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.
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