We found tools, horse harness bits, musket parts within the floors when we stripped this building of its three layers of 16"-22" wide roughsawn planking pegged to post and beam frames with square cut nails. We restored the frames and replaced the board and batten planking.
1855: originally a blacksmith shop, then a cottage during the Great Depression, a garage by the 1940's, a woodworkshop in the 1980's, a cottage in the 1990's to 2003; now abandoned
Introduction
Seeking that wilderness garden we stopped to reconsider options in 1999. Uprooted by circumstances, homeless by definition we retreated to a pastoral southern Ontario backwater, to be farmhands, caretakers in a small wood heated shed, a relic of the 1850's gardening under a large plastic greenhouse dome.
The wood stove kept it alive. Some nights the full moon floated across the ceiling shining on the thick jungle of recycled abandoned houseplants found in the excess of urban wastelands. The greenhouse, a gift, created a circumstantial state of grace within a dream seeking alternate reality or conceptual ‘stargate’; an escape from a seeming dysfunction, our social, economic dyslexia, the city and fires in the hearts of men.
We considered our circumstance through the long winter wood stove night watch, on occasion by kerosene lamp sitting in groves of flowering jade, jasmine and geraniums, in a whimsical garden.
It was quiet, room to air thoughts at the old blacksmith shed by the swamp on the other side of those hills. We cut firewood under the storm clouds and unfolding tensions within the Tribes of Abraham watching a remote reality.
Laying out clean straw for the ducks we mulled the post-traumatic stress syndromes of the generation. What was unravelling a driving paradigm? The personal dysfunction, our internalized "ptsd" seemed mild measured in the context of the larger chaos. We became a microbic reflection of the common virus.
We gardened, dreamed and worked looking for a gentler vision.
After 4 years we lost that little pastoral backwater due to arrogance, ineptitude, a social clumsiness, perhaps a synchronicity, a telling need to move on and to redefine our misfortunes as fortuitous events.
We’re beginning to understand. We missed many of the salient points on the chaos in the empire, carbon loading, wars on terrorism, crises in the subdivisions, dark age melodrama, collapse of reason. We were caught up in personal disasters unique and sufficient to distraction while waiting for the mother ship.
We’re struggling with promise in an unfolding dark age, an opportunity for optimism at its best.
If the empire is collapsing perhaps the moment is a challenge to recycle wealth and refocus on alternative dreams. "Freedom 55" may well be a gardening opportunity.
Mongrel Diaries is a 1962 - 2008 journals.
It will slowly unfold in bits as the farming tasks allow.
And bear with me..
I'm a senior on a major learning curve here. Rusty dendrites, need to reboot RAM, defrag programs and memory files.
?
what are these
bad attitudes
feeding absolutist philosophies,
self destructive fundamentalism,
creating wars within a shifting paradigm,
while the awakening
restructure urban dynamics
in a dissolving industrial age paradigm
..are global villages growing
culturally unbiased metaphysics
to seed symbiotic civilization
?
what are these
bad attitudes
feeding absolutist philosophies,
self destructive fundamentalism,
creating wars within a shifting paradigm,
while the awakening
restructure urban dynamics
in a dissolving industrial age paradigm
..are global villages growing
culturally unbiased metaphysics
to seed symbiotic civilization
?
Introduction
Seeking that wilderness garden we stopped to reconsider options in 1999. Uprooted by circumstances, homeless by definition we retreated to a pastoral southern Ontario backwater, to be farmhands, caretakers in a small wood heated shed, a relic of the 1850's gardening under a large plastic greenhouse dome.
The wood stove kept it alive. Some nights the full moon floated across the ceiling shining on the thick jungle of recycled abandoned houseplants found in the excess of urban wastelands. The greenhouse, a gift, created a circumstantial state of grace within a dream seeking alternate reality or conceptual ‘stargate’; an escape from a seeming dysfunction, our social, economic dyslexia, the city and fires in the hearts of men.
We considered our circumstance through the long winter wood stove night watch, on occasion by kerosene lamp sitting in groves of flowering jade, jasmine and geraniums, in a whimsical garden.
It was quiet, room to air thoughts at the old blacksmith shed by the swamp on the other side of those hills. We cut firewood under the storm clouds and unfolding tensions within the Tribes of Abraham watching a remote reality.
Laying out clean straw for the ducks we mulled the post-traumatic stress syndromes of the generation. What was unravelling a driving paradigm? The personal dysfunction, our internalized "ptsd" seemed mild measured in the context of the larger chaos. We became a microbic reflection of the common virus.
We gardened, dreamed and worked looking for a gentler vision.
After 4 years we lost that little pastoral backwater due to arrogance, ineptitude, a social clumsiness, perhaps a synchronicity, a telling need to move on and to redefine our misfortunes as fortuitous events.
We’re beginning to understand. We missed many of the salient points on the chaos in the empire, carbon loading, wars on terrorism, crises in the subdivisions, dark age melodrama, collapse of reason. We were caught up in personal disasters unique and sufficient to distraction while waiting for the mother ship.
We’re struggling with promise in an unfolding dark age, an opportunity for optimism at its best.
If the empire is collapsing perhaps the moment is a challenge to recycle wealth and refocus on alternative dreams. "Freedom 55" may well be a gardening opportunity.
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