Green Acres Undergoing First Tremors of Transformation
The title I give this repost more appropriate than the relatively mild title I gave it on my personal blogsite . . .
As Equinox nears, Green Acres Village begins to rev up again . . .
The title I give this repost more appropriate than the relatively mild title I gave it on my personal blogsite . . .
As Equinox nears, Green Acres Village begins to rev up again . . .
Joseph was going to prepare an altar, but at the last minute couldn’t do it. Four of us were there, cleaning and preparing the patio for the dinner and ceremony to come, and wow: right away, we pivoted in place and cooperatively figured out how to do a small altar with items on it to a suitable scale (i.e., tiny flowers).
Here it is!
You can’t tell from this angle, but our makeshift altar slants down to the left . . . but not enuf for anything to slide off.
And here’s the context: with the new yurt, the old barn (now called Moloch, since in contrast to the pristine yurt, it has a newly menacing presence), and various junky old garden beds and other weird stuff (like why the fig branches in the white bucket??).
The dinner itself featured a first, in all the years of doing Community Dinners: three seafood dishes, all of them wonderful, and one of them, Jeff’s, totally spectacular!
We asked people to please try to be on time, 7:00 PM, so that we can eat first and begin the ceremony at 8:00 PM.
At 8:00 PM we circled up near the little altar and Mariella, a good friend and neighbor, whom I had invited to “call in the directions,” did so, something she had never done before. First, we all faced East, then South, then West, then North, then Above, and finally Below — while she intoned the special qualities of each.
Then, in response to an email I had sent out to the Dinner List, I had invited folks to meditate on what felt full in their lives right now, at the fullness of the summer sun, what in their lives made them feel grateful. This they did, almost everyone, many more than I expected, and the atmosphere during that circle was centered, meditative, and full of careful listening.
I loved young Rebecca’s story especially. She felt grateful for her body, the fullness within her physical body, and its communion with the body of earth.
Afterwards, we each lit the next person’s candle, and thanked, as a group, the six directions for joining us.
And the piece de resistance? A gorgeous croscosmia, flare into bloom that very day. Every year I forget about these seemingly fragile, but hardy perennials, and wonder what that plants those are (in several gardens now), with those kind of stalks — until one of them gifts us with the fullness of its sun-time glory!
This is the first of two posts for today. . . . Meanwhile, the tornado warning has just sounded, so I’ll be with others in the basement for awhile.
. . .
30 minutes later. Back upstairs, tornado few miles north of here, moving east fast. Big wind and rain here for a short while. Yurt survived. But that big bucket of fig sticks tipped, as did the front porch begonia.
And that’s what we’re doing here, in Green Acres Permaculture Village, “growing community from the ground up.” And it’s the ground which teaches us how to BE with each other.
Which reminds me, see the BEE in the bottom right corner of this montage. I took these photos this morning, and though there were lots of bees flitting about and on the the butterfly weed, I only managed to capture one. Rogue sunflower shooting up top right; climbing beans to the left.
Tiny splashes of color here and there and everywhere . . .
Above, garden panorama; below, Joseph’s fairy garden.
In the top photo above, notice the old two-forked tree stump. That’s from the bradford pear which, not knowing better, we planted the very first year of the garden, back in 2010. Finally hacked it down five or six years ago; yet its trunk still stands, reminding us of the past as we learn from the garden to be so fully present that we move seamlessly into the future.
BTW: only nine people at Thursday’s Community Dinner. “You never know how many will come, EVER!” We remind each other of this as we set up for the event each time, wondering how many tables? This time we had four extra tables (the most ever!), since we expected many more, including a family with five kids! Unfortunately, they didn’t make it, as didn’t many regulars and residents who were out of town. But these intimate dinner conversations dig down deeper than the more rowdy boisterous ones. All in all, very satisfying.
Next up: Solstice Community Dinner: Ceremony and Celebration. June 22.
We’ve been planning on this cleanup for at least a month, but various situations intervened, and meanwhile, of course, the piles, in the verdant, greening midwest spring, kept piling up. Here are four of five piles, as of last Saturday morning, when we took the first pile to the dump, i.e., Hoosier Transfer Station.
After two work parties, Saturday and today, we’re still only half done. BUT: the hardest pile are done, these being left bottom above, Saturday, and right top, today.
It may look like some people are just standing around, but actually they are waiting in line. We decided we needed to organize that way in order not to run into each other.
Today’s load was epic. Mainly because it meant that we were finally rid of what remained from an ill-fated project that was done thirteen years ago, as detailed here:
All the hurt feelings, especially those between a neighbor and myself, have been healed, though that little remnant of bygone times took until last summer!
The oven’s walls, made of cob (a cement like feature) and rebar, sat, in three large pieces, upright in the backyard here for awhile, then were cut into smaller pieces with a diamond blade saw last summer by a visitor from Jackson Hole. There they sat, in a pile, in the back yard, until another man cut them up even smaller, so that the rest of us could haul them out to the front.
I decided to document the final ridding of the cob oven walls extensively, little by little, mirroring the little by little progress over the last 13 years that led to this glorious day. Here goes, with Joseph and Marita doing the heavy lifting, into neighbor Dave’s truck, as usual.
Part way through, this sight, under the bottom layer. We stood around and pondered it for awhile, how nature is full of tiny, lacy mycelliac (is that a word?) structures . . .
Nearing the finale . . .
The finale!
At the transfer station they learned the total weight of the cob oven walls: 1,120 pounds. Actually that feels low, not even as big as a horse.
In any case, we are now free.
Will reserve this week’s Saturday work party for the final haul, probably two trips, of organic matter to Good Earth.