Trusting intuition

I am in the garden, covering the plants by moonlight. It is 10 p.m. It’s not that I didn’t think of it before, it’s just that each time I thought about it, I asked Stephen, who is the one who pays attention to weather in our family, whether there would be frost.

There’s nothing in the forecast, he tells me, and offers to check for frost warnings on the web. For the third time, he tells me that the low for the week will be 40 degrees.

In and out of the back porch all evening, busy with refreshments for tomorrow’s Upper Delaware River Roundtable meeting, the air feels chilly. I check the thermometer; it reads 40 degrees.

“It’s going to freeze tonight,” I say to myself and I think about how I will feel in the morning, with the whole of the pepper harvest--cubanos, cherry, jalapenos and salsa--damaged. Could I actually stand there and whine, “But you said it wasn’t going to freeze.”

And then as if by magic, I finally heard myself, changed my shoes, put on my coat and fetched the sheets from the laundry room.

“There is too much at stake,” I said to myself.

Some 20 minutes later, with those precious plants covered, I am back inside, thinking about Ralph Waldo Emerson, who I have been reading this week in my Unitarian Universalist Theology class. He puts forth that our intuition is more precious that the wisdom of the sages. The ultimate source, he says, of truth is within ourselves.

His philosophy of a belief in oneself came at a time when he was fighting for his own sense of self-worth. Self-Reliance was written in 1841, three years after a Harvard Divinity School Address where his claims that the doctrine of the God was within had cost him a potential job at Harvard. He had left the ministry a few years earlier, feeling that he was not suited to it and had lost his young wife, whom he loved deeply, to tuberculosis after 18 months of marriage. Deep in a career and personal crisis, he hung onto the idea that his soul, and the soul of every person, would transcend his situation.

In an essay called The Over Soul, he wrote: “We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime, within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty to which each part and particle is equally related; the eternal One.”

I'm not sure exactly how not risking covering the garden plants, because the weather predictors say there will be no frost, exactly relates to the existence of an eternal One, accessed through our souls. But there is something to be said about trusting our intuition and taking responsibility for the decisions that we make, no matter what our technology or our experts happen to be telling us.

Down Day

I have taken myself and my distraction into the woods behind my house. I walk on ground that seems undisturbed by human activity.

It’s calming in a way and not helpful in another, as I muse over the current gas drilling accidents, thousands of gallons of carcinogenic chemicals, mixed with water, that have spilled onto and into the ground in Dimock, PA. I imagine this ground, this rocky, wet ground, is not suitable for gas drilling, not like those rolling hills, and pristine farmlands in Susquehanna County that are being carved into five-acre drill sites.

Here, it is bumpy and filled with trees and moraines left over from glaciers long ago. No it’s probably not suitable for gas drilling. Of course, no place really is.

And to that end, I can picture that big machinery coming here. Machinery designed to dig up and move earth in a way that is in accordance to the will of the operator. Machinery that supports the construct of human dominion and our absolute right to destroy and use whatever we want.

It’s not that nature isn’t violent and destructive. Trees lie on their sides, rocks under and in between their roots, which reach skyward. But here, there is a balance of sorts, a stillness, a harmony and a sense of peace. Life and death exists in this moment together. With gas drilling, I see no life side to the equation. The opposite of the destruction, or the death, is excessive energy consumption and the distribution of wealth to multi-global corporations and the large land holder.

You might have gathered that I’m tired, kind of discouraged and in a quandary as to how to inject some sort of measure of environmental responsibility into the mix. I yearn to find something that is compelling enough so that, as human beings understanding our humanness, we decide to protect our best interests, respect the cycles of water, seek sensible alternatives to fossil fuels, and live on the land with a sense of reverence and appreciation.

I took myself and my distractions into the woods behind my house today. I walk on ground that seems undisturbed by human activity. It’s calming in a way and not helpful in another.

Changing season

Grass tips turn yellow. There is a chill in the air. And just as the garden begins to thrive again, recovering and beating the mold that grew with the summer’s rains, I worry about a frost.

I have developed a cold, and I move through my day with sinus pressure on my top jaw and achy, achy muscles. I contemplate whether my body is reacting to the change of season.

Is it human arrogance that causes us to assume that grass would turn yellow and leaves would become shades of color and we, humans in control of our lives, would simply go on, maintaining the status quo, feeling well or ill as usual?

With an amazingly challenging semester that began after Labor Day, I have held myself in a smooth line these past two weeks, moving through a to-do list, reminding myself that if I am going to keep up, I simply need to keep going.

Tonight, after a hot bath with eucalyptus oil, soothing harp music playing in the background and tracing Reiki healing symbols in the air, I realize that no matter how full or busy my days might be, I want to feel the phenomenon of the changing of the seasons and the blessings of a late-summer cold. It reminds me, in my forgetfulness, that I am part of an enfolding universe.

Foraging for mushrooms and meaning

Today, I am on the lookout for Painted Suillus. It’s a common wild mushrooms that the guide books identify as a good edible that has no look alikes. It is a firm yellow mushroom that seems to have more body that some of the others I have been collecting. Basket on my arm, the folding knife lovingly given to me by D.D. on my hip, I move down the road with a sort of easy concentrated effort. The red convex cap is easy to spot and there are enough of them that I don’t feel compelled to harvest any other kind.

I have been hunting mushrooms for some three weeks now and my pantry is stocked with bags of boletes (mushrooms that have a sponge on the bottom, as opposed to gills) that Stephen and I have sliced and dried. So far, I have used them to make a creamy wild mushroom sauce that I served over cheese ravioli and as a base for veggie burgers. Using my food dehydrator and a wide variety of ingredients, it is my goal to assembly a variety of dried soups and rice/noodle entrees from the garden harvests. So far, I have dried mushrooms, some of which were pulverized into powder, onions, squash, green onions, garlic, peppers, broccoli, tomatoes, cabbage and string beans. I even dried some red-bean chipotle chili and pulverized that for the basis of a sauce.

At lunch on Saturday, in celebration of son Zac’s 26th birthday, I told him about my experimentation and how frivolous it seemed. I said that as a seminary student I ought to be falling in love with the writing of Emerson or the mystics of the 13th century, not investing energy into dried convenience mixes for friends and family.

He said it didn't seem frivolous to him and I am surprised that I think that scholastic pursuit is more justifiably productive than being out in the woods and learning something about the rhythms of nature and food production.

Dodger, my 13-year-old dog, enjoys the mushroom gathering activity as we pick our way through the dappled sunlight in a slow and easy manner. I am aware of his frailty and the limitation of time that we have to spend together. In crossing the Grassy Swamp stream on protruding rocks, I make sure that he sees me move to the other side. He has become nearly deaf and often doesn't respond when I call him. (Sometimes, though, he hears just fine and it’s questionable that he isn’t just taking a privilege of age and ignoring my call.)

I am soothed by this newly discovered abundance from the woods. In the face of shrinking resources and fears of environmental degradation, it is a pleasant surprise to become awakened to a complex, self-sustaining world, which, when careful, we can consume with great delight.