The garden

So far, I've got three heirloom Brandywines, three organic plums, one cherry and two ground cherry tomato plants in. I've also got a jalapeno pepper and a zucchini seedling (potted, for now). All of these are flowering. This Saturday, I plan to add a couple of bell seedlings, another couple of jalapeno, a cayenne (if I can find one), and at least another three plums.

I have the first sowing of organic leaf lettuce and organic dwarf carrots coming up, as well as my first sowing (15 square feet?) of yellow organic bush beans just breaking ground. Tonight, I planted a 4' row of beets and a 4' row of chard and my second sowing of organic bush beans (these, a drying type -- I'll have to dig out the envelope to post the names). The beets and chard are in between the bush bean rows. I added some thyme seed to my old winter-worn thyme plant (it's seven years old and I'll get another to grow alongside it before I pull this one out of the ground -- it was the first thing I ever planted in my garden). I also scattered some organic spicy mixed greens seed in with the lettuce and carrots coming up around my heirloom tomatoes.

I harvested some rhubarb yesterday. I should have separated some of it early in the spring. It's sort of scrunched together and scraggly. If I play my cards right, though, I should be able to get at least a couple dozen jars of chutney or jam out of it, and some frozen to boot. Right now, I need to figure out what to do with the 50 square feet or so of lemon balm that's spread across part of the garden over the past summers. Do I just pull it and compost it? I have some young burdock coming up, too, in a corner, and need to figure out when to pull it to get to try out the roots.

I'll definitely take some photos this weekend after I get some more seedlings in.

On the practice of not being jaded (with some Thich Nhat Hanh thrown in for good measure)

I was thinking about someone who passed through my life not too long ago and a conversation we'd once (or twice) had about unconditional love. He'd indicated that anyone who gave it any sort of consideration in terms of its feasibility was certainly trying to compensate for some sort of lack in childhood with which they hadn't managed to come to terms in their adult lives. He brought up single women who adopt babies as an example of people seeking an instant fix to their own similar childhood lacks by taking in a human who'd more or less be forced to love them, by virtue of his or her helplessness and complete reliance on the woman / adoptive mother in question. It struck me at the time that he seemed to have no understanding of the concept of the reciprocity of love, or of the possibility that people might actually seek to love in and of itself, and not necessarily merely desperately seek to set themselves up to be its recipients.

It's along the same lines as people who enjoy giving for the sake of giving versus those who restrict their giving to reward-like affirmations (verbal, physical, et al.) to modify others' behaviour. There are some who dole out "love" as if it's just another component of some sort of reward-based system -- a controlling sort of habit that's ultimately, especially when done consciously, just another variation of emotional blackmail. So I come back to wondering about unconditional love and its place, if any, in human relationships. In the end, does it really all just boil down to baggage and strings? So this got me thinking about Thich Nhat Hanh (1926- ), and a passage of his I'd read and remembered about a more general way to approach those milling about in the world:

When we come into contact with the other person, our thoughts and actions should express our mind of compassion, even if that person says and does things that are not easy to accept. We practice in this way until we see clearly that our love is not contingent upon the other person being lovable.

I guess in a sense, it's about love being more of an approach or mindset when engaging anybody in our lives than it is a tool to define and frame our contexts and relationships. In this sense, according to Thich Nhat Hanh, we need to learn to offer it unconditionally. It's "not contingent upon the other person being lovable". In a sense, love shouldn't be conditional upon someone's loving us back, or someone's being able to give us exactly whatever it is that we want. Maybe it's naive (or side-stepping into the murk) to think of it as such, or to strive to adopt that understanding of it into one's own life and one-on-one relationships, and particularly with romantic interests (at least not without a good therapist watching your back -- heheh). Maybe the term (in the English language, anyway) just covers too wide a range of emotions and interactions for it to make any sort of sense to try to examine it in one single blog post.

Peak Oil and being single -- some ramblings

I've been doing some Googling on Peak Oil and being single. Most articles about Peak Oil (particularly those envisioning a more extreme state of affairs once oil runs out, where society as we know it alters significantly and desperation and chaos set in as food and transportation costs skyrocket) focus on the paramount need for a return to small communities. We're already seeing the impact that $130+ a barrel oil is having on food and transportation costs now; even conservative experts seem hard-pressed to predict anything other than that these costs will continue to soar. Smaller communities producing their own food in a sustainable manner can knock out the increasingly more and more expensive middle step of needing this or that item shipped across (or from out of) the country, thus significantly lowering the cost of food. With individuals learning the sorts of skills that were necessary before cheap fossil fuels enabled us to opt to replace things rather than repair them, and then coming together to share these skills with each other (or to share the products of their respective skills), these communities can be brought closer to a sort of self-sufficiency.

In larger urban centers, many people are coming together to talk about skills acquisition and about transition towns, or relocalization in general. In more rural areas, some folks already have a head start, growing kitchen gardens or living a more basic life where consumerism isn't necessarily as rampant. Then you have these grey areas, these smaller urban centers or larger towns, where ''rural'' means an hour or two's drive into the country, and where finding like-minded people in your own backyard who won't look absolutely incredulous when you mention that oil is running out is like trying to find a dolphin in a goldfish pond. Establishing a Peak Oil group when living in a not-so-populated area starts to feel like a hopeless endeavour and hopping on a farm to learn about growing things can turn into a time-consuming and expensive ordeal unless you have your own motorized vehicle. Books can only take you so far when it comes to learning, so what to do? And what on earth to do if while in the middle of trying to work around these obstacles, you also happen to be unsatisfactorily single? If it's well-nigh impossible to establish a Peak Oil group in a large town, can you imagine finding a Peak Oil aware partner?

I've read about the difficulty that people have impressing the impact of the developing economic crisis on their spouses and family members to try to get them involved. I have a hard enough time when my SUV driving friends affectionately call me a nut for spending most of my time reading about nutrition, herbs, foraging , alternative energy and low-tech skills; however, I can just imagine the small talk over coffee on a first date.

''So where do you see yourself in the next few years?''
''Well, I'm thinking about ditching my things and resettling into an intentional community.''
''Oh...''
''Yep.''
''So, ah... Hmm. Why?''
''We're running out of oil and the economy is going belly up. We've left our food supply in the hands of agri-bullies who've already brought us some of the most toxic man-made substances ever created yet claim their new mostly under-tested frankenfoods are safe, and we need to reclaim our right to control what we consume. Plus, who doesn't want to live a more meaningful life?''
''Er... sure.... Waitress? Cheque please?''

It seems that it would be a lot easier to be in a relationship and to transition into a less fossil-fuel reliant existence than to attempt to do so while head-butting one's way into the dating game. Instead of jumping as a single entity into a community of many, or stumbling about feeling a little lost sometimes, you'd have a cohort to share the challenges. Technology is such that you can reach out to connect with other like-minded individuals over the internet, but these sorts of exchanges are tricky. Also, almost anyone who's ever taken a go at internet dating will gladly share with you their horror stories, or at the very least, will share their tales of heartache and unwanted surprises. And besides, I surely don't remember the last time I saw ''biointensive gardening'' show up on any man's list of interests on a dating site.

Things to think about...

Freedom

So, earlier this summer, I'd been having these gentle exchanges -- more like the gentle butting together of skulls -- with my mother concerning free will vs. predestination. We seemed to be at either extreme. Her take on it is that your entire life is mapped out for you before you're even born. We're just riding a strong current, where the best we can do is try to dog paddle our rafts along to try to minimize harm to ourselves and to others. Ultimately, however, any sort of control that isn't completely laughable is out of our hands. I told her this seemed to be a convenient way to absolve oneself of regret or accountability over having made bad decisions, and of the responsibility of making thoughtful choices.

My take on it: The things that happen to people don't ultimately define the course of their lives. Things can be triggers -- enormous triggers, sometimes -- but we can respond to them in any number of ways, even if some ways seem slight or more obvious than others. It's what you choose to do with things that fall in your path that has the greatest effect on your outcome. Sartre wrote that we're cursed with freedom. When you face it head-on, it can leave you with anything from butterflies in the pit of your belly to the sort of dread that makes you wish you hadn't gotten out from beneath the covers that morning. However, without freedom we'd be no better than things. We'd be the car waiting for the splat from the pigeon overhead.

I stumbled upon something today -- some author trying to sound profound. He put a bit of a spin on the whole Schoolhouse Rocks quip that ''knowledge is power'' by saying that knowledge isn't power -- it's freedom. Miles Davis, in fact, beat him to that particular punch a long time ago by saying that ''Knowledge is freedom; ignorance is slavery''. The thing is that although I really get what they're getting at, it seems that they're both missing the really important step in all of this. I mean, you can fill your head with anything, knowing information that only a handful of others know -- but it's all ultimately just so much useless junk unless you turn it into a tool. Mere knowledge feeds freedom, sure, but unless you use it to take action, it's just an accumulation of words and images sitting in your head. If you don't know what to do with it, you might as well not have it.

This afternoon's rambling session of Free Will 101 brought to you by the letter ''M''.