IN THE GARDEN OF LONG AGO

What beautiful, hungry innocents they are, that couple standing confidently there together in the garden long ago, young bodies fading further from ours with each tick, slipping slowly into the mists of the past.

Yet they still live in us, still speak with our voices, breathe with our breath, still yearn at the core of the you and the I, in all that beauty, hunger and innocent bravery, but now aged with experience; how my heart aches to see them standing there in that widening distance, so new, so unworn at the edge of shadow…

Little they knew that the infinite path before them would lead to this precisely definable place, ticking past even now… Judging by his suit, her dress and the flower she holds, they went from that garden to a forgotten celebration, likely slept well that night, went on with full hearts toward these faraway nows, on a path so much of which I don't recall…

Thanks from the heart for the photo, and for the thoughtful letter.

EYE OF LIGHT

Among the many reasons for living in the naturally rich countryside are the continuous surprises of beauty it brings out for show when you least expect them.

This morning I was anticipating another chill but clear day; instead when I woke up and looked out the deck was covered with snow and the snow was still falling-- no motorcycling down to the station, have to go by 4-wheel drive.

So not much later I was steering down through the entire white, the tall mountain bamboos arching snow-laden over the roadway, when all at once I saw where Hokusai got the ocean waves design for his famed Mt. Fuji woodcut: there they were, ocean waves in the snow on the leaves of the bending bamboo, that he could copy at his leisure, with some colory tweaking for waterness!

Then turning a bend in the road in the thick part of the woods where the road opens out to a view of the Lake, the vista was all one silver thickness of snow: no lake, no sky; but there at one point was a line of burgeoning light that as we slowly descended began to grow into the form of an eye, an eye of pure, soft brightness that was the sun coming over the far mountains and reflecting off the still invisible lake: a skyful of softly falling snow with an eye of light at its heart.

Took that vision with me on the train.

THE COUNTRY SIDE OF LIFE

When you move from the city into the country, a considerable number of municipally peripheral things suddenly come into your life in a big way, such as the moon and the stars. Also insects, trees and animals, not to mention the sky as a whole. As well general vegetation, and a welcome absence of the masses of concrete and asphalt and people that characterize city life, as do power and phone lines overhead.

The moon doesn't play much of a role in city life, except as a kind of urban add-on one sees occasionally that is played up in movies as an extravaganza backdrop, the moon coming up between the skyscrapers. City folks actually don't have all that much to do with the moon, let alone the stars, except in a mythico-cinematico-derivativo kind of way, isn't it mystical, they say in the park, that smattering of artificial countryside city folks resort to in their free time to evoke their roots with a distant wistfulness, as in a museum where you can touch the artifacts. And the sky---in the city the sky is pretty much an artifact too, the less significant part of what metropolitans call the "skyline." Isn't it impressive they say. Well, yeah, I guess so, if you like artifacts in your eye.

Out in the country the sky stretches all the way from here to there (not the city "here and there"; such words resume their original meaning out in the country). And of course the country is where birds actually live, and enjoy themselves. By birds I don't mean panhandling pigeons, but self-supporting warblers, wheatears, grosbeaks, ducks, thrushes, egrets, pheasants, finches, redstarts, hawks, swallows, wagtails, owls, the list goes on. Real birds. Not merely the species or two that can tolerate exhaust fumes for a discernable life span, like the trees the city inserts along the avenues.

And insects---not cockroaches, which can live anywhere, the pigeons of the insect family---but genuine broad-spectrum insects, buzz and hum and crawl, all going about their ancient business in their traditional ways in holes and hills and hives or just plain on the ground (there's actual ground out in the country) to the chirpings and trillings of cricket and katydid as evening comes, and through the night, the fragrant night, and then at dawn vast webs are strung with beads of dew and hung with warbler notes in the pink sunrise from way down at the bottom of the sky.

Then in the spring and summer eves and morns the oratorio of the frogs of course, in their timeless worship of all things high and low, which worship, in all its many forms, goes on all the time in the country but is pretty much extinct in the city, and then there's the occasional snake draped over a branch in the sun like this was the garden of Eden or something, not to mention glimpses of ferret fox boar stag raccoon monkey bear, and there are actual fish in the waters, waters which by the way in the country you can drink without even once thinking of wet laundry.

And fireflies, of a summer night! Or a rainy summer night, when the underneaths of leaves are lit by thousands of tiny lanterns as the firefly party goes on despite the downpour. Rain, too, in the country is different from rain in the city, where it is a wet bothersome thing serving no natural function (except maybe to water the park), only an artificial one when in the summer it sometimes brings desperately needed relief to what city officials and I guess everybody by now calls heat island syndrome, which is when the sun and the city work together to form a kind of sidewalk inferno. And I probably don't need to point out the difference between a city summer night and a country summer night, nor dwell at length on the differences between the other seasons as experienced in these respective locales, but I will.

In the country summer the nights are cool, there is tree breath everywhere and you can breathe its perfume beneath a sky broadcast with all the diamonds of the universe for you, and you sleep better too, since you're so much more at home, because we all came from the country. And when autumn arrives, who can describe what is more beautiful than all the masterpieces of all the museums in the world put together? This is the very beauty painters chase to the grave. And this isn't just oils on canvas on walls in museums next to the park; this is the real thing, you can go out and walk right in it for hours, and there's no admission fee.

Then comes the country winter, with its majestic, sweeping calligraphies of snow just sitting there on silent show, gleaming with sunlight for days and weeks in tree- and stubble- and furrow- and grove-shaped whiteness-impeccable sculptures, and the blue-blue air is so big that the snow show is but a small part of it all, and not in the way, as it is in the city where pretty soon after snow falls and makes headlines it gets slushy and ugly or dangerously icy; country snow, soft and plush, is by contrast a big down comforter mother nature always throws over the countryside about this time, and whereas in the city the snow merely treacherizes pedestrians and vehicularians, and taxes the sewage system with often excessive volumes of what is called "runoff," in the country snow has actual natural functions, among others of insulating the soil from the chill of late winter and watering it in spring the way spring is in the country, for in the country spring is exactly where it belongs, its green songs up out of the ground swelling in time into chorales of wildflowers and all kinds of random demonstrations of the beauty nature can build if left on its own, the way it is out in the country.

WINTER GOLD

I love to sleep in a cold house then get up and get warm by getting the house warm. In winter I sleep with the window open because I love the feeling of being living toast, with the contrasting wintry coldness on my face.

I will considerately pass up this serendipitous but excellent entree into what I believe are the debilitating effects of central heating and move right on with what I was going to say, that today the dawn was a cold icy one more suited to late February, when it seems the sun has just about given up and acts as warm as neon, the kind of morning that when you go outside to thaw the water pipes shows you where your nose is.

Out there in the predawn air, the only light was a sliver of the moon, dangling like a bright icicle among the black-ice branches of the trees reaching into a gray empty sky, the kind of sight that tickles your history, stirs up thoughts of ancient gods...

Our firewood stocks ondeck had been getting low, but fortunately in the deceptive warmth of yesterday I harnessed a bunch of springtime energy and lugged a bunch of stovelength primo cherry and oak wood, lifted and stacked 'em up on the deck so we had a good supply of the wherewithal for a bright warm fire, before which to gaze out upon the frosty dawn.

Winter has its gold.

THE NEXT GIFT

When in your life you have finished with the task of raising the child you've been-- the child we all begin with being-- when you are at last mature enough to move on, ready to bring a child of your own into the light of your experience, the moment that child is born an ancient door is opened to a place you never knew your heart could hold.

The difference between you then and you now is like the difference between a seed and its tree: neither at all like the other, yet each being the other, in the most secretly invisible and magical of ways. Thus we live and grow through stages with which life itself is deeply familiar, but to which we ourselves, at each advance, are utter strangers, entering new galaxies of being.

Raising a child is its own distraction: you have so few moments in that dense procedure to fully step aside, sit aside, think aside, stop and love as deeply as you can-- until, the moment you can, the child is grown and gone, loving on its own.

Then, if seasons follow, from that child is born the next gift: grandchildren. And on these new beings, now that you are free of the rush of child rearing, you can spend your love as freely as sunshine falls on green leaves. And when those grandchildren are far away, the question becomes what to do with all those warm rays? Thus is more indiscriminate goodness and warmth borne into the world.

Not long ago I came across a snapshot of my daughter when she was ten years old or so, a delightful little person I remember well, and realized I miss that 10-year-old very much; I tried to explain my feeling when she came to visit, now a mother, with my granddaughters, but I could tell she didn't really know what I meant. She hasn't been here yet. She'll understand one day, decades from now, when as a grandmother she's going through some old photos, and the past tells her what it told me, what it tells us all, if we stop to listen: open your arms to this moment and its children.

NUCLEAR POWER GUINEA PIG

Headline: Shiga studies impact on Lake Biwa from possible Fukui nuke accident

I've written about this fact before, but it's seldom floated in the standard mediastream and so gets forgotten even by the Japanese: Japan, for its narrowness, size and seismicity, is truly the world's Nuclear Power guinea pig.

As you look at the map, simply center that big green circle on Tokyo, and the cities of Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya (urban area population exceeding 60 million persons) and Kyoto (a few million more), not to mention priceless Lake Biwa (centrally just below the Takahama-Mihama cluster!) are within a short breeze of over 30 nuclear reactors!

Given the world-witnessed occurrence of the statistically impossible event at Fukushima, the potential result of this situation is truly beyond rationale. Yet these millions carry on, living in the shadow of another series of statistically impossible events that would pretty much bring an end to Japan: for most, if not all, of those who survived would have to be evacuated. To... where?

As much as I love and worry for Lake Biwa (where I live), things would be so much worse (especially if they ever start the Monju reactor) than what the authorities' experts are intently studying...

Happy Birthday, Mike!

BRIDGING THE YEARS

Last night we went south a ways to what once was a lively old entertainment district for travelers from old Kyoto along the West Lake road to the Japan Sea and elsewhere. Traditionally 'discreet' for 1500 years or so, it has changed a lot even since we first came here, and is a bit bedraggled and threadbare, but coming back in new ways.

We went there to enjoy the traditional year-end soba noodle meal known as toshikoshi (lit.: “year getting-over”). Eaten at midnight, the long noodles 'bridge the gap' between one year and the next. For that purpose we visited the big new sprawling hot spring ryokan that has everything for everyone and is always crowded with families and folks who come for the restaurants, baths (no tattoos allowed), saunas, hotel rooms, hot sweet potatoes, haircuts, massages, lounges, games, bars, karaoke, with narrow flows of warm water here and there inside and outside where you can stop and sit and dip your feet to be serviced by the tiny feet-nibbling fish. The restaurant has big creative menus, chairs and tables all over up down, sunken tables, big tvs, sushi bar, scrambling waitresses dressed in yesterday mode...

All around is the neighborhood of the old red-light district that has been so since way before Edo, when it was a two-day trip from Kyoto over the mountains, through Otsu and along the lake to Omimaiko for a summer or other distant sojourn; this was the first stopover on that way, sort of a pleasure side trip from the Nakasendo. Here were the big old rambly ryokans where everything happened and more...

Crowds still visit in the steamy, fragrant winter nights-- Happy New Year, from here atop all those old times...

HAPPY DRAGON YEAR

2012

The Dragon is my birth year -

This one (Black Water Dragon Year) should be interesting...

SPACE, TIME AND FIREWOOD

Folks who don't heat with firewood can't really appreciate all that goes into that bit of sunshine in your winter wood stove, they might think maybe it's easy just because it's free (at least mostly free, the way I do it), but there are other burdens that come with the erratic supply of gleaned firewood such as I use. There's really no need to mention here the sectioning and hauling and splitting and hauling and stacking and hauling and burning and hauling and hauling and hauling, but I already did so it's too late.

Take 2: Say you've got four or five cords of firewood crowding out there in various locations around your house, wood from various periods of time in the past couple years, some of it stoveready, some not, but you've run out of stacking space and have just been given access to a whole new multicord bunch of bigwood to be split and stacked so it will dry by the time you need it two or three winters from now, so you've got to put it somewhere but you can't stack new green wood on top of fully or nearly ready wood, so you've got to walk around, analyze your stacks, ponder the weather and your wood supply, juggling disparate concepts sort of like Einstein used to do with various other aspects of the universe while wandering his theoretical woodlot.

With these sylvan symbols as well, like Albert you've got to somehow bend time and space by combining a couple of nearly ready pieces of embodied light, i.e., photons+alpha = wood, into one taller stack, thereby clearing a place for the new incoming atomic structures. Then when winter comes, in the heart of your stove you unleash the energy of those atoms in the welcome form of heat while freeing up some space outside, thereby establishing a direct link between time, space and firewood, but right now you have to match the mix of new and old.

Fortunately, last year you began to denote all this data in numerical symbols on the end face of one piece of wood at the top of each stack, but unfortunately as the universe would have it the newest wood always seeks the top of the stack, so to get at the older wood you have to go to the bottom, by for example turning the whole stack over, which is cosmically impractical (Albert, working in complete abstraction, had it easier in this regard), and practicality is what we're talking about here, so this approach needs work. Al's work led to atomic fissioning and nuclear power, which here in Japan has a bigly negative historic reputation but is still used in winter to power electric heaters, blu-rays, plasma tvs and game consoles, among other things.

This is a universe, after all.

WHY THE WORLD WILL END IN A YEAR

Whatever time you live in, it seems that there are always some folks looking forward to the end of the world, folks who might have done better with the world they were given than to wind up with a headful of Armageddon. Those are the kind of folks who for example promote and look forward to December 21, 2012, a year from today, when the Mayan calendar will end (only because there are no Mayans around to extend it). According to the eager Armageddans, that will also mark end the world. Then they can live out their dream of laughing a righteous 'I told you so!' as they too vaporize.

In contrast, the mellow folks whose lives are considerately guided by that diminishing commodity known as common sense keep trying to explain to the worldflamers that 2012 as a date in this context is no more portentous than May 21, 2011 was. Fact is that of course the Mayans didn't know any more than anyone else when the world is going to end.

When they founded their kingdom and were working out their way-admirable calendar, they said at the imperial calendar council 'What's a good time to start an undending dynasty? What do we need here? When shall we have begun?' After mulling over all the recollections of what some great-great grandfathers were said to have said, they reached that earliest edge of their history, settled on an arbitrary time point further back in the local-time fog (sidenote: place/time points with no physical record are historically/religiously favored for dynastic startups). So the guy in the third seat to the left of the chairman said '730 years ago or so would be good, that fits nicely, better than 200 years ago for sure,' so that's what they did. And that's why the world will end in a year precisely.

Does that include the IRS, I wonder...

SLOW ADVERTISING

If you were to pluck the fulness of your being from the fastforward lightspeed staccato rush of the modern megamedia mindflash, your body from the hypermomentum tomorrownow timeplasma of urbaniamania, and in a fully mindbodied experience softly send yourself meandering down a narrow village road anywhere in rural Japan, sooner or later you'd likely come upon a sugidama (sugi: cedar; dama: ball) hanging outside the door of a local sake brewery. In your strange new state of mind you'd pretty likely whisper wtf?

Unlike the Vegas Strip, say, or one of those tv uzi-ads that repeat the product name at a pace set to induce monetary seizures, when sake is first set to brewing, in accordance with the traditional manner a ball made of freshly cut green cedar branches is hung outside the brewery door as a sign to the community that the new batch is now brewing. In the real world, which is local, this is important news. As the sake brews in its natural way as time passes in its natural way, the cedar ball ages in its natural way. As the ball dries out and turns more and more brown, the closer the sake is to completion, until at last the fully brown ball tells all the village and all who pass along the road that the sake brewed and sold here is now ready and available. Slow advertising.

Imagine that: months of fragrantly tantalizing tenterhook advertising, all without using even one microvolt of electricity. So natural. So elegant. So knowing - and knowing of so many things - a tacit knowing, in which all share. Without neon or billboard. Who now knows how long it takes for cedar branches to turn brown, and that that duration matches the time it takes for sake to become sake? Some elderly folks still know these things, in the small, emptying country towns...

Just posted Dream Car on the Blog Brothers

Cesium in Baby Milk Powder

- Nuclear Risk for Japan Food -

THE WIND AND I: PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT THROUGH FIREWOOD

Hah. Figured I'd finally beaten the wind on this baby. The wind and I have always had a relationship problem, especially the autumn wind, the worst of the Aeolian clan vis-a-vis keeping the damn tarps on the damn ready-to-burn firewood dammit, those gusts and I not seeing eye-to-eye on this human continuity thing.

Don't get me wrong; I understand the needs of the wind, how it has to fulfill its basic mandate of leveling everything as fully and quickly as possible, there are mountains to be flattened and oceans to be shoved around, an endless list of worldwide tasks that must be done, yaggeda yaggeda, but counterposed against this are buildings and other pro tem human artifacts with precious values of their own, such as my humble stack of tarped firewood that must be protected from the elemental assignments to wet everything down, blow it away, reduce it to fungus fodder or whatever-- so I and the wind, among other of my natural relations, are always in each other's faces.

It was therefore with a smirk of satisfaction, I must say - after recovering the wind-tossed tarp from the bamboo forest behind my fresh new facecord of first-class firewood for what I guess must be the xumpteenth time in the last few years - that I came up with the idea of tying some strong traditional cord to the grommets of one tarp corner, threading it through the stack of firewood itself, then tying it taut to the grommets on the opposite corner. Hah. Bite on that, windhead.

That should do it, I thought in that hubris for which humans are famed (which also sets us apart from the animals, though unlike sinning, speaking, toolmaking, blushing etc., it is seldom mentioned in that connection). That night, the wind knowing full well what was afoot, firewood tarpwise, did its damndest to rip that tarp off there. And when I went out in the morning to gloat, that activity was out of the question. The wind had blown strongly enough to cause the tarp and its loopy rope to actually lift and topple that portion of the woodpile! Crafty! Plus more muttery labor for yours truly. Our battle had reached new heights. So then I countered with a newer and even craftier approach, on which I may be reporting any day now.

But my real reason for writing all this was the treat I was afforded while all this redoing was going on, because you know how beautiful mountainsides and all their trees can be when they set their minds to it in the peak of autumn color? Well there was that, and on top of that there was a big, thick, glorious arc of light's components rainbowing from the top of the mountain down to the lake, and through that bow of many colors the leaves of all the trees were enhanced beyond the reach of speech...

I had to stop every once in a while (beauty will do that, thank heaven), amidst my irritation and hubristically driven efforts, to admit to myself that the beauty all around was so much more important than my meager doings, so much more nourishing and truthful than anything an angry or prideful person could ever come up with in a million years if we ever get that far, the way we're going, tarpwise.

So as a result of this experience I've grown a bit more in emotional terms, learned a few things about deeper personal issues, and am on a friendlier basis with the wind now for sure; it's a good wind, but no way it can get that damn tarp off this damn time dammit.

INDIANA CAN HAVE THE PUBLICITY

I started growing - or rather attempting to grow - hiratake mushrooms sort of as a lark, a few years ago, as detailed here. I'd found the spore on sale, had a few oak sections available, thought I'd give it a try but didn't expect much, given my experience with other sorts of exotic mushroom varieties; plus, being in sync with dozens of shiitake logs all over the place for all these years, these mushrooms would provide but a drop in the bucket, if indeed anything at all made it into the bucket.

So far I've learned that hiratake fruit just after the shiitake have finished, at least up here in this ecolocale, and even though I got some sterling hiratake last year, the oak sections soon looked like they'd been coopted by shelf fungi, so I had by degrees begun giving up on the hiratake agenda. Thus it was that I 'forgot' to check the logs under their cover of leaves, twigs and burlap.

Then a few days ago I entered the jungle of my garden and headed along the ancient path toward where legend had it that some old logs had been sequestered under forest debris, plus some older cover; upon exposing the logs, I found that one log had done nothing, as expected, but that the other had sprouted half-heartedly about a week before, so such mushrooms as there were were no longer prime, but even subprime hiratake are a gourmet experience, so we enjoyed them. But I figured that this year was the last gasp of an amateur effort. I had learned some stuff, and might try again with some other varieties, maybe get some a couple years down the road.

So I forgot once more about checking any further until a couple of days ago when I chanced upon familiar signs of an ancient mushroom tomb and decided, albeit pointlessly, to look once more, see if the other log had done anything. I pulled back the cover from the unproductive sections and saw there amidst the crumbly dun of the forest debris the most beautiful fronds of graduated pearl-gray mushrooms cascading down in lifeglowing perfection that I have ever seen.

No treasure hunter has ever felt more awe. Well, Indiana Jones might have come close for the first milliseconds of beholding that golden idol he had expected to find, but the gorgeousness of this natural radiance, shining there amidst the the dull matte of leaves, twigs, burlap and duff where nothing at all had been expected, I think puts me a few paces ahead of that intrepid movie character, plus there was no curse on my discovery. And as to the deliciousness, I got the better deal. Indiana can have the publicity.

Japan households reduce spending as unemployment rises
+
Japan's youth turn to rural areas
seeking a slower life

CENTRAL HEATING

One standby item I dig out faithfully every winter that unfortunate folks abroad in the West know little or nothing of, much to their necessarily unspoken disappointment (rife indeed are the disappointments we know not of) is my good old haramaki. Or maybe my fashionably new haramaki.

Yes, when the days grow short and the temperature falls, when the skin gets bumpy and the snuggle factor begins to rise, when the spirit with spring in its heart but winter in its teeth calls for some sort of cuddle, that's when I feel sorry for all those shivery folks in the developed world who have to crank up the central heating merely because they don't have a haramaki handy.

I truly hope that doesn't include such a thinking person as yourself. And when you think about it, what better place to maki (wrap) than the hara (roughly: abdomen)? The ancient orientals knew all about these things. Long before infrared was made visible, they knew that major quantities of body heat were lost from the uncovered, or even conventionally clothed, hara.

A brief look at your handy anatomical model will confirm this. Note where the ribs end, and where the major organs are as a result exposed and essentially unprotected, sheltered from the world only by a smattering of muscle and a layer of skin. Shivering liver!! Icy bladder!! Snowy pancreas!! Chattering kidneys!! Frozen colon!!

And if you look closely at any of those ancient twelve-foot tall Japanese temple guardians, you'll see that the very center of their dynamic energy, the root of their ki, is the hara, firmly outthrust, and centered with a navel that looks like the satellite image of a typhoon (how well they understood the unity of energy in those days!).

Needless to say, the haramaki soon becomes an essential element of one's winter clothing here in the historically energy-conscious orient, where central heating is not yet the norm and you can go into any general store and get yourself a haramaki of cotton, wool or silk, even a self-heating haramaki, if you're of that persuasion, and lower your heating bills.

In the deeps of winter I sometimes think that perhaps Japan should organize some kind of relief effort and send haramaki out into the developed world to relieve the tremendous suffering caused by crushing monthly energy bills to heat an entire house when you only need to heat the occupant, but then I realize that the Japanese themselves are slowly but surely slipping out of life itself and into the intensive care of central heating, and I think maybe I should stock up on haramaki while they're still available.

On the other hand, though, with the big oil price rises looming incrementally the further we get down the centrally heated billion-lane expressway that is tomorrow, I think the haramaki could one day be, worldwide, the ideal form of central heating.

UNSCROOGED

I suppose as one gets older there's an increasing tendency to get a bit more scroogey as the humbuggy holidays approach, it must have something to do with age and a greater understanding of the value of time or something - there aren't many teen scrooges that I know of - and even though I don't feel all that humbuggish for my age, I may have been scroogey a few times in recent years, especially around the holidays, though such topics make one evasive about the stats. Anyway, this was all more or less true until last Friday morning.

I had come home late the night before and fallen right into bed, having forgotten that the Trio of Brio were staying the night. I'd gotten up before 6 am and was doing some work on the computer, so engrossed in my task in the dawn silence that I continued in forgetment, until all at once the bedroom door to the loft opened and three little sleepyfaced girls came out with rumply pajamas and tousled hair, cute beyond the reaches of that word. Rubbing their eyes, they gathered around me where I sat and all at once began singing Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you, for yes it was my birthday - I'd forgotten that too - and the early morning chill all at once became warm, as these three barefoot little angels turned humbug around on a pinpoint and made it sunshine. It was a touching scene, both inside and out.

So now for the rest of my life if for some reason I happen to get a scroogey twist in my psychoshorts, all I have to do is picture those sleepy, loving little faces singing to me in their really early morning celebration of my long-ago birth and I love everything about this crazy world.

What a birthday present.

TIMES OF NO GARDENING ramble

Left pretty much on its own the garden has gone autumn-wild and punky looking, the marigolds taking over where the tomatoes used to be, the peppers going wild with fecundity. The cucumber and goya vines have withered, the only structures now remaining are the unexpectedly graceful ad hoc architectures of bamboo that once balanced reaching festoons of green and yellow but now stand without purpose. Before it snows I shall turn all that into next year's compost, apart from the marigolds.

Surprisingly, the monkeys have left my 6-week-old shallots untouched! I can't really convey the surprise in this, those green fronds are so succulent and simian-vulnerable. It's a you-had-to-be-here-for-15-years kind of thing. There they are, my happy green sprouts growing unmolested by simian hands for all this time. Either there has been major monkey culling of some kind or the redfaced gang is planning a large operation. It's been suspiciously quiet.

Gardening will get you through times of no marijuana better than marijuana will get you through times of no gardening, apart from the hallucinatory aspects, unless you're growing the weed itself (a topic for another time), to which by the way I am not opposed, though marijuana has never been my drug of choice, which is any kind of pie in season.

I also endorse the weed's use under circumstances of wisdom seldom observed nowadays, particularly in politics and finance, which aspect might interest any young persons who happened to read this without zoning out at the logical and grammatic challenges embodied in some of these sentences, education (another form of gardening) also being what it is today.

Implicit in this pastoral metaphor of course is that knowledge is the seed, the educator is the farmer and the student is the soil, which seems apt enough... Seeds are what they are, but basic educators today are overworked and students are underchallenged. The knowledge is there and vital; we need many more and justly compensated teachers who love to 'garden,' and hungry students rich in compost...

JEE 2012 ECO-CALENDAR NOW AVAILABLE

The new Japan Environmental Exchange Eco-calendar for 2012 is out,
in support of recovery in East Japan:
— 12 Key Concepts to Open Up a New Green World —

Part of the proceeds from sales of this calendar
will be donated toward recovery in East Japan.