Author: Kate

As the summer begins to wind down (and my goodness, has it gone by quickly), I find myself asking a couple of questions as we approach the fall. What has this summer been about? And why bother with all that we have–growing a garden, learning new skills, trying to engage a little more intentionally and carefully? As fall creeps up on us, how can we maintain the mentality of slowing down and being contemplative as all of the activities begin again? Can we?

Of course, I think we can, if we are willing to resist the temptation to sign up for a million things and instead sit back for a bit and partake carefully. As harvest begins, I think we can use it as a way to pace ourselves–as our gardens give, we can enjoy!

As I was thinking about these things, I turned to Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable Miracle. For those of you who haven’t read this, I really encourage you to check it out! In the book, Kingsolver takes readers through a year of trying to live on the land in her country, and asks a lot of questions about the food system, and the general cultural system, we live in, which pushes us to be over-extended and missing a lot of necessities, like knowing where our food is from or how to cook it.

Kingsolver touches on the reasons why our culture shifted from homesteading and farming to what it is today, which is something we have talked about multiple times throughout the class, conference, and events…in the words of Charles Eisenstien, if you ask why, a couple of layers down, the answer is always money. If you grow and cook your own food, money isn’t changing hands. The person growing and eating food from their own garden isn’t able to fit more “stuff” into their schedules, nor are they profiting. Kingsolver talks about the shifts we’ve made to improve our productivity…and the costs these shifts have, whether we recognize it or not. She says,

“When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families’ tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable.”

What an exchange! Is that what we want? When fall comes, and school starts again or work schedules return to normal, are we hoping for quick meals we can purchase at the store so we can continue with our busy lives? Or are we not working so that we can slow down and enjoy life? And if so, couldn’t we work a little less and enjoy life a little more without much shift at all? I think Kingsolver says it well when she says

“Wake up now, look alive, for here is a day off work just to praise Creation: the turkey, the squash, and the corn, these things that ate and drank sunshine, grass, mud, and rain, and then in the shortening days laid down their lives for our welfare and onward resolve. There’s the miracle for you, the absolute sacrifice that still holds back seed: a germ of promise to do the whole thing again, another time.”

Will we wake up and look alive today, or continue rushing from task to task so that someday, perhaps, we will feel like we have worked enough to wake up?

 

Our little garden has grown so much in the past couple of months. We started harvesting our beets and are using them to make borscht  for the falls spirit of the land course. We have had an abundant amount of salad greens and have started to plant our succession crop. Our pumpkins, squash and zucchini are all starting to grow their vegetables now that they have extended their vines all over our plot and into our neighbours’ plot as well.  So lettuce celebrate for the produce we have grown in our un-beet-able garden.

I have the BBC app on my phone, and have it set to receive notifications whenever there is breaking news. And lately, I’ve been receiving a lot of notifications. There has been so much violence lately, reaching all around the world and affecting people everywhere. It has been shocking and scary. I have been filled with sadness for the people I don’t know who have lost their lives, filled with grief for families who have lost their loved ones, and filled with concern for our world in general.

But I would be lying if I didn’t admit that after a while, the shock lessens. Each time my phone buzzes with news of another attack or chaotic event, I find myself less and less affected–despite the fact that with each event, more of the world is affected.

I think this is an experience that many people can relate to. The thing about having consistent chaos in our lives or in our media is that we can quickly become desensitized. Instead of seeing lives affected, we see numbers of death tolls rise, statistics shift, another something somewhere that somehow feels less impactful or heartbreaking.

So what do we do about this? How can we prevent becoming acclimatized to violence or tragedy?

I don’t think the answer is a quick one. There is no app to download for it or formula to make sure we are still fully feeling and engaging with the events of the world. But something that I have learned at Spirit of the Land is that connecting with people and the stories of their lives is an excellent place to start.

Learning to garden, observe the seasons, and recognize the shifts and patterns in nature has helped me connect to the land that I have mostly ignored (or rather, been pretty oblivious to) for much of my life. As such, my responses to disasters, environmental issues, and the nature that surrounds me have changed. Because I am learning to be more connected and aware, I cannot easily become desensitized. I think this works the same way with people; in our lives, we can see many personal examples of this. When something happens to a family member or friend, regardless of how many other things are happening in the world, we feel it deeply. While I am not saying that we need to be deep friends with everyone in the world, I do think that falling in love with the world and the people in it has a lot to do with the cure to desensitization.
Sometimes when we hear about war-torn areas of our world, or consistent shootings, or really any recurring violence, that is all we know of a people or a place. A challenge I have decided to take upon myself, and a challenge I want to issue to all of you, is to get connected. To get to know more about these places and people that are experiencing these difficult times.

Lately, I have been thinking about the Middle East a lot. You know, the war-torn area that we don’t hear much about beyond the terrible events that happen there. But what do we really know about it? How connected are we? And if we are not connected, how can we help but skim over headlines and become
desensitized?

But if we stop and connect…if we stop to learn more about it, have our hearts opened to a place and a people, things change. The numbness that once existed suddenly dissolves, and we are just a bit more connected.

For me, this has been happening with the Middle East. The beautiful pictures in this post are pictures from there, that have helped me connect and see what the media does not allow us to see. I hope they can help you connect a little bit more, too. (All images from a user I found on instagram, everydayafg. Check it out for more stunning images!)

A couple of weeks ago we got together at the Camrose Public Library to talk about aquaponics. We delved into how to set up a system as well how to upkeep it and ensure it runs well. If you weren’t able to come to our event but wanted to learn more, I have attached our power point as well as the infographics below for your benefit. I hope you find these resources helpful.  

At our next “Seeds for the Soul” event next Wednesday, we will be discussing a chapter from one of the books that affected me the most during my time at Augustana, which is “Sacred Economics” by Charles Eisenstein. Eisenstein, although rather idealistic, ask some great questions about the way our economic system works in light of human needs. The following quotation is from chapter 2 in the book, “The Illusion of Scarcity.”

“It is said that money, or at least the love of it, is the root of all evil. But why should it be? After all, the purpose of money is, at its most basic, simply to facilitate exchange—in other words, to connect human gifts with human needs. What power, what monstrous perversion, has turned money into the opposite: an agent of scarcity?

For indeed we live in a world of fundamental abundance, a world where vast quantities of food, energy, and materials go to waste. Half the world starves while the other half wastes enough to feed the first half. In the Third World and our own ghettos, people lack food, shelter, and other basic necessities and cannot afford to buy them. Meanwhile, we pour vast resources into wars, plastic junk, and innumerable other products that do not serve human happiness. Obviously, poverty is not due to a lack of productive capacity. Nor is it due to a lack of willingness to help: many people would love to feed the poor, to restore nature, and do other meaningful work but cannot because there is no money in it. Money utterly fails to connect gifts and needs. Why?”

This is something I had never considered before. Money has always been merely money to me. I had never seen it as something that creates demand or perceived need in our minds. I had never seen it as disconnected from the world around us. But as Eisenstein goes on to explain, money allows our interactions – with the earth, with each other, with our food – to become anonymous and generic. Eisenstein brought me to the place of discomfort with our current system, and forces the reader to push further and ask the difficult questions, not only of “why,” but also, “how can this change?”

I encourage you to check out chapter 2 here: http://sacred-economics.com/sacred-economics-chapter-2-the-illusion-of-scarcity/ so that you can join in the conversation at the Camrose Public Library, from 6-8 p.m. next Wednesday to explore these ideas a little bit more. I hope it will encourage you to ask both the “whys” and consider how you factor into the future of how it can change!

During last year’s Spirit of the Land class, I stumbled across this quote in one of our readings:

“We are recollecting the almost-lost knowledge of our great-grandparents, those most essential of human skill sets: how to tend to plants, how to tend to animals, and how to tend to ourselves.”  ~Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen, “Become an Urban Homesteader”

When I first read this quote, the concept of “learning how to tend” felt foreign to me. I’m a task-oriented person–a list person, if you will. I like to be able to write down what I want to accomplish in a day, and then do it, and cross it off. I like the idea of a finished product, something that is visibly completed that can be tied up into a nice little bow so I can move onto the next task on my list. And, inevitably, I eventually want to throw away the list and begin a new one.

So why is this? And how does this connect to “learning to tend?”

There are different kinds of people, and different kinds of cultures, and that is okay. More than okay, in fact…it is what makes our world interesting, beautiful and diverse. But I also think my tendency to focus on accomplishing, checking off, or completing something successfully is tied to the industrially modeled world we are a part of. In this model, success is only labeled as a success–or economic growth–when there is profit, consumption, or a tangible result is evident. And so, the thought of learning to maintain something, to care for it and know it so that it can remain healthy and cared for cannot equate to success in our world. Tending to something cannot be checked off of a to-do list, it cannot be completed, it will not always create an economic profit. Yet, it crucial to the health of the world, and ourselves…and we have forgotten how to do it!

What can my response be? How do I begin to shift my mentality of perpetually accomplishing tasks to tending, caring, and being? I think Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen are right…that we must begin to learn to tend by recollecting almost forgotten human skills. Starting with tending a plant or tending an animal will inevitably lead to the tending of self. We are forced to recognize the interdependence of ourselves, our lives, on the plants, animals, environment, and people around us.

For me, this meant starting with plants. Aquaponics, to be specific. I had learned a little bit about it when I was in Romania, where an organization I worked with had begun a full-scale aquaponics program, which provided fresh vegetables and food for a boy’s home and a girl’s home, as well as a tilapia harvest every 5 months. Anderson and I thought it would be something fun to try on a smaller scale. While it hasn’t been without difficulty (who knew that newer windows blocked out much needed UV rays?!), it has been an excellent experience of learning to tend – to both plants and animals all at once. We currently have 7 fish (although not for harvesting), and are always playing around with the system to see what grows best. It has been so interesting to see the positive effects of both the fish waste for the plants, and the plants for the water purification. I’ve included a couple of pictures for you to check out our humble system…there isn’t much growing in it right now, as you can see, but learning what works in it is part of the fun!

If you’re curious about aquaponics, come and join us at our second “Seeds for the Soul” event on Wednesday, July 6th at the Camrose Public Library. From 6 – 7 p.m., Anderson will be leading a tutorial of how to make your own home aquaponics system (a slightly smaller scale than ours), and from 7-8 p.m., we will be talking about the chapter “The Illusion of Scarcity” from Charles Eisenstein’s book Sacred Economics. (Check it out here: http://sacred-economics.com/sacred-economics-chapter-2-the-illusion-of-scarcity/). All ages are welcome, so grab a friend and come on down!

Tending to it has also been an interesting experience, and I have learned it is a lot of becoming familiar with the system, and what influences what within it. Likewise, tending to our world and ourselves means becoming familiar with our relationship with everything else. And so, we must learn to tend.

Tomorrow we (the interns) head back to Reclaim Urban Farm for our second day of urban farming! Reclaim Urban Farm (www.reclaimurbanfarm.com) is an urban farming business in Edmonton that partners with local landowners  to grow veggies using organic, sustainable practices in the heart of the city. We have the privilege of working as interns there roughly 4 days a month this summer. Besides helping out with the practical tasks of urban farming, our goal is to learn more about urban farming practices and ways that we might be able to implement urban farming systems right here in Camrose!

Our first day with Reclaim a few weeks ago allowed Carley and I (Kate) to get up close and personal with composting. We were located at one of Reclaim’s larger plots of land, where there were already veggies growing (I even got some fresh spinach for the salad I had brought for lunch), and one empty plot that was waiting to be planted. We started out by spreading some rich, dark compost over the plot while Ryan, one of the two farmers at Reclaim, rototilled after us. We also spent a good chunk of the day both turning and moving compost, which Reclaim receives from Earth’s General Store just down the street.

While this might not seem like a crazy impactful day, I can confidently say that it really was for a number of reasons. Firstly, Carley and I realized that four years of school does not translate into much upper body strength for shoveling, despite the long papers and furious note taking. Secondly, and more importantly, it was great to see something that we had talked about so much in classes happening right before our eyes. While both Carley and I compost in our homes, we both use the oh-so-convenient system the town provides us with–we throw our household food waste into a compost bin that gets picked up weekly or bi-weekly, depending on the time of year, and somehow, somewhere, the city of Camrose turns our stinky, decomposing, unwanted waste into gorgeous, dark, nutrient-rich dirt that is excellent for gardening. Of course, I understand how the process works. But to see the steps of composting in action, from the lovely, earthy smelling dirt we spread over the plot as a nutrient booster, and compost in the process of decomposing, was an excellent learning experience. I can assure you, the food in the process of decomposing was less of a beautiful thing (we didn’t even know that food could smell quite like that), but it was really interesting to shovel the compost and see how some had already turned into dirt. And then there was the steam! It happened to be a fairly cool day, and as we began shoveling some of the more dense piles of compost, wisps of steam came up from the pile. While we had heard of compost producing heat before due to anaerobic breakdown of food waste, seeing it in action was quite the surprise. That stuff gets hot! Anderson (the other intern) had told us about a heating system that uses the heat produced by anaerobic compost. I was skeptical at first, but can now see how that could really happen.

It may have been a stinky day, and we may have been pretty sore the next day at the office, but it was also incredibly rewarding to finally “be getting our hands dirty” (both literally and figuratively) in sustainable agriculture! It all reminded me of Aldo Leopold’s warning: the two more dangerous things to believe are that food comes from the grocery store, and heat comes from the furnace–we need to be connected and recognize our dependence on the natural world. Likewise, our time at Reclaim reminded me that believing food waste miraculously turns into dirt when the city comes to take it away is perhaps easy, but also dangerous.

All that to say, we are looking forward to the next two days at Reclaim, in which we will be doing some transplanting and market prep. Who knows what else we will learn in the process!

Spring is here, and so are the summer interns at Spirit of the Land! Spirit of the land has hired three interns for May to August, and we have now joined the office! Over the summer, we will be looking at ways Spirit of the Land can improve current programs, further explore and develop programming opportunities, educational events, and community partnerships.

We are so excited for what this summer holds. It is a summer of exploring opportunities, dreaming big, and seeing what lies ahead for Spirit of the Land. We would love to see more year-round engagement and opportunities for the Spirit of the Land community, and are hoping that this summer, we can investigate ways to make that happen. While we have just started, we are already working on next year’s course and conference.

We are thrilled to be here, excited to see where the next four months will take us, and looking forward to sharing what this summer holds with you!

While much of Jim Wallis’ book, Rediscovering Values, was review for me, primarily in discussing the issues of our economics and the commons and community we need to turn to, I did find his concepts quite easy to grasp, and they all seemed quite practical. I think his metaphor of an unbalanced stool (the largest leg, the economy, that has grown so large it has now toppled our society over) is very accessible to anyone, not just economists, which allows for the concept of a new economy to be understood regardless of you economic knowledge.

For me, the best section was the last one, which took Chapters 16-17. I think that within these chapters he was able to put forward a transformation that is within our reach, while giving us a list of things we as individuals can be doing to make it happen. Wallis begins with the larger scale, suggesting that “A balanced stool [society] might also need new regulations around the revolving door between government regulators and lobbying for the industry they are supposed to regulate” (Wallis 225). In other words, Wallis addresses the need for change from the top down as essential, and even gives ways to do that – it is all about finding balance in government involvement or lack thereof. This was helpful to me, because while I appreciated previous writers that we have spent time with (particularly Eisenstien in this case), I found that Wallis’ goals and comments for the change that needed to happen on a large scale were easier for me to realistically support. It could be, perhaps, that Wallis’ ideas were not as radical, and perhaps they need to be. But for right now, I think Wallis is on the right track, and feel as though I can get behind his ideas.

In Chapter 17, Wallis narrowed down to what we – as individuals, communities, and churches – can do. He gave a list of 20 practical things, or Moral Exercises, as he calls them, to assess where we are at in embracing a new economy and making change on the micro level. He tells readers that “ Change begins when some people make different choices,” and that “[c]hange is preceded by commitments, new practices, and new disciplines – on all our parts” (Wallis 228, 229). Our actions start change, and sometimes it isn’t until after that our beliefs fully follow.

Of course, I had to read through and consider the Moral Exercises he lists, and ask myself (with only one week until the conference, and only one month left in this course) where I am in embracing the change that the new economy will bring. I had spoken in class a while ago about a practice my mother has, every once in a while writing down what her values are, and then asking herself where those values manifest in her everyday life. Wallis’ list reminded me of that practice. Where does my money and time get invested? When I think of my values, I think of God, my family, the pursuit of Biblical justice, my other relationships, my education, to continually be growing and challenging myself, and my health. When I look at my calendar and budget, it is blatantly obvious that my education takes up the largest section of both my time and money… but I guess there is a time and place for that, and right now I am pursuing education, so I struggle with the question: how does one pursue education and not spend the majority of their time and money investing in it? Needless to say, I still have to figure that one out. But that unique dynamic aside, Wallis (and my mother) challenge me to ensure that my engagement in this world, both economically and with my time, must reflect my values – and if they are not reflecting what I say my values are, perhaps they reflect what my values have become.

Well, it’s week two of reading Leopold, and I am sold. This guys knows what a relationship with the land really is, and reading the second half of his “year” was nothing short of inspiring. I only hope I can know the land as well as he does one day.

As I read through July, I felt like I was waking up with all of the birds he described. It reminds me of this summer, when I was working at the Visitor Information Centre here in Camrose. I had no idea previous to working there that Camrose is a large bird watching community. Since then, I am always watching for – and am always surprised at – the multitude of vibrant birds I see as I walk around the lake. The only question I have for Aldo, mind you, is how on earth he can get up at 3:30 to say good morning to some of the birds, and stay awake all night to watch the dance of others? But aside from that, Leopold, points out the incredible poetics of nature that we so often ignore. If only we all had a dog to “translate [for me] the olfactory poems” (Leopold 46).

I find so much of Leopold’s writing is significant because of his acute awareness of the world around him. When he goes on to speak of Silphiums, a nearly extinct plant, it once again jolts me out of my ignorance to see what we as humans miss – and often destroy because of that. Can we really not have “both progress and plants” (Leopold 51)? How true it is that “[w]e only grieve for what we know” (Leopold 52)! Again, in August, the beauty of the land is discovered because of Leopold’s attention to it – the way the river paints is beautiful because Leopold knows what to look for and how to “hang up” the picture in his mind. Fall sets in, and I am beginning to feel the winding down of the bird’s choruses and already, in October, awaiting another spring.

There are a few other things that strike me about Leopold’s fall months. Firstly, in October, he talks about the single-mindedness of freight trains. When I first read that, I was a bit confused of a correlation, but I realized being single-minded or focused on just one thing is probably a key aspect to the acute awareness that Leopold has. I say probably, because I feel like I so frequently have to be multitasking, I seldom have a chance to dwell on just one thing for two long. Secondly, I love the way he talks about the sun rising later and later. He still rises early, but the fact that it is now darker out for longer does not make him to depressed or tired (which it often does to me). Instead, he allows it to heighten his other senses.

In winter, Leopold starts off with again acknowledging the spirituality of nature, and that landowners have now assumed that they know when best to give and take life of plants. He insists that we must take ownership of our relationship and actions with nature, as it is a person’s “signature on the face of his land” (Leopold 63). He questions himself, his relationship with the land, and allows himself to engage and love it.

            In December, Leopold returns to reminding us to develop awareness and see learning opportunities for just that. “Every farm is a textbook on animal ecology” (Leopold 74). He also talks about object lessons, and that “one need not doubt the unseen” (Leopold 77), which for me is so important to think about as I move forward to write a paper on the spiritual significance of the New Economy. It’s what we don’t see that matters so much – lack of taking care of it has brought us here, and paying attention to spirituality in the land and economic system is what will bring change.