hoar frost

 Photos would be nice today, but i will try to describe. We have been living in a fairy tale world of hoar frost for many days, and  neighbours here that i have spoken to, we all agree it is so beautiful every thing covered in white. A 3 cm  thick wrap around of white down on even the spider webs,  But we all miss the sun. We  all  have been, so it seems, on sun quests, and we have all found  that sun light!. The day before yesterday i climbed up out of it, and saw it is just a small cloud hanging over our neighbourhood. 

This morning i did see stars out of my bedroom window, faint, but stars nevertheless. And stepping outside, clearness does come with colder temperatures, it was -15 C.  And the hoarfrost has transformed into something... In a few hours from now... it is funny how it has been so dark this year as i was explaining here on blog early this winter that we have lots of light, oops not when it is cast over all the time. Anyway i am so looking forward to the light that will come, i  expect  the hoarfrost to be sparkling.  My path to the outhouse earlier , branches were hanging over low, i had to duck . Usually  i will knock of this hoarfrost when in my way, but it had transformed from down into ice crystals. I have never seen it like that.

All is well in the world.

masonhalea richardsonii

 Not knowing kind of what to write about, to many ideas floating around in my head . One of them nagging  for a long time, that i want to write about is  the war in  Ukraine.  But i will not. I will not go into it. 

and on cue

"hey Don  what ever you want!" i  scream at  my husband, as i am bothered by something he snarls at me. It does seem i am often at war in my own house.

 Earlier, 10 minutes ago,  he was coughing a lot, and i gave him some Masonhalea  richardsonii, Arctic tumble weed, to chew on. And took some myself too.

 He wanted to know what are the medicinal benefits. Everyone i hang out with otherwise knows of this gorgeous little lichen that we find on top of our mountains,  in the alpine.  We, my hiker connections, know that it is good for a sore throat, it is native american knowledge around here. And as i am chewing it right now i have come to like its flavor, when not taking it too often.

We frigging all know! And i am not upset at my husband  now for not knowing, he does not hike, he is my walking buddy . But i am upset at  the fact that when i google it, it crosses out masonhalea richardsonii and gives me links to  anti biotics.  Like what is wrong with the media and the Internet ( i have no tv, i am spared that one.)

And that is why i try not to listen to the war on Ukraine, to me it is outrages that this war is still going on. 

humbly but so is my war with my husband. flaring up too often for my liking. 

For our walk i will not instigate or react. That should be possible, Out in nature, he and i, we are at our best. I do not want to say for today, that is too big of chunk for me to bite off.

I will let you know, and please when you catch us in the act, do not encourage us

How would you help us, when you see us bicker?

What works for you to stir a difficult relationship towards more harmony?

and for the masonhalea, i will take another bit, because i often cough when coming into the cold air, also wondering if it is the dust in my house though that is hard on my throat, or the  woodsmoke, or my husband a smoker (outside luckily but still) . The masonhale will be good.

 epilogue

I coughed twice on the hour walk,  lightly. so for sure not more then usual.  

And! we were all lovingly good, and when we talked to the birds (probably redpolls), they sweeped passed us, if to say hi.

I will extend  my resolution, because already back inside, two things have been said... to which i shut up myself, and did not react to his. I will extend for lunchtime.

massage

 My husband just gave me an awesome shoulder massage, I lay on the floor on my belly, he sits on a chair, his feet on my shoulders, upper back.  At the end i turn around and he presses on my shoulder with his feet when i lay on my back. The opening of my heart,  maybe :). This morning started of less open hearted.

 This morning meditating again with impermanence in mind. I try to get it.  This fear of impermanence that Budhism talks about as the elephant footprint of ...i forget, but i get the idea.. I contemplated that  when it is not my fear of impermanence,  what is my fear? What came to me is, that I am triggered by: 

 Before meditation, i got up to go to the bathroom, as it turned out my husband was using it, i kind of knew, but my brain not fully working. He grunts as i try to enter, i tell you he takes his time in there. But his grunt, felt by me, as aimed at me.  of course if you know us a little thing like this often escalates a bit. Nothing major, not at war or anything. But as i learned 25 years ago with the course of miracles, it is either negative or positive, you either feel good about something or not. no matter how little. And this was a negative one.

 Fast forward to  my meditation; contemplating, I don't mind impermanence, or do I? I enjoy the coming and  going of things, looking forward to something, enjoying the something enjoying the after. 

 aha But i do want my life to be always be smooth sailing! no interruptions early in the morning at bathroom time please.

I wonder if that what is meant. by the suffering of change?

 Buddhism  talks about the -suffering of suffering-. Pema Chodron in her latest book mentions it fleetingly. It is i think about the deep suffering, like people in war or,  or people very sick, etc. And Pema somehow writes, that that often is ongoing, one horror after the other.

I have questions about that too. 

Wood

 It feels i am on roll with blogging, i decided to go with the flow of it. I wake around 7 am, meditate for half an hour,  go on the computer ( ah see i skipped my exercises, still not a habit), I made and ate breakfast.. takes 10 min tops. (i will time it tomorrow). And now 9 am. The newspaper says sunrise in Whitehorse is at 9 am. I do not know at what kind of horizon this sun is rising above. We do live in the mountains here, but if it rose i am sure i should see some light, i will go out and look now! ok maybe there is a very faint glow on the eastern horizon, which accidentally has no trees or mountains, but it is really too dark to see. It is dark out no doubt about it.

And as the city is also in that direction, on a clear night the city 80 km away will give off a glow .

Anyway i was going to write about my wood cutting.

  My house should be smaller. I think it is insulated ok, could be better. Our windows are  triple planes or more. Our ceilings are lowish 8 feet.  I think our house is 1600 square feet. We have a large woodstove an old RSF, in the middle of the house.  Old , meaning we do not know, we have had it 20 years, but it was bought second hand. The insulated chimney is the part that gets replaced  a little more often. 

We live in an old growth forest, mixed spruce and aspen.  Due to climate, our biggest trees only get two feet in diameter. We live at the edge of a far out subdivision. say 200 people.   To the east is our city, to the west is Champagne and Haines jct. And south 200 km no roads or settlements there is Alaska. To the North more kilometers of space.

To be so far out is  not very good for the environment,  but gives me an opportunity to live from nature. Lots of wood at our disposal.  You know i even eat it.  We do need permits if cutting it outside of our property. Our house is partially build with spruce logs, from a mill in Carcross. 

Our wood for heating is right here!  Still, like i said my husband is not able to cut anymore.  But for 30 years he did. or we did, and we always enjoyed it,  As a family we made it lots of fun. We never worked our son very hard (maybe ask him)  we found it more important that living this way was happiness, not hard work. But it is hard work. Very labor intensive. I like to joke that wood heat makes you warm many times over. Include the dusting and sweeping i have to do  in the house due to it. Wood is very dirty.

So yesterday, the woods were magnificently beautiful, the hoarfrost  2 centimeters long, the birds abundant.

ehh 9.30 am still pitch black out there, but i am going to wrap this up.

Yesterday two people, 4 hours work incl, getting there on foot) maybe we cut  2 weeks worth of wood, for average winter temperatures ( -15C/ -20C) I actually have no idea.  But i know to cut all my wood for all year,   as a family we were out there,  days, many days.  And then the splitting, stacking, bringing in, stoking. on and on. It is a way of life.

And now we get older, we have started to buy most of our wood, 500 dollars a cord as is.

9.45 am  i stepped outside, still very faint light at the eastern horizon no change from at 9 am.

First light i know  is around 11 am, i have to look into that, why the newspaper says 9 am.

electricity

 I think I have mentioned before that our electricity bill is   approx. 40 dollars per month. I do feel it gives us a lot of luxury.

Is going electric the answer?

To me NOT when as a society we do not curb our use. I can only imagine all the problems when we all go electric.

Last night we watched a movie, the Little Pink House, i can recommend it. It is about people being evicted from their own houses, for Pfizer, who is now long gone from the site, it didn't work out for them there. 

But it made me think of something  i had seen this summer, My husband and i drove through Hudson's Hope,   I loved Hudson's Hope and that whole area there, i had never been there.

To see humongous structures being build, you can't think; oh this is a very green/clean solution. I don't know how anyone can.

Last night after the movie, i googled for the website of the Site-C dam there,  It is  saying -clean energy-, with a photo of a big bulldozer. Like are you kidding me, clean energy?

It breaks my heart even for the land altered, animals displaced and the people forced to move out, just so society can run wild,  other people (like in the movie, not those that had their houses destroyed) can sit in their houses, and demand everything at their fingertips.

And now the talk about fusion, very scary to me.  Nothing that i google, depicts a harmonious life, One with nature.

And we do need nature, we are nature. If we destroy it for advancement, of whom, you might ask, we ultimately destroy ourselves.

What is the answer for you?

 For me,  for today i will  go cut wood with my neighbour. Wood still the best answer for heating our houses. I can walk (40 min) to the site we picked, yes, we do use a chainsaw,  we take dead trees in the mature forest, but not all of them, we are leaving the mother trees, as we call them, for the woodpeckers and all.

 My answer may seem impossible for you, far fetched, but i am sure there is something little you can do.

I do believe every little bit helps.

 

critical thinking

 Yes  i agree ( to comments below my last post.) That there is a place and time for critical thinking, and as i emailed the leader of my meditation group. she wrote back that some of the group  expressed that they missed my presence, because i was always able to start a discussion.. So i did take that as a compliment. 

To express, maybe again, I do  feel i can get better at knowing where it is good to be critical and where i can nip it , my thoughts going rampant,  in the bud.

And i like my critical thoughts to be just that; knowing that one way or another is not good or bad, or false or true but just what it is. Which does bring me to the question what is the  truth anyway. I am sure since Socrates (or whoever mentioned it first) there has been a lot written about that.

I like to believe we all have our own truth. But that gets complicated, yet we see it all around us.

Dawn is upon us, i soon want to get ready for our morning walk.  Looking out of my window I think nobody will deny that  it is getting light outside, and we call that dawn.

The problem comes in when i feel that walks are good for me and my husband. For all i know maybe they keep us stuck in a pattern that is not very outgoing. And to a bit more outgoing would  maybe be very beneficial to our health. Now at break of day, we both start to get ready for a walk, mind you a habit i love and am very grateful for.  

Hey you know where it gets difficult for me, when people say without question , this IS good or bad. Why not say; for me it works at the moment.

So this writing here  (currently as in which i started up recently), of course was born out of frustration of me feeling bombarded with opinions that to me were neither true nor false, but were claimed to be so.  From now on when someone states a fact, i can choose to just listen to it, and appreciate that that is their fact. And here on this blog i will spew mine.

This afternoon i have an appointment with my astrologer. 

How is that for; whatever, if that works for you, that is great?

 

How annoying must i have been

 Last night it occurred to me, how i never did get. Now there is an opening, i still do not get it fully, but..

I am reading Pema Chodron's latest book.  My old meditation group is reading it, they started this morning. I do not join them anymore because  i do not drive into town anymore on a regular base, and certainly  not at 6 am in the morning. But as they started this new book i thought i join them in spirit.

 Now  over the years my opinion of my dear dear Pema took a bit of a gnaw, because her teacher was involved in a sexual abuse case, and i found her response to it all rather callous...

Nevertheless, maybe as she learned lots of helpful stuff from her perverted teacher, i learned a lot from her.

But  reading her new book, i am half way through, i had lots to criticize . Now i have been aware for a long time of my overly critical mind. I asked a teacher about it, and her advice was somewhat helpful, " just be aware"  notice it when it happens.

Anyway  long story short, last night reading the  first chapter 3 times over, for this mornings meditation with the group in mind, i had started to underline things that i do not agree with. A light bulb went on: suddenly i asked myself , Jozien who is interested?  Pema wrote this book as to what she believes, no one in the group or in the world is interested in what you believe unless they ask. And it is not even so much about  others, but can i from now on just hear what others have to say.

It seems obvious, how could i be so blind? 

And already, i feel i am more acceptive of what others say, just listening, instead of instantly figuring out what i think, never mind speaking it.

wowow i am probably the 1 % who does not get this fully.