Artfully Wild Blog Along: 14 September 2021

 I have been writing - or rather, whingeing - but restricting it to my paper journal. Even then I wasn't writing every thing down: I tend to trap negative thoughts inside my head until they die, or burst out inappropriately. Yesterday I wrote out all the things that have been building up and contributing to the sensation of having a huge lump in my esophagus threatening to choke me. My grief and anxiety has  growing to the point where I have nearly passed out from not breathing - although as every parent of a tantrum-throwing toddler knows that passing out leads immediately to the resumption of breathing! The writing down of it all offered some relief, and I slept better last night. Although I still woke in the small hours, I didn't wake with racing heart, raised adrenaline levels, my first thoughts being of my unvaccinated son in Auckland, which has been the standard for the last week. Instead, I just woke, read a chapter in my book, and went back to sleep.

Today I worked on seeing good things, and on breathing. It helped.

There are so many lovely things around our home at the moment:

• Keruru sitting in the trees, and putting on aerobatics displays in the air;
• a tui optimistically inspecting the peach tree to see if the blossoms are open
• the first tulip of the season - a gorgeous red;
• a spider's web sparkling in raindrops;
• there is blossom everywhere! Plum, peach, nectarine, pear;
• the kowhai tree has flowers, although past experience tells me they won't last long as the keruru gobble them in one gulp;
• even the moss has 'flowers'
• and the golden elm is delicious

I have finished reading two wonderful books, only to find the next book I picked up is also just wonderful: I won't finish the month with a record number of books read, but the quality is impressive so far.

I chatted with two of my sons, and my 17yo grandson on FB messenger. Technology is great - I think of the lack of communication for families in the 'Spanish' flu pandemic.

My Auckland son got his first vaccination. He had booked but had been unable to get an appointment until the end of October, but with more vaccinations in the country, and more places offering vaccinations, he was able to get one today! I am so relieved. I will sleep better tonight.

I received an unexpected birthday present in the mail. It is a beautiful handmade stationery folder that she made - she is a very skilled sewer. It came with a lovely card, and a message inside that finally broke me open. I cried with appreciation and gratitude. Then I cried for all the things that have been making me sad. I have not been able to cry. I cried for my recently dead friends, and for their families, and for my personal sense of loss. I cried for my loneliness over the past few weeks, being unable to see my family and friends. I cried for our poor world which is under assault in so many ways. I cried. And then, I cried, again, in appreciation and gratitude towards my friend, Denise, for her gifts, for the release.

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Artfully Wild Blog Along: 7 September 2021

 So much for daily blogging! I am struggling with physical and mental fatigue, but.... take a breath, take the next step, aim to be kind to everyone including myself......

• My pack of 72 seedlings is due to arrive today or tomorrow. That's ok. Just because we have always grown our own spring seedlings in the past, doesn't mean it always has to be that way.
• My pack of 72 seedlings is due to arrive today or tomorrow. I have spent four consecutive days preparing beds in which to plant them out. My body hurts.
• My pack of 72 seedlings is due to arrive today or tomorrow. Now I have to stay alive long enough to plant them out.
• My pack of 72 seedlings is due to arrive today or tomorrow. Then I have to stay alive long enough to harvest, prepare, and eat them, so as not to waste their lives.
• My pack of 72 seedlings is due to arrive today or tomorrow. They do not ponder the meaning or purpose of life. I need to learn to live like a cabbage seedling.

• The ducks are disgruntled: Mac fixed the fence yesterday and they can no longer go wandering into the neighbour's paddock, from which one cannot get back from. I don't know why. There is no apparent difference in the path of coming and going. However, once there she runs up and down the fence line crying. They had also discovered the garlic patch. Hence, the fence is repaired.
• The chooks, who always try to get to the vegetable garden when they are let out of their run, did not appreciate being caught and carried to a newly dug fenced garden to finish the clean up, and tried desperately to get out. Another came inside the house, was chased by Luna cat, and shat all over the carpet.
• Covid lockdown restrictions are reduced tomorrow, so I delivered the last of the free eggs to neighbours' mailboxes. The first of my paying customers will get their eggs tomorrow. But it won't feel like much of a release as long as one son is still locked down in Auckland.
• Because of Auckland's continuing lockdown, my 70th birthday special holiday to Great Barrier Island isn't going to happen. Both the island, and the ferry terminal are in the Auckland region. I guess being alive, well, and safe is a special thing, in and of itself, though somehow it doesn't quite feel enough.

• A friend expressed guilt for having expressed her feelings around pain. Something I have often done myself around both physical and emotional pain. Suddenly, for the first time, I realised that when someone questions their right to pain because someone else has it worse, I've had lots of good things, at least I haven't (fill in the blank)..... this actually denies others the right to express their pain. Because there is always something worse - look! that person is dead!
  
  I apologise to all those who have felt denied, dismissed, unable to speak, by my denials of my right to express my pain.

Artfully Wild Blog Along: 4 September 2021

• I awoke with a sense of dread. I asked Mac (who sleeps with the radio and ear buds), "Did anything else awful happen overnight?" I didn't want to get up and face a day of more heartbreak. "It's okay, nothing more."
• The duck with the injured leg, the one that injured said leg escaping from the orchard through a wire netting fence, was waiting for breakfast outside the orchard! She hopped, stumbled and flapped her way back over the fence, making her way to the feeding dish. When lockdown is over, and we can access materials, we plan on replacing the fence.
• I thought gardening in the countryside was a peaceful, meditative affair. But today I wore my newish hearing aids and was driven to distraction by dozens of small birds having a conference in the pohutukawa tree. Are they always there? I don't know because I don't usually wear the aids around home.
• This year I didn't put in a winter garden, and now it is spring and nothing is ready. As I said yesterday, no seeds sown in trays in the sun by the dining room window, the garden beds full of long grass and other weeds. Today I continued working on the bed I started yesterday and finished it, so now have room for some of the ordered seedlings. Tomorrow, another bed. If I can keep up the pace I will have space for all of them by the time they arrive.
• The keruru are definitely in mating mode - while I was gardening they were chasing each other around the garden, flying very low over my head. I hope they get their courting rituals over soon as I actually felt endangered! But they are magnificent birds.
• At the end of summer, my two beehives had collapsed from lack of proper care, and one was queenless. I thought they would both die, but in a last desperate attempt to save them, I merged the two hives. The single hive has made it through winter and I am hopeful it will take off and grow strong enough to make up a second. Today we did a hive inspection and put in a second varroa treatment. I am so happy to be back with a healthy hive once more. I adore my bees; they are such amazing creatures.
• For the first time since she came to live with us about three years ago, Luna is not demanding food with menaces tonight. We saw her earlier eating a small rabbit. Much as they are cute, rabbits are an awful pest, so we didn't rescue it. She is spending the evening stretched out in front of the fire with a very large tummy.
• Life under lockdown is so small and restricted, and yet it is also infinite. I have always felt a strong connection to this place we came to 21 years ago, always enjoyed the way working on the land strengthened that connection. The older I get the bigger the small things become for me. Lockdown has increased that feeling.
  
• A drop of water hanging from a plum blossom holds the entire world. The whole world is that drop of water.
  
• I am the drop of water. The drop of water is me.

Artfully Wild Blog Along: 3 September 2021

So already I haven't blogged every day of September - but that's okay, and a simple statement, not a hand-wringing tale of failure. Which those who know me well will understand as real progress.

TW violence.

Today, the third day of spring, has been a perfect blue sky day. These are the days when my early morning walk to feed the chooks and ducks is a delight: violets in the grass, pink peach blossom, white plum blossom. Lately it's been a chore, venturing out in wind and cold rain, plodding through mud, today was a welcome change.

The SAD has kept me lacking in motivation, and I realized that I have once again neglected the garden preparation necessary to get my summer garden planted. Not only that, but I haven't started seeds either. So I have ordered a 'vegcombo' pack of 72 seedlings of unknown varieties, which should arrive early next week, thus forcing me to get out and get weeding.

So it was that I spent several hours outside in the sunshine without sunscreen because it's been so long since I last needed it and am now the possessor of a fine pink complexion. Why don't I get out there more often? Gardening always makes me feel good, yet I resist it. The smell of freshly turned soil, the working hard and sweating with the effort, hands in the earth, surrounded by bird song, including the challenges of male pheasants declaring their ownership of their particular territories.

Lunch was satisfying too: homemade bread roll with home grown bean and seed sprouts and egg from my own chooks mashed with onion weed freshly foraged from halfway down our (600m) driveway.

It was encouraging to listen to the daily announcement of cases of covid in the community and hear that the numbers seem to be reducing.

Back out in the garden, I listened to Jessie Mulligan on National Radio talking to Lynda Hallinan about attracting bees to your garden until the programme was interrupted by a news flash. 

A man had been shot dead by police after attacking people at a supermarket.

At 5.15pm the prime minister and the chief of police held a news conference where we learned that the man was a Sri Lankan who came to New Zealand 10 years ago, has been under surveillance since 2016 because of his extreme ISIS views, but has never done anything to warrant arrest. The police watching him had no reason to think this was anything other than another supermarket shop by the man who had shopped there before, but he obtained a knife within the store and started stabbing people. He was shot by the police within 60 seconds of the start of his attack.

Suddenly the black dog is back, snapping at my heels again. I feel helpless, despairing  and sick to the core at this world of fires and floods and storms and violence and disease and hatred and covid and conspiracy theories, and at this heartless earth which just keeps on being beautiful and glorious without a moment's consideration of me or the rest of humankind.

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Artfully Wild Blog Along: 1 September 2021

First of September

First day of  spring.

First day of Level 3 lockdown for those of us south of Auckland.

Thirty eighth anniversary of my second son's birth.

Because of #3, my son's birthday was enlivened by being able to get a takeaway Thai dinner. Such are the highlights of a covid birthday. My heart aches to see him as I sit here remembering the night he was born. I was supposed to bring him home from the hospital on a two hour discharge, but that was so rare back then, it was three and a half hours before they worked out what forms I had to sign to legally relieve them of responsibility for my rash behaviour.

Also because of #3, instead of spending time with my son - in all honesty, I wouldn't have driven to Wellington to be with him but I'd have liked to have had that option - the highlight of my day was walking to the end of the road and back, taking surplus eggs, limes and garlic to put in neighbours' mailboxes. Last lockdown we put our surplus out by our mailbox for people to help themselves, but that was when the autumn weather was fine almost every day.

It's been a grey, wet, windy August, but today it didn't rain, and there was a bit of blue sky amid the clouds. The windmills on the hilltops to the east look like opposing armies on days like this: some shining white in the sun, the others a dark, dull metal grey in the clouds' shadows.

I have never managed to keep a daphne bush growing, but bought yet another about a month ago. Given my lousy track record, I decided to just leave it in the pot it came in, and wait for the already formed buds to emerge. Today I picked a small sprig of delicious smelling flowers to bring smiles to the dining table. 

The light is returning. I know summer will be here soon, even though the wait seems interminable - it has happened every year since I was born almost 70 years ago, so there is no reason to think it will happen otherwise this year.

The experience of those 7 decades  - how the fuck did I manage to live this long? -  also informs me that that damn black dog snapping at my heels will soon leave me alone for a while, once the summer sunshine arrives and I can spend days outside in the garden, at the beach, walking in the bush.

New shoes. 

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I have joined a facebook group with the stated intention of blogging every day of September: I doubt I will manage every day, but hopefully more than my average of about twice a month!

Reading: August 2021

 Nothing remarkable this month - except the book that I have been reading since the beginning of the year! But I still haven't finished reading it so you'll have to wait until the end of September for me to tell you about it. It is extraordinary, so much so that I only read a few pages at a time, and hold the words and knowledge and ideas inside my mind for days, savouring them, caressing them.... but, as I said, you'll have to wait.

Of the other books, the two best were: 

• By the Light of the Moon by Dean Koontz
• The Switch by Justina Robson

The others were good enough to read to the end, but not really inspiring:

• The Lubetkin Legacy by Marina Lewycka
• Unsheltered by Clare Moletar
• The Summer Seekers by Sarah Morgan
• Deep into the Dark by P.J. Tracy
• Who is Maud Dixon by Alexandra Andrews