Black Nails - Green Heart

The blackberries are growing through the fence again, not long since they were cut back. The blackberries...brambles some call them, are they not some of the most hardiest survivors?

This morning, when I was bewilderedly staring out of my body and out of my window, into the grey blue wild sky and down onto the little wall

It does not really brighten up this morning, the guards do not move, a cold nightly stream from the North, moist and silent

I was pruning the willows, 'coppicing' as they say in that case. I remember years when I was pruning vine stocks this time of the year and for long:

Built a beautiful scaffold for the runner-beans today decorated it, beads and feathers, always feels like a sacred act, escorting, guiding life into vertical direction

Dug a potato-patch this blissful cherry-blossom morning, turning grassy ground for humble tubers, found a 20-cent coin deep in the soil, stamped in the year 1884

Midsummer day. Late July midsummer day and blistering heat, can you feel it on your skin...smell it? Close your eyes...can you smell it, feel it again?

I am watching the duck for a minute every day, she is breeding in the duck house since two weeks and another two ahead. Six eggs, perfect pose, no motion: Zazen...just sitting. Once a day she comes out, stretches, takes a short bath, eats a few seeds, bugs, grubs, takes a shit and returns four weeks, then: magic happens!...

I enlivened a new place this year, new lands, a homestead in the fruitful lowlands after many years in mountainous terrain, many years oh life. News spread, so many news spread, overwhelmingly many more than ever. I do not listen to all of them, how fruitful would that be? If I should describe or recapitulate this year, this 'falling into place like a windblown seed'...

I walk along the edges of the fields, can you see me? Oh how I love the harlequin colors, the over-sweet scent, even: the unison, gently moved by air. I walk along the edges. I carry water and I carry extra seeds. For if there is a dry spot where thirst is weakening. For if there is a bare spot that longs to host life. An honorable job this is:...

A spade and a rake and a bottle full of warm tea. The ducks are busy, looking for slug eggs, the spinach can be cut, the pea-pods are rounding, the turnips seem to germinate fine, and the pumpkins grow flower-buds. June morning, woodpecker and peppermint, a deep-breath view from a garden to a sky, and a large bird reflects in sunlight. Contrail some call it's vanishing tail...

We were pruning our fruit-trees lately, one of it is a Kiwi. Oh these Kiwis, how wildly they grow within a year. The Kiwi is a vine you know, it darts out numerous octopus shoots. In search of something to hold on to, whatever they reach they entangle, sometimes...strangle and if they find nothing they turn and wind around themselves, creating knots and clutter, they have to be pruned rigorously...and thrive of it...