Lazy W Marie

Carpeing all the diems in semi-rural Oklahoma...xoxo

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Second Chance Garden

   Around Mother’s Day this spring Handsome took me on a veggie and seeds shopping spree.  He sneakily drove me to a hardware store about fifteen miles away, wheeled a cart up to me and said, “Go for it!  Grow me somethin, woman!” 
   I took a deep breath.  My eyes were big and glassy as we cruised the aisles of tiny green promises.  He helped me choose the leafiest, strongest looking tomato, pepper, eggplant, cucumber, sweet potato, and watermelon plants.  And zucchini and squash.  And hot peppers. 
   Then we went inside and scooped up several million packets of seeds for summer flowers, herbs, and a few late lettuces.  The earth at home was plenty warm enough by May, and I had been composting all winter.  Most luxuriously, Handsome had already tilled the majority of my garden plot, so I was not fazed by this gargantuan purchase. 

   We were ready, baby, MORE than ready.  And the clock was a tickin’.

   Within a few days every single seedling was tucked neatly into the soil.  Admittedly, it wasn’t the most shapely or creative layout I’d ever planted, but it was full to bursting with edible potential.  I felt that what it lacked in design could be compensated for by volume.  The Lazy W Garden 2011 had the potential to be my most prolific yet, and  I.  Was.  Happy.

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   Fast foward about a month.  The mild spring weather turned suddenly and unpleasantly to a record setting Oklahoma summer.  After growing for just a few safe weeks, my green babies were dying a fearsome death.
   The previously lush pumpkin and squash vines were rotting in the sun.  The sweet potato leaves were turning a lovely but dangerous shade of bronze.  The pepper plants were emaciated almost beyond recognition.   I can barely stand to talk about the basil and clematis.
   I tried mulching and watering and sort of weeding, but the truth is that in the midst of the heat wave I had far more pressing issues at hand than the out-of-the-way veggie garden.  I had to keep the animals cooled and watered twice a day, and I needed to work on my tan before our big anniversary vacation.  You know, important stuff.
   So as we packed for that trip in mid July, I silently resigned to the likelihood of returning home to a cemetary of vitamin ambitions.  There were more than a few tears.  Acknowledging this big of a failure is painful, but I did have a pretty respectable base tan.  So there’s that.
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   Everything you might imagine about how a garden suffers in more than fifty consecutive days of one hundred-degree-plus heat, and a drought with the power to shrink lakes, all those horrible things are true.  And I feel terrible about it.  But there are lessons to share and hope to celebrate.
     Here is what I have learned:  In addition to being realistic in your garden planning (ahem), it seems to be really important to make your garden at least inviting enough to draw you there and tempt you to stay.  It doesn’t have to be English knot garden perfect, but when I planted after Mother’s Day, I did so hurriedly.  With precious little shape or pattern, all mess and zero fractals.

   A certain amount of chaos is exciting, but vast expanses of weeds and constant formlessness can drain the gardener’s spirit.  It made me feel like no amount of work I could possibly do there would help.  I never wanted friends, family, or especially even Handsome to see it, that is fo’ sho’.  That’s not an excuse, just an acknowledgement of my human nature.  Beauty matters.  Even if it’s truly wild beauty, we all crave it deep down on a cellular level, and where it is lacking we tend to want to escape.  Agreed? 
   That is the philisophical lesson from this summer.  I pinky-promised myself to do better next season.
   The pratical lesson is that planting things too far apart (like I did) can be painfully challenging for the plants.  It’s actaully groovy to plant pretty closely together.  The plants shade each other and help each other retain soil and moisture, too.  And if you plant stategically you can naturally eliminate lots of pests.  MARIGOLDS.
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   So where are my few survivors?  They are in Veggie Triage.  It’s a three-step healing process consisting of reduction (of both overall population and individual plant size), relocation, and rejuvenation. 
   I have moved the surviving plants from the remote garden up to the flower beds on the east and south sides of the house.  The rationale is that the attractiveness of the flower bed will encourage me to spend more time tending the edibles.  The flower beds had space to fill anyway, so here again we have symbiosis in nature.
   I have already seen marked improvements in every single little baby, and I feel confident that in the coming weeks we can add seed plants like lettuce and spinach, then later on some broccoli, cilantro, etc, to really fill in the blanks.
   Green thumbs up, friends.  I do NOT want to give up completely on Lazy W Garden 2011.  With a little luck and the logic and magic of these two lessons learned, we might be frying green tomatoes by Labor Day.
  

Pockets of Joy #1

   A few days ago I stumbled on a lovely and complex blog called  Bohemian Twilight    Soooo worth a steady gaze, especially if you are in need of the creative person’s equivalent of a B-12 shot in your upper arm.  Check it out and see for yourself.  I found her through some luscious home interior photos on Pinterest (she has a Tumblr slide show), so you can bet I am already planning on how to gypsify the farm.  PLEASE don’t anybody warn Handsome.  Okay?  Okay.  Deal.

Credit for both amazing photographs:
You are welcome for directing you there.
   In addition to the visual feast, this blogger has a lot of wisdom and insight to offer.  Read  her post on anger and the full moon.  Enlightening!

   On Fridays she graciously hosts a link-up where you can share your “Pockets of Joy” for that week.  I groove this.  I warmly welcome the intervalled practice of expressing gratitude and joy for the beauty in a person’s life.  We have so much!  And  sometimes intending to just maintain an “attitude of gratitude” can be rather thin and quiet, at least for me.  Sometimes it’s nice to share those feelings of bounty.

   So without further ado, my fledgling entry:
1.  Rituals.  Piping hot, strong and rich coffee very early every morning, sweetened with real sugar and real cream.  This (especially the cream) is a luxury item that starts the day off wonderfully.  Showering in the afternoon, right before Handsome arrives home.  Cleaning the kitchen just at sunset.  Locking up the animals as the moon reveals herself.  Braiding my legs together with his while we watch some History channel.  Daily rituals are joyful in their regularity.  They help us keep the pace of home.

2.  Weather.  Oklahoma’s extended drought and extreme heat wave have finally come to a close.  At least for now.  This week we have joyfully worked and played in mid-nineties, shade, and even the occassional rain shower.  This is a wonderful refreshment, one we cannot help but celebrate.

3.  Feeding the chickens.  I love delivering kitchen leftovers outside to the chickens and watching them jump and scurry for the best stuff.  I love the way their little talons sound on the gravel paths, the way they skeedaddle and sprint this way and that in feathery bursts of energy.  I have said it before and will say it again:  Letting the chickens go free range in the mornings is the best animal decision we have ever made on this farm.  This week the chickens are enjoying the cooler temps and have been especially joyful.

4.  Speaking of birds, the geese…  They are getting bolder and bolder, waddling up from the pond several times a day now.  I love to be busy indoors doing housework or writing and hear that strange but happy chorus of honking outside the south door.  One goose in particular, Mia, craves human touch all day.  He (Yep, it’s a he named Mia; I will have to tell that story soon.) honks until I am seated in the grass then curves his long neck in an inverted bass clef shape and whines while I pet him gently.  Geese are hilarious and affectionate and joyful creatures!

5.  Blogland.  Meeting people through blogging whom I would never have met otherwise, like Keda from South Africa.  Hello there!  Staying warm?  Check out her blog too.  Thorough, sensitive writing, beautiful lifestyle.  Truly.

6.  Health.  This week I am keenly aware of how good our health is and that we should be grateful for that.  We ate lightly, slept well, stayed really active, and enjoyed the myriad benefits of this practice.

7.  Music.  I rediscovered a Carla Bruni album and listened to it three and a half times while plowing through my overflowing ironing basket.  Something about her effervescent sound and her poetry got me thinking about bubbles, circles, fractals, and mandalas, so I detoured from ironing long enough to get these words out of my head.

Whether or not you participate in the Pockets link-up,
I would sure like to hear about your joys this week.
May they be genuine, multiplied, and ever changing.
xoxoxoxoxoxoxo

joy pockets

Fractals

   Fractal:  To my memory this is not a word I had ever heard, for SURE not a word I had ever used, before reading William Young’s Christian fiction novel The Shack.  You can read this disturbed girl’s review of the book here.
   For now I’d love to concentrate on this mentioned concept that is both mathematical and artistic and delve a bit into what the author might have been getting at by comparing our human spirit to a wild garden, which itself is a fractal.
Webster’s definition: 
frac-tal   \’frac-tel\  (noun) 
“any of various extremely irregular curves or shapes
for which any suitably chosen part is similar in shape
to a given larger or smaller part
when magnified or reduced to the same size.”
   Still with me?  We’re basically groovin’ on patterns here.  Complex but rhythmic, easily analyzed patterns.  Self-repeating patterns that sort of defy traditional geometry.
Fractal Art Wallpaper
  
   William Young spent the better part of a chapter trying to relay the image, sans illustrations, of a garden that at first glance seemed wildly unkempt, messy, even failed.  But as his characters conversed, it became increasingly apparent that the garden was right on track, growing at just the exact rate and with just the perfect amount of craziness that the gardener intended.  The gardener delighted in the messiness and refused to label it as imperfect or flawed, just beautiful.
  
Wild Garden - October, 2009

   Photocredit:  http://www.ourhappyacres.com/
     Being personally and unashamedly obsessed with gardens of every variety, this naturally caught my attention.  This type of metaphor serves well in many settings, and to think of my soul, my non- physical self, being understood as a wild but beautiful place is, well, it is really enticing.
   In the book, it was only when viewed from above (heaven?) that the boundless chaos of that garden fell into a recognizable system of shapes and images, of texture and color.
  
   The whole picture could be taken in view and seen as beautiful, and then the patterned components could be enjoyed as well.

   Revolutionary.

   Like my own Oklahoma gardens, which even on their best days are a bit on the wild side, my spirit is probably less orderly than most.  Even at 37 I mean 25 I am still brimming with confusion and questions, still wandering a bit more than I would like some days.

   About a thousand years ago when I was a retail banker, I had a customer who was an artist.  We became acquainted enough for me to hear one day her theory that everything in nature mimics something else in nature.  For example, examine the shapes in a spray of ocean coral.  it is so similar to the patterns in our own blood capillaries!  And these, together with the dead trees of winter, are so reminiscent of nerve endings.  The comparisons go on and on.  It is dizzying to think of how much rhythm and repetition, combined with riotous, endless creativity, is abounding in nature.  And it is humbling to see how much can be traced back to the human form.

 
   Whatever your proclaimed faith, I would bet my morning coffee you can sit in awe of the beauty of nature.

   Have you ever seen Mandala art?  It is sometimes used as a form of meditation in the Hindu and Buddhist cultures.  Not worship, just a physical activity, guided enough to be focused but certainly freeing enough to allow for all manner of expression and intepretation. 

   I used to have a Mandala coloring book when my girls were very small, then knowing nothing about the religious implications, just intuitively relishing in the circles, the repetition, the blankness that begged for filling.

   In reading more about fractals I remembered the mandala and cannot help but sense the common ground here.  Maybe there is a cosmic message to be found regarding circular motion, patterns, and following that inarticulate voice.

   And how interesting that a Christian writer used this global mainstay to help his readers visualize the human spirit.  I think it is a beautiful use of imagination.

   We are all some combination of rigid and loose; we all have the capacity for both discipline and creativity.  In fact, I believe these two rely upon the other to really thrive.  Give some thought to the state of your spirit, your soul, your garden.  Acknowledge the Gardener and find beauty where before you loathed your perceived shortcomings.
   You are complex and amazing. 
You are loved more than you know. 
You have a ways to go.
xoxoxoxoxoxoxo

  

Instant Gratification

   I am totally in favor of maintaining and chipping away at a list of long-term goals.  These are generally the accomplishments in life that are closest to the heart and therefore most deeply satisfying .  Keeping LTG lists, it’s just the grown up thing to do.  I personally have multiples.  I have multiples of these in every room of my house and every pocket of all my worn out jeans. 

   Which means that I also have a chronic and nasty case of dissatisfaction with how much I am accomplishing at any given time.  On days when I feel like going to bed in utter despair just one more time might be enough to push me over the edge, I try to regroup and spend some energy on short term goals.  You know, the things that when finished (quickly) give you that sublime sense of Instant Gratification.

   Here are some things I know will scratch the urgency itch for me.  What I find particularly miraculous about this stuff is that every single item here on the STG list corresponds to something on one of my LTG lists.  Even these baby steps, satisfying in and of themselves, all build toward a larger, more beautiful end product.  That is just how AWESOME life can be sometimes.

  • Stop everything and go get an incredible work out!  Sweat and burn for twice as long as you normally do, then stretch until you want to fall asleep.  You will feel better instantly, and it will be worth every minute.

  • Mow the front lawn, weed JUST the flower bed, sweep the sidewalk (for me this includes scooping horse poop), and then water everything.  It takes less time than you think, and it makes the whole front of the house look pretty incredible.

  • Paint something.  Anything.  Preferably with either red or turquoise paint.  Or chalkboard paint.  

  • Make exactly one phone call that you have been dreading.

  • Empty and scrub every single trash can in the house then cut one fresh flower bouquet for every floor of the house.  Light candles in every bathroom.

  • Skip one meal and instead make yourself a fruit-yogurt-honey smoothie and follow it with some ice cold water with lemons.  Let the inside of your body rest for a few hours.  Use the time you would have spent cooking and cleaning up doing something you’ve been really, really, really wanting to do.

  • Groom exactly one of the animals moseying around the farm.  Groom him or her from head to toe.  Pour your tender lovin’ care all over that beloved pet as if it is both the first and last day you have together. 

  • Choose exactly one project on Pinterest that is within reach today.  Do that thing.

  • Good grief, take a remodeling shower already and give yourself an at-home mani-pedi.  Lotion up.  Fix your hair.  Wear some perfume.  WHEW that’s better, and check it out…  You can still work and be productive!

  • Gloss up the house, make something wonderful to sip, and sit down to write an inventory of both your blessings and your answered prayers.  Allow your focus to shift from problems to comforts.

  • Clean the floors mercilessly.  Like a shining clean sink, clean floors are contagious.  So are dirty floors.

  • Make contact with the people who are always on your mind.  Show some love.

  • Bake something incredible for Handsome, even though he INSISTS he doesn’t want any more sweets, because when you DON’T bake he might think you don’t love him so much anymore.

  • Lay in the sun and read about fifty pages of something that loosens up your mind.

  • Repot a living plant or reframe a beautiful photograph or some artwork.

  • Choose and prepare fabrics for one sewing project.  Cut the pieces and package them together with the pattern.  If you have time to sew it, go ahead!  But if not, that’s cool.  You are half way there for next time.

  • While doing laundry in the garage or starting a meal in the kitchen, STAY PUT.  Stop multi-tasking and just stay in the room where the big action is.  See what you can accomplish there during the waiting times.  Pretend there is a force field at the doorway.  Resist every urge to wander off and layer in other activities.  Organize, clean, or decorate exactly one room at a time.  Seriously, girl, focus.  F-O-C-U-S.

  • Do a good deed that you are pretty sure cannot be found out.  Help someone in secret then walk like an Egyptian.

   One final note, I see a common thread amongst all of these actionable ideas:  NONE of them requires a list to be written or a plan to be made.  They just invite me to get really Nike about it and soak up the sense of accomplishment in a short amount of time.  That can dispell the nagging sense of “I can’t get it all done” in just a few hours.  Bueno.  Muy bueno.
What do you do for Instant Gratification?
What place does quickness have in your daily life?

The Longest Walk

   When we go to the lake, my job is simple but important.  After the watercraft is lowered into the murky but joyful Oklahoma shallows, I am responsible for driving the truck and trailer up and out of the water and then parking it over in a nearby parking lot.  Then I just have to descend the concrete ramps to the dock, where Handsome is waiting dutifully for me to join him. 
   Sounds simple, eh?
   Never mind how fraught with danger the drive itself might be, what with the pivoting trailer axle and all; what vexes me is the quarter-mile walk after parking.
   I walk plenty o’ miles every day on the farm, but not really FAST.  If I was a race car, I could cover that quarter mile in like eight to ten seconds.  And I might be driven by Vin Diesel.  But that is totally different…

   But I am NOT a ten-second car living life a quarter mile at a time.  I am just a girl.  Just a girl in flip flops.  Just a girl in flip flops and a bulky life jacket battling the elements.  Trying to walk not only slowly but also toe-to-heel in order to reduce jiggle. 

   Supposedly this works, giving the illusion of walking on properly girlish high heels.  But the truth is that doing so greatly diminishes your pedestrian dexterity.  What you might gain in “firmness” you definitely lose in grace.

   And an already mossy concrete ramp is a terrible place to be not graceful.  I promise you that being caught in this situation while in lake attire is humbling. 

   So the short walk from truck to dock turns into a desperate evaluation of my fitness plan.  And suddenly, between dodging those concerned glances from other boat loading Okies, I am thinking a lot less about zooming over the choppy water with Handsome and more about how to improve my situation before our next lake jaunt.   Pitiful.  Waste of sunshine.

   Happily, the water racing is so dang much fun that the Longest Walk is quickly forgotten.  Within minutes I am aboard, screaming and guffawing while we chase other people’s wakes and make plenty of our own.  I have at least a few days to make the next Longest Walk a little shorter.

The End.