25.10.13

this is real life


“It may be when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.”
-Wendell Berry

I have been privileged here at Taproot Farm to invest my days in a manner congruent with my mindset, cycling naturally with the rhythms of the sun & moon.  While oftentimes my mind and heart churn & boil, my head and hands engage in meaningful collective effort.

In crisp autumn moonlight, washed in a sea of stars, I stepped into the labyrinth.  The path to the center seems convoluted because it is.  It must be.  Each step, each moment in the maze, lends clarity to the whole...

maybe sometimes it's necessary to lay awake nights, staring into the darkness, allowing all the uncertainties of being to bubble up from the secret depths.  hearing & seeing - listening & believing to-- the raucous chorus of emotion, feeling each one deeply.... it must be... must be.

but, just as you could classify me as a visual/kinetic/impulse-driven/mistake-based learner, you might consider me a kinetic healer.  it's easy for me to get lost in the stories my mind tells my me. i tend to get caught in loops.  somehow, though, it's mostly when my hands get dirty interacting with life on earth (i guess you can call it 'working,' if'n ye must) that the torrent swirls into manageable eddies. 

Undoubtedly, there are bits of me that are broken. All I can do for now is embrace that & hope that the hugging helps to heal it.  Eso si que es.


When we were rooted in Querencia, swimming silently in the vast ocean of our bodies, Beth's voice purred through the void:

Remember that you are the Mountain.

yes.
please.

this place, this place! saddled between the Alleghany and Appalachian mountains, birthed of devonian rock, shedding its waters into the Cacapon river as it flows into the Potomac and out Chesapeake Bay to commingle with the deep birthplace of us all: the salty seas.

There's a kind of wild magic on this farm that Beth, Tim & Alexor have found a way to cultivate.  If life is located at the intersection of here & now, then Taproot is there too, at the nexus of plants, animals & spirit that you can see when you finally realize you've arrived.  

thank you.

thanks for the photos Lex!
These 3 weeks seem to have flown by, and the longer i stay the less i want to leave.  It's rare in this world to find places to feel completely accepted, where humans interact reciprocally with each other and their environment.  I feel blessed to have stumbled upon it and grateful to have been welcomed back time and again.  And i'm happy that i can say "see ya next time" and know that it's going to thrive in the care of these stewards, and that i've had some small hand in the process.   

14.10.13

bluegrass in the barn


apparently I blog to process previous experience, so i'd like to habituate the practice and hopefully stay up-to-date with what's happening, when it's all happening all the time, at the intersection of here & now. Sheesh.

Blowing in before the storm that hit a nor'easter and caused a misty sog-loop, I have arrived.
I am home. Arrived. Home.

8.10.13

the day the garden died

i woke up in a haze.
 recall: the bonfire raged and all that was bottled up -bottled in-- floated like ash in the updraft.

Wake up. Stoke the flame. Carry on.

or
the reason we call now the present

   I seem to learn lessons cyclicly & one of them is that i'm bad at moving.  If it wasn't for the help of some wonderful humans i'd no doubt be mired in a pit of my own kipple. Thanks folks, from the bottom of my heart.  Some days are spastic, others are mindful, and still others tend towards spectrumy statuses.es.es. On moving day, I was downright spastic.
loads of nodes on some cowpeas!
N-fixin bacteria root colonies!
Nature in Action.action.action

   There's something gut-wrenching about seeing a fluffy patch of fertile soil being raked smooth, spread throughout the grass'n'weeds.  But a solid crew came through to help dig up & save a load of useful plants. And every act is educational.

  It's important to me to treat every place as if i were gonna live there forever.  
  It's important to leave fertile footprints, even if those footprints are just an annoyingly fast-growing patch of grass in the middle of a suburban front yard.

And yes, i have a strong desire-impulse--drive to root, but as a human i might not root in like a tree. i might just root in through the base of my spine, wherever my barefeet are grounded with the earth.


Or it could be that i just need to migrate for awhile until i find the right spot, who knows? But so far a bunch of spots have sung the song of my heart and bones, so I feel it would be wise to keep exploring...drink in the magic of each place...share knowledge, tips, tricks and techniques, build, grow, eat & shit & breathe.  I think that is a natural urge of mine, and has more to do with an explorer imprint -with being a neophile, as Robert Anton Wilson puts it- than an escapists' need to gogogo.
chicken coop on wheels on wheels.


Thankfully, the portable coop ended up being remarkably portable.  Using a borrowed truck ramp from the neighbors we wheeled it and the ladies into the back of one pickup and slid the chicken run into a second truck.  The ladies seemed a lil ruffled after their 20-or-so minute excursion into the paved part of reality, but no worse for the wear.

Although i lament the loss of my garden out in the burbs, a good friend pointed out that the garden didn't so much die as sporulate. Plants found their way to new homes, to feed good friends and family, to thrive outside my narrow sphere of influence. And that is good.


I've shucked off a fair bit of stuff'n'things'n'baggage'n'sedentary debris. There's certainly more to sort and process, but for now i've made it to Taproot: the place where I first learned to build with the earth, where I was first exposed to the works of Helen & Scott Nearing, the place that's always been welcoming, where good friends and good food meld together into a helluva good time.  Everytime i've come here i've left feeling more than rejuvenated, i've felt a little more complete.  And here i'll be for 3 weeks helping get the new farm intern cabin live-in-able and working on a permaculture patch design... but more on that next time.
Meanwhile... back in time...  


As I walked the house and the yard one final time, shell-shocked by the sudden lack of biodiversity and the quick erasure of the signs of a life that wasn't meant to be, I happened to spot a perfect little chicken feather, one of kodo or podo's, resting lightly against the fence.  Carefully picking it up, I thought it to be a memento or a fond farewell.  And as I drove away from that house for the last time, that feather on my dashboard caught the wind,
        that feather soared out the window
                          and shot upwards
as if caught in the updraft.

for a moment i was struck by a profound sadness

then I laughed

 & laughed.

   

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