Summer balance

I love this time of year. There is the slight hint of Fall in the air, but the days are still warm... if not hot. In the morning my meditation happens when the moon is bright, some stars still shine, and dawn is just etching the darkness with color and light. The stillness is only broken by the conversation between two Screech Owls or the bass call of a Great Horned Owl. Occasionally, the darkness of a bat shows against the almost-darkness of the dawn. Then a bird of the morning calls out... sometimes it is a dove or a Towhee or some other bird calling out its territory... or just to let the world know that it is alive. I really love the stillness of morning before the wind moves or the dawn brings too much detail to light.

Of course, it is great that we harvest the fruits and vegetables. The two-year old peach tree brought forth 13 peaches this year! They are gone. The squash and pumpkins haven't been doing well. They have produced a lot of leaves, but they are blighted by the powdery mildew. I didn't even know what it was until a friend showed up and showed it to me. Now I see that it is spread throughout the whole crop. We'll see what happens next. We're still getting squash and pumpkins.

The deer have also been well-fed on squash (they take a few bites and move on), almond tree leaves, cherry tree leaves, pear tree leaves, not to mention apples off our favorite apple trees.

It has also been a challenging year for water. Our well and reserve tank have gone dry. One time due my fault- left the irrigation on. But the others are still a mystery. We've taken to being really careful about water and it may mean that some of the vegetables don't make it. We are at the cusp of the rainy season. It is still reaching up close to 90 degrees and dropping into the upper 40's. So we will see when the well recharges. Hopefully soon.

I was walking along our creek about 10 days ago and we have a place where the water drops about 5 feet into a pool. There was still a little water pooling and probably 4-5 inches of water. As I looked at the water, something moved... it actually swam. It was so muddy it took a few minutes to reveal a fish! The next day a friend visited, we looked at it and then looked online to identify this 6 inch swimmer. The closest we came was a Cuthroat Trout! How in the world did that happen? The water was muddy and murky and there couldn't have been much oxygen. The water went away a few days later and the fish disappeared. Maybe the raccoons got it.

There is a fine line between when you intervene and when you let natural processes take place. We are applying an herbicide to poison oak since I react so strongly to it. We put out traps for the yellow jackets because Susan reacts so badly to them. It is about taking care of ourselves, but when do we just accept that there are things that are going to happen to us? When do we just let natural processes take their natural course? We can't protect ourselves from everything. I was tempted to scoop up the fish and release it in a stream nearby, but instead decided to add water to the pool. Didn't work.

We all have to take care of the land and the people. Sometimes we need to intervene and sometimes let things happened. I've stopped looking for the operating manual and know that I do the best I can in the moment.

Language and Reality

The land reveals itself in color, shape and texture these days. Whether it is the Calla Lily blowing among the Hosta or the male American Goldfinch painting a yellow streak through the air- there is a presentation of form. To express the beauty and interconnectedness of life into a form of language is the challenge. The artist/writer is skilled at it- of evoking a sense of place and connecting it with the experience of the reader/viewer. It is through the power of language that this place becomes a cultural experience.

Today, a vireo perched on the branches outside the kitchen window. Was is a Hutton's Vireo or a Cassin's? I think the later. But what is this inclination, this desire to name something? It is evident that it is important to us. All one needs to do is to look on the bookshelves of any bookstore, or online book seller, to see the world of identification books. Travel books identify the names of historic buildings, wildflowers are categorized and ready to be named. Many people don't retain the name they have just learned, but there is a sense of knowing that comes from having a word to identify it. Language allows us to fit things into categories of the known. It is the rare human being that is comfortable with seeing something just for what is present without wanting to call it something: bird, vireo, or Vireo cassinii.


The photo to the left is of the new raised beds behind the house. Our need to define is tied in to our need for order, structure, consistency. Most gardeners have lines and rectangles. The rows of plants or the planned randomness of a flower garden. There is this consistent need to bring order to our world- we cut down the things that ramble in favor of the orderly. Yet it is the curves, like the snake, that bring variety and pleasantness to our world. Disregard the aversion that you might have of snakes and see the elegance of the lines and the subtle shading of the scales. Now, we use our language to create a category called: like or don't like.
Language exerts hidden power, lie a moon on the tides. Rita Mae Brown, Starting from Scratch. 1988.

Saturation and catastrophizing

Two weeks ago we had record rainfall and subsequent flooding. Saturated soils were unable to retain all the water and it began it's downhill run into the tributaries and rivers. What had been a dry winter turned into a soggy one. Just when people were worrying (and creating catastrophic predictions) about dry wells, empty reservoirs, shriveled crops, burned up lawns, and massive wildland fires consuming the forests... all those concerns were washed away and sent into the Pacific via the Willamette and Columbia Rivers.

Walking through our gently sloped meadow it was easy to see water flowing downhill. The creek was high, but never came close to exceeding it's banks. The clay soil here absorbs a lot of water but when the saturation point is reached all the spaces between clay particlers are filled and the only thing left to do is for the water to pool or run downhill. Less than a mile from us people have sandy soils and the water percolates much easier (they also have a lot of problem finding water for wells) and it too began to pool. Eventually that water has to go somewhere- to the streams, rivers, roadways, basements, farms, and onto the city streets. A rainfall like this clogs up natural and constructed drainage systems. It is such an anomaly that the system isn't used to dealing with it.

It seems to me the human organism isn't too different. When we eat too much sugar or drink too much caffeine our systems are overloaded and can't get rid of it quick enough. Our nerves are over-charged and one way we discharge it is by "the shakes" or some other physical activity. This is also true of our psychological system. When our inner world is emotionally overwhelmed there isn't enough room to take in anymore. Our higher order thinking skills are hijacked by our survival instincts. In a way we become super-saturated and our systems rigidify. Our natural fluidity becomes more static and, if held in that state for too long, we get stuck. We either need to remove ourselves from the things that are saturating our system or to find something else to counteract it. Water, food, humor, sleep, comedy, or positive friends help.

The road shown above  is the one with the lowest water and my sole access to home.

Around here, if you drive a truck into deep clay and then let it sit until August, you won't get it out until the rainy season.

Our planet is the ultimate closed system. There is no other viable place to put the waste from 7 billion people. In 1968 I remember Jacques Cousteau saying that it is already too late to save the planet- that enough damage had already been done. I don't know if he is right or not, but I do know that we've successfully turned around some major environmental problems by recognizing that there is a problem and applying our ingenuity- and be willing to sacrifice some of the extravagances of our lives. Will we be willing to do that for the sake of others? Will we be able to adopt an attitude of service, kindness, and generosity to such a degree that we saturate the world with it? I know we have the capacity to do it.  

Patterns and Meaning

Aristotle observed that "nature abhors a vacuum." So do people. When things don't make sense, we make meaning of them even if it is erroneous. We go to great lengths to have patterns mean something; to create order. In general, we don't like disorder, chaos, and meaninglessness. Even people who say they like change mean that they like the change that they want.

So, what does it have to do with Aisling? Well, there are these undulations on the land. There is one that runs diagonally across the meadow. It doesn't follow the fall line of the slope and wouldn't be part of a disappeared waterway. I thought for a long time that it was a place where someone placed a waterline to gather water from the creek. Then one day our neighbor suggested that it is was the remnant of an old logging road. It makes complete sense. Truth or not, it does make sense.

There was another line than ran perpendicular to that line that could have been the remnants of a waterway. However, with the snow yesterday, it revealed itself.  In the photo, it runs from the lower right corner to the upper middle. A little bit of snow reveals that a road used go right through this section of the land. What type of vehicle? Horses? What stories could we recreate out of just this one little image? This isn't one of those great mysteries of the universe or about human existence, but it does help to understand this little piece of land that we occupy.

One of the amazing facts about humans is that we are meaning makers. It is incredible that someone can have just a few details and then make sense out of apparent randomness. Sometimes this doesn't serve us too well when we are quick to jump to a conclusion based on what we think should be true. One root of our environmental challenges is that we have a preference to act rather than reflect; to choose/judge rather than wait and see. The lands that we occupy need more of our reflection than action. The conundrum is that the means of production demand us to operate at a speed that doesn't afford a lot of time for reflection. I don't think there is a resolution to this, it is a balance that must be found even if it seems ineffectual. The need to make sense translates into preferring a world that aligns with our sensibilities. We are nearing 7 billion people on this planet and there are 7 billion ways of making sense of it and 7 billion solutions for dealing with the problems. It is amazing that we've lasted as long as we have.