What SHOULD be is not What Is.As long as one sets one’s heart on “what should be” instead of What Is, one’s plans will fail.
I have a jar of coconut oil, that in the wintertime I kept in the oven — which, in turn, I kept warm as a place to keep my sourdough starter — so that I could dab the liquid oil on my scalp to soften hard spots (keratoses).
Sometime, I took it out, because I had to bake bread or potatoes; I have kept it on the counter ever since. Back in March and April, it pretty much stayed solid. Later, as the weather warmed up and I kept the windows open, it stayed liquid. Its melting point is somewhere between 70 and 75 degrees.
A few degrees made that difference.
As will be seen, I have a real thing for coconut plants and coconut products.
In planning my container garden, I held to the belief that one SHOULD be able to grow any given plant, anywhere in the 48 contiguous United States. It SHOULD at most be a matter of giving the plant the correct environment.
Turns out that’s not What Is.
Anyway, so now I’ve got my pineapple, my orange trees, my fig tree, my blueberries and raspberries — eh, what else? Cardamom. The ambition of growing strawberries year round inside (Outside, the rodent neighbors will harvest all the fruit.); I’ve read things suggesting it can be done; but it’s getting too late in the season for me to try it now, and I have to restrict my spending because with the current, ongoing, abominable heat wave, I’m facing tremendous electric bills.
So when the weather gets colder, I’ll bring the pineapple, orange trees, and cardamom inside. In Maryland, the other plants are OK to winter outdoors.
So that’s a bit of a concession to the notion that one can’t necessarily just grow anything anywhere. But there’s a lot more to it than that.
The USDA has established “hardiness zones,” based on what plants are most likely to survive a winter, at any given place. I am in Zone 7. It works the other way, too: not all plants will grow in greater warmth; some of those I bought are for Zones 7-9.
So, for decades, I’ve wanted to have a couple coconut trees indoors. I read that, indoors, they get 5-6 feet tall, which is perfect. So I bought a few coconuts and tried to germinate them myself; no luck. Found out you can buy them online, already germinated. I bought two, and planted them in a 20-gallon tote in my front room.
I had read that one must maintain the space where they’re kept, at no less than 70 degrees. That’s feasible; that one room has its own HVAC. But in March, April and May, I wanted to keep the windows open, and I often felt comfortable at 66 or 68 degrees. For hours or days on end.
They both died.
I recalled a rooming house where I lived 2006-2010. In the winter, I felt fine if the furnace were set at 68 degrees. The landlady, however, preferred to set it at 65. At that temperature, my hands turned blue.
A few degrees made that difference.
And evidently made that difference, too, for the coconut trees.
I recalled some plants and animals that grow down south, that just will not grow or survive in cooler temps. Kudzu is a fast-growing, hardy, highly invasive weed that grows in, I guess, Zones 8 and higher. It will not grow farther north. Also down south, they have a giant rodent pest called nutria. These critters won’t live farther north.
A few degrees make that difference.
What SHOULD be is not What Is. As long as one sets one’s heart on “what should be” instead of What Is, one’s plans will fail.
A very large minority of the American people are hopping mad, and up in arms, because their plans consistently fail.
They seek, in fact, minority rule. As they see it, the majority SHOULD share all their stands on politics and the culture wars; What Is, in fact, is that the majority do not find those stands persuasive.
They wish for things such as that God would unleash God’s wrath upon, say, all the homosexuals. That’s what SHOULD happen. It doesn’t, hasn’t, and won’t. What Is: the world is not constructed in such a way as to make any such thing possible.
So there are all kinds of reasons people hold different perspectives; some, I have explored in depth in previous posts about conservatives and liberals. What puzzles me now, is how do these alienated people tend to collect themselves into certain, specific, geographical areas. Why are there “red” states and “blue” states?
Certainly part of it has to do with the normal, well-known dynamics of coercion of thought. Withholding love from the person who disagrees. Shaming and brow-beating. But there must be more than that.
Decades ago, while she was still alive, I studied the work of Olga Worrall, the clairvoyant and spiritual healer. I attended a number of services at her New Life Clinic.
Here, about a dozen practitioners, all gifted healers, would line up at the altar rail to administer the laying on of hands. You might think that such gifted healers are very few and far between. But from the way they talked about themselves and one another, it became clear to me that there must be many such persons —i very likely, at least a hundred in metropolitan Baltimore alone.
How do they find each other?
Similarly, in his book, The Gift of Healing, Olga Worrall’s husband Ambrose, himself a clairvoyant and gifted healer, talks several times about happenstance encounters with other gifted people. It happened often.
How?
Some sort of cosmic magnetism must be at work. People of like minds and dispositions; people who have common interests and values; must somehow gravitate toward each other. In the physical world.
Comentarios