...There Is Nothing At All

“When the Dharma Body awakens completely,

There is nothing at all.

The source of our self-nature

Is the Buddha of innocent truth.

Mental and physical reactions come and go

Like clouds in the empty sky;

Greed, hatred, and ignorance appear and disappear

Like bubbles on the surface of the sea.”

(from Zhengdaoge/Shodoka)

“When the Dharma Body awakens completely/ There is nothing at all…”

Mycorrhizae, root hairs, ants, voles.

Birds, acorns, barberry fruits, and seeds in a matrix of excrement.

Winds used to carry North American pine pollen hundreds of miles out into the Atlantic Ocean, dumbfounding European sailors in clouds of gold.

Canopy leaves catch dust in the hot breeze, rains catch dust in vertical rivers, bark catches dust floods in channels, moss catches innumerable unkown Nile silts in luxuriant green deltas at the foot of the oak in the backyard.

Who is in control?

To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening.

Looking out, there are birds and roots, dust and leaves and moss.

Looking around, what is there? Kaleidoscope center, still point among the shifting colors. Amazement.

The sailors lift their eyes from their tasks to see the backs of their hands, the rigging, and the sails, the sky and the clouds covered in gold. Their mouths hang open and their eyes widen, lost.

The Leisurely One

Pardon the hiatus but I was in Uruguay with my partner Kazim visiting family in January. 

   Two times a year my sangha, The Village Zendo, engages in Ango practice.  Hearkening back to the original rainy season retreats of the early Buddhist sangha, ango (meaning "peaceful dwelling") is a period of intensified daily practice.  We are currently in an Ango period, and the study text for this period is a long poem by the Chinese Zen master, Yongjia Xuanjue, called the Zhengdaoge (Shodoka in Japanese).  I have decided to read it stanza by stanza with an ear towards what it says about my farming practice, and will occasionally make posts on thoughts that arise

"There is the leisurely one,
Walking the Tao, beyond philosophy,

Not avoiding fantasy, not seeking truth.

The real nature of ignorance is the Buddha-nature itself;

The empty delusory body is the very body of the Dharma."

“There is the leisurely one…” What might it mean to farm leisurely? Hardly “gentleman farming,” rather a kind of poor man’s farming.
 
Chuangzi: So removed from civilization were they that they forgot how to speak.
Mumon: His speech is rough, his writing illegible.
 
To farm leisurely might mean farming
 
as if your life depended on it,
as if farming was your life,
as if life was nothing but farming.



As if:

In June Kazim and I pick deep red-purple serviceberries from the trees in Tappan Square in the pallid violet of twilight.

In the evening I pad out the back door and through the high grass to pick orange day-lily blossoms one day short of bursting open into a great steel bowl. Then I string them with needle and thread and hang them to dry for winter soups and stir-fries.

Hurrying ahead of the wave of frost, we work though the evening until even headlights aren’t enough, picking tomatoes and peppers, hanging the immature cayennes upside down so that they continue to ripen to red.

Cattails in spring, lamb’s quarters in summer, mushrooms in autumn.

Hang acorns in an onion bag in a toilet tank and with each flush slowly leach the tannins. Every week hang mint to dry for winter tea.

Save seeds at every opportunity. Seeds in pants pockets, shirt pockets, stuffed in backpack pouches. What were these again?

Read and dream and forget. Hatch plans.

Spend evenings chopping, washing, mixing, pickling.

A Year in Pictures: 2010

Spring

Preparing a bed for planting peas.

Judy Laushmann, Ben Knowles, Mandy Fracchione, and Kazim Ali pull weeds and harvest dandelion roots for roasted dandelion tea at the same time.

Domenico Ruggierio of Oberlin College's Multicultural Resource Center uses a broadfork to aerate soil without disturbing its profile.

The Hawken School and Cleveland Oberlin College Alumni showed up in force to prepare the fields and plant leeks!  Thanks to Matt Young of Hawken School and Kira McGirr of Cleveland OC Alums for organizing this, and thanks to all the parents, students, and alums who came out.

Springtime greenhouse:  lettuces, scallions, Chinese cabbage.

Royal Oakleaf Lettuce.

Touring Old Haunts During a Spring Trip Away from the Farm

Stonecrop Gardens, Cold Spring, NY:  A plant-lover's paradise, and where I spent a year training as a horticulturist.

Stonecrop's Gunnera tinctoria.  The Chilean Rhubarb is the largest herbaceous plant on Earth.  The tallest leaf in this picture is about 7ft tall and still growing!  Though hardy to Zone 8, gardening wizardry keeps this plant alive in Stonecrop's Zone 4 weather.

Stonecrop:  A straw Gertrude Jekyll overlooks the vegetable garden.

Stonecrop:  the Flower Garden.

Stonecrop:  the Gravel Garden.

Stonecrop:  The Wisteria Pavilion.

Stonecrop:  The Horticulture Library.

The Cloisters, New York, NY:  A refuge of calm in the busy city, The Cloisters is a branch museum of The Metropolitan Museum of Art dedicated to Medieval art and culture.  It is so named for the series of open courtyards that house period-style gardens.  I was a horticulturist here for three years.

Hops climbing up the Bonnefont Arcade.

Trie Cloister.

The Village Zendo, New York City:  My home temple where I have practiced Zen for 11 years.

Summer

Garlic, garlic everywhere.  Summer interns Ben Agsten, Emma Cunniff, Gabe Baldasare, Patrick Gilfeather, Assistant Grower Freed, Ian Burns, and WIlly Wickham.

Garlic:  bunching and hanging.  For the next week the strawbale building was redolent with the pungency of curing garlic, somewhat yeasty like baking bread.

Oberlin Farmers' Market Stand:  Me and Freed manning the stand.

Fall

Oberlin College Annual Day of Service:  Every year the George Jones Farm hosts new first-years who come out for a day of volunteer service as part of their orientation.

Day of Service:  Weeding a greenhouse to get it ready for fall planting.

Day of Service:  Education Coordinator/Operations Manager Evelyn Bryant and a volunteer planting lettuce.

Day of Service:  Weeding turnips and lettuce mix.

 Day of Service:  the last big project of the day was replacing the plastic on this greenhouse.

It was a team effort.

Thank OC first-years for all your help.  Welcome to Oberlin!

November Markets at the Farm

We still had lots of produce to offer.

A happy customer with her edible holiday wreath.

Harvesting the Future: Seed Saving

George Jones Farm interns Danny Cowan, Rachel Cotterman, and Emma Cunniff saving celery seeds.

The growing season is finally done.  The fields are covered in snow and the last cuts of salad mix have been harvested from the greenhouses.  Temperatures are hovering in the 20s during the day and snow is a daily occurrence.  But one more harvest remains:  seeds.

Over the course of the year, I made sure to leave some of our crops alone.  Collards overwintered from last year rose up into billowing towers of creamy yellow blossoms followed by slender aqua blue seed pods.  Intensely flavored soup stock celery provided a nice early spring crop before stretching up to the sky and bolting into a profusion of delicate and very fragrant umbels that gave way to the tiniest of seeds.  Both collard and celery flowers made for great seasonal additions to our salad mixes (dill and parsley flowers also offered bright accents), but I always made sure to leave some alone. 

As spring turned into summer the collard's glaucous seed pods weighed heavy and the stalks bent low, the pods shifting from blue to gold as they dried.  As summer turned to fall, the celery's green seeds turned deep brown and dry.  This is the time to harvest the future.  In the mad scrabble of harvest season to get every ripening tomato before it splits and every head of lettuce before it bolts, take some time out on a dry day to cut back these dry seed heads, put them in a paper bag, label them and stow them away in a dry, dark place. 

Now in these cold days, those crumpled paper bags can come out of hiding and slowly but surely seeds can be separated from chaff and sealed in paper envelopes and carefully labeled for next spring.  When I trained as a horticulturist at Stonecrop Gardens, I spent all of January 2004 cleaning and saving seeds.  What a wonderful time to spend in the potting shed hunched over bins of an incredibly diverse array of seeds.  Shimmying the pans, tossing them to winnow chaff, using strainers of varying gauges.  Campanula seeds like shining dust and shimmering silver Ricinus seeds like sinister coffee beans. 

Why save seeds? 

Firstly, from those training days, poring for hour after hour over seeds and dried inflorescences was for me the best way to develop an intimate and intuitive understanding of plant families.  Each family of related plants has its special way of conveying itself through time from one generation to another.  Apiaceae (celery, parsley, fennel, e.g.) seeds for example have a ridged coating and a bend in them that makes them unmistakable, whether large like angelica or lovage seed or miniscule like celery seed.  This may seem an abstract reason, but most of us have grown up so removed from intimacy with nature that this kind of learning develops a powerful intuition later in the field later.  I may not know what wild mustard is but as soon as I see those yellow flowers and then later those narrow silique seedpods waving in the wind, I know exactly what those seeds are going to taste like.  Playing with seeds inside in winter can offer one avenue for becoming conversant with the world around us through the rest of the year.  And the best way is to hold them in your hands, sift them from the chaff, roll them between thiumb and forefinger, hour after hour.

Beyond this, there is utility.  Seeds make plants.  The next growing season is only too close and those seed packets can add up to big bucks once your greedy eyes have perused the stack of  bewitching catalogs that show up in your mailbox.  Saving seeds from your own plants is a way of trimming costs and making next year's garden truly "local" from the very start. 

Back to the abstract, for me the most exciting reason to save seed is participating in a years-long, decades-long, centuries-long process of developing bioregion-specific -- even site-specific -- vegetables.  When I grow a patch of collards and one plant grows noticeably bigger leaves or fends off cabbage worms particularly well or makes it through summer droughts better than others, and I save seed from that plant I am joining a line of farmers stretching back to the beginning of agriculture.  And when I save collard seeds consistently year after year, the resulting plants will become ever better at growing in just this set of circumstances that Oberlin, Ohio presents.  They will truly be of this particular place. 

In this way, seed saving truly is harvesting the future.

Farm Art 2: Crafts and Natural Building

Crafts

Garlic Braid with cayenne peppers.

Wreath made of mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris), ironweed (Vernonia sp.), and cayenne peppers.

This braid and wreath as well as many other crafted itmes, herbal teas, and more will be available at the Alternative Gift Fair.  The fair is a great chance to fulfill your holiday shopping obligations with a good conscience by purchasing unique items from local non-profits, including the George Jones Farm.  It runs from Dec 13-17, 11:30-3:30 in the Bent Corridor of the Oberlin College Science Center on West Lorain Street.  On Dec 18 it will run from 1-4pm at the Oberlin Public Library on South Main Street.  I hope you'll come out and supprot the farm and other great organizations. 

Natural Building

Sprucing up the strawbale building at the farm with a fresh earthen finish.  Nanette Yanuzzi (in the blue sweatshirt), an Oberlin College Art professor, and Anna Wolfson (in the red vest), OC alum and head of Wolfson Earthen Finishes (see my Sources and Tributaries sidebar for a link), lead students in plastering the walls with a rich ochre mixture of clay and sand.

Adding deeper shades of orange and red along the bottom of the wall.

Thank you Anna, Nanette, and everyone who came out to brighten up the walls of the strawbale building!

My first exposure to permaculture came while traveling in Patagonia in 2008.  I volunteered for a week at CIDEP (Centro de Investigacion, Desarollo, y Ensenanza de Permacultura) and was blown away by the beautiful organic architecture that was possible with mud and straw and sand, not to mention the very special community that forms when a group of strangers step into a mud pit and work the clay and the straw and water and sand together with their feet by dancing.  This is a very special place I feel very lucky to have discovered.  My brief time there definitely caused a paradigm shift in the way I think about my work with/in nature and it will be a very long time before I truly see how much that week affected my life.  You'll find a link to their website in the Sources and Tributaries sidebar.

At the entrance, only another mile of hiking to go...

The main building: front

The main building: back

Community at play

The result of a day of adobe dancing

A harvest of adobe bricks

Dry composting toilet: front

Dry composting toilet: back.  The chimney faces towards the sun and is painted balck so that it heats up and creates a draft which whisks away any smells.  This bathroom was truly lovely to spend time in!

Shower room wall.  Note the bottles embedded in the wall.  They not only allow light in but their necks become towel hangers.

The kitchen.  Check out the use of the bottles embedded in the far wall.

Brisa!  CIDEP's resident sprite.

So imagine my surprise when I meet Eric at CIDEP, an expat American, who says when I mentioned that I had just moved to Oberlin, "Oh yeah, I helped build a strawbale house on a farm up there." Turns out to be the strawbale building in the pictures above where I now work as the farm manager. While at CIDEP I also met Eva, a wonderful woman from Portland, OR whose eyes gleamed with passion when it came to plastering and earthen finishes.

Now nearly three years later, imagine my surprise when I meet Anna, who has come from Chicago to do the ochre earthen finish on the building's walls and it turns out she knows both Eric and Eva quite well. It's a small world indeed and I feel very happy to have found myself linked in to this permaculture network of folks inspired to work dynamically with and in natural systems.