flying time

Up north sunset--lake michigan

I know people say it all the time--you know those words about time--about time flying so fast. well, it is a common (overly common) expression for a reason; it is true. really, very hard-hitting, actually ever so true.

My sabbatical is wizzing by me. I've been doing lots. I went away for a week to a permaculture course. It was a blast. I camped at Tibbits Nature Sanctuary Tibbits Nature Sanctuary and lived through an intense night of rolling, strobe lightning thunderstorms. My tent rained in on me, and I tossed and turned even though earplugs were in my ears cause earplugs do not keep out the deep booms of thunder nor do they act as an eye patch for the lightning that beams pulses of blue and white through the thin sheen of tent fabric. You can read more about the LSC at : Qani's (the summer caretaker's) blog

I met great people at the course and really got a general overview of so much connected to permaculture--observation of the land, observation of patterns and plants and wind and sun, becoming more self sufficient and community sufficient while living in our own houses and on our own land (however big or small it may be), and on and on.

I also had the privilege to poop in a humanure all week. A humanure (well this one) was a bucket. We, 25 strangers or so, pooped on top of one another's poop and each time a person expelled feces into the bucket the person covered it with sawdust. As the bucket got full, it was dumped in a compost pit a bit beyond the lovely little house where the bucket lives and it was all covered with thick brush. It will have to compost for two years and then it will be used around trees not vegetables.


humanure outhouse

After the permaculture training, I came home and did homesteady and community things for a week. I made blueberry freezer jam from the 14 pounds of blueberries we picked a while back. I dried a bunch of romas from my garden, i made butter and then i made ghee with that butter; i made some corn chowder with the buttermilk from the butter-making run off. And one afternoon rode around with A from growing hope to plan out the GH Tour De Fresh coming up in september.


blueberry jam


golden ghee


romas

I extracted some honey from one of my frames I harvested a while back; this turned out to be quite a fiasco. I harvested the frames a few weeks ago and, little did I know, I should have frozen them for 48 hours to kill all the wax moth larvae. I did not; so when I opened the tub--yes wax moths and eggs and worms galore. My friend, R, was there with me when I took off the lid and I am so thankful she was. While I love bugs, worms that are not earthworms can make me squirm.

R shaved the sides of my hair out in the driveway cause my hair is growing bushy,bushy, bushy. The top is still all huge but the sides are down a bit now.

And then we packed for vacation and now I sit here typing from the great up north. We are here at all seasons resort-k's dad's place with my mom and dad and sister and brother-in-law and 2 nephews and niece, plus K's dad lives here and her grandma too. And family friends from way back are vacationing here right now also. So, it is a big group and we are having fun together. The kids make me laugh a hell of a lot. and time is flying by too fast but i am not holding my breath and taking it all in.


winning ayla a stuffed patriotic donkey on the claw machine at leggs inn

to die in our house

I'm back; kind of.

The last few weeks have been full up of life-changing experiences and incredible volumes of prismatic glimpses into the cycles of living and dying and living some more going on all around us.



After my last post, k's grandma got really sick. She had been starving herself for quite a few weeks and then her small, 83 pound body started to crash out. On July 28 she was rushed to the hospital from the skank-ass nursing home she was living (if you can call it that) in. She had suffered multiple heart-attacks (ya, those heart attacks somehow slipped past the nursing home staff) and was not able to talk very well any longer.

The short of it is that we brought her home on Friday, July 31 to die at our house. And her final hours in our living room were a gift that will linger long on our hearts. Hospice is an amazing organization. They got a bed delivered to our house asap and oxygen and then grandma sterling was brought via ambulance. When they took her off fluids at the hospital her blood pressure dropped to almost nil and R (an amazing friend of the family who waited with grandma at the hospital while we went home to prepare a dying space in the house for her) did not think she would make the ambulance ride. But she did.

And then we moved her into our front window and the late afternoon light shone over her dwindling body. Her skin was so translucent we could see her bones and her beautiful blue veins--straight skeleton lines and undulating blue rivers trapped beneath her soon to go back to the earth flesh.



R came over to our house to be with us and grandma until other people could be there. I cannot express the gratitude that surfaces in my heart when I think about R and her kindness. 7 years ago when K's mama was dying, R was there by her side and by K's family's side. She is a bulwark--she brings strength and compassion in her shining shadow--she is good and sets for me the example of ideal friendship and loyalty.

We knew at this time that grandma did not have many hours left, so we rallied K's dad to come down from up north, where he runs the resort in the summer and is busy beyond belief, to say his goodbye. He had planned to come on sunday, but we knew she would be gone by then, so he jumped in the car and started driving on Friday evening.

All of this is still so fresh with me. It is hard for me to write about it. I've tried getting it out on paper, but without real results. So bare with me.

We stared at grandma as she lay dying in our living room. It all felt so right and okay. Her life had been long and full. I could not help thinking how the miscarriage happened for a reason. Instead of carrying a new life into this world in the month of August, we were able to help shepherd this old life out of this world. If I had been pregnant, this would not have happened. I would have been about to burst with child. In contrast, we were able to open our home and hearts to a woman who had been the catalyst for the life k and I live together. Without grandma sterling there would never have been a KK.

I watched as the sun dappled brightness over grandma's gaunt and wrinkled yet smooth and beautiful all at once cheeks. I thought about the last of the vitamin D that she soaked into her still moving and living cells. I thought about how one day I will no longer see or soak up the sun. I marveled at the kindness of friends. A cooked for us and sat with us and stayed by our sides. T and R came over and kept vigil for a time. T sang the loveliest of songs to our dear grandma and grandma raised her eyebrows to let us know she heard the melodies and the words of love and assurance.

K's dad arrived at midnight and he watched over grandma with us throughout the night. The mother of his dear, loving, and no-longer-with-us wife now lay before him passing from this world and I could not help but think about all of the sadness that must have crept gently into his gut as he rocked in the rocking chair of his brother who also had left this world while still so young.

We stayed up through the night, sleeping an hour here and then there. We waited for grandma to take her last breath. Her breathing was so inconsistent and shallow; we wondered when it might cease and if we would notice.

Around 9 in the morning K's dad left to go get rest and K and I stayed beside grandma. K had a powerful and lovely morning with her grandma. She called on her ancestors who we could feel hovering in the room. I burned sweet grass around the outside of the house (we did not want to blow up the oxygen tanks so I stayed outside). The tender smell of the grass lifted with the gentle breeze through the windows. Around noon K's aunt came back to the house. And then around 1:00 grandma took her last breath.

We stayed with her body for two more hours. The hospice nurse came to pronounce her dead and get everything wrapped up (like disposal of morphine into cat litter, etc) She told us that we could roll a towel and push it under grandma's chin to keep her mouth closed, so I did this. We did not wash her body and I regret this, but I do not think K's aunt could have handled it. And then the cremation men came in a big, blue, unmarked van. The one man was tall and wide with a white, bushy handlebar mustache. He was gentle and his sidekick was a nondescript man with a small smile and kind hands. Their short-sleeved collar shirts were worn thin and I wondered what their armpits might smell like. K and I stood side by side--K's aunt went into the backyard and they lifted grandma from the bed onto the removal gurney. They covered her face with a sheet and then with the maroon, terrycloth-like gurney cover (the same color was used when a different set of collar shirted men took K's mom's body from the house). And then they took her 96 year old body from the house and set her in the back of the van.

K wept then. We stood on the porch and I held her and she wept. And I held her more.
And then we went inside and K asked me to get the empty bed out of the window. But I could only move the mattress and pillows, so I did.

The last two weeks I have been processing all of this and dreaming of grandma sterling often. There is so much more, but for now I will close.

a soundtrack to one story

The soundtrack to this story is throw silver by mecca normal (the song is used without permission and produced by K records). For, many years now, this song has brought up so many feelings in my gut. It makes me long for something and at the same time it makes me feel buried in the beauty of the present that is made by all of the pieces of the past.

The soundtrack reverberates with the theme of generations—coming and then passing subtly and ever-so-real from this world into the place of dust and stone. There are practical things in my life that are making these thoughts so present and persistent, but also there is this propensity within me to care about that which has happened before I lived and to think and care deeply about that which is to come after I pass from the living.

Two months ago, K’s 96 year old grandmother was moved from her apartment to a nursing home. We have been going through her things and hauling old pictures, and letters, and keepsakes, and pottery, and the belongings of a woman who held onto objects as if they were oxygen to our house, so we too can hold onto these things as our own oxygen.

All of these brittle belongings are lifted and looked at and cared for by us and then I move to my gardens and weed and mulch and fork the soil. I am so much more at peace with my hands in the earth, but I also love to hold onto the remnants of human laughter caught in a photograph or an old note.

And maybe in this time—this very specific time of dying, cause, yes K’s 96 year old grandmother is beginning to pass (she is starving herself)—I am drawn even more to the land and the birds and blueberries.

These words from Bill McKibben’s essay entitled Enoughness (he wrote a whole book entitled Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age) fit in nicely to the throw silver soundtrack busting through my head and this post, "Nature schools us in sufficiency—its aesthetic and its economy demonstrate ‘enoughness’ at every turn. Time moves circularly through the natural world—next spring there will be wild flowers again…The testimony of the rest of creation is that there’s something to be said for fitting in. And because of that, the natural world offers us a way think about dying, the chief craziness for the only species that can anticipate its own demise. If one is a small part of something large, if that something goes on forever, and if it is full of beauty and meaning, then dying seems less shocking.”

In the gardens and the woods I see that all will continue. In the eyes of a granddaughter looking at her grandmother’s past in objects, I see that generations will go on. It is a story; an okay story—set to the sparse guitar and creaky voice of a two person band I have loved for too many years to count (this particular song is slower than much of their other rather loud and irritating-but in a good way-music).

Below is a little quicktime slideshow with photos of the community garden, K’s grandma and some of her old pictures, pics of food and backyardness and my art, and flowers, and lake Michigan, and some of k’s grandma’s furniture from the 1930s all with Mecca Normal’s Throw Silver in the background.

lethargy amidst the crap--and how i cannot get the keeper up inside me

Right around now I would have been 8 months pregnant. When I think about it, I freak out a little bit. Mostly, the idea of me being pregnant or visibly pregnant--all plump with a busting bigger than a bowling ball protrusion extending from my abdomen--makes me cringe and cry.

Actually, i have not mustered up any tears for that which is not: not being pregnant;not having kids; not really wanting kids anymore, but I have thought a lot about it all lately.

I've thought about where we've been--me and my k and where we are going. I've thought about how maybe the miscarriage was really my fortune. Because this morning I was trying to use the keeper (I'm really striving to transition to no waste during my period; k's been using her cup for years, but when I've tried before well) and I kept fiddling around down in the wetness and coming up empty handed with blood all on my fingers and in my nails. I squeezed the damn thing and pushed, but I am tight. My hole is all bound up with muscle and years of being a mostly non-entrance top.

And I thought to myself, as I pushed and shoved and couldn't get it in, how in the hell would an infant human ever come out of this hole? How would I have been able to give birth when I cannot even get a silicone, smooshy, bendable, small cup up inside me?

And then I started thinking about how it would have been 8 months and then I got not sad but lethargic about it all.

Now as k's grandma s is fading from this earth minute by minute and I think about family and growing old and reproduction and hetero-normative bullshit and us(me and my k and our love and tenacity in the face of adversity after adversity), I really feel kind of numb. Like how can I think about this all anymore. How can I make decisions or even desire anything much more than what is just now here before me.

Without sounding all Buddhist, cause I am so far from being a Buddhist, I can only take the minutes as they unfold before me right now. Not that life will always be like this, sometimes anticipation is my greatest friend, and dreaming is my lifeblood, but lately just being able to make it through the day and take whatever news about all of the shit with work, or the march toward death unfolding before us, or the family conflict that comes with that march, or the conversation about children and the future, or the fact that I am taking a drug that makes me shit my brains out on a mostly daily basis,or the fact that k's dad wants some ill-equipped people to care for her other grandmother (the one not quite dying at least not yet, but almost died last year). I'm trying with all of my might to steady myself for the three months I have have off from work (this starts after 5:00 on Friday) and just let the shit roll and me slide side car through it all--with a grin on my face when capable of it.

life is so full

life is so full.

goodness, green, stress, sweat, muscle pain, fatigue, happiness, heartache, sore hands, hard dreams, escape dreams, chewing and swallowing, speaking to one another, crying, smiles forming everlasting creases on the surfaces of human skin, not knowing, knowing too much, wishing for more, yearning for less, wondering, being mean, being kind, patterns, persistence, the calm before the wind comes blowing hard and fast, the calm after the rain leaves dents in the soil, burning in the gut, watching the birds, learning to love always, listening to the sadness, vegetables, animals, bees flying dances of fertility all around the yard, berries, drying the clothes that keep us sheltered from the elements of wind, rain, and fire, calf muscles pulsing as pedals push, enjoying friendship and family, food and drink, dancing on the porch, laughter.

knowing our ever empty wombs are right and that in spite of no children our lives are full and good and sad and lovely and all of it.

below are pictures from the last many weeks.
life is so full.


blackberries--many bushes live and give in our yard


my new beehive in the back of our perennial garden


pie made by A from the blackberries and mulberries in our yard



K hanging clothes on the new clothesline that A and me (and my pops did help with drilling the eye screws) built and put in while k was in scandanavia


a beautiful turnip from one of my vegetable gardens


the turnips cooked in butter in salad with feta and walnuts


garden flowers


trey and me after the ypsilanti fourth of july parade that we rode our bikes in

work, the body, the soul (June 25)

I am sitting here loving a respite from the humid heat that’s been hanging like a milk soaked sponge over our heads for the last day and a half. A late afternoon thunderstorm emerged out of the humidity and pressure; dousing the 93 degree 97% humidity day with nickel size raindrops and ripping cracks of thunder that boomed lead heavy into my ribcage as I pedaled with all my might up the hill that emerges from the Huron river valley.

The rain was hot on my shoulders, but the wind chilled the wetness and sent the gladness of cool over my sweaty skin. The temperature reminded me of how present I am in the always recognizing the physicality of my own body.

Lately, I’ve really been contemplating work. The action of moving our bodies as human beings and gaining something in return—that which must be done to stay alive—work is in essence all about our survival. I am not talking about paid work. I am not talking about our jobs as the tool for survival. I think paid work (and this is stating it simply—but the idea that we make money in order to buy the things we need to survive is what the root really is) is one of the roots to all of our current woes—violence, addiction, “economic hardship”, starvation, lack of community, homelessness, individualism, the existence of the nuclear family sand the extended family, to name a few.

I’m a big Wendell Berry fan. I like his frankness and willingness to call things as he sees them even if sometimes some of his ideas might be twinged with a dose of didactic, white heterosexual man syndrome that makes me cough. I think overall he is a reasonable and very important thinker.

So, I was reading The Body and the Earth from the Unsettling of America a while back and I wept over a couple of paragraphs. I mean really cried. Of course, I had just had my wisdom teeth out. But I was numbed in the mouth, and so my tears came because of the substance behind the text. There is this whole section of the chapter where Berry is arguing that working with the earth has been conceptually turned into drudgery through the disconnection of body and soul imposed upon us by modern urban-industrial society (of course this is my simplistic weaving together of many of his much more complicated points).

The paragraphs talk about the evolution of the “hatred of bodily labor.” Berry states, “ Perhaps the trouble began when we started using animals disrespectfully: as ‘beasts’—that is, as if they had no more feeling than a machine. Perhaps the destructiveness of our use of machines was prepared in our willingness to abuse animals. That it was never necessary to abuse animals in order to use them is suggested by a passage in The Horse and the Furrow, by George Ewart Evans. He is speaking of how the medieval ox teams were worked by the plow: ‘…the ploughman at the handles, the team of oxen—yoked in pairs or four abreast—and the driver who walked alongside with his goad.” And then he says, ‘It is also worth noting that in the Welsh organization…the counterpart of the driver was termed y geilwad or the caller. He walked backwards in front of the oxen singing to them as they worked. Songs were especially composed to suit the rhythm of the oxen’s work…’”

And then I cried. Because this kind of respect and connection and interdependence in the ways we live on this planet, in the U.S. in particular, is so missing. Some of my finest days are the days full of what some might call drudgery. When K and I work in our yard and grow things together and create and build a life and cook and eat and smile into one another’s eyes and sweat deep puddles of salt, these are the days that sink into my heart and fix themselves like nails of golden memory to my brains.

While I am fortunate enough to have meaningful paid work, it still is not the work of creating a household or a community that I will come home to and build my days with. I think in this striving for constructed leisure that now rules the waking hours of so many people’s existences, we have blemished the goodness that can come from hard, physical labor that is interwoven with our very survival and our seeking of that which is beautiful, creative, and beyond our own understanding.

There is a great documentary out there called Ancient Futures: Learning from the Ladakh that is based on a book “by Helena Norberg-Hodge, has become an international grassroots best seller. Part anthropology, part uncompromising critique, it raises fundamental questions about the whole notion of progress, and serves as a source of inspiration for our own future.”

The documentary gives insight into the traditional Ladakhi people and the ways in which body and soul are still connected in their everyday lives--in their work which is their living and survival. It also demonstrates how the body/ soul dichotomy ideology of the west and the ever growing push, that comes with western ideology, toward automation, individualism, monetary wealth and “leisure” has begun to infiltrate and destroy their culture. Anyhow, I suggest checking it out.

So, what I want is to work with my hands and legs and arms and continue to help build this household and community that I am a part of and to do this well and to have the love and beauty that is grown from the people and the other creatures of this region carried on to the next generation and the next.

As Berry succinctly wraps it up, “It is possible then to believe that there is a kind of work that does not require abuse or misuse, that does not use anything for a substitute for anything else. We are working well when we use ourselves as the fellow creatures of the plants, animals and materials, and other people we are working with. Such work is unifying, healing. It brings us home from pride and despair, and places us responsibly within the human estate. It defines us as we are: not too good to work with our bodies, but too good to work poorly or joylessly or selfishly or alone.”

garden dinner

It sucks that my girl is in Scandinavia, and I am left camera-less because now you can't see my veggie garden thriving nicely next to my driveway or my new beehive quaintly tucked in the perennial bed in the back yard, or my tomato bed at the community garden that is bursting up ever taller and thicker with life.

But I can tell you what A and I had for supper which ended up being just divine. Oh, and byt he way K and I have a new roommate. A moved in with us nearly two weeks ago. A is one of our best friends. We redid our back downstairs room and now she's all set up with a robin egg blue space and gray carpet that K and I laid ourselves one long night.

A is a great roommate and we are so happy she is here with us. We worked hard in the yard this afternoon on something I cannot tell you about, and then I weeded and watered all of the garden beds--home and community--and then I picked four young turnips and four pea pods and a bunch of kale and stir fried all of it with the turnip greens in olive oil, salt, pepper, honey and sharp cheddar cheese. It was really quite tasty--sweet and sharp with a bit of spicy zest and served over whole wheat noodles.

One other big note in my life right now. In approximately 3.5 weeks I will begin a two week unpaid furlough from work and then when that is over I will begin a 3 month sabbatical from work. I cannot wait--I need a breather; a big, deep break.

On August 8, I will begin the Midwest Permaculture course in Columbiaville, MI
I'm using some of my tax return to pay for the sort of very expensive course, but I will be certified in Permaculture design when done!

Tomorrow for dinner I will munch a bunch of lettuce from the garden and wait patiently for Sunday to arrive so I can see my kk again and have my camera back.