Fibonacci series - out in the garden

A type of cauliflower I planted this year just because it looks so cool. Plus it would give me a chance to bring up the Fibonacci sequence in homeschooling.

Thanksgiving and the holidays

Here we are the day before Thanksgiving, which I feel is bringing in the holiday season with all the family get-togethers and other holiday stuff. My feelings are divided.
I love the holidays. I love what Thanksgiving means, the chance to openly and publicly express gratitude. I love the coziness of Christmas, and the cheer, and the white snow, and the long nights with low light and cozy fire in the wood stove. I love the smell of the Christmas tree. Some of my best childhood memories have to do with Christmas. These are beautiful traditions that to me are very personal, and I like to share them in a personal way.
But I also dread some aspects of these holidays: the big parties, where I always feel like I have to put on a smile and compare what my kids are doing with everyone else's kids, and pretend that my marriage is great, and everything in my life is perfect, and watch people's eyes dart away as the end of their attention span nears if I attempt to engage in more genuine conversation. I don't like to listen to people brag about their latest job, car, house items, and so on, or to partake in gossip about whoever's not there, and stand by and watch as some people get drunk and obnoxious. I also don't like to see all the food wasted at these events.

I've tried in the past to regard the whole thing as an anthropological experiment, but it didn't quite work. I'm afraid I am becoming antisocial. But I just can't bear the pretense, and it's even worse when I go along with it and be polite and make inane conversation. It makes me feel drained.

So before attending these events, I try to prepare myself by going out into the field, or anywhere with trees, and filling myself up with whatever it is that I find out there that sustains me: fresh air, the smell of earth, etc. I try to remind myself not to get lost in negativity when I'm at the party, not to judge, but just be myself. We'll see how that works this year.

Peace

Important skills that many of us are not taught

Brene Brown on Empathy

 Peace

Bed time reading from one of my favorite poets

Faults
by Sara Teasdale

They came to tell your faults to me,
They named them over one by one,
I laughed aloud when they were done;
I knew them all so well before,-
Oh they were blind, too blind to see
Your faults had made me love you more.

My real day

I follow some people on Instagram and other social media, and sometimes it just strikes me that so many of us are portraying our lives as perfect, and leaving out the not so great stuff (I know I've done it many times). Everyone in some way or another wants to prove that whatever they're doing or saying, or the way they're living, is cool, and I guess that's why we follow them, otherwise it would be kind of boring right? Well, anyway, at the risk of being boring or worse, I'll share what a real day, today, looked like for me.

• I slept poorly last night and got up groggy and cranky;
• We had a big Thanksgiving farm sale all morning, so I had to get up and help Ed set up for it, even though I really wanted to stay in bed and sleep;
• Ed and I had an argument just before customers were supposed to arrive.
• I went out to the field to milk the cows;
• Ed came after me and we argued some more;
• In the meantime, our worker showed up. He was here to prune the raspberries and do other things that needed to be done.
• I did not feel like talking to anyone, but had to talk to him to tell him what to do. 
• Finally Ed and I worked things out
• Then the customers started coming and Ed and I and the girls were all helping and talking to people at various times.
• I had my breakfast late, then started cooking for the rest of the day. It is Ed's mom's birthday today, and she's not feeling well, so we were going to go see her and bring food. I decided not to go, so that I could rest, but was happy to make the food.
• The rest of the day was cooking and cleaning and cow chores.
• I had a nice lunch by myself, hidden behind a pile of woodchips, outside in the sun. Then I read my cheese book for half an hour.
• Sometime in there the kids needed to be picked up from a playdate
• Ed and I got some time to sit and have a regular talk for about 15 minutes
• Then everyone left and I am home alone
• I still feel tired, but really glad to have time alone, and for the rest of the evening, before the kids and Ed get home, I plan to relax watching Russian history videos and drinking hot cacao, sweetened with special honey from Nicu

That's my real day.
Peace

how to "fail better"

from the great Pema Chodron. I needed to read this article this morning. Here is an excerpt:

“Fail better” means you begin to have the ability to hold what I call “the rawness of vulnerability” in your heart, and see it as your connection with other human beings and as a part of your humanness. Failing better means when these things happen in your life, they become a source of growth, a source of forward, a source of, “out of that place of rawness you can really communicate genuinely with other people.”

Your best qualities come out of that place because it’s unguarded and you’re not shielding yourself. Failing better means that failure becomes a rich and fertile ground instead of just another slap in the face.

on "the path"

my sister shared this great article about "the path", and i pulled out some bits here, but the whole thing is well worth reading.
 

"All the places we go when the path gets too rocky and exhausting and brutal and beautiful are dead end detours. If you take these detours you are not bad, but you are wasting your time and energy. Come back to the path. There’s no other way.

There is no solid ground on the path – so don’t hold your breath till you find it. Breathe deeply and keep moving forward awkwardly. You can make it down the whole path imbalanced and flailing. When you fall, give thanks for the opportunity to rest. While you’re down, send love to every other path walker who’s down with you at that moment. Then get back up. Or crawl.

Your fellow travelers are your teachers and students. Your relationships with them will be the hardest part of path-walking. To avoid humbling oneself into the role of student and courag-ing oneself into the role of teacher – many try to walk the path alone. But the path was not designed for solo treks. The path was designed to teach Love. Whenever you introduce your true self to a fellow path traveler and listen and speak and learn and stay with her for a while- that is called Love. Walking With and Staying With messy fellow path travelers for any length of time is Love. Love is the most brutal and beautiful part of path traveling. Participate. Learn from and teach every path traveler you encounter. Exchanging love with fellow path travelers is how we gather the wisdom and strength we’ll need to overcome the next obstacle on our path. Note – You do not teach by teaching- you teach by loving. Be humble and courageous."

Peace

by Walt Whitman

O Me! O Life!

Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,

Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,

Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)

Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,

Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,

Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,

The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

                                       Answer.

That you are here—that life exists and identity,

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

A small village near the border of Italy and Austria

I'm kind of embarrassed to admit this, but I'm already pining for the mountains. I mean, I am grateful for everything that I have here, and I do not underestimate how lucky I am, but there's just something about the mountains that really pulls on me. I love mountains whether they're stark and uninhabited, or peppered with small villages and alpine pastures. One thing I really liked about northern Italy and Austria was how well the wild and the domestic blended together. In the mountain villages we saw, it felt like people did what they had to to live, and took what they needed, while at the same time respecting and maintaining the natural ecosystem.

These pictures were taken near the border of Italy and Austria, in a little village we took detoured through.

Little truck used to collect recyclables. So cute!

Village square

Small shop with cured meats and cheeses

The road leading into the village

View of another village from the road

Panorama of mountain farms and lush alpine pastures. You can see the cows resting on the left of the picture.

And this is the view of the highway we traveled on, connecting Italy and Austria through Brenner Pass. Those rows you see in the foreground are all cultivated grapes.

Peace

Zematis

I made Zematis, a fresh cheese that Nicu taught me in Romania. It is also called Topfen in Austria (as I found out in a cheese book I am currently reading). It is probably the easiest cheese to make. Here's what I did:

• I milked the cows
• I left the raw milk on the counter for 2 days to sour
• I skimmed off the cream that rose on top (and enjoyed it - it was very decadent. I used it to sour some chicken soup I made, and also just ate it straight off the spoon 'cuz it's that good)
• I cut the curd into cubes and warmed it on low heat for about 20 min
• I drained and hung the curds until it was solid enough to my liking,about 6 hrs
• I sprinkled the resulting cheese with salt and pepper 

I share this for fun more than as a recipe, and I actually do not encourage you to try it unless you have your own raw milk from your own animals, and are confident that the animals are healthy and the milk is clean. Due to the microbiology of milk and cheese, this recipe will not work with pasteurized milk, or even raw milk that has been refrigerated. If you leave pasteurized milk on the counter for 2 days, it will spoil and make you sick. If anyone is interested in more details about this, I'd be happy to share.

Here is the result

This morning, I sat under my favorite tree, and had some of the cheese with elderberry jam made by a friend, and pecans. And coffee in my special mug from Romania. A cozy breakfast.

Enjoy this beautiful sunny day!
Peace

RIP Leonard Cohen

He understood the ambiguity of the human heart so well. He made beautiful music that reached me, personally, on many levels. I am so grateful for his life and presence, for what he gave of himself to the rest of us.

He sang of light and shadow; he sang about the yearning of romantic love and spiritual love and how the two intersect. In that way, he is much like Rumi. Thank you so much for shining your unique light in this world, Leonard Cohen.



"In My Secret Life"

I saw you this morning.
You were moving so fast.
Can’t seem to loosen my grip
On the past.
And I miss you so much.
There’s no one in sight.
And we’re still making love
In My Secret Life.

I smile when I’m angry.
I cheat and I lie.
I do what I have to do
To get by.
But I know what is wrong,
And I know what is right.
And I’d die for the truth
In My Secret Life.

Hold on, hold on, my brother.
My sister, hold on tight.
I finally got my orders.
I’ll be marching through the morning,
Marching through the night,
Moving cross the borders
Of My Secret Life.

Looked through the paper.
Makes you want to cry.
Nobody cares if the people
Live or die.
And the dealer wants you thinking
That it’s either black or white.
Thank God it’s not that simple
In My Secret Life.

I bite my lip.
I buy what I’m told:
From the latest hit,
To the wisdom of old.
But I’m always alone.
And my heart is like ice.
And it’s crowded and cold
In My Secret Life.

You can count on me!

Regardless who is president, my allegiance remains to the land that nourishes and supports us. The land that gives me solace in times of trouble. This earth and the life it supports is the only thing I can honestly pledge my allegiance to.

What to do?

Take the time acknowledge and accept how you feel.
Seek to understand what is.
Then keep moving, led by the light in your heart, guided by your inner knowing and by your best understanding of what is right and good. That is all you can do.

Peace

The cows and I are in today's Hartford Courant

I'm not sure if Jasmine would be honored to know that she and her calf made it in the newspaper on election day! Maybe Trump and Clinton should be honored. Jasmine is pretty cool. She'd make a better president.

Mark Mirko, photographer at The Hartford Courant, was driving by yesterday morning, when he saw me out in the field milking Jasmine. He stopped the car, walked over to the pasture and asked me if he could take some pictures for the newspaper. I said yes, and continued my milking while he took pictures. Then we talked about the cows and farming for a while. Mark is very thoughtful and nice to talk to. I  knew him from before - he did a story on our farm a few years ago, also for the Hartford Courant, and he was in our CSA in 2015. It made me happy to see him again and share news of the farm with him .
Here is his picture in today's paper.

Tree lessons

It is so easy to see the beauty of trees at this time of the year, when they seem to draw our attention, and make it impossible not to notice, decked as they are in their most glorious attire.

I love trees. They inspire, teach and comfort me so much. When I feel afraid or insecure, I look at a tree and how it stands there, not trying to pretend to be anything other than what it is. Not comparing itself to others; not feeling inferior or superior, just being what it is, whether young and slender, old and gnarly, split in half by lightening or whatever may be. The story of its life is sometimes plain to see, other times, not. But whatever it may look like, to me a tree is always beautiful and unique.

Also, trees teach me to relax and allow myself to be vulnerable. As my amazing teacher Bert said last night at the lodge "There's little hate in the world. But there is much fear." So true. I and we are all so afraid, and I think that fear is ultimately about being vulnerable. Yet the thing most of us want and need, whether we know it or not, the only thing that can heal us as a person as as a world, is love, and love requires us to be vulnerable. When I look at a tree, I see how vulnerable it is: to the forces of nature, and to the forces of human destruction. And yet it stands, and lives whatever its sort in life may be, dignified and beautiful.

Peace

Beauty and Pointless Destruction

" One can fight for goodness in many ways. One way of serving it is by inculcating a sense of goodness in people." Olga Berggolts

The Flower Seller Of Aleppo certainly does that. Although it is very tragic, his story also has beauty and goodness in it and that, to me, rises above everything else. I just hope that his son will also be able to feel that at some point.

Northern Italy

Flying in over the Alps I got so excited I leaned over and practically squished Aiyana who had the window seat. I think I got a few other people on the plane to be excited enough to at least look out the window...

On the ground, narrow streets typical of small villages

 Olive groves everywhere

Driving around Lago di Garda, with views so spectacular that James Bond movies were shot here.

 Crazy tunnels cut through the mountains, some of them a mile long

View of Lago di Garda from the mountains surrounding it, with small villages at the bottom and cultivated fields

 The center of the village of Brentonico, near where we stayed

 Our beautiful, spotless apartment in the hills of the little village of Cazzano di Brentonico

 Tight, very tight drive to our apartment. We were worried about scraping our (small) rental car.

 Driving to Avio castle in our rental car

Cobble stone road

 Aiyana in an olive grove

Avio castle

Views from Avio castle

Those mountains... enough to make me swoon

Stairway inside the castle.

Sena said this would be a good setting for a love scene

Village house

I absolutely loved this view from the balcony of our apartment. We were perched up on the side of a mountain, above the clouds and birds. I could've stayed there for a long, long time, just looking down over the valley and neighbouring mountains, breathing in that crisp mountain air and enjoying the silence, punctuated now and then only by bird song and dogs barking.

Little villages we could see from our balcony

Peace

About a difficult situation

Here is something I wrote a few days ago about a difficult situation that's been weighing on me:

Recently there have been some ugly developments in my extended family (not involving me directly), having to do with money. In the grand scheme, I know that this is nothing new, as it has been demonstrated many times, on small and large scales, that money and power have the power to sway people in such a way that they will betray their most fundamental values: their families, communities, and the earth that sustains them.

After doing my cow chores tonight I sat on a rock at the edge of the field with LT, the cat, and we watched the cows graze. The peaceful atmosphere brought me comfort, but I also felt sad about this situation in my family. I found it especially sad to think about people who live in relative abundance and affluence and yet are driven in such a way that they allow their family ties and other close relationship to be torn up by money.

It is easy / tempting to get bitter and self righteous with all this, but I thought that it would be more useful to pray for those who are misled, be it by money or anything else. I learned from my own experiences that it is out of confusion, fear, insecurity, anger and hurt that people end up hurting each other and themselves in the end. So I pray that they wake up and heal from whatever is driving them to act in these ways.

Today, I was still thinking about this situation as I drove in my car, while at the same time looking outside and taking in the sunny autumn day. I wrote this little poem:

Overcome
 
Overcome by the beauty of this day in autumn;
The trees hanging their branches,
Letting their colorful leaves fall,
Carelessly, on the wind, one by one.

World, throw what you will at me
Tempt me with anger, envy, greed or jealousy,
Cheap trinkets all, by comparison...

This peace in my heart,
The lessons that I've learned,
The infinite gift of another day, here, to be a part and contemplate all this,
These you cannot take away from me,
Nor will I trade them for any of your ways.

Visiting Nicu in Hunedoara, Romania

I wrote about Nicu in an earlier post. Going to visit him in Hunedoara, Romania, was an important impetus for our trip. We spent 3 days with him, and he treated us like only a parent would. He must've prepared for weeks before we came, because at every meal he served at least 3 courses, all home-made, delicious food. Also, he either grew the food himself, or ordered it from farmers he knew, especially for us. It was really touching to be treated this way.

This is Tutu, Nicu's best friend and companion. Among Nicu's many virtues is that he's very good with animals. He loves animals, and when he leaves the house he always has a bag of bones and other left overs with him, which he uses to feed the many stray dogs that are on the streets everywhere in Romania. Dogs just come up to him, many of them in very rough shape, knowing that they'll get some food and kindness.

Nicu's amazing skills include foraging and food preservation. He roams the woods at all times of year, foraging all kinds of berries, mushrooms and nuts. This is in addition to growing his own garden. He can tell you about all kind of plants, what they're useful for, how to prepare them as food, or medicine, or how to use them in construction materials. These skills, which some people of Nicu's generation still have, will be gone with him, and the world will lose so much. The youth in Romania is mostly not interested in learning about them, just like they're not over here, they're into technology and more modern things, but hopefully there are still a few out there that these skills can be passed on to so we don't completely lose them.
Even though Nicu lives in a communist era apartment building, he has a root cellar full of preserves. These are some of the pickles he makes, and in the left corner are wild nuts he foraged and saved for the winter

And these are some of the grapes he grew, which he harvested for us. He also made grape juice out of them. It was all delicious. The bottles in the background have all kinds of alcoholic beverages made with fruits Nicu forages in the forest.

More preserves put away for the winter. Most of this food he actually gives away, to relatives and friends. He gave us a whole bunch too, and would've given even more if we didn't stop him out of fear of weighing down our luggage too much.

Making wine and another berry alcohol

Nicu's dining room and his whole apartment is small and very neat.

At the start of the meal

The first course for breakfast one morning: potato salad with home made mayonnaise, vegetable fritters and roasted vegetables spread (zacusca). Then followed hand-made crepes filled with home-made cheese and jams; then fruits. There was also hot cocoa, coffee and tea.

Nicu took us to Deva, a town near where he lives to visit a Dacian fortress, dating back to before the Roman conquest.

The sign says: Be careful! Vipers!
Nicu said that there are many vipers in the stone walls of the fortress. They are mostly active in warm weather and are very poisonous.

View of Deva from the fortress.

We took this crazy electric cabin to get up to the fortress. It was riding on a rail inclined at a super steep angle. The mother in me did not like that ride at all. I was relieved it only lasted about 2 minutes.

He also brought us to Cincis, a beautiful place near his town, where his son is building a house, and where Nicu spends time foraging.

This is Nicu's apartment building. He's been living in it for over 30 years. Hunedoara, the town he's in is not very beautiful - it used to be big industry during communist times, most of which has been abandoned since, so it looks kind of sad now. But it does have some nice historical parts, and even better for Nicu, it's very easy to get out of town and into the woods or countryside where he can pursue his activities.

Here Nicu's demonstrating how he makes cheese from raw milk he buys from a farmer. In the background are some stuffed peppers he just made for us.

Sena watching intently as Nicu pours the curds.

Cheese curds draining

And hanging the curds to drain until next day. This cheese then becomes Nicu's daily breakfast, or stuffing for crepes, and other things.

Thank you Nicu for everything (I say this knowing that he does not use computers, but I feel that I must put it out there anyway).
Peace