Despite my best efforts at being a determined ant, the end of the planting season approaches and I wonder what I was doing on all those grasshopper days. So much to do! Then I (re)remember that I go through this flurry of activity in the spring, too. Such is the cycle of cramming things in. It happens when you go on vacation from work, too: you just fill those days up pre- and post-vacation. Not that I am saying winter is a vacation from gardening, though I suppose it is a vacation from all the toil. I certainly do enough work around the yards after the frost hits. Once the snow blankets the ground, though, I am back to paper gardening…between the covers of books, seed catalogs, and notebooks. Less satisfying, but I sure get more accomplished.
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Glad you came to visit! Got something to say? Email me at fastweedpuller at gmail dot com.
Wisdom from the sage
Wendell Berry:
"We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it."
--from an essay in "The Long-Legged House""The word agriculture, after all, does not mean "agriscience," much less "agribusiness." It means "cultivation of land." And cultivation is at the root of the sense both of culture and of cult. The ideas of tillage and worship are thus joined in culture. And these words all come from an Indo-European root meaning both "to revolve" and "to dwell." To live, to survive on the earth, to care for the soil, and to worship, all are bound at the root to the idea of a cycle. It is only by understanding the cultural complexity and largeness of the concept of agriculture that we can see the threatening diminishments implied by the term "agribusiness."
"Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating."
--both the above are from essays in "The Art of the Commonplace: Agrarian Essays"Is this so hard to believe?
"An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor, or Ba'al, or The Golden Calf. As has been said before, we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further," Richard Dawkins, 2002.
The archives! Plenty of opining since 2006.
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El – I am just about to go on holiday, for a week, and I know just what you mean. I have been manically trying to harvest, plant, water, mouseproof the seeds – far far more work than was ever going to be possible with the nights drawing in and the need to spend at least mealtimes with the children. Once the train pulls out from Glasgow Queen Street I shall begin to relax.
Here the frosts are never that long so toiling is possible year round. I am very grateful for the 4pm sunsets in January – and grateful for the whiskey, wine, fire and good books.