Some Thoughts About Story

Sow thistle detail

"Sounds like a Disney movie." After hearing that several times from different people when I describe the reality I am currently living  in Ojai I felt compelled to reflect on where our stories come from. My reality includes spending a lot of time sitting outside  observing and having pretty close encounters with a variety of growing things and creatures, large and small, who hang around long enough and come close enough to make eye contact or otherwise engage me in what feels like a pretty direct way.  Today I spent several hours with a plant called Sow thistle which looks like a very attenuated Dandelion. In fact that's what I thought it was until this guy from the Dept. of Agriculture who is monitoring insect traps on our property stopped by and I asked him to look at the insect life on the the not-Dandelion. He told me the name and described that this plant is actually a thistle and currently it is swarming with aphids and ants and some lady bugs. That much I knew. And I mean swarming, plague-like levels of insects that, so close to Passover, could be seen as implying something not too wonderful. Ag Guy asked cautiously if I was spraying and I said no, I am observing. He seemed relieved.
A different story about the plant is: "Hosting a large population of insects which in turn are nourishing beneficial insects such as ladybugs and giving this necessary cycle a place to occur so it doesn't happen on the nearby artichoke plant." That would be the permaculture story in which there is some concession to "Nature" knowing what "She" is doing, however it also implies that, since I can tell that story, that I know what I am doing. I love listening to people who can tell those kinds of stories and I know that many such storytellers have the firsthand experience of watching and learning to know what they know. Many also have degrees in enthobotany or entomology or another scientific discipline. Part of my task currently is learning that I will not be one of those people, no matter how much time I spend observing, and that is okay. I will learn some of this kind of stuff but it isn't my primary focus. My primary job has to do with making a story bridge from this kind of information to other people, the kind who are genuinely terrified of plagues and are happy to spray whatever they're told to spray to ensure no plague will get them or their tomatoes. On behalf of that constituency and on behalf of Nature, I am doing the work of watching lots of insects and feeling the anxiety and doing nothing but watching and talking to the devas of the plants and insects. I believe my job is to be a bridge between Disney and Science but also between Disney and the war mentality about stuff that grows, flys, and otherwise shares the planet with us.

Cocreated Dress for Cinderella

By the way, Disney didn't do a such a bad job. The mice and birds helped Cinderella create her gown. The problem is that this is considered make-believe, or the 'magic of childhood.' The expression of the metaphor definitely needs updating. That is what I consider my work. I have signed on to co-create with Nature. And I subscribe to the story that Nature is everything in form, not just the plants and insects and animals. Part of my challenge is learning to embody the balance of this work, the imaginative and the actual. I do not believe this is "spiritual" work in the sense of something that you meditate about and things magically align. I experience it as physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual work that grounds and balances me in reality, which has of course, many levels and facets.
What I know about story is that  we live the story that we find most meaningful and contains as much love, beauty, humor and truth as we can bear. If we don't think we deserve much, the stories we tell are dark and not generous. More on stories next time...

Coming Home

 I've been lurching awkwardly toward this "co-creative partnership with Nature" since we moved in to our Ojai house with greater and lesser success.  In 2008 Larry Santoyo, my permaculture teacher, conducted one of his famous "Swan Song for the Lawn" workshops here and we mulched over the grass, build three spirals and planted a variety of herbs. Working with the garden in the front of the house has become more amazing since I began following the Perelandra methods in the last few months. To begin today I opened a coning with Pan, the Deva of the spiral gardens, and my higher self. As I began to work I was being swarmed with tiny black bugs, buzzing around my head and biting my bare arms. Once they got my attention I realized I was definitely disrupting the insects in the gardens. I invited the insect Deva to join the coning, apologized for disrupting their habitat and asked that the disruption be as minimal as possible. Yes, the swarming and biting stopped.
This winter we removed some juniper that had been edging that area and slowly, through intention to hear from Nature and witnessing, I've been directed to do some work arranging more rocks in curved and circular patterns. Once the junipers came out, many more large rocks became visible which form larger spiral patterns on their own. Today I was directed to mulch over the bare areas after a month or more of watching dandelions sprout up. I don't know why today was the day, I just heard it clearly. I'd like to think its because the dandelions are through fixing nitrogen in the soil, but honestly, I have no idea and trusted that.
Our source for cardboard,  our trusty sheet mulch, the solar panel company, has dried up.
I got that I should use old fabric. I had some old curtains, throw rugs and t-shirts that became the sheet mulch and weed barrier before adding six or so inches of wood chips. I recently learned from a colleague and friend, Janis Timm-Bottos,  who had set up an art studio in the middle of a thrift store in Canada that we  should all feel a bit less righteous about giving our clothing discards to second hand stores. It seems that the glut of fabric waste is so enormous that 3,000 dumpster loads of fabric goes into the landfill each year just in her  town of West Kootenay, British Columbia, with a population of less than 40,000 people. The fact is, there is so much to choose from in thrift stores that no one buys stuff with stains or tears so the thrift stores have to pay to take it to the dump.

The idea of using worn out clothes as the mulch/weed barrier was appealing but I did muscle test to be sure I wasn't just enchanting myself with a good story. The t-shirts I inherited from my daughter from her high school days have gotten even a little too filthy to wear to the farm so here was a way to give them one last job and weave some memories (dance committees, yearbook, softball) into the garden. The curtains were really like free landscape cloth, sheers that had stood the test of time in California sunlight. I harvested the drapery pins to recycle and felt like I was veiling a bride as I arranged the fabric cutting spaces to fit over the rocks. The fabric was even easier to work with than the cardboard. It tucks in well at the sidewalk edge using a plaster knife.
I still find myself resisting the work of the garden a bit,  as if thinking about it is enough. I am so much more comfortable reading and writing, making art and staying in the mind. Yet I know that action, to do the physical labor, is necessary to come into embodiment of these new ideas. Today I paid careful attention as I came up with excuses to stop working and finish up later, after the sun goes down, etc. I used muscle testing to test and each time got that I should keep going and do the work. I was reminded of a conversation with my daughter, Adina, about how easing into a stretch in yoga often triggers the mind to say "Stop, get up, this is too hard, you might have some email.." So I stayed with it and happily finished an area of about 6'X25' and it looks really nice, edged in rocks. My body feels a little stiff but I also felt myself gain in accepting the gifts offered by nature: the deeply grounding sense of being at home.

Our Practically Free Three Bin Compost System

One of our first projects this season was to replace our brown plastic composter with a more workable system. After lots of reading and research I decided on a system that uses recycled wood pallets. I needed seven and one had been left here after the kitchen construction. I asked Steve Sprinkel, intrepid Farmer of Farmer & the Cook fame where I might get some and he said "Out back of the store." With the help of another farm friend, Jon Wilk, we loaded the needed six pallets into our trunk. The roll of wire to put the bins together cost around $3.00. Once John (Allen) recovered from the flu he brought from Chicago, we got to work. In less than one hour we had our system built.

Then today we shoveled out the mess in the plastic composter, a mix of dried out stuff, matted grass clippings and petrified veggie scraps and wet it down and added some alfalfa meal to get the process started. The new system makes it easy to turn the pile and the larger size means we can compost more of the yard waste as well as kitchen scraps and newspapers. The bins are discreetly hidden from view of the house by some large bushes but maybe we'll paint them in fun stripes one of these days.  The old plastic bin will hold the "browns" to add to the mix when we dump kitchen waste. The system is also positioned close to the raised beds and the outdoor sink so we can easily dump carrot tops and other things before we take produce into the house. One tip: wear gardening gloves, the pallets are very splintery wood!

Growing Power: An Urban Farm & Community Center

Even though this is supposed to be a blog about my experiences in Ojai, I recently had an earth-bound experience here in the Midwest and of course, this distinction of place is just silly, because the earth is where I am, whatever the latitude and longitude but my poor little brain likes  categories. Last Saturday, my friend Dorie and I drive to Milwaukee to visit Growing Power, a well-known urban farm and community food center. Founder Will Allen has been featured in the popular film Fresh. An ex-NBA player and son of Southern farmers, Will has created an amazing venue that is on the verge of a huge vertical expansion in situ that will include, among many other cool projects, a culinary school. Currently he grows tons of greens and farms fish 365 days/year in a series of greenhouses that were originally the site of Milwaukee's commerical flower industry in the 1930's. With a staff of 35 and over 200 volunteers, Growing Power produces food for schools and restaurants, a local food coop and farmers' markets. They also have goats, chickens, turkeys and mushrooms!

I especially loved the aquaponics. Tilapia are being farmed in a four foot deep plastic-lined trench, which capitalizes on the geothermal effect of the soil, below trays of watercress, a popular microgreen destined for area restaurants. Water is pumped through the watercress for filtering and back to the fish while also fertilizing the watercress with the fish waste. Worm casings from the vermiculture (worm composting) are also fed to the fish. At Growing Power they take some of the partially composted wood chips and food waste material and give the worms a crack at it which they work through much faster that through fresh foodwaste which is what I have been accustomed to feeding them. Then the worms very quickly produce the rich fertilizer-grade compost that can be diluted for a soil additive or sold in bags as a powerful fertilizer. This answered my question about what was really so great about worms since mine took a very long time to digest what I gave them. The tilapia ponds and watercress operation runs the length of the greenhouse and are expected to produce 30,000 fish!