Pledges of regular donations, regardless of the schedule or amount, are crucial to this place and work.  But besides the core financial benefactors present and past, Animá, this family and sanctuary have also had the unpredictable and unexpected assistance of a small number of entirely unconventional Supporters.  These have included Silver, who has talked about donating half of her garden harvest, self described redneck mechanic Ryan who has kept us in vehicles, and Marc and Diane who have helped keep those vehicles working as well as traded us deep cycle batteries for our solar systems and done more and odder favors than you can imagine.  Not all of these characters have been stereotypical nature lovers, healers, activists, empowered women and followers of the Red Road that Animá more typically attracts.

Of these unique and wonder-hearted individuals, none is more loveably archaic, anachronistic, untamed and thus far untrammeled than our old compadre Steve Sale.  He is proof that you can’t stereotype folks, pigeon holing them into black and white categories.  Too often I hear my artist and conservationist friends dismiss everyone who disagrees with them as mindless wife abusers and Bambi killers, voicing as much prejudice (prejudgment) as a Limbaugh ditto-head lambasting longhaired tree huggers as effeminate communists.  Steve might not have the appearance of college grad extrapolators, but he can figure out and re-engineer nearly anything he lays eyes on, finds nearly everything in the world of interest, can’t stand a day where he doesn’t learn something new, and has an impeccable wit.  Imagine that he is anything like the norm, and you will be neglecting to take into account how he lives by an honor code worthy of Geronimo or Ghandi, adheres to core values like truth and loyalty in spite of being a part of a culture of delusion and lies, and respects the ways of spirit.  It was this, in fact, as much as his caring ways and unimpeachable honesty, that had me bonding with him when he was a fellow resident of this outlaw N.M. county.

Steve showed up down the river here for the first time a decade or so ago, after hearing only slightly exaggerated behavior about my lifestyle and comportment, the same stories that had kept plenty of local folks away had somehow served to call him in.  He felt like a brother long before helping with things I couldn’t fix or figure out, and donating wood timbers that still hold up the roof over our grounded-for-life school bus.  It was like the Jerry Jeff Walker song that Linda Ronstadt and others recorded, “Desperados Waiting for a Train,” except that neither of us had been much into waiting.  When he showed back up last month with his sweet earthy gal Val, I should have been surprised… but for some reason I wasn’t.  It was as if I had been expecting to roll up at any time, if just a mite longer than a reasonable person might expect.  Fortunately neither he, nor we, are ruled by reason.  Hence the glad reunion, in which I broke away from important tasks to revel in the reconnection.  Steve and Val don’t have to send checks to be Supporters as well as friends, supporting with not only love but gifts, showing up with needed and tasty food, shipping apples when he couldn’t visit with them, and then spending hours gathering fruits for Kiva’s medicinal elixer as our hand-picked-elderberry Supporters.

In the old days we might call someone you feel so familiar with a “kindred spirit,” no matter how many other ways they might be different.  Where we met, perceptually, was a place between solid projections, where the fields are always shifting and time has no say.  Indeed, when I think of Steve, a defining memory is of him walking with me on or near his land long ago, and how this mechanically inclined cowboy looking feller slowed to take in the sparkle of every crystal studded rock, let the talk fade away in order to take in the visage of the setting sun, then halted walking and speaking altogether in response to a sound or feeling that no progressive ecologist or new-age philosopher could have given any more more heed to, out of respect for something as subtle as it was plaintive, the implorings of the ancient ones atop whose long backfilled pithouses we then stopped to revel and rest.

“Did you hear that?”, he asked in a whisper, gesturing that he meant more than the incessant singing wind.  “Yes I do,” I told him, and that was enough said.

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Categories: Supporter & Ally Profiles, Uncategorized

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