GHEE WHIZ...

Our friend Tom recently returned from a long travel to India, where he has lived, & where he was working on several writing projects. He made this photo to bring home more evidence of my growing international fame...

GRB Bells obviously needs some kind of lubricant for these slow labors [See my previous post] so I suppose clarified butter might be a fine candidate. Even though I'm not eating dairy for now, it should be OK as an external application...

I uploaded these photos six weeks ago when I still could not sit at the computer for long enough to write much. I'll try to bring currency with recapitulation to continue to fill-in the lengthy gap of time I've not posted.

[Remember you can click on the images to enlarge them.]

Tahoma is my ever present, if not always visible, best teacher in the grounding I've needed during this period... here I sit darshan with her one Mayish morning.

The garden is my sandbox where I ground myself more than visually, although dirty hands don't prevent enjoying the vantage of its beds.

This bed of lettuce, arugula, & mizuna was planted in anticipation of Stephen's mother Helen's birthday in mid May, but the greens sat as sproutlings for weeks in our cold gray... not ready to harvest until after the event. We ate lots of salad from it well into July.

There were bounteous beds of cool-loving kale & red mustard for greens to steam & braise. Here is one harvest including a nice variety of the edible flowers I love to garnish our plates with: forget-me-not, wood ruff, chives, nasturtium & arugula blosoms.

It is displayed on the bed of Roman chamomile first planted to mark Gertie's grave... which circle I've been enlarging over several years. It is satisfyingly tedious work to divide this easily rooting plant giving it space to spread. I designed a plan to cut patterns into the carpet to collect new planting material. I've always loved parterres as a foil to my obviously wilder preferences...

One day a spiral began to develop...

Stephen celebrated it on the way taking drinks to the Prow Deck when our neighbor friend Taylor dropped by with his dog Oochee.

It developed over the next while to open the archetypal symbol of the question... of the quest. Appropriate for this time of actively searching for my path to health.

Only weeks later it had begun to grow into the space I'd cut out to transplant at the edges of the enlarged circle cut out of the lawn.

Another spiral grew in quite a different form in the bed close by... Romanesco is a veritable Fibinacci universe of brocolli.

Savoy cabbage is so ruffled its difficult to see that it is growing on the sme plan...

Red Orach is all about rare intense color[s]. I enjoyed tea with the sun behind it tomake me wonder how red could look also blue... like some of the silk saris we saw in India.

By now the chamomile has grow over, obliterating that spiral. However questions, quests & growth are continuity, always ready for another & deeper search... a next adventure. I've no doubt the spiral will return...