Wednesday, August 5, 2020

Some links to useful articles about the coronavirus

For those of you who might want more in-depth information and reporting about the coronavirus pandemic, these links to articles in The Atlantic will prove useful. 


I've included the list of articles to give you an idea of what they are about. I've read a few of them already and they are well-written and informative. 

The Atlantic’s guide to understanding COVID-19

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Friday, July 31, 2020

The wisdom of Alan Watts

·        The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.

·        This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.

·        Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith in life, in other people, and in oneself, is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time.

·        There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied.

·        Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself.

·        Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.

·        The only Zen you’ll find on mountain tops is the Zen you bring up there with you.

·        If you really understand Zen… you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because… the sound of the rain needs no translation.

·        But I’ll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you’ll come to understand that you’re connected with everything.

·        To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.

·        Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.

·        Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.

·        There will always be suffering. But we must not suffer over the suffering.

 


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Sunday, July 26, 2020

Bumblebee nest?

A couple of years ago, I bought a hedgehog house online and placed it under the huge rose bush in the garden. As it turned out, it was never used for hedgehogs because the garden board would not allow us to take in hedgehogs since there are badgers in the vicinity of the community garden, and they are known to kill hedgehogs. So the hedgehog house has been standing empty ever since, until recently. Last week I was cleaning up all of the dead leaves and refuse under the rose bush, and my eye happened to light upon something of interest inside the hedgehog house. It looked like a symmetrically-shaped ornament with a hole in the top. Upon closer inspection, I realized it was a nest of some sort. My first thought was that it was a bumblebee nest, since bumblebees do make their homes on the ground under protective coverings, e.g. an upside-down flower pot or a compost bin (as I have also witnessed this summer). I took a few photos of it in order to search online afterward. I am fairly sure it is a bumblebee nest. But if any of you have other suggestions, I'd love to hear them.




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Inspiration for these trying times




















Both quotes give me food for thought, but it is the last one that got under my skin. After a lifetime of worrying about 'productivity' and 'efficiency', I realize that the 'degree of presence' in your own life and in the lives of others are what matter most. Eckhart Tolle writes about this all the time. We are often so worried about the future, or about what happened in the past. We are powerless to change the events of the past, and we simply cannot map out our futures to the smallest detail since it is the great unknown. So we are left with the present. Accepting where we are, where we stand, in the present time, leads to peace. And it leads us away from the idea that our personal lives must be lived the way our work lives have been lived--by measuring all things in terms of productivity and efficiency. Perhaps this is something one figures out as one gets older. I don't know. I only know that I have begun to think differently about how I want to live my daily life. Perhaps the pandemic has given me the chance to reflect on this. When I stop worrying about how much I need to get done in one day, I am more relaxed and life flows better. I am better able to keep the negative influences at bay because I am 'aware' of where I am in the present. I am aware of whether I am content or not. I am better able to establish the necessary boundaries between me and the rest of the world. I am aware of the uninvited infringements on my peace of soul and the criticisms of others and how that affects me. Society and other (well-meaning) people are always trying to tell us what to do, how to live, what to buy, how to think, and how to react to different events. It's exhausting to have to consider what others think we should do all the time. I simply don't want to. I've done it long enough in the work world.


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Sunday, July 19, 2020

Mid-July garden update

Despite the incessant rain and unstable weather, despite the fluctuations in temperature, my garden is doing/has done a good job of producing zucchinis, strawberries, raspberries, and black currants. We won't get red currants this year, but we will get gooseberries. The pumpkin plants are starting to grow pumpkins, and we'll see how far they come along by the end of August. We will need more sun and warmth for them to grow and thrive. My potato and carrot plants will also yield potatoes and carrots, but they're not ready yet. Ditto for the tomato plants; I planted cherry tomato and full-size tomato plants. I'm unsure how well the string bean plants will produce; the slugs seem to like the leaves and chew them up so that the plants themselves become stressed and eventually die. The three corn plants are growing, but I don't hold out much hope for their producing full ears of corn before the summer warmth is over.

I post these garden updates for myself as much as for my readers. It helps me to keep track of my garden's progress each season. I definitely had beginner's luck with my fifteen corn plants during the first garden season; they grew well and produced at least twelve good ears of corn. It's been downhill ever since for success with corn. With each new gardening season, you learn something new and what not to focus on. The past two years have seen a lot of rain during the summer months here in Oslo, which is something that may force me to re-evaluate what I plant in the coming years.

One of the more interesting things that happened this year--I empty the compost bin at the end of the gardening season and spread the new earth onto the raised beds in preparation for the following year's plantings. Then I begin to fill the compost bin with the dead plants and refuse from the current season. I did that last autumn with the dead marigolds and cornflowers; amazingly enough, they began to grow and blossom on one side of the compost bin this year, as you can see from the second to last picture when you scroll down. So they must have seeded and been quite happy during the winter months, covered with new compost and kept warm until the spring. I also planted my giant sunflower plants (grown from seed in the greenhouse) behind the compost bin; I use the bin to support them and it is working out well so far.

Here are some photos of how the garden looks right now:

Astilbe plant--red goat's beard

the pumpkin patch

behind the greenhouse

tomato plants

zucchinis growing

more zucchinis


raspberry bushes

gooseberry bush

flower garden 

close-up of flower garden

strawberry patches (harvest is pretty much over for this year)


rose mallows growing

Veronica spicata plant (the bees love it)

a rare sunny day in the garden this year

lots of raspberries this year

a type of marigold 


sunflower plants behind the compost bin, and marigolds and cornflowers to the left




black currants


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