Years ago, we moved into a house with a garden. The very next day I bought five composting bins. My husband declared that didn’t have my priorities right – with not a single cradle and box unpacked. I could not imagine what could be more important than starting composting.
You know what to throw in, and what not: No proteins – no fish, no meat, no cheeses. But all fruit and vegetable scraps can go in. Books (and better blogs than this) tell you how to layer kitchen refuse with garden clippings. My method is easier: Throw everything in, and let time do its business. With five bins, one is always ready with crumbly dark humus.
Another easy rule governs my gardening: No turning of the soil (except establishing a new bed). I don’t rake leaves in the fall; why would people take out of their garden what would nourish next years’ growth – and even pay to have this garden gold hauled away? The main point is to never ever step on the soil directly to not compress it. There are stepping stones all over my perennial beds and berry patches. That way, the soil bacteria have breathing room to do their good work.
Does my garden look tidy? Surely not. Some neighbors made sneaky remarks the first few seasons. They have long given up. Now everybody stands and stares and comments on the beautiful wild bloom of my garden. Because we don’t spray pesticides or herbicides, all kinds of fauna appear year-round: birds, skunks, raccoons, foxes, chipmunks, squirrels. Non-poisonous weeds I use in the kitchen – for instance the invasive wild vine that has more resveratrol in its leaves than red wine. Just be very aware that Nature can be fierce: deadly nightshade looks confusingly similar to the untrained eye. Know your stuff before you eat it! Read More
Blog: On Health. On Writing. On Life. On Everything.
The Man I Most Admire
June 30, 2010
Today is the perfect summer day outside: Warm but not too hot. With brilliant light, the roses in their second flush. So I want to go out into the garden, and give you just a tiny thought for the day.
In my life, I have met interesting people of all kinds of walks. Can't say I tend to worship heroes - but here is one:
Many years ago I had a patient, a friendly middle-aged (aside: I am always astonished what Americans call “middle-aged”; where I come from, “middle-aged” is from thirty to fifty…) small man, a light-colored black man, working as a janitor. As it turned out, with some Native American blood thrown in.
The Native American blood must have made him prone to diabetes – he certainly was not overweight. But he was eager to accommodate to some lifestyle changes. When I said “No cake, no cookies,” he shuffled on his chair, and asked “Not even for birthdays?” We negotiated birthdays exceptions.
But for several visits, his sugars did not come down. I finally decided to get a bit deeper into the cookie business, mindful of the former hospital patient who had agreed to a “one cookie per day” policy, and whose sugars were so abject that we could not send her home. When I inquired about that one cookie, she nodded to the drawer of her nightstand, giving me permission to see for myself. I found a “cookie” the size of a dinner plate. Only one, though: She had stuck to our agreement…
With that in mind, I sat my nice little man down and asked him how many birthdays there were in his life. Turned out he had about ten children and who knows how many grand-children - it boiled down to at least a birthday a week!
You wonder why he is the man I most admire? He got all his children through college – including the one son who was wheelchair-bound from an accident. This nice, unassuming man had, against all odds, kept his family together and made a success out of his life.
Who is your hero? Read More
In the Midst of Life We Are in Death
June 29, 2010
The unimaginable for all of us is that we will die.
Other people, of course, die. But not us. This is how we deceive ourselves.
Let’s undeceive: It is time that we lift the taboo around death. Death should be with us all the time, in our consciousness - because it is with us, in reality. It can happen any time: An accident, a bad diagnosis. Not to mention the daily little dying in tiniest pieces that we call aging. In the midst of life we are in death – as the old Church hymn sings. Death surely is the reason why we invented religion – because it is so damn hard to think the unthinkable.
Most of all, we want to protect our children from death. So we are building a world free of the dark side. Death is never mentioned. When somebody dies, we keep children away.
Of course, children are not stupid – they know about death, usually by age four: the hamster that lied stiff under the radiator one morning. The news and pictures of war on TV. Even the wilting bunch of flowers in a vase. Nothing will last forever. All beauty will end up on the compost pile.
But not talking about death makes it even harder for children: They have to hide their deepest fears from their parents, not to hurt their feelings (that is how childhood works: children protect their parents. All the time).
When I was five, my father took me to a patient who had freshly died overnight. I remember the day like few others. It was a sunny Sunday morning, but the room with the dead man was kept dark. The widow cried, but she had enough compassion for the little girl to hand me an apple. I stared at the form in the bed. The jaws were tied up with a white napkin as if the man had suffered from toothache. I smelled my apple. Was it bad manners to bite into the apple in the presence of a dead man? I decided it was, and just held my apple. The widow said her husband had been suffering for so long; now his suffering was over. My father took out his stethoscope, examined the body and confirmed he had died.
On the way home, I asked many questions – I was that why? Why? Why? kid.
Did it hurt me? I don’t think so.
Denial hurts children – it deprives them of the means to grow up. Nothing is sadder than an elderly person who panics about the subject. To acknowledge that death awaits each one of us at the end, makes us live our lives more mindful, more compassionate.
Proposal: Everybody should read Sogyal Rinpoche's "The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying") once a year, as a way to face what is so hard to face. As a way to grow up. Alternatively, for an easier read, try: Irvin Yalom's "Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death. " Read More