a bowl full of sunshine~lessons from the wild.

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sunshine in a bowlplaying with flowersGrumbly to the bone the other day, I prodded myself and my small people out the door in hopes of letting the fresh air breath light into my bad mood and make everything okay again.  Or most everything.  My own lack of gratitude for a perfectly wonderful day and my hope to recapture it out in the sun pails in comparison to the weight and worry of those experiencing very real challenges and trials, as it does face to face with tragedy on the scale of marathons and countries and the whole hurting human race.

But those things I could manage to control, I knew, might be helped by some time outside.  And because I am easily influenced by the natural world towards happiness, and because a quick glance around my day to day life always serves to remind me just how small my own sometimes frustrations are, we quickly felt up for trying something new and something fun~dandelion jelly.

I have been keen this spring, more than ever, to pay attention to some of the weeds out here on the farm that can be useful.  This drive is mostly prompted by my slowly gathering desire to make more of our own medicines, but the truth is, spring weeds are often also great to eat.  The stinging nettle has been a part of our spring diet since a neighbor went out into the woods with Andre the very first spring of our marriage and collected some with him, returning back to our little mountain cabin to prepare them for dinner, much to my pregnant mind’s skepticism. Now, so many years down the road, they are a regular part of our business harvests too, and one of our top sellers.  We even start crave them come early spring, and we make batches and batches of pesto with them, both to eat and to freeze, while we also try to dry enough of them to make a wonderfully nourishing tea to drink throughout the year.  We love them.

But besides nettles, this spring I am noticing that cleavers grow like crazy out here too, and can be a healthful addition to smoothies or juiced and used to soothe the skin in case of injury, and made into a tincture for the lymphatic system.  Wild violets spring up and while they last, they add their cheer to our now lettuce based spring salads.  Plus they are one of the first sweet treats we can just go outside and nibble on, slowly inching us closer to the even sweeter and more snacky snap pea and  strawberry season.

But of course, the most ubiquitous of all these weeds to be so long revered and used is the dandelion.  Eat the leaves early, before flowering, and they can stimulate a body grown slow and weary from winter.  Use the flowers for jelly and wine to capture something sweet and pleasurable.  And if you go the mile, you can harvest the roots and they will do a fine job of helping heal you from the inside.  Always a delight for children, with seed heads that are wish makers extraordinaire–these are a friendly plant.

As we gathered a basket full of these flower heads and then sat in the grass and painstakingly but leisurely pulled off just the petals for making the jelly, the smallest among us dig in nearby dirt, unearthing salamanders and earthworms and giggles, while the older boys sat chatting with their mama about the simplest but sweetest of things.  In that moment, I could already taste this jelly in my mouth, this jelly that tastes like almost nothing at all.  It is simple and sweet, like spring.  Like our days.

I am so lucky.

These often maligned flowers really did brighten my spirits in both the playing with them like I would were I a child again, and in the slow, peaceful work they brought me, side by side my own children on a sunny spring day.  But mostly, they did this through the reminder that even weeds can have a purpose too.

Right now, in spring, this theme is still a pleasant one to take meaning from, and I see it touching some of my closest friends who are also like making metaphors.  One friend posted a picture of a thistle sprouting up on her farm and hearkened it to a symbol of perseverance.  Another friend’s daughter brought her a bouquet of these same wonderful yellow flowers alongside a bouquet of tulips and gave her pause to consider the beauty in all people.  And the herbalists amongst my crowd, of course, fully appreciate the deeper wisdom of weed culture.  Like I find comfort in a bowl full of sunshine, I find comfort in finding meaning, and I find even more comfort in seeing that this meaning is out there, rising from the earth, finding us all.

Come summer, we will be knee deep in weeds that will temper the growth of the plants we are purposefully cultivating in our fields if we don’t take the time to get rid of them.  They will inevitably take on a different, less pleasing meaning then.  But right now, in all their wild glory, they remind me that I have the blessing to be at ease.  That really, I have the duty to enjoy it all.  That this is the only proper response to a moment offered to you from this universe that is not wrought with hardship, not burdened or traumatized by forces outside your control.  That by being in joy if I can, I am being most sympathetic to those who can not.

Take your joy and do not be ashamed of it, because it is your moment.  Find your care and concern for the world at large and those you know who need it–and yourself when it is your turn–from the deepest part of your joy.  Then, abandon to the dandelions your more trivial concerns.  This way, the weight of your worries can find their most realistic proportions weighed against the more strangling weeds that come into this world.   We all have things to grumble about, and we are all legitimately and honestly free to experience them, but the perspective of weeds is this–most things are not as bad as they may appear.

If we are not ourselves in the darkness of a deadly nightshade patch, then we should try to find our own surroundings as pretty as we can.  We should take comfort in knowing that most everything around us in this world is useful and good and full of light, and then move forward from that point, that understanding.  There is solace to be found such.  There is, as this Wendell Berry poem so often comforts me with, peace to be found in these lessons of the wild.  And there is, if you can look closely, sunshine amongst the weeds.

be in joy

Rise up!

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pretty eggs

pretty sweet boy

I have a million and one things to say about yesterday’s holiday.

From an ode to the sweetness of my wonderful kids and more praise for glorious weather.  Simple gratitude for simple fun and lovely gatherings.

To beginnings, resurrections, growings~in the ground, in the body, and in the heart.

But the two words that ended up on the chalk board under the words Happy Easter this year are just right and straight to the point–

rise up.

To your life, to your day.

Rise up, again and again, like the sun in the morning and the green from the brown.

The spring from darkest winter.

Your spirit can soar–should soar–while your feet touch this ground.

That rising is what matters, through it all.

The lessons of Easter are many, but the crux of it is this (and this applies to every single day).  Here is a day to think about what it means to be both deity and person.  Here is a day to practice the wild duplicity of being human and alive in this world.  Here is a day to try, once again, your hand at perfecting the art of simply being~a mother playing a magic bunny~as well as magnificently being~a never ending tide of upward motion.

magic making

hot, sweaty, dirty, love

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hotsweaty + dirtyloveToday, we planted and planted and planted.   The soil is perfect.

I’m not sure where the rain is hiding, but for this pacific Northwest farm, the sun is like a dream.

And for this summer-heart, dirty-hands-happy mama, this is love.

balancing acts: purple cauliflower

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purple, purpleThere are a few themes I have running in my head like a mantra for this year.  Balance was the one I was sure most important.  It was the word I kept writing on the tops of my to do list.  That, and “today is the only day”, which is a constantly good reminder.

But the truth is that balance is a finicky goal when you are a homeschooling mother of four.  I keep wanting to balance some self-care, self-soothing, self-loving time in with the call of other’s needs and the beating rhythm of the farm, but I just can’t trump those others’ needs with my own, it doesn’t work for me.  And I seem wildly inept at creating time.  Sometimes, there just isn’t enough of it and I know that some day my “today is the only day” will look a lot less peopled than my today’s, so I let go of wanting more than it seems I can do while my main occupation and preoccupation is being here for smaller folks.

That kind of balance is hard to find when I look at how the scales are tipped at present, and I want to have peace with that as easily as I did when I probably had more peace in general–a few spirits ago and only a dream of a farm in hand.

so much purpleThe balance that is coming in to focus this year is the structure of our farm business.  We have been a CSA driven business since we set up shop out here, and we always thought this was the best way for us to farm.  We love the deeper connection we tend to get with our CSA customers, the sureness of their harvests over the more changing nature of the markets, and it just was always our driving intention.  We had read so much about it before we actually started to farm, our book knowledge left us settled with a plan before we’d begun at all.

As can be the case with just about anything you learn from a book, but so much so with farming, until you are on your land and doing your thing, you don’t really have all the information you need.  And as great of a model as the CSA model is, for our farm and its particulars–size, labor force, capital, etc–it meant that our own little (big) family was always last on the receiving end of all the really great food we grew.  Having community members invested in our farm for the whole year and having them be the main supporters of our farm meant that we prioritized their experience, always.

This is, of course, a good thing and is what we should be doing for them.  And we were always happy to do it.  But, as with the shoemaker’s children running barefoot round town, at times it was really hard for us to not taste any of a particularly wonderful crop, or to end up (graciously) eating food from other farms instead of our own.  To say it like that makes it sound a bit crazy, even though it wasn’t.  It was, however, not really sustainable for a sustainably driven operation, right?

And so, this year we significantly downsized our CSA.  We even downsized our markets to one summer-only market.  We hope that by restructuring it all, with our family prioritized, we will actually better serve everyone.  The word that has now materialized like a sweet song in my mind for this year is this~abundance.  A beautiful word.  A positive word.

Not that balance isn’t, but for me, it was always sounded with a sense of lacking and guilt.

Our smaller CSA will have a pretty sweet year since we will never be stretched at harvest.  We can provide for them even more abundantly.  Our market customers will be greeted with abundance each week too, since most of the harvest won’t be under the table set aside for the CSA.  And our family will experience the glorious state of abundance as well, which is after all, truly one of the best blessings of growing your own food.  It fills you up in many, many ways. If you have ever done it, you know that feeling.

And so, already in March, my kitchen is up to its ears in purple.  Cauliflowers!  A crop that was usually so important for market at this time of year that I could only drool over it while it made its way into our dear customers hands.  And already, I am getting out the vinegar and the canning jars (fermented cauliflower was decidedly unsavory in our opinion), preserving the abundance.  This, I love.

And although all we do out here on this farm stems from our love for it, to deepen this, straighten it out a bit, and get it just a little bit more right, is always good.  Change is a constant for us–today really is the only day–so we won’t say things are settled, we know better than that.  But I can tell that for this year, or this today at least, things are looking so good.   Balanced, even, a bit more.

pretty pickled purple

nine is bittersweet, so we welcomed spring in the snow

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one last hurrah wintermy snow boymy sweet boyTo be born on an equinox lends one a quality of bothness.  Our second boy, our bringer of light, turned nine on this year’s first day of spring.  And for all the sunshine he brings with him to this world, he is our most devout lover of winter and snow, poor valley boy.   So we aim for a snow trip each year at this time, welcoming the warmer weather of a new season by visiting the much colder weather in the mountains.

And this dreamy boy is now nine, waking up more each day.  He has hung on to his innocence so much longer than his quick to grow up older brother.  But now he is nine and he is shedding more and more, just like we all do when we grow.  I love the babyhood’s of my children so much, so tender and sweet.  And I love the growing that takes place each year from nine on, the increasing awareness and reasoning, it is a privilige to witness their blossoming.  But as with all things slowly left behind, movement forward is bittersweet.

Maybe not so much when we move from winter to spring.  That, I am ready for, 100%.  But the growing up of my children–it is at once the most wonderful thing and the saddest.  Their growing is so marked.  We have to let go so often.

But we can still take to the mountains for a bit of play, go back and forth in time in our hearts and memories.   It isn’t too hard to still find some snow on the first day of spring.  The line is always soft enough to traverse for a while, until we can finally easily settle into what is new.