Sunday, June 12, 2005

I have diverted coverage of our efforts to begin carving a garden out of a wilderness to a new category, The Garden at Thoms Creek. I'll continue to post about the garden here first, and then after a day or two move the post to the category, lest this page become overencumbered by photos.
11:51:44 PM    comment []  


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Minnesota native, Pulitzer-winning poet
Richard Eberhart Has Died

"Richard Eberhart, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet
admired for mentoring generations of aspiring
writers, died at his home Thursday after a short
illness. He was 101.

...

"'Poems in a way are spells against death,'
Eberhart once told the Concord Monitor. 'They
are milestones, to see where you were then
from where you are now. To perpetuate your
feelings, to establish them. If you have in any
way touched the central heart of mankind's
feelings, you'll survive.'''... [AP]


The Blunting
by Richard Eberhart

To survive things have to be blunted,
Raw experience is too fierce to endure.
The mind blots out much of experience
To make good sense of the rest.

The immediate is our hold on reality.
Even the past is always changing,
We see with clarity what we see,
But in no sense in total degree.

Things are best this way. We get on
Because we do not dare the whole view
Which, if we could comprehend it,
We would wonder whether it is true.

There must be a God's view of the universe
Which we are intelligent enough to imagine
But are fated to a human condition
Which has, perforce, its own perdition.

If you are too wary it is too painful,
A blaze in the eyes is partially blinding,
The mysteries the Greeks knew as too deep
Are secrets the sybils are willing to keep.


10:55:33 PM    comment []  


THE GREAT TREE HUNT AT DAY'S END

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6:43:30 PM    comment []  


Feeling much better. Creating a garden out of what had been a temporary holding place for plants. Looking forward to getting help from my brother today, fetching creek water. He is an Aquarius, so carrying water should be second nature. Later this week I'll drag out the creek water pump and set up a system of hoses like the one we had last year. We will run out of creek water this summer. It will be dry for several months. I know this because the source of the creek is the great mountain that used to be in my header, the one covered with snow. Consider that that photo was taken just before I moved here, July 2004. We had water all last summer (except for a week or two when some rancher far upstream diverted it to fill his livestock ponds). Now, as of a month ago, and to this moment, that same mountain is bare and black as it gets. Absolutely bald. So no snowmelt to feed this creek; all that rain carried it off. The ponds are empty because of the flood. And because I can't spare well water to keep these guys alive, they will have to be well-mulched--very well--to get through July-August-September and possibly October.

I feel great today, after a fitful sleep. I think yesterday's revelation marked a turning point for me. I can let it go. I think as long as I stay in good health, and do my yoga like a good little person, keep those internal organs online and in peak form, then my mindset will naturally keep to the positive. I firmly believe much if not most of our emotional wiring lives in the neurons of our kidneys, liver, heart, and so on. And when these become diseased or depressed then so do we. It's the Escher hand-drawing-the-hand: Emotional traumas can damage our organs; damaged organs can keep us depressed, embittered, raging. If we can't fix our thought patterns, then we can work from the standpoint of the body, treating and exercising and massaging the organs and thereby improving our outlooks, helping us to remember love and compassion, get our heads out of our own butts, and move forward with our creative life.

It's just a theory.

But I have been treating liver-kidneys with herbs since this last episode of illness, and yoga last night and this morning, and I feel like I want to plant a kiss on the face of the cosmos. So I'll go with that. My good friends who have been reading feral for a while are familiar with this pattern--to those who still read, I apologize for these "gyrations," as MB calls them. Again and again I rediscover this and again and again forget it. Let's see whether I can hold my own this time.


So onward. To the garden. To the creek. I also plan to dig up and transplant the first of a hoped-for eleven cottonwood saplings from upstream. We'll have trees one way or another...

Today is the fifth birthday of my grandson Ender. He is a brilliant loving sensitive boy. God bless his every breath and guide and protect him and make him strong.






1:54:59 PM    comment []