Morning Light, Autumn

I wish I could send this morning's light to you, my friends. Wrap it up in a big, airy, gauze poof of a package and mail it near and far.

This morning, as I was driving my son to his little school in the hollow, I noticed the light. Going southeast on the neighborhood road that becomes country road after the four-way stop, right before the turn onto the winding road that crosses the creek, the browning rows of corn swayed in the fall breeze. They are the foreground of a series of stacked-up vistas right at that hilltop spot. A tall, thick row of deciduous trees stakes the middle ground in the midst of fields. Behind them, a distant glimpse of farms in a gentle cup of a valley shone in a patch of sun and rolled up to another curve of dark trees. And above them all, low gray clouds diffused the light, made the shadows of trees hover above the asphalt as if they were about to float away. It was a still light, expectant. Harbinger of storm, it promised both life-giving rain to the stubborn wildflowers that are holding fast to the vestiges of summer and wind-rattling death to branches still hung with leaves. It was eclipse light, the hush of reverence before the sun disappears briefly, leaving only the weak rays at the edge of the star to diffuse outward through the ether to hang suspended above us like a fine mist.

Oh, at that moment how I wished Mary Ann Wakely could be there with her paint and easels to capture it on canvas for me!

Later, on my morning walk, I woke a fuzzy bumble bee drowsing on a goldenrod stalk. He was so still that I thought he had died eating his last, sweet meal. But a flicker of a leg told me that the cold morning was a time of rest. As I watched, he vibrated his wings experimentally, starting up his internal heater. He stayed still, waiting either for the sun to emerge from the gray clouds and warm him or for the drops of rain to fall, I don’t know which.

A perfect fall morning.

Flower Mandalas and Other Fall Activities

It's harvest festival time here in the northern hemisphere, and each weekend is filled with more festivals than we can attend. This past weekend we enjoyed a sunny day at the arboretum while we strolled through the booths of an international festival dedicated to plants. This festival is very child-focused, so we did a week's worth of enrichment activities in one afternoon. The activities were a perfect mix of botanical lore and the cultural uses of various plants.

If you're looking for some ideas to celebrate plants and the harvest with your children, here's a list of the activities we enjoyed. They are all doable, most with very few supplies.

We ate pomegranate seeds and listened to the story of Demeter and Persephone and learned why we have seasons. This would make a lovely after-dinner ritual. (This is the beautifully illustrated version of the story we heard. It's by Kris Waldherr.)

We saw a tea ceremony and made origami cranes. Here's a tutorial for folding the cranes.

We sampled Tibetan butter tea for the first time. Here's a recipe.

We walked on "coconut stilts," a game kids play in Singapore. It would be challenging but fun to figure out how to scrape out a coconut.

We "painted" chocolate Day of the Dead skulls with icing and ate them--they were much tastier than the "raw" chocolate we ground with a stone mortar and pestle. You can use these skeleton candy molds. (We made sugar skeletons with these one year and decorated them, but they weren't edible. I think using chocolate is a much better idea.)

We drew mehndi patterns on silk with fabric markers (here are some gorgeous patterns and their meanings), got mehndi tattoos, and helped make vibrant flower mandalas. The mandala was drawn on a large cardboard circle, and the children filled in the shapes with flower petals. (See a whole gallery of flower mandalas here.)

My youngest enjoyed playing in a baby pool filled with black beans. You could do this with rice as well.

Enjoy the season, wherever you may be!

Inhabit: Inspiration

When I turned 40 a little less than three years ago, I didn’t wake up on my birthday with a full-on midlife crisis. The closest I came to it was getting a pricey dye job at the salon to cover my gray streaks. (This was an act totally out of character for me. I don't wear makeup and rarely even blowdry my hair, let alone style it.) I even got a little cocky, thinking, Hey, turning 40 isn’t so tough. What’s the big fuss? Turns out I’m just a little slow. It took a good two years for it to sink in that I was right in the middle of a midlife crisis. I finally tuned in to what my body—my stomach most loudly (gurgle, gurgle), but also my joints—had been shouting: This is not the way you’re going to make it through another 40 years.

So, here I am, at almost 43, finding myself in definite need of some emotional and spiritual resources to help that body along. Yes, I’m as shocked as those who know me--raised Catholic but now avowedly agnostic--to find myself on a spiritual quest.

In my usual fashion I’ve been tackling the emotional and spiritual stuff haphazardly. I’m seeing a therapist, which is good. I’m digging into my memories and writing about my past. Another good practice. I’m walking just about every day. Yay, me; it’s my great joy. I’m trying to hold on to the Zencrafting blog and all that it represents for me.

And I’ve been reading some juicy memoirs (I’m not much on self-help books, though there are some exceptions). The “Inhabit” collage above was inspired by Already Home; A Topography of Spirit and Place, by Barbara Gates. In this spiritual memoir, Gates chronicles her quest to get to know the place she lives: the Ocean View neighborhood of Berkeley, California. “To know my home,” Gates writes, “I want to learn to inhabit the fundamentals—the creeks, the Bay, the air, the sand, the dirt. But it is indeed a challenge to recover this intimacy here in Ocean View, where it feels like the very terrain has lost contact with itself: the Bay clogged by landfill, the creeks culverted, the air fouled, the sand sold, and the dirt paved.”

Through daily walks with her dog Cleo, Gates tackles her fear of the unknown and explores her neighborhood, coming into direct contact with her human, animal, and natural neighbors. It’s everyday stuff, but Gates explores it all with ferocious depth and makes surprising connections between the mundane and her spiritual life.

Early on in her narrative, Gates latches onto the word “inhabit.” It represents her need to come to terms with the grittiness of her neighborhood, of her life. Just like her historical research into the inhabitants of her house or her archaeological reading on the early Native Americans who inhabited a vast shellmound on the shores of the San Francisco Bay, Gates traces the history of the word itself, ultimately locating its root in the Indo-European word for “take.” Tracing this root down through time, she finds that the word morphs into the Sanskrit word for “hand” and divides into two complimentary strands: to take and to receive. “When I think of inhabit in this way, about home, it feels like there’s only relationship: give as receive, receive as give,” she writes. Later she realizes that “through ongoing giving and receiving [with her family, neighbors, and wider community], I inhabit what is beginning to feel more like home.”

Gates’s quest to know her home is at once historical, geological, and ecological (“I think of home in grand dimensions—through vast space and geologic time.”), but it is fundamentally a personal spiritual quest in which she acquaints herself with . . . no surprise, herself. In the end, she concludes that this exploration of home has uncovered what has been inside of her all along:

“Unaccountably, I am filled with a sense of completeness, that for this moment, nothing else is needed. What is here feels like fundamental ground—wide and peaceful. Deeply familiar. I recognize it as home. . . . All the while I’ve been right in this place with that stillness, a hidden possibility, here all along. I was already home.”

In the “Inhabit” collage I’ve tried to bring in some of Gates’s extended meditation on the word: her realization that being grounded in a place involves a vast web of connections and entails ongoing acts of reciprocity (the hand that joyfully gives and receives). The daily work of fully inhabiting a place, a body, a self--with true understanding--becomes a loving foundation and source of support, just as a dwelling serves as a refuge from the elements. I’m trying to embrace this sense of inhabit, especially for my own body. I want to inhabit it fully, to be aware of its needs and support it so that it can do its daily work of being a mom, a wife, a writer, an editor, a volunteer, and whatever other roles this life calls on me to take on. More than that, I want to fully inhabit these roles. I want to joyfully take part in life’s give and take, the holding of hands and the sharing of meals, of laughter, of stories, of learning, and of love.

BTW, as an aside, I learned from the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology that "enhabiten" is the archaic spelling of inhabit. I wondered where Liane came up with that clever name!

Word Search

I've been searching for just the right word lately and have found myself reading the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology and the Oxford English Dictionary. My mind grows dizzy as I page back and forth between the two, tracing the origins and relationships of words that I usually just take for granted.

What prompted this (re)search? Recently I stumbled upon the concept of lectio divina, the close attention to and prayer/meditation on a single word or passage from the Bible. It's very similar, I think, to the practice of repeating a mantra of one syllable or word during meditation. I'm trying to replace some of the self-defeating words that reside in my head with more affirming ones, hence my search. (By the way, why isn't "f**k" in Chambers?)

Here's a sampling of some words I like, pieced into a series of collage vocabulary cards.

09/09/09

I'm taking part in an 09/09/09 Diary project and writing down events and conversations from the day. Here are nine things that I've noticed so far:

1) I woke up at 6:00 a.m. wishing that I had gotten nine hours of sleep.

2) My daughter started 9th grade today. Before she left for school, my three-year-old warned, "Watch out for pickpockets!"

3) At the breakfast table my nine-year-old son told us the title and author of a potential book: "How to Make Split-Second Decisions," by Oliver Sutten.

4) 9 times out of 10 I can turn my little one's perspective around. Our morning drive went something like this: O: It's a bad day. Me: Why is it a bad day? O: It's foggy. Me: I think it's magical. Look outside real hard and then all of a sudden you see a tree pop out! O: Look, I see one!
Later, at school, O said to the school administrator: It's a magical day today because the trees poofed out of the fog!

5) At nine o'clock I noticed a dad taking a picture of his two yellow-raincoated children in front of school. I mentally patted myself on the back for bringing my camera and a raincoat for child #3's sendoff to preschool. I hung his raincoat on his hook but he sent me on my way before I could take a picture. I rushed away gratefully to retrieve his lunch that I had forgotten in the fridge.

6) Then I took a side trip to the pediatrician's office, where I picked up my youngest's medical forms, which are nine days overdue at his school.

7) A fellow preschool mom was telling me about her nine-year-old's school anxiety. When I commiserated and told her my kids were the same way, she said, "Oh, I forgot, you're a pro." Later on I realized I should have replied, "No, just pro-lific." Unfortunately my brain always quips too late.

8) The fog burned away by mid-morning. The sun shone down from a patch of sky between the clouds, and the world was green and golden. Goldenrods are blooming in great clumps now (many more than nine!), arching their slender, feathered necks and golden tassels on the margins where human maintenance meets gentled nature: along roadsides; in a tall line behind a split-rail fence; in squared rows in a fallow field; in an arrow-shaped patch pointing to the tree line at the top of a horse pasture; waving slowly in a meadow that was once a farm and now a nature preserve; along the treed border between neighboring farms; covering a gentle berm of bulldozed earth; in wispy traces on the rock island dividing the creek into two streams under the swinging bridge. They are at once half-wild weeds, a nuisance, a vibrant coda to summer, and prelude to the onset of yellowing leaves.

9) My son and I stopped by the creek after school. We saw a Great Blue heron patiently waiting for fish just under the dam. It was a still, deliberate creature, capturing its prey with a swift, deliberate jab. (Sorry, only one heron, not nine.)

I've also included two photos from our family visit to the New York State fair, for the sole reason that bunnies and pigs are cute, though the first thing that came to my mind when I was editing the pig photo was "bacon on the hoof." I have a one-track carnivore mind.

Farmers Market At Rest

Our local farmers market is a bustling place on the weekends during high season. From early summer to late fall, thousands of people tramp along the dusty wooden floors past the stalls lining the covered main pavilion. Light streams from the upper windows upon heads bowed to inspect the bounty produced by local growers: paper bags of deep red tomatoes, piles of lettuce mixes, bouquets of basil bound with rubber bands, rows of cardboard pints of berries. A riot of fragrant international dishes--Mexican burritos, Belgian waffles, Indian samosas, Sri Lankan curry, Japanese noodles--spikes the air with frying oil and earthy spices, enticing samplers to linger.

It's a happy, loud, lively gathering spot. A band or two, sometimes just an impromptu gathering of players or a kid strumming a guitar for donations, provides a background beat for the shoppers, picnickers, and strollers. It's a rare visit that you don't spot at least one friend, and a quick trip to pick up the week's veggies can easily turn into an hour-long chat by the lake while the kids climb the rangy old tree whose branches hang over the water.

As much as I enjoy going to the market, I have to admit that I find the crowds and noise overwhelming. So it is with some guilt that I reveal that I haven't visited the farmers market once this summer. Instead I've gathered locally grown goodies from nearby roadside farmstands, u-pick orchards, and country markets. The fruit has been especially luscious this wet summer, with huge sweet blueberries, juicy peaches, and fat late-summer raspberries just rolling out of our refrigerator to be made into pies, smoothies, and all manner of sweet treats. And I've rediscovered the gamey goodness of grass-fed, locally raised beef and pork. (And, oh my, yes, I have put on weight this summer! Thanks for asking.) All this with the added bonus of quiet drives along wildflower-lined country roads, giving me the chance to enjoy the sights of silvered-sided barns next to fields of tasseled corn stalks and golden-headed sunflowers.

With school set to begin next week and the temperatures dipping down in the evenings, I know that my summer of food gathering and country wanderings is coming to a close. September is such a time of turning, the culmination of the summer's growing season and the slow easing into fall's declension and winter's return. This one month encapsulates vibrant growth and the skeletal outlines of decline, much like the the farmers market visited at mid-week, deserted and scruffy and at peace with itself.

Without the vibrant cover of people and produce, the main pavilion reveals its elegant bones. It was designed by a local architect and shares the lines of a 13th-century European cathedral, the long pavilion like a cathedral nave crossed by a transept. A skylight illuminates the northern end of the pavilion, its geometry evoking a barnlike version of a cathedral ceiling soaring skyward.


And everywhere I see the leavings of the weekend market's bounty, products of a long summer's worshipful labor.

I hope you are enjoying September's fullness as much as I am. I've missed my online friends during this extended blog break, but I look forward to visiting your blogs and posting more regularly. I must admit I am very rusty at this blogging thing!