More Deliberate Every Day

Prepare to be More Deliberate

Yesterday the temperature here in the Memphis area was a whopping 62 degrees.  Birds chirped, the breeze sang through bare tree branches.  After taking the children to the park where I encouraged them to unburden themselves of their endless reserves of energy, I proceeded to take the dog for a long run as well.  Outside welcomed me.  Winter is always too long:  I didn't recognize my cabin-fever until I took the opportunity to escape from it.

Spring is coming.  Bulbs are pushing through the ground around our house beckoning its arrival.  Sure, there might be a serious cold snap ahead of us, in fact given the last several years of weather we could still see a significant snow or ice "event," but few can deny that winter is on it's last legs.  And with Spring, a new year. 

I know that technically speaking the year begins on January 1st, but the more in tune I become with the earth, particularly as it relates to the cycles of planting and harvesting, the more I realize that the real year begins when we first put seeds into the thawed soil.  At that New Year is just ahead.  So, while we're trying hard to be Deliberate through these last few cold days of winter, we know that the heavy lifting is yet to come, and we're mentally preparing for the joy, and hard work, that accompanies spring.

So what are we doing at the More Deliberate household to prepare for spring?  A few things, at least. 

1)  We're sprouting.  I mentioned in an earlier post that our guest room currently looks like a makeshift greenhouse.  That's because Mrs. Deliberately has flats and flats of seeds starting there, where the morning light hits them directly.  Some of the larger plants have already been transplanted from their initial seed-pods to larger enclosures (think heirloom tomatoes) due to their size.  And of course, each of the choices is related to its placement in the master plan.  Which leads me to

2)  We're planning.  Last year this blog began in March, meaning it's almost a year old.  And for those of  you following along at home all this time you might remember that we were just talking about starting seeds when the blog began.  Which means that we're a good 60 days ahead of where we were last year, the first year we planted our own garden.  Now we're taking it up a notch, with completed plans and a schedule of what needs to be done to ensure a greater degree of success.  Which means more food on our table this season that grows from our own backyard.  And while we love a nice steak,

3)  We're eating more "live" food.  We really like the passion with which certain restaurants (Las Tortugas comes to mind) approach their ingredients.  And while I'm not an advocate of raw food per se, I am a big believer that the closer our food is to its original state, the better it is for us.  So we're eating more vegetables and fruits this winter than we have before, and eating them with an eye to their natural state.  I wish these foods were local and organic and sustainable every time, but I'm confident we'll do better this year planning for the long, cold months when the garden isn't delivering fresh food to the table every day.  Finally, there's a lot of hard work coming up, so

4)  We're getting in shape.  Hauling dirt across your backyard to build raised beds isn't easy work, it's labor.  Even if it is a labor of love.  And while we aren't yet in a place where we can be full-time aspiring farmers, we are thinking big about what we want to do this year.  So in preparation, we're exercising a bit more to make sure that when the work begins we're not panting on the sidelines.  Not to mention that half-marathon coming up in a few months.  Finally,

5)  We're thinking.  Specifically about how to more effectively share what we're discovering with other people.  This blog has been a great opportunity to tell you what we're seeing and hearing.  And while I plan on continuing along on the 'internets' path, I'm also sensitive to how I can contribute more effectively to my community.  So we're investigating new ways to contribute time and resources to efforts right here in Memphis that will lead to more awareness of sustainable, local, organic and ethical foods.  Because what's good for my belly is good for my planet, too.

Spring about here.  What are you doing to prepare?

Deconstructing Dinner Goes Slow

It dawned on me yesterday that while I have for some time been a regular listener of the podcast Deconstructing Dinner I had never mentioned it here on the blog.  The podcast originates from Kootenay Co-Op Radio in Nelson, British Columbia, and attempts to "dispense and discuss current food issues. The program assists listeners in making more educated choices when purchasing food either for the kitchen or at restaurants."  While it's a radio broadcast for many of you in Canada, for us Tennesseans, it's definitely only available on the website.

What made it pertinent this week was an up-until-yesterday unheard episode from August 2nd called Slow Is Beautiful which profiles Cecile Andrews, author of the book by the same name.  From the description of the radio show on the Deconstructing Dinner site:

Food, as Cecile Andrews suggests, is a metaphor for life, in that our relationship to food is also suggestive of our relationship to living and how we connect with the world around us, whether it be plants, animals, people…. or ourselves. Cecile's book is similar to the way Deconstructing Dinner educates listeners about food, in that Slow is Beautiful deconstructs our consumer driven society in order to understand how we perceive happiness, what factors influence this perception, and how it affects our ability to feel alive.

While I haven't read the book it definitely goes on the list to pursue, since it is the first to look at Slow as a way of connecting with community and nature explicitly.  These are ideas that have come up repeatedly here on the Deliberately blog, and the author appears to be latching on to them in precisely the same fashion.

Several of the words I picked up early in the podcast, where Andrews attempts to capture what she means by Slow, were mindfulness and savoring.  Words familiar to our recent discussions of what the More Deliberate lifestyle is all about.  I've got the book coming, so more to come on that.  In the meantime, download the podcast on your Ipod and enjoy.

Convergence and Movements

After my rant yesterday and the declaration that the combined local food, sustainability, and environmentalist activities, to name a few, are not individual efforts but actually a convergence I wasn't surprised to find an article at Orion Magazine by author Paul Hawken about just how large the green effort has become:

After spending years researching this phenomenon, including creating with my colleagues a global database of these organizations, I have come to these conclusions: this is the largest social movement in all of history, no one knows its scope, and how it functions is more mysterious than what meets the eye.

What does meet the eye is compelling: tens of millions of ordinary and not-so-ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.

This could only occur because politics in this country has ceased to function as a vehicle for confronting significant difficult problems.  Washington is about private interests in this day and age, and to expect something sustainable to come out of government is to ignore what has happened in this country over the last thirty-or-so years:  since it's not packaged for the short attention span of Average American and on television, policy is uninteresting.  Instead of taking responsibility for that policy, Average American let's the folks in government do it instead, damn the consequences.

What is most interesting about Hawken's discussion is the centerless quality of what he describes:  it is the same structure that makes multi-national terrorist organizations so successful and dates back centuries.  This mass of activity is actually small cells of engaged individuals passionate about their causes, whether they be to save a tree, have a relationship with the farmers that grow their food, reduce their carbon footprint, or what-have-you.

Describing the breadth of the movement is like trying to hold the ocean in your hand. It is that large. When a part rises above the waterline, the iceberg beneath usually remains unseen. When Wangari Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize, the wire service stories didn’t mention the network of six thousand different women’s groups in Africa planting trees. When we hear about a chemical spill in a river, it is never mentioned that more than four thousand organizations in North America have adopted a river, creek, or stream. We read that organic agriculture is the fastest-growing sector of farming in America, Japan, Mexico, and Europe, but no connection is made to the more than three thousand organizations that educate farmers, customers, and legislators about sustainable agriculture.

This is grass-roots at its most essential:  individuals, not structured organizations, making definitive changes for a better future.  Hawken sees what many are seeing in the world today, a turn away from assuming a leader somewhere will deal with the problems that lie before us, a turn toward personal action and personal accountability.  Apparently there are many on this planet who are choosing to become More Deliberate Every Day.

You can read the whole article here.

How We Grow

I remember my mom discussing growing zones many times when I was young.  We moved around as a consequence of my father's work, and she was always reassessing what the change in locale meant to the massive backyard garden she cultivated.  Now, doing some research on care for the giant fig tree in our backyard (inherited from prior owners), I realized I don't even know what growing zone we live in, and had to go look it up.

Southwest Tennessee, it turns out, is in zone 7.  Really 7b, if you want to be precise.  And that matters because it means that despite my yearning we probably cannot grow olive trees here.   And it's interesting that we didn't reference these hardiness zones prior to planting our garden, since we have no prior cultivation history in this specific climate.  We planted what we knew would grow:  berries, squash, peppers, greens.  How did we know it would grow?  We just did.

These last several months have been an incredible journey.  A year ago I was paying a service to take care of my lawn:  yesterday I mowed with my non-carbon mower, raked, and added much of the resulting waste to the composter.  My body feels it, but my yard is somehow happier.  Last year we were buying our eggs and meat at Kroger:  this year we are eating farm fresh eggs and grass-finished beef.   I may be wrong but I think I can feel the difference and know I can taste it.  Last year we ate mass-produced supermarket meals:  this year we are eating fresh-baked breads (thanks Momma!), slowly prepared dishes, and growing our own vegetables and herbs.  It has become a great joy each morning to visit the garden and see how our efforts evolve.  A year ago I was amassing a dry-cleaning bill of as much as $80 per week:  now we launder everything at home, wash in cold water, and iron it ourselves, if it wrinkles.  There are many more.

So it seems we grow too, not just the garden secluded in the backyard.  I was worried about my fig tree after the late frost, given that the top foot of its twelve foot height had withered and dropped leaves to the ground.  But the result of this frost was just a setback -- the tree's broad leaves are a natural defense against the unexpected, and lower branches are already weighed down with dark green, plump fruit.

As these changes have impacted our lives we've found that we too encounter setbacks, but that natural defenses spring up to ward us on the course.  Our choices have changed to align with a healthier and more deeply informed lifestyle.  We are more deliberate, every day.

I leave you this morning with a quote from Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America:

A culture is not a collection of relics or ornaments, but a practical necessity, and its corruption evokes calamity.  A healthy culture is a communal order of memory, insight, value, work, conviviality, reverence, aspiration.  It reveals the human necessities and the human limits.  It clarifies our inescapable bonds to the earth and to each other.  It assures that the necessary restraints are observed, that the necessary work is done, and that it is done well.  A healthy farm culture can be based only upon familiarity and can grow only among a people soundly established upon the land; it nourishes and safeguards a human intelligence of the earth that no amount of technology can satisfactorily replace.  The growth of such a culture was once a strong possibility in the farm communities of this country.  We now have only the sad remnants of those communities.  If we allow another generation to pass without doing what is necessary to enhance and embolden the possibility now perishing within them, we will lose it altogether.  And then we will not only invoke calamity -- we will deserve it.

Let the body work and cure the mind.  Let the soul flourish.  Amen.

Starting From Where We Are

As I've researched the issues related to sustainability and local food one of the surprising tendancies I've come across if that of people (being spectators on the internet, mostly) throwing stones at other people (being those writing on the internet, mostly) who are attempting to change their lives for a better end, and in so doing of course portend to change the world.  I am one of such latter people.  And the stones that are being thrown are directly related to the fact that despite all of the changes occurring in the lives and actions of the latter people there are still other areas or actions that are imperfect in the eyes of the reader.  So someone may be blogging primarily about eating locally, for instance, and mention having had some chocolate.  Mention that it was dark chocolate from Belgium, maybe.  Release the hounds.

What is surprising is that the readers who respond so violently to this, who lash out at the bloggers or writers, seem to not care at all about the incremental changes that ARE being made.  Are so insecure in their own lives, it would seem, that they can't stand to see someone else taking control of their own and as a consequence becoming more informed and deliberate. 

Why would we not rather loudly APPLAUD those who are doing something, anything, that promotes a better quality of life for us all.  Even if I drove a gigantic SUV, ate and drank bottled high-fructose-corn-syrup, wore clothes constructed in sweat shops in China and all the rest it is still good that I am trying to engage in a conversation, even if only with myself, about what we need to do to fix the traps we've allowed ourselves to fall into, isn't it?  No, not to these people.  They would point out all of my shortcomings and disregard the planks in their own eyes. 

Case in point:  at Casaubon's Book, the blog's author Sharon has been chastised repeately for having multiple children even while she writes regularly in her posts about Peak Oil. 

Like everyone who comes to the peak oil and climate change movement, I have a past. Perhaps all of those reading this blog have a perfectly ethical one - you've lived your whole life in a one-room cabin lighted by your own hand-dipped beeswax candles. But I don't. I flew. I bought groceries from the supermarket. I had Barbies when I was a kid, - I'm pretty sure the plastic from will outlive my grandkids - and I didn't always fully understand the implications of population. And so I start writing from a post-lapsarian, fallen position, in which I have consumed more than my share, done environmental harm, and contributed to quite a few problems - including overpopulation. I admire those of you who come to this from a different perspective - who have never harmed the environment, and have always made wise choices. I have no difficulty at all admitting that you are better people than I am.

For the rest of us, we start from where we are. If you worked in the defense industry, or you had more than a just share of children, you bought designer clothes made by slaves, you burned oil that warmed the planet and that nigerian peasants were murdered for - the only thing we can do is to go forward from where we are. The thing is, if the only people who are allowed to speak are the ones who have always done the right thing, and always lived the right life, it will be a very quiet place. Me, I'm for having everyone speak. It isn't that I'm suggesting absolution - each of us has to deal with our prior impact in our own way. But angst about what is done is an indulgence I don't think we have time for - there's simply too much useful work to be done.

Exactly, Sharon.  Starting From Where We Are.  I'm all about that.  We should be jittery with excitement every time someone becomes more aware of the need to eat locally, whether in the context of being a gourmet, an environmentalist, or a health-nut.  It doesn't matter how they get there, just that they do.  And we need to remember that every path toward a truly healthier world leads to the same place. 

You can read Sharon's whole post on the topic of her children here.

You Are Not Alone

Yesterday I posted about my efforts to incrementally change the way I live my life such that my decisions are more holistic and reasoned.  This wasn't precipitated by An Inconvenient Truth or 30 Days, although I was and am profoundly moved by both of those efforts.  Rather it is a (natural, I think) function of being a relatively new father who is soul-searching about the legacy he wants to leave his sons as well as the example he sets with his actions.

I've always been an idea guy, big on words, but find myself at a place in my life where I am more concerned about actions than ideas.  So while I don't pretend to know how to change the world (though both Gore and Spurlock have some ideas, I bet) I do believe that it's not too late, never too late, to change my own.

And apparently I'm not alone.  Colin Beaven, an author who lives with his family in New York, has committed himself and family to living a year more progressively "off the grid" each day.  His blog, No Impact Man, will chronicle the effort.  From an article in last week's New York Times:

Its rules are evolving, as Mr. Beavan will tell you, but to date include eating only food (organically) grown within a 250-mile radius of Manhattan; (mostly) no shopping for anything except said food; producing no trash (except compost, see above); using no paper; and, most intriguingly, using no carbon-fueled transportation.

And Beaven is not alone.  There are a growing number of people or groups that are using blogs to commit themselves to lifestyle changes designed to be more consistent with their values.  From Fix where Megan Metcalf struggles over whether it is a "cheat" to have purchased paint to The Compact in San Francisco, more and more individuals are stating their cases over the internet, explaining that they don't have all the answers, and taking proactive steps to learning as they go.  Particularly close to my heart, at The Ethicurean, a group of bloggers is investigating how to more closely practice a different approach to food:

eth•i•cu•re•an n. (also adj.) Someone who seeks out tasty things that are also sustainable, organic, local, and/or ethical — SOLE food, for short.

While Eat Local Challenge is all about finding a way to source food locally that is both more sustainable AND economically viable for the average American:

During one week in April, a nationwide group of authors from this site and some Locavores will commit to the Penny-Wise Eat Local Challenge focusing on eating local within the budget of an average American. 

This challenge is not going to be about winning.  It won't be about who can starve themselves and spend the least amount of money.  It's about a very real cataloging of the expense of eating local so that we can begin to have a conversation about whether eating locally really requires a re-prioritization of family budgets.

There are more as well, in fact the more you search for information the more often you will stumble on another individual, sitting at another desk, talking about how they've set a new standard.  And what all of this leads to is the realization that the internet, that blogs, are building a new community around this idea of sustainability even as events big in the media (think Gore, Spurlock, or Schlosser) drive the conversation. 

Somebody with deeper insight will pick up on this phenomenon any day and recognize it for what it is, but the feeling is that there's been a step-change in the way people are approaching these questions, that decisions are being impacted in a profound way.  That new possibilities exist beyond these first hesitant steps.

How I'm Slower, So Far

We're working on being slower, more sustainable.  We're more conscious of our carbon footprint than we were yesterday (speaking figuratively).  And while this hasn't occurred as a revolution in our lives, it is an ongoing change.  My goal is to constantly be getting closer to an ideal place, knowing that the cumulative effect of that effort will eventually result in living a substantially more responsible life.  And the most important impact is a change in the example I set for my sons.

So we've changed.  Not as much as we should, maybe, but substantially. 

We're eating more local food, and have plans in the works to grow a garden this summer so that we're cultivating our own vegetables.  Since neither of us has ever demonstrated an aptitude for growing plant-life, we're utilizing the Square Foot Gardening method in the hopes that a program will make the efforts more successful.  And while we don't plan on giving up coffee, wine, or tea anytime soon, a much larger percentage of our diet is coming from foods that we source directly, the origin of which we understand and can explain.

I'm trying to be more cognizant of the true work related to my activities.  This came from a careful reading of Wendell Berry.  He believes that the act of creating machines that reduced the amount of human endeavor related to our choices disconnected us from the reality of our lives.  And that by more fully incurring that labor we become more connected with our choices.  Case in point:  I have been sending my shirts to a cleaner for many years now.  I hadn't, until this weekend, used an iron since I was in college waiting tables in a restaurant and had to press my single uncleaned work-shirt prior to every shift.  Aside from the potential environmental irresponsibility of sending my shirts to the cleaners, the question I asked myself was:  Do I make the decisions on wearing my shirts with a complete understanding of the labor involved?  And:  Would I be buying and wearing the same shirts if I did?

So beginning yesterday I am now cleaning and ironing my own shirts and slacks.  I know what chemicals, good or bad, go into cleaning them, and I iron them myself.  And no, I wouldn't be buying and wearing the same shirts if I had always been doing this.  And yes, wearing one last night to a dinner party did in fact make me more appreciative of the effort involved in making it ready-to-wear, did make me more connected to the decision.

I'm trying to be less of an unnecessary consumer.  This one's tricky but interesting.  The Compact Group in San Francisco spent a year living away from what they called the "consumer grid" according to an article in the UK Telegraph.  The objective was to source the products they wanted or needed second-hand when possible.  While I'm not a proponent of anything this severe, I do believe that if there is a book I want or the boys want a new toy there are alternatives to hitting Borders or Toys R Us.  And while Ebay is not THE answer, it is certainly AN answer (I can hear Gore over my shoulder, whispering about how much fossil fuel it takes to ship those toys and books via UPS, FedEx, or USPS).  So while I'm not planning on exiting the consumer grid anytime soon, I am buying less cheaply and promoting recycled products.

So this is how I'm slower.  More deliberate every day, that's my goal.  To be more deliberate I need to fully understand the consequences of my decisions, both backwards in the in terms of where they originate and forwards to where they end.  And perhaps most importantly to enjoy them in a more authentic and fully reasoned way. 

Otherwise I inculcate my own children with habits I am not proud of in myself and my world.  Like my sixth grade teacher Mrs. Arnold use to say, if you want to change the world, change yourself.