KEYHOLE GARDENS

KEYHOLE GARDENS

I'm always a little late to the trend, style and taste included, but last year we experimented with this “new” concept of a keyhole garden. It's a idea that is being pushed in dry areas of the world like Africa. One of our misgivings about a garden out here in our dry, hot, and sandy desert is the large amount of water it takes to produce a tomato, egg plant, cucumber or whatever. I mean the cost of water alone could buy bushels of veggies at the market. Throw in fertilizer and time, well while I'd like to be all “green”, sustainable, and you know, kind to Mother Earth but economically it just doesn't make sense and I'm a poor man. So when I came across the keyhole idea from a Saturday morning presentation by the El Paso water company we decided to give it a try.

The concept is very simple. Create a somewhat raised garden so all plants can be reached within an arm's length. Make a place in the middle of the garden to put kitchen compost and water it. That's about it.

We chose to use sandbags, but the perimeter wall can be just about anything you can find, rocks, bricks, logs.

We found an old water purifier fiberglass tank, but some use wire or five-gallon buckets. Again your imagination for the container and what you have on hand is your basic limits for the container. Mainly it should hold compost and allow for drainage of water. As you can see I drilled holes in ours.

For the floor you put anything that will slow the water down but at the same time be porous. We used cardboard, sticks, leaves, paper and more.

On the inside of the walls we put up some tar paper to keep the moisture from getting to the sandbags.

Put about 12 to 18 inches of topsoil. (We used good old West Texas sand and some mulch)

Make a lid to put on the compost bin. Add the kitchen scraps. Sow the seeds and you're off.

The watering is done through the compost bin. ( We did cheat and water outside the bin until the sprouts came out.) The idea is that in 3^rd world countries they would dump their dishwater into the bin.

Early on you can see how pretty the cabbage, lettuce, peas and our one tomato plant are doing. We harvested lettuce, some peas, and tomatoes. The beautiful cabbage had been eaten badly by those beautiful white butterflies that visited. (actually, their larva and subsequent caterpillars) while we were on vacation. But that tomato plant grew and grew and grew and you can see in the photo of Kamala in front of the garden it had taken over the entire garden.

 By Autumn's end we had collected a bounty great tomatoes (and I love vine ripened tomatoes). When our first freeze hit I counted over 200 green tomatoes, golf ball size or bigger.

Our second keyhole-

We also tried another keyhole garden, but by digging down in the ground a couple of feet, throwing in cardboard, paper and leaves. We used some old earthen roof tiles to build up the sides to about a foot above the ground level. We used a 5 gallon bucket with holes drilled in the sides for the compost bin. Unfortunately the picture doesn't show off the construction very well but it does show it's production.

I should add to this little bit musings that neither of us have the gift of a green thumb, so while this is only our first year, not much of an experiment yet, it seems to me that the keyhole concept must be most important factor of success.

If you were really interested in making one these guys do a much better job of explaining it, visit

keyhold garden

WITNESS

ENJOY THE RIDE

I offer up this bit of brain drippings knowing full well I may be wrong in my attempt see into the nature of humans.

"Proof of One's facts doesn't always prove the theory."

(I said that.)

Still the Question begs to be answered so I dally on with my thoughts and perceptions.  The following is a sharing of those meanderings.

THE PURPOSE OF LIFE

Let me be right up front here. If there be purpose to this stream of Chaos, it's  to bare witness to the marvelous flow of this mystical world in this magical time.

NEXT BIG QUESTION

The next question is not; Is there a God? but Is there a Me?

Dust Devil -

Out here in West Texas we've got these little whirlwinds that twist their erratic paths across the dry landscape picking up sand, leaves, sticks and whatever trash it comes across high into air. If you get blindsided by one of these little critters you'll end up with eyes blinded , your mouth crunching sand and your favorite hat flying fast circles above your head then spit out 30 yards away in the middle of cactus patch (in West Texas the hat thing is particularly offensive). Now a Dust Devil is made up of air molecules, hot and hotter, exchanging places and in the process takes on an individual character by picking up environmental trimmings (sand, tumbleweeds,  roofing panels, whatever).

There's a sameness in all Dust Devils because of air exchange (swirly wind)  and all

are individuals due to the uniqueness of what they grab. Nothing static about these guys. They suck things in and spit things out in such rapid motion that within minutes every part of our little whirlwind has changed (air molecules to garbage can lids) Yet we see the little bugger continue twisting it's way through neighborhoods. Eventually it will simply die with a phizzle. This strange creature consists of nothing except what it does. It's a process more than a thing.

Well if we take a close look at ourselves we are a bit like our friend the Dust Devil, a whirlpool of chemicals, molecules and atoms which within their journey in and out of the whirlpool produce an experience and an awareness. With just a moment's attention, One can see this flow in thoughts, events, sensations. You are, literally, not the same person you were yesterday. New chemicals have danced into your body hooking up to form new cells which push old ones out. In time, all of the body is replaced. We, then, like the Dust Devil, are a happening, not a thing. Obviously, there are a lot of differences between the human processes and the whirlwind processes and, as far as we know the Dust Devil processes don't produce an awareness.   But who knows for sure?

The awesomeness of Awareness is to produce a sensation of a static self with a strong feeling of control over both itself and the world around it. But couldn't that just be another illusion? I mean we've yet to come up with any real evidence for the ghost in the machine You know, the the little character riding around up there in your head,  pulling the levers, experiencing the world through your body, making Life's big decisions and exercising Will Power over your, sometimes, unruly body. Obviously, my culture tells me, and it sure feels like my "permanent" Self, or Soul is along for the ride and I'm a not just some fleeting awareness.

Free Will, well yes and no

When we take an honest look at ourselves we have to admit a lot of what we are is, thanks to dear old Mom and Dad, a glorious mix of that ancestral gene pool.

The body is, perhaps, the most obvious gift of genes. Size, strength, hair and eye. Of course, a whole hosts of  negatives in the form of disease  can be inherited. Our self image has a lot to do with this bundle of hair, skin, guts, and bones that has a lineage that stretches back into the obscurity of human beginnings.

Next, comes family and culture. The strength of their influence on us lies in fact they were Blessings from our youth, our very first description of the world, our Prime Paradigm.  Having no other descriptions to interfere with these group messages, we embraced them tightly and lovingly.

Mom and Dad (and our extended family) teach us, by their doings, what the world is like and how to react to it. From the "no,no s" that we get as rug rats to formal education a world view is laid out for us.

A beautiful thing about travel through or the study of other cultures is to realize just how many of our habits, styles, tastes, choices are gifts from our culture/subculture. Everything from what and how we eat to mate selection is shaped by our culture.

So, we're genes and culture running headlong into the unknown.  Bumping into rain, sunshine,  trees, bees, people,  sabertooth tigers (well not lately, but you get the picture) and a whole lot of other stuff that make up this environment thing. Now the first time we run into our neighborhood sabertooth tiger we have only our bodies and what Daddy told us about saber tooth tigers to form an appropriate behavior regarding said tiger. If you, somehow, manage to survive the first encounter then you would then have genes, culture, AND EXPERIENCE at your disposal for your next encounter. But lest we forget, experience is formed by what we already have, culture and genes.  

Now we could postulate our soul coming along for the ride, but between the body/culture/experience interaction with the changing environment there just ain’t much in the line of ‘work’ a soul would  be able to contribute except ride around and enjoy the ride (or not!). Clearly, no matter how you theorize this “soul” entity the only job he could possibly perform is to observe since all behavioral actions have already been taken.

A WORLD OF POSSIBILITIES-

The the soul is a fleeting, mystical  thing (created by the brain) which will dissipate with the end of this body.  Well, ENJOY THE RIDE!

The soul is an eternal entity which will continue long after the body ceases to function.  Ok, but there is still nothing for it to do, but observe, of course.  ENJOY THE RIDE!

The soul is a spiritual being, just here in this world to accomplish some mission, or maybe polish it’s own self until it has reached perfection.  Well, sorry, there really isn't too much to do here. You know, body, culture, experience and environment have already got it all covered.  So, come along for the ride, maybe you can learn something by just watching.  ENJOY THE RIDE?

So FREE WILL?  Sure, in the sense, that you can do “WHATEVER YOU WANT”.  Yes, you can do what you want to do.  But remember, every action that you take is dependent on how you body ‘feels” and  what you've learned up to this point.  This constantly changing WHIRLWIND self acts and reacts to it’s world according to the attributes it possesses(physical and mental) at any given time. It does what it wants to do. As actions and reactions lead to changes in our decision maker. They all have effects on our world and they, in turn, will have effects on both us and our world. Therefore, go forth in this world and make decisions and perform actions as you see fit and do so with confidence. Wait, wait I know that since you are free, you may choose to make all those actions without confidence, but, hey, I mean, Come on, it’s a lot more fun with confidence.

The kicker is that while we have all this Free Will and we get to go about making decisions and initiating actions, and parrying actions made upon us it could be pointed out that due to one’s physical body, the exact impact of family and culture, and the accumulation of experience leading up to now our decisions and actions could have been nothing other than what they were/are/ or will be.  Yep, our Free Will is completely predetermined. Again, forge ahead, with confidence.  Or not.

One last way of looking at this Free Will dilemma, which I tend to embrace, is that the self/soul is an awareness created by the brain/body which itself is transitory and changing as the whirlwind spirals off into the Existence performing actions which it wants but at the same time, it could do nothing else. Free Will or not, I choose to live life as if I had total control and accept total responsibility for my actions……... even if the Devil made me do it.

ENJOY THE RIDE.  

Hope to see you around.

In my youth I was a Seeker but all of that fell away and now in my old age, I'm just a Wanderer,and my vision is so much clearer for it.

Don’t like my paradigm?  Try The Egg by Andy Weir.  It’s a neat little short story. Or, hey, let's hear your's.

Attitude and bicycle touring

A long distant trip on a tandem bicycle is fun, awe inspiring, with beautiful sites, great food, and good conversations, but at the same time it is a continual exercise of polishing one's attitude.  It's not a real big secret that a person's attitude is one's filter of the world. On second thought maybe it is.  That gal who wrote THE SECRET sure made herself a bundle off the idea.  But, hey, the idea has been kicking around for a long time. 

My favorite story is about the guy who is running from a tiger, falls off a cliff and then grabs a grapevine to keep from falling to his death.  Death below, death above and right there in his hand is a grapevine with a cluster of grapes on it.  About that time he sees 2 little mice, one white and one black, gnawing away at his grapevine.  What to do? What to do?  Yep, he eats the grapes; delicious. Enjoy that moment!

As a teacher I've come across lots of people that simply hate where they live and can't wait to get away from there, but, if you engage them in some conversation, invariably their life sucks in general.  And it's that the crap in their life through which they see and pin their misery on where they live. We humans project our inner world out there on the environment. Attitude is everything!  Well, that might be a little too much, I mean that it might be possible to effect the material world with our thoughts.  Maybe Mohammad really did have the mountain come to him rather than him going to it simply by believing (he must have also "believed" it back, as no one reported a missing mountain).  However, that's not a philosophical stance that I'm prepared to defend, but I do KNOW that Attitude is a big part of our trips, and if you're going to do  some long distance touring then make a resolution to find  of little ways to do polish your attitude and keep it fresh and positive. 

The first thing I would recommend if you wanted to keep a glowing, happy attitude is to take Kamala along. Sorry, if she's already riding with me she's unavailable.  Kamala is a romantic optimist that will find something good in even really funky situations.  She is the PR person on our team.  She waves and yells at kids, she says hello to old ladies, when some guy yells the typical contact statement given to tandemists, "Hey she's not pedaling,"  she puts her fingers to her lips and smilingly mouths the words , "Don't tell." She talks sweetly to cats, and dogs, horses and cows. I swear, at a farm in Kansas she started sweetly talking to a herd of cows and before it was over they were galloping, (Yes, cows galloping) along with us.  When I start worrying about where  we're going to throw out our bed roll for the night, she just cheerfully retorts.  "Oh, don't worry, we'll find something."  Don't get me wrong, Kamala is not just some Pollyanna with her head in the clouds, but she just has the ability to see good in most people and most situations.  But ever once in a while she can get down and that's when I'm supposed to be MR. POSITIVE. The advantage of the tandem is that you always have someone there to help up you up.  If you can't get Kamala, get someone who sees the world through those rose-colored glasses. I cannot imagine doing a long trip with a pessimist. 

Obviously, attitude is, at least in someways, tied to a person's personality, but little things help. Like here's a little game that we call Omens.  Now before I get into this, Kamala and I consider ourselves spiritual but not religious.  Does that confuse you?  It's just that you can't get out into Nature very much to realize that there's something a tad bigger than our little egos, but religious dogma seems contrived and made up.  It's okay, whatever works for you, go for it!  For us, we kind of enjoy giving special meaning to objects, plants, and animals.  We make up our own omens. This game did not originate on bike trips, but from one of our other lives when we used to do quite a few long road trips into the Mexican backcountry, but it fits perfectly into a bike tour.  It requires being aware of the natural world that you're pedaling through and it polishes a good attitude at the same time.

Let me explain by example.  There is a beautiful rose-violet colored thistle plant out here in the Southwest.  I believe people actually call it a Rose Thistle, but Kamala and I have another association with it.  Years ago, on a particular hike in the Sacramento Mountains we took a little dog we had named Whisky (because whisky is a licker, get it? licker? liquor?) The bright thistles were everywhere.  Now Whisky was a beautiful spirit that just showed up one day and gave us about a year's worth of joy and then disappeared just as quickly.  So we call the Rose Thistles "Whisky Thistles"  and the meaning  we gave to it was that "You need to enjoy what you have and don't take anything for granted."  As we go pedaling, up hill or down, good road or bad, when we see a whisky thistle we have  to look at our lives and appreciate what we have.  It's always a positive and makes us feel better. How's that for polishing your spirit.  Whisky Thistles became the trip flower the year we went to Seattle.

The white Lilly Thistle represents a "tough but beautiful journey" and was our flower the year we rode mountains in New Mexico  and Colorado.

Poppies became the "Can Do" flower for our European trip when we began to see so many on tough stretches of road.

Hawks are hunter's and as such represent good hunting, meaning you should be looking at yourself and determining exactly what it is that you're looking for, or something you're looking for is at hand; pay attention.

You get the picture?  So these prophetic symbols are pure fantasy from our little "Cognitive Factory" (or are they?) .  They're fun to play with.  When something keeps coming across our consciousness we tag a positive meaning to it.  And you can stick a positive meaning to most anything; take crows.  Crows mean Death, but we take it as, not some creepy, gloomy premonition of our immediate death, but as - are we living like we are prepared to die.  That's just another way of saying - of all the things I could of done, I chose to be here on this bike at this time (tough or easy), So am I making this my first priority or is my mind somewhere else - Pay Attention!.  Some stick and stay around for years, some just last for a few days and fizzle into oblivion. 

Try it! I think you'll enjoy it. We do. Give something a meaning and then treat it as if it's true.  Just keep it positive.

I don't want to give the impression that we're two buddhas, floating over the landscape.  While we've got a long, strong, loving relationship that has just seems to keep improving with age there are "Times".  Times when the day is long, the legs are tired and the stress from the ride has made the cognition fuzzy at best. At these times one, or both of us get a little "cranky".  I get too harsh in my retorts.  Kamala begins to "wobble" in her thought process.  We just don't click and a conversation that is usually clear and understandable seems to be coming out of different realities. Kamala's trick to disagreements is to just to stop pedaling.  Where's that fellow that always yells, "She's not pedaling," when you need him? Now that really stops progress on a tandem.  My options are too limited.  I could yell and curse, but I learned a long time ago that's just going to get us deeper in the muck.  I have gotten off the bike and just sit down, but, although the thought has arisen, I have never just walked off.  Now, luckily, since 99% of our disagreements are frustrations from displacements and once we realize that the other person is getting hurt, we back off and after a few minutes of silence, we regroup, apologize and try to figure out what needs to be done to get on down the road. What we have found that the more we "polish" our general attitude, the less these little crazy times occur.

Sensing

Sitting quietly in the cactus garden, 

Sensing motors pulling/pushing,

Tires singing on the pavement, 

The breeze against body/face,

Birds talking, cat brushing legs, 

Muscle twitch, cheek itch,

Day dreams surface then vanish into a stream of thought that comes in waves

And as the wave begins to slow,

Awareness shows the point/portal/crater/mouth from which the world is said.

Sometimes sad/mean/cruel, but often sweet.

I love this life!

Charley's Electric Bluegrass Acid Trip

Charley's Electric Bluegrass Acid Trip

Kamala and I leave El Paso with the intention of going to northern New Mexico, but at the last minute we hear about Bluegrass Festival in Weed, New Mexico up in the cool Sacramento Mountains. We've enjoyed these all day events before so we detour and head out to Weed, a thriving little community of about 20 houses (maybe), a couple of churches, a store and gas station, and a school. We arrive about 30 minutes early and right away the scene turns a bit surrealistic as the parking attendant, a big gal in a day-glow vest is mounted on a great big horse. She bends down and instructs us to park..."Over yonder on the hill." And so we do and are met almost instantly by a couple of smiling guys, an old man and a teenage boy, wearing maroon Weed Bluegrass Festival T-shirts and driving a golf cart. "Ya want a ride over to the Gym?" they enthusiastically offer. Kamala and I look across the street at a large building which is about 200 yards away and, obviously the only place in the whole town big enough for this kind of shindig. Strange, I mean, it's so close, but, hey the natives are very friendly and, what the hell, we haven't ridden in a golf cart recently so we jump on. "Wheeeee!"

There are only a few people there as we pay and get our wrist bands. We find a good seat about half way back and on the side, I'm beginning to feel this buzz which I attribute to the fresh mountain air, but as I study the people coming in the I'm beginning to sense some sort of "Distorted Reality". Something is off. There are a few young people, but the crowd is definitely older. I remember, at one time, thinking, 'This will be considered a successful festival if no one breaks a hip.' The crowd seems to be a mixture of local families, mostly cowboy, old geezers down from their isolated mountain cabins, and affluent tourists. I'm not sure which category we fit; tourist I guess, but we're sure as hell not affluent.

The music starts and it is good. However, I keep getting drawn back to the crowd as it enters, mills around, greets one another and gossips. The chatter and the mood seems perfectly normal and yet the crowd? Well, it's strange. The acid must be kicking in now because the crowd is full of all these caricatures. Like the short, clean cut, gentleman with a black New York T-shirt that has a nose and ears that would be big on a man 3 times his size, or the crooked lady that had an extreme lean to one side when she walked, or the old gal with dark, penciled in eyebrows, or an older women dressed in a black shirt, black pants and new cowboy boots that seemed to lean and lurch herself forward in stumbling sort of gait that I continually feared she would go head first into the crowd or a wall, or the cowboy dandy that was all dressed up with a long sleeve shirt and a bandana around his neck in the hot weather (even old farts sometimes have to sacrifice comfort for 'cool'). Most people seemed to have some sort of exaggerated quality about their body, hair style or of mode of dress.

'Wow, this acid is some bad shit,' I think, 'I wonder what I look like?' And then I remember...'This ain't the 60's and I don't do that stuff no more. (tired of waking up on the floor).'

So I wonder, 'If I haven't done any drugs, nope, not even alcohol, what's going on with the crowd? Is it just that as we get older our "weirdness" both physical and behavioral become more accented? Oh my God, I wonder what mine are?'

Well the music was good, and the weird people? Well, I just went with it and rather enjoyed the strangeness. We had a real enjoyable time, but I wasn't able to look in a mirror for about 3 days for fear of what I might see.

"Dreams are real while they last, what more can be said of life?"

This is one of my favorite quotes, I guess because it cuts neatly and simply to the paradox of existence. All systems based on binary or dyadic dichotomies are circular and can make sense in and of themselves. That is, they work well if you've got a little faith. But they are ultimately lacking in any absolute resolution of the nature of existence so those of us among the unfaithful are left with "they are real while they last".
I've always loved dreams. As a young boy I can remember actually liking to go to bed at night and slip into a dream world that I actually had some control over. (Years later this would be called lucid dreaming. Who knew? I sure as hell didn't, but in my slipping into sleep I would build an underground world with miniature cars and colorful plastic buildings, populated with small people and talking animals.
Our wise modern psychologists insist that dreams are just yesterday's trash of the mind being thrown away so you can start afresh in the morning and they really have no meaning. And, you know, it kind'a makes sense, I can buy into that. But tell that to the gal that is dreaming that her mother-in-law is chasing her with a butcher knife.
Of course there is that one dream that sticks with you because it is so,so,so real that you can't get it out of your head and you really want to know what it means, but you just can't figure it out. My scariest nightmare was like that. My mother-in-law chasing me, I could understand, but this scary dream shouldn't have been scary at all. I mean no monsters or anything. It was a stark white room. There was a small high window with white filmy curtains and a little girl all dressed in white (no one I knew) and she was pretty but with a rather passive expression. And it was terrifying. Go figure!
Maybe the dreams have no meaning and it's all in the interpretation. I mean maybe the Pharaoh dreamed of 7 fat calves and 7 lean calves (just waste from the day before) but when he asked Joseph to tell him what it meant (Joseph made it real through interpreting it )And the reality was that Egypt was in for 7 years of good times and then 7 years of bad times came to light. (You know God sure makes it hard for some by talking in parables, or riddles, like the fat and skinny cows, but then he must like others more because he gets real direct, "Noah, build a boat.")
I don't actually remember too many of my dreams like I did while I was younger. I once worked with a lady in a dream workshop that came to the meeting with 3 or 4 dreams that she remembered from the previous night, but then she really, really believed that ALL dreams were messages from God and she was supposed to figure each one out. Actually kind'a neat!
As for the meaning of dreams, I find myself leaning toward the interpretation of dreams as having more meaning than the actual dream because you can pick up someone else's dream, treat it as your own and give it meaning **FOR YOU** But that being said, the realness of the dream belongs to the dreamer.
Actually the quote works just as well backwards. "Life is real while it lasts, what more could be said of dreams."
Have you had any good dreams lately?

Way Cool! The century plant by our carport is off and running this spring. The stalk is shooting to the sky and soon, like fireworks on the 4th of July, it will bust out with it's mating finery. It's always such a display of beauty and strength when one blooms! Alas, of course, it is it's final huurah. Now, I've got to give God a thumbs up on this one. I mean, I'm not always so sure of a lot of his work. You know, like crooked mountain ranges and wiggly shore lines. And where did he come up with that taste for black olives or 99% of all wine? Or how about Chinese opera? But, generally, I'm willing to overlook some of those "less than perfect" works (even pizza with pineapple and anchovies) , I figure everyone's entitled to their little weird tastes, even God. But the idea he came up with on the agave was sheer genius. Just let it grow, and grow, and grow and get more and more beautiful and then with every ounce of energy in it bursts forth with a glorious display that seems to celebrate life and then dies. The question is, if he already had this gimmick in his bag of tricks before humans came on the scene, why didn't he use it on us? Why is the human dying process so damn ugly and nasty and, frankly, a lot of work? I know, I know, the Lord works in mysterious ways. Oh well!