Frogs and Ravens

Snow Is Gone Now

My banner's been consistently several months behind the season. Oh well. Enjoy the new scenery!

Our First and Last Home

We are born in bodies, we live in bodies, and we die in our bodies.

Our bodies are the only true homes we will ever know, homes that are with us from birth to death, no matter where we are or who we are.

This is true for all of us, which is why violations of persons that focus on their bodies are so heinous. We live in our bodies for all of our lives, and our lives are as expansive or as cramped as those bodies permit. Our bodies are our tools for interacting with the world, the means of expressing ourselves, giving voice to our innermost thoughts, consoling loved ones, admiring art, creating art, communing with plants, bonding with animals, feeding ourselves and others... We live in our bodies for all of our days, and life, both metaphoric and literal, is not possible without them.

This is why crimes against our bodies are so horrifying. We speak of feeling violated when a burglar breaks into our car, or our house, or when someone spray paints something on the walls of our office, or when someone cuts down a favorite tree, or when someone leaves shit on our doorstep.

More Birthday Silliness

You can customize your own Einstein picture here.

2x3x2x3

Today I am 36!

Garden

Why is it so satisfying to think about gardening and seeds and growing plants? It has been argued by some that human beings have an innate attraction to the living world around them (the biophilia hypothesis); others take this one step further and posit that gardening in particular is, if not truly innate, so intimately bound up in our species' history that it might as well be. Christian mythology links humanity's origins with gardens from virtually the beginning; the moment when we became truly human, it could be argued, is when we shifted from simply residing in god's garden to making gardens of our own.

The larger implications of that particularly position are somewhat troubling to me in that they imply that gardening is about breaking away from and fighting with the non-human world; the idea that having to work the soil is punishment rather than a condition of existence is a curious one. All animals work for their livelihood; human beings are no different from other creatures in this. Christianity as a spiritual system is troubling to me precisely in the degree to which it denies the animality of human beings, seeing their physical selves as the source of unholy urges and as chains binding them to the terrestrial plane, as something that must be rejected and denied in order to reunite with the divine.

For me, gardening and living and spirituality is more about connections than separations and denial -- connections with myself, with my family, with my world and with god. A person who gardens is opening up to the experience of being a whole, healthy human animal, engaged with the world. The urge to garden could be seen as a desire to return to The Garden, but I choose instead to see it as an embrace of the wonders of the ordinary world, the world that we entered when we became knowing animals rather than instinctual ones. When I garden I can sense the divine in everything, a divinity that takes patience and intelligence and love to perceive -- a divinity that is rooted in the everyday workings of ordinary life.

When I look back over my family tree, I see generations of people who worked with their hands, transforming raw materials into things that would feed, clothe, and shelter their families, things that would bring beauty and comfort into lives shaped by hard work and tough times. My father's father, and his father, worked with metal and soil. They were farmers and mechanics and engineers. My mother's people worked with animals and plants, breeding fast horses and growing exotic plants in their backyards. They canned and sewed and knit and carved and painted. When I work with my hands, hands which are practical and deft, I can feel in my blood and sinew the craftsmen and women in my past touching the world. These are hands that should get dirty and grow callouses, while remaining sensitive enough to delicately graft a fragile scion or stroke the feathers of a new-hatched chick.

When I run my hands through the soil, cold and wet, warm and moist, rough or dry or cracked or stony, I feel grounded in a way that's not just metaphor. Watching seeds transform from small packets of vegetable matter into green organisms that respond to light, water, and touch is humbling, and evokes a tenderness that aches in the deep spots of my psyche. It fills a primal need, the same that leads me to feel great satisfaction watching something eat, especially when it is eating food that I myself provided. The growing of plants, especially plants for food, binds me to the world around me -- the world of green living things, and the world of caring and feeding. Did Eve need the snake to tell her to pick the apple? To feed it to Adam? I suspect that it was her deep human spirit, her animal self alive in the world, that drew her to the reddening fruit, even as it was her nurturing self that prompted her to share that fruiting bounty.

What kind of god brings such beauty into the world, and sets it before creatures in whom such urges of appreciation and nurturing are inborn, and says, act not? This is not my god. My god lives in the tiniest of seeds, round grains of amaranth or poppy or lettuce, and in the wide skies that open up and water them, in the insects that creep and fertilize and devour, in the soil that cradles and dirties, in the rocks that support and bruise, in the fingernails of the working hands of gardeners, in the gentle fingers of parents stroking the cheeks of their sleeping children, in those cheeks as well, in all that is and was and will be. Eat not of the apple? Is this not the same as saying that one may not partake of the divine?

We live now in a world where children can grow up and die never seeing a tree. Where people can spend their whole lives eating nothing but chemicals and compounds that support life but do not nourish it. Where those who deny the animal nature of the species are considered holy and civilized, where our physical bodies are attacked and transformed to remove as many signs of their kinship with other creatures as possible. We strive to live in worlds entirely of our own making, inhabited solely by our kind and a few creatures we trust not to erode our fragile sense of specialness, growing up afraid of leaves and bugs and our own smells and the sensations of our skin and the animal essence beneath.

Plunge your hands into the soil, and ground your spirit. Watch the unfolding of a leaf and realize that you are not alone in living. Eye the coming rainclouds and dance in the pounding rain and bask in the breaking sun, and know that the world is so much larger than yourself. Pluck a fruit warm from the vine, put it in your mouth, and revel in the way your body has physical form and weight. Pick another and feed it to someone you love, for the pleasure of giving and nourishing and watching their eyes change with the delight of being fed good food by someone who cares for them. Look at your hands sowing seed, tying up the vines, picking and canning the fruit, and know that you are here because the people whose hands also once held the genes you share did this too. We are small, complicated creatures, who live in a large, complicated world. This is something in which to rejoice, not something to fight. We are holy, the tomato is holy, the soil and the tomato hornworm are holy.

One does not have to garden to know this, but it does not hurt.

Koufax Voting Underway

I'm nominated for three categories: "Best Blog (Non-Professional)," "Most Deserving of Wider Recognition" and "Best Writing."

There are other great folks on the lists, too, so even if you don't want to vote for this blog specifically, do drop by and vote.

Not Quite Human

I am a person who does not have full human rights.

My father, brother, boyfriend, uncles, male cousins, nephew, and other men have full human rights.

Some women have full human rights, but they had to give up their fertility to gain them.

My friend's school-age children, male and female, have full human rights, if not full civil rights due to their minor status.

I, and every other woman who possesses a fertile uterus, do not.

Full human rights include the right to personal biological integrity. This means that no one can legitimately do anything to your body without your explicit consent. If you are a child, your legal guardians can make decisions about your physical self without your consent, but they must make decisions that are of benefit to you. If you are mentally incapacitated, no one may authorize potentially dangerous invasions of your body without your consent. If you are dead, no one may damage or breach the bodily integrity of your corpse without your consent.

A man's human rights are not subject to the whim of the state. A child's human rights are not subject to the whim of the state. Even a corpse is granted the right to bodily integrity.

Women are different.

No one can make you give up your organs, your blood, your marrow, your skin, or any other part of yourself, living or dead, against your will. No government can require this of you either, even if you are the most heinous criminal to ever walk the earth. Charles Manson's body was his own. So was Timothy McVeigh's. So is Saddam Hussein's. So will be Osama bin Laden's if he is ever caught and punished.

This is not true for women.

We speak with horror of governments that refuse to recognize this most basic of human rights: the Nazis and their experiments on Jewish and homosexual prisoners, Saddam Hussein and his torture chambers, the United States and its experiments on black men and its torture of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We speak approvingly of people in this country who advocate taking away the rights of women.

We consider them magnanimous and generous when they say that being a victim of a crime is not a reason to take away those rights, while maintaining that doing so is okay in other circumstances.

This is what it means to be a woman.

I am a person whose rights are limited and conditional.

I am a person whose body can be controlled by the state in at least one part of this country.

I am a person who faces the loss of my rights if I am attacked by a criminal.

I am a person who can lose her rights as a result of an accident.

I am a person who must make a case before a judge to have my rights recognized.

My rights are contingent on the whims of legislators and the state and judges and religious minorities.

My rights are not "inalienable" even though our Constitution says that they are.

This is what it means to be a woman. Your rights are not the same as other human beings' rights. Your rights are violated every single day.

These human rights violations go unnoticed every day.

These human rights violations are justified by blaming the victims.

These human rights violations are justified by granting special rights to other people.

These human rights violations are viewed as normal.

These human rights violations provoke no outrage among citizens who consider themselves good people.

These human rights violations are offensive only to "radicals" and "extremists" and people who are "hysterical."

These human rights violations can be voted into law, and often are.

These human rights violations are not threatening, because they are not "contagious" -- a government that violates the rights of this group is not seen as likely to violate the rights of other groups as well.

These human rights violations do not matter, because they happen to people who are not considered as having the same human rights as other human beings.

These people are women.

I am a woman.

My human rights are vulnerable to the whims of the state in a way that no other groups' are.
My concerns about this are the rantings of someone who doesn't get it.
My concerns about this run against the common wisdom.

I am a second-class citizen at best.
I am denied the most basic of human rights: the right to my own body.

This is the truth.

Garden Insanity

I've ordered seeds!

This is what I'm getting:

Dye Plants: Hopi Red Dye Amaranth, Indigo, Madder (also Maroon Coreopsis and Hopi Black Dye Sunflower).

Herbs: Lemon Basil, Thai Basil, Chocolate Peppermint, Black-Stemmed Spearmint, Peppermint.

Fruits and Vegetables: Snowy White Eggplant, Paint Dry Bush Bean, Cherokee Wax Bean, Mitla Black Tepary Bean, Satsuki Madori Cucumber, Bird's Nest Gourd, Rouge D'Hiver Buttercos Lettuce, Emerald Oak Looseleaf Lettuce, Red Deer Tongue Looseleaf Lettuce, Charentais Cantelope, Moon & Stars Watermelon, Oregon Giant Snow Pea, Sweet Cal Wonder Bell Pepper, Cocozelle Bush Zucchini, Butternut Squash, Stella Blue Squash, Red Currant Cherry Tomato, Red Calabash Slicing Tomato.

Grains: Four-O-Seven Quinoa.

Flowers: Maroon Coreopsis (also a dye plant), Scarlet Flax, Hopi Black Dye Sunflower (also a dye plant), Miriam Edible Sunflower, Sweet Peas, White Sweet Alyssum.

I know this looks like a HUGE lot of seeds. I figured I'd rather have them than not, and it was getting impossible to decide. I'm also probably only going to plant one or two plants of each kind, rather than several. (Only ONE (ONE!) zucchini!)

The seeds (and some plants) are coming from Seeds of Change and The Thyme Garden. (The Thyme Garden is a really cool place; they'll do organic catering and host weddings, too.)

Busy

Sorry - no real post today. The Annual Report opened up its maw and swallowed us alive today.

I do have a shopping cart of seeds to look through -- more later, perhaps.