Tag: living well

I left Salida 12 days ago, headed for the Central California Coast, and returned last night after driving 3,300 miles through parts of five states, six Indian nations (I may have missed some–my apologies), five national parks, and seven bio-regions.

Red and I followed that squiggly pink line from the intersection of US 50 and 285 in south-central Colorado south and west on the outbound journey to California, and north and east coming back. (I drew the line in Skitch.)

It was too much driving for twelve days, but that was the time I had to make the trip, and I did my best to use the windshield time (and the fossil fuel Red consumed) well and thoughtfully.

Along the way I camped and stayed with friends (thanks, Doris & Bill, Terry & Steve, Sharon & Jeff, and Laura & Sarah); interviewed people who work with, write about, and think about plants for the next book; spent time with Molly and her sweetie Mark in San Francisco, and in one very long day, Molly and I drove to Monterey and south along the Big Sur Coast with friend Laura, spreading some of Richard’s ashes in two spots he loved on our favorite stretch of ocean coast.

“Watch for the onshore breeze!” says Laura, just as some of Richard playfully blows back toward me at Otter Cove, near Carmel Highlands. Photo: Molly Cabe

As I do when I drive anywhere, I thought about the landscapes I passed through from the perspective of a plant ecologist who considers and writes about the relationships that interweave humans and the rest of the community of the land–nature.

That swath of yellow in this Mojave Desert basin is a carpet of annual wildflowers abuzz with tiny native bees.

For instance, while crossing the Mojave Desert, I wondered how the native bees know to find those annual wildflowers during the two weeks they bloom every several years. (It’s an important question, especially in light of how global climate change could break these critical natural relationships: no bees, no pollination and thus no seeds, which provide food for the desert songbirds and other lives as well as flowers the next time the winter rains come, resulting in an impoverished desert.)

An important reason for the timing of the trip was to participate in Geography of Hope, a conference put on every two years by Point Reyes Books north of San Francisco.

Driving across the Golden Gate bridge on the way to the conference, a bridge named for the “golden” slopes of the hills that once glowed with billions of wild California poppies in spring. Let’s restore the poppies and re-gild those hills!

I am still cogitating about what I took away from the conference, which included talks and panels by some of my favorite writers and thinkers, including Potowatomi scientist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer (Gathering Moss), philosophy professor and author Kathleen Dean Moore (Holdfast), poet Robert Hass, eco-feminist writer Susan Griffin (Women and Nature), filmmaker and author Gretel Ehrlich (a fellow Wyomingite), author and cultural geographer Carolyn Finney (Black Faces, White Spaces), eco-literature scholar and professor Priscilla Solis Ybarra, among others.

Robin Wall Kimmerer responded to the conference question “What does Earth ask of us?” (especially related to the crisis of climate change) with the idea of reciprocity, working at restoring both our relationship with the earth and restoring the planet itself.

As a beginning to restoring our relationship, she talked about the troubling grammar of the English language, which refers to Earth and the other beings we share this planet with through the dehumanizing “it.” (Read more of Wall Kimmerer’s ideas around that question, and also of Kathleen Dean Moore, here.)

Indian paintbrush on the Big Sur coast, some of my plant kin.

Wall Kimmerer proposed a new word from a Potawatomi root, ki, which she pronounced “chee.” (With a hard ‘ch,’ so maybe closer to ‘key’ or somewhere between the two.) Instead of calling the chickadee I just watched flit by, “it,” for instance, I’d refer to the small songbird as “ki” and the plural, she suggested, as “kin.” I wanted to stand up and clap right then. I’ve always struggled with having to refer to other beings and the Earth itself as the de-personal “it.” You can trash an “it,” but it’s harder to lay waste to a planet or being you call “kin.”

It seems to me that it’s more than time for a reciprocal relationship with the earth, for a radical rethinking of our bonds with and our gifts to our mother planet and its web of lives, starting with language. I’m resolved to abolish “it” from my lexicon related to living beings and the earth, starting now, and adopting ki and the plural, kin.

This could make for interesting conversation with my editors, but that’s okay. As Richard would say, it’s a teachable moment. Any crisis is.

And speaking of kin, here’s Molly and me in San Francisco. Love you, sweetie!

I’ve been in a cooking and reading mood lately, perhaps because the view off my front deck has been white more often than usual. (The photo below is yesterday morning, after 10 inches of snow fell overnight, a lot of snow for my high-desert valley in February.)

Shovel poised, ready to un-bury the front steps and the sidewalk.

On Sunday, when the snow was falling along with the temperature, I had an urge for something green and fruity for lunch. So I invented myself a simple mixed lettuce salad using winter fruits, plus cheese and nuts, a kind of homage to the season that looked toward spring. Here’s the recipe (to serve more than one person, simply multiply the quantity of each ingredient):

Simple Winter Greens Salad

1 cup mixed greens (I used mixed baby lettuces grown in geothermally heated greenhouses at nearby Mount Princeton Hot Springs, but you could use anything, including baby kale and spinach)
1/2 ripe organic pear (mine was a Bartlett)1/4 ripe organic avocado
2 T toasted pecans
1/2 oz gouda cheese (a good aged cheddar would also be delicious; I used gouda because Rocking W Cheeses in western Colorado makes one that’s local)
1 T organic olive oil (I use Stonehouse Olive Oil from California because I value food that’s as local as possible, since it doesn’t travel as far and require so much fuel to get to my plate)
2 tsp organic Balsamic vinegar
pinch salt

Tear or chop up the greens in a bowl, dress with salt, olive oil and balsamic vinegar and toss gently to mix. Slice the pear and avocado lengthwise and chop into bite-sized pieces and arrange over the top of the greens. Crumble the pecans and scatter them over the top of the fruit (yes, avocado is a fruit!), and then slice the cheese into short slivers and distribute those atop the whole.

My Simple Winter Greens Salad, delicious, healthy and hinting at spring….

Take a moment to appreciate the plants that made your food and the people who grew, harvested, and produced it, and then dive in and enjoy!

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When the weather’s this cold and snowy, I love to curl up on the couch and lose myself in a good book. Which is what I did this weekend in between laundry and paying bills and checking in with my 86-year-old dad by phone and the other minutia of household life.

The book I read, which came from my to-review stack for Story Circle Book Reviews, sucked me right in. It was so good that I read it in one sitting, and then read it through again the next day. The story is that compelling and haunting.

Running Out of Night, by Sharon Lovejoy

Running Out of Night is Sharon Lovejoy’s debut novel, and what a debut it is! (Lovejoy is known for her garden books for kids and adults, which have won all sorts of awards and become bestsellers.)

Here’s a taste of my review:

“Mama gave her last breath just as I took my first.”

That simple sentence both opens Sharon Lovejoy’s YA novel and defines the life of its main character, twelve-year-old, unnamed “Girl.”

Although Pa and my big brothers never said they blamed me for her death, I always felt it achin inside me, like the rotten tooth our blacksmith plied out of my mouth. Why else would a pa and his boys let a little girl come into the world and live for twelve years without givin her a name?

Girl lives with her brothers and her bad-tempered pa, “born tired and raised lazy,” on the small farm that was her grandfather’s in the blue-hazy ridges of eastern Virginia in 1858.

Until fate, in the form of a runaway slave girl just Girl’s age, steps in, and the two set off on a hero’s journey, a gripping tale of both great beauty and great peril. The two girls, one white, one black, are transformed by their desperate flight in ways that ring true both for their time and today’s world.

Read the whole review here. And then read Running Out of Night. You’ll be glad you did.