Letters from the Outside, #7

 

I try to time my sunday constitutionals so I hit the road during the third act at the baptist church down the street. That gives me reasonable time to walk in the lull of traffic, to and fro. Sometimes if im running late I cut the walk short (heresy!) for lo, the cars vex me. And im thinking I need a new route for now because walking past The Farm breaks my heart every time. Affects me in an entirely unreasonable way. But otherwise theres not much good walking here unless youre into steep climbs or the county road with no shoulder. The place doesnt seem happy at all. Its a real mystery about those folks. I pray on acorns to resolve this heavy empty ache and then I putter around out back and if I shift the angle of observation inside me I can make the circumference of my world very small and hardly notice the windows of the neighbors houses, or the road. Being in the garden helps with that, too. Its this little space enclosed from passerby, me crouching by a tomato, or under the sunflowers or between the corn, the hummingbirds and the goldfinches and the butterflies and sometimes a hawk or the random spook of a few doe running from rise to rise across the valley and the dogs mad with longing but somehow still obeying the invisible dictum of the fence.

We discuss the connection between corn syrup and petrochemicals, fossil fuels, hieroglyph vs. petroglyph, herd mentality and the galactic/genetic bulge, Cain, iconic outsider, forest dweller, do we jump, or are we pushed? To sit at a table with a cookie and a cup of coffee and say things like “anomaly is crucial to evolution” and “infinite permutations of the genetic code” and not met with blank silence, to be in fact engaged and conversed with and make the air dense with thinking and I diagram the whole process out in chalk, is a true blessing and a gift. To not walk away oppressed with doubt and second guessing, to have exposed someone to the interior and to have not been rejected. This is a great consolation afforded me by life with Cowboy and the boys.

Impromptu stop at the Gurdjieff commune, havent been there since last september and the woman says, “oh, hey! the book rooms open.” I had taken The Docent and the boys to the open house and bought a lot of books. She remembered. I thanked her for recalling me fondly.

Picked some calendula flowers for oil (I know what youre thinking...harvesting calendula on the Dark Moon? What a waste!), collected and broadcast delphinium seed and am sending some to Zuzu.

Am I avoiding picking beans by pruning the tomatoes or am I avoiding pruning tomatoes by picking the beans? 

Rare pull through the perennial bed during which I discover the monarda I started this spring and had completely forgotten about. Looks enough like mountain mint that my first thought was oh dear, is that mountain mint in the perennial bed? and my second thought is Blessed Be im finally becoming Vita Sackville-West.  Sat under the tree in the brewing weather and considered next years perennials. How many can I get away with starting from seed? The bees are in love with the sunflowers, theres so much corn were canning it, and im seeing these tomato plants for the first time this year, all the varieties of fruit and leaf and flower, the rubbery foliage of one and the dragon vernix of another, this blight moves from the center out cell by cell and im grateful its not galloping but I sold Cowboy on the espalier idea and we decided to eat more of the lawn.

Grateful that im satisfied with the events of this summer -- social, emotional, practical and occult. Extraordinary events in the last six months, some kind of pressure still there behind my breastbone, some days it drags me forward some days it blocks my way. Reading up on learning to dance with it, out there on the road to wherever it is im going, The Illusion of Separation is what initiates all this suffering, all over the world. Those of us willing are fighting a lifetimes worth of neurological programming to exhume the Light of our divinity, our souls. I catch myself wishing and wanting and remember that with a true and peaceful heart from now on in, everything will be as it should so I can learn what I need to know. Theres no starting over, but theres Now.