Its About The Beets

     Tadg and I were harvesting some veggies for dinner yesterday, I found myself thinking about what beets looked like when I was a kid. They came in a tin can, when you hammered on one end after you'd opened it, out would pop a red - gelatinous tube of something weird. I remember noticing the similarities between that food and a Howitzer shell: neatly packaged and built for speedy delivery. You could eat it or fire it out of a canon - how cool is that!?
     Its no secret we have World War II to thank for our industrialized method of food production, but canned beets really send that message home. When you pull a beet out of the soil and consider it along side its industrialized (distant) canned-cousin, you can see how significantly industrialized thinking has impacted our food. The spirit of that time, its hopes and fears, completely changed our relationship to food. The difference between live food and what most of Americans eat today is extraordinary.
     Perhaps we came to believe trusting the mechanized world was the only way we could survive and defeat our foes. Maybe too many of us were traumatized by death, hunger, and starvation. For those reasons and perhaps many others we traded in food that was genuinely vital and nourishing for a ridiculously poor facsimile.

     Amazing foods have been hiding behind our industrial farming complex. Not just veggies like beets that have been packaged so far beyond their original form as to be unrecognizable as food. There are also unique varietals deemed too challenging for the American palate that never make it to market. Right now we have mustard greens in our garden that are smoking hot on the palate, and now sorely missed when they don't show up in our salads. After a few seasons they, and other spicy greens we grow, just reseed themselves where they see fit to grow. I can't imagine our garden salads without them.
     Which brings me to the most important reason to abandon industrialized food - if you don't you'll ruin your kids appetite. I never liked beets when I was a kid, because they were a disgusting non-food posing as food. My son loves beets, due in no small part to the fact that he grows and picks them. He has a relationship to his food, he enjoys the food much more because of that relationship.
     When we walk into the garden he picks those greens commercial growers would never market, and munches down happily. He chomps the heads off our broccoli, he'll stick anything in his mouth at least once - often twice because of his short memory.
     Thats probably the way kids have grown up since the beginning of agriculture. Why did we give that up? The barons of Big Farma would have us believe we needed to do food differently in order to feed all of us. Thats no reason to stop gardening though.
     When we ran to an industrialized method of raising our food, we were running away from something as well. Will we meet that specter in the road someday soon? That can of beets isn't so much a way to feed the world, as a way to make it seem tame. Perhaps the wildness of the world was too much for us. We sacrificed Eden so we wouldn't have to deal with the snake in the apple tree.

That reminds me, our young apple tree looks like it will be producing fruit for the first time this year.

Assemblage

     Spring revisited our land late this year, just as we were leaving for a short trip. Chickens were fully grown but acting like crazed hatchlings since we let them roam free, seedlings were newly in the ground, a half dozen projects were left partly done. The land felt like it was just starting to bloom.
     I've come to believe traveling is unnatural in some way. If you really live somewhere, you leave a part of yourself behind when you go.The more invested in our homestead I become, the more it feels like I have to break myself up into pieces as I go. "I can't take the compost part with me, defiantly not the chicken coop-cleaner part."
     Its hard to explain this state of affairs to love ones. "Really, I miss you, I want to come see you - I just can't stand to leave home, you see part of my spirit is committed to feeding chickens." This is especially true in the summer, with so much still to do on the land.
     At this point I think we need about five more years to cultivate free space and build our soil to the point where its producing the way it can. Any weekend away from the soil is like time away from a hungry child. I'm going to start restricting travel to the winter months, when the land sleeps - perhaps fitfully - like a baby.
     This trip included a visit with childhood friends, it felt like a way to fertilize the grown up me. Seeing old faces anew, revisiting memories, seeing how I've changed and how I haven't. I guess I need this kind of renewal, strange and difficult though it can feel at times. Feeding the tap root of me.
     I remember returning home after visiting the same town when my Dad died. The land was gray, the garden fence only partly done, the fridge had turned off days before, saturating the house in rotting stink. That was over a year ago. That was a car wreck and an accident with a chainsaw ago. Its good to come home and find the land shining brighter than when we left. Maybe there's more of me here now, I know its happier. Maybe my own spirit is part of the brightness I see.
     Our dog Bella missed the land, she frolicked like a pup when I let her out of the car. She got a special treat when Terry asked me to trap a gopher. It was the quickest kill yet. Set the trap, walk into the house and it went off. Bella could barely contain her excitement. It usually takes a half hour of savoring to eat a good sized gopher, this one was gone in two gulps.

     This was the first time I used a new technique to care for the spirit of the gopher taught me by the spirit of the land. She and other spirits let me know that rather than waiting until the trap was sprung, I could prepare for the gophers death by journeying to the spirits before I set the trap. A spirit showed up immediately to ensure the care of the gopher. When I journeyed to its spirit after the trap was sprung there was nothing for me to do.
     Of course that makes sense, rituals to prepare for a hunt are as important, if not more important than rituals of gratitude and psychopomp that may follow afterwards. Each new lesson is flavored with a touch of "how could I have missed that!" My skull is at least as thick now as when I left.
     I know it will take a few days for us all to re-assemble ourselves. Tadg has traveled a lot this lately for a just having been out on the planet for 3.5 years. He seems so much more his old self today, as if he left a bit of himself behind too. We're all looking forward to a late hot summer vacation, here at home with every bit of ourselves.

Blessed Bees, Magical Beets and Slain Lambs

     Last night I had dreams filled with talking Bees and Goddesses living deep in the Earth. After I awoke I savored the feeling of well being they left behind. I traced the feeling as it wound through my dreams, leading surprisingly to dinner the night before - and our first beets of the season. The sweet earthy flavor of the beets felt the same as the energy of the dreams. Flavors and feelings mingled with the soothing breaths of sleeping wife, son, dog and cat. I swear those beets gave me the dreams.

     The day before I visited Damien and Michelle's house to help out with the slaughter of two lambs. A ferral bee hive set up shop in a wooden box near the stall where the lambs were killed, skinned and gutted. Though most of the surrounding land was cleared for grazing, many of the bee's carried heavy spurs of bright pollen. They obviously knew what they were doing when they chose the old brown toolbox.
     The lambs bled out bright red in the straw dirt floor, this time a knife was used instead of a gun. Julee -  a latino helper Damien hires - led that part of the process, doing it the way he'd been shown probably since he was a child. I helped steady the two lambs as they were hung, occasionally lifting a warm body to better position it as it was carefully skinned by father, son and helper.
     What gets re-awakened in us when we leave the digital world to take part again in life's harvest? I remember the spirit of the land in one of my first journeys to her, giving and receiving, planting and harvesting. She was joyful and impartial at the same time.
     The colors of harvest were red and golden that day. Early golden beets bunched in by baseball sized red beets, golden and cranberry colored pollen fixed to the bee's spurs, and of course the blood of the lambs, much brighter than I expected as the dirt slowly absorbed it. Somehow all of this added up to the alchemy of enchantment in my dreams last night.
     When Tadg finally woke up he spotted a brown gopher's head popping up out of the dirt just outside the window. There was a time when that would stress me out, now I think of them as good fresh meat for our dog Bella.
     Since I started working with the spirit of the land, making sure the spirits of the gophers passed on peacefully, I now know this to be part of the process of growth and harvest. Bella waited inside impatiently, barely able to contain herself. The trap was quick and successful. My journey to its spirit went well.
     The dreams gave me such a deep feeling of wellness. Our lives have been shaken by the violent loss of a friends daughter, I'm so grateful to feel like life is reaching out to me, helping me re-connect with something bigger and more sacred than my fear. So often the harvesting of a life means violence to us modern folk. Harvesting a life without violence can be a healing journey.
     I look forward to many more harvests. I just wish I could remember what the bee's were telling me. I'm comforted by the knowledge that somehow my soul remembers.

Knotted Me

     Last night I found myself sitting up late again, grateful for the blanket of post-midnight darkness. It seems like every few nights I have new knot in myself to sort through. Soaking my feelings in the darkness helps them to unwind, that and a lot of breathing. Whats left behind is always vibrant.
     Our days have been made strange lately by a distant, violent death. A childhood friend of Terry's lost her daughter suddenly, horrifically. We have no way to really process the news as it comes in from East Coast. The Universe tilts, we search for equilibrium, sometimes finding it - often not. I sit up at 2 AM untangling me.
     Pools of suffering spontaneously appear around us, changing our world irrevocably, only to dissolve again. Sometimes they fade beyond memory - this one I fear will stick with Terry and her tight circle of friends for as long as any of them live. Only an event of this magnitude could exceed the epic song of their shared youth, only something this terrifying could grip the heart they've made together.
     Shamanic work can help in these situations, especially if the living left behind are already comfortable with the methods and processes of shamanism. I was called to do some work in relation to this loss, I was stunned by what the spirits showed me and amazed at the wholeness and brightness of the young woman's spirit. Though I'm distant from this event, I've been forever changed by it too.
     When I first journeyed I was taking part in a missing persons search. I went to a spirit I typically go to for this kind of information, but he told me no, I needed to find another spirit, a Power Animal I work with when dealing with the spirits of the dead. I reluctantly agreed. The energies that animal showed me were the lightest wisp of what happened, but they were enough.
     Our most unique, profound experiences happen to us, not to someone else. Thats just the physics of reality. If you want your soul to be touched by something, your soul has to show up and be a part of it in this reality. Shamanism changes that, taking your soul places your imagination never knew you could go. Shamanism encourages you to experience the profundity of many other realities.
     When I was much younger, waking up at 2 AM was stressful. It meant all was not right in the world. With a young boy to raise I appreciate these moments as the gifts they are. I can find my center, watch the knots dissolve, experience the resounding sacredness of the world, and send wishes of peace to those who suffer everywhere.

Besides, all is not right in the world, and of course, all is right in the world.

May you have the time and peace to unwind your knots, may you be free from the sorrow a family is feeling now, somewhere in the world, as they mourn the loss of a daughter.

   
Image: The bird and the moon II by Luz A. Villa from Flickr, used under 
a Creative Commons license
http://www.flickr.com/photos/luchilu/2414457426/