nature

KT and I encountered this guy in the middle of "Cowpies," one of the many stunnning trails among the spectacular red rocks of Sedona, Arizona. We're in the middle of a two-week jaunt through the west, with stops in Las Vegas, Flagstaff, the Grand Canyon, Sedona, Phoenix and Tuscon. I've put up many more travel photos on Flickr.

Sedona's an amazing place, where the desert meets the mountains. In one hike, you can walk from lizards and cacti to alpine forests - all under the shadows of those luminous red rocks.

There's definitely a special kind of energy in Sedona. Our hotel was nestled among the rocks, and on the last morning I woke up at 6:30 so brimming with vitality I ended up taking a two-hour pre-breakfast hike through the canyon. Those of you who know me know how out of character it is for me to even get out of bed before noon.

Sedonans have concluded that the place is full of what they call "vortexes" - sites where the earth's energy is especially concentrated. The purported precise locations of the vortexes were first mapped out by a local psychic in 1980. Surprisingly, they're all conveniently located within short walks of trailhead parking lots - which may say more about her lack of interest in hiking than in the dynamics of local energy flows.

We had a fantastic tour gide in Sednoa, Dennis Andres, also known in town as "Mr. Sedona." In his invaluable, BS-free guide, What Is a Vortex?, Dennis concludes it may make more sense to consider the entire city one giant vortex, rather than splitting hairs over which spots count as vortex sites. A globetrotting hiker, he compares the energy in Sedona to Peru's Macchu Picchu, California's Mount Shasta, and Mount Everest.

Not surprisingly, Sedona's become a New Age magnet in recent years, leading to traffic, inflation, and a truly boggling number of crystal stores. Land is being gobbled up by rich vacationers, yuppie dropouts, and speculators, As Dennis explains, the top four professions in Sedona today are psychic, jeep tour driver, realtor, and psychic jeep-tour-driving realtor. Out of a population of 10,000, there are 400 reiki healers.

Not to knock Sednoa reiki healers - I had a session the night I got into town that blew my mind. That Sedona energy is powerful stuff, however fuzzy the rhetoric and kitschy the marketing. After three days, I was ready to take a vacation from my vacation, and bring my chi back to more familiar levels. But I'll be back.

Posted by tedf at 01:18 AM | Comments (0)

May 23, 2006

Container Garden, 2006 version, Day 0

Posted by tedf at 01:19 PM | Comments (0)

March 17, 2006

Special Friday Night Dogblogging

Bettie's Snow Day - Google Video

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February 17, 2006

Backyard Bird Count

Guest post from KT:

The Great Backyard Bird Count is an annual event co-sponsored by the Audubon Society and Cornell's ornithology lab. The idea is to get regular people throughout the country to help survey bird populations, and it's actually produced a lot of useful research data in prior years. For my part, I've found that it's both fun and easy. I got hooked on it in 2001, when I became the first person to log a formal report of peregrine falcons in my particular "back yard"--i.e., downtown Atlanta. I had to work that weekend, and I saw them, so why not?

If you're interested, participation is very easy and doesn't require much bird knowledge at all. All you have to do is this: (1) See a wild bird, or several birds, wherever you may be this Friday, Saturday or Sunday. I think the site has some identification tips if the bird is a mysterious one. (2) Enter the information into a handy online report form by sometime early next week. (3) Enjoy the interesting maps and info generated by thousands of comparable reports. (Or, just congratulate yourself and log off.)

Posted by tedf at 08:12 PM | Comments (1)

May 12, 2005

Patio Container Garden, Week 5

Here's a partial inventory:

Annuals: Verbena, Dianthus, Impatiens (the new transplants), some other new stuff whose little plastic ID spikes I promply lost

Shrubs: Azelia

Herbs: Basil (two kinds), Oregano, Spearmint, Apple Mint, Sage, Catnip

Vegetables: Peppers, Fennel

Fruit (hypothetically - nothing's very far along): Raspberries, Strawberries, Miniature Orange Tree, Watermelon. (You're not supposed to plant watermelon in a container, but I just couldn't resist. I've got 5 sprouts in one huge container - I'll probably do triage and just keep the healthiest one. )

Cat: Moby

Not pictured: On the other side of the patio, I've planted some lettuce and snap pea seeds. I know - it's probably already too late into the spring, since they're supposed to need cool nights. But I bought the seed packets a month ago, and I figured better late than never.

I'm spacing on the names of the flowering vines Kate picked out. Kate, want to help me out? . . .

Posted by tedf at 05:06 PM | Comments (2)

April 15, 2005

Patio Container Garden, Week 2 (with Cats)

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April 09, 2005

From the Ground Up: The Story of a First Garden by Amy Stewart

When I'm diving into a new field I know nothing about - Buddhism, photography, wine, wrestling, or gardening, to take a few recent examples - I'm always looking for a certain kind of writer: an opinionated, first-person guide to this confusing new world. My model for this kind of writing is Bill James, the great baseball analyst. I'm always on the lookout for "the Bill James of wine" or "the Bill James of wrestling."

The point isn't that I want an expert to tell me what to think. Rather, I want to hear about this new universe from a distinct, coherent point of view. From there, I can develop my own perspective. I don't want an authority so much as a critical sensibility. These new subjects always teem with boggling amounts of details - the eightfold path of Buddhism, the varieties of wrestling holds, the latin names for all those flowers. I'll never learn all this stuff by trying to memorize it, and that wouldn't be much fun, anyway. Rather, what I want is to absorb the perspective of a savvy participant, so that the field as a whole makes sense to me. Once I do that, the details can fall in place over time, if I decide to stick with it.

I appear to be in the minority in this preference - most people seem to prefer the bland-to-cutesy textbook style of the Dummies guides. Guide series do have their places - I'm a big fan of the " . . . for Beginners" series of cartoon guides. When they're done right, as in the classic Marx for Beginners by Rius, those are a great way to get your bearings on a subject. The newer "Introducing . . ." cartoon series is also great. And Oxford University Press has a nifty ongoing series of "Very Short Introduction to . . . " books. The Jung books from both of the latter series have been great entry points into a massive body of work.

All this brings me to From the Ground Up, my entry point into the daunting world of gardening. I've picked up a half a dozen gardening reference books over the last few years, but all of them succeeded only in dazing me with a boggling array of disconnected tips, warnings, and factoids. What I needed was a theory of gardening that made sense to me. So I switched over from Borders's "Gardening Reference" section to the "Gardening Writing" section. I was wary, because I find nature writing often unbearably twee and smug in that Year in Provence mode. I was wary of this book too, given its sweet but very Provencial impressionistic cover painting of a front yard garden. I browsed the book over several Borders visits, each time wavering, then finally took the plunge.

It was a good call. I devoured the book over just a couple of days, and now I feel a new sense of comprehension of all this gardening stuff. Stewart writes about her first year of building a garden from scratch, as an enthusiastic but inexperienced amateur. Her tastes, reassuringly, are for wildness over rigid structure, and a few weeds and bugs over pesticidal warface. She strongly prefers organic methods, but isn't a compost Nazi when chemicals seem to be the only way to go. I don't really like her taste in vegetables - I can't stand tomatoes or zucchini - but I think I'd really enjoy hanging out in her garden.

This isn't one of those books where the putative subject becomes a metaphor for the writer's life. Sure, we learn about her husband, her beloved great-grandmother, and her two amazing cats. But the focus is always on the garden for its own sake, and that's plenty. We learn a lot about the virtues of compost, the overratedness of roses, and, in a great chapter, the lives of earthworms. (The latter subject must have really inspired her - she followed this book up with a whole book on worms.)

Stewart did have an inspired location for her garden: a rental house in Santa Cruz, across the street from an amusement park and just a block away from the beach. Gardening so close to the ocean - and to druken tourists - has its own specific challenges. And this microclimate has its own specific charms. One thing I'm learning is that gardening is always local. You can browse all these giant coffee-table books full of fantasy gardens, but what really matters is what will grow in your soil, under your sky. (That's why my next step is to start reading books specifically about gardening in the South - Tough Plants for Southern Gardens looks particularly promising.)

I'm still not sure I'll end up planting much more than my current batch of containers. Or maybe I'll just grow a huge row of something simple and useful, like mint - I really like mint. But even if I punt on this whole gardening project, I understand the gardener's worldview a little better now, thanks to Stewart.

Posted by tedf at 03:33 PM | Comments (5)

April 08, 2005

Patio Container Garden, Week 1

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March 29, 2005

Gardening 101

For some reason, out of the blue, this weekend I decided I wanted to plant something. Actually, what happened was a breakthrough: I realized that what I wanted wasn't an entire garden - that had always seemed way too daunting - but just something that looks nice when I'm sitting at the kitchen table looking at the patio through the glass sliding doors. That means I didn't need to even plant stuff in the ground - just get a few "containers," stick them on the patio rail, fill them with soil, and stick some flowers on top. I didn't need to start from scratch with seeds, either - they sell these little starter flowers in six-packs at Pike.

I read through a bunch of books of container gardening at Borders, but I still don't know what I'm doing. My eyes glaze over when they start using the plants' Latin names. But Kate and I got a bunch of stuff planted before it started raining on Sunday, and now everything already looks taller than it was to start with. I'll report back on whether the plants survive my green thumb.

Posted by tedf at 02:54 AM | Comments (1)

March 19, 2005

Amicalola Falls

Last weekend Kate and I visited these falls just north of Atlanta. I think I actually enjoy photographing visual textures more than identifiable people, places, or things. I don't even mind when stuff's a little out of focus. As least, that's what I tell myself.

Posted by tedf at 12:09 AM | Comments (2)

March 03, 2005

Raindrop

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