Western Poison Oak has turned red, hinting of fall.
The woods are aflame with Toxicodendron diversilobum, Pacific poison oak. Like a fastly spreading fire, its red leaves skip across the forest floor and leap high up our California oaks. For many years we tried to rid the ranch of poison oak, annoyed by its impact on us—red rashes and blisters that lasted weeks. We told ourselves… Read more »
Organic produce at First Light Farm Store
Vote with Your Food Dollars Vote with your food dollars! Support a small farmer, a farmer whose business plan includes building soil and biodiversity. Mix stockholders and corporations into this, and the earth and biodiversity become secondary to profit. We seem to have lost sight of the fact that how we make a living is… Read more »
Mandala ripples in the fountain.
The Word for the Day, this rainy morning, from www.gratefulness.org: Mountains and oceans have whole worlds of innumerable wondrous features. We should understand that it is not only our distant surroundings that are like this, but even what is right here, even a single drop of water. DOGEN ZENJI Yes, it surprised us and… Read more »
Mating disruptor
Uninvited Guests (Pests!) When I first started writing The Uninvited Guest: Fire and the New Consciousness, I was thinking about fire. Collectively we banned it from our environment over the last 100 years and now it threatens to return with a vengeance. In this fifth year of severe drought in the West, we are being warned… Read more »
Greener Pastures
Distillation and Death Our goat Estrella passed at the end of bloom when the young grapes were bebe-sized, just before the Mariposa tulips popped into appearance. I told the vet that Estrella had to have help arriving, born by Cesarean, and that now she had to have help leaving. She was in too much distress;… Read more »
Fire is an important part of many healthy ecosystems. Suppressed, it often becomes an uninvited guest! Prairie Fires and Forest Fire: Flames for New Consciousness? The settlers coming into Illinois during the early part of the 19th century suffered many of the hardships of any people populating an unfamiliar territory. Drawn by location and the… Read more »
Cold Winter Light at Sunrise
Listening to the Cosmos: Crystallization Period Beginning the 15th of January, we enter what, in Biodynamic Agriculture, is called the Crystallization Period. In this time of fallowness the earth is quiet and most receptive to the energies of the cosmos, a time receptiveness is critically important. For the ground of my psyche, it… Read more »
© 2024 Patricia Damery.
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