Friday, August 10, 2012

Being Here in Ecotopia

The big news is pickles.  4 Quarts of Bread and Butter on Thursday....7 Quarts of Dill last Tuesday.  One of those satisfying activities that sets us up for enjoying summers abundance next winter.  We're keeping the long long vines of pumpkins and kuri squash well watered as the days are simmering past 100 degrees.  The capillary action of a twenty foot branch of cinderella pumpkin is impressive as it carries water from roots to tips.  Food and water..... what's counts more in the great scheme of things?  It's a revolutionary act to grow your own.  The perfume of the blackberries in the heat is intoxicating.  Picking up wind fall apples with a little 8 year old friend is being in a state of grace.  Savoring the juice of an asian pear, a gift from Gaia from a tree just two years old.  The generosity of nature....so underestimated, so undermined.

I asked Gaia what was on her mind and she reminded me: Make peace with yourself, grow your own food, share and give thanks ceremoniously in community, take care of all children everywhere. Remember what matters most.  Know what you know.
 
What nourishes us?  Not the empty calories of consumerism but the sustenance from original sources.  Grow some chard and adopt a couple of hens. You will eat and feel like a queen.  Blessings shower down like meteors from sparkling north western skies.   If you are not ecstatic with gratitude you are missing what is right before your eyes......

.....like the Perseid's. Don't go right to bed for the next couple of nights.  Go outside and experience reality in the form of a meteor shower..... a spike in the number of meteors or "shooting stars" that streak through the night sky. Most meteor showers are spawned by comets. As a comet orbits the Sun it sheds an icy, dusty debris stream along its orbit. If Earth travels through this stream, we will see a meteor shower. Although the meteors can appear anywhere in the sky, if you trace their paths, the meteors in each shower appear to "rain" into the sky from the same region. Meteor showers are named for the constellation that coincides with this region in the sky, a spot known as the radiant. For instance, the radiant for the Leonid meteor shower is in the constellation Leo. The Perseid meteor shower is so named because meteors appear to fall from a point in the constellation Perseus.

Catch a Falling Star and put it in your pocket save it for a rainy day
Catch a Falling Star and put it in your pocket never let it fade away
For love may come and tap you on the shoulder
Some star less night
And just in case you're feeling kinda somber
You'll have a pocket full of starlight.