Fire Weed..

Six guys, a bottle of highly flammable liquid, a box of matches and something that needs destroying.. a winning combination!

Sitting just outside one of the entrances to the Resurrection Garden is a horrid weed which has proved to be the bane of my barefoot existence! It's thick and bushy with razor sharp spikes and it hates me. I have no doubt in my mind that it spends the majority of it's days just dreaming up new ways of slinging it's spikes deep into the souls of my feet. We hack it back to ground level every few months but sadly this has only served to encourage it, and so it simply grows back bigger and more obnoxious each time. Other attempts to kill it have all failed dismally and so the only option left was to dig it out from the roots, an effort that proved more fun than initially expected.

We had some sweet traveler cats come along to our Community Gardening afternoon here at the River Ashram who were keen to get their hands dirty. They're both pretty interesting characters; one a Mohawk wielding media designer from Finland, the other a French law student who is taking a break from his studies so he can do what all law students do on their break and ride a bicycle across North India then all the way back to France! (So far he's clocked up an impressive 2633kms!!)

They had been hard at work for a couple of hours with Byron (our 6'5" Aussie brother whose a part of our community) when I arrived home from a Christmas party and got on the scene. This was the first time I really got a clear picture of what we were up against. The root ball was massive (about as thick as my upper leg) and bunkered down very deep. They had already dug down a couple of feet through some super tough soil and the base of the root was nowhere to be seen. This was partly because it was still well below the surface, but also because they were busy stuffing paper and sticks and other flammable objects around the base of the root with the plan of burning it out.

I have to admit, I probably would have just kept digging - but being a guy, the thought of setting something ablaze is an option too hard to pass up. Thus Oodbliav went and grabbed a bottle of the most flammable liquid he had on hand and we went to work creating a fire ball worthy of a couple of quick photos.

We ended up keeping the flame going till well after dark and it will be interesting to see what's left of it in the morning. Part of me is concerned of what ghastly abomination it might transform into if we haven't succeeded in destroying it this time round, potentially some sort of flora poltergeist out for revenge, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

 

It's been an interesting experience crafting this post along with these photos as the more time I spend looking at them the more anthropomorphic they become. It's a bit like cloud gazing, the longer you look the more you end up seeing. So give yourself a couple of minutes to set your peepers on the above image and tell me you don't see a woman with her hands behind her back walking up a step! Or the fourth image from the top; the tall dude wearing the low rider pants and miming at firing an arrow into the air. Or the third image from the top; a baby elephant with his trunk raised high in the air with a parrot perched atop it. Or the fifth image from the top; a statue taken from Lisa McCunes' stock pile of Gold Logies (that was probably being used to prop up a kitty litter tray or serving some other similarly noble purpose). 

So unless I'm just loosing it (which is a definitely possibility - I do have 2 kids under the age of 3 and live in Varanasi) I'm keen to hear what you see when you look deep into the flames!