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

Normal is Lamron Spelled Backwards

I am preoccupied with ideas about normalcy. The word "normal" appeals to me; its seduction lies in its association with ideas of goodness and ease. "Abnormal" is necessarily anomalous, and therefore attracts attention to itself.

We throw the word around in conversation thoughtlessly. "Not a normal thought process," "not a normal hangover," and "not a normal chain reaction" are phrases that I have either heard or said in the past few hours. People usually prefer abnormality as a topic of conversation. Each time "normal" leaves somebody's lips I notice it, because I am obsessed with the topic. Normalcy simultaneously seduces and repulses me.

I feel like I belong to an elite country club where nobody likes me. My unpopularity at the popular club renders me irrelevant. Likewise, my insanity within the societal group of sane people-- if the societal group known as "sane people" can be likened to an elite country club, which is still up for debate-- quarantines me to the gray-matter area of not quite normal, yet not quite abnormal. (I hear Britney Spears' next single!)

Technically, is it normal to want to walk through Highbridge Park in northeastern Manhattan because you have heard it called a dumping ground for bodies? Realistically, if I saw a dead body, I'd probably be so disturbed that, if I were 28 in an earlier era, I'd have been sent straight to Bellevue! I know of people who've found them for realz, and it sounds like a pretty grim experience. But the suggestion of death and actual death are two different things entirely, and I figured the chances of my finding a dead body in Highbridge Park were slim enough to prove safe, yet real enough to prove seductive.

Somebody burnt a car here, it seems. I find this quite scary. It would take a lot of chutzpah for me to get up the balls to burn a car. Talk about a conspicuous anomaly! A burning car does not go unnoticed for long. Plus, the idea of a burning car conjures images of raucous violence and tomfoolery that make me feel like I'm 12 and afraid of boys.

Is superstition normal? Doesn't everybody have at least one superstitious tendency? Perhaps you don't step on the cracks if you can avoid it? Maybe you count stairs in multiples of 12? Do you turn over the fork of the diner across from you, so as to divert its sharp angle from your precious eye?

I like to think that skeleton flowers really do facilitate wishes, if blown assertively enough. I know that we cannot correlate desires fulfilled with thistles wished upon, but still, in this circumstance, I choose to suspend logic in favor of nonsensical belief. It paints a kinder picture of the world for me.

Normal or abnormal? This one's a toughie. On the one hand, aren't all major religions involved in the suspension of logic in one way or another? And religion is societally normal, because it is spoken of openly and without shame. But is my pagan-like ritual too involved in nature-- that mystical woman who endlessly eludes us-- and witchery to count as a normal belief? As the 8 ball says, signs point to "yes."

I want to be normal. But I don't want to be normal.

Think of all the ways that statement could be interpreted!

I want to be sane, but I don't want to be bored.

I want to be part of society, but I don't want to live a life contrived.

I want to be happy, but I don't want to be immune to the cruelty of the world.

How To Harvest Honey: City Edition

1. Go to a beautiful Brooklyn rooftop beehive around noon, when the sun is high. Bees do not like being disturbed when they sense a chance of rain, and of course don't like having their honey stolen. This gloomy Sunday morning, atop a brownstone in Ft. Greene with affable veteran beekeeper John Howe, was incredibly humid for sticky honey extraction.

2. Make sure your bees have survived one winter before attempting to extract honey! This beekeeper decided to only extract from his stronger hive this summer. June's endless rain was a tough hit!

3. Instead of smoking the bees, which can irritate them after they've emerged from confused stupor, this beekeeper sprayed a fume board with this stuff and put it in the honey super. It smells a lot like bitter almonds. The bees hate the smell and leave the honey super.

4. Pry the honey-heavy frames from the super. Look at all that excess comb on top! There's a reason they're called busy bees.

5. Remove each frame slowly and deliberately. Be present 100%.

6. Marvel at the intricate craftsmanship of the honeybee, who has capped each hexagonal cell of honey with beeswax.

7. Remove the frames, close the hives, and take the frames to the "honey room." (Climb through roof hatch and down ladder... helping hands highly advisable.) Slice the wax cappings off with a hot knife, releasing the honey and catching it through a strainer.

8. This metal thing is an extractor. It works by spinning four honey-rich frames with a hand crank and catching the sweet, sticky nectar as energy sucks it out of the cells, leaving them shell-like and empty. They will be replaced in the hive this way, so that bees don't need to rebuild the comb from scratch.

9. Pour the caught honey into yet another strainer.

10. Stick your finger beneath a drop, savor it, and bid your fellow beekeepers goodbye!

Me as a Flower

Someone once told me that if I were a flower, I'd be a sunflower.

At first, I thought it was like being an apple if I were a fruit, or a potato if I were a vegetable. You know, bottom-of-the-barrel anthropomorphic flowers, fruits, and veggies.

I blame this on Elizabeth Arden's gaudy fragrance, "Sunflowers," worn by countless middle school girls in the 1990's.

There were so many other flowers I'd have preferred to be!

I'd have been flattered to be considered a lilac, unabashedly purple and rust-busting.

I wanted to possess the wild, witchy soul of the mother of the Aztec corn...

...the audacity of the electric thistle, the wisdom of the fair thistledown...

...and the ethereal elegance of the sweet lily.

But sunflowers, they're so regally mellow, tinted deep maroon from staring at the sun all day long.

They smell like twilight or dusk.

I like to think of them closing their eyes, smiling slightly, and receiving the sun's loving rays in sheer satisfaction.

I want to be more like a sunflower.

Slam! Let the Bees Be Bees!

Natural beekeeping, so called due to it's followers' beekeeping philosophy of human noninterference, additionally refers to the methods natural beekeepers employ to lessen their influence upon the hive. One such method involves excluding the beeswax (or plastic, for that matter) foundation that human machines (machines made by humans, not human-machines) shape into a thin sheet of hexagonal cells, in an attempt to replicate honeybee craftsmanship.

The photo below shows the foundation-less frames hanging in the super. The beeswax foundation is laced with thin metal wires for stability.

The idea behind the beeswax foundation is that of a "head start." The bees will create beeswax in their abdomens and "draw out" the wax, building on top of it to increase its width to be able to hold baby bees and honey on each side. The wax gives them something to work with; it speeds up the honey-making process.

I decided long ago to forgo honey harvest this summer. First of all, June was at least 90% rain. I mean, we felt it too. It sucked big time. But imagine if raindrops were deadly, as they are for bees... and imagine that if we didn't hoard food now, we'd starve in the cold... (cold would also be deadly...) Well, such is the case for bees.

Secondly, my kid sis Dana's boss, the Red Bee beekeeper (whose local honey is delectable) advised her that one shouldn't harvest during a colony's first summer if one wants the bees to survive the winter. And I certainly want that.

So, natural beekeeping seemed an obvious choice. Let the bees do their bee thang. They don't need no stinking human-formed hexagons! They're probably laughing at the shoddy quality anyway.

Here's a foundation-less solution:

Starter Strips must resemble a paint stirrer in composition and size. Stick em in the top of your frame. Use wood glue to make em sturdy. The bees will draw down the comb from the starter strip. Melt beeswax and paint it on the frames. If you don't have beeswax, paint it with bee tea or the like. Voila!

Okay, so we let the bees be bees. Here's my question: what does it mean to let the humans be human?

It would be really easy to create a religious analogy about the relationship between humans, the hive, and the beekeeper, but that isn't at all my intention; although feel free to create one for yourself. Instead, I'd initially like to conjure the image of the beeswax foundation. Then I'd like to say this, dramatically: "The Beeswax Foundation: That Upon Which All Is Built." I would then like to ask the reader, teacher-style, to respond to the following question in his/her journal: "What is the human foundation?" And of course, such generality cannot go by without its subjective counterpart: "What is your human foundation?" Proceed. You have two minutes. And there is no such thing as "finishing" before the two minutes are up.

Last night, my friend Liz and I were at the bar at the Frying Pan, a fantastic location (on a boat on the Hudson) with a horrible crowd. Surrounded by pastels and black shoes, she asked, "Does anyone really enjoy the nine-to-five?" An ironic question of course, because it was obvious that all the shirts were just yucking it up about pencil skirts, golf scores, and the Dow Jones Industrial. I mean, these nine-to-fivers looked like they were loving life, American Psycho-style. Well, here's my answer: they enjoy it because they think they should be enjoying it. The personal days. The cubicles. The midtown bars. Do I sound like a hater? Because I'm really not hating, I'm just saying that maybe paperweights and board meetings are these guys' beeswax foundations.

I mean, take away the beeswax foundation from the bees, and they just build their own honeycomb. How many of us have built our own house? Designed it and built it with our own bare hands? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Wittgenstein built his sister a house from scratch. He said "I am not interested in erecting a building, but in presenting to myself the foundations of all possible buildings." Working on a farm, not the least a farm in Red Hook, I am afforded the opportunity to be surrounded by life cycles. A seed germinates, sprouts cotyledons, the first two sprigs of life, grow leaves, flowers, bears fruit, seeds again... and somewhere in that process, I eat it. It's beautiful!

I am not interested in eating this cool, crunchy cuke, but in presenting to myself the growth of all possible vegetables!

On a serious note, the bees are able to sustain themselves just fine without us humans trying to replicate their intricate work with our fancy machines. Us humans, on the other hand, have made so many technological and industrial advances that sadly, we alienate ourselves from the very thing that made possible higher thought: sustenance. We take it for granted to such a degree that it is unclear whether or not we'd be able to sustain ourselves if we weren't sustained in the first place. We no longer grow the food we eat or build the houses we live in. Which is fine on the one hand, but we've taken it to extremes, as usual. And by "us," I mean us stupid 'Mericans.

I could go on about the constructed beeswax foundations that lay beneath our every hope and dream, but my hand has begun to smoke from writing so fast, and I realize that the average reader's attention span is more accustomed to short, flashy blurbs than my self-indulgent reveries. So I'll end it there, and instruct you to continue journaling for five minutes. The topic? "Is love an essential human need?"

I will then remind you that children denied physical affection become atrophied, and briefly argue on this basis that yes, it is, although not necessarily romantic love. Although, doesn't this inscription on a Ft. Tryon park bench make you think it should be?