Scientific Ink

Author: Dunrie

  • Long term thinking: the value of staying in one place (green #13)

    Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front
    Depletion and Abundance cover

    I just finished Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front. It’s at least in part an eco-survivalist guide to finding your way in peak oil, climate change, and the forecasted hard times that will come from energy crisis. I don’t agree with it entirely, I have to say that I’m not as doom-and-gloom as she is (perhaps just my denial kicking in), but I appreciated several sections of her book.

    One section which inspired me to rethink was her description of the mobility of Americans – apparently we move once every five years on average. Given we’re transitory and perhaps expect future transitoriness, we don’t consider our relationship with our own yards in the way we might if we anticipated a lifelong relationship with the place. Just using the word “yard” seems less intimate and less nurturing than using the word garden, even though these two words have a common origin. Yard seems to be about what it stores (brickyard, lumberyard) where a garden evokes what it grows. Garden is clearly more creative and sustaining in my mind.

    That struck me as a strong contrast to, say, a book I read last summer, The Lost Upland: Stories of Southwestern France, in which the first story chronicled someone weeding and reclaiming an ancient garden plot, thinking of the folks who gardened there before. That whole book seemed permeated with a longstanding relationship to the land, though it in part elegized it.

    One of the reasons I stopped writing about being green was because I was moving to a bigger house on a bigger lot. And, the other day, when I came out the side door and encountered a bed of peonies in full bloom that I didn’t plant, hadn’t tended, and didn’t even notice in bud, I said to myself “what have I done to deserve this.” The peony blooms shocked me. And I was grateful to the previous owner (not sure which, the prior residents were there for only one year) who put that in for me to enjoy today.

    Although there was a fair bit of doom and gloom in the start of Astyk’s book, the depletion part, she did have a clear vision for abundance. Astyk advocates adapting in place, avoiding the cost and waste of razing the current infrastructure, by retrofitting our homes for increased energy efficiency, planning for intergenerational and more collaborative living, and cultivating gardens to increase our self-sufficiency. She’s envisioning a future of suburbia filled with familes and neighbors cultivating the eco-equivalent of Victory gardens. A sweet vision.

    So, maybe I don’t have to feel quite so terrible about the lovely garden and the land we’re enjoying. I benefitted from the past investment of the prior inhabitants of my house. For our part, we’ve put in a small garden bed holding lettuce, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli, and shallots so far. We will add additional kitchen garden terraces in other years. Next, we will invest in longer term items such as fruit- and nut-bearing trees and bushes, inspired by a visit and a rough plan by Nature and Nurture. I’d like to stay where we are for a long time, and plan for abundance.

  • Facebook – I’m staying, for now

    Subtitle: I really do get comments on this blog, just not on this blog.

    I heavily use a handful of social media sites: Twitter, Google Buzz, Facebook, Ravelry (knitting community), and Flickr. I value each for different things, and Facebook is my least favorite. Especially since now they’re trying to take over the Internet.

    Yet, Facebook is where my friends and family are, so I go there to hang out with them. Since I do not do a lot to maintain my Facebook presence, I pull in feeds to it from several places. I do pull items in from my Flickr account and from this blog.

    I have mixed feelings about the broadcasting I’m doing on Facebook via the blog. I like it that my friends engage with what I write – leaving me their reactions or just an “atta girl”. Yet, by feeding the blog into Facebook, I’ve let Facebook capture the interaction on the blog post. So, instead of comments on the post, I get comments on my notes in Facebook. One level away.

    I like this less than comments on the blog itself, but most of the kind folks who comment on Facebook would never encounter the posts except as notes on Facebook.

    A conundrum indeed. I value the interactions more than comments in “the right place”, so I’ll continue to do this. Unless, that is, Facebook drives me away…

  • Nothing like excavation to bring a family together

    Dave’s dad likes ponds. He put a pond in the backyard of the house where Dave grew up.

    We got a small man-made pond when we bought our house. It was at the edge of a slate patio in the back yard, ringed with a kind of perplexing boxwood hedge that blocks the view of the pond from the house. The pond is a graceful figure eight shape. It has aqua concrete walls, cracked now. It was lined with black plastic, held at the edges with loosely placed (unstable) slate tiles.

    The pond was the project Dave spent the winter planning. In the early spring, Dave pulled up the black pond liner, finding several garter snakes nestled into the cracks in the cement underneath the liner. We suppose they overwintered there…!

    Under the black liner was a clear indication that the pond had previously been fed by a spring coming out a few feet north of it. The spring came out of a pipe, from somewhere near our foundation (or from the other side of our foundation).

    If we reinstated the flow through the pond, instead of a stagnant pool full of water striders, leaves, and a few frogs, we could have something more lively and fresh. And, we’d get to engineer a waterfall.

    The planning began. Dave’s dad Nate, similarly inspired, booked a trip to visit from out east. Dave worked to get the end of the spring pipe excavated so that the pond work could begin in earnest once Nate arrived.

    Nate and Dave chipped away the concrete edge where they wanted the waterfall and created the waterfall and streambed using pond liner, river rocks, and rocks from the garden. They endured a false start where they filled the pond and it started leaking back up along the piping, re-designed the flow into the pond, replaced the liner, and finally got to enjoy the waterfall after three days work and many trips to the hardware store. My contribution was putting in my calla lily and voodoo lily bulbs near the spillway. Otherwise, I did other weeding and garden work while Nate and Dave reconfigured the pond and the liner and the piping..

    We watched the water flow into the pond this afternoon with our neighbors, and then once the pond had filled, we watched the overflow start to spill down the waterfall. There’s still work to be done – pond lining to trim, slate to arrange at the edges, landscaping to do, mulch to spread, and weeds to pull, but it’s flowing nicely across the pond and down the rocks and then back into its old streambed. Cool!

  • All it takes is persistence

    Things have been tense, and when they’re tense I’m drawn inward, away from the stress and complexity of other people.

    I feel like every where I turn I am hearing someone talk about writing – friends are turning towards writing books, I’m picking up books published by friends, a quick trip in my car gives me an opportunity to hear an NPR interview where a writer discusses the transformative value of fiction in our troubled world, a man pays to translate an Israeli autobiography into Arabic to honor his son, mistakenly killed in the conflict. Everywhere I turn, it seems, there is a theme of writing, of transformation. Writing underscores our common humanity by letting us into each other’s minds and hearts.

    Yet I’ve resisted the aloneness that writing requires, and I’m not sure if it is for me. I did have a chance to be a more solitary scholar after my dissertation, and I found it too solitary and too abstract.

    With this spinning in my mind, I attended a recent reading by Jeffrey Eugenides in Detroit. He’s a creative writing professor at Princeton University, my alma mater, and the local alumni organization invited him to speak. He read a few passages from Middlesex and told a colorful story of the diversity of disciplines housed at the Princeton University Lewis Center for the Arts, including creative writing, dancer, visual art, and theater.

    His story was vivid and wry, and the playful contrast he drew between the writers (whose work was dragging them more deeply into their interiors and removing their social graces) and the dancers (whose work was making them even more beautiful than they already were, bringing a flush to their cheeks) only reinforced that impression.

    In the question and answer period, when asked about his writing process, Eugenides said that he was not particularly talented (tho I might disagree) but he was stubborn. He said that the only thing a writer needed was sitzfleisch, the skin you keep next to the chair to keep writing. Of course, the dancers have their version of sitzfleisch, it just doesn’t keep them attached to a chair. He said writing teachers know which of their students has talent, but not which will succeed, because success takes (superhuman, in my opinion) persistence.

    All (all!) it takes is the capacity to sit and stare at the computer screen, or typewriter, or legal pad, and tell the story. Middlesex took nine years.

    Typewriter Hammers, originally uploaded by sgrace
    Typewriter Hammers, originally uploaded by sgrace

  • Spring awakening, and the world looks different

    Ah, spring. The trees are ablaze with blooms, the ponds are abuzz with frog calls, the mornings come earlier, and the evenings last longer. Time to shake off the drowse and inwardness of winter and stand, blinking, in the sunshine. At least, when it isn’t spring showers, then maybe stand under an eave, or stand right out in the soft rain, as long as you don’t have to be dry at your next stop.

    I am enjoying the blossoms of spring. I am also writing again. Some of the quietness on the blog was from my own misalignment – in the year I announced I was going to write about greener living, my husband and I started house shopping for a larger place, farther from town. Oops.

    Now, I’m just over 2.5 miles from my work, and I can bike to work, and if I walk or drive 1 mile, I can also bus it downtown. But, moving to a bigger house in a neighborhood without sidewalks and no corner store, I couldn’t blog about being green without, well, lying, and I stopped writing. And then we packed and moved, and I was busy with work and the distracting buzz in my head and body that comes with change. Oh yeah, and a surgeon opened me up and took out something (non-malignant) that should not have been there in December.

    Excuses, excuses.

    This isn’t meant to be an excuse post, but instead a flag of something new. After all of that change and resettling, I feel different.

    I loved the old place – it was the happiest most lovely place I’d ever lived, happiest most loving person I’d ever been, and I didn’t want to risk leaving behind any of that well being. I was also thrilled to walk to work….while I could theoretically walk the six mile round trip to and from work from our new place, I haven’t yet. Other changes, after a lifetime of tea drinking, I am experimenting with coffee (er, a milky mocha that has a dash of coffee, not the straight espresso enjoyed by my dear husband). But, something about going under anesthetic and losing a piece, moving house, and changing your caffeine vehicle has triggered a reassessment. I am, in essence, reading my own tea leaves and pondering the future. This happens to me periodically.

    r is for rebecca
    Exhibit A of many – “R” is for “Rebecca” mini-sweater ornament

    Maybe because I was sedentary, I spent a fair bit of my free time this winter knitting. Socks, scarves, purses…my Christmas gifts to the women in my family were homemade. I made small ornaments for my niece and nephew. I ended up with some gift yarn from a colleague, I had several of my own projects to complete. I knit and knit and knit.

    But now, facing warmer weather, when the thought of wool in my lap is a bit less appealing, I’m questioning all of that knitting. How many scarves can one person wear? Maybe more socks than scarves, but the cost of the yarn plus the hours of work…means the socks end up being multiply expensive. I’m happy to knit, and I’m even happy to spend a little on quality yarn for my free time, but I started to wonder what all of that knitting was doing for me. What I was expressing or replacing by knitting.

    After some quiet pondering, I remembered what I already knew, that it is satisfying a creative urge, one that I’m having trouble satisfying at work. Interestingly enough, this has been a theme that I’ve pondered before. OK, ok, I get it. Time to make a change in my job description to get a little more creative during my day job, let’s see if that calms the knitting drive.

  • Music and breath heals

    A grasp of fresh air, originally uploaded by Bindaas Madhavi
    A grasp of fresh air, originally uploaded by Bindaas Madhavi

    I tweaked my back two weekends in a row. I have some history of back pain, largely stemming from a jaunty twist in my spine (scoliosis). And, because I bend towards my knitting, bend towards my computer monitor, and otherwise stress out my upper back and neck, my upper back gets cranky now and then.

    Once I’ve tweaked it, it is a long process of hot baths, ibuprophen, bodywork, arnica gel, and mostly just rest and time to undo whatever kink or constriction I’ve triggered.

    Boring.

    My interesting stories are the divergences from this pattern: I have had two experiences of spontaneous improvement in my neck/back pain: through pranayama breath, and at a music concert the other night.

    Pranayama heals

    The first spontaneous release I’ve experienced was in a yoga workshop taught in Ann Arbor by Navtej Johar at Sun-Moon Yoga. During the session, the pranayama breath work (shown in the photo above) released the kink that had stuck my neck for days. I have used pranayama breathing some since then, not enough considering its powerful effect that day….To encourage my practice, I recently picked up the Pranayama iPhone app by Saagara from itunes. I used it recently to relax during a bout of insomnia, and last night to further relax my back and neck. It helped!

    Music heals

    The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
    The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross

    Sunday night was the only other time I’ve experienced seemingly “spontaneous” healing. I think I whacked out my upper back on Saturday by trying to move some largish rocks we have in our garden. I woke up Sunday morning kind of sprung behind my right shoulder blade. Later that day, I attended a concert at Rackham Auditorium. It was a reading by Alex Ross of his book The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, accompanied by Ethan Iverson on the piano. While I enjoyed the crisp and funny writing, I found the turbulent 20th Century history revealed in the lives and concerns of its composers daunting.

    I was excited about the concert because I wanted to hear the music of the composers I’d read about. I also sometimes lose track of time, and so I was late for the performance and stressed out when I arrived. They wouldn’t seat us because the piece had started, so I waited, fretting, in the hall for the a slight break to be seated. Well, Rackham has very comfortable seats, and once I settled into our row, the soothing notes of the piano, even playing intellectual 12 tone music, which I’d expected to be annoying, had a physical effect on my body.

    I don’t know what Ethan Iverson was playing in that particular moment, but in the middle of the performance that included Babbitt, Bartok, Gershwin, Ives, Ligeti, Jelly Roll Morton, Charlie Parker, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Stravinsky, and Webern, I felt a muscle next to my shoulder blade go into a release that felt like an inverse spasm. It was a kind of drumming pattern of releases and then slight recontractions, but without pain. I don’t know what it was exactly – I’m going to guess, based on my experience with pranayama, that what might have helped was a relaxation in my own breathing in time to one of the pieces. Or, perhaps my absorption in the event let some other process take its course in my back. I doubt that new age spas around the world play a selection of 20th century classical music, but maybe they should. The concert had an unexpected and salutary effect on my body!