This morning we participated in forest bathing led by the guy’s friend who is a trained therapist. Forest bathing, or shinrin-yoku, is a mindful Japanese practice of soaking in the forest atmosphere through your senses to lower stress, reduce blood pressure and boost immunity. It was held from 9 am to 12 noon at Boffins Public Garden at the University of Saskatoon.
For the most part, I was mindful, bathed in the nature around me. It was hard to be fully immersed in the there and then. There’s this wanting to capture, have and hold. I haven’t learned yet to just experience with my senses and hold it within my body. Hence these photographs for this day 26 of the Ultimate Blog Challenge.
An already hot morning at 10:30 on this day 23 of the Ultimate Blog Challenge. I am on the brink of giving in to the everythings of this world. I haven’t quite fallen in. The sun is unbearably hot with less ozone protection. Researching, I find that Canada’s and the northern regionss ozone have thinned by an average of about 7% since the 1980s. Supposedly the ozone layer is healing. Truth or fake news? Our planet seemed to be heating up every year.
I’ve discovered that cucumber male flowers can become sterile due to heat. My plants in the greenhouse are full of male flowers, more than the female ones. I have pollinated the girls and yet besides the one cucmber we already ate, none came to fruit. So I’m guessing that the males must be shooting blanks. They can recover with cooler weather. If heat can do this to cucumbers, what does it do to us and all living things? Is this not a signal for us to change how we are conducting business on this earth? We can’t eat the greenbacks. Why don’t use them resuscitate this one earth we have?
I probably should stop reading the news. It makes me more melancholic than my natural melancholic self. There’s no fun or use in it. It’s not something I want to bring to the keyboard. I have to pull myself up by the bootstrap, snap out of my old mold, crack the whip and do whatever I have to do. I have to admit that I am a little buried under a little pile of mental overwhelm. Life seems to have no rest stops when you have a 95 year old father. Not complaining. It is what it is. It is not at all the physical thing. He is very low maintenance. It’s the emotional and psychological components that weighs on me.
Enough whining and sighing. Time to get on with the rest of the day. Not sure if my father is being discharged from the hospital today or tomorrow. Will find out soon enough. My brother is there now and he will let me know. Good to have younger siblings. They have more energy and reserve.
They weren’t kidding when they say that life is messy and hard. Please don’t ask me who the theyare. I do not know but I do trust them. It is the middle of June. It is sunny and warm after a couple of weeks of cool cloudy and rainy weather. It felt like so many rainy days but the gardens are still very dry. I was surprised by it when I went to water our community garden plot yesterday. I hadn’t planned on weeding since I did it the week before. I had on my good shoes. There were so many weeds. The soil was so dry that I needn’t worry about wrecking them. I charged in, weeded and then watered. The carrot rows were hard to weed as they and the weeds looked the same. I thought I better leave them alone for now.
This morning I tackled the home front and back with the whipper snipper. It took a couple of hours but both the front and back yards look pretty good now. I was merciless with the creeping bellflowers. It’s much easier to whip rather than dig them out.
My head is a bit clearer with the clearing of the yard. Now I need to do the same for inside of the house. I am once again, hopelessly, drowning in paper clutter. I have no will power and no discipline to deal with them in a timely manner. I’m always scrambling and searching for things I need at the last minute. But at least I did something right today. I didn’t panic or scramble. I phoned for help and got it. It was much better than darting off in person in my car. I wasn’t sure I would get help without making an appointment. I was reluctant to phone because of my hearing impairment. I did fine. I dealt with my issue. I’ve gained confidence in my hearing ability.
Now I’m relaxing with a cup of black decaf and some sourdough bread. I need to just breathe and slow down and empty my head. There’s no need to fill it with useless information. The world is a bit mad right now. I don’t have to make sense of what is going on. I don’t have to join the circus. Just sit and stay.
May 30th, the last day of the month. It’s another warm day though it is not quite as hot as the previous few days. There is a breeze and there are clouds. These days, I have to do my gardening in the morning or in the evening when the sun has gone down. Some days I’m working both ends of the day. Otherwise there will be no veggies or flowers. There’ll be nothing but weeds. For me that’s a sign of mental health problems. So I put on my big girl’s pants, pull up my socks and buckle up my shoes. I got out my trowel, pitch fork, hoe, whipper snipper and got to work.
First I finished planting the raised bed in the front. Half of it has been planted with kohlrabi and a couple of cucumbers. I finished filling it with celery. It is a good companion for the brassica family. A butternut squash filled in the emplty corner. I gave the whole bed a good watering. The grass has shot up in the heat. And those hateful creeping bellflowers are thriving in massive clumps all over the place. The new batteries for the whipper snipper are working great for whipping them and the grass down to the ground level. I was a sweaty mess at the end of it.
After a little rest and quenching my thirst, I packed my equipment in the car along with some bedding plants and headed over to my father’s. I was going to plant my mother’s front flower bed today, no matter what. It was not an easy task as they were really dry and overgrown with weeds. After some digging and hoeing and weeding, I planted some wave petunias and marigolds in one bed. I gave it a good soaking. Then I tackled the bed on the other side. It was tougher because I was hot, sweating and really tired by then. But I was determined and got over half the bed dug and cleared. It was good enough to plant half a dozen or so Chinese edible chrysanthemums. My father came out to watch but I had no spare energy to visit beyond a few words. After another thorough watering of everything I planted, I came home and crashed.
It is nice to have the time to myself, not having to talk or care for anyone. I can just wilt in peace and not think of anything or anyone. A water melon would have been nice but lacking that, a nice big juicy ambrosia apple was good enough. When I thirsting for something cold and wet, it is hot and dry.
Now that we are not having rain or snow, we are having a yellow warning – heat! It’ll be 30℃ temperatures for the rest of the week. On Thursday it’ll be 34℃. We had snow only 9 days ago. Not much was growing for much of spring. Then all of a sudden things sprung up. I harvested asparagus and rhubarb last night. Some of them are already getting old. What a roller coaster of a spring.
Now we are on a mad dash to get things planted. Who knows what kind of a growing season we will have. With this teeter totter heat and cold, I am having alot of aches and pains. Getting the yard clean up and garden in is very challenging. Having an allotment garden adds to the challenge. I just have to keep pushing through everything. It takes quite a bit of pain to get any gain this year. Maybe I will appreciate everything more come fall and harvest time. For now I am grinning and bearing it.
I am happy to say that the greenhouse is doing well. Thankfully there are no aphids this year. I am paying more attention at not overcrowding and making sure there is good ventilation in there. The lettuce is thriving. The spinach is over as well as the baby bak choy. It is too warm in there for them now. The snow peas are starting to produce. I think I will have bitter melons and cucumbers this year though it is early to be 100% sure. I am trying eggplants again. They need heavy feeding and pruning. I am excited to see whether I will succeed. It’s good to be excited again.
There’s still alot of planting in the garden yet. The 5 raised beds are mostly planted. I have yet to do the 6th one. The peppers will go there. The squash will all be planted in the home garden rather than in the allotment. It will be interesting to see how they will do. Gardening is not an exact science, at least to me. I have always garden by the seat of my pants. It wouldn’t hurt for me to find and follow proper guidelines though. Well, maybe next year. It is too late now to get into all that.
A sunny Tuesday morning. I’m surprised to find that it is -2℃ at 8 o’clock. I’ve had a good sleep. It’s remarkable how good that plus the sun can make me feel. I shall not let that goodness and the day go to waste. I will not haste though, but savour all the minutes at my own pace. I remember the saying, haste makes for waste. So how shall I proceed?
The day is almost over. I surely did not haste today. I enjoyed a leisurely 4 hour brunch with my two dear friends. One of them had just recently lost her mother. I shared my thought that I really had believed that we would never lose our mothers. We had them for so long. It’s really strange now to find ourselves without our mothers. But that is the way with nature. We are losing more people as time goes by. It is this stage in our lives.
After time spent with my two friends, it was time to take my father out to the mall for a walk and coffee with my mother’s friends. I don’t have any Chinese friends except these. I don’t have a lot of friends either. I am not a social butterfly. I cannot handle too many people but I am fortunate to have my little groups of caring loving individuals, at the mall, at the YWCA and my retired co-workers. It is enough.
After coffee at the mall, I still had a little time to do a bit of weeding, planting and watering in the greenhouse. My spinach and lettuce are ready for small pickings. I planted 2 sweet one million tomatoes. There’s 2 blossoms on the snow peas. Our days are still a frosty but it was toasty warm in the greenhouse in the afternoon. Now it is late and time for bed. It was a very good day.
spinachlettuceblossoms on snow peassweet 1 million tomato
Looks like winter is here again. It’s been snowing steadily since early afternoon and will most of the night. And most likely tomorrow as well. The moisture is welcomed by the farmers which includes us. We are farmers as well as gardeners. A little sun would be welcomed though. Without the sun, the temperature in the greenhouse has dipped. The little heater has been running most of the day to stay above 0. Presently it is sitting at 3.1℃. The snow peas, onions and celery are fine with that. I brought in the young seedlings of tomatoes, peppers and egg plants.
I wonder when spring will come and stay. It is the middle of April. I wonder if and how all the bombing and destruction going on in the Middle East have affected air quality and climate change. I wonder if all the warring kings have given any thought to how they are destroying our planet and humanity. Why are humans killing other humans? So what if they win the whole world and there’s nobody on it except their 1%? I wonder about so many things. The older I get, the less I understand. So let it snow. Let it snow. Maybe Santa will come down the chimney tonight. Won’t that be a surprise?
I might be getting a little daft. Last night I dreamt I was talking to my mother on the phone. All she said was, Hafong. Hafong is my Chinese name. It reminded me of her last call to me. It has been a year and a half now. She is gone and yet she is still here within me. She reminds me of it now and again in dreams and other ways. One time she woke me up from a nap. I felt her hands on my back. I thought it was the guy. I was a little disorientated and muttered, Is it day or night? When I opened my eyes, it was daylight and there was no one in the room. But I sure felt those hands.
This morning was difficult for me to navigate. You could say I was feeling the lowest ever. No positivity any where near the horizon. The weather had turned cold. Snow was falling from a grey sky. I had a morning dental appointment. Iran and Donald Trump still heavy on my mind. Unresolved and undissolved disappointment with another human being. I have yet to learn acceptance of others as they are. I was a glum and unapproachable person.
It’s another morning. It is colder. The sun is pale, peaking through a grey sky. We’ve had a little more snow. The greenhouse has dipped into minus temperatures again. The greens I have seeded a few days ago won’t be germinating any time soon. Meanwhile, our world is just as dangerous, a push button away from never returning. There is a reason why buttons are dangerous, not only to toddlers but to kings and presidents as well.
I am, however, not as glum as I thought. It was a surprising thing for me to discover that yesterday. I can bounce back. It happened at the dentist’s office. What it took was just a change of scenery, getting into the car and into traffic and arriving at my destination. I had to interact with the receptionist, then the hygienist and dentist. All that disrupted my thoughts and feelings. I had to stop that in order to deal with what’s at hand. Such a simple thing, eh?
It is not that simple, of course, but it is a springboard into better thinking and moods. It stopped my rumination and regurgitation of the same old, same old. I have to keep working at it. It is not a one time fix. I have this habit of falling into the same hole. Don’t we all? So don’t sit with it. Move, move, and move some more.
A sunny mid October morning. I’m sipping my second cup of tea. I am tired from yesterday and the day before. Age is catching up with me. Lunches, art galleries, quilt shows and coffee with my father are adding up. I shouldn’t complain and am not. Getting out in the world and connecting with others is always a good thing. It feels like I’ve been in a vacuum this past year. I’m slowly making my way out into the world again.
It feels a bit overwhelming sometimes, waking up to the world we have today. But I am here, caught up in the constant traffic along with the rest of humanity. It is a bit disorientating. I am reminded of the time I was in Hong Kong. It was on a Friday afternoon when people got off work early. I was standing on the sidewalk with people streaming past me. The sidewalk was like a moving escalator. I was, of course, lost, a foreigner among her own people.
I’m feeling less lost and not getting lost as often. I check and plan where I am going. Now there is a Googles Maps app. I can get directions livestream right to my ears. Now there’s not much getting lost but I still get stuck frequently, starting and stopping. Life is never perfect. Whatever would I do if it was?
Feeling stuck, I do a walk through the house this morning, putting away and throwing out things. I do a walk out the door and through the garden and the greenhouse, snipping and pulling. I hooked the hose to the water catchment and turned on the water onto the greenhouse beds. It could be the last watering. Then it’s time to stop and make lunch. Another day and no dollar.
A windy Saturday morning. The sun is trying its best to shine through the grey sky. It’s a cool 12℃, feeling like 6℃ the weather app say. It is cool and the air is smoky. Rain in the forecast but no sign of it yet. It is hard to feel cheery and hopeful but it does no good to be morose. So I’m trying hard not to be. I made a walk to the greenhouse. It’s a cozy 22℃ with the door closed and just a side vent opened for ventilation. The snowpeas are still in their prime with new growth. I’ve harvested a lot of peas already. Hoping for more. The cucumbers are coming along. They have blooms but will be awhile before we will get something to eat. 2/4 bitter melons are ok. The other 2 are struggling along, being attacked by aphids. I have sprouted a few more seeds for insurance. There’s still time.
Life still goes on regardless of whatever hardship we are going through. The sun still rises in the east and sets in the west. It’s what we call a day. It is up to each individual to choose how they will navigate the time between the two. Many days I feel hopeless and gloomy. Many days I want to vegetate and not do a thing. I know, and we all know, that no action means no change. Wishing and a-hoping are not actions. They’re just words from a song. So I try to shine the best and any way I can.
It’s getting out of bed every morning, getting dressed, brushing my teeth and showing up at the breakfast table, doing the dishes, sweeping the floor, putting away things.
It is Sunday afternoon. I haven’t been good at putting things away lately. My snow boots are still hanging out on the deck. The deck is still littered with all my pottting soil and containers. There’s no place to sit. I’ve been meaning to tidy up and put things away. I haven’t put anything away and meaning to doesn’t do the job. I just have to do it. That’s all. It is quite simple and yet not. I will tend to the boots and make a start on the containers once I’m done here.
We had a bit of rain last night. It took away the smoke and the sun came out this morning. It’s still a bit windy but it was a good day for us to pour libations for our mother and grandparents at the cemetery this morning. It was a bit strange not to have our mother to guide us in the ritual. We did the best we could. We lit incense sticks, bowed and pour libations for our grandfather, grandmother and mother. Then we burn paper money to ensure their well being and prosperity. Then we departed to the Mandarin Restaurant for dim sim.
onethousandandtwo 