Wendall Berry champions mountains

I grew up always wanting to be a poet and practiced in hushed whispers in my room, painfully hiding aspirations. Even as I a grew older writing in my many journals, I bemoaned what I imagined to be the poet's requisite isolation and distance from the world. Romanticizing Frost's austere hermitage on Bread Loaf mountain, but also fearing it. WHAT WAS I THINKING? I'm always thrilled to hear of poets like Wendall Berry using their exquisite voices and integrity in the community and serving as the compassionate champion of nature. See the recent Center for Eco-literacy blog post "Wendall Berry joins anti-mountaintop removal sit."

What Business Do American K-12 teachers Have in Rwanda?

What business do American K-12 teachers have in Rwanda? Serious business, says SEVEN, the social equity fund that is sponsoring me and seven other K-12 teachers to learn from Rwanda's amazing seventeen year growth story and how enterprise business solutions to poverty have been core to Rwanda's development strategy. As the curriculum coordinator for the fellowship, I am developing curriculum that will help the teaching fellows write an op-ed about their experiences. We will visit schools, the mountain gorilla reserve, go on safari and meet with the Minister of Education and President Paul Kagame. My hope is that I will begin to understand global partnerships in education and the teaching of global citizenship to my American students. I'm especially interested in capturing photos of environmental sustainability and sustainable agriculture in Africa that I can post here. And Mark Bittman's Tuesday Opinator blog post "Sustainable farming could feed the world?" could be a great tie-in. Here's dreaming of sustainable design and food security, but this time with Rwanda as the backdrop. Stay tuned.

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.