an excerpt

This is an except from a reflection dated: 23/11/2007. I reread it today and thought it would be nice to post here. Here is the first bit, it continues, but I will keep it short for now:

A reflection:
My time here, so far.
An adjustment. That's what I'll call it: an adjustment. A transition to something new and alien. A transition away from my familiar and loved. It was a bit of a jolt this time. Pushed off a bus into the rainy street--my life on wheels fumbling behind: luggage too heavy and no one to help. No one to laugh about it later because no one knew. Hailed a cab and read from a paper where I needed to be: Emmanuel College, porter's lodge, please. Lost and fumbling I was. Tired, lost and fumbling. I found the porter--he was kind and offered me a cup of tea. He called me a cab to get me round the corner to my new home.

Matt--number three--was the first person I met at my new home. He helped me get my bags up the stairs. My room was bare and small and the 'garden view' was not quite what I expected. But I decided to make it work. I hung and decorated and titled my head to get a better angle. I made it my little home and got used to the overgrown garden. I count the seasons on the tree outside my window now. By my estimation, winter will be here soon. My window has no screen, I like that. I can put my hand outside and feel the rain and the cold and catch the sun. Before my window tree was bare it would toss leaves into my room. A nice, playful welcome from a long-time resident of this place.

amongst a blade of grass

Work has been busy. My first project as project manager is coming to a stage of fruition this coming week... I have to present it to our client on Monday, to be precise. In the middle of the day today I had to leave the office and walk to a small park nearby... lay in the grass and close my eyes. I had to re-calibrate, really: to place myself back into the grander vision. It is so easy to get caught in the local... in the now. Laying there with my face in the grass, hiding my eyes from the blinding sun, I concentrated on listening. A bird... a cyclist rolling by (how nice, I thought, cycling in the middle of a Friday) ... an aeroplane overhead ... a child playing across the way ... another distinct bird call. This is real, I thought, this is reality. I laid there and held to my breast the knowledge of something bigger: millennia of human activity, eons of cells dividing and molecules colliding... something so big that my mind gave in and relaxed.

all shall be well
and all shall be well
and all manner of thing shall be well

Some photos

Today I am posting a few photos from around the garden. I feel a bit silly posting photos of our garden, but there are some quite pretty things to share and sometimes it is nice to see these things instead of just read about them.

In an attempt to eat in season (or at least buy in season), I've begun freezing in-season fruits to use in the off seasons. Below is a collection of apples and various berries: I took a photo because I thought the array of colors was beautiful.


My mom came over and said: Oxalis? That's a weed! I guess one woman's weed is another woman's treasure. Below is one of the two Oxalis plants I bought at the Horticulture Society sale.


Lavender on the window sill. We've got quite a bit of lavender from the six plants in the garden, so I've been placing it around the house in champagne glasses and mason jars.


'Champagne Bubbles' poppy cultivar. These remind me of the Newnham College garden at Cambridge: the poppies brought such light to the landscaped spaces. The pots these guys are planted in were created on day on a whim. I decided to decoupage some old black plastic pots (the kind that you buy plants in) with The Independent, and then touch them up with a bit of paint. I think they turned out quite fun.


Some lettuce in the winter vegetable garden. Newspaper makes a great mulch AND it's a fabulous way to recycle in your own backyard!


Sugar snap peas growing on the north side of the house. I built the trellis from some sticks I found in the yard and cotton string. It's not the prettiest, but it is working quite well.

Linaria reticulata ('Flamenco'): I bought these at Sumida a few weeks ago and added them to the garden at the side of the house. They do not have a lot of foilage but simply burst into magenta and butternut yellow, so they fit nicely with the bunches of cabbage, kale and leafy herbs scattered throughout.

the first rain

I've begun a book called Botany in the Field (by Jane Scott). It was published in 1984... but I bought it for 2 dollars at the book sale and I don't think that our basic understandings on botany have changed that much in the past 25 years. I quite like what Scott says in the opening chapter. She says: 'among the special appeals of botany is the fact that plants, unlike animals, do not vanish at our approach. Yet they do move in time, shifting images with the revolving seasons like a slow-motion kaleidoscope, as bright fruits replace delicate flowers and the pervasive green of summer explodes into autumn's fire.'

Today I began planting our winter garden. This included a trip to the local nursery and a long chat with the owner about how best to (organically) amend the soil to yield the best crop. I even brought in a soil sample to test and get specific advice about. It's so lovely how persons in this field are (or at least appear to be) so willing to share their knowledge.

Another bit of writing that I want to share; this one is actually a refrain that we sing at church when we take the wine and bread: 'Laudate dominum omnes gentes alleluia!' It means: Praise the Lord all peoples, Alleluia' I find that singing in Latin is quite grounding, espeically during communion. It is a subtle reminder of the Saints who came before and of the two thousand years contained within the ritual.

Today we had the first rain of the season; it was light but so lovely. I found myself strangely aware that this was the first rain I've seen in this country in a year and a half. I think I'd forgotten that Santa Barbara is not a land of perpetual summer. Perhaps I developed a bit of an image reflecting that idea during my time away in a land of (seemingly) perpetual winter. The rain today was very, very nice. I love this time of year and the dampness and the gloom and the chill in the air. The sound of rain hitting the roof and the crunch of leaves under foot; I think that maybe autumn is the season that lends itself most willingly to a sense of serenity and calm.

Borrowing from others

Today I am going to borrow from others.

First: 'Je te manque?' in English this mean 'do you miss me?' or more literally 'am I missed by you?' We were writing sentences on the board in french class using the verbs manquer à and plaire à and a boy wrote 'je te manque?' For some reason that struck me: how often is that actually asked: do you miss me? Perhaps it is just me, but I feel like it is silently considered a lot more often than it is actually said. Je te manque? Oui, oui, tu me manques.

Second: I picked up a book at the Planned Parenthood charity book sale called The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris. It is a reflection about her experience becoming a member of the Benedictine order. In the preface she discusses a process of reading called lectio divina, which I think sounds quite good. She decribes the term as meaning: 'an attempt to read more with the heart than with the head ... a slow meditative reading, primarily of the scriptures, lectio respects the power of words to resonate with the full range of human experience'. I don't have any more to comment on it, I simply thought it worth sharing.