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State of the Garden
I think during World War II, backyard gardens supplied something on the order of 40 percent (don’t quote me on this) of the nation’s produce. Were we to do that, how much it might contribute to alleviating any shortages–with so much of our food from beyond closing borders.
How might it help shift our growing climate imbalance and social inequality and the hideous chaos it unleashes? Wouldn’t growing some of your own food be a healthy strategy?
The generous harvest from today’s garden all came up from prior year plantings. I may joke about how many variations of greens and grains and pulses I can come up with, but the greens are from my back garden, bursting with nutrients, and everything else is a long storage pantry item (including in recent years, dried beans, for having grown enough of them). Most anything else is a luxury. I can go a long time between trips to the grocery store and still have well-flavored, healthy, and inexpensive meals.

Flowers Around Town (Anemone in a Tree Box)
In the presence of the grand, such as the cherry trees in full bloom, it is easy to overlook the small things.
I am entranced by the small garden offerings, the loving care and desire for beauty manifested by the plantings of perhaps even a flower or two when all someone has is a couple of square feet of sidewalk space to plant.
So too with our human gifts. How essential to happiness and connection it is to recognize the gifts and contributions to love and community by those who are not extraordinary, not the powerful or the famous.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
Shadow and Light
How curious that the shadow makes the open shape of the wire look twisted.

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Cause/ Effect and Integrity
Earlier in the week, on my way home from a conference on the other side of town, I found on the $1 cart outside of Second Story Books, Starhawk’s Dreaming the Dark — Magic, Sex and Politics. Though I always learn something from reading Starhawk’s books and I had not read this one yet, the book was so heavily underlined, I thought twice about getting it.
Something made me hesitate before putting it back, and I opened it at random. On the page was the following: “Directed energy causes change. To have integrity, we must recognize that our choices bring about consequences, and that we cannot escape responsibility for the consequences, not because they are imposed by some external authority, but because they are inherent in the choices themselves.”
I wondered why this had not been underlined in full when so much of the rest of the page had been underlined because I thought on reading it: “Exactly right; that speaks to our current condition.”
And being in the midst this dialogue in which there has been so much discussion of integrity (along with what we might have caused and how we might have been affected by certain actions), I dismissed the possibility that the underlining would be too intrusive for my own reading because, yes, this teaching comes at just the right time in just the right context for deep contemplation of the deep truth that to act with integrity, we must appreciate our own contribution to causes and results/responses in the undulating fabric of our connected being.




