Worked most of the day at B, the two new Dye Plant Beds and when tired, i walked down here to the Wall Garden, at campsite A where Alyssia will sometime live. Sat and Looked. How it's READY. How I'm Ready.
this is JANUARY. January , the end of. And look at this.
there was the smallest of small BLACK, totally BLACK lizard. Lifting its right hand up and off the earth as it looked at me
as we used to say in the 60's, Trippin. I am trippin with the thing of Compost, the thing of Time, the thing of seeming to be just waiting. The thing of seeming like nothing is happening. So many thoughts that they arise so fast that they never become complete, like, a full sentence, they appear and are "seen" and before they might have a period at the end of their sentence, they move on. Compost. They are compost. I don't even know what to say about it all right now, except it's just Great.
GREAT.
remember a while back when i said i should be in therapy now?, well, Wish Come True, my dreams. Oh, my dreams. How i have always said i should donate my brain to science because of how i dream and now…how great, here i am, 70 two or three, i'm not sure, but my dreams have stepped Up to do the work…no longer are just crazy, but crazy with Purpose. I can't try to make sense of any of this here, it would take up so much SPACE and unnessasarily so, because it's all just COMPOST, but all the stuff, the partially conscious baggage, that stuff that's down in the corner of a deep pocket like Chogyam Trungpa talked about, or was it Sun Bear?, no Chogyam Trungpa, that little ball of stuff that we reach for now and then through our lives, the little ball of shit with lint all stuck to it, that Wendy Golden Levitt and i talked about being there, the small shames….
anyway….COMPOST. ……~~~~~*COMPOST*~~~~~ I LOVE compost. Literally and figuratively and spiritually….LOVE.
Jenny and her man came today to put up the fence around Campsite B. Half of it is finished. I really like working with them. It's Compost. And she brought that compost that i saw on FaceBook, the woman who had horse, goat, chicken, duck and guinea pig compost….a year old…bagged in feed bags. I'd asked her to get 10 bags, she brought 14. Ten for the Wall Garden and then i got 4 for B.
and they left and i had time left to stitch some of the kantha kantha kantha on this Cloth and to look under that flap now and then at the "thing being born" and FEEL it….how nothing is ever wasted. Nothing. It's all compost. Everything we label good and bad, everything we label worthwhile and not , something or nothing, it's just labels and it's all just Glorious COMPOSt.
and the cauliflower. the Bless~ed cauliflower. Here it is. January. We direct sowed seed in May. Late. The plants grew. and grew and grew. Leaves. Leaves that we harvested over the months for those stir fry mornings. When did i stop watering down there, in the Wall Garden?, September? i don't know, but thinking the "season" was over…..and i didn't look for a while. How long? maybe 3 weeks? And today, as we brought those bags of compost in….oh! OH!…like OH in neon, Cauliflower. Only this ONE, modestly sized, but many little ones, and how i'd given up on them but they did not quit, but continued toward their Becoming
it was supposed to be "my" day. The plan was that i would haul even more mulch down to the B garden area. Haul it using the tarp method. Would then be Ready for when Jenny shows up tomorrow to fence it in. But that didn't seem to be how it needed to go. So, it was me and Emrie. And without detail, there was Long and Sustained Gaze upon her, me. She's been calling me Ma. Now it's G'ma. We shifted. We find ourselves in long sustained observances of ourSelves.
yesterday i'd gone to the grocery store in Oroville, to the Post Office and then for the first time over to Alyssia's place…the new rental. For a couple or few months she'd looked at where to move from Chico and couldn't decide. And then, the FIRE. Suddenly, there was NO WHERE to move to. Everything was taken. And then, this place, a rent with option to buy. she has been working on it for a couple weeks. All the copper had been stolen. No pipes work, meaning no water, no gas. It was built in 1910. There's moss on the roof.
She said…. come up Lincoln, past the feed store. Keep going, through the "bad part", and then there's a space of Nothing and then beyond that, some streets to Mill St. left. she's there. At that corner, on Virginia. I went. It was the first time i'd been in a "house" since i moved here. I'd never gone to her place, a normal condo apartment in Chico, i've never gone to Jenny's apartment in Chico. Just haven't. So…..there i was. in a neighborhood. a California neighborhood. an Ify neighborhood. That she described as one with a lot of Foot Traffic. I didn't know what that meant.
a sustained gaze.
Today i watched Democracy Now. The segments on Sundance. Hale County This Morning This Evening. Documentary. RaMell Ross Director. and they talk about this. The sustained gaze, to LOOK, really really look, for a long time.
Staring.
And i watched twice on Face Book something by Sacramento Bee, a documentary Rebuilding Paradise.
All this. How things need sustained gaze. Long. Long Looking.
There was the extra space on the right side. No known reason. And also no question. Extra space on the right.
On the road UP and Down…how it's so different, yet the same road. On the Goat Paths. Twigs and stone form glyphs. RAIN makes them so evident. Bas Relief. am i remembering that correctly? So evident, you stop in your tracks to Read them. Hoping to learn the Language.
this morning felt off. But once OUTSIDE, everything came into focus. Joanne, blog Wednesday's Child, jsuley.blogspot.com nudged me forward. She's teaching a class at her Library in Maine on Permaculture Gardening. I've read a lot. But reading a lot doesn't equal doing. I instinctively respond to the No Till concept, more so, here, in this Forest Place. But….cardboard Oh eee. but with making these first beds for the dye plants, in space where so many of the grass people live. EEEEeee again. I really want the dye plants to make it this year…indigo, madder….and i need just a small space for that. So, ok, cardboard and i ask the grasspeople for just this much space. So much left for them. Just this much.
i pushed back what i'd brought with the rake, going down to the earth and placed the cardboard. Which was made easier for me because Jenny had brought it last summer. Thinking we might use it to discourage the poison oak, but it's just lay there through the summer and to now and, Now, it's soft and already beginning to transform/decompose….soft, pliable, earthlike, i can think. So this is one bed. There needs to be another. Tomorrow.
Way in the far away back you can see SunnyRay as he watches the doe Goats set out. In between working , i sat and watched him. His focused attention on the does. His standing, alert.
and they go. SUN today, after days of RAIN RAIN RAIN there is SUN and they once again retrace their pattern of movement, which is quite soft and gentle and reassring,…the pattern of it, they follow a design that they have made, morning till dark. Their hooves like stitching
rain continued but tonight is supposed to be the last of it for the next 4 days. Stitching and watching out the window, i managed to take advantage of a small space in it and got a bucket full of GoatEarth over there. Rain has been perfect for that. There was a long long deep throated roll of Thunder as if to acknowledge the storm's passing.
and bless her, Krista Tippet On Being, ran the 2015 interview with her again. I'd listened to it then, but today, like the first time. I listened twice. I will listen again.
i know she loved Solitude, believed in it, but now that she's come to be part of the ALL of Everything, i can ask her. Can ask her to accompany me, as i walk and work. It will be ok now, to ask her and i did. She watched as i worked the fence line at B, clearing of branches so the fencing can go smooth. And just inside this part, on the East, a little circle of trees that will be all leafed out and a glade. I'd thought for Emrie and i. But now i think for Emrie and me and Mary O.
