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the path back is the path forward


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things enchanting. [kerri’s blog on two artists tuesday]

such beauty.

i don’t know who – in our town’s parks department – is responsible for plotting what will be planted in the big urn planters around the city or in the hanging pots or in the gardens…but my hat is off to that person. their grasp of color and texture and how they all juxtapose with each other is exquisite. and it shows in each and every planter and garden.

regardless of who it is – precisely, who is the designer – there are many, many others on crews who spend all their working hours tending these gardens, watering and weeding and deadheading – the zillion little tasks that make a garden look effortlessly stunning.

our city has taken inordinate care of these gardens and planting vessels all through the years, preserving the zen people feel while walking in and amongst the yield of this hard work. we are both proud of these gardens and grateful for them, walking through practically every day, noticing the tiny nuances of change as the seasons move – the late spring planting into summer into fall. the smell of cocoa mulch permeates the garden down by the lake and – between the scent of flowers and cocoa – it is enchanting and heavenly.

eric hanson’s video speaks to the current administration’s shrinking of national monuments bears’ ears and grand staircase-escalante national monuments. no small reduction, these federally protected lands lost 90% of their acreage. this reduction opens these lands up to private exploitation, ignoring the native spiritual and conservation environmental regulations that kept them safe and not accessible to road-building or the deployment of heavy machinery for resource mining. these vulnerable lands are gorgeous, part of the history of these United States, enchanting and inviting, a piece of heaven not only for native peoples but for the entire populace of this nation – which – as the video pointed out – are literally owned by we-the-people.

why it is that the administration would work to eliminate protecting the natural beauty of our country is truly beyond the scope of my imagination. so is the rest of what this administration is doing – i simply cannot comprehend the vile, heinous stuff they are – ruthlessly – enacting.

each day our at-least-3.5-mile walk takes us past our city’s gardens and planters along the harbor channel and inland around the marina. each day we are grateful for the careful attention paid to these places of beauty.

the times i have been in utah’s canyonlands or near any of its wild have spoken to my soul. there is a deep root connection to the earth there, a glorious sense of the freedom that is supposedly the law of this land, and sheer enchantment and wonder at how anything could possibly be so stunning.

again, i say, they-in-this-administration have no reverence. for anything.

and as a person with a finite life – just like all of them – i cannot begin to grok the shortsightedness of that.

*****

read DAVID’s thoughts this TWO ARTISTS TUESDAY

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trees are like that. [kerri’s blog on k.s. friday]

“the symbolism – and the substantive significance – of planting a tree has universal power in every culture and every society on earth, and it is a way for individual men, women and children to participate in creating solutions for the environmental crisis.” (al gore)

breck is as tall as halfway up to the peak of the garage now. it feels as if you could quite possibly sit in an adirondack chair – with time on your hands – and watch it grow…bits of branch reaching, reaching, leaf buds and then leaves unfurling and then more branch reaching, reaching and more leaf buds and more unfurling leaves. and it keeps going, despite the weather: storms and wind and hail and threatening conditions, despite it all. we love this quaking aspen.

breck, as i have mentioned, is the only tree i have ever – personally – purchased and planted.

we have had saplings planted on independence pass in honor of our mountain girl’s thirtieth birthday, we have had trees planted in memory of a cousin who loved the outdoors. but neither of us has had the opportunity to plant our own tree in our own yard – before breck.

because our shy-of-a-century-old maple has fallen, we will have another chance to pick out a tree – we hope two – to go in that parkway space between the sidewalk and the street. there is a reforestation program in our city that assumes part of the cost so that there are trees lining the streets of the city. it dates way back to the early 1900s when our ‘hood near the lake initially was planted with elegant elm trees, which, a couple decades later fell to disease. our maple had been steadily shading our home since the time of replanting. we will honor its beautiful and steadfast life by planting another tree – or two.

in the meanwhile, i’ve been whispering to the other trees here. the old – very tall – pine that is green about half-way ’round, its other branches shaded from the sun by neighboring trees, the spruce that stands in the opposite corner of the backyard. and the maples that are on the other side of the fence – they are enormous trees, towering over our backyard and our home. my whispers are for them to be stalwart, grounded, steady, flexible as we experience more and more extreme weather events…to stay standing all in one piece.

we have seen in recent days the dismantling – the decimation – of all kinds of laws as they pertain to climate change, all kinds of laws as they pertain to national forests, all kinds of laws as they pertain to national parks, all kinds of laws as they pertain to clean water, clean air, clean agriculture, all kinds of laws as they pertain to food growth safety, all kinds of laws as they pertain to livestock welfare, all kinds of laws as they pertain to renewable energy, all kinds of laws as they pertain to pollution, all kinds of laws as they pertain to science, all kinds of laws as they pertain to medical research….and all kinds of laws as they pertain to aggressive deregulation and expansion of timber production, regardless of any historic conservation or environmental protections. need i go on?

it is a heartless, short-sighted, ignorant set of ideals that annihilates, ravages, and diminishes the collective intellect of researchers, environmentalists, conservationists, scientists and that annihilates, ravages, diminishes and trashes the ecosystems of mother earth.

preservation is a much bigger word than demolition.

it feels like an honor – with substantive symbolism – to plant a tree in our yard – and to know that we will likely not be here to see it tower above our old house, to know that it will sustain through time – like trees do, to know that it will both breathe and generate clean air, to know that it will remember that we carefully chose it, we nurtured it, and we trusted it to stand fearlessly in the face of all change and any challenge.

because trees are like that.

“happy the man to whom every tree is a friend.” (john muir)

*****

TRANSIENCE © 2010 kerri sherwood

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read DAVID’s thoughts this K.S. FRIDAY

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voila! [merely-a-thought monday]

something wrong with me box copy

20 rolled his eyes at himself when he told us the story.  he was at the grocery store and was looking at dish soap.  he likes dawn dish soap; it gets the best ratings, he said.  as he is peering at the shelf of containers, he can see that way in the back is a container with just a bit more…the volume of the ones in the front seem lower than this particular one in the back.  so he reaches all the way in, moving aside other dawn bottles now rejected by him and pulls out the one where he can see the soap level just-a-little-bit-higher.  he notes that the plastic bottle is not squished or dented (for obviously that would cause a rise in level) and he triumphantly puts the chosen bottle in his cart.  voila!  “there must be something wrong with me,” he said.

as a person who grew up with soap socks and leftovers i couldn’t disagree more.  of COURSE you look for the highest level of soap in the bottle.  that’s a no-duh.  penny-pinching and making things last as long as possible were unspoken mantras for me; they still are.

my sweet momma kept a soap sock.  for those of you who have no clue what that is:  as a bar of soap gets smaller and smaller it becomes increasingly difficult to use.  never to waste anything, my momma would gather all of her tiny vestiges of soap bars and put them in a clean white sock (generally a sport sock…something a little thicker with a tooth like a washcloth.)  she would tie off the end and voila! there you have it – a washcloth with built-in soap!  a soap sock!

i have inherited this trait from my momma.  i will turn bottles upside down and squeeze the life out of them in order to finish all the product.  days after d has declared a shampoo bottle empty i am still encouraging shampoo out of its depths.  our refrigerator rarely has much extra in it – we buy for what we need and we use it up, even if it ends up as some weird concocted leftover.  growing up i didn’t need the “starving children in ….” speech.  i had dna.

so when 20 told us that he takes three pre-packaged 3 lb bags of potatoes over to the scale and weighs them i listened.  apparently, 3 lbs of potatoes can look like 2 3/4 or 3 1/2 or 4 1/4 lbs.  who knew?  you can bet i’ll be trying that.  more potatoes for the money!   voila!

“there must be something wrong with me,” 20 said.  nah.

read DAVID’S thoughts this MERELY-A-THOUGHT MONDAY

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