Aurora Renews: Berries and lettuce, fear and hope

Life, it's just so abundant.

Abundant with red juicy, crispy bing cherries. With new found fruits like goumi berries, which not only taste like a smooth and astringent gummy bear, but that provide the magical service to gardeners and the living breathing soil, whereby these plants transform gaseous nitrogen into nutrients that other plants can eat up from the soil. And it's pretty! The plant bushes out slightly, and the droopy berries have gorgeous gold-brown speckles lightly painted in their surface. Oh the goumi! How I love that you have come into my world! Then there's the thimble berry. Can I make love to one more berry before carrying on? The thimbleberry is delicate - like the most tender skin on your body, it's delicate. And because the berry is so soft (bleeding crimson red juice on your fingers even when you ever so carefully pluck the berry away from it's core) it's not often cultivated. This is a berry you can only grow yourself or find in the wild, it's a special one you won't find in the grocery stores. So grateful I am that roommates who have come before me have planted out this self propagating beauty of a bush, so that each morning for the past week, I have enjoyed just 2 or 3 of these creamy, delicate, vibrant berries before anything else enters my body... The texture reminds me of a sweet pie filling, the seeds so tiny, you hardly notice them. They don't explode with juice, rather they are creamy with a viscous liquid. And their flavour is not dissimilar to flower - ey sweet instant jam.

The public spaces here in Victoria, and also those discovered on my recent adventures to Salt Spring Island and Vancouver are abundant with gifts from Pachamama as well. With boulevard gardening prevalent, community orchards bearing fruit free for the enjoying, community gardens, permaculture commons, and folks living in giant collective homes, the abundance of available garden fun and community gathering around this garden fun, is just so inspiring. The batch of gooseberry raspberry jam I made recently would just not exist if it weren't for the combined labours of Pachamama and community members at large tending to and caring for these fruit bearing beauties.

I'm so grateful to have yard space with so many previously established delicacies and plants of plenty. My efforts here in the garden are all a total experiment. I've learned that the weather patterns on this island are certainly quite different then in Ontario, where much of my gardening experience has been learned. Rather then the sweaty, fast, sultry summer days of a classic Ontario summer, the days here, around the summer solstice are chillier and drier, but with so much daylight. The learning is so worth the figs and goji berries that can grow here, and the brilliant amount of leafy greens that you can grow all winter long! Oh, the thrill. I'm learning what is not growing where, what is prolific elsewhere. I'm confused as to the lack of blossoms on my peas, and am amazed at the slug power. My tomatoes don't seem to be loving their buckets, and beans are strugglin! But the lettuces are delicate and delicious, the tomatillos are fruiting :) All an experiment I tell ya...

And my comments about abundance extend so much so to the abundance of lovely people in my life at the moment. While I find myself missing my friends in Ontario, and I know fewer people here then Ottawa or Toronto, I also love the people that have come into my world recently. My dear roommates are so super sweet, they are mindful, respectful, share common interests, and are generally such a pleasure and privilege to share space with. I'm so grateful for a safe, enjoyable living space! And then there's the other folks I've met, some just with brief exchanges, others where intimacy and connection arrived quickly. People like the super nice lady at the local health food shop in my neighbourhood. Or the 40 some odd folks I see on the regular at my weekly dance jam. While my experience with them lasts just 2 hours each week, often with no language exchanged, I feel connected with them in a unique and spiritual way. My new neighbours. The introductions to friends of friends. My colleagues at the Compost Education Centre are a true drama free pleasure. The out of town visitors I've had in recent months: kindergarten friends, uncles, sisters, fathers, cousins, brother in laws...the list goes on and on, with so many that go unmentioned here - beautiful connections that grace my world, as I begin the journey of building my community, my family, here in this new town I have come to call home...

And while the abundance flows here in my writing, know that I write today from a place of hope and joy and happiness, but that certainly, on other days there's a different story that I may be telling myself. Negative self talk, loneliness, longing, dissatisfaction, pity, sorrow, grief, I have moments of these emotions. In a world where guns, racism, refugee crises, climate crises are in an awful abundance - I can feel that pain and grief in my soul...and I'm sometimes scared for our collective future. And I feel vulnerable even writing that here (for you, my audience that is impossible to know) telling you, that I, a person with a positive disposition in life, experiences such low moments. Luckily, these moments are stories. And as soon as we turn things into a story, it can't control us anymore. And I can choose to rewrite stories, and heal with these new stories...

As the days flow by, I want to be grateful for each moment. For the moments of emotion, of pleasure of discomfort. Just be grateful. It's hard, but so so worth it.

Happy solstice beauties! Happy full moon solstice!