Winter Solstice 2025

Oh Friends, it has been a busy couple of weeks, but now I am happily on vacation for the next two weeks. Aaaaahhhhhh.

The busy was from many things. At work it was wrapping up the semester and trying to make sure the professors I support had all the research materials they needed while the library is closed for two weeks. This while also supporting students studying and taking final exams.

Then home to more busy. James and I helped plan our sangha’s annual tea ceremony. We did not go last year due to bad weather, so we had zero context for what we were helping with. The person doing the bulk of the planning was first out of town and then otherwise engaged, and there was much to do in a week and a half. So many Signal messages and emails and time spend on Zoom working out the details. And of course, the day of the tea ceremony the weather was terrible—first rain, then ice, then light snow and howling wind blowing the snow around. It took me extra time to bike home from work. Then James and I ate a very fast dinner before bundling up and biking very carefully with our portion of supplies to the ceremony. I am grateful we don’t have to bike far.

James and I helped set up, which was already in progress since we were late. Our role in the ceremony itself was to serve the tea and treats to sangha attendees, which involved lots of formal bowing while carrying big trays of tea-filled cups, followed by big trays filled with plates of cookies, fruit, and nuts, which also required lots of formal bowing. In addition I ended up filling the role of tea offerer—placing a cup of tea and a cookie on the altar—because the person who was going to do it lives in the burbs and didn’t come due to the icy roads The altar as on the floor instead of the usual table, and surrounded by candles and flowers. I had to bow and kneel with the offering in my hands, then set it down on the altar. I am proud to say I didn’t spill anything on the altar or on any sangha members, though I did manage to kick two of the many tea light candles on the floor later in the ceremony, making a waxy mess on the floor and on my pants leg.

Still it all came together beautifully and all the attendees gave us gracious praise. Some even stayed late afterwards to help us clean up.

We were out again Friday night, biking in the dark and on sometimes icy roads, to a Beloved Community Circle gathering across the river in St. Paul. The gathering was wonderful, as they always are. Part of our evening was spent formally watering each other’s (metaphorical) flowers. It is so easy to speak from the heart to other people about how wonderful they are and what I admire about them, it is a challenge to accept the beautiful words they say to me. But giving and receiving is part of the practice, and spending the evening with increasingly dear friends was exactly what my heart needed even though we didn’t get home until after 10 and my body was very tired.

Because James had to work at the bookstore on Sunday, the actual day of Solstice, we celebrated on Saturday. Part of the menu was crusty sourdough dinner rolls, which I had enough foresight to make the weekend before and keep them in the freezer. One less thing to do! So after a busy two weeks at work, a week and a half of tea ceremony planning and performing, and a late (for me) night with friends, I spent almost the whole day Saturday cooking.

As you know, James is the cook in the house and he does all the cooking all year except for Winter Solstice. This tradition began over 30 years ago because James with his retail career, was never able to get the Solstice off—too close to Christmas. So I make a sometimes rather elaborate menu, and do all the cooking and have dinner ready when James gets home from work. All these years later, his schedule is much different, but we keep the tradition of me planning and cooking a special meal.

This year’s menu was holiday roast stuffed with roasted golden beet, carrot, and parsnip; wild rice “un-stuffing,” aloo bonda also know as mashed potato fritters (from Vegan Richa cookbook), spicy cranberry chutney, and crusty sourdough rolls. For dessert we had salted date caramel chocolate pie with whipped coconut cream on top. The pie did not set up like it was supposed to and didn’t hold form when removed from the pie plate, but it was delicious all the same. The whole meal was delicious. All the flavors went together beautifully.

Sunday we ate leftovers, and I was able to fully enjoy the meal since I wasn’t tired out from all the things. Tonight is leftovers again. Then the roast will be gone and everything else will get incorporated into other meals.

And now, rest. Though we are in the midst of having our bathroom remodeled. We are converting from a tub with shower to a shower stall that has grab bars. Some days James’s MS leaves him feeling unbalanced and nervous about stepping over the high side of a bathtub. We are also having the old, worn out vinyl floor tiled to match the shower, getting a new toilet that fits our tiny space, and a new sink that also fits the space better.

It was supposed to be done by now, but the city took a long time to issue permits, delaying the start of the work, and then after the new plumbing was done, it took the city inspector a week to come out and give the ok. At the end of last week they did the prep work for tiling. I think that bit is done, but I’m not completely certain since I don’t know what done looks like in this case. All I know is that half my living room is taped off with boxes of tile and other supplies piled up, and I have to walk downstairs every time I need to use the bathroom. The novelty and adventure of this whole project has quickly disappeared, and with Christmas this week, I’m not certain what the work schedule is going to be.

So what do I do for an hour and half this morning? Start back to work on my attic remodel project! I’m still ripping out the old, gross carpet, pulling carpet tape off the under-floor, and cleaning up and moving things around as I go. You may recall I am turning this into a fiber arts room for sewing, weaving, spinning, and knitting. However, it has years of accumulated junk and chaos, some of which I have already disposed of, some of which—like the bins that currently hold my fabric and yarn stash—are getting shuffled around as I work. I would pile them in my living room except I can’t because of all the bathroom remodel stuff.

But now, after this is posted, I plan on some tea and garden dreaming. It’s time to start figuring out what I’m going to grow next year. To get my garden inspiration going, as if I really needed it, I listened to the first Plant Circle Gathering while working in the attic. The Plant Circle is part of a new project by Robin Wall Kimmerer called Plant Baby Plant. It is intended to be the antithesis of drill baby drill. I love their tagline: Raise a garden and raise a ruckus. Yesterday was the first plant circle and when their website officially launched. Be sure to check it out and get inspired!

Something else to inspire you, a photo essay of the anti-ICE march that took place Saturday in Minneapolis. I wanted to go, but just couldn’t fit it in and cook too. Thankfully, thousands of other people were able to turn out.

Happy Solstice!

#atticCarpetProject #bathroomRemodel #BelovedCommunityCircle #ICE #PlantBabyPlant #sangha #teaCeremony #WinterSolstice

The Dark Time

The title sounds so ominous!

As we in the United States once again complain about having to change the clocks, this time back an hour which is easier to adjust to than “springing forward” in March, here is a great article about time and work from an Indigenous perspective. Because changing the clocks twice a year is all about capitalism, of course.

James and I celebrate the Wheel of the Year and for the last few days we have been celebrating Samhain. Contrary to what some may think, this is not the same as Halloween, nor does it last for just one day. It is a season, from now until Winter Solstice, and the festival for celebrating is from October 31st through November 2nd. Though there is much lost to the murkiness of time and colonialism, so those who celebrate have the room to make of the holiday what they will.

For James and I, Samhain marks the beginning of the dark season. Even though the clocks were set back today, very soon I will be bike commuting to work both ways in the dark or near dark. The trees are dropping their leaves and soon will be bare bones. The color gradually leaves the world to become monochromatic. It used to be I could depend on brilliant blue skies, but increasingly with climate change, these months have become cloudier, denying relief from the monochrome.

The dark season is a time of rest and dreaming. Aside from a few more outdoor tasks I need to do like raking leaves off the sidewalk, my work in the garden is done. Now it is my turn to withdraw, bury myself as it were, in the dark like a seed. It is a time to plant intentions that I hope will sprout and grow strong when light and warmth return.

It is also a time for roots, for remembering ancestors—blood ancestors, spiritual ancestors, and more-than-human ancestors. So it was truly wonderful Thursday night at sangha that we did the Five Earth Touchings. Buddhism always honors ancestors, but Samhain is not the particular time of year for Buddhist ancestor ceremonies. So it was a happy coincidence. The prostrations that accompany the Five Earth Touchings were especially moving. I felt grounded, solid, full, and content at their completion. I will make sure this becomes part of Samhain every year.

In addition, James and I like to recall and honor family who have died by eating food in remembrance of them. Perhaps not so coincidentally, Lit Hub posted a lovely article about how food invokes memories of loved ones. Our celebration generally involves making a meal or dish that was a favorite of someone, or that reminds us of them. Last year we had cinnamon toast in remembrance of my Granny who always made it for me and my sister when she babysat us. It wasn’t quite the same since we didn’t slather it in butter, but the spirit of it was there.

This year James made a kugel. His family makes kugel with wide, flat egg noodles, a creamy custard-like “sauce,” and raisins. There has to be raisins. James had to turn out a vegan version. Sadly, there are no vegan-style “egg” noodles so we had to go with fettuccine noodles instead. For the creamy custard “sauce,” he made sunflower seed-based cream. For something like this cashews are the standard choice in vegan recipes, but we don’t buy cashews because the company our food co-op gets organic cashews from cannot confirm that all of their nuts are processed on machines and not by people who might be suffering from burns and skin rashes due to the toxic oils in cashew shells. Nor can they confirm that people were paid a fair wage. So we don’t buy cashews. We have used hazelnuts in the past as well as almonds, but the price of organic nuts these days has increased astronomically and we only buy them as a treat if they are on sale, which they were not when we went grocery shopping. So we use sunflower seeds, which are still inexpensive and do the job just fine.

It all came out great! When James took the first bite he said it tasted just like he remembered it should. His aunt always used to make kugel for holiday gatherings. Pre-vegan days I got to enjoy her kugel at a Passover dinner. So today we remembered Auntie Margo and a few other of James’s kin who have passed. It’s good to remember.

In bookish things, Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera won the Ursula Le Guin Prize. He made a wonderful acceptance speech (skip to minute 7 to get to his speech) which made me like him even more. I have read both The Saint of Bright Doors and Rakesfall and liked them both. They are strange and different and all about power and subverting power, time, memory, and creating worlds. Rakesfall is not an easy book to read and I like that Chandrasekera makes no apologies for it. I like that he demands the reader do some work in the mutual creation that is fiction. And I like that his books are truly different from so much of what is published these days. I am so very tired of the usual sorts of fantasy and science fiction that treads the same plots with only slight shifts in things like gender.

Rakesfall is the only one of the Le Guin shortlist I have read, but I have several of them on my TBR, in particular Blackheart Man by Nalo Hopkinson and The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy. Hopefully I will be able to at least get to these before the next prize list is up in 2026. If you are a reader, you know how it goes.

A large chunk of my day today was taken up by chores and the final Beloved Community Circle cohort training. The trainings have been great and I have learned quite a lot about creating a very specific kind of community. It’s been a joy taking what I have learned back to my own Circle and sharing it with them. We are working towards becoming more deliberate in getting to know one another well and also creating practices around decision making, communication, and conflict resolution. It is work, but it is rewarding work.

So that’s it for today. Rest, dream deeply, and plant the seeds of your aspirations.

Where There is Love, Playing for Change

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cABVKIPk_u0

#BelovedCommunityCircle #daylightSavings #kugel #Rakesfall #Samhain #UrsulaLeGuinPrize #VajraChandrasekera #WheelOfTheYear

Hello Again

Here I went and had another unintentional blog-cation.

We’ve been having second summer for weeks with temperatures as much as 20 degrees F above normal, whatever normal means these days. Yesterday, Saturday, was a record high of 91F/ 33C. I am grateful that today is cooler and we are getting a cold front—finally—that will tip us into more seasonal, if still a bit above average, temperatures.

This means the garden is still going, not that it is going gangbusters like in July, but every evening I go out and pick green beans and tomatoes, sometimes a newly ripe pepper or tomatillo or radish. There are a lot of carrots to pull, but I am waiting for when James is ready to make carrot soup from the roots and pesto from the tops. It has also been dry, no rain for a couple of weeks, so James and I have had to water. Our rain barrels were thankfully full to overflowing and we have yet to drain them, but we water by hand, carrying watering cans around to all the thirsty plants, and this takes time.

I still need to finish pruning the raspberries of this year’s canes. I did give the plum and bush cherries a light trim. I am still picking pod beans—so many! This is what I’ve been doing on my Sunday afternoons instead of writing a blog—shelling dry beans.

The skunk beans did amazing this year. So did the Hidasta red beans. The succotash beans didn’t do great last year so I tried them again this year. Last year was the first year I had grown them and they are pretty purple beans that look like corn kernels. This time around the vines grew tall and lush, but for all that, produced not even a pint jar of beans. I’ve decided I won’t be growing them again.

The brown resilient beans, a mixed genetic variety of bush bean developed by Carol Deppe, gave me a huge surprise. I have ben growing them for four years now and they have been scrawny but productive bush beans that survived drought and multiple rabbit attacks, living up to their resilient name. Each year as I grow them on, it has been fun to see the beans change color. Originally a medium brown, I still got plenty of those, but also started getting tan, mottled brown, white, and black beans. Well this year most of them decided to become pole beans! 

Their decision to become pole beans created a bit of wild jungle because I didn’t trellis them since they are supposed to be bush beans. The vines scrambled everywhere including wrapping themselves around and through several tomato cages and tomato plants. They climbed milkweed and sunflowers. They eventually found their way to the skunk bean and cucumber trellis where they grew so vigorously, they snapped the maple stakes I had made from branches dropped by the silver maple in the front yard. I came close to ripping the mess out in frustration until I noticed how many bean pods were on these vines, and not little pods like on their former bush bean incarnation, but long fat pods.

Now that I am able to pick them, the beans inside are pinto bean sized, and are a pretty light tan mottled with a medium brown. When they are all picked and shelled, I will likely have a quart or more from perhaps 12 plants. I am saving the biggest, fattest of these newly minted pole beans to plant next year. I am not saving any seeds from the ones that retained their bush habit because those didn’t produce all that many beans. It’s possible the bushes were overwhelmed by their aggressive siblings, but I have decided the very productive pole bean development is what I want to plant on and see what happens next year. Watch them revert to bush beans, wouldn’t that be a hoot? (The answer is no).

Every year I like to try to grow a few new-to-the-garden plants. Since I can’t grow corn because the squirrels and raccoons demolish it and rudely leave nothing for me, I thought I would try sorghum. I got a variety that is good for both syrup from the stalk and grain from the flower heads. Sorghum is a grass that looks just like a cornstalk, but the seeds don’t grow on a cob. The seeds don’t need any special processing other than winnowing, and they are big enough that this task would be easy.

I planted 15 seeds, enough, I figured, for James and I to have sorghum cereal for breakfast a couple times. They all came up and flowered. To harvest, I needed to wait until the seeds were hard enough that I couldn’t dent them with my fingernail. I waited and waited, tested and tested. And then birds ate every last seed before they were completely ripe!

I could make syrup from the stalks at least. Only when I looked up how to do it I learned I needed a roller press like a wash mangle. And then the plant liquid needs to boiled. And boiled. And boiled some more like when making maple syrup to bring out the sweet and remove a lot of the liquid to make it thick and syrupy. I might end up with a tablespoon of syrup from my 15 stalks. Too much work for not much. Needless to say, syrup is not going to happen.

There will be no more sorghum growing.

James did promise to help me, however, harvest the amaranth seeds. Amaranth seeds are so tiny that the one time I tried to harvest them for food, It took me hours to separate the chaff for what seemed like a very small return. But given the sorghum fail, I looked up more information on harvesting amaranth, and with the help of James and a fan I think we might be able to make a good enough harvest from the randomly growing self-seeded plants around the garden. I’ll let you know! If it works out, I might make a go of purposely planting some next year. Neither birds nor squirrels are interested in them, so maybe…

I can happily report that plum-sour cherry jam is delicious! It makes a pink jam that at first glance might make a person wonder, but the taste—yum! I can also happily report that plum-elderberry jam is delicious. This jam is dark purple, though a bit lighter than straight up elderberry, and the plums compliment the more astringent elderberry quite nicely without any added sugar. It makes for a mild, somewhat earthy-flavored jam. We will definitely make more of both next year.

In addition to the garden and the usual everyday of work and life, James and I have been attending a weekly Beloved Community Circle cohort training. There are ten people from our sangha who decided we wanted to practice the engaged part of our engaged Buddhist tradition, and so formed a Beloved Community Circle. We’ve been meeting once a month since May, getting to know each other, building our relationships, deeply sharing and listening.

When the organization that provides training and support for Beloved Community Circles announced they were doing a 9-week training, James and I signed up. So far there have been five Zoom training meetings and I have learned so much about community building from each one. I am taking detailed notes and sharing them with my own Circle because James and I were the only ones who were able to make the commitment for the training.

What is a Beloved Community Circle, you ask? In case you don’t want to click through to find out more information, it is, in brief, a close-knit group working in community towards climate and racial justice, grounded in nonviolence, emotional healing, spiritual practice, and mindful action. There are Circles all a round the world. There are about 50 people in the training court from across the United States and the world. Some, like James and I, are members of new Circles, others are taking the training in order to start Circles in their area.

Creating a close-knit community like this is challenging and rewarding work. My Circle is wonderfully diverse in age, gender, background, ethnicity, and class. We have not done any group actions yet; we are still in the building phase which is engaged action all on it’s own given how individualistic and divided the U.S. and the world is these days. Not surprisingly, most of us have a deep interest in care taking/ protecting people/living beings. I personally want to do care taking work within the area of building alternatives, but we’ll see what eventually arises from the group.

I’ve also been doing lots of reading and listening and hope to share some of that with you next week. In the meantime, take care of yourselves and enjoy a little music from a wild mushroom. Apparently mushroom music is a thing!

https://youtu.be/NbP2DgDp890

#amaranth #BelovedCommunityCircle #brownResilientBeans #CarolDeppe #dryBeans #mushroomMusic #plumElderberryJam #plumSourCherryJam #poleBeans #secondSummer #sorghum