Category Archives: Revel Spirit

What? No End In Sight?

On a day like today, when I woke up with my stomach in my throat, my bed in a sea of quease, and my bowels grumbling, for a moment I considered wishing Harold Camping were right.  But, despite his promises, urges, calculations, and – when the world didn’t end in May as predicted – recalculations, today wore on with no sign of Armageddon approaching.  That is, unless, of course, you count all the signs that are cumulatively screaming that the end of the world as we know it is near.  Folks in the camp who say we are on the brink of TEOTWAWKI, as it is known in those circles, point to the following as indicators the end is coming fast: growing political and social unrest, the end of cash currency, stark economic disparity, increased natural disasters such as earthquakes (I’m granting here that the increase of earthquakes in particular is debatable), Hitchcockian “crazy, hairy ants” invading broad swathes of the southern United States, and the ever present threat of zombies (in Hollywood, and on Cracked.com anyway – but seriously this does appear on the list of end times signs of at least some doomsdayer soothsayers).

The inclusion of zombies in the broader apocalypse conversation appears to stem from the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s blog post in May 2011 (just days before May 21, Camping’s most advertised end-times target), “Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse,” in which the CDC gave evacuation recommendations and other guidance for dealing with a natural disaster in the guise of what to do in the event of a zombie invasion.  The blog post was intended to garner attention to an otherwise (perceived) snooze fest of a topic — which it did, and crashed the site temporarily in the process.  The fact that this normally boringly straight-laced federal agency would seize on suspicion of an impending faux catastrophe and poke fun at the apocalyptic Paul Reveres, is a strong indicator that, even if you’re not a believer that the end is near, others are.  At the least, it sure feels like, as is said in that Buffalo Springfield song, “Something’s happening here.  What it is ain’t exactly clear.”  Or, as captured by a recent ironic Occupy Wall Street protestor and his hand-painted sign, “This is a sign.”

So what do all these “signs” mean?  And if there really is no impending end ahead, why on earth does it feel so much like there is?  I could be the only one feeling like this, but anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise: witness the prepper/survivalist movement which seems to have grown out of post 9/11 fears of more terrorist attacks but in recent years has taken on a life of its own, at least in the blogosphere (case in point – each of the preceding word/s is linked to a different blog or article relating to the prepper/survivalist movement, with one in there just in case you want to friend the Facebook page dedicated to defeating zombies).

My guess is that all the hype is just practice for next year, when folks are really going to get bent out of shape about the more longstanding predictions that 12/21/12, where the Mayan calendar drops off, will usher in the Great Big End.  The 2012 prediction has been around much longer than the upstart Camping’s and his group Family Radio’s more recent threats, and since Hollywood has done nothing to assuage our fears (see, e.g., 2012, and a whole host of recent other cinematic what-if exploitations).  As we close out this year without any prophesied calamities setting in (other than the very real ones noted above), I’m betting that the growing swirl of doomsday rhetoric and sentiment, unhampered by global political and social rest, may all be just preface to the panic and disorder to be distributed in the fourteen months ahead.

As for these 2012 predictions, I believe that our fears have been collectively cast onto this quirk in human history that really doesn’t mean much.  Who knows why the Mayan calendar stops on 12/21/12?  It could be to test our faith in our own ability to carry on.  It could be an old Mayan joke, cast on unsuspecting heirs.  It’s possible the Mayans just got tired, and decided to take a little break and never got back to it.  If the Mayans were so smart, and were not just pulling a futuristic prank on us, and that date really represents the End, don’t you think they’d have given us a more of a heads-up on it?  I mean, at least they could’ve drawn a little fire and brimstone.  I admit that I have done no serious study of the matter (unless you count me being up tonight web-browsing serious) and that I do not have any background that gets me anywhere near expert status, but I do agree that, as some suspect, people have been reading way too much into this Mayan calendar matter.  I suspect that 12/21/12 will come and go like 05/21/11 without incidence other than a little egg on the face of some zealots.  (I recently read Cleopatra: A Life, by Stacey Schiff (Brown & Co. 2010), where I learned that ancient civilizations had to reset their calendars multiple times before getting it right, with varying resulting inconveniences, but none of them God’s wrath.)  Another viewpoint, that maybe I could get on board with, is that the end of the Mayan calendar has no apocalyptic consequences, per se, but that it might be a turning point in human history, much the way the birth of a white buffalo in Janesville, Wisconsin, in the 1990s was viewed by some Native American tribes and other people.

But the question remains, “why now?”  Why is it now that there is such a strong undercurrent of instability of the status quo.  Is it really coming from vague fear of what might happen with the Mayan calendar ending?  Is it really just the aftermath of unrestrained fear post 9/11?  Is it the real worry that we’re not going to be able to get ourselves out of the environmental messes we’ve put ourselves in?  Or is something more?  Is it, like the zombies that dance in the shadows of our fear and humor, other monsters of our own creation that are unpredictable and capable of taking on lives of their own?

Recently, I posted MIA: Mourning Jobs, a critique of Jobs’ failure to use his company’s power to create jobs in America and turn Apple into a paragon of social responsibility.  I wrote something in it that was ill-informed.  I commented, essentially, that technology had advanced and is advancing at such a dizzying pace that even technology itself can’t calculate that pace.  Since then, I have discovered Moore’s law, which, roughly stated, was the observation and prediction of Intel co-founder’s Gordon E. Moore, first appearing in print in Electronics Magazine in 1965, that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit (or computer chip) inexpensively will double every two years.   Embedded in the theory of course is the recognition that there must be a limit to the trend, since it requires that the transistors get smaller and smaller.  They won’t just disappear.  Intel’s website identifies Moore’s law as the driving factor of the semiconductor industry, which is echoed by others who understand Moore’s law to have been a self-fulfilling prophecy since, as companies anticipated that their competitors would develop technologies in pace with the predicted trend, they pushed to get there first.  It seems widely accepted that, because of Moore’s law, devices have become more powerful and smaller.  The fact that I was able to write this and you are able to read it is just one minor example of the power of technology.

While we may daily witness the awe-inspiring capacity of modern computing, what we don’t see is that transistors on an integrated circuit are now so small that it would take 2,000 of them stacked on top of each other to reach the thickness of a strand of human hair.  Having gotten to this smaller (or nano) scale may make it possible for Moore’s law to continue since the roadblock just described (you can only get so much smaller and smaller until eventually you disappear) presumes the regular world of physics applies.  Once you get to a nano scale, however, the world of quantum mechanics, with rules much different than those of classical physics, applies.  In this world, for example, quantum particles like electrons can pass through thin walls even though they might not be able to break through the barrier.  This is known as quantum tunneling and has posed a challenge for engineers.  Another leg of the presumption that Moore’s law is bound to end is that it presumes the use of the transistor and integrated circuit, essentially, as we know them.  Already, I suspect that geeky worker bees are busy looking for the next wave of technology that might extend the application of Moore’s law by replacing such units.  (See, also, Ray Kurzweil’s law of accelerating returns).  And now we are smack in the world of scarily infinite possibilities.  The possibilities, of course, are about change.  And herein lies the fear.

The world is moving at such a dizzying pace, and shows no signs of slowing, that it appears some of the framework on which it is laid may need to change fundamentally, or even be overhauled, to accommodate the social, political and economic revolutions that are occurring.  This, my friends, is scary.  But change, too, is inevitable, and I have faith that it is within our means to guide that change for the greater good.  I have been a lucid dreamer virtually since I can remember.  Over a lifetime of talking to others on the subject of dreams, I recall someone once saying that death in dreams represents change.  Assuming this to be true, and there is a subconscious but not intellectual connection between change and death, it would be no wonder that these times leave so many people feeling like the end is near.

The white buffalo in Janesville was born just down the road from where I lived.  For weeks, I watched as people pulled up in their cars, vans and RVs from all across the country to witness the miracle, and be at the point where the crossroads appeared.  There were some people holding signs, encouraging each other to honor the miracle and to lead with peace.  When I was at Occupy Wall Street, I saw signs of love, and goodwill, along with the others telling people like me who make my living working for the big bad banks to jump out the window.  I’m hoping that we embrace the change we’re witnessing as an opportunity to take the high road, and not succumb to the stresses of modern times.

Well, I’d like to continue to wax poetic on the presence of the various predictions and interpretations, but I have to go nurse my flu and may only have three minutes remaining to post this anyway.  Count down, post commenced 9:50 p.m., ending 11:57 p.m.

Revel on, fellow revelers, wherever tomorrow takes you.

post script: 10/22/11, 3:42 a.m.  Welcome to the other side of fear.

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Alternasourcing and Getting Back to the Garden

Hello fellow revelers,

I’ve been taking my time getting back up to speed on things in my garden and life since a much needed hiatus that involved throwing myself in heart, mind and soul in a writers’ workshop in the wilds of Vermont, with one phenomenal group of compadres, led by the magnanimous Crescent Dragonwagon, cookbook author extraordinaire (as well as children’s book author, poet, instructor, all around phenom, and etc.).

A rapid fire survey of the grounds this morning reminded me that a garden needs tending well past the browning of the last cuke on the vine.  I’m not much of a fall gardener, but I still have the steadies going: my hot peppers upstairs, the various herbs, the last of my heirloom tomatoes, and that mysterious bush out back that I never did determine conclusively was dogwood or elderberry (the issue became less pressing when the local herbivores devoured the few fruit it produced this year).  The pumpkins that I got after a friend’s show at a restaurant in New Haven last year gave the scene bountiful color with its vibrant squash blossoms springing from every vine wound relentlessly up, down, over and under every spare inch in my yard.  Alas, I don’t think they’re going to give me a single jack-o-lantern by Halloween.  My neighbor from Bangladesh watched as I cut back the wild rose bush that likes to keep sticking its neck over into her territory where her kids like to play.  As we were talking, she saw me cut off one of the many pumpkin stems squirreling around the yard.  She asked me why I cut it, since it had a small blossom that looked ready to bloom.  I didn’t really know.  I guess it was because we were in conversation, and as I said before, I don’t really like to talk as I’m gardening.  It’s not the kind of multi-tasking that makes me feel like I’m accomplishing something.  If anything, when I’m persuaded to talk while I’m gardening it robs me of that little bit of time I get away from the rest of the world.  But this is a good neighbor, and I like her company, so I didn’t mind much this morning.  But the point is that the talk made me absent-minded, and I plucked a perfectly good vine I likely wouldn’t have otherwise.  She asked me for it, and said she’d like to cook it.  I thought she meant the squash blossoms but she was talking about the leaves.  I remembered a few years ago she gave me a plate of food she had made for Ramadan, and it had fish cooked with leaves from the squash she had growing out back.  It was tasty and I’d meant to ask for the recipe then, but never did.  This morning, after a few more minutes commiserating over a sad season for fruit trees (she has plum, peach, apple, and cherry in the back to my peach and cherry), she decided she wasn’t going to have time to cook today and handed me back my needlessly interrupted vine.  I tossed it in with the other clippings to be put to the compost out back.  We agreed that in the next couple weeks, we’ll make a day of picking and cooking the leaves that are now so overly abundant in the yard.

Something I heard several times last weekend at the workshop/retreat was one of Crescent’s sayings, inherited, I believe, from her father, Maurice Zolotow: “nothing is wasted on the writer.”  The same, it seems, is true of the gardener.

As I mentioned before, the extent of tending my front yard last year was to toss whatever seeds I had aging in my basement to see if any would take root.  As you likely know by now, my approach this year is slightly more steady, measured, and, hopefully, responsible, since that is a goal I’ve set for myself.  I am moving toward living a more responsible life overall, one where little to nothing is wasted.  Toward that end, I am supplanting my gardening with the exploration of additional paths to self-sufficiency since self-sufficiency is, in and of itself, responsible.  Of course we don’t all have the means to “Thoreau” it all away and Walden our days away.  For those of us who are revelers of the brick and mortar set (though not limited to this demographic), I am exploring, in various arenas, a practice I have coined “alternasourcing.”  As I use the term (and invite others to collude), alternasourcing is the obtaining of goods and services from non-traditional sources, which, in its optimal functioning, provide sometimes less expensive and frequently more environmentally and socially friendly products.  Alternasourcing is not just about where you get your goods.  It is also about the how you obtain the things you need to live (as well as the things you want, hopefully with an eye to questioning needs/wants in a new way).

Alternasourcing may include, for example, minimizing the groceries you buy from the corner megastore, and supplanting it with regular visits to your local farmers’ markets, using your own space for herbs or whatever you have space for, learning how to forage for naturally grown wild edibles, or getting a plot in a community garden.  (An aside: my uber-awesome neighbor/friend/co-gardener I mention frequently, and her partner, were on a three-year wait list in our not-super-hip ‘hood just to get a small triangular not-so-enviable plot in the local community garden.)   So, while you’re waiting in line for a patch of dirt down the street, consider new ways to tick those items off your grocery list.  It may include participation in a CSA, a venture I undertook this summer for the first time.  For those of you who have been following, the journey has had its ups and downs, but summer’s not over, nor are the remainder of my bi-weekly shares.  I’ve been chronicling it here, but thought it was time to bring in another voice (of reason, I believe) who has had a more hands-on CSA experience, and whose insight has helped answer nagging questions I’m left with after bagging up my produce (at that same community garden, btw).  Long after I’ve bagged up my goodies and have unloaded them on my table to shoot, the questions linger.  They usually concern the demeanor of the volunteers (disabusing me of the Pollyannaish notion that all gardeners are revelers).   For the answer to this, and an inside peek at what goes on behind the other side of the table….read on my friends in the next post, for a spiffy piece comped by our friend, former neighbor and fellow reveler, Matthew Donoher, who, btw, I ran into on Church Ave. right before Irene hit, as I was vying with the other stragglers to get the last of the should-have-had-a-long-time-ago items, such as flashlights and batteries and radios.  Matthew, to his credit, was cool as a cucumber, in search merely of a new baking sheet to try out an oatmeal cookie recipe.  I have been blessed in my life with good neighbors.

How about you?  What are ways that your life has changed in response to global climate changes, or economic turbulence, or just your own desire to live more efficiently/responsibly?

Go ahead… gimme the dirt!

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Stirred Not Shaken

I should have known I was on shaky ground when I took my usual position on the 9th St. platform this morning — right at the spot that spits me out in front of the turnstile on my stop — and in permanent marker on the post nearest me was a brutally racist remark scrawled in hatred and large enough to read standing several feet away.  I was puzzled.  Maybe I have been naive in believing that level of ignorance was nearly extinct, especially in this great metropolis.  It seemed like the work of an adult.  I tried to imagine him.  It was a him in my imagining.  Unemployed, underemployed.  Poisoned with hatred, but why?  I almost took a picture, thought about drawing attention to the fact that racism is not dead but is alive and … not well.  I decided not to give it more attention than it might already be garnering.  I would not engage in sowing revulsion.  The image in my mind of the handwriting gnawed at me as I tried to reverse the course my day had started.

At work, I comforted myself by settling into my routine after grabbing coffee, yogurt, and trail mix in our building’s basement cafeteria.  I was running late from the time I got up and didn’t have my usual breakfast of oatmeal and coffee at home.  My next-door-office neighbor, friend and colleague came into my office to discuss a matter he was working on.  I complimented him on his snazzy running shoes (he’s a pretty serious marathoner and nutritionist in his free time).  I noted I should keep a pair of sneakers in the office.  We started in to working on the matter at hand, and called a supervisor at another branch to help solve the issue and, as the three of us were on speakerphone in my office, and I was just beginning to feel like the day might be getting back to normal, I spotted a very small bug on my desk, coming straight for me.  “Oh, fuck,” I whispered.  I have worked in this building for four years, and have sat on five different floors in that time.  Moving from floor to floor, you get to know people.  You hear things.  One of those was of a rumored bedbug infestation on another floor.  I smashed the bug, still alive, in my coffee napkin and took it to property management in the basement.  Phyllis looked up at me, raised her eyebrows nearly to the locks above her head and said straightaway, “that’s a bedbug.”  We handled the thing like it was an explosive device.  After I turned it over to her, she smooshed the life out of it, placed a piece of tape over it and began to solicit more seasoned opinions.  After I went through twenty minutes of controlled freak-out, our resident expert inspected the creature and informed us all it was not, in fact, a bed bug.  He produced a bedbug in a baggie for me to compare.  Indeed, mine was not a bedbug.  I went back to my office feeling certain the day could only get better from there.

But we know what happened next.  I have never been in an earthquake before, so to me it felt more like standing on the grates above an active subway station in a windstorm, times 10.  I was talking to a coworker on the phone when the ripples ran through lower Manhattan.  I needed no further warning.  I sprang from my desk, grabbed my bag, and when I realized I didn’t know where the stairs were (what was I doing during all those fire drills?), I took the elevator down the seven stories to ground level, half-apologizing to my colleagues for not sticking around (to watch the building come down), explaining that I watched the first tower come down on 9/11, and I know better than to wait around.  We got down pretty quickly but the street was already filling up with suits, tourists, vendors, workers, all trying to overhear other conversations about what who had felt and what who had heard.  I collected some quick news from my partner whose office is in midtown, one text and a quick call then the cell service was down.  In midtown they had seen the lights shake.  Thanks to my partner, I knew it was an earthquake (not a bomb, as some had thought).  I tried to get away from the tallest buildings, and planted myself near the Trinity Church cemetery.  A cluster of people were exchanging what they had heard: Maryland had been hit; the epicenter was in DC; Brooklyn shook bad; someone in Jersey had felt it.  I threw in my two cents about lights shaking in midtown.  Soon I had enough of a picture to make the decision to head back to Brooklyn.  It was the middle of the day.  I had been Sametimed by my boss for help on an assignment.  This is just one of two days I work in the office.  I knew it was risky to leave without checking.  But I’ve seen people jump from buildings.  I headed for the R and hightailed it for terra firma.

People waiting for the train on the platform didn’t know what had happened.  They hadn’t felt the tremors.  Some said they saw people pouring out of buildings.  Another said they heard firetrucks, but hadn’t felt anything.  I tried to spread whatever news I had.  I told the Asian man in the business suit and his girlfriend in the too-tight dress what I had felt, and asked if they felt anything.  They stared at me with wide eyes, obviously trying to figure out if I was a lunatic.  I smelled alcohol on their breath, and moved on to the next group.  A family visiting from Michigan, the mother obviously trying to figure out how serious this was without out and out asking me in front of her two children, probably 7-10 years old.  I stood with them for awhile, talking midwest nice and trying to get cell service.  I knew I wouldn’t be able to but something makes you try the impossible in situations like this, where you don’t know what really just happened and what lies ahead.  The towheaded little boy innocently suggested I use the payphone on the wall, an idea that struck me as genius until I remembered how rare it is to find a functioning pay phone in New York.  Again, trying the impossible, I picked it up hoping to get a dial tone but instead my ear was pricked by the loose wires where the earpiece used to be.  Eventually, an elderly MTA worker came along and I prodded him to find out what was going on.  He shuffled down to a red service phone that he pointed out should be used in an emergency.  A few minutes later, he returned triumphant, his dark eyes lighting up beneath his broad forehead that was now glistening with beads of sweat.  “TRAINS ARE RUNNING,” he bellowed with pride.  The train came along as if on cue.  Before the family from Michigan got off at the next stop, I handed them my card – sometimes you have to rely on the kindness of strangers.  After Whitehall, in the long passage between Manhattan and Brooklyn, I listed to two girls talking rapidly to each other in Spanish.  Although I couldn’t catch everything, I understood that one was afraid this was the end of the world.  The other was teasing her but obviously ill at ease.  I struck up a conversation with them, and found out then that the earthquake had happened in Virginia.  The girls had been leaving work, ground level, and hadn’t felt anything.  One was able to reach her aunt in Sunset Park who told her some of the details.  The younger one still seemed nervous this was the end of the world.  I told her with confidence that it certainly was not, and that the end of the world would come with much more fanfare – something extravagant like horses with wings and the Pope on fire.  By the time they got off the train, they were giggling and we all were wishing each other well.  The man next to me overheard our conversation, and asked what was going on.  He was on his way to work at the Bureau of Prisons in Brooklyn.  At his apartment in the city, he said he felt his bed shake but thought it was just his wife trying to wake him up for work.  But she had been in the other room.  I gave him what I had gathered from the time I left my office until then, including what others had experienced.

Everyone, it seems, felt something different.  My colleagues on the 11th floor, I later learned, barely felt it.  On 7, we all stopped and didn’t hesitate to flee our offices, the tremor was so strong.   A friend in another building that faces the back of the stock exchange later told me she saw people running out of it.  The folks  I saw underground were either trying to appear nonchalant, or were busy reading other people’s faces to see whether anything more had happened.  In this way, it reminded me of how people were when I worked downtown Manhattan in the weeks following 9/11, or what the sojourn from Manhattan to Brooklyn was like in the blackout of ’03, or the faces of my own neighbors this summer, in the days after Leiby Kletzky was killed.  This is the way a city communicates.  We gather bits and pieces from strangers as much as the people we know.  We rely on each other.  We count on each other.  We exchange odd little nuggets of data and knowledge to put together an incomplete picture, but one that will satisfy us until we have the energy to mine for more.

In telling the prison guard what I had learned, I missed my transfer to 9th Street.  He was getting off at the next stop but told me to wait two stops till I could cross over without having to pay another fare.  I did.  It left me a bit disoriented, and I stood on the platform for a long time before realizing the trains were not going in the direction I wanted them to.  I asked an elderly Chinese woman for help.  She explained that I had to go to the other side and take it back a few stops to catch the F.  There was kindness in her eyes.

Since I now was transferring in a different direction than usual, I didn’t pass the post on the platform where I stood this morning, reading hatred.  When I got to the transfer, I rushed up the stairs, eager to see daylight.  The train was largely empty, a good sign.  There was no apparent nervousness or searching of faces, an even better sign.  Above ground, I stopped at the corner bodega where I heard the earthquake was in DC.  I talked to three different people on the phone in the block and a half walk from the subway station to my door.  Before I reached my house, I found I also had a voice mail from a friend in Indiana. and a text from another in Harlem.  Everyone just checking to make sure everyone is okay.  Once home, relieved and exhausted, I powered up the computer, logged in at work, and took a quick check on NPR to see if there was any news.

There was.  Today, August 23, 2011, a memorial to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was opened to the public at the National Mall in Washington DC.  The statue is inspired by Dr. King’s “lifelong dedication to the idea of achieving human dignity through global relationships of well being [that] has served to instill a broader and deeper sense of duty within each of us— a duty to be both responsible citizens and conscientious stewards of freedom and democracy.”  (www.mlkmemorial.org).  The “Stone of Hope,” a 30-foot sculpture, which took almost five years to build, faced countless obstacles and challenges to its being there.  The brainchild of members of Alpha Phi Alpha, the fraternity to which Rev. King belonged, the statue that began as an idea in 1984 took President Clinton proposing its construction, joint resolutions by Congress for its establishment, a design competition that generated controversy, and fundraising more than $100 million to build it.

But build it we did.

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Living Responsibly

To make my days more than a collection of things that I’ve done and things left to do.

QUESTION: what is responsible living to you?

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I Had Trouble in Getting to Big Easy

The day started out rotten.  Up at 4 a.m. (okay, well 4:30), only to miss my flight to New Orleans, despite my best efforts.  Made it all the way to JFK, raced inside like a lunatic, wheeled luggage flying behind me, only to find out I’d have to pay an additional $80 for the next flight this afternoon, couldn’t check my bags until at least after 1:00, and would have to trek it back home in the meantime to wait (which meant another $100 in cab fare to get home and back again later).  Sooooooo, while still in a spectacularly foul mood, I headed out back to check on the garden.

I had major renovations done on my house in the last six months.  I find that when I’m in a good mood I look at the changes and am pleased as punch I laid out the money for it.  When I’m grumpy, I see the tiniest nicks and chips in the new paint or corner spots where the moulding isn’t perfectly straight, or that infuriating little dribble of paint that hardened under the counter ledge in the opening between the dining room and kitchen, and think about the dollars wasted.  This morning I found the same phenomenon occurs in the garden.  I went out there and all I saw were the problems.  Although the first heirloom tomato ripened, this morning all I could see was the split at the top.  While the peach tree is producing lots of fruit despite some early season troubles, all I saw this morning were problems that I don’t remember being there a few days ago.  (In May, I sprayed it with copper fungicide but not in the amount Shannon’s recommended — I try to go easy with that stuff even thought it’s organic.  It’s still copper being sprayed on a tree that produces fruit I fully intend to eat.)

So, although I didn’t skip through the garden this morning, peppering self-congratulations, I did identify some problems that need fixing.  Of course, my mood is a little improved after getting up close and personal with the plants; that never fails.  Eternal happiness and sprightliness, however, can be a dangerous thing.  I don’t know that I would have spotted those issues if I weren’t such a grumpy gardener this morning.

I do feel like the guy in Dr. Seuss’ I Had Trouble In Getting to Solla Sollew.  He left all the pesky troubles he was having at home to get to the beautiful city of Solla Sollew (on the banks oft he beautiful River Wah-hoo, where they never have troubles, at least very few), but found that the journey wasn’t quite as easy as he had expected.  After an exhausting bout of difficulties getting to SS, he arrives to find that the city is suffering from a key-slapping slippard who moved into the door, and now no one can get in and no one can get out.  The town’s gone to pot and even the ever loyal doorman has decided to leave, off to the City of Boola Boo Ball, where they never have troubles, no troubles at all.  So, while I’d really like to kick off this vacation with a bloody mary, fixins courtesy of the garden, and chill till my flight at 3, I’ve decided to follow dude’s suggestions.

Declining the doorman’s invitation to follow him off to paradise, he tells us what he has decided to do:

…I started back home, to the Valey of Vung.  I know I’ll have troubles.  I’ll, maybe, get stung.  I’ll always have troubles.  I’ll, maybe, get bit by that green-headed Quail on the place where I sit.  But I’ve bought a big bat.  I’m all ready, you see.  Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!

Watch out ants.  I’m going to Shannon’s to buy my big bat.

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My Revel Music Garden

My plots of plants are their own community.  Each is its own star, and sometimes its own diva.  They make their own music and sing their own song.  I love ’em, with their weird little quirks.  Sometimes they’re in harmony, sometimes off key.  They feed me and please me every time.

My tribute to them is to introduce them to you.

The front yard has the hostas & day lilies, surrounded by impatiens, my native plant garden which features some happy black-eyed susans in bloom right now (they always remind me of a photographic negative of daisies – and I may pair these in the yard next year), a couple container vegetables, a few herbs (growth spurt prone mountain mint, rollicking rosemary, and cheerful chives), some lovely jasmine circled by flowers, my container rose bush and the three potted zinnias.

The back has a potted Meyer lemon tree, several struggling beets in various containers for comparison purposes, some cautious carrots that once seemed on the fast path to success but have all but given up in this heat.  There are a few potted begonias who are delighted to live with me.  Along one side I have (yes, in this order) a pretty parsley, beyond robust sage, a sad little bit of rosemary, some thyme that doesn’t know where to end, and then a little cilantro book-ending the row, for diversity.  Then of course also out back are my prized tomato plants.  I usually have a bunch of potted peppers too but this year I just have one small container with a puny (but improving) cayenne and a mysterious chili pepper plant I bought from a small food market on Church Avenue.  The guy I bought it from doesn’t speak much English and all he could tell me (in English anyway) was that it was a chili pepper plant (that leaves it pretty wide open for type) and that it comes from the DR.  He, I believe, is from Bangladesh.  Nice guy.  They always invite me in whenever they have food there after fasting.  Further out back are the peach and cherry trees and the flowering dogwood/elderberries (whose leaves are turning a little brown at the top after a recent clipping to prevent my clothes on the line from landing in the bush, which every summer gets to be pretty ginormous).

The upstairs terrace is having its own little party.  I’m starting to think it might have something to do with the sun — like getting just the right amount now with only a touch of shade from the London Plane that sits in my neighbor’s yard, but shades mine.  The petunias are quite happy.  The peppers are in their element: cayenne, jalapeno and habanero have been having fun.  There’s an ivy put there at the beginning of the summer but she’s kind of off to herself in the corner, not quite sure what to do.  I’ll let her be for a bit, and move her at the end of the summer if she still hasn’t joined the party.

Some are stars, some are struggling.  I think they’ll all get it together in time, with more or less help from me.

QUESTION: What’s in your garden?  Go ahead .. gimme the dirt!

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World View

If I can extrapolate from a moment on my front porch, I venture to say that I think world views are beginning to change.  We had a get-together not too long ago to celebrate something of a big birthday for me.  I found myself in a group of friends, some old, some new, eating things we were pulling up from the ground.  The folks ranged from very young to let’s just say young at heart.  On saying our despedidos, one of the literally young ones admired the jasmine growing in the cement planter that is a permanent fixture of every home on the block.  And I wondered, how did she know it was jasmine?  Of course it smelled great, but this kid was only around 9.  I could climb a tree like nobody’s business when I was 9 but I wouldn’t even been able to recognize a jasmine plant, or most any other for that matter (save the lilacs which grew in a long row parallel to our gravel driveway — Lucinda William’s song “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” always remind me of home).  As for this little 9-year old budding botanist, I’m not sure where she’s getting it from.  I don’t think that schools have radically changed their curriculum since I was last familiar with it.  I’ve seen this awareness in other kids, too, that didn’t seem to be there before.  It looks to me like there’s renewed interest among the young and old in this world we’re living in.

QUESTION: is it just me or do you agree?  Is anyone else seeing the same thing – this increased interest and awareness in nature and how to use it?  Am I just a person that starts driving a Jeep who suddenly sees all the other Jeeps that were always there before?  Or is it a Prius, and a lot many more folks are getting behind the same wheel?

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Still on the Weed

This discussion of weeds: is there really such a thing? has generated a touch of interest and a tad of controversy, so I think we should stay on the weed, for now, so to speak.  In this post, I look at what constitutes a weed.  As in the words of one famous reveler, “A weed by any other name would smell as sweet.”  Another fellow reveler put it better when he said, in relevant part (the rest is good too, check it out in the full comment appearing earlier today):

I recently listened to a podcast where someone said ‘a weed is an herb growing in the wrong place’. It still makes sense if you broaden the term herb to plant. Although I never thought of it, weeds serve to help the garden. Weeds are often some of the first flowers to appear in the garden and attract bees and other beneficial insects.  Check out http://www.theselfsufficientgardener.com and listen to the episode on weeds. It gave me a whole new outlook on weeds, and gave my garden a different look- especially the part that now grows wild. Once I did go walking through the wild section with a machete. It’s not that it is that wild, I just needed to cut the tall grass seeds and get rid of them without damaging the red clover growing below. The lawn mower would have cut everything. …  I hate to kill plants, especially if I planted them.  (Thanks Ralph!)

As I mentioned, my mother is here visiting from Wisconsin.  She has been preparing, for quite a long time now, for one massive blow-out rummage sale in Beloit in August.  My mom seems to be a magnet for things: she knows antiques, books, history, dishes, furniture, philosophy, literature, music, records, record players, and this and so much more.  She seems to be able to find something to appreciate in nearly every person and every thing.  For that reason, she has amassed quite a collection of oddball items and exquisite finds.  And it is all good stuff.  It’s just that it’s still, well, stuff.  She has recognized the need to let go of it, and saying good-bye to all of it, properly, has turned out to be quite an undertaking.  She has undertaken to meticulously wash, inspect, iron, shine and spiff every little thing and every little thing on every little thing.  My dad has suggested the process is ravaging her, and she needs to just let go of it.  Which is exactly what she is doing.  She, I believe, in this ritual preparation is saying good-bye to these things of hers which have become weeds.

For a year or more, I went through a process of letting go of decades of collected stuff.  The task was to big for me on my own.  I had a professional clutter buster who helped me see that the only way to make room for new and better things in your life is to let go of the clutter, which is, basically, anything that’s not useful anymore.  So over the course of that year, I undertook multiple clutter busting sessions.  The process changed my life.  I happened upon his blog today, and found this very apt description of his of clutter busting:

It’s common that clients are surprised at how much stuff they actually have. As the clutter bust proceeds, more and more stuff is found hidden in drawers, closets, under the bed, in boxes, underneath things and in piles. It’s like the clown car at the circus, twenty clowns end up coming out of a tiny car.

We get anesthetized by our clutter and we lose touch. Our awareness is dulled. In the same way vision can get hazy, awareness gets out of focus. We get used to the blur and it becomes normal for us. 

That’s why I’m kindly relentless with encouragement to dig deeper into your stuff. There’s hidden stuff silently wrecking your life.

see today’s post (June 27, 2011) on Brooks Palmer’s blog: http://brooks-palmer.blogspot.com/

I think if there’s room left for the word “weed,” to me it would be defined as clutter in the garden.

If you take a close look at the portrait of my garden, you’ll notice that there’s a patch of brownish green grass toward the bottom (close to my house and farthest from the fence), and, as described, this is where begins the grass/weeds/wild section of the yard.  It occupies several feet from where the picture ends to the front of my house.  My mom suggested that I build up the soil in that area to keep rainwater from seeping and puddling toward the basement.  And, she said, as long as I’m at it, I may as well plant some things there too.  I’m wondering if this is her subtle way of disapproving of that remainder of the yard that is still wild and unruly.  Were she to make a blatant suggestion that I do anything with it other than let it be as it is, she knows I would defend it and launch into one of my weeds-are-plants-too rants.  Bless her heart.

I may do it.  I may try to tame that part of the yard.  I’m not sure if that wild part of my yard is a nod to my own rebellious side, or if I just got exhausted plotting and planting the front half of the yard, and let the rest of it rest.  I will probably do something in the back half.  I’ll probably put my mom to work on it too.  Who knows what we’ll discover there.  It takes a very special dynamic to garden with another person.  Maybe instead we’ll just kick back with some beer and cheese, and watch the grass grow.

QUESTION: What in your life, or garden, or garden of life needs weeding?  Is there anything in your garden that has lost its usefulness to you?  What other plant or thing might arrive when you make room for it?  Go ahead … gimme the dirt!

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Just Thinking Bout My Dad

and how when we were little he would lead us in raking leaves, or splitting wood, or some other way he’d show he cared about the earth and everything in it.  thanks Dad.

QUESTION: what memories do you have of you and your pops doing earthy things?

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Ants on my Peonies

NPR did a piece on memories that resonated with me.  It reports that some of earliest childhood memories are basically wiped out, and considers why that may be.  What came to me immediately is that it is because we have no framework at that age in which to “set” our memories.  Everything is new, and mostly stunning.  (I do remember someone saying if you want to imagine what it’s like to be a young child, just imagine that you are visiting a new country everyday, with all new sights, smells and sounds, and some days it’s several countries in a day).

In other words, memories are stronger that have some association or connection, be it with words, emotions, or the general framework in which we view the world and ourselves in relation to it.  Memories set better once a person has a world view; and very young children have no such world view as yet – bless those little free darlin’s!.  Theirs is a world primarily of experience, and only secondarily of the organizing, compartmentalizing, and identifying patterns in and of the experiences they have.  I think it’s essentially the same reason many people have a hard time remembering their dreams: the dream images/subject are not set in a familiar framework from which we can recall them.  They tend to be random, abstract, separated from our everyday framework, yet still connected enough to “reality” that usually they are remembered in bits and pieces.  This may be the same reason that unusual experiences are easily remembered when those experiences occur when we are adults: we remember them as striking for what they are not – they are not are usual, everyday experiences (or part of our regular framework).

All this reminded me of one of my early, among the earliest, childhood memories.  I am standing outside our house, at the side of the house on Newfield Drive (yes, literally, isn’t that so literal?), staring eye to …  I don’t know what – not quite eye – with this ball of pink, tightly wound, … I have a hard time describing it, realizing only now that it’s a visual I have never tried to put into words … I have looked for this flower years later and believe it to be a peony.  Back then, there were a bunch of them at the side of the house.  It was a flower bush, but I watched only one little about-to-burst bulb.  It was swarming with ants, little busy ants.  They were light orange, each going every which way in no clear pattern, no matter how much I tried to find one.  It was fascinating.  I like the feeling even now just to think about it.  I visited that flower a lot.  I know if I were running a full circle around the house, I could stop, and stare at it.  It was right outside my parents’ bedroom.  I felt like it was mine.  Not mine, as in my owning it but mine as in — there for me to see.

I have a vague recollection of flower petals replacing that tightly wound bud where the ants crawled, but it’s vague at best.  Maybe I lost interest then.  Mostly, I remember those ants crawling.  So busy.  Going nowhere in particular.  I liked that a lot.

I also remember inadvertently being locked out in winter and having to use the bushes and my bottom being really cold.

I think I know why I like summer better.

QUESTION: do you remember the first time you came in contact with the earth, recognizing it as separate from you, and perhaps part of something else?  What is your earliest memory?

Do you remember the first time you saw and/or recognized a plant or other flower? Did you garden as a kid?  Did your parents?  Do you remember it?  Did you like it or was it a chore?

Do you know any particular flower that attracts ants like that?  Are they peonies?

Go ahead … gimme the dirt.

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