Birds, heat, flowers & gratitude

I remember that I can choose to keep focusing on what has value and meaning

The humidity here in the last days of June and the first couple days of July reminded me of living in New Orleans. I remember I was house-sitting this place on Bartholomew Street in the Bywater and my main job was to go out and water the front yard garden every morning. I’d get up around 8 am or so and make coffee and by the time I got out to the front porch it felt like I had walked into a giant sauna. It was already so hot and moist that your clothes were melting into your skin and you just couldn’t imagine how you were going to make it through another 12 hours of that oppressive heat and humidity.

I want to say this was the year before Hurricane Katrina hit. You’d see this bumper sticker all over town. On cars, but also on trash cans, utility boxes, and random walls: “It’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity.”

I always took that message as a jab at the high levels of corruption and violent crime in New Orleans. But I was also fairly certain the heat was playing its part in things.

When I first moved to New Orleans in 2004 I had a short-lived job at Frank’s Nursery, just across St. Claude Avenue from the Bywater, along the Press Street railroad tracks. Working in a greenhouse in the New Orleans heat; now that was a tough job. I think I made it for about two weeks before I fell down with heat exhaustion and got sent home. I really needed the money so I went back to work the next day. I made it through another week there, until I quit halfway through my shift. I was told to scoop a bunch of potting soil out of this big bin and I had almost filled up the wheelbarrow when I started to feel the skin on my hands and wrists stinging and burning. I pulled my arms out of the bin to find a dozen fire ants working over each hand...

If you’ve never been bitten by fire ants — a Southern specialty — the bites swell up into little cysts that itch like crazy and pop to release a clear fluid when you scratch them. The itching and swelling can persist for a couple of weeks. Highly not recommended.

Back to Tennessee…The weather the last couple weeks may not have been quite as oppressive as New Orleans, but it was pretty damn close. Middle Tennessee is known for oppressive heat and humidity in the summer, but it felt so shockingly humid a couple of mornings that I had to check the weather app on my phone just to see how it could be that hot that early in the morning. I was rewarded with the knowledge that, yes, the humidity is 94 percent at 8:30 am and, no, there is no rain in the forecast.

The humidity eased off on Thursday. Which was wonderful because I, along with eight other men from our local mutual assistance group, had signed up to do a volunteer work day helping one of our members put up steel trusses on a house he is building for his family.

It was still blazingly hot, but we got all the trusses up with no serious injuries for anyone involved. I was glad to help John, who’s a really sweet and generous guy and it ended up being a really enjoyable day — despite the heat. Getting to work with a bunch of guys who are all focused on helping a neighbor and friend — no big egos, everyone looking out for each other — it felt like the way the world should be. We overcame some pretty interesting engineering challenges together raising these huge, heavy trusses from a second-floor platform onto the top plates, with three of us standing atop two separate scaffolding rigs raising and steadying the trusses as other members of the crew bolted them into place.

I had already been working in the heat on Tuesday and Wednesday. Tatiana and I had to do a bunch of mowing and weed-whacking in the garden on Friday and Saturday to keep the herbs from being swallowed whole by grass and weeds. And we also spent a few hours working on the little studio/office we’re building.

By Sunday morning, I was ready for an easy day. But we awoke to find there was something wrong with our dog. He was shaking and his breathing was shallow and fast and he could barely walk. This guy is so high energy and so full of life that to see him barely able to raise his head and refusing all food and water was both totally unprecedented and extremely disconcerting. (On his first vet visit here, the vet remarked, “He’s highly food-motivated!”)

It was pretty scary, not knowing what had happened to him and if he was going to be all right.

Tatiana and I always do an “ask your body” checklist in crisis situations; we ruled out his getting bitten by a snake, having broken a bone, or having eaten something poisonous. We kept getting that he was going to be ok but he was so out of it, we spent most of the day Sunday feeling lost and paralyzed.

We think he may have gotten heat exhaustion that accumulated over the last week or so and just suddenly hit a tipping point. He hasn’t shed as much fur this year as he usually does by the start of summer, maybe because the spring was so uncharacteristically cool. And he seemed fine, so we weren’t really monitoring how much time he was spending in the sun or taking into account how humid it was in the cabin even after the temperature had cooled down at night.

I know that our animal friends can’t live forever (at least not in this dimension), but the thought of suddenly losing Kobi hit me so hard.

Tatiana and I have some pretty cool plans for our future and we love to dream our visions together as we’re working in the garden or relaxing in the evening after a long day of work. (Early summer is the time here when you’re battling the weed pressure and the elements and you could really work from dawn to dusk and still not feel like you’re keeping up, so you just have to make some firm decisions to let some tasks go until tomorrow.)

I think we do a pretty good job of balancing the creative dissatisfaction of our desires for what we want to create going forward with staying grounded in the present moment and remembering to express our gratitude for all of the good that currently flows through our life here. But the episode with Kobi reminded me again that I have so much to be grateful for.

[UPDATE: Wednesday, July 9 — Kobi is back. It took a couple days for him to fully recover but tonight he was spazzing out on the porch with a tiny piece of cardboard he found, barking at me to come and “share his bone with him,” and just basically being his old irrepressible self. So…we are super grateful for that.]

I’m grateful for the birds! We’ve done a lot of work to beautify the area around our little cabin (as well as the garden, as I’ve previously shared with you). We didn’t really see or hear that many birds last spring, but after a year of grounding our energy into the land and of Tatiana planting flowers and nurturing the flowers that remained from the previous tenants, we have so many bird neighbors this spring.

There’s a stand of bee balm next to the porch where a hummingbird couple comes to visit several times a day:

This hummingbird is about three feet from my chair on the porch.

A Carolina wren has built a nest in a hanging pot on the front porch and although she and her mate are very discreet, we often hear them singing in the early morning.

The red-bellied woodpecker family and two young cardinals, one male and one female, love the stand of wild blueberry bushes (trees? they’re about seven feet tall) across the little path on the other side of the front porch. I even saw a giant pileated woodpecker land in the blueberry bushes and flail around until he decided the risk outweighed the reward.

I heard a mourning dove making its melodious, eerie call while working in the garden this morning.

And we often see little indigo buntings flying from the trees around the garden to land on a t-post or trellis near the raspberry bushes.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to garden here and for the profusion of flowers I get to enjoy every day. I remember Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now talking about how the existence of flowers must be proof that love is the animating force of the Universe. Even though I spend at least a couple hours a day in the garden, I still experience a moment pretty much every day where I feel gently astounded at the generosity and beauty of Mother Nature.

The view from my relaxation spot camp chair in the garden.

I’m grateful to live in a place where instead of boom cars or industrial noise or the neighbors’ television set, I hear frogs and crickets and owls and sometimes coyotes at night. Yes, there’s a price to be paid for that quiet (at least in our current off-grid living situation): emptying the composting toilet, maintaining the generators and solar power system, charging the battery that runs the water pump, doing without some of the comforts that I previously took for granted like central air and heat, plumbing, a big refrigerator and freezer, and WiFi. And there’s an awful lot of going back and forth from the cabin to the shed where the chest freezer and the generators are and a lot of plugging and unplugging and switching from one power system to another depending on the amount of sun we’re getting and what appliances need to be running at what time.

I’m grateful we’ve had the opportunity to design and build our little studio, which is — even with no walls or finished floor yet — such a delightful place to write, stretch, do astrology readings, and play guitar.

This off-grid living experiment that we’re now almost two years into has been, by turns, challenging, frustrating, daunting, and also wonderfully rewarding. When it feels really hard, it’s tempting to focus on the ease that is often lacking in this lifestyle.

But I guess that’s always the temptation while we’re living in Matrix-world: focusing on lack and strife and pain when we could just as easily decide to focus on the desirable elements of our current situation and on the opportunities we have right now to put our energy and attention towards what holds meaning and value for us.

I hope this little slice of life and consciousness inspires you to remember how much beauty you have around and within you. Love is really the answer, man!