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Desert Wildcrafting

Head out onto the land.

 

Take a look around.

Then look closer.

Greet your old friends with a cry of happy recognition.

How well you look!

Make your prayer, offer thanks.

(Tobacco or corn meal do well, but homemade crackers work in a pinch.)

Ah, that joyful exchange of praise and pruning for medicine.

Wander, greeting the plants all around, eyes tuned to the rocks, the sand, the sky.

The dusky green that makes even this dry land abundant.

Oh friends, your beauty and goodness are a song I’ll never stop singing.

Honor the plants by making simple medicine from them,

And they will honor you with their healing.

Before, during, after.

::

The long, thin “leaves” are Mormon Tea, found flowering and abundant in a wash down south. We’ll add it to our daily tea blend for its rich mineral content and nourishing powers.

The small, shiny round leaves are from chaparral (creosote bush to non-herbalists). This plant reigns over the Chihuahuan desert, and is potent medicine. I’m making oil to use as a base for sunscreen this summer.

Our favorite books for this area are the ones written by our beloved teacher Michael Moore: Medicinal Plants of the Desert and Canyon West and Medicinal Plants of the Mountain West.

(PS happy Earth Day)

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Thanks, Arundhati

I heard the incomparable activist and writer Arundhati Roy speak last week, and I’m still on fire. The night’s immersion into such heady territory–empire, democracy, globalization, commerce, and naturally, the environment, left me reflecting on the nature of information. There have been times in my life where I just have to turn off the noise. I turn away from the news, and even from the intelligent criticism of it. I’m afraid of getting overwhelmed, of despair, of hopelessness. And yes, I can report back that there is a stillness that can be found in turning off the noise. But if it is not a powerful, life changing stillness, one able to counter and upend our culture’s unyielding and destructive growth, then it is finding a false refuge.

We are among the privileged few in the world able to choose the safety of hopelessness. We can say, there’s nothing I can do, so I’ll just not worry about it. It is from that place of dis-empowerment that we can opt out, convinced of our inability to make a difference. From there we comfortably continue on in our lives, content to do the best we can.

Across the planet, in places wrecked by climate change and war (often the two are hand in hand), people have been forced past the point of reasonableness to the precipice of hope. It is a hope born of necessity, and made real with action. These are our kin, our counterparts who can no longer afford hopelessness.

I’m generally always looking for an answer to my questions about how to live. What kind of action is the right kind? What is enough? Where does living well for myself and living well for the planet intersect? I don’t always know what to do, and when I have a fleeting certainty, it is quickly countered by the endless contradictions of our reality. But by staying engaged and educated, I find that I am better able to fertilize my own inner capacity for action, involvement, and change. Which are all fingers on the hand of hope.

Without reminders of the shocking injustices taking place in my name–or in the name of capitalism and growth, a system based on inequality and from which I undoubtedly benefit at the expense of others–I could easilt slip back into my old, I’m Doing the Best I Can ways.

We need the kind of gloablization that keeps us in check. That breaks down barriers of ignorance and apathy. We need to be reminded of our place in the Great Turning, so that even when we are truly doing the best we can, we want to do still more. And do it.

::

If you’re at all curious about what hope, action, and battling for system change looks like in India, please check out Arundhati’s recent article in the recent edition of Outlook India magazine.

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System Cleanse

I once heard a prominent holistic MD give a talk on the importance of making dietary changes in order to facilitate healing. He said he asked all his patients to make some kind of change. Often, it was to simply return to whole foods. Sometimes it would be more prescriptive, a cleanse say, or a certain regimen such as for heart disease or cancer. But even if an individual ailment had little to do with food, he’d still ask them to alter their diet in some way, even if it was only a symbolic way. The reason was because while broccoli and green tea are good for our health, deeper healing is partially facilitated by intention. Our bodies need that symbolic act, that change in diet, as a show of our commitment to transforming a pattern that is not serving the system.

I’ve reflected a lot on that idea lately. You might even say that the larger intent of this otherwise eccentric and unusually rigid (for me) experiment is something along those lines. The idea of cleansing our system while making a commitment to further growth and personal transformation has fueled this project from its humble origins back in the days when it felt impossible.

I’m looking forward to the healthy reintegration of plastic into our lives. It will be nice to be able to buy tortillas every now and then, and to have sour cream with our beans. Despite my occasional griping, though, I am feeling very grateful for this commitment. This is not the kind of thing I’ve done much of, and it has been a powerful act. It has taken me on that long dreamed of journey to the olden days, and given me an education in made-from-scratch like you would not believe. It has wakened me from the cultural sleep, and opened doors to a world in which there are countless ways to praise this good life while living as simply as possible.

So onward we go, into the last month of this simple fast. It will carry on, surely, as we have so much left to discover the alternatives to. I’m not thinking of that so much right now, though. It’s just the external details of what is really about inner change. The kind of change that can’t always be spoken, but is there, singing loudly, nevertheless.

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Earth Hour–Tonight!

I was just reminded that tonight’s the night to celebrate earth hour. Starting at 8:30 pm your local time.

It’s a symbolic act, undertaken with a global community.

Turn your lights out to join folks all over the world in sending a message about climate change.

And to enjoy the nearing-full moon light.

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Garden Books Galore

Annotated map of our yard.

Detail of keyhole beds from Gaia’s Garden.

Tasha Tudor Reminding me that skirts and dirt go well together.

The stacks of our public library yielded this inspiration:

Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture by Toby Hemenway is the best home permaculture book I’ve found. Hemenway carefully builds a framework (or should that be layers a sheet mulch?) of how to understand and create an “ecological garden.” Why to mix perennials and annuals, how to layer plants, the importance of building soil, the role of observation in the garden, and so much more. This is one of the best gardening book’s I’ve ever read.

Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate: At Work in the Wild and Cultivated World by Wendy Johnson is, simply, beautiful. For decades Johnson has tended the gardens at the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Marin County, California. Her writing is as skilled and mindful as the gardens she describes. One part poetic storytelling of a life of Zen meditation and turning dirt, one part highly thoughtful and comprehensive narrative of gardening lore. Anyone who likes to think about plants, gardens, meditation, compost, koans, and their kin will love this book. Even if you just love one of those things, Wendy Johnson will make you swoon for all the rest.

The Sweet Breathing of Plants: Women Writing the Green World edited by Linda Hogan and Brenda Peterson isn’t a gardening book. It is a book about connection and relationship between women and plants, and ranges from the garden to the wilds, touching upon every aspect of green growing things. It includes essays and poems and stories by many writers you already love and others you will come to love, including Zora Neale Hurston, Isabel Allende, Alice Walker, Rachel Carson, and dozens of others. This book is an inspiration that will have you humming with appreciation for your particular plot of earth, the larger homeground beyond it, and the green tribes that fill your life. I revisit this book every year.

When I delve into a subject, I go full bore (a remnant of my interest-led unschooling years, perhaps?) I absolutely inhale everything I can get on the topic, applying it as I go and eventually moving on, a bit wiser for my efforts. A few other gardening books on hold for me at the library, or ordered through interlibrary loan:

How to Grow More Vegetables… by John Jeavons. A classic of bio-intensive gardening that everyone else seems to refer to.

Designing and Maintaining Your Edible Landscape Naturally by Robert Kourik

The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka

Gardening for the Future of the Earth by Howard Yana Shapiro and John Harrison

Stolen Harvest by Vandana Shiva

Seed to Seed by Suzanne Ashworth

The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry

Four Season Harvest by Elliot Coleman

I told you, I’m voracious. Probably won’t get all the way through this list before the actual work of gardening takes hold of me and I turn to the plants and soil to teach me all I need to know. But I might get close. And there’s always next year. For now, I’ll plant the fertile beds of my imagination for whatever harvest lies ahead.

p.s. what are your favorite books?

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Holding, Waiting, Dreaming

Here’s the day bright and warm.

Look carefully and you can see the piles of dirt I meticulously double dug in a burst of “must grow all our own food this summer.” When my wise garden advisor came to weigh in, she nudged me back towards the center of our yard. “See how wide these paths are?” she asked. “Grow food in them.”

Aahhh. I see.

Stay small, work slowly outward, build soil. Listen to this little piece of land, rather than chattering at it endlessly.

The funny thing about this month’s one small change (my grand plans to start walking everywhere), is that it was just a bit much. I blew out my shoulder hoofing it with Cora on my back (the stroller had a flat and I would not be stopped), and now am relegated to staying home and reading garden books instead of roving all over town and randomly turning up soil in such a way that I succeed only in killing our pobre patch of native grass. Next month’s change was meant to be laying the ground work for growing–you guessed it–a lot more food. Which I’m looking at a little differently now. Taking the long view, you could say. As in, how much of the pathway do I really have the energy to turn into something new?

Despite the fineness of them, these barely-Spring days are not time to leap forward. Just as the apricot knows better than to burst forth just yet, I need to observe a bit more, pull my energy back towards the center. So, maybe this isn’t the year I’ll grow all our own food. Maybe this year I’ll learn something unexpected. Like, what I have is enough.

Oh blessed day, it is enough.

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One More Small Change: Walkabout

Sometimes my walkabout view looks like this, and we get to cruising at a nice fast clip, getting all sorts of things done.

Other times my view is more like this. And I realize there really wasn’t anywhere we needed to go, after all.

My goal for this month’s change is to keep the car parked. Not always. We won’t miss playgroup. We’ll keep driving to the mountains whenever possible. Inevitably I’ll make at least one big trip to the grocery store with the car. But I do want to cut back and see how life opens up when I don’t just pop into the car all the time.

Here’s the plan: If it’s within a mile and a half of home, I’ll walk. If it’s farther afield, I’ll try to find a closer alternative, shrinking my orbit when possible. And when I want to go farther than I can walk, I’d like to take the bus. For a variety of reasons (it’s super lame, being the main one) I’ve only taken public transportation once in ten years of living in this town. But life has changed a great deal for me since that ill-fated outing. And if a stay-at-home mama with a little one enamored with busses can’t make it work, who can?

I have already noticed how this requires a whole new relationship to going out and getting things done. Often it means doing much less, not letting too many errands build up, making fewer stops, and sometimes just not getting things done with my usual efficiency. But since having a child, this is what I’ve been doing, anyways.

The last piece of the puzzle is to get the baby seat on my bike instead of E’s, and actually learn to comfortably and safely ride with a passenger and panniers so that me and my little compañera can get our bliss on all over town.

A new month, another new beginning. How are your small changes going?

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Change of Heart

(photo by E.)

Again and again this is my fear: not so much of our being judged in the future as having been the last generation to possess the potential and the possibility–even if hugely diminished by the trajectory, momentum, and infrastructure of all the generations that preceded ours–to effect change of the most profound kind: not a change in knowledge, but in entire systems of logic, or even further, changes within the heart.

–Rick Bass

A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life.

–Wendell Berry

When people ask me why we are taking this plastic fast, the easiest answers to articulate are the surface things. There’s our concern about the pollution associated with plastic manufacturing, the ocean’s plastic soup, the ramifications of a disposable consumer society, and the risks posed by plastics to human and environmental health.

But the truth is, I’m not doing this because of my concern about hormone disruptors leaching from the linings of tin cans (though I still think this is a good reason to avoid plastics, hormone disruptors are, sadly, so prevalent as to be unavoidable). It’s not because I think forgoing tortillas in plastic bags will save the lives of a marine turtle (my concern about the gyres is very real, but my contribution to it from New Mexico, where our rivers hardly make it out of town, let alone all the way to the sea, is negligible.) I am concerned about our plastic filled landfills contaminating ground water, but when we have plutonium waste up and down the other side of the watershed, it seems a bit nitpicky. So why plastic? Why bother?

Until I read the lines quoted above, it wasn’t easy for me to articulate the real reason behind our plastic fast. But it’s simple: We had a change of heart. Which changed our lives.

Yes, certainly — of course — we are undertaking this action as a symbolic protest and act of solidarity with the earth. But, as one of my pragmatic friends pointed out, plastic is not really the problem.

We are.

The reason we are doing this is because it was time to do something. Something more than we ever had before. Something we didn’t think was possible. Something that reflected our desire to live with less convenience and more intention. As in, intention that our grandkids will know we started waking up, and started changing our ways. Even in symbolic ways. Or especially in symbolic ways.

I know it is enormously overwhelming when we start thinking of all the things we think we should be doing, that we want to do. Where to begin? Where to end? (Is there an end point?) For us, plastic was the starting place. It could have been anything, really. But it was this. A small, simple action that nevertheless felt like a powerful way to change our lives. And it has, friends. It has.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground, Rumi said. Same goes for living more lightly. All we need to do is touch our hearts, and begin.

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February Reckoning

Goodness, is it already time to tally up our monthly accrual of plastic waste again?

More milk caps, a lollypop wrapper, a plastic lined macaroni and cheese packet, some wrapping from something or other, rubber bands and plastic tags from produce (you can safely bet that there were a few more of these that got swept away during dinner cleanup).

Now is as good a time as any to bring up the butcher paper quandary. It’s surely plastic lined. We’re eating a lot less meat these days, but still, it’s not something we’re ready to give up completely (and no store will let me bring home raw meat in my own container). So that’s one area where I’m compromising. You don’t see that here because saving paper with raw meat juice on it would be a health hazard.

One other slip I had this month was buying fresh local lamb at the farmer’s market before I realized it came in a plastic vacuum sealed bag. Did I already tell you about that? It was a bummer.

Other than that, and the mail ordered yarn with plastic labels (it was wholesale!),  we seem to be doing well.

Now this pile is from our CSA. It has been an ongoing challenge for me to find ways to make the CSA experience a waste free one. This winter our CSA, which we otherwise love, has gone a little plastic bag crazy, pre-bagging just about everything. I end up carefully emptying the food from it’s plastic bags and putting it into my cloth ones. The plastic ones I give back, but sometimes they aren’t reusable–torn or dirty. Yes, it’s wasteful-ish. But I want to make the point that this is unwanted. The plastic shown in this picture is from things I couldn’t do that with — they had frozen veggies or fruit in them. I could have turned the food down, but I’d already paid for them and it’s a strange grey area for me. Would you say no to pomegranate apple juice with your name on it? On the bright side, a CSA is a great place to actually have an influence about changing wasteful practices. My voice has been heard and they are slowly making changes. And the benefits of the local, seasonal fare are worth fighting for. Besides, each of those baggies will get re-used about a hundred times around here, so they aren’t really trash yet.

Please note: This doesn’t represent all the plastic we threw out this month, only new items we purchased post 1/1/10 and have already used up. Not included are pre 2010 yogurt containers used to freeze food, many times re-used bread and produce bags that are just too funky to keep around, toothpaste caps, and other things from our pre-fast days that are just now leaving the home. Also not included are things given to us by friends–if someone brings a pint of fresh olives or a bag of chips to the house, we follow No Impact Man’s lead and enjoy the generous gesture and camaraderie, and take a break from tallying.

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Kicking Corporations Out of the Kitchen

Recently my friend Jenny and I were waxing poetic about cooking from scratch. We covered the joys of self-reliance and creativity, frugality and reduced waste, and then she reminded me that many health food brands are owned by corporate food companies. So I added “act of protest” to my list of reasons why the Lost Kitchen Arts matter so much to me.

Curious to know more, I did a quick search and found this interesting chart that breaks down ownership of brands that would be familiar to anyone who shops at health food stores. Hmm. Food for thought, indeed. I’m not going to try to interpret this information. Just putting it out there in case you, like me, want to know just what you are supporting with your grocery money.

I will say, though, that I now have one more reason to celebrate the beauty of mixing a few simple ingredients into as pure a form of edible love as I might ever find, all the while reclaiming my role as a provider of true sustenance.

And no, that’s not for sale.