from the balcony at night i hear the falling mangoes thud onto the soft earth. in the morning i pick them up and am pleased to find that at least a part of them is not rotten. everything seems to be rotting on the farm. the pear trees were bent low by the sagging weight of hundreds of pears. we shook most of them onto extended plastic sheets and put them in 20kg bags and took them down to haldwani to be sold. left behind is a rolling green carpet of fallen ones whose rotting brown splodges increase every day. the falling of the pears made a rhythmical thud thud thud throughout the day and night.
nature's timepiece.
i hear the falling mangoes thud onto the soft earth from the balcony at night. mohan and akhil devised a mango-harvesting contraption consisting of a long wooden pole attached to a metal ring to which was attached a fabric bag. a nail was driven into the pole at an angle so that when one yanks the pole the nail severs the mango's stalk and the mango falls into the bag. the mangoes are harvested when they are still green and hard. in time they will become soft and delicious.
onto the soft earth at night i hear the mangoes falling thud from the balcony.
balcony falling the soft thud i hear from the mangoes onto the earth at night.
soft earth falling onto balcony the mangoes from the night i hear thud at the.
from the falling at night the mangoes hear the earth onto soft balcony i thud.
i returned to the himalayan farm project for another three weeks. i thought the place was abundant and green when i was last here in april, but now its abundance has greenly exploded, the jungle seething with nature's exuberant wild desire to grow and multiply. marijuana plants taller than a tall person crowd what used to be paths. the aubergines and the ladies fingers, hidden by the abundant growth of the pumpkin creepers, rot on their stems when we neglect to collect them. amid the green throbbing will to grow, everything is rotting. clothes that must have been spread out to dry on a day of sun are now damp and smelly and returning to the earth. one limply turns the pages of a damp book which is still legible beneath the spreading spores of mould - if those words are going to be read then one better read them now because they too are returning to the earth. my lonely ten pound note - wanted by no-one outside scotland because it was printed by the royal bank of scotland - has also become sprayed with mouldy spores. more and more. great decay and great new growth. it is all happening at once.
it is now the rainy season and the rain is falling with a persistency and intensity which has been unknown for years. elsewhere in uttarakhand the boiling frothing flow of water over the land into the river valleys has provoked landslides and devastated entire villages, leaving thousands washed away, drowned and dead. the farm, perched high on the forest hillside, has escaped these seething calamities. when the new mud building flooded for the second or third time, we mopped up all the water then looked at the steep terraces above, debating: what can we do? the source of the problem is the bay of bengal where the winds laden with moisture intrude in swirls of low pressure into the himalayan region, there to be unceremoniously ceremoniously dumped. there is nothing we can do about that. but why was the mud house built right beneath these steep terraces? we cannot stop the water falling but we can try and divert the water...
"i say we build deep trenches - not just little trenches - on the terraces above and give the water an alternative route."
"i got up during last night's downpour and saw that the water was coming from two principal sources: from this gully directly above the mudhouse - which we ourselves created by installing the pluming tubes - and from this indentation in the hillside which is the path. water from there immediately flows toward the lowest ground - towards the door of the mudhouse."
"so....we either divert that water with a big trench through the vegetable plot - abandoning the vegetable plot as such - or..."
"...or we could build a dam.......or both....."
"and take all the stones from the borders of the vegetable lot - where they are not serving any real purpose - to raise the ground in front of the mudhouse."
"does the mudhouse have any foundations?", asks kim
[pause for stony reflection]
it is built of mud on top of mud and will be undermined; the earth underneath will become soft and the whole structure will fall down, if these rains continue.
"what i have learned, what i am learning", says erika, "is that before changing anything in the environment, we need to first observe - spend a lot of time observing. a few months ago the problem was that didn't have enough water, now we have too much. everything is connected and if we change one thing we don't know what effects that will have on other things. sometimes big changes are not what is needed"
that debate kept us riveted that morning and we didn't pay any attention to the burning sun and the next day erkia's skin had turned bright pink.
heave heave, keep it rolling, are you okay? yes, gasping, grunting, okay, let's have a break. uuuuaagh! mohan makes a heaving effort to rectify the tipping shit barrel, and avoid being splashed with ... how can so much water have got inside? - days of diahorrea - it is only a short distance to the compost heap, and our rolling heaving efforts finally get us there, there to fork out our excrement, heaping it on the pile, then a layer of dead leaves, i'll get some sticks to give it support, what a heap of shit! it feels so satisfying to do this work, i say to konni, and know that our waste is going back to earth to be magically transformed into the mangoes of the future.
i am not looking forward to descending from the farm and going back to giving my contribution to the modern sewage system where shit is mixed with water, so much water, which then needs to be chemically treated to be made clean again. what a palaver when the insects and the microbes want to transform that matter into new life anyway.
life in the city. not everyone has the luxury of a dry compost toilet. not everyone lives in an ecovillage.
my being at the farm coincided with my Krishna's birthday - the seventeenth of July. it was a great day. "this is the first day of my life" sings connor orbest, and it is true also that every day it is everyone's birthday. when i say the spoken introduction to their song "at the bottom of everything", Kim asks me to repeat she puts me on repeat she gets shivers of enchantment everytime i get to the part: its your birthday party. happy birthday darling. we love you very very very very very very very much . . .
So there was this woman and she was on an airplane and she's flying to meet her fiance
sailing high above the largest ocean on planet earth
and she was seated next to this man who you know she had tried to start a conversation
but really the only thing she heard him say was to order his bloody mary
and she's sitting there and she's reading this really arduous magazine article about this third world country that she couldn't even pronounce the name of and she's feeling very bored and very despondent and then suddenly there's this huge mechanical failure and one of the engines gave out and they started just falling thirty thousand feet and the pilots on the microphone and he's saying,
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, oh My God, I'm sorry"
and apologizing and she looks at the man and she says,
"where are we going?" and he looks at her and he says,
"We're going to a party, it's a birthday party.
It's your birthday party, happy birthday darling.
we love you very, very, very, very, very, very, very much."
and then he starts humming this little tune and it kind of goes like this:
one two one two three four . . .
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