Thanks Five, Being Alive

thanks to Mom
and Dad,

for getting together,
in love
lust
whatever it was

and bringing
me
along to this miracle
and crazy
learning that is
sometimes called life


thanks to Earth
and Nature
for evolving me
us
humans
plants
edibles

movement to get the edibles
and to make the next generation


and thanks to
those who
figured reading and
speaking
and clothes
and shelter

some minor
details
we take for granted

running
drinkable water

we've really
got it
made


and thanks for the realization:
time to wake up
get enlightened
stay and increase ecology:

be of service
to Earth
and others
and our
own joy

what a sweet
task,
eh?

Irrigation

IRRIGATION
One of the reasons I moved to Sonoma Valley was to be near Bob Cannard, Jr., soil shaman and green string farmer, who at the time (twelve years ago), was giving a horticultural class through the junior college. Bob taught about listening to the soil, about adding energy ingredients to the water (pine needles from a high energy forest, deer droppings from a free animal, herbs of various potencies and properties), about respecting weeds, about using rock dust.

He also said something that I’ve neglected to follow at times, always to my later regret. He said, “Before I plant something, I make sure my irrigation is in place.” Ah, yes. It’s so tempting in the nice wet spring to just “stick ‘em in” the ground, the soil being wet and the weather forgiving. And since we’ve just “stuck ‘em in,” when it gets hot and dry, we start to lug the hoses around, and that gets to be a habit and we have “too much” to do (always too much to do in a garden), and then we are lugging around hoses all summer. Each hose watering, say taking 45 minutes, whereas a drip system, once installed entails 10 seconds to turn on a valve and 10 seconds to turn it off. But now we are busy and the 3 hours to set up the drip (and especially, the additional couple hours of shopping for the stuff first time around) seems “too long,” and so the 45 minute waterings go on and on and on, until we’ve spend 50 hours on watering our garden instead of 5 minutes, all because we didn’t have the three hours (five really) to set up the drip system.

Now, if you’ve never set up drip, it can be a bit daunting, and the local supplier is probably not the best way to go. I’d recommend taking the long drive out to Harmony Farm Supply at the west edge of Sebastopol and getting someone there to help you get a real setup. You might want to combine that, if you have a free schedule, with a Wednesday trip to help in the garden at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center in Occidental. Another time I'll write more fully about that place, but if you want to see beautiful land and what a garden can be with twenty years of one person’s stewardship, this is a real treat.

Anyway, get yourself some half inch plastic tubing, and some of these things called “Barb and Loc Sleeve” (page 17 of Harmony Farm catalog), and some T tape, and something to reduce your water pressure a little and something to connect the hose outlet to the half inch line and you can have gobs of garden covered by one twist of the hose.

This sounds complicated.

Oh, well. Learning something new can either be exciting, if we go slow and really enjoy the process, or frustrating if we rush through and demand that we instantly know now what we don’t know yet.

In fact, “not yet,” as in, “I don’t know how to do a handstand, yet,” is one of life’s great gifts we can give to ourselves.

So maybe you have a nice irrigation system, maybe your irrigation system is Not Yet created. Good luck, and have fun learning and saving big batches of time if you do create one.

And, oh yeah: this saves a lot of water, usually, like 60% or more.

The Day and our Awakening

the sun is shining
a sweet little nuclear
fushion
reactor
conveniently placed 93 million miles
away

a source
of warm
and growing the food
and lighting
our days

the sun
seems
pretty good

and
of course
we are messing with the atmosphere
so various waters are melting,
and it's getting hotter,

still
the sun is good

where
is the
sun
inside of us
shining
a light toward
the world
and filling our
inner being

somewhere
somewhere
in there
brilliance
glory
waiting
waiting
for us
to wake
to its brilliance
to our brilliance

yes

Paradigm Shift, the Duck Pond vs. swimming pool

PARADIGM SHIFT, DUCK POND, KIDS’ POOL

In the old paradigm, we see “problems,” we panic and we throw a lot of force “against” the “problem.” If illness comes, we throw a drug against it. If a sore shoulder appears, we give it a shot or a massage or a physical therapy workout. If insects visit the garden or field, zap them with pesticides. If some person is "bugging" us, we get angry at them, or wish they would disappear. At the social level, “liberals” like to throw money at social “problems,” with little success, and “conservatives” like to throw money into war, with even less success.

In the new paradigm, we use our intelligence instead of our anxiety, and look for the systemic ways that the “problem,” now seen as an indicator of the malfunctioning of the whole, can lead us to upgrade the entire system. For dis-ease, we look for food, mental health, fresh air, happiness, and breathing to create well-being. In Feldenkrais, a sore shoulder is not a “bad” shoulder, but evidence of a stuck brain, unable to see the connections that a healthy shoulder needs to have with the ribs, spines, neck, pelvis, even the feet. Insects call for rich and healthy soil. The "annoying" person is an opportunity for us to get clear on how to be happy with ourselves and another when we aren't controlling the world. And social/political problems in these times when oil is going to run out and climate warming is happening (Katrina, 20% of North Pole ice cap gone) call for a bigger understanding.

While small potatoes (or peaches) compared to these issues, here’s a set of problems at the local level in Sonoma, California, and one possible non-paradigm set of solutions. At least it illustrates bringing a larger set of variables into the proposed change. The problems: 1) no pool for kids, 2) duck pond overflows poop into creek in winter (via storm drains), 3) Garden Park back orchard languishing, 4) airplane travel creates a huge CO2 debt ( a couple flying to Europe and back over 8 trees to the Earth).

The old paradigm solution for the duck poop problem is to throw money at it, a lot, almost $700,000. Wow. This route might even eliminate the once a year cleaning of the duck pond and taking of nutrients to the Garden Park, where it hasn’t made it to the back orchard the last two years.

The new set of possibilities: clean out the pond at least 4 times a year, so when the winter rains come it won’t be at its dirtiest. Take this tree food to the back orchard and copy one of the core principles of Nature: one organism’s waste is always food for others. Put the duck pond swimming pool money to use for a pool for kids and assisting the garden be a place where people can learn to grow their own food in the times ahead when everyone will need to know this. Have a voluntary self-tax of lucky far traveling locals to buy trees for their CO2 debt and contribute these trees to the garden and to local schools, so kids can begin to taste food grown close at hand. Charge people twice as much to use the pool if they drove there instead of walking or riding a bike. The big picture is big, and full of possibilities and is always more economical, since one part is helping another.

Chris Elms
996-1437

Wet Winter, Dry Summer: All about the rain

WATER IN THE WINTER, DROUGHT IN THE SUMMER
In the winter the skies open, the water pours down and people try their darndest to get rid of the stuff. In the summer, the sun shines, and shines, and shines, and the drought and dry come to visit, and suddenly: not enough water. Foolish? Stupid? Let’s just say, short-sighted.

How much water comes a calling in the average winter? (And the present one is way over the top, isn’t it?). 3 feet of rain in average over our watershed, and that’s convenient, since three feet of water on an acre is about a million gallons of water. Our watershed being 110,000 acres, that means the average winter rains are 110,000 million gallons. To wit: 110 billion gallons of water a year. (Or, 330,000 acre feet). Lots.

On the Plaza alone, using a reduced 30 inch average of rain for the city here, we receive 7 million gallons of rain. Lots.

And on a large sized city lot of 10,000 square feet, the rains bring over 200,000 gallons ( on lots you use the one cubic foot of water is 7.5 gallons figure). Lots even on lots.

So what’s the obvious solution? Save it in the winter? Right-o! Cisterns. Dry wells, a reverse well into which water is pumped all winter: these allow water to percolate back out into the soil and into the creeks in the summer, when it’s needed. In the hills, streams can be slowed with low tech solutions: fallen trees and boulders do just fine.

Also in the hills, swales would be swell. Swales, a concept the permaculture folks borrowed from a WPA experiment (wildly successful) in the 30’s, are long ditches dug ( by hand or dozer) along the contour on a hillside. Since they are on grade, all the water running down the hill has a chance to slow down, hang around and percolate into he ground.

Over the years, the zones just downhill from the swales become saturated with water, and even in desert climates, over time deeply shading trees can be grown there. Around here, the first three or four rows of vines below a swale ( which are put in about every 50 to 100 yards) could be free from irrigation. These swales obviously help with erosion, too.

So the sky has the rain and the land takes some, the trees need some, the vineyards and farms and pastures need some, but lots nowadays washes away in the winter into the creeks when they need it least. Meanwhile the humans in the Valley use less than 5 % of the amount of water that falls from the sky ( the City water district and Valley of the Moon District together use 6,000 acre feet a year, which is 2%), but we get very little of it from the sky, from our own watershed. No, we are busy robbing the watershed of the Russian River, a short-term solution that ignores our natural bounty.

Is this foolish? Stupid? No, just short-sighted.

Chris Elms
Sonoma, 996-1437

13 New Ideas

NEW IDEAS
In Joan Huguenard’s January 13 column, we were invited to come up with some new ideas. This is the type of invitation I like. Here goes:

1) In city elections, when a PAC (Political Action Committee) donates money to support one or more candidates, they be required to match that amount in contributions to local non-profits.

2) In city elections, if a candidate spends more than $3000 on their campaign, they be required to match dollar for dollar the amount above that $3000 with equal contributions to local non-profits.

3) Notice which leg you put into pants first. See what it’s like to start the other way around.

4) Imagine what it would be like to have this non-habitual response: someone is rude to us, and we reaction with curiosity, amusement or delight.

5) Declare partial independence from the entrapments of the industrial/technological world. Spend one day a week car free and television free and computer free. While we're at it, go sugar free and cell-phone free. What's left, just a hell of an opportunity to be present, to love and to live.

6) Think of something you want to write down and then print it out upside down.

7) Think of something else you want to write and write it out with the non-habitual hand.

8) Pay all the teachers in the district twice their existing salaries and fire all the teachers who aren’t fluent in Spanish within two years ( since kids are expected to become fluent in English in about that time).

9) Subscribe to ( and/or bug Reader’s Books to carry again) Ode Magazine. In the recent issue are idea such as balancing the present 3rd world economic debt with a 1st world ecological debt for the resources we extract and the pollution we create; an article on the rekindling of faith in someone who abandoned organized religion; an article on the connection between soccer fervor and women’s liberation in Iran.

10) And this idea, which could save the world: end the legal status of corporations as bodies of limited liability. Put them in the same boat as anyone else who ruins something: they have to pay to fix it.

11) Learn to stand from sitting by shifting weight from pelvis to feet without any use of the arms and without using the back until the weight is fully shifted.

12) Ponder this possibility: both a “problem” with another person and a sore back have the same source: the organization of thoughts and understandings between the two ears.

13) Think of thirteen as a lucky number, the number native European shamanesses (a.k.a. “witches”) considered sacred because it was the number of moons in a year.

Chris Elms
996-1437