Dirty Fingernails

It's been pointed out to me that it's been a month or more since I blogged.

That I should start up again.

So here's a poem I like by Emily Dickinson.

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us -- don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog

And a totally unrealted photo of a monkey.

I haven't been blogging because I have been sinking my fingers into dirt, breaking ground with shovels and forks and planting my garden with 34 tomatoes, Swiss chard, onions, beets, marigolds, Castor beans, pole beans, grapes, lettuce, spinach, basil, cilantro, snow peas, calendula, sunflowers both giant and dwarf and dahlias and lilies and fennel and hops and garlic and cabbage. And a few things I don't recall right now.

I also haven't been blogging because I read too much. I've been watching things fall apart in our economy, our climate and our culture. I've been thinking about how global climate change denial is growing, how we ignore our government torturing and drugging and deporting and imprisoning people, how our unsustainable ways are burning up resources, and also thinking about what an ugly freak show our media and the folks who lap it up are making out of the presidential race.

And I am sick onto the point of insanity of the way the Bush administration seems to waltz right over the top of the thin ice we're on.

So rather than harp on the ugly, I took time to think about these things.

And then I decided my new lifestyle is going to be preaching and practicing gardening, biking and spitting in the face of it all by growing as much of my own food as my little back yard can make, and learning to use this monkey brain of mine to spit in the face of borrowed trouble and try and enjoy the wild ride ahead.

Now's all we have to work with. I keep forgetting that And now's enough.