Sun Pillars

Photo credit: Serge Walczak
Bossonnens, Switzerland 2007

Last week we were treated to a spectacular sun pillar. A pillar occurs when flat ice crystals align to perfectly reflect the sun’s rays in a distinct column, usually in cold weather and at sunrise or sunset.

Sadly my camera was more than twenty minutes away from my hands—our local pillar lasted just over fifteen. Though the beautiful picture above wasn’t taken in Brewster, NY, it does give you an idea of how unusual this phenomenon appears.

Nature often causes me to catch my breath, forget everything else and just watch — yet one more opportunity to be struck dumb in the presence of the holy One.

Ice Storm

Friday afternoon we had a brief, and thankfully not too damaging, ice storm. Once again our woods were transformed. The bird house and mail box dripped with icy lace, the white pines and hemlocks drooped with the weight of frozen water, the branches were sheathed in glass.

It was enchanting. Why would I ever want to watch TV when I can just walk out my door and be amazed?

 

Artisan Bread, the easy way: A book review

I love baking bread, and I’ve made traditional (knead-and-rise) loaves for years. It’s a “task” I truly enjoy, and I look forward to the occasions when I have time to spend this way.

A friend of ours recently visited with gifts in hand. One was a book about creating artisan breads in five minutes a day. Uh-huh.

I read the book, though, because I wanted to see just what the authors were hawking as “artisan bread”. Turns out they have put one heck of a lot of effort into their process; and, sure enough, it only takes about five minutes of your time. There is rise time (which varies with the bread type) and bake time, too — but then your body doesn’t need to hang around for that.

These breads require no kneading (at all, and I’m not kidding on this one), no proofing of the yeast, about 30-60 seconds to shape a loaf … five minutes of your precious time (if you goof around a bit) from refrigerator (where your amazing dough lives for up to two weeks), through your oven, and into your mouth.

This, a loaf of European peasant bread, was my second. The first came out rather flat and dense, which I discovered was my own fault. My dough was a little too wet, and I had inadvertently used a very high (21g) protein flour, where these recipes call for flour with a significantly lower range of 10g-12g. Makes a difference.

But my error was easy to repair; I just worked in a bit of the lower-protein flour before shaping, which added all of one minute to my effort and resulted in the taste treat you see here. If you click on this picture you can see the wonderful, rich texture of this bread.

If you are a baker, or someone who enjoys a marvelous loaf of artisan bread, this book is a must-have for your library. If you’ve been scared off of bread-baking with horror stories of achieving the perfect “feel” of dough, this is your book. Honestly, you need to know nothing more than how to measure four ingredients, pre-heat an oven and time the baking!

A baking stone is probably a must-have, too, as well as a pizza peel (a wooden “paddle” that allows you to slide your soon-to-be artisan loaf onto the hot baking stone), both of which can be purchased for about $50. Both are useful for many other things, too. The stone helps regulate the oven heat more evenly, for example. And hang the peel on your kitchen wall to impress your friends: it will, trust me. Besides, there are pizza bread recipes in this book, too, so you can actually use the peel to slide those incredibly delicious pizzas onto the baking stone for perfect pizza every time.

OK, here’s the poop: Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François (photography by Mark Luinenburg). St. Martin’s Press, November 2007. ISBN-10: 0312362919, ISBN-13: 978-0312362911

Happy baking!!

Healing

The Earth is a healer.

We all know that most of the drugs hawked to us every day in every way have their origins in plants. The drug industry has tweaked them mercilessly, true, but the effective ingredients remain those of Mother Earth.

On our pond walk last week we were looking for evidence of our little beaver, which we found in abundance. But we also found evidence of Earth’s amazing tendency to survive, and to do it well. “Our” beaver works incessantly to fell trees, and we saw his work around the entire pond. But we also saw this:

Apparently some time last year the Busy Beav began work on this birch. Quite a task for a newly minted bachelor: the tree is about 18″ in diameter. That didn’t stop him, of course, so he munched away for quite awhile. Somewhere along the line he moved on to better possibilities, though, leaving this trunk with a raw wound.

Think about it. If someone chewed on your ribcage until a nice six- or seven-inch dent was made, what would you do? Die, probably.

But that’s not what happened to the birch. Some medicinal magic was afoot, and over the year or so since the injury the wound has begun to heal over. Oh, there will always be a dent here, for sure. But the tree stands tall and firm. Sap still runs freely in what is left of the trunk, and clearly it is enough to sustain its life.

Nature seems to be able to determine when a wound is lethal — and when it is not. Apparently that decision has nothing to do with what a human might decide; I would have pronounced this guy dead the minute I saw the gouge. But Mother Earth is a wise and patient healer, and she knows when to call it quits and when to quietly move on.

Here, she moved on. So a new skin is forming over the wound. This birch will live a good long time — unless, of course, our little beaver returns for another try. We’ll just have to see what comes next. For now, though, the tree is healthy and strong. And in some way, even lovelier for its “damage”.

Wouldn’t it be something if we could see our own wounded-and-healing selves this way?

Hope

I finally made it out to the pond this week. The beaver (we think it may be one of the offspring from the beavers in the lake down the road, hopefully building his dam and house in case an attractive honey comes around) has been hard at work.

There are trees galore carefully cut to fall into the pond where their branches make underwater feeding possible. The dam is secure, the cozy lodge tucked into the far bank of the pond.

All winter he has been munching away under the ice, leaving piles of bone-colored remains to mark his winter meals. He has also left hundreds of tell-tale frozen air bubbles dotting the edges of the pond. He’s here, all right.

When the weather cooperates, he climbs out to chip away at the trees surrounding the pond. The eager piece of work above is on a black birch that is about forty feet tall and nearly a foot in diameter. No one can say this little guy isn’t confident.

We didn’t see him on Sunday, but it’s good to know he’s still around. I hope a potential sweetie comes along soon. I’d like him to know all this hard work has been worth it.

Return to the wild

From today’s spiritual reading:

When you stop cultivation, even for a very short period of time, the wildness returns. That wildness is akin to the buddha-nature. Civilization has a way of making wildness seem very negative. Yet, all things return to the wild: people, mountains, rivers, gardens, apples, the family cat. It doesn’t take long. To be truly free, to be truly liberated and wild, is to be prepared to accept things as they are, abiding in their own dharma state. Sometimes it’s painful. And yet, it’s also joyful and open. Always impermanent, never fixed. Unbounded, yet bountiful.

— John Daido Loori, Teachings of the Earth: Zen and the Environment, p. 79

Here’s to Buzz.

You lived exactly the way you wanted: wild and free.

Life goes on

Bill has been working on a chicken coop across the street. Soon, baby chicks will be scratching around a cardboard circle, gaining strength and stamina for their work on the farm. When ready, they will inaugurate the new coop with their cheeps and clucks, with their eggs, with their rich droppings.

Bees are headed this way, too. The hives have been assembled and painted. We have only to wait on the weather to move more surely into spring for the busy-ness of bees to become part of our lives. They’ll be part of our food supply, too, as they pollinate the Three Sisters (corn, squash, beans) field and make tasty honey to share with us.

The ducks continue to lay eggs, to search the frozen ground for any tasty morsel that might have escaped winter’s icy grasp, to delight the toddlers who come to visit them every day after their half-day of school.

We miss Buzz’s insistent demands for his favorite food, the dusty prints he left on the counter, the filthy patch that marked his favorite sleeping place, the predictable snuggle he gave when picked up, the strong contented purr you could hear clear across the great room.

Life does go on. The days become needles that weave the threads of loss and new life into a rich fabric with no beginning and no end.

Thank God for that.

Beloved Buzz

I hoped not to write this blog for some time to come. Buzz Lightyear — The Great Black Hunter, The Buzzinator, Buzzard, Buzzy-Boy — has disappeared. 

I’d love to be able to say he’s probably at a neighbor’s, enjoying the same attention we gave him when he arrived here less than two years ago. But I’m fairly sure that’s not the case. Buzz, I’m convinced, has become a more immediate part of nature. 

We’re left to wonder about his destiny.

I doubt he succumbed to a speeding car, though we have way too many of those whizzing past our little farm. Buzz routinely crossed our road to visit a large feral orange tabby and to see what other wildlife he might dispatch on the other side; cat pickin’s are really good over there. Buzz knew how to listen for cars; I’m sure he could hear them long before they appeared over the hill or around the curve below us.

He ruled the driveway between us and the school, too, stopping traffic as he casually sauntered off to his daily outdoor duties. But he never came remotely close to any of the many vehicles that zip in and out to drop off children at school. No, I don’t think it was a road accident that took Buzz from us.

I don’t even think it was coyotes, even though they’ve been yowling in the woods around the farm for over a week. Buzz has managed to stay clear of them for years; he’s fast and cautious, and can zoom to the top of a tree in less than an eye-blink. Even Simon, who can catch a speeding chipmunk, was no match for a speeding Buzz. No, probably not coyotes, either.

I think it was a Great Horned Owl. Now there’s a predator for you. Silent. Faster than the human eye and brain can detect when snatching its next meal. And deadly. One swipe of those talons and their prey is suddenly walking along in heaven, wondering how the heck that happened.

A pair of Great Horneds seems to hang out in the woods below the fire pit. Good hunting there. Lots of tasty possibilities — from voles to rabbits to small turkeys to cats — pass through those woods at least once a day.

If it were a Great Horned, and if we knew where it generally perched, we might have been able to find a pellet with evidence that wouldn’t need a CSI team to interpret. The casual scientist in me really wants to see that. The loving cat “owner” does not. It’s probably too late anyway; the proof of the crime would have appeared last Tuesday or Wednesday. By now even the pellet has been “absorbed” into the land, on its way to becoming something fabulous for maple tree sap.

One of these days we may have our own bodies enriched by Buzz in an entirely new way. It’s something to think about.

BUZZ LIGHTYEAR
(An efficient and reliable plant trimmer, among his other talents)

Simon at the Wheel

WinterLaze

I know, I’m not being very good about blogging these days. I could say I was busy, but that would be marginally true at best.

There’s just something about these ever-so-slowly lengthening days in January that just leave me feeling, well, lazy. There isn’t any harvest to preserve, no plantlings (yet) to nurture, the sap’s not running (yet) … the pressure’s off and I don’t feel like doing much of anything.

Our new spinning wheel arrived about ten days ago, though. Now there’s the perfect winter activity. The calories expended to spin on a wheel are probably about 7 an hour. Maybe. All you have to do is pedal (our wheel has a single treadle, so I don’t even have to use both feet at once), and gently feed in the fleece. I can do this for hours on end, and given a choice that’s exactly what I would do.

Spinning calms both mind and body. I would even say it’s a form of meditation; that thinking at least makes me feel less guilty about my hours of quiet pedaling and feeding. On the other hand, with so little calling for my attention right now, is there anything more worthy of my attention?

I think not.

So here’s my January advice for everyone (and it’s worth every dime you’re about to pay for it): Stay home. Eat well. Nap often. Learn to spin.