Sustainable living

Winter Gardening

January 19, 2010 — 1 Comment

Under the snow is buried treasure.

Breathing cold quiet sterile air, I remember that in the ground are the hearts of the plants I happily nurture during the warmer months. I see the past and also the potential. Winter is the canvas for my gardening dreams, which makes this season precious. The work of the dreaming season is to build the desire that fuels the hard work of the growing season.

I remember where everything grew, and I recall my dreams of last winter. Some of them I carried out in the growing season, some changed shape, some were discarded, some set aside for another year. Now I file through the ones set aside. I reimagine the landscape, fill it in with memories and dreams.

Standing there in the quiet and the white, anything is possible. The sky is the limit in this moment when I need no money, no time, no muscle or tools to do the work that’s needed – the dreaming.

Just Say No . . . So You Can Say Yes

October 22, 2009 — Leave a comment

Most of us need to say ‘no’ to most of the requests we receive, so that we can say a committed ‘yes’ to a few. It seems to me that it is usually ignorance, arrogance, or fear that drives us to overcommit: ignorance of our limitations, arrogance that denies those limitations, or fear of people’s responses if we don’t say ‘yes.’

As I heard a wise woman say last night, much of the time we explain too much when we do say ‘no.’ There is usually nothing wrong with just saying ‘no’ and leaving it at that. The first time I did that was on the phone with a telemarketer, and I surprised myself and her, who apparently had no prepared script to respond to someone simply saying ‘no’ without excuse. This particular telemarketer, by the way, was from a charity – a good charity, one with which I have no qualms. I said ‘no,’ and nothing else, and she said, ‘Oh. . . well, thank you. Goodbye.’

There are, thankfully, scads and scads of good charities and organizations, causes and movements out there, and no one person can or should possibly commit or give to all, most, or even a significant fraction of them. We do better when we identify the causes we are most passionate about, the tasks we are most suited to accomplish, and say a big ‘yes’ to one or two of them; remembering that these commitments are in addition to the everyday ones we already seek to faithfully keep – our everyday work, care of ourselves and our families, and time with our friends, to name a few.

“Our Need for Everything . . . “

October 14, 2009 — 1 Comment

This morning I am reading Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire (Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker) and came across these words quoting Ephrem the Syrian (c. 306-373):

“The inhabitants of the world fill in the common need from the common excess. We should rejoice in this need on that part of us all . . . Our need for everything binds us with a love for everything.”

I’m thinking today of the World Vision Christmas catalog that my young daughter Luthien and I were paging through a few days ago. You could buy medicine for sick children, food for hungry ones, animals to provide a livelihood for destitute families – and while the pictures were vibrant with joy and my daughter was enthusiastically deciding what she wanted to give, I found myself crying as page after page lengthened the list of needs. There is no way our family can give enough to meet all those needs.

But what a preposterous idea! Our family is one small piece of this circle of love and need. How often I forget, in this individualistic culture, that no one person or family or group is charged with saving the world. Neither is anyone only needy or only loaded with gifts for others. We are all of us needy, and we can each give something – a smile, a well-spoken word, a sum of money, a box of food, an hour of our time – as we affirm the life, the need, the beauty, love, and pain that make up the reality of the world in which we live.

May we all be courageous enough to live more faithfully within this circle of need and love, of vulnerability and generosity.

Sustaining Motion

September 28, 2009 — 4 Comments

I used to believe that with the right amount of effort, therapy, money, discipline, and time, I would achieve the perfect state and then maintain it. I would live in the right town, in the perfect house, with the right person, drive the right car to the perfect job, be the right weight, achieve the perfect hairstyle, have the furniture arranged and the yard landscaped just right . . . and then hold that pose – forever! Perfect! Permanent!

One moment in the life of my late grandmother, Hazel Dominguez Tindall.

One frozen moment in the life of my late grandmother, Hazel Dominguez Tindall.

But not possible. Nothing is ever standing still. My body moves involuntarily with every breath, my heart pumps without my conscious consent, my cells are factories in constant production. Even when I die, my body will not be still, as decay takes over and every atom moves on to become part of something else. The earth on which I stand spins at nearly 1,000 miles per hour, one small mover in a vast expanding universe.

Plenty of movement is required simply to sustain life. But the time and place where I live has “progressed” to a state far beyond simple sustenance. I can get anywhere in the world in a matter of hours or days, learn about anything with a few mouse clicks, communicate my ideas through a plethora of instant media options. Because so much is possible, it takes plenty of energy for me simply to sift through it all, to decide what I will do, buy, wear, eat; and to deal with my own and other people’s expectations and reactions to my choices.

With all this motion around and within me, I find deep healing in the disciplines of rest and reflection. Rest is not perfect stillness, but a deliberate slowing down, setting aside the oars and moving with the water rather than forcing my way through. Reflection is not absolute silence, but a thoughtful tuning out of the noises I ordinarily attend to, so that I can listen to the echoes of the recent moments through which I’ve moved.

Beneath all the layers of progress-driven sound and light, life is still a flowing river. The more I try to hold a living thing in a freeze-frame squeeze, the more energy I must expend – and even as I inflict any level of un-natural stasis upon that thing – be it my face, a relationship, a belief system or a zucchini, it slowly begins to wither in my grasp – or speeds up the natural rhythms that end in death, another way of saying the same thing.

This is why the bugs and baby bunnies my daughter captures usually convalesce until either they are released or they die. It explains why my marriage has suffered seasons of stagnancy, and why the fresh greens I stash in my refrigerator often need to be re-classified as compost.

Healthy living things are always growing. Evolution is the heartbeat of life. We deny the goodness of life when we try to force living things to stand still. Paradoxically, we affirm the goodness of life when we regularly and deliberately slow the pace we’ve picked up trying to keep up with those Joneses, and choose instead to move with the rhythm of the forces that sustain us.

Reaching Maturity, or, If I Were a Tomato

September 17, 2009 — 1 Comment

On Monday evening my proud papa showed my youngsters video clips he had taken of me and my band almost ten years ago. There we are, up on the big stage, under the bright lights, playing our twenty-something hearts out. “We were young and we were improvin’. . .”

the glory days for rock band St. Andrew's Descent

the glory days for rock band St. Andrew’s Descent

Mellencamp was on to something, although I haven’t always thought so over the years. Wrinkles, gray hairs, extra pounds and stretch marks don’t seem like an improvement. But they are simply markers of the real life I’ve been living. The wrinkles around my eyes record the smiles and laughs that have crinkled the skin there again and again. The creases between my eyebrows show the grip of stress, grief, and anger. The gray hairs grow from a head that has pumped out thoughts and dreams at the pace of a Chinese toy factory. The poochy tummy and the stretch marks tell about the two people I co-created, nourished, carried and bore into the world.

These days I don’t look back as wistfully as I used to. I can almost laugh at – I mean with – no, I mean at – the profoundly serious girl up there on the stage, who scans every audience for a talent scout and will soon cry herself to sleep the night she learns of her first pregnancy, certain this means death to her creative life.

Small children, it turns out, are small for only two or three blinks of an eye. This is a great relief and an eternal sadness.

yes, they dress themselves!

yes, they dress themselves!

They are also loaded with material – not only the fecal variety, but the sort of material every writer seeks – magical moments, ironic situations, hilarious word usage, and heart-stabbing lovelinesses and tragedies of all sorts.

On Tuesday morning I took my guitar down from the wall and began to play and sing. My two-year-old Silas hurried from the other room, smiling and dancing like sun-sparkles on a forest stream. It was a stellar performance. I totally connected with the audience. I’m pretty sure I’ll get another call soon (“Mommy! Play my song again!”).

Lately I’ve discovered that the songs and performances I do create, when I take the time, are better than those of ten years ago, and they often take less effort. I think this is about reaching maturity.

This past spring I bundled up and went out to the garage, where I poked tiny tomato seeds into small pots of soil arranged on an old cookie sheet. I brought the cookie sheet into the house and set it on top of the refrigerator so the seeds could stay warm and germinate.  It took about a week before I saw more than soil in those pots. It took even longer for the tiny seedlings to grow into recognizable tomato plants that could stay outside overnight alone.

Once I finally got the plants outside, the tender leaves soaked up sunlight and used that energy to make more leaves, which all soaked up more sunlight and made more leaves, so that the plants grew exponentially. A couple weeks ago, green tomatoes began blushing into red, and I knew that the plants were doing what the seed packet had said they would do in the prescribed number of days – reaching maturity. Now every day I spot another brilliant red tomato, standing out vividly from the surrounding green leaves.

If I were a tomato plant, I think I would currently be putting out yellow blossoms. These blossoms are more interesting than the green leaves I have spent much of my life to produce, but it gets even better! If I keep growing, one day I will make brilliant red fruit with the power to nourish and cheer whoever finds it. I don’t miss those spindly seedling days. And I’m not seeking to preserve these yellow flowers. I’m going for the juicy red fruit. I’m reaching for maturity. I’m still young and still improving.