Daily Pole Beans

In every garden, in every year, there are successes and failures. I choose to look on failures as learning experiences and to celebrate successes. This year the pole beans growing on the tall fence of chicken wire along the garage are a major success. Every day there are new large pole beans to pick. Like grape leaves, the more you pick them the more they grow. We have grown pole beans before in the garden but they have never produced like they have this year. The idea for growing them on a fence came from some friends in Gays Mills, WI who have a good garden when they do not have floods. The chicken wire was something I saw in a home improvement store at a low closeout price. Originally I purchased it for fencing around Dawn’s of DMZ compost pile. It did not work there very well but pole beans seem to love it.

It is good to celebrate successes like I am doing tonight with this posting. Last night some of us sat around the dining room table at Casa Maria, the Catholic Worker House of Hospitality in Milwaukee, and decided to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Milwaukee 14, a nonviolent action in September 1968 to stop the draft and end the Vietnam war, and the 40 year history of the resistance to military training at Marquette University, a Catholic Jesuit University. Borrowing some ideas from the Dalai Lama and Thomas Merton we decided “not to fight for peace” but to celebrate in word, food, music and nonviolent action the peace in us and thus to spread it. Maybe peace is like pole beans, the more you grow and pick them the more they grow and spread. Our Father and Mother, Give us Our Daily Beans and Peace.

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