It was June. I was sixteen, and I was miserable. From my avid reading, not to mention  glimpses of the lives of friends, I was only too aware that this was supposed to be the happiest time of my life. But at sixteen I knew I was a hopeless failure.

When the popular, intelligent boys wanted a friend, or a coconspirator in political disruption, they chose me. But as soon as a dance loomed, they walked straight past me to choose the pretty, popular, uncomplicated girls.

After my beautiful, theatrical aunt gave me a pastel blue, heavily beaded evening bag, to mark my important sixteenth birthday, I stuffed it at the back of a drawer, curled up on my bed and wept wretchedly. How could she imagine that there would ever come a time in my life when I would need such a bag?

It seemed the final insult when my artist mother decided to seize the opportunity of having her daughter home from school to spend the summer painting a nearly life-sized portrait of me in a billowing white ball gown, set against a forest background. What was she thinking of? Did she know the misery I felt at being continually rejected? I do remember her muttering that she hoped someday I would be glad of the picture as a remembrance. How likely was that?

Because I could only spend so many hours of the day reading War and Peace, I capitulated ungraciously. Then began the agonizingly boring afternoons settled in Mother’s Victorian armchair, bought specifically for portrait sitters, staying still, watching the hot sun creep across the dark, varnished studio floor, smelling the evocative scents of linseed oil and piney turpentine, attending to each slight breeze in the forest outdoors, hearing a distant bluejay and wishing I too could be outside. My mother hurried across the room, twitched the frothy white dress into place, looked over her glasses at me without seeing me at all and sighed. “I do wish you could keep still, Peri.”

I could see that my mother was dissatisfied with the beginnings of her ambitious work, planned for exhibition in a Royal Academy show. Now, she had an idea. She loved peonies, and had already used them in her pictures. Now she suggested that we go to the Sheridan Nurseries planting fields beyond Clarkson, to see if the flowers were blooming yet, a scheme she knew would please me.

While I got out of the car, looking for someone to ask whether we could buy a few flowers, she waited in the car, feasting on the masses of pink, white and carmine blooms. In all the fields, there was only one immigrant labourer, stooped over a wheelbarrow. I’m not sure the man even understood my request. But he nodded, and motioned me to follow him. First he pointed to a shell-like pink flower and raised his eyebrows in question. “Oh, yes, please.” He cut one of these, and then another, and laid them across my arm. Then he motioned me to follow him as he slipped along the crowded aisles of fragrant flowers. What about this one, his eyebrows asked. Without waiting for an answer, he clipped a wine-coloured one, and added it, then he chose shaggy deep pink ones, and after that swan-like white ones, with tiny crimson veins of blood at their hearts. Surrounded by loveliness, in the sunlit brilliance of noon, we walked over the warm earth. By now, my mother, reasonably fearing that the many flowers would be too expensive, was trying to call me back. But I could not turn away as the man, smiling a little now, laid flower after flower in my arms, graciously, appreciatively, as if I were a princess. At last, I could hold no more. Bees circled my head, seeing more blossom than girl.

            When I pointed to my purse, the man standing tall beside me shook his head. When I said thank you, he barely listened, turning back to his work.

            Back home, the cloying scent of peonies filled the studio. The next afternoon, as I resumed my seat in the Victorian chair, my mother slipped off her stool, chose a single dark peony, and laid it across the white ball dress.  At last the picture worked for her. Meanwhile, after the moments of beauty she so craved, the girl had an intimation that she might indeed, someday, be glad of the picture as a remembrance.

How it comes back to me. My aging artist father hovering in the shadows, his face intense with wistfulness. “Ah, Per, I just want to show you… If you would just let me show you…”

So often, defending my instinctive need to grow and learn independently, I turned away, ignoring him, hiding from his wish to pile the wealth of his experience on me. “Maybe later…”

His treasure rejected, really he expected nothing else, he slunk off towards his own darkness, clutching himself to himself. Indeed, all too soon, he took his hard-won knowledge with him and disappeared from my life. Ever since, no longer able to ask the questions I shrugged off when I was young, I’ve been reinventing my wheel for myself, as we all must, with no eager, passionate face to cheer me.

And now the haunting is on the other side. I watch, mainly in silence, my very wise and able sons following the stream of their own lives as they, in their own turns, must. Welling up inside me is my father’s longing to share a lifetime’s wisdom that might ease or grace their way. Remembering my own shunting off of the gifts of experience, I stay quiet. Only my heart is whispering, “If only I could show you…”

Years ago former nursery owner, Doug Green, hosted a glorious annual “prelude to spring” day-long garden seminar in Oakleaf, Ontario. After a long Canadian winter, he and his outstanding guest speakers whipped the packed auditorium into a fever of anticipation, offering news of unusual plants and solutions, along with introductions to intriguing local experts. Those of us who attended, staggered home in a blissful daze,  loaded with delicious free stuff and ideas guaranteed to improve our success rates.

Ever since those seminars, one piece of Doug’s advice has nagged at me. Make sure you have a bench looking at your gardens, he insisted, looking straight at us, but also make sure you take lots of time to sit on it enjoying your gardens. Too many of us are so busy laboring over our plants that we forget to simply spend time with them. Ouch.

It’s taken a long time for me to practice the sitting part. The trickiest bit is learning to accept the work in progress state of my gardens without diving into creating perpetual to do lists.  But at the end of the season, maybe to the end of my life, what I will remember most are the still times.

This morning, weary from stacking wood, I flopped on my bench so motionless that a flicker flashed by, nearly brushing my cheek before he settled beside the flagstone path, searching for ants.

It’s not really the triumph of growing a mass of New Zealand delphiniums from seed—all this colour from a five dollar packet. It’s about taking time to watch the sheeny male ruby-throated hummingbird dance among them.

Let me tell you about the bliss of taking a cup of coffee out on a steamy midsummer morning to sit under a tiny grove of bitternut hickory saplings, spending time with the towering hollyhocks. All that moves are magenta petals trembling under the assault of bumblebees.

Thanks to Doug’s advice, I’ll be out there even when I have to bundle on a heavy jacket, watching the brilliant maple leaves swirl about me, storing up memories as monarch butterflies drift over the asters and sedums gathering strength for their long migration. Even in winter I’ve been known to swish the snow from the bench and spend happy minutes enjoying the witchy swirl of the weeping flowering crabapple with its crimson berries, silhouetted against the blue-shadowed whiteness.

** Recently I’ve had the pleasure of discovering Doug all over again. You may want to visit his fine gardening website and blog:  http://blog.douggreensgarden.com/.

a world of uncountable beings dedicating their lives to growing something meaningful and beauty-filled

Tarchin Hearn Something Beautiful for the World

How can you continue to celebrate nature even as you witness its destruction? How hypocritical. Where you need to be is on the front-line of protest.

This painful spring, the first with no dawn chorus, the only answer that comes to me is one clearer to my heart than my intellect. In the face of forces greater than anything I can hope to defeat this simple life of work and devotion intertwined is all I can give. As Joanna Macy has said, “action on behalf of life transforms.” May it be that my heartfelt gestures of rejoicing in our sustaining web of nature and writing with reverence are my offerings to a common good.

How wonderful! It was a sweet May evening, 35 years ago, and here I was, very, very pregnant, heading to the spinning class I had always dreamed of. Mind you, a class on handspinning was actually the last thing I needed at that particular time. Because my baby could come any time in the next month, I wasn’t even sure I would be able to turn up for all five lessons. What was more, it was a year when every penny we made was accounted for. But when I heard that noted teacher, Margaret Richardson, was offering evening lessons in spinning, complete with the use of a spinning wheel of your own to learn on, I signed up immediately. A spinning class in the small village of Westport was exceptional.

As Margaret was distributing the New Zealand Ashford spinning wheels each of us would have for the duration of the class, I glanced around at the nine other eager, friendly women in the circle. (Spinning lends itself to circles, I’ve found.) I wish I could say that I took to spinning naturally. But, as in most pursuits, I’m actually a slow (but thorough) learner. Furtive, I watched my fellow students, as the spinning wheel ate my yarn. Snatching more of the cloud of fluffy, teased fleece, I clutched desperately, while pushing back hair from my sweaty forehead. As Margaret moved around the group, calmly offering suggestions, I couldn’t help seeing that the serious, seventeen year old girl and her mother both had mastered the combination of slow steady treadling and careful drafting of the downy handfuls of fleece. Two grandmothers, best friends, chuckled as they chatted together comfortably, while they handily made yarn.

            This was not fun. But I was supposed to do this. I’d always known I could do this. Flustered, yet again I was hunting down the ragged yarn which had dashed from my fingers to wrap itself around the bobbin, hoping my sympathetic neighbour didn’t notice when my belt whipped off the wheel altogether. Right from the time, as a little girl, when I had watched the Scandinavian lady spinning dog hair and knitting it into the fluffiest and warmest of mittens on a darling small, upright wheel, I knew I was meant to spin. I had the nasty feeling that the teacher was ignoring me, having offered many suggestions, none of which worked.

Then, just before the end of the second class, when the others were enjoying talking about a possible trip to a nearby woollen mill and making plans to bring farm eggs and jars of goat milk to sell next time, I sat back a moment, hoping nobody was noticing the snarled mess I was making.

Margaret, was gathering her supplies, ready to start making trips to her car, when she announced, “Next week I will bring some different fibres, so you can have a taste of them—yak, camel, mohair...” She gathered a sampling of tempting kinds of fluff from one of her big willow baskets. Black, silky but wiry Yak. Oh, my, I wanted to try that for sure.

My eyes turned to my friend, Doreen, watching the way her hands moved. Somehow, watching a beginner made more sense to me than the teacher’s more polished style. Maybe I would try one more time. I couldn’t say how I changed, but something clicked, taking me to a realm beyond the tricky coordination of treadling feet and drafting hands. In the next ten minutes, while everyone else was getting ready to leave, I half-filled my bobbin with passably spun, if bumpy yarn, feeling the pleasure of fanning the fibre, letting the twist run up it, and then feeding it through the orifice and onto the bobbin, my wheel moving all the while. And from that moment, I never looked back.

 In spite of a premature trip to the hospital, I did manage to make the three remaining classes, which was a good thing, because it turned out that the wheels were for sale. While it was outrageous to even think of buying my wheel at this point, it also was unthinkable to give up this newly discovered pleasure. I’ve never forgotten Barry’s generosity, encouraging me to take the chance.

My best, most joyous memory of the spring spinning adventure is of sitting with my lovely new birchwood wheel, in the midst of a field of yellow dandelions, a light breeze ruffling my hair, the baby within me calm for once, feeling the delicious flow of fleece through my fingers, to be shaped into yarn. This is something I’ll want to keep doing the rest of my days, I thought blissfully. And so I have.

I’ve been specially aware of the restitching of the woods here this week. Perhaps it began when a wild gust of a southwest wind off the cold lake water met the rising heat from our  rocky woods. This burst was followed by a queer, glittering stillness. Only later did a wrenching “crack” make me glance out the window in time to see a slender young tree fold into pieces and collapse to the ground with a crash. Within this particular piece of woodland, the pattern of life will change now. The new clearing where the tree fell will surely allow the entrance of an unusual amount of light and wind, which may open the forest community to further ravages. But the tree’s death may also open the way for new pioneering saplings, which may rush up to lend their support to the interwoven web of the forest.

Living as I do, in a clearing, what I am noticing most right now is the swift enclosure of edges.  My entire vision of our woodland is changing. Before we bought this land, cottagers foraged for easily harvested firewood, leaving the margins relatively open. May is the beginning of flourishing new growth. Soon, once again, a startlingly dense canopy will change our landscape. However, what I am noticing most this spring is how quickly the borders are regathering the forest community into itself. For our first years at Singing Meadow, even in summer, we had unnaturally easy views into the heart of our woods. But how quickly saplings have taken advantage of the favorable ease at the edges. Aspens, basswood and ash, along with tangling, twining, vines and brambles are racing to shut the doors into the woods. Before long I see that I will no longer be able to simply glimpse the interior. I will need to enter it.

We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion just as effectively as by bombs.                       Kenneth Clark

The wind is blowing wildly this morning, switching from south-west to north, driving high-flying strings of geese along the length of the lake. On this, Earth Day, I am walking out to greet The Ash Trees at the End of the World. Standing at the peninsula’s tip, in the dazzle of wind and dashing waves, I lay my hand in reverence on the mossy trunk of first one ancient, immense tree, and then the second one. It would take three of me to encircle the girth of one. For hundreds of years these trees have survived, and perhaps flourished, leaning against the fierce winds that funnel the lake. I take my strength from them and their far-reaching roots.

As I turn to walk back home, in bursts of electric sun and clouds, I travel with the heartbreak of knowing these trees may not live much longer, threatened as they are by the approaching emerald ash borer. But as I walk I also rejoice in the fat ochre buds of the butternuts which thrive here, and I listen in gladness to the new sound of the wind gusting through the swelling buds of the elms. Yes elms. For every year new elm saplings spring up over and over again until, perhaps, possibly, some trees may evolve to withstand Dutch Elm Disease. Meanwhile, the buds over my head are as dancing as ever.

Rounding the corner, I pause to greet the most remarkable tree I have ever encountered. So aged is this ravaged beech that its bark is corky, rather than the smooth silver you would expect. So frail is the beech that halfway up the hollow trunk is a window to racing clouds and sun.

At first glance you would say this tree was no longer alive. Indeed, all but one limb has been sheared off by age and rough weather. And yet, only look up towards the sky. One arm reaches skyward in a flourish of new twigs, tipped with coppery leaf shoots. Then look down, amid the jumble of fallen limbs. Forcing up through the rubble is a host of infant beeches, new growth from old.

Moon in the water;

Broken and broken again,

Still it is there.

                                                                                  Chosu

When I can’t sleep, I often turn my mind to the birds who bless the area around our home. Ease comes quickly as I recall them. Exploring the land here, we have enjoyed re-encountering many of the same common species we knew at Foley Mountain. But there are differences of time and quality of surroundings. I want to mention that all the birds here are peculiarly tame, because they don’t encounter as many people as the ones in the park did.

Here are only a few of the birds who mean so much:

• nuthatches A pair of whitebreasts were the first birds we welcomed to our feeder in the disorienting time after we moved to Singing Meadow. Alas, without the dense coniferous woods of the park, we do not have the charming smaller, red-breasted ones.
• blue jays Some might say we have too many of these, but their flashes of blue in flight are like patches of sky on sullen wintry days here.
• herons following threads of water, crossing from their nest pond, across the water meadow, over the creek to the bay where they do their noon-time frogging. Feeling, rather than seeing their shadows pass over me as I move about my day is an unexpected gift.
•  eagle  Breathtaking, with his unmistakeable, powerful flight, he soars high over my vegetable garden, or on a mild-winded day, makes gentle, leisurely circles, travelling the length of the valley, before he journeys on to the lake. Working the thermals, he is air made visible.
• red-tails Wonderfully, a pair of red-tailed hawks nest in the woods near the heronry, and soar each day on the thermals rising from our valley. After the sorrow of experiencing Merak the red-tail’s painful isolation because she was human-imprinted, experiencing the life of a mated pair is particularly heartening.
• chickadees, whose vernal “phoebes” are the first glimmer of spring
• grouse These explode from the brush, startling me back to mindfulness. And of late, the underlying pulse of their drumming echoes from the surrounding hills, the very essence of a northern spring.
• Johnny Crow Admittedly, Johnny and his clan are too much of a good thing, yet I feel privileged to be part of his summer world. From now until the autumn, I see charming snapshots of family life as Johnny and his relations patiently introduce the spoiled infant crows to maturity, strutting and cajoling around our gardens. Simply thinking of Johnny’s outrageous behaviour makes me smile.
• loons To live where I hear daily their haunting, varied calls from the nearby lake is an answered dream.
• pileated woodpeckers, and all the downie and hairy woodpeckers currently drumming in our valley. Their rapping reminds me of the music of the Kodo drummers of Japan.
• gold finches, The drab finches of winter, the males now a brilliant yellow, are accompanied by carmine house sparrows, flitting high through our trees, as vividly coloured as summer itself.
• mourning doves, so languourously preening high in the tree on sultry summer days, their cooing, not sad to me, but rather brooding, a song of peace.

I was taken aback the other day, when a new aquaintance with an academic background said dismissively, “It might be interesting to hear from an undergrad perspective.” Careful there.

There it was all over again, the all-too familiar “us against them” educational perspective, the externally imposed rigidity of a hierarchical system. From my artist parents I inherited a fierce belief in self-directed learning. It was vital, they argued, that I discover how to learn. Once I had these skills, they knew, everything else would fall into place. Nothing in the following years of wide-ranging study and mastery has ever made me think that they were wrong. While it is true that occasional encounters with outstanding, memorable teachers have helped me cut to the essential more swiftly, I am still focused on teaching myself.

It may be obvious that compulsory schooling, based on limiting philosophies was disastrous for me. It seemed to me that my innate impulses to learn were being forced into narrow moulds, based on a philosophy that saw children as machines. How I treasured the scant hours of home life when I lived intently with my forest surroundings, learning symbiosis from the inside out. “Only connect”, my father’s mantra, received from E.M. Forster, was alive for me as I browsed through catholic bookshelves, devouring exactly what was right for me at the right time. I played at shaping and patterning coils of clay, glorying in diversity, until I could show you 30 different kinds of vessel. And, oh, yes, essential life is indeed all about play, a passionate, committed style of play which I find tragically missing from the structured lives of children now.

When I wanted to learn to play the piano, I listened intently to the fine performers on the radio, and crept through the pieces that interested me, being drawn back over and over, until I could play them creditably. When, later, I decided to learn to use a loom, I gathered and repatterned the scant available information and revised until I found a method that secured the tension and flow necessary to create interlacements with this marvelous mechanical aid.

What I would have liked to say to the academic was that I see teaching/learning as a joyous, inspired collaboration between teacher and largely self-directed pupil, and perhaps a broader association of fellow students. Sparingly, the teacher prompts, sows seeds, heartens, yes, “draws out” in the traditional Latin sense of the definition of education.

Lessons do arise from everywhere. Maybe we should talk some time.