Check it out: http://reyfriends.net/greenmountain/

The peas, so luxuriant a few weeks ago, have become grey and withered, leaving a few leathery pods that yield a surprising sweetness. Pull them out, plant a fall crop. The maize maze grows ever higher and more confusing; we are just training the vines up the gourd house. Cucumber and zucchini fruit hide themselves in a tangle and then appear unexpectedly in startling dimensions. Pumpkins look promising; melons hopeful.

Living with a garden is living with constant birth, life, death, and resurrection — a melodramatic statement, perhaps, but still true. Not just yearly with the circle of spring, summer, fall and winter, but also with many other cyles that recur within the summer season. One notorious cycle: blackfiles emerge from their watery wombs to wage heoric areal battles with creatures many times their size — at least the females do, the gentler males drink nectar. Females lay eggs, larva emerge and cling to rocks until transformed from water to sky creatures, rising in a tiny bubble of air and bursting into flight and the work of bringing forth another generation. Again and again.

The early meadow flowers have gone to seed, though a mowing or two returns them to youth temporarily and may bring another hay crop. Eventually even such intervention succumbs to what appears to be an envitable line of time. Fall and winter come, and no mater how many cycles of growing plants and flying insects, cold and snow return, a very little ice age. The line comes back on itself and becomes a circle. With multiple cycles within a summer, and the eventual return of spring, we have spheres upon spheres, an amalgest, like Ptolemy’s celestial geometry.

Anthropgenic global warming may be similar to a hot, dry spell in a New England summer, an interruption of what will some day return to a true ice age with its glaciers miles thick, pushing plants and animals south (in the Northern hemisphere). And like some hot spells and droughts, much may be lost in this extreme and accelarated change in the next years.

We appear to move in circles, but with each recurrance comes difference. Each summer the sun bakes the skin on my neck and I have become to notice lines and lost elasticity. My body will carry the memory of my broken ribs whenever I reach for a shovel. Evolution has transfomed this planet from a liquid stew of early life to its current array of animale and vegetabile. So many lives: lines and circles; spheres upon spheres.

Catastrophic species decline is occuring now, has occured before. What difference will we see in the next few spins of the rolling wheel of time?

I should be able to recover past blog posts, but it may tale a while. 

It’s time to prepare for the garden, to dream of days with full plates of salad, and platters of corn on the cob. It’s also time to walk the woods and find the first wildflowers, and for for a while we can forget that black flies are coming soon…

It’s been a day of driving, a three hour ferry ride, and more driving. We are in the Rai Valley, just outside of French Pass. The ferry ride was comfortable and the views beautiful: first the North Island and the Capital city of Wellington receding as the ferry appears to enter the open ocean, then the South Island appearing, and for a while the islands, equidistant, are visible and seem very close to each other. After more time, and after the North Island disappears, one enters what looks like it will be a bay, but instead one enters a labyrinthine “sound” where it seems at once that there are many ways to go and perhaps nowhere to go as tiny islands and toothy rocks emerge at each turn of the ferry. I am surprised at the landscape I am seeing, just as I was with the North Island. Steep slopes are grazed by sheep with some areas sloughing, revealing sandy soil, or planted with exotic conifers, or the stumps of those confers in extensive clearcuts. The native vegetation, the “bush” as it is called, seems to be a low, shrubby smudge of mixed pastel greens that occasionally patch the hillsides.

the reversal

Any travel involves taking one out of the usual and comfortable world of home and  jarring one into another context.  Having been born in Guatemala and lived for many years in Costa Rica, this is not unusual for me.  However, I have never experienced a world that seems in reverse.  The first inkling of this mirroring came in Thailand, and not from the musical language that I could not understand, nor from the wonderful elephants I learned to communicate with and to ride.  I did learn some Thai, though the elephants still knew more by the end of my visit.  While I did not understand Thai, it feels to be an intimate language.  The lumbering elephants were variations of other creatures I have known and loved — an elephant does not seem to be so different from Poppy the cow I milked this fall, though I found the elephants much more cooperative.  The bustle of Bangkok and the simple living of people who are poor in material wealth — and often rich in other things– was familiar and comfortable for me.

What first threw me was being driven in a car that was hurtling down the left side of the road.  There was also the 12 hour time difference that turned night into day and day into night, or something like that.  It was a mirror of sorts, but what was I looking at?

Australia continued this trend:  the same left-side driving, but now it was not in taxis, I was with a friend who drove and I was next to him in the front seat — on the right.  At each turn I expected the oncoming traffic to run us down.  We were going South, but it was getting cooler, and sun did not set until early evening:  it was with some chagrin that I realized my mistake: we were in the southern hemisphere; the dark days of my winter solstice were had become the bright, long days of summer.

Our destination at the Donnaly “holiday” village continued the mirror, or perhaps this time a parallel history:  I saw a combination of Lincoln and Waterville Valley New Hampshire in the abandoned logging mill and a town turned into a place for tourists.  The Donnally Village is surrounded by the Western Australian State Forest, and managed for timber as well as recreation.  I walked an Australian version of the Appalachian Trail — the Bibblulmum Track — and stayed in a “hut” along the way.  But there were no mountains here, the rise and fall of the trail was gentle,  the forest dry at this time of year, and vegetation certainly other than northeastern deciduous.  The Kangaroos we met were not too different from hopping field mice. Emus, though, appeared as great walking dust mops, and could not quite be translated into my beloved chickens.

And then there was the language.  Here I expected to feel less at a loss than in Thailand, but instead I found I could not understand English; I was caught in one of those fun-house distorted mirrors where the familiar is mapped on a curved surface.

New Zealand has only intensified the Australian experience.  I find myself driving south into cooler and darker lands, this time myself navigating a car on the wrong side of the road, steering a vehicle  from the right side.  I am asked to “give way” instead of “yield,” and have been terrified by the proliferation of double-lane “roundabouts” (traffic circles).  I have not been so focused and anxious since my first days of driving as a teenager.

The greatest sign of my confusion came when I tried to fill a thermos with coffee: “Could you fill my thermos with coffee?”

A puzzled look came from the girl behind the counter: “Espresso?”

“No,  just coffee.”

Continued puzzlement:  “We have long blacks, short blacks,  long whites, short whites, espresso, latte…”

“Just coffee?”

The girl still looked perplexed and I was certainly confused.  In the end it seemed that long blacks were watered down espressos, which seemed to be the closest thing I could get to my black coffee.

And then there is the fact that with the time difference  today is yesterday, or is that tomorrow is today?

falling upward

There is an indpendent film (I don’t recall the name) that features a world where random people fall skywards.   I now wonder if I am clinging to the underside of the world now and risk this fate.

Whiteblack, Jenny and I have been a week in Thailand and we have experienced a whirlwind of activity. The afternoon we arrived, Sunday, we decided to tour the Sunday market. Here we began to get a feel for the color and crowd, scents of spice and the aroma of many flowers — as well as the smell of exhaust and wastewater. The sound of the market is together musical and discordant: tonal Thai is spoken, shouted and sung accented by the the cries of myna birds . The market is a labyrinth of stalls selling everything from t-shirts and kitchen items to fine Thai silk and antique Buddhas, and everything in between.

Monday I launched into my joyful work: three Chalk Talks, two in hospitals and one in a school. As always, it is so rewarding to be with children and draw, and a special privilege to give something to children who are ill and in the hospital. I got a chance to make it through most of the drawings in Curious George Learns the Alphabet for one class, reinforcing English lessons. At Queen Sirkit National Institute for Child Health I received as well as gave: the children drew as I Chalk Talked and gave me their drawings. I had quite an art lesson: much of the artwork surpassed what I was offering…

Monday evening was a special treat as Whiteblack, Jenny and I dined with Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn at her palace. Jenny was fearful that my usual table manners would prevail, but I managed not to disgrace myself. Whiteblack loved the Princesse’s dogs, four of which came into the dining room at my request and ran around the table, barked, and tried to snatch food: it’s nice to know that my dog, Hali, is not the only one who does these things.

On Tuesday we toured the Grand Palace, and grand it was, a glittering city within a city, filled with past royal residences, temples, wats, statues, marching palace guards, Buddhist monks, as well as a gawking and polyglot flow of tourists. Things growing ornamented many of the buildings. Orchids overwhelmed, dozens of species with a rainbow of colors and a variety of sizes and shapes. Because we are guests of the HRH Sirindhorn, we managed to sneak into parts of the Palace that are off limits to others: the throne rooms of various kings and queens, receiving chambers for ambassadors and other dignitaries, rooms filled with gifts from the Royals of Europe, and a hall of portraits of generations of kings and queens.

The highlight, however, was the traditional arts school located in the Grand Palace and sponsored HRH Princess Sirindhorn. Here young (and some not so young) adults are provided scholarships to study traditional arts and crafts. These include flower art, embroidery, cooking, drawing and painting, wood carving, clay relief sculpture, inlay, gold leaf application, and more. The work, which requires patience and long practice, is testimony to a different vision of art than we are used to: individual’s originality is expressed in the mastery and interpretation of traditional form rather than breaking of precedent and paradigm.

This day was capped by a visit to the Queen’s Support Foundation in the old parliamentary building. Here we witnessed the most intricate and accomplished examples of the traditional art we saw being learned, works celebrating such events as the 80th Birthday of the King. We saw the products of hundreds of artisans working for up to two years on a single piece: thrones inlaid with glowing luminescent blue beetle shell and covered in gold leaf; carvings, paintings and embroideries of scenes from various Buddhist and Hindu stories; models of ceremonial ships made from gold and studded in diamond; kingly elephant saddles…

Thursday took us to another Royally supported project, this one for wastewater treatment. Ponds, grasslands, constructed wetlands and compost bins processed wastewater for many thousands and “garbage” (organic waste for compost) for many hundreds. The site is also a research center with hundreds of students working on masters and doctoral degrees in biosolids, wetland ecology, and productive uses of bio-residues — such as a project to use pond sediment for ceramics. The final release of purified wastewater is a natural mangrove full of fish, crabs and other seafood that is harvested by locals

And Friday? We flew to Phuket, which is another story…