Beltane Full Dyan Moon
Pre-raphaelite training today. I”m looking forward to it. One of my favorite group of artists.
Kate and I leave tomorrow morning for Indiana. The Empire Builder arrives in St. Paul at 7:50 a.m, picking us up on its way to Chicago. In Chicago we board the Cardinal bound for Indianapolis. An all day affair. We will see how Kate responds to train travel.
Beltane Full Dyan Moon
Kate can tell when I begin to submerge, move below the surface of day to day contact. I become short, irritable. She gets the feeling of walking on egg shells. By the time this happens I’m not in touch with my effect on the outside world. Distraction and self-absorption reign.
She brings it up. We talk. Today I said, “I’ve moved into melancholy.” The distance between closed. We both know this journey and its dark side. I ate my chirashi and she her teryaki bento box.
“What precipitated it?”
“I have no idea. Chemicals, I think.”
“No. Wait. It began, I think on Hilton Head. Maybe it was the weather. I now that sounds absurd, but then, I know it happens, too. Gloomy outside, gloomy inside.”
“I love you.” Said with the grasp of both the condition and the afflicted. Therapy in their own right.
Otherwise, the day had bees and money.
Mark Nordeen came over and we popped the top on the second hive. Lotsa bees. Took a long while to get the smoker going. The smoke calms them down. They stop flying, go back into the hive.
The top hive had brood on several frames and the number of bees has tripled at least. There were three queen cups and I got to see exactly what they looked like.
“If you ever see a queen cup that has a queen in it, don’t knock it off. That means they’re about to swarm and you’ll need the second queen for those who stay behind.”
We moved the bottom hive on top because there had not been as much work done down there and we wanted to encourage more frames filled with brood.
Later in the morning we saw our cash-flow adviser. We’ve done very well and continue to do so, but as we move to retirement she says there is a big trick to moving from paid employment to retirement income. In the case of Kate we’ve been lucky to have her producing large quarterly bonuses which have enabled us to do many different things: dogs, permaculture, long trips. After retirement, those kinds of bumps in income will disappear and we have to decide how to deal with that. Turns out cash is the primary tool, having lots of it in liquid investments like CD’s, bonds or money market.
The moral here is that no matter how you feel, life goes on. Decisions have to be made. Bees need care. The garden goes through its season. There is something reassuring to the constancy and permanence of natural change.
Beltane Full Dyan Moon
Paula Westmoreland from Ecological Gardens came out today and gave us a walk through, explaining the plants and their relationships. The real distinctiveness of permaculture lies in developing and nurturing those relationships, using plants together in ways that are mutually beneficial. An easy to understand example is the familiar legume family, a group of plants that fix nitrogen in the soil. Since most plants deplete nitrogen in the soil, following a planting of a non-legume, especially if it’s a heavy feeder like, say, tomato or corn, with a legume helps restore the soil chemistry.
There are also plants that tend to confuse insects with their scents; since many of those fit in the herb garden, the herb spiral sits in a key corner of the new design, fooling predatory insects as they head toward our beans and strawberries. Over time these relationships interleave and become stronger, the soil chemistry becomes healthier and the result is a stronger, less insect and disease prone garden. This long term strength of permaculture makes it a wise investment for any yard or garden.
In the orchard and our new vegetable garden design we now have clover in place of grass. It crowds out weeds, can take being stepped on and should provide good tasting honey in years to come.
The gestalt here has begun to feel real. We are less like human intruders on this oak savannah and more like c0-inhabitants, gaining from and giving back in the timeless cycle of life.
Beltane Waxing Dyan Moon
Lingering, an interesting article from the blog N+1, asks the question, is life richer with the internet? The author answers in a mild positive, noting that the web satisfies curiosity and provides a platform for otherwise missing voices, but he also bemoans its time wasting nature, the fact that there is no such thing as sending one e-mail because one internet encounter leads to another and another.
My own experience is similar. Anyone with curiosity finds this and that, then a bit more with the news and blogs and video clips. I know the path people take is not the same because friends locate items I would never find, some of them interesting, some of them not, but it does show that others wander the web from time to time.
Quite a while ago, maybe as long ago as 15 years, I knew a sociologist from Macalester College who had done a study of time wasted on the computer. This was before the internet was as big a phenomenon as it is now. His results suggested that computer use in and of itself lured users into acts extraneous to their original purpose, acts such as reading an e-mail from a friend or sending on something interesting, perhaps checking the calendar or writing a brief note about this or that.
It may be that some web users are like me, my main outlet for manual dexterity is typing. A secondary outlet is chopsticks. The opportunity to type, in and of itself, draws me to the computer and sometimes keeps me there.
Beltane Full Dyan Moon
A gardening morning. The potatoes got a bit more soil around their stalks and, in between rows, Hutterite and Arikara bush beans. All the beds that could take mulch at this time got it, too. The only ones I could not mulch were the carrot and beet beds where the plants are not up high enough yet for mulch.
More bush beans went in amongs the peas and the turnips, this time Charlevoix Red and Royal Purple. With the beans I laid down a small path of tiny bacteria that help these legumes return nitrogen to the soil.
The purposeful acts involved in caring for a garden have a soothing character. They put me in the moment and each task in itself is not difficult. The combination makes for a free floating feeling. The gardener becomes an extension of the garden able to handle those tasks requiring mobility that these rooted beings cannot.
Up early, really sleepy. Nap.
Beltane Waxing Dyan Moon
I’ve never wished for melancholy, it always finds me when it will. I have, however, wished for a descended cloud, not fog, but a stepping off point for paradise, a place to enter the imaginary realm, perhaps withouth need for a return voyage and in its escapist way, its denial of now this wish does not lie far from the darker boundary beyond which melancholy lurks.
These days I’ve had a restless pointlessness, a wandering from project to job to book to t.v. This is, to continue the melancholy/paradise metaphor, a sort of purgatory, neither deep enough for blackness or high enough for light; it is, instead, a descended cloud that is fog, a barrier between purpose and action, no, more, a barrier between heart and purpose.
Slow, again. Like molasses. Also cotton in my ears, dark sunglasses on my eyes. I hear no evil, speak no evil, think no evil. I hear no live, speak no live, think no live. I dangle, neither here nor there.
Beltane Full Dyan Moon
Oh, boy. We spent this morning checking our retirement budget. Big fun. Looks like we’re gonna be fine, barring a financial crisis or something. Oh, wait… No, we’re solid. Great news in this fiscal environment.
Lunch out. Nap.
Kate and I put together a shelving unit for more canned and preserved goods. Made reservations for a summer conference in Decorah, Iowa at Seed Savers Exchange.
Now, a workout.
Beltane Waxing Dyan Moon
A second cold wet day reminds me of the time I just spent on Hilton Head Island. Why travel if I can experience a southern coastal climate right here in Minnesota?
The cold weather and drizzle today made working outside unattractive, not impossible, but I didn’t get out there.
Mark Nordeen intended to come over to check on the hive this morning, see if we need to put a third hive box on the two we have now. He called and said bees don’t leave the hive when it’s cool and wet; they resent intrusion then so the better idea is to wait until the weather warms. We settled on early Thursday.
This afternoon Melina, Taylor and Chaska Helgeson had a big graduation party with asian themed food and rapping by Nerve, aka Taylor Helgeson. There were a number of people there, though few I knew. Sarah and Paul Strickland were the only guests I recognized except for Stefan’s dad.
The noise and the mix of people made hearing difficult so I eased away after about an hour.
We spoke with Jon and Jen on Skype tonight. Ruthie got an owie at a birthday party. Gabe had an elbow bleed and required three doses of factor. He has small veins so it took a lot of needle sticks. It sound painful and frustrating. Herschel, who has hemangiosarcoma, is home from the hospital and feeling pretty good. He has three months as a prognosis. Sad.
That’s about it. A quiet Sunday.
Beltane Waxing Dyan Moon
We’ve had rain all day, a gentle steady rain. Nice. Temps have stayed in the high 40’s, it’s 49 right now at 4:18 p.m.
It rained on Penny’s birthday party. A 70th. The party makers moved the whole thing inside and all was fine.
Here’s another way to know where you are on life’s great wheel. What kind of events do you attend? Is it retirement parties? 7oth birthdays? 50th wedding anniversaries? Funerals? Getting more mail from the Social Security Administration than family members? You’ve reached at least mid-autumn. That’s where Kate and I are now.
Next year we’ll celebrate Kate’s retirement and I want to do a big party again. I gotta think it through though. Not sure just what form it should take. We had a 50’s sock hop at a Maid-Rite restaurant for her 50th; I planted her the purple garden and we had the breast cancer fund-raiser for her 60th. Gotta noodle this one.
An inside, cuddle up and read day.
Beltane Waxing Dyan Moon
“It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.” – William G. McAdoo
Boy, is that true. Look at Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld, oh my.
Had lunch and a by the seat of the pants tour with Mary and Frank Broderick. It was fun, wandering around the museum looking at art with friends.
Obama is such a smart guy. Speaking to the Muslims yesterday, visiting Buchenwald today. He does not allow the dust to settle in any one place before he moves on, readjusting the tunic of America’s presence in the world. In such a short time he has restored my feeling of good fortune in living here. Geez, just to have a President who can string together a complex sentence is enough to make me cry.
Following the low bar of the Bush presidency has eased Obama’s transition, but he would have looked good at any point. Now he looks like superman.
The first phase of the growing season, planting and amending soil, has come to an end. Almost. Now mulch goes down and surveillance for pests.
This is part of the new work we had done last week. The vegetable garden area has no more grass, just chips. It also has new beds with flowers, shrubs and space for some more vegetables. We have made another step toward a permaculture suburban acreage. The small white form in the upper left is the bee hive.