Immerse

I've been feeling divided between projects lately. Chris and I recently completed a marathon of house projects -- moving things from room to room, painting, building furniture from packing crates, and finally making a new chicken coop for the ladies. The new one is just as ramshackle as the old one was, but at least it has walls and should provide more protection from predators and the elements.

But all of our projecting has left me spinning my wheels a bit. Jess and I still have wool to be sorted, washed and spun, and I have so much I'd love to learn about knitting and weaving. I have several ceramic pieces waiting ever so patiently to be fired. But I'm struggling to pick up momentum. My projects are all cramped together, competing for my attention in the hours between sleep, work and chores, and I can't seem to take advantage of the time I have to give them. There's too much transition time, and not enough time to fully immerse myself in what I'm working on.

I've been thinking a lot about immersion, about what it means to fully surround yourself with whatever it is you want to absorb. Thinking how when you finally manage to put yourself in a place where you are immersed, it allows you to stop worrying about whether you'll get a chance to do all you want to do, or whether you'll actually learn all you want to learn. You finally relax because you know that now, immersed in whatever material it is (a language, a set of skills, a way of life), you will inevitably emerge with new knowledge and ability.

On weekends out at Camp Trackers, I have that sense of calm, of trusting that I will learn what the world has to teach me. But at home, at work, and on my daily bike pilgrimages between the two, how can I can achieve that same sense of purpose?

I have my constant rhythms of bread and kefir-making. They ground my daily life with a sense of contentment. If I can get into a similar rhythm with pottery and with fiber arts, then I could devote the time to those skills without struggling so much in the transitions. I have to remember that the things that have become ritual now were still new experiments a year or two ago. Trust in my own ability to learn things given time and immersion.

An Inkling

I am on an endless quest to learn everything. That much has become clear. Pottery (from the harvesting of the clay to the firing of the pots), fiber arts (spinning, weaving, knitting, and crocheting), wilderness survival skills, tracking, native plant horticulture, fermentations of all kinds, fiddle and much more banjo . . . and the more I learn, the more I want to learn. Jack of all trades, master of none?

Yes, certainly.

But lately, I think I am starting to get an inkling of something. There is a feeling of pure focus that happens when I am throwing a pot, when it becomes centered and somehow just works. There is a particular moment and a feeling when it happens. It's almost like I have to ask the clay if it's ready before I begin, and then if it says yes, it works. Once it happens, I am mesmerized by the wheel, by the feeling of the clay running circles against my hands when it is centered, and by the way it fits the form my fingers draw as they raise it up into the shape of a vessel. It feels like the clay and I are working in unison.

Other times I fight the clay and it pushes my hand in off-kilter circles around the wheel like an unruly beast. I have always been convinced that when I can't center the clay, it reveals my own off-center state of mind. When I watch my classmates throw pots with ease I imagine that they are zen masters. But now, when the clay is off center, I think maybe I just forgot to ask the clay if it was ready. Or maybe I asked and it said no!

I don't know if it is really the clay that is needs to be ready, or if it is myself. I also don't know whether it matters; the point is that I'm checking in with myself at the same time as I am focusing all my attention on the clay.

Attunement.

I have the same feeling when the spindle starts to make smoke as I run my bow across it. Everything has to be ready first. I don't know how to explain it, but I feel like there is an energy in that circular motion, and that there is an art to harnessing it.

Of course, to master that art I will have to go out and practice instead of sending my pseudo-profound musings out into cyberspace.

A photo Jenny took of my (so far fruitless) bow drill efforts. More of her beautiful photos here:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Laughing-Lens-Photography/181467861907943

Pumpkin vs. Wild

It is a time of luscious abundance here at the pumpkin house. The hens are laying, the greens are in constant need of thinning, and the tomatoes are about ready to pop out of their skins. Garlic and shallots are drying in the sun on the front steps in papery shades of silver-white and green-gold.

I've put very little work into the garden this summer, with all my rushing

about in day camp crazyland. But I feel like I'm finally reaping the benefits of my last few years of gardening experience. When I look at this garden, small though it is, and compare it with my shady little community garden plot in college, I feel a sense of satisfaction in seeing how far I've come. Just having found a good place to put the raised beds to begin with, and having prepped them properly, has made this year so much more fruitful than the previous ones. Of course, moving south has helped too . . . up in Bellingham even when our tomatoes were healthy, they never made it to ripeness before the frost. Here's to longer, hotter summers!

Meanwhile, with the end of summer camp comes the beginning of the weekend immersion programs in which I will be a student instead of an instructor (there's a little more of an explanation in the previous post, if this is confusing.) I get to do two trainings a month: one focused on wilderness survival skills, the other on permaculture and restoration ecology. As is probably obvious from previous postings, I'm already more of a homesteader than a woods(wo)man, and this combination should allow my to deepen my more rooted, place-nurturing skills, while going completely out of my comfort zone to learn survival skills so I can wander in new places forming relationships with the wild things.

This weekend was wilderness survival.

We made digging/throwing sticks, debris shelters, and bow drill kits. Mostly we learned about sticks: how to find the right sort of stick for different tools, how to carve it and how to use it. If it had been a college GRE it would be Sticks 101.

We split into small groups to build debris shelters. These are not shelters the way people often think of shelter -- not huts or houses or any kind of place you would hang out. We're thinking of shelter in its most basic form: something that protects you from the elements. A debris shelter is more akin to a sleeping bag than a house in its purpose; it wraps tightly around your body, insulating you with layers of moss, duff and twigs, to keep you safe from the cold and wet night.

The process of building a shelter makes you look at your surroundings differently than you otherwise would. I'm used to walking through the forest looking for edible plants and mushrooms, but as I was gathering materials for our shelter I walked over an oyster log dozens of times before I noticed the pearly white mushrooms beneath my feet. (Luckily I hadn't crushed them, and they made a delicious pre-dinner snack later on.)

Instead, I was focused on the shapes of fallen wood -- what was straight, what was forked, what was thick enough to provide structure, what was brittle but not rotten, and (my favorite) what was covered in soft, pillowy moss for bedding. The forest became a maze of useful materials waiting to be gathered, cut, sorted and assembled. Oh, and thanked. Although we tried to gather only dead materials, there is nothing dead in the forest that doesn't already have new life springing from it. I was constantly aware of the destruction our construction left in its wake.

It was also an interesting group process. I think the four of us were keenly, and sometimes painfully, aware of our differences in experience and capability. Especially towards the end, as we were all becoming tired and hungry, we were quietly but certainly grumpy with each other. But I think we all knew that we were lucky to have each others' help, no matter what our level of expertise. It took us several hours to build a single shelter -- in a true survival situation, we would have needed four.

We worked all afternoon on a shelter that turned out to be too small for the largest person in our group. Every team was to choose a group member to sleep in their shelter, so we did a last minute modification for the night, extending the front with a squared entranceway. Our shelter was still ridiculously uncomfortable and our guy bailed halfway through the night.

In the morning we took the whole thing apart and built a bigger frame for it. The re-building was easier and more rewarding than we could have imagined -- since we had already gathered most of the materials, all that we needed were new forked sticks and a longer, straighter ridgepole. I think having a night of sleep and a belly full of breakfast also boosted my morale. Of course, we won't really know how well our new version works until next month when another one of us spends the night in there.

The rest of yesterday was devoted to fire. This was the most challenging thing for me so far. I've gotten pretty good at the one-match fire, but the no-match fire is a tough nut to crack. After I had made my bow drill kit I set about practicing, but my form was bad and I ended up using a lot of arm strength. I ran out of steam before I could make anything beyond smoke.

I did try practicing my fire-starting again this morning, but I was stiff and sore from my earlier efforts. I made some coals but I didn't last long, and the only things burning were my arm and shoulder muscles.

There is a pretty stark contrast between the homesteading and plant gathering that I usually do, and the survival skills we're learning. Here at the pumpkin house, most of the things I do involve the creation of something tangible -- a garden, a chicken coop, a meal, a ceramic pot, a basket. I work on it for a while, inside or outside, and then I can take a shower or plop into the hammock and read.

Not so with the wilderness survival skills. They are hot, sweaty, and dirty, and if you were really a purist about it, there would be no creature comfort relief. And the skills involve a lot more physical strength and coordination -- not my strong suits, but then, that's why I'm doing it.

Hence the "Pumpkin vs. Wild" title. Of course, the eventual goal is to blend the two (homesteading and wilderness survival) together, to garden with native plants and create habitat for half-wild creatures who can be our neighbors or our food as circumstances dictate. But for now I'm trying to learn one thing at a time, while my greed for knowledge springs me out of bed early each morning.

Wrapping up the Summer

This morning I slept in past sunrise and savored the knowledge that I am done with the 10 mile bike commute that has dominated my summer mornings for the last two months. When we did eventually roll out of bed, Chris and I sat on the front porch eating pancakes made with salalberries, blackberries, dock seed flour, homemade kefir, and eggs from our own feathered ladies. We felt like good little homesteaders.

Now the day has turned hot and windy, and I've managed to spend all morning and most of the afternoon doing life laundry: catching up on emails and phone calls, cleaning the house and buying groceries now that this month's food stamps have finally rolled around. My final piece of catch-up work, though, is to back up and tell the story of this summer.

Yesterday was my last day working at TrackersPDX as an environmental education apprentice. I assisted with the summer day camp program, teaching homesteading and wilderness survival skills to kids ages 5-14. It was intense to work full-time outdoors with kids; considering the long bike trip there and back, and with my gardening job thrown in the mix, I can fairly say I spent almost every daylight hour of the summer outside. I've never felt so strong, so stiff, or so sunbaked for so long. It feels great.

I need to reflect in some way, so I'll start with a list of what I learned:

• to make blackberry vine cordage, ivy baskets, a bamboo bow, dock seed flour, yarn netting and finger crochet, plaster casts of animal tracks, coat-hanger/loofa critter-catching nets, and bamboo bullfrog spears
• to adapt my storytelling to variously themed camps, changing the characters to be Forest Ninjas, Oregon Trail settlers, or Safari Trackers. And to find songs to match different camps (bullfrog and crawdad songs were awesome for Wild Safari and Wilderness Survival camps; Appalachian mining songs turned out to be good dwarfish music for Middle Earth Camp)
• a lot of good games to keep kids busy during transition times
• to use mud, ash or even blackberry juice ridiculously smeared on kids' faces as "camouflage"

This summer I had the opportunity to work with some incredibly talented instructors, each with their own very unique style, and each with different strengths that inspired me. Some had incredible storytelling ability, and were able to weave the week's experience into a narrative that held the children captive in its spell. Others were simply awe-inspiring in their knowledge of their subject -- there are a couple of awesome wilderness gurus at Trackers. And others were experts in crowd management, a skill you never truly appreciate until you're teaching six-year-olds to carve with knives or throw ninja stars.

There were also a couple of instructors who challenged me, and a couple of weeks that seemed to stretch forever. I thought a lot about what made these weeks more challenging; partly there were some groups of kids that were particularly difficult to coordinate. I discovered that while I love working with young children one-on-one, I enjoy working with older groups of children in the context of outdoor education. Five- and six-year olds are too spacey and in their own worlds, so you end up spending a lot of time just focusing and herding them. There was one instructor I worked with who did this with exceptional talent and grace, and I would love to get there one of these days, but for now I really savor working with older groups kids who can learn more complex skills.

I spent a lot of time finding the balance between being fun and goofing around with kids, and being assertive about safety. Once you establish a good rapport with a group, a good stern face is so important! It isn't about discipline necessarily, but about good communication -- the kids have to know what's a joke and what's serious.

I'm excited to do the weekend immersion program now and learn a more in-depth, adult version of what we've been teaching. Meanwhile, I want to always be thinking about how I would teach those skills in a way that would be accessible and fun for kids . . . if I do this again next year I will have a full set of tools to make it an even more awesome summer. For now, I'm kind of excited to go back to part-time nanny work during the weeks, and have some more time for the pumpkin house farm and other projects.

Farewell to a cook-pot and an old chicken

Many new projects.

I harvested one of the camas bulbs, which I had written about in my last blog entry, a million years ago. The plant didn't seem to have multiplied, so I let the rest stay put, and hopefully will be able to divide them later.

I wasn't going to dig the traditional pit-fire for my one lonely little camas bulb, but I wanted to steam it for a long time as indigenous peoples did (and do), to make the starches more digestible. I may have destroyed a pot in the process-- I burned the bottom terribly by letting all the water evaporate when I wasn't paying attention-- but the results were tasty.

I've been doing some gardening/landscaping work across town, and one of the perks is bringing home edible weeds I find on the job. The most strange and exciting of these has been mallow root, which I transformed into something you could, with a bit of imagination, call marshmallows. It was a pan of sticky sweet, slightly dirty marshmallow goo. But it was a bit runny and a bit too marshmallowy -- I think it needed a higher eggwhite:mallow root ratio. After thorough sampling I ended up using it in fudge. Which was awesome.

We inherited three new chickens, and slaughtered one -- Swinkles. She was quarrelling with the other hens; perhaps we shouldn't have named her after an argumentative former roommate. Also, we had deduced that she was the only one pecking the eggs, and we didn't want the others to pick up the habit. Chris wasn't down to join in the carnage, so Jess and I rolled up our sleeves and did the deed. It was intense but went smoothly, and in the end we had a bunch of egg yolks (weird, right?!), a ton of chicken stock, a chicken pot pie, and a lot of chicken fat to cook with. Thank you Swinkles.

Chris and I went on an adventure with Cascadia Wild's ethnobotany club, and harvested mussels and seaweed. The coast is such a bountiful wild food garden that we left scratching our heads as to why we had never harvested there before. Although maybe I should speak for myself . . . Chris wasn't a huge fan of either the seaweeds or the mussels. The seaweeds, to be sure, will be better as condiments and in miso than just eaten on the shore; and the mussels require a little bravery before you can enjoy their incredibly vagina-looking deliciousness. I loved them though, with butter, garlic and camas.

A wild northwest luncheon.

Life goes on

I started journaling for the first time when I was eight years old. At that point, most of my entries consisted of descriptions of what Mom made for dinner. And many of my entries started like this:

"Sorry it's been awhile since I wrote . . ."

I don't know who I was apologizing to, since my journal was private, but I feel the same way now. Life has been hectic lately, and I haven't had the focus to sit down and write about it. I haven't known where to begin. Since my last post wandered all the way to el Caribe, let's start back at home with a pumpkin house check-in.

The chickabiddies are growing girls, and a few weeks ago Chris and I moved them out to the coop with the old hens. It was easier than we'd thought it would be to make a chicken-wire barrier that lets them get used to each other without letting the big ones peck the little ones to death. This may be unnecessary since there's been no threatening behavior since the first few days, and no signs of violence when we do supervised visitations; but better safe than sorry.

The hens were pecking and eating their eggs for awhile, and it got to the point where I was making death threats ("If you don't stop eating you're eggs, we're going to eat you!) until I stuck an easter egg in their nest. Since then there have been no more broken shells. I guess the theory is that they try to peck on the plastic eggshell, and since it kind of hurts their beak it helps break the habit.

Spring has sprung. With it come nettle pesto, fiddlehead ferns, and lots of weedy wild greens. I tried lacto-fermenting some fiddlehead ferns with carrots, and then forgot about them in the back of the cupboard for almost a month. This photo was taken when I first put them in the jar with some whey, water and pickling spices. Now the water is a light yellow color, and fizzed up like crazy when I opened the jar. I tasted a fiddlehead, and it was very pickle-y, fizzy and a bit peppery. I think I like it, but I haven't decided yet, and I'm going to wait a while and make sure it doesn't make me sick before offering it to anyone else.

I've been doing some flower gardening in northwest Portland, which is great fun; I dig getting paid to play in the dirt, and it's novel and refreshing to work in a garden whose sole purpose is beauty.

Meanwhile, the garden at home is plugging along -- the alliums are happy, the kale is getting a bit slug-eaten, and the tomatoes have yet to journey beyond their kitchen table window home.

Also the camas is blooming, which means it is time to harvest it. What is camas, you ask? Well, it looks like an onion, tastes like a cross between potato and baked pear, and once upon a time it blanketed the prairies of the Pacific Northwest with a sea of starry blue flowers. Traditionally harvested from what is now Vancouver Island to northern California, blue camas was among the most important plant foods in the region. It cohabitated unique ecosystems with Garry oak, bear grass, a multitude of butterflies, deer, and, importantly, indigenous peoples. Today, only about three percent of the original camas prairies still remain (The Nature Conservancy).

That was the opening paragraph to a final essay I wrote about it for an environmental policy class a few years ago. I became slightly obsessed with learning about camas when I realized it was an incredibly important native plant food that had never even been on my radar before.

Anyway, I got some bulbs last fall and now it's blooming in our raised beds.

The only catch is that I tried some prepared the traditional way, steamed in a pit fire, and I wasn't a big fan of the flavor. So I have some serious research and experimentation ahead of me if I want to enjoy the taste of camas.

Some pizza Chris made awhile ago, served with

miner's lettuce and kefir cheese salad. I miss him and his pizza.

So that's the news from the pumpkin house farm, where all the women are sleepy, all the cats are needy, and all the men are up in the Seattle suburbs house-sitting for their parents.

(I'll save the part about why life has been so hectic lately for the next post, by which time maybe the chaos will have settled down a bit.)

La Isla

My thoughts lately have been drifting away from our pumpkin house farm, and toward the Dominican Republic. Even as I continue in my kefiry, sourdoughy endeavors, and even as the sun breaks through the clouds to welcome a tentative spring, I'm daydreaming of where I hope to be next winter.

This is still related to the theme of finding home, and here's why: I have a second home, one that I haven't visited in several years, but a second home nonetheless.

The last time I visited Rio Limpio was the Christmas before last. I was welcomed back into the family that had first hosted me when I was sixteen and speechless, delivered by an international volunteer program to their doorstep. Reunited, we caught up on what had been going on in each others' lives since my last visit. My host brother had married, had a child, divorced and most recently been almost killed in a truck accident. My host sister, who is studying to be a doctor, was nursing him back to health while continuing to be active in her church. She was also phone-dating an Ecuadorian man who lived in the United States; they were star-crossed lovers, since as an undocumented immigrant he could not leave the US, and my host sister had little desire to go there, and no means of getting a visa anyway. Apart from worrying about her son's injury and her own evolving health problems, my host mother was the only one whose life remained mainly the same. She maintained her complaints about her husband's debt, absence and infidelity, while he maintained his distance and ignored his wife as much as possible.

Funny how when you don't see people for a while, their lives become distilled into a two-dimensional gossip column. But it was so good to see these people, and to have our lives intersect again.

The other news I got caught up on was the news of the town, Rio Limpio. Where there used to be only sporadic electricity, now the government had installed solar panels on all the roofs. Now you could do laundry whenever you wanted . . . while your husband and his friends watched American television. There was also increasing talk of paving the hazardously muddy road into town. There has always been such talk, but with the rate of change in Rio Limpio, now I was starting to believe it.

A paved road would make life better in many ways. It would buy critical hours of travel time, allowing sick and injured people to reach city health care facilities. It would make it easier to visit family in the city, and vice versa. It would indirectly bring all kinds of employment opportunities to a depressed little mountain town.

But people in Rio Limpio complain about the traffic and crime problems in the city, and they lament the loss of time to enjoy life. That's what keeps them in Rio Limpio despite the poverty and struggles of hard manual labor: the chance to sit and talk over coffee with family and friends, to walk across town to call on a sick neighbor or a grieving relative, or to play dominoes in the backyard amidst clucking hens and the blaring of bachata music on a distant radio station.

I'm in no place to judge development in Rio Limpio; I may call it home but I don't live there. I can only look on in wonder as these changes come to pass. Still, I was heartened to find that CREAR, the local school for organic agriculture, had regained its funding and was thriving more than ever. I was also excited to speak with the father-in-law of my host brother, who was working with the eco-tourism office in Rio Limpio, and who was thinking critically about sustainable development and was actively working to guide the town's progress in a way that would be healthy for everyone.

Most of all I was excited to visit a biodynamic farm that I had heard about previously but never actually been to. On the edge of a national park, the farm blended into the forest except that it was brimming with food -- grapefruit, oranges, cacao, coffee, and ginger were all intermixed in what seemed to be a kind of Eden, a magic food forest. At the time, I daydreamed about going back for a longer period of time to do some kind of internship at the farm and nursery, helping with translation if it were needed, and learning about sustainable agriculture in the tropics. Now as I write about it, I'm getting excited about that idea again. I googled it and found that Rio Limpio now has a slick tourism website. It's bizarre to see the people and places I know, who have always seemed a world away, within such an easy reach through cyberspace.

But what does this mean for my oekoseeking here? How can I board a plane and ditch all the things I've been working on? Would they still be here when I got back?

Most of all, do I lose integrity by spreading myself across so much space? Feeling proud as I ride my bike to work, but happily boarding a plane to burn fossil fuels for 3,000+ miles and then talk about "sustainability?"