What used to be called cheap
by E J Brunton originally published in the Napanee Guide
Sometimes I do things that make my more lavish friends smirk and shake their heads. For instance, I really have to think twice to throw away a nice clean bag, be it paper or plastic.
I keep all those plastic margarine and cottage cheese tubs; save string and aluminum foil, cardboard, twist-ties and elastic bands. Christmas cards and envelopes become my note paper; unusual bottles hold flowers; tin cans with the juicy tomato picture still on them keep my pencils handy. Mesh onion bags stuffed with too small bits of wool and string can be hung in a tree as a handy dispenser for birds to choose their nesting materials.
Where did I get these strange habits? Well, long before recycling became the vogue my mother was the subject of much derision amongst her friends. She kept everything; neat piles of butcher paper, huge balls of string and jars of elastic bands. Little bits of soap were saved in a curious metal basket and swished around in the dishwater. Wrapping paper was ironed and reused till it became quite a valuable antique. Tea bags were dried (on previously enjoyed aluminum pie plates) for fertilizing what she jokingly called her “tea roses”. She even saved waxed cardboard milk cartons for freezing the trout that my father brought home. No drawing paper for me when there were plenty of nice clean cardboard pieces from inside the shirts my father sent to the drycleaner.
When her friends would smirk and ask her why she was saving all that old garbage my mother would say, “Well, maybe it’s my Scottish blood or maybe it’s because I lived through war and depression. Those days left an impression on me and I just can’t waste. Why throw out perfectly useable items that you get free everyday and then go and buy those same items?
You send me pies in aluminum tins and I send mine back to you in the same tins. And that bacon grease and bread crusts in old tin cans in the freezer? I remove the tin and put that mixture into an onion bag that I hang out for the birds in winter. My husband is glad to get the kitchen waste for his compost pile and Lord knows he has a wonderful garden that I’ve heard you admire.”
Mother passed away in 1988 but the habits she instilled in me have lived on. What used to be considered cheap is now considered not only chic but indispensable with shrinking space into which to put our garbage.
I can still remember her telling me that those friends who laughed at her saving ways would sometimes ask her for a loan. I hope she didn’t rub it in, when they came with hat in hand. “I’m just like Liberace,” she would say. “I’m laughing all the way to the bank!”
Note : After posting this article I found this blog from Gaiam with some interesting green gift wrap ideas at this link
http://life.gaiam.com/gaiam/p/Top-10-Green-Gift-Wrap-Ideas.html
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Mother's on the tightrope again
I compiled the following from several news reports (CBC, BBC) on the subject.
Chinese meteorolgists have been messing about with the weather in an attempt to even out the precipitation levels. The country’s north is prone to droughts, while the south is often flooded.
In an attempt to alleviate this the government is building a huge network of tunnels and waterways that will funnel water from the south to the north, but the project is still five years from completion.
Meanwhile according to Beijing Evening News, the Weather Modification Office seeded rain clouds by spraying them 186 times with silver iodide to ease a drought that was threatening the wheat crop.
The unexpected arrival of a cold front caused the heaviest snowfall in at least 54 years. In Beijing tens of thousands of people were stranded on highways linking the city with Shanxi, Hebei, Liaoning and Inner Mongolia. Tragically, the snow also caused a primary school cafeteria's roof to collapse in Hebei, killing three children and injuring 28 others.
One report indicates that the use of salt on the roads has resulted in the death of about ten thousand trees.
When are we going to understand that when we twang the tightrope Mother loses her balance?
Chinese meteorolgists have been messing about with the weather in an attempt to even out the precipitation levels. The country’s north is prone to droughts, while the south is often flooded.
In an attempt to alleviate this the government is building a huge network of tunnels and waterways that will funnel water from the south to the north, but the project is still five years from completion.
Meanwhile according to Beijing Evening News, the Weather Modification Office seeded rain clouds by spraying them 186 times with silver iodide to ease a drought that was threatening the wheat crop.
The unexpected arrival of a cold front caused the heaviest snowfall in at least 54 years. In Beijing tens of thousands of people were stranded on highways linking the city with Shanxi, Hebei, Liaoning and Inner Mongolia. Tragically, the snow also caused a primary school cafeteria's roof to collapse in Hebei, killing three children and injuring 28 others.
One report indicates that the use of salt on the roads has resulted in the death of about ten thousand trees.
When are we going to understand that when we twang the tightrope Mother loses her balance?
Friday, November 6, 2009
Unashamed Hippy II
FREE LOVE AND HAIGHT
By E. J. Brunton
At eighteen, hoping to kill two birds with one stone, I left the bosom of my family and struck out for California. I would spend the next year at California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland.
Art Colleges didn’t indulge in the hazing and frosh antics that Queen’s University did, so I could kill off that distasteful bird. The second bird was my burning desire to be an artist.
A year at the college was enough to kill that one too. I saw early on that while I loved to create I just didn’t have the dedication the other students possessed and creating what someone else told you to wasn’t - well, very creative.
It was 1961 and the Flower Child Movement was in full swing. Golden Gate Park overflowed with dreamy, long-haired hippies in their colorful garb.
Smooth-pated, saffron-robed Hari Krishnas chanted in time to their chiming bells.
Timothy Leary extolled the virtues of lysergic acid diethyl amide, commonly known as acid or LSD.
Ubiquitous coffee houses sprouted overnight in North Beach and “happenings” were staged nightly.
Barefoot Baez would make appearances from time to time at some local hotspot, usually shadowed by Dylan. My room-mate gained notoriety once it was learned that she had gone to high school with Bob in Brooklyn.
In the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco Free Stores abounded. You could get your dinner, a couch with no cushions, and a nearly-new pair of shoes with one quick stop.
Free love spawned lots of little Flower Children. Free Clinics looked after the venereal diseases and drug addictions that it spawned too.
Employment agencies were set up especially for these undesirable hippies, some of whom strangely wanted to work. The prospective employers would most likely be bohemians themselves who used the barter system in payment or bleeding-heart liberals who secretly admired the free and easy life style, but lived it only vicariously.
We art students made pilgrimages to this Mecca every chance we got. North Beach and Chinatown were our favorite haunts. We would buy five cents worth of bologna; then we would scavenge left-over rolls from the outdoor patio at Finnochio’s. Lunch was taken cross-legged on the grass in the park.
Thinking the fifty-cent greeting cards outrageously expensive, we copied down the verses and made our own.
And we could nurse a cup of coffee for hours listening to some of the best musicians that the jazz and folk scene had to offer.
Concha Laine, the daughter of Frankie Laine, famed for his rendition of “Ghost Riders”, was our classmate and he often visited the school.
I was in awe of my drawing teacher, Ralph Borges, who was featured in Time Magazine, the year I left.
Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, lame and blind, came to give a free concert at the school.
I learned to make silver jewelry and Found Sculpture from discarded objects, to paint with a stick instead of a brush and greatly improved my drawing skills. I learned that, unfairly, only female models took ALL their clothes off in the Life Drawing Class.
I had never had a room-mate and was not prepared for Laurie, from Brooklyn. She was short and brown with shiny-black hair and bright- blue eyes. She shaved off her eye brows and never cleaned her side of the room. Her sheets fell to tatters when the dorm mother forced her to wash them - for the first time - at the end of the year. There just wasn’t time to attend to these mundane tasks when there were poetry and songs just waiting to be written, guitars to be played and music to compose.
We dorm kids would talk for hours as we listened to Ravi Shankar, Theodore Bikel, or my favorites, The Carter Family. Folk Music was “de rigueur” and everyone had a guitar.
One night I was supposed to go to the movies with Becky and Ann, two girls from the dorm, but I begged off at the last minute.
Just down at the corner they were hailed by a man in a car and offered a ride. Anne got in but Becky wouldn’t. Before Anne could get out again the man drove off with her as Becky stood helplessly by. Anne was raped at gun point and held hostage for several hours.
Becky was able to draw a picture of the perpetrator which was broadcast nation wide and he was caught. By then Ann had escaped and next day her parents took her out of school.
It was an exciting era for a small-town girl and I have never quite recovered from it. I’m just an aging hippy and there seemed to be no cure; at least not until tonight.
Over 40 years have passed and I am looking at a television program about Haight-Ashbury in the sixties. How silly it all seems now! The make-shift weddings in the park; the wedding feast laid out on a blanket consists of a loaf of Wonder Bread in its blue and yellow plastic bag. The squalor of the drugged-out kids sitting listlessly on the street bundled in filthy quilts doesn’t look so appealing, now. The long, flowing hair looks greasy, the colorful garb, shabby.
The musical, Hair, which I watched a few days later, is Hollywood’s cleaned up eulogy to those times.
The much-touted peace and love that would save the world never came to pass. The visions of a time when everything would be free are gone forever, replaced by more sinister things like crack and cocaine, heroin, ecstasy and date-rape drugs.
It really was more innocent then in the time of Love and Haight.
By E. J. Brunton
At eighteen, hoping to kill two birds with one stone, I left the bosom of my family and struck out for California. I would spend the next year at California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland.
Art Colleges didn’t indulge in the hazing and frosh antics that Queen’s University did, so I could kill off that distasteful bird. The second bird was my burning desire to be an artist.
A year at the college was enough to kill that one too. I saw early on that while I loved to create I just didn’t have the dedication the other students possessed and creating what someone else told you to wasn’t - well, very creative.
It was 1961 and the Flower Child Movement was in full swing. Golden Gate Park overflowed with dreamy, long-haired hippies in their colorful garb.
Smooth-pated, saffron-robed Hari Krishnas chanted in time to their chiming bells.
Timothy Leary extolled the virtues of lysergic acid diethyl amide, commonly known as acid or LSD.
Ubiquitous coffee houses sprouted overnight in North Beach and “happenings” were staged nightly.
The City Lights Book Store had telephones on every table. Each table was numbered so you could make a discreet call to another client that caught your fancy. Ginsberg was there; and Kerouac too.
Barefoot Baez would make appearances from time to time at some local hotspot, usually shadowed by Dylan. My room-mate gained notoriety once it was learned that she had gone to high school with Bob in Brooklyn. Free love spawned lots of little Flower Children. Free Clinics looked after the venereal diseases and drug addictions that it spawned too.
Employment agencies were set up especially for these undesirable hippies, some of whom strangely wanted to work. The prospective employers would most likely be bohemians themselves who used the barter system in payment or bleeding-heart liberals who secretly admired the free and easy life style, but lived it only vicariously.
We art students made pilgrimages to this Mecca every chance we got. North Beach and Chinatown were our favorite haunts. We would buy five cents worth of bologna; then we would scavenge left-over rolls from the outdoor patio at Finnochio’s. Lunch was taken cross-legged on the grass in the park.
Thinking the fifty-cent greeting cards outrageously expensive, we copied down the verses and made our own.
And we could nurse a cup of coffee for hours listening to some of the best musicians that the jazz and folk scene had to offer.
Concha Laine, the daughter of Frankie Laine, famed for his rendition of “Ghost Riders”, was our classmate and he often visited the school.
I was in awe of my drawing teacher, Ralph Borges, who was featured in Time Magazine, the year I left.
Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, lame and blind, came to give a free concert at the school.
I learned to make silver jewelry and Found Sculpture from discarded objects, to paint with a stick instead of a brush and greatly improved my drawing skills. I learned that, unfairly, only female models took ALL their clothes off in the Life Drawing Class.
I had never had a room-mate and was not prepared for Laurie, from Brooklyn. She was short and brown with shiny-black hair and bright- blue eyes. She shaved off her eye brows and never cleaned her side of the room. Her sheets fell to tatters when the dorm mother forced her to wash them - for the first time - at the end of the year. There just wasn’t time to attend to these mundane tasks when there were poetry and songs just waiting to be written, guitars to be played and music to compose.
We dorm kids would talk for hours as we listened to Ravi Shankar, Theodore Bikel, or my favorites, The Carter Family. Folk Music was “de rigueur” and everyone had a guitar. Just down at the corner they were hailed by a man in a car and offered a ride. Anne got in but Becky wouldn’t. Before Anne could get out again the man drove off with her as Becky stood helplessly by. Anne was raped at gun point and held hostage for several hours.
Becky was able to draw a picture of the perpetrator which was broadcast nation wide and he was caught. By then Ann had escaped and next day her parents took her out of school.
It was an exciting era for a small-town girl and I have never quite recovered from it. I’m just an aging hippy and there seemed to be no cure; at least not until tonight.
Over 40 years have passed and I am looking at a television program about Haight-Ashbury in the sixties. How silly it all seems now! The make-shift weddings in the park; the wedding feast laid out on a blanket consists of a loaf of Wonder Bread in its blue and yellow plastic bag. The squalor of the drugged-out kids sitting listlessly on the street bundled in filthy quilts doesn’t look so appealing, now. The long, flowing hair looks greasy, the colorful garb, shabby.
The musical, Hair, which I watched a few days later, is Hollywood’s cleaned up eulogy to those times.
The much-touted peace and love that would save the world never came to pass. The visions of a time when everything would be free are gone forever, replaced by more sinister things like crack and cocaine, heroin, ecstasy and date-rape drugs.
It really was more innocent then in the time of Love and Haight.
Unashamed Hippy I
Did you catch the rerun episode of Six Feet Under last night? The one where Claire goes to visit her aunt Sarah. Aunt Sarah has invited some of her old friends for a nostalgic weekend. One of the songs they were playing as they danced around the fire half-naked was Woodstock by Joni Mitchell.
Now I did not have the fortune to attend Woodstock and I might not even have liked being surrounded by so many people. But the song has a haunting eery quality that appeals to me. My favorite part is the chorus " We are stardust. We are golden and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden."
We are - and we do.
Here are the lyrics. Hope it brings back some memories for you too.
Woodstock
by Joni Mitchell
I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him where are you going
And this he told me
I'm going on down to Yasgur's farm *
I'm going to join in a rock 'n' roll band
I'm going to camp out on the land
I'm going to try an' get my soul free
We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe it's the time of man
I don't know who I am
But you know life is for learning
We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation
We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil's bargain
And we've got to get ourselves
back to the garden
Now I did not have the fortune to attend Woodstock and I might not even have liked being surrounded by so many people. But the song has a haunting eery quality that appeals to me. My favorite part is the chorus " We are stardust. We are golden and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden."
We are - and we do.
Here are the lyrics. Hope it brings back some memories for you too.
by Joni Mitchell
I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him where are you going
And this he told me
I'm going on down to Yasgur's farm *
I'm going to join in a rock 'n' roll band
I'm going to camp out on the land
I'm going to try an' get my soul free
We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe it's the time of man
I don't know who I am
But you know life is for learning
We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation
We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil's bargain
And we've got to get ourselves
back to the garden
Thursday, November 5, 2009
That is the lot of a bargain hunter
Okay. So I couldn't resist it. I mean tulips bulbs at half price? I admit it. I lost my head. Any day now 126 tulip bulbs will arrive and have to be planted toute de suite.
I have the room but now I need the fortitude to go out there and dig in what I hope will still be unfrozen ground to plant them. Today would not be a day conducive to this. Rain and bits of snow are falling steadily.
But even worse if the ground is frozen when they arrive my purchase will turn quickly from bargain to bad decision.
Stay tuned....
I have the room but now I need the fortitude to go out there and dig in what I hope will still be unfrozen ground to plant them. Today would not be a day conducive to this. Rain and bits of snow are falling steadily.
But even worse if the ground is frozen when they arrive my purchase will turn quickly from bargain to bad decision.
Stay tuned....
Everything is grist for my mill
A friend provided me with this lovely piece attributed to the Apache (see her comments on the Cree Prophesy post). Thanks S. I am going to be lazy today and include it.
May the Sun
bring you new energy by day.
May the Moon
softly restore you by night.
May the Rain
wash away your worries.
May the Breeze
blow new strength into your being.
May you Walk
gently through the world and know
its beauty all the days of your life.
May the Sun
bring you new energy by day.
May the Moon
softly restore you by night.
May the Rain
wash away your worries.
May the Breeze
blow new strength into your being.
May you Walk
gently through the world and know
its beauty all the days of your life.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Jim Conrad, Naturalist
Some time ago I signed up for Jim Conrad's weekly Naturalist Newsletter. Jim is one of those lucky individuals who have the courage of their conviction. He spends every waking moment doing something he loves. He attained this freedom when he realized that some things are more important than money.
I often marvel at how Jim's views and mine are so closely aligned although my convictions seem to waver. I still heavily favor my creature comforts! But he seems to take the thoughts right out of my head and express them much more eloquently than I ever could.
This is just an excerpt from his Nov 1, 2009 edition. To see more of Jim's free newsletters go to his web site
www.backyardnature.net/n/index.htm
THE DA VINCI CODE, GLOBAL WARMING, TRUTH
by Jim Conrad, from his Newsletter
For years I've heard about Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code so when I stumbled upon a website offering it as a free text download I grabbed it. Finally I know why everyone wants to take a new look at Da Vinci's "The Last Supper." The novel has spawned a whole new generation of conspiracy theories, plus there's a spate of new books and websites either debunking The Da Vince Code's most provocative assertions, or embellishing them. It looks like most people just don't know who or what to believe.
At the same time I was reading The Da Vince Code, poll results came out reporting that despite an avalanche of scientific data documenting the effects of global warming, people believing that there is solid evidence that Earth's average temperature has increased over the past few decades has dropped from 71% last year to only 57% today.
Moreover, in the current public debate on healthcare issues, one side says one thing as the other says the opposite, and opinion seems to track with the side spending most on TV ads. Also I hear on National Public Radio that about half of North Americans believe in ghosts.
It seems that this may be yet another of those yin/yang situations: The more information we have, the less capable we are of processing it. As the information explosion continues, maybe average people will lose their ability to deal with information so completely that they'll become as superstitious, functionally ignorant and vulnerable to manipulation by truth-bearing "illuminati" as our ancient ancestors.
That doesn't have to be the case, however, for Nature offers us all the truths we really need. Moreover, if anything on Earth is trustworthy, surely it is Nature, for Nature is the Creator's most profound and immediate Creation. Nature's structure, the evolutionary trends She manifests, and the spiritual insights She inspires within each of us spontaneously, reveal truths enough to guide us through meaningful, enriched and enlightened lives.
Nature's structure reveals sacred patterns, the most obvious being those of recycling, the sanctity of diversity, and the recognition of mutual interdependency among all components of the biosphere.
Nature's Earthly evolutionary history reveals to us aspects of the "Creator's plan." Maybe the most transfixing feature of this history is the fact that throughout Earth's biological evolution species have arisen with ever more intense awareness of their own context, and with ever greater capacities for feeling creative inspiration. This trend amounts to a spiritual imperative for each of us personally: To harmonize our own lives with the flow of Earthly evolution by always struggling to know more, to understand more, to feel more...
Surely spiritual insights gained by reflecting on Nature's nature inevitably vary from person to person, because we are all programmed to interpret the input of our senses differently. Among my own most useful spiritual insights are those based on The Six Miracles of Nature, which I outline and annotate at http://www.backyardnature.net/j/6/.
Those Six Miracles, to me, reveal a Universe more mysterious, more generous and more beautiful than my little brain can grasp. Meditation on them has bestowed me with a satisfying spiritual rootedness, and a profound reverence for The Creative Impulse. And when I find myself wondering about "the meaning of it all," sometimes I glance that Meaning by imagining what form the Seventh Miracle may someday take.
*****
I often marvel at how Jim's views and mine are so closely aligned although my convictions seem to waver. I still heavily favor my creature comforts! But he seems to take the thoughts right out of my head and express them much more eloquently than I ever could.
This is just an excerpt from his Nov 1, 2009 edition. To see more of Jim's free newsletters go to his web site
www.backyardnature.net/n/index.htm
THE DA VINCI CODE, GLOBAL WARMING, TRUTH
by Jim Conrad, from his Newsletter
For years I've heard about Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code so when I stumbled upon a website offering it as a free text download I grabbed it. Finally I know why everyone wants to take a new look at Da Vinci's "The Last Supper." The novel has spawned a whole new generation of conspiracy theories, plus there's a spate of new books and websites either debunking The Da Vince Code's most provocative assertions, or embellishing them. It looks like most people just don't know who or what to believe.
At the same time I was reading The Da Vince Code, poll results came out reporting that despite an avalanche of scientific data documenting the effects of global warming, people believing that there is solid evidence that Earth's average temperature has increased over the past few decades has dropped from 71% last year to only 57% today.
Moreover, in the current public debate on healthcare issues, one side says one thing as the other says the opposite, and opinion seems to track with the side spending most on TV ads. Also I hear on National Public Radio that about half of North Americans believe in ghosts.
It seems that this may be yet another of those yin/yang situations: The more information we have, the less capable we are of processing it. As the information explosion continues, maybe average people will lose their ability to deal with information so completely that they'll become as superstitious, functionally ignorant and vulnerable to manipulation by truth-bearing "illuminati" as our ancient ancestors.
That doesn't have to be the case, however, for Nature offers us all the truths we really need. Moreover, if anything on Earth is trustworthy, surely it is Nature, for Nature is the Creator's most profound and immediate Creation. Nature's structure, the evolutionary trends She manifests, and the spiritual insights She inspires within each of us spontaneously, reveal truths enough to guide us through meaningful, enriched and enlightened lives.
Nature's structure reveals sacred patterns, the most obvious being those of recycling, the sanctity of diversity, and the recognition of mutual interdependency among all components of the biosphere.
Nature's Earthly evolutionary history reveals to us aspects of the "Creator's plan." Maybe the most transfixing feature of this history is the fact that throughout Earth's biological evolution species have arisen with ever more intense awareness of their own context, and with ever greater capacities for feeling creative inspiration. This trend amounts to a spiritual imperative for each of us personally: To harmonize our own lives with the flow of Earthly evolution by always struggling to know more, to understand more, to feel more...
Surely spiritual insights gained by reflecting on Nature's nature inevitably vary from person to person, because we are all programmed to interpret the input of our senses differently. Among my own most useful spiritual insights are those based on The Six Miracles of Nature, which I outline and annotate at http://www.backyardnature.net/j/6/.
Those Six Miracles, to me, reveal a Universe more mysterious, more generous and more beautiful than my little brain can grasp. Meditation on them has bestowed me with a satisfying spiritual rootedness, and a profound reverence for The Creative Impulse. And when I find myself wondering about "the meaning of it all," sometimes I glance that Meaning by imagining what form the Seventh Miracle may someday take.
*****
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