Summer school is in full swing and this ten year old man is learning from Masters. Masters of life and self-sufficiency. Masters of sharing and being. Learning has been a part of my life forever. Well, kinda. Actually, studying and regurgitating on demand were really my key skills. Studied what the nuns, military, church, teachers, professors, career advisors, financial experts, guidance counselors, and gurus said to study. Was good at complying with expectations and moving along the prescribed path into life.
Along the way, I amassed degrees, rank, status symbols, and lots of stuff. Aced how to plan and filled the right squares at the right time to move up the exact next step on the ladder of belonging and success. Became a man of the world. Learned a lot along the way. Tasted happiness and opened wider and wider to spirituality and the global community. Yeppers. I was the man with the plan and part of something wonderful and grand.
Then I met Tire Man and got a clue. A big clue that resulted in Summer School for me as I headed to fifty eight and felt like a ten year old. Bear in mind, Tire Man was just being himself and doing what was right for him and all that he is. I was doing likewise. Our paths crossed at the exactly the right time for him and for me to really be more since we met than we were before we met. It was more than timing. It was more than fate. It was our Higher Power at work since we were both ready.
I had to be ready to handle the lessons that come so rapidly in this Summer School. Had to have put in my first garden last year to taste that connection and want to expand it.
The first attempt at back yard gardening last year produced some tomatoes, dwarfed peppers, corn stalks without corn, two watermelons, and a bumper crop of messages. Messages about the connection with earth, seasons, self, and all things natural. Messages about learning from first attempts and improving with each cycle. Messages about trying things based on instinct and trusting failures are as important as the successes. Messages that this year’s garden will build upon last year’s just as next year’s will build upon this year’s. Messages that the plants loved me even in my cluelessness. Last year’s garden was the best failure I ever had. It prepared me to lust for the Oz that is Tire Man’s garden. It prepared me to crave how to do that. It humbled me enough to ask for help.
Tire Man did what he does best and always has done best. He shared. Willingly and eagerly. He gifts himself to any that asks. He gifts himself joyously to any that ask and actually learn in the asking. He nourished me and kept nourishing as I came to the well more and more to drink of what he knows. Summer School is in full bloom as my back yard garden emerges as the Phoenix from the ashes of last year’s first fire of passion to understand the lessons of nature that are ours for the asking.
This Summer School is different than any school I ever intended. The measure of success is within yourself. The pace depends on what you can handle and what you need to learn. Lessons come from everything around you. This is a school of immersion. School is everywhere this summer.
School is at the Ogden Nature Center as I learn from example from a Latter day Hippie botanist that lives the life I felt in the promise of the 60s and begin to understand as I approach 60. School is in session as Tire Man’s wife shares how she puts her flower bulbs in an onion sack at Summer’s end, places them under the stoop, replants them in a pot in February, and then is ready for next year’s garden with this years remains. School is in session when I go to Home Depot to buy what was needed to fill the Ninth Tire in my garden.
The Ninth Tire was a great place of learning. Tire Man and I, alright he did all the expert cutting and stuff but moving those tires from hither to yon was work too, placed nine tires that began my true garden. All part of the Summer School of 2010 for this student of life. Tires make for great learning when the tires are part of a garden. The garden in my back yard began with nine tires. Three groups of three with one more group of three due to join them some time in the future. Gotta love the number three. Trinity. Trifecta. Triple Crown. Tricycles. Ah, tricycles. We learn to ride. I learned about gardens and the price of……well, garden stuff. Stuff like dirt and compost and how much we pay for stuff.
Tire Man took his student by the hand, cut tires, turned them inside out, and showed how to level them for container gardening. Then he gathered up several thousand trash cans, it might have been 12 but sure felt like several thousand, and introduced me to the wonders of the Ogden Compost Facility. They knew him there, dumped a yard of compost pretty much in the cans, and wished us well as Tire Man and his “how the heck did I end up doing this” sidekick shoveled the cans full and loaded them in the back of his pick up truck.
Then Tire Man showed me the proper mixture of dirt to compost, explain 12-12-12 fertilizer, and wish me well as I proceeded to fill the tires with yummy dirt for the plants that would blossom forth. I settled in for the project and celebrated manual labor and the good part of becoming a dirty old man.
Turned out that a yard of compost, just over half a bag of fertilizer, and lots of shoveling filled eight of the nine tires. The ninth tire represented a choice. Wait until Tire Man helped out with another run to the Compost facility and such or just head to Home Depot and get the stuff in what is my old fashioned way. Buy it off the shelf.
I lasted one day. Headed to a branch of Summer School in the form of a big orange box. Filled the Ninth tire and learned the price of my old fashioned way. The ninth tire cost as much to fill as the first eight with the additional cost of non-recyclable plastic bags. It stunned me. That is how Summer School works. At least this one. This one stuns you with the reality of the cost of what you used to do and what you should and can do. When you are ready to be stunned that is.
Sometimes I stun slow though. Kinda like the lesson of trimming the tomato plants. That one took a few weeks for me to understand. A few weeks of wondering, a day of doing nothing, and finally I got it.
(If you want to get right to work and save your world, go to Tirecrafting.com and get Tire Man's DVD and Book. It can change your world.)
No comments:
Post a Comment