Trees in the Wind

The tall but half-grown gum tree outside the bathroom window gives me so much pleasure. On still, clear nights it sits with the moon about it like a Charles Long art nouveau painting. Today it was tearing itself apart in the wind like a teenager with a bad conscience. Tossing, not yet fully grown, so tormented and no one able to offer consolation.

Kate Llewellyn, The Waterlily

Pic by Miheco under a cc attrib/share alike licence

I remember that teenage space.  I still go there, into the illusion of separation.  I guess health issues that test your mettle do that to you, but there is always another opportunity to learn to resist that downward tug next time.  To ride the wave rather than getting sucked into its guts.  It is a paradox that you need to embrace and accept the entirety of the wave in order to be able to ride it.  Separating out the full embrace space from the getting sucked under space is one that is a little too nuanced to learn in teenaged years, but which even late bloomers such as myself are always capable of learning. 

Lots of people would like to return to their years of teenagerhood, but not me.  The hypocrisy of adults who have forgotten what it is like to be that age, whose eyes are covered over by jealousy so that all they see is your freedom and none of your torment?  Where they hold all the cards?  No thanking ye :)

It's been rather windy here lately.  I come home from being out in other places and small tree branches and bits of cast-off bark litter the road.  I read this portion of Kate Llewellyn late yesterday in the bathroom, the cold air breathing its way in through the cracked-open window.  It had calmed down from the day before, when the wind was strong enough to whistle through the window and the gums outside became potential housebreakers.  

I saw a picture the other day of a rainbow gum.  What an amazing-looking tree.  One of only four species of eucalypts that are not native to Australia.

I hugged a tree the other night, on the way home from singing along with other crones daggy songs from the 60's and 70's at the Caravan Club.  Though I don't like a whole stack of the songs we sing, the therapy from sitting in a room with a group of people whose sole intention is to get together and sing out loud makes me feel slightly heady.  I hugged the tree to bring me down to earth.  

Trees are people too :P Or they're something, anyway.  They communicate in some fashion with each other.  I wonder if they communicate with us?  It definitely feels like it to me.  But who knows. 

And I guess if trees are sentient beings, then teenagers must be as well :)

The Theoretical Garden

I was talking back in May about how big my garden would need to be if I grew my own ingredients from every plant or tree that I ingest in handy form from the shops.  There are a few more that need to be added to my list at the moment.  Those who have read here for a long time (all three of you) know that I'm on an ongoing quest for better health, and for ultimate recovery from chronic fatigue syndrome.  It's an ongoing quest because, quite frankly, parts of my body are not in particularly good, well-functioning order after a long-term illness and antibiotic regimens.  Those parts of the body are also the ones that are not generally spoken about in polite society.  (I find in my online readings of forums that women, so often, seem to have to go on with the requisite "Eww" and "That's gross" and such comments so that everybody knows that even though they're talking about such gross stuff like their own bodies, they're still feminine and all, you know?  But honestly, there's so much of that stupid squirmy my-body-is-gross stuff that goes on that you would think that they had Barbie mounds and their shit didn't even happen, let alone stink ... but anyway, I digress :)

Hmmm.  Anyway, so even though I diverged there, I do most heartily concur that trees and shrubs and living things are far prettier than me talking about my bowels.  Even though it's fascinating (did you know, for instance, that the gut has receptors in it that are connected to your brain?  A second brain, as it were.  Hence trusting those gut feelings because they balance out the brain in your head with a different kind of wisdom.  A body brain.  And also, my father's comment to people he disliked on the  TV and to us kids that "You've got shit for brains" ... well, Dad, you're not so far off in some respects).

Anyway, my digression digressed.  As I was saying, as my bowels are not of interest to you, instead of talking about them I will add a few more plants to my theoretical garden (which looks far more organised than the real garden, which does not have any of the herbs or vegetables we had planned to plant into it by this stage but instead is growing a lovely pile of daisied weeds at this point in time).

The first new tree to the theoretical garden is the black walnut tree, or juglans nigra.  It's a gorgeous-looking thing, and I could sit under it in my garden and read.  My partner with his magic hands could fashion it into woodish things, as according to this site it is "unquestionably the finest wood in the world."  But what I'm after in my apothecary is the nut, the black walnut, picked green and hulled.  This little baby goes into a nice little concoction with the two items listed below to kill parasites, the latest of my health quests.

Creative Commons pic by Jean-Pol Grandmont

I would need to be careful about where I planted this next shrub in my garden because it can inhibit the growth of other plants grown near it.  Artemisia absinthium, or wormwood, is the bitter herb that goes into absinthe and drives you into beautiful before it drives you mad, according to folklore (although this Wikipedia entry argues that it is no more harmful than other spirits).  The pretty silver-green leaves will be pressed for their oil, to go into the tincture form.

Creative Commons pic by Matt Lavin

Can you guess what spice these flowers are?

Creative Commons pic by Dainee.

They're more easily recognisable in their dried form as cloves (syzygium aromaticum to you, Jack).  Apart from being the most wonderful-smelling air freshener when you boil five or so on the stove with a cinnamon stick, cloves go well in apple pies and, less appetisingly, here in my tincture, where they kill parasitical eggs.  Those tiny little sticklike buds come from a tree that can grow from 8-12 metres tall.

Creative Commons pic by Adrien2008

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.


~ Mary Oliver

Being an account of soup, bisexual flowers and healing bark

I often wonder how big my yard would need to be if I had to grow everything I ate there.  Well, I don't often wonder that.  That would be sorta weird, wouldn't, it, but I do think about it from time to time as I go about my life being able to purchase vast quantities of herbs and spices and thingymies and jiggeries that wend their way to me from parts round the globe to end up looking rather dull in the local supermarket, so that I have to actually take the time to ponder their origins and write, in sentences far too long for good readibility, about how rich it makes me feel to have all of this stuff to be able to cook with and drink whenever I want.

Whereas these Indian women who are picking the camellia sinesis leaves that go into my five-a-day tea habit do not.  We are very lucky, my friends.  When I feel displeased because the era impedes on me with its whirrings and ringings and connectedness-but-notness, I remind myself of the basics of a rich life:  a bed, a roof, and a full pantry.

Image: Nac Datta

This is capsicum annuum.  From this variety we get regular capsicums (known also as bell peppers), cayenne pepper and paprika.  It would also need to grow in my garden because the paprika's gone into the slow cooker for tonight's chickpea soup.  Today it freezes in Susieland in a raining winterishness, and so a bit of pepperishness goes into the soup to keep the immune system running hot.

Image: Douneika

The brassica oleracea, or cabbage, is very unsexy.  It's sort of like the vegetabilic equivalent of a pair of daggy tracky dacks with the bum hanging out.  But I love cabbage.  Whether I love it in the above soup remains to be seen, because Chickpea and Cabbage Soup ain't exactly the thing you dream of rushing  home for when Mum's cooking, but we shall see.

Image: Frank Starmer

This is fabacae, sp. caesalpinioidae, and while we're here, aren't these Latin names rather tiresome?  There's not a lot of timbre about them, is there?  It's like other Latin words, like clitoris and testes;  it just takes all the humanity or shrubanity or life essence out of these things and turn them into something cold and antiseptic that you certainly would not want to touch even with a bargepole, let alone anything else.  Whereas plenty of people like to touch clitorises and testes, and actually find it quite a pleasurable experience.

Drinking this is also quite a pleasurable experience, although not in the same category.  But a cup of senna tea  is a lovely thing to help ... well, you know, move things along down there.  

Yeah, I know, I'm getting all coy suddenly talking about poo, after I've just talked about clitoresis and testes. But those are generalised clitorises and testes, not my personal ones.  Whereas now you all know that I had a cup of senna tea today because the cableman came round and there wasn't any cable to lay.  

Image: Lalithamba

This last one is my favourite.  It is ulmus rubra, commonly known as the slippery elm.  It's not the leaves or the flowers or the fruit that are eaten this time, but the bark.  

Speaking of the flowers, Wikipedia informs me that the flowers of elm trees are bisexual or unisexual.  Well, there you go.

Image: (C) Steve Baskauf

Ground down into a fine powder and drank, the bark becomes very moist and sticky when mixed in water, which helps to soothe inflamed parts of the body.  People use it to help with their inflamed gastrointestinal tracts, bringing relief to sufferers of irritable bowel syndrome and leaky gut syndrome.  

My old doggy had a bad day yesterday, throwing up his guts all over the floor.  A visit to the vet last night reported an overindulgence in bones (mea culpa) resulting in an overtaxed system and an inflamed stomach.  And so I was particularly heartened this morning when Lester, after not eating anything yesterday, partook of his very own soup:  broiled chicken in slippery elm and chicken stock-flavoured water.  Dat dog knows what's good for him.

Which may very well end up being tastier than the version the two leggeds have this evening, but we shall see :)

Image: Swamp Dude

I Spied With My Little Eye ...

This morning is not one of the more pleasurable things I've seen over this long weekend.  But it's not so much what I'm seeing, as how it's feeling.  Granted, what I'm seeing ain't so pretty - there are giant boxes and bags of stuff all over my new abode, product of two households slowly comingling.  Keanu* the couch and Chair the chair are still upended in the dining area, along with my work table and art table, which stand in pieces and sideways respectively.  But that's all okay.  It will all get done.  Nothing is overwhelming me, the morning after a five-day weekend.

And it's sure purdy outside.  Pure autumnal weather.  The windows fogged up, the temperature gauge outside still in single figures.  I can better feel the land breathing up in these hills.  In it goes, and the temperature slowly and steadily climbs, peaking mid-afternoon before out it breathes once more and the temperature wends back down to warming dinners, ugg boots and heaters.  The days lately have been pure sunlight doing its dappling thang, shooting off the leaves.

So no, there's nothing actually wrong with anything that is here this morning.  It just looks like Monday, that's all.

But even that's not so bad.  Because it's actually Wednesday.  But ooh, easing back into the working week does take some doing.  It took a depressing ride home from Richmond to Belgrave after my football team lost (again) to the team it beat to win the Grand Final three years ago and has not been able to beat since.  A football loss, and a trainload of people who all seemed as one to realise as the dark set in around our carriage that the holiday was over.

Oh, well.  A holiday must always end, but it usually takes several hours of internal tantrums for me to loosen my grip on it first.

The tree outside the front door is loosening its grip on its leaves, and they spill onto the path.  While away for the weekend in the High Country, I spied many beautiful maples revealing their true colours of red, orange, yellow.  The colours too of the lower chakras.  I forget and then remember each year how grounding autumn is to me, and it has been nice doing such grounding things as meditation, of not-much-on, of some walking in alpine air up Mount Stirling to feel the earth under my feet.

On the way home, we passed the areas that burned in the Black Saturday fires of two years ago.  The fire burning through the ground has stimulated so much new growth.  This land is made for burning.  The seeds of the eucalypt are thrown into action by the process.  Some areas of ground were rich with eucalypt saplings.  Many tall trees, their trunks still charred, were covered in a fine layer of fuzzy protective moss, or new green leaves.

Closer to home, the vines around Dixon Creek are beginning to turn yellow, in preparation for the stark and beautiful rows and rows of vineyards whose stalks stand out black and underground productive, in the fogs of winter.

How about you?  What have you seen over this Easter holiday?

____

* My partner doesn't like Keanu.  But that's okay.  I don't much like his couch either.  Looks like we're buying new couches at some point.  My partner thinks Keanu looks like he was manufactured in 1989.  And I suppose he has a point.  But I still love Keanu anyway, and now I get to lie on him all by myself :)

Tree Woman

This is one woman who will endure physical and verbal beating for what she believes. She has gone from living in a dirt floor hut to being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. (Well, okay, sure, it's lost its lustre since you can now be awarded one for simply not being someone else, but hey, Wangari Maathai has sure earned hers).

It never ceases to amaze me how much one person, or a small group can accomplish - way more than the sum of their parts. Wangari is one amazing woman, and she has had one amazing life.

When the Kenyan dictator of her country, Daniel Arap Moi, decided to build over Uhuru Park, the only parkland in Nairobi, she stood up to him. She incurred his wrath and denigration (ye olde standby - when people start speaking up, demonise them. If they are an oppressed part of your culture (ie women), call them mad, denigrate their worth, call them onto the cultural carpet, tell them they're not behaving how women should behave, respecting their men).

Proving that not much has changed since Nebuchadnezar, Moi was wanting to replace Uhuru Park with "a giant skyscraper, some luxury apartments, and a huge golden statue of himself." Maathai's protests earned her a spot in jail, charged with treason. It took her three years of fighting and death threats and violence before Moi backed down on his venture after international protests began snowballing.

Maathai's Green Belt Movement began in 1977 in an effort to tackle deforestation, soil erosion and lack of water. What began at the grassroots, a bunch of women planting trees, now has seen 40 million trees planted throughout Africa. Inspiring stuff. Grounding women back into the earth that supports them.

Maathai now speaks internationally about deforestation and global warming. I encourage you to check out the Green Belt Movement site and the article in The Independent which first switched me onto this wonderful woman.

As a scientist, Maathai is warning now that man-made global warming threatens to make the rainforests dry up and die, whatever she does in Kenya. She could save them from Moi – but can she save them from us?

"People don't realise how much they depend for their own survival on this ecosystem and how fragile it is," she says, almost pleading. "The world's forests are its lungs. Thick, healthy strands of indigenous trees absorb huge amounts of carbon dioxide and keep them out of the atmosphere. If the Congolese rainforests were entirely destroyed, for example, 135 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide would be released – equivalent to more than a decade of man-made emissions. So if we lose these forests, we lose the fight against climate change."

The rainforests can be killed from two directions – by the saws of men like Moi, or the warming gases of people like us. That is why she has left the land she loves, armed with the Nobel Peace Prize she won in 2004, and travelled so far: to try to persuade us to let the forests live. "There are moments in history when humans have to raise their consciousness and see the world anew. This is one of those moments. We are being called to assist the earth in healing her wounds, and in the process we can heal our own. We can revive our sense of belonging to a larger community of life. We can see who we really are."

This inspires me even while I feel the futility in a way. (And going deeper, while in spiritual terms I still hold to a tiny naiive childish flicker that the world will be made anew some day, maybe that belief is why we are so languid, who believe such a thing. Why care for the earth when it is going to be made new? Only a people living in our times, as cast adrift as we are from mother earth, would ever be so deluded as to think such things. We are most certainly city kids).

How can things change when it comes down to people who are encouraged within the very fabric of their society, to consume more and more? What happens when climactically the most powerful in the world are ... us?

So often I am overwhelmed by the way everything is set up. Our very cultural fabric, and our riches, our torpor, impede us from getting involved. And so to see people who have broken through that ennui and are willing to stand up is inspiring to me. I was enamoured to see my favourite gardener, Peter Cundall, arrested protesting against Gunn's pulp mill in Tasmania the other day.

It all feels so helpless and pointless because the power is with the governments, and the governments are composed of people who wish to stay in power, who have all sorts of pressures from all sorts of different venues, and who are rich and corrupt despite what they think about themselves, and so what we have is a proposed emissions trading scheme which will see and so what you get when you are hashing out a proposed emissions trading bill is one, the Greens tell us, which will actually will see greater investment in coal in the future. WTF?

But then that's always the way it's been, isn't it. The big people at the top are smothered by their own power, their own position, their own red tape. Even when what's debated is the planet we live on, the air that we breathe, the trees that breathe for us. It is up to people at the bottom to make the real difference. It's always been the way. Power to the people :)

HT to Mike

Hippy Family Shots

My Muddah

My Bruddah

Tree Fix

Birch trees at the Olinda Arboretum



Room to breathe

Sydenham, Springtime

I forget that the term 'Spring Fever' is not just a literary term. I feel flushed. Slightly manic. I haven't had it this bad for years. All of a sudden. Spring impaled itself into my senses right on the dot of 1 September. The Spring fever keeps bubbling out my ears. I'm sad for my northern hemispherean compatriots that their Summer has ended, but I have earned this Spring :)

Tonight when I got on the train I couldn't help smiling, at my book, which wasn't funny, at a woman nearby who had the most expressive face. She was obviously doing some heavy-duty thinking - something I have been unable to do for the past two days. The heavy duty thinking showed itself all over her face. She kept lifting her eyes up so her forehead would wrinkle. Her mouth would pout, her mouth would turn itself onto one side like a cartoon mouth, so that her nose would twitch. It was so full on. I think she might have an answer for the Middle East peace crisis.

Me, I can't focus for too long on much. My eyes kept being drawn to that woman and beyond her, to the older woman wearing a long black imitation leather jacket and carrying a large potted plant. It spilled itself over the sides of the pot in rapturous applause. I don't know what it was, but it was green and light green and it lustred up the carriage. Next to me, a young Asian man held a bunch of lilliums, a gift in plastic cellophane, so young that none of them had opened to tell me their colours.

The woman with the rapturous plant got off at West Footscray. When I got off at the next stop along, the sky was darkening but not dark, not like it has been for months and months on end whenever I arrive on the platform. Tonight it was an aching colour of deep blue velvet violet, like the Vicks Vaporub jar. My tree, in the parking lot next door - the tree I love with my eyes four times a week, was budding new foliage for the first time. It felt the way it feels when you listen to a new song on the second listen and know you're going to love this song so much that you take a mental snapshot of how it felt in your relationship at the very beginning :)

I'm so afevered there's nothing for it but to go and do some cleaning. I have a new CD to listen to (Ohio, Over the Rhine) and oh, it all feels so rich I think I'll just eat the air for dinner (which is good, 'cause there's no clean plates left).

My Life as a Tree

This is the first sculpture I have ever made as an adult. I'm pretty chuffed with it really, for a first effort. It's unfired as yet. I hope it lasts the furnace. If it doesn't it was nice knowing you, Harold.

That's her nickname, Harold. Which is pretty silly. But she won't tell me what her real name is yet. It's a secret. But I think it starts with A.

Me and clay, we've got this thing.

After playing with clay, me and Naughty went to the Arboretum again and saw some real live ones.
I am pure cactus. Had only four hours' sleep, but had a full day of vim and vigour. Which is basically a first for me and my health. I finally finished my essay. I am sorry my teacher has to read such drivel, but there's nothing for it. If I am allowed, and if there is space for another first-year subject in my degree, I am going to take an Introduction to Drawing and Painting class next semester. I'm excited about all this stuff. I'm also going off to buy some clay sometime soon :)

Suburbia

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.

~Bill Vaughn