Yep. Today was it.
Pushing the envelope: I developed a new skill (thank you so much, Jack, for teaching and patience yesterday) that involved tools. I started at 7:30 a.m. testing drip tape and hooking up an irrigation system in my backyard garden. I've never touched so much as a hammer if I could help it, having been married to a terribly handy man for sixteen years. Gloria Steinem, my apologies. But I do make a dem fine cornbread.
Thinking: Hmm. An exploration of confusion in which I did not get lost. Decided that in the presence of opposing truths, I can peacefully hold them all, but live only my own. Walking this truth with my feet to earth is a living acceptance of my current best understanding of me in the all. Humility itself.
Looking hot: complete raingear and carharts with a red silk scarf and Ketchikan sneakers (Alaska rubber boots). Redefining sex appeal. Seconded by dear friends stopping by.
Connecting: A lovely long phone call with a friend from high school days who lives only blocks away and sent pics email of the garden I helped her install this spring. She is full of excitement and gardening plans. Other friends called in or showed up for brief visits while I worked -- such a treat that these dear ones know how much I hate to leave home in the spring and shift their paths to include mine.
Parenting: A loose definition. More enjoying than actual supervision. A twelve and seven year old from up the street joined us for the whole day. At lunch we took turns making strange noises and teaching each other how. A message from the nextdoor neighbor that Chicken Pox have arrived in the 'hood. Total mayhem reigned indoors while I continued with focus out of doors. The Cherry Poppin' Daddies blared (I checked in with the other kids' mom about her comfort with "inappropriate" lyrics), oranges were peeled, squeals of laughter echoed through the house, and when I finally came in, I found all four sitting quietly at the kitchen table with a live mouse in a clear plastic piggie bank dropping oats through the penny slot. "Wait! Let me get my skateboard!" called Sam.
And blessed focus: A whole day (minus 2 hours for lunch, prep, and clean up) gifted me to walk the line looking for leaks, blister my thumb and forefinger pressing in plastic parts, laugh hysterically at my own forgetfulness and everything else I could think of, look to the clouds measuring so many hours passed, and to be grateful, so very very grateful, for the fully perfect life I lead.
Calendar and Current Events
12 years ago
2 comments:
I'm intrigued by the whole issue of irrigation, the modern magic of rainmaking. Some years ago I was tickled to stumble across a fascinating correlation between grace and water in the scriptures of different wisdom traditions. In the White Lotus Sutra, Buddha describes himself as a raincloud, pouring the rain of Dharma upon all. The association of mercy and rain seems particularly strong in the Abrahamic traditions - Mohammed is commonly described as a raincloud dispensing mercy. And elsewhere: "He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass: as showers that water the earth." Pslam 72:6. The prophetic traditions all likewise allude to a time when waters and mercy, together, will flow again - literally. This, I sense, may well be an apt description of the times now upon us - when the ecologies of our hearts and that of the earth we live upon are made whole again, in the truest of unions. Water, mercy, the landscape of our inner lives and the natural world about us, paradise regained, the heavenly kingdom upon earth, all integrated and made Real in the manifested aspriations of a Deep Gardener, rainmaking technes in hand.
And it is all, of course, a Gift. I recall a native american healer once saying to me, "When Spirit decides to rain, everyone gets wet."
And Kristin, you are always a hottie, even as I am glad you felt particularly so yesterday. (smile)
You write, "in the presence of opposing truths, I can peacefully hold them all, but live only my own. Walking this truth with my feet to earth is a living acceptance of my current best understanding of me in the all. Humility itself." Surely such acceptance, the transmutation of contradictions, opposites, of paradox, into an integrated, felt, unifying experience making peace with our needs and the needs of others stands at the very heart of a life well-lived? NVC in a nutshell?
I have been eating dandelion of late, and writing to the Observer gardening blog around the topic of bitters and the bitters reflex
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/allotment/2008/05/best_in_show.html#comment-1118766
On the physical plane, bitters are essential to healthy digestion, the foundation of good health. But isn't the conscious, willing incorporation of bitters into our diets simply another aspect of the same reconciliatory, conscious acceptance of the bitter side of life and its integration and transformation into health and beauty which stands at the heart of NVC process? I have a sense our pushing away from the bitter side of nature may well stand at the heart of what ails us as a culture. As Gary Snyder puts it, 'human cultures...which demonize death or pain or sickness are less able to deal with the bitter side of nature, with intoxications, and make themselves doubly sick...All organic life is struck by the arrows of real and psychic poisons. This is understood by any true, that is to say, not self-deluding path.' Poison and nectar, darkness and light, together, life in balance.
Bitter herbs, when taken as pills or in other forms to mask the taste, do not work their magic. It is the bitter reflex in the mouth, the actual experience of bitterness, which is essential to their healing action. Surely the same holds true for how we choose to experience the bitterness we encounter in all realms of experience - the physical, the mental, the emotional and the spiritual. I am reminded of the words of John Moriarty: "Maturing and moving closer to God involves dwelling longer and more deeply in life's conflicts, not denying or avoiding them."
As herbalist Christopher Hobbs describes it, traditional herbal bitter formulas will often incorporate two other categories of herbs to help the herbs work better and to help us be more receptive to them. Aromatics, and sweet herbs. The medicine is no longer simply bitter and contracting, but now bittersweet and opening. A palatable, healthful mix of light and dark, integrated. What a wonderful metaphor for a life rich with challenge, and perhaps for the inner alchemy of NVC. The power of your path as I see it, Kristin, is about modeling what it is to experientially embrace the truth of wholeness, the knowledge that all things are equal in creation, and that those things which might be experienced as bitter can be eaten, ingested, integrated, and transmuted if we have the proper state of heart-mind. Thank you for the tools you share and teach so magnificently.
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