Helen Lehndorf

Category: Uncategorized

  • Slow-Small Media for the Weekend #12 

    (Above: recent pot of echinacea flower tea. I love watching flowers and herbs steep through a glass tea pot.)

    How was your wintery week? 

    Somewhat counter-intuitively, winter is the time to be planting fruit trees so that they have time to establish roots and resilience before the heat stressors of summer.

    Do you have any spots in the garden (or in a large pot if you’re renting) that you could plant a fruiting tree? 

    Last weekend we planted an omega plum tree. It will (eventually) hang over our front fence in the hope that passers-by can enjoy some fruit also. In 2020 we planted a Luisa Plum in a similar spot.

    To be honest, it’s meant that we haven’t had many plums off that one because people have picked most of the fruit within reach…but that’s okay…it’s why we planted it there. Eventually, the trees will be big enough that there will be plenty for us and everyone else. 

    An Australian man using YouTube to Plant a Forest

    Speaking of planting trees, if you will oblige me by giving this video your attention (it’s just 12 minutes long), your ‘watch’ will contribute to backyard adventurer Beau Miles planting trees on both his own land and other farms in his area, in Australia. 

    I follow Beau on YouTube and when I first watched this video last week, it only had a few hundred views and at the time of writing this it is up to 237, 000 views! 

    (Like I said last week, I love random side-quests.)

    Affordable Art: Studio Soph Tea Towels

    (Above: image borrowe from the Tikitibu website.) 

    I love the bold wittygraphics of New Zealand artist and designer, Studio Soph. 

    Many of her products are outside the $50 cut-off for ‘affordable art’ but she has a fantastic range of tea towels which retail for just $25 each. 

    After all, what is a tea towel but a large rectangle printed surface? With the right presentation, a tea towel can be wall art! Either gun-staple it over a cheap canvas from the op shop, or sew hems to slide pieces of dowling into, or just pin it to the wall as is! 

    She has lots of great tea towel designs, but I particularly like this ‘Bird in Flight’ design, available at Tikitibu.  

    (If you’re new here, I hunt around the internet for affordable art. ‘Affordable’ means $50 NZD or less. I believe everyone should be able to access art and beautiful things for their home.) 

    Something inspiring for your eyes – a street artist paints bee swarms on urban walls to bring attention to the plight of the bees

    I love these urban street swarms by Louis Masai.

    What a fantastic way to get a message across. 

    Poem: The Potato by Joseph Stroud

    What I enjoy about this poem is how a simple encounter with another person (and a potato!), a small exchange, becomes a deeply embedded sense-memory for this poet. 

    Here’s an excerpt: 

    ‘I met a farmer who pointed the way—

    Machu Picchu allá, he said. 

    He knew where I wanted to go. 

    From my pack I pulled out an orange.

    It seemed to catch fire 

    in that high blue Andean sky. 

    I gave it to him.

    He had been digging in a garden, 

    turning up clumps of earth, 

    some odd, misshapen nuggets, 

    some potatoes.

    He handed me one,

    a potato the size of the orange

    looking as if it had been in the ground

    a hundred years…’

    A poem about people exchanging crops with a message of gratitude for the simple things? 

    Yes, please! 

    This week’s song

    This song, ‘Dirty Mattresses’ by Canadian duo, Mama’s Broke, evokes such melancholy in me. The lyrics seem to be about a very relatable wrangling with privilege and failing people. 

    This opening lyric 

    ‘I’ve crossed a hundred rivers today

    And did not feel a thing…’

    really gets  me every time. How flying in planes, over mountains, over rivers, is such a miracle, and such a privilege…and yet we so often ‘don’t feel a thing’ about flying any more. If anything, it’s seen as a major hassle to be endured to get where we want to be. 

    I love their harmonies, their future-ancient sound. All of their work is beautiful. 

    (You can listen to the whole Slow-Small Media Playlist here on YouTube. )

    A  yummy and bright soup:

    Where I can, I like to promote New Zealand food writers because we have many excellent ones. 

    Seeing the produce, writers and food photographed in recognisable New Zealand contexts really fires me up to get out into the vegetable garden and get cooking.

    I really enjoyed the recent book by ‘Reckless Foodie’, Tracey Bennett. 

    (Above: Photo borrowed from Tracey’s website.) 

    It’s shot by my clever wild foodie/photographer friend, Sophie Merkens. See more of the gorgeous images from book here on Sophie’s website. (& Sophie has a very exciting book of her own launching later this year. Stay tuned for more on that!) 

    I enjoy recipe books which are focussed on bright, colourful, fresh vegetables, and Tracy’s book delivers on this. 

    Carrots are often sidelined as a vegetable, but their sweetness means a soup that is mostly carrot has a beautiful, refreshing flavour. Here’s a simple and gorgeous carrot soup from Tracey’s website.

    Another option I like to make for a carrot soup is to cook it with indian spices and then in the last few minutes of cooking, blend in a cup of cashew nuts. It’s spicy, creamy sweetness is reminiscent of a korma sauce, but in soup form. 

    ‘How to walk away from Empire‘

    If you’ve been feeling a bit low from how things seem to be crumbling around us at a frightening pace, go and read this short and heart-lifting essay by Nicolas Triolo.

    It gave me solace this week. 

    Here’s a taste: 

    ‘The moving toward is the whole point. 

    Toward family, toward one another, toward abundance. Let your body’s movement abandon lines. Those lines are the way of empire—extracting, penetrating, demanding, colonizing, ripping, and now, dying.

    Embrace nonlinear meanders, worshipping a circumference held together by a center of unknowability.

    Because another world awaits, is remembered in the shape of a field, a meadow for which there is no label to monetize, no body to exploit, no peak to bag.

    As things die, they also begin anew, becoming something far more curious, rounded, and life-affirming. To walk away from empire means to walk toward a different shape. 

    Firepit, egg, seed, eye, sun, wheel, Earth.’ 

    -Nicholas Triolo 

    *

    Have a good weekend, everyone. 

    Try not to be busy.  Keep it simple.

    Eat some good soup made by someone you know in real life.

    Lie on the ground and look out of the window at the sky.

    Keep going. 

    x

  • Slow-Small Media for the Weekend #10

    (Above: F and I like to have fires in the backyard, whatever the weather. A recent violet dusk.)

    Does it feel to you like the weeks are whizzing by? Friday seems to come around faster and faster lately. Here we are again!

    I’ve had some lovely feedback for these Slow-Small Media digests. Thanks to everyone who has been in touch. I’m so glad you’re enjoying them. I really enjoy ‘foraging’ for things to share with you. 

    A ‘corny’ song

    This week’s addition to the slow-growing Slow-Small Media playlist, is ‘Close My Eyes’ by Arthur Russell. 

    I was new to Arthur Russell until I recently watched this fascinating documentary about him. (I love music documentaries even if I don’t know the subject. I find a lot of new-to-me music this way.) 

    If you’ve been reading these Friday digests since the beginning, you’ll probably know by now that I love nature-based songs, or songs that reference growing food and tending gardens. This beautiful soft song references a corn field: 

    ‘Will the corn be growing a little tonight

    As I wait in the fields for you

    Who knows what grows in the morning light

    When we can feel the watery dew.’

    (I add one carefully-considered song per week. You can find the whole playlist here. It’s nice to listen to on a weekend morning.)

    An ‘Eat the Weeds’ Pesto

    I am a massive Nicola Galloway fan so it meant a lot to me that she gave ‘A Forager’s Life’ a little shout-out in this column in ‘Life and Leisure’ magazine. 

    In the article she shares a delicious version of a foraged weeds pesto.

    Pesto is one of the best ways to ‘sneak’ weeds into your family’s diet if they are weed-resistant. They’ll never know once it’s all blended up and on pasta or some crackers. (Other good ways are soups, smoothies and quiches.) 

    Something to watch: a fascinating wild honey bee conservationist making beautiful hives from wood and rushes

    In the UK, Wild honey bee conservationist and carpenter, Matt Somerville, has designed a beautiful, natural, handmade hive habitat and over the last 14 years has installed 800 (!) for the wild bees. No honey is ever harvested from these hives – they are installed just to support wild honey bee biodiversity. 

    This beautiful 12 minute film about Matt’s work is inspiring in terms of how much of a difference one person with a big passion can make. I so appreciate that he wanted the hives to look appealing as well as being beneficial. 

    Some sweet, sweet cakes that are food for the eyes only: 

    Artist Heather Rios makes delightful cakes from polymer clay and embroidery.

    A feast for the eyes and oddly uplifting to regard, I found.  

     (Above: photograph borrowed from FrogsbyGigi.) 

    Affordable Art: 

    Felt Shop artist Gigi handknits frogs and dresses them in tiny jerseys or overalls.

    They come in under the $50 budge for affordable art and although you might argue they are toys not art, I’ll bet most of them are purchased by adults and then perched on bookshelves and desks…which means they are qualify as works of art. 😉 

    Aren’t they adorable?

    ‘This is the best domestic perfume: an ode to the humble onion

    I like how in this week’s poem William Matthews elevates the humble onion to it’s rightful place as the beginning of many things good in the kitchen. 

    This poem reminds me how good poems are all about looking at things, even humble things, very closely and being curious about what’s to be found there. Over the years, I have written poems about garlic, pasta sauce, my bicycle, and many other tangible things.

    An Anarchist Gardener’s Club on Substack!

    I think I know who the writer is behind this fabulous ‘Anarchist Gardener’s Club’ on Substack…

    …enjoy their call for collective green-fingered mischief!

    “We will cultivate whatever we can.
    We will grow flowers in the cracks.
    We will seed bomb every desolate corner of the scrub land.
    We will enjoy a brew and a biscuit as we do it.”

    Count me in!

    *

    I’m always overly-ambitious for how much I can fit into a weekend.

    Here’s my ‘might-do’ list for this weekend.

    -make kimchi. We got a beautiful cabbage in our CSA box and it’s calling to become kimchi, I think.

    -plant the dahlia bulbs I dug up and divided two weekends ago

    -work on my poetry manuscript some more

    -do some food prep ahead of the week -mostly washing and chopping vegetables- so we are more likely to eat them in salads and stir-fries

    -finish reading this wonderful book by Nadine Hura 

    I think that’s enough of a list, hey? If I even get a couple of those things done I will feel content. 

    What’s on your ‘might do’ list for the weekend?

    Try not to do too much, hey? And always factor in some fun.

  • A new poem and an older, previously unpublished one

    Last week, a new poem I wrote, ‘hemmed in like a boar between archers’, was published on The Spinoff’s weekly column ‘The Friday Poem’.

    I’m grateful to The Spinoff and editor, Hera, for selecting the poem. It was great fun for me to see it on The Spinoff on Friday and to see what image they had selected to go with the poem.

    I wrote the poem last summer. I had a good spell with poetry over the summer and, after a while of feeling like I was wringing out a dry rag when trying to write poetry, suddenly a whole lot of poems tumbled out in a rush. It was a good (and relatively rare) feeling.

    It meant that a poetry manuscript I’ve been fiddling with for over ten years (!) is much closer to completion now.

    I was able to ditch some poems I wasn’t 100% happy with (I call them ‘the weaklings’) and replace them with some of the stronger, new ones.

    (Above: bush canopy in the Rangawahia Reserve.)

    I also wanted to share an older but previously unpublished poem.

    This was commissioned years ago for an anthology about New Zealand’s endangered species. Each poet was assigned a topic. My assigned subject was the Manoao Tree (Silver Pine).

    Sadly, the book project didn’t eventuate so I thought I’d share the poem here:

    Manoao

    Small, sensitive,
    the cleanest of the grassy greens
    of the understory
    single leader, forest pine

    too many years
    of mistaken identity
    growing in the shadow of all
    that a Kauri can be

    rainforest supporter
    prone to sudden collapse
    like all things humble,
    misidentified, or hard to see

    human desire-lines
    walk wide past
    the subtle glow
    in long rows
    of gloaming extroverts

    If we were better, we’d
    take the time
    to thread the eyes.
    of this graceful relict.

    *

  • Slow-Small Media for the Weekend #9

    (Above: low winter sun through some crops gone to seed at the Awapuni Community Garden.)

    Hi lovelies,

    Jeez, another week of scary news in a world gone mad. I hope you are faring okay and doing plenty of sensory, nature-based things off screens to give your nervous systems a chance to recover.

    Winter calls for an encounter with ‘a Wild God’

    Long a favourite poem of mine, I went looking for a shareable version of ‘Sometimes a Wild God‘ by Tom Hirons and saw, to my delight, that you can both read it and listen to it being read by the author here. There’s something about listening to poems read by their authors which is really special.

    This poem speaks to that longing inside us to connect with nature’s raw wildness…how that raw wildness is no joke…and it also has such a great ending. A modern classic, I think.

    Song for the week

    This week’s song is gentle, evocative and sounds a bit like Nick Drake. It’s ‘Crow’ by English ‘folktronica’ band, Tuung.

    As a poet, I can’t fall 100% in love with a song unless the lyrics are thoughtful and interesting. The chorus for this song are so good:

    ‘And we bide our time
    And we shed our skins
    And we shake our bones
    And we sink like stone
    And we crawl through mud
    Til we reach the sky
    And we bide our time.’

    (Listen the full playlist of Slow-Small Media songs here on Youtube.)

    Sally Wise’s ‘Apple Day‘

    Nothing warms my heart like friends and communities getting together to work on food harvests and processing together. (If you didn’t catch it already, here’s an article about some friends and I doing just this with green tomatoes.)

    Australian food writer Sally Wise just wrote about her annual ‘apple day’ here.

    I especially like the photographs. What great seasonal fun.

    Make a liver-cleansing, iron-boosting tonic from a much-maligned weed

    Most people I talk to are unaware that yellow dock, a plant loathed by many, is a powerful medicinal plant.

    When I did a live-cooking event at the Womad Festival last year, one of the things I made was some wild seedy crackers which had yellow dock seed in them which I foraged.

    Dock root is rich in iron, minerals and vitamins. Check out this recipe for an Iron Rich Liver-Cleansing Support Oxymel from one of my favourite New Zealand food writers, Anna Valentine.

    Lot’s of weeds are a bit of a pain, it’s true (hello, tradescantia, hello, convolvulus) …but so many weeds are edible or medicinal. I feel like re-learning all of the offerings of local weeds will be an important passtime for the coming years.

    Here’s to the humble dock plant: mineral-retriever with it’s deep taproot, generous-seed-offerer, cleanser of livers and booster of blood.

    This week’s affordable art: Whakangā

    This week’s affordable art is not wall art, but an artful object, a meditation tool, a little something perfect for the wintery months. This would make a beautiful gift.

    (Above: photo borrowed from the Creative Hive NZ website.)

    It’s a little beeswax candle set from the Creative Hive NZ. Whakangā means in Māori to take a breath, catch your breath, rest, relax or inhale.

    From their website: ‘This beautiful Whakangā set is the perfect addition to your wellbeing with 21 small beeswax candles and an exquisite artisan ceramic kawakawa leaf holder.’

    I think it qualifies as ‘art’ and is very reasonable at just $35.00 for the set.

    This is such a thoughtful product. The tiny candles are made to burn for twenty minutes; just long enough to take a break or meditate. A friend of mine has a set and the candles are so very small and sweet.

    How to make a Wild Food Map of your neighbourhood

    This is a great article from Milkwood Permaculture on how to make a wild food map of your neighbourhood. I haven’t done this but I’d love to. If you have younger kids, it could be a fun activity to get them involved in over the school holidays?

    As well as great instructions on this project, this article has a handy list of links for online community food maps at the end, like Falling Fruit a global map of crowd-sourced information about public fruit trees. It’s very fun to type your address into it and see what’s within walking distance of your house. You can add your local knowledge to it, too.

    Something chill to watch: a Brixton folk artist’s beautiful house and studio

    This short (9min) clip featuring folk artist Abe Odedina on the World of Interiors YT channel is a good time.

    He’s a vibe, and I loved seeing his house and studio. His house is beautiful as is his art. I also appreciated how much he talks about loving being at home. I think since the pandemic, many of us feel the same way, hey?

    (I lived in Brixton a zillion years ago when I was on my travels. I found it such a vibrant, exciting suburb of London.)

    A Manifesto for Stubborn Optimists

    From the Montague Workshop (Brad and Kristi Montague), a Manifesto for Stubborn Optimists:

    ‘We believe that care is courageous.

    Joy is rebellious.

    Wonder is defiance.

    We believe in the builders,

    teachers, growers, healers,

    quiet ones making room at the table,

    the messy middle, the long haul, and

    in the overlooked beauty of a slow repair.’

    This manifesto gave me some solace this week. I love manifestos. I think most things I write end up being thinly disguised manifestos; I can’t help it.

    I’m going to print it out and stick it on my fridge.

    This weekend my oldest ‘baby’ turns 25. Quarter of a century!

    (Above: the oldest baby when he was 4. A favourite pic.)

    I spent my 25th birthday dancing at Duckie London – a queer club night that’s still going! But I started off the night straddled across one of the bronze lions of Trafalger Square in London, drinking straight from a 1.5 litre bottle of Absolut vodka. Classy, aye? (I wasn’t always the quiet homebody I am now.)

    It’s funny, because I remember clearly thinking back then ‘I’m going to climb up here and get on one of the lions…because then I will always remember what I did on my 25th birthday’ …and it worked, I do!

    Anyway, there will be birthday celebrations this weekend and no doubt F and I will have a tipple of whisky and contemplate the bizarre passage of time.

    Hope there are sweet, calm things in your weekend, too. x

  • Slow-Small Media for the Weekend #6

    (Above: the sweet and tiny reading hut at the Red Bach, Turakina, where I recently had the good fortune to spend a weekend.)

    I lost most of this week to dental surgery recovery and felt quite sorry for myself…however, it has not prevented me from rambling the internet with my forager’s bag over my arm looking for good things for you to read.

    If you love me don’t feed me junk

    Those of us of a certain vintage *cough* possibly have a certain nostalgia for the wholefood health shops and cafes of the late 70s through the 80s. I really enjoyed reading this very personal, quirky and interesting research project by artist Faythe Levine about her parents involvement in health food education when she was a child. This research is presented in such an interesting way.

    It sparked a lot of nostagia in me of the health food cafes of the 1980s in Taranaki and the Manawatū which I would frequent as a punky teen getting interested in all things countercultural. I would gnaw down the sprouted lentil salads served in gritty pottery bowls, eat the earnest sugar-free carrot cakes with oily carob frosting and feel like I was really living on the edge.

    A song

    This week’s song is my one of my favourite bands, This is the Kit. I love this band so much. They sing about things familiar to me…like gardens, and cups of tea, staying in to cosy up, friendship heartbreak, and environmental angst.

    I thought I’d share this song ‘Empty No Teeth’ because I’ve been laid up with dental horrors this week…but also, because I love that the lyrics for this song mention ‘autumn…compost….leaf mulch’ …

    (I used to put compost in poems so often that my poet friend Jo banned me from using ‘the c word’ any more. It’s hard, though, because compost heaps are so full of life! and metaphor!

    *By the way, you can listen to the slow-growing playlist of Slow Small Media songs over on Youtube here. (I don’t do Spotify…because #payartists)*

    Affordable Art

    This week’s affordable art is a beautiful scene of a lakeside path meandering through trees. The artist, Gill Allen, writes that it is a scene from Mistletoe Bay in the Nelson region of NZ. I love the dappled light and it makes me think of my slow foraging walks. It offers such a peaceful feeling, I think.

    & you can buy an unframed A4 print for just $39!

    (By the way, if you are an artist who has affordable art to share…or you’re an art-appreciator who has some good leads for me, please share in the comments or email me.)

    A comforting dinner

    I’ve been eating soft foods this week because of dental pain…so here’s a soft and nourishing main dish which uses that handsome vegetable, Italian kale, Kale and Chickpea Ragu, served on polenta.

    Polenta is such a comforting rice/pasta alternative for the colder months…and so easy to whip up.

    Art to admire …surreal reading women

    I spotted these reading women by american artist, Rick Beerhorst on Lithub. I really like the way he captures something of the magic of being lost in a book by the way he paints hovering birds and the like in front of the women. He’s a contemporary artist but they feel like paintings from another age.

    Radical Neighbouring

    This is a new film by inspirational film production company, Campfire Stories, about a man who was gifted a farm (!) and grows food to give away. It’s a beautiful and inspiring story.

    A beautiful photo essay of some urban ‘neopeasants’

    If you’re a permaculture person, you might know of Artist As Family, an Australian family who have a poetic, creative approach to urban permaculture and ‘re-common-ing’ the ‘burbs.

    They just shared a beautiful photo essay (photos by Max Roux): ‘Max slung his camera over his shoulder as we forested, farmed, gardened, creeked, salvaged, ate, played, loved and listened to one another’… and I find it very earthy, heartening, inspiring.

    A tantric, non-dual poem expressing life’s ineffable beauty

    The Secret of Contentment

    By Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
     

    To be the seed and not
    wish to be the flower.
    Or to be the flower and
    not wish to be seed or rain.
    To be the rain and be grateful
    to be the rain. Which
    is to say, to be the self
    and delight in being the self.
    But when I say self, I mean
    to know the self as seed.
    As flower. As rain. When I
    say to know, I mean to
    ever be in wonder.

    *

    I hope there are good things in your weekend. I hope you still have moments in your life when you can ‘delight in yourself’. I hope someone buys you coffee/cake/wine/chocolate when you least expect it. I hope you have access to a cosy fire, a good book.

    See you in a whole new week

    x Helen

  • What do green tomatoes have to do with mutual aid?

    (Above: many hands make work fun. A harvesting and chopping working bee at Kirsty’s place. Photo by Kirsty Porter.)

    Fascism is on the speedy rise, climate collapse is escalating, increasingly our governments and power structures are unreliable at best, malevolent at worst. What is there to be done?

    I am reading a lot of Margaret Killjoy , Adrienne Maree Brown, Bayo Akomolafe and Donna Harraway. Listening to a lot of collapse-aware podcasts. & Trying to be (mostly) off (anti)social media. But beyond what I consume and intake…I am making slow steps towards deeper resilience within my friend groups.

    I’m in a couple of ‘conscious-collapse’ groups. One is aimed more at emotional support and mutual aid (deep listening, space-holding, nourishing one another with beauty and soothing art), the other is more about practical supports, and intentional-relationship-building over time (working bees, resource sharing, fun gatherings.)

    While both groups have group chats in messaging apps, we make a conscious effort to take them offline and get together regularly, because actually being together is so much more healing than more time staring at our phones.

    The photo above is the latter group. We had a working bee to harvest all the end-of-season green tomatoes, then we sat around Kirsty’s kitchen table and chopped up the harvest. We filled four buckets (!) with chopped green tomatoes. Kirsty kept two, M & R took one and I took one. Kirsty, M&R turned theirs into Kirsty’s Grandmother’s recipe for green tomato chutney and I turned mine into a spicy Mexican green sauce.

    While we worked, we chatted, we laughed and the folks in the group who had only recently met got to know each other better. It might not seem to have much to do with the mitigation of fascism & climate collapse…but it was a practical, positive, soul-warming way to spend an afternoon. Every small action like this brings us closer, braids us together a little more…all while we work on our food resilience skills.

    Kirsty might have struggled to ‘capture and store’ her green tomato abundance alone…but with five of us at work…we got it all done in a couple of hours.

    ‘Communities are not built, relationships are built. Communities build themselves.’

    -Patrick Jones

    What sorts of things are you doing to nourish yourself in these challenging times?

    In other tomato news…I like to challenge myself to memorise high-rotate recipes, like fruit crumbles, scones, pikelets, simple cakes…so in the unlikely event I am somewhere I can’t use my recipe books or the internet, I can still make these things. I figure it’s good for my brain, at the very least. Also, it makes me feel next-level to be able to bash them out without cracking a book.

    This winter, I am attempting to perfect and memorise focaccia. I made this one with one of the last crops of cherry tomatoes and basil from the garden.

    In my household, we are seasonal eaters, which gives the last tomato harvests a real poignancy.

    The basil is valiantly carrying on, despite some colder nights…but how much longer for? Time to make some big batches of pesto, I think.

  • don’t buy a sympathy card, buy this

    Another thing that happened while I was too distracted by the release of ‘A Forager’s Life’ to give it the attention it deserved is that writer Iona Winter published a grief almanac called ‘a liminal gathering‘.

    I submitted poems to it and Iona chose one for the almanac, which I share below. I feel privileged to be amongst the writers, artists, musicians and photographers who are part of this precious container for giving voice to grief.

    Iona’s son, the musician and artist Reuben Winter killed himself in 2020. Since Reuben’s death, Iona has used her skills as a writer and communicator to be public with her grief in service to all who grieve and are silenced, or are too overcome by grief to speak themselves.

    A review of the almanac by Hester Ullyart says, ‘This is a hopeful resource, much needed. A rope of stars thrown out into the murk of grief. I recommend this almanac for every shelf, for death touches us all, and no one need struggle alone.’

    I so agree. This book contains both the intensity of new grief and the wearing plod of long-carried grief. It spans anger, raw shock and emotional pain through to gratitude, reverence, elegy…sometimes in the same piece of work.

    If someone you love loses someone they love, don’t buy a sympathy card, buy them this. You will be giving them the gift of a chorus of voices who dwell in the same place as them, a liminal gathering: grief.

    In his piece in the almanac Dear Reader, Rushi Vyas captures the some of the nuance of grief in his poem’s ending:

    ‘Dear Reader, go outside. Feel everything. The wind is cruel. And full of oxygen. The sun is deadly radiation. And our only source of warmth.’

    -Rushi Vyas

    & here is my poem from the almanac:

    negotiating boundaries with the dead

    grief: week one

    kaimanawa horse in my living room

    wild waters                        white flames

    grief: week two

    flower’s fingers holding medals 

    i’m a hobo pedestaled for bravery

    grief: week three

    in the musty cave mushrooms sprout from armpits

    it’s a total eclipse of the total eclipse

    grief: week four

    hurricane chasers, race to get best footage of worst damage

    a raggedy lone wolf to stare down

    grief week five: 

    bat-infested feeling my way   with echo-location

    drink puddle-water      trying for nutrition by chewing on a husk

    grief: week six

    (but wait there’s more

    were you looking for a neat trajectory?) 

    belly-crawling at toadstool height

    make the bed with a chainsaw

    grief: week seven

    turns out the source of the tinnitus is my own throat’s moaning

    some forest fires happen to crack the open the seeds of amoured shells. But not here.

    Just another searing morning. The petrol pours itself.

  • the sharing shelf

    Late last year we put a sharing shelf outside our front fence.

    We’ve always shared excess produce from our vegetable garden by putting it in a box on the community seat (for more about the community seat, check out my last book, ‘A Forager’s Life‘) but I wanted to make it a little more formal so that it could be a site of #radicalreciprocity* in the neighbourhood and many people could contribute to it.

    (#radicalreciprocity is how I try to live my life. Giving generously, receiving with gratitude and humility, and trusting that there is more than enough to go around if we can all learn to do both.)

    I bought the planter from a local young woman who makes them from upcycled pallets and then I painted a dandelion motif on it. The dandelion is a plant that means a lot to me and acts as a symbol of courage and generosity in my personal symbology.

    It didn’t take long -a few weeks or so- for neighbours to get the idea and things began to appear in it that weren’t from us.

    Part of putting something like this into a public sphere requires a willingness to look after it well so I check it twice a day, first thing in the morning and then at dusk.

    Although the purpose of it is to share the excess garden produce and garden related things, occasionally people put perishable or pantry food in it. The perishable food (things like bread, sandwiches, etc) I dispose of (usually feed it to the backyard birds, or my worm farm, if possible) because I don’t want to be responsible for anyone getting ill from spoiled food. Mostly, though, people seem to get the idea. There’s been all sorts of vegetables, seedlings, cut herbs. It’s been mostly delightful things.

    My original sign (paint and vivid marker on an art canvas) melted away in the rain, so I painted an old cutting board with outdoor paint in an attempt to make a more weather-proof sign:

    People have not 100% ‘been cool’. There’s the occasional beer bottle or pizza box after a Friday or Saturday night. There was one incident when someone kicked the front of it in, breaking a board. But for the most part, it’s been a success and a fun, new element in my days.

    March has definitely been the month of the giant marrow. Hearteningly, these swollen offerings have all been taken, though so I guess there are some good marrow recipes being cooked around Takaro. There’s also been lots of bags of tomatoes and apples.

    Every day is different in the sharing shelf. Things flow in and out.

    With feijoas just beginning, I’m expecting it to become mostly a ‘freejoa’ booth any day now.

  • The poem I needed right now, from Mary Walker

    The poem I needed right now, from Mary Walker

    My friend, the writer Mary Walker, recently invited her Instagram followers to request a poem for a particular mood or need. She said she would see which of her poems came forward as answering the request. Mary is a sensitive listener -of both people and the land- so I immediately took her up on the call.

    Mary’s invitation…

    I have a new book coming out next month. It’s a funny thing…publication is both a writer’s dream…and yet is not without it’s challenging elements. It can feel so strange and exposing. Each time I’ve done it I feel a very odd mix of elation and also queasiness and vulnerability. As writers we hope our offerings will be met with kindness, generosity…but once the book has gone from the writer’s mind to becoming a tangible artefact – all control is lost and the work must be let go to have a life of its own, for good or ill.

    So I asked Mary for a poem for ‘vulnerability and visibility’.

    Here is what stepped forward for me…

    Mary’s ‘Wild Fruit’

    A more perfect poem I could not imagine. I was moved to tears when I read it.

    Mary can’t know this (and yet somehow she did) but my book opens with a scene about me picking blackberries as a child…and about blackberries as a powerful edgeland plant with much to teach us about boundaries, courage and tenacity. Mary gave me just the poem I needed…at the moment I needed it. I cannot thank her enough.

    Mary’s new book is available for order now. Her poems reveal her deep enmeshment with the land and a fearless engagement with all of the challenges of being a deeply-conscious human in this world. Thank you, Mary, for this timely gift. Thank you for gifting blackberry back to me…an uncanny coincidence, a portent, and a sign…that there is magic in this world if we invite it and then listen carefully for the evidence.

  • Can we slow down?

    Can we slow down?

    I made this sign for a wild plant identification stall I ran at a recent community event.

    A huge part of learning to forage is learning to slow down…to observe closely…to ask questions of the environment around and settle down enough to hear the answer. I’m not always good at slowing down…but when I do…my senses awaken and the plants seem lean in towards me.

    ‘The times are urgent…we must slow down.’ -Bayo Akomolafe