One Graph

My colleague Diana Wright has many talents: gardener, farmer, maple syrup maker, mother, and more. She is also one of the best people I know at finding data and making that data accessible and meaningful to people.

I thought of her when I saw this graph, because she has long had the idea of a news service that would send, at regular intervals, a graph about the state of the world, a city, a river, or an economy. In honor of Diana (and in hopes that I can entice her into partnership in searching out one powerful graph each week) here's the climate change graph of the week for me. It shows, as Hansen says, why "coal will determine whether we continue to increase climate change or slow the human impact."

These graphs can be downloaded here along with a wealth of clear and helpful information on Dr. Hansen's website.

Burning Bright

On the journey home from the West Coast last month I met an interesting fellow traveler and we struck up conversation about sustainability and the future. In the course of conversation I gave him an article Dana Meadows had written that I had carried in my bag all the way from Vermont to California and then to Oregon. I wasn't sure I'd ever hear from him again, but recently, I received this email:

I just finished my first read through of Dana Meadows article. It was great. What can one say – “she gets it” and has a simple and powerful way of communicating. This led me to your website which is also inspiring and the discovery that she died at 59. Sounds like a soul that had burned very bright.

I agree, about the soul burning bright, and imagine that those of you reading these words who knew Dana Meadows would agree as well.

But we are all burning, aren't we? Literally. We are flames, our cells burning oxygen with every breath. We take the world into ourselves with every mouthful of food and every sip of water, transforming carrot sticks and peanut butter into movement and sound, into violence or poetry.

I wish we taught our children this truth, that they are moving flowing rivers, never, not even for an instant, stagnant, and never, ever separate from the ocean or from the clouds, or from the dark and secret life of the soil.

I wish our leaders knew it. I wish they all knew and acted as though they knew that, as Buckminster Fuller once said, we are not nouns, but verbs. (" I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe.")

That is my image for the day - people as flames. The delegates at the United Nations, my seven-year old at her math assignment, the people – soldiers, insurgents, mothers, babies – on the ground in Iraq.

All of us, burning bright.

Second Chances

There is one very good thing, I find, in this intention to pay attention to sky, to earth, to neighbors and partners and children and wind: you keep getting second (and third, fourth, and fifth) chances.

Last night I remembered to go outside at dusk to say hello to the new moon.

Remember, Part Two

Tucking my 10 year old daughter into bed, I realized (once again) that paying attention to the beauty of the world requires more than simply vowing to do so.

Daughter: Did you see the moon tonight, Mom?

Mother: Moon?

Daughter: Yeah, as you walked home from work. It was a little sliver, a sixth or maybe an eighth. It was sooo beautiful. You could see the dark part. That's the reflected light (said with authority.) That part was dull gray. And the bright part was glowing yellow! You didn't see it? It was right there.

There was nothing for it but to go outside (she, barefoot, wearing pajamas) into the freezing night to look for the moon.

But new moons set early, and this one was gone. My daughter was simultaneously disappointed at the absent moon and gleeful to be out past bed-time, barefoot on frosty grass.

As for me, the best that can be said is that I had enough sense to stand quietly for a moment in appreciation of the shinning stars above my head and the wide-awake child at my side.

Remember

I write this note to myself as much as to you. Remember this (even when there is work to do):

Go outside. Notice the sky. Feel the rocks and the soil and the crackling leaves beneath your feet.

In going to Seeds For The Future I traveled 3000 miles and spent thirty-days, in part to help myself remember to pay attention to the world I am so desperate to protect for my children.

One morning I sat perfectly still for as long as a fish-stalking heron did, which was a long, long time (during which my nose itched and my mind wandered). I don't know about the heron's mind, but she was so still she could have been a stump or a rock in the early morning mist. She struck, she swallowed, she went still again.

Another day, I sat where the river meets the sea for as long as it took for the tide to go out and come back in again, and I didn't do anything else but sit. I made no plans, not one refinement to project strategy or fund-raising plan.

It felt sweet. And rare. I realized how little of my time in this beautiful world do I spend tasting its sweetness. I vowed, on the airplane coming home, to change that.

There have been a few moments. One walk in the maples. One afternoon sifting compost onto the cleared beds of the garden. One wide-awake, eye-widening look at the full-moon rising over the hay-field (a glimpse I would have missed forever, had my ten-year not dragged me by the hand, away from the computer to the porch and the cold night air and the glowing orange disc in the sky).

Most days, I feel the opposite of that heron - motion punctuated by little bits of stillness rather than the other way around.

I don't long to spend my life in retreat, in silence and quiet. I don't want to spend these coming years of influence on the climate of my children's future on a mountaintop or a monastery. I want to be in motion, in motion that matters. But I'm trying to be a little more heron-like, trying to find the stillness before the swift motion.

Today - when a paragraph just wouldn't come out right, when there didn't seem to be any clear, honest words, just extremes of sentimentality and dullness, I turned off the computer, put on my sweater, and walked up the hill.

The pasture-edge smelled of hickory nuts; I heard a distant raven; I saw one golden apple tree,
on fire in the late afternoon sun.

Why I left my children (and my husband (and my job)) for a month

Leave home? For a month? In September?

If you are someone who puts down roots in a place, and particularly if those roots involve a garden in northern New England, you'll know that the words "leave home" and the word "September" don't fit well into the same sentence.

September is the culmination of seven months of planning and working that starts with seed ordering and the sowing of flats in March and April.

Not to mention that September is the month of the HARVEST - when tomatoes need to be canned, dry beans picked, soybeans frozen, pickles made.

The gardening mother of school-aged children who leaves town in September automatically consigns her spouse to mid-night sessions with the pressure canner. If those same school aged children happen to attend "school" at home then the same mother is also consigning her husband to steering through everything from the multiplication tables to spelling words and violin recitals under the burden of sleep deprivation.

If such a mother were also to have major work obligations in October (say a workshop or two and a large grant proposal) then should she leave town for all of September and the beginning of October, she would also be consigning her colleagues to extra work, or at the very least, more than the usual amount of last minute rushing around. (And, if her husband also happened to be one of her work colleagues, well then, what she is asking really would be extraordinary.)

So why did I do it? What I was I hoping to find in thirty-days on the other side of the continent that I didn't already have? What did I think I would find in Joanna Macy's teaching – from meditation to systems theory to the way that our despair for the world opens us up to our love of it – that would be worth asking so much of so many.

Well first there was clarity. Day in and day out I write and teach about the preciousness of the next ten years, the years when the odds are still good that dedicated action can keep the climate from dangerous runaway warming. But it is one thing to be clear about a window of opportunity and quite another to know what to do with it. I went to Oregon hoping to come home someone who was ready to live in a way she'd be proud to have future generations know about it. Someone who was awake to the plight of the world and doing something about it.

And then there was courage. Courage to break away from old patterns that weren't serving me or the world. Courage to say to my kids, 'we aren't going spend money on that even though everyone else you know has one, because plastic junk is part of the problem that is ruining your beautiful world". Courage to ask, in my community that is struggling just to keep up with barn repairs and committee reports, what more can we do? How can we be ready for the rough ride that seems so likely to be coming? Courage to turn away from all those seductive distractions - from trivial conflicts, from emailing while Rome burns.

Clarity and courage are what I went looking for. I can't say that I found them in large measure - though I found little glimpses of the nooks and corners of myself where they might be hiding.

What I found instead is the certaintity that what I need to do - and maybe you too – is exactly whatever it is that someone who did have clarity and courage would do, even (especially) while feeling unsure and afraid. No more than this, and no less.

So I guess it's good-bye retreat - welcome home real world.

Where Have I Been?

It's been a while since I've been able to add new thoughts and experiences here. Not because there haven't been new thoughts and experiences, but because there have been too many, coming too fast, and leaving too little time to synthesize, write, and integrate.

Since the last posting on this blog in June there's been an Our Climate Ourselves Roadshow, on the West Coast of the US, which was followed by an amazing, and still not fully digested, 30-day retreat on the Oregon Coast with Fran and Joanna Macy and 60-odd other activists and educators, Seeds For the Future II. That was followed by a week with the new class of Donella Meadows Leadership Fellows - who where here at Cobb Hill at the end of October. Now, as the days shorten and darken in Vermont I have a little more spaciousness, and more time for reflection.
Many of you, family, friends, and colleagues have asked me: what was it like? how have you changed? what did you learn?

I haven't answered you all very well yet; in some cases I haven't answered at all. But as the experiences and lessons churn, percolate, and digest words are starting to rise to the surface again.

Stay tuned.