Invisible Strings
I am being pulled by invisible strings. I am a puppet, currently under the control of one who is wise and is guiding me towards success and fulfillment. I am being guided by the perfect being.
My thoughts are my own, but my actions are no longer mine. They are those of a higher intelligence, one who is not ruled by my emotions, my passions, my fear or my imagination. It is one who is outside of myself, and who knows what must be done, and wastes no time in doing so. One who knows what is best for me.
I may not always want to do what I am made to do, but it is not me pulling the strings. It is one who knows better.
This is what I am imagining today.
Japanese Is Fashionable
The tall guy on the Ugly Mugs team was wearing another cool band shirt today, and it had just a little bit of Japanese on the front. The band was called Dayseeker, and it said on the corner of the shirt, in tiny font, 暗い太陽. Dark sun. I asked him about it, and then I read the Japanese off the shirt, and he was impressed. He said, “So, you speak the kanji?” and told me I needed to speak to another guy on the team who was learning Japanese.
I had read Japanese off another Ugly Mugs guy’s shirt too, his Japanese racing shirt. It had katakana that said, ドリフットキング. Drift King. Swag as hell.
Japanese is everywhere. Japanese is fashionable.
Just Get Started
I have a reservation to doing my work, sometimes. To doing the thing that I know I should do, that I even want to do. Today, that is write a cover letter and adapt my resume to a job I want to apply for. Well, I’ve already done it. I’m just waiting a bit, to let it settle and then double-check, before I send it off.
A lesson that has been coming up in my life recently, and again this morning, is this:
You just have to get the ball rolling.
This is not any new epiphany, because there already many quotes about this, that say, “Starting is the hardest part” or “the first step is as big as all the rest of the steps combined”. “There are really just two steps, the first step and then all the others.” I know that’s actually a quote somewhere out there.
It’s amazing how much resistance I have to doing things, and 90% of the time, all I have to do is just start, and then I’m having a great time. You’re engrossed in the work, then you finish your task, and feel satisfied and awesome. Conversely, until you do the work that you’ve set out for yourself, you will feel a vague sense of dissatisfaction. You may say, “Why do I feel weird?” But deep down inside, you know why. There’s something you have to do, and you haven’t done it yet.
I have been reminded of this lesson recently with my writing, and this morning with the cover letter/resume writing. Even today, I had resistence. But I knew the thing to do—just go to the cafe, get the coffee, sit down and start.
That’s why starting in the morning is so helpful for me. You have the energy, you have the full day ahead, and you are encouraged to just get right down to business, and get it over with. Then you can have your freedom and fun time.
I’m thinking of the other quote which might be by Mark Twain, possibly Thomas Edison, or who knows, which is the one about eating three frogs in the morning. “I try to eat three frogs every morning.” Something like that. The idea being to “eat a frog” right when you wake up, because it’s going to be the hardest part of your day.
Garden Updates (Sept. 10th)
My soil is not great. I have had some things suffer due to drought, and probably some seeds not sprouting because the soil is too hard or not the right quality. Birds and squirrels may have also eaten the seeds, as many of them I just sprinkled on the top of the soil. It’s a tough patch of earth I’m working with, but things are growing.
The big mystery I have now is why my second patch of zinnias are doing so much better than the first. The first was planted about two weeks before, maybe only one week before. I should have written this stuff all down. They’ve been alive for one or two more weeks in drought conditions, as August was hot and sunny every single day. It rained twice, and not for much. I don’t really know why my second patch is doing so much better. Maybe it is that they just weren’t exposed to so much sun and drought. Even a few days, an extra week of that could matter a lot. I don’t know.
I tried really hard to save these zinnias as they were going downhill, but I’m still a novice. I didn’t know if they needed more water, less water, or if they just were going to die anyways. Maybe they need fertilizer because of the sandy, clay soil. Who knows, but they were growing well and fine, so I think they probably just got cooked, and probably didn’t get enough water. That’s my guess.
You can see they’re brown and crispy. Many are dying, half already dead.
This is the second patch, doing a lot better.
Here’s a marigold. I put down a lot of seeds, two have made it. Not great odds, but hey. Two made it. I thought I had more, but as they started to pop up in places were there should have been no marigold seeds, and they were rapidly expanding outwards, instead of up, I had the suspicious feeling that they were not marigolds. Well, they weren’t. They were tree of heaven, thriving in my disturbed, roadside habitat with crappy soil.
Not a great photo but this is one of the butterfly milkweed sprouts I’ve got, with those little yellow milkweed aphids feasting on it. I’m just letting nature take its course, here. So far it seems that the sprouts can handle it.
Here is an undesirable in my garden (actually several). You can see a little tree of heaven sprout to the right of the larger undesirable plant. The grass at the bottom is undesirable. I can’t remember what this green round mass is called but it’s undesirable. I know that.
I used my Moto G smartphone to help me ID these sprouts when trying to use words with Google wasn’t working for me. Sharing the photos with Google and having it ID things is extremely helpful. It told me right away what I was working with, here. And there were many disappointments, because none of it was anything I really wanted.
Here are some undesirables that I thought were cosmos. They look similar, but they kept popping up and I thought, now wait a minute, there’s no way the cosmos are doing this well in my garden. And there’s more seedlings than actual seeds I planted.
Not cosmos. Common ragweed. At least it’s not an invasive. I should pull it up but I guess I want to see what happens. I’m also still holding out on a fantasy that they really might be cosmos, and they will all become beautiful flowers.
It’s inhabiting the carrot patch but I don’t feel like those carrot seeds are sprouting… at all. Not having a lot of faith in the carrots, here.
This is mountain mint, I got from Shelby. They dug me up a chunk and let me take it home. It’s not doing too well, I don’t think. The leaves are turning brown, almost all of them have gone brown and seemed to die. There are a few green ones left. I hope it doesn’t actually die because I was really excited about this plant. Maybe it’s just going dormant for the season…? (Hopeful optimism.)
I think right behind it in this photo is an advanced tree of heaven plant, I’m almost positive. In the background, to the left. Do you see that thing? Probably gonna have to pull that.
This is something new that’s been popping up that is also an undesirable. There’s a big one that I should have photographed. My smartphone IDed this as “three-seeded mercury” which is an amazing name and hard to remember. Just now I thought it was called “three-headed copper” because I couldn’t remember. Apparently it is a member of the “Spurge” family, which is a pretty incredible word. “Acalypha rhomboidea is a plant in the spurge family…” (Says Wikipedia.)
You know, it looks like the spurge is just in the top right of this photo, actually. I think the rest of this stuff is something else.
Here is the three-seeded mercury, the spurge, to the right. There’s a few of them. And that largest plant on the left is apparently “common mullein”, and is invasive and hated, I have read. From Europe and seems to be a menace. There is another, smaller common mullein in the bottom left corner of this photo.
I’ve got this grass popping up all over in a section of the garden, and I don’t know exactly what it is. These caterpillars (maybe common buckeye, Junonia coenia) like it though, as I had photographed the big one the other day (and I don’t know where that one went off to), but yesterday I spotted an extremely tiny one on a blade of this grass, and today there are three, munching away now. They’re like little lawn mowers. I’ll leave the grass for them. They could get real big real fast, here. Hopefully they stick around.
And the last photo and update—I spied this fuzzy caterpillar this morning on one of my zinnias. I haven’t seen any caterpillar on a zinnia before. This is a new one. And it’s actually eating it. Go for it, man. That zinnia is probably gonna die anyway. I want to see you get BIG.
HAKUMUSU 