I had a good veggie dinner out by the pond this dusky evening, the nearby park so quiet, a chill in the air after a blaze of warm sun most of the day. The nearby grape arbor was decked out in scarlet reds and golds and greens and I thought about our first harvest of grapes this summer. Everything was so still, so quiet, the raucousness of summer almost seemed a dream.
Most years I dread autumn. I’ve viewed it in terms of endings rather than what it is: a settling, a time of pulling inward. This year for some reason, it’s beautiful to me. The trees, our gardens, the birds, all sense the change and move with it. Even as evening fell, and the chill in the air became more pronounced, I felt happy. This has been a season of absolute abundance.
Then the moon rose, silent and steady and slipped behind the clouds. Peace.
My pal Jodene came over the other day and visited our extremely, record breaking, bumper crop veggie garden; she suggested I share some snaps…..For my photo-phile friends, apologies in advance, I took these in bright sunshine. It’s really the first year in a couple of decades that I’ve even put in a serious vegetable garden, so this has been encouraging to say the very least.
We put in a new bed and used stumps from old trees we had to take out of the yard, using them as the container wall for the new bed. Seems to be working really well:
you can see how the stumps have been lined up vertically to form a barrier wall
Here are some other shots. We have grapes! Very exciting, and certainly unexpected. Tomato crop will be record breaking, and in response to the question on any given night, “what’s for dinner,” the answer would be: beans. Good thing we love our french and roma beans, with onion and peppers (three kinds). Not pictured: cucumbers (2 kinds), broccoli, artichokes, basil (4 kinds), arugula. Abundance!
Roma beans and French: what's for dinner? You guessed it.
This grape stand, which will require a stronger support next spring, is only three years old
Early crop this year: black plums, russian, french caramello-yum!
Here’s a short article worth reading, and another one here, about what’s missing in the health care debate: Health. Drs. Andrew Weil and Ornish are both trying to raise the issue of preventive care and health…er…CARE as part of the medical industry’s core responsibilities.
As it stands, Ornish reasons, is we’re funding an industry that seeks out, treats, and only sees Disease. No prevention, no common sense about balanced diet, good food and exercise, the two easiest ways to maintain good health. Disease and its myriad high priced and questionable treatments.
Several years ago I decided to pretty much swear off doctors and the medical industry because it had so completely duped me about my own health. I wasn’t exercising nearly enough, I had put on weight and didn’t feel so good, and I had anxiety about a lot of things. The doctors I saw over the course of a couple of years increased the number and kinds of pills I would “have to be on” for the rest of my life. No one, not one doctor or nurse, suggested I ramp up my exercise, seek out forms of mind therapy like yoga or meditation, and that I cut out the pretty hefty amount of sugar I was ingesting.
Not one.
I decided for myself that I didn’t want to be taking pills so I started down a path of my own discovery. It required a lot of me. A lot of changes, a lot of refusal to give up. And an enormous amount of going against the grain. I’m not at all smugly suggesting that everyone should do what I do, but I am suggesting that people should view the medical industry as AN INDUSTRY. Much like car companies, cereal makers, record labels, and shoe manufacturers, the Medical Industry wants you to take pills and get treatment. It’s their business, after all.
Hence my deep appreciation for Ornish’s article this morning:
If we just cover bypass surgery, angioplasty, stents, and other interventions that are dangerous, invasive, expensive, and largely ineffective on 48 million more people, then costs are likely to increase significantly at a time when resources are limited. As a result, painful choices are being discussed — rationing, raising taxes, and/or increasing the deficit — and these are threatening the public acceptance and thus the viability of health reform.
what’s missing, tragically, is a diagnosis of the real, far more fundamental problem, which is that what’s even worse than its stratospheric cost is the fact that American health care doesn’t fulfill its prime directive — it does not help people become or stay healthy. It’s not a health care system at all; it’s a disease management system, and making the current system cheaper and more accessible will just spread the dysfunction more broadly…
I say an overhaul should be just that: an overhaul. A huge, eye-opening discussion of just what the heck “health care” has become in our corporate culture. In the meantime, eat right, exercise and find a little joy today. It works wonders.
I’ve been getting heavy traffic on my article from a while ago entitled “Plastic Disturbia.” One of the commenters, kevinkrejci pointed me to a special edition of Scientific American called Earth 3.0. It’s a good read and discusses the earth and our relationship to it in a new light: product. We upgraded to Industrial Revolution in 2.0, and now are ready for a big upgrade, doncha think?
Second Thursday is a hood-wide art walk with lots of participants all along California. Northwest Encaustic Studio, part of the art scene in The Building which will also have many studios open for visiting, is hosting a show of encaustic art by Mark Rudis. The show and the art walk generally, goes from 6-9, there will be a reception and etc. See you there
After a zillion years of wanting to learn encaustic, I’ve finally jumped in with both feet. Just finished a really productive and engaging 3 day studio intensive on encaustic miniatures with Larry Calkins and Sean Doll (Sean, get your website going!). The class was small enough to allow for lots of conversation, observation of Larry and Sean in action, and hands-on work–really an awesome 3 days.
Northwest Encaustic Studio is one of our many gems here in West Seattle, housed in a 60s style apartment building converted to artist studios. It’s a great place to drop in on Second Thursdays to get access to lots of accomplished artists and their work. Highly recommended.
Here are a few of the pieces I made this weekend. The boxes are the sculptural part of the encaustic painting, made with Larry’s own finish recipe that adds a complex layer of depth to the piece. The colors in the small paintings really shine when set in against the rough finish of the box.
This small painting is deep inside the box; I sort of like the depth of it--the secret life of birds
Many bird books refer to a certain type of nest as a "cup" with a tea cup used as the symbol. I've always loved the idea of a bird in a cup.
Encaustic on a 1" piece of glass, sort of a joke. Larry fashioned this large frame for the piece which really makes the color of the mini jump out
Over at the HuffPpost, Laurie David is chronicling Charles Moore’s exploration of the path from the California Coast to the northern waters of the Hawaiian Islands. The goal? Plastics. He’s aboard the Algalita, a research vessel dedicated to studying the impact of plastics on the environment of the world’s oceans.
He will be sending regular emails describing their findings, and Laurie David will post them on the HuffPost. I look forward to following the adventure, and hope you’ll help spread the news about this research that affects us all.
Although recycling bags is on the rise in the United States, an estimated 90 billion thin bags a year, most used to handle produce and groceries, go unrecycled. They were the second most common form of litter after cigarette butts at the 2008 International Coastal Cleanup Day sponsored by the Ocean Conservancy, a marine environmental group.
“Plastic, the most prevalent component of marine debris, poses hazards because it persists so long in the ocean, degrading into tinier and tinier bits that can be consumed by the smallest marine life at the base of the food web.”
Plastic is Forever. Lately I’ve been thinking about things like cassette tapes, video tapes, walkman devices, pens, sunglasses, drinking cups, those little wrist things used for ID in hospitals–all of these things made out of so much plastic and that are doomed to be discarded because they are no longer useful, outdated, unpopular, temporary, whatever. The funny thing: we think of Plastic as temporary, but it is in fact the most permanent thing in the world. That’s not an exaggeration.
Look around yourself right now, how much plastic can you see? Now ask yourself: where will that end up?
Anyway, thanks msjean for pointing me to this news. Much appreciated!
What would you give to have a more positive outlook in your day? Or feel stronger, more confident in your body? How about sleeping better, getting sick less often, having better self-esteem?
Most of us, living in this the-answer-is-out-there-and-probably-comes-in-pill-form society of ours, will think, yeah–what are you selling?
Nada. Nothing you can’t do yourself. We’ve collectively come to this place where fresh veggies and fruit taste “funny” and processed food tastes normal. Our energy isn’t great, our brains are functioning on less real nutrients, and then we wonder why we don’t feel so good.
Obama is gathering his forces to help make America healthier, and this effort, perhaps more than his other unbelievable number of efforts, has me swooning. This article on CNN discusses his ideas, and of course finds a way to make the effort controversial (that’s what sells, after all), but the point of Obama’s agenda is this:
A healthy population is a happier, less expensive, stronger, more motivated population. Period.
Happier: endorphins from exercise help modulate mood, we’re made this way. It’s the way our mechanisms work. Further, even if you don’t go out an run 3 miles, just stretching and walking helps your mood by connecting you with your body. It’s natural, it’s how our bodies work. Connection lost: balance lost.
Less expensive: as the article points out, chronic diseases such as adult onset diabetes account for 2 trillion bucks in health care. That’s Two. Trillion. Bucks. Medical studies have long ago proven that better nutrition based of fresh veggies, fruit, fish, etc combined with moderate exercise can help manage a ton of chronic complaints. Imagine tossing those pills you’re stuck on–it could happen.
Stronger, more motivated: you know the old saying, if you want something done, ask a busy person. Once your body is accustomed to moving, whether that means taking the stairs instead of the elevator, doing yoga stretches in your cubicle, going for a walk at lunch instead of sitting around, or even getting up off the sofa to change the channel rather than using the remote, your old bod gets used to it and craves it. Pretty soon you’re finding ways to keep moving no matter what, and guess what: your body works better that way. It doesn’t work so very well if you’re always stationary.
Okay, I’ll get off my soapbox now, but I just had to say, Mr. Obama, you are a dreamboat.
We heard poet Mary Oliver read from her works at Benaroya Hall here in Seattle last night. The collection of poems she read spanned her entire oeuvre–an excellent selection. She read for an hour; it was such a delight to hear her work read in her own voice. Also a delight was her sense of humor, her humble good grace, her great heart.
Her relationship with the natural world, with the beauty and gift of nature itself, made me feel utterly sane. I’m not sure what I mean by that, just that I felt at ease and sane by the end of the reading. Perhaps her call to presence when breathing the sweet air of the morning, or hearing an owl at night, made me feel that there is great sanity in loving the loveliness of this planet we share. That all the flat screen tvs and ipods in the world can’t compete with the feel of the sun on your skin on a summer day.
The other day I was paddle boarding around the bay in West Seattle. At this time of year, we have extreme low and high tides, and the slack tide in between tends to be the collection point for a lot of garbage in the water. Even as the day was lovely, the paddling exquisite, I kept coming across a disturbing pattern: big globs of muck that were built out a tangled mess of fishing line, 6-pack ring, seaweed, plastic bags, algae, bungee cords, dead fish, feathers, plastic bottles, unidentified gunk and plastic food containers. The common ingredient: plastic. And there were a lot of these little floating islands.
These congealed half-bio-half-plastic masses are very quickly becoming ubiquitous in our oceans. If the only damage were that of the scenery, I could almost but not quite shrug it off.
The damage is much, much worse. In fact, you could say that what I was seeing off Lincoln Park was just the barest tip of an iceberg.
Sierra Magazine has an article this month entitled “Message in a Bottle” and it’s worth a few minutes to read. Gird yourself, you may not be prepared for the story:
There is an area off the coast of Japan known as The Garbage Patch, three times the size of Texas and a seeming doldrums where the world’s plastics collect and degrade.
Don’t kid yourself: plastic doesn’t ever entirely degrade like things in the organic world. Plastic simply breaks into smaller and smaller pieces. Those pieces at some point become indistinguishable from krill and other food sources in the ocean
This plastic broth is making its way into the food chain; the bellies of baby fish are gorged with the stuff and yet they die of starvation. Adult birds and fish are ingesting it. It’s real, it’s happening.
One of the main culprits is a thing called plastic nurdles--manufactured plastic molded into small nuggets for easy shipment to manufacturing plants all around the world to make things like that handy blue plastic water bottle, that shovel and bucket your kids play with at the beach, the parts in your car, the caps on your soda, the packing in that new TV (not to mention the TV itself), the plastic wrapper on the grapes you brought to the picnic, the cap on your latte-to-go, your flip-flops, and that bobble-head toy you got at the ballpark. The massive ships carrying these nurdles sometimes lose their cargo, sometimes they accidentally dump large quantities of the stuff, sometimes it just gets loose.
The thing I can’t get out of my head, the thing that haunts me is how much plastic there is. We really don’t even think about plastic as plastic anymore, we think of it as normal. Diamonds may not be forever, after all they are organic structures, but plastic really IS forever. Where will all of this stuff go, this stuff that really IS forever?
In my own little life, we have upped our efforts to decrease the amount of plastic in our lives, but it’s an uphill battle. We reuse our plastic bags and buy in bulk as much as possible, we forego the plastic cap on the latte, we avoid the over-architected containers.
And we have to content ourselves with that. It’s not enough, but it’s something we can do.
The clean-up on this mess will be monstrous; if we started today, we could have 100% employment for decades. The one upside to this is it’s undeniable: the massive three-times-the-size-of-Texas floating islands of garbage are real. You could go there today and be blown away by the iceberg-depth and island-breadth of the mess.
I love the three stages of these clematis blossoms. This clematis simply could not be happpier than it is growing up into an old cherry tree that is now a natural support for both it and an arching wisteria to the north of it. Enjoy!
Originally, this blog was about a year long project to track my personal driving and transportation habits (My Life w/ Car series). That project impacted lots of things in my life, not just transportation. I still try to minimize driving, which in turn minimizes "hunting-and-gathering" (aka shopping) which in turn leaves more time for lots and lots and lots of other things.
It’s really the first year in a couple of decades that I’ve even put in a serious vegetable garden, so this has been encouraging to say the very least.
by Paul Hawkin
