Tag: garden

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Live & Learn16 Comments

Happiness is getting up and going downstairs in the morning, opening all the doors and petting the dogs, walking around the garden and along the wooden pier in the cool morning air and listening to the crows and the chirping of all the other birds as you wait for the water for your tea to boil in the kitchen.

— Orhan Pamuk, “Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks, 2009-2022.” Translated by Ekin Oklap. (Knopf, November 26, 2024)

Notes:

  • Amazon: “For many years, Orhan Pamuk kept a record of his daily thoughts and observations, entering them in small notebooks and illustrating them with his own paintings. This book combines those notebooks into one volume. He writes about his travels around the world, his family, his writing process, and his complex relationship with his home country of Turkey. He charts the seeds of his novels and the things that inspired his characters and the plots of his stories. Intertwined in his writings are the vibrant paintings of the landscapes that surround and inspire him.“
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

Live & Learn29 Comments

True gardeners cannot bear a glove
Between the sure touch and the tender root,
Must let their hands grow knotted as they move
With a rough sensitivity about
Under the earth, between the rock and shoot,
Never to bruise or wound the hidden fruit.
And so I watched my mother’s hands grow scarred,
She who could heal the wounded plant or friend
With the same vulnerable yet rigorous love;
I minded once to see her beauty gnarled,
But now her truth is given me to live,
As I learn for myself we must be hard
To move among the tender with an open hand,
And to stay sensitive up to the end
Pay with some toughness for a gentle world.

— May Sarton, “An Observation” in “A Private Mythology: Poems.” (W.W. Norton & Co. in 1996)

Notes: Poem via Exhaled-Spirals. Photo via Pexels by Karolina Grabowska.

The perfect summer tomato is worth half a shirt

Live & Learn37 Comments

Pick the tomato warm from the garden. Sit right there in a sunny patch if you’ve got one. Brush off any dirt and bugs, but don’t make yourself crazy. Sprinkle with a little salt. And don’t you add one other thing, because there’s just something about a tomato being a tomato. Eat it like an apple. Let the juices run down your chin, and then wipe ‘em away with your shirtsleeve. You heard me. The perfect summer tomato is worth half a shirt. And that’s the truth.

― Kat Yeh, “The Truth About Twinkie Pie” (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, January 27, 2015)

Photo: Pixabay via Pixels

Quiet, please. We are not alone.

Live & Learn21 Comments

Spring unfolds each year in color, yes, but also in sound. And, regrettably, in noise — some of it emanating from our gardens.

When Nancy Lawson, a Maryland-based naturalist and nature writer, speaks about the voices of frogs or birds, she uses the word “sound.” When she refers to humanity’s voice — the din of mowers, blowers and chain saws — she describes it as noise, specifically “anthropogenic noise.”

Her definition: something that is “disrespectful of all the other sounds and runs roughshod over them,” she said, with “often unnecessary rudeness.”

These days, we’re not just driving one another crazy with the racket that fills most neighborhoods. We’re “smothering some of the opportunities for animals to communicate through their senses,” she said, “to perceive the world through their senses.”

That means communications are masked and predator alarms and other critical life cues are stifled.

The challenge she poses for us: “Let’s think about the fact that these are our neighbors, too. And they can’t just run inside and put on noise-canceling headphones.” […]

In other words: Easy does it.

“If you treat the local environment like the homeland it’s meant to be,” she writes in “Wildscape,” “you’ll be exposed to more cultures and ideas and ways of life than if you visited with people from every country in the world.”

Sometimes, she said, that’s not about doing something, but the opposite: Stop mowing so often; stop leaf blowing. “Stop these sensory disruptions,” she said.

Even with actions we know can cause harm, like using pesticides, it’s not just the direct damage that she alerts us to.

“It turns out that putting out scents into the world that cause odor pollution can disrupt flower fragrances, and bees’ ability to find the floral resources that they need,” she said of an often unnoticed violation of the Scentscape.

Noise has unexpected effects, too, like reducing the nesting success of bluebirds and tree swallows, and decreasing the foraging ability of owls and bats.

Or this: As cars drove past, Ms. Lawson noticed a monarch caterpillar flinching upward from the milkweed it was feeding on near her roadside. A paper she found cited the same reaction — and how traffic-stressed animals even bit the researchers, something they had never documented before.

Quiet, please. We are not alone.

— Margaret Roach, from “Quiet, Please: You Are Not Alone in Your Garden”

Notes:

Sunday Afternoon

Live & Learn25 Comments

I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday.

It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain.

You can feel the silent and invisible life.

— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead: A Novel

Notes: Quote via Mythology of Blue. Photo: DK @ Daybreak. 7:21 am, January 2, 2022. 52° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More photos from this morning here.