Alina's Adventures

The nature cure: Why the only cure for now is nature.

The Eldest shows Amy a discovery at Tannehill.

In the latest issue of The Atlantic, James Hamblin explores the emerging profession of "ecotherapy". My heart skips and cartwheels to see Richard Louv's name quoted in a mainstream media outlet.

Children with ADHD who regularly play in parks have been found to have milder symptoms than those who spend more time indoors, for example, and therapeutic-camping programs have been found to decrease relapse rates in substance addicts. Such findings generally have more to do with mood and behavior than basic biology—but mood and behavior are intimately tied to physical well-being. Social connection, for instance, is one of the most important factors in human health. And communal green spaces foster that.

These are things we know. Things which explain why the Boy Scouts continues to survive as an organization. Because, let's face it, once the Boy Scouts start "camping" online, the Boy Scouts are finished. 

But in this day and age, we don't do what we know as much anymore. Instead, we do what the people down the street are doing. If keeping up with the Jones was hard before, it's almost impossible now that everyone can keep tabs on Facebook.

 

And then there's the dilemma of expert-worship. I was surprised and excited to learn of medical doctors, like Robert Zarr, who write prescriptions for nature time. 

In his office in Washington, D.C., Robert Zarr, a pediatrician, writes prescriptions for parks. He pulls out a prescription pad and scribbles instructions—which park his obese or diabetic or anxious or depressed patient should visit, on which days, and for how long—just as though he were prescribing medication.

Zarr says it’s important to give concrete advice instead of repeating the vague admonitions (Exercise more! Get outside!) that people are used to hearing. “If you came in to me with bacterial pneumonia,” he told me, “I wouldn’t say, ‘You just go to any pharmacy, pick up any antibiotic you’d like, take it for as many days as you’d like, with or without food, and I’ll see you in a month, buddy.’ ” He doesn’t necessarily tell patients what to do at the park, however—just to go.

Zarr is part of a small but growing group of health-care professionals who are essentially medicalizing nature. He relies on a compendium of 382 local parks—the product of meticulous mapping and rating of green spaces, based on accessibility, safety, and amenities—that he helped create for DC Park Rx, a community-health initiative. The Washington program was one of the first in the United States; there are now at least 150 others.

That's awesome. It needs to happen. I hope other doctors learn from it. I am very, very grateful for physicians who take a holistic approach to the care, treatment, and diagnosis of patients. 

We climbed up the hill and then picked up rocks to use as chalk. 
Karst or slate make excellent hand-drawn trail markings on trees.

But when I think of long-time organizations like Sierra Club or small local garden clubs and naturalist groups or nonprofits like the Druid City Garden Project, I can't help thinking the only new thing about ecotherapy is the word. People have been involved in careers devoted to increasing our exposure and interaction with nature for many, many years. What stands out in the present is the medicalization of what was once natural. The prescription for what is patently obvious. 

As a culture, we've outsourced care for decades. Now we are outsourcing common sense as well. Before long, we'll outsource our political conscience to men on TV who bully one another. By long, I mean maybe a few months.

The truth is that kids are more likely to have visited a theme park or Disneyland by their 8th birthday than they are to have camped with their family. The memories we make involve purchases and fancy accoutrements rather than stories and campfires. Maybe what we need most is to heal from exorbitant, expensive, and over-stimulated vacations.

Prophet wants me to look, mama, look!

Hamblin concludes:

What makes ecotherapy different from an attempt to “mine nature for its beneficial effects,” Chalquist explained—perhaps sensing that I was eager to begin mining nature for its beneficial effects—“is that we have to give something back.” He tells students that if they want to experience the full value of ecotherapy, they can’t just go touch a tree; they need to come to care about that tree and help preserve it for future generations.

Actually, I found this to be one of the more persuasive arguments for ecotherapy. If the practice leads people to volunteer in an urban garden (as Smith did) or to start a bird-watching club or to fall in love while chained to a redwood, it could legitimately improve their health by giving them a sense of purpose and fostering social connections. The same could be said of so many unconventional therapies (equine, acroyoga, glassblowing) that seem to be beneficial despite the lack of a clear biological mechanism. And even if you don’t “give back,” it’s tough to argue against doctors’ prescribing time in a park, crazy as it may seem that they need to do so. Soil-holding remains optional.

The nature cure is not a cure-all. Think of it more like a foundation- a brick upon which one builds the walls of a sturdy, resilient, awe-inspired self. We don't go to nature to build muscles we can admire in the mirror. Even if we do, what we get is different.

What we get from nature is a sense of awe and reverence. That's why running with headphones through a city street is not likely to be a nature-cure alternative to your treadmill. At which point in the run did you stop and listen to the wind? At which point did you admire a snail slurping across a log? At which point did you leave the clamor and drama of daily life behind?

 

Maybe it doesn't matter. But one of the reasons that I'm homeschooling my kids is because an unpopular, hidden, and secret part of me believes that it matters. And it matters even more given the way the world is changing. The relationships they build with nature right now will sustain them through the challenges of college and early adulthood. When they can't afford a therapist or a fancy counselor, if they don't make enough money for those options, there will always be some woods into which they may run. A forest into which they can retreat. A haven where the busy bodies of squirrels scamper over branches with acorns and hopefully my kids will look up for one second and discover- as so many have discovered before them- that life is much bigger than this moment's heartbreak. The world is much grander than our bewildering ache. 

I had a favorite magnolia who knew everything from my first kiss to the wonder of my first period. My back nested into that hole in her bark perfectly. The shade of a familiar tree offers not only succor by also counsel: the hope that one's strength grows alongside the burls and bruises of time. A place where things continue to change and yet remain mysterious and eternal. A place where you can both lose yourself and find yourself in the space of a single moment. 

Admiring "The Female Man."

Getting the air ducts cleaned out.

Oh there's nothing quite so titillating and gut-wrenching as a weekend spent re-reading Joanna Russ' The Female Man. It should be required reading for any college freshman literature course. It should be the invisible shield within a backpack to protect young people from the sexual insolvencies of current gender norms. It should be required reading for all parties considering heterosexual marriage.

Let's see... what do I love about it? Well, for one, the familiar parts of the female protagonists' scripted life:

Now in the opera scene that governs our lives, Janet would have gone to a party and at that party she would have met a man and there would have been something about that man; he would not have seemed to her like any other man she had ever met. Later he would have complimented her on her eyes and she would have blushed with pleasure; she would have felt that compliment was somehow unlike any other compliment she had ever received because it had come from that man; she would have wanted to please that man, and at the same time she would have felt the compliment enter the marrow of her bones; she would have gone out and bought mascara for the eyes that had been complimented by that man. And later still they would have gone for walks, and later still for dinners; and little dinners tete-a-tete with that man would have been like no other dinners Janet had ever had; and over the coffee and brandy he would have taken her hand; and later still Janet would have melted back against the black leather couch in his apartment and thrown her arm across the cocktail table (which would have been made of elegant teak-wood) and put down her drink of expensive Scotch and swooned; she would have simply swooned. She would have said: I Am In Love With That Man. That Is The Meaning Of My Life. And then, of course, you know what would have happened.

Janet's story intersects with that of other females. One of my favorite scenes is a luncheon for which I've excerpted the particularly delicious parts:

    I knew most of the women there: Sposissa, three times divorced; Eglantissa, who thinks only of clothes; Aphrodissa, who cannot keep her eyes open because of her false eyelashes; Clarissa, who will commit suicide; Lucrissa, whose strained forehead shows that she's making more money than her husband; Wailissa, engaged in a game of ain't-it-awful with Lamentissa; Travailissa, who usually only works, but who is now sitting very still on the couch so that her smile will not spoil; and naughty Saccharissa, who is playing a round of His Little Girl across the bar with the host. Saccharissa is forty-five. So is Amicissa, the Good Sport. I looked for Ludicrissa, but she is too plain to be invited to a party like this, and of course we never invite Amphibissa, for obvious reasons.
    In we walked, Janet and I, the right and left hands of a bomb. Actually you might have said everyone was enjoying themselves. I introduced her to everyone......
    I shadowed Janet.
    I played with my ring.
    I waited for the remark that begins "Women-" or "Women can't-" or "Why do women-" and kept up an insubstantial conversation on my right. On my left hand Janet stood: very erect, her eyes shining, turning her head swiftly every now and again to follow the current of events at the party. At times like this, when I'm low, when I'm anxious, Janet's attention seems a parody of attention and her energy unbearably high. I was afraid she'd burst out chuckling. Somebody (male) got me a drink.

A ROUND OF "HIS LITTLE GIRL"

SACCHARISSA: I'm Your Little Girl.
HOST (wheedling): Are you really?
SACCHARISSA: (complacent): Yes I am.
HOST: Then you have to be stupid, too.

A SIMULTANEOUS ROUND OF "AIN'T IT AWFUL"

LAMENTISSA: When I do the floor, he doesn't come home and say it's wonderful.
WAILISSA: Well, darling, we can't live without him, can we? You'll just have to do better.
LAMENTISSA (wistfully): I bet you do better.
WAILISSA: I do the floor better than anybody I know.
LAMENTISSA (excited): Does he ever say it's wonderful?
WAILISSA (dissolving): He never says anything!

What starts out as a pristine pink filter...
[Yes, work with me on the metaphor here]

A handful of pages later, Janet and/or/plus Joanna enjoy an interaction with your average male. I like Joanna's use of italics to switch between the self she narrates- the public performance of a female self and the human within. Italics are so frequently overused or mottled in fiction. But not here:

    "But American women are so unusual," said the man from Leeds. "Your conquering energy, dear lady, all this world-wide American efficiency! What do you dear ladies use it for?"
    "Why, to conquer the men!" cried Saccharissa, braying.
   "In mah baby brain," said Janet, imitating quite accurately, "a suhtin conviction is beginnin' to fo'm."
    "The conviction that somebody is being insulted?" said Sharp Glasses. He didn't say that, actually.
    "Let's go," said Janet. I know it's the wrong party, but where are you going to find the right party?
    "Oh, you don't want to go!" said Sharp Glasses energetically. Jerky, too, they're always so jerky.
    "But I do," said Janet.
    "Of course you don't," he said; "You're just beginning to enjoy yourself. The party's warming up. Here," (pushing us down on the couch) "let me get you another."
 You're in a strange place, Janet. Be civil.
    He came back with another and she drank it. Uh-oh. We made trivial conversation until she recovered. He leaned forward confidentially. "What do you think of the new feminism, eh?"
    "What is-" (she tried again) 'What is-my English is not so good. Could you explain?"
    "Well, what do you think of women? Do you think women can compete with men?"
    "I don't know any men." She's beginning to get mad.
    "Ha ha!" said Sharp Glasses. "Ha ha ha! Ha ha!" (He laughed just like that, in sharp little bursts.) "My name's Ewing. What's yours?"
    "Janet."
    "Well, Janet, I'll tell you what I think of the new feminism. I think it's a mistake. A very bad mistake."
    "Oh," said Janet flatly. I kicked her, I kicked her, I kicked her.
    "I haven't got anything against women's intelligence," said Ewing. "Some of my colleagues are women. It's not women's intelligence. It's women's psychology.
    Eh?"
He's being good-humored the only way he knows how. Don't hit him.
    "What you've got to remember," said Ewing, energetically shredding a small napkin, "is that most women are liberated right now. They like what they're doing. They do it because they like it."
 Don't, Janet.
    "Not only that, you gals are going about it the wrong way."
You're in someone else's house. Be polite.
   "You can't challenge men in their own fields," he said. "Now nobody can be more in favor of women getting their rights than I am. Do you want to sit down? Let's. As I said, I'm all in favor of it. Adds a decorative touch to the office, eh? Ha ha! Ha ha ha! Unequal pay is a disgrace. But you've got to remember, Janet, that women have certain physical limitations."
    (here he took off his glasses, wiped them with a little serrated square of blue cotton, and put them back on) "and you have to work within your physical limitations.
    "For example," he went on, mistaking her silence for wisdom while Ludicrissa muttered, "How true! How true!" somewhere in the background about something or other, "you have to take into account that there are more than two thousand rapes in New York City alone in every particular year. I'm not saying of course that that's a good thing, but you have to take it into account. Men are physically stronger than women, you know."
    (Picture me on the back of the couch, clinging to her hair like a homuncula, battering her on the top of the head until she doesn't dare to open her mouth.)
    "Of course, Janet," he went on, "you're not one of those-uh-extremists. Those extremists don't take these things into account, do they? Of course not! Mind you, I'm not defending unequal pay but we have to take these things into account. Don't we? By the way, I make twenty thousand a year. Ha! Ha ha ha!" And off he went into another fit.

Winds up looking pretty nasty.

The man from Leeds discerns a connection between conversing with Janet and possibly mating with Janet. He strikes out to explore this situation while we read what Janet's thinking through italics. 

    "You're a good conversationalist," he said. He began to perspire gently. He shifted the pieces of his napkin from hand to hand. He dropped them and dusted his hands off. Now he's going to do it "Janet-uh-Janet, I wonder if you-" fumbling blindly for his drink-"that is if-uh-you-"
    But we are far away, throwing coats out of the coat closet like a geyser.
    Is that your method of courtship!
    "Not exactly," I said. "You see-"
    Baby, baby, baby. It's the host, drunk enough not to care.
    Uh-oh. Be ladylike.
    She showed him all her teeth. He saw a smile.
    "You're beautiful, honey."
    "Thank you. I go now." (good for her)
    "Nah!" and he took us by the wrist "Nah, you're not going."
    "Let me go," said Janet.
    Say it loud. Somebody will come to rescue you.
    Can't I rescue myself?
    No.
    Why not?
   All this time he was nuzzling her ear and I was showing my distaste by shrinking terrified into a corner, one eye on the party. Everyone seemed amused.
   "Give us a good-bye kiss," said the host, who might have been attractive under other circumstances, a giant marine, so to speak. I pushed him away.
    "What'sa matter, you some kinda prude?" he said and enfolding us in his powerful arms, et cetera-well, not so very powerful as all that, but I want to give you the feeling of the scene. If you scream, people say you're melodramatic; if you submit, you're masochistic; if you call names, you're a bitch. Hit him and he'll kill you. The best thing is to suffer mutely and yearn for a rescuer, but suppose the rescuer doesn't come?
    "Let go,____________________," said Janet (some Russian word I didn't catch).
    "Ha ha, make me," said the host, squeezing her wrist and puckering up his lips; "Make me, make me," and he swung his hips from side to side suggestively.
    No, no, keep on being ladylike!
   "Is this human courting?" shouted Janet. "Is this friendship? Is this politeness?" She had an extraordinarily loud voice. He laughed and shook her wrist.
    "Savages!" she shouted. A hush had fallen on the party. The host leafed dexterously through his little book of rejoinders but did not come up with anything. Then he looked up "savage" only to find it marked with an affirmative: "Masculine, brute, virile, powerful, good." So he smiled broadly. He put the book away.
    "Right on, sister," he said.
    So she dumped him. It happened in a blur of speed and there he was on the carpet. He was flipping furiously through the pages of the book; what else is there to do in such circumstances? (It was a little limp-leather-excuse me-volume bound in blue, which I think they give out in high schools. On the cover was written in gold WHAT TO DO IN EVERY SITUATION.)
    "Bitch!" (flip flip flip) "Prude!" (flip flip) "Ball-breaker!" (flip flip flip flip) "Goddamn cancerous castrator!" (flip) "Thinks hers is gold!" (flip flip) "You didn't have to do that!"
    Was ist? said Janet in German.
   He gave her to understand that she was going to die of cancer of the womb.
    She laughed.
  He gave her to understand further that she was taking unfair advantage of his good manners.
   She roared.
   He pursued the subject and told her that if he were not a gentleman he would ram her stinking, shitty teeth up her stinking shitty ass.
   She shrugged.
  He told her she was so ball-breaking, shitty, stone, scum-bag, mother-fucking, plug-ugly that no normal male could keep up an erection within half a mile of her.
   She looked puzzled. ("Joanna, these are insults, yes?")
  He got up. I think he was recovering his cool. He did not seem nearly so drunk as he had been. He shrugged his sports jacket back into position and brushed himself off. He said she had acted like a virgin, not knowing what to do when a guy made a pass, just like a Goddamned scared little baby virgin.
   Most of us would have been content to leave it at that, eh, ladies.
   Janet slapped him.
  It was not meant to hurt, I think; it was a great big stinging theatrical performance, a cue for insults and further fighting, a come-on-get-your-guard contemptuous slap meant to enrage, which it jolly well did.
    THE MARINE SAID, "YOU STUPID BROAD, I'M GONNA CREAM YOU!"
    That poor man.
   I didn't see things very well, as first off I got behind the closet door, but I saw him rush her and I saw her flip him; he got up again and again she deflected him, this time into the wall-I think she was worried because she didn't have time to glance behind her and the place was full of people-then he got up again and this time he swung instead and then something very complicated happened-he let out a yell and she was behind him, doing something cool and technical, frowning in concentration.
    "Don't pull like that," she said. "You'll break your arm."
    So he pulled. The little limp-leather notebook fluttered out on to the floor, from whence I picked it up. Everything was awfully quiet. The pain had stunned him, I guess.
    She said in astonished good-humor: "But why do you want to fight when you do not know how?"
    I got my coat and I got Janet's coat and I got us out of there and into the elevator. I put my head in my hands.
    "Why'd you do it?"
    "He called me a baby."
    The little blue book was rattling around in my purse. I took it out and turned to the last thing he had said ("You stupid broad" et cetera). Underneath was written Girl backs down-cries-manhood vindicated. Under "Real Fight With Girl" was written Don't hurt (except whores). I took out my own pink book, for we all carry them, and turning to the instructions under "Brutality" found:
    Man's bad temper is the woman's fault. It is also the woman's responsibility to patch things up afterwards.

Spring sneaks in, arms heavy with inspirations.

Rose of Sharon purchased from dear Sue Blackshear at the
Alabama Wildflower Society's annual Native Plant sale.

 In my head and notebooks right now...

                    Hungarian fairies

            Henri Barbusse's Hell

 Silvina Ocampo in general

                        the night-life of catalpa trees

                 the cardinal nesting outside our dining room window

The Eldest's happy bush bean shrubs

                rainy day nature journals

Prophet's fascinating "shark tooth"

        fuschia: the sound

                                        hellebore, the plant

                    meeting Madelyn this weekend

                                   half-painted rooms

white as egg shells, the expression

Gnome and Prophet's "Sweet Cedar Club"

            the dogwood finale

            wilted azalea skirts

        blueberry blossoms beginning to fruit

love: the costume

Current muser: Optophones new and old.

From my sketchbook musings..

Playing with dada and surrealism in my sketchbook and finding new fascinations to exploit, including the "optophone", an extinct early bit of technology with varied symbolic potentials. 

The optophone is a device, used by the blind, that scans text and generates time-varying chords of tones to identify letters. It is one of the earliest known applications of sonification. Dr. Edmund Fournier d'Albe of Birmingham University invented the optophone in 1913, which used selenium photosensors to detect black print and convert it into an audible output which could be interpreted by a blind person. (Wikipedia)

The Israeli press describes a new and improved optophone ("Opto-Phone") designed by Zev Zavlesky that allows you to eavesdrop on conversations 100 feet away using laser beams.

I'm so taken in by the old school optophone right now- electrical circuitry and simple lines- that I printed this aged model as a coloring page for the little people. Eager to see how they'll "improve" upon it, perhaps with colors or collages.

The One Lovely Blog Award.

My first response to being nominated for the One Lovely Blog award was surprise- oh but I've been so un-lovely lately- then gratitude to Jordan for her generous heart. It's a gift to live life and write your way through it- and an honor to discover "kindred spirits" who encourage you along the way. 

Now for the robes and rituals. There are 3 simple rules to accepting this award:

1. Thank & link back to the person who nominated you.
2. Share seven interesting facts about yourself, & add the blog award logo to your post.
3. Nominate 15 other bloggers & comment on their blogs to let them know.

I am honored to officially accept this award from A Montessori Story. And it means the world to accept it from a fellow Alabama-raised female whose has lived beyond her borders. On her blog, Jordan Gurganus recounts her discoveries and inspirations as a Montessori teacher. I loved reading that Montessori opened the world of math to her because I feel that way about nature study and science. Perhaps a good teacher is one who loves learning a little more than she loves teaching so when the world opens its hands to her, she can't help sharing.

Tweezing my legs while waiting for a train in Poland.

Now for seven interesting facts about myself:

1. I was born in Romania and raised in Alabama. My parents defected from Ceausescu’s communist dictatorship when I was two years old. I don’t believe in birthrighteousness-- the idea that where you are born should determine your right to live there. Citizenship snobbery makes me sad.

2. I homeschool my three children because I want to give them a gender-flexible, wonder-infused childhood filled with weeds, dirt, poetry, travel, and endless cultural horizons. People and places are more important than products to me. I'm not impressed by your house or garden though I may be impressed by your heart.

3. If you told me I'd be homeschooling my kids ten years ago, I would have laughed in your face and muttered a simplistic trope which stereotyped homeschoolers and revealed my own narrow perspective.

4. I've traveled the gamut of the political spectrum- Repubicrat, Demican, conservative, progressive, anarchist, you name it... Though I sometimes look back on my life with disbelief, I am grateful to have known political parties inside and out because it reminds me that ignorance and snobbery are more powerful than evil. Lesson learned: Empathy is my main political position.

5. Between the margins, I steal time to write.

6. There is nothing I fear quite as much as people who like power. And mean people. Maybe they're one and the same.

7. I do not believe there is a correlation between happiness and success. On the other hand, there appears to be a strong connection between happiness and the ability to enjoy poetry. A girl can dream.

And my fifteen nominations..

TEACHER TOM
Inspiring and insightful. Love this man.

SMALL THINGS
Because Ginny makes me happy.

PROJECT-BASED HOMESCHOOLING
I'm a longtime admirer of Lori's project-based homeschooling.

CAMP CREEK BLOG
Spirit, solace, homeschooling, and light.

AN EVERYDAY STORY
Child-led learning and Reggio.

HANDMADE HOMESCHOOL
For her honesty- and inspiring feminism.

CRAFT FOREST
Inspiring handwork and crafts.

1 DAD 1 KID
Ingenious.

OUTSIDE MOM
Ideas and environmental education.

ROAMSCHOOL 
Not quite a blog but visionary field learning.

ART BAR BLOG
Creative hands-on art ideas.

TO LOVE
The poetry of love and life.

WILD OLIVE
Handwork ideas and personal embroidery guru.

RAISING MIRO
Because world schoolers rock...

MOSSY
Dirt under the nails.

Tomatoes, crusty bread, and feta cheese: A poetic combination.

And the truth is the first girl I ever kissed, tasted like tomatoes.

And I know this, because the second girl I ever kissed tasted like pepper.

It wasn’t unpleasant.

It’s just that I was expecting tomatoes.

 (Excerpt from Koyczan's "Tomatoes")

A poetic feast of tomato poems...

"Cherry Tomatoes" by Sandra Beasley
"Tomatoes" by Shane Koyczan
"Ode to Tomatoes" by Pablo Neruda (plus riotous illustration)
"September Tomatoes" by Karina Borowicz
A shape poem variant on a tomato poem by Victor Hugo
"Patio Tomatoes" by Krista Lukas
"Tomatoes" by Stephen Dobyns
"Roma" by Matthew Dickman
"After Tomato Picking" by Maria Garcia Teutsch
"Fried Green Tomatoes" by Pris Campbell
"Diary from a Tomato Cannery, 1912" by Sandy Solomon
"Tomato Hornworm", a great teaching poem
"I Used to Like Tomatoes" by Flora Veit Wild

Image source: Gathering Books

Sunday silhouettes and cloudscapes.

What began as a plan to play basketball turned into an afternoon of cloudscapes. Looking up at the clouds and each other from the vantage point of a dandelion.

The King settles into a brief observation of Cumulus mediocris. 

Nothing occurs without a context. Our context was clouds- and the study of weather and sky Prophet declares her favorite to be the cumulonimbus- the one which portends a promise of thunder and lighting. 

She prefers the name "thunderhead". And she asks the Eldest, again and again, to tell her about the anvil at the head of the cloud and how it predicts the direction in which the storm is moving.

For the Eldest, the clouds make it hard to concentrate on other things- things of this world, things like basketball games. I like the way he prefers not to fight the daydreaming sky, adjusting his plans as needed. He's a person who acknowledges the leverage of a cloudscape.

Gnome sits astride the elephant and shakes it with her tiny arms. The effect is one of dispersion- each wave a break too soft to crest. The scattering and dispersion creates its own forms. Hail, little Gnome, ye shaker of clouds and creator of cirrus-scapes.

Each of us has his own way of interacting with the clouds. I incline towards the clouds- hoping to somehow scoop them into my body, where their mass mobilizes them into new shapes, always the yearning for new stories. 

"Tell me," I say to the Eldest, "which cloud formations strike you as the most stable and the most unstable."

"Sure," he begins to point and pontificate. Then he asks if I'm worried about the weather, or why I want to know.

"I don't care so much for the stable formations," I try to explain that the unstable clouds are the ones I want to follow, the ones which will eventually be forced by their own inner dynamics to spill into stories- some involving rain and backyard vegetable gardens, others revolving around the way pressure changes and reconfigures us as less than massive. 

Saving your seeds: A great tradition to pass on to children.

A visit to the Petaluma Seed Bank (from Modern Farmer)

The Kind and the Eldest have been discussing saving the seeds from our heirloom plants this year. I found myself thinking it was a lovely family tradition to hand along- one of those that lasts longer than a scrapbook or a photo album. 

If you'd like to start planning to do the same, note that there are always extras that makes better gifts than objects left stashed in a drawer. Unless you own loads of acres, you probably don't need 100 seeds.

On my dream-list of things-to-do would be starting a community seed lending library open to all members of a community, including those who can't afford the leisure time to start full-time gardens. It would act as a resource to encourage good gardening practices and pass on local heirlooms and traditions to those who lack time or land or access.

 Any and every question about seed saving can be answered in the free booklet and seed saving instructions provided by SeedSave. Fine Gardening also features a post on collecting and storing seeds. Here's more to help you on your way....

Seed paper gift pots and tags (Happy Hour Project)
Brown paper seed packet business cards tutorial (Crafting A Green World)
Glassine seed packets with free labels (Martha Stewart)

FREE PRINTABLE SEED PACKETS

Seeds From My Garden packet (Country Living)
Simple seed envelopes (joy ever after)
Old-fashioned seed packets with illustrations (Victoria Magazine)
Origami seed packets (Caustic Musings)
Scrapbook paper seed packet project (Vale Design)
Nostalgia-infused seed packets (Content in a Cottage)
Quoteable seed packet (Vale Design)
Large seed envelopes with blank label (Maggie Wang)
Large seed envelopes with planting instructions (Maggie Wang)
Printable herb seed packet labels (Just Dawnelle)

FREE PRINTABLE SEED PACKETS FOR YOUNG FOLKS

Cute, colorful seed packets (Keeping Life Creative)
Ladybug seed packets (Cafe Garden)
Alice in Wonderland seed packets (Cafe Garden)

The liberating habits of compassionate men.

During my first pregnancy over ten years ago, I devoured books on the topic of raising boys. As with every new terrain, it made sense to cross-reference the maps made by those who came before me.

The most important conclusion from all my reading and research resulted in the taking of a vow. I vowed never to make the Eldest feel that he was only allowed to be half a human- that half currently recognized as the prototypical American male.

Having best friends that were guys taught me how much men suffered for the way we raise them to be caricatures of angry, sarcastic, beer-chugging brutes with "natural drive" for rape, destruction, and violence. Honestly, I've never met a man who fits the bill- though I've met way too many who lived like zombies for trying.

We treat men like they are naturally too insensitive, ego-driven, violent, and lusty to leave with out daughters. Then we wonder why the number of nuclear missiles in our arsenal continues to rise. The truth is that men and women are born with similar emotional needs and emotional expression.

According to various studies, around the age of four, the average American boys realizes that daddy (and his preschool buddies and favorite cartoon characters) doesn't like it when he talks about feeling sad. "Take one for the team," laughs the dad. Or, "crying is for girls- boys don't cry". Some variation on sarcastic disregard for what a boy is feeling and some form of withdrawal that teaches him to detach himself from any feelings lest he lose the affection and regard of his daddy and male peers.

The word "sad" is quickly removed from a developing boy's emotional vocabulary. But the sad feeling persists. Eventually, he learns that boys are allowed to get angry. He understands that winning makes fear and bad feelings go away. He agrees not to name all the complex congnitive emotional states he can no longer acknowledge. Instead, he does what "big boys do", namely, keep his eye on the prize and aim to win. Whether he is winning a soccer game, a promotion, a card game, a bet, a dare, or one of those emotional objects known as females, his develops only one response to losing- the response of fear and anger. Under these two words, entire worlds are submerged.

Men are not from Mars. Women are not from Venus. Both co-exist as human beings on the planet known as Earth. Books which promise to reveal why men and women can't understand one another usually fall back on the self-fulfilling prophecy of claiming that women are super-emotional and have emotional needs, while men are rational and lack complex emotional needs. Seriously, sitting in the stands of a college football game will quickly reveal the extent to which men and women are equally irrational and equally emotional.

Rarely do such pop psychology books acknowledge the cause for these differences is not God or "nature" or interplanetary travel. Rarely do they mention all the scientific studies that show these differences are largely due to the way in which males are socialized to ignore, project, or suppress their emotions. At no point does John Gray admit that male emotional illiteracy is normative but far from natural or even "normal". He's built a galaxy of cash on maintaining the stereotypes that keep men and their partners from being able to live life in its full variety of cognitive colors.

Reading one of my favorite magazines today returned me to the trenches of the old "unemotional male" sophistries. Describing five habits of "highly compassionate men", Kozo Hattori begins with the truth of the past- the early socialization against compassion in a culture that tells men "emotions" are something the other sex does.

Hattori remembers "being a very compassionate child"- the kind that "cried his eyes out" during the film version of "The Little House on the Prairie". By the time he became a young adult, however, Hattori's identity stayed firmly within what he calls the “act-like-a-man box”. Fitting popular conceptions of masculinity failed to equip him with the sort of self-knowledge that enables us to navigate the tight corners of fear and frustration:

Although I was what therapists call “high-functioning,” my lack of compassion was like a cancer that poisoned my friendships, relationships, business affairs, and life. At the age of 46, I hit rock bottom. Unemployed and on the verge of divorce, I found myself slapping my four-year-old son’s head when he wouldn’t listen to me.

At this point, Hattori questioned the self he had become and whether it served the spirit and soul of his body. Like many wise men before him, Hattori started seeking. He began with empathy. After workshops and seminars and hours of meditation, he grew into compassion. Or maybe compassion grew, naturally, from him. Either way, he discovered that the more compassion he felt, the "happier" he became. 

Like anyone who discovers an ineffable and life-affirming truth, Hattori felt driven by the need to share what he had learned and, of course, continue his own journey of learning. So he interviewed a number of individual experts in an effort to determine what, exactly, makes a compassionate man. Or, how a compassionate man is made.   

Interviewees included Dr. Dacher Keltner, co-founder of the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center; Dr. James Doty, founder and director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University; Dr. Rick Hanson, author of Hardwiring Happiness; Marc Brackett, director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence; and Thich Nhat Hanh, the Zen Buddhist monk nominated by Martin Luther King Jr. for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967.

The conclusions were as simple as the feeling of compassion to an unbridled, open heart:

1. Learn to see compassion as strength.
2. Cultivate compassionate role models.
3. Strive to transcend gender stereotypes.
4. Cultivate emotional intelligence.
5. Practice silence.

Hattori's happiness is contagious. I look forward to his research and encourage him to keep probing the depths, tackling difficult and onerous topics that assist fellow humans in resisting cultural influences against compassion.

The opportunities to make the world a better place for boys and men abound. So, the next time your son honors you by trying to explore and express his complicated heart, dive into the depths with him, rather than forcing him to tread water on the surface. Being born a boy should not relegate you to being less of a human being.

MY FAVORITE RESOURCES ON CULTIVATING COMPASSION

"Can mindfulness help kids learn self-control" by Sarah Wheeler (Greater Good)
"The way we socialize boys man harm them as men", a documentary must-see (All Voices)
"No more Steubenvilles: How to raise boys to be kind men" by Kim Simon (Yes!)
"Boys have become emotionally illiterate" by John Amaechi (BigThink)
"Male and female ability differences down to socialization, not genetics" by Robin McKie (Observer)
"I'm not socializing my kids- I'm humanizing them" by Kimberly Yvette Price (Home Education)
"Nervous Nellies" by Taylor Clark (Slate)
"How to deal with mean people" by Christine Carter (Greater Good)
"His hidden needs" by Nara Schoenberg (Chicago Tribune)
Barbie vs. Batman: The socialization of children's toys (Paula vs. Patriarchy)
"Creating a new generation of compassionate and sensitive men" by Dr. Ted Zeff
"We must look at how we teach our boys what it means to be a man" by Neil Irvin (Time)
"Strong men don't hide their emotions, they show them" by Jack Fischl (PolicyMic)
"The man who couldn't feel" by Contessa Schexnayder (Brain World)
"Helping men to help themselves" by Lea Winderman (APA Monitor on Psychology)
Understanding and Raising Boys (PBS Parents)
Peace In Relationships, Kozo Hattori's blog and counseling 

RELATED STORIES FROM THE CASTLE VAULT

The Eldest's first soccer game.
Why I homeschool.
About love.
Cross-stitching with boys.
Home-schooling and socialization: The heart of the matter.
Is technology narrowing our perception of life?
A date with Adrienne Rich.
Mining a fallow field for stories.
Radical home-makers of all stripes.

Gardening with kids of all ages: A how-to and how-not.

Our bamboo bean teepee with seeds planted just a week ago with Bill's help.

The bean sprouts curl their way into a winding adulthood- one in which they will be judged for their ability to produce food. It's hard to under-emphasize the thrill of fruiting. Hard to temper my love for the way a seed leads us to the dinner table. Hard to imagine and cultivate an ethic of beauty and wonder completely devoid of practical considerations.

So I steal a few secret minutes while weeding this morning to acknowledge my admiration for the producers of food. And I hope no one says, "Hey mom, what are you thinking about?"

Marigolds growing around the tomato plants, per Mary's aphid-free suggestion.

The Eldests' heirloom Brandywines.

We celebrated yesterday's rain for the way it darkened the soil and replenished our rain barrel. Today, the Brandywine's stalks are covered in a thick coat of white hairs- I imagined the hairs as a fur coat when last night's temperatures dropped and the wind released loose pink and scarlet rose petals, a pattern of fallen skirts.

While planting cucumbers last weekend, the Eldest warned that cucumbers should not be planted close together lest they attack one another and "keep each other small". I laughed and inquired as to his source. He couldn't quite recall if it had been an almanac or a gardening book. So we planted our cucumbers across the garden from one another. Because, as I explained to the King, "Some boys are territorial and require ridiculous accomodations to their insecure egos". 

The King looked as if he either A) understood or B) remained baffled. The thing about the King is you never can tell. His "I get it" expression is almost identical to his "I'm lost" expression.

The Eldest improvised a cucumber cage from twine and bamboo (see rear of photo).

Cucumbers do not cross-pollinate other vining plants. While you don't want crops growing into each other to create a tangle of vines, misshapen or poorly tasting cucumbers because of the pollen from nearby melons, squashes or zucchini plants. Only other cucumber varieties cross-pollinate -- all are the same botanical species. Cross-pollination does not affect cucumber fruit features or qualities, but it does yield hybridized seeds.

Over the years, I've collected quite a few resources for gardening with kids. Given my brown thumbs, it's rather incredible to see how little I've learned. But I sure did curate a tremendous number of informative and useful links.... So I went back through my gardening posts and added the most helpful, useful, and educational ones- the ones that inspire, inform, and amuse about gardening with kids. Thrive and enjoy.

THE BEST OF GARDENING WITH KIDS

Pre-school gardening club weekly activities plan (Little Green Fingers)
Preparing for our brown thumb garden (alina's adventures)
Is it garden bounty or garden booty? (alina's adventures)
Heeding the summons of spring  (alina's adventures)
The hunt for the perfect compost (alina's adventures)
Cucumbers everywhere (alina's adventures)
Planting poppies (alina's adventures)
The Eldest starts his heirloom seeds (alina's adventures)
The surprise that conquered coxsackie (alina's adventures)
Making scarecrows (alina's adventures)
Getting your garden journal and notebook ready (alina's adventures)
Flower gardening with kids (alina's adventures)
Gardening at night (alina's adventures)
The magical garden of Maria Barnes (alina's adventures)
Gardens and good germs (alina's adventures)
Getting my hands dirty (alina's adventures)

A nature walk with Diane Kappel-Smith.

Dutchman's breeches in Dublin, Ohio.

All the recent, rather immediate demands of a growing garden have kept me from reflecting on our trip to Ohio- from mining it for tiny kernels of insight.

But this morning, I found a crack, the kind that swells into a crevice, between the comings and doings.

As the kids worked on their book reviews, I flipped back through the photographs of our nature outings with the writings of Diane Kappel-Smith in the forefront of my mind. In retrospect, posting the photos alongside the text makes me feel as if Diane and I walked the woods together.

It's so much easier to write about the wonder and obvious beauty of nature than it is to acknowledge the extent to which it satisfies and cultivates a craving for fantasy. Surely I am not the only woman to have trudged through muddy trails with Thoreau at my side.

Today, I walk with Wintering in my head. Or, rather, I return and revisit under the electrifying influence of a particular writer who has more to reveal to me in all the things I have seen.

Walk with me. 

"I come back to the papery leaves, the spring beauties, the sun which reaches me here, now, unfiltered. The twigs, leaves, and flowers that are on their way are already formed, were made last summer and packed away in scales and sheaths; all they have to do is expand like balloons, and then their branch tips will begin their hurry to make more."

Diane Kappel-Smith

"Trees grown in the open are thicker of trunk because the wind has blown them, and they choose to thicken in the parts of themselves most stressed by their own bending. Trees in the dense woods where the wood can't push them are thin as wands".

I would make an exception for the dense, heavy hardwoods growing in the Carpathian mountains of Transylvania. Their trunks are as thick as houses, possibly because their location on the side of high altitude mountains demands heftiness as a form of hardiness for the snow-heavy Transylvanian winters and sharp mountainside winds. 

Of course, if American corporations have their way, these old trees will soon be logged to make fancy dining room tables for the rapacious consumers of Hollywood and Aspen. But I hope against hope that something happens to stop them.

BLOODROOT

The large white petals of the bloodroot plant radiate outward, but often only last for one day. One of the ways to recognize this plant is the leaf often looks like it wants to wrap itself around the flower. If you cut the stem or dig the root, it will bleed a bright red-orange juice.

"In these maples and birch and beech the branches reach out year after year, running skyward like the fingers of rivulets when water is poured on dry ground."

Critical Thinking Exercise on Diana Kappel-Smith review (PDF)
A little something I made for the Eldest and wanted to share.

YELLOW TROUT LILY

Trout Lilies like to keep their feet wet and are common, especially along river floodplains. There are both white and yellow species here. The six petals are usually recurved like this. The mottled leaves is a diagnostic character.

I love the way the leaves resemble purple tie-dyed shirts.

A golden goodbye whose shadow is even lovelier than its hue.

In hope of henbit: A discovery of devotion.

The cost of daily nature study with my children is this blooming ardor for all things green. I crave the company of wildflowers. There are times when I yearn for nothing more than a sheet of paper, a pencil, and a mute plant nearby. A particular plant with a story it wants me to tell. 

There is a carpet of stunning purple-blue wildflowers under the camellias near our front door. Part of me finds herself hoping for a henbit identification. For some unspeakable reason, I maintain a steady affection- an openness to being charmed and re-charmed- for the henbit.

The facts, themselves, don't explain my affection. As a matter of fact, henbit is a member of the mint family. There are a lot of mints that do not smell minty, some of them are edible and some of them are not. In fact, some of the mints can make you ill. Though henbit lacks the minty smell, it is an edible herb. Eat the Weeds offers a detailed scoop on henbit's lovely qualities. 

The mystery accrues, growing heavy with the weight of various Latin names and specifications. I aim for henbit, in spite of the bits that don't add up.

The more I study, the more I find satisfaction in touching the flower with all my senses- seeking a scent, lifting it, again, to the light. Sketching and re-sketching. Focusing on the stalk, adding tiny hairs along its length, bonding closer to my subject. Reminiscient of the way writing a poem breaks down the barriers between myself and what I allow myself to feel for and in the world around me, trying to find a name for this flower wraps me tighter into the wonder and magic of its existence. 

Though I can't seem to find a better id- not even on Wildflower Identification Guide- it seems highly unlikely that this would be henbit. It lacks the characteristic heart-shaped, scalloped leaves that grasp the stem and give it the nickname grasping henbit. 

I find myself focusing on the leaf shape, wondering if the oval is actually a lyre. Since lyreleaf sage grows well in this part of the country, I convince myself that the characterstic lyre-shaped leaves need not be quite as, well, lyre-like as the name suggests.

At some point I realize that more than mere science is at stake. 

Pigmentation takes me further towards distracted fascination and closer to mis-identification. I discover a trance-inducing new blog, Anybody Seen My Focus, where I learn that the leaves of lyreleaf sage reveal the amount of daily sunlight it receives. The greener leaves are usually those of the plants who receive full sun. Purple pigmentation in the edges or flesh of the leaf indicates a shade-dwelling sage. This makes sense given the partial shade in which I found our flower friend.

The King reminds me of our plans for the day, the kids throb their way through the castle, a restless rhythm demands I drop my pencil, turn away from the mystery, and face the familiar music. 

At this point, I recognize the religious pilgrim in myself- the spirit steadfastly seeking an intimacy from something outside the material world. My devotion to this simple garden weed becomes a journey, a quest for a name with all the potency of the Holy Grail. So I leave my awe, like a half-knit sock in the fair trade basket woven by women from Nigeria, for another time, another day, another moment. 

But it's hard for me. Easier to drop the sock in the basket than to quash this burning urge which developed in pursuit of a plant.  

Purple deadnettle vs. henbit factsheet (UT Extension)
Purple deadnettle (Brooklyn Botanical Garden)
Creeping charlie, or ground ivy (Edible Wild Food)
Beautiful images of henbit flower (Project Noah)
A lovely look at Lyreleaf sage (Anybody Seen My Focus)

Love letter #121: The poetic life of the egg tooth.

Three eggs discovered at a rest area in Kentucky.

The last few lines from Gail Mazur's poem, "Evening", come to mind. The lines in which the elderly woman insists that she wants the blue eggs more than the promise of the bird tucked within them.

If it weren't for the specialized aptitude of the egg tooth, the baby bird might never emerge from the egg. The baby would remain a possibility rather than a probability. 

The egg tooth fascinates me. Lodged in my neural networks, waiting to morph into the perfect metaphor, I hold it back like a pawn piece on a chess board, knowing the perfect exchange will appear to those with the patience to see it. 

Chicks with wings that don't work, those baby birds, ensconced in the protective covering of the portable womb known more commonly as "egg". Since the beak and the claws of the chick are not fully developed and cannot penetrate the egg shell at the time when the chick is ready to emerge, the egg tooth plays it brief, dazzling role. 

Found only in emerging chicks, the egg tooth's purpose is brief and to the point; it serves only to assist the baby bird in breaking through the hard shell in the process known as "pipping".

For a chick, the cost of growing within the egg-womb is a decreased ability to absorb enough oxygen through the pores of its eggshell. Compelled by its natural wisdom, the oxygen-thirsty chick uses its egg tooth to peck a hole in the air sac located at the flat end of the egg. This sac provides a few hours worth of air, during which the chick breaks through the eggshell to the outside. 

Far from being a singular miracle, the egg tooth works in concert with a special muscle on the back of the chick's neck. This pipping muscle provides chicks with the strength to force the egg tooth through the inner membrane of the eggshell.

The chick hatches, leaving its shell behind. Soon it learns to open its mouth expectantly. Finally, a few days after hatching, the egg tooth falls off, its purpose exhausted. 

C.D. Wright admires the egg tooth in "Obscurity and Selfhood", a poem published in 1949. I like the poem so much that I can't bear to parse it, to surgically remove pieces and pretend any life can be left in the dissected corpse. So here it is, in it's entirety, in honor of the marvelous egg tooth.

OBSCURITY AND SELFHOOD

by C. D. Wright

Not far
from a college.
Nevertheless.
A man
living by himself

kept his fighting cocks in plain sight. Each had its own tether and
miniature shed and dish with embossed sobriquet. Their domestication
reserved for battle before the table. Gallus gallus domesticus. A young
male, a cockerel, my husband’s patronymic before the adoption. Some hens
are disposed to poach another’s egg. Once there were teeth. Given certain
conditions they could come back. If not a full set. Even now a breathing hole
has to be pipped for the offspring to break out. This is done with an egg tooth.
Not a true tooth. Love among the chickens involves a circle dance. He is
a wonderful dancer. It goes straight to her brain. Before and after they prefer
to wash off in dust. Ashes will work if no dust. If they aren’t forced into shedding
one another’s blood, they can live until their heart gives out.
The cock
the man
could not
resist
loving.
He withdrew
from
the ring.
Yet
relinquished.
To settle
an unforgiven
debt.

My question is this:
Would you describe yourself
as a wanderer, a friend of the court, amicus curiae, falsely construed as a snitch, a blue yodeler,
   an apostate, a lost cause, a bird in the house, a biter, a common blogger, a contender, a purse
   snatcher, a false witness, a palterer, a silkie, a backyarder, channeler
for malevolent spirits, girt in the loins, figure on a shard of black pottery, moderately active, a fog
   machine, a visionary miserabilist, a chook or a cuckold, a roundhead, a little seditious, a slow-wave
   sleeper, a dead mule, a gongorist, honey on the comb, half goat half god, a white throwback, crossed
   with a mongrel, a genesis, a retired fighting
cock,
a doll
named
Memphis.

Will D. Campbell, a man unlike any other.

The first time I heard Will D. Campbell's name was in the context of a conversation with an elderly neighbor whose voice churned confetti and fireworks as she described her favorite "bootleg preacher". I was intrigued- but all that breastmilk-induced oxytocin erased the name from my memory until I ran across it again while reading a book of conversations with Walker Percy. And then again when researching the life of Clarence Jordan.  

Like Clarence Jordan, Will knew what he was up against in racism- a form of excusable disgust and hatred which preachers sought to justify using scriptures and traditions. For Will, it would not be enough to decry the hatred for other races. Instead, he would have to learn to love even the most unlovable human beings.

"I have seen and known the resentment of the racist, his hostility, his frustration, his need for someone upon whom to lay blame and to punish," Campbell wrote in his first book, Race and the Renewal of the Church. 'With the same love that it is commanded to shower upon the innocent victim of his frustration and hostility, the church must love the racist" Therefore, in 1969, on the night before Bob Jones, the Grand Dragon of the North Carolina KKK was shipped off to federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, for contempt of Congress, Campbell was there in the Dragon's Den to celebrate communion with a bottle of bourbon. Later, Campbell talked with James Earl Ray, the man who had murdered Campbell's friend Martin Luther King. When people asked if he really expected to save the souls of such men, Campbell allowed that that would be presumptuous: "They might, however, save mine." (Source: Lawrence Wright)

Given his extensive career in the Christian church, Will often surprised people by confessing that his faith came to him much later than his memorization of scriptures. Though a preacher, Will claims he actually became a Christian when his friend, Jonathan Daniel, was murdered in 1966. Daniel had come from his Episcopal seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to register blacks to vote in the notorious Lowndes County. After walking into into a country store with a white priest and two black friends, Daniel emerged holding a Moon Pie and a soda pop. A sheriff's deputy named Thomas Coleman found this Moon Pie to resemble a threat and decided to resolve the matter with the help of his shotgun. Daniel gave his life for the civil rights movement.

When Campbell heard about Daniel's death, he was visiting his friend PD. East, the colorful and defiant editor of the Petal, Mississippi, newspaper called The Petal Paper.

It was East, years before, who had badgered Campbell into giving him a definition of the Christian message in ten words or less. “We're all bastards, but God loves us anyway," East recalled. “Let's see if your definition of faith can stand the test. Was Jonathan a bastard?"

Campbell was still in shock and deeply grieving for his friend. Mainly to get East to shut up, Campbell admitted that Jonathan was a bastard. “Was Thomas a bastard?" East asked. It was easy enough to agree to that.

Then East pulled his chair around, put his bony hand on Campbell's knee and, staring directly into Campbell glistening eyes, whispered, “Which one of these two bastards do you think God loves most?"

This was the turning point in Campbell's life. He describes it in his memoir, Brother to a Dragonfly.

I walked across the room and opened the blind, staring directly into the glare of the street light. And I began to whimper. But the crying was interspersed with laughter.

He was laughing at himself: ”At twenty years of a ministry which had become, without my realizing it, a ministry of liberal sophistication. An attempted negation of Jesus, [a ministry] of human engineering, of riding the coattails of Caesar ... of looking to government to make and verify and authenticate our morality, of worshipping at the shrine of enlightenment and academia, of making an idol of the Supreme Court, a theology of law and order and of denying not only the Faith I professed to hold but my history and my people - the Thomas Colemans."

I never got over Campbell's Brother To A Dragonfly, which I read en route through the entire opus of Walker Percy. Unlike Percy, Campbell didn't need to play dress-up in order to reveal the nakedness of modern man. Like Wendell Berry, Campbell's sense of "place" oriented his characters in a way that is familiar to anyone who was born in Romania and raised in Alabama, between one place and out the other.

Passages like this one found a nook, a place to sit and simmer, in my mind:

I said something about Hitler taking over the world and none of us being free.

"Brother, nobody is free. Freedom is how much you're willing to do to get people to leave you alone."

"And patriotism? That's just something they sold us. How can you love a country? A country is nothing but a big piece of geography. I love that eighty acres of land up there in Amite County where we were raised. But I can't love three million square miles."

As a piece of southern history, Will's book is unsurpassed. It breaks the heart while mending it. Though Will passed away several years ago, his influence continues to ripple outwards. Here are a few selections from those who knew him...

"Rev. Will D. Campbell, Maverick Minister in Civil Rights Era, Dies at 88" (New York Times)
"Bubba to a gadfly- remembering Will D. Campbell" (Ken Carder)
"Reverend Will D. Campbell, southern racial reconciler" (Southern Spaces)
"The first church of rednecks, white socks, and blue ribbon beer" (Rolling Stone)
"The tragedy of the redneck" (Joel Rieves)
"Apostle to the rednecks" (Phillip Yancey)
Brother to a dragonfly (The Contrary Goddess)
"Brother to a dragonfly" (Paul Greenberg)

Kurt Vonnegut and an unexpected tree pose.

One pose amid many.

“I love you, Eliza,” I said.

She thought about it. “No,” she said at last, “I don’t like it.”

“Why not?” I said.

“It’s as though you were pointing a gun at my head,” she said. “It’s just a way of getting somebody to say something they probably don’t mean. What else can I say, or anybody say, but, ‘I love you, too’?”

Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick or Lonesome No More!

Why art is more likely to appear as a drag queen than a mailman.

Art is a true account of the activity of mind. Because consciousness, in Husserl's formulation, is always consciousness of something, art thinks ever of the world, cannot not think of the world, could not turn its back on the world even if it wished to. This does not mean that it's going to be honest as a mailman; it's more likely to appear as a drag queen. The problems I mentioned earlier, as well as others not taken up, enforce complexity. "We do not spend much time in front of a canvas whose intentions are plain," writes Cioran. "Music of a specific character, unquestionable contours, exhausts our patience, the over-explicit poem seems incomprehensible." Flannery O'Connor, an artist of the first rank, famously disliked anything that looked funny on the page, and her distaste has widely been taken as a tough-minded put-down of puerile experimentalism. But did she also dislike anything that looked funny on the wall? If so, a severe deprivation. Art cannot remain in one place. A certain amount of movement, up, down, across, even a gallop toward the past, is a necessary precondition.

An excerpt from "Not Knowing", an essay by Donald Barthelme

I took the last two lines as a morning journal prompt for myself and the Eldest. He ruminated about our trip to Transylvania, and how it connected him with sheep and Dacian history- how wearing his wool vest reminds him of the rhythm of village life.

One quick way you can make the world a better place right now.

I had big plans for the weekend- massive plans involving backpacks, a tent, the King and myself narrowed by the weather to still-grandiose plans involving the kids, the road, and a visit to Newbern. Ultimately, the plans were abandoned, replaced by the surprising deliciousness of my husband's Red Cabbage Borscht and those notebooks covered in meaningful scribbles which I keep hoping, one day, to revise in a manner worthy of publication.

 

On the unexpectedly lovely side, we made it to Sunday morning services early enough to warrant a stroll through the budding trees on campus.

As I sit and sift through dinner preparations tonight, even the day's beauty fails to distract me from the sense that there was something I should have done- a tiny kernel within those well-wrapped plans that might have made a difference in someone's life. It's the demise of our planned visit to the Newbern Public Library, a current project undertaken by Auburn's Rural Studio, that sticks in my mind. 

Image of library vision from Rural Studio tumblr.

So I return to the website, calculating a way to squeeze the roadtrip into our planned activities for the coming week. It is gazing at pictures of the work in progress that leads my eye down to a tiny link reading "Newbern Library Wish List". Lo and behold, the possibility of books we can donate to the kids of Newbern suddenly appears on my screen, accompanied by the following request:

Select the "ADD GIFT" option and indicate your name as book donor and/or to whom you wish to honor with this gift. By purchasing from this list, you are helping to found a library collection for the community of Newbern, Alabama. The library organization is recently formed with an emphasis on children's learning. Thank you for your support!

Is it silly that I felt a flood of happiness as I purchased Iggy Peck, Architect from the Newbern Library wish list? Such a tiny, little action- and the opportunity to acknowledge Mr. Peanut's hospitality- whisked the mislaid plans from my mind and returned my mind to the dinner at hand.

Sometimes those extra-big plans of the monumental kind can be husked to expose the kernel, the tiny little seed of action which made the plans so exciting in the first place. The plans were first formulated because I wanted to pay tribute to the Rural Studio students building this library for the kids of Newbern. At the heart of the hope was the way in which the little people growing up in Newbern are being honored by this project. We couldn't drive to Newbern this weekend. Yet I could help build their book collection by purchasing a book from the library wishlist.

Why put off until tomorrow what we can do today? Have a look at the Newbern Library Wish List and see if there is something simple that you can do today- right now, this very minute- to help build the Newbern Library. Get little people involved by encouraging them to pick which book your family should gift or the wording of the gift message. 

New Year's road-trip: Going through ten different states in ten days.

En route to our mountain vacation, we drove through a total of 10 states. Courtesy of the tourism bureaus in each state, the little folks and I walked away with bags of information about American history, geography, geology, economic development, and culture. 

OUR TEN STATES

Missississippi
Tennessee
Arkansas
Oklahoma
Kansas
Colorado
New Mexico
Texas
Louisiana
Alabama

On the way, the King and I learned a few lessons about long road trips, teachable moments, and the importance of multiple good playlists. The take-homes:

Pee outdoors when possible.
Stopping at established restrooms involves walking through gas stations full of candy and glitter intended to seduce your kids (and you) into forking over a small chunk of change in return for some junk. Also, imagine all the germs and viruses you can avoid by just peeing in the woods with the song of a sparrow to lighten your load. So pack that toilet tissue and vow to find nature-made restrooms on your road trip. By the way, snow isn't a problem. In case you haven't noticed, kids will pee anywhere. It's their adult companions that crave the water wasted by those porcelain thrones we call toilets.

Nature journals.
Whenever we stopped at a rest area or even along a scenic piece of road, Max wandered around with his nature journal and made notes. The King provided the latitude and longitude as Max canvassed a brief area for local birds, trees, plants, grasses, and insects. Then, when we got back into the car, he flipped through his field guides and tried to identify each living thing while journaling them into a context (i.e. climate, geography, etc.).

Geocache kits.
Simple as having an iphone, a compass, and a geocaching log. If you have a signature stamp, bring it along as well. There are geocaches aplenty all over these fine United States. It makes a great excuse to pee in the woods for the more inhibited family members.

Printed maps and colored pencils.
Oh the things you can do with just a few maps and pencils. Encourage the writers to list all the towns they pass through on the map and then turn them into a narrative poem. Show little ones how to draw a blue circle to indicate a lake (and then mark them as you pass) or a red square to indicate a barn or a black dot to indicate a cow. Then let them make their own map adding what they observe along the way.

Read-aloud chapter books.
Long car trips are a great time to read that awesome book to a captive audience. Who needs illustrations when the scenery keeps catching your eye? I shared A Finder's Magic by Phillipa Pearce with the crew, while Max read chapters from the original Winne the Pooh by A. A. Milne aloud to the girls.

Water bottles.
Skip the juice boxes and other sugar-laden laxatives- water is the best possible drink for the road. It saves big folks the frustration of spills, sticky luggage, and endless restroom stops. Kids tend to drink water when they are thirsty, while they will often drink juices to satisfy hunger or a craving for sugar. Keep it simple. Milk at night and water during the day.

Apples and clementines.
Bring along washed apples and seedless clementines. The little folks like to peel their own in our family. As for the apples, what could make a better all-around snack?

Scissors, glue sticks, and white drawing paper.
Using all those fantastic resources procured at each stateside rest area or travel office, cut out pictures of landmarks or places in each state and pass them (along with glue stick and paper) to the little people to make their own state-based collages. Alternately, let them tell stories by cutting their own pictures and pasting them to white paper (reimaged as a blank storyboard). Then, when you make your next stop, tell everyone that he or she has to pick up all the paper scraps around their chair and put them in the trash bag if they wish to "get off the bus", so to speak. Consider cleaning up as a ticket (a get-out-of-van-free-card). 

White cardstock and stamps.
Make your own postcards using glue sticks and travel brochure cut-outs. Let the kids write a message on their creations and then use your iphone to look up addresses. Put on a stamp and drop them off at the next post office box you see. 

Good music and playlists.
There are so many ways to tie the music to the state you are visiting. For example, some cities are mentioned in songs. Travel brochures will mention which musicians hail from their state, so add a few locals to your playlists. Use the songs as segues for discussions about history and culture. Or just find a few favorite sing-alongs. We use Spotify rather than mp3s or ITunes because we can find any song in world and enjoy it without having to "own" it. You can also find lots of stories and songs for kids. 

Poems and inspirations.
Find beautiful words to add to the mix when whimsy is conspicuously lacking. The little people may or may not show interest, but it will probably stir your soul just right. Keep your own journal of impressions and observations. Everything you see becomes part of the story you discover together. 

Discovering Christmas decorating ideas along the Tuscaloosa Tinsel Trail.

Earlier this week, after discovering we were too early for ice skating, the kids, Angie, and I took a stroll down the fantastic Tinsel Trail along the Tuscaloosa Riverwalk. Each tree was sponsored and then decorated by different community businesses, nonprofits, or individuals.

Max found a sign that had fallen over. He quickly picked it up and staked it back in the ground. Because, in his words, "Duh, that's what boys DO, mom." I bit my lip and kept the "ideally" from coming out. One should appreciate the ideal rather than demand it. Or so I've read...

So many trees to see.... There were large, bombastic trees smothered in bows....

Angie strolled along, looking relieved that the ice-skating rink would not give her a chance to skate.

And there were many discoveries and inspirations for our own crafting plans...

1. CD ornaments painted with reindeer scenes.

  

2. Little yarn Dr. Seuss-ish ornaments....

  3. Lovely little critters cut from pinecones and brush....

4. A gauze-wrapped snowman tree.

5. Stockings cut from burlap and decorated with paint and glitter.

6. Candycanes also cut from burlap and painted.

7. Recycled aluminum can ornaments.

8. Aluminum soda can tree people.

9. Classic glitter-dipped pinecones hung with rope.

10. Instruments and horns adding glitter to the tree.

11. Laminated sunshine photos of children at the R.I.S.E. tree.

12. A rope garland lined with bells and pieces of bandana fabric.

13. Hand-painted glass globes with black and red backgrounds.

14. A collection of colorful handprints with glitter decorations.

15. A glue-covered and glitter-dipped CD.

16. A tree covered with toys- this was B.'s "favorite".

17. An Eric Carle inspired butterfly tree-topper.

18. Monopoly money and game pieces as upcycled tree decorations.

Our vote for the wackiest, "cutest" tree- the big mouthed Bama Fan?

As we neared the end of the Trail, Milla found a fellow she deemed intriguing. B. stopped to scope him out. Before I understood what was going down, Micah joined them..

The luckiest faux gingerbread man on the block earned a kiss from three little ladies far sweeter than himself.

We headed back to the spaceship with the words from one advice-giving tree still in our minds- "Peace on earth begins at home". 

"How These Words Happened", a poem by William Stafford.

Fred Shuttlesworth: #2 of my top 25 Alabamians.

2. FRED SHUTTLESWORTH

The boy who became the man known as Fred Shuttlesworth grew up under the rigid system of segregation, which used skin color to determine the value and honor accorded a human being. Segregation served as both a political and an economic way in which to preserve the heavy hierarchies of southern society. Most people fail to question the ugliness of an official policy; once something gains the status of law, the majority tends to comply.

As a high school student in Birmingham, Shuttlesworth complied. Like the vast majority of Alabamians living under segregation, he assumed that segregation was the only possibility, the only way things could be. After getting married in 1941, Shuttlesworth relocated to Mobile where he worked at Brookley air force base. In an interview with Bud and Ruth Schultz, Shuttlesworth described how the initial seed of activism was planted in his mind:

While there, I was encouraged to register to vote by a person in the NAACP who was very outspoken. A few of those people were tolerated. They were called "crazy niggers" or "big, uppity niggers". So long as there weren't too many of them, the system could roll on anyhow. But you had to appreciate those brave people.

Around 1954, the year when the US Supreme Court reversed the Dred Scott decision which legalized segregation, Shuttlesworth was elected Membership Chairman of the NAACP. He remembers the time as one of hope, in which the law of the land suddenly paved a path for equality. In an interview twenty years later, Shuttlesworth looked back on the times:

Well, you must remember that we were two societies. Blacks and whites couldn't play together, couldn't sit together, couldn't go down the street together in 1948 in Birmingham, Alabama. United States Senator, Glenn Taylor was arrested for sitting in a church- the same church with the black children were killed in 1963- with Negroes.

Bull Connor was the epitome of segregation and Bull Connor had a saying, "Blacks and whites are not going to segregate together." A misnomer, but he said it. And even in mass demonstrations he said, "Birmingham may become a dead city, it will never become an integrated city." And when the massive struggle began and somebody went to him and said, "Now, Mr. Connor, this is a law-abiding country…" Connor replied, "Damn the law, down here, I'm the law." 

The year 1956 strengthened his growing resolve. In May 1956, Alabama outlawed the NAACP while Shuttlesworth was still serving in his position as Membership Chairman. Shocked by the popularity and effectiveness of the Montgomery bus boycott, Alabama officials ignored the fact that the NAACP did not start the protest. In their panic, officials thought that outlawing the NAACP would, in Shuttlesworth's words, "kill the drive for freedom". The appetite for equality in a country that called itself "the land of liberty" was not going away. But Shuttlesworth understood that the strategy of the white supremacists would not work:

You can outlaw a movement, but you cannot outlaw the determination in people's minds and hearts to be free. I don't think you can do it. Then, now, anytime. You can keep a man in prison, but... you can't imprison his mind, he has to do that. By accepting the walls, actual or imagined. Freedom is something that I think people will always aspire to. And when you tell people they can't have it, this was... in effect saying, you can't hope.

You can't kill hope in people's minds and therefore we were determined. So it was on this [basis] that the Alabama Christian Movement was organized. ...I was the NAACP Membership Chairman, and, I was holding, I remember a membership meeting when this Sheriff, Deputy Sheriff came in with a roll of paper that looked liked it roll out half the room down to the floor, and he had a pistol with a shiny belt looked like it was the longest belt I'd ever seen.

He said, you're outlawed, you can't do this, you can't do that. And, of course, I didn't accept it, I told him I doubt if you're going to make this stick. And he said, well, you're outlawed. I guess the thing that got me was that people started calling up see, from all over, people saying what can we do, what can we do? Can we send things to New York?

Well, we couldn't collect membership, we couldn't do anything. And the NAACP Board, they were outlawed; our attorney Shores said, well we really can't do anything, we're outlawed. I said, we're going to have to do something. He said, well, you'll be in contempt. I said, well, we have to be in contempt. He said, If you get in jail for contempt, you can't get out. I said, well then, somebody has to go to jail.

Meanwhile, people debated what they could do. A couple of days passed; the debates and strategies continued. Shuttlesworth recalls how a plan finally took shape:

I remember Friday morning, or Saturday morning, I believe it was (before June 5th because we called our first mass meeting on June 5th), I sat up in the bed 3 o'clock in the morning wide awake. That "what shall we do" was just drumming in my conscience. And it looked like to me God or something said to me, you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. I knew then instantaneously, it was God telling me I had to call a mass meeting and get people organized so, I decided that Saturday to call a mass meeting and ask the Negroes if they wanted to organize for freedom.

I knew we'd be in contempt and I expected to get arrested. This was frightening, it hadn't been done in Alabama nor the South - every radio program, TV program, every 15 minutes, Rev. F. L. Shuttlesworth, 3191 North 29th Avenue, telling the Klan where to put the bomb... This went on from Saturday until Tuesday might just say hear Pastor of the Church, 16th Street at that time, was a famous preacher and he was nervous too, so he called me up and told him the Lord told him to tell me to call that meeting off. I wasn't quite as nonviolent then as I am now.

I said to him, "Well, Doctor, when did the Lord start sending my messages to you?" Because I knew he was afraid. That was about uh, 9 o'clock in the evening. But 11:30 that night, I recall it, there was my picture on TV, radio, everything was blaring out Rev. F. L. Shuttlesworth, Negro Minister, 3191 North 29th Avenue, has called a mass meeting, and he called me back at the same time that was on, he said, "Well, I've been praying. The Lord told me to tell you he really wants you to call it off. And I said, "Well, Doctor, I want to be respectful, but you go back and tell the Lord that I think he told me to call it on. And the only reason I'm going to call it off is he'll have to come down himself in person and tell me to call it off. He'll have to bring the identifying marks, his pierced in his side, nail prints in his hands. And so the meeting went on.

At the end of the year, the Ku Klux Klan brought their policy of terrorism closer to the bone. Shuttlesworth explained:

I believe it was the night after Christmas, but on Christmas Night in '56 the Klan set about uh, 16 sticks of dynamite right at the head of my bed, the corner of the church, the corner of the house and I was in the bed at the point of the blast. And this dynamite went off about 9:15. It blew the wall between my head and the dynamite away, it blew the floor out from under my bed, space of I guess, 15 feet. The springs that I was lying on we never found them.

The roof came down, all that dust, the house was about 60 years old, dynamite dust and blast was, smoke, other things were there. This is a strange thing, I knew that the bomb was meant for me, I knew what it was, and instantaneously, at the same time I had a sense of presence that I wouldn't get hurt. I knew that. You can know something you never read. And, I might say to you, at that moment all fear was taken from me. I never feared anything since that time. 

This personal encounter with the Klan's policy of bombing homes and churches did not have it's intended effect. In Birmingham, terrorism against blacks failed to scare them into submission. Shuttlesworth describes how surviving the bomb blast fueled his convictions:

I walked out from this instead of running away from the blast, running away from the Klan, I said to the Klansman police that came, he said, "Reverend, if I were you, I'd get out of town as fast I could." I said, "Officer, you are not me, you go back and tell your Klan brethren that if God could keep me through this, then I'm here for the duration." I think that's what gave people the feeling that I wouldn't run, I didn't run, and that God had to be there.

The NAACP board wanted Shuttlesworth to pause, pull back, and lay low as they dealt with the KKK bomb's implication for the movement strategy. But Shuttlesworth insisted on continuing with the plans for the Birmingham desegregated bus rides. "There's nothing to think out," he told them. "We said we're going to ride and we ride- we do what we say for a change."  So they rode the buses and over 250 people got arrested.

And so Shuttlesworth traded the fripperies of a middle-class life for the mold and mausoleum of the American jail. It was to be a common station in the journey of many civil rights activists. His activism resulted in his May 1961 arrest for a Freedom Riders protest (along with reverends William Sloane Coffin, Ralph Abernathy, and Wyatt Tee Walker). Shuttlesworth’s mug shot from that arrest is seen above, thanks to The Smoking Gun.

Among his many accomplishments, Shuttlesworth helped organize the 1965 voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, which ended in the notorious bloody confrontation on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. The notoriety comes from the horror and tragedy of this event, which made it impossible to continue doubting whether institutionalized white power was, indeed, a "harmless" affair.

Civil Rights Movement veteran Charlie Cobb recalls Shuttlesworth's courage and determination:

Shuttlesworth was not some smooth city guy. He had been raised in Alabama's backwoods and had been convicted of running his family's whiskey still in 1941. He'd been a truck driver and cement worker before becoming a Baptist preacher.

Although Shuttlesworth's bravery was already legendary, my generation of activists' first meaningful contact with him happened during the 1961 Freedom Rides. He tracked the Klan and informed CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality) of its violent plans. After Klansmen in Birmingham beat Freedom Rider Jim Peck into unconsciousness, Shuttlesworth boldly walked into the bus station and carried him to a hospital. Two days later in Montgomery, as hundreds of Klansmen surrounded the church of King colleague Ralph Abernathy, where Freedom Riders and local supporters were gathered, Shuttlesworth conducted CORE Director Jim Farmer through the mob into the church.

During his lifetime Shuttlesworth survived two bombings, dozens of arrests, and a number of police beatings that left him hospitalized. He brought many law-abiding, middle class blacks into the movement through his establishment of the Alabama Christian Movement for Civil Rights. 

His participation and leadership during the march from Selma to Montgomery helped lead to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Shuttlesworth’s participation in St. Augustine during their violent Civil Rights marches and Beach wade-ins helped lead to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  

Teaching the next generation

An extensive collection of Shuttlesworth's speeches and letters is housed at the Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham. It is a must-see for families and homeschoolers in Alabama. You can also make use of this printable I created for Max about Shuttlesworth. It includes a primary source analysis activity based on a telegram from Martin Luther King Jr. to Shuttlesworth.

Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth: Amazing Alabamians (PDF)

Other resources

Shuttlesworth archives (The King Center)
Shuttlesworth Humanitarian Award
 "The world is my pulpit" (A video interview with Fred Shuttlesworth)
Interview circa 1985 with Fred Shuttlesworth (Eyes on the Prize)
Shuttlesworth as remembered by others (Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement)
Gov. Bentley's remarks at Shuttlesworth's homegoing ceremony (Office of the Governor)
"Rep. Lewis gives a fiery tribute at Shuttlesworth funeral" (The Raw Story)
Dan Warren and Fred Shuttlesworth obits (The Economist)

25 extraordinary people from Alabama for whom I am thankful this Thanksgiving.

The first of 25 extraordinary people from Alabama who made a difference

I am thankful for people who give chunks of their lives out of love and concern for others. In creating this list, I aimed to skip over the sentimental, day-to-day thanks and head straight for the gray matter. Forgive my lack of attention to formal titles- none of these people would be any less significant without added titles and degrees. Their contributions surpass any professional accomplishments to which they may lay claim.

These twenty-five exquisite human beings inspired me, educated me, and gave me the courage to do more than aim for the perfect lawn or household appliances.

In no particular order, here's the first of my twenty-five extraordinary people of Alabama.... The remainder will follow in the coming weeks as I look over the past year and make plans for the year that lies ahead.

1. FAYA ORA ROSE TOURE

Faya Ora Rose Touré is a Harvard-educated Civil Rights activist and litigation attorney who has worked on some of the highest-profile civil rights cases to come before the courts. Touré—who spent most of her career as Rose Sanders until she decided to step away from her "slave name" in 2003—was the first African-American female judge in Alabama and was part of the winning legal team in Pigford vs. Veneman, the largest civil rights case in history. This case led to the payment of a billion dollars in damages to black farmers by the U. S. Department of Agriculture. In addition, Touré is founder of the National Voting Rights Museum in Selma, Alabama, and a founding partner in the law firm of Chestnut, Sanders, Sanders, Pettaway & Campbell, LLC. She uses her many talents to further her message and is a prolific songwriter and playwright, as well as the host of a weekly radio show, Faya's Fire.

Touré was born Rose M. Gaines on May 20, 1945, in Salisbury, North Carolina. Her parents, the Rev. D. A. Gaines and Ora Lee Gaines, taught their six children to conserve so they would have something in life to give back to their community. Training the children by word and deed, Rev. Gaines didn't always adhere to protocol, but he got the job done. "He was a trained minister who didn't always fit the image of what society expected," Touré said in an interview with Contemporary Black Biography (CBB). She notes similar traits in her own personality. Touré has the courage to follow her own drumbeat. She speaks frankly on controversial matters of race, injustice, and education, but said in her CBB interview, "I'm not fearless. I just won't let others define me."

Here mother Ora Lee's ways have rubbed off on Touré as well. For 30 years Ora Lee's strength and support helped Touré run the McRae Learning Center, a private community school Touré founded in 1976 to raise children's reading levels. "My mother made the greatest contribution to that school as she traveled back and forth from Birmingham for over 30 years," Touré told CBB. "People always approach me to say how much my mother's work helped their kids. We had them reading at 3 and 4 years old. Many were starting in the 27th percentile. We raised the level to the 74th percentile. We know the kids' greatness. I'd like to see other schools around the country do the same. That's the challenge."

Touré's community work began at an early age when she organized kids in the neighborhood. Through her teens, however, she remained unsure about what she wanted to do with her life. After graduation from George Clem High School in 1962 she entered Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, graduating Summa Cum Laude in 1966. Still unsure where her career path would take her, she completed a law degree at Harvard in 1969 and was awarded the Herbert Smith Fellowship. That led to an assignment the following year at the National Welfare Rights Organization and the Columbia Center on Social Welfare Policy and Law. In 1971 she worked briefly for the Legal Services Corporation, and opened the law firm of Chestnut, Sanders, Sanders, Pettaway & Campbell, LLC the following year along with her husband, Alabama State Senator Henry Sanders. In 1973 Touré became the first African-American female judge in Alabama, serving as municipal judge until 1977. In 1982 Touré was hired by the Emergency Land Fund for the Department of the Agriculture to conduct a study of black land tenure and document land loss by African Americans.

Through the years Touré's legal skills led her to several major cases. In one important case she teamed with noted attorney Johnnie Cochran to seek reparations from corporations who profited from slavery. Seeking academic reparations for African-American students for what she calls "400 years of miseducation and discrimination" is one of Touré's latest projects. She is also preparing a case on behalf of black women who suffered sexual abuse during slavery. It challenges current laws that, Touré said, "do not offer equal justice from sexual assaults and misconduct towards black women." 

Touré's day job never kept her away from her extensive community work. In 1982 she co-founded the Black Belt Arts and Cultural Center, an arts-based community organizing group. She founded the National Voting Rights Museum in 1993 to tell the story of the Voting Rights Movement and founded the Bridge Crossing Jubilee in 1965 to commemorate the Selma-to-Montgomery Civil Rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. She co-founded the Coalition of Alabamians Reforming Education (C.A.R.E.) in 1993. In the 1990s Touré spearheaded a movement against the practice of "tracking" in Selma public schools, a controversial system that can limit education and career opportunities. Touré founded the 21st Century Youth Leadership Movement in 1985. The group educates young people about the political process and encourages their involvement. It has chapters around the United States and in Mali and Senegal, West Africa.

Mothers of Many (MOMS), a group Touré founded for low-income women, has opened three businesses under Touré's direction. Touré founded the Replacing Inequities in School with Excellence Network (R.I.S.E.). Their mission is to fight the practice of tracking and work for better education nationwide. She co-founded the Africans in America Renaissance Project. The organization provides land for purchase and development by African Americans in South Africa. Touré also founded MAAT Leadership High, an all-male school.(Source)

Faya Rose Toure spent this past Tuesday night in an Alabama jail for trying to speak out against the city of Selma's decision to donate land for a monument to General Nathan Bedford Forrest. 

After losing the Battle of Selma, Forrest returned to Tennessee and resumed his successful business activities. Along the way he also helped to organize the Ku Klux Klan. Members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans view Forrest as a hero of the first order, a brave leader known as the "Wizard of the Saddle." Critics say "wizard" was an apt description, as in Grand Wizard of the Klan.

For those unsure of what the Bedford monument represents, Occidental Dissident speaks fairly clearly for his supporters. Responding to Toure and others, he says that "Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest is best remembered for the manner in which he dealt with the Black Undertow". He elaborates: 

How would the real Nathan Bedford Forrest have dealt with the likes of Al Sharpton and Faya Rose Toure? Would he have responded to such an insult like Connie Chastain or the Virginia Flaggers in Richmond? White Southerners can learn a lot from Nathan Bedford Forrest. Foremost among these lessons is how we should have responded to Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement.

Note: If there had been more Nathan Bedford Forrests and fewer Connie Chastains in the last generation, Selma wouldn’t be an uninhabitable Black Undertow city today.

The loss of this bronze bust of Forrest is less important than the loss of Selma, Dallas County, and the whole Black Belt region to White people, not to mention Birmingham, because MLK succeeded in getting the Voting Rights Act shoved down our throats.

It's hard not to cringe when I read this. In the same way that the statues of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu were offensive to Romanians that lost friends, family, and hope under his totalitarian regime, a monument to Gen. Forrest should not be housed in a public space. If a man wants to build a monument to a person who used his power and authority to oppress other human beings, he should do so in the privacy of his own home or backyard. No one should be forced to participate in this particular fetishization of historic nastiness.

After the revolutions of 1989, Romanians removed all monuments to Ceausescu. Residents of Selma should ensure that no monuments to vulgar racists are funded and erected in the first place.

 

The spirit of Selma is alive in efforts to keep the KKK from being honored in local history.

Faya is married to Alabama State Sen. Hank Sanders. When she's not being arrested by hyperactive local police, Faya serves as the co-founder and chair of the Direct Action Committee of Saving Ourselves (S.O.S.), a Movement of 32 organizations for Justice and Democracy.

Her lack of complacency serves as a reminder that we must insist on our dignity as human beings first and foremost- that we cannot rely on our elected officials to do the daily ethics for us. Alabama is a better place as a result of this woman who refuses to take complacency- "That's just the way things, are honey... You can't change the world"- for a serious answer. You can, of course, sign this petition against the erection of a disgraceful monument in Selma. 

More to explore

C.A.R.E. 
Faya speaks to Selma City Council (Video and news report)
Article on "Moral Mondays" and Toure (Greene County Democrat)
"An African American Manifesto on Education" (Faya Toure)
"An Opinion on the Death Penalty" (Faya Toure)
"View from Selma: Can Obama Debate Be Colorblind?" (NPR)

Just a thought... stolen from Wendell Berry.

It's our journaling prompt for the day, and it set me to thinking. What moments in your life have illustrated Wendell's thought?

OUR KOINONIA EXPERIENCE: A sense of place.

Days long past at Koinonia.

The spiritual kinship between Clarence Jordan and Wendell Berry is hard to escape. Both put a tremendous amount of stock in the importance of community and the beauty (not just the duty) of sacrifice. There were many moments when Wendell's words came to mind as I watched Koinonians share their concerns about the year's pecan harvest and the challenges of shared burdens. 

One of the interns left her book on the outdoor table at Jubilee House....

I am reminded of the poem, "Healing", which Wendell published in a book of essays called What Are People For?. A poignant excerpt:

Good work finds the way between pride and despair.

It graces with health. It heals with grace.

It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.

By it, we lose loneliness:

we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us;

we enter the little circle of each other's arms,

and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,

and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.

Micah before one of the pecan orchards.

This commitment to living for and with others- living alongside nature in a mutually sustaining relationship with humans and creatures- is how a sense of "place" is created and cultivated. As pilgrims to an established place, we pay homage to it through awareness and respect. It is not our "place"- not unless we agree to give up our current lives and accept this shared responsibility- but it is a place we deeply admire. A place that has changed the way we feel the blood rush through our veins. A place that brings to life (and brings into life) many of the ideas that have changed our hearts and minds over the years. 

OUR KOINONIA EXPERIENCE: The arrival and introduction.

What we saw when woke up at Koinonia Farms and the dew soaked our shoes.

A few weeks ago, we took a little trip that may have changed our lives. The kids and I drove down to Americus, Georgia in search of Koinonia Farm, an intentional Christian community started by Clarence Jordan way back in the 1940's. We didn't know what to expect of the experience- only that it had been on my list of hopes for a long time and calendars finally cleared to make it possible.

Since the king had to keep up appearances of having a "real job" during the week, he remained in Tuscaloosa then drove down on Friday and joined us for the weekend. This left me and the munchkin-heads driving alone at night along the winding backroads of Georgia looking for a tiny slice of history that managed to live its way into the present.

Koinonia first came to my attention a few years ago while planning and preparing the Local History Workshop for homeschoolers. Trying to find local notables for the kids to "reenact" at the final gathering, I discovered that Millard and Linda Fuller, founders of Habitat for Humanity, once lived in Tuscaloosa before they sold their fancy lives and moved to Koinonia in search of meaning over money.

Millard Fuller's relationship with a former Baptist preacher by the name of Clarence Jordan played a significant role in the founding of Habitat. I caught a whiff of tantalizing details. The skeleton of story never left my mind, though the flesh of it needed filling. I vowed to learn more about this Baptist pacifist preacher who managed to anger ever respectable, success-craving social group in the town of Americus. 

Finally, I learned.... through immersion. For almost a week, we wandered around Koinonia, chatting with members, interns, and volunteers, as well as reading every book I could find on the topic. When we weren't gobbling down cinnamon pecans, we were asking questions and devouring answers. I wanted to understand why Clarence founded a separate community rather than work within the existing nearby town of Americus. I needed to see what sharing meant apart from cliches and abstractions. The kids, of course, spent the week roamschooling the history of civil rights movement and life on a permaculture-based farm. 

In the early 1940's, Clarence and his wife Florence Jordan set about to change their world alongside Martin England and his wife, two missionaries with a similar frame of reference.  The Jordans and the Englands established Koinonia Farm as a communal, interracial farming community. Their model came from the verses of Acts 2:43-47 and Acts 4:32-36. The two couples envisioned a community whose members would eat and work together, sharing their property, their labor and their lives. The act of breaking bread together- communion- took on a special significance as they sought to develop a racially-integrated community based on love and fellowship. Soon, Sumter County residents began to criticize Koinonia residents for having been conscientious objectors during World War II. 

From where we stand, it's hard to grasp how radical Koinonia seemed to its fellow Georgians. At its founding, the civil rights movement hadn't yet gained a threshold. For the first decade after 1942, Koinonia grew slowly. The hard work of racial reconciliation and building trust with local black neighbors took a fair share of time. After all, a black man or woman invited to share a meal with a white man or woman back in those days had every reason to suspect a ruse. Segregation was enforced through social conventions and norms- the force of the law wasn't needed to keep whites from forming intimate, true relationships with blacks. But the Jordans and the Englands keep sowing their tiny seeds, nurturing buds where they blossomed and tending to the growing network of human beings in what was becoming a special part of "the beloved community".

Soon, select Sumter County residents began to criticize Koinonia residents for having been conscientious objectors during World War II. In 1950, the Rehobeth Baptist Church, the place of worship for most members of Koinonia, voted to remove the names of six Koinonians from its membership roll because church members believed that the Koinonians were trying to integrate the church. The "integration" in question occurred when the Jordans brought a visiting Indian Hindu friend along to observe worship services. Perhaps having had so little exposure to members of other races led the church elders to confuse an Indian with a black American. 

Meanwhile, in nearby Americus, the Ku Klux Klan was enjoying a cultural renaissance among the middle classes. For professionals and hoighty-toighty types, the formation of the national White Citizens' Council in 1954 proved a boon. With the WCC, local segregationists and racists found a vehicle to act as a political and economic lobby for their darkest sentiments while maintaining their positions of leadership as Rotarians and citizens. Unlike the KKK, the WCC rejected violent tactics to maintain segregation. In the place of cross-burnings, Council members used economic boycotts and social stigmatization to maintain white privilege in towns across the South. 

By 1956, Koinonia had 65 members, 15 of which were black. For the first decade, Koinonians managed live without much interest from the town of Americus. By the 1950's, however, the rising power of the WCC and the beginning of the civil rights movement drew unwanted attention. A persistent campaign of drive-by shootings, bombings and other forms of terrorism and violence began. The work of farming was complicated by the daily fear of reprisal. Koinonia members worried about attacks on their children. 

In 1956, Clarence's unsuccessful endorsement of the applications of two African Americans to Georgia State University in Atlanta precipitated two years of vandalism, legal investigations, and violence, as well as a decade of economic boycott against Koinonia Farm. The successful farming enterprise halted. 

Always on the look-out for a way in which to "serve" their fellow man, the Klan bombed Koinonia's little roadside nut stand. Undeterred, the group rebuilt the stand only to have it blown up again. Having gotten the message, Koinonia switched to selling nuts by mail order, with the slogan: "Help us ship the nuts out of Georgia!" Thus Koinonians adapted by developing a mail-order pecan business, which depended on purchases from people across the United States who had learned of Koinonia's plight from the national news media.

According to Cotton Patch for the Kingdom by Anne Louse Coble, a band of men from the popular Ku Klux Klan showed up one night with some news for the Jordans and the Englands. "We understand you been taking your meals with the nigger," said their spokesman, "and we're here to tell you we don't allow the sun to set on anybody who eats with niggers."

Clarence couldn't resist. With a smile, he turned to the KKK spokesman and replied:

"I'm a Baptist preacher and I just graduated from the Southern Baptist Seminary. I've heard about people who had power over the sun, but I never hoped to meet one."

The Klansmen, one of whom had a Baptist preacher for a father, understood that Koinonia would be a thorn in the side of their attempts to keep Americus (and America) "racially pure" through segregation. Maybe the only thing Clarence could have done to further infuriate them would have been to start whistling "Jesus Loves the Little Children", a Baptist Sunday School staple. 

It was these little things, like the lyrics of "Jesus Loves the Little Children", alongside obvious big things, like Clarence's understanding of the New Testament after earning his doctorate in Greek, that made it impossible for him to play by the rules of his culture. And it was his unabiding commitment to love and fellowship that drew pilgrims and wanderers from all around the world to this small farm somewhere in Georgia. I found myself comforted at being just another pilgrim in a long line of names and faces drawn by the dream Clarence left behind.

Jubilee House, where we spent our days and nights in a cozy suite complete with kitchen and all the settings. 

We arrived around 8 or 9 p.m. with restless little people and their excited, nervous mother. A young intern greeted me- there was a group of five or six reading aloud and chatting on the front porch of the Jubilee House when we arrived- and showed me to our apartment. A big part of me wanted to go jump into a chair and chat with the interns, learn their stories, but the other part of me knew the singing and dancing that follows me wherever I go might be disruptive. It was a peaceful scene- and we four were sounding anything but peaceful.

Koinonia was the birthplace of so many amazing social projects and nonprofits, including Habitat for Humanity, Jubilee Partners, Prison Jail Project, and Fuller Center for Housing, among others. I found myself wondering if those conversations had taken place around the table at Jubilee House. Walking through history demands the ability to inhabit the mystery of "place"- to see how even a wobbly nightstand offers signficance and inspiration. We whispered and hugged, happy to begin another adventure, this one in place imbued with unseen wonders and whys.

 

 Max explores the playground castle across from Jubilee House.

So we settled into our apartment, slipped on some pajamas, and then ventured out the back door to sit in a field and stare at the amazing moon and her sister stars covering every square inch of the sky. Milla marveled over "all those stars" while Max and Micah invented new constellations from the myriad of twinkles. 

The sign above the screened-in porch.

The easiest way to keep up with the latest at Koinonia is through the Facebook page. If you are in the Americus area this weekend, Koinonia is co-hosting an event with Tree of Life, an interfaith group that seeks to provide conferences and educational opportunities to help make this a more just and peaceful world in which to live. Four Koinonians traveled into the Holy Lands with Tree of Life- and they will share what they learned in their peacemaking efforts. Contact information is available at the FB link.

Stay tuned for the next installment of our Koinonia experience....

Revisiting France with Thomas Merton.

"A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire."

Thomas Merton

When I was a young lass, my father took a sabbatical to teach in Nancy, France. Carla and I went along with him and I studied in a French school for the first semester of 7th grade. It was the longest time I'd lived without the sweet Tresor-scented aura of my mom nearby.

From what I remember, 7th grade was the year when all my Catholic school friends started "dating" and tight-rolling their jeans. I was a little bit of a wierdo- the kid who wasn't allowed to watch "Saved By the Bell" or to shave her legs, the one whose mother laughed when she mentioned getting a "perm"- "You don't need all those chemicals in your hair, Alina!"

In a sense, I escaped the pressures of 7th grade girldom in the States and found a whole new world. In this new world, everything you had to do as an American preteen made no sense. My experience with cultural relativity did so much to ease my transition into the teenage years. All those imperatives assumed their proper space within a particular locality and culture. Peer pressure lost its rub on me. 

And my Tuscaloosa friends could not hide their concern when I returned wearing straight-leg jeans and having "grown out" my bangs. The good news is that I found better ways to relate to my friends that by wasting hours "styling our bangs" together. Rather than love them for the way they fit the mold, I was free to love them for the ways in which they were themselves, young girls on the cusp of womanhood with inarticulable dreams and a soft spot for star-filled skies.

My 7th grade class at Lycee Frederic Chopin, where I learned more red-letter words than my parents knew existed in the French language. It was a baptism of fire for me in my puffy red down coat. 

I loved to chew on these anise-flavored twigs for days at a time. I think we were driving through Lorraine on our way to Domremy-la-Poucelle in this photo when the most beautiful storm belly-danced around us. 

Every weekend, we climbed into our car and visited another tiny village. The intensity and rich backdrops of history absorbed me completely. I would just sit with my Walkman and gaze at the amazing stories unfolding around me. It still gives me chills to remember those days and that effervescence that tied me to the soil while leaving me somehow floating above it.

In a park munching on baguettes with Carla and her friends.

Given the sensual awakening of my first love affair with a land, I wasn't surprised to feel a tad of Franc-envie while reading Thomas Merton's The Seven Story Mountain this morning. When ennui sets in, Merton reminds me that "the biggest human tempation is too settle for too little". To settle for marriage without love. To settle for faith without awe. To settle for life without living.

Merton describes his impressions of Cazals, a small village which even today has an estimated population of 160 people. His description captures certain shades of the meaning invoked by the daily wonder we discover when refusing to settle for commercial voyeurism and, rather, delve deeply into the heart and flesh of human culture.

It was an old, old town. Its history went back to the Roman days- which were the times of the martyred saint, its patron. Antoninus had brought Christianity to the Roman colony in this valley, and later he had been martyred in another place, Pamiers, down in the foothills of the Pyrenees, near Prades, where I was born....

The town itself was a labyrinth of narrow streets, lined by old thirteenth century houses, mostly falling into ruin...

Everywhere I went, I was forced, by the disposition of everything around me, to be always at least virtually conscious of the church. Every street pointed more or less inward to the center of the town, to the church... The church has been fitted into the landscape in such a way as to become the keystone of its intelligibility. Its presence imparted a special form, a particular significance to everything else that the eye beheld, to the hills, the forests, the fields, the white cliff of the Rocher d'Anglars and to the red bastion of the Roc Rouge, to the winding river and the green valley.... and the significance thus imparted was a supernatural one.

The whole landscape, unified by the church and its heavenward spire, seemed to say: this is the meaning of all created things: we have been made for no other purpose than that men may use us in raising themselves to God, and in proclaiming the glory of God. We have been fashioned, in all our perfection, each according to his own nature, and all our natures ordered and harmonized together, that man's reason and his love might fit in this one last element, this God-given key to the meaning of the whole world.

And this is exactly how I remember feeling when driving through the French countryside, unassaulted by billboards of girls in bikinis promising that I could look like them if I purchased some product meant to distract me from that trembling little spirit within- the only real and eternal part of me. My parents did more to nourish my heart and soul with these experiences than all the Sunday School sessions in the world combined. By drawing my attention and imagination to history and the varieties of cultural experience, they freed me from an allegiance to "looking good" or "being cool". It's all temporal anyway...

Now, in the present, looking backwards, I wonder how to share this lesson or experience with my children who have been raised in the culture of affluence..... As I plod along, don't be surprised if you find more Merton in the coming days. And don't be too reticent too share how you have found ways to connect your children to the beauty of the eternal in everyday life.

A visit to the Alabama Rural Heritage Center.

 

En route to the beach, we bit back into our royal plan of making a pilgrimage to every Rural Studio construction in the state.  So we stopped and spent some time exploring the Alabama Rural Heritage Center in the tiny town of Thomaston. The wide open spaces combine with ingenious construction innovations to produce the effect that made Rural Studio so famous.

The kids explore the handmade local wares.

Unlike other schools of architecture, the Rural Studio celebrates the story which emerges from every single design and construction. In many cases, the designers create a website which reveals the plans and charts the journey through the project. The ARHC building's story, like the audacity of those who first dared to dream it, is preserved eternally at the project website. 

In August of 2003, the Alabama Rural Heritage Foundation, and the Rural Studio of Auburn University began a partnership helped along by a $400,000 grant from HUD with the intent of helping to stimulate economic development in the community of Thomaston. Using less than half of this grant money, five determined Auburn students in the Rural Studio Program, Abbey Barnett, Melissa Harold, Paul Kardous, Nathan Makemson, and Robert White, embarked on a thesis project to design and construct the Alabama Rural Heritage Center (ARHC).

Free experimental beams made from recycled, compacted trash.

Rather than starting from scratch, the students renovated the Home Economics building of the old Marengo County High School and constructed a new 5,000 square-foot addition which includes a gift shop, commercial kitchen, packaging room, and vegetable cleaning/processing area. A separate grant allowed the students to add an outdoor pavilion/deck intended for use by the community.

True to the Sambo's building philosophy, the students' construction process made use of experimental and eco-minded materials, including the free "trash beams" pictured above. 

On April 9, 2005, The Alabama Rural Heritage Foundation celebrated the grand-opening of the new Alabama Rural Heritage Center. 

Max concurred with the ingenuity of offering free meteorites to little people. Each of the kids selected at least two "Alabama meteorites" with accompanying brochure. I crossed my fingers quietly, hoping that the idea for a "meteorite fight" would not leak from my brain to theirs.

The sense of community is enhanced by the prodiguous pamphlets, signs, and cards announcing the work and support of local artists, artisans, and nonprofit centers. Deeply-rooted communities tend to be those that engage us at multiple levels- from our individual preferences and affinities to our group identities and social concerns. 

The gift shop overflowed with the with the creations of local artists, artisans, and traditional crafters. Since many creators leave a business card next to their creations, it's more like a gallery of local creatives than it is a gift shop. The gourmet Mama Nem's Red Pepper Jelly is made and sold in-house.

Local historian and advocate Foster Dickinson collaborated with Nancy Anderson to birth a book/curriculum guide which is now on my wish-list, Treasuring Alabama's Black Belt: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Teaching Place. If you can't find it in stores, I'm sure ARHC wouldn't mind maling a copy in exchange for a phone call and little mullah. 

Hours of operation for the gift ship are Thurday and Friday from 10 am to 4 pm and Saturdays from 10 am to 1 pm.  You can also make purchases by email (ruralher@frontiernet.net) or by placing a call to 334-627-3388. The kitchen and dining area are still available for rent if you're seeking a special place to host an event in Alabama. 

The kind lady who eagerly answered all my questions at the gift shop (and who even went so far as to compliment me on my "well-behaved children") explained a little project she had started on the back wall of the old school. This project, the Kid's Korner, featured art for sale by young Alabama kids who donate their creations as a fundraiser for the Center.

When she said the project "wasn't going as well as she had hoped", I had a feeling we'd be mailing some art donations from the Coryell Castle before the tomatoes got fat enough to fall from the vines. If you live locally and find yourself staring at that same "feeling", just write a short note about the artists, scoop up the art, and mail the whole cornucopia to Rural Heritage and Gift Shop, 133 Sixth Avenue, Thomaston, AL 36783.

Otherwise, scurry over to their Facebook page to learn more about upcoming events and opportunities.

Smitten with flower press.

I found a charming little flower press on sale at Barnes and Noble and decided it was absolutely necessary for our learning this summer. It's unusual for me to be enchanted or inspired by a brand, but if it happens, it tends to be French brand. In this case, Moulin Roty.

Even the cardboard box is too lovely to toss....

The history of Moulin Roty began in 1972 when a group of 20 odd friends were searching for a common project that would provide both income and way of life. In the small French village of Moulin Roty, the friends decided to purchase an old mill that has fallen into ruins. They renovated the mill bit by bit so that their families could move in and live there together as a commune. The adventure began with screen printing and craft items (lamps, jewellery, decorative items . . . ) and ended with a worldwide commune brand. 

In 1980, Moulin Roty opened its doors as an official Cooperative (SCOP) in order to "ensure the development and the durability of the company". This status helps board members conserve the founding values of the brand : solidarity, sharing and respect. The French cooperative movement offers much to emulate and inspire its American counterpart.

Then, in 1988, a fire destroyed the entire workshop at the old mill.  The designs, stock, files and machines were completely lost. Moulin Roty moved to Nort sur Erdre, 15 kilometres away and decided to begin from scratch. This new start also gave added importance to the design and sales aspects of the company. The latter kept its status as a cooperative but became a public limited company (SA) in 1991.

In 1996, a Hungarian-Romanian gentleman by the name of Arpad Kovacs got involved in the creative aspect of Moulin Roty. He designs the large majority of their wooden games and toys thanks to the company he founded in his native village in Romania. The company offers work to 150 families and possesses unique know-how that has long been forgotten in France, especially with regards to wood and wicker.

In 2000, the first subsidiary in Great Britain is created and a strong web presence for Moulin Roty emerges.

And just to think that the Moulin Roty Botanist Set is 72 dollars worth of beautiful... We'll just have to use that cardboard box to make our own... In the meantime, even the coloring pages delight us.

Right-click to open full-size printable.

Exploring world culture for kids.

Yesterday, our family story, "The day the sheep came home in Transylvania", was posted as part of MamaSmiles' awesome World Culture for Kids series. There are some great photos of this unique cultural event, as well as follow-up links to learn more about life and culture in Transylvania.

If you haven't read it or seen it, please go take a peek. It was written in a way that makes a great family read-aloud, and our photos are sure to make you smile (especially the one of Max hitching a ride in a wagon). Quick, go see! And thanks to MaryAnne for putting together such a great educational resource!

"I Remember, I Remember" by Mary Ruefle.

Excerpts from "I Remember, I Remember"

I remember in high school there was a girl named Lizette. She had black hair and a very pale face and because her mother was French she was an outsider and to make matters worse she was not the best student but was awfully good at art and took all the art classes and we worked on the literary magazine together and I liked her very much but I was afraid to be her friend because after all she was strange and I think I was jealous of her strangeness at the same time as I was afraid of it, and when we were together we read our poems out loud to each other, and in this way, through poetry, it was always safe to communicate.

I remember (much later) wondering what ever happened to Lizette.

I remember another friend in high school whose mother was an artist and their house was full of statues—the Buddha and nymphs—and the furniture looked like it was hundreds of years old and there were paintings on the wall and her mother had a separate apartment called a studio and in it were figures of clay on pedestals and in one corner an old hand-cranked Gramophone and I liked being in there but it was kinda scary too, it seemed forbidden in some way I couldn’t figure out; art was scary, strange, forbidden, and the really confusing part was I wanted it and needed it.

I remember one afternoon my friend and I were in the studio and all the clay figures on pedestals were draped with white sheets and my friend told me her mother did that when she didn’t want to look at them anymore and I was totally confused. 

I remember standing in a field in Switzerland at dusk, surrounded by cows with bells around their necks, and reading John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” out loud from an open book I was holding in my hands, and I started to weep—weep is a better word for it than cry—and I remember the tears slowly streaming down my face, it was that beautiful to me, and I loved poetry that much. I was eighteen.

I remember (later) thinking that it was actually hilarious that I used to read poetry to cows, that they were an integral part of my most serious moment.
...............

I remember, two years later, reading Three Poems on a grassy slope while across the road three men put a new roof on an old house, and I was in love with one of them. I could watch the men working as I read. I remember that everything I was reading was everything that was happening across the way—I would read a little, then look up, read a little, then look up, and I was blown apart by the feeling this little book was about my life at that moment, exactly as I was living it. I remember loving the book, and that it was one of the memorable reading experiences of my life.

I remember reading Rilke’s Duino Elegies again and again and again, until I “got” them, until something burst over me like a flood, and I remember, once again, weeping and weeping with a book in my hands.
....................

I remember that I did not always know authors were ordinary people living ordinary lives, and that an ordinary life was an obscure life, if we can extend the meaning ofobscure to mean covered up by dailiness, glorious dailiness, shameful dailiness, dailiness that is difficult to figure out, that is not always clear until a long time afterward. Obscure: not readily noticed, easily understood, or clearly expressed. Which is a pretty good definition of life.

I remember, I remember the house where I was born.

I remember driving by the hospital where I was born and glancing at it—I was in a car going sixty miles an hour—and feeling a fleeting twinge of specialness after which I had no choice but to let it go and get over it, at sixty miles an hour.

I remember I was a child, and when I grew up I was a poet. It all happened at sixty miles an hour and on days when the clock stopped and all of humanity fit into a little chapel, into a pinecone, a shot of ouzo, a snail’s shell, a piece of soggy rye on the pavement.

-------------

I remember, on the first Tuesday of every year, that I became a poet for a single, simple reason: I liked making similes for the moon. And when things get tough and complicated and threaten to drown me in their innuendoes, I come back to this clear, simple, and elemental fact, out of all facts the one most like the moon itself. O night, sleep, death and the stars!

I remember the moon was covered with dust and I used my finger to write clean meon its surface, and my finger was ever after covered with a fine gray blanket, as when you pull lint from the dryer.

I remember more than I can tell. 

I remember heaven.

I remember hell.

I can't get enough of poet and essayist Mary Ruefle these days. You can read the entire "article"/poem here. For more of her word-loving ways, pick up a copy of Madness, Rack, and Honey. It will soon become your favorite book, an anthem of sorts for growing, living, and loving.

The perfect day that made no promise.

It didn't have to be a perfect day.

One might even say that I began the day by jinxing it. We drove to Alabaster for an herb co-op only to discover that I had mixed up the times. Suddenly, we had three hours to kill in a town sixty miles from home. 

Though I always forget to bring along food, drinks, diapers, and all the necessaries, I never forget to bring a book just in case the right meadow should present itself.

Today, I found Ruth Sawyer's The Way of the Storyteller tucked in my backpack, using the space normally taken by the baby wipes.

Perhaps I needed Ruth more than baby wipes today. Her words reminded me of my own blind spots- the way in which I use stories to "teach" rather than tell, to train rather than liberate, to "educate" rather than elucidate the intangible shaded areas of human existence. Though her book is intended to reframe storytelling as a folk art, Ruth clears many cobwebs along the way. So I sat in the grass, reading Ruth, peeling clementines, and watching the little people turn rusted old pipes into balance beams.

"Storytelling is not for remedial purpose or for training. It is not a mechanical process to be made easy and pleasant. It is not a means of presenting limited material to the minds of children. It is an art demanding the utmost of your capacity and mine for living and understanding ; it us dependent upon our power of creation; it asks for integrity, trust, and vision."

We see different things. They see a perfect line to follow like a thread. Maybe they see something small enough to master.

I see a tunnel running underneath their little feet- a subterranean world with its own songs and arguments, a passage beneath our habitual empiricism, a possibility whose darkness symbolizes comfort rather than cruelty. 

"I think stories must be acquired by long contemplation, by bringing the imagination to work, constantly, intelligently, upon them. And finally by that power to blow the breath of life into them. And the method? That of learning incident by incident, or picture by picture. Never word by word."

"Here is a sad paradox: those musical instruments invented on the pattern of the human body, and stringed to produce the most sublime qualities of the human voice, have so far outdistanced us in resonance and beauty of tone that now we turn to them to get the quality we would like to hear in our own voices." 

The story changes every time I try to touch it with a word- maybe the light didn't hover so much as it haunted, or the shadows moving quickly across the grass left us dizzy rather than lulled. Or my viewpoint went from vertical to horizontal. Where does the story stop changing? 

Ruth might say this is a problem not for the storyteller but for the writer, who must choose one fixed version to pass along. The storyteller never stops spinning or weaving, adding new colors, removing salted ones.

The storyteller is free from the bindings of one weather- free to inhabit the "whether".

What can I say? The story continues. My words don't equal the watching. The perfect day that made no promise also left me with no settled story to tell Patrick.

Maybe when the images finish pickling and I hanker for the salt, my hunger will get the best of me and today's story will hatch, shiver, shake its feather, and wander out in the world unsettled, changing each season, that chick-turned-hen I'd rather follow than catch.

Exploring figurative language: Idioms.

Part of all the script-writing we've been enjoying lately involves being able to use and understand different types of figurative language. In my opinion, it's easier to learn how to write dialogue in a story by starting with writing dialogue in a script. That way, the essential verbal communication is captured first, prior to additional descriptions and mood. 

Figures of Speech Study: Idioms (PDF)
5 pages of worksheets like the one above

Today is devoted to idioms. Max started with the Idioms worksheets I made for the occasion (which you may use as well) while the ladies colored some fantastic pictures of idioms and learned from the  Illustrated Idioms Handout (PDF) that I discovered online at Henry School.

Curiosity Killed the Cat coloring page (PDF)
Raining Cats and Dogs coloring page (PDF)

More idiom-based free fun to chase:

Eye on Idioms (Read Write Think)

Illustrated Idioms Handout (Henry School)
Idioms Worksheet Set (Education.com)
"The idiotic joys of idioms" (The Guardian)
An Idiom A Day Activity (Fancy Free in 4th)
Idioms and their meanings (Idiomsite) 
The origins of proverbs and idioms (Phrases Finder)
Idioms (The Dog Hause)
Idiom worksheets (John Sherman Mills)
Out of this World Idiom Story (The Dabbling Speechie)
Children's books for teaching idioms (The Best Children's Books)
Online games related to idioms, for kids
Idioms Illustrated video (Vimeo)
Unveiling Idioms: A Game of Concentration (Read Write Think)
Paint By Idioms game (Fun Brain)
Idioms by Kids, a great site with illustrations
English Idioms Daily Blog 
8 Fun Things to do With Idioms (Minds in Bloom)
Idioms Worksheet #1 (Have Fun Teaching) 
Idioms Worksheet #2 (Have Fun Teaching) 
Idioms Worksheet #3 (Have Fun Teaching)  
Idioms Game (Children's University of Manchester) 
Teaching children with autism to understand idioms (Hear Our Voices) 

Love letter #92: Literary tattoos.

Oh what a fantastic way to relive good books. Contrariwise introduces more literary tattoos than you have shelving space. Also browse-worthy is Unique Tattoos From Around the Globe,  Needles and Sins, Bailey Hunter Robinson, Meditations in Atrament, Allen Tattoo, Swallows and Daggers, Tatoologist, and Tattoo Road Trip.

A few of my favorite inkings from today's brief foray, the kind that won't come unstuck....

Among my favorite tat subjects right now:

Edward Gorey drawings
Egon Schiele sketches
Emma Goldman
Dr. Seussisms
Unicorns and narwhals
Kurt Vonnegut quotes
Hannah Arendt quotes
Still life black and white pen drawings
Wittgenstein quotes

And, of course, there's the partner tattoo.

Yoga with the kids and smiles all around.

Whoever first realized that yoga is just as awesome for kids as it for adults deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. Seriously. We've been using Baron Baptiste's book with yoga for a while now, but rising enthusiasm made a it a more regular part of our day.

This morning, Max positively beamed after half an hour of Shanti Generation yoga (yes, you can stream it on Netflix). As it turned out, his devotion to his practice led him to forsake math for an extended period of poses on the living room rug. 

IF I WERE- Sammie Haynes

Thanks to the Childlight Yoga Blog for sharing this song and lyrics. Although the song works best in a class format, it can also be prepared by homeschooling families for working partners upon their return to your castle. But performance should never be forced. One of the greatest things about yoga for kids is that it is not competitive and doesn't force shy wildflowers into recitals.

If I Were (written by Lisa Flynn, music/performance by Sammie Haynes)

If I were the sun, (reach up)
I’d shine down on you. (fold forward, reaching for toes)
If I were a rose bud, (hands behind ears, elbows touching in front)
I’d open for you. (stretch the elbows out wide)
If I were a puppy, (down dog)
I’d wag at you. (lift one leg and shake) 
But since I am a child, (hold one hand down, palm facing floor)
I’ll sing for you.  (bring hand to mouth, then away)

If I were a star, (star pose)
I’d twinkle for you.  (rock from side to side, from one foot to the other)
If I were a penguin, (heels together, toes out, hands at sides, fingers out)
I’d waddle to you.  (‘waddle’ in place.)    
If I were an eagle, (eagle pose)
I’d soar to you.  (stretch out arms and legs to ‘soar.’)
But since I am a child, (hold one hand down, palm facing floor)
I’ll sing for you. (bring hand to mouth, then away)    
And since I am your child, (point to self, to parent, then palm to floor)
I’ll give you hugs too!  (hug self or run to parent to hug!)

From Little Lotus Kids Yoga Flashcards.

More free yoga with kids if money is not on your mandala:

Relaxation scripts (Relax Kids)
My First Yoga: Animal Poses for Kids app (iTunes)
Robot relax script with visual (Om-azing Kids)
Kids Yoga: Bedtime Rhymes video (YouTube)
Yoga games for kids (Yoga in My School)
Dr. Seuss-inspired yoga pose printable (Om-azing Kids) 
Pose of the week (Yoga Kids)
"The Benefits of Yoga for Kids" (Greenchild Magazine) 
Peace tree visualization printable (Om-azing Kids)
Joytime yoga warm-ups (Joytime)
Good behavior in yoga group social story (Om-azing Kids) 
Om-azing Kids Yoga tunes (Soundcloud) 
Yoga for Kids with Autism video (Shiva's Centre) 

Dream houses.

Some houses are simply unbelievable. See for yourself. Dream something small and incredible.

The Dream Green House Pamphlet (PDF)

Tiny things which make themselves known in February.

Life along our street this month.

The first signs of spring, even such as make themselves felt toward the middle of February, not only produce little white and violet flowers in the more sheltered corners of woods and gardens, but bring to birth thoughts and desires comparable to those faintly colored and sweetly scented petals in the minds of men and women. Lives frozen by age, so far as the present is concerned, to a hard surface, which neither reflects nor yields, at this season become soft and fluid, reflecting the shapes and colors of the present, as well as the shapes and colors of the past.

Thus Virginia Woolf begins the 24th chapter of Night and Day.

10 things to sew into spring.

1- A frock with this gorgeous gathered neckline (Very Homemade)

2- Summer jammies from thrifted sheets (mmmcrafts)

3- Linen ruffle shorts (Homemade by Jill)

4- Pipe vault t-shirt dress (Tally's Treasury)

5- Easy potholder (Sew Country Chick)

6- Toddler harem pants (La Malediction du chat en carton)

7- Super easy fabric trays (Noodlehead)

8- Floor square cushion (dobleufa)

9- Garden gnome hat (Sew Country Chick)

10-  Interoffice envelope backpack (Kollabora)

"The Fog Town School of Thought", a poem by Maurice Manning.

They should have taught us birds and trees
in school, they should have taught us beauty
and weaving bees and had a class
on listening and standing alone—
the children should have studied light
reflected from a spider web,
we should have learned the branches of streams
spread out like fingers or the veins
of a leaf—we should have learned the sky
is the tallest steeple, we should have known
a hill is a voice inside the sky—
O, we should have had our school
on top and stayed until the night
for the fog to bloom in the hollows and rise
like cotton spinning off a wheel—
we should have learned a dream—a child’s
and even still a man’s—is made
from fog and love, my word, you’d think
with the book in front of us we should
have learned how Fog Town got its name.

This poem is currently published in the recent issue of Orion Magazine, one of my favorite respites for poems about the way in which even one little leaf has the capacity to completely blow even the most well-ordered mind.

Tangled in triangles.

I find myself continuially inspired and educated by the drawings and lines on 10,000 Pages. This morning, it was the triangles that caught my eye. And my eye couldn't help sharing my newfound fascination with the munchkins in a visual language that they understand. Hence triangles for the letter A and triangles for gnome homes.

Astrometaphysical, a poem by Robert Frost.

Love letter #43: Stitchspirations from Jane Eyre with Charlotte Gainsbourg.

Charlotte Gainsbourg has the voice of a dove and the kind of beauty that never passes for merely "cute" or remotely pretty. Watching Jane Eyre (1996) last night left me longing for capes, cloaks, and long frocks that brush against my ankles. And a little Charlotte on the playlist. 

La Collectionneuse- Charlotte Gainsbourg

From the capelets to the long cloaks and the gorgeous white dressing gowns or nightgowns, the opportunities abound. 

For the tutorials and how-to's....
Sew a walking cloak (The Jane Austen Centre)
Knit cool cape (Pickles) 
White sheet hooded cloak (Mermag) 
A cape for all seasons (Imagine Childhood) 
Upcycled kids capelet (Project: Project) 
Little riding capelet (The Black Apple)
How to sew a capelet with pattern (Prudent Baby) 
Sweet little capelet (Sew Mama Sew) 
Audrey cape tutorial (Project Run and Play) 
Multi reversible cape (Lia's Space) 
Lacey bolero (Joy Folie)
Blair waldorf capelet (Ruffles and Stuff) 
1830's corded petticoat tutorial (Historically Dressed)
Capelet collar pattern (Sew Stylish) 
18th century style cloak (Romantic Historical Clothing) 
1820-1840 corset ( Koshka the Cat)
1790's wrap-front gown (American Duchess)
18th century petticoat (Koshka the Cat) 

For inspiration and admiration....
Poison ivy hooded cape (Stitchophrenia) 
A capelet for sister (Pretty Ditty) 
Corded petticoat (Koshka the Cat)
Boulevardier capelet (BHLDN) 
A Most Peculiar Mademoiselle 
Embroidered regency dress with pink spencer (Koshka the Cat) 
c. 1810 silk dress (Adventures of a Costumer) 

Love letter #42: Illustrators of the curious.

I've been known to tear pages from the books of Edward Gorey and Shel Silverstein, frame them, and put them on the walls. Something about those fantastic illustrators of the curious and uncanny appeals to my imagination. So a brief little love letter of images and links to inspire and excite the most unimaginable imaginings by these illustrators of the curious...

EDWARD GOREY
Edward Gorey's Elephant House  
2012 Edwardian Ball 
Edward Gorey documentary 

SHEL SILVERSTEIN
Uncle Shelby Silverstein 

AUBREY BEARDSLEY
Aubrey Beardsley 

JEAN GIRARD (aka Moebius)
The Official Moebius website
quenched consciousness 

What to do with a big roll of craft paper.

Source: huaban.com via alina on Pinterest

Draw placemats on the tablecloth. Wrap like a cool man. Wrap like Kate. Stamp all over it to make your own wrapping paper design. Make a paper flower drop garland. Create a loving placemat. Stitch some owl treat bags. Make a paper pendant lighted garland. Design a menu. Combine with burlap to make a garland. Fly away with paper wings. Cut brown paper flowers. Wrap a fresh bouquet of wildflowers for the gifting. Make bread bags. Cut and fold a beautiful paper rose. Prepare a fall brown flower wreath.

8 authors conversing in my head- with images.

IRIS MURDOCH SAID:
“Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom.
We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are.
Or because we’ve been educated – if we have.
But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy.
It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking,
convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever,
that of the mind, and gives us the assurance – the confidence – to walk
the path our mind, our educated mind, offers.” 

WENDELL BERRY INSISTED:
“Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed.
By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion.
People of power kill children, the old send the young to die,
because they have no imagination.
They have power.
Can you have power and imagination at the same time?
Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion
for them at the same time?” 

HUNTER S. THOMPSON QUIPPED:
"Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex."

WILLIAM FAULKNER MUSED:
"Memory believes before knowing remembers.
Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders."

JORGE LUIS BORGES REPLIED:
"Reality is not always probable, or likely."

IRIS MURDOCH POINTED OUT: 
“Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.” 

ALBERT EINSTEIN BLURTED:
"Never memorize something you can look up." 

LOOKING BACKWARDS, MILAN KUNDERA OBSERVED:
"People are always shouting they want to create a better future.
It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone.
The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us,
tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want
to be masters of the future is to change the past."  

RICHARD BRAUTIGAN CONCLUDED:
"I don't know these people and they aren't my flowers."  

Of Lamb, an illustrated poem.

A collaboration with the poet Matthea Harvey, Of Lamb is "an irreverent and irresponsible retelling" of the nursery rhyme, “Mary had a little lamb.” In this version, Mary spends time in a madhouse, Lamb favors slippers and the two fall in love and contemplate having half-human half-sheep offspring. Illustrator Amy Jean Porter's hand is on every page.

 

The book, which includes 106 drawings and poems, is available from McSweeney's.

The exhibition of the original drawings was presented at P.P.O.W., New York, June 23 to July 22, 2011. Drawings are gouache and ink on paper, each 10 x 7 in.

My weekend to-make list.

Window screens from old lace

all the luck in the world's plastic cube displays

Ladenlokal's chalk wall illustrations

Andi Potamkin's rock and plank shelf

12 free printables to charm even the most resolute curmudgeon.

You can purchase this print online from Society6.

Somedays are made for the love of print and illustration. Fortunately, my kids are not exempt from the appreciation thanks to all the freebies provided by illustrators and artists online. Here's a list of twenty you don't want to miss.

1. Illustrator Alice Cantrell's 2012 calendar features various herbs with explanations.
2. Prepare for fall gardening with this fall gardening notebook for both young and old dirt-diggers.
3. A plant life cycle handout that evokes tenderness and mercy.
4. The how and why of cairns with a subliminal message urging you to mark your own yard or trails with cairns.
5. A perfect little printable color book to help learn colors.
6. Four watercolored winter birds to print with little spaces for hole punches. Imagine the perfect mobile.
7. Simple Mason jar printable to fill with a magical world of your own making.
8. Sweet printable thread bobbins from Wild Olive.
9. A birds on the branch craft to prepare for the fall migrations.
10. Perfect patterned paper birdy from Make magazine.
11. Fingerprint art poster to inspire and excite as your prepare your walls for unintended prints.
12. Everyone needs a little cat bookmark.

Love letter #39: Apologies, from average to evanescent.

I'm sorry we don't always see things the same way. 

Damon interviews Elizabeth to learn more about how she raises those lovely chickens, posted with an underwritten apology to our hens who passed away.

"Sorry David David I Am So Sorry", a poem by Francesca Chabrier and Emily Hunt

"Sorry Was in The Woods", a poem by Michelle Taransky

Sorry, the game we play

Sorry Everbody, an experiment in the politically personal

"The Six Most Insincere Apologies of All Time" at Cracked

"State Apologies and the Transformation of the International Legal System", a paper by Azuolas Bagdonas

"Apologies" by Mosaik, the sound

4400 Apologies

"Apology to Roadkill" by Shaun Gladwell, the photos

Apologies for war in ancient Chinese sacred texts

Artist Park Reece with "apologies to the duck people"

Shazai, the art of apologies in the Japanese tradition

Apology and forgiveness how-to with English and Finnish subtitles

How a whispered apologies comic gets made

"The Art of Apology: Teaching kids the power of I'm Sorry" at Portland Family

"Cultural Con/texts: Apologists vs. Apologies", an exhibit

Apology letter for hurt feelings template

"The Earthy Paradise: An Apology", a poem by William Morris

Apology letter for pet behavior template

Walking across the US of A all in a day's play.

Patrick has to work on some Saturday mornings, and this Saturday morning was too beautiful to lollygag around the house waiting for the king to return. So we hopped into the spaceship and bobbled over to the Bobby Miller Center in Taylorville. The bright, unexplored playground (and the lack of students) across the street diverted us from our original goal.

Max walked back and forth across the balance beam at least five times, with Micah swiftly catching on and following him. 

Because there is nothing that he can do which she will not try. And there is no limit to the number or shape of things Micah will try- the spirit of a mountain climber in the body of a ballerina. Grace and strength in a combination that is entirely her own.

After trying to emulate M and M, Milla finds her own way to move across the balance beam- one more in sync with her personal style. When she made a hissing sound at me, I understood she was slithering.

Ferocious creatures at the playground dwell.

The kids kept getting pebbles in their shoes on the see-saw.

I walked over to the asphalt ball court with Milla, who seemed slightly bothered by all the see-sawing taking place without her. Fortunately, the asphalt was painted with a lively map of the United States.

I think we need one of these on our driveway....

Milla loved throwing pebbles onto various states, so we made a game of it.

Alabama Alina.

West Virginia Max.

Quasi-Alabama Micah with Georgia on her mind.

Kansas Milla.

Lonely little Hawaii.

Tornado tree chair.

Look at what we discovered at the Georgine Clark Gallery in downtown Northport.... Kudos to Tanya for her creative vision in using tornado wood for good.