Coming Up Roses

When I went to cognitive behavioral therapy a few years ago I learned some very important things. 1) You're the best one suited to figure out what's important for your own mental health, no one else can decide that for you. 2) whatever activities you find calming, provided they cause no harm to yourself or others (with emphasis on others), you should be sure to keep those activities in your life.

At the time I didn't find much that was calming. All of my sewing and crafting projects were in a constant state of suspended motion (there were always tons of them incomplete which I found very stressful), I had an eighteen month old very mobile challenging boy, a house in need of lots of repairs, depression had already sunk in for a very nice long run of two years solid, and panic attacks woke me up many mornings. The one thing, I told my therapist, that I found calming was to go hang out with my roses. I enjoyed pruning them and gathering them to arrange in vases. When I would bring them into the house and place them in various rooms, I could be really stressed and then see them, stop to smell them (most of them had strong scent) and although they didn't have the power to erase all the panic, I could feel everything in my chest settle down a little. The world would get a little bit more quiet.

So my therapist suggested I make sure to spend time everyday cultivating this relationship with my plants. I don't really know what it is about roses, I never intended to fall for them, that's for sure. It was accidental. The way you can take in a stray cat because you are a caring person and not really love cats, but over time the cat's charm gets under your skin and you find it hard to give away. In the first house we ever owned we inherited a few incredibly abused rose bushes. The previous owner had pruned them with a weed whacker.

I felt sorry for them. I intended to plant herbs and vegetables and some wild flowers and daisies, but not roses. I always thought of roses as fussy and kind of over-rated. Philip and I started to prune the roses back to a healthy shape and as we did we got more flowers from them until we found ourselves being thanked by these sad roses in a profusion of gorgeous bouquets which we both found incredibly satisfying to arrange and put in our house. We became so enamored with them that in our next place we planted over thirty different bushes, which as any rose growers know, is hardly any at all.

My roses never look perfect. You can fuss over roses quite a bit if you want prize winning blooms with no hint of disease. That's not my style at all. Roses are surprisingly hardy if you don't mind some rust, black spot, and mildew here and there. You don't even have to spray with anything more than dormant oil (nontoxic) to get good results. You'll have some of all of their known issues, but none of the rose diseases will kill them if kept in check by giving the plants healthy growing conditions and picking off black spot leaves when you see them. If a rose becomes overcome with problems you have but to take a little care and it will come back.

In this house we have probably close to thirty roses but only four of them are ones we've chosen ourselves. All of the other ones were already here. Which is really exciting, but also means that I don't know what some of them are (I've figured out a few of them though, I'm a pretty good rose sleuth) and unfortunately almost none of them have any scent at all. Scent is a huge criteria for choosing rose varieties in our house. Part of the enjoyment for us in growing roses is the sensual ritual of walking the rose beds sniffing at the opening blooms. I think the scent has a lot to do with the calming qualities I find in rose growing.

Because of the store, my garden has been tremendously neglected. I don't mind the weeds going nuts as much as I mind that the roses have gone untended. I only got one bed pruned at all this winter and since then it has gone through it's first flush and because it was never dead headed, it has had only meager blooms since then and the bushes have gotten scraggly looking. I mind that a lot. I don't care much what the neighbors think of my dead lawn, my weeds, or anything else about my yard. I don't garden to impress others. But when I look at my roses everyday while watering the vegetable garden I long to go and snip and clean up, dead head, and talk to them.

Yes, I said I TALK TO THEM. I know that most passionate gardeners do this too. I have put in some good time in the studio. It's in working order now, though not finished. So today I plunked my kid in front of a movie (after he declined to join me outside) and went out front to prune the "Hot Spot" roses. I have four of them. The roses are hot hot pink and have almost no scent at all unless put together in a huge mass of blooms. They're very pretty, especially when paired with my orange german roses (can't remember it's name) which grow on the other side of the front yard. It's hot out there. But I pruned all four of them. They desperately need a big soaking so later on I plan to get a big hose at the farm store (with Max on the scooter! Should be fun!) so I can reach them with the sprinkler and soak those bushes for hours.

It feels so good. They attacked me quite seriously, but I don't blame them. Next after soaking them is cleaning up the weedy bed they're in. I have room to plant my two potted roses (a Mr. Lincoln and a Peace rose) so I want to plant those two roses and then plant some rudebekia and more daisies (there's a daisy volunteer there that popped up this spring to my delight) and possibly some more lavender.

I have lots of room to cut out more space for roses along the whole edge of my lawns. Some roses I have had and miss and will get again are:

Peter Mayle
Frederick Mistral
Madame Isaac Perriere
Oklahoma
Ingrid Bergman (sadly not too fragrant)
Abraham Darby
New Dawn
Apothecary's Rose
Honor

I think I'll ask for them for Christmas and my birthday. In all the hubbub of life I nearly forgot how much I get out of my roses. In spite of the heat I had good conversations with the Hot Spots and they look so much better now. In spite of neglect this past winter, they all have at least one or two brand new thick canes. Are any of you big rose fans and what are your favorites and why? Talk to me about them because I miss my friend Sharon who loves roses as much as I do.

Soul Mapping

Soul Mapping

This is one of my very favorite photos of my mother and my sister. Two women who have been known to drive me batty and at the same time to inspire a fierce love and desire to protect. If I could give them everything they've ever wanted in the universe, I would do it. Just to make it clear, I have been known to drive them just as batty. We are all so different that we have to spend time trying to bridge the divides between our reasoning selves. At the same time, and what fascinates me about families, is that we share some elemental qualities in common. Elements of our true selves that often lay hidden in the folds of living.

My mother is many things. Among her strongest attributes is her earthiness. Her connection to the living body, the dirt we walk on, the food we eat, the physical sensation of living, the light that makes us grow, the primal drive to love, to explore, to move on and on and on, is strong in her. For so much of my life I have thought of myself as being so different from my mother. So separate in qualities.

Where she throws caution to the wind, I am constantly assessing risk and cautiously moving forward. Where she is completely comfortable with our corporeal existence, I hated the moment I had to start shopping for bras because I didn't want to be reminded of my body and it's dusky growth, it's neediness, and it's potential for abuse from others as well as from myself. While my mum has been more or less on a never ending safari hunt for the best spiritual expression, my spiritual life has been the same for most of my life, merely growing in definition rather than changing in essentials.

My mother has lived fearlessly, trying on new lives, new mediums for expression, new jobs, new adventures. She has lived in a commune, lived in Europe, written a cookbook, designed book covers, raised three children, raised chickens, built incredible gardens from huge patches of weeds and fallow earth, been married three times, been a pregnant farmer in British Columbia, was a part of the first wave of urban homesteaders*, lived in a tee-pee, sang in a gospel choir, and has marched against things she felt were corrosive to the human experience such as war, and she's gone to jail for it**.

In the past couple of years I have been surprised to discover that I am very much my mother's daughter. That I was cut from the same cloth. I'm not sure if my sister has always known that she is also very much my mother's daughter, but she is. All three of us share more in common than we share differences. My sister, for example, has the restlessness that made my mother move and move again. My sister has moved across the country and back. She always seems happiest when in motion.

Both of us take risks just as our mother does. I didn't see it for so many years. But my happy marriage was achieved through a strange sudden realization that I needed to marry Philip because he was so different than the men I usually unhappily went out with. The stranger realization that I couldn't date him, I just needed to marry him. I didn't think of it as taking a risk so much as I saw an opportunity that I could either grab onto or lose. We hardly knew each other when we married and certainly we've had the usual rough patches, but fourteen years later I see what others saw at the time; that marrying a virtual stranger constitutes quite a bit of risk. My sister takes risks too. Both of us have hauled off and moved to different states to start fresh lives. Just like our mother has done before us, over and over.

I can't write all that could be said about our sameness in one post. It would take days to write and longer to read. Right now my mum is starting fresh again. She's just graduated from her masters program and is interning to earn her license as an MFT (Marriage and Family Therapist). There is no one I can think of better suited to this job than a woman who has lived as large and as colorfully as she has. She has made a lot of choices along the way with both happy and unhappy consequences, but if seen from the therapist's lens, I think those choices have endowed her with a greater understanding of where life can take you, which makes her peculiarly suited to helping others steer their own boats away from shoals.

She is moving up here to Oregon in a couple of weeks to live with us while she gets replacement hip surgery. It's been a grueling past twelve months for her, living with such tremendous pain and getting no help from Kaiser. She has started a blog and I would like to invite all of you to check it out. She has made a set of cards that are her own version of a tarot deck. Every week she draws cards to see what the coming week may bring to us all. She's started to write about how her readings have panned out in her own week, which is very interesting. If you think tarot readings are nothing but witchy mumbo jumbo, I can promise you that this is no hokey promise of riches and husbands being doled out by a traveling gypsy, though, I must confess that my mother has always seemed like a gypsy to me.

She's going to put up her own shingle in Portland as soon as she has recovered from the surgery but needs to focus on something besides her pain to get through this time. So help keep her mind off of the surgery: ask her a question, ask her advice on just about anything. You can e-mail her at lorena laforest [laforest@sonic.net]and after a little dialog between you she will publish your question (anonymously) and post the answer. She can either address your quandary with strait therapy, or you can ask her to draw cards for you (which is basically just a tool for getting at the issues at hand) and use the cards to help answer your needs. I have to tell you that the cards are almost always right.

But aside from that, she's great at giving advice. I've found it annoying as her daughter at times to have her always being right; to have her telling me what I definitely don't want to hear, but knowing that it's always exactly what I need to hear. So this is your chance to get some free advice on how to choose new directions in life, how to overcome the patterns in your life that are keeping you from your dreams, how to mend relationships, and how to heal yourself. How to make tough decisions of all kinds.

Just remember, my mom was always the cool one, the one my friends wished was their mom. This can be annoying when you're a kid. But I've learned to live with her coolness.


*Urban homesteading as I see it is the desire to live as self sufficiently as one can in the modern context, the best you can without having a farm or more land than a city lot. She grew as much food as she could in our big yard and she also preserved as much of that bounty as she could through canning and freezing the food.

**I consider it an honorable thing to go to jail for protesting, for exercising our right to do so. I very much respect this. Just for the record though, her stay was the usual brief interlude of hours reserved for protesters.