July, 2022

In which we skip town, get mad sick, and reflect on (what else) maimed and mangled bunny rabbits

Jul 01, 2022

NOTE: We continue to be out of town, till about the middle of July, at which point we will get ourselves together and begin seeding/potting for a return to market probably at the beginning of August. Till then, stay cool, and take it easy.

I write to you today from my parents’ basement, in Sunny South Seattle, where it is beautiful outside (75 and sunny), bajillions of “wild”flowers are in bloom, the stonefruits are poppin (parents’ fruit csa this week had cherries [2 types] and apriums, as well as honeycrisp apples), a thousand types of lavender are popping out of every crevice and crag anywhere in the city, the people are loath to acknowledge each other on the street, the hills are steep (though the people all have one-, two-, three- or many-wheeled contraptions with motors and all kinds of whizzbangs for uncannily easy travel), and where Maggie and I1 are hunkered down with covid in our little hidey-hole.

Not a lot more to say than that, most especially because my brain’s been totally blown out my ears by the covid, but — nevertheless — onward and upward!

Worlds Apart

Here in Seattle, where I grew up, there is a large green space called Woodland Park, that for me, a skinny North Seattle kid, filled this role of umbilical to unsullied, primordial wilderness. We could walk into the park, from the urban chaos of Aurora Ave, and enter immediately into a wooded Eden of douglas firs inhabited by possums, bats and raccoons, criss crossed with waterways fed by underground springs fed in turn by some vague font at the (literal or metaphorical?) center of the earth. I have a magical feeling even now, writing about it a decade+ later.

The “World Navel” is the point of connection between one realm and another (its “parent” realm). It’s worth thinking through some of the implications here: not only is one realm descended from and formed from the stuff of another (parent) realm, but it maintains an umbilical connection between the two. This World is continuously fed by a prior, more completely formed World, and they remain necessarily fixed at the Navel.

But as always seems to happen, the Woodland Park membrane between realms was compromised, reflecting back and regurgitating a bastardized “nature” from this World back upstream the umbilical and into its mother, yielding all types of shudders and rifts in this reality and that.

At some point, someone(s) released (intentionally or not) some amount of domesticated, pink-eyed, fuzzy-white bunny-rabbits into the park, who then bred over the years into a(n un)healthy population of numerous hundreds of rabbits, thriving in the sense that they were able to reproduce much faster than they died off, but suffering in just about every other sense. Through thousands of human-supervised generations they had lost the ability to evade predators or properly care for themselves, and thus that Eden was tempered by hordes of fuzzy-whites, adorable from afar but, from a-close, seen to be missing eyes and toes and patches of their cotton candy fur. I couldn’t have expressed it in these terms at the time, but I could have told you at least that this zombie rabbit horde did certainly throw off the vibes.

In the instance of the bunnies-of-Woodland-Park, the space was geographically severed from the outside wilderness by long stretches of urbanity. Even the streams that once fed Green Lake had been stopped up long ago by then. Still it had the connection of those underground springs, but, thankfully, so far as I know, the bunnies weren’t able to swim against those flows, down through pores and crags, and contaminate the Center of the Earth (though there’s microplastics in the mariana trench and in our blood, and space is full of trash, so what do I know?). Nevertheless, the clash of realms was jarring, disorienting in a way I found difficult to articulate. And this is not even to mention that Woodland Park also houses a literal zoo, and beyond the zombie hordes we could also witness the knobbly heads of curious giraffes among the fir and pine.

Any number of items and practices might serve as this point of connection (the World Tree, may poles and totem poles, the Ark of the Covenant, all kinds of artifacts and “graven images,” Transcendental Meditation, chants and prayer, psychedelics, extreme experiences of all kinds), but the most relevant — and, I think, the most profound — manifestation of Navel here2 is that of Place: literal, physical, geographic location.

In many, mostly older, conceptions, the two Realms in question are This, the realm of physical reality and human affairs, and That, the realm of Spirit or Immateriality — the Realm-From-Which-We-All-Have-Sprung. There is a poetic simplicity to this framing: on the one hand, all that we can see; on the other, all that we cannot.

But I might argue that we are these days at least one more level or Realm removed (or, if you like, insulated), if not two.3 No longer are we only one step distant from that original Mother-Plane, the Realm of Spirit; we are in fact distanced now from that next realm too, the Realm of Physical Reality, or “Nature.” None of us could really say exactly when we were spat from that realm into the next, whether when we first made permanent settlements, bred field crops, invented toothbrushes or air-conditioning, but I can confidently say that we’re well past that transition by now. The umbilical connection between the tidy realm of “Civilization” and the goose-pimply chaos of “Nature” takes the form of city parks, fishing camps, bird feeders, “native” and “wild” plantings along highways and interstates, whale-watching tours, ant farms and fish tanks, even fashionable aesthetic choices such as the lumberjack-hunter-peasant-woodland-chic looks so carefully cultivated by those of us (or, more likely, the brands who sell to us) who are desperate to signal some kind of Original Innocence, unsullied by Civilization.

A case could be made that we either are exiting or have exited already even this level of remove for a realm more insulated still — a realm cut off entirely from physical-spatial reality as such: a realm of the pure symbolic. Here we live our lives entirely within ideas and information, books, magazines, instagram, gardening newsletters, podcasts, internet forums, VR goggles and plant-ID apps. The most common points of connection from this World to its Mother are… subscription boxes? news broadcasts? I couldn’t really say.

What draws me to the bayou is that same sort of function as a sort of gateway to the Great Beyond. Bayou St. John, banked by cement steps and snaking through manicured lawns, underpasses and some of the fancier neighborhoods of New Orleans, connects us to the Lake, and so also the Canal, the River, the Gulf, and then, of course, the Sea. Alligators make their way in from the swamp. There are snakes and turtles and jumping fishes. The other day I saw a big ol’ alligator gar fish.

The water in the River has seen farmland and industry, but also mountaintops, icy floes and gnarled pines, mooses and bears, starry skies and weird niche ecosystems found nowhere else on this plane. That’s what’s coming at us from one side, but the water that breached the levees after Katrina was in large part surge pushed up from the Gulf, against the River’s powerful inclinations, bringing alien fishes and flotsam from the coastal swamp — a whole other world of unfathomable beyond-ness.

The Great Beyond through the portal of the bayou is that primordial, murky water that covers most of our earth, the amniotic stew of all life’s birth, and the greatest mystery of this physical reality.

But these World Navels cannot serve to fully unite all the Realms here discussed. They are only vistas (and pale ones at that) from one world into another, there is no healthy interaction between them, no umbilical nourishment flowing really in either direction. What we need, if we are to rejoin ourselves to any other plane of existence, is a point of interaction between ourselves and it: a means of participation.

Enter: the Vegetable Garden (you knew we’d get there eventually).

The garden (and most especially the food garden) can serve as a point of connection between all the realms we have mentioned. It serves of course as a navel from the world of Pure Symbolic to that of Material Reality, but also as navel from Constructed, Human-Oriented Reality to that of Wilderness, and finally to that Initial Realm of Spirit. Through participation in a diverse garden built on these concentric navels, this Axis Mundi, we may reengage ourselves with the processes of life and Being — not as observers, but as organs of that same initial “Spirit” that binds all realms together.

None of these planes of existence needs anything from us, particularly. Certainly they don’t need to be “saved,” or anything like that. They will go on functioning, infinitely in every direction, just as well without us. But this would be our loss, and we owe it to ourselves I think to maintain at least some small points of access between them.

Anyway, this has been exhausting. I appreciate whomever of you have read this far.

Thank you and good night.

See you in a month.

Note: If none of this has been at all comprehensible, let’s just chalk it up to covid brain and move on with our lives. I swear though that it makes at least some kind of sense to me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Oh, wait! One more thing:

Orchid Corner!

On our way up to Seattle, between visiting Maggie’s cousins in Denver and our buddy out on the prairie of Montana,4 we swung by a rural Colorado nursery and picked up 2 healthy specimens of Vanilla Bean Orchids (Vanilla planifolia), which I am quite pleased to say have survived at least the drive up here, where we will be pawning one off on my sister to grow in her brightest indirect-est light. The other one will drive back home with us and join our collection.

In some time, after 3-ish years, 12-15ft of growth and who knows how many attempts at hand pollination, we hope to have our very own vanilla bean. I can’t hardly stand the wait, and I will, of course, keep you all posted.

The Too Tall Garden Review

Discussion about this post