Let me explain. I am in the middle of my end of year projects. For days I have been purging files. I have already cleared and shredded a 2 foot high pile of papers and check stubs. Aside: I smoked for 39 years and ever one of these papers is has the stink of smoke. This makes the task nasty. Oh, and I am not letting myself go into nostalgia mode. I am so pleased when I have this kind of clarity during purging. It pays to turn to this kind of project at the right time, as anyone who has gotten lost in reminiscence instead of clearing knows.
Having just applied for social security, I am focused on a whole new chapter in my life. I am done with my career in facility planning and interior design. I am done with my own dreams of building a consulting business. Serving the rich (the only market for my skills) is the last thing on earth I want to do. So, this indeed sounds like a ritual of growth, right? It is, but it isn't the one I am writing about this morning. It is related because I had a dilemma in the midst of my paper shredding. I filled a barrel with shredded paper and borrowed a couple more. My plan is to have shredded paper for my wormery, the park compost / wormery and the elementary schools upcoming compost demonstrations. (I adore the idea of feeding worms sensitive, private paperwork.) So, I needed more barrels and bags.
I went searching and found a barrel in the garden filled with black plastic bags full of dried horse manure. I emailed the woman who had secured the manure and asked if I could spread it on the garden so that I could have the bags. She urged me on. I switched gears and turned to the garden work. Some neighbors had laid out two large black plastic sheets weighted with stones and pavers to kill weeds and pathogens. I folded them up and put them away in a shed before opening each bag and raking the manure across the whole garden. I was sweating buckets, but I secured a bunch of bags and the barrel for my mountain of paper shreds.
Shorty after I finished we had rain! The first rain of the autumn was a real surprise (she says thinking of the two loads of laundry I had hanging), but a delicious treat. I felt that the garden was beckoning me to sow seeds in the newly fertilized and moistened earth. Then I remembered I'd awakened the night before with the bright light of the nearly full moon. Well, there you go. I didn't need a coven of sister witches to tap me on the shoulder. I went to bed knowing I'd awake pre-dawn to a full moon. I did wake with a grin. I threw on clothes, grabbed the can of clover seeds donated by another gardener neighbor and walked by the light of the moon to our community garden. The stillness felt sacred. I repeated words of lifting, life and blessing. I stood in the moonlight and envisioned the green abundance of clover to come. It felt so extraordinary I had to sit down and record it. I am still smiling.
Image credit, How Plants Work blog
6 comments:
We are busy cleaning and putting things up, discussing which things can live here (sauerkraut? A kitten? An extra human?) washing windows and purging in the basement (one of my partner's cousins is getting political and majoring in environmental science, so I'm giving her all my old Earth First Journals and Wild Earth magazines and books about composting toilets that I hadn't been able to let go of before. The internet has such a short memory, this stuff is barely available anymore and it's only from 1993.)
Your climate is so different than ours, even though we get autumn rain too. This post makes me think of Spring. Wendell Berry wrote an essay about burning old manuscrips and putting the ashes in his garden...i must have given the book away, but I bet you've read it.
And your post reminds me of a Greg Brown song:
Spring and what's left of the hippies return from
old rooming houses and Mexico.
More letters, more journals,
more poems to burn; Real heat at last. At last my words glow...
Spring and what's left of the songbirds return,
to fight about loving
and nesting and such.
Thanks for the letters you sent back to burn.
Their smoke is as light, and as dark, as your touch.
Happy sabbat! Happy new world!
You wrote those lines before, Rosa, and I think they took hold deep within me. Beautiful.
Good to hear about you and yours. How good to have a young person in your family who is aware. It brings hope.
Oops! My brain pretty much has a Greg Brown soundtrack.
It is exciting that she's so excited about it. I generally feel pretty silenced by that family so finding allies there is awesome. My family is a lot smaller, without the same kind of connections to make within it, and learning how it works is interesting (the alliance of daughters-in-law that is shaping up is like Surviving Under Patriarchy 101, too - i'd only ever hung out with resisters before, not adaptors)
That is exactly what I was reading between the lines. The ally aspect is a real boon.
I'm off to take a nap. My pre-dawn adventure is making me so sleepy now.
Wow! You write poetry my friend! I wish you still wrote the monthly newsletters too.
I love how the story unfolds within the light of the moon...so elloquent, so poetic. I can almost imagine and feel the sensations you experienced.
Thanks for working so hard out there, with laying out the horse manure too, and folding up the black tarp.
Hurrah! Social Security Baby!!! Whooo Hoooo Hooooo!!! I'm jealous.
Love you!
Thank you. I should have followed up with watering or with re-sowing after the last rain. We shall see. Happy to see your website is growing. Good for you. Jim has asked me to do a a notice for a Halloween get together under the newly trimmed pine trees.
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