Daily Archives: March 9, 2014

Garden, Our Land and Home

Seed Orders

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Imbolc                                                                Hare Moon

The Great Wheel has been nudged forward, beginning to turn toward spring: the light in the sky today and the moisture in the air, the sudden grittiness of the once pristine snow. The temperature, even now is 36 degrees.  Above freezing.

The seed orders, filled out a couple of weeks ago, went into Harris Seeds and the Seed Savers Exchange.  Plant orders too.  The garden map for 2014 came out and I figured the square footage for certain kinds of vegetables.  This information went out to Luke Lemmers of HighBrix Gardens.  He’ll send me nitrogen specific to the various beds.

Each one of these steps is gardening.  Gardening is not only hoe and rake, seeds and soil. It’s planning and knowing, sourcing.  This is the gardening work that can be done while the snow is still on the ground.

We did start our own seeds for a few years with a hydroponic set up, but the space it requires and the fussy of it didn’t appeal to me.  So now we buy transplants.  A bit more expensive, but much less hassle.

An important next step comes when the soil becomes workable and we can put in those hardy vegetables that like the cold.  Then, after May 15th or so, the usual last frost date for Andover, we’ll plant the tomatoes and peppers and egg plants and kale and chard and collard greens.  After that, it’s caring for the plants as they grow.

Look for our Beltane bonfire, May 1st, the official opening of the growing season.

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Caesura

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Imbolc                                                                     Hare Moon

 

25 years ago I left the workaday world for home based efforts, but the weekend still has a different, more relaxed feeling.  As if things just aren’t quite as urgent.  This is thanks to the union movements press for the 40 week combined with early Protestant and Catholic Christianity that tried to reserve Sunday for church.

In a more secular time Sunday has become, for many, a true day of rest with Saturday providing time for the domestic tasks not accomplished during the week.

The notion of a day of rest, a time to pause and consider the week behind and the one ahead, can seem like a luxury, perhaps even irresponsible.  The cell phone, e-mail, broadband, and television are available around the clock.  In hypercompetitive work settings there is the awful sense that someone might be catching up or that you’ve not done enough. Why not fill up this blank day with that extra effort, the push that might get you ahead.

In music there are rests, the caesura that lets a particular line or run of notes breathe, giving them definition.  In winter whole species of animals hibernate and thousands of individuals are doing so right now on this property where I write.  Holidays, spread throughout the year, are caesura, as are our vacations, our anniversaries and birthdays. In art, especially sculpture, we learn that negative space defines a work.  Without negative space that David would still be a block of granite.

Taoism, perhaps the clearest on this idea, points out that the usefulness of a cup is not its body, but the negative space it contains.  Windows. Doors. Rooms. Baskets. Silence.

The effort in our lives is like the cup, the window, the door, it is the body which contains the life, it is not the life itself.  Life itself is realized in the negative spaces among our focused efforts.  That’s where the laugh comes, or the gentle touch, or the smile, the encouraging word, the hug, the tear.

In my view it behooves us to grant ourselves as much negative space as we can and a day a week does not seem like too much.  It is probably too little.