To Russia (And Elsewhere) With Love

One of the most fascinating things that I have found about writing a blog is tracking its audience.  Don't get me wrong, this system is in no way exact - I have no idea of who actually is reading, but only a very general idea of where they are from.  I have noticed that for some time now I have had readers (or reader) located in Russia, some in Germany, some in England, and a few here and there scattered over the globe.  It would be wonderful to have some comments posted from readers from other countries and if you are concerned that your English isn't very good....no worries, because I guarantee that my Russian, German, Portuguese and Thai are much worse than your English ever could be.  We are one global nation thanks to this lovely Internet, and I, for one, like to know my neighbors.

Standing Stones

Nature in all its many facets is astounding.  In Spring I revel at all the new flowers and plants that bloom, I sit mesmerized while watching honey bees and other insects going about their busy lives with no thought for us whatsoever, I am fascinated by watching migratory birds return year after year to nests that only they know how to find, and I even harbor great affection for the rocks. 

Perhaps the quietest members of my garden, there are many rocks that line my flower beds and get moved slightly from place to place as I weed around them throughout the year.  I like the feel of them, their heft, their rough edges and sharp angles.  They are the oldest things here - limestone, granite, sandstone, quartz, geodes- they speak of a time that I will never know.  A time of heat and turmoil.  Pressure and seemingly infinite spans of time.  There are small trilobites that I find embedded in the limestone rocks, whole generations of a species that, at one point, thought they were the height of civilization as we do now.

For whatever reason, I have a fascination with standing rocks up - a change of perspective for them, I imagine. When I find a small pile of them lying around, even though they may have odd angles, I take on the inherent challenge of balancing one upon the other.  It takes a little time and patience to get them to all work together, and not enough can be said to praise a small amount of sand that helps create the all important friction that holds the odd-angled rock in place, but when they are all in harmony and supporting one another, they almost seem enlivened somehow.  Even a rock wants to be something - whether it be a quiet meditative being lying in the midst of a field, a part of a building's foundation , or a member of a cairn.  Perhaps that is being overly anthropomorphic, but then I try to imagine what the animal world looks like to a stone - we all must be in high speed motion to them, flitting from place to place, growing, aging, dying within a blink of a rock's eye.  How ridiculous must the work-a-day world seem to a rock.

Sometimes they fall.  Gravity, rain and wind work their change on the rocks just as they have for millions of years and I will come across the dismantled pile looking like so many pieces of puzzle and stoop to rebuild them again as I take a break from the endless pulling of weeds.  No two piles are ever the same, but then it is fun to hear people's remarks that have seen a group of stones together and then realize that they are subtly different, as though by magic they have shifted themselves.  Sometimes, I think they do.

A Most Unusual Cat

"...He had been gardening again and held in one hand the kind of wide-bladed, lime-green grass that grows at the untended edges of sidewalks and lawns.  He shook the dirt free, pulled out a half dozen of the longer strands, smoothed them, then twisted them into a flimsy green braid.
     'Time', he said, holding up the braid to me.  He indicated one end, then the other, 'Maybe one thousand year.' He touched the individual stalks of grass tenderly. 'Souls, Spirits. You see?  You, your father, your mother, sister, wife, children, you see? Your spirit is together with their spirits like this, tight against each other. That is why you were born into this [l]ife together.  He pulled one strand out and tossed it up into the sunlight.  'Maybe one of these people, or two, not so close after this [l]ife.  But people you really love, spirits that are close to your spirit, you see? They tie around tight to you,  [l]ife after [l]ife."

-Breakfast with Buddha by Roland Merullo


I read this book several years ago, but this was a part from the book that entered into my mind upon getting to know Vincent.  Vincent is a cat and I am quite sure that he has become one of the strands of grass in my braid of time.

Vincent came to the farm slightly over a year ago.  A feral cat, wild and frightened of anything and everything human.  Only enticed closer by the lure of food that is left out nightly for the resident clowder of cats.  He would wait until we had put the food down and then would warily creep into the mob of cats and grab a few furtive bites before any move on our part would send him flying.  Skinny, crumpled ears, and starving, night after night he would get just ever so slightly braver until finally, after many months of very slow and patient work by my kids, he let one of them touch him.  Always only afraid, never mean.  Cats have two defense mechanisms that they work from when they are in over their heads - they become incredibly ferocious, or they do everything in their power to flee - Vincent was always the second.

At our farm, when a new cat arrives, it is given a certain amount of "breaking in" period before the local vet - that's me- steps in and insists on said cat being a more socially acceptable pet, by which I mean neutered/spayed and vaccinated. Vincent was having none of me anywhere near him even with food available, and carrying a net looked especially worrisome to him.  I left the net in the care of my son and within a few days of trial and escape, Vincent came to the door of the house, trapped in the net under much duress just as I was in the process of making pizza on a Sunday night.  Time and tide may wait for no man, but neither does a cat in a net.  In short order Vincent was anesthetized via an injection in the muscle, tested for several nasty cat viruses by doing a simple blood test, vaccinated and neutered.  All while laying on my front porch surrounded by four (and sometimes five) curious kids - my son opted out of watching the neutering process.   Anesthetic reversed and by the time the pizza was done, he was completely recovered and had staggered off in the direction of the barn.


What happened to that cat during that process, I have no idea.  From that point on he is always around.  He sits just outside the door on the stoop so that you almost step on him when going outside - even in the very coldest of weather.  When I go anywhere on the farm, he trots along beside me as though he is a dog trained to heel.  When I cook in the kitchen, he sits on the small table just outside my window and monitors closely.  The other cats on the farm will drift by and briefly interact with me while on their own personal missions of self satisfaction, but for whatever reason, Vincent seems to have appointed himself as my personal entourage while at home. He loves attention and will purr and roll affectionately around your feet and legs.  Gina, my typically cat-intolerant dog, loves him and will actually allow him to eat out of her bowl right under her nose. 

And so I ask myself, who is this little soul that seems to have adopted me?  I sometimes peer into his round, furry face as he loyally sits by my side while I garden and think, "Who are you?" and more often, "Who am I to deserve this affection and loyalty?"  How can something that was absolutely terrified of all things even remotely related to me, suddenly change and appear to love with such complete abandon?  Human beings don't have the monopoly on souls, as far as I am concerned.  An animal's ability to love unconditionally so far outstrips our own that at times it is shameful.  Whatever the reason, from where ever he came,  I hope his soul is one of those that stays with mine for all time. 

Pi Day

This late winter day finds me completely preoccupied digging in the dirt.  I type now with sixty four thousand scratches on my hands from weeding flower beds, smelling of leaf smoke, and my lower back is sunburned from spending the day happily bent over perennial flowers that are starting to emerge.  Many thoughts made their way into my head, but most of them were directed at the plants, the earthworms, the birds....no time today to sit and write them all down, but pictures speak volumes.

Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things,

man will not himself find peace.

~Albert Schweitzer

The clever men at Oxford, know all that there is to be knowed.

But they none of them know one half as much, as intelligent Mr. Toad.

~Kenneth Grahame

The grand show is eternal.  It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising.  Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.

~John Muir

All through the long winter, I dream of my garden. On the first day of spring,

I dig my fingers deep into the soft earth. I can feel its energy, and my spirits soar.

~Helen Hayes

The Benefit of Boredom

One of my favorite things to hear from my children is, "I'm bored."  I can usually tell when it is coming because they will hang around me and offer to do jobs for more screen time to play on the computer or watch a movie, which I will often deny.  Then they hassle their siblings, pester me more, and then finally it comes out...."I'm bored."  To which my only reply is "Good."

This may seem rather cruel - to enjoy the boredom of your children - but there is an amazing thing that happens to a bored kid....they eventually find something to do.  It sometimes takes a while.  Usually it goes through the common routine of driving me crazy, driving siblings crazy, driving the pets crazy and then...finally, they launch into something completely original and creative.  As a parent, it takes a little fortitude to survive through these stages, but the results are often amazing to observe. 

Today, as an example, I was a horrible slug of a parent. Unwilling to even engage my 6 and 7 year old in sorting out their conflicts with one another, I simply listened to their arguments run their course and when I checked in with them this afternoon, the entire table was covered with a mosaic of playing cards to look like a garden and the dominoes had been constructed into some kind of castle.  The game that they had devised had rules that only they completely understood, but they were happy as larks to be playing it together.  It continued  until sometime after dinner (we simply slid it down to one end of the table to allow a place for us to eat) and then they happily picked it all up before bed. At other times I have evicted all of my children from the house to sort out their boredom outside and then watch happily as one of them happens to find a Frisbee and a whole new sort of 'ninja Frisbee-kicking' game is born that eventually involves all five of them in a sort of strange one-on-one-on-three sort of set up with modified two hand touch tackling.

Periodically, I feel bad keeping my children in the technological dark ages, but then again, all that technology is always going to be out there.  Like Pandora's box, it has been released into the world and there is no way to contain it again, so they will have access to it and they will have to learn to use it at some point.  Entertainment is easy and always on these days, but boredom....that is harder to come by.  There are times when I, myself, get caught in a rut and spend entirely too much time in front of this screen and find my mind slowly dissolving into so much mush.  Opinions and news stories are all too prevalent, too dramatic, too polarized.  A person hardly has time to think for themselves anymore because they are being told so immediately and constantly what to think by news programs and "experts" who, ironically are employed or paid nicely by whoever or whatever they are advocating.

 I have been reading a fascinating book by one of my favorite authors, Barbara Kingsolver - The Lacuna which is a historical fiction novel about the time period in the 1930-1950s and deals with such characters as Lev Trotsky, Stalin and the McCarthy era in the US.  Her writing is so heartbreakingly beautiful and so thoughtful that there have been times when I simply have to stop and think about what has been said.  One of the points that stood out for me is that, at that time of history, the radio was the new media of the day.  It was the beginning of the constant barrage of 'the truth as other people see it' in which they would express whatever facts were available, and when the facts weren't readily apparent, they would embellish the truth to fill the air time to avoid a lapse in programming.  The whole "Red Communist" scare was mostly a news media fabrication to keep people in a constant state of fear and anxiety and thus listening to the news programing or reading the latest headlines.  Not unlike the news programing today.  Maybe we should have allowed the lapses and dead air as useful time to think and process what facts were actually available.  Maybe we should make time for those lapses now as well.  This is one of the main reasons that we avoid technology around here as much as we do.  What good has come from it, really?  It has made communication easier, but we are so busy with trying to be constantly entertained that we don't effectively communicate with anyone anymore. I love having good debates with people about differing view points - it gets my ire up, but it stretches my thinking, makes me see other sides of the issue, and forces me to state my own opinions as eloquently and succinctly as possible - something the news media doesn't give you a chance to do.

 Writing, reading, assimilating, synthesizing and creating something completely new and different are the hallmarks of a populace that can continue to advance.  Simply being a sponge and absorbing so much bad news and other people's opinions does not help to make a difference in the world. 
And so, at our house, boredom it is.  A lapse in entertainment in which the brain actually has to take in information and do something with it, make something of it, learn something from it.  When the brain is thought of more along the lines of a muscle,(rather than simply being a bundle of fatty neurons) - it requires work outs to become stronger.  And the brain wants and needs things to think about - as evidenced by the way it wanders while we struggle to get to sleep, or the dreams that it comes up with in the middle of the night.  But when we sit in front of a television screen or Wii and are being fed a constant diet of cheap entertainment that requires little more than a rudimentary ability to understand the English language and some kind of reflex activity....well, suffice it to say that the mental muscles are not being flexed.  It depresses me to see language being obliterated by 'texting'.  Beautiful, thoughtful lines of prose reduced down to "lol" or, if it is really good, "lmao".  Our world is now being run on information that is being communicated 140 characters at a time.  This depresses me.  But, as Pandora found Hope in the bottom of her box, I have five kids who never cease to amaze me with their ideas, creativity, energy, and eventual ability to play well together.  They are my hope in this crazy, media driven, entertainment seeking, technological world.

In Like a Lion

March is upon us and seems to be coming in like a lion....at least from the perspective of my emotions.  
March usually marks the point of "Spring" in my mind and I will likely start becoming overly anxious to be outside every waking moment.  I become cagey and frustrated every day that I have to go to work when the weather is beautiful. And, it never fails, the worst days are always the ones that I am at home.  There will likely be much gnashing of teeth from now until April and I have a tendency, I'm afraid, of turning into a bearcat with my family due to the confounding weather of March.

I am still up to my eyebrows in trying to redo one of the bedrooms in the house.....namely mine, and this will likely manage to keep me preoccupied until the ground warms up enough to start moving flowers around and planting seeds in the ground, but that doesn't mean that I won't be staring out the window with my face pressed up against the glass to peer into the gardens throughout the day in the hopes of seeing tulips and daffodils on the rise. 

There were also seeds planted indoors today to help reduce the early spring gardening anxiety.  One hundred and ten onions,  23 tomato, 12 red peppers, 6 leaks and countless lettuce plants were all started today in organic potting soil and will need to be monitored closely and protected from the threat of house cat destruction until such time as the greenhouse becomes more hospitable (and enclosed) to harbor tender plants.  Their planting is like a promise that in the next six to eight weeks the weather will be nice enough to move them outside.  Planting them is sometimes a more hopeful predictor of spring than judging whether or not a groundhog can identify his shadow. Watching them sprout and then take root in their small pots is a moving pep talk that, indeed, spring is on its way.