Did the rain make me a puddle?

2 year old Bodie just woke up from a nap and asked, "Did the rain make me a puddle?"

Are We Down to Earth Enough?

You get boys outside in nature and after 6-8 hours they're pretending they're frogs or bears rather than Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader with light sabers. I say 6-8 hours because yesterday my son was playing with a friend at the Redwood Bowl in the Oakland Hills. After 2 hours he was still using a pistol-like stick with beautiful green lichen as a laser. My 4 year old draws a lot of aliens at school with laser see-all eyes inspired by his cousin who made a robot with see-all eyes designed to save the environment. I know his cousin isn't the only one influencing him; my own time spent here on this lap top, and the time I let the boys play on pbs kids.org contributes to their point of view: that the fantastical omnipotence of robots and futuristic objects trumps all. We love this stuff-- at least a lot of us do. An iPhone can feel more alive than something really alive like a stick or a towering redwood forest. I wish sometimes I could sail away on a small boat with the boys for a year and a day to where the wild things are. Not because I want them to know how to becalm them but because I want them to know that sense of belonging and being awake in wildness. In a way a hurricane or a Nor'easter wakes us.

Blossom Jack- fours years plus

Not that I write hundreds of entries a year-- but there is something of value to having a little history. I started Blossom Jack around the time my son Jackson turned 1 in 2007 and six months after my father passed away. The title came to me out loud as a dialogue with my husband. I wanted a name that might fit both genders and represent something that grows, grows beautifully and naturally. Blossom Jack came to me after a few tries and just coincidentally happened to be the name of the cow my husband had as a child in Sparks, Nevada. I had never known he had a cow before that conversation. Just for the record, his family cared for and got milk from Blossom Jack and then ate her, an urban homesteading tale from the early 70's.

Summer lovin': My plums, food trips and blogs to remember

Here's my plum tree humming with bees in spring. Missed my plum harvest this summer but Doug picked 8 or 9 pounds and froze them. Made one batch of vanilla bean plum preserves and my favorite plum upside down cake from Ruth Reichel's The Gourmet Cookbook and still have half the harvest in my freezer. Two remarkable food trips of the summer- neither necessarily new to foodies but new and lovely to me: Momofuku's ssam and milk bars in NYC in July and then today Humphrey Slocumbe's ice cream parlor. We had burnt butter, salted chocolate and the especially nice Irish Breakfast: vanilla ice cream with bourbon and cornflakes. Question: what's with the salt? Seems like it goes hand-in-hand with avant garde food. In any case, it worked today after a foggy morning at Ocean Beach. Two food revolution blogs to follow and fantasize about the days when I can hit all the Slow Food/ and Forage events around the country right at peak harvests: Forage Oakland and two recommended by my best friend Julie: Sweet Beet and Splendid Table.

School Begins

How to break down the walls of a classroom? My CEL Academy colleague suggested just start opening windows and get eyes off the screens. I have all these visions for my urban school-- bee hives with long chimneys for bees to exit and enter high above the playground activity like the one at the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden. I want all kinds of edible plants, but also plant guilds, and historical gardens to help teach the environmental history of the school yard before its concrete. I have so many inspirations in the Bay Area and now also in my mom's town of Essex, CT where vegetable gardens make the old colonial houses look like 18c. homesteads again. It's so critical with children and adults to as Carolie Sly at the Center for Eco-literacy says: make it simple, make it real and the opposite of boring. Not as simple as it sounds. So I revisited the CEL webiste and found the essays on the Change page to be another important starting point. Big breath-- o.k., so be it.

Suzanne Collins’s “The Hunger Games,” review: newyorker.com

Suzanne Collins’s “The Hunger Games,” review: newyorker.com

Strolling in a Storm: Walking Ecology

I walk to work during the storms instead of bike. It's a bit like preparing to go skiing with full pants and jacket since the wind over the last few weeks has whipped the rain diagonal and even pelted me briefly with tiny hailstones. Umbrellas are useless. Sounds tough but it isn't. A meditation in the rain is a great remedy for what a storm otherwise whips up-- that pent up cabin-fever feeling when you feel forced inside by the weather. The cabin fever is especially poignant in an urban setting where indoor space is often shared by so many people. I'm still surprised how during storms kids are encouraged to stay indoors as if puddles weren't for playing in. Staying indoors, storm ecology is what is lost. For instance, a five minute walk through the neighborhood in a downpour makes one aware of storm drains and wonder where the water goes and what it's collected along the way. Then there are the small ponds that form in the flatlands reminding us of our proximity to the water and the flooding that happens in spots close or even below sea level. A little hail triggers the joy of wondering what could make such a strange object suddenly drop from the sky. Just thinking about my storm strolls conjures words I love to say, poems I love to remember.

106. In a Station of the Metro Ezra Pound

THE apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Ecological Economics: Cloud Institute's free 2-day workshop (pdf)

From The Cloud Institute Bookstore: Ecological Economics: A Community Exploration (adult)

"This 2-day workshop uses a collection of readings,activities, reflections, and experiences to provide community stakeholders, individually and in groups, with a practical introduction to ecological economics. (200 pages)

Ecological Economics for Life is an admirable pedagogical program of participatory learning that elicits, explains, and integrates the basic principles and issues of ecological economics. ~Herman E. Daly

Free Downloadable PDF- The Cloud Institute

Ecological Tales from India

And here's another find showcasing ecological tales and video from India. Following a link from the Ecological Tales blog, I found the charming Urban Balcony written by a Delhi based gardener.

Great Environmental Ed Blog

I love this new blog find: Simplified Environmental Education.
http://enviroeduguide.blogspot.com/

Elder's wisdom

Margaret Oakley wrote a short on-line memoir "Growing up in Glennonville" about growing up in the 1930's on a family farm in Missouri. I like this passage: "Except for an acre, Papa and Mama's small farm has been sold off to a farming conglomerate. There are no wild rose fences left. The path running through the field to Uncle Carol's house has been plowed under. The persimmon tree that stood in the middle of the field for shade is gone. The wind blows the dust across the fields denuded of wind breaking trees. A dust devil can be seen rising into the air. The arrowheads in the old potato patch are buried under several feet of chemically fertilized soil. "Progress", you say?

The little house is slowly caving in. The curtains hang in shreds at the windows. Despite the decay, the tin roof that shelters the house can be seen in all its tarnished glory. Jonquils, planted by Mama so many years ago, still bloom in the yard each spring. Members of the Lady's Alter Society pick them to place on the altars at Easter Mass. Children beg to explore the old house when they pass by with their parents. They hope to discover a ghost lingering within. They need have no fear of the little spirit woman they have glimpsed. It is only Anna hurrying to the back porch, drying her hands on her apron, to welcome them"

The Zaballeen

Garbage Dreams, a noteworthy movie screening this winter through Community Cinema, is about a garbage city in Egypt where 80% of the garbage is recycled. The trailer and clips look fascinating. The documentary follows three boys who have grown up as Zaballen or garbage collectors and recyclers and what they learn traveling to other countries. The Cloud Institute: "Garbage Dreams, directed by Mai Iskander, addresses garbage and consumption in an innovative way. In the world's largest garbage village located on the outskirts of Cairo, Egypt, the Zaballeen (Arabic for garbage people) recycle 80 percent of the trash they collect-far more than other recycling initiatives. Garbage Dreams can be a great resource paired with our Changing Consumption Patterns and Paper Trails curricula, found here.

Questions about Bradbury's classic "The Veldt"

Ray Bradbury's classic short story "The Veldt" was originally published in 1950 as "The World the Children Made." I read the story in high school and never forgot it. That was long before the internet and just moments before the dawn of cable T.V. We got electronically engaged with the first video game "Pong," basically digital ping pong and played Pac Man at aracades when possible. In the early 80's, I liked the story because of its terror more than anything. Now "the Veldt" affects me differently, of course and has inspired the questions below.

This story relies heavily on setting. What specifically are the two principle settings of the story?

Describe how the veldt is described in the story and what it represents first from the point of view of the adults then from the point of view of the children.

Why does the veldt become the setting and vehicle of fear, savagery and death at least from the point of view of the adults?

Do you think the children were calculating in their choice to collectively imagine the veldt? Were they making the world of the veldt in their nursery consciously to challenge and then snare their parents or were their imaginative needs some how mirroring their parents' world?

Is Bradbury yet again pitting technology against nature in a way that romanticizes nature and demonizes technology? Why or why not?

Consider the first title for the story. How does it change your view of the story? Why do you think Bradbury changed the title to "The Veldt"?

Nick Paumgarten on Whole Foods

Sorry to quote The New Yorker yet again-- clearly my free reading time is pretty limited these days. In any case, I really appreciated Paumgarten's insightful article on Whole Foods founder John Mackey. Particularly passages like this one:"Depending on where you are on the spectrum of epicurean cultural politics, you may consider Whole Foods to be a righteous grocer or a cynical con, a prod to self-improvement or a gateway to decadence, a neighborhood boon or a blight, a force for social good or a place to pick up chicks"

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/01/04/100104fa_fact_paumgarten?currentPage=2#ixzz0bqnBbYV8

Global Warming Fiction

"“capitalism cared more about its children as accessories and demonstrations of earning power than for their future” from Helen Simpson's chilling "Diary of an Interesting Year" in Dec.21 New Yorker. A short story not for kids under 16.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/12/21/091221fi_fiction_simpson#ixzz0brhlnWgW

Adopt a Seed

Adopt a Seed - a donation program through The Royal Kew Gardens.

Ecopoetics

See Laura Elrick's article "Poetry, Ecology and the reappropriation of lived-space" (2006)
I want to check out this The Eco Language Reader when it's published.

Recent Poems of Grief and Love and Nature

Found several maybe relevant poems recently published in the New Yorker like this one by Sara Arvio "Wood". See my earlier post: A Boy Once Told Me.

And this one "Last Day on Planet Earth". This one reminds me of the art I run into a lot among friends in the San Francisco art scene. (eg. Eric Davis' great How I survived the Apocalypse: the Burning Man Opera; my friend Nate's memoir Packing for the Apocalypse.) Apocalypse has been a fascinating humanity it seems since the beginning of history, so I hadn't really taken the recent fad seriously until recently when I've felt its gravity all around me and in a way that deeply bothers me. Will my students, my own boys, my nieces and nephews have children with gadgets implanted in their heads? Will they feel some end more poignantly than we fantasize about now? O.K. so I guess somebody should be asking these questions and romanticizing lonely but liberating space travel. But I'd rather not.

And there's Merwin who thankfully for decades has been writing amazingly beautiful poetry about nature and time and love and memory and self: "Young Man Picking Flowers". My idea for a poem below is in deference to Merwin.

Somewhere between nostalgia and love
and grief and anger and
revision and children
and little hands
and little first words
(Hello Mama)
there are warm days and
warm winter nights
and tomatoes in December
and roses in January
and so many pretty things
flourishing, blossoming, dangling
hypnotically.

Thawing persimmons, Feasting Ravens

Yesterday I caught a fleeting glimpse of a leaf-bare persimmon tree with maybe ten persimmons, pendulant, ornamental, like deep orange Christmas balls. But it was ten ravens in the tree that held my eye. The persimmons and ravens and bare limbs on a cloudy Marin New Year's Eve day closing towards dusk. Fire and night. Just after a cold snap when the ravens must know the getting's good or it will be. Maybe they were standing guard. I'm not from California, so persimmon trees are still so exotic. Just last year, I was the novice caught puckered trying to eat a local persimmon not yet ripe after reading Gary Snyder's "Mu Ch'i's Persimmons" poem. I learned you can force a persimmon ripe by freezing but it's got to be goop to eat.

Last night we ate sweet persimmon cake Debbie and Oliver fed us for New Years Eve dinner. Which of the three cured my hunger? The tree, the poem or the cake eaten with old friends? Those sugar-dark thawing persimmons, those feasting ravens, New Year's Eve.