Adopting Hope

Tags

Adopted daughter, adoption, Gardening, healing, Isolation, Quarentine

Have you ever read something that brought a seismic shift in your thinking? This happened to me last week.
I was taking an urban walkabout in Santa Fe, New Mexico to the nearly deserted Plaza, our town square. I came across a prose poem inspired by the pandemic. It was displayed, blown up large, on a storefront, and it inspired me to think differently about my months of self-imposed isolation. I recalled the dozens of online operas I’ve viewed, thanks to the Metropolitan Opera’s HD free streaming, of my thriving vegetable garden in the back yard, of books I’ve read lately, of the novel I’ just finished writing, of hikes in the mountains and arroyos. Though I miss people, their hugs and smiles and warmth, there are blessings that come with staying put.

Photo by Tom McGuffy

 

PEOPLE STAYED HOME
by Catherine (Kitty) O’Meara

And people stayed home and read books, and listened and rested and exercised and made art and played games and learned new ways of being and stopped and listened deeper.
Some meditated some prayed some met their shadows
and the people began to think differently and the people healed
And in the absence of people who lived in ignorant ways, dangerous, mindless and heartless,
even the Earth began to heal.
And when the danger ended and people found each other they grieved for the dead
and they made new choices and dreamed of new images and
created new ways of life
and healed the Earth completely
just as they were healed themselves.

*****************************

Join author Elaine Pinkerton on alternate Mondays for reflections on adoption, hiking, and the writing life. Her newly-completed novel The Hand of Ganesh is being edited and scheduled for publication in 2021. What have you found helpful during the Coronavirus era? Please share your stories. Your comments are invited!

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Lazy Summertime…

Tags

adopting a new attitude, Community, Creativity, Gardening, Lost Dog, Peace, serenity, Solitude, writing

“Seek peace and pursue it.” – St. Benedict

As the Summer Solstice draws near, I’m looking for fresh creativity and new ideas.

This scarecrow works 24/7-so we gardeners can do what we love

Once I week, I drive to Frenchy’s Field, the nearby community garden where four other women and I planted and now tend four plots. This morning, while watering the rows of spinach, tomato plants, cabbage and cucumbers, I admitted to myself that Arundati, the sequel to Beast of Bengal, isn’t writing itself. It cries out for more of my time. I also vowed to accelerate the revision of Santa Fe on Foot-Adventures in the City Different.

That said, beginning in late June, I’ll be  posting every other Monday. In the fall, I will most likely go back to weekly posts.

Like most writers I know, however, I’m always writing. People at Frenchy’s Field tend to be congenial. There’s a hospitable air, and so even as I gardened, I harvested material for future plots or subplots.

The city watering hours are only from six to ten a.m. and four to eight p.m. When I approached the garden around nine, someone was already there, gently hosing the plots that she had adopted. She handed over the hose so I could water my territory, and we chatted. It turned out that she also was a writer. We talked briefly about our published books. She had a long bike ride ahead and I had four plots to water before the ten a.m. deadline, but it was likely, we agreed, that the garden would bring us together again.

Another encounter happened as I was locking the padlocked gate to go home. A tall man wearing a bereft expression was calling for “Roy,” the dog he’d lost just a few hours earlier. Having recently lost my adopted orange kitty Thomas Cromwell, I related to Roy’s owner, and I wanted to help.

“He was last seen right around here,” the man explained, giving me a full description of his pet, as well as a telephone number and e-mail address. I assured him that I’d pass along the description of Roy – brown, labrador mix, shy and gentle – to people I met in Frenchy’s park. It turned out that before I got to my car, I’d alerted several dog-walking people to look for Roy.

Gardening seems to go quite well with writing. It provides a quiet, thoughtful time. It can also yield rewarding interactions with total strangers. Like seeds sprouting under the earth’s surface, ideas grow and break through. I went home and wrote for the rest of the morning.

Backyard Reverie

Tags

Agave, Bark beetles, Contemplation, Drought, Gardening, labyrinth, Relaxation

Once again, I’ve “re-purposed” my back yard. If that sounds strange, allow me to explain. Here in the Southwest, Anasazi Indians (literally “the Ancient Ones”) preceded the Hispanic and Caucasians who followed. After years of populating what is now northern New Mexico, the native people vanished, most likely driven from their dwellings because they had no water. Fast forward to NOW. A drought, seemingly like that of the 1200s, has returned to plague us. Environmental ways of coping with the new dry times have advanced, but they are not moving fast enough.

The Century Plant towering over my backyard

Like other people in my town, I do what I can to help the situation, to conserve water and vote for environmentally helpful legislation. But having done that, I just want to enjoy what is. As the weather turns nice, I spend more and more time in my back yard, and as I putter about, I recall the yard’s different stages of being.
As I reflect on the yard and my journey of healing from adoption wounds, documented in The Goodbye Baby, I find parallels. Why the newly philosophical mode? Maybe I have finally calmed down enough about being adopted to enjoy and appreciate being here now. No longer agonizing over the fact that my grounds cannot be the way they used to be, I review the yard, remembering its former guises.
In the 1970s, there was a miniature forest of piñon, so dense that you couldn’t see more than a few feet. When there were trees, it was easier to grow things. I planted and tended a large vegetable garden. Aided by moderate watering, Nature provided abundant rain to help it thrive.
Fast forward a couple decades. The vegetable garden was long gone when a drought and subsequent bark beetle invasion decimated the piñon, taking 70 trees in all. There were bare spaces where shady groves previously existed. Weeds, that apparently scoff at the desirable plants’ need for water, thrived.
Mourning the loss of shade, I wandered about. My mission, an impossible one, was eliminating weeds. Anything that bloomed, whether or not it was officially a pest, was promoted to the status of “wildflower.” In addition to this anti-weed campaign, I listened to birds and gazed at clouds.
Part of my ongoing restoration of the back yard was building a seven-circuit labyrinth. So, in addition to weeding, I added labyrinth walking. Ambling, sauntering, trudging or lightly treading, I circuited the spiral path in—to center—and back out. I’ve continued to walk the spiral path for eight years. The labyrinth provides an important respite, a chance to simply be.
Beyond the labyrinth, I’d planted a blue-tipped agave plant from Mexico originally but purchased at a local nursery. It was perfect for the newly rock-scaped back yard. The hearty agave lived in the soil unobtrusively, pleasingly and attractively. No water was required other than what nature provided.
Words can hardly describe my surprise when I discovered that my agave seemed to have gone wild. A stalk was growing up out of the center at the rate of three to five inches a day!
Miracle or monster? I checked with the nursery and was told that the agave was actually a Century Plant and that it could grow up to 15 feet tall, would bloom and then die. I could cut the stalk down, thus saving the plant or I could simply witness the saga. I named it “Ferdinand” and witnessed the skyward trajectory until it was 15 feet tall. After that, it dried up and started to wither. I left it standing for another season. Finally, however, Ferdinand toppled over and the fellow agave plants, as if in sympathy, shriveled and died.
The agaves are all gone now but in their stead I’ve installed a cold frame garden plot and compost bin. Just as I’ve grown into a new iteration of my life, so has my yard. My reverie brought with it a message: A metaphor for life itself, or more likely just a “postcard from the yard.”

Elaine Pinkerton dreaming away the afternoon