stupid me -- blamed the chisel when it was the hammer’s fault 

WHEN THE QUIET FILLS WITH LIGHT

First snow of winter fell during the night and is still falling. Kind of late, even on the mountaintops; the first white dusting was only a couple of weeks ago. When it's still dark and you're just waking you can tell by the deeper silence that it has snowed; then the quiet fills with light and seems even thicker...

When you hear that silence, peep out the window and behold that whiteness covering all you see, something changes in you as when you were a kid, that ancient winter quickening, a new flow you can feel, a current native to the bone, this new cold white adventure just beginning to build, for there are things to be done, special things-- snow to be shoveled, outdoor items to be covered or moved into snowless places (good thing the snow tires are on -- a smile), break out the Sorels, the heavy socks and gloves, get the snowcoat, thick hat, shovels, heavy brooms, car brush, window scrapers, cover the wheelbarrow, put the ladders away, bury the garden faucets and hoses beneath mounds of leaves, stack more firewood closer to the house before the snow builds its deadline.

The dawning birdsongs are sharper and clearer - more frugal; energy is at a premium -
Appetites change too, as a result of all this action, this freshness of air scrubbed through the night by trillions of fine-edged waterflakes; hunger gets big, the body gets ready for what is to come, the work and the fuel, the food and the firewood, the lifting and shoveling and hauling, fighting the doubtless wind, pushing through the deepening snow, ice to be chipped away, like old days of waiting...

stupid me

I blamed the chisel

when it was

the hammer's fault

A growing list of inspiring links on Ken Elwood's epic links page...

HIGH NOON

Well maybe not exactly high noon, but pretty near - near enough for the purpose of this tale I'm about to relate. Gimme a whiskey. Sogyu was due at noon. Sogyu was Gary Cooper-- cool and taciturn, Japanese gardening and landscaping expert. It was high noon, or pretty near, when he came from Kyoto town, out the dusty road to the mountain ranch. It was time. I went out to meet him.

In the holster at my side I was wearing my trusty Gracemaker. And what a tool it was, signed by the maker Wakajishi, the clippers that won the East, or at least my part of it. Popular in fast-draw gardening circles hereabouts, and bonsai too. A name to reckon with in these parts. Not for the mountain country those imitations of quality you see all over the place, sometimes with aluminum blades even, dadblast it; no, this was quality iron, forged in the ancient Japanese way swords were forged, from select steel, with care. Sure it cost more - a lot more - but it's worth every yen when your lifestyle is on the line. And man is it a beauty to use-- cuts like a bonsai master's dream, sharpens like it was up front in the Seven Samurai.

I was wearing my old Gracemaker as I say in the holster on my gardening belt when I stepped outside to meet Sogyu, who had stopped by to talk about some work, when something caught his eye and he suddenly went silent like Gary Cooper; he was looking at the holster on my hip. "Ahh, I see you have the fine clippers..." Yes I said, showing my quick draw. He examined the well-maintained artistry; there was a kind of Samurai/High Noon background music playing up in the sky somewhere.

We talked our talk, then Sogyu went on his way down the mountain road; I turned and set off into the garden. Getting a bit wild; it needed taming.

WORK OF THE EARTH

Got riled the other afternoon with the office over some common editorial hassles and I was at home so no point in sharing it there or stewing on it but if I just sat around my mind would turn it over and over, pushing the same aimless mindrock up the same pointless mindhill so I went out to the tool shed and got the rake, hoe and pitchfork, made another couple of garden rows and planted some carrots, which are immeasurably more important than anger, mean more than any argument, are nourishing and delicious, just as the tilling of earth and the enriching of soil are more important and meaningful than cultivating bitterness or digging up bad feelings.

Gardens of light are better than gardens of darkness, rows of nourishment better than sloughs of toxicity. How much nicer to turn the deep and living soil, watch it gleam in the sunlight, alive with tomorrow, than to foster shadows of past illusion... When you till your garden you till yourself; when you seed the earth, you grow; when you nurture life, you live the more.

When at the end of the day I looked upon the result, at those straight, dark, rich, seeded rows, at what I had shaped with my hands, my tools and the work of the earth, rows that soon enough would bear little green flags of hope, that in their time would grow to food, I had never been riled at all, it was just a useless imagining back there, spent in a dream from which I'd awakened some time ago.

If you're upset, plant something.

TURNING MY HAND

Grandchildren, among all their other unknowing kindnesses, point out to us one by one, step by step, all the countless things we ourselves had to learn (or unlearn) to become as and who we are. With our own children there was no time in the blur to note such fine points; this new privilege is another of the gifts that grandkids bring to us in their little hands.

When they come to visit, and out in the garden I give them a rake or a shovel to help me with, I am caught unawares by the fact that they don't know how to use these things (that's not inborn?!) so I have to show them how to hold them and then how to use them (I used to not know how to use a shovel and a rake!), and for example how to extra-hold the rake with one hand so as to pick up leaves against it with the other hand (I had to learn that!), or how to best light a fire (they touch the lighter to the top of the leafpile) so I show them how heat rises, and they feel a new power when they light the pile at the bottom and the fire complies; how to get leverage when using pruning shears (they love the sharp knowledge of cutting stuff into pieces) and how to hold a pruning saw (the branch came off!) and then in the house when I add wood to the woodstove, whatever they're doing the twins run to look through the open stove doorway into the fire, amazed that there's a blazing fire here in our own living room-- in all their few years they've never seen such a thing! Big sister Kaya likes to add some wood to the fire; when I open the stove door she gets a stick from the kindling pile, tosses it in quickly and gingerly, pulling back at the heat, the twins still just watching from a distance that inferno roaring with all its red tongues right here in the room inside that open door, and what amazement it is in myself to behold in the grandgirls the fascination at every single detail of all these things, all these actions and tasks, right down to the heft and weft of the mass of the nature and the gravity, every second of having to learn how water behaves, and ash, and leaves in the wind, and dirt and fire and spark, handle and blade and twig, how to run with boots on sandals on sneakers on barefoot going updown stairs and hills on grass or snow or sand the infinity of it all how ever do we do it, how do we ever learn it all, how ever do we make it to my age, where I stand right now without the slightest idea of how many such things I've come to know, or how I learned them like turning my hand...

THE MUSHROOMS OF UNDERSTANDING CHINA

There I was the other day - a fine day - with 40 beautiful, fresh shiitake oak logs tapping their feet waiting to be inoculated with that fine megashiitake spore I'd copped at the farmer store along with a special shiitake-inoculating drill bit, but by the time I got home from the store it was too dark.

Then after a next day in the office doing one-after-another-after-another of just a few of all the things that are distinctly unrelated to the task of inoculating shiitake logs (there are approximately 10 trillion such things), early the next morning I stacked up the already ongoing shiitake logs for the winter, then did some editing of mere words, saving the late afternoon hours to inoculate about 10 logs.

Then a little more than an hour before dusk I plugged in the long extension cord for the old 100W drill and began, got about 6 logs drilled and inoculated, when on the seventh log the tired little drill said Nope, no more, Bob; this is it pal, see ya in heaven, then darkness fell exactly the way it does after your drill gives up. Then I was in the office again among the 10 trillion things.

In time I managed to reach the shore of another weekend and went off to the farm store once more, this time in search of a bigger, better, more powerful drill, and found one I wanted, a Japanese brand-name 400-Watter, for about 120 dollars-- and then another I wanted more: a 430-Watter with an extra sidebar handle for about 160 dollars, but I didn't want to spend that much, since I'll mainly be using it just to drill shiitake logs once or twice a year as the old logs get used up and become great compost.

As I stood there pondering a solution to my econoshiitake dilemma I noticed some other, differently colored drills lower down on the tool display shelf-- way down there, in fact, sort of pushed to the way back of the way bottom. Their price was too low for the kind of drill I was after, but I hunkered down there anyway, since I wasn't going anywhere at the moment, reached in and pulled out one of the boxes, noticed that it was in fact the same kind of drill, except that it was a 480-Watter, had one of those great sidebars, and cost about 30 dollars! And was made in China-- probably using fine, Japanese-made electric parts.

One-fourth the price of the higher-up drills of less power and more costly utility, Japanese drills that only a moment ago had gleamed in my mind's eye as equipment of the highest standard, prestigious and priced out of reach; they now looked a bit forlorn, their luster dimmed, their true price now apparent (approx. 80% markup over labor cost, since they too were assembled in China, I'll bet).

So of course I bought a bright and shining miracle Chinese drill, took it home, plugged it in and finished five logs like a dream, in a tenth of the time. It was the Ferrari of drills, as far as I was concerned. And as I drilled on efficiently into the dusk I suddenly saw first hand what China was really about to do to (and at the expense of) the developed world and its laborers, apart from vastly increasing my shiitake crop.

MY AMERICAN RETURNS THE POWER SAW

Well, I took the broken new cheap power saw of the previous post back to the big farmer-tool store where I'd bought it a couple months ago, of course taking the receipt along (I would never in a million years be so efficient as to save a receipt, let alone find it some months later, but the miraculous Echo is; always amazes me). In that still some-decades-ago-US part of my mind where my American resides, I was expecting that basically suspicious response from an incipiently surly clerk, "you got the receipt," (from under hooded eyes) "you sure you didn't remove those screws yourself, you know what the warrantee says," etc. with all those tacitly intimidating implications, then maybe "Ok we'll send it back to the manufacturer see what happens, be a few weeks, we'll let you know, just fill out these forms completely with this smeary ballpoint pen attached to the desktop with this powerful spring coil," and so on in my American's head. (I'm sure it isn't really like that in the US any more, I'm sure customer relations have become much more loving and personal, arm-around-the-shoulder caring and we're-all-in-this-together-y, with much better and unfettered pens, since my American's time there.)

Went in to the store, found the hardware clerk busy pricing some stuff; showed him the saw, where the screws had come out and probably shot down the mountain and the blade had come off but fortunately lockstopped; he said "please wait here," took the saw into the back of the store. A couple minutes later the manager found us, bowed deeply, said "we are very sorry for the extreme shock you must have suffered at this mishap" or words to that effect. And still to that effect, bowing as to very important persons, "please accept our profound apologies and be so good as to select one of these more expensive brand-name power saws as a token of our deep regret and respect for your patronage of our humble store." I picked out a very nice Ryobi: more power, lighter etc. The manager threw in an extra new blade as well, never even asked for the receipt. Despite many similar experiences here, my American was dumbfounded yet again.