Sunday morning is my designated time to water the garden with a hose, should I choose to. I wish I didn't need to but this last week has been hot and dry, again and again and again and will be until at least next weekend, again. Holy valotta this is not fun and I have had to take to blatantly disregarding the state government's watering rules everyday in order to water my little seedlings and newly sown seeds. No government is going to stop me growing my own food. Ever. Having my vegetable garden mostly in the front yard makes it very obvious that I am not towing the line and this puts me in a very bad mood. Don't ring me or visit me this week or I may rip you to bits with my anger then spit you out for the worms! Unfortunately I took out a bit of my frustration on a couple of people at KGI this morning - there is always someone there to tussle with! Soon they will kick me out for heckling.
Spraying a fine lovely shower of water over some tiny plants is a glorious past-time and really sharpens all your senses. First, you feel and hear that first burst of energy as the water arrives at the nozzle-end of the hose and then the cool (or hot, if you've left the hose lying in the sun) tingle on your fingers if, like me, you herald the arrival of the water by letting it pour over your hand on its way to the soil. It is the next best thing to standing under a waterfall. Next the plants and earth release a wonderful sigh of the aroma of life and if you close your eyes, you can absorb it into your own breath. The light always catches in the droplets differently and reflects like little jewels on the leaves of even the tiniest of seedlings, maybe for the very first time. New life gets its first drink. Everything responds to water, including me, and I can forget about why I am watering, for a while, and just enjoy the simple pleasure of connecting with our most basic human need - water.
Too soon the dream gives way to reality and my thoughts don't just wander off but are rudely snatched away by the heat of the day and fall into some terrible hole somewhere, from which it takes some effort to climb out, at times, and at other times it seems like a better idea to stay there and try to work out how to make a terrible, hot hole into a cool, shady cave.Which is what I did today. It was somewhere down there, an hour or two ago, out in the garden that I came across "The comfortable chaos theory". I read a lot of stuff and I try to cut through the chaff to get to the seed and it is interesting to see how many other people are doing the same, in books, on the radio and TV, and here in Etherland (I don't bother with newspapers). Most people's general thoughts range around one seed in particular - oil. The consensus I hear (not, however, my view) is that an energy crisis involving reduced oil supplies will cause a collapse which must, at all costs, be stopped / side-stepped / diverted and that life without astronomical reserves of oil will be reduced to chaos.
Always contrary to popular opinion, I see that what we have now, at this time, is total chaos - but one with which people have, over time, become totally comfortable. Hence "The comfortable chaos theory". Imagine trying to explain to an alien about the ridiculous complexities we think of as normal today, just for example in the world of agriculture. Someone knocks down a huge swathe of virgin forest, killing all animals and plants that could have provided some food or other useful purpose to people, burns it all and then plants into the soil, (now subject to erosion and, in a lot of cases requiring irrigation by pipes full of water from hundreds of kilometres away) the seeds of plants not native to the area, or selected for their benefit to human health and more and more often genetically modified to withstand vast amounts of chemicals to be poured onto them in order to get them to produce a crop that is harvested and made into fuel to drive the machinery needed to tend the next crop! And the fuel is called bio-fuel. And this is normal? This is definitely a serious state of total chaos to which so many people have become inoculated that it has become a comfortable chaos.
In the future - if there is one - crops may be grown from local seed, some of which will be native to the area, and every plant grown will provide nutrition to those who eat it, including the wildlife. Pretty simple idea. This doesn't sound too much like chaos to me. It sounds very sane (that's for you Brett!). People say "yes but...." and I say no. Stop. We are on the wrong path. Your path leads to a big, hot, black, nuclear hole. My path leads to a cool, moist, shady cave.
Which one will you choose?
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3 comments:
Kate I choose your path as well! Most of the time this chaos is only visible to those of us who have awoken from the false reality which is our current civilization. I too have taken the red pill!
Kate, you're an excellent writer. Thank you for yet another thoughtful post.
Thanks both of you. Its not the feeling I often get with some people saying I should write this way and others saying I should do another thing and yet more telling me what photos I should take or I should keep to gardening. You know what I think? No? Not even after all this time of reading what I write, day after day for hundreds and hundreds of posts? Basically, I love everybody's input, in fact crave it - good, bad and indifferent and I read it all and care about it all and it probably affects what I write. If, one day there is nothing left that affects me, that will be the day I stop writing.
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