Looking back, it seems I'm managing to post at the rate of once per month. Not exactly stunning productivity, but it could be worse, eh? "Productivity" is not a word I'd actually associate with any area of my life at the moment...certainly not my academics. I feel as though I am wrestling with some interesting and important questions in some of the writing and research I'm doing right now, it's just that so far the questions are winning. Perhaps one source of my trouble is the metaphor of wrestling with those questions. Better, I think, to attempt to dance with them. Dancing may involve some dynamic confusion about who is leading who, and getting one's toes stepped on once in awhile, but all that is still preferable to being pinned to a mat. Engagement, rather than domination, admitting I'll only ever get one version of a multivalent "truth"...that's the way to go. Or maybe I've just become all buffleheaded* from all of this nonviolent, peacebuilding stuff.
(*"Bufflehead, n. A small North American diving duck, related to the goldeneye, with a large puffy head. " The adjective form I've just now invented. It means just what it sounds like it means. If you think people should refrain from inventing words, I invite you to go look up "peacebuilding" --the field in which I am currently pursuing a Master's Degree--in Miriam-Webster.)
I spent last weekend in WV, with a brief detour (or re-tour) to Harrisonburg for a meeting of a Deep Ecology discussion group that one of my classmates is organizing. Lots of thoughts about that group, but I was left with the impression that I might be more optimistic about the prospects for widespread environmentalism than your average deep ecology group participant. I attribute that optimism in large part to the fact that we spent the day before and the day after the discussion getting our hands dirty--starting some seeds in the house (tomatoes, peppers, basil, and the like) and others right in the ground (parsnips, leeks, peas).
Incidentally, we tested our garden soil and found that it was acidic and low in nitrogen. Happily, we had buckets of wood ash sitting around from the winter, which balance acidity, and friends who could give us manure from their farm to up the nitrogen. Drew's charming (seriously) tendency for borderline obsessive, somewhat free associative research has been a tremendous boon for our gardening enterprise. He knows all that good stuff.
We also turned our compost pile on Sunday; it's funny how in the proper context dirt is sort of exciting (as in, "look, we piled up all our trash and made dirt! sweet!").
I might not have predicted, in my younger days, how much I would enjoy gardening and other homesteading-type projects. Isn't kind of exciting how you never really know who exactly you're going to turn out to be in the end?
Goal for this weekend: more dancing (of both the literal and figurative varieties)
