STILL

There was no weather today. If that’s possible. It wasn’t really cloudy, or really sunny. Neither warm , nor cold. The only movement was the thermometer’s slow climb from 28 to 50. Still I’m going to write about the weather.
I went for a long walk along our road and through the swamp, and ended up on the river bank under the bridge. Everywhere I went I looked for signs of spring. Still none were to be found.


Flood waters still linger in ditches and hollows.




Flood debris still clings to the trees like weaver birds’ nests.


And yet, I was not disappointed. I had expected, that the only sign of spring would be me looking for spring. And when I recognized this, and accepted it, a stillness came over me. Not unlike the stillness of the day. An exquisite suspension between past and future, winter and spring called now.
Yet, still in now I wait for spring, look for signs expecting none.
And that is the first sign of spring to me.

TIME IN A WORD

Time is a 4 letter word.
Like fuck , like love.
Today I wished a friend “ all the time in the world” as if time were a commodity, like money. But contrary to popular belief time is not money. Time is time, slippery, ungraspable, “never-enough-of” time. And yet we make time, or take time continually.
My friend has a desire to write a book, and that takes time. So I told him he had to make time. But that takes time he said. So I simply wished him time. All the time in the world. As if I were a billionaire in hours, or the head of the State Chronological Lottery Board.
Wouldn’t that be something if you could buy a lottery ticket and the prize was time?
What would you do with all that time?
Spend it on a lavish world cruise?
Feed the time-hungry like mothers, or work-a-holics?
Would you keep doing what you’re doing , only longer?
The first thing my friend would do is quit his job.
Would you quit your job?
I don’t think I could.
More time , more gardening.
Maybe all the fruit trees would get pruned this year, and the grapes, too. Maybe I would finally get one bed totally weed free.
Or read all the greatest gardening books of all time.
There it is again, that 4 letter word.
“ Time isn’t after us,
Time isn’t holding us”
David Byrne of the Talking heads sang those words more than 20 years ago, when youth perhaps made him believe he had all the time in the world. Would he sing about time running out today?
Does time run out on us? Or do we run out of time?
“ Time’s up!” the game show host calls out.
So maybe time is not win-able, or make-able, or even take-able.
But it sure is enjoyable.

OUTSIDERS

Each Morning I wake before dawn. Even before the birds begin to sing. I’ve stopped looking at this as a problem, a disorder, and accept it as a gift. Extra time in the day. A few moments of calm before the storm of activity I call my life.
The first thing I do is step outside. No matter the weather. Still in my slippers and pajamas, this time of year often wrapped in a blanket, I go out on to the covered front porch on the east side of the house. The darkness around the porch is dispelled by a light we keep burning day and night. It is the strange fearful habit of farmers to keep the light burning , in case the cows come home I guess, even if we don’t have cows. In this little mantel of light I take a few deep breaths.
You see I’m an outsider.
A few years ago I had a knee operation, a very simple operation , that had me laid up for weeks. While I lied in bed my left knee cocked into an uncomfortable position by a big pillow, I thought. I had plenty of time to think.
What I thought about was what I would do if I couldn’t garden for a living anymore. I had horrific visions of fluorescent lighting in taupe painted rooms. A chair and a desk as tight as a straight jacket. A small unopenable window to the outside. I find office jobs scary. You see, I’m an outsider.
When I go to the theatre, during intermission I go outside with the smokers. I’m afraid I might have missed something, like a chance shower, or a fluctuation in the temperature. Just to breath the second hand smoke seems preferable to being inside.
I know sometimes this behavior borders on addictive, reeks of claustrophobia. If I’m somewhere where I can’t get a breath of fresh air I get panicky or sullen. I used to sleep with the window open all year long. Now that I share my bedroom it’s out of the question.
So I get up at 5 AM, and the first thing I do, well, maybe not the absolute first thing, is to go outside.
You see, I’m an outsider.
Are you?



Unexpected snow.

FAMEFAMEFAMEFAMEFAME

I first started thinking of my self as a writer back in a 1974. I was wearing tartan bell bottoms and blue platform shoes, listening to David Bowie at that time. I was a young dude and it was the 70’s, please forgive me. Cooks were cooks and gardeners,gardeners. There were no Iron Chefs, just Julia Child, no garden celebrities, just Thalassa Cruso. It was a time when fame became famous. It was probably Andy Warhol’s promise for 15 minutes ( he actually denied saying that) that got the fame mill going and fame began to displace money as the American Dream.
Things were much simpler then. I would mimeograph my poems and hand them out. It all seems so quaint and nineteenth century as I type it into my laptop, though it truly wasn’t that long ago. I still am a hunt and pecker, technology has not changed my skills there. But it’s the malleability of the ‘page’ I love now. No white out , no reams of paper before arriving at a clean copy. I know “we’re using less paper”, that computer technology is “greener”, I think history will show us the truth. But that is a subject for another blog. Now like most of you I am mesmerized by the web to the point of believing I can’t live without it. “It’s only a tool,” a friend said to me only a few years ago when I sidled up to my first computer, with the voice of “2001”’s HAL echoing in my brain. I’ve learned to make use of this tool over the years. It has revolutionized bookkeeping and tax time for me. It has given the hidden researcher in me a speedy way to bounce from subject to subject without leaving my chair. I still go to the library frequently, I will never get over the lovely sensuosity of books. But what I really love about my computer is distribution. I used to be an avid letter writer, to the point of which licking the stamp was a ritualistic act. I actually miss it at times, but it never had the far reaching impact of blogging, which at this moment I think of as corresponding. I ‘correspond’ in Australia , Israel, Germany, India and Wisconsin. At least that’s the ones I know of. The web has put my ramblings in global distribution.
When my friend Bre ( check out his website I Make Things) set me up with a blog 7 years ago I was dumbfounded as to what to write about. I am a gardener so I decided a gardening blog might be the way to go. But Bre didn’t like my content.” Just report what you’re doing: ‘ Today I planted 700 tulips’ ; ‘Today it rained all day’ ; ‘ Today I dug a hole’,” was his stern advice. He truly believed a blog, a web log, was exactly that, an archive of activities. But my persistent poetic under-pinings, let me to believe it was an archive of thoughts and feelings. But I tried his way for a while, but lost interest. There is a sufi saying that Jesus said “ a man can only spend what is in his pocket”, mine happen to be full of poetic under-pinings and philosophic meanderings. Because I had so few comments on my blog I thought maybe I wasn’t so brilliant after all and stopped. I read other peoples blogs. Some were “ archiving activities”, others were “mimeographing” poetry and “handing it out”, others were becoming columnists, reporters and educators.
So I began contributing to the blog-o-sphere again. Spending what I had in my pocket.
But I still have my notebook and pens. It all starts there for me. My thoughts flow better in ink on paper. The clickety-clack, or should I say clunkety-clunk under my hands, of the keyboard some how bogs down my thought processes.
It’s February and I have more time than dirt on my hands.
More space to wonder and wander in this fat old head of mine.
More time for questions.
Is there a difference between writing and blogging? I’ve heard the word ‘blog’ tossed around so derisively by some very well educated people, or at least people who want to you to believe their well educated. Is blogging somehow less than writing? And if so what is it then?
Who are we bloggers?
The new journalists?
Columnists?
Writers?
Or Correspondents? Are we all little Anderson Coopers on the front line of our back yards?
I guess I would say that’s how I see myself after 5 years of blogging. I’m simply writing missives, letters, correspondences with no address but the wide open cyberspace. Like messages in bottles they land in Australia, or Italy, Boise or Kentucky.
A few weeks ago I stood naked on the beach. Not truly naked, but without a lens, or a screen or any devices between me and the world. The world that we have made so small with the internet. But I realized that the world has not changed size. The Pacific is still immense beyond comprehension. Not even the most skilled swimmer among us would consider swimming it, unless you include whales in the “us”. And when I looked up into the night sky and the tenderly flickering Milky Way, I wondered if anyone up there was reading my blog. Then suddenly I realized how claustrophobic I was in cyberspace. How seductively expansive the small piece of sky above my head was, how wide still the seas.
Now I am back home sitting at my desk in logger jeans, I’ve kicked off my Muck Boots and slipped into the camel hide slippers I bought tin India (somethings haven’t changed). I’m clickety-clunking away at another letter to no one and everyone, at least everyone who reads it. On February 23 Andy Warhol will have been dead for 21 years. Are his legendary words finally coming true? Is fame being diminished as we each gather our 15 minutes, one megabyte at a time?
Is garden writing being turned into a series of soup cans with out a brand name?

TRADE OFFS

We’ve made it half way. Two days ago was Imbolc, the pagan festival that celebrates the halfway point between winter solstice and spring equinox. You might think of it as Candlemas if you follow the Catholic calendar, or Ground Hog’s Day if you’re a T.V. meteorologist. What it means to everyone in the northern hemisphere is that the days are getting markedly longer, and you couldn’t complain about that, no matter what your religion.
We are lucky in the Northwest to be having a sunny spell. A long overdue sunny spell. You can really fell the jump toward spring, the birds are singing more and dandelions begin to pock the lawn. But it’s the sun, so warm ,so bright that gets all the credit for our good moods these days.
I’m busy in the garden again. Pruning shrubs. Cutting back the last of the perennials. Hopefully fertilizing. I’m as busy as the flocks of robins gorging on the waking insects, getting drunk on the fermenting cotoneaster berries.
I’m a little drunk myself, on sunshine. The gray diffuse sheen we called days these passed weeks was hard . Weather dependent, I guess that’s what I am.
The English novelist Julian Barnes wanted to entitled his first novel “No Weather”. Actually as a young writer he vowed to never write about the weather. I don’t know if he managed it, but it seems to me like a perverse literary pretense. Maybe he felt that the weather was too mundane for great fiction, or that “the most popular subject of conversation” would bog down his fleet stories. I don’t know how you could leave it out. Weather influences everyone and everything. It is the common denominator. No matter your religion, race, political affiliation or sexual orientation weather, like love, will get you. Maybe it this incredible loss of control in the face of weather that makes us human.
Look at London. Big powerful London. Modern fast moving London, shut down by 4 inches of snow. Julian Barnes lives in London. I wonder what he’s thinking about weather now. Was he part of the throngs of Londoners who came out to play, because everything else was impossible? Does he look for a sunny spot on a park bench in February?
Last night I went out to say good night to the stars. It’s a silly little bedtime ritual I’ve initiated since I’ve moved to the country. As if they were my children, or I, theirs. The moon and Jupiter were icy white and brightly haloed. The temperatures had already dropped below freezing. If it were summer I might have lied on the deck and soaked up some star light, but a thin layer of ice was already forming and i was longing for bed.
By morning the world was frosted. I had to scrape the windshield, but that was a small price to pay for being able to see the sunrise.

WASTE OF TIME

I always like to get away from the garden in the winter. Usually I escape to books. Sometimes a snow deletes all the chores around the garden, at least for a day or two. Sometimes I just need to get away. Last Winter we went to Mexico, which was great for squeezing every last drop of chill out of my bones. But the lush tropical gardens, even the wild dry jungle of the Yucatan gave my botanist’s and gardener’s eyes a lot to do.
Where do you go?
This past weekend we drove to the Washington Coast. We rented a small cabin in a small Quileute fishing village at the mouth of the Quillayute River. A barren winter beach can really calm a gardener’s mind, even though the ocean is never quiet. The waves are constant and strong at La Push. So we retreated to our cabin and I read until I fell asleep. In the middle of the day!
When I woke I could hear my mother’s distant voice, “ What a waste of time.” Luckily she was only in my mind.
So, I though I couldn’t bring myself to get out of bed, I thought at least I could think about work.
But I failed.
I did spend a few minutes trying to imagine a beach garden. Really an oxymoron. Just considering moving the detritus to get started was daunting not to mention the waves. So I thought about our garden back home. How one big slow wave --that’s what a flood is after all-- passed through a few weeks ago. How one big wave 8 feet tall passed across our land depositing tires and stealing soil and plants. We have been so busy cleaning out the basement that I haven’t had time for the garden or the nursery that I wrangled together at the last minute with bird netting and posts. I did pick up a few lavenders of the north lawn that had been de-potted by the current and shoved a 100 yards down stream. I was actually amazed to find the potted pinks that I keep on an old metal shelf to keep them dry ended up 4 feet under water and still look alive, and well.
So, there I was at the beach wasting time thinking about the garden when I could have been counting waves until I was mesmerized. But I started thinking about beach gardens , and waves, and our garden, and floods. Remember the fun-filled and frustrating hours building sandcastles? What a waste of time. But what a pleasure, too. Sunny hours building, cultivating delusions of permanence.. And then a wave came....
Even though the flood was only one big wave it knocked down a sandcastle I was building in my mind. Was I wasting time?
I began to think about other gardens I made. That rose up, not unlike a wave, and crashed when I moved on. All our gardens are prone to the waves; months, years, decades, a lifetime. They crest and crash. And yet we are perfectly happy to build our castles in the sand. Snubbing out noses at impermanence.
Wasting our time?



Is surfing a waste of time. I’m not talking about internet surfing, but wave surfing. There were surfers at the beach, wet-suited young men gutsy enough, or is it ballsy enough, on January 24th to enter the cold North Pacific to catch a wave. I admire their bravado, or is it “madness” as my companion called it. All for the thrill of catching a wave for a moment or two.
Our gardens are momentary, too.
Declining and reviving constantly, moment by moment.
Dissolving when we leave-- a garden is the gardener -- wave-like into a larger reality.
So what if we made our gardens in that larger reality? Would that be less of a waste of time?
Or should we just keep surfing, through the seasons, the years,the floods, and the chores?
And stop wasting time.





Life in the surf holds tight.

YELLOW

Even though Mahonia "Arthur Menzies" is screaming April yellow, It's still winter. I even heard a rumor of snow.