"The garden communicates what it shows to you but you also contribute to the garden some of what you are seeking in terms of your own life, your own state of being. One reason a garden can speak to you is that it is both its own reality and a manifestation of the interior life of the mind that imagined it in the beginning." -- Stanley Kunitz
Raised beds: A desire for defined potential and the full use of all available space to thrive, get closer to other living things, dissolve boundaries and rows so that all can touch. A dance of cool and warm crops as the human hand wishes to respond rather than enforce something fighting too fiercely with its own environment, wanting to control it rather than nurture (in order to know it on its own terms) and sustain it.
Flowers and Carrots: Bulldozing woman of purpose, will you not sit still long enough to hear what the flower whispers to the bee, what the carrot confesses to the zinnia? Beauty has a purpose, too. You won't waste time noticing it, stubborn list-maker.
Vertical or Growing Up: The sudden bursting out and up of a thing held too long to the ground, pinned like a wrestler, allowed to tilt greenfacedleaf fully to the sun, tall and made to be taller. And if I learn to not slouch, ashamed and sky-shy, perhaps I too could be fruitful, could take the full breath of lifting lungs and negotiate the space each one of us was given to move and not to cower.
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
When Good Friends Give you the Things They Say
1. "Sometimes faced with a wall in our path we look up, gathering its height. Sometimes we glance left or right, and walk around it instead... When there is difficulty we contemplate the height of the leap. Never the potential narrowness of the obstacle. To either side it might open into a garden."
"I'm stealing that."
"It's yours."
2. She texts to tell me the song she wrote for me is finished. "Can I come over and hear it?"
"This poor heart was scorched earth and his song was my rain...his voice coming through...I was blinded by sorrow and that big sky...but he sang me through every mile...you put me together piece by piece...you should know it was your words that helped me find my own...and if he ever comes to claim what I owe him, well, he'll have to take all of me..."
And I'm sitting on her couch after driving the truck from the pool parking lot where I sat grading essays with both windows open and breathing for me. Our kids are at preschool, and I wasn't expecting to cry like this, to hear this thing she found written in my life before I knew to live it, but there it is.
"So, yeah, I wasn't expecting to cry today."
"Oh, man, I'm sorry."
"Nah, nah. I'm not afraid. I'm not scared of this."
3. Friends, friends...lean in. Lean in. We're going to make it. We can do this.
"I walked the perimeter asking, 'What is needed?' And there were answers."
"I'm stealing that."
"It's yours."
2. She texts to tell me the song she wrote for me is finished. "Can I come over and hear it?"
"This poor heart was scorched earth and his song was my rain...his voice coming through...I was blinded by sorrow and that big sky...but he sang me through every mile...you put me together piece by piece...you should know it was your words that helped me find my own...and if he ever comes to claim what I owe him, well, he'll have to take all of me..."
And I'm sitting on her couch after driving the truck from the pool parking lot where I sat grading essays with both windows open and breathing for me. Our kids are at preschool, and I wasn't expecting to cry like this, to hear this thing she found written in my life before I knew to live it, but there it is.
"So, yeah, I wasn't expecting to cry today."
"Oh, man, I'm sorry."
"Nah, nah. I'm not afraid. I'm not scared of this."
3. Friends, friends...lean in. Lean in. We're going to make it. We can do this.
"I walked the perimeter asking, 'What is needed?' And there were answers."
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Sometimes When You Just Need a Small Reminder
Very sharp bleu cheddar cheese.
Snapping asparagus out of the ground and eating it right then and there after brushing any dirt off onto your jeans, which you'll wash over the weekend and hang on the line, another part of the grand cycle.
The way the pansies lift their faces almost immediately after you water them.
Your daughter's pink flushed cheeks after chasing a butterfly through the mud, over the grid in the garden, over lumber, broken branches, windmill and dandelions--barefoot and openhearted and reaching.
Laughing with a room of poets who allow me to not be a professor while being a professor.
Sinking into the knowledge that it isn't what is taught but what is loved between each of you in the room as you build it and break it apart and lift each other up again stronger for having spilled it.
Stopping in the middle of the dark hallway in the basement where my office is, so I can follow rather than forge ahead.
Makin' copies.
More green whispering trees calls me summer mind and a hammock to hang between two mulberry trees in the orchard near the field, which will be planted in soybean this year. My favorite because of the way the lightning bugs lift themselves out of the low, green foliage into hesitant dances that are there and then not there and then there again.
Snapping asparagus out of the ground and eating it right then and there after brushing any dirt off onto your jeans, which you'll wash over the weekend and hang on the line, another part of the grand cycle.
The way the pansies lift their faces almost immediately after you water them.
Your daughter's pink flushed cheeks after chasing a butterfly through the mud, over the grid in the garden, over lumber, broken branches, windmill and dandelions--barefoot and openhearted and reaching.
Laughing with a room of poets who allow me to not be a professor while being a professor.
Sinking into the knowledge that it isn't what is taught but what is loved between each of you in the room as you build it and break it apart and lift each other up again stronger for having spilled it.
Stopping in the middle of the dark hallway in the basement where my office is, so I can follow rather than forge ahead.
Makin' copies.
More green whispering trees calls me summer mind and a hammock to hang between two mulberry trees in the orchard near the field, which will be planted in soybean this year. My favorite because of the way the lightning bugs lift themselves out of the low, green foliage into hesitant dances that are there and then not there and then there again.
Monday, April 16, 2012
Teagan's Hamster Handbooks (Plural)
A few weeks back, our good friend Teagan came to visit. She has a beautiful eye. If you'd like to look through it, go here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/teagannicholle
After holding Nora's pet hamster Henrietta, Teagan began to wonder out loud if a hamster was something she might want in the future. Nora had a lot of advice, and we made a cardboard hamster puppet for Teagan to practice feeding--just to make sure she would be responsible enough for the real thing. I haven't heard how it's going, but I'm hoping the little cardboard hamster head is still alive. Anyway, Nora has composed a three part guide about hamster care for you, Teagan. Here it is. Oh, and be sure to click on the photos, so you can read Nora's comments:
After holding Nora's pet hamster Henrietta, Teagan began to wonder out loud if a hamster was something she might want in the future. Nora had a lot of advice, and we made a cardboard hamster puppet for Teagan to practice feeding--just to make sure she would be responsible enough for the real thing. I haven't heard how it's going, but I'm hoping the little cardboard hamster head is still alive. Anyway, Nora has composed a three part guide about hamster care for you, Teagan. Here it is. Oh, and be sure to click on the photos, so you can read Nora's comments:
Saturday, April 14, 2012
In a Day
Grading essays. Stocking tornado shelter in basement. Hooking up black and white TV in the basement and realizing I can't see any of the red "danger" zones. Washing Nora's hair. Eating salad with hard boiled eggs from Easter, some avocado, ranch. Playing "Farm Cat Farm" with Nora and setting up the Littlest Pet shop toys in a "homestead" format complete with vegetable stand and juice press. Watching the rain fall inside the house as it pushes through one of the living room window frames. Tucking Apple in next to the tractor and sprayer. Watering plants. Pinching mealy worms between my fingers. Folding laundry. Moving pansies under a protective roof. Praying for those in line of storm. Wondering why my weather radio hasn't been going off. Too tired to think of much else. Remembering I was going to clean the fridge today. Letting it slide.
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Liberty Lady
Not always. Not every time, rarely. Sometimes I can put it into words. Sometimes the new. Sometimes fragment and unsure. When awkward. When almost vowing not to.
Then silent spoken fingers green trembled in the breeze I see pass through the light green leaves of a tree being born again and the caress, cooler than water, speaks to the ten year old girl in my heart, the one the 38 year old woman has been suppressing, the one who dances as if her blood were made of wine or the one who remembers the flat rock where she could sit on the mesa looking down into the valley, the grass the horses hadn't found yet an ocean, and she watched the hawks for hours drinking wind and lifting bones above their weight and age.
If there hadn't been a dirt road, twin scarred, by which she could lower herself into the valley, then she would have found a way despite it into that green sweeping world all full of popping grasshoppers and the thin emerald whisper, regenerate and swaying, of the native Colorado grasses that would feed the horses below, some we owned and some we never would. Some that would dive chest first into the sharp-tongued barbed wire, chased by the white reins of lightening. By the time she healed, the yellow puss and bandages mixed in the fine silt under hooves that needed trimming, by then she would be too old to break and too scarred to trust us completely, we, the barbed-wire ghosts that haunted and crushed, full-bodied and brash, the velvet purple world of the alfalfa that grew moonward.
That apple tree is bone white bone now. Those starved horses gnawed away the vein and skin, the last wet thing left there on the dry mesa that suffered after the man who remembered to irrigate had died. I miss him and I miss that mesa and I miss that girl who was still so smart and weird and brave and quiet.
Her name was Liberty Lady, an appaloosa, the daughter of Liberty Bell, her prize-winning mother. My thinking of them tonight: this is the act that lifts them almost free again, running ringing, white-eyed scared and free again into a memory as threatening, as liberating as a storm you'd see spilling its gray curtain in the distance and you knew you still had 20, 30 minutes until you'd have to go in again, before the thought of it met the real thing and chased us all dark and inexperienced into the cutting fences we'd built to keep us away from ourselves.
Then silent spoken fingers green trembled in the breeze I see pass through the light green leaves of a tree being born again and the caress, cooler than water, speaks to the ten year old girl in my heart, the one the 38 year old woman has been suppressing, the one who dances as if her blood were made of wine or the one who remembers the flat rock where she could sit on the mesa looking down into the valley, the grass the horses hadn't found yet an ocean, and she watched the hawks for hours drinking wind and lifting bones above their weight and age.
If there hadn't been a dirt road, twin scarred, by which she could lower herself into the valley, then she would have found a way despite it into that green sweeping world all full of popping grasshoppers and the thin emerald whisper, regenerate and swaying, of the native Colorado grasses that would feed the horses below, some we owned and some we never would. Some that would dive chest first into the sharp-tongued barbed wire, chased by the white reins of lightening. By the time she healed, the yellow puss and bandages mixed in the fine silt under hooves that needed trimming, by then she would be too old to break and too scarred to trust us completely, we, the barbed-wire ghosts that haunted and crushed, full-bodied and brash, the velvet purple world of the alfalfa that grew moonward.
That apple tree is bone white bone now. Those starved horses gnawed away the vein and skin, the last wet thing left there on the dry mesa that suffered after the man who remembered to irrigate had died. I miss him and I miss that mesa and I miss that girl who was still so smart and weird and brave and quiet.
Her name was Liberty Lady, an appaloosa, the daughter of Liberty Bell, her prize-winning mother. My thinking of them tonight: this is the act that lifts them almost free again, running ringing, white-eyed scared and free again into a memory as threatening, as liberating as a storm you'd see spilling its gray curtain in the distance and you knew you still had 20, 30 minutes until you'd have to go in again, before the thought of it met the real thing and chased us all dark and inexperienced into the cutting fences we'd built to keep us away from ourselves.
Monday, April 9, 2012
Littles
1. Nora sneaking a bite of guacamole before saying grace, then asking if she could say it: "Thank you for this food, especially good food like what we're having tonight. And please take care of my mom and guide her in the right way. Amen." (I always ask to be guided in the right way when it's my turn to pray, so she must have wanted to be sure that one got covered.)
2. Getting cut working in the garden and Nora washing and bandaging it after being sure to wash her hands "so all those germs don't get in there."
3. Nora and I pounding tacks every foot then throwing an orange ball of yarn back and forth across the row as we wove the grid for the first section that now holds the potatoes and onions we planted.
4. A hot bath and a book.
5. Digging up the "black gold" from the bottom of the compost pit and mixing it in with the other dirt. Watching it turn from light brown to blackish brown.
6. Wind that puts your thoughts back in line.
7. [ ]
2. Getting cut working in the garden and Nora washing and bandaging it after being sure to wash her hands "so all those germs don't get in there."
3. Nora and I pounding tacks every foot then throwing an orange ball of yarn back and forth across the row as we wove the grid for the first section that now holds the potatoes and onions we planted.
4. A hot bath and a book.
5. Digging up the "black gold" from the bottom of the compost pit and mixing it in with the other dirt. Watching it turn from light brown to blackish brown.
6. Wind that puts your thoughts back in line.
7. [ ]
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