Every moonbeam

Burdock in wok

Last night I made burdock root for the first time. Here's the recipe I used, and it took much convincing both myself and others. I let the sandy whole plants K. dug up from the garden sit in the sink in water for about a week before I could bring myself to clean them, before I could contemplate eating them. When I first searched online for them, what I was looking for was an effective way to kill them.

Murder them, I should say. Their roots go sometimes three feet deep, according to the internet, and I feel like I've seen them go deeper. Even the smallest, innocent-looking little weed seedling sprouts a massive, impenetrable, herculean root. When they grow, they become tree-like shrubs with purple flowers that quickly turn into clinging prickly seedpods that cling to anything they touch, especially a dog, or a dog's tail, or gloves, or a hat, or my hair.

I hate them. I've been doing everything I can to kill them since the day I figured out what they are, but unless you dig up every last hair of a root, unless you catch and burn every last burr—they sprout up again come spring.

Burdock kinpira with pan-fried whole trout, caught at Lake No. 9 that morning--it doesn't get any more local than that. 
(Except yes, the lemon came from the IGA, and the basmati rice came from Thailand.  Sticklers.)

I knew they were, theoretically, edible. It's one of those rural myths up here. “You know, you can eat burdock.” So I was surprised to discover, that when I searched “best way to dig up burdock root” that what I discovered was urban foragers, Japanese sushi blogs, and how-to sites on making burdock tea. Evidently burdock, called gojo in Japan, and in restaurants where my sister eats, is a food perfectly designed to supplement the immune system, providing mammoth amounts of manganese and vitamin C and who-knows-what-all vitamins.

Still, I had to convince the collected assembly they were not poisonous.

The flavor is unique. I struggle to describe it—something, perhaps, like a musky wild mushroom, an oyster or a shiitake, with a hint of earth and parsnip. Surprisingly delicious, although still tough. I'm not sure if that's because I didn't let them steam long enough, or because I let them sit in my sink for a week, or because they were stringy new ones. In any case, I can check that off my to-do list. And if we ever run out of things to farm, we can always sell dehydrated burdock-root tea.

K. likes to do sushi-style bites.  This is rice with fried bluefish, from Massachusetts last year, and Thai nam chim, sweet chili sauce.  Delectable.

Walking the blues

Homo sapiens evolved about 100,000 years ago.  Incidentally, this data is a bit old.  We hit 400 parts per million last week.
Chart from Datafuzz.

Another climate change post, I know. I wrote a letter to my pastor about divestment and he said it's good if people have a “bee in their bonnet” about these things. So I suppose I have a bee in my bonnet. I've been looking for ages for a succinct infographic that can explain to people what's going on with carbon dioxide and climate change, and all along all I've needed is a simple graph.

The problem with most of the articles I see on carbon dioxide is that they only address the problem over the last couple of decades. “It's the hottest year since 1971!” or whatever. Or they address it over the last 100 years. Even climatologists will try to compare now to the 1890s. Or, if they're particularly enlightened, they address the rise of industrialism during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, how we began spewing carbon into the air at the advent of the Industrial Age.

Although that may feel like a long time, the button factories of Victorian Britain, really it's very recent in global climate cycles. So essentially we've been burning shit since we discovered fire.

Another of the challenges I've discovered in talking about climate change is how unwilling people are to accept human evolution. Yes, they believe in dinosaurs and carbon dating and the pyramids and the fossil record. Yes, they believe in the big bang and cosmic goo and the quantum mechanics that allows computers to function. But humans came from animals? Hold on there a minute. Never mind that 99 percent of our genetic material is identical to that of an ape. Never mind that we've not found just one missing link but several—the various branches of evolving primates that led, eventually, to homo sapiens.

It's more than that. It's this sense that somehow evolution devalues us and devalues our God. But if you really read about it, really study it—it's hard to imagine a more beautiful or elegant method of creation.

Faith is not incompatible with science. Can't we just agree on that? Science, itself, as any scientist would agree, is a form of faith. Faith in data, faith in abstract mathematics, faith in the power of numbers and proof and the predictability in matter in motion.

And carbon dioxide is matter. Every time you exhale, you contribute to the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Trees breathe it in, we breathe it out. It's the most basic ecosystem, the balance of chemistry in our atmosphere, and we didn't even know about it till 100 years ago. After we'd already begun to contribute to the radical spike of its presence all around us.

Even if you're the brave humanist to believe in evolution, do you know the difference among what happened during the planet's history during the last 100,000, 1 million, or 100 million years? I didn't, up until a couple of weeks ago. But now I know that 100 million is when the dinosaurs were around. Neanderthals started their era about 800,000 years ago.

And homo sapiens? The first evidence of "abstract consciousness" comes from perhaps 100,000 years ago.  We started our exodus from Africa around 70,000 years ago, give or take, riding the wave of receding glaciers you can track on the above chart, riding the end of our last ice age for a very long time. Around 40,000 years ago we conquered the planet.  As far back as then when homo sapiens in Russia were burying their children with millions of beads. Then the Lascaux caves and fertility goddess figurines then Stonehenge and Jesus.

And now it's getting hot around here. Hotter than when the dinosaurs were here. Twice as hot as at any point in human evolution. Things are changing, and they're going to change more and more quickly, and they're going to keep changing until we are honest about ourselves and our technology and our civilization.

This American Life mentioned “war-time measures.” They mentioned that government climatologists, paid by us to report on the data, are lying to us because they're afraid that they'll be fired if they tell the truth.  Numerous state climatologists have been fired by Republican officials for their honesty about global warming.  These same climatologists are quietly buying second homes far, far above sea level.  But This American Life also profiled the Freedom Riders of a new generation, the founders of a movement that could save all of us. I hope to be one of them.  They also say that trying to convince us, all of us, who bathe in oil, drink it, breathe it in--too start a movement is like asking slaveholders to be the abolitionists.

I find myself becoming more and more conservative, in the truest sense, in the sense that we must conserve. When did conservation and conservative become incompatible? I am not a traditional conservative, more of a green socialist. But the only method we've found for motivating human behavior on a massive scale is capitalism, as brutal as its methods may be. Which means every breath of carbon has to cost more if we're going to bring down its level. Yes, this means that poor people will starve, will roast, will freeze. But they're going to do that anyway, and much worse, if we fail to address the actual science. Which means cap and trade, and radical disruption of our civilization, and that's if we're blessed.

I'd forgotten work today

Asparagus, first year, gone to seed--you can see the rest sprouting in the distance

The asparagus is growing. I wrote about it last year, when we rooted the year-old octopus-shaped slips of plants, as a symbol of permanence. If we plant asparagus, that means we're staying. Perennials mean that one is perennially rooted in one place.

Or so I believe. The asparagus is going to seed, as it's supposed to in its second year, although I've been desperate to sample some. I tried one bite, raw, of a piece the cat knocked off.

Maybe what I like about impermanence is how its a blank slate on which to draw. The unknown elements in the future.

A farm is a new adventure each season. Based on three years of experience now, I still have no idea what to predict. Certain crops will fail utterly. Others we will drown in and have to throw away. It's impossible to know what will succeed and what will fail, but we have to keep trying, with each, with utmost faith.

The perennial garden grows every year—this year I'm able to identify handily the jerusalem artichoke and echinacea coming up, and the rhubarb is sprouting little alien brains by the day. I may even get a pie this year. The fiddleheads are going gangbusters, and I still haven't made my way out to collect any. The rhythm grows familiar.

Last year at this time I was nesting the asparagus roots in the ground. It's almost a prayer, planting things like that, entrusting them to this speck of earth. Trusting myself to husband them. Trusting they will bear fruit in time, in two years. Next year, we can eat asparagus omelets all spring.

And still the unknown beckons.

Accendi una luna

Local egg benedict

Sometimes I make homemade hollandaise. It is among my many talents, and not one acquired lightly. It started at one point, after s/v Secret, if I recall—when I decided to eat for breakfast what I really wanted most. Which is, always, always, always eggs benedict.

The world's most perfect eggs benedict is made by Ann Sather, in Chicago. Or maybe I only remember it as such because it was my first—with ham off the bone and cinnamon rolls as a first course. Cinnamon rolls you could eat with a spoon. A spoon! That's how gooey they were. Chicago. Good times.

So I decided I'd learn, and I started with a packet of McCormick powder, and then I broke out Joy of Cooking, and now the only thing keeping me from eggs benedict is the stick of butter and three egg yolks hollandaise needs. It also takes a fair amount of time, although not the time you'd expect: it's time of assembly, and getting everything to come out hot at the same time. The hollandaise will sit in a bath of warm water for a fair bit, but to get a perfectly poached egg at the same time as seared ham and a toasted english muffin is no mean feat. It's a skill I've glad I've learned now that I live someplace where there is no Ann Sather.

I did some fun cooking in Chicago. I learned how to bake and how to make homemade yogurt and mayonnaise and dehydrated a year's worth of food for the Appalachian Trail. But with the amount of amazing cuisine there was around, the surrounding milieu of culinary genius (in the Ravenswood area where my apartment was, there were restaurants of twelve different ethnicities within walking distance) it was almost a crime to cook for myself. Now here in the woods there is no takeout—no decent pizza—no delivery—no Thai—and I have learned, of necessity, how to cook these things. If I want eggs benedict, I must make it myself.

Luckily, sometimes, the neighbors across the street give us eggs, from their chickens. Now I am surrounded on two sides by neighbors with chickens, and I am unable to commit. Quelle surprise. But I get their cast-off eggs, and them I poach, and whisk, and photograph.

Number 5

Mars Hill windmills, a couple of weeks ago, on the last day the mountain was open for skiing, when there was still snow

Here's maybe my favorite line from the Paris Review interview of Louise Erdrich, although there are so many that it's hard to pick just one—her explanation of the attraction of magical realism for someone who grew up immersed in Scripture is also fantastic:

I was quite shy, so meeting people was painful. I’d be at a party and because I was so quiet, someone would say, You’re stoned, aren’t you, Karen? (My name was Karen then.) But I was only rarely stoned, just shy.

This during her first semester at Dartmouth, when she's acting like a pleasant person on the outside and wanting to tell them all to go to hell on the outside. “At Dartmouth, I was awkward and suspicious,” she says, and reading her account was a moments of recognition, of recognizing another person much more comfortable with words than with people.

She's not the only writer I've been reading about lately who's socially awkward.  And the more a writers words make me fall in love, the more apparently socially awkward they are.  I've even met a handful of these writers, and I meet them and I think—oh, how awkward we are being! Whatever am I doing wrong? And then I realize that their magic is in print, not in person.

Like them, perhaps, I can be intimate, gentle, immediate, exact—but only in writing. In person I fumble, I flail.

This condition, which used to be termed ordinary shyness (one of the first words I learned in Thai), is now Social Anxiety Disorder, with which I am afflicted in spades. They have drugs for it, good drugs, the anti-anxiety ones that you can sell on the black market or smoke in a pipe. But I don't want the drugs. I just want the words.

I was punished as a child, more than once, for hiding in a bathroom and reading when I was supposed to be socializing. It's funny how there's still a stigma to being a bookish outsider, and I find the stigma associates with what I do here, too, writing online. There's this sense that anyone who bothers to post things to the internet is just a dork, a geek, a nerd, someone who can't make it in the real world.

Again, maybe it's true. But the more I dive into trying to figure out who I really am, the more I realize what a hermit I am—how much I loathe leaving my troglodytic cavern.

This verse also has been surfacing in my consciousness, Jesus saying: “Love each other as I have loved you.”  Another impossible commandment.  So I write here, now, because I love, because I have no other way of showing my love.

The way that Mama raised us

At least we managed to get the spring garden in this week, and the asparagus is coming up, the asparagus whose roots went in last year, and now the jerusalem artichoke and echinacea in the perennial garden are making their appearance alongside the horseradish and rhubarb. It sounds impressive. Maybe it is impressive. Already it's easy to see how much farther we are than at this time last year.

Every year it gets better, more accomplished, more precise. Last week peas, radish, chard, kale, and carrots all went in. It's actually early enough for a lot more, but it's also already easy to begin to wear out on digging up weeds and take a breather. I'm starting seeds in the glassroom, just basil and lettuce, but Thai basil this year.

It's easy to believe that already that's enough. I know that just the half-row of chard will be enough to keep me in greens through October. And the amount of carrots that got put in has quadrupled—in addition to all carrots planted last year that lasted in the crisper through last month. The north garden can be filled with the six pounds of onion sets I bought at Maine Potato Growers this week.

I begin to see how farmers specialize. If the only goal was growing garlic, all that would have to be done now is weeding, cultivating, harvesting, preserving—a job enough, but when you do that for every vegetable you want to eat, it's a lot more work. I'm trying to commit this year not to judge my success against the ideal, but just to try to do a little each day. It's amazing how much I accomplish with a consistent hour. But isn't it the way with everything?

Whips of opinion down my back

Someone whose opinion I respect recently said: If you write about God, homoeroticism, Bob Dylan, food, farming, bicycling, hiking, Thailand, sailing, climate change, politics, film, science, philosophy, and travel you can't expect to have an audience.

Me: Why not? Columnists say: “There are stories every day. The hard part is picking which one to write.” (I ruminate thoughtfully.) Also: Montaigne. Montaigne could write about anything.

Then he asked: Yes, but how many sites like that do you read?

I can cite several: Sonia. Monika. Annie. Patty. Although I wish all of you did more writing about homoeroticism and film and climate change.

But my friend may, in fact, be right, because I don't seem to have much of an audience. Save you, dear reader, whom I adore.

Now I am again writing about writing, which--although it is a tag in my sidebar--tags that (I believe) neatly and comprehensively sum up my chosen subject—is my least favorite topic. John Gardner wrote about writing best. No one can do it better. And he would eschew this genre.

But Montaigne would not. Montaigne would have the world's most awesome blog.

I cite Grillabongquixotic, again. What sets his online log apart is not that he's building a boat in Mexico and sailing it to Panama, although that helps. It's because having that adventure sets him free to write about climate change, culture, food, travel, linguistic experimentation, faith, dancing, wood grain, automobiles, public transportation in foreign lands, music, and depression. At a certain point in his adventure, he heads back to New York, where he lives, much as I do, in a rural woodland. It may be my favorite part of his story, and I miss the posts he didn't write while he was there, the posts about food and music and neighborhood bickering in a different context.

I want to write those posts now.

Okay, so I'm going to give in and admit that this is my annual--although I try to make it biannual because I hate it—apologia for the blog. It's been coming, for a while, as you know.

Have you heard yet of Aaron Swartz, who developed RSS at fourteen and Reddit at nineteen? Who became an activist and downloaded $2 million worth of data to distribute freely to “children in the global South”? Who was prosecuted for that crime and is now with us no more?

Here's what he said:

So here I am. We're somewhere over a dark patch in the middle of the country and I'm in the window seat in the last row in the plane. The guy in front of me's leaning all the way back, but I'm in the last row so my seat doesn't go back, and I have to lift my legs up to stretch out a muscle that was sitting funny while I was asleep.... But that's not the problem.

This from his blog, cited in the New Yorker profile, where Larissa MacFarquhar writes: “He kept a blog for most of his life.” Also:

Prose creates a strong illusion of presence—so strong that it is difficult to destroy it. It is hard to remember that you are reading and not hearing. The illusion is stronger when the prose is online, partly because you are aware that it might be altered or redacted at any moment—the writer may be online, too, as you read it [see I just redacted that sentence]--and partly because the Internet has been around for such a short time that we implicitly assume (as we do not with a book) that the writer of a blog post is alive.

I am alive, but I will not always be so. I am writing to you, but I do not know if you are there. I am writing so you will know how it feels to be alive inside of this body, with the peepers out the window over my left shoulder, with my lamp lit, with only my computer and my New Yorker and my Holy Spirit stained glass medallion to keep me company. I am writing from a different dark patch in the northernmost part of the country and I'm writing because writing is a practice, just one of many, and it's the best way I have of marking time, if nothing else.

Aaron Swartz “didn't think of his blog as published writing, exactly, nor was it a private journal, since it was accessible to anyone. It was something in between. He wrote about things in his blog that he didn't tell his friends—about his depressions, about his ulcerative colitis. It was not clear who he imagined his readers to be.”

Aaron Swartz wrote not just about depression, but also how it felt to be a millionaire, his insecurities, his politics, crying in the bathroom at work, music, poverty, alcohol, and saving the world. Yes, he also killed himself, as I've been reminded that writers do since I was a child—Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, David Foster Wallace, Sylvia Plath, etc. ad nauseum. Maybe it's because none of them kept a blog.

That's trite and untrue because of course Aaron Swartz killed himself, too. My friend's point remains, however, and I think it a valid one. If I refuse to limit my subject matter to, oh, say—long-distance hiking or sailing around the world or lushly photographed recipes—I can't expect an audience of any significant size. But I'm done censoring myself. I do worry that I am becoming too esoteric, too eclectic, too random. But I am in fact all of those things.

Now I'll go shut up and watch Jon Stewart.

Lay me back down

“I hate blogs. I even hate the name. Blog, blog, blog. Awful word.”

“I rather like it. It recalls snog, the British word for kissing a stranger. A nice echo.”

Embarrassed laughter by assembled audience.

“Also there's the sense where it's a web log. I keep my blog because I began at a time when I kept a boat log.”

“According to the Writer's Digest, you're suppose to have one if you want to publish. But you're supposed to write about something other than what you want to publish!”

“Can't you think of each post as an essai, in the French sense? An attempt? A brief questioning into the nature of a subject? A petite picaresque? Montaigne wrote essays about asses farting.”

“Awful. No. All of that electronic stuff. I've never read a blog I liked.”

“Maybe they're the best books being written, ones that read beautifully as complete oeuvres. Bumfuzzle, I recommend. This guy, trying to sail in a canoe to South America, after building his boat himself in Mexico. Then there's this couple, living in a 21-foot Sea Pearl in Argentina.  The Secret Life of a Former Prostitute. The Out of Eden Walk. Scarlett Lion.  And Tavi, a gift from the spirit of the age, thank God. But each blog is like ether. They drift off and disappear, to be mined, in the future, but cultural archaeologists.”

“What about the comments? You have to deal with the things people say!”

“And they do say awful things. Someone once told me to burn in hell. Some else told me I'd be better off dumping my loser boyfriend. It was not cool. But now, mainly, I take every comment as a precious gift.”

Even you could comment, for instance, if you wanted, and I'd love it.

Number 29

 Moon 

I swear the best chunk of work I do all day is between midnight and 2am. Everyone else already is in bed, even the dog, asleep with his back against the hallway wall. Internet is fast. I'm alone in my office with the light (compact florescent) burning, just me and iTunes on shuffle, a blanket over my knees, no sunlight across my left shoulder to taunt me.

I used to condemn myself for it. Some days I still do, especially when I wake after noon, with sun already half-burned. I love sun. I could be a devotee of Amon-Ra.

Here, in winter, light of any kind is in short supply, and giving up half a day's sun to be a nightdweller appears perverse foolishness. I said once, half in jest, that I was a vampire, that all of us are vampires. I said that if this log is anything it is a log of depression. As anyone who's read the trail journals can attest, grief and guilt are conditions that oppress me, whether during Aroostook winter or adventure travel.

Do I bring grief on myself with my affinity for night? I write my record of battle at two in the morning, alone, my Shadow in the hall and my knees beneath my desk, keeping myself from the light that cures. A hermit, I carry my lantern before me as I walk in the bleak wilderness. All of us walk alone through the valley of the shadow of dark with only a light to guide us.

Anxious to close

JP's Blue Plate Special

JP's jagacita, of Cape Verdean and Puerto Rican descent, is rice studded with shell beans and sausage, the equivalent of jambalaya or Bahamian pigeon peas and rice. The secret ingredient is ketchup, as in Thai street fried rice—the world's perfect condiment. A blend of three of the Thai five flavors—sweet, salty, sour. The other two being spicy and bitter, although bitterness is just my word for the fifth-flavor approximation. The bitterness of coffee or cress or or kale or burnt garlic, although maybe all of those are merely the Japanese fifth flavor, umami, after all.

My brother's Thai friend, who cooked for us duck curry and savory fried omelets filled with ground pork, said they made it that way for us because we were farangs, Americans, foreigners, and farangs want everything with ketchup. It is perhaps true. I use it in my fried rice, just a tablespoon, and on my potatoes, and JP uses it in jag. It comes from Indonesia by way of India and the British raj, according to one story, where it's a syrupy black soy concoction, with fermented anchovy and tamarind and tomato, closer to Worcestershire sauce than anything.

All of our food comes from afar, is an amalgam of history that our genes themselves are. The definitive jag also calls for Stewart's shelled beans, a kind I'd never heard of before moving to New England, a pale pink moist bean. Evidently Scottish, it has a Stewart plaid on the label and is canned in West Paris, Maine. Just the thing for Puerto Rican food.

And also then linguica, the Portugese sausage inherited in Massachusetts from Cape Verde, red and garlicky and chunked with cubes of fat, a sausage that should by rights be at least as famous as bratwurst or kielbasa. But you can't even buy it outside New England. I tried, in Chicago, when I wanted to make Portugese kale soup, the perfect vehicle for greens. The only essential ingredients are kale, kidney beans, potatoes, and—linguica. Even the artisanal boutique saucisseries in Boystown didn't carry it.

I always want to travel everywhere, and when I get there, I am the most enthusiastic locavore—wanting to eat whatever is the local-est, whether beer, fast food, street noodles, or sausage, and I still look at the life I'm living now with an outsider's eyes. Aroostookisms, here, New England specialties retain the exciting frisson of a tourist's gaze: poutain (deep-fried potatoes drenched in beef gravy and melted cheese), coffee milk, frappes, and fried clams are still more exotic to me that guiteau nam and plah sahm roht and unripe papaya salad. Maybe it's the gift that my parents gave me. I am an eternal traveler passing through, and I will remain so even if I live here for the rest of my life.

Whatever I see, I read as an anthropologist. I snap shots as a journalist. I'm a food critic and a travel writer, even in my hometown, because it is not, of course, my hometown. I'd come to Detroit, the city of my birth, with the same existentialist terror with which I approach locals in almost any context, even my own neighbors.

Shortly before midnight, last night, I stood in my kitchen watching “boat television,” the hypnotic shuffle of nine years of photographs from my life with K—starting from the Appalachian Trail—overlaid with my iTunes library, always on shuffle. I have written before about my attraction to randomness. It is something I love, like God is speaking directly. He spoke last night, showing us a photo of the front yard in summer. The sky is blue and cloudless. The front yard and garden and ring of pines green. The beaver pond, fringed with water plants and cattails. It looks like Acadia, a mythical perfect paradise. It is Acadia. It is perfect. It is heaven.

K cracks: “But it doesn't show the mosquitoes.”

A holy war

“I've always wanted to go there,” I say, watching another travel show on PBS.

K. says: “But you say that about everywhere.”

But it's true. I've always wanted to go everywhere, and Maine is only one of the many places I dreamed of visiting. I've debated enrolling in the Century Club, where members visit all 321 (at press time) of the world's countries before they die. The number varies, of course, with new countries minted, nullifying a lifetime attempt to check them all of the list, forcing deathbed adventure, at least in my imagination.

But Maine: Maine I saw as cliffs and white-stone beaches, me walking along the shore barefoot, wearing a white dress, with a white house perched as an ocean lookout above the white-grey sea. Wherever this vision came from the illustrated children's version of Moby-Dick or from Bangkok billboards, I'll never know.

Maine is different. Maine is cold. Maine is a place where one can remain indoors, quietly stewing, for weeks at a time, while outside the moon principle rules, the cold, the dark. It's the yin principle come to life, the yin I recognize from childhood, although it's perhaps my first acknowledgment of its power.

The first yin-yang I saw was on the Confucian temple, bedecked with pink and orange pastel. We passed its alien statues of a dark-bearded idolatrous Confucius as we walked to our friend's house in the slum along the khlong—one of Bangkok's fetid bottle-green canal-sewers, smelling of garlic and rotting flesh, a smell I still catch in my dog's breath, which reminds me, thoroughly, of home. It doesn't disgust me. When I catch the smell from a septic release valve or loose propane now it feels old and faintly nostalgic, as when I caught the whiff of raw sewage through my dorm-room windows, in Manila.

What do sewage and the yin-yang have to do with each other? And how do they connect to cold and Maine and wanderlust? Who knows. Just another string of associations, the dangling trail as I pull monkeys from the barrel of memory. But I still want to go everywhere.

Tweedle-dee Dum said to Tweedle-dee Dee

Full moon, not from now--because this week the moon was new

“Your presence is obnoxious to me”
They’re like babies sittin’ on a woman’s knee
Tweedle-dee Dum and Tweedle-dee Dee

In my ongoing Bob Dylan series: it's not hard to imagine Bush and Gore in the above pair, and then we dive deeper into gemini, the astronomical twins. Of course all of us hate the thing closest to us, the thing we are most like—the vision of ourselves as obnoxious stranger, the shadow, opposite us, looking exactly like us, but wrong. The thing we hate the most is the thing most like us.

On Novalast week, they went inside the ancient computer built by Archimedes, found in the Adriatic Sea. Its complex of knobs and toothed wheels predicted the color of eclipses, the movement of the stars, decades into the future. Carved legible Greek words—helios—carved in the bronze. How the wheeling of the stars has been important to thousands of years of human beings, and how long have we been here. Jung says the collective unconscious holds the collective store of our memory, and the thing we hate the most is our Shadow.

I have a Shadow. He follows me around, room to room. He whines at my door, scratching to be let in. He follows me to bed at night and looks at me with a face of love as I pat his warm belly. I fear his death.

So my dog is named after Jung's great other. And he reminds me of how humans have used science, astronomy, the whirring of the planets, to make sense of reality for thousands of years—and art, to tell each other stories. Alice in Wonderland names the pair—suspendered and roly-poly—and then we identify them as what they are, ourselves split, ourselves at war with ourselves—unable to grow up.

All you need is love

To take good care of houseplants

So I decided I needed a garden project and since the garden is still covered in at least two feet of snow and it keeps snowing, even though allegedly I can start my beet seedlings--according to the gurus--I repotted the plants that had been sitting in the windowsill languishing. You can see their poor shriveled leaves in the above photograph, but also that it's trying its darnedest to flower.  I can be a bit too laissez-faire in all of my housekeeping endeavors.  If the plant is living happily sitting in water, then it can't be doing too badly, right?

Except maybe it's not living that happily

Seriously, it lived in the water for more than a year.  And I'm keeping the ivy in its vase.  But when this one with the speckled leaves died, I decided I needed to rescue the other one.  The glass is found glass from the land.  I like to think an old moonshiner used to live here, but it's probably just someone's garbage glass pile.

Here's what the roots looked like

So now I have a plant living in my office, facing towards the sun, yearning with its chlorophyll towards spring, as do I.  It's long and spindly, and the new cat hired to kill field mice keeps trying to eat it, but it sits in my window and makes me happy and reminds me that occasionally I do successfully dig in dirt and make things grow.  The too-early seeds, planted in a neighboring pot, withered when I uncovered them too early.  But whatevs.

And here's what it looked like at the end

Note that it is still dark out in the above photograph.  We finally had the time change a couple of weeks after I did this mammoth repotting project, and now we're getting some light in late afternoon.  Do you think it'll still flower?  I have my doubts.

Into the big sleep

Fat, I think

Cynthia Timmons was the youngest of a missionary family's second set of twins, both adopted. Her family came from California. Her dad worked for World Vision—a development organization that my family judged as being too rich—proved by the vicious monkey he kept chained in their driveway. He'd adopted the chimp young and it turned cruel later. When we went to visit their house, we had to sprint from the car to the house. Cynthia and her identical twin were different, also, aliens among us, if I feel like making excuses for her. Filipina by descent, adopted as an infant, she bullied me on the playground—really a park attached to a pool, accessible to us because of the apartment our missionary cooperative rented as a schoolroom. I remember the crucial moment when she convinced me, cornered me. She was casually, unintentionally cruel.

“Fatso,” she said.

I didn't know enough to let it lie. I chased her, first one side of the littorea bush, then the other. She was dark, lithe, small. I was chubby and easily winded, the girl always sitting in the corner reading, the girl who walked with an open book in her hand along the soi to recess. Cynthia dodged and laughed.

“Fatso, fatso, fatso,” she said, as if discovering that word's power. As if discovering the magic spell that would hold me in thrall for the rest of my life.

Fat, I think, looking in the mirror. Fat, I think, putting my body through cleanses and fasts. Fat, I think, gaining it all back. Why couldn't I just let her run away?