Today, the kid was at my mom’s so I didn’t feel the ultimate rush I usually do at dinnertime to make dinner. It has been raining here to an absurd degree: the usual August allotment came in two days, but that was eight days’ worth of rain ago. SO! Let’s see what we shall find, okay?
Step one: Don shoes. Roll up pants.
Step Two: Open a bottle of liquid courage (you see, I don’t think I will like what I find out there, frankly) because, well, it’s darned hot. And I like this beer.
Step Three: Pick up The Mother of All Colanders, and her sister, The Mother of All Dough-Rising Bowls. (Note beer bottle for scale.)
Step Four: Say hello to chickens. They assume, of course, that if I am bringing a bowl out AND setting it down, it must be for them. This is Phyllis II on the right, an Ameraucana, and Verloe on the left, a Rhode Island Red.
Step Five: Say hello to Penny, and throw her Flying Squirrel twice. She wishes you’d throw it more than twice. How about a half hour’s worth? How about more than that? I will catch it every time, I will, I will! Promise her you will, but later.
Welcome!
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.
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Oooh… Oberon. I discovered that stuff last summer on a trip near to Sleeping Bear Dunes. Yummy.
Glad that you had some time to putter and just be. That’s a necessity and a luxury all at the same time.