The Spring, Summer and Harvest seasons have flown by! We’ve just celebrated Samhain and in 3 days we’ll turn back our clocks. It’s the month of November and we’re preparing for the Winter holidays.
Last I wrote it was spring and I’d intended to write a post each month. I was excited to dig my hands in the earth and grow edible greens that also added to the beauty in the world. My 17-year-old tended to our backyard garden beds while I grew peas, lettuce, braising greens and carrots in our small bed in our co-housing community’s collective gardens next to the chicken coop. The frequent rains encouraged more weeds to grow than we’ve been accustomed to, so our #1 challenge was keeping up so that everything we planted and wanted to grow flourished.
Strawberries and Mint in June
I’ll miss walking by a garden bed and procuring a healthy snack when I’m hungry. I’ll miss harvesting the wild raspberries and blackberries on our property, too. They are delicious in salads and as garnish for our morning oatmeal.
Berries from our land and scones baked by my son.Peach ice cream made by my son
My body is missing the abundance of daylight hours. The shorter days mean my energy wanes sooner. But that is what this season is for ~ gathering ourselves into a cocoon and resting. I’m in my pajamas by 7:30pm these days. What is your favorite way to spend your evenings during the colder months of the year?
A pumpkin that will soon become a pie
Now here I am, winding down the growing season and surrendering to the season of rest. It’s time to sit by the hearthfire and keep my hands busy with other occupations such as knitting and sewing, art and writing. They don’t leave dirt under my fingernails. Well…the painting does. That’s part of the charm of both gardening and painting. May you be blessed with good health and happy hours doing something you love this Winter. See you in the Spring.
Our household’s community garden bed, resting for the Winter
My prayer on this day is that you enjoy all of the blessings of a cozy and prosperous holiday season! At least two snowstorms have hit New England before today, which was sunny and windy. Gratefully, there are some hardy herbs that still give of their bounty even after winter arrives, such as thyme.
My daughter has enjoyed many pleasurable hours of fresh air and exercise these past few weeks, sledding and running with her friends. She has made two batches of delicious hot cocoa topped with fresh whipped cream to celebrate the arrival of winter. Between all this, she has spent the month writing feverishly to achieve the goal of 50,000 words by November 30. She just informed me that the NaNoWriMo team emailed her winner’s certificate to her.
Sunset at the Playground
Mother-Daughter NaNoWriMo
This month has been busy, and wordy. My fourteen-year-old daughter and I attended a local NaNoWriMo ice-breaker with a friend on October 28, and I have attended two write-ins. We have been keeping each other updated with all of the plot twists and surprising ways in which our characters have developed. We took turns at my mother’s computer when we visited her in Virginia, a surprise for her eightieth birthday. Now she has successfully reached the target word count for a novel and is very proud of her accomplishment. She deserves to be. I am two thousand words behind the goal, but I know I’ll finish successfully this year. I’ve been actually working on two stories, one a full-length fantasy novel about a magical labyrinth in a secret garden and the other a holiday-themed children’s fantasy chapter book about a lively gingerbread cookie.
I believe that our working together in camaraderie has contributed to our success. We have encouraged each other and we’ve given each other the time and space to work on our novels. We have also reminded each other to get sleep so that we can keep going and not run out of steam. On November 30th, we’ll raise a glass of wassail to our first successful National Novel Writing Month. Here’s an excerpt from my story about the gingerbread cookie:
“I am, but…” Sandy didn’t finish her sentence because the little gingerbread man hopped out of the pocket in the door and onto the seat next to her. He ran very quickly for a little brown man with short, two-dimensional legs. He hopped onto her lap and stood with each of his legs on one of her thighs. His trimming was beautifully crafted with white icing, raisins for his eyes and nose, M&Ms for his smile, string licorice for his hair, pink swirly peppermints for the buttons on his suit, and pastel confetti at his wrist and ankle cuffs. He looked too beautiful to eat. She beamed at him as he drew close.
The little gingerbread man put his hands on this hips and looked up at her with wide eyes and a big smile. “Hi! What’s your name?”
My daughter has been reading a book that combines comical storytelling with introducing math concepts. She recently came across a chapter that covered the Fibonacci sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, etc. It was hard for her to imagine why these numbers mattered and why she needed to know about them. Familiar with how much I love math and numbers, she asked me to explain the book’s illustrations in a way she could grasp.
Fibonacci sequence in spiral form
Numbers in Nature
First I wrote out the sequence in a linear fashion, adding the numbers as we read the section together. Then I showed her how the sequence can be seen in nature. It usually appears as a spiral. An online search for images of the Fibonacci sequence as it appears in nature resulted in images of: the center of sunflowers, pine cones, plants, snowflakes, seashells, the double helix, human fingerprints and the design of the human ear (nautilus).
As Unique as…Fibonacci
My daughter’s fingerprint
My daughter studied her fingerprints. She was fascinated by the idea that her fingerprint, unique to her, contains a clear spiral pattern. She pressed her finger on a blue patch of ink pad, pressed it on a piece of paper, and took a picture of it. I did the same with mine, in purple.
How can something so unique as an individual’s fingerprint also contain a universal pattern such as a spiral? The same thing holds true for our genetic blueprint, reflected in The Double Helix (Watson, James D., 1968). To me, it’s nothing less than amazing, inspiring wonder and respect for the design of the entire universe. Our very uniqueness also connects us, at the cellular level, to the infinite order of our galaxy and beyond. Carl Sagan was telling the truth when he said, “we are made of star stuff.”
The spiral at the center of a sunflower
The Heart of a Sunflower
All elements on earth seem to hold the spiral as a universal pattern for growth, whether this means the design of a living organism’s growth pattern (sunflower, pine cone, seashell), or a species’ proliferation across planet Earth (rabbits, bees, etc). For the sunflower, the spiral is at the very heart of its center, and is the part of the flower that holds the seeds, which serve as a nutritious snack for humans, hamsters, birds, and other creatures.
Mysterious Pine Cones
Pine cones hold nuts beneath the tough semi-circular casings that line the core of their form. The cones seem to be designed especially for rodents with very long teeth and little hands shaped like those of squirrels or chipmunks. Their hands are shaped to keep a firm hold on a pine cone, and their teeth are shaped to peel off the hard shell that resembles tough tree bark to get to the nutrition-packed nuts inside. It’s one way that our Mother Earth takes care of the creatures that depend completely on her for their “daily bread.” In return, the squirrels and chipmunks help Earth plant more trees, which make more oxygen for all species to continue living. The mathematical patterns in nature are both beautiful and life-giving.
Happy Spring to you! We’ve seen Pi Day, St. Patrick’s Day and the Vernal Equinox/Ostara come and go, yet the snow continues to cover the ground in New England. We hope and trust that under the white shroud of crunchy crystals, the earth is preparing to bless us with a panorama of brightly colored buds. The tender beginnings of flowers and leaves are ready to announce their presence to a world that yearns for their cheer. The snow is ready to melt, and so are our hearts.
Winter hoop houses hold growing greens for our community to make salads
Growing Like a Vine
Global warming has dumped upon us a series of very unusual storms this season and many areas of the world are reeling from them. Despite such phenomena, I believe that the earth will manage to deliver her cyclical rebirth through the flowers and plants that will sprout and become green. The cold winter will recede to let her have her way with the world.
Vines are one type of plant whose growth pattern seems to run parallel to human development. All types of vines begin small and tender like infants, in the form of fragile seedlings. With enough sunshine and water they take off, running up trellises at light speed like happy growing children. A vine is one type of plant that needs just an ounce of life-giving energy in the form of basic nutrients to blossom and run rampant. With a moderate amount of encouragement, they blossom beautifully and reach for the sky.
Peas are one of my favorite types of vine, which love to climb toward the sun as they grow. March is the time I usually sow snap pea seeds in my gardens. I provide trellises to support the nature of their growth patterns and they reward me with beautiful flowers and a harvest of sweet pods full of peas to snack on. Pea plants tolerate a wide range of summer temperatures, so if I plan well I can grow up to three cycles of snap peas in one summer season.
Ivy as a Symbol of the Vine Family
Peas are not the only prolific type of vine plant. Pole beans and grapes are others. Gourds are also very fruitful, delivering their delicious creations at varying times throughout the summer growing season. Watermelon is the sweetest of them. Then there’s the yellow squash, zucchini, and butternut squash.
A section of ivy painted with acrylics by my daughter around our back door frame
Finally, there is the ivy plant. Ivy’s fresh green leaves begin sprouting past their dried up ancestors in April, and by July the plant needs to be cut back so that it doesn’t crowd out everything else I’m trying to grow. In the fall, ivy is a symbol of abundance that lasts the longest of all climbing vine plants before it succumbs to the hibernation demanded by winter. Some have foliage that turn bright colors before they die, but most remain green.
To keep the essence of green in our homes throughout the cold winter months, my daughter and I have painted ivy around our back door frame. The back door opens onto a deck with stairs that lead to our back yard, where our gardens are. Below the stairs is a rock garden where ivy used to climb up the frame. Since I learned that climbing vines can damage any standing structures they latch onto and contribute to their premature decay, my daughter and I have taken to painting the ivy instead, using a stencil.
When the days become seasonably warmer, we will take our stencil outside to paint ivy on the wooden columns that hold up the deck stairs, to replace the climbing ivy that was removed last year.
Climbing Toward the Sun
Sometimes I find myself feeling akin to a vine. With a little care, I’ll grow tall and leafy and climb around any support structure provided for me. With the support of an ornate trellis to cling to, I will climb toward the sun. The extent of my growing more branches and leaves depends on the energy that I take in and the height of my trellis. From my growth as a vine, my leaves are the gifts I share with the world: music, writing, leading labyrinth walks, and giving love through cooking and baking.
What forms my support trellis? I believe that eating well, giving myself enough rest, and doing what makes me happy are all parts of my trellis. So are my friends, family and co-housing neighbors. What materials work together to provide a support trellis for you to climb around as you grow? Please feel free to share as a comment below. I look forward to reading them.
We all can use the support of trellises. Sometimes we are called upon to play the trellis for friends or family members who need our support. Small nurturing gestures show love that encourages our fellow humans to grow fresh branches with many leaves that reach far and wide. Let us be trellises for one another in these challenging times.
My rock garden while the ivy still grew there. The two plans were good at reaching toward each other in favor of growing farther.
This past week I did something I did not expect to do until June. I sent a letter to our local school superintendent with my intent to home-school my child – in the middle of the school year! We had been home-schooling together from grades 1 through 6, but I enrolled her in middle-school in September of 2017. The guidance counselor decided that it was best for her to start from the ground up, so she entered school as a sixth grader.
From that time until the present, I heard earfuls of grief about how miserable she was at school. Some children have made the transition from home-schooling to public school learning with relative ease, but my child was not one of those. She had supportive teachers, but that was not enough to keep her going. On top of that, last month she fell and has since been recovering from a concussion. That caused her to miss an extra week of school and to fall behind in her schoolwork. I wasn’t sure if she would ever recover. I was also done with the constant worry about her emotional well-being. I missed home-schooling as much as she did and was ready to return.
Socialization
It wasn’t the schoolwork that she found hard, except for math. Math has been her most challenging subject, but that can change with time. She was doing well in all of her other subjects. It was the social scene she didn’t like or trust. She couldn’t figure out who was a potential friend because everybody was mean to everybody else and put each other down constantly, with few exceptions. They were also fickle. They changed their allegiances at the drop of a pencil. She was so bothered by the culture on the school bus that she asked me to drive her home every day instead of making her take the bus.
The one argument most people make in favor of formal schooling has been around socialization. But, are our children learning things we may not want them to? Are they emotionally and physically safe there? Is the predominant culture all that healthy? Unless there is an extreme case of bullying, I don’t think teachers or administrators notice if a child is feeling unsafe. This type of thing builds up quietly until it is too late. There is tremendous peer pressure to go along with the norm of what classmates think is funny, cool, etc., or be harmed by rumors, teasing, practical jokes, or worse. If my daughter did not want to learn in the environment that she encountered at school every day, she wasn’t going to. If a child is under tremendous stress, her receptivity to learning new things is diminished significantly by that stress. A sense of safety is important to learning new things. My daughter will learn more with her fellow home-schooling friends, travel, and random gatherings with other youth than if she kept attending public school.
The environment of most public schools is not one conducive to inspiring all children to become lifelong learners. Sitting at desks does not engage their imaginations. Their curiosity and wonder are crushed by long days with limited movement. Perhaps not all children experience this because they somehow thrive in the academic environment and succeed, but that experience does not serve all students. We have read many stories about what happens to the students who cannot fit in.
The bottom 3 sets of ivy around the right side our doorway was painted by my daughter.
Curiosity, Wonder and Unschooling
My philosophy about life is that we only have the chance to live ours once. We need to do it right. Why not make it the happiest life there is, and generate the fondest of memories to warm us on cold, dark, wintry nights? I wanted to give my daughter back her happiness and to lighten her spirit. I wanted her to love both life and learning again.
During our former years of home-schooling, I sat beside my daughter and worked with her to develop skills in observation, experimentation, and recording what she saw. She learned how to draw what she observed, think about how two substances interacted together and wrote down questions she wanted to find answers to. This time around, I know that she is old enough to take responsibility for her own education. She will start by reading some books in each of the subjects that we already have at home, and then supplement those resources with library books, field trips and other fun activities. She will use our local library’s web site as a free portal into the world of learning new languages, such as Spanish. I will need to work while she reads, writes and explores, but will make time to listen to her share what she has learned. She will also be responsible for keeping up-to-date records of her learning experiences – just enough information for me to write the progress report in June.
My daughter’s spirit and energy are returning to her, more quickly than she expected. She has expressed curiosity about the content she is reading and wonder about what she notices happening in the world around her. That is because she is given the room to demonstrate agency when choosing her own curriculum at the highest level she is capable of learning. She knows herself best. She takes lots of initiative in beginning and completing projects, such as painting ivy around our back doorway (above). She is also given time to exercise her body, because physical activity also feeds the brain. I am excited to see how she works through the learning activities she sets up for herself, and look forward to working with her on projects such as painting wall murals now and then.
Welcome back to the Gardener Dragon’s blog. I hope that 2018 has been good to you. It’s off to a roaring start here in New England with the biggest snowstorm of the season upon us. I am grateful that I have the warmth of company from my husband, my hamster, my daughter and her friends in my home as I write. At 6:45 we’ll gather with our neighbors at my co-housing community’s common house for a delicious meal of black-eyed pea stew, collard greens and corn bread. I will be heading off for some gaming before that.
With a grateful heart I welcome this new year with wide open arms, and I resolve to write 12 fresh blogs this year ~ one per month! I give myself that goal because in addition to this blog, I write for SheWrites and Hub Pages. I am also working on two novels.
Letting Go
When seeking inspiration for my writing, I often look to nature. When the weather is mild, i.e. a range from warm summer sunshine to light snow flurries, I walk the wooded labyrinth at the south end of my community daily. I witness the wonders of life in the activities of the flora and fauna that live there. Birdsong, chirping crickets and the calls of peeper frogs are some of my favorite forms of music. I also enjoy the shower of rain sprinkling over me through the tree canopy above the labyrinth. In autumn, the vibrant colors in the leaves embrace me in a warm and cozy aura of love. After a light dusting of snow, sunlight is reflected in rainbows on the soft carpet blanketing the path.
One day in October, I walked around the woods by the labyrinth until I captured an image of a leaf falling from a tree. The leaf floated gracefully to the ground in the breezes ruffling the canopy of branches. The grace of the leaf’s descent came from the grace with which the leaf let go of the life it knew as part of the tree branch it sprouted and grew from. I imagine that the elder leaf bid her leaf siblings and nearby oak and maple friends a fond farewell as she let go of her hold on the branch and let herself descend to the ground.
A golden autumn leaf falling from a tree branch
Transformation
The elder leaf was ready to let go of the life she knew in order to become part of the earthy humus that feeds the tree she fell from. She gave herself back to the earth as a gift. She was ready to become food for the tree that gave her life, or a gift found by a wanderer and pressed in a favorite book. She was ready to let go and give herself over to becoming part of a new reality without forethought of what that new reality would be. She was open to whatever she was called to be next.
Lying on the ground, she was the same leaf she had always been, but also more than what she once was. Her earthy fragrance became like a balm that lifts the heart of the pilgrim who picks her up and breathes her in. Her life became connected more closely than ever to the other leaves that had already fallen to the ground. Together, their lives ended. They were ready to rest under the frost and snow that covered them throughout the winter. They were at peace because they knew that that they would eventually become warm and glisten in the vernal sunlight as the wheel of the earth turned to the next place in her cycle of life.
I strive to be like the gracefully falling leaves of autumn. I want to let die within the parts of me that don’t fit anymore in order to rise to a new me in the spring. Winter gives us a transformational gestation time to reflect, renew our homes and ourselves, and emerge in the spring more fully the people we are meant to become. But that is not the end. Our lives are the journey, ever transformed by the moments we live among our fellow travelers of every species. Let us be transformed by the darkest, coldest months, to rise to the warmth of spring. Let each of us be a new life ready to blossom.
Frosted fallen leaves waiting for the peaceful sleep of winter
Last week my friend Richard brought my daughter and I out into the harbor for an afternoon on his brother’s boat. Despite dire weather predictions, the day planned for our sail was perfect. We were thus inspired to stay out longer than we had originally planned, tacking back and forth, sailing close to the wind. The sun, wind, clouds and water gave us a magical day.
One thing I learned about myself is that I am due for a serious refresher course in the basics of sailing. Since my two main totem elements are earth and water, I’m okay navigating through them easily. When you add the wind, I’m not so sure I can play well with its unpredictability. I’m okay when the wind is behind me, but if I am faced with the prospect of sailing a boat close to the wind across the bow, my sense of balance flees from me. My sense of adventure is checked by my desire to make sure the boat stays in one piece. I am told that’s a good thing.
The Boldness of Youth
My daughter had been looking forward to our sailing trip for a month and was eager to help out with whatever tasks Richard was willing to hand over to her. She helped hoist the sail, tied knots, and took her turn at the helm for a while when the wind was calm. She even climbed up onto the prow when it was time to tie the boat to the dock post at sunset.
While Richard steered, my daughter was happy to splash in the salt water, sing songs from Les Miseràbles, take pictures, and watch out for pirate ships. One racing boat we saw sported a black hull and matching black sails. She called it “The Black Pearl.” Guess which movies we’ve been watching together this summer?
The Stillness of Nature
One of the phenomena that I noticed during our time on the water was the effect of nature on the three of us. Though we engaged each other with lively chatter in the car on the way to the marina and back home, against the backdrop of an broad mix of music, on the boat we settled into long periods of companionable silence. Our senses became attuned to the sights, sounds and touch of nature. We noticed flying cormorants, listened to the lapping of the waves against the hull, and were delighted by the spray of water and play of wind in our hair. The atmosphere was so enchanting that our attention was fully engaged with how the elements moved in harmony with one another, and how the creatures of that world moved from place to place.
A Fond Farewell
Our first boating adventure of the summer was also our last, since it happened so late in the season. My daughter’s school year has begun and it is time for me to return to my writing and gardening.
Perhaps I will find a place to take a sailing class or two before our next adventure together. In the meantime, I am grateful for the magical afternoon spent with both enchanting nature and charming human company.
Our first hamster, Chocolate Chip, scampering across the rainbow bridge
Over the past two years we have loved and lost two pet hamsters ~ Chocolate Chip and Elsa. They filled our lives with love and joy while they lived, and when they met the end of their lives our hearts were filled with grief. The average life expectancy for most species of hamsters is 18 months, though we had hoped to keep Elsa living as long as two years. If we continue our habit of adopting hamsters every year and a half, we must learn to approach their impact on our lives as preparation for letting go.
Attachment and Healing from Loss
Zen Buddhism is famous for promoting the concept of non-attachment. In order to be an effective hamster parent, I believe that it is important to form a bond of attachment with our pets, but then readily let it go and heal from our grief when they die. Each time we adopt a pet hamster, it is important for us to form a loving bond with the individual critter that communicates to our pet that he/she is cherished. Such a bond is expressed through showing the animal appropriate measures of respect and affection, including consistent fulfillment of their physical needs: fresh water changed daily; a bowl full of food and chews, and a clean, stimulating cage environment.
When each hamster passed on, it was comforting for us to think about the concept of their little spirits crossing over a “Rainbow Bridge” to a special heavenly home. We buried Chocolate Chip and Lucky (my daughter’s previous pet, a blue beta fish) under the weeping willow tree on our property. We buried Elsa near our community labyrinth, with a little mausoleum of leaves, sticks and flowers built around her resting place.
We learned from the death of Chocolate Chip that in order for our hearts to heal, it was important for us to let go of our attachment to our former pet, then allow another hamster to fill our hearts. It took us a month to adopt Elsa last year. It has taken us five days to adopt Sammy Bear. She is such a merry little hamster that she wrapped her little paws around our hearts as soon as we laid eyes on her.
Each hamster that we have loved has taught us how to care for him or her, and for hamsters in general. We hope that this learning will keep each hamster we adopt strong and healthy for more months than the previous hamster. We heartily thank our furry friends for being such loving, patient teachers and will always hold them dear in our hearts.
Chocolate Chip
Elsa
Samantha Bear, our newly adopted merry little hamster
Rumi Pippin, the youngest hamster addition to our family
Welcome to The Gardener Dragon’s blog. Step aboard to join me on my maiden voyage. Sail with me to find fresh adventures, both in my home gardens and in gardens tended by fellow wayfarers. Discover fresh ideas, recipes to use with your own garden harvests, and reflections on the way my family engages in home-schooling. Exchange thoughts and information with me. I am looking forward to having your company on my journey. Welcome aboard!
gardenerdragon 