Practicing thought

(Posted by Himanee)

My colleague Sue Jefts and I met this afternoon for a couple of hours to discuss our project to create a workshop on personal sustainability. The idea for such a workshop emerged last year after we created a successful two-hour presentation called The Poetics of Sustainability for a conference on transliteracy, teaching, and technology last year that focused on our college's response to students, faculty, and staff affected by Hurricane Sandy. We also had begun work with two other colleagues on a course in what our college calls educational planning that would be centered on building sustainable careers, professions, communities, and lives; and we both were members of our college's sustainability committee. In the latter role, we had helped to developed two additional conference presentations on sustainability as well as a webinar for students on incorporating interests in the topic into their studies.

We presented our workshop proposal to a year-long institute for mentoring, teaching, and learning that our college supports. The proposal was accepted with an encouragement that we try and narrow our topic.

I'm good at responding to constructive feedback (or at least I think I am) so I immediately began searching for ways to scale down the idea. But as Sue and I talked to each other and shared our thoughts with others, the project kept getting bigger and bigger -- to the point that it felt almost too large to be, well, sustainable. In a move that might seem to run counter to the very mission of inclusion, I started to resist approaches that did not match my vision of what sustainability was.

My resistance was rooted at least partly in discomfort. I didn't want to advocate an understanding of sustainability that I personally did not -- or could not -- support myself with words or actions. At the same time, I felt increasingly that I lacked the scholarly expertise to address such a huge project. I also began to doubt my own understandings of what sustainability meant. Was it about a reduction of resources? Was it about getting away from the built environment and going out into nature? Was it about giving up meat and becoming a vegan?

I had a couple of months of release time, so I put my active role in the project on hold and went off to work on other research projects and to ponder what sustainability meant.

The more I pondered, the more I began to feel that there was no one right way to define the term at all. Yet, it seemed that sustainability was something important, especially when one started to think of it at a personal level. Sustain means to last, to hold, to prolong, to continue, to keep going. It is the opposite of contract, release, cease, stop, discontinue. On a personal level, it seems to be about making ways for the things that make your own life joyful, energizing, and fulfilling while being cognizant that your own life doesn't exist in a vacuum. Because we are social creatures, a sustainable life for the self is also a sustainable life for a community and perhaps for a life. And … and … and … the idea gets bigger and bigger.

So walking away from the project for a bit caused me to walk into my self. And, it seems, that my life -- on both a personal and communal level -- seemed to grow more sustainable in the process. As I thought about how writing brought joy, energy, and fulfillment to life, I became a regular twice-a-day (and sometimes three times a day) writer. As I harvested beans and planted fall garlic, I began to appreciate even the tiniest connections between returning nutrients to the earth and feeding both bodies and souls. And, as I scrimped and saved and tried to get my life cleared of debt and my household on a workable budget, my financial pressures started to ease. I suddenly found myself feeling like I had more than enough, even though nothing financially had changed. Overall, it seemed, there was more of everything. More time to write. More time to garden. More time to exercise. More resources available. More time for friends and colleagues. More time for students.

Nothing had changed, except for me.

Sue divulged today in our time together that she had experienced a similar evolution. Her workload, which had felt out of her control, suddenly seemed to be within her control. She equated this shift to "doing the workshop on herself."

I felt overjoyed by her phrase "doing the workshop on herself" because it seemed to ease the pressure of coming across as an expert, of knowing all there was to know about sustainability and about what it would take to do things right. It also seemed to reinforce the point that what living a sustainable life meant would differ for nearly everyone.

We hope in the coming months to distribute a survey that will give us a sense of what potential participants might like to explore in workshop on personal sustainability, and think we might be able to create our workshop from that. We also hope to initiate a strong and potentially creative conversation on what personal sustainability means through presentations at upcoming conferences for our college's community, and to continue to build our dialogues on sustainable lives from that point. Another colleague has developed a workshop on sustainable mentoring -- one of the most important services our college offers its students -- and has suggested that she might be able to work with us in further development. To that end, we also are hoping to have her present her workshop to the faculty, professionals, administrators, and support staff who are affiliated with our center. Our hope at this point is that sustainable thoughts might lead to sustainable actions, and that others will see how doing the workshop on themselves could make a difference.

Daily bread

(Posted by Himanee)
The days are getting shorter and crisper. With the deepening darkness, our stockpiles of vegetables for winter are becoming richer. Winter squash fill an entire table in our cellar, and cans and cans of jam, tomato sauce, and salsa are resting in a basement room that we hope in the next few weeks to turn a root cellar for storing vegetables like carrots, beets, potatoes, turnips, radishes, and celery. Much of this produce still rests in the soil where it grew along with deep green sheaves of collards, kale, Swiss chard, and bok choy. We're now harvesting dried beans by the boxful, and I anticipate that my down time in November and December will go toward shelling.

This has been an exciting year for our backyard farm, and while I don't want to jinx our success, I do feel as if I'm going into the winter season of rest, restoration, and recovery with a sense of peace and of pride. My husband and I have invested an enormous amount of energy into trying to see if we could live more sustainably off our land by growing food and rebuilding soil, and in our third year of work on this project, the little engine seems to be chanting inside us, "You can, you can."

Still, there is much to learn, and as the 2013 growing season draws to a close I am plotting new projects for 2014 and beyond. Among them are:

1. Raising mushrooms;
2. Adding blueberries and raspberries to a clutch of strawberry plants that were gifted to us by one of the Saratoga Farmers Market vendors last June;
3. Creating a perennial herbal tea garden; and
4. Growing grains.

The last of these four projects is the most ambitious, and might be unfeasible for the amount of land we own. Yet, it is appealing. For the past year, we have been baking our own bread, and I have roughly calculated that we go through about 120 pounds of flour a year. Flour is not expensive -- the brands we get are about $4 to $5 for a five-pound bag. But I don't know where that flour comes from or whether the grain from which it's milled has been genetically modified or doused with pesticides. Having a local source -- and better yet my own -- would be much healthier in my view.

One of the Loca-vore challenges that I agreed to take on was to do a community assessment of the availability of local foods. I wish I had had the time to do a formal assessment because the results would have been interesting to know. Informally, I can say that nearly everything we consume -- food-wise, at least -- can be obtained from local sources at prices that are affordable to most. The main exceptions are: butter, nuts, flours, and items like cat food, sodas, chocolate bars, and teas. Butter can be made at home fairly quickly if one has a food processor such as a Cuisinart, and teas can be produced if you grow the right herbs. While I haven't found a satisfactory solution to sodas, chocolate bars, and cat food, I did do some research on local flours. I found that there are grain growers and some companies that mill grains from these growers to produce flour for a consumer market. But as I feared these locally produced flours are seen more as specialty items and are priced as such. Those prices are a little too much for an already taut paycheck.

The good news, however, seems to be that local farmers who are committed to sustainable agriculture are aware of this dilemma, and are beginning to investigate options for producing what are called "heritage grains" themselves. The heritage grains lack the genetically modified compounds that comprise so much of the commodity flour that goes into making wheat. Some farmers considering the possibilities of growing heritage grains have been wondering if it was the loss of seeds of those grains in the wave of mass produced store-bought bread that has contributed to growing outbreaks of wheat allergies and other ailments. I wouldn't necessarily support this claim without looking into it more myself, but the idea of knowing the source is decidedly appealing.

Festivals as sustenance

(Posted by Himanee)

Today marks the eighth anniversary of my marriage to my husband Jim. We married later in life -- I, at age 42, and he, at 32. For that reason perhaps, the ritual of our anniversary is marked less with flowers, chocolate, and expensive gifts and more with jokes and mock sighs of relief that we've managed to hold it all together for this long. This year's joke was about how all the blisters of the past eight years had finally healed, a point that Jim and I discussed animatedly as we devoured our anniversary dinner.

Dinner was homemade risotto, though I splurged a little and bought pine nuts, dried porcini mushrooms, and a finely grated pecorino cheese to go along with the butternut squash, tomatoes, onions, garlic, and bok choy from our garden that I tossed in.

Our anniversary also marks the official beginning in our household of seven months of non-stop holidays. One of the advantages of being an interracial and religiously pluralistic couple is that the plethora of festivals that accompany the multitude of cultural and religious traditions that comprise our partnership give us a lot of excuses to celebrate. Following our wedding anniversary is Diwali and a slew of related festival days around it. After that (or sometimes before, depending on the vagaries of the Lunar calendar) come Hallowe'en, El Dia de Los Muertos, my birthday, the Muslim festival Idh-al-Fitr, Veteran's Day, Thanksgiving, the day after Thanksgiving, all the Advent Sundays, all the days of Hanukkah, the Winter Solstice, Christmas Eve, Christmas, the days of Kwanzaa, Boxing Day, New Year's Eve, New Year's Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Jim's birthday, Mardi Gras and the beginning of Lent, all the days of Lent, Valentine's Day, President's Day, St. Patrick's Day, the Spring Equinox, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter. I am thinking of adding Passover to our list of observances as well as Ramadan. For now, however, October through April has evolved into a series of celebrations.

It strikes me that the festivals begin as the fall harvest season is nearing its final stages and that they end just as spring planting season starts to really rev up. It also strikes me that festivals offer another way to build sustainability into one's daily life, not so much because of an urge to rush to party after party but more because they offer an excuse to slow down. Celebrations need not be elaborate or fancy. A memorable meal, a goofy handmade gift, or simply a small ritual such as leaving a lamp burning all night in one's home on the night of Diwali to guide the Hindu epic hero-god Ram out of the forest and back to his kingdom can re-create a festive spirit by themselves. More to the point, the festivals are like markers on a calendar, reminding you that e-mail can be closed, work can be curtailed, and one can go home on time (or even early) because an important event is waiting.

My mother and my sisters all observe a Hindu festival that occurs four days after the full moon that precedes Diwali known as Kaurva Chaat. During this festival, married women fast for the health and longevity of their husbands. Chauvinism aside, I joined them in observing the fast on the first Kaurva Chaat that followed my marriage. I haven't done so since, partly because my husband doesn't want me to fast at a time of year when teaching and other work demands tend to come thick and fast. What I remembered most about the festival, however, was not the fast but the gaiety that fills the day. You're supposed to wear bright, happy colors; paint, draw, or create something pretty; and prepare a meal that breaks the fast of several flavorful and wholesome dishes. You're also supposed to be on watch for the moon. Its appearance signals the moment that one breaks the fast. The happiness of the event breaks up the day, giving one a reason to get up from the computer for a creative break. While I probably will not fast, I look forward to doing something special on that day, for no other reason.

Festivals also follow different rhythms of time, and getting on their cycle can help put the grind of the work week and endless mountain of work into a different perspective. It seems appropriate in this sense that they occur in the interim period between harvesting and planting when lands rest and recover. They offer a reason to slow down, to celebrate successes, and reflect on the strengths of one's prior progress, and to consider how one might work better, more smartly before planting the seeds for the next harvest cycle.

Loca-vore update

(Posted by Himanee)

September comes to a close tomorrow. With it, the loca-vore challenge ends technically. Since I was out of state for the first 11 days of September and my husband was immersed in canning peaches and tomatoes, we decided that we would give ourselves two more weeks to try and meet the challenges we set. Nevertheless, with the month coming to a close, I wanted to offer a brief progress report on our efforts, to date.

One of the things that I learned this month is that being a full-on loca-vore is not as easy as it appears. My husband and I already do a lot to eat out of our backyard and to buy the bulk of what we eat from local farmers. But as the month went by I came to realize that there was a lot more that I could do.

I also realized that there were a lot of things about my lifestyle that didn't lend themselves easily to local eating.

For instance, my husband and I both trained this summer for the Adirondack Marathon, which we ran happily and successfully on Sunday, September 22. Happiness and success depended on being able to keep ourselves properly hydrated and fueled with quick energy over the course of the 26.2 mile route. For me, that meant sipping the Powerade (a Gatorade equivalent) beverage offered at the water stations every two miles in order to keep electrolyte levels in my body steady. It also meant downing a packaged "power gel" or "energy shot bloc" every four or five miles. I got the gels at the local EMS shop and they were, according to the package labeling, 90 percent organic and had brown rice syrup and natural fruit extracts as their primary ingredients. But they were manufactured (and I do mean manufactured; after all, they come in foil, vacuum sealed packages) by a national company that markets its product worldwide. I did investigate possible alternatives, but in the end decided that the tried and true sins of corporately-produced replenishers were a safer choice than the dizziness, dehydration, and nausea that I might experience if I ran without such aids.

Another blip in our goals toward goodness turned out to be chocolate. To put it mildly, both my husband and I love it, and see no harm in indulging ourselves with a post-dinner Hershey's Bar or Nestles Crunch. Chocolate can serve as a pain reliever for mild soreness and fatigue, so its consumption can be justified. But trying to find a locally-sourced chocolate bar that's not outrageously expensive can be quite challenging. I did find a somewhat happy resolution tonight, however, while shopping at a new store, Healthy Living, in Wilton, when I picked up a bag of semi-sweet chunks of Callebaut chocolate in the bulk food aisle. The chocolatier is Belgian, but a search of the company's website shows that they engage in fair-trade practices and buy the raw materials used to produce their chocolate from small growers in the regions where cocoa beans and other chocolate-making ingredients grow naturally.

A final "sin" was our binge two nights ago on late-night nachos. I had signed on to volunteer for the Adirondack Ragnar Relay's two-day event, and my shift was from 7 p.m. to about 11 p.m. at a transition point a little north of Lake George. In preparation, we made an early dinner of a mussel stew served with vegetables from our garden and our homemade bread. But by the time I was headed home I was ravenous, and could only think of one word: nachos! We had homemade salsa, and a hunk of cheddar cheese. At least the cheese was Cabot's New York Cheddar. But even if the package of tortilla chips that I picked up on my way home said "Stewart's" -- a local convenience store chain -- the chips themselves were most likely manufactured elsewhere.

On the success side, I discovered that stevia is a wonderful sugar substitute. I used dried stevia leaves to make a pear pie about a week ago and in a blueberry pancake recipe this morning. Both of the recipes called for sugar, which the stevia stood in for wonderfully. I look forward to growing more of it next year, and to getting used to seeing small flecks of green in dishes that require sweeteners.

We also learned that we could make our own butter in our Cuisinart with Battenkill Dairy's wonderful cream. I had made butter in the past with the famed jar-shaking method, but the Cuisinart whirs the cream to butter in about five minutes, and eases the process up considerably. I also learned that a pint of cream will yield more than two cups of butter (which is essentially the equivalent of a box of four sticks), and if I buy the cream directly from the Battenkills at the Saratoga Farmers Market, the price is about 50 cents cheaper.

With two weeks to go, we still have a lot on our list to conquer: building a root cellar (we've been so busy harvesting that we haven't had much of a chance to think of storage, beyond the ground itself which happily remains unfrozen); finding a source for local grain for making bread; and doing a community assessment on the strengths and challenges in our local food systems. We'll do our best to make a dent in these challenges as October approaches.

Longer, slower, cheaper

(Posted by Himanee)

The slide from summer to fall has initiated a round -- slowly -- of fall cleaning. My husband Jim and I ran the Adirondack Marathon in Schroon Lake, NY, on Sunday. We began our round of fall cleaning by moving all the jars of salsa, tomato sauce, tomato paste, catsup, peaches, and various jams that Jim spent the month of August canning into our basement. As we loaded cans, I took a quick inventory:
* tomato paste: 10 jars;
* tomato sauce: 26 jars;
* red salsa: 33 jars;
* green salsa: 4 jars;
* catsup: 22 jars;
* jam: 21 jars;
And there's more to come.

This morning, we woke up to 32 degrees, our third night since September 16 of experiencing overnight frosts. Figuring that the end was near, I harvested the remaining tomatoes from our vines and Jim spent the afternoon transforming the red ones into barbecue sauce. The green ones will become salsa verde (or green salsa), one of our favorite additions to Mexican style pork, chicken, and bean dishes.

As I picked tomatoes, I rejoiced at the sight of geese honking as they flew overhead, our backyard chickens creating a cacophony of clucks as they laid one egg after another, and the glimpse I got this morning of the pear tree in our backyard bearing fruit for the first time since we bought this house in 2011. I felt as if this -- the crisp cold air, the sunny skies, and the "free food" stretching all around me -- was what sustainability meant. It was hard work, with tangible rewards.

The tomatoes are a special pride and joy. For the first time since we started gardening as a way to create our own food, all 160 plants were our own, started from seeds. We sowed three packets of seeds: a hybrid, an heirloom, and a cherry tomato variety. We expected to lose at least half the plants we started to wind, drought, insects and other yard pests. We lost virtually none.

And so we'll eat well through the winter, as the practice of "puttin' up" stretches our harvest through next year.

In the realm of the loca-vore challenge, I experimented tonight with stevia in place of sugar. I picked up a stevia plant at the farmers market this summer, and on the night before our first frost hit, clipped off several of its leafy branches and left them in a sunny spot in my mudroom to dry. To my surprise, the leaves dried fairly and crumbled in my hands this evening as I picked them up. I dropped the crumples into a bowl full of sliced pears and mixed them in well to create a filling for a pear pie. No other sweetening was necessary, though I did replace the requisite cinnamon and nutmeg with a pinch of the garam masala made by my uncle, following my father's family's village recipe.

I also have been making my own butter, and managed to turn the residual buttermilk -- which my father's family referred to as "chaach" -- into a batch of biscuits that also included leftover butternut squash. The biscuits started out as hamburger buns two nights before our marathon, and were breakfast the next day. Today, they formed part of a biscuits and gravy breakfast, and the last few probably will be breakfast tomorrow. Just as the vista of food-producing land seems to connote a sense of sustainability so does my growing ability to make one round of cooking stretch into three or four meals.

Last night we had chicken, slow-cooked in a crockpot. Tonight, we had a rest of the chicken quick-grilled as fajitas. As I made tortillas and the pear pie, I simmered the chicken bones in water. The resulting broth will serve as a base for a seafood paella tomorrow. Because it's very difficult to buy a mixture of seafood for just two people, Jim and I have planned the next three days of meals as a sort of fish fest. Tomorrow, paella's on the menu and will likely feature wild shrimp, mussels, clams, and some sort of locally sourced cod fish (most likely hake) mixed into the rice. The remaining clams will then become a chowder for Thursday, and the mussels a spicy mussel soup on Friday.

Before this year, I thought I would go crazy eating the same food more than one day in a row. I always tried to use up leftovers but often in the crazy pace of life, the leftovers would end up in the trash or compost bin because I hadn't gotten around -- three days later -- to doing chicken dish #2. The easier solution -- and a fresher one, it seems -- is to start with a "big game" meal -- a roasted chicken or a pot roast -- and work down to the small: roast to stir-fry to broth; or slow-cooker dinner to fajitas to broth. The meat stays fresher longer and meals become easier to plan and execute. And, perhaps best of all, the weekly shopping trips to the farmers market end up being less expensive, allowing one to sustain sustainable habits a little longer.

"Local" eating

(Posted by Himanee)


Ten days of September's Loca-Vore Challenge have elapsed, and I have not had the opportunity to eat "local." I have been on the road since August 28, traveling with my parents. I flew to Chicago and traveled from O'Hare to the western suburbs, where I spent the next four days attending my cousin's wedding. Every meal, except for the complimentary breakfast buffets at the hotel where we stayed, featured fully vegetarian yet highly rich and extremely spicy foods. From Chicago, my parents and I drove to Iowa City and Cedar Falls, where we spent the first few days of September traversing the paths they crossed in 1961 as new immigrants to America. We then traveled to their home in Muncie, Indiana, where I've been for the past week. Every meal, except for our Papa Johns Pizza indulgence and our Sunday breakfast at the local IHOP, has featured fully vegetarian, somewhat rich and spicy fare. The past two nights' dinners have been festive, as the season of honoring deities around the fall harvests that culminates with Diwali has begun.

But in this non-local experience, many thoughts about what it means to be sustainable have arisen. One of the great assets of being a part of an immigrant/diaspora community is a sense of understanding about protocol. Meals -- especially during the festive seasons -- are in honor of God, and, as such, are prepared with the freshest, cleanest foods available, which for the members of the predominantly Hindu Indian community in Muncie (as well as the Indian community in Chicago with which my cousin's family interacts) is code for vegetarian. The blend of spices, vegetables, yogurt, ghee, and fresh chilis within each dish often overwhelms my palate, which has grown accustomed to single ingredient dishes in recent years. However, the flavor mingle pleasantly even as my body sweats, and I end the meals feeling full and refreshed.

My parents buy some of their produce at Wal-Mart, despite my admonitions, and because they are my parents and I am a polite person, I eat what they serve me without sermonizing on the corporate giant's exploitative practices. My parents also grow their own tomatoes and chili peppers, and share their bounty with other Indians who in turn provide them with fresh karela (bitter melon), eggplants, and squashes grown in their backyard gardens. Among the seasonings that my mother uses is a blend of garam masala made by my father's family in India. My uncle, who is 84, shared the secret formula with my parents when they last traveled to India in 2009, and my mother three days ago shared it with me. If I can manage to grow some of the spices it contains, I will do so. Otherwise, I feel content knowing that I can carry on a family practice of making garam masala in the village way.

As we ate -- with our fingers, mostly, blending "wet" curries with rice and scooping dry vegetable dishes up with roti -- my parents asked me many questions about the backyard farming that my husband and I have undertaken. Frequently, the topic of milk came up, with my mother asking me if we would ever have any interest in raising a cow. It's fortunate that my husband wasn't with me on this trip because he might have procured a loan from his doting mother-in-law for such an investment. He is trying to convince me that we can raise a cow; I feel that we need more land -- and more of a financial safety net than we have currently -- before we can take such a plunge. (Goat milk, by the way, is not an option for me, for reasons that are too complex to delve into here.)

The topic of milk triggered my father's memories of his family's cow. He was born in 1932 in a village in northern India, between Rajasthan and New Delhi. The family was a large one, and initially quite poor though grew prosperous over time. They kept a cow, which was milked at dawn. The milk was boiled, then consumed at a midday meal and used in cooking throughout the day. My father recalled my grandmother churning some of the milk for butter, which would be stored in a pot, and heating whatever milk was left at the end of the day with a little water. The water would steam and evaporate, leaving a thick cream-top that the family called malai in its wake. That would be the bedtime treat. The residue from that process would be used to make yogurt, and whatever liquid was skimmed off would be given to poorer families in the village as buttermilk. I laughed as I thought about how prized real buttermilk has become today.

What struck me in this discussion was how nothing went to waste. And, tonight, while attending a puja (or worship) at a younger Indian immigrant family's home, it seemed to resonate with how we prayed and prepared to eat. The gathering was multi-generational, with participants ranging from about age 6 to 86. Despite the dressy Indian attire that we donned, the atmosphere was informal. The puja -- which was the stated reason for the gathering -- lasted about 15 minutes. Dinner immediately followed and continued for about an hour. A delivery truck showed up with pizza for the younger kids. As for the adults, some of the main dishes were ordered in from an Indian restaurant that has opened up in Muncie, something that wouldn't have been possible in my children when one could count the total number of Indians and South Asians residing in Muncie on two hands. The sweets, however, were homemade, which surprised and delighted me because so many companies these days offer them via mail order and Indian groceries stock the delicacies, as well. We ate on paper plates, and wiped the curry stains and oils accumulating on our fingers on paper napkins. As we left, it became clear that none of the food was going to waste. Individual-sized zip-lock bags appeared and were filled with channa, kofta kari, aloo sabzi, and the homemade sweets. A single meal fed a community at least two times over.

I place this experience against the context of how I think of being a "loca-vore" when I'm home in New York. It's great to grow your own produce, to can your own tomatoes (as my husband has done diligently these past two weeks), and to feast on eggs your own chickens laid. But against that sense of "own-er-ship" is a price: the work behind growing your own food is clean and honest, but it is labor-intensive. Feeding a community is challenging when a crop goes awry or when ethics about eating in particular ways for certain reasons are not communally understood.

I look forward to coming home tomorrow, and eating fresh from my garden. But as I resume my loca-voring, I would like to continue to consider what it really means to be sustainable.

In case it appears all I write about is poetry, let me say something about food. It has been sneaking lately into my writing, which isn't surprising since eating locally grown food has become increasingly important to me on many levels. Eating locally grown food and growing some of one's own have a lot to do with sustainability and living slowly, and of being intricately connected to nature. Nature is where my poetry grows from - the rivers, mountains and forests of the Adirondacks, Vermont, and sometimes northern Quebec, Iceland or Scotland. So it seems natural that food grown in these places should start appearing in my lines of verse.

I have been growing a few things of my own this summer: tomatoes, cucumbers, kale, eggplant, and lots of herbs. The rest we buy fresh from local farms. Eating something that you know has been picked that morning is a magical and complete sensory experience. The nutrients and flavors are so alive in your body, for a moment you forget where you leave off and the earth begins. You forget you are a separate entity walking around. And of course we are not separate from the earth, or each other; we are made of what it is made, nothing different.  

A recent summer inspired poem:

I've never eaten so well, I've never felt this close.

Heirloom tomatoes, tarragon and thyme 

and cheese from goats I might have met. 

I haven't said enough about gratitude, 
for movement of tongue over cantaloupe seed, 

through blend of sweet cream and mint, 

for olive oil trickling into my throat, a kind of thrice blessing.

Only sun and hands have touched these goods.

And I haven't said enough of time. 

Of the time it took to arrive in this moment, 

not more than a blink, yet it feels

a stretch of eternity - the way it runs rivulets 

of sun full over by skin, lets linger long

the taste of earth's fruits on my tongue.

The ecological philosopher Thomas Berry spoke of communication with the earth as a "renewed communication with other beings and other species." This must be why it inspires so much rich poetry and music. Both have been a part of most ancient and tribal cultures, whose people were intimately connected with nature. There is indeed an immediacy of communication that happens (if one is present) when walking a wooded path, drifting down a river, or biting into a just picked peach or pear.

Berry also spoke about "the spontaneities" and of "wildness we might consider as the root of the authentic spontaneities of any being." I love his use of the word spontaneities and while this could be experienced in many settings it seems a likely one is immersion in and amongst the elements from which we came, whether they be earth's waters, wind, and forests, or the stardust from above. It is all about our ongoing co-creation with the universe through our unique expressions of ourselves within it. For now, let that be the fresh grown foods of summer and the dance of the elements inside us.

Loca-Vore Challenge

Himanee Gupta-Carlson

In a moment of possible craziness, I signed up for a new monthly challenge. The challenge is the New England Association of Organic Farmers-New York's annual Loca-Vore Challenge, which takes place in the month of September. The goal is "to inspire awareness and action in eating locally and organically," according to the association's web site at https://www.nofany.org/events/locavore-challenge and the challenge includes a range of possible action-steps that one might take.

I first heard about this challenge two years ago when it was in mid-process. I learned of it again last year but was uninterested because it emphasized things like eating at restaurants that get their products from local sources or hosting or attending community dinners. These actions cost money, which I didn't have much of, and the list of actions that one could do for free didn't really seem to include much of anything I wasn't already doing. So I poo-poohed the idea as another yuppie-inspired creation and more or less forgot about it.

This year, I stumbled on the challenge while searching for information about a course that I had heard Adirondack Community College was offering on sustainable farming. I looked a little more closely at the different kinds of things that one could do to participate in the challenge and decided to give it a try.

The same caveats about spending money by eating at restaurants or going to community harvest dinners still apply. If anything, I will have even less disposable income this year than I did in the previous year, and frankly, I don't think making one's self a true "loca-vore" is about spending money.

The idea behind being a loca-vore is to try and obtain as much of your food from locally produced sources as possible. The rather shifty term "organic" gets embedded from time to time into this localism; however, the real goal is to get your milk from the local dairy and your meat from the farmer in the next county, rather than someone on the West Coast (when you're living on the East Coast). The goal, as I understand it, also is to sidestep the national retailers and corporately produced foods.

My husband Jim and I grow about 90 percent of the vegetables we eat, and buy the rest from local farmers. We also buy all of our meat from local farmers, with the exception of an occasional purchase of prosciutto from Roma's, an Italian and Mediterranean deli. We also raise hens, which means we produce our own eggs. We get our milk from a local dairy. However, we do buy cheddar cheese, butter, flour, yeast, oil, soda, beer, nuts, seltzer water, chocolate, granola bars, juices, and fruits such as bananas from the grocery, and because of our rather tight pocketbooks, don't always buy the best-est most organic versions of such products.

So what might this challenge do to help me eat even more locally?

Here is a list of action steps I committed to trying. I will note that this list includes only steps I have not already taken such as committing to buying produce from local farmers.

* Building a makeshift root cellar for storage crops. This is a project that my husband and I have been discussing for a couple of years, so perhaps the challenge will give us the kick in the butt to actually make it happen.

* Using local honey and maple syrup in place of sugar. I've got stevia growing in my garden this year, so I'm adding that natural sweetener to my list.

* Making your own local organic butter, yogurt, or ice cream. I have given up on trying to make ice cream, but I will commit to not buying butter or yogurt -- and making it myself.

* Making your own bread with local organic grain. I have a feeling that I might be priced out of this action step, but I will look into it, at least.

* Doing a community assessment to identify the strengths and obstacles in your local food systems. This project particularly intrigues me.

* Reading books on the NOFA-NY recommended list.

* Sharing the experience via a blog.

I should emphasize that there are a variety of other action steps listed on the NOFA-NY website that also do not entail spending inordinate amounts of money such as experimenting with canning or freezing fresh produce, composting kitchen scraps, or getting involved with grassroots political efforts to promote more availability of locally produced foods. I wanted to choose steps for myself that would challenge me to look at what I was eating and how I was obtaining it a few steps further, so these were the steps I decided to take. I will share the experiences as appropriate via my Moving Your Body and Sustainability blogs. Stay tuned!

I am borrowing a line from the end of  Himanee’s last post:

Perhaps the fall is the time to slow down. To take in the newness, to approach the new calendar slowly as if it is our support and not our penalizer....

This comment resonated well, as I have decided in the past month that my fall was going to be a continuation of my summer in the sense of balance and richness that has come from it. Some work, regular time off, hiking and paddling with friends, some travel, and lots of writing.  I have just returned from several days in northern Vermont spent with friends along the shore of Lake Champlain, and kayaking out to the islands. Life seems naturally slow and idyllic in this part of Vermont. The water and wind are constant soundscapes. There is little chance of moving too fast. The roads don’t allow for it, and the scenery captures much of your attention. The peaks of the Adirondacks drape the far western horizon in changing hues. The Green mountains to the east balance the visual drama.

I have always loved fall, in part for the promise of new experiences, ideas, and learning. In part for the cooler weather. I have worked in higher ed since 1990 so it’s been a constant in my life.  And that will be the case this fall, but I am choosing to decide more consciously this time what those work and learning activities will be, rather than have them all decided for me. I hope to soon have a conference chosen to attend, will be heading to our college’s Adirondack Residency in October, and am in the process of contacting a potential mentor in Vermont to provide feedback and guidance as I put together my new book of poetry, my first full length one. I feel I've written enough poems by now, gotten enough published, and have had enough encouragement to take the next step. It's time.

Putting together a book of poetry is a rich and unique experience. On the advice of a wise poet, I have spent time sifting through my poems, and noting the themes, feelings, settings, and ideas within them. I have found some that I thought were about one thing, such as a particular place, are really more about a relationship. But I also see now how inextricably intertwined place and relationships are for me.  Other poems, such as ones that seemed to focus on a difficult experience, were really about growth and transformation. These poems have shown to me hidden facets of their content, and have revealed new layers of meaning. My poems seem to fall into six different theme areas and I have been letting them sit for a while on a large table in my home to see what they have to say to each other. To see if together they create a larger unifying theme, an important aspect of a book of poetry.  Of many things.

So poetry has been showing me once again, about listening. About being still, quieting one’s thoughts, letting go of one’s (or another's) agenda and becoming attuned to a deeper agenda. One that works at more of a soul level. If our soul is not on board with what we are doing in our lives, things are not going to go well, or at least not for long. I know if I don’t make myself quiet enough, mindful enough, and singularly focused for at least part of each day, I will miss those deeper messages and before long I feel the consequences.

As we watched the late day light descend over Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks, the deeper contours of the mountains emerged, evoking subtle nuances of feeling. This kind of light – it’s a little like being quiet, a little like listening. A little like poetry.

Re-defining our time

Himanee Gupta-Carlson

A Seattle friend observed a few nights ago on Facebook that a sunset at 8 p.m. in May seems unduly late, whereas a sunset at the same time in August seems too early. The remark reminded me of the shortening days of summer that August ushers in, and with those shorter days, the onset of fall.

For educators, fall means a sudden up-step in pace. Course syllabi must be prepared, books must be ordered, classes are ready to start. New students will start to fill classrooms, even if these days so many of those classrooms exist in cyber space. E-mail, which slowed to a gentle trickle in August, will suddenly gush once again like a torrent of water rushing downward over and across boulders to the rapidly filling up pond below.

Or, maybe not.

My college has a twelve-month calendar, which is sort of like code for "no summers off." Prior to my arrival here, the prospect of always being at work would have sounded dismal if it had not been for two completely unrelated sets of circumstances. The first was that I had spent three years as an adjunct faculty member at two colleges, which did have summers off. Summers off for adjuncts, who are essentially contract hires, meant three months of no pay, which translated for me into part-time jobs as a tele-fundraiser, political canvasser, fitness coach, and, one year when I was really broke, a one-day gig as a field worker at a vegetable and fruit farm. It also meant calls to the unemployment office and a brief stint on food stamps. The second circumstance was a chat with a future colleague prior to my campus interview who happened to know my sister. "Someone may have mentioned that we have a twelve-month calendar, here," she said. "The advantage of it is that you get vacation time!"

This year, my vacation time has managed to stretch itself to delicious lengths. Beginning with a surgery in mid-April, I regularly took one or two days off from work a week, strategizing the time off around holidays and Fridays, which informally are regarded as professional development days for faculty. I did this with a few simple goals in mind:

1. I wanted to add a new layer of commitment to my daily writing practice, enhancing my three pages of first-thing-in-the-morning longhand free writing done in the spirit of "anything goes" with an evening gig of writing a minimum of 750 words on topics of a slightly more structured nature.

2. I wanted to be more active in the backyard farming venture that my husband and I had instigated when we moved to New York three years ago.

3. I wanted to kick up my fitness training for triathlons and marathons.

4. And, last but perhaps most significant, I had a book manuscript to revise.

What these goals required me to do was re-articulate some relationships of ideas and antinomies: vacation and work, time on and time off, pleasure and toil. Because I was never really entirely unplugged, I was never really off work. In a sense, then, I was simultaneously on vacation and away from my desk, and present for students and others who needed me almost as much as I would have been during the school year. I had days off on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays, and often for purposes of research, ethnography, and conference attendance, I was on the job on the traditional off days of Saturday and Sunday. In the process, work stopped being a job and evolved into pleasure. Toil, too, became something I associated less with poring over a student's assignment or degree plan and more with the healthful and rejuvenating work of growing food. The blurring of concepts resulted in a sort of relaxation that makes me wonder sometimes how a day that began with the rooster's crowing, involved writing on three separate projects, exercise, gardening and cooking, and ended with the late-night hooting of an owl could actually have a beginning and end. Time also blurred from set calibrations into a cyclical force governed by a sort of daily dance between the rhythms of nature and the day's to-do list. The list never was completely accomplished, but more got done than I expected.

        Is there a way to measure accomplishment? Six poems accepted by a writer's festival; one short story accepted by a social media story-writing site; a draft of terms defining hip-hop studies in place; a book manuscript that's 80 percent revised, eight energetic days away from completion. More accomplishments: The creation of five blogs to which I contribute regularly; a triathlon done; a 14-mile run for a marathon done; research trips to Seattle and Washington DC complete; scads of tomatoes, squash, and collards, among other veggies; 400-plus heads of garlic curing in the barn.

Now, the sun sets before 8 p.m. It is dark in our part of the globe by 8:30. In approximately five weeks, the fall equinox will occur, creating first two equal 12-hour chunks of daylight and night and then tipping the balance in favor of night.

I used to dread the loss of daylight because it signaled the onset of winter. Winter meant colder weather, discomfort, and perhaps for me in a symbolic sense, death.

Perhaps I disliked the concept of death in my earlier years because, like many humans, I feared getting old: Losing my faculties, my energy, my ability to run marathons. As a result, I treated fall as a race: Rush to the office, hurry up on the syllabi, caffein-ate myself, and write, read, grade, volunteer for committees, race to the meetings, squeeze in those workouts, and don't forget about yoga as if every day was going to be its last. And, predictably, I got nothing done. The days turned out to be long and short at the same time, and I was so busy running around that I never had time to stop and consider what needed to be done.

The shorter days now make me wonder if we might be able to redefine our understandings of fall. As academics, we see fall as the beginning. A new academic year, new courses, new calendar, new faculty hires, new faces and new possibilities. The newness makes us rush and plunge into life breathlessly; we don't want to be left behind. Perhaps, however, we have it wrong. Perhaps the fall is the time to slow down. To take in the newness, to approach the new calendar slowly as if it is our support and not our penalizer, reminding us of all the deadlines we're missing, the things that could have been done sooner, faster, better.

Maybe it's the time to remember that if we work on a twelve-month calendar, we have advantages. We have a full year of pay and we have vacation days.

I meant to publish my first post weeks ago. I have been taking time off from work to paddle in the Adirondacks, be with friends and family, and throughout all of that - write. I am mainly a poet but write essays as well and I have written a lot of both in recent weeks, mostly related to my ongoing interest in personal sustainability. As my colleague Himanee mentioned, this can mean different things to different people and I have been thinking about what it brings up in my own life.

For me, it has a lot to do with slowing down. And the first thing, or one of the first things I turn to when I slow down is poetry.  Or perhaps I should say return to, for it is always there waiting in the sidelines. My intention this year is to bring it back more centrally into my life.  Because it isn't just about poetry; it is that and everything that poetry embodies, which for me and I think many artists, is a great deal. It is an art form, yes; a way of working with and exploring language, but it is also a way of exploring what it means to be alive on this earth. It is a way of being, a way of maintaining presence in an increasingly fast paced and not so mindful world.

I have been reading a lot about the affects of technology, especially email and internet use, on our psychology, neurology and emotions. One thing I've learned is that it is significant. Much more than I'd thought. So much of it is silent, so much of it is insidious. It is so prevalent and often all consuming that it is hard to find the time and space apart to reflect on this infuence and feel exactly what it is. This does not mean it is a bad thing. Much of it is extremely helpful in our lives. But it seems that technology is best used when it is a supplement to our lives, an enhancement that we mindfully put to use. This is how I try to use it in my own life - thoughtfully and in a limited way. At times, however, it can be hard to do this as the technology at times is ever present. Often, there seems little space and time for truly pausing, for stepping back and reflecting on what we are doing and how and why.

At the moment, however, it is summer, and I have time for pause and reflection. Hence this blog and my being able to write. I am vowing to continue my writing practice, work on my new poetry book, and continue to focus on my well being and healthfulness once the busy fall term begins. In order to be effective in any of my work, whether my job or my poetry, it is vital to feel a sense of space during the day, to have pauses between between activities. For me, that sense of space translates to awareness. Awareness of how I am doing my work, how I am doing my life and if they help create a sense of ease and peacefulness, or more the opposite. To even begin to know this, it means taking time away from the pace and away from overuse of technology. Yes, it is ironic I am writing this on a blog, but I find it oddly therapeutic in its simplicity and directness.

It seems more and more, we are moving at an unnaturally fast pace. I read about a conference held this spring in Toronto which explored our use of technology and how it influences our experience of time, space, silence and solitude. One of the questions they asked was "what are we speeding up for?" Another was "are we hoping to save time, and if so, can time be saved?"  I think these are fascinating questions, made more so by their simple presentation and the fact that few people seem to be asking them. I hope to pick them up in my next post and explore them a bit more. Until then......enjoy the moment.

.

Training and hip-hop, sustainably

        Tonight is the night before a triathlon that I signed up on February 1 to compete in. I should put compete in quotation marks, because, really, the only person I am competing with is myself.
It feels like time flew by quite fast, and it also feels like it's been ages since I first registered for this triathlon.
       As I mull the triathlon, a poem I wrote three years ago comes to mind. It's entitled "B-Girl Warrior" and celebrates the competitive female break-dancers (who prefer to go by the term recognized more strongly as a sign of commitment to hip-hop culture as b-girls). Here it is:

The b-girl seethes, like a warrior.

She lets nothing show.

Her moves are like the white crane spreading its wings,
stretching past its earthly limits.

But her smile shines down to earth,
upon those the world ignores.

What does she battle?

Frustration?

Injustice?

She won’t let on.

She’s a warrior;

She lets nothing show.

At the cipher edge, she stands, cross-armed, waiting, watching,
hinting that she has a plan.

But until she answers the call
and steps into the ring,

nothing shows.

I need to be clear that as much as I would like to call myself a b-girl, I do not feel I can lay claim to that title. I do not battle in the way that these warrior women do. But I do draw a great deal of inspiration from them, which fed my training for the triathlon. I am sort of impressed with my competitor self: In the months between February and July, I lost eight pounds, and increasingly began to feel like the lean mean fighting machine that I've aspired for years to become. Giving up a big vice -- drinking wine and other alcoholic beverages --  has made a big difference. So has getting the full eight hours of sleep, and so has being resolute with my training.
I have been thinking, of late, of how my work with hip-hop and my training are connected, and how that connection nurtures an understanding of community building that is such an underlying component of sustainability. I always worked out, and I always felt that exercise was an important component to living a good healthy life. But I do feel like it took on a new dimension this year, gaining a level of seriousness and commitment that I didn't have with it previously.
I have been thinking of asking a colleague who I met through the Hip-Hop Education Center at NYU, if he would be willing to serve as a mentor for me in hip-hop. The individual is a few years younger than me but much older than me in his understanding of the community-based wisdom that emerges through hip-hop. I thought that one question that he might ask is what I think I might need a mentor for. I guess there's a few responses that I could give to answer this question.
The first and perhaps the most obvious is that I would like to have someone to guide me toward gaining a deeper realization of the oppositional consciousness that lies at the core of how one thinks about knowledge (or the fifth element) through hip-hop. I hear and appreciate the importance of academic types being in touch with communities, and at the same time I feel that looking at my own community -- predominantly (but not entirely) white, rural, and traditionally grounded in the trades of farming, trapping, hunting, fishing, and logging -- requires an oppositional consciousness that is not traditionally associated with hip-hop. Now, I could drive the hour to Albany or Schenectady to find hip-hop, but would that be my community or would it be constructing something artificial? I also could move. But the fact of the matter is that I chose to live in the place where I live. Not because I detest cities; on the contrary, I love cities and miss many aspects of the deeply urban environments where I used to live. We chose to live in the country because we wanted to grow food, we wanted to have the space to make art, and, well, truth be told, I think we wanted some peace and quiet. We wanted to be left alone.
I think I do have a different sort of community via social networks. I have friends all over the world, and colleagues and like-minded allies in many different places. An increasingly large number of these individuals are associated with hip-hop. When we get together on Google Hangout calls, through Facebook, and face-to-face at conferences or hip-hop events, the interaction and exchange is refreshing. I think that community is an important one to build. But I also look at where I'm at, and I think it's important to build in the place where I'm at, too.
Artists and intellects have always -- let me revise that to often -- sought refuge in nature. B-Girl Naj, one of my first connections to the hip-hop community in Seattle, liked practicing outdoors, even as she professed not to really feel at one with nature. Some of her favorite memories were of getting into a car with her crew members and driving out to a park or beach, and then setting up a stereo and getting down with the moves. She particularly loved it when a crowd would gather to watch the group dance, and once in awhile, they would put out a hat, which always resulted in some extra income for their effort.
There is peace in coming home to a quiet place, where I hear owls, see deer, and occasionally smell skunk. There is peace in spending a day under the summer's heat pulling weeds, and gathering vegetables from my backyard to make into meals. There is peace in training on roads around my house, where "around-the-block" usually means at least a four-mile loop. It would be nice to have nearby lakes or clean ponds in which to swim right around the block, but they are in fairly good supply, just a few miles.
The discipline of training is about helping me become a better person. Training keeps me off alcohol, and encourages me to cultivate vegetables, raise hens for eggs, and to support local farmers by purchasing the meat that they raise, usually in kind and sustainable ways. Training also helps me write better, and with more discipline because when I sit down at the computer, I do so with a healthier state of mind as well as a stronger body. Writing can be an exhaustive process, especially if you're not writing with discipline or with an end goal to build.

A loaded term?

I've been thinking about the term "sustainability" and this blog, which I created shortly after the July 2013 Summer Institute for Mentoring, Teaching, and Learning but have not been very active at maintaining.

What does it mean to be sustainable? I feel like I turned that question over in my head so many times that the very thought of the word frustrates me to no end.

I have come to conclude that sustainability is a loaded term. Talking about sustainability with others can wear me out because my idea of what is sustainable bumps up against others’ conceptions of what is not. And, of course, the opposite is true. This has made writing about sustainability a challenge because I feel as if I am not an expert on the topic. All I know is that I think about living sustainably a lot as I move through the rhythm of each passing day.

           

          I particularly think about living sustainably as I work in the garden. Much of my sustained time in the garden involves pulling weeds, a task that I find quite therapeutic. I usually rub a good amount of a mosquito repellent/sunscreen on, and don a straw hat before working in the sun. I find that weeding is best done in mid-afternoon when the mosquitoes, deer flies and other insects that populate the Adirondacks are less active. I usually down on my butt in the dirt, pulling out tall grass and the ever-persistent dandelions and stinging nettles that populate our land with my bare hands. I have mild allergies to birch and an air-borne mold that is present in our soil, which helps me further appreciate the privacy of weeding, as I can let my nose run and my sinuses clear themselves out without worrying about appearances.

            Clearing is the task of weeding. Our grass grows tall and fast. I do not think it's all that harmful to the garden because it seems to trap moisture down near the roots, which keeps the edible foods we sow well hydrated. But as I clear the grass, the garden plants bounce to life -- I swear they bounce -- with a certain level of joyfulness. One hour, two hours pass, and the wheelbarrow near the edge of the area where I'm weeding fills. Below me and all around me are clean patches of soil, the results of my labor. As the space is cleared, other, more functional plants have room to grow.

            Clearing is what I did last Thanksgiving when I moved from the office I had been occupying for about two and a half years to an empty space down the hall. The move gave me a good opportunity to sift through papers, files, books, and journals -- and to recycle and donate many items for which I no longer had use. It also gave me a chance to reorganize my space in accordance with fang shui principles (which I had studied once before but hardly am an expert in) as well as the understanding I had gained of how to best do my job over the past few years of doing it.

            My position is that of assistant professor. That means that while my job description is vague, my official responsibilities and personal projects and initiatives are infinite. Officially, I teach; supervise independent studies; mentor students who have a variety of personal and professional interests; oversee six courses which includes reviewing, revising, and creating curricula as well as supervising approximately a dozen adjuncts; serve my college and community through participation in a variety of committees and special projects; and devote a fair amount of my personal and professional time to scholarly development.

            When I first joined the college, the job seemed daunting because there was so much. I attempted to organize my office and my computer desktop in a way that would always have my student folders close at hand, the books for my classes at my fingertips, and separate folders -- both electronic and paper -- for every single college related activity with which I was involved. I kept e-mails stored indefinitely, and reacted to every single e-mail that I received from a member of the college's support staff or administrative offices as if it were the most essential data to my job. By the start of "year three" on the job, I realized that I didn't need to do all that, and that data that had seemed vital in the first three months on the job didn't need daily checking. My office reorganization plan reflected that shift. To put it mildly, a lot of things were weeded out.

            Clearing also has been reflected in my efforts to establish priorities. Some people draw a line between the personal and professional. I used to draw that line, too, until I realized that my line of work necessarily involves a bleeding of one into the other. With that in mind, living in a sustainable way came to gain a new direction: Instead of asking myself how to reduce my time in front of my computer or how to create a stronger separation between work life and home life, I started considering what was important to my life. In 2012, a very friendly and extremely competent and caring member of the support staff retired. She laughingly described her decision to retire as an opportunity to read more books and to travel more. She was 65. Because I began my academic career later in life, I decided that year that I would plan to retire at age 75. I turned 50 at the end of 2012. So when I asked myself what was important to my life, I considered what I wanted to have accomplished over the next 25 years, and how I would like the planet to look. Those questions proved to be foundational to how I chose beginning in 2013 to articulate my role as a professor (assistant and hopefully someday associate, then full), as a writer, and, in a sense, as a community servant.

            Articulating those goals has changed my relationship to my job. It has made me a better time manager. It may not look that way on the surface. In fact, when I look at a time management tool like a day planner or a how-to guide on writing “to do” lists or at how some of my colleagues seem so effective at organizing their days around working with students and logging into their classes, I do not look like a good time manager at all. But I am good because I do my best to focus on what’s important for me to accomplish in a single day – as a professor, a writer, and community servant.

Initiating Dialogue

I spent more time in my office the past two days than I probably have spent all month. I was there for about nine and a half hours on the first day, and for about eight hours today. The time in my office was well spent, and it reminded me of how fortunate my position in life is, in so many ways. Most of the time, I can set my own schedule; work at home or at the library or in a coffee shop if I wish to; and take days off in the high time of summer to bask in the sun and enjoy life with my husband at our home.

            Returning to the office puts the being-ness of the office back into high gear. I am reminded of multiple unfinished tasks, looming and past-due deadlines, and a clock that seems to tick faster and faster. I chide myself for not getting in early, for wasting time trying to motivate myself to work, and for not being more responsive to the demands of the job.

            I am learning slowly, and often in a rather difficult, uneven, and anxiety provoking way to understand that I have the kind of job where the work will never get done. The best I can hope for is to cross between three and five things off the to-do list each day; the reality is that I'll get one or two items on that list accomplished if I'm lucky.

            And, in the meantime, more things pile up.

            "What does sustainability mean to you?" "When you hear the term sustainability, what words and images come to your mind?"

            These two questions shaped three workshops, discussions, and presentations on the concept of sustainability that I helped develop and facilitate during the past academic year. The questions also are shaping a project on creating sustainable lives that my colleague Susan Jefts and I plan to create over the coming academic year. That project was the reason I spent so much time in my office yesterday and today. The two of us were participating in an Institute for Mentoring, Teaching, and Learning organized by our college that was aimed at encouraging faculty and professionals to dig into a project of personal interest over the year.

            I took part in the institute in the previous year, and found it to be a rich experience. I developed a study on Creative Writing as Critical Inquiry, and found that it gave me an opportunity to coach and guide students in writing-related projects. It also helped me develop a deeper, more intentional and much more sustained personal writing practice than I have ever had. The other participants in the institute were exciting and engaged individuals, and I found that being around them as well as the main institute facilitators was a great experience in nurturing and growth.

            That experience, I think, begins to underscore how I would answer the questions above: What does sustainability mean to you? When you hear the term sustainability, what words and images come to your mind?

            When Sue and I submitted our proposal to the institute, our ideas were all over the map. The facilitators urged us to think about what we might want to gain from the institute, and choose a piece of the project to work on. In the two or three weeks leading up to the institute, we gave the question some thought and settled on three goals. Sue worried that we were being too ambitious; I worried that we were not being ambitious enough.

            Perhaps both of us were right. But for different reasons than what we might have envisioned. We were too ambitious in wanting to reach as wide a range of people as we hoped: community groups, faculty members, students, professional and administrative and support persons affiliated with the college, prospective students, and others. But perhaps we also were not ambitious enough in what we wanted to dig deep into. We were, and perhaps still are, nervous about making the personal issues that face all of us -- not just people at our college but in workplaces throughout the United States and post-industrial world the focal point of our project. Among those issues are: overwork, increasingly more work, a rapid rate of diminishing resources available to help us in our work, too much dedication to a job, less and less time and often less and less money to create and enjoy the personal lives that we love.

            "There's something very personal about this," remarked one other participant at the institute, in a small-group session. "It makes me want to be a part of it."

            "I am beginning to wonder if being sustainable is sustainable," added a second participant, in a conversation with Sue and myself.

            I left the institute feeling tired by the intense pace of conversation and brain activity but inspired by the feedback we received. Sue and I decided that we would revise our three goals so that we would spend the next year creating

            a) a workshop for students;

            b) a professional development activity for faculty, professionals, and support staff at the college; and

            c) a blog where we could regularly reflect on our activities and learnings about sustainability over the year.

            We also found a lot of energy in listening and interacting with others. The first participant I cited is going to join our project by providing resource materials and perhaps helping us create the workshop itself. The second participant is going to serve as a liaison between us and the college's Student Affairs Committee, and we are going to incorporate her burgeoning scholarly work on emotional labor into our workshops. A third participant will hopefully join us through a joint sharing of workshops: she has created a workshop on the sustainability of mentoring (the term used at our college for the close advising and degree plan development that all faculty and many professional staff members do with our students, who are primarily adults over thirty). We are hoping to host the workshop at the location in the college where we work, and to support her work with newly hired faculty members and others in sharing our thoughts on balancing our professional, personal, scholarly, and creative lives.

            We hope that this blog will be a useful way for us to keep track of our work, and for others to learn alongside us about what it means to live a sustainable life in what appear to be increasingly unsustainable economic and social conditions.