People say that Summer is the best time of the year for fresh produce, but Spring is "not half bad," to make a Yorkshire understatement.  You have to buy or grow the good stuff of Summer, like tomatoes.  In Spring the edible goodies are, literally, growing like weeds.  That's because most of them are weeds.

Nettles are one of my favorite wild foods.  I love the tea, made from leaves desiccated in the dehydrator until crumbly.  I love the fresh greens, cooked like spinach and substituted for spinach in any recipe, but without the slimy, unappetizing gooey black mass that cooked spinach becomes.

I understand that there are contests around the world to see who can eat the most raw nettle leaves without vomiting, despite the sting.  I've never tried it (and probably never will), but supposedly you can roll a fresh leaf upside-down, from base to edge, and eat it raw without getting stung.  I think I'll skip.  Nettles are too good cooked to bother.  Creamed nettles, nettle pesto, nettle dip, nettle green sauce, nettle fak'a hoy - the last two are African recipes worth dying for.  It's probably unfair of me not to print the recipes here.  Sorry, I can't give away all my secrets.

Another workhorse of the un-rototilled garden is dock.  Dock is used as a green or potherb, and has a slightly lemony, faintly sour taste.  We like it in spring soup, for chilly days.  Dock doesn't reduce as much as other greens when cooked.  Because it likes disturbed ground, it often pops up in the garden before the domesticated vegetables are even in the ground.

I prefer many of the wild weeds to their more commonly available domestic counterparts.  Just as I prefer nettles to spinach, I would rather eat Japanese Knotweed any day over asparagus.  Asparagus is nasty.  The stalks are either like chewing on the branches of small, flavorless trees (undercooked), or mushy rolls of wet newspaper (overcooked).  Yuck. 

The flavor of Knotweed isn't like asparagus.  It actually has a flavor.  It's just a little tart, and the texture has a little crunch to it.  It's good enough prepared simply, sauteed in butter or oil with salt and pepper, that you may never try it any other way.  It's the young shoots - eight inches tall or less - that you eat this way.  Older, taller shoots can be peeled and sliced and used like rhubarb.  Don't confuse it with Poke, another Spring shoot which grows under last year's stalks; Poke needs to be cooked in two changes of water.  

I do not get it.  I just do not get it.  People spend so much time, effort, and money trying to get rid of their dandelions.  Eat them!  Eat the greens, use the roots for a decaf "coffee," put the flowers in salads or use them to make wine.  Or just let them be - they are so pretty.  How many places can you go in the spring and see people trying to get rid of dandelions - with their yellow flowers - so they can put in things like daffodils - which have yellow flowers.  Besides, dandelions are a huge early spring resource for bees.  If you poison the dandelions, you poison the bees, which will cut into the supply of that worth-it's-weight-in-gold, highly in-demand local honey everybody wants.

I went on a plant walk, and one of my fellow walkers told me that he is highly allergic to bee stings.  When he gets stung, he mashes a plantain leaf in his mouth to release the juices, and puts it on the sting like a poultice.  I got stung on the face a couple times (veil fail while working the hives), so I tried it out.  I munched up the leaf, stuck it on the stings, and kept it there about 15 minutes.  I also got stung on the hand, and I didn't do the plantain thing on that sting.  The stings on my face did not swell, did not turn red, and did not itch.  The hand sting drove me crazy for a week. Apparently one of the properties of plantain is that it removes toxins. Good to know.

Please don't think that reading this brief essay gives you enough information to go out and safely start eating your backyard weeds.  As I tell my foraging students, get a book! Go out with someone who knows what they are doing. Look at Wildman Steve Brill's website, or Sunny Savage's Youtube videos or VeriaLiving TV shows.  Whenever you try a new food, take just a little the first time, until you gain experience with both identifying and eating wild foods.

Once you start eating wild foods, you'll be amazed at how many there are around, and how prolifically they grow.  They are there for the taking. Spring is here, and it's time to eat some weeds!

    Once, after I had been  traveling, I woke up in the middle of the night with no idea where I was.  The most surprising thing about this  experience was that I was completely unafraid.
      
     I sort of walked around for a few minutes, and eventually figured out
where I was by noticing that the bathroom was on my right, and therefore I must  be at home.  It was all very  matter-of-fact.  It happened again,
months later and in a different place, and once again I oriented myself by the bathroom.  Which probably says a lot about where I spend most of my time, but that’s an essay for a different time.      
 
      I’ve written about undergoing vision therapy before (see Archive August 2011 and September 2011), and I thought that particular journey was over.  I was wrong.  I keep learning new things and seeing things differently and going new places.  And finding that I have no idea where I  am.

      This reminds me of Ellen DeGeneres’ joke about her grandmother taking up walking – and now they have no idea where the hell she is.  That’s me.

      I knew that the vision therapy was going to affect more than just my visual acuity – it would affect the way I see the world, not just the way I see.  That had already happened; you can’t change one variable in a closed system and expect the rest to keep chugging along unaffected.

      I was unprepared for how it would change my art.  At first, it was color.  I suddenly seemed to have a greater facility for, and desire for, great glaring gobs of color.  That’s weird.  There’s no reason that should have happened.  Vision therapy doesn’t do anything about recognizing or appreciating colors and the interplay between them.  But here it was.  I don’t know if I am unique in this.  I do know that in the 1980’s, according to the fashion of the day, I decorated my house all in shades of white.  By the early ‘90’s, I had become so color starved that I painted every room in my house a different color.  And I am never going back.

      Also, in the 2000’s, I went to a big exhibit of work by the late artist Andrew Wyeth, famous for his  rather bleak color sense.  By the
end of the exhibit, I was rushing to get through it.  When I emerged from the building, slightly panicked and breathing hard, I remember thinking, “I’ve got to get away from all those god-awful browns.”

      So I guess my color sense has been a developing thing, and vision therapy opened it up further.  It’s not supposed to do that, but okay,
cool.

      I figured I would be all about learning space, and how to depict it, and utilizing all this newfound depth perception in my pictures, creating vistas and layers and painting 3-D rooms you can practically walk into. That so didn’t happen.  The twelve-year-old part of my personality (about 97% of it) rolled her eyes and said “b-o-r-i-n-g.” 

      But I’ve really got a groove on for texture.

      Ooh, I just want to run my fingers through shag carpet and rocks and dirt and dry orzo and dreadlocks and tree bark.  I’ve become a surface pervert.  Pretty soon I’ll be wearing a rumpled raincoat and feeling up people’s tire treads in parking lots. 
      
     I guess I was texture-starved, too, and didn’t know it, because my lack
of depth perception had made texture, and tactility, unavailable to me.  Who would anticipate that a visual deficiency could also profoundly inhibit one’s sense of surface as well?  

      Okay, so vision therapy, combined with my own particular pathology, united to create some  unexpected results.  All of this has refracted into the art that I create. I have lost all interest in creating pretty pictures – you know, the kind that actually sell?  I’ve been sculpting, and creating weird three-dimensional art reminiscent of ancient artifacts, and abstract paintings with magic elements that can only be seen from certain angles.  It’s been really fun. The problem is that none of this stuff is photographable.  It just doesn’t translate.  I can’t make it flat, and fit it into a 2-dimensional medium.  It won’t squish.  It doesn’t look good on film – it’s not photogenic.

      It’s tactile.  It wants to be touched.

      I have no idea what to do with this website.  Most of the new stuff looks like it was made by a completely different person, because, in a sense, it was.  Not the same eyeballs.  Not the same brain.  Should I start over?  I’ve always been committed to following the muse wherever she leads, even if it’s not a marketable place.  I didn’t become an artist so I could do the same thing every day.  I admire jazz singer Dianne Reeves because she’s so daring. She takes a lot of chances in her singing and in her choice of material, refusing to be limited to any genre or style. She’s willing to let you hear her taking those chances, even when they don’t work.  I want to be like that. When I’m not fondling hay bales and the bottoms of cheap flip-flops.
      
     The truth is that I don’t really know what I am interested in
artistically anymore.  It’s sub-verbal.  All I am doing is putting the medium in my hands and seeing where I go with it.  
  
      I guess I’ll be all right.  As long as I can find the bathroom.

    We must have heaven, at least a little once in a while, in order to navigate earth.   
    My husband and I bought ourselves a fountain for our anniversary.  I am creating a haven, and I thought it would add to the nirvana atmosphere.  It certainly does. There are many other components of a haven, too, though; some can be real and some can be pretend.  What you can't actually obtain can be summoned from memory or imagination or books once read long ago.
    When I was a kid, my haven was my suburban back yard.  It was a whole world to me, and the rabbits and the crows and the Queen Anne's Lace were my best friends.
    Now I have a fountain and bird feeders and wind chimes and chickens.  Yup, chickens.  That part is hard to explain.  You have to watch them poking around in their silly way to understand how they contribute to the bliss factor.

    You have to create bliss in order to withstand the grieving, when it comes.  
    But bliss is it's own reward, too - worth doing just for the doing of it.  Some say that paradise is a garden (the Koran) and some say it's a library (Jorge Luis Borges).  What if it's a garden where you can read?

    I like to say "create your bliss" rather than "follow your bliss", as Joseph Campbell did.  To follow something means that it exists somewhere else, away from you.  And you might never find it.  If you create it, it's yours.  Always.  Now, and in memory forever.
    Spring reminds us to remember to create our bliss.  In fact, it forces itself upon us with a big sloppy kiss.  The Greeks and Romans and Norse all held wild bacchanalian fertility festivals to honor the power of Spring.  They understood that Spring, and the deities associated with the season, controlled mighty, far-reaching kingdoms.  The ancients said that all the gods bow before Venus.  That is how important love and flowers and sex and seeds are to life, and to living.
    Many cultures continue to celebrate Spring fetes and fairs and holidays today.  Even grim Soviet Russia celebrated May Day.  I think these Spring happiness parties are so ubiquitous around the world because they are so necessary.
    As a people, we have gotten away from this, to our detriment.  We expect ourselves to just keep grinding away in our offices.  I don't think it works.  It just makes us crazy.  Like if we just keep repeating these autonomic motions, somehow we'll forget how much we want to be outside.

    The words "haven" and "heaven" must derive from similar roots.  We can surely survive without an actual, present heaven - we're doing it every day we're alive.  But can we survive without a haven?  A port, a refuge, a slice of goodness pie?  Why would we want to?

    So many people forget to make themselves happy. 
    It is tempting to think you need lots of "stuff" to make a haven.  After all, I bought a fountain.  It isn't truly necessary, though.  All it really requires is a state of mind.  Even the concrete and asphalt can be beautiful in the spring.   

    You probably don't need an actual fountain to find your bliss.  Maybe all you need is a fragment of lyric in your head:

    The truth is, I don't know what it is that you need to create your bliss.  Yours might be different than mine.
    But I do know that you must create it.
    Let the Gods of Spring roll over you and have their way with you.  Celebrate your surrender to all that is bigger and more beautiful and stronger than your daily existence.
    Then you'll recognize heaven, when you get there.  
    Your heaven.

I signed up for a workshop to photograph the Bruce Munro exhibit at Longwood Gardens.  Bruce Munro is an installation artist who sculpts with light.  The exhibit should not be described; it should be experienced, therefore all I will say about it is "go."

I shy away from photography workshops in general.  I know for a fact from many past experiences that photography workshops, usually set up with the idea of giving photobugs an opportunity to shoot some interesting thing/place/situation/whatever, actually provide an opportunity to take lots of pictures of a whole row of photographers' butts as they jockey for the best spots right in front of the subject.  All photographers' butts look exactly alike, regardless of age or gender.  They take that Official Photographer Stance, bent over the tripod, and it's like a sea of endlessly repeating generic buttocks.  Not being a big fan of repetitive patterns in my work, I usually skip the workshop scene.

This was different: it was after hours, it was at night, it was the Bruce Munro exhibit.   Therefore, I thought I would be different, too.  It would not be the usual Festival of Idiocy that is my life.  I would take Great Pictures.  It would be Swell.

The weather was beautiful, I was not late, I did not forget anything (like my camera), all seemed to be going great.  Then I arrived, and that was when it all started to fall apart. 

The idea of the workshop was that we would get to see and shoot the exhibit after dark, after all the people had gone home.  And the people had all gone home.  But it was not dark.  It was not getting dark.

Last week was the Summer Solstice, a.k.a. the Longest Day of the Year.  When it doesn't get dark until Really Really Late.  So, we went to shoot the light exhibit, in the dark, on one of the seven lightest days of the year.  Excellent planning on somebody's part.

Then, right at the beginning, horrors, my holga broke.  It just stopped - taking - pictures.  Since the Holga is a camera (well, allegedly), this presented a problem.   But HA!  I had brought two holgas! Because I couldn't remember what @##$@# kind of film I had loaded into either camera, so I brought them both.  So for a moment it seemed that I was saved, God did not hate me, there was hope - and light- somewhere in my future!  What a geek!

Allow me to explain.  Bringing a Holga to a photography workshop is like showing up on the Autobahn riding a Big Wheel.  And then making revving noises with your mouth.   One of the four instructors for the workshop (they were all excellent, but shall remain unnamed so I hopefully don't piss them off) looked at Helga the Holga and said "what the hell is that?"  Photography workshops are great places to stand around and compare equipment and talk about how long your lenses are.  If you know what I mean.

In case I'm not being explicit enough, I'm saying photography workshops almost always devolve into big-penis contests. 

Luckily, I have a Nikon for when I do Real Photography, so I was equipped with penis and could keep shooting.  So I whipped out the penis and took some lovely photos of Longwood by daylight, since there were two hours of full light still to go for our night photography workshop. The wonderful people at Longwood thoughtfully provided a guide to help us navigate the exhibit sites we were to photograph.  Our guide was very thorough.  She was so thorough that I'm certain that she's in every single shot I took.  I finally gave in and just started framing her up, since I figured she was going to be in every picture anyway.

Longwood is big.  It allowed me to discover, as our intrepid group trouped about the grounds, that my tripod was really heavy.  I looked around, as I was gasping for breath, and noticed that everybody else's tripod was about a third the diameter of mine.  I decided I have the hurricane-strength tripod.  Next storm we get, I'm going to put the tripod out and see which survives the hurricane better: the tripod or my house.  Hey, I may carry a Holga in my holster, but my tripod is massive hardcore Triple X. 

It got dark!  Which was great!  Woo-hoo!  Except I couldn't see the controls on my cameras!  Luckily, I brought a flashlight.  The little flat kind, not too bright, perfect for not screwing up everybody else's night shots at a photography workshop.  Like I said, I did not forget anything for this workshop!  Not me!  

There was no way to use it and work the camera settings at the same time.  This is the kind of flashlight you have to press, on both sides, to make it light up.  I could have put it in my mouth, leaving my hands free to work the camera.  I could have.  I just couldn't bring myself to do it.  I don't want to die.  And I really don't want to end up on "1000 Ways to Die."  I had visions of putting this thing in my mouth and going "ZZZZTTTTTTT" as I electrocuted myself with a tiny flashlight at the Longwood Gardens night photography workshop.  Consider the earlier discussion about penis contests and let your mind wander.  The irony is too ripe.  I just don't want my obituary to read like that.

All told, I actually had a great time and got some really nice mediocre shots, which is what I went to do.  They say you either have a good time or a good story, but I got lucky and had both.

There's another workshop in August, if you want to go.  Don't forget your tripod!