Herzog For Halloween Week. Do You Have A Soul?

One day, not too long ago, I posted feelings of love for a plant on Facebook. Here’s what I did. I wrote about the Montauk Daisy, (Nipponanthemum nipponicum), which grows in my dooryard and my gardens. I described the plant as a “happy late bloomer” thus identifying my own humanity with the plant and, furthermore, employing the plant’s bright white, daisy-like flowers as an arousal agent for human emotion.

This sentimental slash romantic behavior stirred up a cyberspace snake pit—that vale of venomous angst where contemporary culture gathers to unlock, and brutally judge, the mysteries of human existence. Before long I felt the sink of snarky fangs slicing through to my bones and calling me out—in the public theater of social media—for being a romanticized, sentimental dweeb. The pointy fangs punctured a few rowdy endorphins that flow like champagne bubbles through my blood whenever a shot of botanical bling makes my heart way too plump. Pop!

I considered that if I wanted to survive the bite and reduce the stings of humiliation, perhaps I ought to come up with a clever response or those fangs might sink as deep as the taproot on a bloom of winter depression. Alternatively, I could open a bottle of champagne and drink up. But a killing frost was in the forecast for New England and I still had more than 50 potted shrubs and perennials to settle into the soils of my pleasure grounds, aka My Gardens—the breeding environs, of course, for radical romanticism.

So instead of wrestling with snarky snakes, I escaped into the hours of the day’s late afternoon and went to work finding places in the garden for as many of the potted plants as I could. I also wrenched gnarly clumps of Lily of the Valley, Convallaria mojalis, out of the Earth for division and reinsertion into my little part of the Earth’s ecosystem. I did the polka with a nest of bumble bees, Bombus terrestris, while trying to place some Royal Ferns, Osmunda regalia, over those bumblers’ hideout. And when the setting sun lit up the colors of autumn on every growing thing wherever I looked, I halted my obsessive work and did my own kind of calling out:

Da mi basia mille, deinde centum, dein mille altera, dein secunda centum!

(Give me a thousand kisses, then another hundred, then another thousand, then a hundred more!)

Struck happy by a soulful rush of satisfaction with my own little world, I concluded there would be no rehab for my sentimentalism or my romanticism. I carry the propensities for mush from at least an 8-year-old self. She is such an awkward self, yet remains a dependable friend. I see her again, (the delirium of my labors has done it), and she is hiding under a tree, reading a book. She is most likely in love with the tree and is sure the tree loves her too.

The book my 8-year-old self is reading, (under a tree I have decided to remember as an apple tree that must have been planted by the folk hero John Chapman), is entitled George Washington Carver, A Great American. It’s about an American-born slave—traded as an infant for a horse—who conquers adversity to become a botanist, scientist, inventor, artist, and teacher. Carver also believed that flowers planted in the dooryard and bright colors painted on the interior of an otherwise dreary cabin, could lift the spirits. (Both of these practices have become life habits for me. I plant flowers in my dooryard and I paint the walls and doors and ceilings of my home with bright colors and cheerful pictures.) After my young self is done reading about George Washington Carver, she climbs into the tree. (Surely it must have been an apple tree. They were the best for climbing.)

I had discovered the kiddy-lit biography about George Washington Carver on the shelves of a Bookmobile that visited my Indiana neighborhood during summertime. In those days I’d wake up early on Tuesday mornings and leave home to wait for the Bookmobile. I’d press my butt up against the butts of every other kid crouched onto the stubby curb of our cul-de-sac, where the Bookmobile parked and stayed for a few morning hours. We all wanted to be first on board the big white van and although we’d come to attention and stand in line politely when the Bookmobile arrived, it was only because we’d already scraped each other’s grimy faces over the pavement, in the gladiator arena of that cul-de-sac, for curb positions.

The Bookmobile days marked a time in American history when every butt on every kid was small, and summer reading was a free-choice act, (there were no required summer reading lists where I lived), that led to the fulfillment of at least one unalienable right: the pursuit of happiness.

I remember how the interior of the Bookmobile smelled as sweet as a Garden of Eden.

It was not a snake pit. It was a quiet sanctuary.

Nobody bothered anybody else in that mobile monastery.

The librarian was nice to romantic dweebs.

********

Alone at home, later, after the day of the Facebook snake bite, I turn on the television. I click into the movie, Almost Famous, about a young kid who wants to write about rock music. There’s Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs (the legendary writer and critic) talking to his adolescent mentee, William, on the telephone. William is despairing about his life. Bangs breathes out a sobering declaration for William, but his voice drifts from TV land and fills the quiet chamber of my empty house:

“We. Are uncool,” he sighs.

William tells Lester Bangs how glad he is that Bangs is at home to take an SOS call.

Bangs smirks: “I’m always home. I’m uncool.”

The scene about “cool” in Almost Famous is a great one. It comes after William’s euphoric rise as a neophyte rock-and-roll journalist ends in profound heartbreak. And, let’s face it, if you’re home alone clicking into that scene—a scene featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman as the inimitable Lester Bangs—after examining your failures as a sentimentalist, you’re bound to experience a disturbing attack of dweeb doom, slamming like a rogue wave into your gut, and tossing you to the carpet into a pitiful heap of smoldering defeat.

I was so home alone listening to the character of Lester Bangs define cool on television, something I rarely watch, even though earlier in the evening I had gone out for a brief excursion. My excursion delivered me to a leftover bookstore because I wanted to buy Patti Smith’s newest book M Train. When I couldn’t find the book on any of the display tables, I asked a doe-eyed young woman standing behind the help desk about the book. The young woman had cool, long, blond hair. She wore cool boots. She had a cool scarf, cool jewelry, and cool make-up. Back when bookstores were cool, the people who worked in them could talk cool about books.

“Tell me the name of the book again?” The young woman said to me.

“M Train.”

“And tell me the author again?”

“Patti Smith.”

The young woman tapped her cool fingernails onto a computer, consulting cyberspace. She had cool painted fingernails. “It’s shelved in our music section,” she said.

We went to the music section.

“Tell me the author’s name once more,” she said.

“Smith. Patti Smith.”

I found the book. There were three copies.

“Here it is,” I said to her, “thanks for your help.”

The young woman told me she had never heard of Patti Smith.

Wow. I thought. That’s kind of cool.

********

Just about anyone can related to this line from the first pages of M Train: “It’s not so easy writing about nothing.” (Word, Patti.)

And from Almost Famous I soon locked into another great line, delivered by the character of Lester Bangs, as acted out by Philip Seymour Hoffman, via the screenplay by Cameron Crowe:

“The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.”

I thought: Sharing. In cyberspace. It’s what we do nowadays: Cats. Dogs. Bunnies. Horses. Food. Art. Kids. Lovers. Boozy late nights. Landscapes. Good times. Flowers. Music. Articles. Events. Epic trips. Holidays. Crafts. Births. Deaths. Illnesses. Fund raisers. Videos. Political bullshit. Tricks. Deep thoughts. Rants. Raves. Blog posts. Selfies.

********

Later, later, later into the night, I exchanged some text messages with my son about Werner Herzog, the filmmaker. My son told me to check out Herzog’s documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams about the Chauvet Cave in France which contains the oldest known paintings created by human beings.

So I did.

It’s a romantic film. You might not believe in the human soul or the soul of flowers. You might not even be sure if you have a soul. Herzog will help you answer some of these questions. It is his goal to arouse your imaginings and seduce you into believing that about thirty-two thousand years ago, something magnificent happened in the history of evolution: The awakening of the modern human soul.

So since it’s Halloween week, why not watch Cave of Forgotten Dreams and consider the human soul? (It’s easy to watch online.) The music, composed and performed by Ernst Reijseger on cello with Harmen Fraanje on piano and the voices of the Kettwiger Bach-Ensemble, will evoke the hauntings of a Poe short story, the sleeping quarters of a dark, damp, and cold medieval cathedral, and the conjuring of the human soul from the great beyond!

Let Herzog guide you into the Chauvet Cave.

Allow your imagination to become unleashed. Free your rational mind.

You will find yourself in the spirit world—where trees can speak, man can become an animal, an animal can become a man, and the spirit world controls the hand of the artist.

You will believe the walls of the cave can talk, while killing you softly if you linger too long.

You will think of leaving this life to enter the world of the spirits and you will not doubt that the spirits exit their world to exist in ours. Indeed, even the scientific minds that have laser scanned every nook and cranny of the Chauvet Cave have admitted to being overcome by irrational feelings of “eyes upon us” when they have been inside the cave—eyes from humankind that lived more than thirty thousand years ago. And perhaps never died. (A chilling historical point of reference: The last glaciers melted away just twelve thousand years ago.)

As Herzog guides the viewer on a strange pilgrimage into the lives of humans so vastly long gone, he asks: Did they dream? Did they cry at night? What were their hopes, their families?

The ending became, for me, deeply unsettling and spooky. I felt the familiar ghosts of romanticism and sentimentalism wrapping their arms around my shoulders and taking control of my hands and my heart, growing my soul.

For many viewers, the ending won’t be unsettling or spooky at all. They’ll think it’s mushy.

The film is only spooky, and wonderful, if you have a soul.

********

Lemon Sweet Sunshine.

Daylily Days!

Squish a lime into an ice-cold bottle of Corona beer.

Cut fresh flowers for a vase in the guest room.

What’s for dessert?

My daughter was home for a few days and we had company coming. She enjoys baking and we all enjoy preparing the house for company. I showed her my dog-eared pages in the new magazine Sift I bought back in early spring. We couldn’t decide what to make! She chose Lemon Meringue Bars. A great choice—refreshing and light, colored yellow and white.

There’s a quote from Julia Child in the magazine: A party without cake is just a meeting.

And dinner without dessert is just no fun.

********

LEMON MERINGUE BARS: (From the premier issue of Sift, a King Arthur Flour publication.)

CRUST:

1 1/2 c. King Arthur Unbleached All Purpose Flour

1/4 t. salt

1/4 t. baking powder

1/2 c. (1 stick) unsalted butter

1/2 c. sugar

3 large egg yolks (save the whites for the meringue)

FILLING:

1 can sweetened condensed milk

Grated zest from 2 lemons

1/2 c. fresh-squeezed lemon juice (We needed 4-5 lemons)

TOPPING:

3 large egg whites

1/2 t. fresh lemon juice

1/2 c. sugar

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease 9″x13″ pan; line with parchment paper—the edges going up the sides.

For the crust: Whisk together the flour, salt, and baking powder. Cream the butter and sugar together in a separate bowl. Mix half of the dry ingredients into the butter/sugar mixture, then add the egg yolks. Blend gently, then add the remaining dry ingredients, mixing only until the dough comes together. Pat dough into the prepared pan. Bake for 15 minutes, until golden. Remove from oven to let cool.

For the filling: Blend condensed milk, lemon zest, and lemon juice until the mixture thickens slightly. Spread over the cooled crust and set aside.

For the meringue topping: In a clean bowl with clean beaters, beat the egg whites with the lemon juice until foamy. As the mixer is running, sprinkle in the sugar and beat until thick enough to hold a medium peak. Spread the meringue over the filling—pulling up little peaks. Return the dessert to the oven to bake for another 15 minutes, or until the meringue is golden brown. Remove from oven and let cool for half an hour.

Use the parchment lining to gently pull the dessert straight up and out of the pan and onto a cutting surface. Cut into squares.

One of my friends delivered fresh-picked berries from her gardens

on the same afternoon my daughter was baking. My daughter arranged them with

the lemon squares on a simple white plate.

********

July’s Garden and the Feast of the First Tomato.

Now grows July’s garden like a wild child. She is ten years old. She exists in the trance of summer’s ancient charms. She leaves home for the day and goes everywhere—into the meadows, the forests, over to the creekside, up into the trees. She returns home wild with superpowers. She can bloom, fruit, set seed, and seek love. All through the wild days, the birds follow her. She runs barefoot through clover fields and, alas, disturbs a very busy honey bee. The honey bee drills its barbed-edge stinger into her foot, then dies. The wild child limps home, weeping. Her mother concocts a salve with baking soda and water, paints it onto her wounded foot, and reminds the wild child to keep her shoes on whenever she is running away from home.

July’s garden resurrects the wild child.

She is older now, but nevertheless dons her play clothes early in the morning and leaves home for the day, slipping yonder out the old back door and into the garden. She begins with a plan, but then her shoes come off. She knows her superpowers are no match for the Eden she has muscled out of the dirt.

July’s garden remembers love at first sight.

July’s garden persuades recklessness to overrule order.

July’s garden teases, with perfume-scented dangers. If the wild gardener survives her broken back, poisoned skin, and woodchuck-tattered will, serenity seeps in—so sympathetic—and replenishes the rain barrels, the bird baths, and the wine cellar.

July’s garden blinds the wild gardener with full-on sunshine.

Flowery aromas, suspended in the steamy heat, wait for the beat of a butterfly’s wings to disperse memories of heaven to wherever the gardener is at work heaving and hoeing. This is real aromatherapy. Fragrances penetrate the wild gardener’s weak sensibilities, reducing them to a soothing salve of unfettered romantic longings. The gardener paints her world with the sweetly-scented cure, healing loneliness, failures, sorrows, and fear.

July’s garden sings only love songs, and the gardener, barefoot and pregnant with too many dreams, closes her eyes to listen. Her fingertips replace her eyes as she reaches out, finding her way using her hands and her tongue and her nose. The gardener stumbles to the melodies of love—hands a-sway, her nose in the air. Such a snob indeed she has become, expecting her garden to attract the favor of the gods.

July’s garden calls the devoted gardener to kneel next to the tomatoes and keep a vigil—for it is bad luck to grow them and not be the first to eat them. The Feast of the First Tomato is never scheduled. When the time comes, the wild gardener plucks the chosen fruit, adores it, and then eats it.

The Feast of the First Tomato unravels the wild gardener’s soul.

She builds a blueberry-beaded rosary, anoints every berry with her sweat, and prays for everlasting sunshine. Then she collects the blueberry prayer beads into a bowl and feeds them to her family.

July’s garden responds to the wild gardener, emoting and inspiring more primal desires through performances of sultry, blooming, botanical ballets. The show won’t go on forever. But the wild gardener is smitten and chooses to spend the rest of her life believing it might.

This is how the gardener ended up married.

This is how she ended up with children.

This is how she learned she would never find the inside passage to Eden,

without first running around outside—barefoot—

through clover fields, buzzing with bees.

Shining Island Nights.

I am alone in a cottage on Southport Island, Maine.

The tide is up, the sun has gone down, and the moon is growing full.

I arrived a day ago amid surly, stormy winds that pushed my car into drunken-man swaggers making it impossible for me to drive a straight line along the center lane of the Maine turnpike. Though the wind came in bold bursts, the rain did not. It fell with vertical and horizontal determination, saturating the airspace between Heaven and Earth in the surround sound of snapping patter that was never accompanied by pitter. Temperatures stayed in the 50’s—chilly enough to get a fire going in the wood stove of the little cottage I’ve rented for one week.

I am here to immerse myself in the studies of Myth, Magic, and Medicinals at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. My one-week course is entitled: Drawing and Painting Medicinal Plants of the Physic Garden. Every summer, I pack up my books, pencils, pens, paintbrushes and pads of paper, and retreat to summer school, somewhere. This year, I am pretending to be a monk with a little stall in a cathedral that overlooks gardens I am in charge of tending, studying, and drawing for the rest of my life.

On my way to this summer’s brain and body summer camp, I stopped in Brunswick, Maine to view the Bowdoin Art Museum’s new show, Night Vision: Nocturnes in American Art 1860-1960. The show opened as I was driving by and runs through October. Such indulgent moodiness possessed me as I dashed through the gloomy rain, descended into the basement of the museum, and commenced falling under the spells of American artists who were crazy, brilliant, multi-talented, hard working, and passionate.

Night Vision is superb. It leads the psyche, via art, through darkness, illumination, electricity, romance, and altered perceptions. The range of featured artists and media is stellar. The history is broadly and surprisingly revelatory. This will probably be my favorite art show of the year and for anyone motoring back and forth on Coastal Route 1 in Maine this summer, a stop to see the show will be a highlight (or bright nightlight!) of summer. Free admission for non-stop thrills and chills and fainting spells.

********

It is now twilight, as I write, after my first day of summer school and I should have studied and practiced what I learned in class today. But summer’s sun composed symphonies upon the sea and inside the forests all around me, and I found myself out walking instead.

There was a wooden bridge at the end of my street beckoning me.

There were charming gardens beside the cottage begging for admiration.

And, of course, I noticed how well suited I am for sitting still in the final light of summer’s last Monday in June. There was something else on my mind, too—three years ago on this date, my beloved father-in-law died. Thirty years ago, he would have awakened us at dawn, filled the thermos with hot coffee, revved up the motorboats, and off we would have gone to prowl the lakes of Maine for fish. I didn’t care so much about catching fish. It was enough to catch the break of day, and the quiet that ushers it in, with him and my husband and Uncle Herb and cousin Mark. We liked letting the first thoughts of the day commingle with the soft lapping of lake water rocking up against our boats. Aunt Margie and Mom Bertz welcomed us back to shore and the rest of the day was given over to talk about how great it was to be together, in Maine.

********

Moonlit tranquility is arising at last to finish off day one of my summer school. The gentle drones of a distant foghorn sound like sighs of romance as I prepare to go to bed and sink my head into the pillow. But for anyone sleeping alone in a small cottage by the sea in Maine, a foghorn, before long, takes on the sounds of a moaning madman. The neighborhood, soon after, becomes Stephen King’s. And the doors—are they locked?

And the sweet little cottage, does it have a basement?

Louder, louder, louder groans the foghorn. Redrum. Redrum. REDRUM.

And the gardens around the cottage—the hedges—is the moon bright enough?

For the art-class-lady to ever find her way out?

Will she ever learn to draw and paint and name every plant on Earth?

I already like my teacher. She told me that if all I do, all week, is spend time learning how to draw a leaf, then that’s just fine. I can be a crazy leaf lady. She also said that when you are drawing, both hands must be at work advancing the cause of art—as soon as she sees one hand being used to cradle a slumping head, she comes in for a rescue.

And before we can begin to draw any plant, we have to write about the plant’s history and its healing properties. We have to write about how and where the plant grows. We have to write and write and write, using any words at all that come to our own minds, about every part of the plant, in every possible way.

I am so bewitched by the shine of my midsummer night’s dreams.

My cauldron boil-eth over.

********

Views from my cottage and a wooden bridge.

********

Ralph Albert Blakelock’s A Waterfall, Moonlight 1886

On display in the show at the Bowdoin Art Museum, Night Vision

Blakelock was a self-taught original. He studied the styles of the Hudson River School. A madman, a genius—some saw him as a prophet of the styles of abstraction to come. This painting was one of my favorites in the show, borrowed from the MET in New York.

AND LOOK WHAT HAPPENED in my very own little cove of the world the next night!!!

Myth, magic, and the medicinal madness of island nights.

Rich Man.

Plan: Depart after chores on Saturday morning, motoring 160-ish miles southwest for an overnight in the Hudson River Valley.

Chosen villages: Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown, New York.

Opt for one afternoon activity on Saturday, agreeable to all two of us.

Sunday already figured out: First to the Bronx, for the New York Botanical Garden’s show, Frida Kahlo – Art. Garden. Life. After that: A Sunday afternoon street fair in Soho where our son would be performing with a band.

Since the Frida Kahlo excursion was something I wanted to do, it was only fair to balance Saturday with a visit to something my husband would want to see. We chose the Beaux-Arts bling of John D. Rockefeller’s estate Kykuit. Pronounced, “Kye-cut”, as in cut a check.

At Kykuit, our tour guide, (a perky opera singer), directed us through the interior living spaces, the art galleries, the carriage barn, and the grand gardens. She told neat and tidy stories about the Rockefeller family. Everyone was polite and listened well, but many of us had read or heard other stories about the family, too. Soon, whispered remarks with smirks and sighs spiced up the lonely settings of JDR’s Gilded Age otherworld—now at rest like an unblemished ghost town, encased in a crystal bubble. The gardens are so meticulously manicured and carefully preserved, that not even with a worthy breeze blowing in from the shores of one of the most romantic rivers, would one leaf or one fragrant flower petal dare to take flight.

Nor would one weed dare to trespass.

Nor were there any pathways for a visitor to choose, instead.

Walking the grounds, I felt as though I’d slipped between the covers of a sumptuous art history book, without marginalia or dog-eared pages, where everything came to life off the pages.

How famously our culture preserves the legends of wealth and legacy.

As an enthusiast of the phenomenons of human nature, I like traveling to the monuments, museums, and palaces where the booty of human fortunes is displayed. It’s thought provoking and interesting to visit the fairylands of rich Americans because many of them used their wealth to hire rockstar architects, designers, and artists to create their utopias.

When rich people die, they leave a trail of art history, decorative arts history, and garden design history loaded with ideas for us do-it-yourselfers whose garages are cluttered with monuments to frustration—like the drill with as much power as a hamster’s electric toothbrush or the bags of Grub-B-Gone that were as useful as the empty wallet they drained dry.

Whatever stories have been silenced by time in the empty interiors of historic homes or buried in the gardens surrounding them, the settings that remain still tap the imagination. It’s one thing to view a painting in a typical museum. It’s quite another charming thing to walk through gardens and landscapes growing more and more palatial, long past the days when their first admirers sat with a cup of tea underneath a newly-planted allee, without a computer, or a cell phone, or an income tax.

I journey to the sites, primed to be inspired with ideas and prepared to fall under the spells of several emotional extremes: I am convinced I could have been a happy tycoon. I am convinced I could have been a happy, married-to-wealth, lady of the manor. I am convinced I could have been a happy caretaker of noble gardens, living in a stone cottage nearby, writing poetry. I am convinced I could have been the go-to designer of the times, hired to create the most impressive works of art for the most insatiable rich people in the world. I am convinced I could have been the darling first born, given over to the greatest educators in the greatest schools, coddled and cuddled and mentored by the most ruthless businessmen and women. I am convinced I could have been the beloved philanthropist who saves the world.

All the money in the world, whether it is controlled by one person or one family or one government, will never save the world.

I came to a couple of conclusions after touring Kykuit. First, I have lived my life without ever having a brand new car, and, after walking through the carriage barn at Kykuit, I realized I have never wanted a brand new car. I want horse-drawn carriages and I want the rest of the world to want them, too. Gas-powered, horseless carriages have wrecked the world. Secondly, if I had an art collection like Nelson Rockefeller’s—including the Picasso Tapestries he commissioned a woman in France to weave by hand, in cahoots with Pablo himself—I would never display my collection in a cramped, subterranean man cave on some of the most prime real estate in New York State.

Thanks to Nelson Rockefeller, the art and cultural history of Kykuit has been preserved. Up until his storied reign over the Rockefeller kingdoms, all Rockefeller residences had been demolished, by family decree. For instance, in Maine, you can tour the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Gardens in Seal Harbor (by reservation only), but the house where she summered with her husband, JDR, Jr., is gone with the Atlantic winds. After touring Kykuit, a second-hand store shopaholic can only wince at thoughts of what became of the contents and components of all other Rockefeller residences.

*****

We had dinner later in the evening, after our Kykuit Grand Tour, in Tarrytown at Bistro 12. The restaurant is run by the artful energy of the owners, who are from Madeira, Portugal. I think the chef is from Italy. Therefore, European dining reigns. The owners work the floor and the bar. Just when we were sad to sense that the evening was coming to a end, the owner arrived with a complimentary cordial. He also revealed himself as the painter of all the artwork hanging on the walls. There was a ukulele on the bar. We asked about it. The owner played it for us. He proudly, and gently, told us that we were all wrong about the ukulele. Though it might have stolen our hearts in Hawaii, the instrument arrived there in the late 1800’s, and was brought by immigrants from Madeira, Portugal who had gone to Hawaii to work in the sugar cane fields.

*****

On Sunday we went to Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul, her home with gardens in Mexico, as interpreted by the New York Botanical Gardens. It’s not the first time New York City has hosted stories from the life of Frida Kahlo. In 1934, her husband Diego Rivera experienced a bitter battle of ideals with Nelson Rockefeller who had commissioned Rivera to paint a mural at Rockefeller Center. The mural included the face of Lenin and Rivera refused to change the artwork he was commissioned to create. Rivera was dismissed, his artwork destroyed.

Our visits to Kykuit and the New York Botanical Gardens stimulated plenty of conversations:

The designers of Kykuit were guided by European artistic styles.

—Frida Kahlo wanted to rid herself and her culture of the trappings of European culture.

Kykuit was loaded with copies of existing art.

—Frida Kahlo was an original.

Kykuit represented comfort and joyful excess, with heartbreak and adversity subdued.

—Casa Azul housed a lifetime of physical and mental suffering, documented through Kahlo’s works of art.

Nelson Rockefeller’s art collection is squished into a musty underground corridor.

—And at the New York Botanical Gardens, original, rarely exhibited Frida Kahlo paintings were squished into a small gallery in a huge building that required a cramped elevator ride in order to view the wonderful work.

Both excursions to view art and study art history wended us through stunning late-spring gardens.

Our final excursion to Soho, on the other hand, to see our son perform in a band at a street fair was not as calming—we got stuck in horseless carriage gridlock, New York City style, all the way from the Bronx.

After the street fair, we had time for one beer with our son and his band mates out on the patio at his place in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. While my husband and the devoted musicians passed around a guitar, I noticed Morning Glories, Nasturtiums, and Zinnias, all planted by my son, growing in his urban gardens—the richest green legacies from his youthful summertime days out in the country.

Here’s where to go to find original art NOW: It’s happening TONIGHT, June 10th, at Cake Shop in NYC. (As in, “Let them eat cake.”) One of NYC’s best venues for music. My son and his band mates are putting on a show FOR THE PEOPLE!

http://www.teethpeople.bandcamp.com

Find the Rich Man disc under discography—

First song on the link: RICH MAN.

*****

**********

Rich art. Original. For the people. Happening now.

Rich Man disc @

http://www.teethpeople.bandcamp.com

If you’re looking for a rich man.

The Yellow Azalea in Bloom.

Yellow is—

is golden.

Is the color insects like best.

Yellow is sexy happy.

Is glory, wisdom, and harmony.

Yellow is noble,

is fun,

is brilliance.

Yellow is—

is the angel’s hair.

Is the breeze of the new baby’s breath.

Yellow is—

wine, glistening,

cooled to creek water temperature.

Yellow is my daughter’s favorite color,

my son’s truck love days.

Yellow is—

friendship,

and patience.

Yellow is memory’s concert hall

sun-flowered,

and sun-shined.

Yellow is

the azalea’s fragrance

Coloring my world in long swallows through my nose,

gold, dusting my eyelashes.

Yellow is—

Alchemy.

Heaven’s songs,

performed in peace,

on Earth.

For My Children, after Mother’s Day.

Now the early mornings are warm and the grass is soft again.

I wear every leaf on the garden paths, woven together with all the others, for garden slippers.

No pair is perfectly matched. All are left behind with every step.

Earthy dew zaps my feet, washes them, startles the heart and composes a hymn.

*****

The sun rose a long distance east of the pear tree,

warming the Earth and waking up the air

which took flight from the still night

like invisible wings, gliding out of sync on unmapped airways.

The breathless sighs blew soft as fluttering eyelashes on sleepy schoolchildren

who wished to be out of doors on this day

out of classrooms.

The kingdom should set children free on such a day as today

when invisible magic carpets will steal them away

when the petals of the pear tree blossoms will fly into their ears and onto their tongues

and leave stars on the tree.

When the children will run

or gather into tribes around the lilacs

and look down to find ants,

look up to the bee, with pollen stored into travel packs on minuscule legs.

When everywhere, the breeze says nothing

and the robin stands next to my cup of tea showing off a beak filled with nest-building materials

all foraged from Earth.

It is all fiction when we talk about it in the classroom.

*****

Remember when you were unafraid of your dreams!

Remember climbing into the tree and watching how the twig grew a flower

and the flower grew a fruit

and the bee made honey!

Remember spending all day building nests, using your mouths

how you stood at the edge of the nest

and I watched you fall

my tears concealed underneath the stars on the pear tree, ripe.

And when you returned, eyes bigger, bellies full,

brains buzzing, chirping, and brave–

I fed you pear bread, with a dollop of pear jam.

All the things I made,

from the tree I grew,

because your father was once a little boy who lived on Pear Tree Drive

And after I loved him,

I had you.

Ordinary Goddess.

HAPPY MAY DAY.

I propose a revolution. Our leader will be the goddess of flowers from Roman mythology, Flora, whose name is still used today to describe plants indigenous to a specific region of Earth.

Through the flora and fauna of a region, we discover Earth’s most diverse and defining differences. People are the same all over. But an ancient saguaro cactus thriving in the desert is quite unlike the primrose growing near a woodland stream.

We shall kick off the revolution with a revival of Flora’s Festival of Floralia.

Homes, temples, and hairdos will be adorned in flowers.

Any ordinary person will become a queen or a king or a princess or a prince. Or a forest spirit. Or a fortune teller.

There will be milk, honey, and flowers.

With vegetables, fruits, and fertility.

Everyone will wear brightly colored clothing. Or no clothing at all, just flowers.

The festival should not be isolated to a hot and remote corner in the northlands of Nevada.

Like all good revolutions, the restoration of the Festival of Floralia will be about the ordinary people.

Us commoners. The usuals.

I had an ordinary great grandmother who grew an ordinary garden and lived an ordinary life.

All my life I’ve been ordinary, too.

And now arrives the month of May, in the year 2015, on the continent of North America in the region of New England.

The sun that shined upon the Goddess Flora, shines upon me.

And from my May-seasoned Earth springs daffodils, heathers and heaths, hyacinth, hellebores, magnolia blossoms, tulips, grape hyacinth, herbs, andromeda blossoms, peach tree blossoms, pear tree blossoms, skunk cabbage blossoms, and the Bethlehem sage, in pink and blue.

and other flowers I planted as bulbs, but forgot to label.

The leaves of grass grow in congregations of sun worshippers. They wave their green tips to the sky, occasionally taking a break to comb through the red feathers of a hungry Robin’s breast.

May. These ordinary days of outdoor work.

Of standing next to the magnolia tree, staring into the blossom.

Of sniffing every flower. Touching all the petals.

Of stomping on anthills and slapping mosquitos.

Of tracing the flights of butterflies.

And awakening to birdsong.

The festival is upon us. The seasons of dopey drunken outdoor joys are here. Leaves and flowers and seeds and fruits will take over our pathways, drop onto our heads, infiltrate our sinuses,

and overflow from the plates on our dinner tables.

We shall write poetry, draw pictures, and make music.

We shall paint rainbows on broken stones, following the instructions of the children.

We shall ride bicycles.

Hike trails.

Paddle waterways.

Pitch tents.

Cultivate gardens.

And harvest goodness.

We shall not fret over our innocence, our incompetence, or our unabashed ecstasy.

This will be a good revolution

A festival of ever-blooming celebrations

When we find flowers in the compost pile

And make castles

Out of molehills.

The Hand-Cut Garden and Earth Day

A lawn is a lovely thing, but having one is like trying to grow a crop of happiness in Eeyore’s garden. If a lawn is cultivated to be weed-free and lush, it will need a steady supply of water, harmful chemicals, and daily doses of manic obsession in order to thrive, unnaturally and falsely beautiful, in controlled areas.

(Makes me think of marriage and parenthood and human-ness and how perfect we think we can make our worlds.)

Lawns that are allowed to become their own blend of grass, weeds, and other kinds of plants are less of a strain on the environment and the psyche.

But I know a lot of people hate weeds like dandelions. That simple hate causes a lot of harm to the Earth. It doesn’t have to be that way…

*****

Here is the most useful and harmless tool for removing dandelions from a lawn. It is a hand tool:

You push it deep into the soil near the center of the dandelion, wiggle it to and fro loosening the tenacious tap root, and then—with an “I’m the boss” kind of tug—you pull the plant out. This is quiet work. (You don’t shout out, “I’m the boss!” You say it softly, to yourself.)

This work involves no loud leaf-and-dirt blowing machines and no harsh chemicals. You take your body for a stroll around the garden. You bend that body over, you stoop it down, you crouch with it—stretching the backbone into curves, keeping the knees oiled—and the mind glides away, like a kite on a string tied to your heart.

What looks likes a mindless exercise in futility (how will I ever remove every dandelion? They will just come back!) is actually a mindful excursion into peace. You will not ever remove every dandelion. They will come back.

So will the sun, and all of its ways to light up the Earth—you’ll work in early morning’s hopeful light, late afternoon’s tea-time light, and early evening’s anxious light—another day is ending. Did I love my life?

The rain will come back, too. As will the quiet walk and the fresh air.

The gentle work you do that brings no harm to the Earth will continue to give you a cycle of calm, meditative motion for the body and the soul.

What do I see when I watch my husband walking around with the dandelion puller upper? I see a modern-day, part-time monk tending his place on Earth. There was a time when he wanted to use chemicals to annihilate the dandelions. But any man who works sinfully long hours most days and spends sinfully long hours commuting to Boston while hating dandelions, can either put his stress into the Earth by way of more harm—chemicals—or he can put it there by way of more peace and groovy love—the dandelion puller upper.

Collected dandelions can be tossed onto the compost pile or into a sauté pan. They go on the compost pile around here because my husband has memories of eating bitter, icky dandelions at his grandmother’s house when he was a boy. I should give them a second chance for him—maybe all his grandmother lacked was the benefit of the Internet to hunt down more memorable recipes.

Dandelions look as breathtaking as fresh sunshine glittering on calm seas when they bloom in upstate New York’s farm country and all over Vermont’s mountainside meadows. The bold yellow flowers make you love them all over again, (if you loved them as a youngster), or they cause you to love them for the first time. (It’s never too late to become a flower-hugger.)

******

So for the past week, I’ve been hand cutting new paths and garden beds from the lawn on my one acre of uneven land in Massachusetts. The way I do this, with spade and body, is nuts. But it is good for the Earth and if I were to calculate my carbon footprint, I’d probably find that I’m tipping the scales on the wrong end because I drive a car, fly on airplanes, ride on trains, and I live in a house that has heat, hot water, and AC.

I know the hand-cut garden won’t save the world.

It is probably more artisan than activist.

More crazy lady than cool mama.

More secret to happiness than maddening masses yearning to keep breathing (and ingesting) chemical sadness.

Nevertheless, whenever I hear that yet more and more landscapers are out there advising folks to make new gardens in their lawns by dousing the grass with Round-up to kill it before planting the garden, I want to douse the landscapers with Round-up and shut them up. Round-up should be used only to douse poison ivy—a true hazard in the home garden.

Grass in a lawn, also known as sod, is a mighty chunk of nutrient-rich greenery and soil. (Of course, if it has been doped up for years, it’s not as good as the clean stuff. But it’s still good.) After I design new garden beds in existing parts of the lawn, I dig deep. I jump onto the spade and let it sink down, down, down. I lift the hunk of Earth out and flip it over.

It’s hard work.

The Earth weighs about 1,000 trillion metric tons. A shovel-full of New England soil weighs more than a glass of wine, more than a spoonful of ice cream, and more than a handful of M&M’s. Heaving it up and out and over is more work than logging onto Facebook or tapping out a text message or chilling out to a TED Talk about how you can save yourself and the world and be all you can be.

The hand-cut garden is a solitary, quiet pursuit. No team. No sponsors. No fan club.

In the realm of that royal solitude, created while at work with the Earth, you get to fill the palace inside your head with anything you want. You can clean the palace out, rearrange it, or decorate it with lofty aspirations. You can study and think. You can feel curious—about how strong you are and how strong you are not. You can notice how filled with stuff—ancient stuff—the soil is. You can realize how noisy the birds are.

If you are fortunate, like me, maybe you live in a town where they still allow church bells to clang out the melodies of hymns from your childhood. The church is more than two miles away, as the crow flies, but when the bells ring and I am outside working, I am able to listen. Because my work is quiet work.

My garden is also downwind from the local coffee roasting business.

Church bells and the aroma of roasting coffee beans blended up with the rising scent of fresh, hand-tilled soil. Soon, the farm down the road will spread fresh manure over the fields. That’s a day when the air smells shockingly ripe.

*****

Hand-cut gardens need the magic rope—a pliable, long strand of woven fibers which becomes like a lasso when waved from the fingertips of a garden design guru. Every dream of Earthly, Eden-like beauty can be caught with the magic rope and drawn out onto the ground. There’s some sketching beforehand and immersion in garden books, but I’m an on-location designer. I have to feel how the land sways, drops, and hovers. Before and in progress:

The magic rope abides by important design principles linked in with geometry, but it is also influenced by artistic visions that can’t be suppressed—like memories of Gustav Klimt at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, during the dead of winter, when I was reminded that I’ve always wanted to figure out how to make the Earth’s trees laugh in flowers:

*****

How I do it (sort of):

I draw the lines of garden beds and paths onto the Earth. Then I cut the edge into the lawn—using the rope as a guide—with a square-tipped spade. I return the good soil to the Earth where it will decompose and build up the soil for garden beds. I make sure to dig deep and flip over the sod, chopping it up here and there. Then, I cover the repurposed lawn with chemical-free, not-artificially-colored mulch to suppress weeds until the bed is fully planted up with trees, shrubs, flowers, ground covers.

I think of my hand-cutting-out-of-gardens as a secret process for sustainable gardening. Though the work is like taking baby steps to help heal the Earth, it’s better than not walking at all. I have hand cut every garden on my one acre, and I have planted every plant in the hand-cut beds.

All the plants survive within the soil, as it is.

And with the rain, as it comes or doesn’t come.

And with the wind, as it blows.

And with the sun, as it shines, or doesn’t shine.

The soil changes every season with decomposing fallen leaves and ever-present wandering worms and weeds.

This is a nice picture of my front yard in September. I have never used an automatic watering system nor have chemicals or added fertilizers ever been dumped onto the garden beds. The lawn includes grass, clover, moss, bugleweed, crabgrass, dandelions, violets, and a lot of annoying ants and moles.

*****

Late in the afternoon on last Saturday, after a full day of helping me hand work my gardens, my husband announced that it was quittin’ time for him. There was cold beer in the barn and our son was in there, too—he had come home for an overnight visit. The two of them, my husband and my son, are musicians and they wanted to play music.

But, my husband had dug up about half a trillion metric tons of Earth from a garden bed for me and he had piled it onto two tarps as long as the aisle in the church where we got married. The walk down that aisle was long. The walk out the door, together, as a married couple, happened in the blink of a spring Robin’s eye.

But I am not a spring Robin anymore. I suddenly realized that I had tried to feather too many new nests in one week. My wings were sore. Instead of crying, which is what my exhaustion wanted me to do, I yelled at my husband. I told him he did everything all wrong and now there was no way I could continue my work and finish it by the end of the day.

One of the rakes we were using had broken.

My husband walked away and when he returned, a little while later, he brought a new rake.

And then, together, we moved half a trillion metric tons of Earth, by hand and body before the sun set. Some went to make a nicer garden down by the pond, and some went back into the new garden bed.

Dirty, sweaty, sunburned—our skin welted up with black-fly bites—we headed for the barn and cold beer and the company of our son, after folding up the tarps and putting the tools away. I made a toast to my husband. I thanked him for noticing that I was in over my chirpy head and was about to fall out of the tree without any wings to save me.

If I have a secret for saving the Earth while keeping a marriage going and trying to raise kids, maybe it’s the dandelion puller upper.

And a hand shovel.

And honored memories of the first time you walked down a long aisle, or road, or unbearable challenge—together—and knew it was a lot easier than doing it alone.

I think about that when I’m at work healing the Earth or helping others learn how to do it.

It’s nice to work alone.

It’s also nice to work together.

That’s when the Earth laughs in flowery bouquets and puts extra spring into our baby steps.

*****

The paths and gardens, beginning to take shape behind the barn:

HAPPY EARTH DAY.

A Modern Sunday Morning Breakfast.

On Sundays in spring when a cheerful breeze can be felt bringing the sun’s warmth for an all-day stay to my country hideout, gratitude begins with breakfast. There are two of us up early and ready to get to work fussing over our little estate and our charmed lives. But first, we want something to eat.

The breakfast should be hearty enough to sustain us only through the morning’s work, because we don’t want to miss out on feeling hungry for a good lunch.

I set the table with spring flowers received from a friend and a small jar of Maine blueberry jam. (Meant to hold us over until I make fresh jams again when the strawberries bloom. And the blueberries, raspberries, peaches, and pears.) A stoneware pitcher contains stirred-up orange, pineapple, and strawberry juices.

There is always a candle on the breakfast table, too. On this particular Sunday, a day when our breakfast conversation will be about planning a trip to France, the candlelight shines dreams of fairy tale escapes to small villages in the French countryside, where I am inside a stone church, because we have gone for a walk to find fresh bread, but have come upon a church on the way. The church is deserted, filled only with sunlight and the musk of centuries of fervent desires, damp, absorbed by the stone. No prayer is ever wasted.

The same friend bearing the bouquet of spring flowers, which smelled heavenly because of some sweet Hyacinth, delivered a collection of perfect eggs from her hens, in an egg carton she decorated just for me. The eggs will be the main course for our modern Sunday breakfast.

*****

These flowers and eggs were all part of a birthday gift to me and I immediately thought back to a day at the end of last summer when I sat with my friend on her grand back porch and watched the hens running around in her gardens, free as love at age 14, hiding, causing us to worry about them, then showing up again without any concern for our worries. We drove around my friend’s country estate on a garden tractor together—I was at the wheel (for my friend had a broken leg)—visiting all her gardens and stopping to admire a lush patch of beautiful gourds rambling, (free as love over age 55!), through her pig pen. She’d had some pigs, but they had gone to slaughter. I should have come to see them as cute baby pigs, but I think pigs are very smart and they would have seen their fate in my eyes. I chose a colorful collection of gourds from the vines that day and piled them into the garden tractor, but when it was time to go home, I forgot to fetch my treasures from the tractor. My friend was so pleased with her gourds, I am sure she will grow them again this year and I will get another chance to pick the ones I like. If my luck holds out, I won’t forget to bring them home.

*****

I was excited to have the fresh eggs from my friend because fresh eggs to me are forever York, England—a place where my true love and I drove after we abandoned our last baby at Oxford College for a summer study program. She was only fifteen years old and it all seemed so exciting until we arrived to drop her off and then had to leave her. She didn’t have a friend, nor was the study program connected to any familiar school with familiar teachers.

In York, we stayed at a bed and breakfast just beyond the magnificent medieval walls. The youthful innkeepers served eggs fresh from the countryside, delivered by a woman well past eighty years old, still working hard taking care of her hens and delivering eggs to her customers. The eggs had rich coloring to the yolks, not pale or faded. After we ate them, we embarked on charming walks into the city of York, through gardens well tended amid ancient Roman ruins. York, England was the outermost reach of the Roman empire. For a little girl living in the times of Rome’s expansive empires, there was little chance of ever finding out about foreign lands. And for her mother, little anxiety that her daughter might wish to leave home, at a young age, to test the limits of distant horizons and a mother’s fragile heart.

*****

For our Sunday morning breakfast: I sautéed chopped, sweet onion in olive oil to flavor the olive oil. I scooped out the onion and set it aside. Next, I slipped two eggs into the heated olive oil (one for each of us), careful to keep the yolks unbroken. Then, sea salt and cracked peppercorn medley. (Black peppercorns, coriander, pink peppercorns, white peppercorns, allspice, and green peppercorns.)

Then comes the gentle folding over of the eggs, easy. Fresh bread, or whatever is in the house, is toasted and olive oil is drizzled over the toast. The egg is layered on top of that with the onion and some capers. While preparing the eggs, I had strips of prosciutto cooking under the broiler in the oven, not for long, just enough to crisp it up like bacon.

*****

After breakfast, I went to work in the garden. How my creative and hungry soul winced when I spied the parsley in the herb garden, barely making it up and out of the earth. Why didn’t I check for it sooner? And not far from the parsley spiked the chives, brilliant green! I could have placed the freshest, sweetest, teeniest brand new leaves of parsley on my exquisite eggs or fancied them up with a few circles of chopped chives! I remember, as I arranged the plate, feeling a restless urge to add some color, either the red of a tomato or a pepper, or the green of fresh herbs.

But, it was time for church in our little cathedral and my true love was bound for the airport and a business trip. I didn’t have all morning to obsess over the eggs. We sat down to share our Sunday breakfast and knew everything was perfect as it was. We had flowers and eggs from a friend, memories, new flavors, and, as always, our prayers of gratitude and one of hope—that the next time we sit down for a Sunday breakfast, we will be heading into the gardens, together, to work all day—building our appetites for dinner!

Excursions

The Gypsy Apprentice

Category Archives: Gardening

Herzog For Halloween Week. Do You Have A Soul?

Lemon Sweet Sunshine.

July’s Garden and the Feast of the First Tomato.

Shining Island Nights.

Rich Man.

The Yellow Azalea in Bloom.

For My Children, after Mother’s Day.

Ordinary Goddess.

The Hand-Cut Garden and Earth Day

A Modern Sunday Morning Breakfast.