Today, I woke up and realized that my herb garden desperately needed attention. It's winter, and here in the Bay Area it's been remarkably cold in the last week - like New York in the winter cold, like Midwest cold: no snow, but it smells like snow. It is my first year of having an herb garden, so I am not so sure what is supposed to be done in the winter - I have heard of pruning, or mulching, or thinning but I am not 100% sure what those are, or how you do them. However, the weeds (this invasive type of clover - with awful burrs) had choked the rosemary and the thyme, the parselys (flat & curly) had gone to seed, the mint & lemon verbena had grown woody. I did the best I could, weeding and clearing and clipping what looked too dead to ever come back.
Herbs are wonderful things, actually. Naturally, they give off marvelous, heady aromas when you work with them - even if just weeding, the strong smelling ones will release their fragrance into the air so that you can smell them before you get to them; I could tell I was getting close to the chamomile by smell alone. I love everything to do with working with them - washing them, hanging them to dry, putting them in their jars and bottles; their oils on my hands have such a calming and fortifying effect.
I use my herbs in many ways: teas (fresh or dried), cooking, inspirational or magickal uses. I just recently started getting into more pagan celebrations - we just had a Twelfth Night fest last week, picking and King & Queen, toasting "wassail" and everything - and herbs are a great way to connect to the earth, to the seasons. According to both traditional (folk) medicine and aromatherapy, each herb has a certain set of qualities, supporting this or helping with that (mint, for instance, for an unsettled stomach, or ginger for digestion), and I often work with them in this capacity. They also have energetic qualities, which, combined with their scent, make them especially good for setting intentions - they are symbolic, and useful in that way.
If you have ever done yard work, you know it's one of the most immediately tiring things one can do. In the summer, the heat can make it more exhausting, although easier to do for longer and rewarding when done - you can make a mint lemonade and sit back to admire the view. In the winter, it's harder to get motivated, but I made headway. I also bought a new garden decoration - you have to be careful about these or you can spend lots of money and clutter your space; this one was a glass blown mushroom, maybe a few inches round, but with tiny phosphorus flecks which - get this - glow gently after dark. I couldn't wait for night to fall so I could see how it looked. Talk about enchanting! It's like you can hear the fairies whizzing by.
"Enchanting," by the way, actually has a very simple meaning - "to sing to," or basically direct your positive energy toward with your voice, and music - both very powerful tools. For really effective herbs, you are supposed to sing to them while you plant them, as well as ask permission before you harvest. I do both of these things, which to some people may seem very silly, but I find that honoring some of the old ways, being aware of traditions and finding your own way to follow them can deliver a very powerful sense of belonging and community.
In fact, community has been much on my mind. Today, after the gardening, I decided to take advantage of the winter sun - cold but bright, and we've had so much rain - so I dragged out the lawn chairs, bundled up in coat, scarf, hat and blanket, and spent a little time getting some vitamin D. The fence, covered with some sort of flowery clinging vine, was a busy scene, with a few fat furry bumblebees hard at work. Bees the size of a nickel! It was heartening to see them at work, and feel that spring will indeed come again.
I've been enjoying the cold. It's unusual, and makes me feel like I am on vacation - I tend to travel to the East Coast and Europe off season; I've been bundled up from New York to Amsterdam, from Paris to London. If you groove into it, try not to fight it but see its beauty, it really isn't that bad. I don't have to deal with snow, so maybe I'd be less enthusiastic if I did, but cold in the winter is a good thing. It connects us - we're all (well, this hemisphere) experiencing cold. My Facebook friends' posts have a unifying theme: the other coast is cold, my local friends are cold, my family in the high desert is cold. It's a community of cold, and it's a very big one - half the planet is experiencing winter, and the entire planet experienced a solstice, this time with a lunar eclipse. I like this sense of "hey, we're all looking up at the same moon" that everyone on the planet has.
It's amazing the many different ways in which communities can be defined. It can be the weather, or the earthquake we all felt, or even, in cases, the terrible traffic we all experienced, or the shutdown of the airport that can bring people together. Usually, we don't herald these as positive events - who wants their flight cancelled? - but it does bring strangers together in unique ways.
And this can happen anywhere. From the hemisphere to my house - we've lived in the same house for quite a few years, and there have been many roommate who have come and gone, some of whom have become friends, and return for visits on in a regular or intermittent way. We're all M____ians (M_____ being the name of the house, the street, which I won't mention here). It's a little community, in its own way.
The recent singing and dancing I spoke of are also communities, although it took a long time for me to recognize that. My friend J had the same experience as I did, and articulated it clearly when she said, "One day I looked around [at these people I've been singing with for a couple of years], and thought, hey, these are my friends....I don't know why it took me so long to realize that." I know why - because we think of friends (our community of friends) as people we know, to whom we speak and socialize and go out with. But that is only one type. There are people in the circle whose names I have no idea about, whose social and political views I have no knowlegde of, whose profession work I could not even guess, yet I know them. I know their faces, I have seen them singing their hearts out, I know who they are - not what they do, nor where they came from, nor what they believe but who they actually are.
It's the same with dancing: I've got a whole group of men I know - again, names are spotty, details are even more elusive, but once you dance with someone a few times a year, every year for eight years, you kind of know the person. You seem them getting older, heavier, sadder or happier as time passes. You certainly know them in this physical way that is usually only reserved for sexual encounters - you are used to their hands, their balance, their breathing, even. You notice when they get a new cravat, or grow a beard. It's funny - many of them I have only seen at these "period" events, in period dress. Many of them I have never seen in 20th century clothes. I saw one of them once in a pair of jeans, and I didn't recognize him for a few seconds, despite having seen this person hundreds of times! So it was hard for me to see that these relative strangers are part of my community - yet they are, and once I widened my gaze and loosened up my definition, I felt so much more connected.
Connection, it seems is always the key, whether one is out in the garden connecting with the herb, or on a dance floor connecting with a leader, or in the circle connecting with everyone else in the circle. It's like character actor Tracey Walter as Miller in the 1984 cult classic Repo Man says:
A lot of people don't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch of unconnected incidents 'n things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything. Give you an example; show you what I mean: suppose you're thinkin' about a plate of shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate of shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconsciousness.
I certainly can't improve on that!
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