Ghostwater Garden

Gardens of Souls

I give thanks that I live in a country that was founded on principles of freedom, by folks that had every reason in the world to try and preserve that freedom, for both themselves and for others.

I give thanks that I live in a time that is defining what that freedom means, and who gets to have it. 

I give thanks that we are moving towards a society that allows families to chose what to believe, to believe in the God they were raised with, and to honor the traditions of that/those God/s without imposing those traditions on others who do not share them. 

I give thanks that giving others the same freedoms we enjoy allows the true spirit of blessedness to pervade the land.  That others can be a blessed as we, and judgement not be ours, but left to the higher powers. 

I give thanks that all children can learn the joys of knowledge without having religion intrude on the school environment.  That Christian and Muslem and Hindu can sit in the kinderclass and be as one, in 'a, b, and c,' in '1, 2, and 3.'

E Pluribus Unum. 
We are strong in our freedom. 
We are all equally blessed. 

For this I am thankful. 

My Misery Has a Name: NAO

...in a few days our temperature dropped from 70 to 17 degrees, with 45 mile an hour winds. We were victims of the NAO, the North Atlantic Oscillation. A large area of warm air has now encamped over Greenland, which blocks the circumpolar wind circulation, and causes the jet stream to buckle southward over the central and eastern U.S., and so all of the cold air which had been trapped over Alaska, pours down over us. Unfortunately this tends to be a long-term pattern, and portends a continuing and cold winter.

From An Iowa Garden

This year is certainly kicking winter off early.  My unheated sunporch, where plants transition from outdoors to inside, typically has tender residents until mid-December, some years as late as January.  Not this year. 

The porch was hovering around the freezing mark today, so in came the plants that Mark despises.  The pelagoriums are in da haus.  Remaining out there for the time being are a bunch of things that aren't hardy to zone five, but can take a freeze or two - most of the pond plants and the rosemary. 

Eventually, the pond plants will find their way inside, as I like to have them ready to go come the warm days of spring.  The 'tender' ones are zone seven, so I'm okay for a bit yet.

Meanwhile, in my real life, the business start up still has umpteen million things I need to do, and the house hasn't had a nibble or a showing for months.  The new plan is to remove the old monster and put up a modular, as opposed to a mobile.  I'm all for this, if it wasn't for the fact that we want {Ahem: some say 'need'} more than we can afford. 

So the pretty pictures I've been taking with the intent of posting here, and all the colorful commentary that I've written in my head, tends to be postponed... and postponed... and well... not posted. 

One of these weekends I'll grab some time and get some color back on this page.  I just can't promise when that will happen.
{Ed:  Got tired of the bland pages.  Made it happen today.  Chores can wait for tomorrow, right?}

Silly Fun

    

I love Paghat's quote bag:

She pulls from all sorts of places to find bits of verse and text to illustrate her posts. 

This bit of verse I especially like:

"Only on some mounded heaps
Cinquefoil creeps,
By whose line you still may pace
Out the place
Where a great house, bravely planned,
Used to stand."

-Cicely Fox Smith
(1882-1954)

She uses it for an entry on cinquefoil of course.

after a blustery november sunday

the magnolia is stripped of leaves
fuzzy buds held high
full of promise

a string of starlings
garlands the sky
alighting in the trees

and a single dandelion
awash in a sea of lush green
winks at the sun

snippits:

Dreaming, designing, planting, editing, weeding, watering, watching.  I love my garden time.

robins flocking
russet bellies
against blue sky

Philosophy

mono no aware
[the pathos of things]

Or from Paghat:

I think the largest part of this spiritual response to gardens & gardening originates in early imprinting of what must have been the very first beautiful things we ever saw in the world around us -- plus, where blossoms are concerned, our first encounter with the ephemerality of all things, what in Buddhism the Japanese call mono-no-aware, "the tragedy of things," a transience which is also the essence of all awesome beauty.