slow glowing

the beet goes on

14″x17″, with uncooperative corners held in place by a green rock i found at the ocean and a couple pieces of smooth driftwood i found in the grass at a residential street corner far from the ocean in southeast portland:

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i finally planted a container garden:

clockwise from the bottom left: lavender; more lavender (i love lavender); strawberries; a big pot full o’ herbs with basil, oregano, parsley, chives, thyme and sage; and a mini bell pepper. my mom gave me these pretty glazed ceramic pots, which i guess were sitting in the garage unused. i still have a few more to fill! and a whole bunch of packets full of seeds. in august, when i get back from california, i’m going to plant snap peas and a lot of salad greens: kale, arugula, spinach…

more food from the garden:

blueberries, best eaten with mere inches and seconds between plant and mouth (though some palm hoarding is okay):

beets!:

i love beets lately. yesterday we made a roasted baby beet salad for lunch. i peeled the beets with my fingers and got my hands all bloody with beet flesh. tom robbins’ “most intense of vegetables.” the lines in my palms were stained pink.

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i feel so overwhelmed by all the ways to save the world–you know? i don’t know which is for me to do. i’ve been reading so much lately, about history, community, science, spirituality, art, and everything else. a. and i have been watching joseph campbell’s the power of myth. a few days ago i went to powell’s on hawthorne and bought myself a small stack of books for my birthday. while there, i was really struck by the the assortment of books on the “new arrivals” table and the other tables in the front of the store. so much of them were about food, farming, gardening, fuel, green politics, etc. i know i live in portland and all, but i really feel like the whole world’s awareness is changing. it’s so great!, though it does make me feel sort of unoriginal. well, i may not be the seed, but i hope to be one of the gardeners.

i have friends who seem to have really clear paths, who know what they need to do to be doing what they need to be doing to be fulfilled (not an end to the path, but a way of walking it), or are already there–and i have friends who are more lost than me. i think that’s okay. it is sort of beautifully messy to be lost. i am stumbling across all kinds of things i would never notice or explore if i had any idea where the heck i was going.

one-sixth of my life ago, i went to italy. it was a family vacation, but i arrived after my parents did and had a few days in rome before meeting up with them in venice. totally coincidentally, my boyfriend at the time was in italy with his family at the same time. we met up in rome my first day there. my flight had gotten in very late the night before and my parents had paid for a hotel room for me for the night (after that, i planned to stay in a hostel). i was not a seasoned traveler at that point, and the cabbie who drove me from the airport ripped me off. i was supposed to meet my boyfriend and his family outside the vatican, but due to a transportation strike in the city, they were very, very late. we had no way of getting in touch with each other. i desperately needed a drink of water, and there was a cart selling bottled water very near where i was waiting, but i had no euros and was afraid that if i left to find an atm, they’d never find me or i them. eventually they showed up, of course, and we toured the vatican museum, the sistine chapel–lovely–all that. then my boyfriend and i left to find my hostel. with the subway closed by the strike, it was a long walk. we walked all up and down the street it was supposed to be on, until we finally matched the correct street number with an unobtrusive unmarked door. after some weird communication difficulties, we finally got buzzed in to a stairwell. we walked up the first flight. no hostel. the second. my head was throbbing from some combination of dehydration and jetlag. after the sixth, i sat down on the stairs and cried, feeling totally incapable of continuing. the hostel was on the seventh floor.

i guess my point is that i was so close to where i was going, and it felt so impossible to get there, when really i had done pretty much all of the getting there already.

my boyfriend and i broke up less than a month later. our relationship had not been doing well for awhile, but what really brought about the end of it was that he said he didn’t respect me. when i asked him why, he referenced the incident above–which i think i would otherwise have forgotten by now–said i gave up too easily. now that moment on the stairs seems like the place from which i have been walking–you know? the months that followed were rough on my self-respect. rebuilding that took a lot of work and several years. i’m probably still doing it. but it allowed for an awareness (of myself and of the people and the world around me) to blossom that i didn’t have in my life before then.

maybe if i were telling another story, i’d pinpoint some other moment as That Moment. there is no That Moment, probably. but still, what i have said is true. (”no truth can make another truth untrue”–ursula le guin.)

that boyfriend is still (peripherally) in my life, mostly (i must admit) because basically since that time, he’s been in a relationship with one of my best friends, one of my favorite people in the whole world. that’s how it goes in this funny universe. sometime–i don’t remember when–i told him that i would appreciate it if, when or if i ever “earned back his respect,” he would tell me so. he never has, and probably he has long since forgotten, because in his life it was not That Moment. i don’t need him to anymore, but even so i am not sure how i feel about writing this in my blog, now, because there’s a chance he’ll read it. que sera, sera.

he is one of those friends with the path all clear and well-lit. i am happy for him, as i stumble around in the brush of my path, pulling fat tasty blueberries off the bushes.

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in the meantime, here’s some joy (at the rose garden with matt; photos by him):

(the frankenrose, made from fallen petals)