two

summer

 

back to illinois

island

This weekend I got to remember how much I like islands. Mustang Island is close to Corpus Christi and home to Port Aransas. We arrived Friday and left Sunday. But the Saturday in between was just ... the best ... full of doing nothing but walking the beach. Managed to avoid sunburn everywhere except on the tops of my feet. And that serves to remind me of the goodness of sunscreen applied everywhere else. Earth. Air. Fire. Water.

More pictures HERE and HERE.

earthing it up

Yesterday's theme must have been Earth-Consciousness. The very chilly morning found a number of us burning some fossil fuel to move up I-10 beyond Boerne to Welfare, where we visited Santuario Sisterfarm, an ecological sanctuary in the Texas hill country for "the cultivation of diversity" ... one of many such sites sponsored by Dominican sisters.

Sisters Carol and Elise shared with us their wonderful hospitality and deep knowledge of the earth and their particular place on it. Permaculture is the word ... a way of living in which nothing (or as little as possible) goes to waste.

Water is precious in this drought-stricken land. So we noticed right away that the yard is mulched rather than grassed. And there are systems of lines and tanks for catching whatever rainwater appears and reclaiming graywater for irrigation. We were shown a variety of gardens and techniques for working them. Here is the spiral garden, still partly undercover against the chill.

 

Sr. Carol introduced us to the joys of vermiculture, composting with earthworms.

And there's nothing like the presence of critters to keep us smiling.

 

These two pups above made me reconsider my standing as a cat guy. This below is the friendliest rooster I've ever encountered ... but I left the up-close-and-personal to Maria.

 

Sisterfarm is a very compact site with (it seems) almost every inch turned to some practical and/or aesthetic purpose. The ponds of Turtle Island and elsewhere are especially inviting.

 

Here below is an artichoke. Ain't it pretty?

The tower is a unique structure with a really fine view.

 

And another cool place for meeting with others or sitting apart is the yurt.

 

 

The farm is bounded on one side by Big Joshua Creek.

 

 

And there you have it. I finished off the day by observing Earth Hour and reading a chunk of Thomas Berry's The Dream of the Earth by hand-cranked flashlight. He has written of the challenge of our time:

What is clear is that the earth is mandating that the human community assume a responsibility never assigned to any previous generation. We are involved in a process akin to initiation processes which have been known and practiced from earliest times. The human community is passing from its stage of childhood into its adult stage of life. We must assume adult responsibilities. As the maternal bonds are broken on one level to be reestablished on another, so the human community is being separated from the dominance of Nature on one level to establish a new and more mature relationship. (The Dream of the Earth, 47-48)

Clearly, at Santuario Sisterfarm, we are being shown some paths by which we might approach that new relationship with Earth.

big mystery

The Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds is an experiment in scale: By condensing 4.6 billion years of history into a minute, the video is a self-contained timepiece. Like a specialized clock, it gives one a sense of perspective. Everything — from the formation of the Earth, to the Cambrian Explosion, to the evolution of mice and squirrels — is proportionate to everything else, displaying humankind as a blip, almost indiscernible in the layered course of history.

Each event in the Evolution of Life fades gradually over the course of the minute, leaving typographic traces that echo all the way to the present day. Just as our blood still bears the salt water of our most ancient evolutionary ancestors.

Seed Magazine

(and check out their intriguing slideshow "Saved by Science" by Justine Cooper)

1992 - UN Earth Summit - Rio de Janeiro

Well, that was seventeen years ago. Why have I never seen this before now? Sadly, my tardiness doesn't seem to matter. Severn Cullis-Suzuki's words still burn. What progress toward a healthier planet has been made since '92?

Thanks to Joy for bringing this to my attention!

rain today in San Antonio, but ...

Beeville Journal - Texas Ranchers and Farmers Struggle in Drought - NYTimes.com.

“The last time we had a drought this bad was in January 1918,” said John Nielsen-Gammon, the state climatologist. “The droughts in the 1950s in individual years were not as bad as this.” Mr. Nielsen-Gammon, a professor at Texas A&M, said the weather had been unusually dry for the last year and a half, but since August, much of the central part of the state — a broad swath from just south of Dallas, through Austin and San Antonio and down to Corpus Christi — had gotten little or no rain. Even last year’s hurricanes, Dolly and Ike, did not help, he said.

Though about a half-inch of rain fell in Austin and Dallas this week, it was not enough to offset the 20-inch deficit in rainfall over the last 18 months, he said.

A weather pattern over the Pacific known as La Niña has pushed the jet stream north, keeping the normal fall and winter rains away, meteorologists say. In the last three months, only about a quarter of the usual rain and snow has fallen across the state.

“We are dry from the Rio Grande Valley through the High Plains — there is no subsoil moisture,” said Travis Miller, head of soil and crop sciences at the Texas AgriLife Extension Program. “I really don’t think anybody’s going to plant until we get significant moisture.”

pix here

Just realized I haven't been keeping up with my visual representations of the places I am now, but I've been posting them to facebook. So here are links to

MtM

A Walking Place

Mission San Jose

let's hear it for clean coal

TVA says it will clean up massive Tennessee sludge spill - CNN.com.

KINGSTON, Tennessee (CNN) -- The head of the largest public power company in the nation has pledged to clean up the massive spill that has dumped more than a billion gallons of coal waste in central Tennessee.

Four days after the spill, the water is cloudy on the east bank of the Clinch River in Kingston, Tennessee.

"This is not a time where TVA holds its head high," said Tom Kilgore, president and CEO of the Tennessee Valley Authority. "But we won't hang our head, either, because that won't get the job done. I'm here to tell you that we will clean it up, and we will clean it up right."

The spill unleashed more than a billion gallons of sludge -- enough to fill 1,660 Olympic-size swimming pools.

The sludge is a byproduct of the ash from coal combustion. A retention site at the Tennessee Valley Authority's power plant in Kingston, about 40 miles west of Knoxville, contained the waste until a wall breached last Monday, sending the sludge downhill to damage 15 homes and cover at least 300 acres.

passing through

Just the other day, Pat and I were entertained on the drive downstate by Eartha Kitt's rendition of "C'est Si Bon" (which somehow had found its way onto my iPod) and now we hear that she has died. So long, E. K.

And then there is the death of Harold Pinter, playwright of my youth. In the spring of maybe '71, encouraged by a very good friend, I auditioned for and got the part that he probably wanted. I stumbled into the role of Pinter's Bert Hudd in The Room, his first play (written, they say, in three days and first produced in 1957).

I can't believe I was a very good Bert. He was a brutal, silent British truckdriver. I might have had the voice for it. Maybe I was bearded enough to disguise my baby face. But I doubt that I had the physical presence. Still, I got the part and passed most of my onstage time miming a meal and scowling. Then, of course, at the end, I got to kill our blind visitor and smear his "blood" across the white enamel stove.

After that I started reading what I could find of Pinter and even took a shot at directing Silence for a class. I was clueless, but HP was cool.

Years later in D. C. I was able to take in my first professional production, and I suppose that if you only got to see one Pinter in your lifetime it would have been this one: Gielgud and Richardson in No Man's Land ... with a most memorable pratfall by Sir Ralph.