Tag: gardening

Rain On

It is pouring rain outside. Pouring with the kind of intensity that would keep you off the roads and safe at home if it were snow. But it isn’t snow. TBTg.

I used to hate rain. Destroyer of picnic plans. Ruination of spring weddings (though rain on a wedding day is supposed to be good luck. Heaven knows why. Certainly not for the bride’s wedding dress.)

A random rain shower for which you are unprepared can leave you cold and damp. Then the rain adds insult to injury and utterly abandons any semblance of comfort once you go inside.

You might have to sit on a hard wooden seat in the damp and cold while suffering through a less than scintillating lecture. The cold and damp do nothing to elevate the subject matter. Quite the opposite. They mirror it a little too precisely.

At home, at least, you get to strip down, throw the outerwear in the dryer, get into some cozy dry clothes and start the day over.

In point of fact, rainy days have not always been doom and gloom for me. I’ve had magical experiences in rain. Years ago, I was preparing to trek the Pokhara to Jomsom route in Nepal. The crude hotel rooms were a bit makeshift by our standards. They were really nothing more than cinder blocks stacked on top of one another.

Set on the four corners of the block walls, the roof was simple sheets of corrugated metal, held down by fairly hefty rocks. This flimsy arrangement held together well enough most of the time. Until monsoon season.

if you have ever been caught in a monsoon downpour, you are unlikely to forget it. The nearest analogy I can come up with is standing directly under a waterfall with an industrial fan blowing at you.

The corrugated sheets of the roof were no match for the monsoon. I was both dazzled and distressed by its power. When the roof of your hotel room blows off and flies away into the distance, it creates some intense feelings.

My primary concern was for my precious Canon 35 mm SLR camera left in my hotel room. It would not survive, I was sure. I dove into the room, fished it out from under the bed covers where I’d stowed it for safety and tucked it under my clothes. Hugging the lens toward my chest, waiting for the deluge to die down.

In a similar monsoon season in Sri Lanka, another downpour aforded a unique personal care experience. The rain shower was so intense and lasted so long I was able to go out into the hotel courtyard to wash my hair. Not only wash it but condition and rinse it with plenty of time to spare.

They say that into every life, a little rain must fall. That is not necessarily always a bad thing.

More and more, I see rain more as a gift of nourishment. For the earth and the plants and for us. It refreshes everything. It washes the plants and softens the earth. It quenches their thirst. We recently planted fruit trees and a hedge around our house which are still being established.

The frequent rains are not only life-enhancing for the plants, but they let me off the watering hook when they come.

I am more than grateful for this frequent, if unbidden, gardening assistance. Rain on, say I.

Infinitely Meaningful

If we pursue a path of lifelong learning, the possibilities are infinite.

Too many people eventually arrive at a place in life where boredom and ennui settle in. Those people walk around with a general attitude of “been there, done that.” There is nowhere else they want to go – nothing else they want to do. What a pity.

We stop learning because we stop looking. We stop asking questions. We park our curiosity. We lose our innate sense of joy and wonder. That loss is both a choice and a process. To keep our curiosity and learning skills sharp, “use it or lose it” applies.

I have been thinking about this as I plan and plant a garden. Again. I once said that remarrying is an expression of hope over experience. I have similar feelings about gardens.

My gardening experiences are awash in a mantra of frustrations and disappointments. And, if I’m honest, learning. Much like life.

There is something about planting and growing things that repeatedly ropes me back in. At about the point I am ready to throw in the trowel forever, a redolent night-blooming jasmine grabs me by the nostrils and I’m off to the nearest nursery.

I have said that in the harsher learnings of life, I would much rather have read about them in a book. Nice thought but not how the game of life is played. Or gardening.

In recent days we have embarked on a petit patio planting project. A little lemon tree. A larger and leafier Hass avocado. A spindly bamboo that I bought just to see what it does. I hear they are super fast growers. I’m curious to see if that is true for my one tiny, little trooper. Out of an abundance of caution, I will hold off on ordering the koala bears for now.

With the careful placement of a smattering of new greenery, I feel a slight lift in my heart. Akin to falling in love. And like falling in love, I have no idea how it is going to turn out.

Gardeners must have great faith in a higher power. Call it Mother Nature or Gaia or a green thumb. I know that beyond my role as a caretaker, I don’t have much to do with the eventual success or demise of my planting. I will likely reap the rewards of this planting to the exact degree that I invest my love and care.

We’ve lost sight of the magic and wonder of plants because – like so many other practices – we have given over our management and control to others. We no longer grow our own food. We have placed our trust in others to do that for us. We have lost and gained in that process. We no longer know what harvesting and eating our own food “feels like.”

I have zero to little idea what I am doing. That’s kind of the fun in it. The sense of adventure and entering into the unknown. The challenges ahead and whether I will have the insight and fortitude to rise to meet them.

And yes, I am aware I am simply talking about plants. And that plants are everywhere. And that on a scale of one to ten, keeping plants alive is probably pretty low on the list of life priorities. Or is it?

I remember delightful lessons in Antoine Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, written 80 years ago in 1943. Saint-Exupery’s protagonist, the little prince learns that investing time and care and love in something makes that something important to us. As humans, we have an innate need for connection and the drive to make sense of our lives. The little prince finds a rose.And it becomes his whole world.

I know what will matter most to me at the end of my life will be those people and things that I choose and chose to love and how well I am/was able to do that. It is a deep and persistent longing and calling in all of us.

So here’s the question: what’s your rose?

“People where you live,” the little prince said, “grow five thousand roses in one garden… yet they don’t find what they’re looking for…?

“They don’t find it,” I answered.

“And yet what they’re looking for could be found in a single rose, or a little water…”

“Of course,” I answered.

And the little prince added, “But eyes are blind. You have to look with the heart.”

“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2180358-le-petit-prince

Nest Building … Again

There are curtains going up around our patio today. The sense of comfort and coziness is palpable. I am going to enjoy it while I can.

I have frequently been guilty of my eyes bigger than my belly. No more so than when trying to set up house.

After some pretty unsatisfactory relationships, I chose singledom for decades (would I say anything different even if I hadn’t made that conscious choice?). That decades-long period of my life was socially thin but healing. And safe. It allowed me to clear a lot of cobwebs from my eyes.

But I have to admit I was a lot less productive than I might have been had I been coupled up. No way of knowing, really. During my hermitage, I found it mighty easy to devise elaborate plans and projects in my head. Actualizing not so much. I have that gift. Living in my head, I mean.

So when I imagined the verdant garden I would build in my minds’ eye, it was invariably better than actually creating it. Setting out to create a garden brought me nose-to-nose with hard reality. Especially of the four legged variety.

I once saw (to me) a hilarious cartoon. An onlooker watching his gardening neighbor working in the soil, waxed on about the paradisiacal scene unfolding in front of him. The gardener looked up and sharply retorted: “This isn’t paradise. This is war!”

After years of impotent vegetable production and many failed gardening attempts, I well understand that gardener’s frustration. Though I lived in the city, it might as well have been living in the deep, backwoods country.

There were skunks that lived under the deck. The groundhogs set up shop beneath the storage barn. The rabbits lived on another property nearby but visited regularly. The raccoons came and went and were very attentive to the slightest food scrap left out for them to enjoy. And the squirrels.

I am not sure I could utter that word out loud without having it sound like a curse word. Diabolical, clever, determined beyond all reason are those little bushy tailed demons. And hungry. They are blessed with great appetites. As I learned and it turned out, nothing I set out in my garden was safe.

A beautiful green pepper was growing in my raised container garden (that I sing the praises of a single pepper underscores how poor my green thumb actually was). I was so proud. One day I came out on my back deck.

The pepper was sitting on the rail of the deck. I panicked but quickly settled when I saw it was still verdant green and perfect. On the side facing me. The backside of my single perfect green pepper was carved out like someone had conveyed an abstract menacing message in hieroglyphics. I got the message.

On another occasion, thrift seeker that I am, I once bought a half dozen end-of-season corn plants. A good three to four inches high. I couldn’t wait to get them into the ground.

The local rabbits couldn’t wait to get them into their gullets. The morning after I planted them, I found only several sad remaining nibs poking out of the ground.

Instead of saving lotsa bucks with my thrifty purchase, I lost ten bucks worth of plants. Or, as the rabbits would have described them, absolutely delicious tender little bunny hors d’oeuvres. Bunny hors d’oeuvres sounded pretty appealing around that time.

In other aspects of gardening education, I learned how to drown slugs in beer placed in jar caps. The little lushes.

I put chili flakes and cayenne pepper in the feeders to ward off the little curse words because I was told squirrels will not eat hot spicy things. Well, that was a lie. I’m convinced the squirrels deeply appreciated how the spice kicked the birdseed up a notch. Don’t get me started on blood meal (which was bloody expensive) and whatever pestilence that was supposed to ward off.

And I knew it was the squirrels because no bird goes through as much birdseed as that feeder dispensed in just a few short days.

So I am enjoying my current delusion of comfort and coziness with the installation of new curtains. In here, protected from the elements and Mother Nature.

I can fool myself that there is not a whole wicked world out there full of raccoons, and skunks and bunnies and squirrels that will soon descend on my virginal and vulnerable patio vegetables and make short work of them.

For Northerners reading this, I will agree my complaints and caution may seem unseasonal. But mark my word. You have a whole winter ahead of you to gird your loins and bone up on how to protect your plants and keep the peskier elements of nature far away from you.

Trust me, if you wander down that garden path, you are going to need all of the ammunition you can get.

Boredom Begone

I’ve never understood boredom.

I have been bored from time to time and usually for very concrete reasons. Sitting at a conference table listening to someone in love with the sound of their own voice, going on and on has been tantamount to coming close to death by boredom.

Some of my teachers and university lecturers were less charismatic than others. Some would drone on in a monotone that suggested they were more suitable candidates for administering hypnosis than complex intellectual theories.

Anything that is examined closely will often put you on a path that will yield more insight and education than you can possibly absorb in one lifetime. It can feel as if knowledge and insights go on forever and ever depending on the path of inquiry we pursue.

The word “gardening” is a pretty bland high level description of what most of us have passing familiarity with. We glean our familiarity either as the beneficiaries of some gardeners’ efforts or as gardeners ourselves.

I have been scouring gardening sites, looking for fast-growing plants germane to our climate and environment. What started out as a quick jaunt to get familiar with what might, and what will not work, in our yard, I am on track to earn a PhD in horticulture.

There is not only a dazzling variety of types and colors and heights and purposes for plants but a dazzling assortment of species and sub-species within any plant genus.

To many people – often depending on their age and stage of life – gardening is dead boring. An end of life activity that rates on the excitement scale right up there with watching grass grow.

But as you begin to tease out this plant’s hardiness and drought-tolerance against that one’s delicate and easily undermined growth temperament, the whole genre of gardening becomes complex and multi-layered. Master gardeners are often referred to as “artists” and with good reason.

Life is rather like this. Admittedly we all arrive on the planet with little other agenda than to get our needs met and survive. Sadly, some people get stuck at this stage for their whole life. I kinda feel like I was stuck there for an unnecessarily protracted period of time.

Curiosity has always been one of my primary drivers. I need to understand something inside and out and upside down before I can rest easy. This has applied to many aspects of my life from family, to religion, to alcoholism, to power structures, and money. I unashamedly admit the parallels with my life challenges.

So except for exposure to self-important windbags, I am rarely bored. It is said it was philosopher Aristotle who said: “The more you know, the less you know.” A blogger/software architecture developer called Ardalis (https://ardalis.com/blog) that I recently came across explained that phenomenon this way:

“Try to keep in mind that most of the things you have a cursory knowledge of, but which really are known unknowns to you, probably are similar in that if you were to really dive into them, you’d find there’s a lot more to them than you realize now. Doing this has several benefits. It helps keep your ego in check. It helps keep your curiosity and willingness to learn alive. And it helps you develop and maintain respect for others who maybe have taken the time to learn more about a topic about which you’ve only scratched the surface.”

This is a bugbear of mine in our modern world. Everyone is pitching themselves as an “expert” in spite of limited experience and equally truncated chronology.

“This paradox of “knowing just how much you don’t know” can lead us to a more human centric solution: “It’s easy to feel small when we consider how large the world (and universe!) is. It’s good to keep in mind just how big the world is, as it offers us humility, but to keep from feeling down it’s important to focus on what you can impact. This starts with yourself. How can you make yourself better? What can you do this day to make it so the you of tomorrow is better than the you of today? Once you’re on the path to trying to improve yourself, it’s gratifying to try and help others do the same. Can you help the whole world or move the universe? Perhaps not. But everyone can help someone. Even if all you do is share your journey and what you’re learning, even your struggles, you’re bound to help others facing similar hurdles. Do these two things, consistently, and you will look back and see the progress you’ve made and the lives you’ve touched and hopefully feel that you’ve made a positive impact.“

What I personally don’t know could fill volumes. Or copious numbers of concurrent blog posts. Given all I don’t know and all there is out there in the world to know, boredom is the last thing I, or anyone, should allow themselves to be.

Whether your thing is gardening or nuclear physics, there will always be more to explore and discover during your lifetime, even when it most seems like there ain’t.

Dear Abby

From the Facebook Wisdom of Life Community

This query from an overwhelmed Mom popped up on this Facebook group I belong to. My answer to this writer’s call for help generated positive feedback on that site. I thought it might be worth sharing. (The inquiry is anonymous so I am fairly sure I haven’t breached any ethical boundaries.)

Not so long ago, I could have written a similarly themed post. On the other side of those dark days now, I wanted to share insights with her that helped me. Healing deep emotional damage is a marathon, not a sprint.

In my answer, I borrow shamelessly from the advice column stylings of Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren. They were sisters who doled out daily nuggets of hope in “advice” columns published back in the middle to late 20th century in newspapers across North America.

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Writer: I am suffering from severe treatment-resistant depression and anxiety. I am in the middle of tapering off Valium and having an extremely hard time getting off of it. I’m in a loveless relationship for 20 years with four kids. I have no job or career and nothing to call my own except for being a mom. I’m scared, lost, and have no support system. My dad died in September and I was disowned by my mom and family so I only have one sister left. I’ve spent my life caring for others and not being cared for myself. I’m in a deep dark hole with no way out. Nowhere to turn. Can’t sleep. Can barely function. And very moody. My only time to myself is when the kids are in school but soon they will be home all summer and I don’t think I can handle it with the way I feel. I just need someone to love and support me. And I don’t have that. How do I navigate my way through this?

Answer from Margot Brewer: I have been where you are (but with two kids). Identifying your misery is a healthy start. That may sound contradictory but it isn’t. The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. You have to start learning to love yourself and truly believe you are worthy of love. You have lived without love in your marriage for a long time. When you have a long history of want, it is hard to conceive of another way of being. You have a lot of healing to do. Losing your Dad and your family are massive losses that need to be acknowledged and grieved. I lived through that, including the estrangement from the family. Be ever so gentle and compassionate with yourself. Look around your life and decide what you can and cannot control. Find something in your world every day to be grateful for. Make a gratitude jar. This may seem flaky. I get that. Do it anyway. And start taking extra special care of yourself every day. Carve out space in your downtime to do things that make you happy. Music, books, nature, gardening. Anything that gives you even slivers of joy and gets you outside yourself. It is a long road to get out from underneath the weight of your life but you can by holding on to the belief it can change. I still take some medication for occasional relief but it is only part of my self-care routine, not all of it. Thank you for your post. I hope you find the strength and belief in yourself to feel better. It may take a while but the journey is worth it. Take good care of yourself.

Make Our Garden Grow

I love Easter’s message about the certainty of renewal and resurrection for all of us. I love it not so much as a religious message but as a spiritual rule of life. Resurrection and renewal underscore the phases of our lives. There are repetitive patterns of death and renewal throughout. To move forward in life usually means we must leave something behind. Nothing lasts forever. Neither good times nor bad. Leaving things behind is what we need to do in order to grow. Graduation means the end of formal schooling and close connections to the pals you shared it with. Marriage, done right, is saying goodbye not only to singledom but self-centeredness. Birthing children means the end of a good night’s sleep for months on end. Okay, that shortchanges the enormity of how children affect us inside and out. When those babies eventually leave home to start their own lives a decade or so later, it can be a wrenching loss and upheaval for parents. But it can also be liberation. Time is finally available to allow us to return focus to our own interests. This pattern of death and rebirth occurs regularly in everyone’s lives. Time grants us the perspective to look back and accept the certainty of these patterns as the natural patterns of life. If we’re lucky, we get to say a gentle goodbye to every era of our life and welcome what is coming with open arms. Time presses on with or without us. Of course, it requires emotional balance and maturity to make those transitions seamlessly and successfully. Most of us traverse these fissures well enough, often accompanied by some measure of anxiety and trepidation. Most humans react predictably in the face of meeting the unknown. Farmers and gardeners are lucky to be more closely connected than most to these recurring patterns of birth, death, and rebirth. It puzzled me in my youth why gardeners – often older people – took such satisfaction from creating a garden. Looked like a lot of work for questionable results. Nowadays it makes more sense to me. A garden is a contained world we can create and tend through our own choices and efforts. We get to enjoy and share the joy from the beauty of flowers, the nourishment of fruits and vegetables, and a tract of grass that can be a carpet and a playground. A garden is also a guard against erosion – personal and spiritual. Cultivating a metaphorical garden inside ourselves that manifests in our outer life nourishes us and our loved ones. It is considered by some observers to be one of the fundamental ingredients for happiness. As the years press on, our sphere of control in the world outside gets smaller. But our inner world is eternally ours to manage. Reading books nurtures our inner garden. It takes us to places and worlds we may never visit in person and introduces us to all manner of exotica. Readers know this intimately. So do writers.