unexpected connections

Today started with an appointment to look at a desk I’d seen on craigslist. I’m a big fan of the CL, partially because who doesn’t like to save a buck? But more than saving a buck, my primary motivation is simply to not buy new things as much as possible. There is so much extraction from the earth, and buying new things just contributes to that. I know it is not sustainable. This isn’t even an opinion, it is the simple reality - we’ve got a closed system that we’re living in, and a closed system means that there are limits to every resource out there. There are bigger limits on things that are either less abundant by nature, or which take longer to grow and develop, but very real limits apply to everything we “consume” (which is not a term to apply only to food).

Regardless, I try to avoid being part of the buy-new lifestyle as much as I can. I know it is not always feasable. I simply make change where I can, which isn’t to say that I have made drastic changes all at once. It was about 3 years ago that I stopped buying paper towels and switched to using cloth towels for all cleaning. It works great, and I can no longer remember what I used paper towels for, let alone why.

Step by step I make changes that get me closer to where I want to be in this life. And so today, I bought a used desk. Gorgeous, as it happens, and I unexpectedly had a fantastic conversation with the seller of the desk. He is into environmental issues, especially sustainability, and so we happily chatted about how wonderful craigslist is, how good it is to avoid buying new.

It simply wasn’t a conversation I expected to have while buying a desk from someone in Georgetown, I admit!

And then at the farmers market, where I bought yet another tomato plant (brandywine this time), I had another interesting conversation. The farm I bought this plant (and some produce) from is apparently a collective. A spiritual collective, and a lot of the ideas sounded good. They all work, but they don’t have to worry about many of the things that we do when we’re locked into working jobs we might not like and which might not be fulfilling, but which we can’t get out of because we have to pay th erent, the utilities, the everything else just to keep our lives running.

Collectives are interesting, and the cooperative effort is very appealing to me. The spiritual aspect of this particular one is not. But they say they’re open to visitors, and I might just take a day and volunteer my time, see what I can learn, both about organic farming, as well as about collective living.

I’d love someday to be part of a vegan collective. A co-housing growing cooperative maybe. Someday.

And finally, I had an interesting conversation with my favorite barrista. This was not unexpected, since he’s an interesting person, and we always manage to have short but interesting conversations. Today was a bit about him becoming car-less. It was odd, in the way of random coincidences, because I’d just recently read someone’s story on them going car-less, and I found it very inspiring. For my barrista, it was a story of his car being towed, and him getting a notice a month later that he owed a whopping sum of money to get it out of their impound. He was surprised to get the letter, since he hadn’t noticed that his car wasn’t there. (This tells you how often he drives! I was more surprised to learn that he had a car at all.) So, since he didn’t want to pay a big sum of money, and since he had wanted to stop being a car owner anyway, he gave them the car in exchange for not owing them the big sum of money.

And so now he is officially car free. We talked about the blog I’d been reading recently about the person who went car-free two years ago, which has included a really long bike commute. I have been thinking more and more seriously about making that kind of committment.

Not to go completely car-free - I have a ridiculously cheap vehicle on which the insurance is hardly any amount at all, and I have one long trip to make every Saturday in a place where there just isn’t public transportation. They don’t even have taxis! I could likely find a way to make it work anyway (I’m not the only one going to the sanctuary, after all) but for now, I might as well keep my old truck for that trip every week.

But I did put in my name to be on the list of people moving to the other office location…the one that is not any closer, but which is a reasonable public transit commute. And in pouring over some online bike maps that people have made of the area, I was stunned to realize that if I was to try to bike to that area, 90% of it (a wild guess, but anyway a really large percentage) would be on a bike trail.

Not even a quietish road on which I’d be more comfortable, but an actual trail!

Of course the actual office location is in a really horrible area for bikes, but…but I still feel like there are some possibilities here.

Though it is doubtful that I would have any way of, say, showering once I got to work, and I also know that I’m a real wimp when it comes to cold and nasty weather.

Still, biking might just be an option for more of my life in the future.

I’m really excited by the possibilities.

as the garden grows

My eggplant has two blossoms in various stages, not ready to bust out into full bloom quite yet, but hanging in there. I now obsessively watch the weather predictions as much as I do the garden itself - looks like we’re clear of 95 degrees through most of this coming week, at least. I just don’t quite see how that will hold out until my wee eggplant can manage to give me some fruit, but we’ll see!

The tomatoes are coming along, they seem to grow in visible increments every day. I’m very impatient, given that I have likely about 6 weeks to wait until they’re actually ripe. I planted a plum tomato plant last weekend, which at the very least will have a quicker time per tomato!

I also bought a basil plant at the farmers market last weekend, and it also seems to be doing well. There’s all kinds of new growth on the plant, which is fantastic, because I love growing fresh herbs! That one went into a pot so I can bring it inside when the weather gets cold. I’m going to slowly add to that collection of fresh growing herbs.

The newest news though is that my cucumber plants have blossomed. I have one fully opened bloom on each of the four plants. I’d been keeping an eye on the star shaped pre-blooms, but I missed the beginnings of the blooming itself, because what I saw was as if there was nothing one day, and a fully opened blossom the next! Now that I’m looking closer, I see others getting ready to open on each plant, with the pale yellow color showing through. I hope the cucumbers do well! The only plant left that hasn’t displayed a bloom are the peppers. The buds are there, though, they’re just taking their time.

So, the garden goes well. I am content. If not exactly patient!

eggplants - interesting history (and why the flower dropped)

My eggplant had been doing great, with a gorgeous fully opened flower, and then suddenly when I checked on it on Sunday, the flower was on the ground. Sara commented, saying that she found my blog when looking for answers as to why her eggplant had dropped its flower, which spurred me to do some more research.

Oddly some sites said that eggplants required both male and female flowers, and if a fruit wasn’t fertilized, it would drop…yet other sites said that eggplants were self-pollenators. It was confusing to me, but I found a site that not only has some extremely interesting information on the history of the eggplant, it has a very simple and logical reason for why my eggplant dropped its flower:

When temperatures rise above 95°F, eggplant ceases to set fruit and may drop flowers or abort immature fruit.

Well, there you go. It got up to 95 and beyond on Saturday, during our first heat wave of the season, and Sunday morning the flower had dropped. Now I just have to hope that the next heat wave waits until August! Somehow I have a feeling that my poor eggplant isn’t going to do too well, though it already has a couple flowers in various stages of development. What is somewhat confusing to me is that the information also says that eggplants do well in the desert Southwest. As in, Arizona. (The site I linked in is actually for the U. of Arizona, which is in Tucson. And which I know, from personal experience, has many days over 95 in the summer. Yet the eggplant needs 5 months of soil warmth to produce fruit! Some additional information:

Eggplants prefer consistent soil moisture, but once established can tolerate dry spells. Although the majority of water- and nutrient-absorbing roots are found in the top 18 inches of soil, roots can reach a depth of 4 feet. To avoid flower and fruit drop, water deeply and regularly, especially during long, dry periods.

To conserve soil moisture, try planting in waffle beds or applying a 2- to 3-inch layer of mulch around the base of each plant. To minimize sun scald during the hot, intense days of summer, provide a bit of midday sun protection. Depending on your garden’s location and layout, shade can be provided by tall, nearby plants or by shade cloth. Eggplant can be grown successfully in containers. Choose smaller plant varieties and large containers with good drainage. Be prepared to water more often, since the soil tends to dry out more quickly.

The history made me chuckle a bit:

In China, as part of her “bride price,” a woman must have at least 12 eggplant recipes prior to her wedding day. In Turkey, “imam bayeldi,” a tasty treat of stuffed eggplant simmered in olive oil is said to have made a religious leader swoon in ecstasy. When first introduced in Italy, people believed that anyone who ate the “mad apple” was sure to go insane.

I guess it explains why eggplant recipes are so common in Chinese cuisine, and much less so in Italian! I’d love to know how the idea that eggplants made people insane came about in Italy though.

craziness abounds

What’s up with this weather?

Granted, we’re approaching records but breaking only some of them, so I guess it isn’t completely crazy weather. Then again, when I look at the headlines, they seem to be full of extremes everywhere. Earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, cyclones…

Heat waves.

I read last week that the first heat wave of every season is the most dangerous, that more people die in the first heat wave every summer than in later ones, presumably because we’ve acclimated a bit as the summer wears on. We’re in the middle of our first heat wave this year, and it was extra dangerous because it followed an unusually cool spring. To top it off, we had tens of thousands of people without power this weekend.

Now that had to have been rough. I was feeling the heat this weekend, and I like hot weather! The humidity was soupy and gross, though, and I’m not at all a fan of humidity.

So, we had a tornado on Wednesday, thousands of people without power through Saturday night, and a heat wave that started on Friday, but really picked up on Saturday, and is going to last through tomorrow, at least.

It just seems odd to me. Maybe I didn’t pay attention as much last year, but I don’t remember weather like this at all!

color in the garden

I started craving some color on my patio, so I stopped at the store on my way home today and picked up some flowers. I had a really nice time wandering the aisles deciding what to get. I have a feeling I’ll go back and get more, but I’m glad I only got a few plants today. I exhausted myself planting them, mostly because it also inspired me to finish weeding almost the entire rest of the patio. The person who lived here before me put smallish whitish rocks over the entire patio, which looks nice enough, but is brutal to weed. I have to move the rocks aside from small areas to get to the weeds, and my hands get torn up and bruised after a while.

But…it is (mostly) done…until the weeds grow again. Which they always do!

There is so much more I want to do with the patio, but I’m in no hurry. It will develop slowly, and likely will never be finished. It is really satisfying to think about the ongoing relationship I’ll have with my garden, as odd as that might sound. A thousand thank yous to my realator, who understood better than I did at the time just how valuable I’d find having a patio.

And as I was weeding, I found an unexpected resident! I think we scared each other, but I was able to get a couple shots off before he left.

my heirloom tomato plant: cherokee purple

A few weeks ago at the farmers market down the street, I picked up an heirloom tomato plant. I didn’t go with the purpose of getting an heirloom tomato plant, but it is a small market, it was the only organic stall selling plants, and I don’t know what I’m doing regardless, so heirloom or not, I was getting one of their plants.

They had several varieties, and I was clueless about them all. I asked her to describe them, and the variety is really fascinating. That’s the point of seed swaps and heirloom varieties, really - doing a small piece of biodiversity maintenance! And the earth needs all the help she can get, after the large scale farming, and especially after the issues GMO companies like Monsanto have created.

So I was happy to get an heirloom plant, even though I would never have expected it to be as easy as walking down the street to the farmers market. I chose the “cherokee purple” almost entirely because it already had a couple little blossoms, and that seemed like a good sign to me!

And wow, it seems to really be producing.

In addition to the 3 obvious baby tomatoes (I only noticed two of them yesterday), there are 2 partially hidden babies, and 1 fully hidden one. That’s 6 tomatoes on the plant right now!

The other exciting thing about this plant, for me, is that it seems really sturdy. It is growing strong without any kind of stake or cage to prop it up. As it gets heavier with fruit, I might need to put a cage around it (I’m too inexperienced at this point to know for sure) but the other (non-heirloom variety) tomato plant I have not only has just a few much smaller blossoms, but it needs a stake to stay upright.

When I was purchasing the Cherokee Purple, another woman was asking about Brandywines, but the stall had sold their Brandywine plant earlier that morning. The woman asking seemed very disappointed and absolutely uninterested in any other variety. I finally looked up some information on the Cherokee Purple, and was interested to see that it was described as having a similar taste as the Brandywine! Good or bad, I suppose I’ll find out soon enough. It is supposed to be a very sweet tomato. I have no idea what to expect. did find a nice blog of someone dedicated to writing about her Cherokee Purple experience! And some gorgeous photos on there of the end result, sadly not her own as the weather in her home state doesn’t sound friendly towards these tomatoes.

Doing even the smallest bit of research on the Cherokee Purples and Brandywines has me excited about heirloom plants. I might try saving the seeds and participating in a seed swap next January, or even casually with friends. It is really interesting to read about the history of particular varities and to realize that they can be traced back to specific people, and that the were sometimes in someone’s family for 100 years!

I was also surprised to see a big change in that eggplant blossom between today and yesterday. It amazes me how fast things change!

a jumble of thoughts: growth & green things

I read some really interesting articles in various photoblogs today. The summary:

• photography isn’t really art…and that’s a good thing
• art is a verb!
• daily practice is important, and for reasons that relate to a book called Blink.

Well, that seems good enough for a recap. Those are the three thoughts that were important enough to me to stick, anyway.

Daily practice is hard for me. I’m away from the house for 10 hours a day, and while that sounds like it would leave plenty of time for some photos, it doesn’t leave much room for inspiration. However, to practice the technical skills (so that when we’re inspired, we’re not thinking about the hows) doesn’t necessarily require inspiration.

Luckily it has gotten a bit easier in the past few days, coinciding neatly with my excitement over my garden. things are growing! The blossom on the eggplant plant went from looking tired and already done to suddenly being a pale purple, and then today it was spread open. A lot of change in two days!

My heirloom tomato plant has been blossoming like mad ever since I brought it home. Today I noticed two tomatoes started on it!

And even the stuff I planted by seed (way too late in the season, but it seemed worth a try anyway) is starting to show some real progress. A wee tomato plant!

I find myself going out to my little patio as soon as I get home from work to take a look at the green things growing. The weeds need some attention of course, they grow faster than anything else.

One of the things that I love about my newfound obsession with gardening and with taking pictures of the things growing in my garden is that it makes me feel really connected to … well, a lot of things. To the “art is a verb!” statement. Taking pictures of my growing garden is a two-dimensional verb!

And it makes me very happy to have nourishing things growing right outside my door. To connect myself to that aspect of life, to gain those skills, experience, knowledge.  Gardening gives me a feeling of peace.

Round 2 of Stormy Weather Night is kicking into high gear now.  A tornado supposedly touched down about 10 miles from me earlier this afternoon, but now we just have a lot of rain and thunder and lightening.  Rainy days bothered me so much more before I had a garden to nurture.  Now I’ll press my ear against the glass of the window, and just listen.

permission to feel

I wasn’t sure anyone would be interested, but Momma Wintermoon asked in a comment how my meditation practice was progressing. It helps me to write it out as well, record while I can still remember what I felt and how it went.

My first session was last Wednesday. I then didn’t have time on Thursday and forgot on Friday and Saturday. I made sure to do the guided body scan meditation on Sunday, and I’ve done it yesterday and today as well.

As expected, it has been quite different each time. On Sunday I felt like I really struggled. Not with staying physically still - the consistent part has been that I feel unable to move during these sessions, as if my entire body was made of cement or weighted by cement - but with paying attention at all.

Instead my mind sent me off into scenes from fantasy books I haven’t read and which likely don’t exist. Sword play dominated. I found that disturbing.

Yesterday was disturbing in a different way. I was feeling down about some stuff, and without being consciously aware of it (as odd as that sounds) I was playing out scenes in my mind of how I negatively project the future, and that was before I even started the meditation. I had tears running down my face during the intro, and where they mingled with my hair tickled during the entire session.

Instead of scenes from fantasy novels, I had scenes from my pseudo real life, and none of it was good. I was less able to pay attention to the body scan than even on Sunday.

Yet I think I felt the benefit today. I was very frustrated at work today, at one point almost to the point of tears. And…I took a deep breath. I let it go. I made progress, and got stuck on something else, but I made progress, and I reached out to a friend and through her got the name of someone who can help me with what I’m stuck on. I’ll talk to him tomorrow. The intarweb can get me only so far, it seems, when I am stuck on something.

Today there was none of the sadness. There was slightly more ability to focus on the body scan, though I missed entire sections of my body, so involved in other thoughts was my mind. I heard some music again, which I hadn’t heard since the first session, last Wednesday. My left hand felt like it was curled into a little bud, but when I looked at it afterwards, it was exactly the same as my right hand. I don’t know what is up with that left hand!

I definitely feel a calming benefit from the meditation. I am only just started on this particular journey, but I do have hope that it will help me at least recognize the ruts my mind falls into. “Being present”, as zen practitioners will tell you is the goal, makes it impossible to travel down those old paths of recrimination, guilt, blame and the projections of nothing-good. The more present I am, the less hold the old brain patterns will have on me.

One of the first things that he says in the intro to the body scan guided meditation is that we should give ourselves permission to feel. Whatever we feel is okay, physically as well as mentally. Letting ourselves feel lets us recognize it and then release it.

Easier said than done, granted, but it is a beautiful thought. I’m not finding meditation easy, but I am finding it helpful.

if I believe in it…

I have a dilemma that I feel should be simple.

I believe in reducing my dependence on inefficient and unsustainable energy for transportation. In other words, I feel that I should drive less, and walk/bike/bus more. I’ve made the changes in some ways - when I go to NYC now, I bus.

There are other parts of my life where it isn’t feasable - going to the sanctuary, for example. I could get within 10 miles on bus, but that’s it. Maybe a little closer. It could be argued that I could then hop on a bike, but the weather is very often not suitable, at least not for me. In addition, I imagine it would take 2.5 - 3 hours each way. That’s a lot of time.

Going to work, a quick 20 minute car ride would turn into a 2 hour public transit trip. Each way! That seems unreasonable to me. I could do it, sure, but I feel like it is crazy to expect it of myself.

And so this is the dilemma. An additional location is opening up for work. It would take me an hour on public transit, 20-25 minutes driving. They’re taking names of people voluntarily putting themselves on the list to move. It will cut some people’s driving commute pretty much in half. For others it would double it. They won’t allow us any kind of work-from-home options nor alternate work schedules that would allow us to limit the number of days we had to drive to work, so it is nice that they’re being reasonable about the location thing. They are running out of room in our building, or rather they ran out of room months ago, so they need an additional location, but they easily could have enforced teams sticking together, and made the decision for everyone who would go where.

I haven’t put myself on the list to move to that building. Yet. I am thinking about it.

And it seems like it should be a no-brainer, you know? An hour, that’s not really a big deal. Though thinking about the fact that it is bus-metro-bus with 40 of the 60 minutes being spent waiting for connections…and imagining that in winter months or any bad weather it would be painful…still, how is that different from anyone else dealing with public transportation?

This is a gripe of mine with the public transit in the area. Perhaps I simply expect too much, but 75% of the time (guessing), the places I want to go are easier, faster, and cheaper (even with the high price of gas and traffic in the area) to get to by driving than by public transit, and often by a factor of 2 or 3.

And so I find myself not putting my name on the list, and feeling guilty. At least if I was at that other location, I’d be in a position where public transit was something of an option.

I frustrate myself. If I believe in it, what is a little inconvenience?

gardening, and other things that feel good

About a year ago, I read Food Not Lawns and it changed some things for me. I had wanted to do some gardening, but Food Not Lawns made me feel that, as someone concerned about the environment, it was more of an obligation to grow some of my own food. An obligation to the earth herself, to my ideals.

I tried last year, but I can’t claim any level of success. It was half-hearted, I’ll admit that, on top of me being clueless.

I’m still mostly clueless, and I started a bit later than I likely should have, but I have growing plants in the ground right now. I have an eggplant, some peppers, cucumbers, a couple tomato plants. The tomato plants are flowering, as is the eggplant, and I believe I recognized a soon-to-be flower on one of the pepper plants. I put in a bunch of seed as well (the rest I bought as partially grown plants) and some of them are sprouting as well.

It feels good. I feel like I’m doing something. Growing things is always a source of pleasure, I believe, but in addition to that normal pleasure in green things, I feel like I am slowly making my way towards etching my own world within the larger world.

Progress is slow, as it always is if it is positive. It is motivating nevertheless.