Honey, I'm Home!

Today's bittersweet harvest from one of our abandoned hives. Thankfully the other is thriving & well.

* Queen Bee *

All About Me - news from the goings on in my life

Has it only been a week? (In this case, no, because I'm a few days late in posting, ha!). Still, it always surprises me, especially when I look back over my pictures and remember all of the things that I have done and seen.

Taking the Ferry to Grand Island

I started off the week by visiting the farm where some of my housemates have / currently work. After breakfast at dawn, I took a lovely walk out to the pasture, where I got to watch four dairy cows being milked and cared for. This was a very welcome image in my head later on in the day, when I tagged along at a livestock auction. I felt very affected by feelings of fear and chaos, due mostly because of the crowded, feces-steeped holding stalls and the way some of the cows were in poor health. As a couple of friends and I were reflecting, one reason scenes like this may be disturbing is because the way that we treat animals reflects on the way that we treat people. Thus, to see them poked, prodded, and paraded, spooked into frantic displays of their qualities, I could not help but to think of times not so long ago when humans were similarly treated as creatures not worthy of respect when money was on the line. It reminds me of a teaching in "Be Here Now" by Baba Ram Dass:  "A holy man once gave two men a chicken and told them to go and kill the chickens where no one could see. The first man went behind a fence and killed the chicken. The second man walked around for two days and came back carrying the live chicken. When the holy man asked him what had happened he said 'Everywhere I go, the chicken sees.' " 

 Though it was an intense day, I deeply appreciate my time on Grand Island, where I took a bike ride on open road beneath bright Autumn sky, completely alone amidst fields of green and wondrous, sweeping hawks!
           My week also contained the wonderful experience of visiting the Traditional Japanese Gardens in Portland. I'll save myself the trouble of a deeply impressive description by sharing the statement from their website: "Proclaimed the most authentic Japanese garden outside of Japan, the Portland Japanese Garden is a 5.5-acre haven of tranquil beauty nestled in the scenic west hills of Portland, Oregon." It truly was a tranquil and impressive experience that made me want to return and spend hours there, simply watching the complex displays of light amongst the leafy shadows, or moving across the rock garden's sturdy stones.

 

A wonderful view of the Portland Skyline through the trees on the East edge of the garden

          One of the interesting things I learned from eavesdropping while passing a tour group is that only 30% of the land in Japan is habitable, meaning that the population is concentrated into very small areas. I'm not sure if this is statistically accurate or not, but the ideas was very interesting to me: with a very condensed space, the art of spatially expanding an area through the use of layering became a very valuable technique for making a small space feel much larger. I definitely felt this way in the garden, because the landscaping started with such small, up-close details, and the trees opened up higher and higher, drawing your gaze ever upward and giving each section a feel that it is decorated with the infinite. Truly, because the light and seasons are always playing their own artwork differently upon the leaves and branches of this (and every) garden, it always is an expanding, changing artwork. The aspects of scale, infinite space within a finite boundary, and the ever-changing nature of a seemingly still experience all reminded me keenly of the characteristics of fractals. This artist, Dez Pain, seems to think so too!

* Worker Bees * 

For do-ers and make-ers - tips and tidbits from handy skills I've learned

        

            This week I got to learn how to make Tomatillos salsa, combined with the skills of canning it! 

Step 1: roast tomatillos, peppers, garlic, and onions (remember to slit tops of tomatillos- or tomatoes) 

Step 2: grind roasted veggies in food processor.
                                                                                        Add cilantro, salt, and lime, as wanted

Step 3: as an extra, secret step, saute the salsa until it gathers a gentle froth on top. To the best of my perception, I would say that this step helps to blend the flavors, evening it out    (good)                                                                                                                                       

Step 4: sanitize jars, lids, and lid rings (using handy lid and jar dunking tools, if available) by letting them sit in boiling water

 
 Step 5: fill jars, leaving a little bit of space at the top (but not too much). Seal jars with lids, but do not screw on too tightly- this way air can escape. If the air remains in the jar, it will become oxidized (not good).

Step 6: arrange filled jars in pot of boiling water. Let sit for 30 minutes or so.

 Step 7: let sit with heat off for a while, then remove jars. You can take off the lid rings to reuse for other jarring projects, because the lids will still retain their seal.
Step 8: if storing for winter, repeat this process many, many times

(My household completed these and more before I got here...next summer that will not be the case) ;) 

* Gatherer Bees * 

For savorers of the sweet stuff - the sticky, juicy nectar of inspiration 

An Asian Pear and a flower blossom  -  in honor of fractals 

From "A Geometry of Nature" in Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick         

"As it happened, that dichotomy [between small transient changes and large long-term changes] had no place in the pictures of reality that Mandelbrot was developing. Instead of separating tiny changes from grand ones his picture bound them together. He was looking for patterns not at one scale or another, but across every scale. It was far from obvious hot to draw the picture he had in mind, but he knew there would have to be a kind of symmetry, not of right and left or top and bottom but rather a symmetry of large scales and smalls." 

"Clouds are not spheres, Mandelbrot is fond of saying. Mountains are not cones. Lightning does not travel in a straight line. The new geometry mirrors a universe that is rough, not rounded, scabrous, not smooth. It is a geometry of the pitted, pocketed, and broken up, the twisted, tangled, and intertwined. The understanding of nature's complexity was not just random, not just accident. It required a faith that the interesting feature of a lightning bolt's path, for example,was not its direction, but rather the distribution of zigs and zags. Mandelbrot's work made a claim about the world, and the claim was that such odd shapes carry meaning. The pits and tangles are more than blemishes distorting the classic shapes of Euclidian geometry. They are often the keys to the essence of a thing."  

(Euclidian geometry: straight lines and perfect symmetry... what fractals are not) 

* Drones * 

For lovers -  short essays on subjects of life sustenance and creation 

Life as a Quest 

         This week at game night, I learned a lot about myself by playing "Settlers of Catan." I made a rather poor competitor as I struggled to embrace the mindset that my goal was to expand, taking over as much of the board and its land as possible. (Yes, you caught me - I am sometimes known to take board games a bit seriously...and other things. Ahem.) Instead, I felt most secure to "hunker down" in my own little settlement, trying not to cause much of a stir. (Don't play board games with me unless you take that term literally... On second thought, please do!). I realized, upon later reflection, that all my life I've tried to live by that mindset: it's best, when possible, not to need anything. Then you don't have to involve yourself in the messy business of trading with other people, getting your request turned down, making a bad decision- just stick with what you've got and keep things simple to avoid mistakes. This opened my mindset to a new perspective of internet games, video games, computer games, all of those situations in which you, as a player, are on a quest to accomplish something. Here in your inventory is everything you have to work with, and as your forge your way through your world, making your way through varying degrees of danger, you use these items to accomplish your task. Trading, exchanging, deciding when a loss is worth it in the end, figuring how best your means would be accomplished...these kinds of skills are a little bit terrifying to me, in real life. I noticed that instead of getting involved in the tedious, risky task of asking my neighbors if they had bricks (for instance), I would store up four wood sets to make a more private transaction directly with the "bank" of supplies. In short, I was faced with the reflection of myself as introverted settler who did not use the human resources of my fellows, because the aspect of competition threw of any clear understanding of boundaries (when is it good to help someone accomplish their goals if their success threatens your own? Why would they help me?) What if it's good to need something? I began to wonder. What if it is our needs that give us a means by which to engage with people in the world around us, an invocation to get involved, in short, to play the game? As I am writing this, I am a little skeptical that drawing generalized philosophic conclusions from a board game and extrapolating it to living in the real world is really the wisest way to learn a lesson. Yes, in fact, that is the new message for this essay: relating every little microcosmic event to what it means to live life can make the littlest things way too stressful. So don't do it.