is it good for the children

As most of us are aware, we live in a time of climate change. Our situation is dire enough that we cannot live our individual lives as though our actions are neutral. Because we rely on fossil fuels, our choices have ramifications for other living beings, water, soil and air.

I wonder how to parent while being mindful of this.

There is a societal expectation to provide children with enrichment opportunities. As though we’re somehow short-changing our kids if we don’t have them enrolled in various activities but instead let them, God forbid, just play. You know, WITHOUT electronics.

For many reasons I am skeptical about all this enrichment. I wonder if it’s children’s jobs, not ours, to take initiative for their hobbies. I wonder if the ‘all about me’ orientation we engender in children through shuttling them around for enrichment will be manifest in them as adults. Will it prompt them to become engaged citizens, focused on the greater good, or just their personal good?

This summer my middle daughter attended an aerial arts camp 15 minutes away from home. That meant an hour a day driving. If this camp sparked passion to be an aerial gymnast then she would be trying to replicate her experience at home. She’s not. Once the camp ended, she was over it. But did she love it? Did she experience something new? Yes and Yes. So what? The greenhouse gases we emitted transporting her to and from this enrichment experience exacerbate climate change.

Climate change will shape her future more than any benefit derived from aerial arts camp.

It is this future we are tasked with equipping our children. Given the compromised habitat the next generation is inheriting from us, how does it even make sense to expend fossil fuel on diversions to entertain my children? Or to encourage them to cultivate skills they’ll need only in the vacuum of a particular activity? Will enrichment opportunities equip them with what they’ll need to cope? How does developing hobbies help them prepare for a future of more extreme, violent weather and seasons out of whack? How will capoeira, something my two oldest and I love, equip my children for the rise in asthma, disease and allergies? How will music lessons, which they all love, help them navigate their responsibility in a world where access to water is politicized? Will soccer help them understand that teamwork extends to strangers downstream?

I know hobbies aren’t meant to carry the weight of such responsibilities. So where will they learn to carry this weight? Places of worship? School? Isn't it up to us?

I can’t help but wonder too about the collective weight of all us parents motoring around towns all over America fostering our children’s hobbies. What does that look like in terms of emissions? Or in virgin resources consumed for uniforms and equipment? Or in single use disposable drinks and snacks for events? And maybe most importantly, what beliefs form in our children’s minds about their place in the world? 

I wonder if they will learn, through years of pursuing enrichment, they are entitled to use whatever resources they want for their own satisfaction and personal growth. This is not what I want my children to learn from me or how I want them to regard our only habitat. 

That’s not enrichment.

as we go through this together

Last spring, I got to spend a handful of hours volunteering with the organic farm through which my family shares a CSA with another family. I wanted to understand their process of seeding, growing, harvesting and distribution. Partly for my job, mostly because it’s my secret desire to be a farmhand.

So one April morning I went to the farm, only 6 miles from my house. I met the farmhands who offered me camaraderie with easy graciousness. I was given a large tub to carry to the fields and got started. We harvested spinach, chard, greens, kale and more. Since it had been an unseasonably cold, windy, grey spring, my fingers went numb with cold and my eyes watered from the wind. 

It is easy to pick my family’s salad from my garden. To briefly squat with a colander and fill it is a snap. But as I squatted, bent over, kneeled, for several hours, picking say, spinach, leaf by leaf, it got me thinking about grocery store produce.

There are about 40 grocery stores within a 25-mile radius of where I live. If each store has piles of bagged spinach, how many acres did it take to grow? How many people did it take to harvest? Was it by hand? How many hands? Were they paid fairly to be outside in all weather and were they exposed to chemicals? Where does it all come from all year? Where does it go if it’s not bought?

When I was little, I loved connect-the-dot books. I tried to anticipate the picture before starting; then with each dot, I tried to guess what was emerging. Not much has changed. Only now I try to connect real life dots, seeing how my day-to-day choices and actions are part of a bigger picture.

Being a part of a CSA, helps me connect the dots between what I eat and how it gets to me. Weekly I get updates detailing what I’ll be receiving. Here’s an email from spring 2013.

Good Morning, CSA, and Good Night, Winter.

  

Going through these days of extendo-winter, we’ve had to readjust our harvest projections and now since the winter was a super-extendo-winter we are having to readjust our succession plantings plan. Last year as we tried new things to be ready for what looked like a promising spring without a freeze after mid-February, we adopted a ‘let’s do half of it the old way and let’s do half of it a new, wild and crazy way’ mantra. This mantra will continue with a twist. We had seeded more than twenty beds of roots, greens, scallions and potatoes and now since not much has germinated, we’re faced with a what-to-do-now question. We’re going forward, with a plan and noticing what might happen. For example, out of the four beet beds we seeded in late January and reseeded in mid-March…we’ll keep two and we’ll turn in two. The succession plan needs those two beds for filet beans and tomatoes. We’ll learn lots from both decisions. So fortunate to have this challenge to become better farmers…I do mean it, there is just a touch of anger and a bit of frustration there.

I often think of Gunther Hauk. He is a old-timer biodynamic beekeeper in Virginia. I once heard him speak to the question of Colony Collapse Disorder. He was grateful for it. Weird, right? He said that it provided the opportunity to see better. His thought was that without the opportunity to look at this tragedy, we might never develop the ability to more fully see and to open our minds to search for ways to adjust.

This mindset still sounds radical to me.

Being grateful for a tragedy like CDD?

It’s hard to pause long enough to think this through, but I still feel the validity in his words.  

In this game of life, there are no guarantees. We see that every day in the field. In these times, especially, we are faced with new questions that offer new opportunities for growth. I believe the highest challenge is for us to pause long enough to look and to consider. 

Winter is the time of pause. So it is very fitting that winter extended itself to drive home the point to us that we need it…we need to pause. 

This week. Not an easy time of harvesting as you all know. I so appreciate all the kind words and hugs of encouragement as we go through this together.

This week, we have for you:

Spinach

Microgreens

Rosemary

Funky Fresh

Scallions

Two little cucumbers of hope from the greenhouse

And

A beautiful nasturtium plant for your own patio or deck. Its leaves are edible, its flowers are edible. It loves the sunshine and can tolerate summer’s heat. Keep it watered. Take pause long enough to enjoy the color.

This is the missing dot at the grocery. These emails provide the backstory, completing the picture of my food. When vegetables and fruit appear 365 days a year, exactly the same size, shape, condition, I have the illusion that because I can access them easily and always, then their production is just as effortless.

But just because I am unaware of the story behind what I get, doesn’t mean there isn’t a story. In fact, it’s even more important to seek the dots and make connections since we often only engage an end product. We have become removed from processes we rely on daily, unaware of the details that go into how things appear on store shelves.

As I read the weekly emails, I picture ‘my’ farm: the fields, the high tunnels, workstations, sheds. I see vibrant workers in jeans, heavy boots and smiles. And because I know a bit of what went into getting it to me when I receive our share, I am humbled. 

What a gift to know where my food comes from and to know, by name, those who grow it. I feel reverence and gratitude for what I receive. I am then eager to prepare this bounty in a way that honors it. Further, I'm motivated to access more of what I need through relationship with those who actually produce it.

I am also in touch with an organic cattle and chicken farmer. In the summer of 2012, I learned about drought; about parched ponds and the plight of dairy cows drying up. As I would go for my morning run and see sprinklers soaking impossibly green lawns and often sidewalks too, I couldn’t help but think of farmer Ozais. Couldn’t help but think of him when I so easily watered my garden, gave water to the stray cat on our porch. Couldn’t help but think of farmers struggling with drought each time I went into the grocery store where there was scant evidence of their hardships. Drought impacting farmers fell out of the abstract and into the concrete for me. 

When I see the dots and connect them, I connect to them. I begin to understand that I am indeed part of a web. That’s what the dots bear out. That is the big picture.

What I do with this awareness becomes the question.

why am I here?

I love capoeira. Ok, mildly obsessed. This August I have the opportunity to attend an international training and earn my first belt. Besides being terrified of having my ass handed to me, I have Wendell Berry’s words in my mind:

“To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration.”

I am conscious of how much time, energy and material resources-body and blood of creation-this mild obsession requires. Weekly, I train 6 or more hours. That’s time away from my family, friends, other pursuits and responsibilities. I wear a uniform I can’t get from a thrift store. That means finite resources, water and fossil fuels are expended for me. I sometimes drive the half-mile to class, more materials depletion, because I didn’t manage my schedule to include walking.

Just to pursue a hobby.

Every day, necessarily, I break body and shed blood of creation to live. Now I’m contemplating travel, food, accommodations and miscellany for 3 days; draining the earth’s resources solely to satisfy my desire. Traveling invariably requires unsustainable choices and this trip will benefit no one but myself.

In a sermon, a friend once said, “God distract me from myself.” I think about this a lot. Media, industries with their enticing gizmos and programs and even places of worship, keep me preoccupied with myself. As though my hobbies, appearance, health, pleasure, personal and spiritual growth, home décor, all my life’s minutiae, are supposed to dominate my energy, time and money, regardless of their environmental toll. As though it’s perfectly natural, indeed my right, to exhaust natural resources-break body and shed blood of creation-for whatever pleases me.  

But to borrow from Star Trek, what is my prime directive?

I don’t think my prime directive is to focus primarily on what benefits or entertains me. Despite propaganda to the contrary, I do not think I was created and lavished with opportunity, intelligence, health and wealth, merely to pursue my own contentment and in the process, trash the planet. 

Just before my last class, I read an article about the government’s increasing reliance on drones in what is devolving into unending and unjustifiable ‘war.’ This is on my mind as I’m doing push ups. How can I simultaneously care about Yemeni children being blown up and having nice guns? In fact, the notion of nice guns being a priority and you knowing what I mean by that but maybe not knowing exactly where Yemen is or why we’re terrorizing the Yemeni people, underscores my point. It is easy to telescope my attention to what’s put directly in front of me for my benefit or entertainment. I find encouragement to do so all around me.

What if I relinquished my fabricated directive to be athletic and have nice guns for the real directive to inform (perhaps mobilize) a citizenry of its government’s reign of terror in the Middle East? For this agenda, breaking body and shedding blood of creation would be, as Berry says, sacramental and therefore, worthwhile.

Is it a surprise when governments carry out atrocities while its populace stands by? It’s one thing if a people are too consumed with meeting their basic needs- water, food, shelter-to challenge leaders. But what if we’re preoccupied with Candy Crush Saga or flying across the country to play capoeira? 

It’s simple. Because I am finite, when I focus my energy, time and money on my interests I can’t attend to other, more vital things.

Moreover, how can I exhaust finite natural resources, break body and shed blood of creation, to indulge a hobby when God continually distracts me with the world’s suffering?

Magic Deeper Still

Come close. Let me tell you a secret. I do magic.

In my hand I hold charcoal colored seeds, no bigger than mouse droppings. A friend collected them when they fell from his morning glories and has now shared them with countless others. The back of my neighbor’s garage, which butts up to my driveway, will be their playground once I erect a chicken wire trellis for them to climb. Imagine a whole wall of violet blue flowers unfurling with early morning sun then raveling closed at night. They promise to draw bees, butterflies and hummingbirds, guests I am eager to host. Morning glory flowers are edible. The seeds serve as a laxative and can be used as a hallucinogenic. The leaves heal insect bites and stings. Dry those leaves to make tea in winter and the liquid relieves frostbite and chilblains.

All this magic from nascent seeds.

They will go in an area of ground being readied especially for them. My retired neighbor has been helping in the preparations. With the attentive precision of a scientist-midwife, she monitors the compost pile; adds layers of leaves and grass clipping from her yard, dutifully spreads grounds from a coffee shop. Many others help. Worms, mice, creeping crawlies and whatever else turn our apple cores, eggshells, onion skins and so on into dirt. Into this dark richness I’ve mixed chicken poop from the community garden center. In a world where we categorize smell as good or bad based on appeal or lack thereof, I pause and inhale happily.

More magic.

It is the scent of time and place consecrated; redeeming what was discarded as foul, worthless refuse into new life. It is fragrant hope borne out of a communion of living things bent on shared purpose. Together we make soil so plants can thrive.

This alchemy of seed and soil is magic deeper still, "when death itself starts working backward."