Savage Nature

I believe that if I live seasonally, in the way Ma Nature intends the rest of the organic world to live, I will be altogether better. Bountiful, beautiful, bright-eyed summer will find me indulging in juicy watermelon and cool green honeydew, laughing with my silly friends, and splashing around in pools, lakes, oceans and rivers alike. I'll bust out the running man with the no-nonsense enthusiasm of a lemon cucumber vine spitting out yellow, tennis-ball-ish fruit; the butterfly will burst from my crazy legz like a million purple string beans.

During the indian summer, I'll begin to reflect on the untamed euphoria of previous months; the trees will turn fiery and I'll eat fresh pumpkin bread to fatten up for the oncoming winter, during which I will essentially hibernate. Springtime, that magical season of hope and promise, will provide me with the first asparagus of the season, crisp and sweet, and embrace me with happy yellow daffodils and joyful pink tulips. Then it'll start all over again: excess, reflection, rest, growth, repeat. If I could discipline my body and mind to respect this archetypal cycle, I believe I'd be a more productive, happier, healthier person.

2009 has afforded me the oft-forgotten luxury of rolling with the tides, as they say. No obsessive planning. No lofty schemes. I've barely made a decision; decisions have presented themselves in front of me as if to say "I am the only logical choice." I drifted into the cycle in March, that temperamental lamb-beast, and I've cycled through as beekeeper, then writer, then farmer, all the way into the heart of August.

Keeping bees, working on a farm, and writing share a common denominator: the beekeeper, the farmer, and the writer rely on that which is natural and wild to be natural and wild, while attempting to contain the naturalness and wildness within an imposed structure. We must work with nature-- the hive mind, the harvest cycle, the unbridled idea--and manipulate it to produce our intended outcome. (Do I sound Romantic yet?)

From Andre Gide's The Immoralist:

"I marveled at the serene future promised by those robust oxen, those fat cows in their opulent pastures.

Secret treasure, Red Hook Community Farm

The apple trees planted in rows on the favorable hillsides heralded a splendid crop that summer;

First local heirlooms of the season, Union Square Greenmarket

I dreamed of the rich burden of fruit beneath which their branches would soon be bending.

NYC tomatoes sans blight (so far)

From this orderly abundance, from this happy subservience, from this smiling cultivation, a harmony was being wrought,

Little Shop of Horrors collard greens, Red Hook Community Farm, Brooklyn

no longer fortuitous but imposed, a rhythm, a beauty at once human and natural,

Rooftop hive in Fort Greene, Brooklyn

in which one could no longer tell what was most admirable, so intimately united into a perfect understanding were the fecund explosion of free nature and man's skillful effort to order it.

Morning light at Red Hook Community Farm, Brooklyn

What would that effort be, I thought, without the savage mastery it masters?

Bed prep at Added Value's farm on Governor's Island

What would be the savage energy of that overflowing sap without the intelligent effort which channels and discharges it, laughing, into profusion?"

Man mastering savage nature in Brooklyn

Hive-Mind: The Man Behind the Curtain

Anthropomorphism is considered by many great minds to be self-indulgent, suggesting departure from truth and marking the human tendency to sentimentalize. But answer me this: how can we attempt to understand animal experience without framing it, in some meaningful way, with human experience?

Dog days of summer finally upon us here in NYC, honeybee colonies are at their strongest in number. The new, spring hive has housed a handful of generations of bees already, and the current inhabitants continue to work for a future that they'll never see.

Each pair of pollen pants tells a story. A fearless forager bumbles home, weighed down by the heavy pants, and waddles inside where her sisters take a load off Sally. The pollen pants will be transferred from Sally's legs to those famous hexagons that all bee fans know and love. Scientists originally thought that long ago, bees evolved by learning to build tiny hexagons when their non-hexagonal cells naturally smooshed into the six-sided cubbies. Now, it seems that the hexagons have always existed; in other words, Ma Nature imbued honeybees with the ability to build these fascinatingly precise wax cells at their very creation.

Who is the man behind the curtain? Who pulls the levers and pushes the buttons?

The Wizard of Oz builds a fantastical world upon an illusion of power. The queen bee (named anthropomorphically... you're busted, scientists...) exerts a similar illusion of power over her human fanatics. We love the Queen Bee... she's a fine-assed woman who won't take nothin from no one. She rules the roost with sass and class, right?

Wrong. The queen bee is more bumbling man behind the curtain than great and powerful wizard. Come on, Sir Francis Bacon and other haters, if you want to criticize anthropomorphism then don't call her Queen Bee in the science books. You might give people the wrong idea.

Although it is unclear who makes the decisions in a colony, meticulous observation suggests that decisions are reached by consensus in the honeybee world. All elections must eventually resolve themselves unanimously. Does one, sole honeybee organize it all? Does this honeybee pass down her role as hive-mind to a future sister by filling a single brood cell with knowledge? Only Ma Nature knows, and she's pretty tight-lipped.

Human cannot master bee. Within their ordered, efficient, just yet ruthless world, the hive-mind of the honeybee is as unpredictable as human history. How can't we anthropomorphize when speaking of honeybees? We're all just lonely animals trying to understand our own finite existences. The honeybee's short yet harried life gives us small, hexagon-shaped glimpses into our own small places in this widening gyre of consciousness.

"'Tis a Maple Tree!" posits B-Bot

My truly radical friend Brianne sent me an incredibly informative response to my question in the previous post. Her description of how trees grow was so easy to understand, and enabled me to create this awesome 4th-grade-ish project. I mean, freshman year we had to pull the old Natty Ice-Nyquil bait-and-switch at 8am to prevent B-dude from attending Bio. Her bejeweled beret (photo coming soon) couldn't block her brainy contagion, and I was infected with with curiosity, plus a need to express myself visually and a desire to summarize, label. Double-click on the photo to see clearly. (This was news to me.)

In B-jeweled's own words:

"I got to lie down inside a ginormous redwood a couple of summers ago up in northern California. The hollow inside was probably at least 10 feet in diameter and you could lie inside and look all the way up and out to the sky through the center of it (it was probably around 200-250ft tall). It was fully alive and well!"

The Urban Garden

The aesthetic of the urban garden either enchants or repels, and nothing in between. The enchanted see life sprouting from nothingness. The repelled only see nothingness.

One cannot allow country coveting to conflict with one's inspired attempt to grow where nothing else grows.

Green vines slowly consume rusted remains and shroud walls that divide the land.

A weed shouldn't be capitally punished for having so much energy. Our weeds are glorious fighters that must be perpetually subdued to allow for more docile existences.

In this changing city, the urban garden's ancient cycle is sacred.

Chemicals have done enough damage to the Gowanus Canal for the rest of Brooklyn to get out of jail free of pesticides.

In an urban garden, coexistence triumphs. A metropolis has never been so serene. Or so alive.

When planting seeds, the urban gardener hopes that humanity's cruel indifference to itself hasn't impacted her ability to cultivate growth.

But Ma Nature is a witchy woman with weird and wonderful whims, and she almost always gets her way. Plus, she's got friends in high places.

Because at the end of the day, its all about friendship, right?

All photos were taken at the volunteer-fueled organic gardens that have begun producing fresh local produce for Roberta's in Bushwick. The shockingly lively leafy greens were picked lovingly and put on the table only moments later. Delicious.