MamaStories

Amie and I will be traveling over the next two weeks, so posting will be sporadic, if I post at all. We have a 9-hour plane ride ahead of us (BANG goes the Riot), and my main concern right now is which book to take. That, and getting a letter notarized in which DH gives his consent for me to take our daughter out of the country.

I’ve whittled it down to three:

Death, Sex by Tyler Volk and Dorion Sagan

In the Loyal Mountains by Rick Bass

Wolf Willow by Wallace Stegner

I’ve read about 1/3 of each of these and still can’t decide. Of course I would take The Book if only it weren’t so voluminous - both volumes will come along in my suitcase, though, along with Holmgren’s Permaculture.  Amie will read Charlotte’s Web. But hopefully we’ll both sleep on the plane.

Edible Forest Gardens, vol.1

(It’s on sale at Chelsea Green)

I’m reading Edible Forest Gardens (EFG) again, alongside Holmgrens’ Permaculture. I’m underlining and taking notes in the books and making summaries on a quadrille pad. I’m on volume 2 of EFG, which is the most practical volume of the two, and I foresee a lot of drawing up of plans as I come across passages that apply to my homestead. I’ll let you look in over my shoulder as I “make my mistakes on paper” (the best place to make them).

I’m also looking around for a Permaculture course, preferably online, or a local one spread out over nights and weekends, as I can’t afford, time and money-wise, the three-week intensive in Bolivia, or even in Cape Cod. I found an online course given by Dan and Cynthia Hemenway via Barking Frog Permaculture, which I could even monitor at minimal cost. But I missed the entry date. Next year maybe?

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I’m excited  but apprehensive at the same time. I hope my turning to permaculture again won’t turn me away from Transition. I know the latter came out of the former. Rob Hopkins, the “founder” of Transition, is a permaculture teacher. And he advises that at least one member of a Transition Initiative facilitating or initiator group take a permaculture course for a good reason: the principles of permaculture and Transition are the same, only their domains differ.

Edible forest gardening is one part of permaculture, which applies its basic  principles to the agricultural domain, and which in turn then nestles inside the vast ambition of Transition. It is exactly for that reason that I fear I might lose track of Transition. Permaculture, especially when studied with such selfish motivations as my own (I want to make my homestead a permaculture site), could easily blind me to the larger challenge of Transition.

I feel I need to work on my own place - as a base, as a model - before or while I work on the place that surrounds me. And so my vision contracts and expands, expands and contracts. But when focusing on the ground right in front of my feet, I might lose track of the path. Then when I look up to find it again - or because it calls me - my suddenly telescoping vision might make me dizzy, overwhelmed, and I might turn away again.

I know myself. I am aware, and wary. This is one of the reasons why fellow initiators in my town would be so valuable: to keep me balanced!

People, I just received Death and Sex from Chelsea Green and I am just blown away. It is a lovely book, consisting of two texts bound together beautifully, and with great humor. Reading all the rave reviews at the beginning of each text makes me want to pour that cup of coffee, sink into sunlit sofa and read.

This one, for instance: “Dorion Sagan and Tyler Volk show us sex is optional and death is necessary” (Adam Daniel Stulberg). And: “quotidian simplicities are dissolved in the acid of evolutionary theory” (Andrew Lionel Blais).

I had forgotten to set a deadline for the Give-Away. We’ll be drawing a name on Wednesday 18th at 6 pm EST. Grab a chance while you can!

{UPDATE} And the book goes to… Carol! Congratulations, I’ll stick it in the mail as soon as I have your address.

Now this is book I’m interested in reading: Death and Sex by Tyler Volk and Dorion Sagan published by  Chelsea Green - my favorite publisher (see my reviews of Coperthwaite’s Handmade Life, here, here, and here). Looks like it will fit perfectly in my daily regimen of gardening and homesteading books and peak oil and climate change info. You can read parts of the book on Chelsea Green’s great blog, here, and below is an excerpt.

Also, featuring this excerpt here earns me the book, for free, plus another copy, for one of my readers. That means this is my first book give away! If you would like it, indicate such in a comment and I’ll mail it to you.

Enjoy!

…

The following is an excerpt from Death & Sex by Tyler Volk and Dorion Sagan. It has been adapted for the Web. The source is here.

From chapter 4: Recycling of the Dead

When carbon ends its “lifetime” in the biosphere, it doesn’t stop being carbon. It merely passes into a deeper zone. One is reminded here of ancient myths that feature souls, victims, or heroes descending into the underworld, as a dramatic moment in the story. Like those mythic souls presumed to continue to live but in a new form, so carbon transported downward and outside the vibrant biosphere, after “burial,” continues to be carbon but somewhere deep and dark, and often hot.

Carbon is buried as detritus from dead marine plankton when it fluxes out of the dynamic surface system in the form of tiny calcium carbonate shells. The coal we mine to burn for electricity is the dead and highly compressed remains of giant ferns and mosses from dinosaur-era swamps. Our precious, diminishing reserves of oil were long, long ago the sediments underneath some of the world’s most productive marine areas ever. Verdant patches of algae grew, then fell into the sediments at such rapid rates of death that even the voracious bacteria alive there could not keep up with the rain from what was their heaven. The sites and rates of death that led to the fossil fuels upon which modern civilization came to depend were historically unique burial traps.

More commonly, carbon that was buried from organic tissue in the form of the bodies of plankton was finely dispersed. Today we see it as the black tincture in rocks such as shale, in contrast with the pervasive white of limestone rock that entombs once-living carbon in a paler shade.

All these buried forms of carbon can eventually spring back up, like the ancient Greek myth of Persephone emerging from the underworld to bestow life to the surface. She was said to rise up annually, as a rite of spring. But carbon’s stay below is typically millions to hundreds of millions of years. Its ports of reentry are the volcanoes and surfaces of rocks that dissolve when exposed to soil, rain, and weather, thereby returning carbon to the surface circulation of active cycles.

How dependent is life in the sunny biosphere upon this resurrected carbon? In the long run, very dependent. Without the reemergence—a kind of biogeochemical reincarnation, if you like—all carbon would slowly and surely exit from the interconnected surface system of life, air, soil, and water. Emergence would be limited to only truly primordial carbon that comes up as a portion of volcanic activity.

From chapter 7: Built from Death

Surpassing in some ways the wonders of death within the living animal body are the roles of the functional dead in sculpting the towering lives of trees. If you go inward from the bark, past a thin layer of cells called the phloem and another narrow layer of cells that are actively reproducing, you come to a notable layer called the xylem.

The xylem consists of tubular columns of dead cells that function to move mineral-laden water gathered by the roots up to the needles or leaves. Its special, dead cells are called tracheids. Tracheids (or, when grouped into units, tracheid elements) not only provide water and mineral circulation but also support the entire tree in its climb upward against gravity. Without tracheids there would be no forests or grasslands, no green life on land, except for some ground-hugging tiny mosses and a paltry soil coat of photosynthetic bacteria and algae. For not only do trees contain tracheids, so do all nonwoody herbaceous plants. Tracheids are in all stems, branches, and trunks of trees, in the shoots of grasses, in flower stalks (usually in their centers), and even in the veins of leaves. In all these instances, the dead are part of the living.

Without the evolutionary invention of tracheids just inside 400 million years ago, the land today would be virtually deserted. For more than 90 percent of Earth history, neither land plants nor their vital tracheids existed. And because tracheids are dead, in them we have an ideal example of how nature turns death into life to create organisms from cells.

It’s finally here, the book!

At the beginning of 2008 I got an email from Marjorie Wilson. She and her husband, Brent, are the authors of the seminal Teaching Children to Draw, published in 1982. Marjorie wrote that they were putting together the second edition. She was doing research on the net when she found the YouTube video of Amie drawing the three-headed person (here). From there on she made it to this blog, where she found “Drawing as it Develops,” my record of Amie’s drawing progress. She wondered if we would let her use Amie’s example in her new Introduction.

Of course!

We emailed, I sent her scans of Amie’s drawings, and we had a wonderful phone interview. Amie picture was chosen for the front cover, and her drawing of Tigger (this one) is printed, in color, on the back flap. The new Introduction tells the story of her drawing from age 1.5 to about 3 and how a lot of what she and we did corresponds with their findings and recommendations in the book. There are stills from the video and photographs of the resulting three-headed person, of Amie’s first scribbles, of DH carrying her in the backpack, and of this collaborative drawing in my journal.

Amie doesn’t quite understand - her first reaction looking at the still of the video was: “That’s not how you hold a pencil!” But she knows how happy and proud we all are.

And for me there could be no greater confirmation of the value of this blog. All those entries on Amie’s drawing are not only a record (that I would have failed to keep so orderly and punctually in my journal), but they are also of actual use to others, for their viewing pleasure as well as for information on how children draw.

So the book is finally out - Amazon says it will only be released in February 2010 but that seems to be a mistake. If you’re interested in childrens drawings, this is the book to get: full of insightful observations, great practical advice and lots and lots of fun examples. Brain food and eye candy. And our Amie, of course.

Now can you believe that I have been keeping this under my hat for over a year?!

I bought the book. Nowadays when I want to buy a book I get it from the library first. After a couple of weeks of perusing and handling it, I might think differently about spending $15 on it… Not so with Coleman’s Winter Harvest Handbook. It’s full of hard practical advice and it’s beautifully made and I couldn’t wait to underline and make notes and set exclamation marks in the margins.

We are about to build a “cold house” (an unheated hoop house) out of pvc pipe and plastic cover, that will cover four beds (dark blue). Inside the hoop house each of these beds will be covered with an extra layer made of row cover. In these doubly-covered beds I’ll grow lettuce, spinach, broccoli, chard, kale, parsley, carrots, arugula, leeks, mizuna, mustard greens, scallions and beet greens.

Some beds (light blue) we’ll cover with row cover at first and an extra layer of plastic during the coldest months. This double protection is one of Coleman’s three components of the winter harvest. In those I’ll grow the most hardy crops (mache, mizuna, tatsoi, pak choi) for Winter and early Fall harvest, and I’ll tuck in arugula, pea, carrot, beet and onion seeds for overwintering and germination early in Spring.

I’ll try some of those crops in the small glass covered frame (dark blue in front of the house), which I want to convert into a hot frame, heated with decomposing horse manure. I just found out that my source - a horse owner right around the corner from our house - uses wood shavings for bedding, which Coleman considers detrimental to vegetable soil, so I might only use it in the hot frame, where it will not be mixed in with the growing soil but will only be used to heat that soil from underneath. I still need to find out exactly how that’s done… (Good news is that the horse is on no medication whatsoever.)

The hoop house will be light and portable and the idea is to get four people together in late Spring to pick it up and move it to another collection of four beds, where it will create a nice environment for the usual greenhouse plants, like tomatoes, eggplant and peppers. In the Fall we’ll pick it up again and move it to the Winter Garden beds.

This means I’m going to have to be a lot more careful about crop rotations than I have been. I must say that crop rotation is a problem for Square Foot Gardeners. This year’s problem with blight made that clear: if you had blighted potatoes and tomatoes scattered all over the place this year, you might not want to grow any Solanacaea at all next year. I did some SFG this year, but I think I will move to more conventional beds and row next season.

This is, of course, yet another grand experiment, but so worth a try. I had no spinach whatsoever in my first garden: my spinach seedlings bolted in Spring and I’ve been craving it ever since. If only the spinach works out, I’ll be happy!

I am reading Jerry Mander’s In the Absence of the Sacred. The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations. Many points are too loosely argued for my taste - as in, I doubt it would convince my DH, who is a total techno-optimist. As a confirmation for what I believe, it reads pleasurably.

But these lines grabbed me:

With each new generation of technology, and with each stage of technological expansion into pristine environments, human beings have fewer alternatives and become more deeply immersed within technological consciousness. We have a harder time seeing our way out. Living constantly inside an environment of our own invention, reacting solely to things we ourselves have created, we are essentially living inside our own minds. Where evolution was once an interactive process between human beings and a natural, unmediated world, evolution is now an interaction between human beings and our own artifacts. (p. 32)

I have read in many environmental books that we are destroying nature, that great Other. McKibben, in his seminal End to Nature, hangs nearly his entire argument on the despair of there being just us.  I never realized what it meant until I read Mander’s words.

Don’t say that this is not true, that there is no other, that it’s just us. In many parts of our world this is already true:  in mega cities, malls, schools, work places. Look around you: what do you see that will take you out of your own mind? What do you see that is not you? Sorry, the potted palm does not count. Nor does the lawn. The creatures visiting your lawn, yes, but how often do you see them, look for them? And it is getting worse second by second.

Then you may ask: so what?

…

A few weeks ago I was on my way to fill up the buckets with rain water  when I came upon this creature amongst the weeds.

A garter or garden snake, about as dangerous as a field mouse (to us, not to the field mouse). But it’s a snake, and my biological instinct was: hark! And it felt good, that jolt of surprise and rapt attention, that lurch out of the of the ordinary.

I was, for a few seconds, out of my mind.

…

If we eliminate what is other, then we are without surprise, without instinct, without perspective, and without the possibility of ever being truly free.

In 2002, Chelsea Green published William Coperthwaite’s book A Handmade Life, In Search of Simplicity, and the book has now been released in paperback (read the review). It is a book that aspires to social design, and it is most perceptive and inspiring on the issues of childcare, the nurture of the young, apprenticeship and education.

• Nurture and apprenticeship

Bill Coperthwaite’s hopes for fairness, integrity and completeness in our lives and societies reside first of all with the children.

Coperthwaite holds both a Ph.D. in education from Harvard University and an unconventional view of the education of the young. The originality of his views, in fact, goes so far as to negate the usual meaning of “education”. For one who is of the opinion that “many of the most important lessons in life can be learned but not taught,” and that the best lessons are learned through experience, nurture and encouragement are the preferred words.

If, when reading his book you think of Coperthwaite as a “guru” in the sense of a life-teacher, he will challenge you to put that in perspective. At most he will commit to this one line, which sums up his message for the young and those in charge of them: “Apprentices needed, not disciples”.

• Non-violent, natural learning

Coperthwaite diagnoses several ills of traditional schooling, for one, the fact that it runs solely on competitiveness and compulsion, not enthusiasm, curiosity and self-confidence.

For most, school is “a parade of failures, one after the other, year after year, with ever more ‘proof’ of inadequacy.” For most, it is the threat of the law, social condemnation and the loss of “prospect” that keeps them there. And Coperthwaite is talking not just about the students, but the teachers too: all seem to be in school against their wishes. It’s a sure recipe for disaster.

But all children are naturally excited and eager to learn. To nurture that, he proposes “non-violent learning”, in which all are learners, young and old, chose the curriculum and participate in a voluntary and firsthand exploration of the world.

Central to his are three components, the first of which is nature.

• Nature

It is no surprise that Coperthwaite, who is homesteading “off the grid” in the wilds of Maine, locates the best kind of learning in nature. He asks: what are the most important geographical factors in your child’s life? A tree, the sky, the sea? Or the convenience store, parking lot, TV?

He is not advocating that we all go back to homesteading. His proposes not “back to the land”, but rather “down to earth”.

Nature inspires awe and tranquility. She teaches small, bite-size lessons – the ways of bees and grain – and, once in a while, whopping big ones too - as when a storm overtakes a scouting party and spurs survival instincts. All of these will teach a child about life: how it works, and also, more importantly, how to interpret and deal, indeed live, with it.

A close connection to nature not only heals the child – one need only read Richard Louv’s recent book, Last Child in the Woods (2006) for scientific and practical confirmation of that statement - but the earth as well, when that child grows up to be a good steward of it.

• More remedies

Coperthwaite’s other prescriptions for a better education are a context of home and family, and a feeling of usefulness through physical work, whether it be work on the land or in crafts. I’ve written about these here.

In A Handmade Life (read a general review here), Bill Coperthwaite promotes a different view of education. If education is more of an apprenticeship than a discipleship, if it allows the innate enthusiasm of children for the unknown to run its natural course, and if it acknowledges the value of nature, then children and, by extension, society, will be happier and smarter. But first and foremost, Coperthwaite points out that such an education would not yet be complete without a context of home and community and a deep-seated feeling of usefulness.

• Home and community

Coperthwaite deplores the sequestering of the young in centers of learning (from daycare to college). Wouldn’t their education would be so much more complete, and relevant for their futures, if they were immersed into the community of adults again. Simply put: “Do you want better doctors? Improve kindergarten,” or rather, abolish it altogether!

Coperthwaite writes that “the home is the center of education and emotional security… a school is no substitute”. But he is not your average proponent of homeschooling (or unschooling): the home where schooling needs to take place needs to change.

What is missing from our homes is variety. We should enrich our nuclear families with the elderly, who have so much to offer in terms of experience, stories and time. Extending the family also means adding layers of personality and ways of dealing with problems. And it is important that every member of the family is valued for his or her usefulness. “Every child has a right to a family with a purpose,” he writes, and purpose entails work.

• Usefulness and work

The best kind of work is physical work, what Coperthwaite calls bread labor. It includes raising and preparing food, making shelter and clothing, caring for children.

Children in our “civilized” societies rarely get to witness that kind of vital labor, or any work, for that matter. In the morning they and their parents go off in opposite directions: school and the office, shop or farm. When children do catch a glimpse of “work,” it is often as a negative: a stressful activity that adults rarely enjoy, something to be avoided.

This is shame and a crime, Coperthwaite finds. Children should get to participate in bread work again. But before we squirm at the thought of child labor, he makes it plain that that is not what he has in mind. Rather, young people, even small children, can be useful and indeed draw a lot of self-confidence and pride from their usefulness. Moreover, engaging in this kind of work will restore to them a sense of the value of the meat on their plate and the clothes on their backs.

• Homemaking

For Coperthwaite, homemaking is “the most important profession and can be the most exciting of all.” He is a homemaker himself – he built his home, makes his supper, washes his clothes (by hand).

He is also childless, but he is not without insight into children, or without the regular company of children. Going by the many anecdotes about children, and Peter Forbes’ pictures in the book, it is company in which both he and the child thrive.

A Handmade Life, In Search of Simplicity, by William S. Copethwaite and with photographs by Peter Forbes is published by Chelsea Green Publishers (ISBN 1933392479).