self, all of us come blind.

I had this idea recently, I think it’s related, that it is not a third eye, but the second mouth which lives in our minds, and all senses feed. I had this idea when I was thinking about the nature of an eyeball. A receptacle, a trash can filled with recycling. Receiving, not really creating. And that’s a poor analogy for consciousness. Considering how much reality imagination is responsible for making. A mouth breathes, in and out, and that you behind the you is not just pulling strings but also reaching out and tying them to things, maybe it should be called the third hand.
See. See how hard it is to see yourself clearly.

To talk about how it feels to feel and make up perfectly parallel analogies. We have no control. No comparison for an ideal life. The one human who did it right. Sure enough, many have tried. Problem is, they said they wouldn’t, but they really did just up and die. Our great philosophers filled our heads with what ifs and wait and sees, and almost none of them fought to hold on to life in the breakneck manner which was passed down to you and me. They left their model incomplete. They never warned us the third eye speaks. And that it isn’t an eye. It’s a disgusting sloppy pair of lips we shove stuff in to spit stuff out and swallow hard and peel back and shout.

It took cameras cheap enough to fit into a commoner’s pocket to show us who we are. And we’re hypnotized, by all the things the storytellers of our society never wrote down. We’re demanding of ourselves to be some new creature because we have never seen us before, even though the latter can true while the former remains demonstrably false. Nothing new in the last fifteen thousand years for Man. Learning something new about yourself isn’t really news.

I believe they call that revelation.

My Garden

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

So many things. Looking out across a haze and realizing it is me. My garden. The dust off the disc I’m pulling. And so many things. The only reason I can see is that I’m directly beneath giant crackling power lines drooped between towers every tenth of a mile. A direct channel cut the way a river dug, shaved the way a razor does. At one time, both creating and destroying this view. 

I think my grandpa felt brilliant when he decided to garden here. Four acres under a power company easement he’ll never get out from under. A sort of real-estate-recycling. Not normal power lines, mind, these are cables connecting two plants together. It’s nuclear and coal combined above my head, where papaw said a light bulb would light up if I held it up high enough. Got paid for the easement, can’t plant trees on it, but shoulder high corn and mound-sprawling peanuts and the juicy expectoration of squash plants up from the ground. Ground he can’t build on or develop. But a collaboration with sunlight eating, root-based life forms in a surface level nutrient mining endeavor, also known as, gardening, it is the perfect spot. Gentle south facing slope.

Four acre field, he called it, the sixty year old question mark shaped man who farmed it. And if he had worked any other part of the land, then we would not have this commanding view from the grinding bucket throne of a geriatric tractor seat. I can see a mile. I can see my great uncle’s old place a hill or two over. I can see a truck with evening piercing spotlights floating like an earth-satellite splitting a wide green field’s black night. But mostly, I see all this taupe dust in the late May, late day, dying light. 

It’s my father’s land, his father’s and his mother’s, and his grandfather’s father before him, floating, off, and we will never see it again. Only the most fertile stuff takes off on a whim like that. The best of the best will always be less beholden to the rest, that’s what we do to people when we tell them they’re the best. We take them off their team. Remove the heat, kill the steam. If I did this enough, I’d lose my garden’s bite, I’d dull its teeth, but once, in a time crunch, on the unguarded border of late spring, North Carolina drought, I could get away with it, and have to, if I want to get it planted by Sunday. Before the rain comes. If all my neighbors, and every farmer for miles did this, we’d create a sizable cloud, enough to squint the eyes of people in town, and if we did it enough, for months, for years, we’d fill up that old dusty bowl full with so many years ago, and the ground would shake from so many old heads shaking in their graves. 

So many things. So much to see. When the power company came through and cut the trees they buried them in long, not so shallow graves along the way. Since they have rotted and collapsed and take up not even a tenth of the space they did in life, there are just massive rectangular divots every acre or so along this regularly mowed river of hovering, frightening, electricity. Like graves who spat out their guests sit gaped, the dirt that once filled them long washed away. A half mile of haze. Churned up by rolling discs that sat for twenty years in the expanse between a grandparent and a grandchild.

If I could have done it any other day, if there was a way I could have waited for the rain, I would have. But there are so many things. So much to think. And then again, there really isn’t. 

To think my grandpa is somewhere buried beneath the same stuff in these clouds of dust, that his old set of garden discs has risen.

The same damned thing

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

The eyes wear a mask. As does the mouth.
Many a closing flap. To keep in and let out.
A mask for the mask of lips.
A mask to hide the shapes of hips.
A mask with laces and rubber soles and leather
to cover the leather we swing like levers
to power this whole mess on.

The worry isn’t the ask to mask,
it’s how they told you to.
To do it. Breathe through it. Lose hope.
Renew it. Take it in stride,
how much there is to hide,
if you want to be accepted.
But do you?

Human not humane. Can a mask be worn on a name?
Is it a guilty face that’s to blame, is that why we wear our shame?
Though the hands do the deeds of love,
they call their masks gloves,
and it hides from whatever you touch,
and no one ever called one tyranny.

But a mask to filter your breath,
shouting give me liberty or death,
like they’re not the same damned thing.

Simply Put

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

It’s about renovated bathrooms and kitchens and putting new floorboards down on corrupt foundations. We need a more solid base. Government hit the track running, declaring for us, by us, a bill of rights more for us than by us. I believe in balance. Two way streets. Other than signs and painted lines and flashing lights, every road goes both ways. No matter who or what says otherwise. Remember that. We need a Bill of Rights, over authority, for government, because without it, they’re keeping us arguing over simplistic basic functions of human society established outside of time. Beyond constitution and revolution and justice systems. Food. Water. Shelter.

We’re launching missions into outer space, subsidizing single crops and mandating the price points of others. We are arguing decisions that are only to be made by trained, certified doctors. With no other natural resource for them, we’re policing medicine, as if people seeking health were criminals.

I don’t care the color of tile we choose for an upstairs bathroom if the concrete left corner of all of this is sinking into ever-softening earth. When there are termites enjoying the joists for breakfast, we should not discuss building new nooks to take meals in watching the sun rise. While gravity takes bites out of the high rise and everything metal gets dressed up in rust.

We, the people, need to write rights for our government to operate by, and before we’re all provided the resources to reasonably feed, house, and water ourselves, there is no higher priority on the agenda.

The founders knew a bureaucracy would be so confounding to the common people we’d fall under it obediently confused and subservient as if legalism was a new kind of steeple, for what is an altar without a gavel to bang it and summon up unsettled verdicts like they were lingering spirits. I don’t want to argue the way things things have been done. The founders invested the lives of our ancestors in the pursuit of freedom and left slavery in the system. Their ideas, their version of quality, is moot. We need to take our way of life down to the root, and start again.

Representation is the curse that has beleaguered this nation. Representative currency. Representative government. Representative freedom. And since its establishment, it has kept farmers, landowners, food producers, too tired and too busy to build any kind of revolution comparable to the first one. We need an agricultural economy, built locally into the infrastructure of every corner of our country. Barter based. Community supported. Democratically governed.

Everything else can remain the same, but the economy that dictates the prices of new Mustang convertibles or used iPhones or shiny logos on tennis shoes should not be the same one that determines the price of food, medicine, life giving water, or me and you. That economy already existed long before America, before Europe, before anyone conceived of something so big as a continent enough to name it. A farming, agricultural, basic, solid, slow changing and frustratingly consistent system at the bottom of our big, grand, shiny, plastic, expensive, current one.

A food, water, and shelter economy. One that recognizes the inarguable fact that poverty is, simply put, just another word for death.

Wrote a new ‘About Me’, thanks for reading!

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

I’m currently enrolled in a master’s program in writing at Lenoir-Rhyne’s Center for Graduate Studies in Asheville, North Carolina. My writing has not yet been selected for widespread publication or inclusion in any creative writing journals, but that hasn’t stopped me from submitting. Mostly I put down poetry, but I have also written upwards of five novels, many more short stories, and have recently dabbled in play-writing and screenplays. My ultimate goal for the degree is to better understand the publishing industry, as well as to eventually obtain a position as an adjunct professor or workshop director at a college or university.

I believe writers benefit greatly from diverse employment in fields that are ‘secular’ to the literary craft, and I currently run a small, slow growing farm, perform in local theater and historical reenactments, as well as being a carpenter’s apprentice, mostly creating high-end custom woodcraft and feature installations in the Charlotte area.

My farm is located in Cherryville, nestled in the southwestern region of the North Carolina Piedmont, about twenty minutes from the South Carolina border. We work one hundred and thirty acres, mostly planted in longleaf pine trees, but also with a herd of dairy goats, a large brood of egg layers, and crop farming as much as weather and time permit. On November 9th of this year, my wife and I hosted our own wedding on the property in an attempt to gauge the possibility of creating a modest farm/forest themed event venue on our land. It was (in our humble opinions) a monumental success, and I have posted some pictures from the event below. We are planning to open it up for select events starting in March of next year.

If you have any questions, or interest in what I have going on in my life or on my property, please feel free to reach out. We’re always looking to partner with local or not so local businesses, as well as individuals interested in increasing their farm and vocational work experience. No matter your main interest or occupation, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised how positive, proactive interactions with nature and the land increase appreciation for seemingly separate, unrelated endeavors. I can be reached at: writeractorfarmer@gmail.com and we can move forward from there!

I’m also a lifelong hiker and advocate of the Appalachian Trail, and outdoor activities, camping, hiking, homesteading in general. I hiked the eight hundred miles from southwest Virginia to the New York state line two years ago, using the Appalachian Trail, and am always looking for new ways to incorporate the outdoors and the life-altering experiences it engenders into my writing and occupational interests.

If you’ve read this far, you can see I keep a lot of irons in the fire simultaneously, which is what makes writing so important. Stories are maybe the only place where a universe of diversity all combines together to form a single cohesive element. It is the unifying, all encompassing invention of humankind: storytelling. Which is why I proudly list it first in my little titular list of occupations: writer, actor, farmer. Literature is the roof under which I house all other interests, it is how I keep them warm through the night, safe and dry even as the sky opens up and baptizes us all beyond anything we would ever decide for ourselves.

But almost nothing is possible without community. An open dialogue, an audience, an ongoing interaction with those around me, is essential, vital. So thank you for reading, for caring, it has made a world of difference, feeling so unalone and included by the earth-wide family that is humanity. Let’s talk. Let’s collaborate. Let’s find out how many hands it takes to make hard work lighter than a feather, so that we can get down to the fun stuff. Celebrating life and death, singing through poetry, dancing in labor.

Learning as lifelong profession no matter how we earn a living.

It didn’t make it onto my list, but in my opinion, it really goes without needing to be said, that the superpower of our species is lifelong enrollment as students of time and memory. The earth has meant many things to many people, but it makes much more sense to think of it as a giant, rotund, rolling school. I’m convinced that is what it is, and learning, not invention or fabrication, is our primary purpose. And in that sense, there will never be a final frontier. We’ll never be finished finding new things in an evolving, ever-altered university such as this.

Existence is a wave, it can be a harsh lesson to stand up and position yourself against it. But it can also carry you faster and further than ever imagined if you move along, let yourself, humbly and lightly, be pushed by its powerful and unapologetic presence.

Learn. Grow. Stop fighting currents. Let yourself go. You’ll find you’re caught and held by a mighty grip every time. I promise. I can, because I know.

Life is not a status. It is a story.

And the only way to get it wrong, is to not write it for yourself.

To Be Continued…

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

It’s official, I left my job at Foust after four incredible years. What an opportunity, and like most good things in life, buried at the center of a nesting doll of so many other jobs and situations. I remember working at the suit store in the morning, then landscaping all afternoon, gardening all evening, and walking my dogs just praying, begging God for a better way to make a living.

It isn’t just a phrase when people say you work for the job you want, not the one you have. Nothing was promised, but I trusted, and each job dropped me off exhausted, ready, done, right on the doorstep of a better one. I feel blessed. I feel hungry, but in the best way. I’m knocking down the door of a greater opportunity already. I’m not exactly sure what life will look like on the other side of this hike, but I have a good feeling
Foust is a part of it.

Which means for now, this really isn’t a true to form good bye.
So much as it is a to-be-continued in disguise.

Land Poor #oldjournals

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

You work dirt soft
and form rocks
out of the palms
of your hands.

The skin flakes off and leaves you.

To bruise blue and callous fingers.
Wrinkle knuckles.
Vein-traced paths twist above bony
wrists bent and flexing always. Stalling.
Avoidance in abundance.
Blisters too.
Fast friends to you.

And you are their inspiration.
They depend on you for friction.
For handwritten diction
dated phrases of speech
strangers looking stranger
than if southern meant
alien off another world.

Cut grass. Wave passed.
Smile miles down the road.
Flush commodes into septic tanks
emptied in cracked quartz rock clay.
Hot sun. Burnt red necks brown.

The skin flakes off and leaves you.

To bruise blue.
Same tan trembling finger. Only you linger.
Only what was planted at the core.
Only what was unafraid to be called poor.
And you are.
You stay.

Sore.

Another person’s grapes

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Off to dig a hole that is deep and wide,
enough to bury three and a half foot of railroad tie,
to hang warped, ripped, busted cattle fence against,
to trellis not yet purchased baby grape vines.

Not a branch, a pole, a shovelful of it is mine.
Not even the seconds bloomed minutes written leaves hours.

At work toward a harvest you will never taste is grace.
And grace is building trellises for another person’s grapes.