The Biggest House in the World: a little response to Graham Hill's New York Times op ed "Living with Less. A Lot Less."

In the early 70's I attended a Montesorri pre-school and kindergarten.   I still remember the white walls and learning stations, tables with various fascinating objects and toys designed to engage a young child in abstraction. There were no cars or trains. Really no toys... more tools than toys.  I remember well the gram measure puzzle with the same awe that I remember my first time playing with nesting Russian dolls. But perhaps the most emotionally charged memory was my dear teacher Mrs. Bailey reading to me Leo Lionni's story The Biggest House in the World.  The story is a kind of fable within a fable, of a father snail warning his baby snail about a foolish snail who had ambitiously "twisted and twitched until his house (his shell) was a big as a melon"and then twitched a bit more until multi-colored coronets sprouted all around its shell.  The snail dies soon enough because he can't move his grand new home.  So he dies before he can manage to move on with the others to eat at the next cabbage plant.  And his death is sad, like the relic of a beautiful Dr. Seuss city, or the day the circus died.

Today when I read Graham Hill's New York Times op ed "Living with Less. A Lot Less," I thought of  Leo Lionni's little book.  How I rediscovered the fable a few years ago when my boys were born, and how the re-reading after forty years was so poignant, as if my little self at 4 or 5, already knew that she would follow the teachings of the father snail.  That she would "keep it small.... and when I grow up I shall go wherever I please."  And also that I would one day go out "to see the world." And that world would not be somehow less because the snails lacked colorful coronets or my shell was too commonplace.  Instead it would be what it is, incredibly diverse, incredibly colorful with crystals glittering in the early sun, "polka-dotted mushrooms, and towery stems from which little flowers seemed to wave... a pinecone lying in the lacy shade of ferns, and pebbles in a nest of sand, smooth and round like the eggs of the turtledove."

A Ridge-line near Point Reyes

My niece and nephew at the Bendy Tree looking out over Nicasio Reservoir.  February. 

DIY mulch pits to retain rainwater in gardens

 Mulch pits are a simple way for students to begin a rainwater garden.  Find spots where water is already accumulating and even over-saturating the soil.  Dig a pit and fill it with sand and mulch in 3:1 ratio then cover the pit with topsoil. These materials retain rainwater in the garden and keep it from becoming run-off that carries with it top soil and water so needed in our Northern Californian eco-system between storms and in the dry months from April-November.  Once you dug and filled the mulch pits, observe them over time. 

26 by Rachel Eliza Griffins

I recently sent a message to my senators via Mayors for Gun Control arguing that the second amendment is unsustainable. In my view, pervasive gun rights have no effective role in a sustainable world. Sadly so many of us did not wake up to the problem until the massacre in Newtowne, CT. I resisted writing about it on my blog until now since it's about gun control advocacy and not ecology, but in effect gun control is critical to the Commons. Safe streets, safe schools, safe passage is impossible without better gun control laws in urban areas. As a teacher and mother of a first grader, the massacre elevated gun control in my mind with climate change legislation. With these intentions in mind and their belatedness, I pass on and save this poem my brother passed on to me.

26
by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Your names toll in my dreams.

I pick up tinsel in the street. A nameless god

streaks my hand with blood. I look at the lighted trees

in windows & the spindles of pine tremble

in warm rooms. The flesh of home, silent.

How quiet the bells of heaven must be, cold

with stars who cannot rhyme their brilliance

to our weapons. What rouses our lives each moment?

Nothing but life dares dying. My memory, another obituary.

My memory is a cross. Face down. A whistle in high grass.

A shadow pouring down the sill of calamity.

Your names wake me in the nearly dark hour.

The candles in our windows flicker

where your faces peer in, ask us

questions light cannot answer.

Wind and plum blossoms

The blossoms pictured above are from my plum trees in my small Berkeley garden. Chinese New Year every year heralds the first plum blossoms in our neighborhood where nearly each small garden plot has at least one plum tree. In June when our trees are laden with plums it's hard to find neighbors who will take a bagful because we are all inundated with our respective plum harvests. Friends have plum jam parties to ensure the plums will be made into jam or upside down cake. Today, though is a crucial day. If the wind is too strong, the blossoms will fall before the local bees can pollinate each one. If we're lucky, we can sit below the trees and listen to the hum of bees. And we are often lucky, because neighboring redwoods and houses block the steady westerlies from the Pacific, just enough to ensure we will have a prolific harvest in late June. Not all plum blossoming trees are so lucky. Today is a windy and sunny: westerlies at 14 mph. Better than a storm.

Hummingbird skeleton

Several years ago a hummingbird flew into our front window and died. My son and I found the body on our front stoop. We had recently seen, I think, the living decay exhibit at the Exploratorium, so I told my son let's just put the body in the garden and see what happens. In a day or so, ants had created a small dirt mound beneath the hummingbird as they excavated a tunnel that ended just beneath the bird. There they scavenged bits of the bird and carried the bits away bit by bit. The eyes were already gone when we first checked. Within 3 days only a clean white skeleton remained and the ants were gone.

What's happening

What I love about blogs is the chronicle quality. That it is a dated path. So I find myself in moments pre-writing answers to questions I had when I began this blog. Lofty ones like: how must language change for us to belong again to nature? And the little practical ones like: how can I inspire my students to care about their impact on the distant future without being preachy and dogmatic? And now I can say joyfully, the answers don't seem as elusive as they did seven years ago. I think language is changing. I guess I say this today because I found a compatriot in David Mitchell's character Zachry in Cloud Atlas. In my own deep word ecology it's not that I want to appropriate images from nature so much as make the images the star of the show, the teachers, the collaborators, the wonderous. Not as objects but as subjects, the ones with the know-how that I didn't figure out or know that perhaps I belonged to. Instead I suffered for a long time because I let my ego be the dictator. And we in nature surely are dictators, predators; nature's not a democracy, but it's also not all as greedy and selfish a base reality as we imagine it to be.  At a talk on leadership at the Center for Eco-literacy, Zenobia Barlow warned of the little words that are getting in the way: I, me, she, it, them, you. The subject pronouns that make objects out of others.  At least that's how I remember her talk.

 So I wonder if the next influential phase in language will be emergent, merging, not so easily the voice of one as the voice of the inter-relational and ever more diverse. Ex. if I am only the consequence of every little action around me, and I am fluidly in relationship with these ever merging and emerging elements, then I am everything and at once anew and also not really "I." It's an abandonment, a dissolution of self, a take to the wind, and yet also an acceptance that we belong and become. It's odd, because our language gave humans a feeling of superiority and entitlement. So it's an endless humble path to imagine the languages of beings without our speech. We can't forget, what has been done in our names. In our tongue. Sometimes I imagine every word must be an apology.

The day the spider flies (remix)

A day, a cloudy day, a breeze-loft day
the waspy jangles in my gut ignite
 the supple thread, my ticket spun today.
O where? and why? I do not ask the light,
the wind, my hair, the shiftless clouds,
Alone one migrant flies aloft a-flight
 sidelong, I drop and dare to wear no shroud
Instead a tail of silk to fly aright,
 but if the clouds keep traveling to where
the sea between the land expands and then,
will it be that height is worth the fare?
or landfall marries me to all new there?
The travel, the nights aloft the sails ballooned
take me, I go, and with you, wind, am maroon'd.

The day the spiders fly

The Day the Spiders Fly What day? A spontaneous day when the clouds' right and their's is a bit of wind and perhaps predators on their tail their organs jangled they spin a ticket just gossamer trails in the breeze invisible travelers, if you please one lone migrant per flight but not alone the timing is all that we know if we, still, heed the body, the wind, the clouds launch sideways aloft daring why not why not belong to the breeze