Slug Challenge Kick-off 2018

The first seeds have been planted. This means that my yearly challenge has been issued to the slugs who are the de facto overlords of The Crooked Wood.

I think this is year two (?) for my flat-topped hugelkultur bed. 

I bought a bigger bottle of Abundance liquid fertilizer at Seedy Saturday this year, but last year's empty is still in my garden. I think this photo demonstrates how picturesque it can be to be messy and a total chaos muppet.

I hear slugs hate sand, so I gave this bed of bok choy and other greens a good sprinkling...

Salinger enjoys gardening. And, of course, he is quite good about staying off the planting beds –
at least when anyone is watching. Now, if only I could help him acquire a taste for hunting slugs – but ugh.

Some of the open-sourced seeds I got from the lovely folks at Seedy Saturday this year
(held in Dayspring at the Municipal Activity and Recreation Complex, aka the MARC, back in February).

The garlic I planted in the fall is several inches above the ground, so that's encouraging. I am planning to build many more hugelkultur beds in the next couple of weeks – some for veggies, some for flowers and herbs, some located along my driveway and others on the land that was cleared around the new cabin. 

I am also harbouring some nut tree fantasies. I haven't decided yet if those are in my budget for this year, but I expect you know the saying: "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."

Mindfulness and Meteor Showers

Every year I get excited about the Perseids meteor shower – and then it's overcast or there's a full moon or I forget about it or I can't be bothered to get up in the middle of the night and go look.

This year, it felt important to me not to miss them. I read that while they peak around August 11–12, the light from the waxing moon may interfere with viewing this year. So I decided to make some time to view them before their official peak.

Tucked away in the woods, my view of the sky is somewhat limited, so I asked a friend who has a glorious hill behind her house if she would mind if I drove up to the top in the early morning to do some star-gazing. She gladly welcomed me to share her skyscape.

Staying up late is not my preference, so instead, I got up early.

I drove in the dark up the dirt road leading to her hilltop, the long grass in the middle of the road pinging against the bottom of my car. At the top, it was brisk, but not too brisk. Breezy, but not too breezy. Extremely clear. I was on the late edge for viewing (after 4am, with the sun already starting to lighten the east), but the moon had set and most of the sky was still very dark. I saw seven meteors in about 20 minutes, with the two brightest just before I left to come back home and start working.

As I stood there (I had forgotten to bring a blanket to lie down on), I thought about how magical it is to watch shooting stars. Calm, with happy surprises.

Calm can be a tricky place. It can be easy to slip from calm into the stories we tell ourselves to keep our brains busy. I don't know about you, but some of the narratives I spin about my life are not very pleasant ones. A few times while I was star gazing this morning, my mind drifted off to think about difficult things: work and personal relationships that are troubling me, the book that I'm reading about trauma (The Body Keeps the Score) that is stirring up many upsetting feelings. Each time my mind strayed – Whoosh – shooting star! And each time, I felt a surprised and delighted smile sweep my face, hustling my anxious, hamster-wheel thoughts out of the spotlight.

It strikes me that "calm with happy surprises" might be the optimal state for human life.

Calm without any surprises is boring. From there we often slip into old scripts: catastrophes, anxieties, dramas, anything to make things interesting and give us an illusion of control. Never calm, (i.e. continually stressed) is a brutal way to live. And mostly calm with unhappy surprises, with that slammed from out-of-the-blue feeling, is definitely not optimal.

I have a lot of calm in my life right now. I need it and I'm grateful for it.

I'm reminded this morning to seek out and appreciate happy surprises too.

I had one last Friday, when some friends dropped by and invited me to join them for supper and a few hands of gin rummy.

And come to think of it, I had another happy surprise a few weeks ago, when some friends were home for a visit and spent an evening reminding me how to play Slay the Demon – a game I find deeply meditative and sweetly surprising. And of course, some visits with my favourite young people this summer have been spontaneous and full of in-the-moment sandcastle-building and wave-jumping. And some heart-to-hearts with friends have taken me to that same "brain-lit-up-in-connection" good place.

Waves are happy surprises. So are smiles and hugs. So are friends dropping by. So is dancing. So is breaking out into song. So is the High-5 burger at the Hebbville Tastee Freeze.

I'm reminded to cultivate and/or appreciate happy surprise interruptions to my long hours of work and the dark thoughts that sometimes take over my mind while my hands are busy typesetting.

When you wish upon a star...