March / October

It is mid October. Stopping at Coastal for bunny hay, I fill my arms with bulbs. Mostly daffs, a few indulgent tulips.

I return to this past March garden to see where I wish to place more color for the future March to come.

 

Remember early March? These top photos are from the 1st. We had no fucking idea. That smash of daffodils across the back, though.

The far small bed beyond the tree stumps is pretty shadowy in summer now, under the pear tree in Giorgio's yard. I put some rhubarb in there this summer. Last year in April there was an explosion of forget me nots, with a few small head, orange nosed narcissus poking up. I wonder if all that got enough sun to show again.

All three of the metal edged beds can take a lot of new bulbs, I'm seeing. But I always hesitate to push this transition. I love watching things fade and whither.

It was a smoothie heavy time, the early pandemic.

Somehow, we had no idea, and also really already knew. 

I remember the appalled inner rush of those days. My guts pacing. I said to Jeff more than once, voice strained with strange grief-laughter: I Feel Really Weird Right Now

Against the panicked urgings of the internet, we kept a small core of our chosen family together. We brought in the Equinox. 

We did what we could to ground.

Jeff vacuumed a lot and pushed back against the blackberries.

We began to rest again; we began the slow process of waking up.

That spot of pink in the back is a random hyacinth from before my time that I swear I am going to move every year. She has a cousin in the yard - where? I want to put them near each other. 

Indoor harvests help. I remember also digging green garlic from the mud, cutting side shoots from weathered broccoli, double washing dirty wild arugula, parsley, thyme. And several strong rounds of radishes, there in late March.

Oh! And self seeded corn salad! A lot of that to look forward to, maybe. 

By late March the dark tulips were already up, despite the snow. Can you believe it?

I grieved the garden that was here for years. That process helped me know how to grieve my job when I lost it in late March. How to grieve the connections we grow against all odds in the context of the construct we call school. How to grieve my independence and the direction I was building in my work. I had a full summer planned. A lot of learning, a lot of outside time. There was a big push of energy behind it, a lot of things converging. As I felt the imaginary floor fall out, I landed on the ground. 

I watched the peas push their coiled heads from the earth and cried from gratitude. 

Summer 2020, a short report

the garden got fully queer, this year

intuitive, self-reflective, erotic, fractal, co-creative

i don't know what will happen tomorrow

more than ever ever, i wake in awe that there is space to breathe and heal

this is not a 'productive' garden

the cats haunt the roses and try to eat bees

this is not a time for hand wringing

look upon the beauty of the world before it is gone

pregnant people came to this garden this summer to resonate with each other, six feet apart

we brought out a bag of clay and some tools and set up a place to touch another form of earth

who will create ritual if not us?

if our mother keeps living, day to day, what does it matter if we do not rest in her glorious softness?

it is not a privilege to pause, it is a prayer

reciprocity begins in witnessing

 

Things to know

The garage house is on airbnb! 

I started writing this blog to keep track of what was growing in my garden, way back in 2010. Over the last two years a little house grew where our garage-for-bikes used to be, and I let that garden go. Slowly, I started a new garden, one where the plants can take more care of each other while I am away; one in which the soil can change back into what it was before cultivation ever came here. I joined a program run by The Portland Audubon to try to stem the staggering losses of songbirds, and to repopulate the Willamette Valley with historically native plant species. This new garden is just in its infancy, and I often miss the old garden, and all the ways it connected me to season and purpose and cycle. At the same time, I hold deep, deep gratitude for how I have come to know myself in relationship to this small piece of land. 

I hope that this temporary home will bring all who contact it into deeper community with this place, its people and history, and themselves. As I notice some surprise and agitation in the first steps of sharing a very precious and private place through a very public and automated service, I want to pause and ground into my values, really feel my willingness in this process, and clarify my intentions.

I intend to hold good boundaries so that my closest loves continue to experience flow and belonging on this small piece of earth as we open our space to others. 

I intend to communicate with clarity and kindness so that our guests and neighbors feel seen and heard. I intend to care for the garden in such a way that the bonds between plants, animals, seasons, and people grow strong and resilient. 

I intend to be transparent so new friends can find out more about us/ this land/ this process/ this place, and so I can get help, feedback, and encouragement wherever it is available and authentic. 

Things I want to say right now:

1. This land has a whole life. It has been breathing through the seasons here for so much longer than we have been here. We don't really OWN it. We are here in the lap of the animals, plants, spirits, ancestral deities and traditional guardians of this place. We are here in their abundance, as part of their web: learning, growing, worshiping, forgetting and remembering our place.

2. Our African American neighbors were here, are here, will be here. Expect them; respect them. From my perspective, this is their neighborhood. Some of our neighbors we are very close to. Some play their music louder than we might prefer. This is true independent of race. If you have an issue: please let us know. 

3. Careful on the swings! These swings are part of our family rhythm. Jeff made them for Zelda's 4th birthday. For her 5th birthday, he made them taller. You may play on these swings but we take no responsibility for your safety while you are on or around these swings. Our children swing very high. They do dumb stuff and are joyful. People have fallen off. Getting hit in the face by one of the solid wooden seats is not fun. We do not have insurance for these swings.

Grief

When I want to be kind to myself, I put 24 exposures into the K1000 and set aside an hour of good light with zero artistic goals. Sometimes I smoke a little pot. Just go ahead and blow the whole roll, I say to myself.

In August, I was feeling sad about the garden. I could feel how I was the one breaking up but I was also making a bunch of drama. You still look so good to me. Maybe we don't have to do this. But it's ... impossible. Etc. I think I learned this routine from the late 80s and early 90s movies I watched as a pre-teen.

Somebody - I think it was Trungpa Rinpoche - said Nostalgia for samara is bullshit.

But what about nostalgia for nirvana?

I guess any nirvana you can lose was samsara in the first place. Suffering is, after all, the truest truth.

I am still feeling sad about the garden, even though now, eight months after these images were made and this post was started, there is growth again. There is green. And green feels hopeful. Is hope the opposite of grief? Grief does come from a loss of hope, I guess. The loss of hope for reconnection.

When I made these photos: I was sad. Saying goodbye to a life. Starting a different life. Back then I felt and talked and wrote about how representative my process with the garden felt of the overall shift I was allowing/ creating/ engaging with in my life.

I look at these pictures and think, Oh, August Devon.

You know how they say (I sometimes say) that the fear before is worse than what you were afraid of when it actually happens?

Not true! the transition I was afraid of turned out to be deeper, harder, more daunting and sad than I believed I was readying myself for when I took these pictures.

I just saw how readying has dying in it. Hunh.

Dying is one name for it. What Buddhists know is that dying is not a one-time thing. It happens distinctly, repeatedly, gradually but continuously.

So let's distinguish between fear and sadness. Because fear - in this case, a case of no real, imminent danger, and no more relational trauma than is average in a privileged life in late-stage patriarchal, white supremacist capitalism - is a projection. This sort of fear names something out there that can be a container for bodily aversion so that we can, in our hubris, try to avoid it.

I projected aversion onto, sought to avoid, even as I stepped right toward it: immersion in the American productivity hamster wheel. Wake, dance quickly through the guard or grasp of the beloved; commute in a parade of lonely drivers in a landscape of death; show obedience by being inside for the agreed-upon hours; stumble back to the freeway; indulge thoughts of self-care activities while running errands; drag bags into the house (a thing called home which means mostly that you can fall apart there) and begin the bedtime cycle: bonding, sedation, nourishment, cleansing, rest.

I feared the hamster wheel because I had watched my parents on it, because I had my own innate sense of mystery and magic co-opted by the clock and calendar at their behest. I felt how our connection was so often based on a tired exchange of the days events, followed by a hurried flash forward to tomorrow.

I feared the hamster wheel because of the little bird's joy I knew crossing over smoggy freeway gridlock on the pedestrian bridge on my bike, wind in my hair at 8:30am on a Wednesday. The delight of a Tuesday picnic eaten naked at a quiet lake that was just swarmed for the weekend. The tender, swaddling sac of my kitchen, my garden, my children, my books: I feared that the tenderness, richness, the contact and cloister of these would be made thin and brittle by being sequestered to the edges of my days, and thus the edges of my attention.

 

I dreamed that I was hiding from the truth, not taking my turn, or that if I did not go out in the moment that my youngest child went out - that if I accepted that she would be indoctrinated, institutionalized, but refused myself to know and face this force - that I would become an empty husk, a weakling in the world, a ghost haunting my children's lives.

Maybe more sensibly, I knew full well that many, may women do this and more. They run the hamster wheel and reengineer it while they're on it, and reach out to each other and get the momentum from their wheels to align. Men do this too. I was afraid - am afraid - of not being in their company. Not doing enough. Not being brave enough.

But there is also where I started, which is grief.

I think sadness is more beautiful and heartbreaking than worry or fear could ever be. Sadness is when we have already acknowledged that nothing we can do will change the flow of time. Will meet the need. Will patch the leak. Will close the opening between me and the pain of the world.

And grief - grief is sadness that knows no return. It its sadness deep in the bodily groove of samskara. Grief is the cut power line of unmet attachment, bouncing in the street. Grief is sadness in the place where belonging lived.

Belonging is a link from this breath to the next; a container for the loose parts of individualized existence. Even when grief is for what never was, it is for what we once believed - bodily, for the sake of survival - could be.

So I was right to be sad. I suppose I was also right to be afraid. I have to admit that I grew stuck, too tight, in the space I had made for myself, and had to press my head against the way out. I complained about my own privilege, wished for intensity and business, hoped to have things taken out of my hands that I couldn't quite put down on my own.

I wonder now, as I sit with this school year undigested in my gut, what I guessed then about how this time would change me. I was afraid and excited for how it would change my family. I was sad and resigned about how it would change my home. I was afraid and sad about choosing to go away from the earth, my body, the practice. I was hopeful. Or determined. Willing.

I see this spring how willing the garden is, to be a new thing. More on that, next time.

Going, going

October 2017

I've said here before that one of my favorite parts of gardening - and this is a favorite part of the gardening in the Pacific Northwest - is the succession, the year-roundness of it. Knowing what will follow, even interplanting the next season into the current one, feels like practice for real life to me; a challenging mix of planning and presence, a titration of change. 

 May 2018

July 2018

I know in my body that growth is a coil. Up is around; forward is back. As much as I have been known to change the scenery, though, this is one of those times where I am actually dismantling my own work: I stayed for the whole cycle.

A few years into this garden (if I had the time I'd find the pictures, but let's just imagine), after the lead testing and lead-abatement grant work we had done on the house and garage (and yard), we built sides for all three beds, and added a bunch of top soil and compost. I put the screws in then; now I am taking them out. The beds have been crumbling for years. The kids use them for balance beams; the slugs and ants for homes. As each bed comes out, the soil there becomes the former garden. I give away what is left to the rabbits. No new seeds go in.

This spring we cut down the two apple trees we planted as our second act on this bit of land (right after making fences to hold the chickens we brought from the farm). I planted a Western Red Cedar in the back corner of our lot. A new kind of promise, presence, plan.

I've been wanting (asking, campaigning) to turn the garage into an apartment for a long time. I've always wanted more people on the property. I like change. I like sharing. And for so long I was here so much; I wanted a way to add to our income without lessening my emphasis on home, kids, food, friends, rhythm in place. I imagined how I would share the food and beauty of the garden with travelers, guests. I imagined jars of jam and pickles waiting for people when they came to check in; a list of things currently ok to harvest alongside. How welcoming our little plot would be for young families, elders, people from far away. How grounding.

That plan was not to be. Now that the project I wanted is happening, the feelings I have are nothing like I dreamed. I'm going to work full time in a few weeks. My kids are bigger: we are home so much less. I don't pickle and jam all day with a baby on my back, a toddler under foot. After nearly eleven years, this yard farm has run its course. The new openings on the garage necessitate paths, privacy plantings. There are no steps now down from the deck (to the disappointment of short-legged dogs and grandparents) and when they are built, it will mean more paths, more planting. 

Also for years we harbored fantasies of somehow taking over the lot behind us, with the long-abandoned house or without. We sure talked a lot about what we might do with that land. And all the time, the blackberries over there got stronger. We (mostly Jeff) fought back, other neighbors fought back. I think the city even sends someone to mow the front yard every once in a while. Finally, just a few weeks ago, I told Jeff we should build a fence. If I had more time, I'd write all the words about growing up, accepting limitations, the depth of transition -- but let's just imagine. 

Our greenhouse is full of bikes. 

Later, there will time to write about the new plans, the new present. For now, I am letting go.

Then, now

It is overcast, deeply grey, warm. The air feels fresh and gentle. I sit for meditation on the deck, on a sheepskin and two couch pillows. Wrap myself in the same scarf I've been using for meditation since I bought it at The Himalayan Institute while I was there for my teacher training in 2003, the year I met Jeff.

I listen to the same three bird calls. A Mourning dove, a Black Capped Chickadee, and I don't know who. It is long after sunrise when I sit these days (5:45), and the sounds of cars passing on 15th seem to fill my ears. The construction crews (there are five sites that I can hear from our house) haven't yet begun.

I sit with my thought patterns as they loop around loss, fear, and judgment, compounding any sense of present loss with the threat of future loss and the specter of imagined and calculated past losses. Cultural loss, loss of life, loss of space, connection, depth. The birds are good! Focus on the birds. Poor birds, there are not enough and they can hardly hear each other. What do I know about what the birds can hear? I hate these new cheap, hastily constructed spec houses and what they represent and mean. My jaw is soft but the teeth of my mind grit against the swish of tire on pavement; I make my own inner mourning sound, below the level of hearing, a gut keening, imagining these birds flying

from one lone, preserved tree to another, one piece of private property to the next. 

I condemn in my mind these lines, the lies they tell and the history of thievery they carry forward into today. And then I peek out, to see the shape of my lines. Are they good enough? Am I making this little piece of the world more beautiful? Do the birds like me? I can name each plant, remember the time I put its roots into the soil here. I claim them automatically. My choice, my money, my idea, my careful noticing of sun and wind, my failure to protect from freeze and drought, my mistake, my daughters' home, my new idea, my future, my past. 

then

now

I must row strongly against the current to pull myself out of my central seat.

My thoughts take turns punishing me, patting me on the back. I hear the sounds beyond my form, and the sounds within. One follows the next, floating, falling away. I make my own bird call, which is breath: a filling and emptying rise and fall whose pattern sings my soul out, and in again.

I tell the sob story of how my children find safety and familiarity in the sounds of cars instead of the sounds of birds. I rub the fabric of my implication: moved away from the wild place I knew and loved, from birds and sky and family; an early gentrifier in this neighborhood, getting when the getting was good; the daughter and wife of builders, living all my life on money from development, dead trees, heavy sheets of steel, architects' fantasies made 3-D, luxury; two kids who take baths and buy the newest plastic at the art store down the street, who want to believe that they belong to this planet, to this place and its plant and animal people - but can they learn that from me?

I refuse the human company of the people who will pay $500,000 for half of one of these off-gassing duplexes. I call up my judgments. Their "Tibetan prayer" banners and Cascadia flags. Their expensive strollers and highlighted hair in high ponytails for jogging. Their assumptions: that we are the same; that this neighborhood is ours; that we are making things better, nicer, safer; that I want to be on the inside with them. I take up a smaller space inside myself to get away from the grinning monsters I have conjured. They can have the right, I'll be on the left. And yet, it's not even safe here in this wedge of my rib cage/brain: we are their precursors. We came before and laid the carpet: we made them possible.

then

now

We were the people the neighbors saw roll in with a U-haul when Alberta park was still full of Black laughing teens and Black families in parade chairs with plates of food and syncopated Black basketball games watched by young Black hopefuls and tiny Black babies dressed in tiny ironed jeans getting their pictures taken on the baby swings. We were digging up the yellow grass to put in a garden and cutting holes in the roof to put in a dormer within a month of moving in. We were feeding our neighbors' chained up Pit and scooping up his poop. I was that lady: the pregnant white one smiling at everyone, full of ownership, with no idea in the world why her neighbors didn't think she was the cutest, most benign thing on Earth.

We had no cash flow but we bought our house for cash. We moved to Portland because it seemed like we could make it there, find friends, fit in; we would be within a day's drive of my parents; the food shed and water sources helped us imagine a safer future. We saw what is now our home of eleven years while walking to breakfast from our good friend's house the one time we visited. The owner (a white lady, for the record) was selling it herself and was too old to know about Craigslist, so it was still on the market at the right price when we sold the house Jeff had invested so much sweat in back in Idaho, at the absolute tail end of the bubble, in the summer of 2006.

Our mindset then was that we were buying it so we could leave. The math worked out to a $1000 a month to travel on. We went to India after staying in the house for less than a week, prepping it for the renters I had secured before ever walking in the place. When we came back a year later, our mindset was different. I was three months pregnant; the house was the only ingredient for home we had. We furnished it with free Craigslist desks and Jeff started work gutting the upstairs, throwing the plaster and lathe out the window into a waiting dumpster in the driveway. I worked on his website, started seeds, and cooked: soup, a baby. At night we walked long loops around the late winter neighborhood, wondering how the trees survived such prolific bloom, wondering what our lives would soon become.

then

now

My grief at this memory brings me back to the deck, the pillows, the air, my breath. I am sad for the lonely year that followed, when Jeff and I lost each other as I found the iron bond of motherhood and he went, adrift, toward building again the relationship with his work that had always sustained him. But there is also the good hardness there, the slow work of growing up, and all the laughing moments of shock and potent magic. 

I am sad for myself now: it has been so long since I travelled; since I lived free as a single body the shape of only me; since I woke not knowing what the day would be. 

I am sad about all that I see now that I didn't see then: how I wander and dig in a garden planted with the seeds of the slavery and genocide that grew around and through my ancestors in times now unreachable except in the harvests I, their heir, reap daily. I am sad that the Western women who carried forth the line in ways I can't imagine and ways I intimately know (blood, milk, tears, laundry) handed me also a tendency to blame myself for everything, and smile sharply at the world. 

But the grief, truly, is the grief of believing in my own small story. The solidity of my perspective is intolerable! The chance for it to go differently, or mean something else, for me to stand somewhere that lets me see it afresh - or just to live it all again, awake - is a dream of sky I see from the bottom of a well. I feel grief for all my own dead selves, all the projections around me, each daily baby I locked eyes with, and all the eyes though which the world flooded into me, which saw only what they chose to see. 

Yet here I am, still, in this skin, gazing at this garden. The house blooms behind me, fresh for this moment. The cool air ripples across my face like water. There is no answer for it. No solution. I was trapped then and am trapped now: I look out of tese eyes only. This place is mine and not mine. The burden of my presumption here is too big to fit inside me, and too steady to escape. Each nasturtium bud blooms for a few days. I see before me many that are blooming now. 

Ode to seeds

I plant a full row of shelling peas every year. This year, I planted two full rows. It was not, for the record, a waste of space.

I've planted Alderman, there on the left, for years. The peas are delicious, long pods, and I like how dramatically tall the plants get. I have been, admittedly, one for some garden drama. But the Lincolns I bought this year - they are the new pea seed for me. Shorter plants, less drama (read piles of broken stalks burying the pathway/lots of tying up/broken twine/self-abasement for bad pea-care etc), amazing heat resistance (really, the picture below is from my birthday - July 17th! - when the Lincolns were still putting on beautiful, sweet peas), and they're OP!

Open pollinated seed that makes delicious, resilient food is the holy grail. Not like those other OP peas. Maybe next year I will save my own seed. My heart swells at the thought.

Saving seed and then growing a crop from it is, for me, like connecting the two wires that make the lightbulb turn on in Middle School tech class. WOW. Also like being a truly useful person. Also a Best Mom Moment. Ode ode ode.

This is the year that I got to show Clara how the poppy seed pods can also be pepper shakers in the Rock Box Cafe.

 I let the fava plants that tillered most productively and didn't fall on their faces alone and they made me some beautiful purple seed. If that is not pure Hope, what is?

Flower seed. I looked at the Wild Garden catalog (in which, this year, Frank Morton shared how he lost his head for flowers) and I just wanted to be like Frank so bad. His descriptions of the comfort and joy that flowers are bringing him in his age - and the incredible intimacy with seed that he has grown through those many years of openness and dedication ...

Potatoes! Easiest cycle to see and feel. Clara helped me drop potatoes that had already grown sprouts in the basement into well-prepared holes and they went ahead and multiplied themselves. Yes, I piled more dead weeds and loose soil and bunny bedding on them through the early summer, but it seems almost unconscionable to say that I grew these potatoes. 

As you maybe guessed from the sprouting-in-the-basement part of that saved seed story, I had no idea how to season the above pile of potatoes after harvest. I googled and followed some stranger's instructions and while we ate the vast majority before they shriveled and sprouted ... they shriveled and sprouted. 

Fresh seed/old seed. I grew melons and squash from mystery old seed, using my strategy of clearing out my stash by planting several piles of multiple varieties of old seed in one hill and watching for vigor in the new plants, eventually thinning down to one strong plant. I always mean to save seed from this plant, because though it is sloppy and very unplanned, this method shows all kinds of desirable characteristics. I think I overwatered/over nitro-ed (bunny poooop) all the cucurbits I grew this way, because the squash, especially, was so airy when raw and so melted when cooked I could only make soup with it.

I grew carrots and broccoli and bush beans and a crazy kale mix from Adaptive from new seed, and marveled at the vigor and grace of these little lives leaping from the soil. Something was missing in the soil, though, because the aphids were too heavy on all the brassicas by harvest time to do anything but give them to the bunnies. 

Which brings us to flowers. I already wrote an ode to flowers I think. Or more than one. This year there will be black scabiosas. And more nicotiana. And more zinnias (which C and I made a fall garland from). And more more more more ...

But maybe not so many more sunflowers this year. It is hard to even type that, but this year they were so floppy, and I have given so much garden space to them for forever, and I didn't want to leave them in long enough for them to turn into bird feeders, which is my favorite part, and so I tried to save some seed for the birds, and give the leaves and stems to the bunnies ... which they loved. So, I dunno. Hard not to grow sunflowers!!