jayme*s first sweater

there it is.
my first sweater.
the cuffs and bottom
are in the same pattern at the neck:
deeply ribbed and a bit flared.

it is a bit of a funny picture, but I really like the neckline.
A little bit puffy, too big, but good.

This next little chunk of words is extracted from an outgoing email that I just wrote, feeling expressable. I wish I could engage in such good nice connection more often, and with the people I love all over out there.
A snapshot, a one sided affair:

I sure do miss the ocean landforms, the ocean ecology, the ocean west coast aesthetic. ( That word even looks good.)
We were talking about ocean landforms in Geography last night, and I ached for Cortes.
Life is strange, no?.
-who you meet, who you are, how people react to you.

So university part time,
which is great. I am loving the stretching of my head,
of gaining the tools I could sense that I was missing.
Money is fucking stressful though.

I was working today, in Guelph. In the best little flowershop in
the area. A big area. It is really great to work there.
Aesthetics....
Style....
flowers and planters, eve candy, things looking good and fresh, alive sweet.
The girls there- Kelli, 33, rehead, gorgeous, hardworking funny straightup grounded, and her sidekick, trusty Fun Sara, with brains to back her looks, little brunettte with side ponytails.
Yeah, I like it.



I knit.
In school and on the bus, I knit.
I knit the sweater I am wearing. It is the color of arbutus bark.
I knit one armwarmer, heathered beige and ornately cabled.
Kelli loves it. She said I could sell them, and I think I could. Could I?
self discipline.

Betty Basement and the Flower Designer

The flower industry is bereft with irony. Flowers are symbols of Nature. We bring them inside to remind us of beauty, of simplicity and complexity, of our connection to nature. Yet the flower industry is a giant petroleum burn that comes out smelling like roses. Starting, often in the laboratory with some genetic manipulations, most commercial flowers are grown in the slave labour greenhouses of South America. They heavily douse the product with pesticides and fungicides, fertilzers and growth hormones, most of which are petroleum based. Once cut, the flowers are treated, packaged in disposable plastic, stored in massive cooler systems, then sent on the private commercial cargo flights to the North American auction sites. Trucks and coolers support and transport these precious cargo, guzzling the hydrocarbons, until the flower arrangers and designers set their minions to treating them again for retail.
The flower shop. I have worked in a few now. The first one I worked for here in Ontario was The Flower Basket up in the strip mall. A bunch of clucking old birds doing funeral wreaths with babys breath and carnations gives you a bit of a picture. One day I was asked to make up a planter in a lovely zen-style basket. When I finished, the proprietor asked me to give it a little spray with Floralife Leafshine. I read the contents: propane, butane, heptane, propranol, isopropranol. So I went outside to spray. Around this time I was studying the Holocaust. Suddenly I could understand part of how the atrocities happen: there I was spraying petroleum on a living creature because I was told to, and with an attitude that it is a small and necessary compromise.
A few days later while working there, I witnessed the owner make one of the most cliche racist statements I have ever heard. An Indian lady came into the store and was asking some prices. She left without buying anything. Once gone, Julia said, "Just like that other Indian lady that goes to Janice's church... It is something in their very ethnicity that makes them want everything for nothing. Always." Well I didn't quit on the spot, I am ashamed to say. I waited until I cooled down, and then spoke to her the next day. She was as defensive as you can imagine, and so I wrote her a two page letter on how I want to approach all things from a place of compassion and integrity. I dont make beauty for people who speak hateful ignorance.

Okay, so the po-dunk flower shop was not a nice place. So off I go, seeking another lovely flower shop where I can play amidst the beauty and life. I want to twist up life and symbology, medicine and antiquity into art that makes you smile when you enter the bathroom....
And there is another flower shop near by that feels young and funky, more of the west coast style that I am used to. I checked back in with them, they called me in right away to work a day so we could all get the feel for each other.
It is a friday, one month before Christmas. The shop is busy like Granville Island flower shop on a Saturday. There are three ladies and the big handsome gay newfie owner. There is playful banter, but no asks me anything about myself. Until the big guy asks,
" So, are you a flower *arranger* or flower *designer*? Because there is a difference."
"Oh? What is it?" I ask.
" Well, a flower *arranger* just does it recipe style, you know. I think of Betty Basements. Flower *designers* are artistic and creative, they are creating art in their designs. When I hear flower arrangers I just think of Betty Basement."
I am thinking of the picnic table beneath the apple tree in the Hollyhock garden, and asking Pam, Denise and Nori which they are. I imagine this man saying he is a "flower designer" to them, and the slight raise of Nori's eyebrows. This haughty snob at the end of the life line, who deals in death to feed his ego and thinks it is beyond both.
When he calls me back to offer me work, I hope I have the wherewithall it tell him to take his whole teeny little ego trip of a world and shove it up his fat designer ass. I should phone him first and tell him not to waste his time thinking about me, because I couldn't fit into his world so small anyway.
Bah!

To all the Betty Basements out there, keep puking on their shoes, and keep your shit tight. We will usurp them without them even noticing, their heads are so fat and that world so small. To all the people still alive, praise be. The goddess is listening.

teetering owl and a whiskered kangaroo

yup.
the camera is good.
the girls are cute.
teetering and pouncing in this here ontario
town.
i get my bike tomorrow.
oh, am i excited.
hey jes and ali, i miss you.
kirsten nettle, you and emmett too.
cortes, manzanita, kw'as park...
here we are, art admiring itself while missing you.

the kittens

hey zoe, kdub

apple pie : love

apple pie.
crust is appropriated from JD's *pate brise* recipe









3/4 cup organic butter. unsalted.
3 or 4 teaspoons organic cane sugar.
1 and 3/4 cups organic flour.
intention.
love.
presence of mind:

With two silver, long pronged forks, using left and right arms, whole body in fact, cut the ingredients together, until they are in pea sized balls.
I was the dough, I was a farm mama, I was a church lady, making the best pie crust, the ones that people remark on and remember. "... yup. She makes a mean pie."
Apple pie was the all-american desert. I say was because I would guess some sort of fast food, pre-processed and packaged desert is now, like the donut or twinkie. But home baked apple pie! Back in the days of pioneers, the 13 colonies, of the America that grew its own food, apples were the main source of sweetness. In his book The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollen talks about Johnny Appleseed carring his canoe loads of appleseeds all throughout america. Applepie and applejack. Stories and these apples lace me through history, through farm mamas, housewives, mothers baking sweetness for their families: women and domestic detail: the variable genetics of apples carried along in seeds, and propagated in graftings; the story of the versatile apple; butter and flour, our metabolic staples; the alchemy that can be created by the different ways of processing these ingredients. I let my mind drop into the process of the butter and flour being cut together, forming little balls that would layer into flakes. Each bit of butter dusted in flour.
I do get immense pleasure out of doing a task with patience, intention, and observation. Doing it with integrity, careful selection of each part, guided by intuition, embeded in the craft. The pleasing feel of quality. There is for me a deep joy in being present. In sinking into the depths of the action, of the moment, the moment becomes eternal and the action becomes infinite.

The man pulling daikon
pointed the way
with a daikon.
Isso

So cut the dough until it is mostly all those little flour covered, pea sized balls.
Then, and here is the trick, instead of using 4 tablespoons of ice water, use cold, bubbly mineral water; I used Gerolstiener. (It also mixes very well with the Frangelico to sip while you work with the other elements to combine). I remember someone telling me to use 7up years ago; it is the bubbly the helps the flake. San Pelligrino would work. With the water tossed in, form it into a ball. I was concious of how the consistancy changed as I did. What new structure is forming? What pattern am I cultivating?
There is a balance between being gentle and forceful. Roll it out, put it in an ungreased pie pan, and bake it at 375 for 20 minutes or so. I tend to overcook mine. Don't forget to prick the bottom with a fork so that it doesnt inflate with air bubbles.

Baking two is better than one. The timing works out nicely. I make each separately, and it almost takes twice the time, but the clean up is better, and it feels a more rounded experience somehow.

Peel your apples, cut them how you like.
I laid pears in the bottom in a lovely starry dynamo, ( too bad I didnt take a picture, but duely noted), then chucks of apples, getting smaller for the top layers. I rolled all the apples in a sauce made of one shot of Frangelico (hazelnut liquour), and one shot of maple syrup, fresh ground cinnamon (lots), green cardamom, and a few cloves.
Bake at 375 for a while, until it is golden and fragrant. 40 minutes or so.

On half I layed slices of blue cheese. They were too baked to be of much flavor. Chunks of blue within the pie though, all baked in with the apples and syrup and liquior... ummmm.

I served it with pinapple cashew cream, instead of ice cream or whip. Cashew creams are easy to make, quick, vegan and raw, just healthy, and so tasty- creamy- rich. Soak some cashews and any dried fruit, like a date, in crisp water for the afternoon. Toss it into the blender...not too much liquid, and viola! Raw whipping cream. With pinapple. ( Joy showed me this).

* *

It moves me to tears to be able to make this. I have the time, I have the ingredients. I do. I am whelmed full. As we manifest ourselves, this manifestation of all that has come together to bring this to me. This manifestation of my love, of our love, of each of our choices, of the love that I have shown along the way to bring me to here. I pull it from the oven and serve it up, calling my lover from his studies. It is flakey and light and sweet and healthy and scrumptious.
To tears. My eyes pour forth with emotion nearly every morning and night. A story, someone's story, an email from a sweet friend. The openings whe hurl ourselves through, the emotional cliffs we leap, throw ourselves off; How a bit of support and sincerity from someone is like a gallon of clear, sweet water.
I am in love with life, with me, with my lover, with our choices. It is not all easy, I am not all sane, it is all terrifying in its way: and I love who I am, that I am here, and that everywhere I turn I have gorgeous friends who are full too. Ingrid, Sarahbee, Karen Louise, Kdub, Zoella...
(hey does anybody know how to put in accents into here? for the e in Zoe?)

Sarahbee wrote to me this, which is what inspired the recipe, and who is mainly to whom the blog was narrated. The beauty of it all is that it is all so connected, about so many things, to everyone; we all learn from each other so beautifully well.

it is raining slightly in east van, and the moss on the huge ornamental cherry outside my brother's living room window is bright, excited green.

i struggle sometimes to let myself be full - to express and be real.  to let emotion and thought stream out and in, full size.  taking the space they deserve.  respected.

i have apples that i bought at the apple festival on salt spring this fall... wolfe river and bramley's seedling... i was planning to bake pie this weekend - if you have a recipe, i would LOVE to bake a jayme style pie. a perfect physical manifestation of the lovin you have supported me with this week.  oh goddess goddess thank you so.

i'm off to study chemistry today, and fix bicycles.  i got an intern job at the local bike shop on campus. it's so much fun jayme.  if my hands can't bear traces of soil all winter, then bike grease will do just
fine.

i spent last night with ~*~ again.  i have so many fragments of conversations and gestures traced all over and through me.  i want to hold onto them all, document them all, savour and remember.... and i know i can't.  they fall away like cobwebs over time.  i guess i choose a couple, and hold them close.  then allow movement. life flows in such an intricate, yet simple, and beautiful way.

i like that as i grow older i know more deeply in my bones that it is all ok.  no matter what.  no matter what,
i was reflecting last night, as i rode my bicycle down hill in the darkness at incredibly fast speeds.... over wet pavement and leaves... that i felt fear of falling out of love.. fear of loss. and i realized, i've been through that before.  and it hurts.  and still there is joy.  there is movement through and beyond.  it leaves a scar, a tenderness and a heightened sense of compassion..  it brings depth to experience and being. and so, plummetting down the hill as i was, i spent a couple of minutes imagining separating from gavin. wishing peace and letting go.  and then, with that feeling and awareness laced somewhere inside me, i let myself go back into loving being with him.  walking on the earth with the intent to be grounded - as solid and honest as possible... and also to be water - to open and to let myself fall, to let myself be completely immersed in this experience, these feelings.

falling in love with someone is an incredible human experience - and i want to allow myself to feel it. consciously and wildly all at once.

and now my sweet - an ee cummings poems for you:

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)

i fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which
grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

the moon glows closer thru smog

As we pulled out of the driveway last night, and looked left over the hill, there she was, the moon, enormous and full. Plump in her sweet irony, she lingered gianormous even as she rose high.

Kili and I are in full honeymoon, in full manifest. We are transitioning from hippie to yippie, yuppie, stylish, and set-up. We are closer in our union and co-habitation. I am finally living in the material world I have been trying to manifest for so long. I have the resources to set myself in the world I physically want to be in, which gives space for the spirit and unharnessed creativity.
We glow. We are rocking it. We play, sass, and continually dance with each other. Love ineffable. I shine to be here. I can barely believe it: I continually give thanks for us having met each other.
We went to Guelph for breakfast this morning. What a fun town on a mound. It is so regal and playful. I am inspired.
Time to bust out the sewing machine.

Zoe, I will post bathroom and kitchen pictures real soon: I need daylight to do this best I think, and I am painting the bathroom right now. I am doing it various shades of white and cream, and will decorate it in antiques in various shades of white.
I will do a blog soon on the antique mall.

everything gardens

I have a renewed perspective on the phrase.
I have just moved.

We have moved into a large stone house at the base of a hill, at the edge of town. Ontario. The downstairs neighbors are fighting. The neighbor below me is Cathy and her boyfriend Terry. Nasty people they are; crabs in the bucket making sure no body thinks they can get out. I tend to become self conscious and hard on myself around that energy.

My other downstairs neighbor is Wanda, a lost punk poet, mother of two, and on today, our second meeting, she shed tears, and already I loved her. She is supportive, and needs support, she needs the flowers. Everyone does really. This whole scene needs a fat injection of good energy.

The world here feels tight, like a clenched fist. I sense a violent rebellion, a volatility, perhaps more likely to lash out in a race-related shooting than an uprising. I can feel its pressure on me. I am having to, I will have to chose not to buckle, on a daily level, and remain upright, buoyant, living as I want to live with the fun in it.
Gardening.

To garden.
As I walk along, for the first or second time, I write mental lists of things to do:

• pick up garbage here
• pull out these bricks and put in stone stairs
• find the trails in those woods
• put a planter box there
• do a photo shoot there

As a child, I was baffled by how people could not art the spaces around them. How could people not make spaces more beautiful?

I know much of has to do with laziness. It is not that they cant, we couldn't, but that we don't. We do other things.

"Which is the most universal human characteristic: fear or laziness?"

As I enter this new space, this new neighborhood, I am filled with ideas; fresh eyes can see so many possibilities and improvements. But also I can sense my reluctance and self-consciousness, worrying what the neighbors will think. It will be an interesting challenge to remain light and playful, while the grey people call me crazy. Or at least I think they will.
It is always a balance of time to play and time to bust ass for cash, as to how much gets done. What will I do? What deals can I swing? What health will I manage for myself? How bring can I shine, how hard will I rock it, in this balance with this new environment?
Everything gardens.
Everything and everyone affect the space around them. Everything encourages lives and deaths because of their actions.

Wanda welled up with tears today, and she said that they hurt her because she had not cried in such a time. We were looking at the picture of her little girl. We were talking about people with special spirits, grieving, challenges when they are multiplied on each other, magnified. I was just standing with her there, listening. Woman to woman. There was a moment where I had a flashback to Yenson's 'Heart of the Shaman' workshop, the slide show of the human experience. The direct contact with That, that Holy Moment, ( a sensation much like vertigo for me), is the essence of life, and Listening to the Land affirmed that in the most multi-faceted way for me.
Wanda and I hung out a bit, I did some theatrical story telling, and then got to gardening. I ripped stuff out, did some pruning, and began to reshape the space. Here, I have jumped into their lives, I jumped into her life and how will we garden each other?

How will I deal with this new culture, these changes and challenges? How will I survive these days, financially? What will I pull together to balance my time and cash flow? The possibilities are infinite.
I felt caged-in in this city today. Compressed. I tried to run and everywhere I turned it was a main road with traffic. It smells like Japan, that sweet, bright aroma of heavy traffic. The cars felt like whips to me, a lash with every one that passed. An assault. A gauntlet. And so I ran, back home, to where my garden will be.
I am going to create a bunch of ecosystems and environments, walls that shelter people, buffer energies. I am going to change the energetic flow form of this place.
And how will it change me?

Listening to the Land

Listening to the Land
Conversations about Nature, Culture and Eros
Derrick Jensen
published by Sierra Club Books 2002.

In order to see the dim twinkling stars, deep in the night sky, you cannot look directly at them, or they will dissappear, a function of the rods and cones in our retinas. Instead, if we look just to the side or just beyond, and observe them in the slight periphery, we can then keep the star in focus. In coming to understand the big questions of these times, of life, we must come at it in the same, round-a-bout way, always keeping observation in the periphery. This metaphor comes to me from Paul Shepard, who I was lead to through the Derrick Jensen in this book of interviews, which does so gracefully this.
Why do we act as we do? What is the relationship between technological innovation and human misery? Is there a direct relationship between environmental destruction and other forms of oppression, such as misogyny and genocide? Is there hope? What are the paths to reconnection? How do we remember to listen?
And so in speaking with many eloquent thinkers, through a colorful palette of topics, travelling in concentric circles, this book has opened my heart - and help align my heart with my head and my actions. So here I lay my notes, with links, to see what you and I may find, and connect.


Dave Foreman
fantastically enough, it looks like the whole interview is online, complete with photos.
He and Christopher Manes are co-founders of EarthFirst! (check out that site: there is some funny stuff there.) They are some hard-core activists, and some eloquent thinkers. These conversations made me think of how in Prodigal Summer, Barbara Kingsolver paints magic around the importance of predators to the food chain: us humans need to see other big creatures around us. ( The thought of this brings me to near tears somehow. I am so deeply grateful that daily I see the gentle eyes of blacktailed deer, and often feel the feline eyes of cougar watching me as i walk home alone late at night. I feel the truth and humility in this, and ache for the millions of numbed city creatures devoid of this consciousness.)

Christopher Manes
A summary of his book: Other Creations: Rediscovering the spirituality of animals.

David Orr
excels at asking questions. Designer, professor and chair of Environmental Studies at Oberlin College. He emphasises how we must reconnect to our communities and localities, and one way is through stories.

Thomas Berry
continues " Narrative is the basic modality in which the which the human mind functions." Modern people are in difficulty because the biblical story we live by has become disfunctional. With the story carrying no meaning, our lives becoming meaningless. His work on co-creating a new story is published by the Harvard Divinity School.

And there is bonding- every least particle is bonded with every other least particle. Everything is integral and interacts with everything else. This means tha nothing is itself without everyonthing else. There is a commanality, an integrity, and intimacy of the universe with itself.
And that intimicay, I think, is the fulfillment of the universe, withthe conditioned on the uniquness of things. Saint Thomas has a wonderful phrase, where he speaks of difference as the prfection of the universe.
Uniqueness is communion with. Thats what the universe is all about.
DJ: does the universe then have a purpose?
TB: The purpose is simly existance. And the glory of existance. Thats the ultimate purpose of everything - existance and self-delight in existance.

Charlene Spretnak
continues the dialogue on reconnecting using a new narrative

Fellow citizens, reality has turned out to be a lot more complex than we thought. Our tradition, always conscientious and hard-working, clung so fiercely to the mechanistic, reductionist model of the natural world for 300 years that we got a lot wrong. Throughout this century, however, we’ve been gradually correcting our orientation. Now, with the breakthroughs of the new sciences, we’re making many exciting discoveries about the subtle interconnectedness in and among our bodies, nature, the biosphere, and the whole universe. This brings us a new respect, which we hope you’ll share, for other traditions that perceived that sort of interrelatedness all along, such as religion, art, and native peoples’ worldviews.to continue

John A Livingston
Author of One Cosmic Instant: a Natural History of Human Arrogance, The Falacy of Wildlife Conservation, and Rogue Primate: An Exploration of Human Domestication. He is a professor emeritus at York University where he taught from '70 to '92. President of Canadian Nature Federation and the first producer of The Nature of Things.
"The Ecosphere in which we live is a web that envelops all organisms and ecosystems, that gave rise to life in the first place, and that sustains it now. Every organism and every ecosystem is a full participant."
(This quote is from the Ecospheric Ethics website, a fantastic anthology of useable works). Livingston paints cohesive the dialouge that we are not separate from nature, we need to transform our language and thinking patterns away from the self/ other split.
"I think the self/other split is so pernicious because we spend all our time concentratin on self, and we seem to take the idea of other as given. I dont think the coyote sees the bunny as other. She is what she eats, and before she eats it."

Matthew Fox
His work attempts to rescue Christianity from the destructive tendencies which now surround it. He is the founding director of the Institute of Culture and Creation Spirituality in California.
"How do we teach gratitude? What do you do with your gratitude? Thats part of the mystical impulse. Our whole being, our existance, is a miracle."
His writing of estatic, quote Rilke, speaking of awe, eros, and mystery. We are all part of the mystery, and the acceptance of that is our freedom.

David Ehrenfeld
The Arrogance of Humanism is one of the most important texts of the last 20 years, so say the big thinkers. With degrees in history, medicine and zoology, he is professor of biology at Rutgers Universtiy and columnist, author and editor. He works to dismantle our underlying assumptions of humanism, the mightness of science, and our belief that we humans know so much.
" The idea of 'now we know how to do it better' is wrong. When it comes to timber management, we dont really know what to do. We know in Oregon where we've clearcut, that agter three planting the trees still arent growing back ... Because we dont understand the way the world works, we also dont understand the sources and origins of goodness. Unexpectedly, good things happen. They happen fairly often."

John Keeble
"It occured to me once again that the trick was to enter the chaos, not control it, nor to wipe it out with one form on monomania or anothet, and yet at the same time to hold fast to a sense of right conduct, to keep looking outwards, and not to get trapped inside an illusionary net." Author of Yellowfish, Broken Ground, and Out of the Channel: The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in Prince William Sound.
"Language is a natural resource, or maybe I should say natural wonder, born of the air we`ve taken into our lungs from the atmosphere, loases with the detrius of the air, and shaped by bone and cartilage and flesh as it comes out in words. It's a way we have of keeping contact with each other and of giving form to our dreams. Language is extraordinarily diverse."