Growing avocados in chilly Canada
Growing avocados in chilly Canada
We think the present is invincible and we can abuse it to our liking with endless indulgences; we are a long way from being dedicated constant gardeners.
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark
And the living nations wait
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye— W.H.Auden,In Memory of W.B. Yeats, 1939
*****
We eat a lot of avocados at our house. They are great on salads. Seeing as I am retired with nothing better to do I decided to grow an avocado tree. Going online the instructions were straight forward and now I have three sprouted seeds ready to go into a plant pot. The bad news! they grow very slowly and it will take 8 years to bear fruit if at all. It seems the commercial growers have a way of hybridizing them to harvest abundant fast growing crops.
Growing an avocado tree is no doubt influenced by my wife, the avid gardener of many decades. She is getting ready to plant her vegetable crop. Our modest perennial garden in the backyard is pushing up out of the ground with fresh green shoots. Six weeks from now there will be a profuse array of flowers.
Growing plants and other things is one of the most humble and at the same most noble activities we humans can undertake. It is a very good way to connect with the natural world, its cycles and precepts we are so easily alienated from today.
In these times our modest patch of paradise takes on new meaning as there is gratitude at being alive and so blessed that we live where we do.
Outside the garden gate is a world for lament-and self-immolation with chill winds blowing. I see the land of my youth a pale shadow of its former self.
This is not the lament of an old codger suffering nostalgia for earlier times. This is the verdict of history and its well calibrated measuring rod. We think the present is invincible and we can abuse it to our liking with endless indulgences; we are a long way from being dedicated constant gardeners.
*****
I have never been to the Ukraine, but it is much like Saskatchewan, a province of the Canadian prairies. Both are known for growing the world’s best wheat and cereal grains.
In my youth Saskatchewan was a vast sea of wheat. It was dotted with towns that were ethnic enclaves where immigrants from Europe built new lives and escaped the ravages of European wars. Some towns became known as ethnic enclaves where French, German, Russian and Ukrainian were languages spoken on the streets. People went to the churches of their choice and were free to celebrate their ethnicity.
Those towns are gone now as corporate farming has taken over. Now Ukraine lays in ruins and the corporations have already bought up the farmland. As a condition of loaning Ukraine money the International Monetary Fund(IMF) required the sell off of national assets which is how countries around the world are impoverished to their creditors and pried opened for predatory investors.
The chill of war, death and destruction hangs heavy in Ukraine, while the heavy frost of betrayal hangs heavy in both countries. Canada once touted as the “Peaceful Kingdom” has sold its soul to the gods of war and we are hideously complicit in the those wars. Canada has participated in the destruction of Ukraine.
Of course there are the fatuous fools who claim Russia started this war, that it provoked it. Such claims are shot to hell by history. It reveals the imperial West has been plotting the destruction of both Russia and China for over a 100 years. The Western media has effectively buried the historical context and circumstances.
Further more, it is now evident the destruction of Ukraine is the opening salvo of WW III with the aid of a quisling utterly immoral government duped into sacrificing its country to imperialist barbarians.
The Canadian government has abdicated its role to lead, to speak for peace and civility. It is hostage to the empire’s bloody wars.
Ottawa is a hot bed of Russophobic/Sinophobic politicians. Implanting hate and racism is the first requirement for imperialist wars and their incessant escalation.
People cannot speak the truth of the destruction of the Nordstream Pipelines and its profound consequences. The empire has put its NATO vassal states under padlock in service to its desperate war agenda.
World War II finished off three empires, the British, the Third Reich, and Japanese empires. America does not have immunity from the cycles of history. Nor does China, it is already predicted its prominence will be waning by 2050.
History reaches into the future just as it does into the past.
W.H. Auden saw the intellectual disgrace on the eve of WW II, now it is pandemic and the consequences much more devastating.
My avocado tree may never bear fruit but seeing some semblance of growth in a world so toxic to itself is reassuring.
Of further interest—Empowering Tucker Carlson
The firing of Tucker Carlson from Fox News once again signals how desperate the Western power elites have become. Carlson commanded a very big audience and his firing will result in an even bigger audience. It is only a matter of time before he finds a new platform where he will be even more effective. Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox, will regret the day he fired Carlson.
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