Tag: health

Sub/urban poetry

Time to fold up this tent and move into my/our deepest meditation zone

for I/we see we have exited our middle-life years

of high-anxiety, rush-rush-rush, fear we’ll die without accomplishing anything.

No more worries about being forgotten

which drove us to write our own origin stories, books and blogs.

We enter our later-life years, not yet our late-life or end-of-life years,

where we begin to harvest the fruits of our labours and investments in retirement,

disconnected from the younger generations,

leaving them to their own social anxieties.

Our path is individualistic in thought

even when it follows well-trodden social change in recent decades that led before us,

tromping on,

bulldozing over,

crushing flat uneven territory little touched by previous thousands of our species’ evolving generations.

We return to the sanitized suburbs of our youth,

securely cocooned,

locked in place like a jigsaw puzzle piece.

We hope you forget about us,

looking to others for inspiration and

distraction from daily drudgery.

We will remember your kindness

in the many “like” presses you made on our blog entries through the years,

your occasional comments much appreciated.

Our journey was prescribed for us at birth.

We have oft resisted but rarely strayed far from our clearly-defined destination.

We are domesticated, if not sophisticated animals,

comfortable in our gilded cages.

Thank you for your time and attention.

G’day, mates!

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Excited to be back on big backyard business

Five pallets treated, three to go…

Meanwhile, the frogs keep busy getting warm…

…and, being childless, little concerned about global warming/climate change (not our future offsprings’ survival to worry about), we stop dreaming about going the offgrid tiny house route, planning for something similar to this, instead…

Time to move

After living 30+ years in the same domicile, which requires walking up/down a short flight of stairs from the garage to the main level, we’ve decided we require a one-level home in which we can age in place as long as possible.

We’ve compared notes, our life companion and ourselves, and agreed that although we want a maintenance-free place in which to die (assisted living facility? hospice? hospital?), we wish to live in a place of our own for the next few years/decades.

This, of course, disrupts our plans for building a backyard writer’s cottage in the woods.

Honestly, though, it’s not a bad thing.

For some reason, we’ve always hesitated tearing apart a wooded backyard, seeing that the main house, with a study/workshop/laboratory, sunroom and garage should have sufficed for our writing and mad scientist tinkering.

Therefore, we’re going to take the leftover wood from our old backyard deck we disassembled in 2001…

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…using most of it to construct the pirate-themed treehouse…

treehouse-2018-Jan

…and build an art exhibit of some kind, we’re not sure what, where the rebar is mounted in the rock outcropping up in the woods, adding a few of the the cedar logs we harvested.  Hopefully, it will inspire the new owners to take it to the next level of artistic expression for themselves.  Regardless, they will be free to do as they please.

Meanwhile, we keep playing with the electronic development boards and getting rid of junk in the house in preparation for moving, all whilst working the midnight shift, saving lives every day with preparation and delivery of the vital fluids we call blood products, thanks to volunteer blood donors and laboratory blood processors.

Our new life, 2018 and onward, free of social media influences, free of social dancing pressures (including social drinking), is more free and fun than ever, quietly getting to know our spouse/wife/life partner/companion all over again.

Now that we know the recycled material we’ve collected will be used to build a sunny garden of our dreams, complete with orchid/tree fern greenhouse and pallet wood gardening shed, it’s time to ride our motorcycle again!

Rock. Gardening. Rock. On.

What once was a rocky knob in the landscape, too hilly for farming, a higher point on the landscape traversed by deer and other animals, (some of them hunted by thousands of years of our human presence), full of fossilised seabed, converted to suburban estate tract, with a small backyard patch of mowable grass, became an herb garden….

…then a flower garden…

…and slowly but surely returns to its forest roots…

The frogs remain the same…from 2004…

…to today!

Can we tell you with these images how happy we’ve been, living the childhood dream of a full-length adult life centred on a cottage in the woods near a town full on intelligentsia?

Would you understand we’ve too often let others temporarily convince us that two people quietly living their lives for each other and no one else can’t possibly be true happiness?

On this, St. Patrick’s Day, whilst we wear a Munster rugby shirt, drink Earl Gray tea and burn a bit of peat turf, our wife at a friend’s house handcrafting note cards, we recall this day 12 years ago when we and our spouse stood on O’Connell’s Bridge in Dublin with work colleagues, snow falling, and watched the Americanised version of the Irish St. Patrick’s Day Parade. We drank quite a bit in those days.

We don’t consume fermented beverages in the quantities we used to, giving our set of states of energy the opportunity to live and die without the poisonous effect of alcohol pickling.

In our mid-50s, we’ve survived our midlife crisis years that extended from age 39 (when we jumped out of an airplane) to age 55 (when we bought a motorcycle).

Now we settle down, childless, free of the pursuit of a reproductive mate that included seven years of dancing, drinking and sleepless nights.

We return to our core set of beliefs that include this cottage and the near celibate life of a woodland hermit monk.

We give up pleasing others, reduce the need for chameleon personality traits, disregard our adolescent contrarian ways and meditate on relaxing, no expectations, no deadlines, nothing but the pure joy of meaninglessness.

We’ve written the text we needed to form our own personal creation myths — poems, short stories, novels, skits, plays and sketches, including photographic essays (“a picture’s worth a thousand words”) — removing the need for creation myths and organised religions of others.

We wonder, other than this ongoing set of dispersed blogs, if we’ll write a fictional narrative tale that’ll take on the traditional book-length novel form.

Should we? Do we need or want to?

What if being here is all we want?

Food for thought…just in time for lunch!

Daily progress

Spent the morn measuring and testing the platform for the writer’s room portion of the backyard meditation space in the woods…8’x8′ the simplest base size…

Will precut and predrill the pieces after the greenhouse is finished.

Speaking of which, it looks like the greenhouse rock foundation idea will win out, which meant scraping dirt until we hit solid rock outcropping…

North view

East view

We want the greenhouse to be 8 feet high at the center, motivating us to build a two-foot tall foundation.

The greenhouse base will rest on 4″×4″ posts secured to the concrete footings and the rock foundation built around that.

Something like these images from the Web…

Can hardly wait to pick out and pile rocks but we must sleep, too.

But first, we pause to meditate whilst staring at the treehouse…