Category Archives: Politics

Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, permaculture, Politics

In the Garden

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Summer                        New Moon

A.T. used the chainsaw this morning.  He cut out a mulberry tree growing in an unwanted (eastern) location.  A.T. feels manly after he uses the chainsaw.

Kate and A.T. harvested peas, greens, beets and turnips, too.  A.T. planted beans as a cover crop among the onions, where the garlic came out.  A.T. plans a much larger garlic crop for next year.  He has 9 or so large bulbs set aside for planting and set in an order for several new varieties.  At the SSE (Seed Saver’s Exchange) conference over the weekend a speaker suggested planting the garlic earlier, even in August.  A.T. asked SSE if he could get his garlic earlier than the September 7-9 ship date.  Nope.  Not to  worry, he’ll plant his own in mid-August and check the crops against each other next June.

This whole gardening process now begins to blur the line between horticulture and agriculture.  With crops meant for immediate consumption, but others for storage:  potatoes, turnips, carrots, squash, beans, garlic, onions, greens and peas, plus the eventual fruit yields, our garden has become a substantial part of our lives.  Substantial in the transubstantiation notion loved by Catholics.  We eat of the body of our garden and our orchard and in our bodies it becomes use, transfigured from plant to human.  A sacred event.  Substantial in the way it requires the use of our bodies to realize its harvest.  Substantial in the political sense since it cuts down trips by car, makes our place better than we found it and keeps us close to our mother.

The bees have added another dimension.  An interdependent, co-creative collaborative effort.

Faith and Spirituality, Politics, Woolly Mammoths

No Ring. Yet.

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Summer                            Sliver of the Waning Summer Moon

Inquiring minds want to know.  No, Antra, no joy yet.  There are still a few possibilities but the weekend trip and a busy day has not left me time to go check.  We have approximately an acre and a half fenced and 2/3rds of that is woods, so we may never find it.

Woolly’s tonight.  We discussed Good and Evil in our own lives.  Tom Crane showed a wonderful documentary about a French region focused on Champion sur Lignon.  The people in this whole region hid Jews during WWII.  In interviews with them after the fact they implied that they just did it.   It was a very moving story.  It hit me especially since they were Huguenots, the group to which John Know belonged.  Their position relative to helping the Jews I recognized from work within the Reformed tradition.  Then, too, clergy played a direct role in the attitudes that led to their extraordinary, yet very ordinary actions.

Great Work, permaculture, Politics

A Meeting

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Summer                             Waning Summer Moon

Today I went over to the Westside (St. Paul) to Neighborhood House for a meeting.  In days now long past I use to go there quite bit when Eustolio Benavides was its director.   We worked on a few projects together.  He got bounced out, I think, but nobody I talked to remembered him.

This meeting was an initial one to get the legislative agenda setting process underway for the collaborative structure, Minnesota Environmental Partnership.  The Sierra Club is a member and as the new legislative committee chair I attended.  I haven’t been in a large room filled with people like this in quite a while.  I knew only Dan Andreson, now the lobbyist for Clean Water Action and my immediate predecessor as chair of the LegCom as the Sierra Club names its legislative committee.

Since the players are new to me, the individuals new to me and the politics of the environmental organizational community still pretty opaque to me, I just sat there, took notes and listened.

The meeting finished at 4:30 p.m., putting me right in the middle of the evening rush so I drove up to Saji Ya on Grand Avenue and had some chirsahi as the highways untangled themselves.

In the old days I used to say, “Another day, another meeting.”  Now they’re a bit unusual.  I don’t dislike meetings.  A lot of folks I know profess a dislike for them, but I consider them one way of getting work done.   This one was the start of a long process.

Art and Culture, Garden, permaculture, Politics

My life, now

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Summer                                  Waning Summer Moon

Vega the wonder dog has:  shredded the netaphim irrigation,  chewed up a length of high quality hose, swallowed my wedding ring, peed on the bench cushion Kate made and, most recently, peed on our oriental carpet.  As a result we have:  put up a split rail fence, done loads of laundry and taken the oriental in to the rug laundry.

On the upside, she’s irrepressible, enthusiastic and downright funny.  Her sister Rigel, a sweet girl and a lover, seems bland in comparison, but they have the same parents.

This weekend I’m off to Decorah, Iowa for a conference at the Seed Saver’s Exchange farm.  There will be lots of information on organic farming/gardening, wagon rides, two speeches on heirloom vegetables, a presentation on Heritage Poultry and a barn dance.  There will be workshops on saving seeds, garlic, potatoes, hand-pollination and bud grafting.

This turn toward permaculture, horticulture, gardening was a gradual process.  It sort of snuck up on me as I dabbled in perennials on Edgcumbe in St. Paul, grew some vegetables, then did a bit more after we moved to Andover.  Later, I took a horticultural degree by mail from London University in Guelph, Ontario.  At some further point I began to read about permaculture, picked up Bill Mollison’s book and began to make contacts locally.

The real spur to push further on all this was a conference Kate and I attended in Iowa City three years ago now.  Run by Physician’s for Social Responsibility it convinced me that I needed to turn my activist attention toward environmental matters.

It took a while to get going but I got myself on the Sierra Club’s political committee last year in the summer, then followed up with work on the Club’s legislative committee this last session writing a blog.  Last September we hired ecological gardens to do a permaculture design for the whole property and made a push to get the orchard planted that fall so it would have the benefit of a full growing season this year.

This gives me work outside, in the political arena and, as a Docent, in aesthetic and intellectual realms.  A really good deal for me.  As always, thanks, Kate.

Garden, Great Work, Politics

Mulch

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Summer              Waxing Summer Moon

The six cubic yard of mulch pile has become several piles of mulch at strategic locations along the paths and beds of last year’s orchard installation.  Now it awaits distribution, looking like debris fields from some recent wooden mountain slide.  Mulch serves many purposes in the garden.  Winter mulch keeps the ground cold during spring’s heaves as the earth thaws and refreezes.  Summer mulch helps in weed suppression, keeps the ground cool to avoid plants getting overheated and helps hold moisture in the soil during hot weather.

Mulch in the orchard serves mainly to suppress weeds and to give a uniform look to the beds and paths, but it has one important purpose that Paula Westmoreland of Ecological Gardens taught me.  She says the breakdown of wood chips gives a different boost to soil chemistry, one more favorable to perennial plants while straw works better for annual plants like vegetables.  I don’t understand it, but she seemed very confident.

I drove into Panera’s in Northeast for a meeting with Dan Endreson, outgoing legislative committee chair of the Sierra Club and Margaret Levin, its executive director.  We went over the past patterns of developing agendas for the upcoming legislative session.  Dan made me a disc of all the documents that had been useful for him and the committee over the last four sessions while he’s been active.

It’s fun to get into a responsible role in an issue area I feel is important and in an aspect of the work that involves politics.  The future looks like lots of meetings, phone calls and work in or around the capitol.

The kids are on their way back here from a 4th of July spent in Chicago with Jen’s family.  Herschel will be happy to see his family again.

Garden, Great Work, Holidays, permaculture, Politics

As American As …

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Summer                                   Waxing Summer Moon

As american as stock-car racing, country music, Walden Pond and the Beach Boys, another long hot summer is well under way.  The neighbors love fireworks and each fourth of July they show off the good stuff they’ve picked up.  Some of it is impressive for local effects.  Flowering showers with a boom at the end.  Fiery pinwheels with whistles.  Percussive blasts.

Rigel and Vega did not get as upset tonight as they did last night.  Reassurance and familiarity are a powerful antidote.

The harvest continues and picks up speed.  Tonight I made a dish with chard and beet greens, topped with baked beets in Balsamic vinegar.  There was, too, roasted turnips covered in olive oil, pepper and Kosher salt.  Potato crusted wild Cod finished the meal.

The Seed Saver’s Exchange calendar that hangs on our kitchen wall has this quote under July’s photograph of heirloom tomatoes, onions and bell peppers:  “When the harvest begins to flow is the gardener’s joy.”  It’s true.

Digging up turnips and beets, cleaning and cooking them feels so good when they’ve come direct from the garden.  Though there are political reasons for having one, ecological reasons  and aesthetic reasons, the real payoff from a garden is fresh food, grown in a manner you know and in a place with which you are familiar, even intimate.

There are certain activities that just seem congruent with life.  Among them are picking, cleaning and cooking your own vegetables.  When I dig up the turnips and the beets, I remember the day their seeds went into the ground, one at a time.  Their first shoots.  Their growth over time.  All part of my life and theirs.

Another tradition of the fourth at our house is a meal with dishes cooked from our own sources.  Hope yours went well, too.

Great Work, Politics

A Promising Alliance

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Summer                     Waxing Summer Moon

A strange sensation today as I walked up the long flight of stairs at 2828 University Ave. SE.  Not deja vu exactly, I knew was this not a relived moment of my past, but a definite sense of having been here before, walking in to a strange room, meeting people, shaking hands, thinking further down the road.

It was the celebration of the Blue/Green Alliance’s opening its new offices.  The mayor’s of Minneapolis and St. Paul, RJ Rybak and Chris Coleman gave speeches, Ellen Anderson and Melissa Hortman were there along with others including Mark Andrews, former Hennepin County Commissioner.  There were labor leaders, leadership of the Sierra Club and a number of other folks whose personal and political lives pull them somehow into the orbit of labor and/or environmental politics.

I met Michael Porter, a guy from Macalester who runs their intern program.  I shook hands with Mark and saw Margaret Levin, executive director of the Sierra Club and Joshua Low who has done great work as the Green part of the Blue/Green Alliance.

Crowded rooms make hearing a difficult task for me, so I look to get away when I can, but it felt familiar to be there, getting ready for something months away, the second session of the 2009-2010 legislature.

This particular group and what they represent give me real hope in a couple of different directions.  Labor unions have had a tough go of it over the last twenty years or so and this represents a new and promising direction.  David Foster, the executive director of the Blue/Green Alliance, put it this way in a speech in Germany recently:  I want every job to be a green job and I want every green job to be a union job.  Sounds right to me.  Second, the environmental movement has often looked away from the difficult politics of economic justice, yet no lasting change in environmental policy will take place if those in the lower income sectors of our economy have to bear the brunt of it.

Art and Culture, Politics

Al Franken wins election to the US Senate.

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Summer                          Waxing Summer Moon

Al Franken wins election to the US Senate.  Boy, these election returns took a really, really long time to come in.  The election was in November of last year and today is the last day of June.  We have gone through Samhain, Winter, Imbolc, Spring, Beltane and into Summer while waiting on this decision.  Finally.

He was not my favorite, his politics and his manner jarring to me.  Norm Coleman was certainly not my favorite.  Still, Franken is a Democrat and he will caucus with the Democrats.  He may have provided the necessary vote to pass cap and trade.

I went into the museum today for a confab with other docents touring the pre-Raph show.  So much there, so much.  Only scratched the surface have I.  Not yet ready me.  But soon.

Art and Culture, Family, Garden, Politics, Writing

What Do You Do Well?

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Summer                      Waxing Summer Moon

“We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it.” – William Hazlitt

What do you do well?  No false modesty, please, just a clear honest look at yourself with an assessment of your skills and abilities.  Each of us has something that we have forgotten the how of in the midst of performing the act.

Typing is one such skill for me.  I long ago broke with the eyes to the keyboard, careful typing of the uncertain.  I’ve used a keyboard since turning 17 and it is now a tool about which I think little.  Perennial flower gardening is the same.  Vegetables not so much, since I still have to think about growing season, water and food preferences, sun and varities.

Politics comes naturally to me now, but only because my dad and I started watching political conventions when I was 5.  Weighing the political possibilities in a given situation is like typing.  I no longer look at the keys.

Writing, too, has begun to come into that category, too, though the longer pieces, like novels, still require a good deal of careful planning and thought.

Parenting and child-rearing, also, seem to have become second nature to me.  I can think about it, but I don’t much.  I just do.  In the same vein caring for dogs now has experience and attentiveness to guide me, not conscious thought so much.

Cooking, too.  I’m not confident in my cooking skills when it comes to cooking for others, but for Kate and me, I work in the kitchen with interest and experience.

Touring at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts has gone through peaks and valleys, with my comfort level and confidence now beginning to rise again.  This one will take a while to pass into something I do well consistently.

OK, that’s my list.  What about yours?

Great Work, Politics

Accepting a New Position

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Summer                      Waxing Summer Moon

The escape artists of our local pen had to remain outside when I drove into the Sierra Club meeting.  They did not break out again.  In this case they need an incentive to escape.  That usually consists of a human in a place not immediately accessible to them.  I was gone; Kate was gone; ergo, no incentive.

This was the baton passing moment for the legislative committee.  Josh introduced me as the person taking over from Dan Endreson, who had filled the job for the last four years.  I enjoy politics, enjoy talking politics and enjoy the strategy and execution.  This position will be a lot of work, but a type of work that energizes me.

The heat which sat on us for a couple of days has modulated a bit downwards and the night is pleasant.

The waxing summer moon is the slimmest of slivers, a nursery rhyme moon in need of a cow.