My son-in-law says it’s his lucky number, so he and my daughter were married on May 24th, fourteen years ago. I hope that they had a Happy Anniversary today. I made dinner — spicy glazed shrimp over pasta with a double chocolate mouse pie for dessert. I even did the dishes (that’s usually my son-in-law’s job). And my grandson dressed like a waiter in a fancy restaurant and poured the champagne, served the dinner and dessert, and cleaned the table after.
It was a nice day all-around, even though it was muggy and the mosquitoes were out having a great time.
I’ve always wanted to grow calla lilies, and today my daughter planted the pot of them I bought last weekend. I couldn’t resist buying them because it was the first time I had ever come across a whole blooming pot of them for sale. I might have liked a different color, but those were the only ones available. They won’t last through the winter in our planting zone, but I’m going to try to remember to dig up the bulbs and bring them inside during the fall. I really do like calla lilies. (duh)
All the rain we’ve been having has really stirred up the growing green. When they bought this house, I sent them an odd tree I had seen somewhere called a “Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick.” From here: This shrub reaches a height of 8′-10′, with a similar spread. The flowers of Harry Lauder’s walking stick are yellowish-brown “catkins,” as on pussy willows. The blooms appear in early to middle spring. However, this shrub is not grown primarily for its blooms but for its unusual branching pattern, which is indicated by its other common names: corkscrew filbert and contorted hazelnut. For as you can see from the picture, its branches contort themselves in every which way, resembing corkscrews.
Right now, ours is only a couple of feet tall and is covered with spring leaves. But in the fall you can see the screwy branches. In a few years, it’s going to be a real eye-catcher around here.
Our gardens around the house are fun and funky, evolving as the spirit moves one or the other of us. I’m rather partial to the little troll house that sits in the middle of a section of flourishing green at the end of a little path. No one seems to be living there yet, but, certainly, any on of our resident chipmunks would be welcome to move in.
Meanwhile, over where I put a bird feeder so my cat can sit on her perch and watch the activity out her window, a male grackle visits several times a day. I’ve never had a grackle feed at a feeder; they usually just eat what falls on the ground.
Although the grackle is often considered part of the blackbird family, along with crows and starlings, it actually is not. It is part of the meadowlark and oriole family of birds. It is a large black bird with an extra-long tail. About its head and shoulders are iridescent feathers that change from blue to green to purple or bronze, depending on the light.
This coloring often reflects a need for those to whom the grackle comes to look at what is going on in their life differently. It says that situations are not what they appear to be and you may not be looking at them correctly–particularly anything dealing with the emotions.
Keep in mind that black is the color of the inner and the feminine. The purple and bronze coloring about the head especially usually indicates that emotions are coloring our thinking process. The grackle can help us to correct this.
….it has chosen to live here and delight my senses. And be a host to the lovely fritillary butterfly.
For violets suit when home birds build and sing,
Not when the outbound bird a passage cleaves;
Not with dry stubble of mown harvest sheaves,
But when the green world buds to blossoming.
~Christina Georgina Rossetti
As with so many ideological positions that humans embrace, there often is no right or wrong. Wild violets are weeds. It is OK to enjoy them, ignore them, or eject them. Whatever works for you.
What works for us is letting them grow wherever they want and then mowing them along with lawn AND transplanting them where they make beautiful borders or mounds in strategic places. I just transplanted some to grow at the foot of our little sitting Buddha and to top off this goofy head/planter that guards a little side garden plot.
I wonder if they’ll grow happily all year in a globe of water, the way my Prayer Plant and various ivies and vines do. I’ll probably give it a try.
(If you are interested in prayer plants and the correct way to grow them, you should read this.)
Which leads me to the tale of the whale.
While I do not believe in a god of any kind and, therefore, by definition, am an atheist, I do believe that there is a wisdom — a kind of energy — deep down in each of us with which we easily lose touch. Or maybe we never actually found it to begin with.
And, it’s possible (given quantum mechanics stuff) that such wisdom is connected somehow to everything else in the universe. What I call wisdom or energy, many people call SPIRIT. But that word conjures something close to a being, and so even that word doesn’t work for me.
“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.”
“Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature.”
“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere.”
So, in my pursuit of what I have lost touched with, I’m seeing a therapist who uses “active imagination.” I have engaged in this practice many times before in my past and have found it useful, helpful, and creatively engaging.
One of narratives that can be introduced into an active imagination exercise is the “Personal Totem Pole,”, a technique developed by Dr. E.S. Gallegos. I participated in a Totem Pole workshop that he led more than 25 years ago, and I still remember how the experience energized me and helped me to begin resolving issues that I had with myself.
Oh yes, the whale.
Well, that’s the image that appeared in my chest (my heart chakra), where I have been physically feeling a great deal of constriction. Apparently, the whale is not the usual image associated with the heart chakra, but there he was, looking more like a Disney cartoon than a real whale.
The thing about these “inner journeys” is that whatever comes up is the right thing to come up. So, a cartoon whale is as valid and as powerful as the image of a singing humpback.
So, now I both spend meditative time with this whale as well as time googling around for information about whales in general and whales at totem animals. I also popped over to Itunes and downloaded some whale songs. Sometime this week I will dig out and again watch our DVD of Whale Rider.
The process that starts with a guided imagery/active imagination exercise fascinates me. It takes me down learning paths I never would have gone otherwise. It uses my affinity for symbols and metaphors to stimulate journeys into my unconscious that always wind up unleashing some of that inner wisdom/energy that is hard to consciously tap into.
With wild violets and whales, I launch myself into Spring.
A day like this in early Spring would be the beginning of our “stoop sitting” season.
There were no driveways in that old urban neighborhood, with no basketball hoops in them. But we all had stoops. The stoop was for the kids; the upstairs porches for the adults, from which they reigned over that blue-collar neighborhood with watchful eyes.
My cousins and I would sit on the bottom step of the 3-family-house stoop (where most of them lived) and play Jacks on the sidewalk or Stoop Ball (which we called Fly’s Up) from the first two steps using a super pinkie ball. The sidewalk itself would be chalked with games of Girls Are and Hopscotch. I couldn’t find anything online defining our game of “Girls Are,” and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s just the name we gave it. Maybe it’s even a game we made up.
There wasn’t much of a backyard, back then, and within what there was my grandparents had planted various greeneries that I thought were weeds until I saw my grandmother make concoctions for her arthritis out of them.
Now I live in a middle class neighborhood where people don’t seem to ever sit out on their stoops. Except for us.
The front of our house, with its minimal stone stoop, faces south, so it’s the best place to sit and have a cup of tea in the morning or relax after dinner. In a few weeks it will have plants on and around it, but it’s still too cold to get the plants in. But we all sat out there in the sun for a while today — the only family in the neighborhood who stoop sits.
We do have a back yard, where the vegetable garden will go again, bigger this year, and where perennials wait for a stronger sun while crocuses, daffodils, and a yucca plant that never dies off in the winter are pressing their way into Spring. And in the shady side yard, where the irises are are just sprouting, the heavy old cement Pan statue that I have hauled around through four moves, now sits, down and dirty, playing his silent pipes.
This is my response to the visual writing prompt at Magpie Tales. You can read the responses of other writers at Magpie 35.
Compost
It is the season’s leavings
that root me to this spaded place —
bent twigs, loosed leaves,
the year’s used ends and endings
storm-swept in sheltered corners.
Barren fields and desert reaches
free the weed to tumble in its time,
but the clutter of the season’s leavings
frees the roots from hidden seeds
of other spaces, other times.
It’s been a long while since I’ve published any of my poetry. It’s been a long time since I’ve written any poetry.
Early last spring I ran across a request for submissions from the Ballard Street Poetry Journal, and I took a chance and submitted one, which was published in the current Summer 2010 issue.
I find the poetry in many journals rather inaccessible, either for reasons of language or subject. But I loved all of the poems in the Ballard Street Poetry Journal. Here’s mine, which appears on Page 21:
The Gravity of Gardens
They gave me a garden the size of a grave,
so I filled it with raucous reminders of sense:
riots of marigold, lavender, sage
rosemary, basil dianthus, rue.
And waving madly above them all
spears of brazen Jerusalem artichoke
that perplexing garden gypsy
that blossoms and burrows,
grows up to nine feet tall, and
in the harsh summer storm
dances her defiance
to the grim arrogance
of gravity.
My daughter grew several different tomato plants from seeds, and they all came up — pear tomatoes, German striped, persimmon, purple, and others I can’t remember the names of. I have been in tomato heaven. I eat them like fruit.
It’s the end of summer now, and the last batch is ripening on the vine despite attacks from tomato horn worms.
I didn’t do the kind of gardening this year that I used to love to do. Too tired, I guess. It’s getting harder and harder to get down on and up from my knees. And, for some reason, a lot of the herbs and flowers I planted in the spring didn’t make it.
In my early married years, before I cultivated a green thumb, my husband used to joke that I killed even plastic plants. Maybe I’ve come full circle.
I am looking forward to autumn. It’s my favorite season. The weather suits me, as do the colors.
It is the end of summer, and I will miss sitting on the canopied swing in our front yard. It has become my favorite place to hang out.
It is the end of summer, and I wonder just how much longer my mother can go on.
Well, it’s not MY toy, really. I just sit and watch. And take photos.
This spring it will be a bigger garden plot, with tomatoes of all colors. With lettuce and beans and squash and other vegetables that their fertile fancies haven’t yet decided upon.
I grow the herbs on the other side of the house, where even now the lemon scented Melissa is boasting a mass of bright green leaves. It will make a relaxing summertime iced tea after those hot days tending the garden.
I noticed that the poppy seeds I planted in the fall are starting to poke up through the covering of autumn’s leaves that have kept the ground from freezing all winter.
Things are springing. They are tilling. I am waiting.
Until the snows came, Buddha rested on a tree stump in the corner of our yard. Now he waits in the corner of the porch, along with bike helmets and what will be the starting of seeds.
I wish I could wait like Buddha, without anticipation or expectation. Waiting in stillness as lives begin and end, as the first butterfly finds its way to our doorstep, as somewhere on a mountain, an old woman cries for stillness.
Early in my marriage, I tried to grow some house plants and they all died. My once-husband used to say that I could kill plastic plants.
I grew up in a city-space house devoid of greenery. What did I know.
Later, when my own nuclear family moved into a house on a rural hillside, I started a garden. About the same time, I joined a writers workshop. Things started to grow, inside and out.
Today, the jade plant I’ve been nurturing for years is on its last leggy legs. Even the ivy in the hanging planter is drying up. My garden outdoors is wilting. This blog hasn’t been faring much better.
And so I’m on a quest for a Fall writer’s workshop. I need to get that green thumb moving, need some seeds, fertilizer. Need to stir that dirt, above and below.
I’ve always wanted to grow calla lilies, and today my daughter planted the pot of them I bought last weekend. I couldn’t resist buying them because it was the first time I had ever come across a whole blooming pot of them for sale. I might have liked a different color, but those were the only ones available. They won’t last through the winter in our planting zone, but I’m going to try to remember to dig up the bulbs and bring them inside during the fall. I really do like calla lilies. (duh)
When they bought this house, I sent them an odd tree I had seen somewhere called a “Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick.” 
No one seems to be living there yet, but, certainly, any on of our resident chipmunks would be welcome to move in.
What works for us is letting them grow wherever they want and then mowing them along with lawn AND transplanting them where they make beautiful borders or mounds in strategic places. I just transplanted some to grow at the foot of our little sitting Buddha and to top off this goofy head/planter that guards a little side garden plot. 
The front of our house, with its minimal stone stoop, faces south, so it’s the best place to sit and have a cup of tea in the morning or relax after dinner. In a few weeks it will have plants on and around it, but it’s still too cold to get the plants in. But we all sat out there in the sun for a while today — the only family in the neighborhood who stoop sits.
