“I’m sorry; we can’t do that.”

November 10, 2011 by scillagrace

You know how once you get pregnant, all you see around you is pregnant women? I want to trigger that phenomenon in this post and bring awareness to something I feel is pretty common in our fast-paced American life. I want to see how often people come up with the “I’m sorry; we can’t do that” line when what they really mean is something else. Something like, “I’m sorry; I haven’t been trained to do that” or “I’m sorry; my computer can’t do that, and I don’t know how to do anything without the computer” or “I’m sorry; we aren’t willing to do that. Your request is not as important as other things.” The real answer is absolutely valid and a fine place to begin negotiations. The problem is, we don’t often get the real answer.

I worked in customer service for a few years, and I remember the nervousness that accompanied requests to depart from policy. I didn’t know if I had the authority to make exceptions. I often didn’t want to be in the position of the middle man going back and forth from the customer to my superior. It made me feel caught in a conflict that wasn’t mine, especially if it dragged on and on. Eventually, I got to the point where I rather enjoyed listening to people and trying to come up with creative compromises. But then I was told that I was spending too much time on these discussions and I should simply state the policy and get off the phone.

Dealing with people is tricky. They require your time, and time is money. To be an efficient society, we must streamline our systems. Any person who does not comply with procedure is throwing a monkey wrench into the works. So what do we value more, the “works”, the people, or some other ideal? Once you become aware that you’re getting an “I’m sorry; we can’t do that” response, what do you do?

Here are a few examples of this kind of exchange in real life. The first one is “How do you want your coffee?” Steve does not like the prevalent custom of serving coffee in disposable containers. He likes to drink his latte from a mug. He rarely orders anything “to go”. He values conservation of resources and energy and is not too concerned with “convenience”. We have breakfast often at a local cafe that has recently been hiring new staff. Young staff. I am patient and cheerful and as helpful as I can be when I’m placing our order. I got to ordering Steve’s latte and said, “With that breakfast, I want a latte in a mug with 2% milk.” “Um, okay. What size?” “In a mug.” “I’m sorry; we can’t do that.” We happened to have had breakfast there just the day before. “Well, yesterday you could.” A more veteran server came up behind him and whispered, “Yes we can. It’s served in a soup mug.”

I’m not saying this young person did anything wrong. It was probably about his third day on the job. The point is that we often get streamlined into making concessions in our decision-making and forget that there are other options. We don’t have to take the disposable option. We don’t have to take the profitable option if profit is not our highest goal. We don’t have to have a lawn or rake our leaves or live in the city or send our kids to public schools or give birth in a hospital. We don’t have to go “up and to the right” and continue to support a growth economy. But we’ll probably be told when we suggest an alternative, “I’m sorry; we can’t do that.”

Here’s another example. I am following a discussion on a blog about an architectural idea coming out of Italy. The title of the article is “Milan’s Vertical Forest”. http://pensci.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/milans-vertical-forest The premise of the idea is to create a “less crowded, less polluted, less inhumane” city by erecting high-rise buildings with open balcony space on all four sides to accommodate trees and greenery that would help clean the air and provide a natural aesthetic. It sounds great, but it makes me wonder whether it’s assuming “we can’t” do something else instead. If what Milan wants is forest, why not tear down the high-rises and convert the land into open green space? If what Milan wants is urban housing, why are they calling it a forest when in reality, it’s just apartments with more balcony space? Are potted trees really going to thrive there? And will people actually use all that space for vegetation instead of storing their bicycles and grills and laundry there? If we really want the city to be less crowded and polluted, why not encourage people to move out and work the small farms in France that are being abandoned, for example? No, “we can’t do that”, we have to think of solutions that keep people in the city and promote more construction and more growth. Well, we don’t have to. Let’s just be honest about what our goals are and discuss from there.

So what happens when you “throw a monkey wrench” into the system and ask for a different option? Do you get an honest negotiation? I would like to gum up the works of the political machine and ask for a candidate who would admit that s/he is not perfect in character, is not superior in knowledge about every facet of American life and doesn’t necessarily have to be the prime ideologue, but who would be a skilled administrator willing to represent the people and carry out their ideas.

I don’t want a cardboard cup with the shiny logo and a snappy lid. I just need a teacup to hold some tea long enough to get it to my mouth. Any Buddhist will tell you, it’s not about the teacup, it’s about the tea.

Living on the Land – or a few feet above

October 28, 2011 by scillagrace

I am considering bird feeding options. I would love to have some cardinals visit our small south yard this winter. They do anyway, but I want to encourage them to linger a while and refresh themselves. I stopped in at a wild bird and pet shop to look over some of the products. I was pretty much appalled at the prices. Suburban homeowners around here spend a lot of money on their yards. I am only an unemployed renter, so I’m going the DIY route. We have a weathered old wicker chair frame and a CD storage chest that have been sitting outside for a few seasons. I’ve decided to try to build a feed station using them. Recycling, don’t ya know. So I went online to read up on bird feeders and squirrels. There seems to be a conflict among humans as to the desirability of squirrel activity in proximity to our dwellings. They are amazing animals who don’t mind being observed. They also have been known to move in with us humans and destroy property. I see squirrels in the trees and in the garbage around the duplex, but so far there haven’t been any signs of them moving into the attic and eating books. I want to keep it that way. I don’t think the squirrels need any assistance in finding food around here, so I’d like to provide a food that’s not attractive to them but will be attractive to cardinals and other song birds. I’ve read that safflower seeds may be just the thing. So this is my goal: to construct a platform feeder using the chair and storage chest parts and buy safflower seed for the winter. Then we’ll see what the birds and squirrels do.

Do these guys care about Game 7?

Might Itchy-Twitchy become tempted to move inside?

Even if I didn’ t do a thing, I’d still have cardinals and squirrels as my neighbors. I doubt my project is going to make a difference in their survival over the winter. I don’t imagine that I have any role as a wildlife manager in this situation. I could pat myself on the back and say I’m being wildlife friendly, in a way. But it’s not that big a deal. I’m really only doing it for my own amusement. I often wonder at the decisions and efforts I’ve made to be eco-minded. For example, the online petitions and letters to my congressional representatives urging them to take certain actions on various pieces of legislation. Does that really make a difference? So far, I’ve noticed that it only generates more junk mail from Republican officials who write to thank me for my input and inform me that they have no intention of doing what I suggest. I could take the next step and send money to the originators of these petitions, but I have no income at this time and have therefore decided not to do that. I don’t know what effect that might have if I did. I have moments when my idealism dares me to hope great things, and then I have moments when my realism admits the futility of my individual efforts.

Making ripples that travel in unknown directions. Will we contribute to a tidal wave? Will we send a blessing bobbing toward a distant shore? We have no way to know. I do my best to have good intentions. I hope my Buddha smile makes the world a kinder place somehow.

Homesteading

October 22, 2011 by scillagrace

Because I’m going on the road today to visit my children, I’m not going to spend a lot of time on the internet. So here’s my suggestion: spend the time you may have spent reading my blog checking out this website.

www.urbanhomestead.org

This family is amazing. They settled in an urban house in Pasadena in 1985 and converted it to a working small farm that produces nearly all of their food and subsistence needs, including biodiesel, clothing, health care products, and much more. They now have an institute and do educational outreach all over the country. Having lived in Southern California myself for 11 years, I find this fascinating. I hope you’re inspired.

Spontaneity

September 26, 2011 by scillagrace

Okay, so we didn’t set off on our camping trip today. Steve’s feeling a bit…odd. Low energy. So, instead, we’re going to see a foodie film that’s part of the Milwaukee Film Festival (“El Bulli – Cooking in Progress”), and we’ll set out tomorrow. We also picked out a new novel to read aloud. This is a tradition that we started the first year we were dating. We began with Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, and now we’ve begun The Plumed Serpent by D.H. Lawrence. Also, check out my new blog bling, Brighter Planet’s 350 Challenge Patch. It’s at the end of my posts. One week from yesterday is the Diabetes Step Out Walk. There’s a link to that down there, too.

My personal gold star for the day was letting Steve sleep in until 11am without getting anxious about a change in our plans. I am becoming a more spontaneous person. My kids will applaud.

Slowing Down

September 25, 2011 by scillagrace

The morning after a splendid dinner party looks like this:

A kitchen full of dirty dishes

Four people, five beverages, three courses = dishes to wash. Oh, but it went quickly and painlessly. Then I took naps. Three so far. We’re both feeling a bit out of it today, not sure why. Not hungover or anything, just slow and wobbly. Plus, it’s been raining steadily. Seasonal changes and changes in habit seem more noticeable as I grow older. That’s good, though. I want to be more aware; I want to slow down and notice life.

Tomorrow, we plan to head north into the upper peninsula of Michigan and camp in the Porcupine Mountains. I’ve never been there. I want to take lots of pictures and write blog entries in a journal to post when I return. I want to keep my eyes open and learn. I also want to figure out how to recycle the empty propane canisters for the Coleman stove. We’ve collected 5 now, and the best information I can gather from the Coleman website is that perhaps a steel recycling place will take them, perhaps not. I remember finding one in a fire pit once and digging out fibrous pieces that looked like asbestos or something. With any luck, we’ll find enough dry wood that we won’t need to use another one.

Today’s reading material was from the book of Job and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Radical affirmations of the mystery, sanctity and loveliness of life. “Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare, if you know all this.” I cannot comprehend, but I can love.

C’mon People Now; Ev’rybody Get Together

September 22, 2011 by scillagrace

Harambee is a Swahili word that means “all pull together”. Many community organizations use it in their name. I understand this concept very clearly, being the linear thinker that I am. I visualize a load at the end of a rope. The object is to move the load in one direction, so everyone grabs the rope and pulls together in that direction. I would love to figure out how to jump onto that rope line and move the planet back from the brink of disaster. Problem solved, “ta-dah”, now we party. However, our interconnected web of global systems presents a more complicated “load”. If you start pulling in one direction, something else will be effected and will move. How will that effect everything else? That’s something to take into consideration. In fact, the whole thing has to be considered at the same time, holistically. So how do you visualize that? Steve was talking about a gyroscope-type model, with himself as the hub. He mentioned staying balanced and grounded in that center. I thought that sounded rather egocentric, but then he spoke about the Buddhist idea that “no one can be at peace until we’re all at peace”. Then, I visualized a round tabletop that was balanced on top of a ball at the center. With all of life on the tabletop, we would have to arrange ourselves simultaneously and evenly around the table so that it doesn’t tip in any one direction. Nature sort of works like this. Take populations: when one gets too large, the food web makes a sort of correction to bring it back in balance. Human beings are way out of balance on that tabletop. We have tipped everything in our direction; we are way too heavy in many different ways. How do we pull back in toward the center and make room for all the rest of life to be in balance? How do we look at the entire tabletop at once?

Steve has often pointed out to me that I am “not an athlete” (for example, when I’m getting in his way while he’s carrying a heavy box of books). He talks about how really good athletes have a way of anticipating how and where to move in just the right way to be in the right place at the right time. Think of soccer goalies or basketball rebounders. They seem to have eyes in the back of their head or peripheral vision and electromagnetic sensors that enable them to assess the total situation far better than the average person. There’s a grace and an instinct that gives them that special edge over the merely agile and strong. We need to have that kind of sense about our global situation. How do we move to counteract the imbalances in our systems?

I wish I were more of a visionary and that I had an answer for you. I am a freight train in many ways. I pull slowly and persistently, but I’m not the leader you’re looking for. I may be the droid, though. : ) But I believe that leadership is out there. There must be athletes in global perspective somewhere on this planet. Let’s start a forum. Let’s get together to work on sustainability. Let’s balance this tabletop before we all go crashing over the edge.

On track to sustainability

Awareness, Appreciation, Action

September 8, 2011 by scillagrace

Today was Day 2 of volunteer training. Insects and Soil were the topics. Howard, the second staff naturalist, began the day. We went through some background information about the Animal kingdom and where Insects fit in, targeting the 1st grade through 3rd grade audience. Then he sort of stepped outside of the topic to comment on why we teach this stuff. He said that he likes to keep AAA in mind: awareness, appreciation, and action. I understand completely that there is a dearth of awareness about the natural world in our urban youngsters, especially as technology advances and funding for enrichment education is continually cut. They spend more and more time on the computer and less time outside, then they look under a log for the first time and are amazed to find critters living there. Ta-dah! First step. Then comes appreciation. They wonder and want to know more and are fascinated by what there is to learn. Animals, plants, rocks, the solar system, cycles, etc., all inter-dependent and inter-active, details and marvels in abundance. I recognize that my appreciation increases every day and that I have a voracious appetite for more. I want to spend more and more time outdoors, more and more time learning. This is a pretty cool place to be, but it’s not the end. The final step is action. What do we hope for these young people who come to learn about the natural world? What do we hope for the next generation? Well, I raised my hand and ventured, “Responsibility?” because that’s what I hope for myself. I want to take all this awe and love and turn it into decisions that will make a positive impact. This is indeed the toughest part of the trilogy to grasp and embody, and it’s where Steve and I are currently stuck. It’s fine to recycle, buy local food, and support environmental legislation, but is that really going to make a difference? In order to reverse trends and live sustainably, we need to make more progressive and radical life decisions, and we need to implement them in community with others. But where do we begin? How do we find others who are committed to that progress?

How will I respond to this awesome world?

We have a lot of reading material (as you would expect), and Steve is planning to write to some of the authors he’s following: Derrick Jensen, David Orr, David Foreman, etc. He’s looking to start or join a forum or study group of people with similar action goals. I know that often, when I sit and think about how to solve a problem, I end up going nowhere because I’m too much in my head. I find it useful to just get out and do something in that direction, anything, and see if that reveals the next step. That’s why I’m happy to be meeting naturalists and educators. It feels like I’m tracking down a clue. When Howard began talking about action, I got excited. That’s it! That’s where I want to go! I’m hoping that more clues will open up.

Cottage Industry

August 29, 2011 by scillagrace

The first time I set foot in Steve’s house, I stopped dead in my tracks on his enclosed porch and inhaled. It smelled like my grandmother’s beach cottage. I commented on that, and he said, “Oh, it’s probably all the old books.” I had never seen so many books in one person’s house. I thought my parents had a lot of books, but they weren’t running a book-selling business. I have learned a lot about having a “cottage industry” in the last few months. I like the idea of finding appreciative homes for books that someone else might have thrown onto a rubbish heap. I like the idea of having a small, personal business that enables us to make just enough money to pay the rent, but doesn’t require us to work set hours or sign a company policy based on someone else’s values. And I like the books. I like flipping through each one before we mail it off. There is so much to learn about, so much I’d like to read. Also, I like pictures. I like imagining the people and places the books will be going to. This morning, there was a book going off to Switzerland, and a book about Frank Lloyd Wright going off to Japan (neat pictures in that one!). I like my friends at the post office. We are on a first name basis and chat about camping and sports teams and what to do on the weekend here. I like discovering a treasure of stuff in the stacks that we plan to keep. I feel like we are amazingly rich in what we have to explore, just between these walls.

The dining room

The business is not predictable, and it is rather a mystery why the online orders come through as they do. The hosting website manages the postings, so we have little control of how visible our books are over the other vendors’. So, we’ll have a dry spell and ponder the various factors. Is it the economy or is it the website? Not worth worrying about. The more Steve works on posting new titles, the more orders we get, even from stuff that’s been online for years. So, he just puts in the hours and the orders come in. Summer is a good time for estate sales and book sales. We have a lot of fun roaming neighborhoods for books. We did find a real beach cottage estate sale north of Milwaukee. This lady had some interesting antiques. Steve goes directly to the books, but I poke around for other stuff, just for fun. Old electric hair dryers and curling irons that were heated directly in the fire, for instance. Hats, sheet music, Victrolas, jewelry, vintage clothing, Reader’s Digest from 1958. I bought a pair of binoculars on Saturday, just like my dad’s. In a book about Opera, I found a season ticket brochure for the Lyric Opera in Chicago from 1940. Seats were only $8! I like old wooden tools and kitchen gadgets made to last a lifetime, not these flimsy, plastic, planned-obsolescence items we have so many of today.

Home economy is a term that has gone out of fashion. We don’t have Home Ec in schools now, we have Adult Living. It seems like we keep getting further away from the hands-on way of life – using electronic gadgets that can’t be fixed at home instead of simple machines, for instance. Steve hands me anything that breaks around here. He knows I like trying to figure out how to make it work. There’ s a simple satisfaction in that. Ask my mom about being one of the “last Luddites”. The value of being self-reliant is seen as old-fashioned, but I really worry about what happens when we are too reliant on mega-corporations who make large-scale decisions. Local and specific values get plowed under. Balance and scale and harmony with nature get ignored. It gets to a point where we don’t think we can change…that WalMart is going up whether we want it or not, right over 4 acres of our outlying marshlands, because we need cheap goods readily available to the people in those new subdivisions, and we need those jobs. Do we? Are you sure there isn’t another way?

Recommended reading: anything by Wendell Berry or Harland Hubbard.