The days are long enough now with the hour change, for me still to be able to squeeze in a good walk with the black dog after dinner, and before the light totally fades. She and I head in the direction of birds singing. Down the lane to the creek. Far off, I can hear the starlings caroling from their night-time roost in a tree two streets over. Masses of them go there at every dusk, because they like to live in community. Go figure!
But the birds I was hearing aren’t these starlings. Rather, they have a sandpiper call and are piping and whistling from the grasses around the creek. It doesn’t matter that I don’t know what birds they are. I have all summer to find out.
And I’ll be creeping up on the river otters some more, too. I’ve seen them a number of times already, splashing about in the water and then rolling around on the grass. I want to know what they think is so funny.
Yesterday I heard a chickadee guy calling for a sweetie from the top of a bush. I would say yes, if I were a chickadee gal.
What a good time of year this is for the village!
Construction has settled into a steady rhythm on the two buildings beside and across from me. Any of you who are following our unfolding story will appreciate my telling you that our toilets are flushing into the new tank system. Ohm Farm has its greenhouse finished. It’s windproof and it has propagation benches, fans, warm soil, and beds for tomatoes and peppers. Nevin shows me tray after tray with tiny seedlings sending up their twin leaves. (Have you ordered your CSA weekly vegie box from them yet? ) http://www.ohmorganicfarm.ca/
The planting day for the Stewart Creek restoration went really well, with a large swath of native plants settled into their earth nests. The Fraser Valley Watershed coalition and a local troupe of Boy Scouts planted with our Creek Team. The previous week, a college class of environmental students helped get the ground prepared. This isn't only our creek!
We’ve been having a cool, damp, early spring, but still, the fields are greening up. Julian’s chickens are laying more eggs. Joel from Osprey Organic farm runs his brand new tractor up and down the rows, turning the soil over and the groundcover under.
There’s nothing like the hope and tidiness of a farm in early spring to have one thinking that an intentional life is easy. Seeds chosen from catalogues await, stacked and organised in their labeled brown bags. The farrows are straight and lined up. There are no weeds. Idyllic, right?
Well … yes and no, it’s not quite that tidy in the unintentional of an intentional village.
Even with all the steady progress in building and settling into a regular and sustaining rhythm of daily life, we have some struggles that make our shared life more complicated. Sometimes they’re about details. How to keep dogs off the planted gardens. Sometimes the complexities go deeper as we aim to communicate with some clarity about the details, but our inner worries express themselves in subtle ways. Spreading mulch with weeds in it, may implicate a farmer in a backbreaking project later, when their time is better spent selling vegetables. And a biggie--How will we balance our considerable financial needs to build a well-functioning housing development with our limited funds?
Sometimes I’m in the middle of a complex situation; other times, a bystander. Sometimes I’m with insight; other times not.
When I have a village conundrum to think over, I open my curiosity to the wondering of nature. I walk with the black dog to the back pasture and ask a question. The way to an answer comes to me in the grass blown by the wind, by the whistle of birds and the flow of the creek water over the rocks.
Today, I see the mallards grazing in the cow pasture next door. Unlike cows, they peep in distress when we come too near and rise into the air. At my feet, are the first seedlings of the invasive pink Impatiens that last year rose six feet tall and choked the stream bank. The air is warm and it smells good.
The answers I seek don’t come from what I find, standing beside the creek, listening to the burbling voices. Instead, they come from what is not here.
We have had no earthquake. Nor a tsunami or nuclear meltdown. We are safe.
We are fortunate. We have problems that are solvable with talking, or with quiet. Alone, or together. We find easier ways with patience, or even with some grumbling.
In the grand scheme of things, it’s a certainty we’ll survive and we’ll more than survive. I reckon we’re thriving.
We’re green and growing.
Poem—
e e cummings (1894-1962)
i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
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