Tag: Mother Nature

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.

Coffee, Tea or Cyanide

Nothing like an early morning flight to remind you how precious sleep is.

Over years of intermittent early morning flights, I have come to rely on my internal alarm clock.

I don’t rely on it so much that I don’t set an actual alarm, mind you. But inevitably, I wake before the clock chimes the hour. I rouse myself no matter how sleepy I am when there is something important to be done. Like catching a flight.

I used to travel enthusiastically. I am not sure what has taken off the edge of excitement. These days I dread travel like I used to dread going to the dentist. Given my druthers these days, I think I’d happily hop in a dental chair.

I’ve been to a lot of places in the world, so there’s that. But no, I think it is that the overall quality of travel has dipped precipitously. My recent flight plans were a shining example.

Flying Leg #1 from North to South was straightforward enough. But at a central hub on the Eastern US seaboard, Mother Nature had her own secret plans for a messed up travel day. A messed up heyday, in fact. Thunderstorms. Complete with thunder and lighting. Travel cyanide.

I have to admire how cleverly the airlines handle such disruptions these days in their own best interests. There was a time when the merest hint of bad weather would shut down flights. The airline would hie its’ passengers off to a nearby hotel with meal vouchers to ride out the storm. Ancient history.

Instead, the airline’s tactic today is to keep passengers baited and on the hook. “We regret to inform you your flight will be delayed by one hour. It is now departing from Gate Whatever at whatever time one hour from now is.”

The same email and text message gets sent out hour after hour after hour. It keeps people dangling and on the hook. Clustered sleepily in the airport waiting lounge sipping bad coffee and chewing on hope.

To be fair, the airline finally made a humanitarian offering of “hydration and refreshments”: warm bottled water and Goldfish pretzels. You’d be within your rights to see the close comparison to the “bread and water” regimen they once served incarcerated prisoners as punishment.

Until finally, when pilots can no longer safely fly because they have passed the allowable FAA regulations deadline, the airline cancels the flight. I don’t know what people do or what happens to them when that happens. I didn’t stick around to find out.

Operating on fumes, I finally bailed at around 7 PM to find a hotel room for the night. I would have felt foolish if my flight actually made it out that night. Luckily it didn’t and I didn’t feel foolish. I awoke this morning to find a text message advising all passengers at close to midnight: “The flight has been cancelled.”

Ominously I had been checked into Room 911 at the hotel. That was particularly ominous in light of today’s chilling anniversary. It was a minor nuisance to learn there was no bathtub, so I asked for a room change. Thus I avoided two undesirable scenarios and my uncomfortable feeling.

There was an eeriness in seeing the room number 911 assignment in a Washington, DC hotel exactly 22 years after the fact. And a “shower only” bathroom. I’m old school and need a bath to relax. Especially after a travel day like this.

The flakiness I sometimes exhibit both confounds and comforts me by times. So many had so many more feels to wrangle on this horrible anniversary and likely still do. But damn, travel is different. No room service. “Only at dinnertime,” said the chipper young thing at the front desk.

I pleaded illness and incapacity to get a basic breakfast delivered. (“Oh, we can give you a mask when you come down.” CYT offered, cheerily.) The whitener served with the coffee was totally oversold. It barely turned the coffee a dark mocha to say nothing of the host of chemicals that cannot be good for man nor beast.

I am about to go all Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz on myself after this necessary travel jaunt. “There’s no place like home!” At least, I can count on a full breakfast any time of the day or night and a readily available bathtub to soak away the cares of the day.

Travel was once the playground of adventure, learning and tolerable inconveniences. These days it is a passage through purgatory to get to wherever it is you absolutely want or need to get to.

Purgatory is a polite way of putting it. Occasionally it can be hell on earth.

Yesterday’s travel came perilously close to that.

Ask anyone who was waiting all day yesterday to board Flight 4424.

Which, of course, they never did.