este é um partido
um a dança com a mãe
a dança vinda levantando-se final
com o ayahuasca da serpente.


So grateful to the Mother. Humbled by the light of God in all things - and in myself. She has shown me the work and the path and the purpose that lies ahead of me. She has shown me darkness and the way out. She has shown me the web of my own heart and begun the cleansing process for my journey. She has shown me that I am divine and the seasons of my life will flow according to my surrender - it is all up to me.



BLESSINGS!

Who was I ?

When I got to this place?




I haven't written a poem in days and days . . .
I haven't picked up a paintbrush since last fall . . .
Touched clay at all since spring . . .

But I sing . . .
My guitar has been my lover,
singing sad songs,
over and over . . .
until I find solace I can't afford
in minor chords.

My mind has been my respite . . .
I've disappeared
Without a trace of the wheels turning,
Without a trace of the flowers booming.

I think it's obvious,
I cannot find the line and I'm
forgetting my path . . .
faltering from my pupose.

I need two notebooks
I need routine
Stay out of the scene and seek harder
Kick the drum and hit the starter switch
Listen more, play, rewind, repeat . . .
Try not to miss the break-beat

I've been on sk - - ip a while too long now,
Dropping lyrics to the wind
Leaving so much fogotten.
This Scratch -
Is the sound of my cells
trying to turn me in the opposite direction . . .

I want it so badly too . . . I want to feel you pressed up against my body, your breath on my neck, your eyes full of seductive hunger, to know that you want to please me and give me ultimate pleasure.

I want to feel your energy, your spirit, your soul.

I miss you Joeyzinho. I miss your touch, I miss your taste too . . . I miss your smile and the fun we have together. I want you to remember that for me, it will always be more than sex, always.

I am sending you this in Portugese so you will remember when we were fresh and new and only beginning to cultivate our love. When you used to whisper in my ear, trying your best to tempt my body into surrender.

Hot summer evenings with our bodies dripping sweat and loud moans escaping both our mouths - our mouths, speaking the truth of our souls.

Our souls now, in the wake of this distance are all we have to share, and words are only the voice of the soul. These are my words:

You are beautiful, and I miss you ALL WAYS.

Upon reflection I realize that I am an effieciency enthusiasm. I am always multi-tasking, always trying to find a better way to do things, searching for the time saving short-cup.

I recall myself harvesting the feverfew and chammomile from the garden, experimenting with what worked best. Plucking the flowers off seemed far to aggresive, though I'd watch Jayne do it in the summer, the first time I ever learned about feverfew, what it was, that we had it in the garden, that it keeps away colds in the winter . . .

I don't like to kneel in the garden, and squatting is only comfortable for a little while, so I have found that a stool or chair work the best. I derived that when you cut the flowers off, while holding the stem with one hand, and the clippers with the other, they easily fall onto the ground. I also noticed that it takes a lot of time to move your hands from one flower to the next.

My next step was to grab a giant bowl from the kitchen, and place it under the plant. Then, instead of grabbing hold of the flower stem (tiny flowers, remember), I would grab the stalk and bend it over the bowl. This way, I could simply snip the flowers rapidly, and they would fall one by one into (and randomly out of) the bowl. Then it was just a matter of picking up the ones that fell to the ground and moving onto the next stalk. After noticing the spiders and bugs crawling around my bowl of little white flowers, I let it sit outside for a while. I found that Marisha would do this too, leaving her jars of seeds open to the air so all the little creepers could crawl out before she snapped the lids on tight.

So . . . PERMACULTURE PRINCIPLE EMBODIMENT:

1. WORK WITH NATURE - rather than against the natural elements, forces,
processes, agencies, and evolutions, so that we can assist rather
than impede natural developments. (use gravity, use native species,
use the sun, wind, etc.)
2. THE PROBLEM IS THE OPPORTUNITY - everything works both ways. It is
only how we see things that make them advantageous or not.
Everything is a positive resource.
3. RELATIVE LOCATION - Through proper placement of elements we can save
time and energy.



In a roundabout way, I followed these principles (in order of relation) by, 1. putting the bowl under my plant to work with gravity, 2. harvesting more flowers by grabbing the stalk instead of the stem. I think that both of those embody #3.

Those are just three of the many, many principle of working with Permaculture. I was just reflecting on the ones I used when harvesting those little flowers for my winter sunshine in a cup!

I brought some zucchini from our garden down to Portland when my parents came to visit in August. Mom used to make zucchini bread every year when Mrs. Robison, the next door neighbor would bring over GIANT zucchinis. I now know that such size zuchs are really ONLY good for making breads.

Because mom didn't bring her old recipe, we searched for a new one, which I have made some changes to since. It serves well as a substitute and I've decided to adapt it as my own.


ALMOST AS GOOD AS MOM'S ZUCH BREAD RECIPE:

FIRST:

IN A BIGGER BOWL MIX:
3 Cups Organic Whole Wheat Flour
1 Tablespoon Cinnamon
1 teaspoon Baking SODA
1/2 teaspoon Baking POWDER
1 teaspoon sea salt

SEPARATELY MIX:
2 beaten organic eggs
1 1/2 Cups Organic Raw Sugar
2 Cups shreaded zucchini
1/2 Cup of organic cooking oil

- Preheat oven to 350 degrees
- Make a hole in the dry ingredients and pour in wet mixture
- Fold with a spoon or spatula
- Will be lumpy
- Bake for @ 30 minutes.

You can explore baking times and temperatures between 25 degrees and 10 minutes.

**** For CARROT ZUCCHINI Bread, use 1 Cup of Zucchini and 1 Cup of Carrots. This was my most recent YUMMY experiment. It yielded the best batch ever with slightly longer baking times!




OKAY - HERE'S MOM'S FRIED RICE RECIPE ! Straight from the Queen of the Kitchen herself:

- Rice should be cooked with less water than usual, then fried with a bit of butter or oil, a splash of soy sauce, and salt and peper to taste. Then throw in a squeeze of ketchup to turn color. Cook it only until hot and no more (5-10 min. max). STIR CONSTANTLY ! (like an iron chef or, a fierce chinese woman wielding a wooden spatula)!

- The rest of the ingredients are:

Corn, peas, and carrots
sauteed onions
green onions
chicken or chinese sausage (boiled and fried)
scrambled eggs (sliced omlette style)

- Add in the veggies one by one, STIR !
- Add in the meats
- Then the eggs LAST ! making sure not to smash them !

YUM YUM YUM - This one IS just like mom used to make.

The closest thing I've ever done with food saving was to put things in the freezer for later or actually use one of those machines with the vacuum sealer, you know, it's calle a FOOD SAVER.

This year, I've learned about canning and dehydrating as well as the joys of saving herbs and flowers for tea.

Here's a couple of recipes I've used this year:



APPLESAUCE:

- Fill an 8-10 quart saucepan with 1/2 cup of water
- Heat until tender, 5-20 minutes, stirring to keep from browning
- Press w/masher or puree w/blender or skip these steps for chunky sauce
- Add 1/8 cup of sugar or more/less to taste
- Reheat to boiling and fill jars with 1/2 inch head space
- boil at 20 minutes for quarts, 15 minutes for pints


WOW! Jarring/Canning was an entirely new thing for me. There are some crucial steps to doing this kind of food preservation which can be found on any box of mason jars, purchased at your local food Co-Op or grocery store. Most of these steps involve sterilizing the jars so no bacteria will ruin all of your hard work.

- First you must boil all of your jars and their lid rings.
- You must use all new lids! These can be purchased where you find new
mason jars. You wash them with hot water but not boil them because
the seals become vulnerable.
- Then, you must add the mixture, be it applesauce or jelly etc., while
it is HOT. Be sure to WIPE off the excess from the rim and lip.
- You put the lids and rings on and boil the jars again for the alotted
time in the recipe.
- You pull them out, HOT, and let them cool. At this step, you can
listen for the POP of the lids as the heat causes a vacuum seal.
- You must wait to tighten the rings until everythings has cooled. Here
you can check to see if the lid dips down from the vacuum.


I had a lot of fun this summer doing this with friends. Here are some of the other recipes:


APPLE BUTTER:

8 lbs. Apples
2 cups Cider
2 cups vinegar
2 1/4 cups sugar
2 1/4 cups packed brown sugar
2 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 tsp. ground cloves

- Cook cider and vinegar slowly
- Press
- Cook pulp w/ sugar and spices, stirring frequently
- To test for doneness:
- remove a spoonful from the steam or place on a plate
- if the butter "mounds" & does not separate, it's ready.
- Fill jars and boil for 25 minutes


*Marisha's recipe for Apple or Pear Butter is much simpler:
- 1 part juice / 2 parts fruit
- Cook it down (hours and hours)


BLACKBERRY JAM

Cook down 1 quart of blackberries,
1/2 - 1 cup of sugar,
1 teaspon of pectin,
and 2 teaspoons of calcium water


I also made lots of other things this summer, including Apple Chutney, which I decided I don't really like, pear butter and plum jam.

When Marisha asked me to save seeds that day, she said, "So you're cultureseed. You should think about what that means and how you can embody the seed." Then she left me with the meditative work of harvesting these little tiny metaphors for so many things.

I began to understand more about these seeds, about their different ways of ensuring their own survival. In my own garden, I became curious again, seeing it in a new way after having worked with Marisha. I thought mostly about our edible flowers, and a comment that Sierra had made after trying to sell our herbs and flowers to the restaurant she worked at. I had asked her if they were putting the calendula and nistertium in the salads. Her reply was that people are too wierded out by flowers and they won't eat them anyway.

I thought about how silly and sad that was. How ignorance was was being perpetuated by a lack of creativity. I then thought about how many flowers we actually had in our garden, realizing that neither all of our household nor all of our friends' households could eat all of the flowers that our garden produced. If we are Cultureseed, we are supposed to be spreading the seeds of culture. Eating flowers - now that's a beautiful cultural trait that needs to be propagated.

I thought about education. How do we educate people about the flowers as we offer them. Well, Sierra said that the restaurant was placing our edibles in vases on the table. How do we let people know that these aren't just ornamental flowers? We could create pretty little signs that stem from the vase with the flowers, with plant identification and an invitation to partake: to pluck one and add it to their yummy salad. And another invitation: to request seeds from their server.

Cultureseed could deliver not only an opportunity for people to experience a new edible garden treat, but leave a stash of little seeds, maybe in individual packets with the restaurant - or maybe even on the table with the sugars. In this way, we can achieve the both goals of spreading culture AND seeds at once. And in the following years to come, seeds from our garden can sprout in the gardens of others and flowers will be in salads everywhere!

So all week I've been in the garden. Running through a list of all the things that need to be done. Working with Marisha was so inspiring and I don't even feel like hanging out in the garden day-dreaming is a waste of time. Our garden is look is looking beautiful. I can't wait for Marisha to come over and spend some time with me in it.

I followed her lead in the 2 principles I learned about at Wild Thyme. We save seeds and maintain the garden. There were a few things that were dying off. I took down the feverfew, noticing that the flowers had dried so I tried to save the seeds . . . All seeds are different and all the plants have different mechanisms for protecting and disbursing their seeds. Feverfew is a tiny little daisy-like flower that closely resembles the white chammomile flower. We have both in the garden so it's easy to tell the difference. The leaves are completely different and the chamommile has a more button like center. Anyhow, I realized that the feverfew seeds could be plucked off by squeezing it. They are teeny tiny little seeds.

The motherwort was also dying off so I brought out the wheel barrel and used Marisha's technique of cutting off the stalks, holding them in a bundle with one hand and banging them on the edge of the wheel barrel. The seeds come flying out and the flower heads are emptied. I also found some sweetrockets I didn't even know where there. I was careful with them, like I'd been instructed to do and began the process of learning . . . I also have begun to save the seeds from our countless calendula flowers and nistertiums. There were also parsnips, poppies, rose campions and (french cups?).

While I was doing all of this in the sweet sweet sunshine, I formulated and idea . . .

so she says to me...

"with these ones you have to be very careful because they snap open." Those were sweet rockets. I also harvested motherwort that day... she has prickly spikes to hold the seeds in, but only after the flower dies ... that is so that pollination isn't discouraged. What else that day? Foxgloves, which I'd allready experimented with: tiny tiny tiny brown seeds, way tinier than a poppy seed, like big sand, just falling falling out soft little pockets of flowers. Foxgloves seeds are amazing to me.

What else, what else ...
That was the day I saw Marisha winnow. She stood in the grass, barefoot, circling the bowl around and around in her hands and then, she looked up into the wind. Her long brown hair swam in the air as little bits of dried flowers blew all around her. She looked over at me and smiled, and I was watching with such purity of heart, her graceful way of being a gaurdian of the plants.

My first visit to Wild Thyme Farm.

I spent the day with Marisha, and her long time friend, Posie. We worked in the food forest that Marisha began setting up 5 years ago. This was my first introduction to Permaculture. When I arrived Marisha and Posie were working in the forest, then they took a break to catch me up on what was going on.

Marisha was seed saving. She has a business called "growing greetings" which is essentially, greeting cards with seeds imbedded in them. She got me started on the ming that was dying off under the red-flowering currant. All of the mint needed to be taken down, a third of it was still good enough to harvest for tea. I learned about mint's creeping quality, of which I was familiar with, but by working with it closely I was able to actually see how it spread from it's roots. It was everywhere. And it smelled so good to be dancing with it beneath the plum tree.

I also learned about comfrey. All I new was that it spread like crazy and Sierra had mentioned her never-ending battle with it when she worked the garden at Evergreen. It's such a beautiful broad leafed plant - covering the floor of the garden with large soft green fluffs. Marisha was having me cut it down at the base of the stalk. What I learned from here about the Comfrey was that it only spreads if you chop up it's roots. Then it sends new shoots out and creeps allover.

At one point, while Posie and I were hard at work barefoot on our hands and knees, Marisha looks up from her wheel barrel and turns to me to say, "Why am I saving seeds? You're Cultureseed, you should be doing this."

I'll be travelling back to California, my home state, for a weeklong Permaculture intensive and Sustainable living festival in Angel's Camp. This will be the first in a series of 2 Permaculture training getaways I will be taking with Marisha Auerbach, Queen Bee of www.herbnwisdom.com and a Permaculture educator who also graduated from Evergreen. This is something I found on the site, and just the beginning.


Permaculture Terms and Definitions

Permaculture - The conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive systems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems; the harmonious integration of landscape and people to produce their food, energy, shelter, and non-material needs in a sustainable way.

Permaculture Design - A system of assembling conceptual, material, and strategic components in a pattern to benefit life in all of its forms.

Ethics of Permaculture
» Care of Earth - Provisions for all life systems to continue.
» Care of People - Provisions for people to access those resources necessary for their existence.
» Return of Surplus to the above aims (including labor, money, and information), Fair Share.

Permaculture is based on...
Working with nature, not against.
Protracted and thoughtful observation rather then protracted and thoughtless action.
The allowance for evolution in a system.

Our responsibilities are to (account for our actions and be responsible in the efforts to):
1. Reduce waste (pollution)
2. Replace lost minerals
3. Practice careful energy accounting
4. Act to remedy negative effects on society

Symbiosis: any interdependent or mutually beneficial relationship between two persons, groups, etc.