State of the Garden (and the Dinner Table)
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January Cold
Here’s a picture of the chard I harvested last Wednesday. I don’t usually harvest that much at a time just to feed myself, but it was harvest Wednesday or let it die back. I have most of my chard plants in a large rectangular container on my very sunny back deck (not really a deck, but a platform to which the patio stairs are attached). There’s room for my bay tree to go outside in the warm months and to have a few containers, maybe a chair. Barely that really. All it takes, though, is a few containers and a little mindfulness to be eating some fresh greens 10-12 months of the year in our hardiness zone. It looks like the plants survived the bitter cold last week and will go into leaf again when the temperatures are back in the mid-40s, but I’m not certain of it. I’ll be patient and observe what happens so in future years I’ll have a more refined gauge of what works and what doesn’t work for different shifts in the weather patterns. The weather will do what it will; but I can act to adapt in a way that tries not to fight what is. Dan — how is that chard patch of your in New Bedford?This morning my harvest was from my refrigerator and cupboard by way of the TPPS, Yes Organic, Farmer’s Market, Whole Foods, and Giant by way of all sorts of places — and this is supposed to be the good, healthy eating. I took the basic proportions from the back of a box to make muffins that had spelt flour, multi-grain flakes, wheat germ, hemp seeds, currents, flax seed meal, walnuts, chopped fresh apple (it all started with needing to cook the apple), ginger, vegetable oil, baking powder, salt, dehydrated cane (unprocessed sugar), and spices. No eggs, no dairy even on the back of the box of currents. By the times I was done transforming them, though I would have enjoyed the original, I’d ended up with the kind of muffin the Vermont-granola-style restaurants name “power” muffins, or “energy” muffins, or maybe “everything” muffins because it is too hard to be descriptive of this many ingredients. I think they will be good food to carry in pockets when out in the cold for extended periods of time.
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Cause/ Effect and Integrity
Earlier in the week, on my way home from a conference on the other side of town, I found on the $1 cart outside of Second Story Books, Starhawk’s Dreaming the Dark — Magic, Sex and Politics. Though I always learn something from reading Starhawk’s books and I had not read this one yet, the book was so heavily underlined, I thought twice about getting it.
Something made me hesitate before putting it back, and I opened it at random. On the page was the following: “Directed energy causes change. To have integrity, we must recognize that our choices bring about consequences, and that we cannot escape responsibility for the consequences, not because they are imposed by some external authority, but because they are inherent in the choices themselves.”
I wondered why this had not been underlined in full when so much of the rest of the page had been underlined because I thought on reading it: “Exactly right; that speaks to our current condition.”
And being in the midst this dialogue in which there has been so much discussion of integrity (along with what we might have caused and how we might have been affected by certain actions), I dismissed the possibility that the underlining would be too intrusive for my own reading because, yes, this teaching comes at just the right time in just the right context for deep contemplation of the deep truth that to act with integrity, we must appreciate our own contribution to causes and results/responses in the undulating fabric of our connected being.
