Environmental Shopping

            There must be some better way to discover what would be an ecologically sound decision to make.  We’ve spent a lot of time recently trying to find healthy, environmentally friendly personal care products and still haven’t gotten something that both works well, doesn’t have to be shipped from a long distance, and doesn’t cost a fortune.    Today I wanted to get a case to protect the iPad we were given as a Christmas gift and I wanted it to be as environmentally friendly as possible.  For me, that includes not being made of leather, which eliminates a lot of choices.  Because Kathy already had a black case for her iPad I also wanted a different color.  I found lots of options but none of them seemed great. 

            There were eco-friendly leather cases (which it turns out means they were still made from animal’s skins but didn’t use harmful chemicals in the processing). 

            There were lots of cases with environmental slogans. (My favorite was ‘lose the lawn’.) Unfortunately none of them said anything about being made in an environmental way and most of them were made out of leather.

            There were bamboo cases.  I almost bought one of these. It looked very nice. Bamboo can be grown every three to five years from the same plants, it releases tons of oxygen into the air while it’s growing, and it’s a pretty strong wood.  I couldn’t tell though, whether it was grown using pesticides or whether the workers were fairly paid, it had to be flown from another part of the world, and it didn’t have a cover on it to protect the touch screen while it’s not in use.

            I found some very nice sleeves made out of recycled clothing, but no cases.  Sleeves are great for travel but don’t protect the iPad during daily use, when it’s also apt to be dropped, scratched, or otherwise injured.  The sleeve that I liked the best, though, was made from a pair of recycled old jeans. While it wouldn’t help on a daily basis, as a travel option it’d be great.  I think the next time one of my pairs of jeans wears out I’ll make myself one from them.

            After a long time searching, I ended up in frustration by buying a blue silicon case for the iPad.  It’s got a cover, it’s not made of animal products or plastic, it’s made in the US, and it’s not black. I think it’ll protect the iPad, but I’m not at all convinced that it was a sound environmental choice.  There has to be a better way to make these decisions.

Books Read in 2010

1. Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

2. Sara Maitland's A Book of Silence.

3. James Swallow's Synthesis

4. Michael Pollan's Food Rules

5. Guillermo Del Toro's The Strain

6. Mark Bittman's Food Matters

7. Lonnie Edwards' Spiritual Laws that Govern Humanity and the Universe

8. Robert Charles Wilson's Darwinia

9. Wendell Berry's Leavings:Poems

10. Gail Godwin's Unfinished Desires

11. Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Played with Fire

12. Mary Gordon's Reading Jesus

13. Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft
14. C.S. Friedman's This Alien Shore

15. Kage Baker's In the Garden of Iden

16. Swami Satchidananda's The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

17. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

18. Kage Baker's Sky Coyote

19. Alexandra Horowitz' Inside of a Dog

20. Toby Hemenway's Gaia's Garden

21. Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

22. Patricia Lanza's Lasagna Gardening for Small Spaces

23. William Gibson's Spook Country

24. Alan Roxburgh's Missional Map-making: Skills for Leading in Times of Transition

25. Graham Bell's The Permaculture Way

26. Ross Mars' The Basics of Permaculture Design

27. Elizabeth Kostova's The Swan Thieves

28. Elizabeth Moon's Sheepfarmer's Daughter

29. David Holmgren's Permaculture: Principles and Pathways

30. Colin Beavan's No Impact Man

31. Bill Mollison's Permaculture: A Designer's Manual

32. Marian McCain's GreenSpirit

33. Henri Nouwen's In the Name of Jesus

34. Stephen Webb's Good Eating

35. Robert Sawyer's WWW: Wake

36. Terry Pratchett's Nation

37. Bill McKibben's Deep Economy

38. Laurel Kearns' Ecospirit

39. John Updike's Of the Farm

40. Paul Nabhan's Coming Home to Eat

41. Gordon Hempton's One Square Inch of Silence

42. Anna Quindlan's Every Last One

43. Gernot Candolini's Labyrinths: Walking Toward the Center

44. Chris Cleave's Little Bee

45. Anna Edey's Solviva

46. Karen Armstrong's The Case for God

47.Gail Schumann's Plant Diseases: Their Biology and Social Impact

48. Eliot Coleman's Four-Season Harvest

49. Nick White's Save Energy & Cut Your Bills

50. Ki Longfellow's The Secret Magdalene

51. Eugene Peterson's Working the Angles

52. Shane Hipps' Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith

53. Janny Wurts' The Curse of the Mistwraith

54. Deepak Chopra's Jesus: A Story of Enlightenment

55. Kage Baker's Mendoza in Hollywood

56. Barbara Brown Taylor's An Altar in the World

57. Rachel Held Evans' Evolving in Monkey Town

58. Thomas Truxes' Defying Empire

59. Ben Lowe's Green Revolution

60. Gary Gunderson's Leading Causes of Life

61. China Mieville's The City and the City

62. Vandana Shiva's Earth Democracy

63. Matt Biers-Ariel's The Triumph of Eve

64. Vandana Shiva's Soil Not Oil

65. Maeve Dawn's In the Beginning, God

66. Marilynne Robinson's Absence of Mind

67. Donna Schaper's Labyrinths From the Outside In

68. Abigail Gehring's Back to Basics

69. William McDonough's Cradle to Cradle

70. Colleen Shehan's James Madison and the Spirit of Republican Self-Government

71. C.J. Cherryh's Foreigner

72. C.J. Cherryh's Invader

73. Len Wilson's Digital Storytellers

74. Lisa Miya-Jervis' Cook Food

75. Brian Swimme's The Universe Story

76. Terra Brockman's The Seasons on Henry's Farm

77. Elie Wiesel's Rashi

78. Bryan Beyer's Encountering the Book of Isaiah

79. Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody

80. Andrea Cohen-Kiener's Claiming Earth as Common Ground

81. Don Lattin's The Harvard Psychedelic Club

82. John Sawyer's The Fifth Gospel

83. Candace Chellew-Hodge, Bulletproof Faith

84. Charlene Li's Groundswell

85. Carol Howard Merritt's Reframing Hope

86. C.S. Lewis' Reflections on the Psalms

87. Geraldine Brooks' People of the Book

88. Peter Rollins' The Fidelity of Betrayal

89. Brian McLaren's A New Kind of Christianity

90. Anne LeClaire's Listening Below the Noise

91. Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible

92. Thomas Merton's Praying the Psalms

93. Walter Bruggemann's Praying the Psalms

94. Eugene Peterson's Answering God

95. T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets

96. Robert Charles Wilson's Julian Comstock

97. Janny Wurts' Ships of Merior

98. Bill McKibbon's Eaarth

99. Lillian Daniel's This odd and Wondrous Calling

100. C.J. Cherryh's Inheritor

101. Andy Crouch's Culture Making

102. Peter Rollins' How (Not) To Speak of God

103. Robert J. Sawyer's WWW: Watch

104. Dwight Friesen's Thy Kingdom Connected

105. Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

106. Mary Appelhof's Worms Eat My Garbage

107. Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From

108. Stu Campbell's Let It Rot

109. Manny Howard's My Empire of Dirt

110. Janny Wurts' Warhost of Vastmark

111. Joshua Ramo's Age of the Unthinkable

112. Thomas Berry's The Great Work

113. Eugene Peterson's Run with the Horses

114. Masanobu Fukuoka's The One-Straw Revolution

115. Larry Rasmussen's Earth Community, Earth Ethics

116. John Daido Loori's Teachings of the Earth

117. Juliet Schor's Plentitude

118. Michael Pollan's Second Nature

119. Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question

120. Robert Laha's Jeremiah

121. Walter Bruggemann's A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming

122. Fritz Haeg's Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn

123. Paul Hawken's Natural Capitalism

124. Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac

125. Wendell Berry's Imagination in Place

126. Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra

127. Wendell Berry's Bringing it to the Table

128. Worldwatch Institute's State of the World 2010

129. Richard Rohr's The Naked Now

Gift

 This month, gifts and gift-giving can seem inescapable. What's the most memorable gift, tangible or emotional, you received this year?
 

While I’ve had several great gifts this December (a leaf shredder and a worm farm stand out as ones I really, really loved), the most memorable gift was my ring.  When Kathy and I were first together we’d gone to Santa Fe for a conference. While we were there we’d gone to the square and bought matching $25 turquoise and silver rings.  We’d each worn them ever since.  When we got our wedding rings (also silver and turquoise) we tried to wear them instead but they weren’t very comfortable and so we went back to the $25 rings.  This fall, I looked down one evening and noticed that the stone had fallen out of my ring.  It upset me a lot.  I began to wear my wedding ring instead, but I really missed having the other ring. The day before my birthday, Kathy and I went out for dinner.  At the end of the meal, Kathy gave me my ring back with a new turquoise stone in it in place of the one that had fallen out—best gift I could have been given!

Achieve and Defining Moment

What’s the thing you most want to achieve next year? How do you imagine you’ll feel when you get it? Free? Happy? Complete? Blissful? Write that feeling down. Then, brainstorm 10 things you can do, or 10 new thoughts you can think, in order to experience that feeling today.

I feel like I’ve already answered this question in several of the other Reverb10 questions: the one about 11 things, the one about future self, etc.  So here goes again.

 Next year I hope to find more peace and balance in my life by focusing more on sustainability and less on consumption, more on things I can do and make myself and less on things I buy, more on ways to stay centered and focused in the present and less on things I hope for in the distant future, more on enjoying whatever is in front of me (or breathing deeply into it when the situation is not enjoyable) and less on grabbing after something I don’t yet have.

 Describe a defining moment or series of events that has affected your life this year.


 

Two series of events stand out this year:

•              Becca’s going to college and then coming back home and all the changes and reexamination of life that those have meant.
• 
  
•            The gardening-green yoga sangha-master composter- Roots & Wings – permaculture interweavings in my daily life.   This is causing me to not only rethink daily physical decisions (what I use, where I go, what I eat, etc.) but also my moral and spiritual approaches (how to make moral decisions on behalf of future generations, a theology for God and the kingdom of God that would better reflect a sustainability model,  language choices I make that move away from an anthropocentric worldview into a worldview that takes into consideration all creation).

Ordinary Joy

Our most profound joy is often experienced during ordinary moments. What was one of your most joyful ordinary moments this year?

            There were so many joyful ordinary moments this year that picking out one as standing out wouldn’t do justice to the year.  I’ve tried this year to stay focused on the idea in the following quote by Wu-men:

“Ten thousand flowers in spring,

            the moon in autumn,

a cool breeze in summer,

            snow in winter—

If your mind is not clouded

            by unnecessary things,

this is the best season

            of your life.”

I’ve enjoyed watching the birds at the feeder this winter, sitting on the front porch in the evening being surrounded by fireflies or bubbles, watching my kids play videogames together, listening to bird calls, playing ball with Chase, lying in the hammock and looking up at the clouds and trees, sitting down to dinner, working in the garden, feeding the worms, canning tomatoes, listening to Macy purr, kneading bread, and so much more—all ordinary, joyful moments.

Soul Food

What did you eat this year that you will never forget? What went into your mouth & touched your soul?

            Food that stood out for me this year were of two very different types.  The first was a meal at Per Se in New York City.  The restaurant itself with a view of Central Park and Columbus Circle, where there were two or three waiters for each table, was in and of itself an experience, but each course of the food was memorable.  Except perhaps for the meal we had at Buddakan for Dan’s 25^th birthday, I don’t think I’ve had a more memorable meal.

            The other food that stood out though was the weekly food Kathy cooked from the things we grew in our garden and from the CSA.  We had the most amazing meals—soups of all kinds, vegetables like kohlrabi I’d never heard of before, much less tasted, and casseroles and dishes from a wide variety of cuisines that used what we were growing.  I loved sitting down to those meals and tasting those tastes, knowing that we were eating as locally as possible, as healthily as possible and as “tastily” as possible.

Photo

Sift through all the photos of you from the past year. Choose one that best captures you; either who you are, or who you strive to be. Find the shot of you that is worth a thousand words. Share the image, who shot it, where, and what it best reveals about you.

The picture was taken on a beach in Dennis Massachusetts in early September, when Kathy and I were spending a few days up at the Cape. In many ways, while I also love forests and fields, beaches –or any place where water and land meet- are the most natural non-work setting for me.  There I can relax, reconnect with my more reflective spiritual side, and just be my non-work self. I don’t like the Cape beaches much during the summer—too many people, too much noise and too much disturbance.  Once Labor Day comes and goes, though, the crowds empty out and, whether it’s warm enough to swim or windy (as it was the day that this picture was taken), the beaches are fairly empty.  They’re perfect for walking along, sitting on, or just watching the wildlife that makes them home in the off seasons.