Clarity, in Pieces (ii)

The Thirteenth Moon

Even if you have lost heart
She puts a tide in you
Even if you have lost heart
You will be moved
You will be all lined up
The soil has tides
Bedrock has tides
The horizon heaves
She will drag even you

“That turns out to be a place where it’s just it and me.“
When I wrote that, it occurred to me that that is how – in solitude –  many seek their god(s) and that that is how I used to experience spiritually during rich introspective times in my life, before all this came down, before Transition.  Why had I lost sight of that? This is why: I forgot it in my sudden rush to act, which soon turned into a full-blown desire to save the world, which meant, of course, coming out of my solitude.
It turns out that what I thought I had to do (save the world) is not my role. These last few months, I have been letting go of the wish to save the world. Being the committed activist that I still am, and still a seeker of joy-even-though-I-have-considered-all-the-facts, and still a believer in my power to change things, there can be only one thing that could make me give that up:  I let go of the hope that the world is, at all, savable.
As I write this, I am amazed at how easy it is to say that. It wasn’t easy coming to accept it.
Here, ask yourself: what is it that you most cherish, that you most want and might even have? Ask yourself: why won’t I give it up?  Because you made it or worked for it? Because you deserve it and it makes you happy, maybe even makes you you? Consider any of those reasons, and any others. Then ask yourself:
So what?
Do you dare to test
the endurance of your hope
To take it to that far place
where still it refuses to leave
or maybe not.
Where, regardless,
it turns out to be
not what you wanted,
but what you need.

Solar Hot Water: Going Ahead!

en_secusol

After too many estimates but wonderful and very instructive conversations with installers, we have committed to going solar for our hot water. We got our shade report that tells us that our solar effect of 95.35% qualifies us for the State rebate (minimum requirement is 75%). Our solar fraction is 73.1% which means that solar will provide that portion of your hot water on an annual basis, but this is calculated on the average hot water usage here in New England, so I’m sure we’ll do even better.

Our greatest delay was figuring out what to use as secondary backup. The most straightforward was to run two heat exchangers through the hot water tank: one to the solar array, one to our oil-fired furnace. Obviously we looked into electrical backup alternatives because we have solar PV. These were (1) running the second exchanger to an  (electrical) heat pump, (2) a second, electrical tank, possibly on demand, (3) going with one heat exchanger and one electrical coil. But it turned out that our overproduction would possibly not cover the secondary energy needed and might even tip us over quite a bit. So after all that research we are sticking with the oil backup. If later on we want to change to electrical, it will be easy to refurbish.

As for more details: It’s a drain-back SECUSOL system, made by Wagner, with two flat-plate collectors and one 92 gallon tank. The installer is applying for a monitoring system (which the State would pay for), but as this system has already been monitored (and gets the highest rating), there is only a slim chance of getting it. Would be neat, though: we love data!

As for the cost, we’ll recalculate once the system is up (takes about 6 weeks), but if there are no surprises it will be $8000 – $2000 (State rebate: 25% of the cost up to $3500) – $1800 (30% Federal tax credit) = $4200. That’s much cheaper than the solar PV ($18,290 after incentives), but because we’re such frugal users of hot water and because there are no SRECS for solar hot water, it’ll take us longer to pay off this system (about 14 years versus the 8 for the PV).  It’s still worth it, though.

 

 

 

Clarity, in Pieces (i)

virginsmallI feel like I’ve gained some clarity in the last few months, but it has been hard to write about it. Every time I sit down to start, the task seems impossible. So let me break it down into pieces – events, insights, decisions, changes in plans.

The first evening when all of my thinking and reading actually “came together” was the evening I decided to leave my church (Unitarian Universalist). I can’t remember what came first in the process: the sudden flare of insight (this is what it all means, this is how it all hangs together), the insight that leaving the church is one of the things I need to do because of this new insight, or the very act of emailing the people in the congregation I care most about – good friends, fortunately, also outside of church – and taking the step. All I remember was the immense empowerment of seeing an insight emerge out of many strands of thought, feeling and soul-searching, and acting on it. Sadness too, that this newly emerging insight meant that I had to give up something that I cherished (and that it wouldn’t be the last thing I will need to give up). And, lastly, awesome too, because I had felt uncomfortable with this cherished “membership” for while, and now here it was: the reason why!

So, as to the reason why.
I work with a vision of our predicament all day long. All my thinking, reading and writing are related to it, and my activism, and nowadays also every act of mothering, shopping, cooking, doing laundry-you name it. I am now at a stage that I carry this vision with me at all times and nothing escapes it. It is empowering, frightening and often exhausting.  It is not a comforting vision, though it does allow me or actually inspires in me, a kind of  joyfulness. I call this Joyfulness Notwithstanding.
I need a place where I can keep my Joyfulness Notwithstanding alive and cultivate it. How? Not by retreating to a place where I can forget that vision for a while, but on the contrary by actively stepping into a place where I can look at it clearly.
That turns out to be a place where it’s just it and me.
And so a place where I do not have to discuss/justify the vision and where I am not confronted with circumstances that I feel are part of the problem and that automatically bring out the activist in me. Working to eliminate paper cups during coffee hours is fulfilling work for me as an activist, and as an activist, I want to keep working with the congregation on these issues. But it greatly muddles my spiritual clarity.

Amie’s Self-Portrait

Back in the day when this was a Mama blog, I used to report so often on Amie’s art and drawing. There is a whole series about her early drawings on  here, somewhere  (enter “drawing” in the search engine). It caught the attention of Brent and Marjory Wilson, who wrote about Amie in the new foreword to the new edition of their classic, Teaching Children to Draw.  Amie still draws, but there so many other things in her busy seven-year-old life, like playing with her friends and the chickens in the garden, that this once-a-day occurrence/sometimes-obsession has been put on the back burner. That she still has the knack, though, became clear today, when she brought home this self-portrait from school:

I was truly blown away by it. What a kind face!

Upheaval Poems

There has been a major change in my thinking/feeling about our culture, our future, and my role. An upheaval big enough for me to burn some bridges (to set fire to them, at least), to shed some tears. Well. Good things are happening too as a result of it, I hasten to add. Clarity is one of them. I hope I can write about it soon. But in the meantime, here’s part of another poem I am working on.

Do you dare to test

the endurance of your hope?

To take it to that far place

where still it refuses to leave

or maybe not.

Going for Solar Hot Water

We are very close to choosing our solar hot water system and installer. It is something we were thinking about even before we went for the solar PV, and when the latter system was designed, we made sure there would be plenty of room for thermal collectors. Now that we have whittled down our oil consumption, solar hot water is the natural next step.

And how much we’ve whittled it down became obvious last week. An enthusiastic referral brought in a last-minute installer for a site visit – we have nine estimates already lined up, but a tenth can’t hurt. This lady was very down-to-earth and she loved our small home, with the wood stove, the insulation, and the PV array, of course.  When we told her how much oil we use for hot water, and for that and heating, she said: “that’s not possible.” Then I told her about the Riot, and she looked around again, and believed it. “I’m glad you told me,” she said, for the sizing of the system.

According to our August Riot, when we had a full house (5 adults, one child), we used about 10 gallons of oil for heating water. Over the year, our total consumption of oil (hot water and heating) is about 200 gallons. That is about 25% of the US National Average.

So, we’ve reduced our barrel of oil (in the first year of our Riot – before we had the wood stove – we used about 600 gallons of oil in general, that’s 75% of the US National Average) to a bucket of oil (200 gallons), and now we’re looking at reducing it even further, to… half a bucket of oil (since it turns out, then, that we use about half of our oil for heating water and half for heating the house).

Now it’s just a matter of deciding what we want as a secondary backup (for when the sun isn’t quite up to heating the water enough): oil, electrical (we do have *some* solar PV overproduction), or heat pump?

I’ll keep you updated!

PS. We also just we filled up our two oil tanks (the previous owner needed two so her 50-year-old furnace could overheat her uninsulated house) with 358 gallons of BioHeat, a biofuel. May it last us three years, even more!

Root Cellar Roots

Time to check on the stored roots. I didn’t grow any these – as usual I lost control over the garden mid-Summer and have yet to grow a successful Fall crop. These came in my CSA farm share from Siena Farm. As you can see I had a hard time keeping up with the parsnips! I also have a lot of carrots but that’s because the farm grew an epic carrot crop this year.

Luckily these roots keep well and long in the crisper in the fridge and in boxes in the mudroom (the coldest room in the house), but they would store better in boxes in sand and sawdust (we generate a lot of the latter) in a root cellar  (it’s a long-standing wish).  There is a possibility: we could build a cupboard around the north-west facing  basement window in the new storage room. We could open or close the window to regulate the temperature somewhat, and there are ways to keep it somewhat moist. As I fill up that storage room, I’ll keep that possibility open.

Can’t wait on that though, because some of these  have been in the fridge for too long. So I am looking at souping, blanch and freezing today.