Category Archives: Great Work

Home Work

December 18, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

8 bar steady 30.27 0mph NW windchill 6 Samhain

Last Quarter Moon of Long Nights

A busy morning here at the homestead. I played around with various formats and methods of research for the Sierra Club legislative committee. One setup uses Google News Alerts and Google Docs to create a real time log of news articles, web entries and video feeds on the five issues the LegCom will target during this years legislature. This much I can do at home.

My new datalogger for my weather station has not yet succumbed to my troubleshooting, but I imagine I’ll wrestle it to the ground sometime soon. Something about ports seems to be hanging it up right now. Requires detailed attention and I have to set aside time for that.

Kate and I had our business meeting. In spite of the negative financial weather swirling around we’re fine; not as wealthy as we were in, say, August, but fine nonetheless.

Good news on the car front. It was only a blown tire as far as they can see. Everything else looks fine. Under $400 bucks and I’d imagined multiple thousands. Quite a relief. We decided we’ll keep this one running until the plug-ins make sense.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Politics

Star Filled and Wonder Saturated

December 17, 2008 Charles 1 Comment

-4 bar steady 30.28 0mph SW windchill -4 Samhain

Waning Gibbous Moon of Long Nights

I have a run of almost 3 weeks with no outside obligations. This is a time of the year, even when I worked for the Presbytery, that I would stay home, take up a research project or a book I’d wanted to really absorb. This habit probably started during the Presbytery time because no congregational folk wanted to talk to judicatory people during the Christmas holidays and immediately afterward. Which was fine with me.

Right now it’s quiet. It has been dark since about 4:30 PM. The long nights have begun to swell and take over the rhythm of the day. This means more silence, more time to enjoy the darkness of mid-winter. This is a time of year and a natural cycle that draws us all inward. This inward pull pushes some of us to string up lights, go to multiple parties, perhaps drink to excess, spend money beyond our means. We’ll wake up sometime in the new year, ought 9 in this case, with a hangover wondering how the season got so out of hand.

The season can be filled with holy nights, silent nights. Starred filled and wonder saturated nights. It matters how we come to the season.

Instead of driving in to the Sierra Club meeting tonight I chose to participate by phone, as did all but two of the other legislative committee members. By the time I got done with my workout and shower, a lassitude crept over me, borne of the tensions and aches of the last couple of days. If I had driven in, as it turned out, my trip would have taken twice the time of the meeting. Not very efficient.

My original reason for driving in, to match peoples faces with names, would have been thwarted, too.

As it was, I was on the phone for 45 minutes, took notes, then hung up and went upstairs to read the Story of Edgar Sawtelle. Without the long drive it felt like I’d cheated.

Garden, Great Work, permaculture

Two One Hundred Yard Pots of Soup

December 14, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

15 bar steep rise 29.50 5mph W windchill 9 Samhain

Full Moon of Long Nights Day 8hr 45mn

It’s 4:48 and the sun has been down for 20 minutes, twilight almost run its course. We are a week away from the Winter Solstice, the high holiday in my personal calendar.

There is a simple pleasure, at once profound and straightforward. Grow a vegetable. Save it in the fall. Use it in soups in the winter. Today I made bean based soups with white and black beans from our garden. Onions and garlic went in each of them, too. So did some Swiss Chard grown in our hydroponics.

Clive Thompson, a writer for Wired Magazine, had a column this issue titled Urban Food. He said to heck with the 100 mile meal, I’m talking about the 100 yard meal. These two pots of soup are 100 yard pots of soup.

Feels great.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, permaculture

Make Meadows, Not Lawns

December 13, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

38 bar steep fall 29.49 2mph N windchill 36 Samhain

Full Moon of Long Nights

Another TED video worth watching: Where Have All the Bee’s Gone? In it apiarist Dennis vanEnglesdorp gives a brief overview of the honeybee disappearances in the U.S. We have lost about 1/3 of the total hives each year for at least the last two years. Beekeepers have prevented this from reducing our total bee population by splitting hives and buying queens, but the price of doing this year after year will become prohibitive.

Just this year I saw some honeybees in our garden for the first time since we’ve lived here. They surprised me.

At the end of the video he diagnoses the primary problem behind the bee disappearances as NDD: Nature Deficit Disorder. We have become, he says, too distanced from the natural world and no longer pay attention to how our lives influence the rest of the nature. His solution? Replace lawns with meadows. Works for me.

This is an example of the followers of the old faith. Each beekeeper, amateur or professional, is in the community of the saints, necessary in large, large numbers for this old faith to survive.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Myth and Story

An Old Faith Taking on New Raiment

December 12, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

18 bar steep fall 1mph SSW windchill 18 Samhain

Full Moon of Long Nights

How do you stretch out the creative muscle, let the reins loose on the resources hidden somewhere beyond or under the rational wall? When the Pegasus of new thought tries to rise from its tether inside the amygdala, the fear raiser of the brain, what can be done to smooth its way? To calm the nakedness of the soul?

There is, I am sure of it, an old faith taking on new raiment. It says nothing new; it proclaims nothing that is not obvious; it offers no new wisdom. It cares not for written texts, for prayers or priests, for churches or temples. It does not require protection under the first amendment or any amendment of any laws of humankind, for its law is writ in the language of the stars.

It has holy places. Places we know by their Torii or their thick ropes. Places we know by worn paths that lead us through forests, along rivers, up mountainsides, into the garden. Places we know by the trembling sense of wonder they evoke in us. A crashing waterfall. An erupting volcano. An opening tulip. The birth of a howler monkey among the ruins of ancient Angkor. Places we know by the care others have taken: paintings, poems, cairns and prayer ties.

These holy places were not decreed in some council or by a guru or selected by a committee. No, they were decreed by the hand of Pangea, sculpted by the artisans wind and water. They were discovered, not made.

This old faith has so many followers, so many who take its truths with them into the fields, onto the lakes and oceans, alongside them in struggle, carried in wicker baskets into the flower and vegetable gardens. So many followers.

There is no common book, save the verdant field. There is no common book, save the flowing stream. There is no common book, save the vasty deeps. There is no common book, save the azure sky. There is no common book, save the dark night sky filled with stars. And these are more than enough.

If you are a member of this faith, you know it. You need no congregation, you require no chant or hymn. You need only a quiet moment beside a brook or a butterfly.

Art and Culture, Great Work

Long Day

December 5, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

22 bar steep fall 29.71 1mph SSW windchill 22 Samhain

First Quarter Moon of Long Nights

Two tours. 2nd graders. Fun, but not as much fun as the dual language immersion kids. A home-schooling group. Some of the boys looked like they might go all Columbine except they had no school. Could not get them to talk. The moms, however, enjoyed the tour.

A long day, from 9am-3pm, long for a home boy like me anyhow. I took an Alleve before I went and that seems to have worked well.

Tomorrow Sierra Club anti-racism training. Now it’s about the inner work, the soul work of organizing. Hmmm. We’ll see. The budget numbers for the state will make the next session pretty interesting.

Great Work, Hydroponics, permaculture

A Prolegomena to All Future Gardens

December 3, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

17 bar rises 30.08 3mph NNW windchill 13 Samhain

Waxing Crescent Moon of Long Nights

The black plastic has been laid down; the marsh hay rests on top of it in fluffy abundance. A good snow right now would marry the two until early spring. May it come soon.

This was a long project. I had to cut down weeds, trees, raspberry canes and shrubs, pull vines and dislodge a deadfall. All this was prolegomena. The black plastic had to be rolled out, made to conform to the odd shapes created by various impediments, then cut and staked or held down with logs. After a piece of plastic was cut and laid in place, then the marsh hay went over it.

This process, too, is prolegomena for the next phase. In that phase we will plant serviceberry, hawthorne, and other shrubs and small trees that produce food edible by and interesting to birds and varmints. That phase ties in with the orchard as a distraction from the human edibles, in the hope that more–or enough–will end up for us. It is this linkage of one piece with the other, all in the service of creating a sustainable enviornment for people and animals, that excites me about permaculture.

I have also mulched all the bulbs I planted and/or transplanted at the end of August and the middle of September. These are daffodils, tulips, hyacinths, snow drops, lilies of many kinds and iris. I have both mulched and not mulched over the years and find that mulching the first year for all new plantings and after for those plants sensitive to cold increases the germination rate considerably.

There are also many peppers now in the hydroponics. Only one is large so far, but they keep sucking down nutrient fluid at a rapid pace so they are growing. I have not yet convinced any eggplant blossoms to move on to fruiting but I imagine that’s only a matter of patience.

Great Work, permaculture, Politics

Home As A Political Statement

December 3, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

15 bar steep rise 30.05 5mph NNW windchill 11 Samhain

Waxing Crescent Moon of Long Nights Day 8hr 56m

Below are photographs of recent work underway along the wood’s edge here. Almost done for this year.

The fruit trees as winter takes hold.

Marsh hay before use. AKA hay without seeds or straw without seeds.

View along the wood’s edge facing due north. The straw in the foreground and mid-ground covers the black plastic. The area covered is approximately 15 feet wide, that is, 15 feet between the truck path and the beginning of the forest proper and extends perhaps 150-200 feet from end to end. This whole area will have shrubs and small trees planted in the spring.

This gives you a better picture of what’s going on here. I ran out of hay on Sunday and had to get the new load visible in the first shot.

Do you remember how you felt when you first realized you loved someone? I have that feeling over and over with the land here.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Holidays, permaculture

A Holimonth Filled With Holy Days

November 29, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

Kate and I will head over to Beisswingers in a few minutes. The lawn tractor has had a checkup, gotten set up for winter storage and had its blades sharpened. It will go in the machine shed, the one back on the wood’s edge.

After that, we will start laying the black plastic. I cleared the area of standing weeds, trees and brush over the last three weeks. I want to get the plastic down before it snows.

Though by my reckoning we’ve been in Holiseason since Samhain, the pace does pick-up between Thanksgiving and New Years. A real holimonth filled with Holy Days. The sacred puts itself before us in so many ways over the next few weeks.

The article I posted yesterday from the magazine Orion points to a key locus of the sacred: home. At some point over the weekend I’m going to post some thoughts about home and ge-ology.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Work, permaculture

The Most Radical Thing You Can Do

November 28, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

From the Faraway Nearby
The Most Radical Thing You Can Do
Staying home as a necessity and a right
by Rebecca Solnit
Published in the November/December 2008 issue of Orion magazine

LONG AGO the poet and bioregionalist Gary Snyder said, “The most radical thing you can do is stay home,” a phrase that has itself stayed with me for the many years since I first heard it. Some or all of its meaning was present then, in the bioregional 1970s, when going back to the land and consuming less was how the task was framed. The task has only become more urgent as climate change in particular underscores that we need to consume a lot less. It’s curious, in the chaos of conversations about what we ought to do to save the world, how seldom sheer modesty comes up—living smaller, staying closer, having less—especially for us in the ranks of the privileged. Not just having a fuel-efficient car, but maybe leaving it parked and taking the bus, or living a lot closer to work in the first place, or not having a car at all. A third of carbon-dioxide emissions nationwide are from the restless movements of goods and people.

We are going to have to stay home a lot more in the future. Continue reading The Most Radical Thing You Can Do →