Helen Lehndorf

news + musings

  • beets and pieces

    First some writing news – Fourth Floor Literary Journal is up and I have two poems in it! Yay! You can read them HERE.

    Back HERE I mentioned my friend Helen wrote an essay about ‘Taking Care’ (killing) ‘Of Animals’. It’s also in 4th Floor. It is a funny, chilling read – you can read it HERE.

    *

    I continue to be tired. It’s like when you’re on a Merry-Go-Round and you jump off and you have to run so you don’t fall over and then you feel a bit dizzy and woozy until you get your balance back. That’s me right now.

    *

    The Beetroot liquid makes a great vegetable dye (the vinegar in it acts as the ‘fixer’.)

    After we ate the beets, I had some beautiful hand-spun wool that a friend had given me, but it was in pastel colours. I prefer stronger colours so I dyed it with the beet juice. Here is how it turned out:

    What am I going to use the wool for? No idea. Back into the stash cupboard it goes for now.

  • unexciting gluts

    Sometimes I end up with an unexciting glut in the garden. Recently it was silverbeet.

    A silverbeet glut is not like a tomato glut, or an apple glut – where your friends will get excited and happily take bagsful off your hands or you can make bulk delicious things like ketchup and apple sauce.

    I tried giving away some of my silverbeet and got either screwed-up faces or ‘No thanks, I’ve got lots of my own in the garden.’

    Poor old silverbeet.

    While it does freeze well – in the Manawatu I can grow silverbeet twelve months of the year, so I didn’t feel especially motivated to freeze what I know I will have on hand fresh. However, if you live somewhere with a snowy winter – there is an excellent photo-tutorial of how to prepare greens for freezing over on TEND BLOG HERE.

    I am, however, thrifty to the core and wasn’t going to let it go to waste – so I picked it all. It was a green supermarket bag absolutely chocka. Once cooked down, it was about twelve cups. That’s a lot of silverbeet.

    I love silverbeet, but it does have a strong iron flavour – so I thought, right, I’ll do something with it which will temper the iron flavour.

    I made a huge mixture of egg, strong cheese, fried onions, chopped olives and chopped sundried tomatoes – I figured the cheese and olives would be a good accompaniment to the strong flavour of the silverbeet. Then I made pies. And pies. And some more pies.

    I made four full sized pies and two dozen mini-pies. We ate one that day, and the rest I wrapped and  froze. The mini-pies have been great for taking to work for lunches.

    & that is the story of the great silverbeet glut of ’11.

  • the poppies live on

    A few years ago, I rescued a whole lot of plants from a garden in my old neighbourhood which was about to be demolished.

    When I moved to my new house, just over a year ago, I was careful to shift a lot of the tiny poppy baby plants from the legacy of that garden-save. (At the time, with a whole household to move, faffing about digging up tiny seedlings seemed kind of mad – but I now I am glad I took the trouble to do it!) I am happy to report they are doing well, and doing what poppies do in their second year, which is ‘pop’ up in all kinds of places which are often not garden beds.

    As well as the red poppies from the old house, this year I also planted big pink poppies. Alas, on the verge of flowering magnificently – they got blown over in last week’s winds. I will leave them in anyway, in the hope they still go to seed, so I can at least have them next year.

    (Photo one above is the pink poppies about to pop. Photos two and three are rununculas, in lieu of the (now horizontal) pink poppies. The rununculas are being the pink poppies ‘stand-in’ for this post – lol.

    I also planted yellow californian poppies. These are lovely, elegant plants. In New Zealand you often see them around lakes and rivers. There are lots of bright orange ones around Lake Taupo, for example.

    As well as poppies, I’m planting as many self-seeding flowers as possible so that after a few years, I will have a low-labour, self-sustaining flower garden.

    Viva la poppies!

  • ‘The Comforter’ has a cover!

    My book is going to print at the end of this week! I can’t believe it.

    Helen Rickerby, who owns Seraph Press and edited the book, has somehow made the process of editing and co-ordinating the book (seem) effortless AND even fun. She is a wonderful editor who really gets behind the poets she publishes, deeply engages with the writing and works to present the poetry in the best possible way.

    So anyway, drum roll please, here is the cover! (There is much more to Sarah Laing’s design than just the front cover – there is a beautiful back cover, book flaps, inside cover and illustrations within – however – I want to leave some of it as a surprise for the ‘in real life’ experience of the book!)

    So for now, here’s the front:

    The textile art is by Melissa Wastney, a friend whose artwork I love very much.

    I wanted something for the cover that combined my love of nature and textiles, and which was elegant and understated. I think designer Sarah Laing has more than achieved that. Thanks so much, Sarah! I love the texture and wrinkles of the slubby linen and the way the trees look like they could be underground…

    (The book will be launched in Palmerston North on the 2nd December and in Wellington on the 3rd December. Launch details to come.)

  • the trail is not a trail

    One of my favourite poets is American poet Gary Snyder. He is described as the ‘poet laureate of deep ecology’ by some and I would agree with that. I guess he is a natural fit for me – he studied Zen Buddhism in Japan for years and writes a lot about the human spirit and nature.

    I have to defend his work from most of my poet friends who think his stuff is ‘obvious’ or romanticises nature or whatever – but I think a) the simplicity of his work often echoes that of the Zen Koan (short poems or spiritual conundrums) he is obviously schooled in.

    You could say this very famous poem by seventeenth century Japanese poet Masahide is ‘obvious’ and yet in its simplicity it also contains multitudes of meaning:

    Barn’s burnt down-

    now I can see

    the moon.

    *

    And b) I don’t find his nature writing to be ‘romantic’. I find it to be frank and direct. However, it is hard to write ANYTHING about nature in the 21st century and not be accused of being ‘romantic’ and Wordsworthian. Nature poetry has an undeserved bad rap, I think.

    Anyway, here is my current favourite Gary Snyder poem. Like a Zen koan, it is deceptively simple and yet depending on your reading of it can blow out and up and be a big existential gesture. As well as enjoying it aesthetically, I am returning to it lately as a reminder of mindfulness…because the trail is not a trail, there is no destination, ….or if there is it is only death – hence the pressing need to be present in the moment!

    Here it is:

    The Trail is Not A Trail

    by Gary Snyder

    (from Left Out In The Rain, North Point Press, 1986)

    I drove down the Freeway
    And turned off at an exit
    And went along a highway
    Til it came to a sideroad
    Drove up the sideroad
    Til it turned to a dirt road
    Full of bumps, and stopped.
    Walked up a trail
    But the trail got rough
    And it faded away—
    Out in the open,
    Everywhere to go.

  • peel the beet

    The garden is warming up to the point that some of the things which have been in it over the winter are starting to bolt.

    I harvested my beetroots the other day, as they’d been in there since autumn. Time to pick them to make room for some more exciting summer vegetable.

    Beetroots are great to have in the garden over winter because while they are growing you can pick the leaves off them and eat them as you would spinach. So by the time you come to harvest the roots, you’ve had months of greens off them as well – making them a very generous plant.

    People think beetroot is messy to prepare, but I’ve worked out that by doing it the following way – there is not a stain anywhere. Not even on my hands.

    Ignore all the recipe books which tell you that they are too hard to peel raw and that you should cook then peel. Cooking then peeling = MESS! & They are no harder to peel raw than a potato.

    Of course you don’t have to cook them – you can eat them raw, but I prefer them cooked as I’m not a huge fan of their uncooked dirt-like flavour.

    Helen’s No-Stain No-fuss Beetroot Preparation Method

    1. Fill the sink with warm water.

    2. Chop the leaves off the beetroots. Keep the tender leaves for eating, (leaves not in this recipe, put them in your fridge and eat them later!) discard the rougher ones.

    3. Throw the beetroots into the warm water. Using a potato peeler, peel the beetroots UNDER THE WATER. Check it out! No stains on your hands. Awesome.

    4. Cut the wet beetroots into appealing chunks. Throw into a pot.

    5. Fill the pot with 1/3 vinegar (I use white or cider), 2/3rds water, a teaspoon of salt and the spices of your choice. Because the beetroot is so plain and earthy tasting, I like to use strong flavours like a bit of curry powder, lemon zest, cloves and wholeseed mustard.

    6. Boil until the beetroots are just tender. Cool. Eat! They are great added to salads, sandwiches or just as a side-dish by themselves.

    (Because they are cooked in vinegar, what you don’t eat right away can be stored in the fridge in a container with a lid and will last a couple of weeks.)

    & Super-thrifty tip: when you have finished eating your beetroots, the juice can be used as a natural dye for cotton or wool or a food-colouring replacement for baking (you only need a drop or two, so the vinegar-taste won’t appear in your baking.)

    So there you go – that’s what I do with my beetroot! How do you like to eat beets?

    …& the beet goes on…(groan)…

  • snatched creativity

    Mothers who are also creatives (writers/artists/musicians etc) are extremely resourceful in terms of snatching creative time from days that fill up (and sometimes overflow) with children and domestic stuff and work.

    I feel like everything I make is done in intense short bursts, taking half an hour here, an hour there, ten minutes over here to quickly write/stitch/grow.

    Like most creative mothers, I look back on how I spent my pre-children time and shake my head at the ‘waste’….ha ha. But to do that is silly and ‘mooching’ is an important part of being young.

    It’s an interesting issue. On one hand, I get enormously frustrated at the lack of time I get to spend on creative work, I long for the space to deeply engage with the thinking and processing needed for quality creative work. I daydream about what I could create with more time.

    On the other hand, my creative ‘muscle’ is in peak condition. I can whack out a poem draft in a stolen ten minutes, I can add another layer to a journal collage while I wait for pasta to boil, I draft writing in my head while taking the kids to the park – scrawling notes on the back of receipt.

    Something about the urgency of snatching the time makes me more determined, more tenacious. I value my time more than I ever have before and I try not to waste it. I am good at saying ‘no’ to things I don’t really want to do (a skill which took YEARS of conscious work.)

    I feel like I could write lots, lots more about the topic of mothers who are creatives (maybe I will when I get time – lol). I would love to hear from you about how you cope with the twin demands of children and the creative compulsion…? How do you cope? What methods have you employed to stay sane and keep in the flow?

  • keeping the prunings

    Every time my lavender needs a prune, I tie up the prunings and hang them up in our porch to dry. Then, some months later when I have a spare hour, I pull the dried blooms off the stalks and add them to my lavender jar.

    My friend Melissa makes lovely lavender sachets with hand-printed linens. I think everything Melissa makes is beautiful.

    I like being thrifty and so I get a kick out of turning prunings into something useful. It’s a process that (to me) is lovely at every stage – the lavender is beautiful on the bush while it’s growing, it’s attractive hanging to dry on the porch, it looks nice in a jar and it will be delicious in a sachet – the heady scent of the blooms living on long after the stems have turned to compost.

  • fly away home

    I was sitting at the table and Willoughby said: ‘What’s that black spot on your skirt, Mum?’

    It was a green ladybird (I think) – dark, pearlescent green. I’ve never seen a green ladybird before. I looked it up on the ever-wise internet and found that ladybirds can be “yellow, green, orange, grey, white and brown, but are most commonly red. There is even a breed of ladybird which is black with coloured spots.”

    I got her to model for a couple of photographs and then I went and released her back outside.

    When you wear a lot of floral, you attract all kinds…

     

  • forgetting and remembering

    I’ve had a week of battling my ‘monkey mind’ – that part of the mind that is unsettled and dissatisfied, busy and graceless. This week my monkey mind has been a place of impatience and regret – both fairly useless emotions.

    It’s the school holidays, I’ve got far too much work on my plate (which I can’t get to, because it’s the school holidays) and I’m burning, itching, yearning to get to some creative work -writing and making- which is coming waaaaay last at the moment, because of the aforementioned kids, work.

    Cue the negative internal brain loops.

    The good thing is, I see it, I notice it for what it is – useless thoughts, pointless mental torture – and so as they arise, I work (and boy, does it feel like work) to let them go.

    Feel it, notice it, let it go. Feel it, wrangle with it, notice it, let it go. Feel it, watch it flare, notice it, let it go.

    When I’m wrestling with my demons, the best thing for me to do is to go outside. Be with my plants. They bring me solace. I can get perspective out in the garden, also nothing soothes a restless mind like a bit of weed pulling.

    All over the garden, forget-me-nots have self-seeded. They are growing all over the place, occasionally in an actual garden bed. I didn’t bring them to this yard, so they are an inheritance from the gardeners who lived here before me. I love the self-seeded flowers best of all – staunch, self-sufficient little fellas.

    Bright blue flares of tiny flowers everywhere – they’ve come in just the right week, when I need reminding what is worth remembering and what to forget.