Monday, May 5, 2014
The Concept of Care
I first encountered Joan Tronto's book Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care when I was in graduate school. The text, published in 1994, was an assigned reading for an American Studies course on the politics of knowledge. I read the book in 1997 when I was in my mid-thirties and in a phase of my life where I have to admit that I did not care for much of anything or anyone. I was angry at how I perceived the workplace and its presumptive pursuit of happiness had duped me, and I felt that society had let me down, too. I wanted to lash back and get even, but I wasn't really sure who or what the enemy was.
As a result, an idea that "care" could create a richer, more fulfilling world for everyone didn't particularly go over well with me. Some people didn't deserve care, I found myself muttering to myself. And nobody cares about me. Why should I extend care for others?
Flash forward a decade. I am teaching classes in Political Science as an adjunct instructor at a community college. I am a liberal Democrat; most of my students are not. It feels -- in this post-9/11, high-Bush, not yet age of Obama -- as if the future is bleak. The students care more about saving souls (via Jesus and the conservative politics of mega-churches) than they do about showing compassion for their others -- particularly those who are poor, of color, and reside in lower-income urban communities. As a sort of wild experiment, I pick up Tronto's idea of an ethic of care and divide the class into two groups: one is to simulate the role of a pro-choice organization; the other is to play the role of anti-abortionists. Together the groups must create a satisfactory resolution that supports a single teenage woman who has become pregnant.
Weirdly, it works. By deploying the idea that being cared for will help the young woman be a better giver of care to her future child, the two groups reach a consensus that averts an abortion yet provides the woman intellectual, emotional, and financial support to care for her future child and for herself properly. The students agree that the woman's career need not be sacrificed, and that the woman should be given the means to attend college. They come up with realistic solutions to education, child care, nutrition, and career development.
If only public policy could be so easy.
The ethic of care returned to my mind last summer as I was working with a colleague to develop our Poetics of Sustainability project. In the midst of the project's development, we met a third colleague who was affiliated with a center different from ours but within the same college who was looking at our work of mentoring (advising and supporting students through their college careers) as emotional labor. As the colleague articulated her understanding of emotional labor, I began to see how an ethics of care could make sense. If the mentors did not receive adequate care, they would use up their care reserves and would not be able to care for more than 25 to 30 students in a single shot. Reading between the lines of my colleagues' research, I realized that this perhaps was already occurring as workloads for mentors were increasing without any appreciable acknowledgement or in pay. My colleague on the Poetics of Sustainability project showed with her words that she was an actual case-in-case. With nearly two hundred mentees and responsibilities to take incoming calls from hundreds of others two or three days a week, she had virtually no time for herself.
The ethic of care stayed in my mind over the past year as I worked with my initial partner and, over time, three other individuals to make the plan to create workshops around personal sustainability a reality. When we finally hosted the five workshops we were able to organize -- all in the month of April -- I was amazed. The workshops engaged participants with deep breathing, meditative drawing, and reading and writing poetry, and participants responded with joy and ease. I, too, played a role in many of the workshops as a participant-observer, and was amazed by the lightness and sense of good feeling that the workshops left me with.
Looking back on what worked, I realize that the ethic of care was at work. It allowed us to participate in creativity, even as we were teaching it. In doing so, it helped us let go of old monsters and fears of the past, to build something entirely new.
Sunday, May 4, 2014
Poetry, Painting, and Personal Sustainability
(Inspired by StoryADay's suggestion to write 2,000 words today. It seemed like an appropriate way to get down some thoughts on the work of sustainability that I've been doing through the past couple of years.)
I moved to Saratoga County, New York, in 2010, a largely rural area, after living in the hip, urban cities of Seattle, Honolulu, and again in Seattle for twenty-years. I learned in Seattle to recycle every possible material under the sun, and Honolulu that vegetable scraps buried into soil will decompose rapidly and create new nutritiously dense soil. I drove as little as I could in both of those locales, and rode buses and bicycles or walked whenever I could. Coming to Saratoga made me dependent upon a car for the first time in more than two decades, and to see such natural products as trees not as species that unqualifiedly needed to be saved without question but rather as "renewable resources" that were far better to use for such purposes as heat and furniture than the oil, electric, and hydro-power that consumed so much of my previous home cities' carbon footprints.
I was surprised, as a result, when I received a survey from a sustainability group on my campus asking if I would be willing to take the bus instead of drive, or to carpool with co-workers.
"Sure," I scrawled back. "If a bus existed."
I live eight miles from my office in what feels like a different world. Goats, chickens, dogs, horses, cats, and llamas outnumber the human population within my immediate neighborhood by a ratio of probably four-to-one. This is not a land where the nearest house is two miles away; my neighbors on either side of me live within a one-minute walk, and we're all wired into each other's lives via cell phones, text messages, and the Internet. Yet, it is the country. Which means our homes are served by personal septic tanks, not a countywide sewer system. We receive our water from wells on our property, not from a municipal source. And when we need to get anywhere, we turn to our cars. It is possible for me to walk or bicycle to my office; it is not possible for me to ride a bus. The nearest bus stop is the local Amtrak station, located about one-third of a mile from my office.
The survey also asked me if I would be willing to consider recycling my household items instead of throwing them into the trash. I found the query fairly incredulous: our rural waste service truck comes every other week to empty two bins: one for trash, one for recycling. The trash bin is usually close to empty; the recycle bin overflows.
These findings caused me to look at the term sustainability in an entirely different way. I realized that while I had learned much about protecting the planet in my previous lives as an urban dweller, I had to rethink the equation in rural terms. I also felt that it was incumbent to rearticulate the meaning of sustainability so that it might hold some value for the bulk of our college's students, who, like me, were residing in fairly rural environments. How can we push bus commuting on people who reside in areas without buses? Does bike commuting really present a viable alternative for areas whose roads are covered with snow at least four months out of each year? And what about recycling? And saving trees? Do these adages of the urban really make sense in an area where if you don't trim out some trees, the trees will choke the growth out of everything else? Does it really make sense to promote recycling when those who make their living in agriculture -- as many rural dwellers still do -- repurpose and reuse virtually everything, who were born into families whose motto for generations was to not let anything go to waste?
I did not realize that these ruminations would lead to a series of projects that a colleague (who happens to be a poet) and a librarian (who happens to be a painter) and I (a professor who happens to be a creative writer) would develop over the next two years under the umbrella term "The Poetics of Sustainability." My poet colleague and I came up with the name when we decided to create a workshop for a conference on Transliteracy, Teaching, and Technology on understanding the impacts of natural disasters (such as Hurricane Sandy, which had ravaged the northeastern coasts of New Jersey and New York) on student and faculty life in ways that would transcend words. The work underwent a series of interesting twists and turns but ultimately turned into a question that we had initially asked explicitly but gradually made more implicit: What does the word "sustainability" mean to you? What words and images come to mind?
So, to give a few dates. My poet colleague and I first presented our thoughts on sustainability in a two-hour workshop at what's called The 3Ts conference: Transliteracy, Teaching, and Technology in March 2013. We generated an audience of three. The three individuals, however, were keenly and tightly drawn into the discourse on defining sustainability for themselves and then trying to find a way to extend it out toward care of family, community, and planet that the two hours stretched into two and a half hours, perhaps three. That scenario repeated itself when we presented a session on sustainability six weeks later at an annual distance learning conference. And it repeated itself again when we proposed the project in April 2013 as a yearlong endeavor that we would develop for students, faculty and stuff, and the overall community in a 2013-14 Institute for Mentoring, Teaching, and Learning. In the latter case, nobody -- including ourselves -- could quite figure out what we were trying to accomplish. But everyone was intrigued. We had tapped some sort of personal chord.
"I don't know how to offer a simple response to this project," said a librarian, who later became one of our project collaborators. "But there's something about it that attracts me. I don't know what it is. It just feels so personal."
My poet-colleague and I grappled, too, partly because we represent different demographics, or appeared to initially, at least. While we share much in common, she lives near the downtown of our small city, and thrives on the natural grocery stores, health food stores, yoga studios, and ecstatic dance clubs that abound in the area. I live on a farm and find that while I occasionally frequent the natural grocery and health food stores, I consider much of their produce unnecessary or overpriced. Overpriced often because it is shipped in from the West Coast where I once lived. Unnecessary because I can grow my own food much better. Having hit the age of fifty-one, I also have found that while I once enjoyed yoga classes and ecstatic dance quite a bit, I'd rather spend my evenings at home with my cats and my husband. There's little that new up-and-coming yoga teachers can teach me, and I find their rituals off-putting for their lack of cultural literacy and sensitivity. Like so many things, yoga has evolved from a communal to solitary pursuit.
These differences of opinion returned my mind once again to the questions we initially asked: What does sustainability mean to you? What words and images come to mind?
As the summer of 2013 wore into fall, I found myself feeling weary by the questions. I felt grumpy and nervous. Because we had signed on to be a part of the Institute of Mentoring, Teaching, and Learning, I felt a certain level of expectation awaited. We needed to produce something. It didn't have to be brilliant. But it had to be something. Yet, that didn't satisfy. I didn't want to recreate mediocrity. To ask questions about bus commuting and recycling that were of high relevance perhaps to urban residents but not suited for our demographics. I wanted to look at what sustainability meant in a meaningful way. But there wasn't a unified sense of what meaningful meant, either. The differences of opinion between myself and my colleague exemplified that.
In a November 2013 conference call conversation with other participants in the institute, I surprised both my colleague and myself by stating straight out that I felt stuck. That I didn't know what to create, that I wasn't a content expert on sustainability, and that I wasn't really all that interested in the term in an environmental sense. I also intimated that I felt that the term was somewhat racially coded; discourses on sustainability seemed aimed at a white, urban middle class crowd. People of color, the poor, and the rural were always left out.
One person suggested we organize our workshop around feeling stuck, and use the experience to gather data on what others thought sustainability meant. I didn't really want to take this route because I felt that we had already done it. I wanted to find a way to give people who might attend our workshops something they could apply to making their own lives better.
My colleague visited me in my office soon after the conference call.
"Himanee," she said, "I think you're looking for problems where none exist."
She went on to describe how her workload had felt so overwhelming at the time that we proposed the workshop that she was left with no energy to write poetry. She felt drained, and had considered cutting back her position to a 75 percent role so that she would gain at least one extra day to create. Thinking about the workshop had led her to look at how I -- her partner -- had made writing a priority in my life. She said she started to reflect on what was vital to her energy and sustenance, and began to incorporate those aspects of her life with deliberation and consciousness. She gave herself time and permission to write. She allowed herself the privilege to take vacation days and go into the mountains to commune with nature and reflect. And she pushed herself to seek professional development funding to attend the sustainability conferences that educators throughout the region were hosting.
"I feel like I've been doing the workshop on myself."
I laughed as I took in this remark. As she spoke, I realized that she was right. When we proposed the workshop, I, too, was drained. Not so much by the lack of time and emotional energy to write but by the scarcity of money that seemed to pervade my life. My income was stagnant, and my expenses were increasing. Every day after payday seemed like a bated breath, as I wondered if the money would last to make it to the next payday. Somewhere in the midst of the summer and fall, as a deficit reduction program sliced about $70 off my twice-monthly paycheck and increases in health insurance costs took another $60 off, and as the accumulated effect of these slashes forced me into a series of negotiations with billers, I stopped worrying about money. I realized that I had everything I needed to survive from one day to the next, and that the bills I needed to pay were only bills that needed to be paid. If money was short, I simply needed to tell the truth. People would work with me if I was direct, communicative, and up front with them. My colleague's words made me realize that I, too, had been spending the summer and fall doing the workshop on myself.
And, so, that's where my first batch of philosophical musing leaves off. I came to realizing my own way of interpreting the question "What is sustainability? What does sustainability mean to you? What words and images come to mind" was not necessarily specific to just me. My word of choice in playing this free-writing question game generally was "hold" or "prolong" or "to make last." It never was a value judgment about recycling, bus commuting, or the right way to do yoga. It was about thinking politically about getting to Marx's vision for a classless utopia without destroying all of the systems of society and the planet itself in the process.
I moved to Saratoga County, New York, in 2010, a largely rural area, after living in the hip, urban cities of Seattle, Honolulu, and again in Seattle for twenty-years. I learned in Seattle to recycle every possible material under the sun, and Honolulu that vegetable scraps buried into soil will decompose rapidly and create new nutritiously dense soil. I drove as little as I could in both of those locales, and rode buses and bicycles or walked whenever I could. Coming to Saratoga made me dependent upon a car for the first time in more than two decades, and to see such natural products as trees not as species that unqualifiedly needed to be saved without question but rather as "renewable resources" that were far better to use for such purposes as heat and furniture than the oil, electric, and hydro-power that consumed so much of my previous home cities' carbon footprints.
I was surprised, as a result, when I received a survey from a sustainability group on my campus asking if I would be willing to take the bus instead of drive, or to carpool with co-workers.
"Sure," I scrawled back. "If a bus existed."
I live eight miles from my office in what feels like a different world. Goats, chickens, dogs, horses, cats, and llamas outnumber the human population within my immediate neighborhood by a ratio of probably four-to-one. This is not a land where the nearest house is two miles away; my neighbors on either side of me live within a one-minute walk, and we're all wired into each other's lives via cell phones, text messages, and the Internet. Yet, it is the country. Which means our homes are served by personal septic tanks, not a countywide sewer system. We receive our water from wells on our property, not from a municipal source. And when we need to get anywhere, we turn to our cars. It is possible for me to walk or bicycle to my office; it is not possible for me to ride a bus. The nearest bus stop is the local Amtrak station, located about one-third of a mile from my office.
The survey also asked me if I would be willing to consider recycling my household items instead of throwing them into the trash. I found the query fairly incredulous: our rural waste service truck comes every other week to empty two bins: one for trash, one for recycling. The trash bin is usually close to empty; the recycle bin overflows.
These findings caused me to look at the term sustainability in an entirely different way. I realized that while I had learned much about protecting the planet in my previous lives as an urban dweller, I had to rethink the equation in rural terms. I also felt that it was incumbent to rearticulate the meaning of sustainability so that it might hold some value for the bulk of our college's students, who, like me, were residing in fairly rural environments. How can we push bus commuting on people who reside in areas without buses? Does bike commuting really present a viable alternative for areas whose roads are covered with snow at least four months out of each year? And what about recycling? And saving trees? Do these adages of the urban really make sense in an area where if you don't trim out some trees, the trees will choke the growth out of everything else? Does it really make sense to promote recycling when those who make their living in agriculture -- as many rural dwellers still do -- repurpose and reuse virtually everything, who were born into families whose motto for generations was to not let anything go to waste?
I did not realize that these ruminations would lead to a series of projects that a colleague (who happens to be a poet) and a librarian (who happens to be a painter) and I (a professor who happens to be a creative writer) would develop over the next two years under the umbrella term "The Poetics of Sustainability." My poet colleague and I came up with the name when we decided to create a workshop for a conference on Transliteracy, Teaching, and Technology on understanding the impacts of natural disasters (such as Hurricane Sandy, which had ravaged the northeastern coasts of New Jersey and New York) on student and faculty life in ways that would transcend words. The work underwent a series of interesting twists and turns but ultimately turned into a question that we had initially asked explicitly but gradually made more implicit: What does the word "sustainability" mean to you? What words and images come to mind?
So, to give a few dates. My poet colleague and I first presented our thoughts on sustainability in a two-hour workshop at what's called The 3Ts conference: Transliteracy, Teaching, and Technology in March 2013. We generated an audience of three. The three individuals, however, were keenly and tightly drawn into the discourse on defining sustainability for themselves and then trying to find a way to extend it out toward care of family, community, and planet that the two hours stretched into two and a half hours, perhaps three. That scenario repeated itself when we presented a session on sustainability six weeks later at an annual distance learning conference. And it repeated itself again when we proposed the project in April 2013 as a yearlong endeavor that we would develop for students, faculty and stuff, and the overall community in a 2013-14 Institute for Mentoring, Teaching, and Learning. In the latter case, nobody -- including ourselves -- could quite figure out what we were trying to accomplish. But everyone was intrigued. We had tapped some sort of personal chord.
"I don't know how to offer a simple response to this project," said a librarian, who later became one of our project collaborators. "But there's something about it that attracts me. I don't know what it is. It just feels so personal."
My poet-colleague and I grappled, too, partly because we represent different demographics, or appeared to initially, at least. While we share much in common, she lives near the downtown of our small city, and thrives on the natural grocery stores, health food stores, yoga studios, and ecstatic dance clubs that abound in the area. I live on a farm and find that while I occasionally frequent the natural grocery and health food stores, I consider much of their produce unnecessary or overpriced. Overpriced often because it is shipped in from the West Coast where I once lived. Unnecessary because I can grow my own food much better. Having hit the age of fifty-one, I also have found that while I once enjoyed yoga classes and ecstatic dance quite a bit, I'd rather spend my evenings at home with my cats and my husband. There's little that new up-and-coming yoga teachers can teach me, and I find their rituals off-putting for their lack of cultural literacy and sensitivity. Like so many things, yoga has evolved from a communal to solitary pursuit.
These differences of opinion returned my mind once again to the questions we initially asked: What does sustainability mean to you? What words and images come to mind?
As the summer of 2013 wore into fall, I found myself feeling weary by the questions. I felt grumpy and nervous. Because we had signed on to be a part of the Institute of Mentoring, Teaching, and Learning, I felt a certain level of expectation awaited. We needed to produce something. It didn't have to be brilliant. But it had to be something. Yet, that didn't satisfy. I didn't want to recreate mediocrity. To ask questions about bus commuting and recycling that were of high relevance perhaps to urban residents but not suited for our demographics. I wanted to look at what sustainability meant in a meaningful way. But there wasn't a unified sense of what meaningful meant, either. The differences of opinion between myself and my colleague exemplified that.
In a November 2013 conference call conversation with other participants in the institute, I surprised both my colleague and myself by stating straight out that I felt stuck. That I didn't know what to create, that I wasn't a content expert on sustainability, and that I wasn't really all that interested in the term in an environmental sense. I also intimated that I felt that the term was somewhat racially coded; discourses on sustainability seemed aimed at a white, urban middle class crowd. People of color, the poor, and the rural were always left out.
One person suggested we organize our workshop around feeling stuck, and use the experience to gather data on what others thought sustainability meant. I didn't really want to take this route because I felt that we had already done it. I wanted to find a way to give people who might attend our workshops something they could apply to making their own lives better.
My colleague visited me in my office soon after the conference call.
"Himanee," she said, "I think you're looking for problems where none exist."
She went on to describe how her workload had felt so overwhelming at the time that we proposed the workshop that she was left with no energy to write poetry. She felt drained, and had considered cutting back her position to a 75 percent role so that she would gain at least one extra day to create. Thinking about the workshop had led her to look at how I -- her partner -- had made writing a priority in my life. She said she started to reflect on what was vital to her energy and sustenance, and began to incorporate those aspects of her life with deliberation and consciousness. She gave herself time and permission to write. She allowed herself the privilege to take vacation days and go into the mountains to commune with nature and reflect. And she pushed herself to seek professional development funding to attend the sustainability conferences that educators throughout the region were hosting.
"I feel like I've been doing the workshop on myself."
I laughed as I took in this remark. As she spoke, I realized that she was right. When we proposed the workshop, I, too, was drained. Not so much by the lack of time and emotional energy to write but by the scarcity of money that seemed to pervade my life. My income was stagnant, and my expenses were increasing. Every day after payday seemed like a bated breath, as I wondered if the money would last to make it to the next payday. Somewhere in the midst of the summer and fall, as a deficit reduction program sliced about $70 off my twice-monthly paycheck and increases in health insurance costs took another $60 off, and as the accumulated effect of these slashes forced me into a series of negotiations with billers, I stopped worrying about money. I realized that I had everything I needed to survive from one day to the next, and that the bills I needed to pay were only bills that needed to be paid. If money was short, I simply needed to tell the truth. People would work with me if I was direct, communicative, and up front with them. My colleague's words made me realize that I, too, had been spending the summer and fall doing the workshop on myself.
And, so, that's where my first batch of philosophical musing leaves off. I came to realizing my own way of interpreting the question "What is sustainability? What does sustainability mean to you? What words and images come to mind" was not necessarily specific to just me. My word of choice in playing this free-writing question game generally was "hold" or "prolong" or "to make last." It never was a value judgment about recycling, bus commuting, or the right way to do yoga. It was about thinking politically about getting to Marx's vision for a classless utopia without destroying all of the systems of society and the planet itself in the process.
Saturday, May 3, 2014
Growing Stones
(Inspired by a prompt to write 640 words, with the words musky and vermillion in the first 250.)
Men who grow mushrooms for a living seem to take on an essence that exemplifies the mushrooms themselves. They seem not to be of the soil but rather of the matter from which mushrooms spring themselves: wood, water, and this odd thing called mycelium.
We met a new mushroom grower today while visiting the farmers market. We actually had visited them at a different farmers market from our regular one about a month earlier, so I should have been prepared for the fast-paced pitch on teas, powders, injections, and other purported healing uses for mushrooms.
Mushroom Man -- yes, that was his name -- delivered a litany on the healing properties of mushroom teas, powders, and tablets as he stood beside a vermillion specimen protruding from what he described as a block of gypsum and sandpaper. He also was wasting his breath; we had already bought shitakes from a vendor whom we frequent but don't entirely trust because he purports to hate the very mushrooms that he sells. Plus, I'm in my fifties now and have quit drinking and take cholesterol and high blood pressure meds. Although I continue to distrust the allopathic credo that there's a pill for every ailment, I have concluded that in some cases I am just too old to argue.
Don't get me wrong. I believe mushrooms can make you feel better. I still remember how my husband and I felt one night after sautéing farm-raised chanterelles in butter, inhaling their musky aroma and savoring the burst of woods-like earthiness that each forkful left upon our tongues. The delight continued through the remainder of the meal, and through a very good night sleep. Both of us reported upon waking up that we'd experienced a kaleidoscope of brightly colored, psychedelic dreams. The experience was enough to prompt my husband to start making inquiries into how we might acquire the "real" psychedelic shrooms so that we could be stoned in more than just our dreams, but I have never been much of a recreational drug user so I wouldn't go for it.
But I have thought that it might be cool grow my own chanterelles, oyster, shitake, and portabella mushrooms, which was one of the reasons that I stopped by Mushroom Man's booth in the first place. He got wildly excited at the prospect of taking on an apprentice, invited me and my husband to his farm, and began promising pre-inoculated logs in exchange for a day's work on the farm.
It seemed like a plan, but the spiel -- and his odd appearance -- couldn't help but throw me off. Could I trust a guy standing behind a vermillion piece of fungus protruding from a sawdust block, which didn't offer any promise of a musky odor and seemed somewhat frighteningly and appropriately known as the snake?
I averted my eyes from the snake and searched a bit hesitantly for a price list as he launched into an animated monologue about how mushrooms had a level of nutritional quality that surpassed even kale. When I finally got a chance to get a word in, I said, "Ok. Consider me converted. Now, I need to ask you to slow down."
He laughed and somehow turned into a human. And then I got the lowdown -- sort of. An inoculated mushroom log that's about four feet in length will produce about four ounces of mushroom in about two weeks. Eight weeks later, another four ounces will show up, and so on -- for four to seven years. The cost for one is about $50, but there's a price break if I were to buy, say, 30 or so. I felt too baffled to do the math so I gave him my business card -- figuring that if he were seriously a Mushroom Man, he'd write me off as a stuffed shirt corporate executive but if he were interested in helping me grow mushrooms, he give me a call.
 |
| Accessed from http://everythingmushrooms .com/shiitake-mushroom-log-kit-instructions/ |
We met a new mushroom grower today while visiting the farmers market. We actually had visited them at a different farmers market from our regular one about a month earlier, so I should have been prepared for the fast-paced pitch on teas, powders, injections, and other purported healing uses for mushrooms.
Mushroom Man -- yes, that was his name -- delivered a litany on the healing properties of mushroom teas, powders, and tablets as he stood beside a vermillion specimen protruding from what he described as a block of gypsum and sandpaper. He also was wasting his breath; we had already bought shitakes from a vendor whom we frequent but don't entirely trust because he purports to hate the very mushrooms that he sells. Plus, I'm in my fifties now and have quit drinking and take cholesterol and high blood pressure meds. Although I continue to distrust the allopathic credo that there's a pill for every ailment, I have concluded that in some cases I am just too old to argue.
Don't get me wrong. I believe mushrooms can make you feel better. I still remember how my husband and I felt one night after sautéing farm-raised chanterelles in butter, inhaling their musky aroma and savoring the burst of woods-like earthiness that each forkful left upon our tongues. The delight continued through the remainder of the meal, and through a very good night sleep. Both of us reported upon waking up that we'd experienced a kaleidoscope of brightly colored, psychedelic dreams. The experience was enough to prompt my husband to start making inquiries into how we might acquire the "real" psychedelic shrooms so that we could be stoned in more than just our dreams, but I have never been much of a recreational drug user so I wouldn't go for it.
But I have thought that it might be cool grow my own chanterelles, oyster, shitake, and portabella mushrooms, which was one of the reasons that I stopped by Mushroom Man's booth in the first place. He got wildly excited at the prospect of taking on an apprentice, invited me and my husband to his farm, and began promising pre-inoculated logs in exchange for a day's work on the farm.
It seemed like a plan, but the spiel -- and his odd appearance -- couldn't help but throw me off. Could I trust a guy standing behind a vermillion piece of fungus protruding from a sawdust block, which didn't offer any promise of a musky odor and seemed somewhat frighteningly and appropriately known as the snake?
I averted my eyes from the snake and searched a bit hesitantly for a price list as he launched into an animated monologue about how mushrooms had a level of nutritional quality that surpassed even kale. When I finally got a chance to get a word in, I said, "Ok. Consider me converted. Now, I need to ask you to slow down."
He laughed and somehow turned into a human. And then I got the lowdown -- sort of. An inoculated mushroom log that's about four feet in length will produce about four ounces of mushroom in about two weeks. Eight weeks later, another four ounces will show up, and so on -- for four to seven years. The cost for one is about $50, but there's a price break if I were to buy, say, 30 or so. I felt too baffled to do the math so I gave him my business card -- figuring that if he were seriously a Mushroom Man, he'd write me off as a stuffed shirt corporate executive but if he were interested in helping me grow mushrooms, he give me a call.
Friday, May 2, 2014
The Magnetic Touch
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| Photo by Jim Gupta-Carlson |
A second principle of the law of attraction is based on a presumption: You attract what you put out. So if your response from the person in question is not what you initially desired, it behooves you to look at the energy you’re putting out.
And then there’s final thought: You might attract exactly what you need, even if you do not know what you need.
This magnetic draw both perplexes and fascinates me, mostly because I am fairly sure that it works and because I am fairly skeptical of theories like this. They seem beyond New Age, which is something I somewhat approve of, and misleading.
Still …
How else does one explain the fact that survivors of Hurricane Katrina started appearing everywhere I went in Seattle – at the bus stop, in the grocery store – after I began looking for individuals for students to interview? How else does one account for all the ads and informational articles about wetsuits that began showing up on my Facebook page after I mentioned to one person face-to-face, not via cyber space, that I was weighing the options of acquiring one? Oh yes, cookies. That explains the latter.
Often, self-help and personal development books discuss the law of attraction in terms of looking for romantic love or in regards for the unquenchable lust for money and power. That’s where the magnetism is seemingly within one’s control. You go to bed every night meditating on money, and before long, there’s money coming at you in a hundred different directions. You dream of sex, and before you know it, you’re having a lot of sex. Or so the theory goes.
I don’t think the process can be so deliberate. That’s more like wishful thinking. It’s the CEO of a bankrupt company – morally and financially so – saying we’re going to build something massive but having no budget and no plan for doing so. That’s perhaps where the line between attraction and vision exists. One can have a vision, and with that vision acting as a guide post, one can develop, modify, practice, assess, reflect, evaluate and constantly refine that plan to get to a goal. But simply turning a vision into a mantra with no backup? That is a recipe for disaster.
Thursday, May 1, 2014
Getting to home
(National Short Story Month has begun with the first day of May, and with it come prompts from Julie Duffy's Story A Day site. The first one was to write about getting to home.)
Getting home is often much easier than leaving these days. Perhaps it's the hot mug of coffee, the cozy fire, the warmth of the cat's body curled on your toes. No matter how early I wake up, I find it hard to speed up my morning rituals.
Some days it's nearly 2 p.m. by the time I head out the door. This kind of late departure is a luxury, I know, a privilege of the educated elite who are lucky enough to have jobs where they can usually set their own hours. But privilege comes with a price. Getting to work after 2 p.m. means that for most of those around you, the work day is done. They're wondering why you're heading in just as they're thinking about heading out.
"You're going the wrong way," I'm told more than once, as I'm climbing up the stairs that others are climbing down.
The joke bothers me. It always has. Back in my days as a newspaper reporter, it was more of a norm than an exception to work unusual hours. Yet, it seemed that even there the critical mass was packing up briefcases, lunch packs, and bags, and heading out at 4:30 p.m. Heading in seemed a grievous error even if the news operated on a schedule of 24/7.
But now it feels like everyone is watching, and wondering where I have been, how I could manage not to do any work at all, until 2 p.m. I wonder if my personal life is a subject of much speculation. What does she do until 2 p.m.?
Not much, to be honest. Time flies taking care of life's necessities: washing dishes, writing, cleaning the cat boxes, writing, making breakfast and eating it while writing, washing more dishes, going out to look at the garden, logging into the bank account and then needing to decompress from the shock of the lack. It feels like I am working, working a lot.
With the hot mug of coffee, the cozy fire, and the warmth of the cat's body against my chilled feet. These little accoutrements make me feel cared for, valued, loved and not needed. They give me the capacity to care for others.
After I've settled into my desk, after everyone in the office has left, it seems -- with forty-five minutes to spare -- my work day begins. For that last chunk of the day before sunset, I am in synch with my work, loving my job, caring for students and projects alike. It almost seems sad that I need to pack up my bags in order to get home before sunset, where I fear the inevitable scolding of coming home -- once again -- too late to have a reasonable dinner.
It's tough when you inhabit multiple worlds. No place feels like a comfortable fit; it's hard to belong. And when there are really good days, I often feel a bit wary, as if I am just bracing myself for something to go wrong.
I did work quite a few things out today, namely that the biking distance from our house to Latham is 33 miles one-way and that a lot of it is on country roads and bicycle paths, which should make for a pleasant ride on National Bike to Work Day in two weeks.
It seems like a ludicrous idea. Bike three hours to get to work. Spend one hour at work. Bike three more hours to get home. It's all in a day's work, and I know that that hour may stretch into two hours, and that the time will be well spent. And bicycling home will be a pleasurable breath of fresh air, even if it takes me three hours to get there.
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| A conceptual design for a greenhouse, accessed 5/1/14 |
Some days it's nearly 2 p.m. by the time I head out the door. This kind of late departure is a luxury, I know, a privilege of the educated elite who are lucky enough to have jobs where they can usually set their own hours. But privilege comes with a price. Getting to work after 2 p.m. means that for most of those around you, the work day is done. They're wondering why you're heading in just as they're thinking about heading out.
"You're going the wrong way," I'm told more than once, as I'm climbing up the stairs that others are climbing down.
The joke bothers me. It always has. Back in my days as a newspaper reporter, it was more of a norm than an exception to work unusual hours. Yet, it seemed that even there the critical mass was packing up briefcases, lunch packs, and bags, and heading out at 4:30 p.m. Heading in seemed a grievous error even if the news operated on a schedule of 24/7.
But now it feels like everyone is watching, and wondering where I have been, how I could manage not to do any work at all, until 2 p.m. I wonder if my personal life is a subject of much speculation. What does she do until 2 p.m.?
Not much, to be honest. Time flies taking care of life's necessities: washing dishes, writing, cleaning the cat boxes, writing, making breakfast and eating it while writing, washing more dishes, going out to look at the garden, logging into the bank account and then needing to decompress from the shock of the lack. It feels like I am working, working a lot.
With the hot mug of coffee, the cozy fire, and the warmth of the cat's body against my chilled feet. These little accoutrements make me feel cared for, valued, loved and not needed. They give me the capacity to care for others.
After I've settled into my desk, after everyone in the office has left, it seems -- with forty-five minutes to spare -- my work day begins. For that last chunk of the day before sunset, I am in synch with my work, loving my job, caring for students and projects alike. It almost seems sad that I need to pack up my bags in order to get home before sunset, where I fear the inevitable scolding of coming home -- once again -- too late to have a reasonable dinner.
It's tough when you inhabit multiple worlds. No place feels like a comfortable fit; it's hard to belong. And when there are really good days, I often feel a bit wary, as if I am just bracing myself for something to go wrong.
I did work quite a few things out today, namely that the biking distance from our house to Latham is 33 miles one-way and that a lot of it is on country roads and bicycle paths, which should make for a pleasant ride on National Bike to Work Day in two weeks.
It seems like a ludicrous idea. Bike three hours to get to work. Spend one hour at work. Bike three more hours to get home. It's all in a day's work, and I know that that hour may stretch into two hours, and that the time will be well spent. And bicycling home will be a pleasurable breath of fresh air, even if it takes me three hours to get there.
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
Growing Communities
Steve Otrembiak, one of the regular vendors at the summer Saratoga Farmers Market, shared this story on Sunday, March 23, during a community forum on the social, economic, and environmental benefits of shopping at the farmers market. The story captured for me the spirit of farmers markets and the relationships that build between vendors and customers around them.
The forum was organized by representatives of two local colleges -- Skidmore and Empire State -- and the Friends of the Saratoga Market, an all volunteer organization that a half-dozen farmers market regulars formed in 2011 with a mission of helping the Saratoga Farmers Market continue to prosper. I was one of the initial organizers of the Friends of the Market (FOM) and currently serve as its convener, a role that leaves my over-extended, somewhat disorganized self feeling a bit frazzled at times. Nevertheless, the work that I do with FOM has enriched my life in Saratoga Springs and my work as a faculty member at Empire State College greatly because it puts me in touch with farmers and the art and joy of growing and eating incredible food.
Good food formed a foundation of the forum. It opened with an assortment of foods prepared by Parkside Eatery, a Saratoga Springs business, that were prepared entirely with ingredients from the farmers market. When I say entirely, I mean entirely. Even the dressings were made with yogurts, vinegars, fruits, vegetables, and cheeses from the farmers. Parkside representatives bought the ingredients at the market the day before, arriving at the market around 11 a.m. with a local photojournalist in tow.
Following the food was a panel of farmers and customers that in addition to Otrembiak included cheese maker Liza Porter of Homestead Artisans; Abby Foster, the granddaughter of M&A Farms owner Arnold Grant and an agricultural educator with the Cornell Extension Service; Joyce Elliott of Empire State College; Elizabeth Cohen, a student at Skidmore College; and Carol Maxwell, founder of the Lake Avenue Elementary School's "garden project."
Otrembiak noted that as spring moves toward summer, fresh vegetables and fruits start to replace the seedlings that his farm would initially sell. But the customers buying their produce would still report back on the plants they had purchased at the start of the season, providing periodic progress reports. Sometimes, Otrembiak said, they would bring in a discolored leaf in order to get advice on a potential problem. At other times, they would bring a sample of the plant's harvest. Customers also would bring recipes and occasionally samples of dishes prepared with the plant.
"So the relationship builds up and continues," Otrembiak said.
The analogy of seedling to food seems appropriate for understanding the forum's theme "Growing Community". As relationships form between farmers, gardeners, food enthusiasts and others, a community is built and can be sustained year after year.
Otrembiak's story was just one of many shared at the forum that crystalized the power of farmers markets in my mind. I've lived in Saratoga Springs for approximately four years, and unless I am out of town it is rare that I miss a market. I've long sensed that while shopping at farmers markets is all about buying food, something greater is at stake. Being at the market is about learning the vibe of a community and perhaps also about finding your fit within it. This process of learning and of discovery doesn't come with one visit to the market or through occasional visits. It's a sustained practice that -- like growing your own food -- requires attentiveness, nurturing, patience, and time.
Other panelists also described the market as a venue. A place where friends meet, where ideas are exchanged, and where politics are expressed were some of the expressions that came up.
"I'm not sure I'd want you all to see our vendor meetings sometimes," quipped Homestead Artisan farmer Porter, adding that through differences rather than a bland unity communities grow.
Cohen, the Skidmore student who is examining the impact of farmers markets on local communities as part of a senior capstone project, pointed to structural factors in a broader society that might deter such growth. She noted that farmers markets often are perceived as being expensive and intimidating for lower-income individuals and suggested that such concerns be kept at the forefront as farmers markets gain popularity.
Cohen's words hit home for me, at least partly because I have always lived with a sense of being an outsider: I am a daughter of immigrants. I am a woman of color. I am a newcomer in a community where people have extremely tight family and kinship ties. And I am an adult who moved frequently al over the country for school and for work through my 20s, 30s and 40s. Moving to a small, fairly rural community like Saratoga in 2010 after having lived in Chicago, Kansas City, Seattle, Honolulu, and Seattle again produced not only a geographic sense of displacement for me but a cultural dislocation, as well. However, having been a regular farmers market patron in Honolulu and Seattle prompted me to inquire if Saratoga had a farmers market even before I moved here and, upon learning that it did, to visit it as soon as I arrived.
Reflecting on Cohen's words later, I thought that knowing what it was like to feel out of place might offer a new way of understanding how to promote sustainability through an ethos of inclusivity. A society that stays closed to new people or new ideas cannot last long. But for the newcomer understanding how to come into a new setting might take time. Perhaps this knowledge might be like the selling cycle of the farmers market itself -- that process of plant to product to relationship that Steve Otrembiak evoked so poetically.
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
The Delights of Self-Denial
Now, I have no reason -- no religious reason -- whatsoever to observe Lent. I was not brought up in a Christian tradition and even if I am somewhat of a follower of Jesus, I am neither a Bible reader nor a believer in doing anything absolutely by the book. But Lent has had an unusual hold on me, ever since I learned that people "give up" things -- meat, chocolate, soft drinks, etc -- for the six week period leading up to Easter. It always seemed like an interesting practice in self-sacrifice. And as a woman who has long been conscious of her physical appearance, her figure, and weight, it always seemed -- truth be told -- Lent like a good way to burn some calories and shed some pounds since so often the things being given up were food.
I began observing Lent more formally around 2006 when I was both newly married and had newly joined a Presbyterian Church. I was intrigued by sermons about service to Jesus, which my skeptical, academic mind was rapidly reinterpreting as service in the name of fighting racial injustices, gender and religious oppressions, and economic disparities in the United States and throughout the world. Observing Lent seemed like it could be a symbolic step toward social justice through a sustained practice of self-denial of a personal indulgence for a brief, six-week period each year. And, of course, if the personal indulgence were caloric in nature, there might be the added benefit of a loss of a few pounds.
For Lents past, I have given up (or more appropriately tried to give up since my resolutions always failed) drinking wine, eating red meat, and such high calorie items as cheese and chocolate. I have pretty much stopped going to church, and I am more of a critic of the normativity that Christianity imposes on people's lives than an advocate these days. Still, however, I have continued to try and practice Lent and last year I found success. I gave up playing computer games. The success was a revelation for a couple of reasons: First, it made me aware that my past failures were due to the fact that there was no real lesson attached to a brief sacrifice of "vices" unless the sacrifice was made permanent. And second, it made me aware of what was both beneficial and detrimental of a vice worth sacrificing, even if it was for just a temporary stint.
My computer game habit was two decades deep. It began with the arrival of personal computers, which were pre-installed, of course, with a range of addictive games: Spider Solitaire, to name one among many. It deepened with the advent of vast use of the Internet, which of course made access to a range of "free games" easier than ever. With the games came reasons to escape, to shut down the mind, to not think. This I continue to believe is beneficial for those of us who work at jobs that require juggling multiple "thinking tasks" all the time. The brain quickly goes into overload and shuts down. The games offer a rest, and a way to come back.
But the games also offer a reason for the brain to simply check out altogether. As a result, what I began to see during my six-week fast from games were all the stressors going on in my life that were causing me to play games in the first place. Because I was resolute last year (and because I was learning so much about myself), I refused to give myself permission to fail at the self-sacrifice. I did return to games after Easter had passed, and I would like to believe at least that when I play them now I do so in a way that is much more mindful of how I am negotiating my habit against my responsibilities. I no longer yearn to eliminate games from my life. I simply want to enjoy them without getting obsessive.
Which brings me to this year's Lent: Because it snuck up on me, I was puzzled as to what to give up. So I turned to Facebook and asked friends for suggestions. Many were amused by my seemingly warped need to give up something for Lent. Others offered a range of suggestions: meat or red meat, negative thoughts, sex, reading, and even Facebook itself. Others proposed adding a positive to life. One friend from my Muncie childhood years suggested I meditate on it, which I did, and another friend from those same years sent me a church devotional on twenty sacrifices one might consider for Lent. After some reflection on what it meant to self-sacrifice, why I felt it was meaningful as a learning experience, and how self-sacrifice might enable me to live more fully with the world without getting into the religious strings attached to it, I settled on a self-sacrifice that might be closer to self-care. I would give up my dry skin, a problem that plagues me particularly terribly in the winter when I feel like I'm too busy, too cold, or too broke to take the time and the few extra pennies to drink some more water, sip a hydrating tea, or rub in some lotion, lip balm, or even olive oil into my skin to take care of myself. It seemed like a good way to find out why busy-ness, cold feelings, and scarcity consciousness might get in the way of such a simple daily cosmetic step.
With such a resolution in mind and a bottle of skin lotion sitting in my rather cold bathroom, I began the ritual tonight. I took a hot shower, and then proceeded to nurture my skin with lotion. It added all of about 90 seconds to my schedule and even if I was momentarily chilled, the massaging motions of my fingers rubbing my skin did warm me up. So perhaps this will be an exercise in self-sacrificing worth keeping, even after the six weeks are up.
(Image credit: http://www.openbible.info/blog/2009/02/top-100-things-twitterers-are-giving-up-for-lent/)
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