Thursday, December 18, 2008

:over and out for 2008:

School holidays started today, we have visitors coming, corn to tend, friends to cook for, Christmas to prepare for...so I think I’ll sign off for the year so I can turn my mind and hands to the full days ahead.

But before I go - thanks to Louise Twenty Cent Mixture for organising the Christmas Ornament Swap - it was lovely to get into the Christmas Spirit through December with darling ornaments arriving in the mail. Thanks too, to my swap partners - I really like everything I received! Lookee here and be impressed:

Wishing you lots of lush summer fruits and vegetables:

Lots of lovely gifts - like this sweetly wrapped one that Miss Emma sent me this week (check that bird peg! Delightful!) that I am SAVING until Christmas Day, unlike Emma who opened my gift to her when it arrived. Hee!

I’ll leave you with a link to my favourite Christmas song of all time. I love this song all year round, but if I hear it at Christmas time it actually brings tears to my eyes - not least because I was always a huge Kirsty Maccoll fan, and this song is a reminder that she’s gone.

This song moves me because of the 3/4 time, the Irish tin whistle, Kirsty’s singing, and also the lyrics capture so much of the mixed feelings Christmas can bring - you’re happy, but you’re also remembering people who are no longer with you, you are enjoying your family...but you are also often pushed up against your family in ways that can be challenging...aah, Christmas - you gotta love it.

And most of all, a big stripy sock Merry Christmas and Solstice and Festive Season to you, dear readers:

See you in the New Year - be safe, be strong, be happy!

xxx Helen xxxx

Monday, December 15, 2008

:antidote:

Standing in the kitchen this morning, bleary-eyed, sipping black coffee, Magnus yelling because he doesn’t want the cereal or the other kind of cereal or the toast that I made him, & on National Radio - suicide bombers, dead mountain climbers, and manifold ways the National Government is already making this country less of a place I want to live…

..so I walk over to the radio and switch stations to our local Student Radio Station, and THIS song was on…

Whew. What an antidote. Thank you, Michael Franti! Go listen.

***

(sample lyrics)

There’s a battle going on in this earth
everyday. Work, school, death, and birth.
There are 6 billion people on this earth,
can you tell me what every single life is worth?

You got to let go of remote control!
You got to let go of remote control!

Hey world, you know you got to put up a fight
Hey world, you rumble in the jungle tonight
Hey world, keep bringing it the rest of your life

You got to put up a fight.
You got to put up a fight.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

:sometimes a step backwards is progress:

All this talk of recession - it’s relentless!

I have to confess to you - a huge part of me welcomes a recession, if it brings with it the kind of resourcefulness, community building and sustainability practices which occurred in other times of global hardship, like the great depression and World War Two. It’s just a shame that it’s only in times of crisis the majority of people will get on board with these ideas. In my utopian world, the notions of these wonderful World War Two posters would be how we approached daily life, at ALL times.

I’m from a small town in Taranaki, my father and most of the fathers of my friends worked in the local Freezing Works, or the local Gas to Gasoline plant, or were farmers or farm workers. Our community was small enough and poor enough that there was a lot of community spirit and help. I remember lots of swapping of homegrown fruits and vegetables, swaps of skills - my mother would often help people out with sewing clothes and curtains in return for physical labour or babysitting. Older people in the community would hold “weed and feed” afternoons, whereby people would help them maintain their gardens in return for lunch. Like a Taranaki version of an Amish barn raising, the laying of concrete driveways and the building of car sheds were often done communally, in return for beers and “a feed” of fish and chips. 

In the early 1990’s a social anthropologist came to the town to write a thesis on “the green dollar exchange systems of the small town communities of northern Taranaki” to the town’s amusement and bemusement - until then, no one had heard the term “green dollar”.

It was a wonderful model to grow up with, in terms of how community can be. And surely, could be again on a larger scale? If it takes recession for us to get there - then I’m fine with that.

(a Dutch poster - produced during the famine that occurred there towards the end of the war - encouraging people to forage for nuts in the forests.)

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

:this is not a poem:

journal ramblings transcribed:

***

Plants -
you choose them, put them there,
but they have minds of their own. Sprawl
or shrink. Rampage or rot.

Force a bulb in late winter, glacial roots
in cold water and you’ll get your heady hit
of spring but what is it but another form
of corruption? Dyed sunflowers. Pumpkins
grown for ornaments.

If someone you dislike, sends you flowers
do you compost them straight away? Or do
you owe it to the blooms to rinse a vase?

You can only usefully weed, if you can
recognise a weed. Before then-
it’s sheer brutality.

Those Japanese Anemones will take over.
All manner of geraniums, too. But shouldn’t
tenacity be rewarded? Watch me try to grow
a rununcula or a tulip here. This is not a game.

Love-lies-bleeding and it is no coincidence that
convulvulus has heart shaped leaves and thorns
must be accepted for the desire of a rose.

Turn your back on the flowers. The striped tomatoes,
veined cabbages and rainbow chard will bring you pride
and vitamins. we will grow where we want to grow
says the black pansy thriving in the sandy footpath crack.

And that’s that.

Tuesday, December 09, 2008

:community corn:

A friend of ours owns some land out near Paihiatua and this summer she has divided a paddock into 14 strips - so for $25 people can ‘rent’ a strip of field and get 150 heirloom corn seeds from Kaonga Gardens. Her vision is of a ‘community corn field’ - the strips radiating out, like rays of the sun, from a small circular communal garden which will be the hub of various social events...culminating with a big harvest dinner in the autumn.

We have a strip! And on ours have planted the corn seed, 24 seed potatoes and 10 pumpkins - this only used about half of our space so we also flung a $4 for a kilo bag of wheat seed around, without much hope that it will grow. You can see some of baby corn plants above.

So far, the experience has been enormous fun (yes, hard work, but I have peasant blood - so work is fun for me). It looks like only a small percentage of the people who ‘bought’ strips have actually gotten around to doing anything with them, but that’s OK - because there are enough of us involved for it to seem communal and pleasant. And just when I think “Ooh - it’s so dry, better go out and see to the corn....” it buckets with rain! (Like today!)

I have little confidence (with our lack of knowledge about this kind of intensive growing) that we will end up with anything to eat at the end of the season - but we figured it was something worth supporting and so far has been a wonderful thing to be involved with. Especially when we made a scarecrow - Consuela, the corn-mama - out of one of my old sparkly frocks and a wig I wore to an 80s party as Boy George.

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