Garden Journal, 17 March

Signs of spring... pussywillow branches from Ma

We’re getting a taste of sunshine in Seattle today, and its brought home just how ready I am for Spring this year. Our first winter in our newly purchased house brought home all sorts of unpleasant realities about insulation and drafts and mold, and I’m ready to throw the windows wide open (the ones that aren’t painted shut, anyway) and let in some fresh air.

Even the houseplants have cabin fever.

the butterfly plant Michele gave me for my birthday 3 years ago, pressing itself against the window like a kid stuck inside at recess.

The first two rounds of indoor starts are doing alright. The seed-heating mat got me the near-instant gratification of TWO-DAY germination on this last round, which I still can’t quite believe. My first-ever tomatoes-from-seed are a couple inches tall and looking very sturdy.

those teeny seeds actually turned into tomato plants. with Wee hedgehog from Dad for scale.

Some of the other starts are looking like they got left out in a strong wind. Onions, broccoli, cauliflower, leeks, seem to have grown too fast to hold themselves up. They’re hanging in there, but I need to figure out how to convince them to start working on root structure and less on growing tall. For the time being, since everyone is above ground and soil temps are clearly adequate, I’ve turned off the heat mat for this round of seeds, and am giving them all slightly less plant light time. Once they’re a little sturdier, I’ll start taking them outside to get some fresh air and colder temps during the day.

I set up some shelves to accommodate all the new trays of starts I’ve got to get going in the next week or two. This means we are once again able to use the kitchen table. kind of nice.

New setup: room for 9 flats!

And boy howdy, do I still have some planting to do:

The seed packets in the black clips have already been planted. Everything else is still waiting to get into the dirt.

A funny lesson from this round of planting. I usually just shovel some dirt into last year’s plastic pots, and start seeds in there, rather than spending money on peat pots or peat starter, (which isn’t particularly sustainable, I’ve learned). Turns out, there were some little slug larvae in the dirt, and they grew into respectable sized slugs very quickly. Slugs in paradise. So, every day I have to check for signs of chomping, and those tell-tale silvery slug trails. Offenders are removed to the out of doors.

Incidentally, the starts aren’t the only thing growing like weeds.

Boy in raincoat. Callum now crawls, freestands, and gets into things with unprecendented speed.

Up next for planting:
Next week I’m going to direct seed:
Rainbow Swiss Chard
Spargo Spinach
Jericho Romaine Lettuce
Merlot Lettuce
California Poppies
and shortly thereafter,
Sugarsnap peas
Sweet peas

In mid April, I’ll be starting these in 3 and 4″ pots:
Jack Be Little Pumpkins
Zephyr Squash
Waltham Butternut Squash
Y Star Squash
Burgess Buttercup Squash
Small Sugar Pumpkins
Galeux d’Eysines Squash
Honey Bear Squash
Baby Bear Pumpkin
Costata Romanesco Zucchini
Carnival Squash

and these in flats:
Toy Choi
Genovese Basil
Thai Basil
Emerite Pole Beans
Petaluma Gold Rush Beans
Armenian Cucumbers
Lemon Cucumbers
Franklin Brussel Sprouts
Black Eyed Susans
Moonsong Orange Marigolds
Benary’s Giant Deep Red Zinnia
Purple Coneflower
Cannellini Beans

Garden journal, 7 March

with Mama in the garden. 6 March

My kitchen nook greenhouse now holds 3 trays of starts. My system is evolving. I’ve got a lovely new plantlight to keep everyone warm and in light, and a seed heating mat the size of one flat. Each flat gets about 12 hours on the heat mat, in rotation, keeping the soil nice and warm for the wee seeds. I’ve never used a heat mat before, but I am absolutely sold on it…

Everything from the first planting is above ground:
Yellow Cipollini Onions
Blue Solaize Leeks
Green Globe Artichokes
Conquistador Celery (still haven’t renamed that one yet).

so tiny they had their own envelope inside the seed packet. these will turn into tomatoes. I can scarcely believe it.

Second big round of planting yesterday afternoon:
Walla Walla Sweet Onions
De Cicco Broccoli
Snow Crown Cauliflower
Sun Gold Tomato
Zapotec Tomato
Hillbilly Tomato
San Marzano Tomato
Sweetie Cherry Tomato
Yellow Pear Tomato
Konasu Eggplant
Tomatillo Verde

Nothing like a list of heirlooms for an instant poem. We’ve had a few days of nice spring-like weather, but I don’t think winter’s giving up yet.

Garden journal, February 10

February 7, Sorting seeds by planting date

This is a big year for my garden.  For years, Ryan and I built beds at rental houses, planted seeds as we were able, then moved on after a few harvests, before we’d had a chance to get fully into the seasonal rhythm of the garden.  No longer.  We’re homeowners now, and for the first time, I get to plan a long-term garden. A lot of our friends are also experimenting with growing their own food this year and have asked for suggestions/advice so I thought I’d document my backyard farm efforts here on the blog, for anyone who cares to follow along.

We moved into our sweet little house last April, already seven months pregnant and with a big mess of remodelling to do.  The garden wasn’t a huge priority, but Ryan still found time to track the movement of the light across the yard, determine the best growing area, tarp off the grass, and build me four giant beds.  (Flashback to last year!)  Our friends and relatives came and spent a long, fabulous day in the rain helping shovel a dumptruck-load of Cedar grove vegetable garden dirt into the beds.

my dear friend Heather, fellow new Mama and quite the badass gardener, filled 2 beds by herself, with a broken wheelbarrow, no less.

Aunts, sister-in-law, cousins, my Mama and my Grandmother and mother-in-law were all hard at work.

Ryan's mom, Mary Jane, and my grandmother Marian, supervising

They brought dozens of veggie and herb starts for me as babyshower gifts, and I was determined to partake in the joy of planting my garden, even though I was having a harder and harder time getting around.  With help from my mother, I got all four beds planted.  Of course, squirrels and birds and snails had first dibs on the tender wee plants, and I began to notice the firemen across the street eying me as I lumbered around replanting, no doubt wondering if they’d have to run over to deliver a baby in the front yard.

Callum waited till the garden was underway before arriving on July 2. He and the garden spent the rest of the summer thriving alongside each other.

C and rainbow chard

We had awesome harvests from July onward… basil, lettuce, chard, bok choy, broccoli, zukes, cukes, pattypans, beets, carrots, some garlic, some tomatoes, a few eggplants, potatoes, leeks, and even a few sweet pumpkins and winter squash.  I’m still cooking out of the garden in February (hurrah for the last few garden carrots and leeks).  I want to take my gardening to the next level for the 2011-12 season though.

A few weeks ago, with January ice and frost glistening around the yard, I sat down with the Natural Gardening Company catalog (divine, beautiful, exquisite, helpful) and picked out varieties that seemed well-suited to our garden (We live in what gardeners know as Zone 7B, at latitude 47 degrees and longitude 122 degrees.   Which translates to lots of rain, temperate weather,  some good sunshine, and a “last frost” date somewhere around Mother’s Day.  Find your zone here).  I decided to go all out and order flower seeds too, something I’ve never done before.  They’re attract pollinators, they’re beautiful, and I want to do more ikebana, (meditative Japanese flower arranging)  so it seemed worthwhile.  My husband nodded at the tiny box of seeds that came in the mail a few days ago.  “Hard to believe there’s almost 200 dollars worth of stuff in there.”

Indeed.  It was hard to shell out that much cash on seeds, which seem so tiny and unpromising, particularly when our budget is so tight.  But! Once I thought about how much I’d spend in the average monthly visit to the grocery store to buy organic, heirloom veggies, I realized the seeds would pay for themselves in about 2 months.  And I’ll likely be harvesting from this seed order for at least 2 solid years.

First step after ordering my seeds was sorting them by start date.  (Ie… start indoors 2-3 months before last frost, start indoors 2-4 weeks before last frost, et cet. I have 9 waves of seeds to start this year, and roughly 15 plantings, as I’ll have to transplant everything I start inside into the outdoor gardens.)  First in line for planting: Yellow Cipollini Onions, Green Globe Artichokes, Blue Solaize Leeks, Konasu Eggplants, and Conquistador Celery.

Today I put on my farm boots (Hurray Bogs.  it makes you feel like a more legit gardener if you wear farm boots, BTW)… and headed outside into the cold February sunshine to sort all my seed-starting flats and containers.  Set up the first flat, and shovelled some nice dark dirt in, then brought it inside so the soil can warm up before I plant the first seeds.  My plan… turn our breakfast nook into my indoor greenhouse for the next four months.

Potatoes

(from a letter to Molls)

just left the baby on his blanket with the dogs to babysit and dashed outside with a trowel and a basket to dig up some potatoes for dinner.

Stood over the bed in this light misting rain, staring up into the greysky, listening to the birds.

Rooted around in the rich moist black garden dirt and unearthed a dzen  beautiful purple red potatoes, my first ever harvest of my very own potato crop.  Grew them and harvested them with my ma as a kid, but this is a new sort of satisfaction. I planted them when I was about 38 weeks pregnant and could barely bend over, and for weeks nothing happened.  Figured it was too late in the season to replant, and the boy had been born anyway, and I figured I’d just try again next year.  Then one or two sprouts showed themselves. Then a few weeks later, a few more sprouts.  Then a few weeks later, dozens.  I remembered something I’d heard years ago, about how potatoes harvested at different times will sprout on their own timetable when replanted.  Maybe folklore? maybe practical farm knowledge.  Dunno.  But I spent the summer watching the sprouts grow into 2-foot tall plants from the window in our breakfast nook,  entranced with the idea of potato memory.

And now, harvest.  Even when I could hear the boy hollering inside, I lingered to dig up a few more.  it was just so nice to be doing something nice by myself.

And then I dashed inside and scooped him up off his blanket with my dirty hands and kissed his little teary cheeks and knew that nice things by myself that took longer than harvesting a dozen potatoes could wait till he was a lil bigger. cuz he’s just so dear.

(and the next time i harvested potatoes, I brought him along.)

Like Instructions for Dancing

This morning, I took the dogs outside
the neighbor’s chickens cackled
and a foghorn sounded a few blocks to the west
greysky
softskinned baby on my shoulder drinking the world in without concept
the squash plants are dying off in the garden
inside again, i realize:
when confronted with eight wet dog feet while holding a baby,
bending over to dry them is impractical.
it is easiest to simply follow them around the house,
pushing a towel across the floor with one’s toes
in so doing, i notice how much their footprints
are like instructions for dancing
and so we do

(listening to “i was made to love her,” Stevie Wonder)

Annie and Assata, photo by Andrea Fuentes-Diaz

a laundry list of inspiring bits.

Travels with Owl, a new blog from Samantha Claire…

There are days when OWL naps beautifully, his mouth relaxingly puckered in sleep as he ghost-feeds, perfect child’s pose.  I shower.  I meditate.  Wash the remaining breakfast dishes.  He awakens in giggles and I find him surrounded by books he’s pulled off the shelf that’s bolted to the wall of his walk-in-closet-turned-bedroom.  We walk slowly & deliberately to the grocery store, cook dinner, and dance to Leonard Cohen or Dolly Parton, his tiny feet on my mine as we move slowly & deliberately, mindfully & with love.  We hike & camp.  Ride the buses & trains.  He loads the dryer while I fish for quarters.  He says noodle and turtle and thank you.  And it really cannot get any better that.

Pearl Nelson, a Mississippi White Trash Girl, a collection of poetry and musings from Pearl Nelson….

(from “Walking in the dark around the pond”)

I wonder aloud if the raccoons and deer
and all the other song-less creatures
wish everyone would just shut up.
Not me. I especially love the frogs
who bleat like newborn lambs.
and the old grandmother crickets with
rusty worn out summer voices. And you
when you tell me about your day.

Turning the Mind into an Ally, a book by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

What we call ‘war’ is a series of calamities arising from beliefs and opinions, which are always subject to change. What we call ‘peace’ is the absence of aggression, a tenuous state. When it is winter, summer no longer exists. We organize our life around the concept of a solid self in a solid world, even though all of it is simply ideas and forms coming in and out of existence, like thousands of stars flickering in the night. … Contemplating impermanence can be a liberating experience, one that brings both sobriety and joy. In essence, we become less attached. We realize we can’t really have anything. We have money and then its gone; we have sadness and then its gone. No matter how we want to cling to our loved ones, by nature every relationship is a meeting and a parting. This doesn’t mean we have less love. It means we have less fixation, less pain. …We’ve learned to look at what’s in front of us. 149-50.

From my garden

in the name of our mothers

With my Mama... 1982

Last year, in honor of my mother, I wrote about the revolutionary roots of Mother’s Day. I invoked the words of Julia Ward Howe, the founder of Mother’s Day, which sound somewhat different than the average Hallmark greeting card.

Arise then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts! Whether your baptism be of water or of tears! Say firmly:

“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies, Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.  We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.” Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.  As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home, for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means Whereby the great human family can live in peace…

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality, may be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient and the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.

—Julia Ward Howe, 1870

“Mother’s Day wasn’t founded for mothers,” I wrote. “It was founded by them—and with revolution in mind.  Acutely aware of the costs of war, industry, and greed, Julia Ward Howe and like-minded women initiated the first Mother’s Day as a day of activism, a day in which women would stand upon the basic principles of motherhood to demand a more peaceful, just world.  It wasn’t the first time women made such demands, and it would not be the last. Having gone through the pain and joy and struggle and exhilaration and labor of bringing children into the world and raising them to be caring, responsible, creative, moral members of society, many women have historically found it difficult to stomach the wars and social forces which then twisted the bodies and minds of their children—and the “enemy” children of other mothers—in the interests of ideology and profit.”

These words ring truer than ever for me this year. On some still-unknown day in the next seven weeks, I will bring a child into this world, becoming a mother myself.  My mother is becoming a grandmother. My grandmother is becoming a great-grandmother.  The lineage is deepening, and so too is my commitment to working for peace.

But today, on this particular mother’s day, my feminism, my activism, my hell-raising looks different.  As Ani DiFranco reflected a few years ago:

I find it metaphorically resonant that a pregnant woman looks like she’s just sitting on the couch, but she’s actually exhausting herself constructing a human being.  The laborious process of growing a human is analogous to how women’s work is seen… much of women’s work just makes the world quietly turn.

The past week has been filled with ups and downs and ups, and I finished it off by pulling three waitressing shifts in a row, which is a bit of a challenge on this end of the pregnancy.  No matter how well I sleep, I tend to wake up tired these days.  So, on this mother’s day, I practiced peace close to home and did small things, in honor of mothers.

I filled and hung a birdfeeder; in honor of Annie, the mother who raised six children in this house, and loved birds; in honor of my mother in law, Mary Jane, who gave me the birdfeeder some time ago; and in honor of my mother, Theresa, who has made her backyard into a veritable songbird sanctuary over the years.   As I hung the feeder from the wisteria vine, I heard the insistent, high-pitched chirping of baby birds, and realized that one of Annie’s old birdhouses is hosting a family.  Here’s hoping that bird mama realizes she can stay a little closer to home to feed the wee ones.

birdfeeders

I took a small walk in the Bigleaf Maple forest near our house, with my husband and our dog. The sunlight filtered down through the green canopy, and the forest floor was warm and earthy-smelling.

Back home, Ryan set to work constructing my mother’s day present: four giant raised beds for our vegetable garden.  He’s been mapping the pattern of the sunlight in the yard for weeks, and last week he staked out mesh to block weeds and grass from making their way up into the gardens.  Last night, he and our friend Ross picked up lumber and hammered together the first bed, and this afternoon he finished the final three.

I moved our three trays of vegetable starts out of the laundry room and into the sunshine, and sat at our picnic table starting seeds. Pattypan squash, three kinds of basil, kentucky wonder pole beans, cilantro and cucumbers.  Sorted through the rest of my seeds and lined up the packets I’ll direct seed once we’ve hauled in dirt for the garden beds.  Three kinds of carrots, beets, lettuce greens and sugar snap peas… more to come, I’m sure, just haven’t thought of them yet.  I know of few things more peaceful than growing food by hand, at home, and I can think of few ways more appropriate to honor the woman who raised me.

Seeds and herbs.

in my Mama's garden, 1982

After I finished the seeds, I sat in the sun and pulled my shirt up over my belly to let the sun warm the baby, and called my good friend Nora, who’s also pregnant, and expecting in a few weeks.  We swapped pregnancy stories and laughed, talked over things like last names and placentas, made plans to visit soon.

As the sun arced out of the yard and the day began slipping into early evening, I wandered inside and sat down at the computer. Made a donation to FINCA international in honor of my mother, my grandmother, and Ryan’s mom.  Thought about the small, humble ways we can create peace in our everyday lives, peace which inevitably overflows into the lives of those who we cross paths with.  Maybe next year Callum and I will call up Grandma and find a protest to rally at.  But this year, we’re celebrating peace quietly, in the name of our mothers.

To my mama-san, Theresa, my grandmother, Marian, my mother-in-law, Mary Jane, and in honor of my Nana, Frances and all the other women worldwide who are loving and struggling and prevailing as they try to raise their children in a peaceful world…  Happy mother’s day, and thank you.

Coexistence

I’ve been particularly attuned to the weather for the last few weeks, because I planted my autumn/winter garden seeds at the beginning of September. Walking to work on nice days, I’ve been guessing at the heat of the light and the number of hours its been landing on the garden, warming the seeds. We had lots of days like that, interspersed with gentle September rainbursts, which I gloried in, imagining the droplets seeping down through warm soil to nourish emerging seeds. It was the perfect weather for starting a cool-season garden.

autumn in the garden 1: ripening tomato

Witnessing vegetables sprout from seeds is one of my favorite things, so I watch my garden like a hawk in the days after I plant it. When they’ve had enough time to germinate, I start checking every few hours, increasingly giddy and paranoid. Giddy because I know tiny green shoots will appear at any moment. Paranoid because I know as soon as the shoots appear, the snails will come. They decimated my spring starts, migrating into my garden under cover of darkness by the hundreds and chomping the plants down to the dirt. So, as I took satisfaction in the garden-friendly September weather, I also because increasingly neurotic, imagining hordes of gastropods converging on my garden to destroy everything I’d planted and yearned for.

Autumn in the garden 2: pumpkins

As the day neared when the seeds would sprout into the daylight, I became increasingly obsessed with tactics to protect them. I could use poison to keep the snails out. Or something less toxic; say a beer trap for them to slime into and drown. I could even follow the example of New Zealand grandmother Oriole Parker-Rhodes, who decided to one-up the helix aspersa by harvesting them right along with her garden veggies and serving them up in butter and garlic.

Oriole Parker-Rhodes

But weirdly enough, even though the snails destroy something I love SO much… I can’t bring myself to kill them. For a couple reasons.

First: its hard for me to kill anything, honestly, which is part of the reason why I am mostly vegan. [I eat fish maybe once a month, cheese once a week or so, and meat once or twice a year. Every meal I cook at home is vegan.]

Second: I’ve come to realize that each of my actions—particularly those that involve consumption—have far reaching consequences. I recently discovered that, in addition to creating a carbon footprint, I am also creating a water footprint. Josh Harkinson recently published a fantastic article on the subject in Mother Jones. Chew on this:

[Farmer] Shawn Coburn, turned toward me and demanded if I knew how much water it took to grow one almond, a cantaloupe, or a pound of tomato paste. (I didn’t. Turns out it’s 1 gallon, 25 gallons, and 55 gallons, respectively.) “The people in the city, they don’t know what their footprint on nature is,” he scoffed. “They sit there in an ivory tower and don’t realize what it takes to keep them alive.”

autumn in the garden 3: peppers

Farmer Shawn is right. We have no idea what it takes to keep us alive. After reading Harkinson’s article, I did some research and discovered that being mostly-vegan also enables me to reduce my water footprint by nearly TWO TONS every year. Once I learned that, I became obsessed with my two tons of not-wasted water. Where was it? I started imagining a tiny, two-ton alpine lake, ringed with talus slopes and huckleberry plants. Every day in the year I abstain from consuming animal products, the lake gets a little deeper. If I’m dawdling in the shower, I picture my lake-level dropping, and I turn the water off. I try to only water my garden at night or in the early morning, and if a dry spell goes on for too long, I will stop watering altogether and let my garden die until the rains come again.

I suspect that, akin to the imaginary lake filled with water I have Not wasted, there is an unseen ecological consequence of all the snails I have Not killed.

I’m not against using scare tactics. The other day, while helping me rake leaves and fill holes our dogs had dug in the yard, my friend Gretchen picked up a snail to study it more closely. Her chocolate lab puppy Butters darted up and licked the snail, top to bottom.

Butters, prior to snail-attack, in bottom left.

Gretchen turned the snail to face her and informed it seriously: “Tell all your friends. This is what we do to snails around here.” Then she tucked it safely in an empty potting container, from whence I deposited it in the (covered) compost cone later that day, to live out its snail-life in a paradise of rotting vegetable matter.

I’m too lazy and squeamish to pick them off my garden at night with a flashlight, like Thich Naht Hahn does at Plum Village. Some online gardeners suggest lining your garden with hair clippings, but I don’t have any at the moment. I have lots of dog hair, but I’m sure it would blow away. Eggshells are also supposed to dissuade snails from crossing into your garden, but being a predominantly vegan household, we don’t generate any eggshells. Copper is also rumored to dissuade snails and slugs via a tiny shock to their tender bellies (vaguely Guantanamo, but still non-lethal), so I tried lining my garden with pennies. It seemed to be working, but then they started getting knocked off the edge of the bed by unshocked and/or braver snails, clearing a path for their legions of followers.

By the time I’d pulled together a little extra cash to buy copper wire to wrap around my 36 foot garden perimeter, it was too late. The snails had made short work of my babies. Six rows of winter greens, chomped all the way down to the root. And despite all those hours of obsessing over my seeds, weather patterns, and non-lethal slug aversion techniques, I wasn’t angry at first. Just sad and frustrated.

I comforted myself with the concept of coexistence. I thought of a conversation I had last week with Dharma teacher and organic gardener Dan Peterson, who reflected thoughtfully that the snails probably enjoyed eating his garden just as much as he did. Staring ruefully at my decimated garden, I thought about Aldo Leopold, who noted in the Sand County Almanac, that humans are simply “plain members of the biotic community.” Who’s to say those snails’ pleasure is any less important than mine? I’ve identified philosophically with deep ecology since my early twenties romance with the writings of Gary Snyder. I agree with deep ecology’s founder Arne Næss, who wrote in 1973: “The right of all forms [of life] to live is a universal right which cannot be quantified. No single species of living being has more of this particular right to live and unfold than any other species.”

Still, this was MY garden! Those winter greens belonged to Ryan and I. We were going to use the kale in soups, as and bake it in olive oil and salt. The spinach was going to get drowned in peanut sauce and served up with tofu, and the rainbow chard was destined for hundreds of breakfast scrambles. I clambered into the garden and knelt down, searching in vain for any surviving green. There was none. Now I was mad. I shouted at the alley, and retreated into the house.

Later, I listened to a recording of a talk Dan Peterson had given at the Seattle Shambhala Center on mind terma, the treasures of Buddhist teaching passed from teacher to student through the generations. I’m not a practicing Buddhist, and I have trouble sitting still, so a lot of Buddhist teachings sail straight over my head. But Dan tells great stories, and his talk pulled me in. He talked about “how we wake up, moment by moment.” I thought of all those days I’d taken note of the weather and the light, and all the times I’d knelt by the edge of the garden to watch for the tiny miracle of green sprouts pushing their way up through the dirt. Moment after moment of awakening to my surroundings, to the intimate process of growing food. The moment of discovering decimation by snails contained an equal amount of awe— awe at destruction, not creation. But in that destruction, the snails thrived, and something else was created. Dan told a story from his own garden:

In the morning I go out into the garden in my barefeet to water, and I had the experience of stepping barefoot on a slug. It felt like electricity. It was a sentient being! So I would gather the slugs in a plastic container and carry them to my compost heap. I kept it moist, and they were fine there. Later, I found literally fifty to eighty slugs coming out of the compost heap, and they were all lined up in the same direction, going back to the garden! Our regard for what we call slugs can be east. We can be facing east when we look at a slug. There’s no enemy.

By facing east, Dan was referring to a Shambhala chant. “Radiating confidence, peaceful, illuminating the way of discipline, Eternal Ruler of the Three Worlds, may the Great Eastern Sun be victorious.” He explained:

The East represents richness, brilliance, and is the quality of unconditional experience… Peaceful means that there’s no aggression, which means there’s no territory. There’s complete openness. With no territory, there is primordial confidence. There’s nothing to defend, no enemy. This is a lot of conceptual load to put onto the simplicity of direct experience, but I think its helpful to point out that’s what happening. There’s no enemy… Radiating confidence, peaceful, is east.

I tried facing east. Watching snails destroy my planting, after all those weeks of tending and watching and waiting, was an opportunity. A pile of direct experience to wade into and consider.

There is no territory. The garden Ryan and I built belongs no more to me than it does to the snails. The land the garden sits on belongs no more to my landlord than it does to me. We are all of us only dwelling here for a little while. Here, in my decimated garden, was my deep ecology philosophy made real. How could I be angry? There was no enemy. I took deep breaths. Felt peaceful.

A couple brussel sprout plants were large enough to survived the snails, so today I planted some company for them. Stopped by the West Seattle Nursery and picked up small starts of red cabbage, kale, broccoli, winter greens mix, and some onion and garlic bulbs, all big enough to (hopefully) survive the oncoming snails and frosts.

starting over.

It begins again.

sunrises of the mountain and urban varieties

Imagine waking up with your nose poking out of a sleeping bag misted in morning dew. You’re briefly annoyed about the dew, but you remember that’s the price of sleeping out under the stars, and you’re glad it didn’t rain, at least. You pull the mummysack drawstring more snugly around your face and stare at the greyblue northwest sky, jagged between the evergreens. It may have been hot yesterday, but its September in Cascadia, and the mountain nights are chilly—mornings before sunrise even chillier, somehow. There is the possibility of coffee, or hot tea, once you crawl out of your sleeping bag, but for now you are comfortably ensconced, so you lay there. You can smell the campfire smoke in your hair and maybe someone you love is closeby, or maybe you are alone. You glory in either circumstance.

There is nothing like waking up in the mountains.

A sunspot appears on the pinedirtground next to you, and you watch it snake across the clearing, setting individual shoots of grass to glowing as it goes. Tendrils of steam-mist begin to curl off the damp earth. The patch of sunlight continues to grow, crawling into all the corners it abandoned for shadow last night. The pine smell gets headier in the sunlight, somehow. You are caught up in these individual moments and then you realize suddenly; Sunrise is happening. You get swept up in everything turning gold and the sky being born as an entirely new hue, and last night being over and tomorrow beginning which is happening now, incidentally, and suddenly the sunlight is racing up the evergreens at the foot of the clearing, branch by branch, climbing the trees like a cat, and then its leaping off the treetops and spilling down the mountainsides, and a whole new day is begun.

You’re left a little breathless by the whole thing.

As far as I’m concerned, mountain sunrises are as good as it gets. Urban sunrise has never really moved me that way.

Confession. I don’t tend to get up for sunrise in the city. I’m a lunch/dinner waitress (read: never have to be at work before ten and usually get off long after sunset). Its a worklife that’s enabled me to continue my college hours (read: I get most of my writing done in the middle of the night). I don’t see much beauty in sun hitting skyscrapers, and glowing pavement isn’t that interesting, unless it has shadows.

Its not like I live in some horrible concrete jungle. Confession: I actually live in the most beautiful city in the world. At least the most beautiful one I’ve ever seen. Seattle is surrounded by water, islands, and mountain peaks, and I live on the westernmost face of the city, on the westernmost edge of the last hill before the water, which means that our neighborhood looks over a wide stretch of the Puget Sound, backed by Blake Island, Vashon Island, Bainbridge Island, and the Kitsap Peninsula. These landmasses are covered in Evergreen trees, and behind those trees are the jagged and often-snow-capped teeth of the Olympic Mountains, and there’s usually a couple green and white Washington State ferries chugging across the water.

SO, if I bothered to get up and walk to the end of my street, I could take in a pretty damn picturesque sunrise, from the city. I could also walk up over the crest of the hill and watch the sunrise hitting the 14,000 foot peak of Mt. Rainier and the neighboring Cascade range (the setting of many versions of the aforementioned mountain sunrise).

Granted, there aren’t too many buildings in my views, so maybe those sunrise varieties wouldn’t qualify as urban. I’ll mull over that. The point of this blog is, I saw the sun rise in the city this morning, and my view didn’t have any mountains, or islands, or ferries. And it was still magic. (and you thought this blog didn’t have a point).

I laid awake last night listening to Ryan and the dog sleep-breathing, mentally poking thru garden and cupboards, plotting a dinner with friends. This morning, after Ryan left for the first day of school on his new scooter, I putzed around cleaning the kitchen, and then went outside to dump the compost jar. The sky was still darkish, and the grass was wet, because it is September in the northwest. A zillion fruit flies plumed up out of the compost cone when I pried the lid off, and I waved my hand around my face and thought, “goddamn it, I hate fruit flies. I hate it when I wait to take the compost out until its gotten nasty in the jar. I like compost when it is freshly chopped vegetable remnants, and gorgeous rich humus for my garden, and I am not big on it during the in-between stages.”

But then it occurred to me that compost reminds me of autumn, which is the time when the year rots into itself and creates the mulch for next year. Compost is a creative process, and autumn is a creative time, for me. I tapped the last of the sludge out of the jar, closed the lid of the compost cone, and turned around, feeling satisfied about autumn. Noticed the maple outside our backdoor was starting to turn colors, one of my favorite things about our little urban backyard. Noticed the sunlight creeping across the grass.

It hadn’t occurred to me yet that sunrise was happening, just that it was light enough to spot ripe vegetables in the garden. Went to poke around under the leaves. Picked a good size zucchini, 3 pattypan squash, a handful of tomatoes, and a fistful of basil. Noticed the sunlight creeping across the uneven bricks of our backyard patio, and glowing on the weeds growing out of the cracks between the uneven bricks. Started to walk up the steps, balancing all the garden vegetables, and noticed the gold light inching up the steps alongside me.

Suddenly, I realized I was watching the sun rise. There was no dramatic vista, no glowing peaks or shimmering saltwater. There was only our dear little backyard in the city, getting drenched in the gold light of Wednesday, on the first day of school.

I stood there, holding an armload of vegetables on our little cement back stoop, grinning like a fool, and watching the sunrise crest the sage plant and pick up speed as it climbed up the dark blue pot on the top step and into the forest of basil. It was at that moment that the sun itself crested the hill behind me, and the warmth joined with the light and set the sweetpea vine glowing alongside the backdoor.

I had an inane thought:

“I just watched the sunrise in the city, and it was beautiful.”

Inane because: I live in a beautiful city, in which I have a backyard, and a garden, a privilege many city-dwellers don’t have. It made me wonder: would it occur to me to watch sunrise if it illuminated ugly things? Would those things look less ugly in the warm light, or more?

And I went inside and arranged the garden bounty on the windowsill.

windowsill

basil driftwood ikebana

A few snapshots from the weekend, just because….

spinach and bok choy starts for the winter garden, rescued from a friday night rainstorm

Auntie Em visits from Spokane for the weekend.

makes pancakes in a scooter helmet

trying to fathom.

“Maybe everyone felt this way at some point, when one realized there was a depth to one’s life and emotions beyond one’s own significance.”

-Kiran Desai, the Inheritance of Loss

A week ago, I was lying in bed next to Ryan in a tin-roofed cottage in an orchid nursery on a steep hillside in Kalimpong, India, scribbling in my journal, thinking forward to our return to the states.  I began a sentence:

“I am trying to fathom”

and a power failure swallowed us in darkness.  They’re part of ordinary life in India—usually happening several times a day and frequently lasting hours.  I crawled off the bed and bumped around in the dark looking for the matches, which stubbornly refused to light when I struck them, as the dampness of August monsoon in the Himalayan foothills had softened their matchheads. 

Digression: the dictionary of English etymology defines “fathom” as the length made by the outstretched arms, 6 feet. It is a verb for measuring depth, getting to the bottom of. In the world of sailing ships, a fathom is the same measurement, and in the days before electronic nautical instruments, a rope was stretched along one’s arms, and knotted at intervals matching the human reach. Once this rope was lowered into a water of unknown depth, the number of submerged knots would give an indicator of how far down the bottom lay. Fathoming. The word has always reminded me of Melville’s sailors, staring fearfully into the dark of the ocean. I learned in college that Moby Dick was a metaphor as much as it was a whale, and so I suppose it follows that in testing the depths of that deep water, sailors were searching for meaning as much as literal ground. In the act of fathoming, we make ourselves vulnerable. When we stand with arms outstretched, reaching our fingertips as far out as they will go, we expose our vital organs to the dangers of the world. And it is in this way, and this way only, that we are able to gain some idea of what it is that lies at hand.

After I’d struck a half-dozen Indian matches, one sputtered into flame, and I lit the 4 candles we’d been burning across India.

I crawled back into bed in the candlelight, and we lay without speaking.  The forest was suddenly audible in the absence of the oscillating hum of the electric fan; now we heard the low buzz of thousands of crickets rubbing their legs together, the brushing of insects against the leaves and the echoing telegraph of the village dogs, passing messages in the streets.  Ryan returned to his book, and I picked up my journal again.  “It seems to me,” I wrote, “in the darkened silence, that we’re made aware of where we really are, this place it is we inhabit.  Suddenly it feels like we’re surrounded by jungle-forest, even though we’re only dwelling in its edges.  After all, it is vast enough, this thick green of the foothills of the Himalaya, that even roads and villages are little more than an interruption, and a small one at that, as all of this “civilization” could be washed into the river by the forest in the mudslides of a good monsoon.  Listening, it seems the forest breathes between the paced exhalations of cricketsong, and having just read about the tigers of the Sunderbans [the mangrove-forested islands in the mouth of the Ganges River], I feel respectful and small in the dark.”

The lights and the fan clicked back on after only a short while, and I returned to the unfinished thought I’d begun before the power outage.

I am trying to fathom

Like many sentences in my journals, this one had been abandoned half-finished, interrupted by a distraction. I stared at it for a moment, bemused that it might actually constitute a complete sentence. Subject, me. Verb, fathom. I had left myself standing there on the page, arms outstretched, reaching into the darkness. It was, technically, complete, I supposed. But what had I been reaching for?

I am trying to fathom what I’ll say to my dear ones next week, when they ask

so how was your trip

which moments will I select for recapitulation?  which observations will surface in my jetlagged disorientation?   I realize I am trying to fathom what This All Means.  These 32 days in India, living out of a backpack.

One the one hand, These 32 Days in India Living Out of A Backpack were nothing more than a collection of moments.   They can be reduced to a list, of places, and journeys between places: cities, airports, trainstations, rowboats, hostels, lodges, rivers, mountains, monasteries and restaurants, faces, pots of tea, meals and evenings and books and rickshaws and tickets and rupees and bad maps and alleys and signs in Sanskrit.

I could recount all those details, and it would be an exercise akin to measuring the depth of the ocean by making note of the quantity of seaweed floating on its surface, or the size of the waves.

The real measure of the experience has nothing—and everything—to do with the details. There is no fathom-rope deep enough to get to the bottom of 32 Days in India Living Out of A Backpack. It is an ocean of murky emotional-intellectual-spiritual experience (which is also made of observable things, like waves and seaweed). Walkabout— wandering the world just for the sake of seeing what it has to show you— is an act that is, by its very undertaking, a fundamental unmooring from the Acccustomed, the Habitual, the Known, the Routine, the Familiar.  Like a sailor setting out under the wind, you realize you are not entirely in control of where you end up. Like a sailor, you bring what you think you’ll need, the tools and clothes and bits of knowledge you think may best serve you. India, like the ocean, can change on you in a moment. Suddenly you’re in over your head, bobbing up and down and rubbing the sting out of your eyes, as wave after wave of new smells, tastes, sounds, and visions splash into you.  You are washed over by culture, history, and curious, probing stares. You are confounded by new and ancient ways of doing things.  And as the hours pass and you remember you never did have any control over all of this, you start to relax, and recognize the universal currents flowing around you, human suffering, joy, art, commerce.  You start to take stock of all you have carried with you from home: preconceptions, useless luggage (why this pair of pants? why that assumption?). You feel deep gratitude for the things that prove useful: patience, that orange pashmina scarf from Emma, this nail clippers you got past airport security, that gluestick, open eyes, open heart…

You begin to realize things about yourself, attitudes and prejudices and capacities, revealed over the passing days, things you never really understood before.  The country, the people, offer you a mirror in which to see yourself; your mannerisms, your skin color, your clothing, your privilege, your guilt, your joys, and the wellspring of patience that is infinitely deeper each time you dip into it.  It is the kind of mirror most Americans conspire to keep covered, because the reflection is not always flattering to our ego.  Yes, I see in the mirror of India, I am capable of racist thoughts.  Yes, I am capable of walking past a starving child, reduced to bones and skin and eyes, sitting next to his unconscious mother on a traffic island surrounded by a chaos of cars and rickshaws and buses belching diesel fumes, walking past and doing nothing.

There’s plenty of beauty too, too much to take in, enough to bathe in the memories of it well into my old age.  But I think the discomfort, the awkwardness, the truly unnerving took more fathoming, had more to teach me about myself.

Now I am home again, in the states, and my jeans and my music and my shower and my kitchen table and my house feel like a foreign country for the first few hours.  I am trying, again, to fathom

what I’ve brought home.  What it means to be here, to be of here, in my sweet kitchen, my backyard garden, the land of milk and honey, Michael Jackson and roads with lanes.

trying to fathom.

[wrote this listening to: \”First Breath After Coma,\” Explosions in the Sky