We spend the day going over the toxins that have been found in New Orleans’ soil, and the three basic methods of bioremediating them—using microorganisms, using fungi and mushrooms, and using plants. We divide people into different groups for hands-on practice, making compost, starting worm bins (worm castings are the major source for the microorganisms we culture), starting seeds and taking cuttings, and inoculating strata with mushroom spawn.Somewhere in there she mentions they are using worm castings as the base for their 'biobrew'. It sure makes a lot of sense to me: worms are like little moving tubes that digest and purify all that passes through them, leaving life behind them.Some toxins, like diesel range organics, are big, chainlike molecules mostly composed of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, and can be broken down into harmless substances like carbon dioxide and water. Beneficial bacteria can do the job, and so can enzymes released from fungal mycelium, the underground weblike matrix from which mushrooms emerge. We intend to do some trials with mushrooms, but its harder to grow mushrooms on a mass scale than it is to culture bacteria, so we’re starting with the brews of aerated compost tea. We’re also using a different preparation of micro-organisms, known as Efficient Micro-organisms, which is anaerobic and has many different uses. The house-gutting crews have been spraying it to counteract mold, with great effectiveness. They’ve had assistance from someone who does professional mold abatement and who has the equipment to do spore counts before and after. The bacteria and yeasts in the EM spray eat the mold spores and then colonize the surfaces mold grows on, preventing its regrowth. It’s non-toxic and much safer to use than bleach, and more effective. It’s success against mold has made me wonder if it would also be effective against Sudden Oak Death, the fungus-like disease that is devastating our forests in Northern California. The company that produces EM, and has donated a lot of it to Common Ground, has offered to bring a mobile processing unit down to New Orleans to produce it on a mass scale. But they have been unable to get the funding—nearly $200,000—they need in order to do so.
EM is mostly anaerobic—the organisms involved do not need or want air in order to reproduce. We’re also experimenting with EM sprayed on the soil, to see if it will help get life back into the dead, compacted, muddy sediments.
It’s exciting. It’s also uncharted territory. Lots of people have worked on bioremediation, in the lab, on highly toxic sites, in well funded cleanup efforts. We don’t know of anyone who has tried it on a low-budget, mass movement backyard scale.
And more, some underlying force of health and life and serendipity that we tap into when we do this healing work. There’s an excitement, a sheer raw energy unleashed that animates the digging forks and keeps us working joyfully and eagerly into the twilight. It’s as if the earth herself wants to be healed, and when we take on that work, we tap into an upwelling spring of life giving power. Out of nowhere, benevolent allies appear.
"Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul." Edward Abbey
Two cats in one!
there it is.
apple pie.The man pulling daikon
pointed the way
with a daikon.
Isso
it is raining slightly in east van, and the moss on the huge ornamental cherry outside my brother's living room window is bright, excited green.
i struggle sometimes to let myself be full - to express and be real. to let emotion and thought stream out and in, full size. taking the space they deserve. respected.
i have apples that i bought at the apple festival on salt spring this fall... wolfe river and bramley's seedling... i was planning to bake pie this weekend - if you have a recipe, i would LOVE to bake a jayme style pie. a perfect physical manifestation of the lovin you have supported me with this week. oh goddess goddess thank you so.
i'm off to study chemistry today, and fix bicycles. i got an intern job at the local bike shop on campus. it's so much fun jayme. if my hands can't bear traces of soil all winter, then bike grease will do just
fine.
i spent last night with ~*~ again. i have so many fragments of conversations and gestures traced all over and through me. i want to hold onto them all, document them all, savour and remember.... and i know i can't. they fall away like cobwebs over time. i guess i choose a couple, and hold them close. then allow movement. life flows in such an intricate, yet simple, and beautiful way.
i like that as i grow older i know more deeply in my bones that it is all ok. no matter what. no matter what,
i was reflecting last night, as i rode my bicycle down hill in the darkness at incredibly fast speeds.... over wet pavement and leaves... that i felt fear of falling out of love.. fear of loss. and i realized, i've been through that before. and it hurts. and still there is joy. there is movement through and beyond. it leaves a scar, a tenderness and a heightened sense of compassion.. it brings depth to experience and being. and so, plummetting down the hill as i was, i spent a couple of minutes imagining separating from gavin. wishing peace and letting go. and then, with that feeling and awareness laced somewhere inside me, i let myself go back into loving being with him. walking on the earth with the intent to be grounded - as solid and honest as possible... and also to be water - to open and to let myself fall, to let myself be completely immersed in this experience, these feelings.
falling in love with someone is an incredible human experience - and i want to allow myself to feel it. consciously and wildly all at once.
and now my sweet - an ee cummings poems for you:
i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which
grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)
I have a renewed perspective on the phrase.
I have just moved.
We have moved into a large stone house at the base of a hill, at the edge of town. Ontario. The downstairs neighbors are fighting. The neighbor below me is Cathy and her boyfriend Terry. Nasty people they are; crabs in the bucket making sure no body thinks they can get out. I tend to become self conscious and hard on myself around that energy.
My other downstairs neighbor is Wanda, a lost punk poet, mother of two, and on today, our second meeting, she shed tears, and already I loved her. She is supportive, and needs support, she needs the flowers. Everyone does really. This whole scene needs a fat injection of good energy.
The world here feels tight, like a clenched fist. I sense a violent rebellion, a volatility, perhaps more likely to lash out in a race-related shooting than an uprising. I can feel its pressure on me. I am having to, I will have to chose not to buckle, on a daily level, and remain upright, buoyant, living as I want to live with the fun in it.
Gardening.
To garden.
As I walk along, for the first or second time, I write mental lists of things to do:
- pick up garbage here
- pull out these bricks and put in stone stairs
- find the trails in those woods
- put a planter box there
- do a photo shoot there
As a child, I was baffled by how people could not art the spaces around them. How could people not make spaces more beautiful?I know much of has to do with laziness. It is not that they cant, we couldn't, but that we don't. We do other things."Which is the most universal human characteristic: fear or laziness?"
As I enter this new space, this new neighborhood, I am filled with ideas; fresh eyes can see so many possibilities and improvements. But also I can sense my reluctance and self-consciousness, worrying what the neighbors will think. It will be an interesting challenge to remain light and playful, while the grey people call me crazy. Or at least I think they will.
It is always a balance of time to play and time to bust ass for cash, as to how much gets done. What will I do? What deals can I swing? What health will I manage for myself? How bring can I shine, how hard will I rock it, in this balance with this new environment?
Everything gardens.
Everything and everyone affect the space around them. Everything encourages lives and deaths because of their actions.
Wanda welled up with tears today, and she said that they hurt her because she had not cried in such a time. We were looking at the picture of her little girl. We were talking about people with special spirits, grieving, challenges when they are multiplied on each other, magnified. I was just standing with her there, listening. Woman to woman. There was a moment where I had a flashback to Yenson's 'Heart of the Shaman' workshop, the slide show of the human experience. The direct contact with That, that Holy Moment, ( a sensation much like vertigo for me), is the essence of life, and Listening to the Land affirmed that in the most multi-faceted way for me.
Wanda and I hung out a bit, I did some theatrical story telling, and then got to gardening. I ripped stuff out, did some pruning, and began to reshape the space. Here, I have jumped into their lives, I jumped into her life and how will we garden each other?
How will I deal with this new culture, these changes and challenges? How will I survive these days, financially? What will I pull together to balance my time and cash flow? The possibilities are infinite.
I felt caged-in in this city today. Compressed. I tried to run and everywhere I turned it was a main road with traffic. It smells like Japan, that sweet, bright aroma of heavy traffic. The cars felt like whips to me, a lash with every one that passed. An assault. A gauntlet. And so I ran, back home, to where my garden will be.
I am going to create a bunch of ecosystems and environments, walls that shelter people, buffer energies. I am going to change the energetic flow form of this place.
And how will it change me?
And there is bonding- every least particle is bonded with every other least particle. Everything is integral and interacts with everything else. This means tha nothing is itself without everyonthing else. There is a commanality, an integrity, and intimacy of the universe with itself.
And that intimicay, I think, is the fulfillment of the universe, withthe conditioned on the uniquness of things. Saint Thomas has a wonderful phrase, where he speaks of difference as the prfection of the universe.
Uniqueness is communion with. Thats what the universe is all about.
DJ: does the universe then have a purpose?
TB: The purpose is simly existance. And the glory of existance. Thats the ultimate purpose of everything - existance and self-delight in existance.
Fellow citizens, reality has turned out to be a lot more complex than we thought. Our tradition, always conscientious and hard-working, clung so fiercely to the mechanistic, reductionist model of the natural world for 300 years that we got a lot wrong. Throughout this century, however, we’ve been gradually correcting our orientation. Now, with the breakthroughs of the new sciences, we’re making many exciting discoveries about the subtle interconnectedness in and among our bodies, nature, the biosphere, and the whole universe. This brings us a new respect, which we hope you’ll share, for other traditions that perceived that sort of interrelatedness all along, such as religion, art, and native peoples’ worldviews.to continue
John A Livingston
Author of One Cosmic Instant: a Natural History of Human Arrogance, The Falacy of Wildlife Conservation, and Rogue Primate: An Exploration of Human Domestication. He is a professor emeritus at York University where he taught from '70 to '92. President of Canadian Nature Federation and the first producer of The Nature of Things.
"The Ecosphere in which we live is a web that envelops all organisms and ecosystems, that gave rise to life in the first place, and that sustains it now. Every organism and every ecosystem is a full participant."
(This quote is from the Ecospheric Ethics website, a fantastic anthology of useable works). Livingston paints cohesive the dialouge that we are not separate from nature, we need to transform our language and thinking patterns away from the self/ other split.
"I think the self/other split is so pernicious because we spend all our time concentratin on self, and we seem to take the idea of other as given. I dont think the coyote sees the bunny as other. She is what she eats, and before she eats it."
Matthew Fox
His work attempts to rescue Christianity from the destructive tendencies which now surround it. He is the founding director of the Institute of Culture and Creation Spirituality in California.
"How do we teach gratitude? What do you do with your gratitude? Thats part of the mystical impulse. Our whole being, our existance, is a miracle."
His writing of estatic, quote Rilke, speaking of awe, eros, and mystery. We are all part of the mystery, and the acceptance of that is our freedom.
David Ehrenfeld
The Arrogance of Humanism is one of the most important texts of the last 20 years, so say the big thinkers. With degrees in history, medicine and zoology, he is professor of biology at Rutgers Universtiy and columnist, author and editor. He works to dismantle our underlying assumptions of humanism, the mightness of science, and our belief that we humans know so much.
" The idea of 'now we know how to do it better' is wrong. When it comes to timber management, we dont really know what to do. We know in Oregon where we've clearcut, that agter three planting the trees still arent growing back ... Because we dont understand the way the world works, we also dont understand the sources and origins of goodness. Unexpectedly, good things happen. They happen fairly often."
John Keeble
"It occured to me once again that the trick was to enter the chaos, not control it, nor to wipe it out with one form on monomania or anothet, and yet at the same time to hold fast to a sense of right conduct, to keep looking outwards, and not to get trapped inside an illusionary net." Author of Yellowfish, Broken Ground, and Out of the Channel: The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in Prince William Sound.
"Language is a natural resource, or maybe I should say natural wonder, born of the air we`ve taken into our lungs from the atmosphere, loases with the detrius of the air, and shaped by bone and cartilage and flesh as it comes out in words. It's a way we have of keeping contact with each other and of giving form to our dreams. Language is extraordinarily diverse."
