Monthly Archives: September 2018

when it seems like too much

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In the midst of this intentional time of rest and healing in my life, I have been gardening, as I am able.  Sometimes even the garden needs more than I have to offer.  I have days when I feel overwhelmed by my own lack of knowledge about how to care for the trees, how to deal with challenges to them, how to help them thrive.  Margy reminds me that it is a learning experience.

Peach Tree SoresSo the latest “too much” were these sores on the peach tree trunk.  Our friend Mihku noticed them, and suggested they were peach tree borers.  The usual remedy is to cut out the wound with a knife and poke the caterpillars manually. But I couldn’t seem to find any clear culprits, and truthfully, the trunk is so small, I was afraid to do too much.

I researched what I could on the internet, and in my Holistic Orchard book.  Sometimes that is overwhelming, too–to read about everything that can go wrong. Beneficial nematodes were mentioned as a possible solution for peach borers, but the only options for purchasing online were in sizes meant for an orchard, not a solitary tree.  I did find a product locally with Bt in it, but that was said to work better on leaf and surface eaters, rather than trunk borers.  Perhaps it is just me, or perhaps it is these times, with the overlay of such despair growing in so many realms, but this problem just felled me, sent me to my bed.

Eventually I did get up again.  I prayed for the tree. I prayed for help.  I consulted my spirit stone, a beautiful rock with a hole through its center, that I use as a pendulum for guidance when I feel uncertain or overwhelmed. I pulled out some products that we use for the orchard, and consulted the stone about whether any of them might be helpful.  Then I noticed that the very simple label on the bottle of Neem Oil mentioned the concentration to use in the case of borers.  Okay.  The stone agreed.  So I made up a small quantity–1 teaspoon Neem Oil to 2 cups water, with some dish soap added as an emulsifier.  I also felt like adding a little compost, in hopes of introducing some beneficial microorganisms.  I washed the mixture over the trunk with a rag.

Peach TreeSomehow, calling for help from the Spirit, and then taking one small step to do something got me going again.  It might not work.  The tree is so beautiful and healthy, and has grown so well this first year, that it would break my heart if it is killed by this wound.  We’re not a big orchard.  Each of our trees is precious and the only one of its kind in our yard.  I had also recently purchased some tall stakes, so I staked the tree (not yet in the photo) and also put up stakes for the mulberry tree, the apple tree, and created a border of stakes and string for the raspberry bushes, which are growing fruit now.

I know so little about how to care for the trees, the plants, the creatures of this yard, this small circle of the earth.  Meanwhile, we human beings are doing so much harm to all beings, and it may be too late to heal.  Meanwhile, the powerful seem bent on destruction and abuse and greed.  Meanwhile, so many wounds everywhere coming into the light.  I don’t seem to have any answers these days. I am trying to be quiet, to attune to the deep River of Life, to stop pushing, acting, deciding… I am trying to wait for the River to move me.  I am trying to learn how to care for the garden. I am reminded of some verses from the Tao Te Ching (translation by Stephen Mitchell.)

Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?

May the River of Life have mercy on us.

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Bird Mystery

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Northern Flicker

The other day I heard an unfamiliar racket out the window and discovered a small flock of northern flickers had come to visit the garden.  They were eating bugs in the ground, and also poking their long beaks between the pavers on our patio, so I am going to guess they were eating ants.  They settled in for a feast, and made themselves at home.

They are so distinctive and beautiful, a spotted breast with a black bib (and cheek patches on the males), red heart shape patch on the back of their head, and white rump feathers visible when they fly.  Oh, and a bit of yellow on the tail.  I also saw a plain looking smaller bird that I believed was a juvenile flicker, but then noticed it had white spots on black instead of black on white. It was clearly hanging out with the male and female flickers, but it looks more like a starling juvenile.  Does anyone know if starlings ever drop eggs with the flickers to get them to raise the young starlings?

Stranger than it first appeared.

Northern Flickers

Going Back to School

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USM IDI have a feeling of glee because I am taking a class at the University of Southern Maine.  Well, actually I am auditing it.  I discovered that anyone 65 and over can audit classes almost for free (compared to actual tuition costs).  I had to pay a $55 “transportation” fee, and then learned that with my student ID (I have a student ID!) I can take the metro bus for free.  So many new things, and it reminds me of my excited feelings of going back to school when I was a kid.

But I am especially excited about this class, Wabanaki Languages, taught by Roger Paul, whom I got to know through the Decolonizing Faith project in which I am involved.  Roger is really fun and funny and is a native speaker of the language, and a fountain of history and understanding. We’ll be learning “oral history of Wabanaki languages and stories of Wabanaki elders passed from generation to generation,” along with vocabulary and pronunciation and the like.

For those who are not from this area, the Wabanaki peoples are the Indigenous people of Maine, and there are four distinct modern tribal communities, but as Roger tells us, they are not really so distinct.  It was Europeans who thought of them as different from each other.  The people lived in villages where the food supply would support them (mostly hunting, fishing and gathering) and when the group grew too large for that system, they would start a new village down river or at the next river.  So the languages are variations of the same tongue, and the people were identified by the places they lived, or by characteristics of those places.

Most of the students in the class are Wabanaki tribal members learning to speak their own language, as much was lost during the era of boarding schools.  Now there are efforts among children and adults to revitalize the language while there are still Native speakers.  Roger has been involved in teaching children on the reservation.  But why am I interested, as a white person, to learn this language?  Years ago, when I was first learning about the challenges that face Indigenous people, I got involved in the issue of cultural appropriation–the theft of Native spiritual practices by non-Native peoples, especially in New Age settings. (See more on that at Wanting to Be Indian.)

I remember one Indigenous writer saying, “If you really want to learn about our spirituality, learn our language.” I’ve learned a lot from Native authors such as Robin Wall Kimmerer talking about some of the key differences between Indigenous language and English.  Particularly, Kimmerer speaks about the idea of animacy and inanimacy as embedded in the syntax.  Trees, animals, plants, rivers are never referred to as “objects” or as “it” in her language.  They are alive, animate.  All the verbs and pronouns are organized around whether you are referring to something alive, or inanimate.  The language we speak affects how we think about our world.  The English language has colonized this place, made the land and water and creatures into “its.”

I want to learn Wabanaki Languages to better understand Wabanaki people and culture, and this place in which I live, the language native to this place.  I want to help decolonize my mind, and learn to think in a new way.

Loving the Body

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Sassy and Billy bath

Today is a day when I chose to stop my plans and just love my body and follow what it needed.  My teachers were our cats Billie and Sassy who were having a cuddle and a nap in the sun on the bed, washing each other’s faces.  I lay down next to them, and took a few photos with my phone.  Sometimes, even in this desperately wounded world, we must honor the demands of our bodies, first of all.  This I what I am learning about illness or whatever it is that has taken hold of my body.  My own tendency is to want to figure it out and fix it. But some things can’t be easily figured or fixed.  And so we are faced with other choices.

When my partner Margy and first I got to know each other, she had been dealing with chronic illness for a long time already.  She has been my teacher in what that means, and how to cope, how to live in the midst of it all.  But in that process, I took on the role of the “well” one, the one who would carry things when she could not. But now, I also have some sort of chronic illness, and it’s a new chapter for us, a new chapter for me.  I haven’t really ever identified myself as having a chronic illness, because that was her identity.  I know that sounds a bit illogical, but it never seemed that I had it bad enough to call myself ill.

But then there are these days, more now than before, when I just can’t follow my plans, can’t work in the garden, can’t go to the beach.  When I ache all over, or feel weary and slow.  As I said, mostly my impulse has been to try to figure it out–what did I eat? what did I do?–that might have triggered all this. What can I do to make it better? But today, I thought, just follow the lead of the body, just love the body and do what it wants to do.  Rest, lay in the sun, watch mysteries on the television. No shoulds.

I am remembering Paula Gunn Allen writing about this, and I found the quote, an excerpt from “The Woman I Love Is a Planet; The Planet I Love Is a Tree,” from her book, Off the Reservation.  I love how she links our love of the body to our love of the planet–even when we can’t even go outside.

Our physicality—which always and everywhere includes our spirituality, mentality, emotionality, social institutions, and processes—is a microform of all physicality. Each of us reflects, in our attitudes toward our body and the bodies of other planetary creatures and plants, our inner attitude toward the planet. And, as we believe, so we are. A society that believes that the body is somehow diseased, painful, sinful, or wrong, a people that spends its time trying to deny the body’s needs, aims, goals, and processes—whether these be called health or disease—is going to misunderstand the nature of its existence and of the planet’s and is going to create social institutions out of those body-denying attitudes that wreak destruction not only on human, plant, and other creaturely bodies but on the body of the Earth herself….

Being good, holy, and/or politically responsible means being able to accept whatever life brings—and that includes just about everything you usually think of as unacceptable, like disease, death, and violence. Walking in balance, in harmony, and in a sacred manner requires staying in your body, accepting its discomforts, decayings, witherings, and blossomings and respecting them. Your body is also a planet, replete with creatures that live in and on it. Walking in balance requires knowing that living and dying are two beings, gifts of our mother, the Earth, and honoring her ways does not mean cheating her of your flesh, your pain, your joy, your sensuality, your desires, your frustrations, your unmet and met needs, your emotions, your life.

Sassy and Billy nap

Hell Strip to Esplanade

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Planting the roadside strip

Lisa & Myke at work, photo by Margy Dowzer

Last month, Margy and I were talking about the crabgrass that has overrun the lawn in so many places, including the strip between the sidewalk and the street. This strip seems to be referred to by many names–from “hell strip” to “esplanade.”  She is working on other strategies for other places, but I had the idea (after some internet research and an appreciation of what someone in our neighborhood had done to theirs) to see if hardy perennials might eventually outcompete the crabgrass and solve the problem. Then it truly would be shifting from a hell strip to an esplanade!

I started off by moving some turkish rocket from our backyard garden to the front. Turkish rocket is a fast growing perennial vegetable with beautiful yellow flowers. I had planted some last year, excited to try it, but this spring discovered that I didn’t really like the taste of the greens–they were too sharp and bitter for me.  But the flowers were amazing.  So I decided that I’d move it from the food forest to the strip.  Another friend came by and transplanted some yellow day lilies and blue cornflower that needed a new home!

I put out a call on our permaculture meet-up, and was gratified when another member, Sandi, responded by saying she had a lot of perennials that needed dividing and we could have them. That’s the thing–so many wonderful perennial flowers multiply of their own accord and expand out of the area they are originally planted.  So why not use that spreading habit to achieve a better use of the roadside space–for pollinators and for beauty. So I went out to her house and we dug up a whole bunch of plants.

That weekend, our friend Lisa was visiting, and she jumped in to help me with the transplanting effort.  And it was a big effort!  In the end, we had 24 new plants along the strip, mostly with blue or yellow flowers, which we tended to alternate.  Several patches of Siberian iris and several patches of allium; anise hyssop, heliopsis, calendula, white ruffled iris, goats beard, astilbe, mallow, and lady’s mantle.  The other day, I added some catnip–another plant that can spread, but hey, maybe it will outcompete the crabgrass, and we’ll also have catnip for the cats.  The whole thing doesn’t look like much yet–a bunch of scraggly transplants, only a few with any flowers right now–but we’ll see how it goes next summer.  If we can get a load of wood chips, we may put down some cardboard and wood chips between the plants.  But that can happen later too.  I will let you know how it goes.

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