20151119 The 3-Acre Woods and Beyond

I ventured into formerly forbidden territory and survived!

Though the same can't be said for whatever creature this was whose bones I found lying in a woodland thicket.

I'm just back from a walk in our woods AND the unexplored stretch of woods to the south of us. 

I'd never gone very far over our property line in the past because I thought I'd be trespassing. No one could have seen me if I had, but that's just the way I do things. 

Then, last week I learned that the 40-plus acres adjacent to ours, to the south and east, had been purchased back in 2013 by Avalonia Land Conservancy, Inc​.  The property is now designated as the Mistuxet Hill Preserve, linking the whole woodland to the Denison Pequotsepos Nature Center​ and permanently preserving all of it from development. Forever!

All this time, the nearby woods where public land. I had no idea!

Today, I walked right on past our property boundary and wandered far off through thickets, around fallen trees, and over a little trickle of stream nestled between mossy boulders. There were no trails, besides those suitable only for deer. I had to make my own way through the tangle. I found many interesting corners and a few mysterious "treasures" along the way--animal bones, including a large skull, several different kinds of mushroomy things I never seen before growing on downed trees, stones with crystals sticking out of the mossy soil, and giant leaves that looked like they might be chestnut (could they be?) from a now bare, unidentifiable tree.

I've just returned from meandering for more than 2 hours, exploring the "wilds" of the woods in our own back yard. I feel deeply peaceful and contented, something I can't explain with any specificity, but truer than true, nonetheless.

I had been holding myself back for years from this ready source of adventure and exploration simply because I incorrectly assumed it wasn't possible or permissible. 

There's a broader lesson here. 

Moving forward, I may rely a bit less on my usually cautious assumptions. 

You'll find me out push boundaries in my own quiet way, while venturing into the unknown territory outside my own back door.

©Kay Pere ~ Effusive Muse Publishing

ECO ACTION: Air Drying Clothes

I've decided to take the challenge over at Fake Plastic Fish to air dry at least one load of laundry each week. Have been doing this occasionally, but not in any methodical way. The idea is to use the electric dryer less, thereby consuming less electricity and contributing in this small way to reducing global warming.

This week, already, I've air dried two full loads of laundry with very little extra effort.

This is the week each fall when I get out my winter clothes and put away my summer things until the following May. Always a bitter-sweet exercise, marking the passing of one season into the next. This morning I washed and hung out the following in the sun on a large wooden rack:

• 12 sweaters [mostly purchased from second-hand stores last fall, still good as new]
• 3 long-sleeve tops
• 1 sweatshirt
• 6 pair of heavy socks
• 1 polar fleece vest

I just checked and found that these are nearly dry after just 5 hours of letting the sun and air do all the work.

The wooden rack came from a crafters store near my house, Cape Cod Crafters, that unfortunately no longer carries them. I asked when I bought it several years go and was told it was handmade by a craftsman in the Ozarks. I wish now that I'd kept his information. With another rack like this one I could dry several loads of laundry at once. Fully expanded, it's 4 feet long, 2 feet wide and about 5 1/2 feet tall. Folded it's 4 ft x 2 1/2 ft x 6 inches thick, and will stand on its short end against a wall, out of the way.

Yesterday was cloudy, so I used a smaller wire rack set up in the bathtub, plus several hangers on the shower curtain rod, to dry a small load of laundry in about 24 hours. The few things that were still damp this morning got a 10 minute touch-up in the dryer. This brief touch-up also softened the items that had a stiff, crunchy air-dried feeling. That load included:

• 2 polar fleece jackets
• 2 tops and 2 bottoms of silk long underwear [To be worn indoors as a layer under other warm clothes, so we can keep the heat set at 65F during the winter, saving $ and heating oil.]
• 10 cotton handkerchiefs [Started using these back in May to replace disposable Kleenex tissues, reducing my use of disposables and the energy consumed to make them.]
• 2 long-sleave shirts
• undergarments not suitable for air drying in publicly visible areas of the house or outside

All very easy to do. I just have to plan ahead so I'm not rushing to get clean clothes to wear for the same day, washed and dried in a hurry.

In the process, I feel more connected with what I'm doing. Ironically, returning to the old ways of doing things brings me more firmly back into the present moment.

The freedom promised by mechanized, electrified 20th century technology is frequently squandered on mindless worries and shallow distractions. If I know I can hurry around getting things done at the last minute, I often do. The freedom I truly enjoy is freedom from worry, freedom from distraction that comes when I'm fully engaged in what I'm doing--and when I plan ahead for tomorrow's needs.

We should make sure that the impact we're having on the environment through our uses technology is, at the very least, being traded for something of lasting value. If not, then returning to more traditional, low-tech ways might be a better answer.

(c)2009 Kay Pere ~ Effusive Muse Publishing

CREATIVE OATMEAL: other things to think about #2

[free or nearly-free happy things]

Perhaps not the most exciting subject, but a favorite breakfast for cold weather.  And it provides many options.

Here's my recipe.  It makes about 6 servings.  I eat one immediately and refrigerate the remainder to reheat on subsequent days.

Basic:

• 2 cups Old Fashioned Rolled Oats (slow cooking)
• 4-5 cups Water
• 1/4 tsp Salt (adds approx. 100 mg sodium per serving)

Bring to a boil.  Cook about 5 minutes over medium heat or until thickened.  Stir occasionally.

Additions:

• Dried Fruit, chopped (If you want them plumped, add at the beginning of cooking with oats.)
• Frozen Fruit, thawed while cooking
• Nuts, chopped (If you want them crunchy, add at the end of cooking.)
• Flavorings:  cinnamon, vanilla, nutmeg, cloves ... use your imagination
• Sweeteners:  brown sugar, maple syrup, honey, molasses, jam, fruit juice

Once it's served up on a bowl, I also pour on a little soymilk to make complete proteins.  (legumes + whole grains)

Cost:

• 15 cup container uncooked Store Brand Rolled Oats = $1.75 US (on sale)
  
• 3 Servings per cup (with additions)
  
• $1.75 US for 45 servings per container
  
• $0.04 US per serving + cost of optional additions and soymilk!
  

Time:

• 10-15 minutes once a week to cook 6 days worth of servings.  
• 2 minutes once a week to packaging in a resealable container for the frig
• 2 minutes each day doing other things while the microwave reheats (stir in a little water to thin)
  
• 1 minute once a week to scrub out the pan (if I don't remember to let it soak it takes longer)
• less than 1 minute once a week to wash the resealable container

Favorite Creative Addition Combos:

• chopped dried apples, brown sugar or maple syrup, cinnamon, vanilla, chopped walnuts
• chopped dates, chopped pecans, cinnamon, vanilla
• chopped dried apricots, honey, slivered almonds, almond extract (tiny amount)
• frozen blueberries, maple syrup
• frozen raspberries, honey
• strawberry jam, almonds
• blond raisins, pecans, cinnamon, vanilla, maple syrup

Yum!  Now you can tell someone they are as interesting as oatmeal and mean it as a compliment.

And Mom was right.  It does "stick to your ribs."

STUDIO WINDOW: other things to think about #1

Because life is not all gloom and doom, not all health concerns and financial contraction. ..

I'm going to make an effort to post quick snippets about happy everyday things, as an antidote.

#1 OUTSIDE MY STUDIO WINDOW

There is a dogwood tree right outside my studio window who keeps me company as the seasons change. In the past few weeks it has lost all its vermilion leaves. A fine filigree of branches remains, outlined against the sky.

All day squirrels use its branches as a highway from one tree to the next. Fat grey clowns in flannel suits, they carrying nuts too big for their mouths to hold, performing acrobatic feats as they hurrying past on their way to some secret cache.

Occasionally one will catch sight of me watching through the window and freeze in place, as if hoping to become instantly invisible. This is usually followed by loud, menacing chirping sounds and wild waving of a long fluffy tail. The cat may be intimidated by such antics--I just smile.

My studio window faces west, with my computer monitor on a desk in front of it. This morning, over the top if my screen, I watched the last quarter moon on her way toward the horizon. This evening, if I'm lucky, I'll catch sight of a brilliant sunset sky behind the silhouette of my companion dogwood tree's branches.

These are my simple joys today.

:-), Kay

GAIA LUNA: Harvesting What Isn't

Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub;

It is the centre hole that makes it useful.

Shape clay into a vessel;

It is the space within that makes it useful.

Cut doors and windows for a room;

It is the holes that make it useful.

Therefore profit comes from what is there;

Usefulness from what is not there

~ Lao Tsu, From Tao-Te Ching

Health brings life filled with activity.  Illness empties time to its barest essence.

Health allows forward motion.  Illness stops the wheel in mid-rotation.

It was the emptying, the resting, that brought clarity about the perpetual motion of my healthy life.  This was the useful outcome of two months of illness;  once I was able to get past the first heat of frustration and anger (at not being able to do everything I'd planned for myself), I began to see with vividness and gratitude the small things that could happen.

Back before I got sick, I'd planted corn from seed for the first time, started indoors before the soil had warmed, then planted out in early June.  When the corn went untended, with little rain for many weeks, I gave up hope of growing anything more than bare stalks.

Even so, in late August I harvested a dozen perfectly formed ears of corn.  The stalks where spindly and short, but they had overcome adverse conditions to fulfill their potential.

The lesson learned: Plant the seeds.

Don't worry.  Just do it.

Within each seed is a powerful will to become.

Even if you're unable to tend it something will still come of it.  If nothing else, you'll learn that you can plant a seed and watch it grow.  You'll get the joy of experience.  And you'll either learn what it takes to make it produce, or what can stunt it.  

Knowledge is the most valuable harvest.  It's yours to keep no matter what the outcome.

Ideas are an artist's seeds. An artists plants ideas by beginning the process of realization.

Even when the process of realization is interrupted,  the artist may return to find the idea has produced something useful.

It's up to me to begin.  It's up to me to do what I can.  And I've also seen clearly that things can become what they're meant to be even without my direct involvement.  

I can let go and my dreams won't fall apart.

At times, my role in the creative process must be simply to sit still and watch the seeds of planted ideas unfold and grow as they will.

GAIA LUNA: Fall Harvest 08

Happy Autumnal Equinox, to those in the Northern Hemisphere.  It's a day to celebrate our creative harvest.

The picture above is the last big harvest from Gaia Luna: one spaghetti squash, half-a-dozen each sweet italian banana peppers and bell peppers (red and green), a few jalapeno peppers, several acorn squash, and an arm-load of under-sized delicata squash, all topped by a bunch of pink cosmos.

This is far more than I thought the garden would produce with so little water and weeding during the height of summer.  It falls far short of what I had envisioned last spring, but vastly exceeds my most desperate hopes during the many weeks I was confined to the house.

The only credit I can take for this harvest is in minimally preparing the soil, planting the seeds and erecting a fence to protect them from deer, all prior to the first weeks of June.  Everything else, quite literally, was done by the sun and the wind and the rain.  At the end of it all, I simply walked out with my clippers and gathered what the plants chose to supply.

Other things didn't go so well.

The zucchini, yellow crook-neck, and patty pan squash plants I'd grown from seed were stunted when I mistakenly pealed off their paper pots before planting, damaging their tiny new roots.  This and the lack of water yielded only a handful of summer squash.  This was a blessing in disguise.  They produced just the amount I could deal with.

I planted three kinds of cucumbers.  Because I couldn't get the rabbit fencing up, groundhogs and rabbits got into the garden and ate the growth tips off each.  Two varieties died from this and lack of water.  The third, the lemon cucumbers, produced prolifically enough for many salads plus a large jar of refrigerator dill pickles.

I planted tomatoes, too, but didn't get nets over them.  Bluejays and crows carried away each tomato before it had ripened.

A large net was thrown over the blueberry bushes, but it had unnoticed holes in it this year.I hadn't the strength to fix it.  Catbirds got in and ate all the blueberries.  There will be no frozen blueberries from the garden for my breakfast cereal this winter, no blueberry jam.  Very sad, but ...

There was another solution.  Once I was feeling better again I went to a pick-your-own orchard and brought home fruit to freeze and can.  I brought peaches, to eat fresh and preserve, home from vacation and from a local farm stand.  I made friends with someone who had more zucchini than she knew what to do with so I could make bread-and-butter pickles.

More soon about the meaning all this has communicated to me, in the world of gardening as metaphor.

GAIA LUNA: Seed Saving

Last fall I saved seeds from my marigolds, cosmos, nasturtiums, string beans, and a couple of herb plants.

In the photo they are drying in the sunroom after being separated from the flowery parts. Not so difficult to do. Here are enough seeds to grow several gardens full of flowers, the equivalent of a whole rack of seed packets from the nursery from just a few plants.

These are old fashioned varieties that will stay true to type, meaning that plants grown from these seeds will be the same as the parent plants, at least in theory. I got two books on seed saving for Christmas that confirm this.

Right now, the seeds are stored in loosely covered glass canning jars on a the cool shelf of the attic, waiting.

Soon, soon ...

GAIA LUNA: Grounds for the Ground

Compost!

Very few people get excited about the potential of rotting organic matter, but I'm one of them.

I'd heard that Starbucks gives away their spent coffee grounds to gardeners just for the asking. So this morning at about 10:30, after exercising, I stopped in and got the morning's grounds for my garden. When I asked, the girl behind the counter didn't hesitate for a moment. She added the filters from the machines into a large bag already full of grounds and cheerfully double bagged the whole lot for me to take. I walked away with about 20 lbs of grounds, which I added directly to the soil in Gaia Luna.

According to several sources (see below) coffee grounds are a good source of nitrogen for building the soil. The food I grow and consume gets its nutrients from the ground in which it grows. I'm intent on making my garden soil as rich and healthy as I possibly can, improving it each year.

Last June, I snapped a picture of my compost bins.



At the time there were mostly filled with straw mulch recently removed from the strawberry patch, fresh spring grass clippings and kitchen scraps.

Now they hold the remnants of tomato, squash, and bean plants gone by, chopped up sunflower stalks, frost-killed cosmos and nasturtiums, a large bucket load of fallen apples from beside the driveway, plus several months more kitchen scraps from daily cooking and summer preserving. They're a little short on brown, carbon rich material right now, so when I get a chance I'll rake up some fallen leaves and pine needles to add.

I'll also rake decayed leaves from last fall to add directly to the garden beds, to balance out the nitrogen rich coffee grounds.

I'm not an expert composter by any stretch of the imagination. I just dump stuff in and stir it around every so often with a shovel or pitch fork. It does it's thing, breaking down plant material and egg shells into a rich crumbly brown earthy material that grows better vegetables.

It doesn't stink unless I add too many kitchen scraps and leave them too close to the surface without piling dry leaves and things on top.

To me, it's the ultimate in recycling: today's potato peelings and coffee grounds become next summer's green bean salad.

Here's some more info on composting:

• http://www.mastercomposter.com/
• http://www.mastercomposter.com/survey/coffee.html
• Starbucks on composting coffee
• US Composting Council
  

Flow Around

Blocked momentum.

My energy and effort dammed up behind an obstruction, or channeled off in another direction without my consent, for someone else’s purposes.

I become a stream, curving around a stone.

Or the pressure builds. With enough force the stone may be pushed over or moved aside, or it may be destroyed in the process.

In that time, I am going nowhere. I must decide, is this a good use of my energy and effort? Is this the best way to get were I'm going, to do what I'm meant to do?

The stone has as much right to exert it's will upon me as I have to choose my own response.

I acknowledge obstruction.

Today, this time, I choose to flow around.

Perhaps, it will be smoothed and reshaped a little by my passing. Perhaps, I will learn something of determination by touching its steadfastness.

©2007 Kay Pere ~Effusive Muse Publishing

Thankful

Happy Thanksgiving to All!

I'm most thankful for the simple things, like being able to enjoy the colors and sounds, tastes and feelings of everyday things.

I'm thankful for my mind and my health.

I'm thankful for someone I love to share my life with.

Wishing you all a year ahead filled with many reasons for giving thanks.

Completion / Reflection

Late fall. This is the time for quiet reflection that follows, and precedes, intense activity.

It's been a hugely busy fall for me, a giant project recently completed and awaiting response. It's also been a time of repeated illness--colds, laryngitis, fevers, allergies--fortunately over now. The two, combined, left little time for contemplative writing, outside of the occasional journal entry or email sent to friends.

Gaia Luna has been put to bed for the season. Its protective circle is closed for now. The harvest is over, except for a few herbs remaining until the first hard frost comes.

My pottery tools and supplies have been brought in from the Art Barn. I may still use the kick wheel on days when the weather is warm enough. A propane heater and overhead lighting for the space are being considered. They might enable me to work out there even when the snow comes. It's a drafty old barn, though. I don't know if any heater could warm it effectively. The only way to find out may be to try.

Now that one big project is behind me (or the launch pad phase of it anyway), I'm beginning to look toward harnessing that energy to reach other goals.

Before I proceed, though, I need to take time to capture the many ideas and competing goals circling in my mind these days, to listen attentively for what they might tell me.

It’s imperative to write down my goals, ideas, and wishes as they occur. Certain ideas arise only in specific circumstances. I’ve set traps for these, all around the house, built from stacks of blank 3x5 cards and piles of sharpened pencils. I ensnare ephemeral intentions, transcribing them as they coalesce, quickly, before they can evaporate into a fog of recollection and a chalky residue of regret.

I’ve tried writing these things down in long lists, on pads of paper, in composition books, or in my Palm software on my computer. These lists quickly become outdated, stagnant.

3x5 cards seem to be a practical solution. I can add to them flexibly, prioritized them tactilely, spread them out in front of me to examine in a variety of groupings and chronologies.

My growing deck of cards is a computer-free, 3-dimensional database of ideas, in keeping with my preferred, off-the-grid, web-like creative process.

This time of reflection is an important preparation for the next cycle of activity, in the time before it begins again. Perhaps it will add depth and meaning to my creative work.

Action will follow again when the time is right, when I make the choice to move ahead, or when the next idea comes and chooses me to give it life.

(c)2006 Kay Pere -- Effusive Muse Publishing

Quiet Little Cold

Things have been quieter than usual around here recently. I came back from Philadelphia and came down with a cold that took my voice for over a week. Sometimes our bodies decide it's time for rest and reflection, and there's no arguing.

Now there's a fall chill in the air. Time to start thinking about putting the garden to bed and enjoying the art barn while the weather is still warm enough.

Instead, deadlines loom for a huge project (of my own choosing, fortunately). I'm stuck in my studio, working at computers on documents and packaging while sunny days pass by outside.

Feeling a strong need for completion. Wanting to move back into a more free flowing creative realm again.