NOMAD DREAMING

I had just read an article about NOAA (one of my absolute favourite federal agencies) predicting an above average monsoon season this year, when I looked out the kitchen window to see beautiful dark grey green liquorice clouds building in the west, intensifying all the colours. Thunder started to rumble. Doves were unperturbed. This is why the 14th century Spanish name for the place where I tend a garden was Ojo Caliente de las Palomas. It really is a hotspring of doves. A fo

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, There is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, The world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other Doesn’t make any sense. Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī 1207-1273. If you build it, they will come Every day now, I walk out into a field of flowers. My ongoing pursuit of black flowers manifested this season in a patch of Black Peony poppies (Papaver somniferum) . Not quite bla

“Look for the helpers” Mister Rogers (1928-2003), Presbyterian minister and American TV children’s programming personality famously counseled. I think. Full disclosure: I’ve never actually watched a Mister Rogers show but icons of the adopted culture creep in subtly, then lurk, embedded on the edges of awareness, to surface at moments like cockroaches when I switch on the kitchen light suddenly at midnight. This May Day (mayday mayday) I take a moment to acknowledge some of

People forget that eating represents their most profound engagement with the natural world. Through agriculture is how we change the world, more than anything else we do. Michael Pollen in The Omnivore’s Dilemma Agni (digestive fire) inhabits a little patch of garden on the southwestern boundary, under the (recently restrained and reshaped) mesquite tree. The stand of hulless black barley, Hordeum vulgare nudum (it’s not truly hulless, I am discovering) sowed late autumn, smo