A Snapshot of Garden Life Just Before November

This afternoon I cycled to the allotment gardens again.

The plant life is settling back into the ground as always in late autumn, figments of leaves (green and red and yellow, with pale underbellies like fish) and pink rose petals plucked off the trees and bushes and shrubs and melting into the grass, gravel, and earth, against dark wooden posts and tree trunks, garden sheds and evergreen trees. But instead of the vinegary scent of rotting apples or other whiffs of decay, the air was relatively fresh and I only caught an occasional trace of rose blossoms.

Besides the rose haws and late flowers, orange berries, Virginia creeper leaves, and late red apples that had partly fallen on the grass — tattered and drying late purple asters and the odd hidden nasturtium blossom in flaming colour, were adding life to the scene. A bird flew overhead to a hidden congregation of crows.

2023 was not a great year for grapes due to the better rainfall and scanter sunlight. They were more sour and less flavorful than last year, and began to sag in September; now a lot of them seem to have dropped from the vines instead of enduring, round and sweet, late into winter's frosts as they did last year.

In one of the garden plots, the pumpkins that were hanging from vines like orange lanterns have disappeared; so I think have the beans, and the ginger blossoms are shrivelling after being bright and beautiful for several months. But the dark, long kale is thriving, and the chili peppers planted alongside it in the same raised bed have ripened.

Leafy tree species are, of course, losing leaves at different rates. One species is almost entirely bare; but the spiry thin cottonwoods are largely green, for example. The amply leaved oaks beside the gardens, with their high-arched autumnal warren of shadows and tree trunks and rain-wettened asphalt path beneath, suggested a Thoreau-era New England in early autumn, even if (almost?) all of their acorns seem to have been shed already.

Other people worked, went for walks or bicycle trips, or met with friends, in the garden enclosures and the paths; but they were lost amongst the shrubbery. The brooding grey sky exuded the same heavy, sound-dampening feeling as the sky after snowfall.

Passages of poetry (that I've probably quoted before in this blog) recurred to memory.

Keats:

The sedge is wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.

Byron, where my 'sea' was instead the wind in the trees and the distant roar of cars:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
⁠By the deep Sea, and Music in its roar

I came home with three red apples more or less the size of walnuts, more like Christmas tree decorations than like edible fruit in appearance.

Scylla and Charybdis, and Studies

For the second weekend in a row, I've been practicing amateur journalism skills by going to protests about the Israel-Hamas war. It's been challenging to keep my own feelings in check, also as in Germany this war has brought up longstanding stereotypes about Middle Eastern neighbours that I personally find deeply offensive and unfair. The German press coverage also makes my amateur journalism far more uncomfortable: pro-Palestinian protestors have no empirical reason to trust me; as a result, I have not conducted any interviews or photographed many people's faces. But I figure that having more opinions about the war is not going to help anyone, so it's not hurting anyone if I shut up about mine; and at least I personally feel quite safe at the protests. So I just vent freely to my siblings and my mother, and attempt to be outwardly neutral.

What's going much better is the next university semester. While I still haven't received a final response to whether I am accepted for full-time study or not, I like the Plan B that I've implemented: i.e. another semester of guest-auditing modern Greek. This year, the fellow students are native German speakers who don't insist on speaking Greek 100% of the time. So, regardless of how class compositions may look in future semesters, it gives me a chance to wholly follow what's being taught and discussed, and to steadily acquire enough knowledge to handle Greek-language classrooms in future.

That said, a fellow student has a Palestinian parent, and she hasn't been showing up to classes in the last week. I didn't fully understand what was discussed, but it sounds like she's distressed by the university's public stance on the war. As she's the only fully enrolled student in the Greek programme for our year, this means that missing classes will really be a disadvantage to her university career, although our professor is flexible and sympathetic.

As for the weather, the transition to fall has been abrupt, and 'suddenly' there have been a lot of gloomy days. The Tiergarten had dramatic yellow foliage yesterday, interspersed with rust red from the chestnuts or horse chestnuts, and temperatures have dipped near the freezing point repeatedly. Last night the switch from daylight saving time happened. While I felt remarkably early-birdy for waking up at around 8:15 a.m. this Sunday morning, I figure that soon I'll backslide.

On my schedule today are three protests, plus hanging out with my family. Potentially at a restaurant, to celebrate my sister's well-deserved acquisition of a Bachelor's degree, after fulfilling the last formal requirements.

An Early Autumn Outing at a Forested Riverside

The last few posts are not cheerful. I've realized retrospectively that there are a few more things that have made me uneasy lately (the cooling of the construction industry that my youngest brother is in, flights of military jets over my neighbourhood, ...) that I forgot to mention...

But, on the bright side: the smaller company I used to work for before it was bought in 2021 is likely going to be reestablished. It's impossible to feel truly happy if one always has this consciousness that, even if I myself escaped our Employer Overseas by quitting, a lot of my friends are still metaphorically straining under the whip and yoke of the workplace every single day while I frolic. It's also difficult to feel truly happy if suddenly they're all unemployed and thrown upon the mercies of Berlin employers (good and bad). But now that a new set of opportunities is arising, the constant ache and grief of the past few months is healing rapidly.

***

At around noon I met with two former colleagues and godfather M. to traipse around the walking and hiking paths near the Nikolassee and the Havel, at the western edge of Berlin.

On the way, acorns were firing like little bullets from beneath my bicycle wheels, patterned with their graceful curving leaves in the forest floor once I was walking in the forest itself. Elm or beech leaves, and maple leaves, in yellows and reds, were also spreading and peaking on the ground. Brown squelched horse chestnut hulls carpeted some of the bicycle paths, their shining dark brown fruits spilled here and there, or crushed to green powder underneath car tires.

And the tree canopies were mostly still intact, curving over the sidewalks and streets and forest paths, piled as copiously as the vast and quickly-changing clouds (white or grey) in the sky. Often splashes of sunlight streamed across the paths, often splashes caught in the upper leafy branches. And although a few dead trees seemed to testify to losses from summer droughts, and many twigs and branches had been shaken to the forest floor by gusts of wind, the overall impression was: green.

The weather was so good for boating that the loud sputtering of the many sails was audible from the shore — louder even than a fire-engine-red speedboat — the grey surface was choppy, and foaming white wakes trailed from the sterns.

There was an elaborate set-up of hiking paths, information panels (also at an 1840s stone memorial with the same Gothic nubs you might see on a church spire, that had been refurbished in 1945 and commemorated a legend, overlooking the lake), bus stops, benches, etc. for humans. And black sheeting to help keep frogs from meeting a swift and smashing demise by hopping onto a semi-busy road beside the shore. But not so many other people that one constantly felt accompanied.

A group of swans was putting in a 'pit stop' on a grey sand shore. A raven flew overhead, I think, when we paused on a bench (to eat pastries and rest) overlooking an idyllic riverside copse; it made its echoing clicking calls, while dragonflies hovered over a horizontal tree trunk. And a few crows I especially noticed at the beginning. There must have been a red squirrel or two, but I didn't fully pay attention. There were, relievingly, no frog or mouse corpses glued to the roads as I'd seen elsewhere in and around Berlin. And although a few tree roots looked a bit blackened or even charred, it didn't seem as if there'd been many losses due to lightning strikes over the summer.

And although I felt too much like I needed to conserve energy to speak much with the other hikers, at least I listened to the conversations. It was a lovely outing.

Foreign Affairs and the Lemming Instinct: A Rant

For the past months I've been feeling more and more uneasy about the balance of world politics. I don't know if it's a presentiment or if the world is just surviving as it always does, as contradictorily bad and good.

The sea change in the rhetoric about asylum seekers and migrants, who in my view are caricatured in the Berlin and national German news more and more as a threatening mass. (Quite ignoring the reality that, as two or more speakers at the UN General Assembly mentioned in September, there are more conflicts in the world today than there have ever been since World War II. — The more conflict, the more people fleeing conflict. It's not that people suddenly 'decide' that they want to be refugees. — And that countries around the world, even the poorest, have accepted millions of refugees too; it is not just the European Union and the United States.)

The weird inertia about evacuating people from Afghanistan who are endangered for being women or too 'pro-Western.' Afghanistan being kept in a worsening limbo as countries refuse to work with the "de facto" Taliban government. Apparently refusing because of the Taliban's bizarre policy about women's professional lives and education, which based on General Assembly speeches many other governments in the world seem to see with genuine bewilderment — a policy that also concerns me because it's a huge economic self-own.

The impulse in last week's Bavarian elections to vote extreme right primarily (55% of AfD voters identified this topic as important for them) based on 'concern' about accepting more refugees and migrants. — As if migrants were having the worst effect on quality of life, instead of global inflation due to the War in Ukraine, or climate change-related droughts and other natural disasters, for example. And thereby thrusting young and old, men and women, poor and (well, probably not rich) alike back into the arms of people who will torture, oppress, and kill them. Why not turn into a fascist state at once?

The wielding of eco-friendly home heating legislation in German political discourse as if it were a terrible civil rights oppression. Many countries around the world, affected more badly than Germany by global warming, wish they had as much public money to devote to reducing emissions as Germany does. But also the (in my view) counterintuitive impulse in countries like Germany to produce more and more climate-friendly cars and power plants and heating systems etc. etc. instead of focusing on reducing demand.

The continuing war in Ukraine. The impossibility of shipping its grain to countries who do want it (tons) as opposed to countries who don't want it (Poland, ...).

The downfall of Twitter and the megalomaniacal whims of Elon Musk.

The baffling support amongst American voters for the reelection of the US's 45th president, despite the sleaze that's radiating off of him like a mile-high nuclear fireball.

The peculiar support in business and politics for the United Arab Emirates and especially Saudi Arabia, despite the cloven hoof and horns that peer out whenever one considers the treatment of migrant workers, women, political opponents, people who lived in the path of 'eco-friendly' neo-cities before they were shot to death while protesting, Eritrean migrants crossing the border, and journalists.

And a lot of the unease I felt was already peaking even before Hamas tore down parts of the border wall in Israel and began massacring civilians.

Regardless of whether a cataclysm like a nuclear strike happens or not, justifying my foreboding, Martin Luther King Jr. Day did make me think that I should not whine about all the obstacles to civil rights and political rights today. If he could resist an establishment where policemen were genuinely out to crack his skull, like John Lewis, and much of the political elite that supposedly represented him probably even wanted him dead, and if he could still improve his country under those circumstances — why should I, as a woman who faces little-to-no oppression from my government, give up hope?

It's important to keep trying to live (if one has the privilege of trying it) in a way that shines a beam of light into the tempest.