Changing Places

This is just a collection of bits of poetry that have popped up lately in various places in my life.

The poetry is coming back to me, I feel it coming…

I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly,
A dedicated Spirit. On I walked
In thankful blessedness, which yet survives.

– William Wordsworth

And though thou notest from thy safe recess old friends burn dim,
like lamps in noisome air love them for what they are;
nor love them less,
because to thee they are not what they were.
-– Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Why then, have to be human?
Oh not because happiness exists,
Not out of curiosity…
But because being here means so much;
because everything here,
vanishing so quickly, seems to need us,
and strangely keeps calling to us… To have been
here, once, completely, even if only once,
to have been at one with the earth –
this is beyond undoing.

– Rainer Maria Rilke (different translation)

Thanks to a friend’s generosity, I have fresh squeezed orange juice for breakfast today! Yay!

Look yummy, don’t they?

They’re painted… more about Margaret Morrison here at lines and colors.

Lift me Up — Kate Voegle

This road is anything but simple
Twisted like a riddle I’ve seen high and I’ve seen low
So loud, the voices of all my doubts
Telling me to give up, to pack up and leave town

Even so, I had to believe
Impossible means nothing to me, yeah

So can you lift me up,
Turn the ashes into flames
‘Cause I have overcome
More than words will ever say
And I’ve been given hope
That there’s a light on up the hall
And that a day will come
When the fight is won
And I think that day has just begun

Somewhere, every body starts there
I’m counting on a small prayer,
Lost in a nightmare
But I’m here, and suddenly it’s so clear
The struggle through the long years
It taught me to outrun my fears

Everything worth having, oh
Comes with trials worth withstanding

So can you lift me up,
Turn the ashes into flames
‘Cause I have overcome
More than words will ever say
And I’ve been given hope
That there’s a light on up the hall
And that a day will come
When the fight is won
And I think that day has just begun…

Looks like my kitty Willis… we usually use catnip therapy with him, though!

Native plants “spring” to life in early winter during the winter rains, with flowering periods starting at that time and running throughout spring. As things heat up in the summer, some of the local natives, those that are not evergreen, go dormant, which some people consider a disadvantage.

In one sense, this opposition to natives may simply be a matter of personal taste. There are also people for whom the whole process of dormancy can look beautiful. For example, the leaves of the Black Sage (Saliva melifera) begin to brown in June after the plant has finished flowering. Some of the leaves fall off right away, others remain for different lengths of time. This leads to beautiful contrasts between the ones that are still dark green on the top sides, the bottom sides of others that are light green, and those leaves that are turning different shades of brown.

There are also ways in which opposition to dormancy may be more than simply a matter of taste. On a conceptual level, it is strange that so many people are unfamiliar with the idea of summer dormancy, even people who were born and grew up in California. To me, this fact demonstrates the extent to which imported horticultural standards dominate or condition our expectations of what a garden should be, and even of what nature should be. What seems even stranger to me is that in the East the concept of dormancy is accepted, and even appreciated during the winter. However, this tolerance for dormancy was not imported alongside the Eastern lawn-based traditions.

Whatever the cause, we seem to have learned to expect plants and lawns to behave as if we lived in New Hampshire, or Georgia, or as if we were in the tropics and San Diego were a Hawaiian island and not a desert climate. Whatever the causes, to fulfill these expectations and ideals we certainly water the heck out of our yards throughout the summer to attain them.

I suspect that underlying the adoption of these foreign horticultural standards is the sentiment that seasons just get in the way. People want their gardens to reflect a constancy and uniformity that defies nature. Because of the mildness of our climate it has been possible to achieve this ideal, but we are slowly coming to realize the extent of the costs of this sentiment, and that it leads to waste on a very large scale.

Besides the incredible waste of resources, I believe that the most unfortunate result of the horticultural ideal of making our gardens look the same year round is a growing disconnect between people and the nature that surrounds them. It is not hard to see how this disconnect has lead to damaging consequences for the environment.

Were we to learn to value the concept that each region should reflect its own character, there would be less problems with invasives. One step in this process is to plant a native garden. Very simply, by planting natives you decrease the number of invasives that are planted. Hopefully, helping our neighbors become familiar with natives in this way will lead them to do the same, and the use of invasives could really decline.

To me, it is a dynamic prospect that using local natives not only helps conserve resources but can also strengthen the image of San Diego as having its own identity, and that this in turn could help inspire people to preserve the natural environs that we have outside of the garden domain.

Of course, one downside of expressing individuality in this way is that planting a native garden goes against a strong current of traditional horticultural conditioning. That is, going native would seem to put one directly at odds with a blind, powerful force in the world that makes money by perpetrating and maintaining a dead-end horticultural direction.

Fortunately going native is not as scary as this sounds. All the drama one may feel associated with such a change in direction dissipates quite easily from the simple act of placing a young native plant in the earth and watching it grow. How refreshing that such a simple action can undo years of misdirection.

“It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they are. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think Mr. Frodo I do understand, I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. They kept going because they were holding onto something.”

“What are we holding onto Sam?”

“That there’s some good in this world Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.”

– Sam’s speech at the end of The Two Towers.

If I have even just a little sense,
I will walk on the main road and my only fear will be of straying from it.
Keeping to the main road is easy,
But people love to be sidetracked.

When the court is arrayed in splendor,
The fields are full of weeds,
And the granaries are bare.
Some wear gorgeous clothes,
Carry sharp swords,
And indulge themselves with food and drink;
They have more possessions than they can use.
They are robber barons.
This is certainly not the way of Tao.

Tao Te Ching, 53

Weeds

The first step for establishing a successful native garden is to get rid of weeds. While this is analogous to traditional gardening practices, it differs in that weeds, or unwanted/ harmful plants, will be defined a bit more broadly than is usual.

The definition of weeds used here will be all plants whose maintenance interferes with maintaining healthy soil conditions for natives. These will include:

a) Plants that require a lot of water and nutrients for quick growth, and thus are very competitive with native plants for these resources,
b) Plants that typically grow fast and that can crowd out the native plants, which take longer to develop,
c) Plants that do not connect or do not contribute to the mycorrhizal grid, and thus compete for resources without giving anything back to the community, and
d) Plants whose maintenance adversely affects the nature of the soil from the point of view of what benefits the fungal network, and thus the plant community in the long run.

Thus, from the standpoint of a native garden, the term weed will not only include traditional weeds, but also annual exotic garden plants, many perennial exotics, and lawns, since the maintenance of these alien species moves the nature of the soil away from supporting the fungal species that natives require. In short, the soil conditions which support imported, water-loving garden plants can inhibit the growth of a mycorrhizal fungal network.

No, I’m not on facebook. I actually really kind of dislike social networking, twitter, and all the other Net 2.0 stuff. I don’t find anything very fascinating in other people’s little mind farts, preferring to read a bit more thoughtful posting than 140 characters, even though the little twitter haikus can be amusing at times. I do think I would like being on grunter and stalker, though!

Also see: 25 things I hate about facebook.

But I do find it interesting that there really are only a few people that we really keep close to, no matter how large our networks may seem to be. And since what I value most are my most intimate relationships, perhaps my petty jealousies over those who seem to have a lot of friends are somewhat misplaced. Maybe they really are only as close to the same number of people that I am, after all.

OH, I also note that my Google reader now has about 130 blogs listed, which also fits perfectly into the Dunbar number theory.

What also struck Dr Marlow, however, was that the number of people on an individual’s friend list with whom he (or she) frequently interacts is remarkably small and stable. The more “active” or intimate the interaction, the smaller and more stable the group.

Thus an average man—one with 120 friends—generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual’s photos, status messages or “wall”. An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten. When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only four people and the average woman with six. Among those Facebook users with 500 friends, these numbers are somewhat higher, but not hugely so. Men leave comments for 17 friends, women for 26. Men communicate with ten, women with 16.

What mainly goes up, therefore, is not the core network but the number of casual contacts that people track more passively. This corroborates Dr Marsden’s ideas about core networks, since even those Facebook users with the most friends communicate only with a relatively small number of them.

Put differently, people who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are “broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,” says Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a polling organisation. Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever.

via The size of social networks | Primates on Facebook | The Economist.