The Inner Landscape

In the course of my life I've moved around a lot. Like many people, I've often felt that I was looking for something. Like many people, I've had trouble figuring out just what that something was.

 

Where was I going, all this time? What was my destination? The answer isn't hard to find, if I'm being logical. All my paths through life have led me to where I am now; therefore this is where I was heading all along.

 

 

But being logical doesn't always come naturally to me.

I've tried to live lightly, with an open soul, loving what comes into my life rather than longing after what I don't yet have. But my heart catches on things. Almost inevitably, I am hooked by things, muddied by the paths I tread. Without even trying, I come in from the forest covered in burrs.

 

 

I've tried to live lightly, and at the same time I've tried to carry a light within me, a light that in my best moments illuminates and sustains me through all manner of storm and cloud.

 

 

Late at night, in the country dark and the country quiet, I can feel it within me, breathing my own breath, filling me with something more than myself and yet nearer and dearer than my own skin. By that light I can see, softly, as in a twilit mirror, a hidden landscape, similar to the one I walk in broad daylight, but more familiar, as though I'd been there many times while dreaming, or when I was very small.

 

 

 

All its contours are known to me, though I remember them only slowly, each moment of recognition a tiny thrill. Still they shine through, clearer and nearer, once remembered, than all the harsh, bright, busy confusion of the dream that we call life.

 

 

I have tried not to sleepwalk through this life. I have tried, at all times, to be aware of which world I am in. It is one world, layered more deeply than autumn leaves, and it has both an outer and an inner side to it.

 

 

On the inner side, I am who I need to be. I have come into this world with all things needful, and I know what I was set here to do and to be. In that inner landscape I am both king and vagabond, wise with the world's wisdom and content with a child's contentment.

 

 

 

I believe in this inner landscape, not as one believes in mighty principles or in things unseen, but as one believes in one's own skin: it hardly bears thinking of. And yet it is there, breathing my breath, tasting my sorrow and delight, grieving and rejoicing with me and nurturing the long, slow awakening of the best that is within me.

 

 

What is it, this life, this hope, this destination toward which I have been stumbling all my days? It is the fountain at the heart of the wood. It is the clear spring that flows down from the mountain of desire, and that quenches thirst. It is the light that streams out everywhere, and whose home is nowhere.

 

Tremendous things will happen in the outside world; people will move in strange ways, and be moved by tides greater and more powerful than any of us. Do not be dismayed, I tell myself. Remember where you were, those nights when a soft light illumined the inner darkness, and you breathed your own breath, quietly, and knew that you were equal to the task at hand. Remember the quiet rivers that flow through the soul, and the lights that come out only when the sky is dark.

 

I am going there. I'm going there, and I am here already. I've come so far. I have so much more exploring yet to do.

A More Resilient Garden

The picture below is from early June. At the time, this was the extent of the garden I planted at the camp where I work, when things were just starting to pick up. I'm pleased to report that since then the garden has quite exceeded my expectations, but also that there was a significant twist along the way.

 

For a few years now I've been consulting a book by Carol Deppe called The Resilient Gardener. I've explored the topic of resilience elsewhere on this blog, and Deppe's views on the need for personal and collective resilience in the future unfolding before us have a lot in common with mine. But even more relevant to the present season, her gardening style has been intimately shaped by personal health concerns.

 

Deppe has celiac disease, an intolerance to wheat and related grains. Most of the carbohydrates in her diet come from corn, squash, and potatoes, which she found were more flavourful when she grew them in her own garden rather than relying on commercial varieties. For a period of time she was also deeply involved in caring for her ailing mother. Whenever her mother entered another round of illness or crisis, Deppe had to abandon her garden for days or weeks at a time, and her crop yields suffered accordingly.

The way she describes her change in philosophy is so eloquent that I'll quote directly from the book's introduction:

These days, we tend to design our gardens and our gardening for good times, times when everything is going well. That isn't what we need. Reality is, there is almost always something going wrong. Hard times are normal. My experience of gardening while caring for my mother helped me realize that I needed to garden differently. My garden needed to be designed around the reality that life has its ups and downs. It has good times and bad. How to garden in the best of times was not the issue. I didn't need a 'good-time garden'. I needed to understand more about how to garden in hard times. I needed a more resilient garden. And I needed a garden that better enhanced my own resilience, in all kinds of times, good and bad.

I found myself in a similar situation this summer. Although I've thankfully stayed in good health, my six-month, May-to-October job living and working at camp didn't turn out as planned. In mid-May the provincial government announced that overnight summer camps would not be allowed to run this year. This came only a few weeks after I'd moved up to my tiny cabin in the woods and only a day after my colleague and I had finished working a trailer load of compost into the garden's raised beds and planting all twelve with crops that- we hoped- the kids would enjoy harvesting and eating.

Cherry tomatoes, anyone?

 

How about pumpkins, or fresh salad greens?

 

Or maybe (an annual favourite of mine) multi-coloured potatoes, sown in half-full buckets and steadily covered over with earth as the plants grow, producing layer after layer of pink and purple spuds?

Fortunately the government couldn't stop the plants from growing, and through June and July the garden flourished. There was enough other work on site for three of us to keep busy at: we kept the property in good condition and made repairs and upgrades while we waited to hear whether we'd be allowed to run day programs for kids from the surrounding area. Throughout that time we enjoyed all the greens, beans, and cucumbers we could eat as we watched the other crops grow and change.

The tomatoes filled out their cages...

 ...pumpkin vines grew long and leggy, and kale luxuriantly leafy...

Even the potato plants reached for the sun, and were rewarded with fresh layers of earth mixed with compost.

 

 

The garden went from looking like this...

 

 

to this...

 

 

...and finally to this.

 

Then we got word that day camps were cancelled too. The three of us were to finish up what we were working on at camp and move back to the city on August 1. A crack team of staff had been building and running an online camp program for the kids via Zoom, and that would end up being the mainstay of this year's summer program.

Throughout that spring and early summer of uncertainty, the garden had been an oasis for me, a sure source of calm and steady purpose and, of course, snacks. I went there most evenings to weed, water, and talk on the phone with friends and relatives far away. Now that I was leaving, its resilience, as well as my own, would be tested.

Unlike Carol Deppe, whose gardening was frequently interrupted without warning, I was able to do a few things to prepare for this transition. I made sure I stayed two steps ahead of the weeds, which meant pulling and tossing them before they released their seeds all over everything. My plants, now mature but not yet fully fruiting, got a fresh layer of wood chip mulch spread over their beds. In Oregon, where Deppe gardens, it's too rainy and damp for mulch to help with anything except birthing hungry slugs, but in the hot, dry summers of southwestern Ontario, mulch of any kind helps hold moisture in the soil. It's also a terrific help in preventing mid-season weeds from getting started.

Here's that pumpkin patch again, with a circle of bare soil surrounded by a protective sea of wood chips:

The main factor in garden resilience, of course, is healthy soil. I had the good luck of inheriting the hard work of the camp's previous garden coordinator, who had built up the raised beds and nurtured them with compost and sheep manure. This year's trailer full of compost was graciously supplied by her family's farm back in early May. My colleague and I worked it into the beds with pitchforks, mixing and loosening while being careful not to turn the soil structure completely upside down, the way a plow or rototiller does. Once healthy organic soil structure has been established, as it had been here, less intervention is generally more.

August was tense. I watched and waited, and finally the camp was given the go-ahead to host fall weekend retreats, with careful health protocols in place. After four weeks away, I returned to my garden to find it changed indeed. The tomatoes, just starting to show colour when I'd departed, were now rotting on the vine. Big leafy pumpkin plants had exploded out of their own bed and overrun their neighbours'. The kale had attracted chewing insects of some kind, and the potato plants were peering down from well above the rims of their buckets.

Overall though, it turns out that when left to their own devices plants still grow and do their thing. Lettuce gets stalky and goes to seed, sunflowers blossom and attract bees, and zucchini plants spawn monstrous fruit in the shade of their enormous leaves. Raccoons enjoyed the sweet corn that we missed out on. But the garden still had enough diversity of crops that some things were coming ripe into early September.

Oh, and we were finally able to host some kids at camp, during the Fall Family Hike weekend. They had a good time with those pumpkins.

This year has been a good test. How resilient is my way of life, exactly? Am I prepared to keep going through good times and bad? Do I fret when my good-times plans don't turn out the way I'd hoped? Or am I thankful for what I do get to enjoy of the fruits of my labour?

Most importantly, am I able to trust that the cycles of life will continue? That giving up some of my hopes for this year and spading them into the soil to nurture a future year's harvest is an okay and perfectly natural thing to do?

Winter is coming, and with it the time for reflecting on what has been and dreaming of what will come. Resilience, to me, means knowing that although the oasis is currently out of sight, when the time is right I'll be able to plant it anew, wherever I find myself.

Happiness Is...

For a while now, one of the things I've wanted to have more time and room to tinker at is composting. Growing food is fun and all, but composting is the real cool, deep, satisfying part of gardening. Instead of taking material away from the soil, composting adds to it. Kind of like putting funds in a savings account for later, rather than withdrawing all the time.

Just outside the kitchen window here at camp is a neat little solar box that someone built a long time ago, for seedlings I think. I arrived in early May and we got snow almost right away, so it didn't seem like the right year to try my hand at starting seeds outdoors. But almost any time can be compost time, if you have the right ingredients at hand.

I decided to give it a try. I started by loosening the soil with a pitchfork, twelve inches deep. On the left-hand side of the image below, you can see the flat, packed-down sand which was there initially. On the right, the soil has been loosened (but not mixed) so that it can hold more air and moisture and little squirmy things. Nothing has been added so far but my own elbow grease.

Next I broke up a bunch of twigs and sticks I found lying around, and threw them on top of the chunky soil. This too has the function of improving air flow at the bottom of the pile.

Then a layer of dry leaves I'd raked up the week before. In between the rows of wooden benches by the main campfire area we have to rake away the leaves every spring, otherwise they increase dampness and rot on the undersides of the benches. If rot is what you want, however, then damp leaves are just the thing. People actually pay money at garden centres for bagged organic matter rich in carbon. Around here it just grows on trees.

Next I threw on the kitchen scraps we had sitting in a bin on the kitchen counter. Any 'fresh' vegetable matter, that is, with some juice still in it, provides the counterpart to the carbon in the leaves: nitrogen. The best naturally-sourced nitrogen is in animal manure or fresh grass clippings, but I only managed to score some of that later on.

Then a few shovelfuls of dirt, you know, to give the compost pile a tangible example to live up to. And a good dose of water from the watering can. And finally, for good measure, I threw in some gorgeous worms from someone else's composting experiment last summer that had survived the winter in a bin in the basement.

  

 

A side note on worms: I kept a bin of composting worms in my kitchen cupboard at home for years. When done right, they give off nothing but a faint and pleasant earthy kind of smell. The trick is checking on them regularly and making sure they have the right level of moisture in the bin. A sprinkling of water or a handful of shredded newspaper adjusts the balance. And worms are like babies- their food goes down easier if it's chopped up real small.

Finally, I put my new compost pile to bed, tucked in with a final layer of leaves, and closed the glass lid. The main obstacle to composting in our area is hungry bears, but with the combination of a well-fitting lid, solar heat to speed the breakdown process, and a high carbon ratio provided by all those leaves, I guessed we wouldn't attract anything large than a mouse. So far that guess has proven accurate.

The picture below was taken five weeks later. This afternoon, to be precise. We'd been watering the pile almost every day with a full watering can, to keep it nice and moist. We'd been leaving the lid on, to keep it nice and hot. We'd been adding three people's worth of kitchen scraps- veggies, cooked grains, bones, anything. I mowed the grass yesterday and threw a big pile of fresh, moist grass clippings onto the left-hand side (I'd already prepared the ground with pitchfork, sticks, and a layer of leaves). Twenty-four hours later that nitrogen-rich pile of clippings was quite warm to the touch, even on a cloudy day.

As I mentioned earlier, this is an experiment. Like any experiment, you have to be willing to end up with something gooey and funky if you mix in the wrong things at the wrong time. There are very precise formulae for making good compost, involving high or low temperatures, different ratios of carbon to nitrogen, and leaving it to sit or stirring it regularly via pitchfork or friendly burrowing critters. I followed no precise recipe except for the initial layering steps I've outlined here, which I took from John Jeavons' classic book How To Grow More Vegetables. But my pile seems to be working out so far.

Ideally an experiment should be carefully observed, well-documented, and replicable by anyone with access to the necessary equipment. Oh, and fun. Experiments should be fun, too. Because happiness is a warm compost pile.

Tasting

What if I planted a garden and nobody showed up?

The spring air is sweet, the sweat of my brow is salty, and the taste of hopes dashed could be bitter, if I allowed it to be. But I've lived in the forest long enough to know that there are other flavours to be found, if I have the appetite for them.

Even the occasional sour day doesn't get me down completely, because I know there are new surprises leafing out all the time.

Sometimes I pause in my work just to drink in the flavour of the afternoon. It's best when I discover I'm not alone in doing so.

It's wise to look carefully before you taste, of course.

 

But over time it's possible to develop an eye for these things.

And once your palate has cultivated the necessary discernment, well, then you're cooking with fire.

Even so, you can't expect to always receive what you were hungering for. In the Bhagavad Gita it is written, 'Desire not the fruits of your labours'. A gardener needs just such an attitude: the willingness to perform well the work that is before you, regardless of the results.

Last year's squash vines, for example, looked promising but didn't end up bearing substantial fruit.

This year's wild spinach, however, has been surprisingly delicious.

With patience, timing, hard work, and a willingness to accept the unexpected, life can be savoured no matter what comes up.

 

That's the truth about gardening. You do it because it's beautiful, because it tastes of hope. You do the work, and then you watch and pray.