What a wild week it’s been. Tuesday it was 80F/26C. Wednesday it was 76F/24C. Thursday it rained and snowed! The ground was much too warm for the snow to stick, especially since the air temperature was above freezing, but snow it did. A nice Halloween trick that.

In spite of the brief snowy flirtation, the weather continues a warm 50F+/10C+, with no nights currently forecast below freezing. The arugula and dyer’s chamomile in the garden continue to bloom. I even saw a bee investigating one of the flowers. And most of the trees are still holding onto their leaves. We have rain expected this evening, Monday and into Tuesday, but not snow. I guess this is what autumn is now?

The rain on Halloween stopped in plenty of time for the kids to have a dry, if not a little chilly, evening. We haven’t handed out treats for years, there being fewer than ten kids coming to our door making it a waste of time and money. To my surprise, there were packs of kids on the street, and I felt a little guilty not having anything to offer. But we were not home anyway because we spent the evening at Blooming Heart Sangha.

I did have some Halloween fun at work, however. I have cat ears I wear every year as well as a Halloween sweater that has spiders, pumpkins, and ghosts on it, and beneath the sweater a t-shirt that says “Vegan Zombies Eat Grains.” Heh. The real fun was the law school hosting a Thriller dance event.

We had a dance teacher come in and teach us some of the easier steps from Thriller. Faculty, staff, and students from the law school and a few other departments on our little Minneapolis campus, got our zombie on, about 30 people. It was a blast! A colleague of mine took a short video of me shaking my groove thing, but for some reason WordPress hates me and won’t let me upload it so you will just have to use your imaginations.

James and I had our Samhain dinner Thursday evening. Samhain (pronounced saw-win, those crazy Celts spelling words that are pronounced nothing like they look), is halfway between the Autumn Equinox and the Winter Solstice, and is also considered the beginning of a new year in the Celtic calendar. It is a time when the veil between life and death is thin, a time to remember our ancestors.

At my house we have a memory dinner, choosing a food, or foods, that remind us of someone. This year it was gravy. For big holiday dinners my Grandma always made the gravy. She believed my mom didn’t know how to make gravy, which drove my mom nuts. Unlike Grandma, who made the gravy from the turkey or ham drippings, James made us some vegan gravy from bean broth, flour, nutritional yeast, soy sauce and what he called “Kentucky Fried Chicken” herbs and spices. To go along with the gravy we had chickpea cutlets, mashed potatoes, and fermented green beans. Before digging in to the delicious meal, we took a moment to remember our human and more-than-human ancestors.

As I mentioned earlier, we went to sangha in the evening. We enjoyed some sitting and walking meditation. And the dharma teaching for the evening was the Five Earth Touchings. I did not know what this was, but it turned out to be a marvelous enhancement to our Samhain celebration because much of it is about honoring ancestors. It is a beautiful ritual that involves five earth touchings—prostrations in a sort of child’s pose (if you are familiar with yoga) while each segment is read. For those who are unable to get down on the ground, they remained seated and bowed forward from the waist as much as they could to reach down and touch the floor if they were able. It was coincidence that it was Samhain, but it fit so perfectly I have decided that every Samhain going forward will include this ritual.

It continues so warm here I am finding it difficult to motivate myself to do all the end of season outdoor chores. I haven’t done any leaf raking since so many are still on the trees. We’ve not winterized the chicken coop either. I did manage to get myself out Saturday afternoon and cut down the nettles. They grew fat and tall with all the rain over the summer and will yield a good amount of fiber.

I wore a sweatshirt over a long-sleeved t-shirt and got hot while working in the late afternoon sun! I have so many stalks to strip of twigs and dead leaves that I only got through about half of them before I ran out of energy. I put the stripped stalks on top of the leaf-covered garlic bed where they will ret over winter in the snow and damp to make the fiber softer and more pliable. I’ll finish stripping the rest of the stalks next weekend.

The chickens came to investigate briefly, but because I wasn’t digging they quickly lost interest and wandered away. Still, they kept an eye on me in case I started doing something else. Even though I find the extended warm fall weather unsettling, the chickens are loving being out and about. Though with the time change today, they won’t be very happy going forward because there won’t be much daylight left when we get home from work at the end of the day, which means not much time to scratch about except on the weekends. Sorry chickens.

Reading

• Book: A Muzzle for Witches by Dubravka Ugrešic in conversation with Merima Omeragić, translated Ellen Elias-Bursać. Published in Croatian in 2023, this is the last published work of Ugrešic who sadly died in 2023 at the age of 73. I’ve read and enjoyed a couple of her nonfiction books, and this interview did not disappoint. I love a smart woman with firm opinions and a sharp sense of humor. The interview ranges all over and includes discussion about Ugrešić’s career and her exile from Croatia, Yugoslavia and the politics of the break up of the country, capitalism, feminism, and literature. It is one of those slim but full and rich books. And she made me add some books to my TBR.
• Blog: The subversive Farmer: Whatever Works (There are no rules). A really great essay about how there are no rules to gardening, only borrowing ideas and techniques from all across the garden and farm spheres in order to do what works in your garden. All gardens are local!

Quote

“We are all of us affected by a hysterical drive to leave traces of our personal existence on the planet Earth. This narcissistic hysteria is evaluated as a positive, as success, and in the realm of literature, as artistic success. However, the Booker Prize has not appeased the anxiety of the successee, because in success the Booker has been far outstripped by the producer of little bottles filled with one’s individual farts. Everyone has a right to leave a trace. Everyone is able to leave their trace. Traces draw attention to the fact that we exist, that we will not be erased. Therefore all evaluation is pointless, because the producer of fart jars and the author of a novel that has been awarded the Booker Prize end up equally forgotten. They will be pushed aside by a flood of new creative people, influencers, visual artists, writers, actresses selling candles perfumed with the scent of their own vaginas.”

~Dubraka Ugrešić, A Muzzle for Witches, page 124

Listening

• Podcast: Scene on Radio: Capitalism: The Extracted. This episode is about what capitalism has done to Africa. The global north may no longer hold Africa as physical colonies, but the continent has been economically colonized. They take a deep dive into how this works by looking at the production of chocolate.

Watching

We watched the final episode of Pride and Prejudice. Oh, so delicious! And I must say that Firth and Ehle are excellent eye actors, the looks they give each other!

James’s Kitchen Wizardry

This week it was the Samhain meal. There was also butternut squash mac and “cheese.” And for a treat this weekend he made peanut putter cookies. I am blessed with scrumptiousness!