It’s impossible for me to see a bit of wildness and not want to be out in it – surely it’s a reachable walk to the Hohokam ruins at the top of a small mountain nearby in the national forest?  I am smart enough to take water with me into the desert, but my friend arms me with a walking stick for snakes.  My route is circuitous – up the path past the sheds to the stream bed, up from the stream bed to the high-wire pylons, up from the pylons to the sticky-outy rocks, and among the careening boulders to the series of foundations at the top – still no more than a couple of miles.

The Hohokam were canal builders who inhabited this desert up through the 1200’s, and the hilltop encampment must have been some kind of fort arrangement overlooking either the village or the canals, for it would have no water of its own.  There is one oval ‘mystery room’ – I have no doubt: a hospital, the medicine man’s room – you have to take them out of their usual surroundings to heal them, so this would be a special round healing room.  But of course I have no idea, and neither does anyone else in our white world, and maybe not the aboriginal world either.  It is very hard to put ourselves into the mentality of even Europeans living 800 years ago, let alone the inhabitants of this forbidding desert.

Walking through such Sonoran desert reminds me of the Don Juan series of books, written by the now-deceased (if he ever existed at all) Carlos Castaneda.  Although I lost my grip on the series five or so books in (I only made it through one Harry Potter, but gorged on the entire Aubrey-Maturin series of Patrick O’Brian), the first three or four, especially the incomparable Journey to Ixtlan, are full of unforgettable life lessons – listening to your death, accepting personal responsibility, the four enemies of a man of knowledge, wrestling with your ally – that have stuck with me all my life in my personal ‘desert’.

The books are written from the point of view of an anthropologist studying the otherworld of the Yaqui Indians’ brand of sorcery.  Whether it is true or not, whether there is a Don Juan or not, took up a lot of ink in the 1970’s, and I am sure some of my generation took off for the Sonoran desert to try to find either Don Juan or Carlos.  Thought about it myself.  In retrospect, I think Carlos was more of an invention than the brujo Don Juan.

In the books, young Carlos is the narrator, the anthropologist who stumbles into this magical find and is inducted into a training most of us would kill for.  His steady maintenance of the Western logical reductionistic head space in the face of all evidence to the contrary is alternately amusing and exasperating.  Nevertheless, the books reveal the inner world of the sorcerer, first through drugs and then through ceremonial vision quests, in such a knowing and complete way that the narrator, who purports to be the writer, is far too stupid and thick-headed to have accomplished.

In other words, the narrator is the fiction, and in fact a very, very clever act of fiction.  Whether Don Juan and Don Genaro and all their antics and miracles are fiction is beside the point, really.  One accepts it or not – but the consummate art of the writer is to get you to accept the narrator, who is clearly a rational impossibility.  Once you have accepted Carlos, you accept the whole premise, and the lessons in the books – timeless, harsh, and aimed straight for the practical and intrepid soul – flow like water.

I won’t go on any more about it, you had to be there – but the the books are still there to be read by another generation should they wish.

I am thinking about the Hohokam shaman and Don Juan as I survey the way back down to my friend’s house, out of sight in the Cave Creek canyon.  She has warned me that the blue-y green desert is rougher going than the brown-y green.  I have to try it for myself, and she’s right.  I saw no snakes or scorpions, but in the blueish desert seeds and prickers abound, catching my clothing and riding along with me.  Ducking through a patch of bushes, I catch a bunch of cholla.

Now there are cactus and there are cactus. In this desert I am surrounded by hundreds of huge vertically rugate saguaro taller than my head, arms lifted in gestures alternatively grandly noble or ridiculously pompous.  There are prickly pears, flat ones and round ones and a hundred others I cannot name, but in all my wandering I have never come across this cholla, which appears to be a little green berry of a succulent surrounded by small thin resilient 1″ spikes.

Little spikes? Little spikes? Within a second these barbed and incredibly attractive ends have buried myself in my finger pads, nail beds, thumb sides, and then into the finger that came to rescue those fingers and any attempt to remedy the situation just makes it worse, and within half a minute I have six digits from both hands tangled inextricably and very painfully in nature’s own Chinese finger puzzle.  From thinking of myself as superior to Carlos in my understanding of Don Juan (you see? that’s his art), and thus a budding desert shaman, I am reduced within a minute to a blubbering helpless landlubbing fool with both (delicate bodyworker’s) hands hooked in a dozen places and no fingers left to extricate each barb – how in the hell do you get these things off?

Others later offer help: Use duct tape (and how do you get it out of your pocket, given that you happened to bring it along on your walk?) and other impossible remedies, like ‘eat peyote’. The best ex post facto comes from a gardener: pick up a stick with your mouth and get the prickers out that way.  That advice I could have used, but after getting past the pain, and then the helplessness, and then laughing, and then considering walking all the way home in cellulose handcuffs, I opted for the tear-it-out model of a quick separation of my hands, which did in fact involve considerable pain, and the last of the barbs did not exit my skin – despite everyone’s subsequent good advice – until I completed some deep needle work a week later.

So, the saguaros aren’t the only pompous thing in the desert, and their little cousin the cholla cut my pomposity down to size in a minute; I arrived back at my friend’s house a humbler man with a rueful smile of respect for the small and tenacious.

Having put away the class for the first good week, I need a weekend out of cell-phone touch, and I get my wish.  Tootling along the endless sandstone strip-mall sprawl out of Phoenix, onto smaller and smaller roads as the phone plinks off and the sunset flares, dies to embers and settles straight into creosote for our last crinkly washboard turns before we rinse our dusty tires in the few inches of Cave Creek and curl around into the house.

My friend has led a hard life with pluck and wit, but without the physical advantages of rude health.  To find her in the last fingernail hold of habitation before miles of national forest is a surprise; to me she’s a city girl.  In fact, she’s lived all over, but I knew her in NY and Seattle, not in Crested Butte, and even in that tiny frontier town, she was director of the local theater.  She’s been out here in this stage-free isolation for more than a year.

That open breath of yawning stillness from the surrounding hills absorbs all sounds and mixes easily with our companionable silence before the small firepot on the porch.  The clouds clear and the stars come out, and one falls.  “I wonder what civilization that was?” she asks, recalling to mind the Asimov short story of the solar system that burned to create the star of Bethlehem.

I start explaining that this is a meteorite, that the death of a solar system would be a supernova, essentially the explosion of a star, only visible… Until in the firelight I see her face of calm indulgence, and I realize I have my literalist hat on – still being the teacher – and let it fall for the dunce hat or the beret of the poet.  What civilization is dying here tonight, indeed?

This is the real desert, muse for D.H. and Georgia and Paul, harsh, sterile, thinly aromatic.

In the morning, a sliver of waning moon gives way to the sun and what was just dark shapes comes into view.  The house is nothing much on the outside, a box based around a trailer – about like a double-wide, though is solider than that.  Inside, she has wrested it away from the shag carpets and ill fitting windows to create an artist’s interior space, lined with soft colors, fabrics, the complete works of Shakespeare, and objets.

Just outside she has the garden she will have wherever she is, and the quail and road-runners and cardinals and goldfinches who feed on her sunflower seeds she raised and shook out there.

Around the house are a few other houses occupied by people I never met, but who are, she says, afraid Obama is going to take away their guns, so they are buying more and practicing a lot – kapow!  My friend, though not that way inclined, says they’re a good sort – living off the land and all.  “Get out here and you start talking to yourself,” she says, and the ranch hand who helps her has a pretty continuous stream of mumble going.  I don’t notice her falling into this, but then I am there for two-way conversation.

Tucked up behind the little houses hidden by the trees that line the creek is a ‘storage yard’ filled with rusting junk that somebody’s gonna use some day, including an old Ford F350 that has seen better days and is probably home to some snakes or scorpions.

This is real desert: people can die out here.  Already the ranch hand has killed one rattler who had wandered into the garage.  Threw a hammer at it and killed it on the spot.  And then there’s skunks under the house that must be trapped, covered, and dispensed.  By now, it’s down to mice, which most of us have to live with, though there are covers over the drains which are designed to keep the scorpions from coming up through them, rather than keeping debris from going down – a bit disconcerting when you eyes are full of shampoo in the shower.

No, neither the harshness of the environment nor the views of her neighbors will turn my friend reactionary.  She has John Stewart for a friend, Tivo’ed off the cable, though she cannot tolerate my new best friend Rachel Maddow, because she has a ‘point-of-view’.  “I don’t watch Fox and I don’t watch MSNBC.” John Stewart and Steven Colbert don’t have a point-of-view?

My friend does bodywork at an alternative cancer treatment clinic (anoasisofhealing.com), and has a lot to say on the theater of cancer, how bodywork works in the context of their family’s opposition, the weakness of the body vs the resolve of the spirit.  I counsel her on the simple power of touch, and how to approach the tumor sites themselves, though soon she will be teaching me.

These and other conversations ebb and flow as we come together for delicious raw-ish meals inspired by the diet at the center, and then periods of silence where we both work on our writing.

The father of her children came back form Vietnam a broken man, and his progressive disintegration into psychosis, culminating in his arranging her funeral without the usual prerequisite, was one of those Nietchzcheian trials that makes you stronger by almost killing you.  Between her travails in the VA with him, with her children and herself when they were on their own, and with the clinic, she has a real stake in the health care debate.

It is a deep pleasure to sit with a friend who is quick, opinionated, and has been so tested by life as to be unafraid.  I am sure she has her phantasms when the nights are lonely and the desert winds blow, but each day she aligns her unruly body and her unruly hair and her unruly mind (as long as we understand this last to be ‘anti-rule’ – I cried as I watched her jump out of a very comfortable airplane with no parachute some years ago rather than live by someone else’s rules).  And then she ventures forth to tilt at windmills, and she’s knocked a few down as well.  I will pray for you in the same whisper the desert makes – Parasam Gate, Bodhi Svaha.

So many of the earlier posts in this series celebrate bucolic pleasures; this year between the lines we feel the pressure of recession: harried relationships, hurried tasks, and for a few people horrid choices, especially around the animals Quan cares for. There are dozens of abandoned horses around the state and the shelters are filling with rabbits, cats, and dogs of people who are moving to find work or simply cannot afford to feed them any more. Of course times are tough all over, but the poorer regions of the poorer states see the effects more deeply. The lobster prices are down, so is tourism, and so is demand for paper pulp, so we can feel the contraction of the economic cling wrap around us Mainiacs, bringing us closer together but hampering our movement.

Though not immune, I am very lucky to still have work, and a sailboat for that matter. But somehow I have not been able to write of my summer sails – it seems frivolous. They were mostly up and down the river in any case, a repetitive and solitary pleasure when, afloat, I could steal a few hours from keeping the business and the place afloat. When I took it down to be stored for the winter before I left for overseas, the eagles I wrote about have left, and the islands are aflame with October leaves alive in the northern blue sea and sky. Tycha and I, a bonded unit with a single mind at the end of the season, make our sails blades to slice the substance of the wind, bringing her across the white chop ahead of the storm. I was shivering solidly as I rowed with clumsy hands ashore to the boatyard against the sere breeze for the final time.

While I was in Amsterdam, the leaves turned to patches of rust, and Quan and a friend cut down the old apple tree. I had not quite consented to this; I have quite a history with those two trees. At about 10 I tried to smoke corn silk under the one they cut, and first heard some dubious lore about sex (“No, my parents never ever did that!”). The second one held my treehouse, and that one I definitely vetoed – many a pirate battle, western last stand, and GI heroism had emanated from that simple box and ladders set in a crook overlooking the garden, and I am not ready to let it go. But with 50 years of growth, they were too much shade for the tomatoes, and the womenfolk wanted them down. The apples were only good for the horses anyway.

I guess we compromised with the one, as it was a bristling plug of firewood stacked against the stump when I came home. It takes a bout one tree each year to keep the fireplace and sauna going, so this year that’ll be this tree. Next year actually, because now comes the wood palaver – you want the newer wood in back to dry, and the older wood in front, but with a minimum of fuss. We created a new front row, and tucked the half-cord or so in behind. It’s an act of respect for the tree, almost fitting it together again with your hands in the stacking – square on square, and the round ones into the V’s.

The tree was centered in dry rot, and needed, I admit quietly as the truck empties and we sweep out the bark and the lichen, to come down. Some of the wood near the rot is already dry and goes on the front row. Apple burns hot, and is good to mix with other wood. This evening, we burn a few sticks to ward off the damp – such a cheery smell! This morning, with snow on the ground, it is hard to pack short-sleeved shirts for a week in Phoenix.

When I was 10 or 11, I remember as I look at the remaining tree with frosting on its remaining leaves, I came upon my little sister and her friend in that treehouse, with a brown golfball of a steaming turd laid on the rough pine floor, the girls’ 4-year old eyes wide with fear fighting with giggly pride. Though one part of me intuitively understood that this was normally exploratory, the other part – it was the 50’s – stood aghast. That part went and told my mother, who handled the situation with relative aplomb. But that I went and told has always been an act of which I was secretly ashamed – at my weak need to seek another authority than my own native common sense.

Can’t be all work and no play on these trips, so after the conference ended I joined Christoph and Riccarda for tour around what’s open of the Rijksmuseum, Some days you want Van Gogh, but today it was Rembrandt I was craving, and I was not disappointed. As dark and smooth as Dove chocolate, Rembrandt’s paintings crawl out of the murky edges, gradually filling in until he finds his center, imbued with unearthly light. It may be just a portrait of Dutch burghers, or the Nightwatch, or a commissioned portrait of some self-important notable, or his own endearing self-portraits, but the dude knew his paint, and made faces luminous.

Willem Heda has got to be the still life artist of the millennium – a table full of random shiny objects, each reflecting the all the others perfectly and subtly. And the brushwork on some of the trees in the landscape series, and the ships with sails flying in the naval depictions.

But in the end, I have to go back and stand in front of the ruffled collars and their faces, unafraid of wrinkles or of character, and certainly not flattering, but suffused with an illumination that is simultaneously profound and oblique, single-pointed yet permeating capable of ignoring or simply implying whole stories and areas of the canvas while bringing one telling detail so the fore with no more than a prick of photons. Rembrandt – it’s more than a toothpaste.

After dinner with a friend, I decide to walk back from downtown to my hotel at the Vondelpaark (pronounced fondle-park and apparently, according the number of used ‘Charles River Whitefish’ in the bushes, living up to its name).

We had eaten very hot Thai in a funky dive downtown, and my first few streets were very much the red-light district. In the outer reaches of canals, the women are older and blousy and heartbreaking in that they are still in the red-lit windows. The girls downtown are much hotter, in studded bras and butt-floss, crooking you in with the finger of one hand, while they talk on their cell phones with the other. Nearly 40 years ago when I was here, I was too naive and scared to take them up on their offer, but now – however much I know about feminism and equal opportunity – I cannot see these girls as anything other than my potential daughters – what if Misty took a turn here? Ay-yi! After a while I cannot even look any more, these hopeful faces atop the black-lighted perfect bodies – it’s all incest and incestuous, and I strike out up a main canal with my blinkers on.

It is not more than 3 miles, I would say, but Amsterdam is so curvy and confusing and (I have noticed this in the woods as well) I have a tendency to veer to the left. Thus, while it seemed I was crossing the canals in the right order, etc, I was actually headed over to east Amsterdam, and when I found myself bordering an industrial district, I realized I had gone badly wrong.

It took me two hours to get home (and I have foresworn the ‘coffeeshops’ after my one encounter with the GMO hybrid carefully cultivated weed they purvey here, so being loaded was not the reason). I don’t usually get lost; it is in fact hard for me to get lost, but this city leaves me wondering whether I should be going this way or that way down a main road I encounter, and a bus map on a signpost orients me enough to get me near. Finally I recognize the National Theater and wend my way successfully to my hotel and gratefully to my bed.

A few other rolfers we happened to meet at the restaurant were on their way to a sex show. Apparently they watched several couple make love. How boring could that be? The mechanics of lovemaking can be acrobatic or interesting, but hardly erotic or edifying. Or am I just too old? or too snuggly comfortable in the depth of gentle connection that characterizes Quan’s and my leftover steam from the volcano of our earlier days? I find it all a little sad, a little amusing, a little despairing, and not at all attractive. I have become adamant about fidelity (more to oneself than the other person) in my older years, but it is without prudery or moral ascendency, but simply as an expression of inner integrity. May writing this not bring me to the fall that goeth after pride.

Here are some highlights from Day 2, though the coup de grace on the old anatomy was delivered by Jaap van der Wal, but more on him later.

The theme of the day was the sideways connections of the fascia within the muscle. Jst how does the muscle convey its force to the fascia and vice versa?

Carla Stecco of the famous Stecco family started the day by tracing the ‘trellis’ (I would say onion bag) arrangement of the fascia at rest, with additional ‘crimping’ in the tissue. Dense irregular tissue is not ‘irregular’ at all, but has a variety of directions at very precise angles for dealing with the forces. What slides, and what is fixed?

How much is the thoracolumbar fascia a sense organ and how much a force transmitter? asks Jonas Tesarz.

Jean_Paul Delage, working with Guimberteau, shows the cells in the paratendon (what we used to think of as the sheath).

Peter Purslow showed great pictures of the honeycomb of the endomysium, showing the same angle of fibers Stecco described, which go longitudinal when the muscle is stretched, and go circumferential when the muscle is contracted. Interestingly, while the endomysium is well-equiped to transmit force, the perimysium – which is continuous with the epimysium – is poorly constructed to transmit force – so what it is for?

Although I think of myself as moderately well-traveled, I realize with surprise that the last time I was in this city rescued from the sea was 1970.  I was in Venice in 1984, and have recently been in St Petersburg, so I am familiar with canals, but Amsterdam has a unique feel – all the houseboats and sails seen through buildings.  I have been in and out of Schipol but that doesn’t count – except seeing the tulip fields from above, that was cool – swaths of yellow or red or pink..

But now the train is rocking gently along the bank above the waterway toward the central station.  The rain has followed me from New York and the wet streets are speckled with yellow leaves after the technique of Seurat.  Tiny cars crawl over the bridges, and the pretty girls and serious, quiet men go about their business in this live-and-let-live town.

When in Rome… Gathered up in a group of Canadians, I’m hanging on the back side of a bicycle, tootling around the canals in search of night life. The difficulty of getting people motivated goes up geometrically as the number of people goes up arithmetically, so indecision was reigning and my ass was getting sorer so I made an executive decision for ‘Kelim’, a Turkish restaurant.

After patliçan and lamb, we slide over the road to a ‘coffeeshop’.

Having not been in Amsterdam for nearly 40 years, how could I expect it to be the same? There’s a menu of various kinds of weed and hash, along with papers, tobacco, and raspberry leaf for those allergic to tobacco. They even sell perfectly rolled joints for those with fumbly fingers. One of my companions is an expert, and negotiates our way through the various choices of afghani or moroccan or these crystals or that White Widow whiff.

One or two hits later I am floored by this strong European stuff and have to quit this hole in the wall dive with its loser patrons and stale air to walk it off on the streets. Predictably, my companion and I got lost and ended up on a several hour walk through Amsterdam – catching up, solving the problems of the world, gossiping, and laughing our heads off but shaking them at the poor sad women who sit in the windows overlooking the canals until a man comes in and they close the curtain,

We finally make it back through the winding park to the hotel, on the ground again. Once was great, but now let’s refocus on the task at hand.

I am not given to local festivals or local theater.  In theory I support them, so I am reluctant to say this, but in practice they are excruciatingly insupportable.  And I have been a participant, most recently in the Oyster Festival that, in my father’s name, raises money to support education about the river on which we live.  All great, and you can catch up with friends too, whom you ought to have seen but oddly haven’t for a couple of years.  It’s actually sitting through a warbling production of Guys and Dolls in this day and age when Marlon Brando or Nathan Lane are available at the push of a button.  The live part simply doesn’t make up for the lack of practice part.

But the other day, the time and tide were right for a trip upriver.  We call it a river, even though I essentially live on a very slim 12-mile bay – completely sea water, flushed 90% each 24 hours by the two tides.  Usually I head down, toward the sea, as that is where the wind is.  But today’s west wind blows over water and fields alike, and I know it won’t run out.  It takes me just over an hour to twist my way six miles up to Damariscotta, hard over some of the time, belting on a beam reach past Glidden Ledges and the oyster farms my father spawned.

Past the tricky final mud flats and into Damariscotta Harbor, I made it onto a mooring and rowed ashore for the Pumpkinfest.  By then it was four pm and the crowd was thinning out in the late afternoon chill, but I walked around to get a snack and see the carved pumpkins.  The largest pumpkin was there too, a huge if slightly deflated 1210-pound monster (“Ooh,” quipped an English voice beside me. “that’s as big as two Americans!”).

It was just before five when I set sail again, laying off from the mooring to get some speed, but then laying back for a run down river.  The shadow of the earth began to gather in the east, and I rounded the turn to home (Soup!) in a chill and gathering gloom.  It was a treat though – such clear air when it blows from the west – and as the sun went down it shone up for a moment, and there was a red-hot skillet under the cast iron clouds.

An unavoidable extra day in London yields a most pleasant result: a day-trip to Kew Gardens with my friend Martin, Zen priest and master garden designer – he is the author, with his wife Alxe, of Landscape as Spirit (http://www.amazon.com/Landscape-Spirit-Creating-Contemplative-Garden/dp/0834805383/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253279658&sr=1-1). Given his background in designing massive gardens with waterfalls, lakes, and huge stones all over the world, the chance to see Kew – the living result of the Victorian need to collect and categorize, in this case botanicals of every description – through his eyes is not to be missed.

Martin and I go way back to when he was my student in the early 90’s, but our deep friendship dates from the time when he picked me up and gave me a place to recover in the aftermath of my family break-up.  Over these two decades, I have seen him flush and destitute, secure and ass over the edge, 30 employees and none, in the bosom of his family and wracked with grief as tragedy overwhelms – and he always has the same calm demeanor, philosophical attitude, childlike curiosity, and Buddhist detachment that many people claim but so very few inhabit.  My brother, mentor, and friend.

Along with mowing lawns, I have generally ‘graduated’ myself for many years from taking subways whenever and wherever.  As Kew is way south at the suburban end of the District Line, the Tube is likewise unavoidable, but the London Underground has improved in the years since I lived here – the cars cleaner and smoke-free, and on this day there are no delays.  There is “Mind the Gap”.

Martin is dressed in new Zen robes (polyester and wrinkle free), which make him look priestly and striking amid the downdressed Londoners.  His small porkpie hat and large-knobbed walking stick adds to the eye-drawing mix.  His wife Alxe, English by derivation and East Coast by education (and therefore more conservatively attired), is a small but forceful woman who likes big dogs (who have thankfully been left home on this 50^th birthday tour of England).  Through the miracle of SMS, we meet without hassle.

The street from the Tube to the park is lined with identical row houses, but they must be pretty pricey given the BMW’s, Mercedes, and even an Aston-Martin in the drives.  First stop inside the gate is the Palm House, a huge white metal and glass arboretum with the largest of the plants – huge palms of every description scrape the ceiling.  It is so humid inside that I shed my sweater and Martin is constantly wiping his camera lens, and it’s a relief to slip outside again to the row of mythical beasts – the Griffin of whatever, the Yale of Broadhurst, the Lion of England – all rampant and holding an heraldic shield passed down through generation from Tudor or Plantagenet titles.  What a lot of nonsense the Queen must have to know!

The waterlilies are next, huge leaves like boats and exquisite blossoms.  The young fella in his waders has a bucket sitting in one of the tray-like leaves, spooning out the duckweed with a net.  Most of these only bloom for a few days, and many only at night, he says, and require a singular beetle to come in and get the pollen when they are open and transfer it to a male plant.  It is one of the best arguments for evolution – God would never have designed something this messy, haphazard, and imperfect.  But then again, God did.

Although it is certainly Kew as I remember it from the 80’s, there is much that is new: the Princess of Wales Conservatory (Augusta, not Diana) replaces temporary greenhouses of succulents in a huge new building of six different climates: Step through a door to enter a desert full of cactuses, another to luxuriate in varieties of orchid, another to wilt with the tropical ferns, another to peer into the carnivorous plants, and another to tiptoe under the vines.

Another new element was the Treetop Walkway, which takes you 100’ or so up into the canopy, making me nervous as it swayed.  I could not keep from looking down through the mesh floor to the forest floor way too far below.

Aside from the new rock garden, which did not meet Martin and Alxe’s design standards (too boxy and unimaginative), and the new Japanese gateway (good, but not up to what I saw in Japan), everything we saw in this Eden was good.  The trees – huge and from all over – were especially welcome.  Kew was hit with a huge windstorm some years ago that took out hundreds of unique trees and left the head gardener in tears, but no damage was in evidence now.

The surprise, that Martin dragged me to unwillingly as I was getting ‘museum feet’ in the late afternoon, was the gallery of botanical art.  Though I was prepared to be bored, the marvelous watercolours and drawings easily straddled the utility-beauty gap, consistently conveying more than any photograph could manage.  Especially amazing was a moss painted onto the reverse side of a windowpane; I had to peer over the top to reassure myself it was not just moss stuffed in behind glass.  Others so captured the essence of the wild grape or fig or magnolia that you could palpably feel the artist’s love.

I am not a gardener or a farmer, though I work in the garden and live on a farm.  I am an urban dweller, even in my town of 600 souls, hooked to the internet and cell phone, with an embarrassing wealth of friends spread over every time zone.  Martin meditates for hours to days on the spot of a new garden before beginning the design.  I admire and even envy him his inner space, but plants move too slowly for me; I like the pace of humans, as destructive as they are.  For several hours, I slow down to Martin’s pace with Martin’s eyes – the slow shaping of the landscape over decades into a vision that matches the setting, the plants, the climate, the people – it’s such a gift, to see through another’s lens!