“Defensible Space” is on our minds these days. The deadline for clearing the brush and whacking the weeds was July 1 or the Marin County Fire Department will do it and attach an invoice to your property tax bill.
Richard’s son Eli who used to help with the whacking says, “Why don’t you just call Task Rabbit?”
FYI – Task Rabbit is an online service designed for millennial’s who have more money than time to take care of household fix-its and like to have helpers on-demand. And who doesn’t dream of having a personal assistant? We did have someone to help, but when he fell out we considered the TR, even looked at their website, but decided, hey, we can do this ourselves!!!
The thing is, we really like the feeling of doing a physical task. This was one of defining tenets of the do-it-yourself part of the 60’s. Seeing the start-to-finish of projects. When doing anything repetitively, especially things that get you out of breath, there is an existential thereness. Is there “thereness” sitting motionless looking into the garden. C’mon. And that’s the very thing about gardening, “yard work.” It’s a place and a state of mind where you can truly “BE THERE” right in your own back yard as it were. It’s enlightening, I tell ya. Working up a sweat or basking in the visual fruit of your labors…
Trying to get a handle on the 60’s beyond the Cliché—beyond the flash and dazzle of drug-fueled music and sex as a social commodity, you fall into the do-it-yourself movement. DIY was the 60’s. Authenticity was the litmus paper testing any assumption, as all assumptions were tested in the 60’s. Along came Marxist Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man (1964), on every college course syllabus from psychology to sociology to history, setting the philosophical ground-rules suggesting that a totalitarian state may be achieved without violence through the commodification of everything, especially experience itself. The news these days is not current events it’s infotainment and sold by advertising mostly for pharmaceuticals to treat societal imbalances—anxiety, depression and irritable bowel syndrome. Consumerism swaggered in so fully it has now become the very air we breathe, the water we swim in.
So in the spirit of DIY we have been on the case every morning doing our diligence. Not only have we found that the physical activity makes us tired, real tired, it is a great cure for the societal ails of anxiety and depression. Plus we have the real ails of sore muscles, bug bites and blisters.
Although it is a grueling task, it has given us the opportunity to become familiar with the acre and a half of our septic leach field. From a distance it appears to be just the golden brown of California summer but upon closer inspection we have discovered 15 varieties of grasses.
Artist Paul Klee was an avid observer of plants. He pressed plants and preserved specimens in his herbarium books and drew upon the natural world to explore ideas of growth and fluctuation, often comparing the growth of plants and natural phenomena with the genesis of an artwork.
In 1923 Klee published his formative article Wege des Naturstudiums or Paths to Studying Nature, where he said “For the artist, dialogue with nature remains a conditio sine qua non. The artist is a man, himself nature and a part of nature in natural space.”
Fire is our primary concern but there are so many other ways we are defending our space — from the mighty buck who sashayed through and our latest resident Task Rabbit, the jack-rabbit. And did we say GOPHERS. From above and below our garden is always under siege.
We appreciate the stalwart folks who volunteer for the fire department and give a big round of applause when their vintage fire truck rolls at the 4th of July parade in Woodacre. 
And we are grateful for the free yard waste disposal day sponsored by the Marin County Fire Department and West Marin Compost. We always take full advantage.
Go Little Red!!!!
