The Moss Garden

The Moss Garden

Somewhere outside Kyoto’s line, she said,
they stumbled across the famous garden of moss,
the smallish sign so plain it could have been
overlooked. No temple, only moss.
So they entered the walkway with little expectation,
the silence creeping in, much like expectation.

Instead of leading them to the garden directly,
two monks had led them to a different task,
requested they copy three hundred characters,
the ink and paper set down for the task.
And this, too, was a practiced form of prayer,
left behind for those who had forgotten prayer.

The monks left brushes, ink, and bowls of water.
They asked the seekers to write, to pray. But prayer,
any prayer, wasn’t easy. The brush and ink,
the doubting hand, made not for simple prayer.
And even as I write this, I do not want to pray.
This story changes nothing; I do not want to pray.

--C. Dale Young

Garden Master 3 Video Game

Well, it's actually an ad for GameStop insinuating that gardening is quite boring. I WAS INSULTED. I get insulted a lot, that's my own blessing, but I choose this to be especially insulted about today.

And why not check out the Sims 2 expansion pack, Mansion and Garden Stuff, where you can create wondrous gardens and improve the interior decor of your house. Now THAT sounds boring.

Bamboo Torture

You can torture someone by growing bamboo into them (something that apparently happened in WWII). I love me my Mythbusters on the Discovery channel. They proved that within only 3 days, pointy, piercing shoots can grow many inches into a human torso. After a few weeks, a 12 foot stalk will be high above you.

I've always wanted to find a way to meld my horticultural interests with my slightly therapeutic / illegal fantasies.

Fall = 63 / 13

63 today, 13 tomorrow night. I'm not even sure what day, month, year it is anyway, and Nebraska goes and does this to me. It's fall, see:


















'Golden Spirit' smokebush is a rainbow of color.














Amsonia, surrounding the still young 'Black Lace' elderberry.































'Brilliantissima' red chokeberry is quite red, and the berries are still there.


















'Little Henry' itea looks much like its slightly bigger brother 'Garnet.'


















Weeping bald cypress making me weep.


















For some reason this just dead morning glory from a few weeks ago makes me think victorian. Or gothic. Or grandmotherly.

Possible About Many Theory Clock Arranged Mice

--Reading 90 application files for a search committee looking to hire a new English prof.
--Grading 44 creative nonfiction essays.
--Wondering when I will write / outline a presentation for a conference I attend next weekend.
--Wishing I didn't have to fly again.
--Saying no to something I wish I could say yes to.
--Choosing books for two classes next term. Book orders due soon, but at least I got the classes I asked for in my last term as a grad student. LAST TERM! Oh praise all the various deities (which very well might be the same one).
--Thinking about my dissertation, but unable to work on it. 270 pages in stasis.
--Knowing I've not sent out any poems to literary journals this fall (this is equivalant to a squirrel not packing away food for the winter--I may have a dead year publication wise which is, in this business, career suicide. But at least I have essays out).
--Observing the last of the potted annuals die. Die. Die. Die.
--Waiting, praying, for two big things to swing our way. Actually three things. A house. An essay. A job.
--Wasting time whining here into digital oblivion.

October--Mary Oliver

Not all of it, but most of it, lineated incorrectly....


October

1.
There’s this shape, black as the entrance to a cave.
A longing wells up in its throat
like a blossom
as it breathes slowly.

What does the world
mean to you if you can’t
trust it
to go on shining when you’re

not there? And there’s
a tree, long-fallen; once
the bees flew to it, like a procession
of messengers, and filled it
with honey.

5.
Look, hasn’t my body already felt
like the body of a flower?

6.
Look, I want to love this world
as though it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get
to be alive
and know it.

7.
Sometimes in late summer I won’t touch anything, not
the flowers, not the blackberries
brimming in the thickets; I won’t drink
from the pond; I won’t name the birds or the trees;
I won’t whisper my own name.

One morning
the fox came down the hill, glittering and confident,
and didn’t see me—and I thought:

so this is the world.
I’m not in it.
It is beautiful.

Nature is a Fractal--And I Feel Fractured

Most everything in the natural world can be seen as a fractal. What's a fractal?

A fractal is generally "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole," a property called self-similarity. The term was coined by Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975 and was derived from the Latin fractus meaning "broken" or "fractured." A mathematical fractal is based on an equation that undergoes iteration, a form of feedback based on recursion. (Wikipedia)

What's really a fractal? Trees. Ferns. Coneflowers. Rivers. Mountains. Coastlines. Clouds. Snowflakes. Broccoli. Blood vessels. These things can be modeled and hypothetically extended on the computer via mathematical equations.

This knowledge can potentially heal us in several ways:

1) The tiny blood vessels that form with cancer cells are nearly impossible to see with a microscope. By using ultrasound, however, we can see them as fractals, and by using fractal algorithms we can possibly predict if these blood vessels will lead to cancer formation.

2) Heartbeats can be mapped as fractals, and could possibly lead us to help identify heart attack risk.

3) By studying one tree in the forest, an example of fractal formation, scientists can predict the growth of the larger forest and calculate how much oxygen they are producing and how much carbon they are sequestering.

4) Larger animals / plants more efficiently use energy than smaller ones. Why? Internal wiring within the genetic code is fractal based.

More? Cell phones, needing to be small and transmit / receive many differnet sorts of signals, use fractal-shaped antennas.

I find it both disturbing and transcendent to think of our natural world as a fractal. To think we can mathematically map and predict the world takes away the awe, maybe the soul in some respects. If we can put nature on a computer screen, what bounds does our hubris have? If we know where we are going, what does matter where we've been or what we're doing now?

And yet, to know is to heal, but so often our knowing destroys our bodies and souls, so it's easy to distrust this knowledge, easy to want to fight against it. I think I begin to understand the enlightenment more, or at least the struggles of belief and faith, past and present, the destruction of our various global cultures and ecosystems of both human and animal / plant.

*My thanks go to PBS's Nova series for the above info on fractals.

My Memoir Abstract--Would You read This?

Below is a brief description of my book, so far at around 270 pages. I hope it's done by January, or February at the latest, as I'll need to "defend" it for my PhD soon after. I'm almost done with school! Happy thoughts....


Morning Glory: A Story of Family and Culture in the Garden

My book manuscript is part memoir, part cultural exploration on the history of gardening, and part environmental treatise. At the core of the book is my time spent growing up gardening with my mother, how this has lead to us being closer in adulthood, and culminated in my discovery of the lineage of fear, distrust, and forced solitude within my family that I innately exhibit. This darker side of my mom’s family—of poverty, religious fundamentalism, and an abusive stepfather—is paralleled with an exploration of global culture in the natural world, specifically, through gardening.

By looking at our attitudes toward nature, manifested by its exploitation, manipulation, and our artistic interpretation of it, I compare this outward struggle with our humanity to an inward struggle with violence, loss, confusion, self-doubt, isolation, and longing. Through the lens of global religions, philosophies, and cultural histories in gardens, as well as poetry and seminal ecological works, Morning Glory shows the fine line we walk as mediators, and how our violence toward the environment comes from the same root as our violence toward ourselves and each other.

Many nature writers and critics suggest we need to recreate or find a metaphor that links culture to the natural world, that the answer to our ecological and social crises is to get more culture into our relation to the earth; through the personal story of my family and the exploration of garden history, this book does that.

Final Planting List

Does a plant list say the same thing about a person as a movie or music list? Books on the shelf? Clothes in the closet? A mad rush to plant mail orders in the last weeks before autumn gets serious has made me tuckerd out. Autumn has been toying with us here in Nebraska, flirting, or, more precisely, starting with feather tickling torture before the electrodes get brought in. Yeah. That's it. Snow showers on Thursday the overly excited young man on channel 8 says (he commonly runs out of breath and trips on his own words--he must be just out of weather school). 4-6" of snow just a few hours west of here Wednesday night.

Iris 'Alida'
Iris pseudacorus 'Berlin Tiger'
Eupatroium 'Baby Joe'
Caryopteris incana 'Sunshine Blue'
Eupatorium masculatum 'Purple Bush'
Cassia hebecarpa (Wild Senna)
Echinacea pallida (Pale Purple Coneflower)
Mimulus ringens (Monkeyflower)
Monarda fistulosa (Wild Bergamot)
Thalictrum dioicum (Early Meadowrue)
Verbena hastata (Blue Vervain)
Asclepias sullivantii (Sullivant's Milkweed)
Liatris squarrosa (Scaly Blazingstar)
Liatris spicata (Dense Blazingstar)
Liatris pycnostachya (Prairie Blazingstar)
Gentiana andrewsii (Bottle Gentian)
Spiraea tomentosa (Steeplebush)
Aster puniceus 'Eric's Big Blue'
Aster tataricus
Aster tataricus 'Jindai'
Pycnanthumum virginianum (Mountain Mint)
Liatris cylindracea (Dwarf Blazingstar)
Iris fulva (Copper Iris)
Dodecatheon meadia (Midland Shooting Star)
Arisaema triphyllum (Jack-in-the-Pulpit)
Angelica atropurpurea (Angelica)
Amorpha nana (Frgrant False Indigo)
Amorpha canescens (Lead Plant)
More drumstick and globe master alliums
More white and black tulips
Some shasta daisies (I give in)
Some various coreopsis cultivars (WAY on sale)

A well deserved rest awaits, methinks. Spring will be, well, stunning.

It's Cow Farts, Not Car Exhaust

Bill Nye told me that cow farts, comprised of a lot of methane (much more potent than CO2), contribute to 20% of total greenhouse gases each year.

But if we fed cows garlic, we could cut their emissions by 50% (garlic reduces methane-causing bacteria in the stomach).

I like my once per month filet mignon, so please, feed them garlic--it's better to stink on one end than both. That's what my mom always said growing up.

Hafiz

from A Cushion For Your Head

Just sit there right now
Don't do a thing
Just rest.

For your separation from God,
From love,

Is the hardest work
In this
World....

--Hafiz


Courtesy of Mary Rose O'Reilley
The Garden At Night: Burnout & Breakdown in the Teaching Life

Video of Monarch Coming Out Party

The last two monarchs came out this afternoon, both male. 11 days ago they formed chrysalides within 2 hours of each other, and today emerged about 30 minutes apart. Yesterday two females emerged who also went on the same day 11 days before that, again, within hours of each other going in and coming out. Our 2 dozen or so monarchs mostly emerged at 11 days, a few at 10--very dependable.

I apologize for the grainy, shakey video--don't watch if you're feeling a bit tipsy. I wasn't ready, and so I only had my digital camera at hand, not video camera.

Such a sad day. The last of the monarchs are off. The weather forecast calls for a 20-25 degree drop in temps for tomorrow down to 55ish, with rain and 20mph north winds. With today's gusts to 40, many of the trees are now bare. I had no idea trees were turning, but that's Nebraska, brown and done, sometimes even green and done.

Goodbye summer. I am deserted, suddenly. (I wish I was desserted with my mom's chocolate pie, or chocolate velvet cake--hear that, mom? When you visit this week bring dessert!)

Cats and Morning Glories About to Glory Themselves

The beautiful spiral pre bloom of a morning glory, and the awkward dance of two cats vying for sunlight.

Take On Me: Literal Video Version

I love this song, I love satire, I love this video. I love all of you, too. But not you.

Speaking in Tongues

Speaking In Tongues
by Mary Rose O'Reilley


I go to church every Sunday
though I don’t believe a word of it,
because the longing for God
is a prayer said in the bones.

When people call on Jesus
I move to a place in the body
where such words rise,
one of the valleys
where hope pins itself to desire;
we have so much landscape like that
you’d think we were made
to sustain a cry.

When the old men around me
lift their hands
as though someone has cornered them,
giving it all away,
I remember a dock on the estuary,
watching a heron get airborne against the odds.
It’s the transitional moment that baffles me—
how she composes her rickety
grocery cart of a body
to make that flight.

The pine siskin, stalled on a windy coast,
remembers the woods
she will long for when needs arise; so
the boreal forest composes itself in my mind:
first as a rift, absence,
then in a tumble of words
undone from sense, like the stutter
you hear when somebody falls
over the cliff of language. Call it a gift.

Suddenly, Autumn

Is it here at the window where we truly see
the brown-leafed oaks, the drying grass,
the bulge of clouds that darkens asphalt roads?

Is it within a frame of measured faith and chosen
color, relief of temperatures in flux—the southern
wind that fishtails from the north in thirty minutes,

sun spots glancing blows through tattered canopies?
How everything is almost everything we feel?
Loosening cold clothes from our tired limbs,

the quick friction warming us against the air,
then against ourselves, between our knees, our
arms and torsos, bone and streaming lungs.

Is morning like hot tea gripping at your chest,
flooding down and through you like some
revelation, incantation of the perfect pitch,

choral song of waking, sparrow, passing cars?
Will emptiness feel as bold, will the space
our body’s voices leave be sacred words

that vision won’t speak, that sound won’t touch—
a place the mind can’t frame without such absence?


Appeared in Puerto del Sol (Volume 41, #1, Spring 2006)

REAL Garden Art

Check out what I got at the Lincoln Arts Festival last weekend. I'd been searching for a long while for real art, but everything was way too expensive. I was overjoyed. Verklempt.

The artist, Shannon Hansen, dropped this off Monday. I had unknowingly been coveting his work for years as I drove by a local gallery almost every day, but those larger pieces were tres chere.

My piece is not in its permanent place in the garden (due to spring plant moving plans) nor is it perfectly straight, but you get the idea. Shannon is a cool, down to earth artist who teaches metal working / industrial welding at a local community college (and he was impressed with my disappearing fountain, so hey). The piece is carbon steel, coated in acrylic urethane, and is from his "flex" series. Go check out his work, I know there's much more I'd like to have.

Sick Musings

In the delusion of illness, and this is just a head cold, it is amazing how much clearer things are in life. I am very angry about being sick, cancelling classes, losing productivity on my book, being unable to read, having a fever that almost made me vomit, but still, I think if a person can take some sort of illumination from sickness then it is a very good thing. Maybe even a designed, perfected thing in the end. I feel more in love with my writing, my garden, my wife--maybe not in that order.

This time allows me silence on the couch, silences I've either let go or refused over the years. These silences are deeply necessary and restorative, mentally, physically, psychologically. I know we all need them, but I feel DEAD without them, and I think I've felt dead for a long time now. Being sick is, for a few brief moments in the grossness and agony of it, healing.

I have more time to sit outside, walk the garden, feel this cool 70 degree autumn breeze clash with the still warm sun, and that battle is oddly balancing. I notice more birds than I thought we had left. I chase more squirrels from the feeder. I see spiders catching bumble bees and the preying mantis doing the same. There are plenty of bumble bees, even a very large one the size of my thumb working the now-closed blue morning glories. To heck with teaching and running around and responding to emails and....

My ears are ringing. My nose is runny. My body feels limp. I yearn to work on my book and see if I can't, somehow, someway, make the darn thing work like one cohesive narrative. But I also can appreciate this nothingness I am in, this halting the world has forced upon me, this warning, this awakening, this anguish.

"I consider not being able to write as a manifestation of grace; I think grace sometimes can be anguishing." (Christian Wiman)

Come at me grace, come at me and refill me and hold me under until I start to listen again and be what I need to be, what I'm supposed to be. I tried to edit some things this afternoon, but knew it'd be better to let that moment of inspiration go to a more useful area: out into thin air, recycled back to that which gives me sustenance.

Foggy Morn Avec Spider Web

The ONLY benefit to getting up at 8am every day (far, far too early for me), is feeling the cool morning air, and finding such treasures as fog in the fall garden--fog you could see sliding through the air and collecting on several spider webs. The droplets on the largest web mimicked the 'Prairie Jewel' eupatorium in the background, and the virgin's bower (native sweet autumn clematis) in its first season on the arbor. I strongly suggest clicking on pics to expand. I love it when a plan comes together (I miss the A-Team). Bonus: don't skip the hummingbird moth (white-lined sphinx) at the bottom, I almost did.

Mantis Eating Bee

These are R rated photos, so click away now if you don't like seeing nature doing its thing. The mantis was hanging from a culver's root, 'Erin,' and has the bumblebee torn in two. At first the mantis had both halves in its clutches, but dropped the head--which was still very much alive, arms flailing, wings moving, and responsive to my breath. This does NOT make me morbid, it simply makes me interested in the affairs of the garden. Right? Click on pic to expand, if yee dare.

Lincoln, Nebraska Hates Flowers--A Rant

I drive Rosa Parks Way every day, twice--no, it's not Rosa Parks Parkway, which makes more sense to me. It used to be called Capital Parkway, which also made sense because it leads straight to the penis of the prairie, uh, capital building. I don't want to get in to too much trouble, so let me move along.

There were hundreds, if not thousands of sunflowers lining this four lane, 50mph, 3 mile stretch of road.

They are all gone now.

The city crews brought their big mowing tractors in and that's that. No more gorgeous yellow blooms in the twilight of summer. No more pollinator heaven. No more nature. I mean, who doesn't like flat, browning expanse? Oh, the migrating geese do like this spot....

These plants were far from the road, in fields and gullies, nowhere near sight lines or such that might imperil drivers. This just really @^^&**$^!~@#$$^ pisses me off. It's like the trees they cut down on campus to make room for building new dorms / unions, trees that stand at the FRONT of where these new buildings will be, not in the MIDDLE. Will they replace the trees? Hell yes. Will they be small and marooned in concrete planters like the union plaza? Indeed. Will they drop leaves early, stressed because their feeder roots are under 10,000 square feet of concrete sidewalks, like the many maples in front of the union? Hmm.

Anyway, back to the sunflowers that used to make my drive in to teach at 9am and my zombie like drive home at 2 delightfully bookended and uplifting--here's to you, helianthusized, euthanized, pulverized. May the sunflowers along Highway 77 remain untouched and find their seeds blown your way. Damn Lincoln.

It's Autumn, and I Just Made It Under Deadline

Today I'm headed to the post office to mail 19 envelopes--submissions to literary journals, some of which like me, but not enough yet. (Fall is the time to submit along with all the other lemmings, and hoepfully you get rejected in enough time to submit again in early spring.) 18 envelopes are essays, as I'm behind on poetry, and frankly because I've been doing 99% nonfiction for a while now. See, I've got this dissertation thing coming up, and I had an epiphany about it, which to other grad schoolees won't seem like one, but 'twas for me.

The only time anyone on my committee will read any meaningful, sizable chunk of it--and offer some comments--will be when I turn it in. And what I imagine will happen will be I'll get some praise, some minor suggestions, a slap on the back, and a degree. But I hope not. I really want to go through the gauntlet on this one. I want it to be as perfect as a first book of prose can be. But it's up to me, as it will be come May and until I die.

I think at this stage in the game--6th year of my PhD, after 3 in the MFA--it's assumed I have SOME idea I know what I'm doing (ha ha ha choke). I do, I think. I mean, yes, I do. I suppose. It's trial by fire--it's the only way a person can ever really be a writer, by diving in, doing it, failing and not. I know this, but never has it been on such a grand scale with so much seemingly at risk.

I can not tell you, whoever you are reading this, how hard it is to keep a whole 260 page manuscript in your head at once, to keep going back in and editing, making things less redundant, trying to make the essays and chapters flow together, to work as a whole, and trying to remember what you add so it isn't saying the same thing again, but knowing you sometimes have to say the same things again (if at least in a different way) to remind the reader (and yourself) what the heart of the narrative is, how it all connects--I learned when I first started teaching some call this sign posting.

Anyway, blog posts are less, and less meaningful as of late, and I predict this will be the case for a while. I've got some committee work coming up this fall--my first in 9 years of grad school, I almost made it--which will also be pulling at me.

I will say it helps to have things ground you in life, and right now it's the monarchs. We've got 7 pupating, and 4 cats left, one about to J it up. It's enthralling to watch them shed skin, to emerge, and to fly off. And my garden--is--so--wonderful right now. Sweet autumn clematis, eupatorium, helianthus, penstemon, agastache, sedum, buddleia, aster, turtlehead, goldenrod, milkweeed seed floating about, so much going on even with the first trees turning now.

Just as I turn back toward myself, relieved the first heavy batch of grading is done, and I now have a three week reprieve to write--oh to write, that divine miracle that burns, actually burns, in my arms and eyes and spine.

I Sure Do Like Me Some Depeche Mode

More on the Drugs You're Drinking in City Water

U.S. hospitals and long-term care facilities annually flush millions of pounds of unused pharmaceuticals down the drain, pumping contaminants into America's drinking water, according to an ongoing Associated Press investigation.

These discarded medications are expired, spoiled, over-prescribed or unneeded. Some are simply unused because patients refuse to take them, can't tolerate them or die with nearly full 90-day supplies of multiple prescriptions on their nightstands.

Few of the country's 5,700 hospitals and 45,000 long-term care homes keep data on the pharmaceutical waste they generate. Based on a small sample, though, the AP was able to project an annual national estimate of at least 250 million pounds of pharmaceuticals and contaminated packaging, with no way to separate out the drug volume.

One thing is clear: The massive amount of pharmaceuticals being flushed by the health services industry is aggravating an emerging problem documented by a series of AP investigative stories — the commonplace presence of minute concentrations of pharmaceuticals in the nation's drinking water supplies, affecting at least 46 million Americans.

Researchers are finding evidence that even extremely diluted concentrations of pharmaceutical residues harm fish, frogs and other aquatic species in the wild. Also, researchers report that human cells fail to grow normally in the laboratory when exposed to trace concentrations of certain drugs....

Hospital waste is particularly laden with both germs and antibiotics, says microbiologist Thomas Schwartz at Karlsruhe Research Center in Germany.

The mix is a scary one.

In tests of wastewater retrieved near other European hospitals and one in Davis County, Utah, scientists were able to link drug dumping to virulent antibiotic-resistant germs and genetic mutations that may promote cancers, according to scientific studies reviewed by the AP.

Researchers have focused on cell-poisoning anticancer drugs and fluoroquinolone class antibiotics, like anthrax fighter ciprofloxacin.


Keep reading Tons of drugs dumped into wastewater: Discarded medications end up in drinking water, ongoing report finds.

The Smurfy Garden, As of Whatever Today Is

Fourth school week is coming up and I feel like my head's an irrigation pivot. I imagine this blog will soon become partially neglected, so I'm front loading it now with two posts.

But the garden looks--interesting. I'm liking the wild way it looks, because it's starting to fill out and / or it's late in the season. I really have no idea what I'm doing this first full year. Plants which were supposed to be medium are huge, plants that should've bloomed haven't yet (but are working on it), and with 2.5" of rain Thursday and Friday, and cloudier days, everything is putting on tons of new growth. The monarda are on steroids, the filipendula rubra on half doses of steroids, and the helianthus is like a proton collider (see, I work in current events). BTW--pinch back your balloon flowers in July, they actually bloom again (first time this has ever worked for me).






















Pinching back the geranium (behind the coreopsis) also produced a 2nd flush of blooms. Who knew this actually worked.


















I LOVE my Eupatorium altissimum ‘Prairie Jewel.’ In the spring they emerge with golden foliage, which turns a mottled white and green, then these lovely white blooms come along which attract 2,437 bees, wasps, butterflies and other insects each minute. Only problem is all three are 4-5' tall by 4' wide, and the rain and wind have bowed them over to a 45 degree angle. Don't know what to do next year short of staking. I hate staking.

And do you see that Helianthus 'Lemon Queen' back there? It's three times as big as the 7' bald cypress behind it. Somebody's getting moved, but is it better to move the helianthus now, or in early spring, in order to ensure this massive flourish of blooms for next fall?




















The copper rain chain seems to be doing its thing. Maybe not my dry stream bed.
















We get many blue jays at a time here. One morning a few were perched atop some corn I'm stubbornly growing in a place it shouldn't be growing.
















I found some smurfs. They were calling to me....