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.