The Worm Bin

While flipping over rocks at Three Sisters today, I was delighted to come upon several red wrigglers! I had been searching through manure the past few months for the critters to no avail. Now that spring has sprung they are everywhere, wriggling through the wet soil up into the sun. Now I can start my worm bin. What is a worm bin, you may ask? I certainly had no idea before I went to EAT. The purpose of a worm bin is to create worm casings which you can use fertilizer, either putting them directly onto your plants or by brewing worm tea. They are easy to make. Just get a garbage can and poke some holes in it so the worms can breathe. Toss in some newspaper and some food scraps and some red wrigglers, and the worms will do their thing, digesting your food scraps into succulent casings. It sounds grosser than it is. The casings actually look and feel just like soil, not like the manure which they actually are. A worm bin is more practical than a compost pile if you live in a city. You can put it in your basement or under your kitchen sink. The worms should be red wrigglers, not the larger earth worms. Red wrigglers can be mail-ordered, purchased from a bait shop, or dug yourself--horse manure is a good place to look. To make worm tea take a handful of casings and add it to a five gallon bucket of water. AT EAT we dumped in two bottles of blackstrap molasses as well, since the sugar promotes bacterial growth. The tea should be aerated by stirring it for an hour or by hooking it up to a pump (like for an aquarium) if you don't want to do it yourself. Here on BI, a wormbin is economical as well, since we have to pay for our trash by weight at the dump. Plus you get to have pets!

Sadhana

Sadhana is a Sanskrit work meaning spiritual practice. It is doing the same thing day after day until it becomes an unconscious habit, like tying your shoes, only sadhana relates to more intangible things like the emotions. My hope is that if I do my sadhana every day I will be able to deal with my emotions the same way that I tie my shoes.

Sadhana

A scent upon the surface.
A dew covered mountainside at dawn.

Insects pass their mantra on to the bush birds
twittering as the sun strikes the far side of the valley.

Callused fingertips. A shaky hand.
Not many years left of doing.

A stooped woman leans forward to pick tea leaves.
Heavy basket slung across her shoulders. Crooked hips.

Who do you belong to the same way
the leaves belong to the branches?

The air is so humid she pretends she is swimming.
Nobody ever taught her, but she knows how anyway.

The game is to forget what you’re doing her mother told her.
When she was a girl she used to believe clouds had faces.

Do the branches wonder if they belong to the roots?
She’s lived her whole life in this valley.

At the end of the day she sits on her porch drinking tea.
The insects take up the mantra as the moon peaks.

Her children have all moved to a far distant city.
If she could write, she’d tell them how the earth turns when
she stands in place.

Vultures draft on currents of air she can’t feel so close to the ground.
There’s a road leading out of the valley.

I still might take it, she thinks.
I still might learn to write.

One last sip.
What do the leaves at the bottom say?

Go to sleep, old woman.
There’s work to be done in the morning.

The Internal Tsunami

It is rainy on Block Island. Ducks splash in roadside puddles, water pools on the street and the ground is soggy at Three Sisters, where I've been making sandwiches for the past few days. So much has been going on for me internally that I haven't been able to channel my thoughts into a permaculture focus, so I haven't written in a while. Maybe I should anyway. Restricting myself to permaculture only is in a way, focusing on product over process. With permaculture as my umbrella, the frame which guides my thoughts, then everything I go through is part of the process and equally valid, even if I don't relate specific permacultural facts in every post. This makes me realize how sensitive I am to criticism, how much I need approval. When I first started this blog someone wrote to me and told me I should have more ecological information and not so much personal information. I have felt self-conscious ever since if I don't write some "facts" in every post, which is ridiculous considering this is my blog! Self-censorship is an issue that has come up a lot in the poetry seminars I have been participating in at The Block Island Poetry Project. I like to think that I don't censor myself, that I go as deep as I can and don't fear what my audience will say or think. Compared to some, I think I don't, but I know that I do censor myself sometimes. Not because I'm afraid what I say will shock others. I've gotten over that. But because I'm afraid of the emotions I raise. Afraid of what they will do to me. Will they burn all that consumes me away so I will be free of the pain they cause? Or will they destroy me? This is where being an addict comes into play. Everytime you take a drink or eat or have sex in a non-sacred way, or whatever it is that you repeat over and over to numb your pain, you are stamping down that emotion so you don't have to feel it. I do this with food every day, and it is very painful for me. Recently I realized why I crave salty food so much. Most people seem to crave sweets, which signifies a need for nurturing. While I do need to be nurtured, I seem to act out my addictive impulses with salty food. What does salt do? It asbsors water. Water represents emotions. Every time I eat salt I am soaking up the emotions I am afraid to express. More and more I feel rage and despair building in me, like they are gonig to burst out of my body, like my body is not large enough to hold these feelings. I go about my daily business as best I can, but the strain is very difficult and exhausting. I feel like I am leading a split life. Like there are two of me walking around. I bet everyone feels this way, but I have a feeling that most people just push the feeling away and keep numbing themselves. Recovery is a process.....not a product. We are never "fixed." There is always a new door that appears before us. A new room calling to us in our dreams.

I call what I have been going through for the past month my internal tsunami. I got word from some folks on the Breaking Open The Head forum that an east coast tsunami was predicted for may 15th of this year. Many synchronicities made me feel that this was going to happen, that I was going to die in a tsunami. My name--Whitewave--the asian tsunami, which occurred on my birthday--the name of my publishing company, Tsunami. The name of my first book "Siren" and my second "The Apocalypse Diary." --and the many poems I have written in the past three years that feature a great wave sweeping everything away. I have since shifted focus to an internal tsunami, experiencing everything being swept away inside me, which is a more productive thing to do ultimately than to worry about finding higher ground on May 15. I am at a point where I almost don't care if I die, which isn't as bad as it sounds. There is actually peace to be found at this point, especially since I know intellectually we are all one--all part of one energy--an endless wave-but to know something intellectually is not the same as to know it in your heart. In my heart I feel separate, disengaged, despairing. Thoughts of killing myself come every day. I am lucid enough to know that these thoughts are part of the wave that wants me to let go--so dont' worry, I am not going to actually kill myself. I am just being honest with my words because my goal is to become transparent, to grow as much as I can, to be as simple as a bluebell blooming amongst lily of the valley at the foot of an ancient oak tree. I don't know what I have to do to feel the union I know intellectually. I learned something very important from the yoga teacher and poet Jeff Davis, who came to BI to teach at the Poetry Project. I asked him what one should do when one is experiencing dark emotions. He said the thing to do was to not attach one's self to them. To recognize that one is experiencing them, but not to fully identify with them. He said that this applied to what we perceive as positive emotions as well. Emotions are our teachers and the more we experience of all of them, the more our hearts grow, and the deeper our souls become. I asked him what I should do since I couldn't disengage and observe my emotions. He said "practice." And that is where things like yoga or meditation or AA come in. I have written here I think about how I think addiction is a substitution for ritual. It makes sense that practicing yoga or going to an AA meeting is something that would lead the ego out of attachment and suffering. Since that weekend I have been doing yoga again everyday, and while the dark emotions are still with me, I do feel better that everyday I am practicing. I knwo that if I stick with it this will work,because the one time I was uniequivocally happy was when I did yoga everyday for four months. Jeff Davis was a great teacher. I recommend his book "Journey From The Center To The Page."

Well, I planned to write a blog today about bio-remediation at Abby's behest. She actually said she missed me! All the rain inspired me.......but I had to get to all this other stuff for some reason. All I can say is that it is part of my process. If people want info about ecoology there are plenty of places to get it right? Anyway, bioremediation, in a nutshell, is a process of treating contaminated water or cleaning up waste through natural means. It can be done by building marshlands to treat wastewater (marsh plants are masters at cleaning water) instead of having to chemically treat the water, or through using fungus. Did you know that mushrooms can break down toxic wastes, including nuclear waste? If you're interested in learnign more google Paul Stamets. He is a researcher in the pacific northwest who is doing amazing things with mushrooms that gives solutions for even the most dire environmental problems. The great thing about bioremediation is that it is another way to get off the grid. Cheaper and more efficient and better for the earth and the body. And aren't we the earth's body too? It even says so in the Bible. God created man out of clay, and Adam created woman out of his rib. While I would argue with the order of events here, not that it matters on a spiritual level, but on a political matter it certainly does, I find it kind of funny that the fundamentalists who claim to interpret the Bible literally are very often the ones who are so disconnected from the earth that they are the ones most invested in destroying it. George Bush anyone?

No more words left today, but I will try to write through what I'm feeling, because if I'm not sharing it, then what good am I?

Breaking Open The Head

The words have been coming in different ways for the past couple of weeks. I apologize to anyone who has missed me! I am almost done with my poetry manuscript--or at least I think I am. It is hard to tell when one is done in poetry. I would like to direct people to a really incredible forum at www.breakingopenthehead.com. I have been writing a lot here lately. Click on discussion when the website comes us. It is based on Daniel Pinchbeck's book, Breaking Open The Head: A Contemporary Journey Into Psychedelic Shamanism. I highly recommend the book and the forum. I have been learning a lot from the people on the forum...I will get back to permaculture soon, but right now, I would like to say that it is OK to feel angry. Any of you who feel angry, let it out! Just don't hurt yourself or anybody or thing.