Criticism

“The only way to speak the truth is to speak lovingly"~~ Henry David Thoreau


I have a 14 year old daughter who loudly, strongly, and frequently speaks her mind. She criticises everything I do. I have to remind myself that I am an adult and I can take it. I also have to remind myself that she is not an adult. How often are our interactions with teens of a critical nature? It is so easy to point out all the mistake and things that need to be done or things that are done incorrectly. All our emotions are contagious. Speak with love in the hopes that one day that love will be reciprocated.

Geese and Planting

"The wild goose is more of a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast in Canada, takes a luncheon in the Ohio, and plumes himself for the night in a southern bayou"~~ Henry David Thoreau from Walden

There is a major goose migration pattern over our house. We can sit in our sun room and watch the giant V's shift through the sky like a compass guiding us to Spring. The Geese head north from the Great Salt Lake with their honks a song calling all us gardeners to gather our tools. A couple of sunny days and the dirt in our raised beds is dry enough to dig all the leaves I placed on top into the soil. We added our ashes from the wood burning stove to the carrot box. We'll see how that works. I plant lettuce and spinach in the box with the garlic sets from the fall, and will plant peppers here in late May as the bed thins out. Another box I plant full of peas and will plant a second crop of lettuce and spinach here in August. The fourth box will be full of onions; we didn't plant enough last year. Greg builds two more boxes for tomatoes and potatoes. He also makes an additional garden bed with rocks hauled in from surrounding farmer's fields. This will be a flower/squash bed flowing from our green roof. Working in the sun, turning our dirt into gardens, makes me so happy. It is a process slow by the limit of time and energy to labor and money. It is a process that builds gradually with the imagination and gives me something to think about and look forward to during the darkness and cold of winter.

Love

“There is no remedy for love but to love more.”~~ Henry David Thoreau

Love-- the most basic and eternal human quest. We seek in in many forms: romantic, platonic, occupational, and internal.

Nowhere do you see this more than with teenagers. As a mother of teens and a High School Educator I witness how it is the daily focus that motivates and emotivates.

The very intelligent boy or girl who acts like an idiot over a girl or boy.
The seeking out of friendships and belonging.
The need to find a niche, the place where success can be achieved.
The development of a positive self image, respect, and confidence.

All these forms of love create our world. What we discover as teens will carry on into our adult life. We teach math, English, history, and science in concrete standardized ways. We demonstrate love with our actions and relationships with others and the environment we work in. A little bit of love and empathy can make a huge difference with our human interactions. We all need to find continual fulfillment in all four areas of love, that is why it is an eternal quest and why giving out more love is often the remedy to achieving our own love needs.

Finally Winter

"Why do you flee so soon, sir, to the theaters, lecture-rooms, and museums of the city? If you will stay here awhile I will promise you strange sights. You shall walk on water; all these brooks and rivers and ponds shall be your highway. You shall see the whole earth covered a foot or more deep with purest white crystals . . . and all the trees and stubble glittering in icy armor." ~~Henry David Thoreau

It finally snows, the irony of a snow-less winter after purchasing a snowplow. I am glad for the color that snow adds to a landscape of gloominess that seemed bleached of all vitality. For snow holds within that whiteness the rainbow of all color. It makes the sky bluer and the browns stronger. Winter is not winter without snow. We have had suffocating haze and rain that freezes at night into sheets of ice covering all the fields around us so we seem to float, our house, on a little island in a sea of ice.

Our Corolla dies, a sad death on the highway into town. Transportation is where all our money goes. You pay for those miles in more than gasoline. It makes me think about urban sprawl and suburbs, about how there use to be small independent cities. We found out we are living on land that use to be a town called Square Town. Greg has been spending time researching this town that no longer exists and by the strangest of serendipity found that his great-great-great Grandpa Abbot settled in Square Town. Talk about unknowingly returning to your roots! He can't find much information and nothing about why the town disappeared. We need to break out of our introversion and talk to the old locals before they die and take all that knowledge with them.