March!

It's the last week of winter as we march into spring and many plants are either busting out or getting ready to bust out for another ring of growth and a chance to make a unique flower, fruit, and seed to send into the future. To commemorate this special seven days between March 14th and March 21st, I am transposing, as best I can, the three seven step thinking exercise onto the seven days, Monday through Sunday as a "marchable" thinking exercise.

Monday, March 14th, begins appropriately, with a time to notice something about your first workday of the week. In Japan Monday, literally means the same thing: day of the Moon, or getsuyobi (a good day to notice and ponder the moon!) To notice something different -- something that stands out to you as unique, informative, inspiring, perplexing, etc., something that may draw a response from you. The garden provides the backdrop for this session of noticing:

In between the chores of hauling mulch, digging underground trenches with tractor using a subsoiler to alleviate an overly alkaline soil and transplanting old blueberry bushes from a shady area, we noticed where the rabbits and deer are coming into the garden, and we know that something needs to be done. (There is nothing more disheartening than nurturing lettuce from seed in the fall, nurturing the seedlings through the winter, only to have deer eat the lettuce hearts out of the heads the night before you planned to harvest them!)

Tuesday, March 15th, is time to collect the pieces that will organize and inform the build the "fire" for the week. Tuesday is literally the "fire day" kayoubi in the Japanese language, but it actually refers to the day of Mars, or kasei in Japanese (Mars has reddish color like it is on fire).