Spring Cleaning

before after cutting down dead tree

Last week we joined Deb and Josh at the garden and started the spring cleaning in preparation for new planting. We pulled up old growth and cleared shrubs (see before & after pictures). We will be there this Saturday from noon to 3pm, swing by and join us for more yard work.

Gearing Up

Matt polishing up our rusted shovels.

Down to earth in ground and labor; Why is this art? In my studio work I begin with known or recognizable forms and I try to tweak them, bend them or insert secret spaces. This is a long process at first, tedious getting there, remaking a formal vocabulary, reciting shapes and surfaces. It is all for reaching a place where I can play, that is invent. Where I can move away from the familiar and into the unknown . It is these perceptual and cognitive forays that breathe, that are alive on their own, that are emphatically present and affectively charged. They allow me to see things in a new way. They provide for a moment of seeing things afresh; the opportunity to recalibrate perceptual faculties, to adjust/reconfigure one's understanding of and relationship with the larger world. When this takes place within oneself there begins to emerge an idiosyncratic remodeling of all manner of mental constructs: social emotional ethical legal psychological . When this occurs more broadly (at the level of a small collective of willing and able persons) it can have many very positive outcomes: recalibration of various social dynamics (alliances and rivalries switch up; bigotries are dissolved or abandoned, or at the very least brought to light so they might be dealt with) In this new understanding of things there is freedom to do what we will, we are at liberty to advance new models for the way things go. We can do something about it.

So we planted some seeds and lots of people came to help. More, perhaps, than we knew what to do with, but it registered deeply that most people care and want to do good things and want to assert themselves constructively at a community level. I put stock in this native instinct: that to touch the ground we live on is to feel connected in a way that is unignorable. In that moment there is a process of determination which will shape future action. There are many ways and degrees to which we commit to ideas. I am most excited/invigorated by those that I've initiated out of an informed understanding that it is the thing worth doing {if it's worth the going it's worth the ride} This now is the time to do it, this is our time and we have no other.

Breaking Ground

Land: Legal any part of the earth's surface that can be owned as property, and everything annexed to it, whether by nature or by the human hand.

Earth: soil and dirt, as distinguished from rock and sand; the softer part of the land; the solid matter of this planet; dry land; ground.

Turf: a piece cut from a layer of earth or sod.

Ground: the solid surface of the earth; firm or dry land: to fall to the ground.

Soil - the top layer of the earth's surface, consisting of rock and mineral particles mixed with organic matter.

Dirt - earth or soil.

(definition culled from www.dictionary.com)

When some of the herb seeds I sowed in a pot last winter popped up a week ago on the windowsill, my mind naturally wandered toward our plot of land project and all the preparations needed to gear up for the garden’s renewal. Even with the few months’ break from gardening, the garden nonetheless gave us fodder for thought, mostly through conversations, questions and enthusiasm from friends about the project. This week, with fair supply of sunshine, and daffodils shoots pushing out of the ground on OSU campus, we know it’s nearing time for us to turn over the soil and add compost. Anyone who gardens has a special connection to the dirt and soil, because we work with it we are attuned to its health.

This morning, flipping through a newly published book “Fuel,” an Edward Burtynsky photo caught my eye (see above). A photo of a field of oil rigs, dated and futuristic at once, like a starwar movie image. It also illustrates an abstract relationship we have to the land on that grand scale. Consider the nuanced differences of the definitions of these words: land, earth, turf, ground, soil, dirt, their inter-relateness yet in their precise difference, marks the personal and political way we treat them in accordance to our values and desires. The garden for us is a ground for reflecting on these issues, big and small – as widely range as they seem, they are intensively connected.

For more information on turning soil over see article from MotherEarth News.

Join us in the last two weekends of March for yard/garden clean up and Earth Day weekend for planting. Click on "Calendar" above to find out more about upcoming events.