Author Archives: cdmdw

Your Tropisms

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09.29.2013.tuihealthcareFor several weeks I’ve been mulling over tropisms. It’s a word to describe how plants grow in response to the environment, an example of the interconnections we all experience. There are several types of tropisms:

Photo: response to light, Geo: response to gravity, Hydro: response to water, Chemo: response to chemicals, Thigmo: response to stimulation, and Trauma: response to wound. We have these too. How have you grown? Toward or away from what?

Explore video documentation of tropism and other special movements *here* and be sure to check out another page under Circadian Responses: Pulsating Pumpkins.

All things garden: Hortus Conclusus

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2013.09.26.persimmon The glow is real and felt. I was with a joyous American Persimmon (Diospyros virginiana) in a joyous place. Two weeks ago I began a program through Cornell Cooperative Extension – a Master Gardener program – to nourish my farmer soul.  Our class recently visited an 11 acre edible landscape and botanical wonder. Hortus Conclusus is in Stone Ridge and is an inspiring place of bounty, study, bravery, and passion (http://www.hortus.biz/).

There is so much we could grow to eat in the NorthEast! Sweet and sour cherries, mulberries, kiwi, quince, goumi, cranberry, lingonberry, currants, gooseberry, paw paw, elderberry, sea berry, akebia, ground cherry, and one that I fell in love with in particular: Medlar. This is all in addition to the apple, pear, peach, blueberry, strawberry, nectarine, blackberry that we are more familiar with. Will they all glow? We need to grow to know.

Forty Seven

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2013.0.19.tuihealthcareWithout going outside, you may know the whole world.
Without looking through the window, you may see the ways of heaven.
The farther you go, the less you know.

Thus the sage knows without traveling; sees without looking; works without doing.
– Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching

Marry Gratitude

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When Death Comes
by Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Web, Hive, Town

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Where have my words been?

My *news* post has been quiet just as my speaking has, a sudden wind-cold attack took my voice for almost a week. It has been interesting to communicate without it. It made me a better listener. It made me strange to the children I work with. It made my facial expressions and hand gestures very important and deliberate.

I cancelled QiGong class so I could rest and restore. What kind of output and how much I could give was suddenly measurable.

People have been incredibly kind and adaptive. I felt the leanings of need being supported, I came again to the knowing of us all being in this together. We’re sharing the making of our different narratives with varying degrees of awareness of the process. We plan, or don’t, we adapt, or don’t, and we always participate.

photo by: Nathaniel Kassel