the real world

drawing from humble springs

~ carin ~ Leave a comment

“Mechanically we have gained, in the last generation, but spiritually we have, I think, unwittingly lost. In other times, women had in their lives more forces which centered them whether or not they realized it; sources which nourished them whether or not they consciously went to these springs. Their very seclusion in the home gave them time alone. Many of their duties were conducive to a quiet contemplative drawing together of the self. They had more creative tasks to perform. Nothing feeds the center so much as creative work, even humble kinds like cooking and sewing. Baking bread, weaving cloth, putting up preserves, teaching and singing to children, must have been far more nourishing than being the family chauffeur or shopping at super-markets, or doing housework with mechanical aids. The art and craft of housework has diminished; much of the time-consuming drudgery—despite modern advertising to the contrary—remains. In housework, as in the rest of life, the curtain of mechanization has come down between the mind and the hand….

“….The answer is not in going back, in putting woman in the home and giving her the broom and the needle again. A number of mechanical aids save us time and energy. But neither is the answer in dissipating our time and energy in more purposeless occupations, more accumulations which supposedly simply life but actually burden it, more possessions which we have not time to use or appreciate, more diversions to fill up the void.”

~from Gift from the Sea, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh (pub. 1955)

♣

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planting solitude

ethanol on the beach: one story, three versions, with pictures

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

Version I

The city didn’t want it. Another city did. Some shady dealing went on. The city that doesn’t want it is getting it anyway. And they’re upset. And the city that wanted it is upset too. And please don’t ask if an environmental assessment was done because that’s just silly. Of course it was NOT done. The new rules say we don’t need such fluff and nonsense.

So there.

End of story.

VERSION II

Cronyism has won the right to build an ethanol plant in Durham Township, right on Oshawa’s busy and environmentally sensitive waterfront, much to the dismay of everyone except the cronies. Meanwhile, nearby Brock Township has a site they’d love to dedicate for just such a purpose but the cronies wrinkled their noses and said no, they want to play at the beach instead. It’s rumoured that one stamped his foot and threatened to hold his breath until he turned blue(r).

VERSION III

In Search of Gifford Hill—my take on visiting the site.

And pictures too.

little things (the big stuff always is)

~ carin ~ 6 Comments

“If you are like me, learning about bees will change your life. I’m not suggesting that you’ll drop everything and devote yourself to studying insects (though that is possible). What I have in mind is more subtle: a new alertness, a quickening of wonder. Little things that, in the past, have slipped by almost without notice will now demand that you stop and pay attention to them. The hum of wings: whose wings? An insect darting among the flowers: is it a bee or a beefly, a bumblebee or a wasp? What is it doing? Where is it headed? True, it may take you a bit longer to water the petunias or pick the beans, but in those few stolen minutes, you will have been on safari. Gradually, you will begin to sense that a garden is not just a bunch of plants set out in pots and rows: it is a world within a world, a half-tamed ecosystem, full of some of the most exotic and astonishing creatures on the planet.”

—from Bees: nature’s little wonders, by Candace Savage (Greystone Books, 2008)

bird brain

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

All monkey minded during yoga in this morning’s mugginess.

Cardinal sings at the very top of a skinny birch; it’s hard to focus on my Om so I focus on his.

But my mind is slippery today and the moment it wanders, the bird is gone.

compass

~ carin ~ Leave a comment

A strange goldy light in the garden this morning; the kind that sometimes comes before storms or in those moments just before sunset—always fleeting and rarely at dawn. A little eerie but entirely beautiful. It comes from the east, over the roof to catch the tops of the spruce. A train clatters past in the south and to the north is the smell of toast. Meanwhile, at the most westerly edge of the yard, a cardinal points out the ripening blackberries by swishing about the bushes and probably stealing a few.

These are the things that tell me where I am.

i have met my muse and she is green

~ carin ~ 8 Comments

Did I say green?

I meant she’s outside.

Which rather surprised me and it shouldn’t have. I’ve met her before, always outside—at the beach or the ravine or in the sunrise or sunset on Goose Hill (yes, it gets both, this magical place at the end of my street). She’s often on the streets and sidewalks that run through my neighbourhood and once I found her in a little patch of milkweed that’s easy to overlook.

But mostly she’s in the garden right outside the back door, among the weeds.

It’s with a hoe that I find her every time.

She speaks through fistfuls of creeping charlie and chickweed and pretty soon—no matter how daunting, no matter how much needs to be dealt with before it’s done and no matter that I won’t get it done today—just doing whatever I can, an hour’s worth, a half hour—makes an enormous difference to the whole thing, allows me to move around inside it a bit better, see it all that much more clearly.

Less chickweed, more clarity.

It never fails.

And she is never not there.

Yet, fool that I am, I forget… and wait for her at my desk.

Where do you find yours?