Green Acres Undergoing First Tremors of Transformation

The title I give this repost more appropriate than the relatively mild title I gave it on my personal blogsite . . .

As Equinox nears, Green Acres Village begins to rev up again . . .

Summertime, mostly in the garden

JUNE 22, 2023: SUMMER SOLSTICE DINNER AND CEREMONY

Joseph was going to prepare an altar, but at the last minute couldn’t do it. Four of us were there, cleaning and preparing the patio for the dinner and ceremony to come, and wow: right away, we pivoted in place and cooperatively figured out how to do a small altar with items on it to a suitable scale (i.e., tiny flowers).

Here it is!

You can’t tell from this angle, but our makeshift altar slants down to the left . . . but not enuf for anything to slide off.

And here’s the context: with the new yurt, the old barn (now called Moloch, since in contrast to the pristine yurt, it has a newly menacing presence), and various junky old garden beds and other weird stuff (like why the fig branches in the white bucket??).

The dinner itself featured a first, in all the years of doing Community Dinners: three seafood dishes, all of them wonderful, and one of them, Jeff’s, totally spectacular!

We asked people to please try to be on time, 7:00 PM, so that we can eat first and begin the ceremony at 8:00 PM. 

At 8:00 PM we circled up near the little altar and Mariella, a good friend and neighbor, whom I had invited to “call in the directions,” did so, something she had never done before. First, we all faced East, then South, then West, then North, then Above, and finally Below — while she intoned the special qualities of each.

Then, in response to an email I had sent out to the Dinner List, I had invited folks to meditate on what felt full in their lives right now, at the fullness of the summer sun, what in their lives made them feel grateful. This they did, almost everyone, many more than I expected, and the atmosphere during that circle was centered, meditative, and full of careful listening.

I loved young Rebecca’s story especially. She felt grateful for her body, the fullness within her physical body, and its communion with the body of earth.

Afterwards, we each lit the next person’s candle, and thanked, as a group, the six directions for joining us.

And the piece de resistance? A gorgeous croscosmia, flare into bloom that very day. Every year I forget about these seemingly fragile, but hardy perennials, and wonder what that plants those are (in several gardens now), with those kind of stalks — until one of them gifts us with the fullness of its sun-time glory!

This is the first of two posts for today. . . . Meanwhile, the tornado warning has just sounded, so I’ll be with others in the basement for awhile.

. . .

30 minutes later. Back upstairs, tornado few miles north of here, moving east fast. Big wind and rain here for a short while. Yurt survived. But that big bucket of fig sticks tipped, as did the front porch begonia. 

Mid-June, and the flourishing takes hold!

And that’s what we’re doing here, in Green Acres Permaculture Village, “growing community from the ground up.” And it’s the ground which teaches us how to BE with each other. 

Which reminds me, see the BEE in the bottom right corner of this montage. I took these photos this morning, and though there were lots of bees flitting about and on the the butterfly weed, I only managed to capture one. Rogue sunflower shooting up top right; climbing beans to the left.

Tiny splashes of color here and there and everywhere . . . 

Above, garden panorama; below, Joseph’s fairy garden.

In the top photo above, notice the old two-forked tree stump. That’s from the bradford pear which, not knowing better, we planted the very first year of the garden, back in 2010. Finally hacked it down five or six years ago; yet its trunk still stands, reminding us of the past as we learn from the garden to be so fully present that we move seamlessly into the future.  

BTW: only nine people at Thursday’s Community Dinner. “You never know how many will come, EVER!” We remind each other of this as we set up for the event each time, wondering how many tables? This time we had four extra tables (the most ever!), since we expected many more, including a family with five kids! Unfortunately, they didn’t make it, as didn’t many regulars and residents who were out of town. But these intimate dinner conversations dig down deeper than the more rowdy boisterous ones. All in all, very satisfying.

Next up: Solstice Community Dinner: Ceremony and Celebration. June 22.