No Poison

when we moved here in June, 2004 the driveway/parking area in the foreground below had zero vegetation. this is a current picture. middle of winter. more stuff grows in the spring and summer. we tried a mixture of vinegar, dishwashing soap, and salt, recommended by a neighbor as an effective weed control. hah. everything thrived. we suspect that the previous owners used roundup or some such "weed control". we do pull the broadleaf plants, but the grass is too much to keep up with. we aren't going to use poison. maybe fire.



the photo below shows an area that was grass when we moved in. luscious, green, golf course pure grass. now it's a mass of moss and broadleaf plants. we tried weeding. even paid a very nice local kid to weed. i think we'd need 10 kids full time clean it all. and even then, every weed removed leaves a hole, or at least a grassless patch of dirt, which sprouts another dandelion or such long before the sod can fill in. we asked a neighbor whose lush, weedfree lawn we were admiring how he maintains it thusly. fertilizer and weed killer. oh.

the only golfing possible here is off in the rough.
and don't get me started on the dirt mounds everywhere. gophers, i reckon. last year there were a few gopher dirt piles waaay over by the property line. this ex-lawn is 150 feet from there. this year seems to be good year for the little diggers. i have seen pastures locally with hundreds of gopher dirt piles in lines going ever which way. last year tent caterpillars. this year gophers. ya think nature is unbalanced? do we have a hand in it?

Utter Irrelevance

In a week where Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty and gave us a glimmer of hope that the Republican stranglehold on American politics would come to an end, and twelve miners breathed their last breaths in the hellish underworld of coal, three finches sat on a bird feeder unaware of their irrelevance on earth.
The quail eats black-oil sunflower and safflower seeds that have fallen to the ground from the bird feeder. It has no vote and no voice. It has me, a vote without a voice.

Such Connoisseurs

(please click on each photo to see this amazing sky)

I joined a reading group. First, let me say that I haven't participated in a group since I quit Girl Scouts in 1963. I'm not a joiner, but here I am in a group. We're only reading one book, Jack Kornfield's A Path With Heart. That's not too burdensome (I say that now). We're meeting in a house that is in walking distance, and we're meeting during the day. All of this is well within my comfort zone.

I went to the first meeting on Monday. There are only four of us right now. Two of us don't have the book yet. So we all introduced ourselves and said a bit about what draws us to a spiritual life. An interesting quandary for me because I haven't actually determined if I am so drawn, in the traditional sense. Is there a traditional sense? I have just followed my mind assiduously down that path that it wanders. I have followed my heart hoping it wouldn't lead me astray.

having read, years ago, a zen aphorism attributed to Wu-Li -- "before enlightenment, chopping wood, carrying water; after enlightenment, chopping wood, carrying water" -- quoted in, i think, some book by gary snyder, at a time when i did actually chop wood and carry water to live, i figured i was on the path. then i read that seeking enlightenment is a sure way to fail at finding it. hmmmm. so there is a path, but apparently one must pay attention only to each step lest one goes astray from peering ahead. sort of a paradox. maybe a koan. zen practice suggests that contemplating a paradox may befuddle the rational mind so that one may see a larger reality, if only dimly and temporarily. i can't contemplate the big picture while i'm minding my steps. i stop stepping every so often so i can look around and see where i am. hasn't worked yet.
I felt insecure about not having the book so before the meeting I googled Jack Kornfield and found an interesting interview he had done a few years ago. I printed it and brought that to the first meeting. We read the interview out loud, which was really fun because he said some laugh-out-loud funny things.

When asked what is the greatest misconception about the spiritual path, Kornfield answered: One is that enlightenment will come to us instantaneously and remain permanently. Another is about certitude, that we eventually become "the wise person who knows about everything."

That made me laugh.

RD may know her own neuroses well enough to gain personal insight by contemplating them. i can scarcely say that i have no neuroses, but i am more familiar with my addictions. You could say I'm a connoisseur of addictions, so i'm thinking that any self-knowledge lies there. i go for mood altering stuff, or perhaps attitude adjustment. imbibe, ingest, inhale. oh yeah, i inhaled. so i listen to my inner dialogue about whether to have more, or sometimes any. whoops. there's a funny concept. "inner dialogue." i'm talking to me, silently i hope, and i'm listening and replying, still silently i hope. the conversation is a koan of a sort. i'm not sure if this watching is helpful (with what?). i am provisionally sure that minding the wood and water, or the current equivalents, and appreciating the process of securing same is conducive to a peaceful mind. to be satisfied with a peaceful mind seems at least a mini-enlightenment.
When asked if anything about the spiritual path truly surprised him, Kornfield responded: Oh yes. For one, I thought that if I worked with the big difficulties in my life – my fears, arrogance, neediness, anger – then they would go away. That I could somehow uproot them and they would be gone. But they aren’t gone. That was a really big surprise. At the same time, my relationship to my imperfections has changed. Now, there’s a lot more spaciousness and compassion, and a lot more humor. I’ve become what Ram Dass calls “a connoisseur of my neuroses.” I had thought that if my practice brought a true mystical experience – which it did – it would then transfer to the other parts of my life. But it turns out that those experiences simply gave me a road map of the heart. It’s up to each of us to apply that map to our lives.


none of this is to suggest that i am not mortified by our president and most of congress, ashamed of our nation's foreign policy, or that i don't yell at various talking heads and politicians through the tv.

That's what really made me laugh. A connoisseur of my neuroses. Yes. That's it, that's my spiritual path. I've been that connoisseur for years. This could be a very interesting reading group.

Post #364

Fun with Einstein's Blackboard

blogging this past year has been good for me. was it good for you? some posts are easy. some are a challenge. the whole thing is very interesting. i have written more than i have in the last thirty years all together. i have always seen myself as a print junkie. i read voraciously. i certainly have opinions. i think i have held up my end of conversations with informed and intelligent friends. it is, however, a different thing entirely to commit thoughts to print, or what passes for print on a blog. conversation rolls on. ya think it. ya say it. looking at my words on the glowing screen is sometimes embarrassing. did i say that? it reads strangely. or worse, stupidly. i do have the advantage of a very good editor/proofreader in my beloved RD. she has saved my sorry ass more than once from thoughtless commentary. so the good for me is doing it. thinking and writing. and pictures. even describing such a mundane thing as moving a building.

the best rewards though are the people we have met online. your kind and informative and funny comments are very much appreciated. i have learned a bit about myself, and some about topics i have researched for posts, but that learning is a drop in the bucket of stuff i have learned from other people's blogs and from comments on ours. botany, archeology, physics, medicine, public health, birds, insects, politics (of every kind), poetry, killer prose, every aspect of personal relations, depression, daily life and wildlife in every corner of the world, tragedy, triumph.........all offered to me (well, technically, to everyone) freely to read, muse upon, and comment upon if i wish. thank you all for doing your part in my continuing education project.

when we started this i had no idea that anyone beyond two or three friends and relatives would ever see it.

my thanks to the inventors of the internet, and to al gore for the actual work he actually did to move it along.


I'm not even sure I can remember the impetus to start a blog. We had been reading blogs for six months. Eschaton, Pandagon, and Kos helped us endure the 2004 election cycle. We thought we had a voice. We thought we'd be more political than we've turned out to be. I had no idea that the natural world would pull us as much as it does. Birds, sunrises and sunsets, coyotes hunting the fields call to us in a way that Bush's sneering swaggering bravado or Cheney's sepulchral specter just don't. If Bush or Cheney had yellow eyes and magnificent wings, swooped through our yard like hungry hawks, or jumped our fence in search of food I might find them more interesting. Our leaders are merely common thieves doing the work of their masters. My eyes are drawn to those creatures who are masters of their own fate -- even if they are just scratching their behinds outside of our fence, while they dream of the cherry tree in summer.

That you like these same things have made this year's adventure absolutely worthwhile. Hopefully we'll have another year's worth of inspiration to post at this url. It's been great fun, challenging and goofy. Just like we like our life to be. Thanks everyone.

Sunrise in Sequence

I was going to write a post about the dawning of a new day, on this day that the Abramoff pleading was released, but instead, I had a migraine headache that seriously kicked my butt. Fortunately, I was clear-headed this morning when I went out to shoot the sunrise. Although trying to put these photos into some sequential order really exacerbated the pain.





So I just lay on the couch most of the day, ice on my neck, and listened to old Donovan from Sunshine Superman. From his song Celeste,
"Dawn crept in unseen to find me still awake
A strange young girl sang her songs for me
And left 'fore the day was born.
That dark princess with saddening jest
She lowered her eyes of woe,
And I felt her sigh, I wouldn't like to try
The changes she's going through..."

The Greenhouse Project Liber IV

ok greenhouse fans (you know who you are). the final series of pictures of the move. captions below each picture.

here's a view with the former location in the foreground. the greenhouse (hereinafter called, as i dubbed it, gus) has moved about 40 feet. a sunny day, so the areas of shadow and light are clearly visible. gus is going up to the sunny spot.

after a 20 degree turn and 16 feet forward, from the previously pictured location, gus is ready to turn 90 degrees onto the bare dirt patch which will be his home.

half turned! just visible (click on the pic for the big view) under the window is the steel pipe upon which gus is pivoting. the truck is used as an anchor for the come-along winch. really, that's wet grass in wet soil. barely enough traction to move the truck itself. the wheels are blocked.

the covered mounds in the foreground are the soil from the growing beds in gus in his previous location, wheelbarrowed here by pirate energy. i can't do organized exercise, so i stay healthier when i have projects requiring physical work. the best projects, like this one, require some thought too.

ready for the final 16 feet.

from the old location, which would be in the shade on a clear day, looking at gus in his new place, where he would be bathed in sunlight on that imaginary clear day.

there is a load of gravel to move for the foundation and floor. i expect it will be easier than moving the building. i plan one more post about the move to show the tools used.

there are two ways of applying motive force to move gus when he is set up on rollers. 1. push/pull gus himself. 2. apply rotational force to one (or more, beyond my capability here) of the rollers, or trundles, upon which gus rests. you've seen the movie of the pull gus with a hand winch method (haven't you?). now see the pipe wrench on the roller method used to move gus.

First Day 2006

Looking east toward the clouds over the Cascades

Looking west toward the Olympics

It was stormy weather out west. Wind blew most of the day, and the rain came down in drizzle and torrents. There's an old saying that may be appropos for most places on the planet: If you don't like the weather, wait five minutes. This may not be true in the sunbelt, but places where cold fronts meet, say one from Alaska and one from Hawaii (appropriately named the Pineapple Express), the weather changes on a dime.

Sun broke through for no more than five minutes and backyard lit up

This Dark-eyed Junco enjoyed the puddles

How was your first day?