Found Exhortation


I looked up this morning to notice that an orchid from Trader Joe’s from before the pandemic, decided to bloom.


Mark Dion, “The Field Station of the Melancholy Field Biologist, Storm King Art Center
After eating homemade popsicles. This week’s variation: lemon, lime, with white nectarine. The liquid was an chilled tisane with herbs from the garden; the sweetener, local honey. The farmers at the market were packing to go home. Tomatoes and peaches only $1 a pound. Tonight–cucumber and tomato salad with the second cucumber of the year from my own garden. The salad to accompany whole wheat pasta tossed with garden greens, herb pesto (basil, parsley, arugula; garlic in the pesto from a friend’s garden), and white beans. Later in the week when it gets cooler, slow-cooked tomato sauce and white peaches poached in wine (perhaps turned into popsicles).
For those of us living fully in our modern material world, as I am, it is important to think not so much about denying ourselves things or giving them up, but rather, seeing how we can make shifts to living more lightly. One of my heavy impacts on the environment is computer usage. Right now, I have on my work computer, my home laptop, and my Blackberry.
All of you who are reading this blog are doing so via computer or by a personal device with web access that requires battery charging. I’d hazard a guess that most of these portable computers are not being powered by sun and wind. I am still waiting for Pepco to come and change the meter to hook up my newly installed rooftop solar panels to the grid, and I don’t have a solar charger for the Blackberry.
One thing I thought I could do to help make enjoying this way of connecting have less impact on the environment would be to go carbon-neutral. In the world of plastic, the ideal is don’t use, reuse, repurpose, recycle. In the world of electricity, it is don’t use, use from better sources, off-set. With respect to my blog, I am choosing to use the necessary electricity, but go solar with my house, buy electricity from a source that uses offsets (Clean Currents) for that electricity that is in excess of what the solar panels will provide, and I’m choosing to offset this blog’s impact based on readership through the Carbon Fund.