Meditations on Visionary Gardening, Philadelphia, Summer 2015

Branch & Wood Garden Art. The sculpture with the shells is a creation of a neighbor who lives two blocks north. I couldn't believe the beauty of his work as I happened to pass by his house. He sat peacefully on the porch, while I got out of my car. As I walked to the sidewalk to begin a tour, he gets up and comes to the porch railing to tell me that he'll give me a good price. I left with several sculptures and a chair. 

                                                                          Gardening, Summer 2015
My daughter and I are in dialogue about how things are going to shift next year. We are going to focus more on the greens- kale, turnips, collards, salad greens- and I'm going to give broccoli another try.

Lucinato and purple leaf kale. What's amazing about these greens, including the swiss chard that's all gone now, is that if the leaves are cut off about 1/2" from the root stalk, the greens will continue to grow. It's September and I've had kale for 2 months. It freezes up nice too.

The kale was grown in a keyhole garden that I structured last year. In the center, I dug a hole, that serves as a composting bin. I'm reading about the exact ratios of leaves and scraps that make for ideal compost. 

In the keyhole garden next to the kale is rue, planted last year. It has more than tripled in size. This herb is used in cleansing rituals. I have another in the front sidewalk bed. I figure my house is protected. On Pinterest, I found this, "The Romans call it "Mars Herb" because it can be as fierce as the god Mars. It is known to relieve pain, colic and to improve appetite and digestion." 

In the keyhole garden between the kale and the rue are two types of tarragon, a dark and light green variety. I used them in a marinade for turkey chops, and then grilled them. The aroma was amazing, and the taste, incomparable! These herbs are perennials, so they'll be back next year. 

Gardening, in this time, in this period, I've discovered is multi-dimensional: it is a form of protest, it is an act of rebellion, but more than all of that, it is one of the ways in which we can shift how we are living on this planet. 

Three years it has taken me to remove all the grass from my yard, front and back (I'll begin on the side sometime next week). During the past three years, I have taken/am taking in everything that I can about the urban gardening movement and permaculture. In all honestly, I have had to take a serious look at my time. 

Gardening, on this scale, the scale where you eat what you grow, and you try to grow as much as you can of what you eat, is not a couple of days a week. Weeding is three or four times per week, given the size of the back and front gardens. Pruning, watering (especially during the dry spells, and we've had some dry spells in Philly this summer), staking, these are daily. Throwing in the harvesting time for some plants, like the fig tree I planted 2 years ago, seed planting, canning, the gardening season begins around March and extends into November. 

I have never been in Philly when the figs are ready. So as of next year, I will stick around, waiting until about November, to begin my migration to Mexico. I'll be making fig paste and fig and brandy preserves.

Then there are the tomatoes! Tomatoes! And more tomatoes! I grew two heirloom varieties of which I will repeat next year, the purple cherokees and  the yellow zebras. But the cherry tomatoes I will forgo next year.

What else? Cucumbers galore. I have been drinking cucumber, apple and ginger most mornings for the past month or so. I feel great! I went out one morning with the intention of cleaning the cucumber bed because I thought they were all finished, and this is what I discovered hiding behind the vines that had wrapped themselves around the gates of the garden entrance. 

Jalapenos (excuse the lack of accent), yellow wax beans, mojito mint (will come back next year), Thai red peppers (used a couple to season a mess of greens and some green, purple and yellow beans). When those purple beans hit the heat, they turn green.

Finally, there's the front sidewalk bed of thyme, rosemary, and in the front yard, lavender, oregano, sage and valerian! 

  

Lots of flowers from seed this year, and a little more focus on one of my favorites places of my sanctuary, the porch. 

Purple, spicy basil. Robust flavor.

Last year I cleared the grass under the side wall, that borders the driveway. The purple grass didn't make it through the harsh winter, so I had to find something else suitable for the area. 

Well I'm participating in a show coming up in December that requires 5 more pieces. I suppose I can focus on them now. I know that I haven't posted "here" since April, since we lost "Athelstan," (The Vikings).  There are two other publications on my plate,  the workplace blog and the ezine. It's a handful, but I love it.  

Oh! By the way, if you're into new earth consciousness stuff at all, I would recommend a book that I just finished. Charles Eisenstein's The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible. Fucking brilliant! Inspirational, motivational and right on point. I enjoyed every chapter. What else am I reading? The Way of Mastery, a thorough review of topics covered in ACIM and ACOL. I'll settle down this fall and start focusing on that 4th book that I wanted to finish last year. The Sessions in Shifting should be completed within the next couple of weeks, and I've decided to offer them for free. 

All and all,  I'm on it and the Source is with me. Always. Eternally.

April 7, 2015 The Resurrection

Flokki took Athelstan out! Geez.

Athelstan was an interesting, conflicted, beautiful character on The Vikings. I don't know how many of you watch the series, but I have been addicted since the first episode. I had come to identity with Athelstan's conflict. Not his conflict between his loyalty and faith in Thor or Odin and the Father of Jesus Christ, but the conflict between seemingly conflicting states. His, as mentioned, was between a relationship with the Viking Gods or the God of Jesus Christ.

The nature of my conflict was slightly different, but nevertheless a conflict.  It was the conflict between being in relationship with the world, as it is, with separation, its anxiety, its ups and downs, the addiction to the emotional roller-coaster ride, to polarity.  Up one day, down the next. On the other hand, it was the attractiveness and the peace of being at home in Christ Consciousness. Joining heart and mind in oneness, uninterrupted focus on being at One. That conflict, like any, is intensified when one can clearly distinguish, in feeling and experience, between the two states.

Athelstan had made peace with Thor and Odin, and he made a choice, one that preceded, as choices always do, the experience of being born again, or the resurrection into the light. When Flokki arrived, Athelstan was at peace with his choice and his experience.

It is clear. The old self must die in order that the new self may be born. It seems an easy choice doesn't it? -between lack and limitation, sadness, conflict and discord, and the eternal peace of Love's embrace. Not so.

Michael Hirst, the writer and producer of The Vikings, in response to the death of Athelstan, said that the kind of internal conflict Athelstan was experiencing must have a resolution. It had to end. A Course in Miracles says as much: there is a limit on pain, and sooner or later, the spirit seeks relief. Athelstan has merged back into non-physical, and that's that. So be it.

It's time to get in the garden, one of my favorite spaces, and one of my favorite times of the year. I am not a summer person, and gardening is the only thing that I can really appreciate about the summer. I'm just not a happy camper in the heat and humidity of Philadelphia, but the garden and the joy I experience in it, overshadows all of that discomfort. I've got plenty of projects that I want to get underway. I bought wood to construct a garden arbor last year, but never got to it. That was mainly because I didn't clear all the ivy from the back of the yard. It turned out to be a labor intensive endeavor. I have resolved to make clearing the remainder of the ivy the first thing I do after starting my seeds. I have purple grass that I planted last year along the driveway, and it grew so fast, that the plants are taller than the wall that borders the driveway. They will have to moved to the back. Where, I do not know. Hopefully the garden spirits will pick out a spot.

 
Then there is the inside! I started last year working on the foundation of the front of my house because there are so many cracks in it. It's an older house, and it just needs some tender loving care which it hasn't gotten from its previous two owners. Let me tell you, cement work is no joke. No wonder masons charge so much. I'm not mad at them. But I will see the project through. It may take another year to finish all the cement work, but I am up to it. I am the woman for the job.

I love my house. It is my sanctuary, my refuge, my temple of solitude and peace. And I have no doubt that it was given to me to heal, and as it is healed, so am I. It's a great exchange. Giving and receiving is one in truth.

What else is up?

A show in December, 2015.  I'm three-quarters finished with the pieces. I have two more to complete this summer and I'm ready. I'm averaging about two shows per year, and with that, I am satisfied, and grateful.

Books. A stack that I have to get to. So it will be many evenings, after working on the house and in the garden, of gin and tonics and some good reads. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, been on the reading agenda for over a year. Charles Eisenstein's The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible; Resistance Against Empire, by Derrick Jensen; Hemenway's  Gaia's Garden, all about permaculture and the urban gardener.


Relationships! My children. I'll hang with my daughter and daughter-in-law, my grandchildren. Take in tapas and the Eastern Market in DC. with my son. Visit sisters and brothers. Take in a wedding and there's plenty birthdays to celebrate! 

It's a divine unfolding going on here.

Tonight I am working on the text for the Sessions in Shifting, and ideas or information, however one wants to put it, always come to me when I am putting together something that is for a learning purpose (or in this case an unlearning purpose). Sometimes the information that comes to me has nothing to do with what I am writing. I just think that it is when I am in that zone of nonresistance, the communication flows so much easier.

But what came to me tonight was this idea about time. I felt like 2014 flew by, and I have heard other people make the same or similar comment. There is a dialogue in A Course of Love and A Course in Miracles about time. In ACIM, time is defined as a learning interval: it's the time it takes one to become aware of who they are. All life experience "in time" is engagement in lessons that are designed to bring about the awakening. Once that awakening takes place, there is no longer a  need for time. In ACOL time is used to complete the transitioning from the state of separation to the state of Unity Consciousness. ACOL takes one through this transition in The Treatises and in The Dialogues. 

Some of the guidance includes recognizing when one is acting, mostly from habit, from beliefs in the separation. It's called "running into your old self." I do this a lot, and it is what I am focusing on now. Like with this idea of time. I have begun to experience this dismantling of time. It's not like how I thought it was going to be. At first, it is emotionally painful and disorienting. Some depression comes with it, and I think this is because those structures that I based my life on have been deconstructed, and are no more. And I wouldn't go back, couldn't go back, and rebuild them anyway. They were all based on illusions/falsehoods.

Anyway, what I am finding disorienting is nothing but mind's response to absence of those structures. It's totally about thinking, and that is why ACOL says that all thought, as you have known it, must cease, or else...well, I will spend the rest of my days in this transitioning, and I simply cannot bear that.

So I will say it again. Tonight, while I was working on the Sessions, I received some communication: I've come too far, and I can't turn back now; and there ain't shit in that old world, that old life that I would turn back too. Nothing.

December 15, 2014

In approximately 16 days, we will be welcoming 2015. If the new year is anything like 2014, I am going to need a new seat belt, because the one I'm wearing now is just about worn out! Nowadays, I am focusing on the present moment, and it is no easy process. It's the dedication, the will, making a choice and abiding by it, to focus in and on the "now." I have had some challenges this year. Back in July, I was guided and inspired to live in silence. It was hell for a few weeks.Some days, I wanted to fucking scream, to drown out all that silence. For the first time in my life, I came face to face, or ear to ear, with a constant stream of judgments, criticisms, complaints, blame. Unbelievable. I knew something would give, as I made the decision that if I am going to live in silence, I'm not sharing it with those kinds of thoughts! So there was nothing to do but to deal with them. Not engage them, but to look at them and declare them "false."

2.  In August, I began consistently practicing restorative yoga as soon as I awakened. Then I added a morning meditation and an evening meditation to my day. I became aware of some channeled transmissions in September that assisted me in understanding how to eliminate this tension and separation between the right and left brain, between the feminine and masculine energy. The silence of course eased the blasts of energy from the left/masculine so that the feminine or right side could be heard. Now I am asking for a balancing and recalibration of the feminine and masculine energy of all of my bodies: physical, emotional and mental, since the feminine and masculine polarity are permeating all the bodies.

3.  Towards the end of September, I became aware of the need to give up dairy products. I don't know if it's the chemicals in dairy, or what. All I know is that for about 3 weeks, I was so congested and felt so out of sorts in my body, that it really didn't matter and still doesn't what the cause might be. I do take in about a fourth of a cup of dairy now, every week, sometimes, and I am fine. I no longer take the lactaid tablets, and I feel much better. I sleep better. I rarely have gas and indigestion. I began drinking cucumber and alfalfa juice, with a little honey and lime, which is a shift from having a small can of coca-cola in the mornings. I didn't have it everyday, but one or two days a week, but it wasn't the best way to start my day. Next is gluten. I'm not going to totally eliminate it, but I will move towards drastically reducing it. I love bread and pasta, and even with a regular exercise routine, they can pack on the pounds, and make me feel groggy.

4.  Make no mistake about it. When the belief system shifts, everything else must shift and recalibrate to the frequency of the new beliefs. When old beliefs go, then there is the old in the physical and emotional body that will naturally make its exit. Until those shifts and recalibrations are complete, there is some discomfort. But now I know that discomfort signals the coming of an expanded state and a physical reality to reflect it. Life is good and it's

getting better and better.

So for 2015, it's the balancing and recalibration of all of my bodies, and I expand in and with silence and meditation.

Verizon and the Present Moment

I am entering my 3rd month of living the majority of my days in silence. I thought it would get easier, but today I had a really tough day.I would probably call it a set-back. But one of the things that I know is that set-backs actually propel me forward. To escape the mess, I was going to go out and have dinner, even though I have food in frig to cook, because I couldn't bear one more minute alone with myself.  Knowing that I was trying to escape is what kept me inside, cooking and reflecting on how "I" threw myself off center. I got myself worked up and in a tissy. Moved right out of the present moment to get annoyed and down right pissed off at Verizon. I have been trying to pay my bill, on line, for the past 5 days, and every time I try to log in, the "connection" times-out because Verizon's server is taking too long to respond. On Saturday, I chatted online with a customer rep. who told me my problem was that I hadn't migrated my account over to the new system. After spending 30 minutes on chat with her, trying to migrate my account over, I am told that my account has already been migrated. I had sense enough that day to call it quits after that revelation and try again another day. So today was that day. 57 minutes on the telephone 2 disconnects, 4 service representatives, 2 mis-connects (I was connected to Verizon in California, when I should have been connected to Verizon in Pennsylvania, Residential service when it should have been Business). As soon as I am ready to give the last service rep my payment information, call disconnected. Now I am not only uptight, I'm pissed to the Nth degree. Of all people, I should know what workplaces are like, especially Verizon, whose workers have been complaining about how working for Verizon has gone from pleasant to a virtual hell. But I know this, and I know that my experience had the potential to drive me up the f#@king wall, i.e., out of silence and out the door. I didn't do it.

Instead, I prepared kale with garlic, onions and pasta. I sat myself down and quietly took my meal. When I finished, and as I took my plate to the sink, I remembered a line from A Course in Miracles, that says something like, "you are not really angry for the reasons you think. It's far deeper than this." In other words, I was simply using Verizon as a punching bag. And I had to come to terms with what I was really pissed about, and it wasn't pleasant because, as always, I was angry with my Self. Why?

Because this "living in the present moment" ain't fucking easy, and the returns on the work is just not what I expected. So what did I expect? I expected to make up my mind that I wanted to do this and for it to happen instantaneously. In other words, I wanted time suspended. Sometimes I have a hard time coming to terms with having chosen this experience, "spirit in form." Which brings me to the reason why I made the decision to stay in, and allow this experience to move through me: I want to be done with the separation. Now.  I don't want it lurking around some dark corner, lying in wait to have its way with me. So, in short, I appreciate the four representatives at Verizon for holding me on the line for 57 minutes and allowing all of this to come to the surface.

57 minutes is not long at all to make progress that would have otherwise taken one hundred years. I consider that a high yield. And I can do it again. All I need do is to stay "connected."

Time Acceleration II - Just another photo from the back yard

This is a Ugandan key hole garden. The center (with the basket on top) is where I put all my veggie scraps, and I water from the center too. This is the first year I have tried this type of garden. I've got baby bok choy, dill, rutabegas, tarragon, chives and a little rosemary growing in there too. I bought basil and cilantro from Lowe's and of course, it's finished. I will follow my daughter's lead and grow both from seed next year.All that shit in the right upper hand corner is weeds. Maybe the next time I blog, it will be cleaned out. Either way, I'm going to take a before and after photo. Those are always so cool.

Time Acceleration

Last night I had to get my items for August' ezine in for editing. I can't begin to tell you how time is flying by. It seems as if I just gathered all the information for the July edition. I remind myself all the time about the "collapse of time" that is actually occurring. Sometimes I like it, and at other times I feel like things are going way too fast for me to actually enjoy them. What's even more alarming is that I know that I have control over my time now. Managing and manipulating energy is real new to me, and I guess I haven't gotten the hang of it yet. I just finished making my son a quilt for his 30th birthday. Everybody gets something handmade for their 30th birthday. Well, not everybody. Just my children.

We had the baby shower for my 9th grandchild last weekend too. It seems like that came and went at lightening speed. I have a list of things to do in my house and while I can see everything in completion, I just don't know if it will all happen this summer. I started in the kitchen today, reserving a week for each room, still having to attend to my gardens, the one in front and the one in the back. And of course I have all the writing that I do: the workplace blog, the ezine, and I am back to working on the Sessions in Shifting, after having a serious block that I was starting to get a little concerned about. Then I realized that they needed some adjustments to compensate for all the information that I have been receiving in the past 2 months. Revelation is just pouring through me.

The decision to live in silence has helped tremendously. I was so accustomed to getting up in the morning and turning my music on, and then turning on the spanish television channel for listening practice. Now when I awaken I start my meditation of "acceptance" and go straight to restorative yoga for 20-30 minutes. Directing the energy the first thing in the morning makes a big difference in how my day unfolds. I was going a bit nuts there for a while, at least the first week of silence because all of my thoughts seem to be coming through on a bull horn. After reading a passage out of ACOL, I realized that this is natural. So now when some unpleasant thought comes up, I can smile, even laugh knowing that it's like shit rising to top to be released.

Here are some photos of my garden, the on in the back.The green pot is gladiolas and some wild flowers that are supposed to attract bumble bees; on the bottom, about center is purple and green okra. I wasn't here last year when it was ready, but I will be this year. To let left of the okra is mellon. I planted too many, I think, and what's worse is
that I haven't seen one mellon. If I don't get any

t

I am planting something else next year. My
fruit plants don't seen to fare as well as my veggies. Anyway, there are jalapenos and some
other pepper that is coming along next to the
okra. In the plot to the right of the green pot are
broccoli, turnips, and some other peppers. To the right of them are green,yellow and purple string beans and russian brown cucumbers. They are amazing. And of course to the right is my laundry.




Here are some other photos:Below are the tomato plants. They're huge, but I planted some orange grape tomatoes, and they are absolutely delicious. I just have to figure out how I can cook with them. In that green pot is the vicious mint. I had to take that stuff out of the ground, because it takes over everything. I am still pulling mint out of the front yard.