Thursday, June 24, 2010

Been busy in the garden....

While I do tend to cherish the time to visit my plants, do a little weeding, watering, and replanting when the spirited grey squirrel has decided to dig up my bok choy seedlings, I have been thinking about how I have not been living well.
While I try to live with an evolutionary consciousness, to re-create myself as a member who is seeking to terminate my membership in a very dysfunctional society, I do become stuck in the gap.
I speak often of having to live with one foot in this industrial, commercial and mechanistic society, and one foot in another world, one that celebrates and raises my awareness to the fact that I live within an evolutionary story. I am a member of a community of people, who similarly to the people of Copernicus's time, are coming to understand that separateness is an illusion, that all life is kin, all of Earth's dynamics exist inside a larger story. And this story provides a new framework for defining why humans live.
The last line in one of Chellis Glendinning's books answers the perennial question: What is the meaning of human life? She answers: To celebrate creation! To become fully human is to feel the urgency and to actually move to celebrate, to witness, and to be creative with a sense of living in a permaculture, and the larger Universe Story.
Now, permaculture often is used to describe an approach to growing all kinds of plants, the wise use and nurturance of water and soil, and to meet our pest adversaries with humility and to watch them to learn how to work with, rather than against them.
Permaculture also means to me: finding a way to create a culture that is leaning in a direction that is permanent. By accepting that there is nowhere else to go when the garbage and depletion has come home to rest, we can decide to become long term residents, with our existence in the land reflecting our commitment to our progeny. And by understanding that our kin, the bees, the ladybugs, the butterflies, and the wasps, are all my family - is where and how I find strength when I find myself in the gap.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Last plant planted....I think

I finally sat down after finishing my impromptu lasagna garden. I had been talking with my neighbour about using the little strip of land beside the lane way, and they agreed that I could use it for tomatoes. So I gathered up my composting leaves from last fall, some straw, a few cardboard boxes, some horse manure, and finally, some topsoil. When the mess was compiled, I planted 5 tomato plants, type unknown due to a largely foreseeable tumble-down of the seedlings in the greenhouse a few weeks ago. They might be yellow pear cherry toms, moon glows, pink ping pongs cherries, or yellow Roma's, who knows, we'll have to wait and see.

Cutting the front lawn with a 45 year old fire engine red reel mower is no fun. Not that I expected it to be, but it is great exercise, and I get funny looks from our neighbours and people driving by. Our neighbour's little girl, about age 9, walked by and asked me why I don't get a 'real' lawnmower, one that uses gas. Well, I decided that I wasn't going to argue with a 9 year old, so I said "I like doing it the old fashioned way, and I like the exercise," which caused her to pause, and said we could borrow her dad's. Funny hah-hah, not funny strange, that the conversation about the neighbours who use a push mower must have occurred around her dinner table, and she being naive, shared with us her disapproval, which must have been generated by the adult conversation.

This brings me to think about how the school system has missed the boat. Both, about teaching young people about diversity - that is choosing an alternative way to do something apart from the dominant trends, and, actually reading about ways the City of London supposedly encourages greener lawn care. Not that I'm naive about the system neglecting to reinforce greener and healthier ways of living, but, she being 9 years old, is the next generation who will come of age in a time of Peak Oil. Spending one's limited income on fuel to cut a large area of plants that will in about a week, grow back. Lawns are a money pit, a relic of the age of plenty and conspicuous consumption.

Therefore, every year, I will gradually reduce the amount of space dedicated to lawn, and replace it with raised beds for herbs, flowers, and other beautiful plants. Today, I gleaned from my other neighbour, 2 12' long boards, that I will use to create a raised bed, along with some bricks of various sizes. I think some red Swiss chard, some parsley, and some marigolds will look lovely. Details and results to follow.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Reflections on a Growing Local Food Movement by Richard Conlin

Reflections on a Growing Local Food Movement by Richard Conlin

After the rains....

Rain fell yesterday, most welcome of course! Today, I am finishing planting my beets, carrots, and turnips. I am also planting my mini-Italian sunflowers around my birdhouse. Beside my strawberries, I am also planting my cosmos flowers. These will grow quite large, inviting in hummingbirds and beautiful bees.

I was able to buy some local straw and hay to lay around the garden. We put up my hammock from the tree everyone wants me to cut down. I feel cradled like a baby in the hands of the tree, it is a great pine tree with boughs that sweep in the wind. As I write, a morning dove is busy in the garden, gathering dried maple leaves for some distant nest. My cat Smokey, watches intently from the window.

The next big job will be to dig up and move the blackberry bushes that keep springing up around the fire pit. These berries are deep purple and can fit on the end of your thumb. Delicious eating right off the canes. Off to work now, have a good day.

These are most of the friendly, optimistic thoughts that I start my day with. Then the reality of the massive Gulf of Mexico oil leak dribble in, and though toxic leaks are becoming the norm for our industrial society, all I think about is the tragedy that as a civilization, we are heavily invested in being only reactionary, never precautionary. We can easily blame the corporate mindset - but every morning, a very large group of people, from all backgrounds, get up, eat breakfast, kiss their family members goodbye, and go to work making decisions that are not in their best interest. These are "educated" folks, who wish to succeed, earn money and status, and mostly continue to be elevated out of and away from the human condition. By this I mean, physical work. Whether this is peeling your own potatoes, hanging your clothes out to dry, bottling your own in-season foods, sewing and repairing our own clothes. Our attempt to escape and be relieved of all this drudgery, has preoccupied our minds and values, so that we must try to capture and enslave all the remaining petroleum, until another generation as passed and we have no idea or inkling how to live a non-oil dependent life.

I joke in passing sometimes that petroleum has robbed me of an authentic life. I dream of real adventure, resistance, and intentional living. I can artificially find it at the movies, where for two hours I can be the protagonist who is facing some daunting challenge that will test my personal muster and will. My body reacts: my heart pounds, I feel the adrenaline rush, my feet lift off the floor, my hands tighten, and I realize I've been clenching my jaw for too long. My desire to fling myself into this reality is quite strong. But, then the film ends, and I am left feeling like a tourist, always behind the protective glass or guard rail.

Perhaps what I'm feeling, is the call to activism. I too want to throw myself up on a horse, hang on tight, and gallop toward some evil that cares not to address Earth's promise of abundance and beauty. I value the fact that as humanity can begin to understand that we are the evolving expression of the Universe and we are the Earth's mind, capable of reflecting on itself/ourself, new possibilities can emerge. I am energized and enlightened, to know that each and every being has been dreamed into existence, by the evolutionary dynamics of the Universe.

So....I think of this when the grief and heaviness of the crimes that humans commit against the promise of the Earth. In the meantime, I grow my spinach, and smile at my daisies.

Shannon Hayes Rethinks the Meaning of Work

Shannon Hayes Rethinks the Meaning of Work