Full October Moon: How to live with the rhythm of nature

The leaves are just turning where I live and the nights are suddenly cold. As I learn to live closer to the rhythms of the earth, I notice which plants turn first---the climbing relative of ivy on our southern fence has already turned brilliant scarlet amid the green leaves of plum and nettle, and then the leaves of the cherry trees start to turn. 

Still there are a few blackberries, just enough for a tart taste on the way to the chicken coop every evening. The Siberian buckwart is abundant with bright orange berries loaded with vitamins and essential fatty acids. But much of the garden lies in browning shambles. The last of the tomatoes are barely ripening ahead of the mold and a line of pumpkins sits frost curing on the back porch. 

In this modern world, these things make me odd. My neighbors have yards but little in the way of gardens. I exist at technological extremes--alternating between dictating notes to an iPad and wielding a short-handled shovel. I tend to leave out a lot of the accouterments of modern life in between. We don't own a TV and our microwave dates from the previous century.  I have noticed that this embrace of the extremes of technology without the middle part has become the mark of a certain tribe in today's world,

We are often people concerned with the future of the earth and the human impact on it. We see technology as a tool to be used carefully and also as a drug that can both save lives and enslave if self-control is not exercised. We grow food from seed and cook from scratch, but at the same time we communicate over vast distances with the most sophisticated technology This is a tribe that admires simple living but cannot abide simple thoughts. 

Here are a couple of seasonal tips for those of similar mind:

• Now is the time of symbolic harvest, whether you grow food or not. It is the time to take stock and think about gift giving. Use these October days to make or shop for gifts for whichever midwinter holiday you celebrate. This is why our ancestors placed the gift-giving holiday several months after harvest. We have ample time now but no time to waste. And forethought will make the winter celebrations much less stressful. 
• At the end of October comes the first of the great sugar festivals of modern times. But modern medicine increasingly shows that a diet high in sugar is even more dangerous than a diet high in fat. Cut the sugar in most recipes by half and see if you notice. If necessary add a little back but only a little and then less the next time you make the recipe. You will likely find that you enjoy the treat every bit as much and you will ingest less sugar.
• Security experts say the best long-term defense against natural and human disaster is not skill with weapons but skill with the soil. Those who can grow their own food without lots of electricity and plastic shall inherit the earth within the next one hundred years. Start the process of learning in your family. You don't need to do it all at once. But now is the time to begin. Dig a garden bed in your yard or acquire and fill potting containers for your balcony or apartment window. You don't need to have a farm now, only get to know the complex skills needed to make food grow from soil. Turn the mass of grass and roots. Add compost, manure, unpolluted wood ashes and other natural fertilizers. In climates where frost is not imminent, plant green mulchto keep weeds down and treat the soil. In colder climates, let the cleansing cold beat back pests and mold in your garden until spring.
• Substitute grated zucchini for milk, yogurt and other liquids in cake. It not only increases your the ratio of vegetables in your diet and uses up excess late-season zucchinis, but it also tastes better (if you like your cake moist and rich). Grated zucchini freezes well and can be put in just about everything sweet or savory.
• Add calendula flower petals to salads, breads and pasta dishes. A lovely dash of fall color and health benefits at a time when your body is preparing for the cold. 
• Save leftover potatoes and add them to bread dough for a softer, fluffier bread or roll recipe. 
• Fallen leaves, corn husks and other normal (not moldy) dying vegetation, make good mulch for borders and along fences. Put down an armload of drying foliage where you don't want spring weeds to sprout in six months. You'll have a tidier yard with less work. 
• Carrots don't need to be dug immediately. Whether you have a root cellar or not, they keep better in the ground as long as the soil is not frozen and can be dug up as needed. Extra space in the refrigerator and less chance of spoiled carrots.  

These are just a few seasonal tips. Please share your own simple living ideas and experiences in the comments. Sharing your wealth of experience is one way to celebrate the symbolic abd real harvest.

A candle in the frost

Most evenings I teach English as a second language in order to stretch the family budget a bit. The lessons are based on the same principle as my blogs and newsletter. A cup of tea and some food for the soul are crucial. 

One class has been going on for seven years at a local community center. It's a small group of women who meet every week for tea and conversation with my interjections on grammar for spice. And this is by no means a group of only  young ambitious women. Our elder is seventy-three and she's the only one who consistently does her homework. 

A couple of weeks ago a hard frost came through in mid-April and killed just about everyone's tomato and cucumber starts. Only the eldest was spared.

She hunkered over her notebook filled with carefully noted English sentences and fairly cackled with delight, "Too early for seedlings last week. Now I'll put them out and then when the last frost comes with the three frozen men, I put a candle in the greenhouse. That will keep them snug. Just a little candle."

I had fared better than most because I hadn't had time to put out all of my seedlings yet. But by the first week in May I had to plant them. And I thought they would be fine. The weather had obviously turned to late spring with grass shooting up and everything starting to bloom.

But then out of the north it came--a huge storm of rain and sleet. We were on a bike ride with friends at the time and expected only a little spring shower. We stashed our bikes beneath an awning and took shelter in a restaurant for soup and hot chocolate. But then we watched with trepidation as a deluge flooded the road. Sleet fell white amid the pouring rain.

And the air behind the cloud bank was ice cold. For three days it stayed and I learned this is what the old-timers here call "the three frozen men." There are always three days in May when a wall of Arctic air comes down to destroy crops and cripple orchards in Central Europe. It often falls on the days named after the Czech saints Pankrác, Servác and Bonifác--three grim old men with severe faces.

I hurried to cover my tender squash seedlings that evening. But my greatest fear was for the tomatoes and peppers in a small greenhouse. It isn't just frost they won't tolerate but anything close to it. 

Feeling a bit like I was reenacting a folk superstition, I took a candle and a prayer to the greenhouse late in the evening under the light of the full moon--now shining in a clear, frosty sky. My breath froze in silver clouds as I stepped inside. The frost was already creeping in.

The next morning I woke up to a world gone unseasonably white. The blossoming plum trees were coated in ice. The grass was crunchy under foot. Even the soil had frozen half an inch deep. According to local measurements, the frost had lasted at least 6 hours throughout the night. It was much harder than I'd expected.

Some of the covered plants suffered frostbite. Anything vulnerable that wasn't covered was entirely gone. But the peppers and tomatoes were fine with the candle still burning in the dawn--a tiny flame but just enough to keep the frost at bay.

I look forward to going back to the tea-and-chat circle next week to compare notes and tell how it really is the case that we need the wisdom of old-timers.

In hunter-gatherer societies and even in the days when most people lived through farming, elders and their experience had a crucial place for precisely this reason. But today with chemicals and technology so much has changed that it's hard to remember to listen.

Yet these are the days when a frost of another kind is coming down--the chill of authoritarianism and xenophobia. There are signs from all sides that times will be hard. 

For me this is a timely reminder to pay attention to those with long experience. And to simply listen to long-burning candles in the frost.

The healing draft - A poem on home herbalist medicine

I have trusted my life to doctors and surgeons and I have trusted my life to dusty herbalist tomes along and my own brain. I've done each in its time and with a lot of forethought. 

I have written these experiences about reclaiming my own health and I've debated in minute detail with proponents of the "medical model" approach. 

My family depends on our herb bed for 90 percent of our medicine and health care. We're lucky to have built up a good perennial supply and the skills to use it. We're also lucky to avoid most chronic illnesses requiring medications with unpredictable interactions.

Still we've seen time and time again that herbs grown and used at home are far superior in action to pills and drugs bought from the pharmacy. We are as careful about the pharmacy as we are about the herbs (and we have a good friend who is a pharmacist to advise us when we do go that route). 

Even with this experience, the drumbeat of advertising and skepticism about herbal medicines is so constant that we have the same discussion every year--just me and my husband as well as with our extended family. We've seen herbs work again and again. And yet there is a resistance to believing that something so simple could be so powerful or that if it is so powerful that it could ever be used safely. 

After a recent skiing trip--during which my husband was too apathetic to put herbal salve on his sore muscles or take echinacea tincture to stave off an encroaching cough, while I breezed through both with the help of these simple medicines--I am tired of the endless argument. I am tired of citing studies and debating with a behemoth industry with my relatives as surrogates. 

This is the season of inspiration and intuition, the days just before Imbolc, and so instead of another detailed treatise, I put it into a poem:

Every day an anecdote,
Sickness, headache, injury or pain
Washed away as if through clear water.
You've got two wore legs-
One rubbed with salve,
The other left to rest and ache.
One is new again in the morning,
one is stiff and swollen.
But it is not a study.
It isn't clinical and you are not blind.

It means nothing, they say.
A child crying in pain,
Blisters raised on the skin.
A six-year-old sister goes to pick the leaves,
to brew the tea, to place the cool cloth
against the flaming skin.
And the child smiles,
the blisters disappear
in ten minutes by the phone clock.
But it is not a study.
It isn't clinical and you are not blind.

How many times must you see it?
I ask my brother, my friend, my doctor, my dear one
How many times makes a study?
How many people sick with a lasting cough,
How many who drink the garden draft,
who get up and tend those who took pills instead?
How many times before you understand
that medicine is not in an ad?
It isn't Big Pharma or Big Natura.
It is in the hands, the care, the knowledge.
It is not a study.
It isn't clinical and you are not blind. 

The questions fall heavy and predictable
like the drum beats of a campaign.
What if you make a mistake?
What if it doesn't help? 
What about the things you cannot fix or cure?
What about all the studies with freeze-dried herbs?
Who are you to say?
You have no double blind or placebo.
You have only whispers
gathered over a thousand years.
You have only the bright faces of your family.
You have only this little plot of growing things.
You have only your own health taken back.
It is not a study.
It isn't clinical and you are not blind.

This is my wish to all in this season--health, healing and inspiration. May your home be snug and your well of strength brim full.