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| Was I dreaming? |
It's been a long spell since my last post; something that generally happens when there are either things I can't talk about or don't want to. In this case it's both. The ground may be shifting under our feet soon on a personal level -- or not -- and writing from that limbo state of "maybe" is very difficult. It would be bad to put any of it in writing, since it effects other stakeholders (how's that for obtuse?). It's nothing negative for us, though, so no worries there. If it happens it will be a huge and very positive thing. Just a potential big change.
I think the other half of my silence is still being dumbstruck at the time travel back to 1964 our current administration seems committed to doing, environmtenally speaking. I catch the Current Occupant of the While House on television giving himself and his cronies high-fives at press conferences and feel a stab of unbelief that this is all real...that those rollbacks of environmental regulations, clean energy mandates, health care protections, climate change acknowledgement, and animal welfare safeguards is all actually happening.
Sometimes we want someone to pinch us to assure us that we're awake. If only someone could pinch us and we could "come to" and find it's still 11:30 pm on the night of November 7, and that we just dropped off for a little nap when the blue and red board behind the news anchors shifted and changed. "Whew! I had the strangest dream, guys....."
And yet, like any loss, I've processed my five stages of grief, mostly, and have come to that state of acceptance. It doesn't mean some days I'm not back to Stage One (denial) or Stage Three (depression), but I do bounce back. Maybe someday I'll be able to put my finger on what died last November, on a national basis.
On a personal level, things around the homestead are good. There's plenty of spinach, potatoes, carrots. lettuce, asparagus, onions and herbs in the ground and since we had a great water year, everything is growing quite happily. All the trees in the pasture are loaded with fruit, green now but ripening into the shape of a bountiful summer.
Our two new chickens Daisy and Delilah will be integrated into the flock this weekend, which means lots of temporary drama. And we're planning another trip to WA State this summer, because through the good and the bad, life goes on, and heading to cooler climes in July feels like a good idea no matter what the political climate is.
Hope you're well and happy on your own pieces of ground, and living the sweet reality of hands in your garden dirt in this seeming age of magical, crazy thinking everywhere else. Sometimes all you can count on are those you love, the sun rising at roughly the same time each day, and music on the radio. And your land and what it produces for you.
Not bad things to have in this Very Strange Age.
I liken these last few weeks of the election and election night to a group of people standing on the roof of a high-rise skyscraper, looking at a watermelon perched on the edge of the railing.
The inevitable temptation arises to push the watermelon over the side to see what happens. It's an almost irresistible urge, in fact, even though we logically know that anyone who happens to be underneath as much as a penny thrown from an 80-story building can die, due to the velocity a falling object picks up on its descent back to earth.
But because we've never seen a watermelon fall 80 stories to the ground before, it promises to be a good show, filled with excitement, fear, exuberance or maybe horror. Maybe all those things at once. And so on Tuesday night, we pushed that watermelon off its perch on the railing of the skyscraper, and now we're committed to seeing it plunge towards...whatever happens when a watermelon collides with a planet. It might be interesting and educational. People might be harmed. Or not. No one really knows.
But the collective "we" wanted to see what would happen, and so now the watermelon is in flight -- or free fall -- depending on your perspective.
This is why I write a blog dedicated to homesteading and living locally. It's because of falling-watermelon times such as these.
So what can you do while the cucurbit is airborne? Plant your garden. Make some soap. Focus on your local government and hang out with like-minded friends.
Protesting the watermelon-pushing is futile. So is hating the people who pushed it. They had their reasons, I suppose, some noble, some silly and self-serving, just like anything else.
If you're having trouble with the national elections results, my advice is to unplug from things at the national level and prepare for change by seeing to the things you can control at the local one. You can't always control your garden or home but you can focus on them, as areas you have the ultimate decision-making power in. Set a gopher trap or destroy the burrow? Castile or shea butter soap? The choice is yours and only yours in matters such as these.
Focus on the things that will not change as a result of what happened this week. Since those are the only things you can truly manage as one individual, in many ways they're the only things that really matter. Focus on that scrap of earth you call your own, and those people and animals you share space with. Be astonished at their beauty, be dismayed at Mother Nature's fickle nature, and be humbled that you are the steward, if not the actual landlord, of the ground you call home. But see it directly, not through the filter of the media or the internet. Focus on those things you can see with your own eyes, in a one-to-one relationship.
The seeds will sprout, new animals will be born in spring, the rains will fall and the sun will rise at its appointed time no matter who is sitting in the Big Chair in Washington DC. And that can certainly be a comfort if you're willing to live in your own actual, local reality and not the national one.
Tune out the whooshing background noise of the watermelon in flight for the sounds of birdsong, the neighbor's lawnmower, or even the local blues band. The good news -- and the bad -- is that the watermelon is now in flight and there's not much any of us regular folks can do about it except the same things we've always done...plant our gardens, make our soap, and try and be as self-sufficient as possible. Not trivial things by any measure.
