Well, well. This morning I spent speculating on the human propensity to expect disaster. Mass PTSD you might call it. And who knows? Maybe it’s true! Maybe Hercolubus, aka Niburu, aka Planet X — is real and on its way. Comets, remember, are messengers, periodically bringing news from deep space to and through our tiny, myopic solar system.
And this one planet-sized? Wow, that must be some message!
Meanwhile, remember that dis-aster means “to turn away from the stars.” We have been turned away from the stars Above for far too long, paying attention to what lies here, Below, but in the grossest of ways. Endless, grinding, consumptive materialism that regurgitates itself daily, hourly, in every city dump. This is what to expect when you go out there,
which Rebecca and I did, yesterday, to drop off 1200 pounds of poisonous material (rotting creosote logs, and then some) that she and Patrick, the tenant next door, unearthed around the base of the gigantic oak tree at the edge of the property next to the DeKist house. That mother/father oak tree is the soul of this three-home place. No wonder he/she was looking sickly. And there’s probably another load of equal size still to be pulled out.
Now where will all this “garbage” go, when “there is no away,” when, really, there’s no such thing as “waste”? To the landfill at Terre Haute, of course! Outta sight, outta mind, the way we’ve been running this country and this finite planet for far too long.
Getting to the dump was iffy. “Betsy” is old, kind of sick, and not supposed to carry more than 800 pounds. Especially uphill, like that last 500 yards once we turned in the gate to the “trash transfer station.” But we crossed our fingers and urged Betsy on. Luckily, she rallied.
This was deemed especially important because after we dropped off our load we were to make a beeline for Martinsville, 30 miles north from the dump up the highway that Betsy was not supposed to go on (no long trips, the last mechanic had warned), to pick up our water tanks, ordered off Craig’s List last week (two 275-gallon tanks, $75 each).
She made it. And they fit inside her bed. Yeah!
Before leaving this farmstead where a blended family (him and his three kids, her and her three kids, all under 12; she works, he stays home) moved “from the city” only a year ago and they already have 70 chickens, a pony, cows, nice woods, about a half acre of garden (not permaculture —yet) and . . . two turkeys!
— which strutted towards me, greeting, with their weird, lightning-fast, like they’re on way too much caffeine — gobble!gobble!gobble! — and not only do they strut in concert, but one cues the other with each new gobble stream so that they’re almost, but not quite (about a millisecond apart) united that way, too. Wow! I’ve never been so close to real live turkeys.
What a matched pair! Strut strut strut! Wow — look at those heads! Light blue and pinkish red, like Disney turkeys . . .
Betsy made it back home, too, and Rebecca immediately deployed to the garden to finish preparing the new beds.
Here’s where these two tanks are going to go, in the back of my house, on the NE corner, between the edge and the window, stacked. Notice the gutters and downspout are 6″ rather than 5″. That’s new, since last October. The gutter guy will hook them up once we make the frame for the bottom one to hold up the other one.
We want to be prepared for both downpours (6″ gutters) and drought (water tanks) in this volatile era of climate change.
There’s another tank in the GANG garden that’s due to be hooked up to the corner of the DeKist house.
We already have a swale that funnels water off parts of both roofs and runs it into the pond. Now, with these two corner treatments, our water catchment plans will be fully enacted sometime next week.
So much to do, so little time! Especially if Hercolubus decides to take us out before we decide all together to shift his/her trajectory so he/she doesn’t. And maybe that’s the planet-comet’s giant message: learn how to meditate individually, and then get together, folks, collectively: let us attune ourselves into a single, aware noospheric consciousness, when necessary. May the spirit of Teilhard de Chardin be with us!
Meanwhile, breathe! And stay awake, no matter what. No place for fear. Only love. When we fear, we close ourselves down like zombies. When we love, we surrender to the mysterious magic of the living universe.
