Peripheries

or Coming to Terms (Again)

If you go back to its roots, a periphery is literally something that is "carried around."  Back in the 16th century (or the 14th, depending on your source), the word referred to the atmosphere around the earth.  I'd love to know what, in those long-ago days, people really meant by atmosphere.  Maybe they had something like the Belt of Venus in mind:  the pink glow carried around the horizon at dusk and dawn, at the point where light and dark merge—something visible and radiant with the vast unknown beyond it.

"Periphery" has long since lost that atmospheric shade of meaning, and even its literal one.  These days its primary definition is simpler:  the outer limit or margin of something.  It's a neutral word, describing plain facts.  Take the fine hairs on Sempervivum leaves, for example.  They grow on the leaves' peripheries, on their margins or outer edges.  That is a simple truth, and periphery sums up those little hairs' place in the world without question.

Something beautiful gets lost in the summation, though.  Even in the softness of shade, those delicate whiskers carry light around the periphery of the leaves and bring an atmosphere shining to life.  The edges are where light gathers and plays.  The periphery isn't a neutral place—it's where the magic happens.

Still, better a neutral meaning than a negative one.  The other definitions of periphery aren't so pleasant.  They're about relative position and status:  inside vs. outside; center vs. edge.  To be on the periphery is to be marginal, secondary, in a lesser or unimportant position.  It's to be like the second of the hens-and-chicks in the photo above—on the edge of your awareness, fuzzed out of focus.  Not central to anything, even though you might notice if it weren't there.  Just...not mattering all that much.

Is anything as fascinating as the periphery of a tulip leaf?  At least, until the tulips bloom.  Then the leaves become...peripheral.

I've been a little thoughtful about peripheries lately, a little pensive.  I've missed some activities that kind of broke my heart not to be a part of—an impromptu cello performance by my oldest nephew, some dear friends' son's bar mitzvah—because, even though I'm doing better than I have in years, I'm not well enough to participate fully.  CFIDS/ME really puts you on the periphery of your own life, because being in the thick of things is too disabling.  You make it work for you:  you find other avenues for life, like blogging and Facebook, and reveling in the small wonders in a small garden.  Over time, you kind of forget what "normal" life is like.  But then you have a sudden reminder of the everyday pleasures other people enjoy unthinkingly and realize how far out on the periphery you are.  You are a bit like Gomer Goldfish:

Except that I'm never that grumpy.  Obviously.

This really isn't a down-hearted or complaining post:  I know full well that being peripheral to activities does not make me peripheral in the hearts of those who love me.  There are so many things that I can do.  The things I miss out on do not diminish the value (or my enjoyment) of the "less important" things that come my way.  And I really like my sofa; you could not find a more comfortable sofa to lie on.  For hours on end. 

It is, however, a thoughtful post.  I've found myself wandering around the garden (in a non-strenuous way) looking at leaf edges, at boundaries and margins and outer limits, and wondering about them.  What does it mean to be on the periphery?  And if it means something unpleasant, what can I do to change it?  I can't change illness (so far).  It has set the limits.  So instead, what can I do to change the periphery?  To make it, not a place that's out of focus or on the edge of awareness, or even a place of neutral fact, but a place where light gathers and plays, a place that carries its own radiance around with it and has, maybe, just a bit of a pink glow?* 

On the periphery between shade and sun.

How can the periphery be a place where magic happens?

_________________
* Except that I'm not really all that fond of pink.

Delusions of Grandeur

or In Which We Refuse to Believe That Less Is More

Small dogs have their own burdens to bear.  It can't be easy to have the instincts of a guardian, a large and noble beast, a lion-hearted predator, and then to have the body of, essentially, prey.  One of my neighbors has a toy poodle—a little dust mop of a dog who barks maniacally every time you walk past.  She sounds like she means business until the moment you turn and look at her, at which point you can see her doing some quick math problems in her little head, calculating relative sizes, force vectors, speeds, distances, and levels of irritation.  After a rather painful moment of "ah," she turns tail and runs around the corner, from which point of safety she can resume barking.  But she knows, and you know, and she knows you know, that from then on it's all show, pure bravado with no substance behind it.

When I'm working in the garden, the poodle seems more curious than territorial.  Our houses are separated by a five-foot high concrete wall, which she obviously can't see over, but she can hear me moving around.  She comes over to the wall, puts her nose to the half-inch wide gap between two of the blocks, and sniffs large, purposeful sniffs.  The gap works like an echo-chamber—it magnifies the noise and makes her sound more like a Rottweiler than like a six-pound bundle of fluff and nerves.  It is a sound that does her heart justice; she must find it incredibly satisfying.

I've been taking advantage of mild weather this weekend to wander around the garden and make plans for winter cleanup and spring planting.  In particular I was pondering the microgarden, which is a blank slate at this point.  Normally it would have some cold-weather greens overwintering in it, along with maybe a last carrot or two that I'm saving to brighten a dreary day, and some perennials like chives and bunching onions.  The aphids ran so far amok last fall, though, that I ended up emptying the bed completely and now have the pleasure of refilling the whole thing at once.  I'm contemplating soil mixtures, compost, pest control, organic fertilizers, and other things of that ilk.  Oh, and seeds.

Lots of seeds.

Keep in mind that the microgarden is a two foot by four foot raised bed, divided into about 30 growing cells of different sizes.  It is not a large space; its growing potential may be impressive for its size, but it is hardly what we would call unlimited.  And into these eight square feet, according to my current seed list, I am planning to put twelve varieties of greens; two kinds each of carrots,  radishes, and onions; peppers, squash, garlic, cucumbers, Chinese long beans, tomatillos, basil, marigolds...

I was sitting on the blue bench in the garden being serenaded by the ferocious sniffing of poodles while I looked over the seed list, when suddenly the absurdity of it hit me and I burst out laughing.  (Maniacal barking from across the wall.)  Apparently miniature dogs aren't the only ones with delusions of grandeur.  Are three varieties of chard and four of amaranth really necessary to my health and happiness?  Chinese long beans may be a good idea for a small space in principle, but is a ten-foot tall vine (starting from three feet off the ground) really going to be all that easy to harvest?  Will all of these tall plants really be able to grow in such a small area without shading each other?  Do I really expect this to be the year that squash vine borers and cucumber beetles leave my squash and cucumbers alone? 

Well, really, the answer to all of those questions is, "No."  But what does reality have to do with gardening?  Okay, with results, sure, maybe a lot, but with the hopes and dreams of seed buying?  With winter plans? With the visions of bounty that tide us through the colder months, of vine leaves spilling prolifically over the sides of the garden, of the earthy sweetness of baby carrots, of the scent of basil as you accidentally brush against a leaf, of the gleam of marigolds against the greenery?  Reality has just enough to do with those visions to keep me dreaming big dreams—Rottweiler dreams, wolf dreams.

But it's still just a miniature poodle garden.

Turning the Corner

or Celebrating Light

Every winter solstice, one of my dearest friends in Vermont happily points out that "We've turned the corner!"  Her blitheness used to drive me crazy when I lived there.  The sub-zero Fahrenheit temperatures of January and February were still ahead of us, and even worse, the cruel tease known as "March," not to mention the disgusting weeks of mud season, when knee-high boots are sucked off your feet to disappear forever in the muck and mire.  To be rejoicing that the days are each growing one minute (oh, wow, one whole minute!) longer seemed to be missing the point of the three months of winter and their 129,600 minutes yet to come.

And yet, truth be told, we have turned a corner, away from darkness toward ever-increasing light.  Spring is, in fact, if we are to be completely technical about it and ignore such incidental phenomena as snow, ice, and frigid temperatures, on its way.  Here in New Mexico, as in much of the West, the coldest months of the year are December and January; the solstice really does mark "midwinter."  We're at the nadir of this very shallow valley and beginning to saunter out again.  Now that I'm here and not dreading any actual, you know, weather, I can appreciate my friend's point of view a little better.

I was thinking about that yesterday morning, the first day of winter, as the combination of sunrise, unseasonable warmth, and a hot cup of tea beckoned me outside.   I was taking photograph after photograph of the painterly clouds and thinking of the view as a sunrise (which it was), all the while wondering what distinguished it from a sunset, other than the whole obvious east/west factor.  Visually? perhaps nothing.  Experientially? almost everything:  the sense of vibrancy rather than of sleep, the pull toward action, the glad shout of life—

And rather than being intrinsic to the sunrise, almost all of that experiential difference comes from inside our own heads. 

When I first became ill, I slept between 12 and 14 hours a day, at the minimum. I would sleep through two alarms, and wake feeling as though I had never slept at all. After several months of that, I realized how much hope comes from the idea that "it will all look better in the morning"—how deep the belief in dawn, in the solstice, in turning points, in improvement, runs. When you wake in the morning feeling worse than you did the night before, and realize that that's just the way things are going to be from this time forward, it's not only physically wrong, it's counter to everything you know in your gut about the way the world "should" work.

At some point you realize that turning points don't just happen.  Solstice isn't meaningful all by itself; the days may grow longer, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they will become any better.  A sunrise may suggest an awakening to life, but that doesn't mean the awakening will occur.  You have to make those moments pivotal.  You choose to see the dawn as a time of possibility, to celebrate the growth of light rather than to bemoan the cold of winter, to live your values rather than to harp on your losses.  Hope is something you decide on, not something that automatically waltzes your way with the sunrise or the solstice.

This is the time of year for celebrations of light. As a more-or-less Friend, a Quaker, with deep Protestant roots, I celebrate the birth of the Christ child—the Light come among us.  To those of you who also celebrate Christmas, I offer best wishes for a very merry one!  To those who do not, I warmly extend my hands in a wish for peace on earth and good will toward all.

May God bless us, every one.

On the Edge of Utopia

or E Pluribus Unum

The only bow I'm taking in the direction of Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, this Thanksgiving:  dried cranberries.  The other ingredients for the salsa—oranges from California, pecans from Georgia, red chile powder from here in New Mexico—come from parts of the country that never really had a share in the narrow slice of history behind Thanksgiving Day.  While the locavore in me—the part that believes in eating foods grown as locally as possible, with the emphatic exception of coffee—is appalled at the distance these foods have traveled to be prepared in my kitchen, the American quite likes the "melting pot" aspect to this side dish.  It is sweet and savory, tart and spicy.  It goes amazingly well with everything.*

Since moving to New Mexico, I've looked at Thanksgiving with new eyes.  Several of my acquaintances have ancestors who came over with the Conquistadors, who weren't exactly proponents of religious freedom.  They were here to find wealth and make converts, both by force.  They were soldiers or priests, with the power of the Crown and the Pope behind them, and they were here decades before the Puritans established the Plymouth colony.  Yet, 450 plus years later, their descendants serve turkey and cranberries (and probably posole) with enthusiasm.

Other acquaintances are Navajo or Pueblo Indians.  They are twice separated from the Thanksgiving story:  their experience of Europeans was Spanish, not British, and in any case, they see little cause to be thankful for the invasion of their lands and the decimation of their peoples.  They may observe Thanksgiving with caveats—with an awareness of loss that cuts to the bone—yet many of them observe it.  Like the Spaniards' descendants, they, too, might serve posole, a native food.  Their thanks-givings foreground a joyful recognition of harvest, and they acknowledge centuries' worth of pain without closing the door to hope.  They balance the need for change with keeping the faith, with taking the steps so that harmony can prevail.

I asked an acquaintance—a descendant of Coronado—why he embraced Thanksgiving so heartily, when it wasn't the history of his ancestors.  He said, "Because I'm American, so it is my story, and it's such a great story to boot."

And it is a great story, the way it was taught to us in childhood.  At its core, Thanksgiving is all about a belief in Utopia—a Utopia that we ourselves can bring into being.  We absorb that myth of Thanksgiving in our first years of school.  We learn about the Pilgrims fleeing persecution because of their beliefs, and about their first horrible winter of privation, illness, and death in the New World; about the kindness of Tisquantum (Squanto) and the Wampanoag peoples in sharing their know-how, which helped create a glorious harvest the next year; and about how all sat down together to enjoy the blessings of friendship and plenty, knowing that the coming winter would be a better one.  And beyond that, who could say?  It was a whole New World out there, and anything could happen—with a little hard work, a little friendship, and by the grace of God, Utopia was theirs to create.

Of course, as we grow older, we discover that the myth is, in fact, mythical.  The meal was not a meeting of equals and, though relations between the initial colony and the Wampanoag were relatively  peaceful for 50 years, it hardly presaged harmony among nations; the persecution of the Puritans in England was as much political as it was religious, and the Puritans were happy (in a dour sort of way) to persecute others in their turn; the New World had a horrible dark side of slavery and genocide; and Utopia turned out to be a pipe-dream, in part because it was envisaged by Puritans, who wouldn't have recognized Utopia if it had bitten them in...some place that they probably wouldn't have approved of.

But we still grew up believing in that story, no matter what part of the country we grew up in, or what our personal history; just as we embrace all kinds of stories, not only the ones that pertain directly to us.  For a day, even if only deep-down, we imagine what it must be like to sit on the edge of a continent, purposefully putting the past behind us, knowing that none of the former rules need apply; knowing also that while the risks of death and disaster are great, the possibilities are just as endless; that we can create a world that reflects our deepest values, and not just the history we've inherited; that while that future might sink before our limitations, it also might rise beyond our grandest dreams.  (And the dreams in such a situation can be grand indeed.)  Underlying every Thanksgiving dinner, no matter how deeply, and if only for a day, the heart of that myth endures:  a respect for past sacrifice, a joy in current plenty, and a belief that the future is still a whole New World—that anything can happen.

My favorite Thanksgiving happened while I was a graduate student, when I was one of only two or three Americans at a long table of celebrants.  World accents as rich and savory as the American turkey, the Israeli lamb and couscous, the Welshman's mushy peas, the Italians' handmade pasta, enlivened the meal.  It was every bit as American a Thanksgiving as the ones I had experienced in my parents' home—as American as cranberry salsa, as we like to say—because of the spirit of adventure and discovery and camaraderie we all shared.

Because of our belief that tomorrow could well be a whole new world, and that anything might happen.

Happy Thanksgiving, my friends.

__________________
* My sister (in whose home I'll be spending Thanksgiving) has Vegemite on hand, and I admit to some serious doubts about how well cranberry salsa will go with Vegemite.  If the results are not too graphic, I will report on them in a footnote sometime next week.

Fruition

or When a Plan Comes Together...

I usually think that gardening is about hope, though lately I've been wondering if it isn't more about Master Narratives. But no matter what I think, my actual experience is that it's a leap in the dark.

My desert olive trees have olives, you see, so naturally I'm a bit confused.

One of my friends is fond of saying that we make our own realities, that our world is as much a product of our perceptions as it is of objective truths. I see this perspective playing out in the way I view my garden, and the ways its successes and failures are shoe-horned into a Master Narrative, an archetypal story—in this case, “It's all going according to plan.”

The desert olives are a case in point. They are among the plants I didn't really know much about when I put them in, although the same could be said for almost everything else in my garden. Even though I grew up in the west, I learned about perennial gardening in New York state and Vermont—antithetical regions to the high desert of Albuquerque. I designed my garden based on research into native plants, a lot of ideas from British gardening books, and (some) common sense.

In case you were wondering, research is not the same as experience. You can read all the right books, haunt the online forums, prowl the botanic gardens, question the people in the biggest, floppiest hats at your local garden center (strange but true fact: the people in big, floppy hats always know the most), etc., etc., but you don't really know what a plant will do until you know its life history in your garden. That is to say, you only really know what it will do once it has actually done it. The whole endeavor is a leap in the dark, a lesson in hope—but once it works, it's what you had planned on all along.

To return to the desert olive (Forestiera neomexicana). What I read in my books is that it is a large shrub or small tree with delicate leaves, golden fall color, and small, olive-like fruits that attract songbirds. The branches bend at unpredictable angles, giving mature trees distinct personalities and winter interest. They're deeply taprooted, so they are suitable for small spaces. I'd never seen one in action, so to speak, but they sounded perfect, so I planted three of them.

All according to plan...

Four years have passed since then. The first two were not easy, even for native plants that scoff at ease, as almost every single leaf on all three trees was eaten by leaf-rollers before the summer was half gone. I didn't know whether the trees would survive, but what do I know about New Mexican plants? They did, and even put on 18 inches of growth each year. They had grown enough by last summer that I could begin the gradual process of limbing them up. They're taking nice little shapes. The trunks are beginning to twist and bend. The leaves are even (mostly) still on the branches, well into August—I may actually see some fall color this year. And for the first time, the two female trees have fruit—enough to feed several birds several meals this winter. The trees are beginning to settle in, to thrive, to do what nature programmed them to do, to fulfill the Grand Plan built into their genetic code. And even though I'm just now finding out what that is, I am as full of “ta-da!” about it as they are.

Of course, one hopes when one plants trees that they will grow, leaf, and fruit—it's rather the point of trees. But telling the story, “My trees are doing just what I'd planned on them doing; my garden design is all working out” ignores the fact that my garden is on its fourth Master Plan in four years, that those three trees (and two bush cherries) are literally the only things still growing where I initially put them (if at all), that some of those unpredictably bending branches are shading what used to be direct-sun beds which will now need replanting, and that the finches have defoliated all the upper branches by perching in them so that they (the branches) look really silly.

All those things get brushed to the side, simply because the trees now have olives, and have done what desert olive trees (apparently) do. The failures, changes, re-thinkings, quirks, and disappointments are all recast as sketches, rough drafts, part of the learning process leading to this ultimate end. That's the story I tell.

But really, it was all just a leap in the dark.

Lost

or  Looking for Hope

I'm sorry if this is a rehash for some of you, especially for my Facebook friends.   But an incident happened at work today that really rattled and angered me, and I have been trying to come to terms with it.

What happened was this:   I work as the secretary of a church, and the church building lies on a route that brings many who are needy or confused or wandering to our door (which is kind of the point of a church).  This morning, a young woman who was clearly on drugs rang our bell, and when I answered, she came in and said that she had lost her daughter—she had just turned around for a minute, and her two-year-old girl was gone.   The woman wasn't particularly distraught, acting more—not even confused, just stoned, than anything.   I can't exactly say why, but it seemed more important to me that she call 911 than that we go out and search the neighborhood.  Maybe I hadn't really absorbed what she had said, or I was half disbelieving her (she wasn't entirely coherent, and you develop a certain cynicism when you answer the door at a church very often), or I wanted more capable hands than mine to deal with it, or I wanted the authorities to get involved so that this woman wasn't given charge of a child again.   I don't know.  I was already angry with her for coming to our door:   if you lose a child, you don't leave the vicinity!  You search high and low, flag down a passing car, and have them call the police!   But church buildings are places of refuge, and in times of crisis, people often turn to them automatically.   I still don't know whether it was the "right" choice, but I helped the woman place the call, intending then to go out and search for the little girl until the police arrived.

But I couldn't leave.   The woman had no idea where she was, and someone had to stay and feed her information so that the police would come to the right place.  I listened to that entire conversation and got more angry than I have been in years, or possibly ever, because while this woman was maundering on and on about nothing, a child was out there somewhere lost, and no one could do anything about it, because this mother was too high even to ask for help properly.   When the emergency dispatcher asked her to describe her daughter, the woman said that she was "short."   She thought that she might have been wearing something pink—a tutu kind of thing, or maybe a shorts jumpsuit; she was blondish.   The woman described her plans for the day and what she thought about the weather.   She had lost her daughter at—was it the corner? the bench at the bus-stop? in the bushes by the sidewalk?   The girl's name was Jessica.  Or possibly Marie.

At that point, I began disbelieving in the existence of the daughter, or at least in the mother's tale.   But who can run that risk?   Who can afford to say,  "Oh, please.   Just move along now, ma'am," when the possibility exists that the mother is right?   The inconsistencies in her story weren't those of a liar, but of someone not in her right mind.   So some parts of her story could just as well have been true.

As soon as the phone call ended, I ran to find my co-workers, and we started to look outside.   The police came almost immediately, bless them, and were competent, efficient, and kindly.  An Amber Alert, two television crews, and a visit from the paramedics later, it became clear that the daughter had been in Roswell, 200 miles away, all along.  She had never been in danger; the mother had been hallucinating.   The paramedics took her away.

But I cannot forget the feeling of powerlessness and injustice when that woman was on the phone in my office—the anger, not that a woman could look away and have her daughter disappear—that's all too realistic a nightmare and can happen to anyone—but that she could get so drugged up that she couldn't even ask for help in what she thought was an emergency; that those of us who wanted to help the child couldn't because we had to help the mother instead; that someone so criminally irresponsible should have made the choice to have a child, when so many who would love a child can't have one; that the little girl was the one who was going to pay for her mother's negligence.

And then it all turned out to be OK.  Only it isn't.

It just isn't.

And so I am hunting around for a context to put this in, and two things come to mind.   One is a recent comment by a friend, that God is in the Small Things.  The other is a conversation my sister and I recently had about a photo of a new leaf unfurling—that the leaves remind us of babies yawning and stretching out one little fist, maybe half open.  My sister asked me to write a blog post about it, and I agreed.  This isn't what either of us had in mind.  But to see these leaves—their intricate, laser-cut edges, the perfection of every minute hair, the clean musculature of the new leaf as it opens—is to remember the spark of Life that guides all growing things toward the Light.

As another friend and I recently discussed, hope can be a double-edged sword.  If a hope isn't realistic, it can just as easily lead to disappointment and despair.  But I have hope for that little girl, that she will grow up strong and loving, and for her mother, that she, too, may one day choose strength and love.  I have seen it happen. 

By the grace of God, who blesses small things.