Never Alone In The Quiet

This guy is the last to leave the garden party. There isn't much for him to eat but he's still hangin' around.

I got two six packs of rainbow chard planted.

Looks pretty messy out there. It's an Obsessive Compulsive's nightmare.

I adore the optimism of seeds. Tiny dill seedlings are volunteering in the bed. Frost will probably kill them all before they mature enough to harvest.

Sunshine streamed into the chicken run and the girls fought over some cucumber I brought them. Non-local cucumber that Max has been eating.

There were quite a few bees trying to gather the last bit of pollen for the season. My roses obliged.

I made it outside yesterday just as I promised myself I would. I want to describe the warmth of the light as malty though I know it's a stretch to smell it and feel it as I did-sweet and sluggish, rich and mature. Unlike the weaker colder sun of winter, it was like a day from summer accidentally popped into our fall week and it shook itself all over the place; all over me. It even sounded like a summer afternoon; lawnmowers were busy in the distance; bees lending a lazy humming to the quiet; the hens clucking and shuffling in their run.

I planted my baby chard in the bed that grew my cucumbers and dill this summer. Everywhere in that bed were tiny dill seedlings, bright slender green notes of ever-hopeful life. I shook weeds out of the way and as I removed them they released the scent of the dirt into the warm air. I had to sit down and just listen and breath. I actually forgot how the garden can be such a great place to be at peace. I'm always so busy planning, plotting, and trying to get things done in minus time, I rarely go out there and just sit in the quiet.

Or the peaceful unquiet. Perhaps what I find so soothing about it is the great industry of organisms that undulates all around you in happy accord with the fact that their lives are short and they are driven by instinct, light, and hunger, to do what they need to do in order to complete their own cycle. The tiny worms curled up in the dirt don't ever ask "what is the meaning of life?" nor question the fairness of having to die in a few days or a few months or one year. It seems so greedy the way humans suck up life and feel entitled to a long one, feel cheated when someone gets only a few years, or worse, when someone gets seventy long ones and still-it's never enough for us.

Who are we to say that a fetus that lives only a month in it's mother's womb didn't live the perfect cycle of life? Who are we to know what that spirit wanted or what it should have had? Who are we to declare that the spirit of a man who's lived for eighty years and then packs it in in violent crash wasn't relieved to have left this mortal coil?

I once inspired great ire in a man I worked with by suggesting that humans aren't superior to ants. In fact, I think I asked "how do we know that we are 'more intelligent' than ants?" I had been reading a nonfiction book about ants and it occurred to me that a human measure of intelligence cannot be used to measure an insect's intelligence. Some ants milk aphids. They herd them like we do cows, to plants the aphids like, and then they harvest the "dew" that the aphids exude from their skin. Nutritious substance that the ants feed on. Hello!!! We are not the only beings on this earth who have figured out how to use other creatures for our benefit.

The man I worked with was deeply offended that I could even question such a thing. I was surprised, actually, because I really didn't see my questions and my curiosity as a threat to human existence. So what if we are not necessarily the most superior beings on earth? We're still pretty high on the food chain and have got the whole world in our destructive grips- are we so insecure?

If humans are too afraid to even ask these questions then our belief in our own superiority must be pretty weak.

Out in my garden I don't count myself as the superior being. I don't really count myself at all. I just move in it. Building. Planting. Smelling the air. Watching as the insects live their lives and wondering at their view of the same world. I sat on the edge of one of my raised beds and listened and felt the warmth of the light heat up the fibers in my shirt. I could almost hear the soil moving.

When you are that aware of the universe of small life around you it is impossible to consider unloading a jug full of Round Up. When you are aware of the universe of small life around you, you also become aware of the universe of small life that makes up your own body. There is no real difference between your own flesh and the soil. All of us made up of molecules of matter; all of us made up of colonies of smaller beings than ourselves. When you pour killing concentrations of any substance into the ground you are disrespecting yourself most of all.

I don't go around preaching to people about using chemicals in their yards. I'm not even trying to do that here. I'm merely saying that when you stop all the talking in your brain, when you shut up and listen, you will find that your place in the world is not separate from the dirt but right smack in the middle of it. And when you realize how connected you are to soil, the ultimate source of all of life on earth: dirt and water, you just can't knowingly pump it full of toxic matter. Because it's like pouring bleach down your own throat.

This is all very earth-mama and the part of me that rebelled against pot smoking earthy women with long arm pit hairs would like to whip out a gin and tonic and put on some Frank Sinatra REALLY loud so I can pretend I didn't say all the things I just said. I do NOT wear patchouli. (anymore.)

It's interesting how talking about my jaunt in the garden yesterday I am making it sound like it was so serious, dark and grim...yet I just meant to tell you how good it felt. How hopeful. How peaceful. How wonderfully loud with life it was.

Truth in advertising

Note: All the pictures with this post have mysteriously disappeared. This makes the post almost useless. I will try to restore the post to it's original form when I'm a lot less tired and confused.

Right now, for the next five minutes, this is the sweetest spot in my house. While it's true that I always have a bowl of beautiful California grown "organic" lemons in a pretty bowl sitting out in my dining room*, I don't want you to feel that you too should have an inviting bowl of citrus displayed in a playful bowl at all times. Who needs the pressure? I don't know why Romantic Homes has not yet approached me to do a spread on my "quirky" decorating style when it's clear to everyone who enters my home that it is a place where creativity and magic abound.

A place, in fact, where romance truly thrives** I have offered this sunny little corner for your viewing pleasure because I know that what you really want is a little taste of what it's like to be psychotic a deliciously wacky person, like me. Which is why I'd like to point out that this beautiful case, on which my sunlit lemons sit, houses my semi-professional accordion which will not be practiced on again until I've forgotten every song I know how to play on it. The case isn't dusty, as you may have been secretly thinking to yourself, it's actually just a "patina" of age***. I like everything in my house to be weathered, because this shows what a person of character I am.

It's important to me that you are impressed with my character.

But not so much that you are intimidated. Because I am just like you. Except that you don't have my bowl of lemons.

Because I know how tortured you feel sometimes when looking at homes filled with gorgeous tableaus (like mine), I offer up the wide angle view. Do you see my lemons back there? Most of the time I like to sit right next to my lemons. Because that's the only place in my house that really sends my creative muse into hyper space a delicate meditation of my art.

I am here to reassure you that if you would like to spend your life sitting next to a bowl of lemons which are resting on a dead boy's custom made accordion, encouraging your muse to ramble through the meadows of your gentle mind, please don't stop on my account!

I like to let flowers reach a pinnacle of decay in order that I can deeply appreciate the full cycle of life. I am a contemplative quiet person**** who likes to read mushroomy poems about nature and I find that watching the algae grow around the rotting stems of my two week old dead daffodils brings me as close to the voice of the universe as I can get. Although my family does sometimes express concern over my zen-like qualities, they are often moved to leave me to my quiet contemplations.

Here's a little housekeeping tip for you (it's copy righted, so don't express this tip as your own in a professional capacity please!): When your family has grown impatient with life's evidence of decay (as in a vase of dead flowers that have developed an odor), simply move the evidence. They will be so relieved that it isn't where they expected it that they will be too stunned to comment when they find it somewhere new.

Let us come back to the lemons. There is a feast of textural riches to be explored here. Why spend time anywhere else in your house when you can behold these beautiful fruits that have the added bonus of preventing an unexpected epidemic of scurvy?

Now, I want to share a few other random things with you, my oh so patient (and obviously gentle) readers:

• I constantly have imaginary conversations in my head with people I know, and sometimes with people I've never even met but imagine I may, at some point meet. (I also compose a lot of letters in my head, of the hand written variety). Today as I was cycling home I was having a conversation in my head in which I (puzzlingly) declared "If I was a man, I'd totally be a lesbian!" If you can figure that one out I will give you a million dollars, just as soon as I earn my second million.

• If you are going to become a close friend of mine, it is inevitable that at some point I will feel the need to let you know that Philip and I are not swingers. I don't judge the swinging life*****, I just think it's important that a potential friend is aware that at no point in our friendship will I make a pass at them, or accept a pass either.

• This is why I will usually also offer reassurance that I am not an adulterer or a lesbian. I can honestly say I have no prejudice or negative judgements about being gay, which seems as natural to people who are as it is natural for me to be heterosexual (and not an adulterer). The only reason I feel compelled to point this out is to avoid any confusion on these points. I do have negative judgements about adultery. I disapprove of it. If you are willing to betray your spouse that way, you may as well just leave him/her. Obviously this is not an issue if you are a swinger.

• I also ask Philip about once a year if he's gay. It's a kind of ritual. He gives me no reason to suppose that he is, (besides his enjoyment of flower arranging), but I've heard so many stories about men who, after twenty years of marriage to a woman and three kids later, leaves his wife for a boyfriend. I don't think Philip will do this, but I'm a naturally cautious person and don't like surprises. So I check about once a year. He's gotten used to it.

• I'm not an easy person to live with.

• Apparently I am very concerned about developing scurvy.

*Not a verifiable fact.
**Other members of the family were not available for comment on this point.
***Only uneducated cretins call this "dust" these days!
****A claim widely disputed.
*****at least, I want to be totally OK with other people doing it, which is similar to not judging it.