The quaintest swings.

As I worked around the house today, repairing, cleaning, moving things to where they belong, reclaiming space post-divorce, I ended up thinking expansively about my life. This led me to affirmations I'd not heeded previously, but am otherwise proud of. Later as I cooked dinner, sauteing onions and shiitake mushrooms with some garlic from the garden, my plan was to have it over arugula with tomatoes, also from the garden, and to augment with Israeli feta.

I found myself wondering that I can grow beans, and enjoy them fresh off the vine, better by far than I can get anywhere else. I can grow tomatoes, and though I struggle with early blight, the fruit I get is astoundingly good compared to any I can buy. I enjoy many flavors, complexities that thrill me as I eat, and after sauteing the onions, throwing the mushrooms in for their turn, I decided to add a chopped fig from the tree given to me by a dear friend... I knew this salad would be special in ways that I could never impart to some people. It would be special, like all salads, and all meals I enjoyed making to nourish myself.

A great love of my life gave me a book many years ago, Gardens, An Essay on the Human Condition. The opening salvo is, "Human beings are not made to look too intently at the Medusa head of history... . This is not a shortcoming on our part: on the contrary, our reluctance to let history's realities petrify us underlies much of what makes human life bearable: our religious impulses, our poetic and Utopian imagination, our moral ideals, our metaphysical projections, our storytelling, our aesthetic transfigurations of the real, our passion for games, our delight in nature. Albert Camus once remarked, “Poverty kept me from thinking all was well under the sun and in history; the sun taught me that history is not everything”. The truth is an uncompromising bastion of hope for me. I’m a humanist, and the truth is that I’ve been thinking about this person, perhaps too much lately. I’d not read the book in years, and upon the inspiration to write today, the aforementioned wonder at growing beans, tomatoes, arugula, etc., I found myself naturally thinking of her. I grabbed the book and read the preface, what I quoted above, and found it strikingly relevant to what I’d been thinking all evening as I contemplated the work I was doing around the house, and then my dinner. Go fucking figure! Some use the word synchronicity, but that’s too clock-like for me. I love clocks, but links like this are outside of time.

I often wish I were better read - and over the years I’ve listened during my commute to some of the books I always felt I should read, the Russian masterpieces, the highly derided capitalists, more of the works of greats like Mark Twain, the early feminists, Charlotte Perkins Gilman for one. I’ve digressed.

During the making of my salad, these thoughts settled deeper and stronger, and I found myself feeling proud of my nature that adapts and adopts better ways to do things. I’ve learned to be utterly open minded and to welcome new ways and understandings, when intelligent or obvious.

Further, I realized I love the mess spiders make in their work of living. Their ‘mess’ is beautiful, whether the wrapping of their prey in some elaborate weave, or their intricate webs. They are a part of a cycle I feel I understand intrinsically.

I love buying records I don’t know, and taking them home and enjoying that I don’t know them. They are regularly amazing to me. Tonight I listened to Ruth Laredo’s interpretations of Rachmaninoff’s solo works for piano... whether significant or not, it was wonderful.

As I made my salad, I thought about several things that I'm quite proud of, and that are now so natural, that I can barely believe anyone feels differently. Washing my arugula, I found a worm, and accidentally washed it down the drain, quickly apologizing, but while I did so, I thought fondly of the beautiful moth that would have been it's parent, a white marvel with a black dot on it's wing. I thought too of the ants who had been parading across my counter or floor for a couple weeks. I don't feed them like pets, and I do clean up and try to get rid of them, just so they don't get so bold as to infiltrate my cupboards, but I also talk to them, and encourage them to stay outside, because whatever they're finding inside (cat food, butter left on a knife, a spatula I'd stirred last evening's meal with) would be gone very soon. Equilibrium is best. And bees and wasps and hornets - when in the garden, I often find myself surrounded by buzzing insects working their sexy wonders with the flowers that will be my vegetables and fruits, and those that are the dizzying array of scents in my herb gardens, lavenders, mints, dill, thyme, sage, and many others. I feel a part of a greater existence when among these wonders, and I find I’d lost my fear of any of them a long time ago.

My life is a delicious soup of hurdles and realizations, sure - mistakes were made - but I don’t like the idea of regret. There is truth in chickens - they lack particular prideful practices, yet strut as if proud, and they at least entertain, and damn if they don’t squeeze eggs out for us to eat, though, of course it’s obvious they’re squeezing them out to raise chicks... purpose is confusing. I’ve fucked up a couple times, and yes, I’ve had some real trouble reconciling my humanism with the humans I’ve encountered here and there, and yet one, one particular human is a marvel to me, and I simply nod, and get it, and agree, and know, and see, and feel, and want.

Sex Education (the show) gave us a new season recently, and it came and went in a few days. This unrequited, or perhaps nervous - love between two main characters is charming, and painful. The excellent writers have conveyed to us that they are made for each other, and that tugs at our heart strings as we recall the quaint ones who were made for us, and sometimes got away. The season ended with them parting yet again, and it made me long for resolution.

My expansive day is not over yet. I’ve moved sewing machines to their temporary home as I contemplate selling, using, admiring them. I’m looking into home improvements... maybe just to sell, maybe to further engulf myself in domesticity. I made maple syrup once, heated with my own labor, fixed my own cars, sold shit to make some cash, and imagined all I could and would do. I work now, a lot, and make pots that go unsold. Many hundreds have accumulated, maybe thousands, and my retirement is in those pots and others I have yet to make.

Here I am with a long list of projects, the patio, garden fence, outdoor bathtub, pizza oven, chicken coupe (a car for chickens?), greater gardens, more pottery, swing time, a small deck, more south-west facing windows, and I'm thinking a lot about how to proceed, using fewer resources, and enjoying more of my natural surroundings.