I'm gonna write ya what I know (or, the yoga of Gratitude)

Perhaps it is breathing through these cramps, leaning into the acceptance of them, and perhaps also slightly the Ani Difranco I haven't heard since high school, and maybe even the simple yoga positions I find help the pain. My heart feels ten times bigger than usual, an exponential expanding muscle, an obviously all-encompassing pal of mine. I'm thinking of my beautiful family and friends, their incredible faces and hands and stories. How I should be blessed with such beauty is a continual wonder of mine.

I'm set-up here on my older sister's little living room floor in her perfect apartment. She has decorated these walls with her love's paintings (including husband, daughter, herself). My lovely sister, my mommy-friend, the lady who dragged me out to look in dumpsters and introduced me to our oldest living female relative. She resides in my heart. I include her in my acknowledgement of self. I'm staring at my clothes piled high against my backpack on the other side of the room, mixed up with Mike's piled high against his. We have been wandering like hungry ghosts, like hobos trying to get home. My little heart and me, like stray kittens, really, accepting gifts of food and affection from strangers. We're residents in love, or so I'm told.

One of my older brothers, the last in the sibling line before me (and eight years apart), he's going through a rough time, has been for many years, I suppose. I'm formulating a prayer for him, and that's all I can say about my beautiful, intense and wonderful brother who cared for me so kindly when I needed it very much. May he simply know before he travels on how firmly he is held tucked in my heart.


It occurs to me I have prayers to offer up. Please be well. and be in joy.

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My birthday is tomorrow. We're heading to the Florida Keys, I think Big Pine Key in particular. We're going with our friend Katie who is great. After that is on to plant a garden with my mom in her front yard, maybe visiting a Mountain Gardens intern on the way up to Joe's to drop off Mike's jewelry equipment and garden-sit for a week or two, go to Organic Grower's one-day school where Joe is teaching south of ASheville on March 8, maybe see Badger if he's still in Cincinnati on our way back to Illinois for a few weeks. And then back to Joe's in western North Carolina. Mike plans to build tensegrity structures using Buckminster Fuller's concepts and perhaps start an earthship foundation for a greenhouse/living quarters. I kind of want to take over the kitchen. :/ I can't wait to have very little power again and the built in exercise of mountain climbing the driveway.

Also, we went to see Susun Weed talk on Valentine's Day, and of course it was wonderful. She talked about the huge difference between men's and women's heart attcks and heart disease. She discussed the many benefits of chocolate like it's an anti-inflammatory, increases blood flow to brain (helps women think), regulates blood pressure, controls heart disease, is Packed with antioxidants that fight free radicals that we get from eating seed oils (vegetable oil, soybean oil, flax seed oil) and processed foods (cereal, milk, veggie burgers, cheese, soda, ketchup, bread, etc), and due to its anti-inflammatory nature allows the parts of us that are supposed to become inflamed to more easily become engorged. :) I am a food advertiser today. I wish I were getting paid in food.

Went yesterday to meet my almost 90 year old great aunt on my dad's dad's side down in Sarasota, south of Tampa. She loves fruit trees and gardening. She has a starfruit tree, two avocados, two tangerine,s two grapefruits, a few oranges, a ponderosa lemon, a smaller variety of lemon, and her front fence is covered in jasmine. She's near blind, but gets around just fine, gardening and raking and hauling bags most days. She has arthritis in her thumb sometimes. We also visited the Ringling Estate where we visited the Circus Museum and his lavish estate. My dad's dad's dad was the Ringling's yacht captain until the boat was wrecked in the Gulf of Mexico. Afterward he was made the groundskeeper for the 60+ acre estate. After Ringling died, the family (including my aunt Alta and grandpa Nick), lived on the estate during the depression while the house was in litigation. Ringling died penniless, and it's pretty easy to see why when walking through the HUGE art museum on the property with famous painter's names everywhere and an entire room devoted to pottery and statues from 500BC Cyprus. Apparently what's on display is only a third of his collection. This is where my dad played as a child. Ringling gave my great grandpa two buildings, one a four apartment complex, and another wooden building. Grandpa just had to move them. My dad's parents lived in the complex after they were married. Most of this is new information for me. Life is so funny sometimes.

recent books: The Revolution Will Not be Microwaved, On The Banks of Plum Creek, How to Grow More Vegetables (John Jeavons), Craig gave us a copy of Wild Fermentation
recent foods: salad of first spring lettuce, radish sprouts and turnip sprouts in Citra, chickweed/ cleaver/ magenta lamb's quarters/ garlic chives pesto over pasta and steamed garden broccoli, tangerine juice!, watching my sister try to be patient as she waits for the curds to separate from the whey in her goat milk

The Black Earth

Mike's birthday was the other day. He's 29, which my sister says is the return of Saturn to the place it was when you are born. Year of note. Year of re-direction? I made him a German chocolate cake, and it's good. For a second I thought it might be ridiculous to give Mike something he wouldn't be able to control himself around, but fuck. When else do you get to eat straight-up sugar, butter and chocolate? I stole him a pink candle from a partially opened package, and it was beautiful.

I have spent time thinking about pattern, a good deal. I find myself using the information I have access to as a sort of back-up for a time when the access is more limited. In effect, I have enforced a policy of intense learning to be done using my hands and brain and all the information I can get at the library, through netflix, through the internet. Information networks being patterned themselves into net-like webs, I find myself very integrated in these patterns. I'm delighted to read about old ways practiced over long, long periods of time. It's fascinating to discover a recognizable and repeated journey of woman and man in general. It's easier to imagine a soul journey, a destiny or purpose, or a conscious underlying pulse when you can see yourself as a person throughout history and time, connected to your mother and father and on backward. We share a very common thread with each other, and those threads manifest to me in discovering a common method of clothes washing by women before this most recent era of oil. That is deeply re-connective to me, and healing.

studying.

you cain't help but hear me

books i've been reading:

laura ingalls wilder
journey of man (population genetics & human motion)
jonathon livingston seagull
the celestine prophecies
1909 children's guide to trees
diary of an early american boy
african-american southern gardens(& yards)
community gardening
nourishing traditions
past in perspective (early hominids at the moment)

ferments from past few weeks:

kimchee
cortido (w/pineapple vinegar)
mint chutney
pineapple chutney (rinds/core made vinegar)
apple cider vinegar
beet kvass
lacto-fermented ginger ale
ginger beer bug/ginger beer
& we used the whey from the farmer's market raw milk to make butter/buttermilk
mike makes loads of sourdough that is delicious
kombucha!

lists for my head to forget now.

farmer girl

We watched the debate the other night, noted Kucinich's absence and Paul's small amount of speaking time. Particularly I noticed the lack of integrity many of the candidates seemed to display. That's as much as I want to write about that, except that we saw a Ron Paul blimp flying around Tampa yesterday. That was kinda neat. I respect him, at least.

Went to the Palm River Thai Buddhist wat yesterday for old Thai lady breakfast/lunch. They were out in droves doing their Sunday service for the temple, including selling locally grown Thai herbs and fruits. My sister bought she and I baby Kaffir lime trees. hurray! We had noodle soup, coconut milk and rice flour dumplings, thai iced tea and coffee, rice cookies (like fried crepes), and coconut dumplings filled with brown sugar. O, also fried bananas, sweet potatoes, and taro root. Saturday she took us to the botanical gardens in Largo, outside of St. Pete. We couldn't get to the historic village or the inside the studios or museum, but it was still wonderous! Tropical plants galore, fruit tree garden, alligator pond, etc. In the herb garden they were growing common herbs, mugwort, cinnamon trees and ayahuasca. It was an exciting visit for me, and I'm particularly excited to go back. It was part of my sister's free weekend plans for us. :)


We had an exciting few days on the grove with the freeze. The temps predicted fortunately were lower than it actually got, but the damage was done to a number of plants and trees, particularly the banana trees, papaya trees, the sweet potatoes, the baby seedlings, the fennel and the oregano bush. Mike and Craig covered the peppers and potatoes, they also laid down all the bamboo in the nursery and covered them with frost cloth while I went around covering all the baby avocado trees throughout the grove. Craig drained the hot water panel and cistern lines, and he got up every two hours on the night it got down in the low 20s to re-load the wood stove in the greenhouse where the jackfruit, cacao, pineapple, miracle fruit, adamoya, eggfruit, papaya, and strawberry guava reside. He also reloaded the wood stove inside where we were soundly sleeping through the cold. I am glad I'm not a naked tree when it's freezing outside. Craig made an attempt to pluck some fruit from the trees on the second day of freeze, but a lot is still on the trees. Some froze, but it's still edible for a while. If anything, the fruit won't last as long, so we won't be taking it to market as long. On another note, I found out the Food Not Bombs peeps have one meal before the market on Wednesdays, so that may be a lovely volunteering opportunity. I realized how much I love cooking for people, good food I feel good about, mostly because then I know they aren't eating corn syrup or MSG. It is, however, difficult to always enjoy cooking for different dietary restrictions. Sometimes that bugs me. But mostly I feel a sense of communion with others, a real feeling of community when sharing food. It is incredibly intimate and something that should be done frequently among friends and neighbors. It is the thing that sustains us, food and sharing. We should certainly pay more attention to our common needs of good land, clean water, clear air and food in particular.

Mike just told me they collect presidential shit. :/

Also, I read Farmer Boy this last week, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I love Ms Wilder, her straightforward interpretation of homesteading, farming, community and integrity. She gives explanations of family and community systems that are meant for young ears to understand, and certainly most of us have young ears these days. I found the book I was reading recently in the Little House series almost eerily connected to our situation. The folks are in northern New York, and the other books are in the northern midwest (Lakota territory!), and they dealt with freezes and inhospitable climates. While I'm thinking of creating life and community in the north, these books seem to me a godsend. Friends, read them so you will feel happier and more able when it comes to making things happen with the Lakota, if that is ever possible.

We make possibilities. We are creators.

feels kinda free

kinda, yeah. mike is working with silver, and i am about to look up some books to see if they are perhaps selling for too cheap. i think i'll look up mycelium running, companion plants (the old one), culture and horticulture, and maybe some food not lawns for christmas gifts if for some reason there is a crazy outlet store for chelsea green online.

i'm nursing a sore taste bud, so i have been taking it easy on the tangerines, but it is hard. that is the toughest thing i'm working with right now. they are so orange! o, this is what i've been doing the last few days- there is a famous local pizza place in gainesville called satchel's pizza, and satchel lived on this grove for years in his treehouse. the remains of his home are still on the back of the property (or the side), along with another house built back there. mike and i have been battling vines first to find the tiny citrus tree in front of the supposed pile of rubbish that was the tree house. when we found that tree, two large piles of vines later, we continued pulling vines from the pile, which cannot be left out as it was like unearthing an archaeological site. mike continued pulling vines from the actual pile when we got to it, and i pulled apart some roofing tin from old boards and pulled vines and yanked out refuse and old boards from the pile, also continuing to cut paths back into the pile through young palms, spiders and mosquitoes. our concept is to uncover everything, get it finished pulled apart, salvage what is salvageable, not get bit by tarantulas, sweep off the porch that is down there, and build a platform with mosquito net and a slanted tin roof that utilizes some of the easier sustainable technology like catching the rainwater off the roof filtered through a sand filter, using a cool box that hangs in a tree, rocket stoves in an outdoor kitchen situation, and the basics like composting (organic matter/poop) and re-using our water (graywater). we got the hands, the motivation and the support for this project, so i'm pretty excited about it.

yet again we are tied to pizza.

we've also planted up the newly reclaimed part of the garden in chinese cabbage, beets, kohlrabi, purslane, cilantro, mizuna, arugula, lettuces, indian lettuce, and sugar snap peas, and there are still kale, turnips and flax to be planted! also the market was this wednesday, and we went with craig's friend, robin, and robin's son, heartbaby, to sell the tangerines we picked earlier in the day. robin and his wife used to live here on the grove before craig, with oliver. we sold out in two hours! everyone was like, "let me get 6," then trying the tangerines on the table and asking for more. they were confused which were the tangelos and which were the tangerines. these tangs is so super sweet! after the market, we went to a potluck with lots of happy, healthy, kind people, generally interested in the same sort of things as far as sustainability (we saw at least half of them at the market). we had raw wedding cake to celebrate a new couple, a drum/guitar/singing circle around the fire, the kids were swinging and throwing snowballs (from an ice maker) at pictures of santa and frosty the snowman. and, as always, plenty of good conversation (including the topic of loving poop).

things are good in our tent. it's still pretty warm. the papaya are great, so are the bananas. hope to see and hear from everyone soon. there's plenty of room down south for happy visitors!

new beginnings in blogtastics.

we're living in this tent, now, in citra FL on a tangerine/permaculture orchard. craig is very into researching alternative technologies and small scale, sustainable practices. he has a large green house made from salvaged materials for tropical trees. we put in a wood stove the other day. it looks great. mike built a masonry wall on two sides that is beautiful, and the stove pipe loops around to create more radiant heat inside the greenhouse before it heads outside through the tin roofing material we used around the exit. also, we have cleared a bit of ground for planting and for reclaiming the fire pit. haven't done much more, yet, but we've only been there a week. it's quite enjoyable, on solar power, but not using much. however, there is a tv with dvd player and satellite radio. there's a permaculture group that gets together for work parties every two weeks, and that's neat, too. one day we spent cleaning bee boxes for that. nice folks.

florida is hot. it was 80 in st petersburg today, where we're visiting my sister. it takes some adjusting to get used to hot days in winter. i'm so happy to have the light and warmth. it's like something i'd forgotten but which has flooded me with good feelings. we went to the dali museum today, and that was incredible. such a wonderful conceptual artist on top of being a master painter. one almost brought me to tears, with two stone figures, like giant ruins from an old city in the shape of these figures from angelus by some guy i don't know. there were these two tiny figures at the bottom of the painting pointing up at them. just moved me.

more to come, my dear loved ones.

old blog at myspace on /nyotok. no more updating, though. some good links, however.
photos at flickr.com