Monday, November 19, 2007

Worlds Colliding

Nothing better than a Farmers Market. And I especially love this one held in the plaza directly below my office window. What a delicious (literally) juxtaposition of the corporate and the agrarian. Every Thursday, the skirt- and suit-clad professionals of Century City descend from their glass skyscrapers, briefly abandoning their virtual harvests to sample the literal fruit of someone else’s physical – and in that sense, real – labor. Each week when the Market comes, I can’t help but wonder if any of my fellow office dwellers share my secret desire to leave the desk job behind and head to the fields – to draw something out of the earth rather than out of a spreadsheet. There must be a very different sense of satisfaction connected to working the ‘cursed ground’ than of that connected to sitting day after day in a fluorescently lit great and spacious building (which, as it turns out, isn't very satisfying at all...).

Give me the sun, the smell of damp dirt, a row to hoe, the thorns and the thistles – the whole nine yards. I want to grow something for a change!





“In this state of total consumerism—which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves—all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. A person who undertakes to grow a garden…is helping himself in a way that dignifies him and that is rich in meaning and pleasure. But he is doing something else that is more important: he is making vital contact with the soil and the weather on which his life depends. He will no longer look upon rain as an impediment of traffic or upon the sun as a holiday decoration.” --Wendell Berry

Sunday, November 11, 2007

Yucca it Up


We took a trip to Joshua Tree recently. Okay, so it’s been several weeks - but I’ve been too busy to post anything….

It’s an interesting place. Not much to see except a plethora of Joshua Trees (go figure) and a decent sampling of unusual rock formations. Many of them seem almost too contrived – as if someone ("someone like maybe God," suggested Eva, as we all sat atop one of said rock formations) stacked these enormous stones in somewhat unnatural and seemingly impossible configurations just for laughs. Good work, I’d say. Very funny.